Sex and Bacon (28 page)

Now get a baking pan—9 x 12 is good. Coat it lightly ‘with nonstick spray (or rub a little oil in it to keep your casserole from sticking), and turn the pasta mixture into the pan. Sprinkle grated parmesan over the top. Bake at 375°F for about half an hour, or until the cheese appears nicely browned and appetizing.

Now, here’s the thing: You can use Cream of Anything soup instead of Mushroom. Cream of Celery is actually very nice if you don’t mind your casserole appearing slightly corpse-green under strong light.

You can add frozen broccoli florets instead of peas.

You can use leftover cooked chicken or turkey cubes instead of canned tuna. If you do, try using Cream of Chicken soup for a variation.

For that matter, you could use a few cups of diced ham instead of tuna. (I’d recommend sticking with Cream of Mushroom soup for that, though, not Cream of Celery or Broccoli. Nobody likes cadaverous ham except Doctor Seuss.)

You can add more grated parmesan to the soup/tuna/noodle mixture before you turn it into the pan, if you really like parmesan. Or you can sprinkle mozzarella over the top of the casserole, or romano, or pretty much any other white cheese you think would be good.

You can add dried or fresh onions. You can add parsley. You can add black pepper. You can add a pinch of nutmeg to the soup/milk mixture. Seriously, nutmeg’s good—it brings out the creammess of the soup and acts as an accent for the tuna flavor. But don’t use more than a smallish pinch—a little nutmeg goes a long way.

If you’re feeling extra-fancy, you can mash up potato chips and sprinkle them over the top of your casserole before baking. Some Southerners wouldn’t dream of making Tuna Noodle Casserole without crushed potato chips, claiming the whole point of the dish is to act as a vehicle for its own crispy, salty, fried topping.

One last thing: You know those cans of fried onion bits that you only buy around Thanksgiving? If you happen to have any of those, throw em on top with the parmesan and the chips. They’re so good! But I never have any on hand because when I buy them I just end up eating them straight out of the can with my fingers the second I get home, like movie popcorn.

For dessert, make:

This recipe is my own variation on something I got from
Southern Living
. I tricked it out a little bit, but I bow down to
Southern Living
, because even though it has a lot of crappy old-lady articles on gardening and decorating, it also features a lot of excellent, nonfussy recipes using seasonal ingredients.

This recipe is sound as a motherfucker and will simply never, ever fail you. I make this for guests all the time because it’s easy and scrumptious. People love having fruity things for dessert because despite all the sugar and butter that combine to form the backbone of any good baked dessert recipe, most folks consider fruit “healthy.” I mean, it’s just
fruit
, right?

1 C white sugar

_2/3
C white flour

_1/3
C cornmeal

1
_1/2
t baking powder

1
_1/2
t salt

1/2 C butter, melted
_1/2
C = 1 stick, just FYI)

2 C frozen berries (I’ve made this with raspberries, blackberries, strawberries—even blueberries! So use whatever berry you like best)

Mix the dry ingredients together. Pour in the melted butter and whisk till just blended—you’re not trying to get all the lumps out. Pour batter into a lightly greased square baking pan (I use my 8 x 8 or 9 x 9). In a separate bowl, sprinkle your berries with 1/4 C white sugar and toss them until they’re pretty much coated. Then drop the berries
over
the batter and bake at 350°F for about seventy minutes, or until the top of your cobbler is golden brown and you’re half-nuts from the delicious baking smell of it. (Note: the berries sink into the batter and end up at the bottom of the dish by the time it’s done baking.)

Serve in bowls with scoops of good vanilla ice cream all melty on top. Sprinkle the ice cream with a little cinnamon if you like, just to be fancy. Eat with a spoon.

Berry Cobbler is also really good reheated for breakfast when you’re tired of having ice cream by itself. What’s healthier than fruit for breakfast, I ask you?

AFTER YOU EAT
your Tuna Noodle Casserole and your Fruit Cobbler, take a bath and put yourself to bed. Sometimes you have to be your own good mama and let yourself be comforted.

Good night, Sleepyhead.

1.
dIf you want to know what my childhood tasted like, it’s Swanson’s Salisbury Steak TV dinners and Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable soup. It’s not that my mom couldn’t cook, or was a lazy homemaker. I just loved TV dinners and canned soup and clamored for them constantly, and every so often my mother would relent and allow me to have them instead of more-nutritious fare.

2.
And, for what it’s worth, I love reading recipes that say “set aside,” as if we’re so dim-witted we have to be reminded to
physically move a bowl or ingredient out of the way
so we can concentrate on the next part of the dish. Like, “Oh my God, I’ve mixed the dry ingredients and now I need to mix the wet ingredients, but I
can’t
, because the dry ones are still in the way! WHAT DO I DO NOW???

HEARTBREAK 4:
SUMMER BERRIES

SUMMER IS WANING. MY BIRTHDAY CAME AND WENT.
I baked myself a chocolate Betty Crocker cake to celebrate and frosted it with canned vanilla icing that was so sweet it made my teeth ache. I decorated the cake with fresh sliced strawberries that I eventually picked off and ate by themselves.

I’m thirty-six now. Thirty-six feels exactly like thirty-five, but I like that my age is now divisible into three equal twelve-year chunks. Three is the magic number, isn’t it? Zero to twelve, twelve to twenty-four, twenty-four to now. So far I think I like the last chunk best. You couldn’t pay me enough to live through the middle chunk again.

I’ve been thinking about Home a lot lately—-what makes a Home? Who’s responsible for it? Is Home something you can have by yourself, or do you need a family to have one? Is just staying in your apartment alone on Friday night enough to make a home a Home? Or is Home just another word for
community
—the wolf pack of people you love and spend your time with, in all their messy and constantly changing permutations of singleness and parenthood and partnership?

At thirty-six I’m an Old Maid. I’ve never been married. I stay home, earning my living by putting words on paper. I cook for myself, freeze things to eat later, and make sure that what I consume is as fresh and delicious as it can be. I preserve, occasionally. I’m learning to bake my own bread. I even own a secondhand couch that I stretch out on when I read. Having a couch is just as great as I’d always thought it would be.

But do I have a Home? Does all my cooking give my apartment a warm core? Am I the beating heart of my own residence?

Can I be a homemaker, even if I live alone?

I’ve never wanted a traditional marriage: the big white dress, the beaming parents, the catered dinner for 150 guests, the awkward formal-wear. But all externals aside, I’ve never met the person I knew, without a doubt, I would stay with for the rest of my life. I don’t believe in divorce and I don’t believe in affairs, so to me getting married means knowing damn sure that out of all the people in the entire world, you’ll be able to stay in love with—and faithful to —one person. But then again, maybe my idealism’s inoculated me against actual marriage the way a porn habit creates chronic dissatisfaction with one’s real-life partners. Maybe if I didn’t believe so strongly in monogamy, I’d have the opportunity to test my theories on it. All I know is that for ten years, most of the clients who jerked off in front of me wore wedding rings—and if that’s their idea of marriage, give me my spmsterhood. I may be alone, but at least I’m not being betrayed by someone who’s pledged to love and honor me forever, forsaking all others.

Despite my previous career providing sexual entertainment to strangers for money—or perhaps, because of it—it’s clear to me that erotic intimacy was designed to nourish our hearts and keep us close to each other. Subverting that by using people as objects wounds us all. If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that love is an unstoppable human drive, fierce and universal, and that sex is the physical manifestation of love. And that sex without love is missing the whole damn point. Sex brings us home to love.

It’s all so clear to me now that I’m alone. And now, no matter how much I try to make my apartment feel like a warm, safe nest, I feel like the heart of my home has been yanked out, whole and throbbing, and tossed aside as offal.

A FEW DAYS
ago I bought a half-flat of fresh blueberries off the back of a pickup truck at the local farmers market. They’re bruised and pulpy and startlmgly sweet, tasting of sun and earth and green growing things. The blueberries are the best things I’ve eaten in weeks—straight out of their boxes, chilled from my refrigerator. I try to remember to wash them before I eat them, but gluttony and impatience win far more often than I’d like to admit. I’m sure I’m becoming sterile from the pesticides.

But still. I’m making blueberry buckle and blueberry betty and blueberry crumble. I’m making blueberry-bran muffins and blueberry-sour cream coffee cake. I’m contemplating a cold summer soup, thick with heavy cream and pureed blueberries. I’m gobbling handfuls of them, plain and unadorned, staining my fingers and my keyboard with winey purple splotches. This morning, my shit was blue.

The phone rings as I’m popping blueberries into my mouth, one by one. I swallow, and pick up the handset. “Hello?”

“Hi,” he says. We both freeze.
What’s next? Who says what?

Oh honey, I miss you,. Please come home
. I’m biting my lip. I want him so badly. The sound of his voice on the phone has raised the tiny blond hairs on my forearms, like a magnet raising iron filings. He is my magnet, pulling me to him even when he doesn’t want me.

“What’s going on?” he asks, like we talk every day and this particular phone call is no big deal.

“I’m cooking,” I say. I’m lying. But I’m not about to admit to standing in front of an open refrigerator chomping on pesticide-laced berries, fetchingly attired in big white comfort-panties and the same Slayer T-shirt I’ve been wearing for three days.

“So, I was wondering . . .” his voice trails off.

“Come home,” I say.

“
What?
”

“Please come home.” I am crying. It’s terrifying to say the words. I hate saying them. What if he laughs at me? Or simply, kindly, refuses?

“I have a kitchen full of blueberry breads and muffins and cobblers that nobody’s eating,” I say in a rush. “And I can make us coffee. You left your press.”

Silence. I can hear him thinking, considering.

COME HOME
. I have never wanted anything this bad in my entire life.
COME. HOME
.

“I’ll be over in an hour,” he finally says.

WHEN HE ARRIVES
, he has a plastic grocery sack in his hands. He’s so handsome I can’t breathe. I can smell his skin and his summer-day sweat. I feel faint. I feel like vomiting. The air between us is vibrating lightly sizzling like a plucked guitar string. Kvery cell in my body is drawn to him. I’m a shaky unbathed mess with dirty feet and snarled hair. I am not in my tightest pants nor a skimpy tank top. I’m not tiny. There are no lit candles. This is not how I pictured our reunion at all.

We don’t smile at each other. I move back into my apartment, and he follows. He puts the grocery sack on my kitchen table silently then sits. I busy myself by opening the bag to put the contents away bustling as if under deadline. I still can’t look at him. I am humiliated by my stubbly legs and my sour breath. Why why why hadn’t I showered first, or at least swabbed my crotch and pits with a warm washcloth? I’d been so surprised when he’d said he was coming; half of me didn’t believe he would actually show up.

Half of me doesn’t believe he’s sitting in my kitchen right now. It’s possible that I’ve lost my mind and am hallucinating out of sheer need. I consider pinching myself hard. But what would that prove? Crazy people can pinch themselves as hard as they like and they still need their Depakote. It’s not like crazmess is a dream from which you can wake. Being nuts is like being brokenhearted: Asleep or awake, you’re pretty much doomed to a version of reality that’s not what you’d like it to be.

He shifts in his chair and tries to look into my face, but I’m keeping my eyes down, focused on the task of unpacking this bag.
Nope!Not ready yet!
My cheeks feel hot. I must look ridiculous, like a red-faced tomato on scissoring legs.

Was this a bad idea? Did I fuck everything up by asking him to come over?
I am miserable. He probably doesn’t even want to be here. He probably already has a new girlfriend, someone prettier and cooler and nicer than me. All of a sudden I feel a crippling wave of shame.
How could I have done this? Humiliated myself?