Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (8 page)

Honey Cake

Although I always had a sweet tooth, I never liked honey until I ran clean out of sugar one day and tried this.

Mix 1 tablespoon corn flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1lb flour and set aside. Cream together about 5oz butter with just short of a full jar of honey. Gradually add the dry ingredients, along with 3 eggs beaten into a ¼ pint milk, until the mixture is smooth and creamy. You can add 1 teaspoon of vanilla, or cinnamon to taste—but I always preferred it plain. Turn into a greased loaf tin and cook in a medium hot oven for up to 1½ hours.

Replacing sugar with honey may seem like a straight swap, but it isn’t as simple as that. Honey works best when used with sugar, not instead of it. Sugar does the hard work of sweetening, and honey acts as the top note. Of course, a lot depends on the honey—and as with all ingredients, some are better than others. Granddad kept bees, so the honey Grandma Bernadine used was unique and fresher than anything you could buy in a shop. I know. Westside Market stocks forty-six brands and I’ve tried them all. You can use a full jar of really expensive stuff and you still might not even be able to taste it. Generally, taking sugar out of a cake recipe for the sake of a little honey is a pointless sacrifice.

*

Dan’s parents were Irish Catholics, and he came near the middle of eight children. He was the only one who wasn’t married by age thirty-five, and the only one who didn’t attend Mass each Sunday. By his family’s standards, he was wayward and unconventional. A real wild card.

Eileen, his mother, was a substantial woman who turned every question into a barked instruction: “You’ll have tea?”

She spoke in a Cavan accent distorted with a Yankee twang. Her home was a shrine to marriage and children. It was crammed with trophies, china dolls, pictures of children in heart-shaped frames and frames with teddy bear motifs. More cherubic faces were emblazoned on mugs, coasters, and calendars. Every surface was groaning with wedding photographs surrounded by Waterford crystal or ornate gilt: nudging boys in navy suits, their seventies haircuts skimming their shoulders; girls with glittering eyes and toothy smiles in leg-o’-mutton sleeves. All of Dan’s family were interconnected; they godparented one another’s children, bought one another’s cars, shared ownership of ride-on mowers. They shopped at price clubs together, passed on information about A&P specials to one another, visited the mall in hair-sprayed, buggy-pushing gangs. They decorated one another’s houses and fed one another’s children. Reigning over this car-pooling, babysitting, meal-sharing, mall-mashing industry was Eileen Mullins. She cooked and coordinated, but mostly she just presided. Inscrutable, indestructible, in charge. Dan was a little afraid of his mother, which I found disconcerting.

In contrast, Dan’s father was a wiry, self-contained fellow who mostly just kept out of everyone’s way.

I was with the father, hoping to stay on the outskirts, but it seemed I was not to get away with it.

*

Dan left his superintendent’s job in Manhattan when we moved out to Yonkers and started doing contract building work. With his vast network of friends and relations in Yonkers it meant that he was getting enough small jobs to earn him as much as he was earning before, with plenty of time to work on the house.

One Sunday at noon Dan said, “You better get dressed, honey—we’re due over for lunch at one.”

I was confused. This was a surprise and I didn’t like surprises. Especially when it comes to food, and especially when I was exhausted from unpacking boxes of junk in an effort to make our house home.

“What, have you booked somewhere?”

Dan raised his eyebrows quizzically, as if the answer was so obvious it didn’t needed stating.

“Mom’s place, of course.”

Of course.

*

Ninety-eight percent of Dan’s extended family lived in or around Yonkers. An only child, I was raised in a loft with a single parent. How was I to know that marriage was going to suck me into a vortex of relations? That saying “I do” would initiate me into a tribe of women who rummage in one another’s handbags for tissues?

“Sorry, Dan, but you should have told me earlier. I have things to do.”

The vastness of the understatement wasn’t lost on him. We first visited this house just five weeks ago, and already we had packed up my apartment and prepared it for rental. Dan had knocked a wall through from the front to the back of the house, downstairs, and was preparing the plumbing and electricity for my new kitchen. I had planned pared-down Shaker style units with open shelves and an imported solid-fuel Waterford Stanley stove. Completely different from the high tech state-of-the-art one in my apartment, it was going to be a grown-up working kitchen for serious hands-on cooking. I could get appliances in as and when I needed them. But for the time being, I wanted to keep my cooking as simple as possible. Perhaps because my head was swirling with complications, my body craved the clarity of physical activity; the one-two-three order of mixing and beating and pouring. Only the sitting and waiting for it to bake disturbed me, so I turned to the garden and within days had a vegetable patch cleared and ready to be planted.

The day before, Dan had joined me and, without asking if I needed his help, begun to rake the soil while I remained on my knees crumbling it with my fingers. Mincing compost into the square yard of gray grit I had meticulously weeded the day before. He babbled on for a few minutes, asking me questions about what I was going to plant, then the two of us fell into a concentrated silence. We worked well together in those first few weeks in Yonkers. Dan was physical, strong—and so, I discovered, was I. We made a good team, and I found myself appreciating the way we could pass tools or make each other coffee without the other having to ask. It was a kind of intimacy, an easing into our marriage. I kept busy because when I was working, I was less aware of my guilt, the fear that all I was doing in creating this home was building more obstacles to hinder my eventual escape.

The following weekend was the Food Writers’ Symposium in Chicago and I was looking forward to the break. It’s bad to want a break from marriage after just two months, but I had decided it would give me time on my own to try to sort my head out.

Dan could have mentioned lunch at his mother’s house while we were out in the garden the day before, but he didn’t. I needed to draw the line. If I went with him, then we would be expected to go every Sunday, something he’d always been expected to do before meeting me.

“We only need to go for an hour,” he said.

I was not aware of the kind of emotional blackmail that Eileen could inflict on Dan. My mother had always been an independent woman. She did her thing and I did mine. My grandparents longed for my visits to Ireland. I knew that, but they never made me feel obliged and always celebrated my career successes even though they meant less frequent vacations spent visiting them. This pleading was alien territory to me.

“Please, Tressa.”

However, I was learning real fast.

Dan was a good man and he was doing all the right things. He could plumb a toilet, fix a roof, wire a stove—he never said “no.” He was staying up all night to put together kitchen units to my (exacting) specifications. He had accepted my lies of being exhausted from the stress of moving and had laid off me in bed. I could see how he was putting everything he had into this marriage, and yet it was not enough. I knew it would never be enough because whatever it was I needed to make me feel fulfilled, content,
sure
—that mysterious ingredient that just said this was right— Dan did not have it. Not for me. No matter how hard he tried.

But because he was trying, I felt guilty. So I gave in.

“OK, I’ll get dressed. One hour, then we come home—right?”

He was beaming like a prize-winning schoolboy and it was making me nervous.

*

I was not in Eileen’s house five minutes when I realized what a monumental aberration it was that I had managed to avoid this Sunday lunch gathering for so long. There were a lot of people there, maybe twenty including the children. It always alarmed me when I saw how many there were in Dan’s family; names and ages started whirring and they seemed to blur in front of my very eyes. They were all greeting me with the warmth one might reserve for somebody returned from the brink of death. Their relief was palpable, like
at last
Dan’s wife has graced us. I realized that Dan’s casual “we’ll pop in for an hour” invite had come after weeks of intense family pressure. So now there was this layer of knowledge: that I knew that Dan knew that I didn’t like his family, even though I had never said anything to suggest it. And now
they
knew that I didn’t like them because it had taken us so long to respond to this ongoing Sunday lunch summons.

Basically—it was one of those buttock-clenching, awkward moments.

When we entered, Eileen grunted at me briefly, but that meant nothing. She was from the generation before hugging was invented. Stern matriarchs who provide shelter and food, but don’t offer affection after your fifth birthday. No wonder her kids were all grinning at me like frightened rabbits.

I asked, “Can I help, Eileen?”

A sister-in-law, Shirley, caught my eye, and raised her brow a degree, although I knew that she didn’t mean her fellowship to comfort me. Shirley was a cheap, competitive cow. She’d worn a white gauzy dress to our wedding—and no underwear. Nipples in the chapel. Classy.

The twins leaped up to help their mother. Kay and Connie are identical, right down to their square, straight teeth and their bubbly personalities. They were mercilessly upbeat and friendly. You had to like them, although their appearance was unsettling. Kay wore her bangs side parted and tucked behind her ears, Connie had a back-combed fan. It’s sad to think that their senses of individuality were so crucially contained in a hair-spray can. The twins both seemed much younger than their thirty years and still lived at home.

There was no order to the meal. Cutlery was thrown onto the center of the table along with an open packet of napkins. Kay handed out (un-warmed) plates, which were supplemented by disposable party ones; men wandered to get beer from the fridge and women took the opportunity to call to them for a Sprite. Connie and Eileen started to carry out platters of food, and guests haphazardly cleared away newspapers, bills, kiddie cups, Walkmans— the miscellaneous stuff that gathers in a kitchen—to make room on every crammed surface. The food was mostly fried meat— drumsticks, steakhouse burgers—accompanied by man-made variations of the potato—fries, waffles, wedges. Everyone grabbed at it hungrily and started dipping into bowls full of various store-bought condiments.

Shirley was picking at a bread roll with her curved fuchsia nails and poking shreds of dough into the corner of her mouth with the reluctance of the vocational slimmer.

“Bet this is different to what you’re used to, Tressa.”

I knew the comment was designed to make trouble and there was no “right” response but everyone looked at me, waiting for the new family recruit to make her reply. I smiled as brightly as I could and said, “It all looks delicious.”

With that, Eileen picked up a plate of ribs and stuck it under my nose. I took one and she nodded toward a bowl of sauce. She was going to police my eating, check the fancy food writer’s response to her cooking. I was not, despite being a food snob, a fussy eater. But this pressure was making me feel physically sick and the vinegary smell from the dripping meat did not help. Dear God, I was going to hurl. I could feel the shocked faces follow me onto the patio.

Dan came straight out after me and when he laid his hand on my shoulder, it released a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. For no specific reason I could determine, I started to cry. He led me to a corner of the patio where nobody could see us and wrapped himself around my head and shoulders. He didn’t care that I was sobbing in the middle of what was supposed to be a happy family gathering, and he didn’t ask what was the matter with me. This was just as well because I didn’t have the first clue myself. It was a relief, briefly, not to think about it and just let myself go.

Dan held onto me until I managed to gather myself back together, then he took my chin in his hand and wiped my wet cheek with his palm. I felt about ten years old.

“I guess Mom’s ribs are pretty bad, huh?”

I managed a smile and said, “Thanks.”

“Thanks for jack shit, baby—that’s my job,” he said, then took my hand and walked me back into the kitchen. In a funny way, I think he was pleased that I had snapped; it showed him I was human.

“Tressa’s got a bug, folks. I’m taking her home.”

They were all concerned, although I could see Shirley smirking in the corner as if to say, “Welcome to Ma Mullins’s Sunday Bonanza, bitch.”

As we were walking out the door, she called after us, “See you at the first communion next weekend?” and I could feel Dan’s hand weaken over mine.

The years passed and brought with them the inevitable intimacy of routine. I knew James’s footsteps on the gravel of the road, I could trace the pattern of his body in our bed, I grew used to the smell of his skin, so that I found comfort in it. Still, I would not let go of my ideal, and not one single day passed when I did not think of Michael. Over those early years especially, I remember walking out in the field at the back of our house late at night and looking up at the stars.