The Way Life Should Be (22 page)

Basil Marinara

6 to 8 garlic cloves, peeled

½ cup olive oil (half extra virgin, half regular)

3 (28-ounce) cans whole tomatoes, crushed by hand

½ cup fresh basil leaves

Salt and pepper

Sauté whole garlic cloves slowly in olive oil over medium heat until golden brown or even caramelized (the longer the better). Then add tomatoes, mashing them as they cook into sauce before adding fresh basil in strips, a stream of oil, salt and pepper to taste, and perhaps a sprinkle of sugar to blunt the acidity of the tomatoes. Place the pot on low, on a back burner, and simmer as long as time allows.

This sauce, like most Italian cooking, is better on the second day. I relate Nonna’s method for reheating: Heat it until the oil rises to the top, then stir it back in and serve.

For
fra diavola
you crush a generous pinch of red pepper flakes with your fingers, sprinkle it into the marinara, and taste. The amount of spice is up to you.

Next, we steam clams and mussels in seawater, wine, a little garlic, and a splash of oil. When they’ve opened, we dish them into bowls and ladle the sauce over the top. Then we take our bowls and migrate to the knotty pine farmhouse table laden with our prepared dishes: rolled eggplant stuffed with
impestata,
or dried ricotta, egg, and cheese, covered in marinara and baked in the oven; asparagus wrapped in prosciutto di Parma, sautéed with a lemon-butter sauce; a simple salad of mixed greens.

Through the picture window, the bay is dark. Darkness came fast, the sky draining from charcoal to black in a flash. A heavy crust of snow, illuminated by the lights on the porch, hangs on the tree branches outside the window. Across the water, small, isolated lights shine in a few other homes, dotting the shore like party lanterns. Most houses on this bay are closed for the season, Rebecca explains, the owners back in residence in Boston or New York or Washington. Some, like migratory birds, fly to Florida at the first sign of frost.

In this moment, I feel perfectly happy. Here I am, opening a mussel shell like a spring-loaded trap, taking out the plump
golden, black-rimmed creature inside, running it through the sauce, tasting its elastic brine with the kick of red pepper. There’s no place I’d rather be right now than in this kitchen with these people, eating this feast, looking out at the frosted trees framed by the window to the satin blackness beyond.

CHAPTER 22

“When are you coming home for Christmas?”

Lindsay’s voice is indistinct. I’m driving through a weak-signal area, a brief stretch of road between Dory Cove and Spruce Harbor.

Perfect timing.

“You’re breaking up, Linz,” I shout into the phone, which is on Speaker, in my lap as I drive. “I’ll call you back!”

“Are you at that goddamn part of the road again? Why even bother to call me when you know—”

Silence.

I snap the phone shut.

Though I wanted to talk to Lindsay, I’ve been avoiding this particular conversation. People come and go from the shop all day long chattering about shopping lists and finding the perfect tree and packing up to visit relatives in faraway places, but I’ve been in a blissfully holiday-free bubble. I don’t know if I want to celebrate Christmas this year, in any form. What I do know is that I’m not ready to go home.

The weak-signal area is actually located along the shore-loop road of Dory Cove, on the way to Mollusk Point—the long scenic drive to Spruce Harbor, the route I prefer. At a wide, flat expanse of rocky beach I pull off to the side, as I do every day,
so Sam can get some exercise before I take him to the shop, where he’ll laze near the baseboard heater for the rest of the morning.

Sam leaps from the car and trots toward the water, tail in air, ears perked, jubilant as always at the roar of the waves, the white caps fifty feet out, the searing cold surf. “Not too far, Sam!” I call, as if he understands English. I’ve heard tales of people swept out to sea near these rocks, children turning delightedly toward parents—
Look! Look at me!
—and disappearing in an instant, knocked off by a wave and sucked in by the undertow.

Leaning against the car, zipped in my parka, the hood’s faux fur brushing my cheek, I gaze at the view. A pebbled beach extends to boulders visible only when the tide is low, as it is today. The austere shapes of the rocks are softened by their colors, charcoal and sand and green-brown. Though the air is frigid, the sun makes a valiant effort to warm these rocks, this place, my face. The coast is not cold in the way that people think, or even in the way I imagined before I came. The coldness is threaded with warmth, tempered by moments of grace.

I see Sam down at the end of the beach. “C’mon, Sam! Let’s go!”

He stops, lifts his nose in the air, cocks his ear, and bounds back to me.

The library is quiet.
When I approach the front desk, Eileen’s face lights up. “I can’t tell you how much I needed something like that cooking class,” she says. “I haven’t been here long enough to make real friends.” When I ask her where she’s from, she replies, “A town up north. But I had to leave. There wasn’t anything there for me anymore.”

“Oh.” I pause, unsure of how much to ask. I’m coming to discover that on this island so many of us are from somewhere
else, and everyone has a story. I don’t know how much Eileen wants to tell me, or even how much I want to know.

I hand her the Wodehouse novel. She is disappointed that I didn’t love it. “I wanted to, but he’s so—English. And so male,” I say. “I want to read something I can relate to. Any other ideas?”

She nods thoughtfully and leads me down a narrow row of stacks. “Maybe memoir,” she muses. “How about—” She runs her fingertips along the glossy Mylar spines, hesitating on
The Liars’ Club
,
Anywhere But Here
,
The Glass Castle
—all books I’ve read; I shake my head—until she stops on a spine I don’t recognize. She pulls it out.
Crazy in the Kitchen
, by Louise DeSalvo. “I think you’ll like this,” she says. “The Italian grandmother, the food. Try it.”

She presses the book in my hand and I open it at random. My eye falls on a sentence—
I begin my education in the pleasures of the kitchen, in the pleasures of the flesh.
I take the book back to the coffee shop and read all afternoon with a voracious hunger.

“Excuse me, do you work here?” Flynn inquires.

I look up. “I think you have me confused with someone else.”

“Well, stranger, would you mind checking to see if the muffins are done?”

Mine, the dilemma of all the descendants of immigrants. To want to belong, yet to know that you do not.
“That’s presumptuous of you,” I say, closing my book with great reluctance.

The menu, I’ve found,
must derive from the shopping trip. Tom calls to ask if I want to visit the Blue Hill market again. The vegans demand organic vegetables, he says, making them sound like an angry tribe.

This time the front seat is free of clutter. Riding in Tom’s car on the plush heated seat, with the tinted skylight and iPod dock,
I realize what a clunker I drive. My car announces each bump, each pothole; when it rains, the wipers push water lazily back and forth across the windshield in an opaque scrim. Cold seeps along the windows; the chassis vibrates if I go above fifty miles an hour. One speaker is blown. In this car, with its multiple air bags and vacuum-sealed panes, I feel protected, snug, invulnerable to the vagaries of the chilly world outside my window.

At the farmers’ market I find butternut and acorn squash, onions, garlic, beets, and goat cheese. A menu begins to take shape. Even though Flynn will grouse, I want to make risotto again, this time with seafood—because I know how, and I think people will learn something new, even those who have made risotto before. Our first course: roasted squash soup and a salad of marinated beets and goat cheese.

Some of the growers recognize me from last time. “Next week I’ll have fennel,” a ruddy farmer in a flannel shirt, from Cherryfield Farms, tells me.

“I’ll be here,” I say.

By the time we finish, the merchants are packing up. Tom has an armload of bags, and I’m loaded down with squash. We stagger to the car, heave the bags in the trunk.

“Do you want to stop at that place in Ellsworth and order some contraband animal protein?” I ask.

“I’d love to, but…” Tom looks pained. “I think Katrin has something planned.”

“Oh, right.”

It’s awkward between us now, the air thick with unease. I had put the girlfriend out of my mind, forgotten she existed. And maybe for a moment, I tell myself, he had, too.

With my cleaver I stab
the slippery butternut, the tortoise-shelled acorn squash, in several places before splitting them in half. Alone in my house, I am cautious. I imagine slicing through the webbing between thumb and forefinger, cutting a tendon, bleeding to death (can you bleed to death from a cut hand?) on the kitchen floor. An item in last week’s
Islander
told about an elderly woman who, attempting to dispose of her trash, slipped and broke her hip, and was found the next morning frozen to death, twenty feet from her back door.

I’m not old, and my hips aren’t brittle. But I do live alone down a dark road in a dark harbor.

The cooking class gathers around
the squash and onions and garlic, roasted last night in my oven with olive oil and sea salt. These puckered vegetables fill a tray on Rebecca’s gleaming island.

“This is the easiest soup in the world, and it allows for infinite variations,” I tell them. “First, you roast hardy vegetables—pumpkins, squash, carrots, potatoes, beets—with onions and garlic in the oven at three hundred degrees until soft, about an hour and a half. Allow them to cool, then scoop out the seeds, if any,” I say, scooping out the seeds in demonstration. “Spoon the vegetables into a food processor in batches with chicken stock and some herbs—in this case, tarragon. Add salt and pepper to taste. Heat on the stove, then add a splash of cream.”

“Do you have a recipe?” Eileen asks.

“That was the recipe.”

So much of this kind of cooking, I tell them, is about learning to trust yourself, developing an intuitive understanding of how flavors and textures work together. But first you must learn the crucial building blocks: stock, marinara, vinaigrette. If you learn
how to make vinaigrette, for example, if you understand the simple science of emulsification, you can use that knowledge for every kind of dressing and marinade.

Josh wanders in and out, tastes the bright orange soup, nibbles a piece of cheese. He brings in a ball of string, and Tom shows him how to cut a length, tie a knot, and pin it to a board to begin a macramé bracelet.

We make the beet salad by steaming the beets until soft, about thirty minutes, plunging into cold water, and removing the skins. After cutting the beets into small cubes, we toss them with a vinaigrette of orange juice, vinegar, olive oil, and shallots, adding crumbles of goat cheese and green onion, for color and taste and crunch, at the end.

Finally, we’re ready to make the risotto. It can be tricky, I emphasize; the proportions must be just right. I take live lobsters, shrimp, and scallops out of the fridge, and we prepare a broth with bay leaves, carrots, and onions in which to boil the lobsters. Later we’ll use the broth as liquid for the risotto.

Anticipating Eileen’s request, I hand around a recipe I’ve written out:

Risotto with Seafood

2 bay leaves

1 carrot, chopped

2 small onions: 1 chopped, 1 minced

3 (1-pound) lobsters

¹
/
³
cup olive oil

3 tablespoons tomato paste

2 cups Arborio rice

1½ cups white wine (dry)

2 tablespoons butter

2 pounds medium shrimp, peeled

1 pound scallops

Fill pot with water sufficient to cover 3 lobsters. Add bay leaves, carrot, chopped onion. Bring to a boil, add lobsters, and cook 10 minutes. Reserve water the lobsters were cooked in. Cool lobsters and remove meat.