Cleaving (17 page)

"I want to hug you, but..." His words descend again into indecipherability under the roar of traffic.

"I'm sorry... what did you say?"

"I want to hug you, but I don't think I should!" Snappish.

"Oh. Okay. All right."

"I've got to go."

"Yes. Okay." I try to press the bag with his scarf inside into his hand, but he just gives me one last, faintly incredulous
glance, and turns to walk away.

I manage to keep from collapsing to the pavement in tears for approximately half a block. Wind up sobbing at the feet of the
Gandhi statue near the corner of 15th and Union Square West. So classic. I ought to have my own
New Yorker
cartoon.

H
AVING MISSED
Thanksgiving at Fleisher's, I must make up the time, for myself and for Josh. I'll be working right up until Christmas Eve.
My parents and brother are coming from Texas for the holiday so I can both spend time with them and log in the necessary hours
at the shop. They've rented a cottage just up the road from my small apartment. We're going to make pork crown roast for Christmas
Day dinner; I'm going to cut and tie it myself.

But it's not quite time for that. For now, I'm just tying a bottom round for Aaron. I bring the cone-shaped spool of butcher's
string to the table. I place the oblong muscle, which I've released from its Cryovac bag with a slash of my knife, on the
table so that the short end of the rectangular cut of meat is facing me. I unwind a couple of feet of twine and slide it under
the round, then loop up over the meat from the back to the front. Holding the twine taut along the top of the round with my
right hand, with my left thumb and forefinger I loop the other end, the one snaking out from under the meat, over and under
it. I perform the same twirling movement with thumb and forefinger a second time, over the upper length of string, down through
the loop I've just made between my first knot and the incipient second. Then with my left hand pinching the two-loop knot,
I gently, evenly, pull the string through it, until it tightens. I don't pull too quickly or the knot will catch before it's
cinched tight around the meat. Once the string has done its job of gathering the meat in a bit, not too much, I make one final
twirl of thumb and forefinger, an overhand knot, and tighten, to reinforce. Then I cut through the string, freeing it from
the spool, leaving at the forward end a neat knot, two white, slightly unraveling bits of string sticking out like a young
girl's pigtails.

All this is the work of about ten seconds. Which is not terribly fast. I'm more precise--or perhaps, to be honest, more hesitant--than
I am speedy.

The next loop of string goes around the length of the meat as well but perpendicular to the first, so that the string never
slides under the round. Getting the angle on the loop in this direction was at first a little tricky, but I've gotten pretty
used to it. I still have to tilt my head to the side to get my bearings. Again, I don't pull the string too tight; if there's
too much pressure now, the twine could snap by the time I finish.

Next I lift the round off the table, turn it ninety degrees, and set it back down. I'm going to be tying circles of string
up and down the whole length of the roast, about an inch and a half apart. In the end, the little bulges of meat between the
loops of taut string will make the roast look segmented, like a little flesh caterpillar. An image that we will not be sharing
with the customers. I start in the middle, scooting the twine up along the underside of the meat to the center. Loop, loop,
cinch, loop, cinch, cut. From there I move out. One circle to the left of center, one to the right. If I had started from
one end and worked to the other, it would be like squeezing a toothpaste tube from the bottom, correct form for toothpaste
but not for beef. I want a regular cylinder when I'm done, which will cook evenly, not a squashed roast, tiny at one end,
bulging to bursting at the other.

When I finish the roast I furtively eye the clock. Two minutes. I cannot yet tie a roast in twice the time Josh and Aaron
can break down a side of pork. (Josh recently edged out Aaron's score of fifty-eight seconds by two seconds. Stopwatches are
now involved, and precompetition stretches.)

Josh walks by, always walking by on his way to someplace else. "Julie, that's
perfect.
You are my god."

"Uh-huh." That would seem high praise, except that Josh uses that particular phrase about five times a day. Still, it
is
rather lovely. I fancy that I tie the prettiest roasts in the shop, though I would never say so. I carry it back to the kitchen
along with several marrow bones--that is, sections from the middle of the shank bone, cut on the band saw into two-inch rounds.
I rub the roast generously with the salt and pepper and brown it over high heat on the stovetop before arranging it on top
of the bones and sticking it into the oven.

Then I wash my hands and loiter for a moment over a cup of coffee. Juan's trying out a new chicken and lamb sausage, "Moroccan-style."
He's fried up some of his latest batch before stuffing it into the casings. On a kelly green plate sits a small pile of cooked
ground meat, a slowly cooling pool of grease. I nibble.

"Mmm. Juan, what's in this? Good!"

Juan shrugs. "Dried apricots, garlic, cilantro, turmeric, ginger... I don't know. It's missing something, I think."

"Yeah?"

Juan shrugs again and rubs his chin. He is beginning to grow a goatee for the Great Facial Hair Face-off that Aaron has got
scheduled for the spring. We both take another taste of the sausage and stare together at the plate intently. Then he nods.
"Just a little more cinnamon, I think."

"Jules?" Aaron gestures me over to the table. He's holding a rack of lamb's ribs loosely in one hand. "You set the timer?"

"Yeah. One hour, twenty minutes, right?"

"At what temperature?" Pop-quiz style, he asks.

"Three hundred."

"And what do you want the thermometer to read?"

"One forty?"

Aaron cocks his head and just stares at me for a moment, going, "Aaaahhhh..." I know by now--well, I'm pretty sure--that this
is his "tweaking" noise, what he does when he's thinking about adjustments. Or then again he could be lightly chastising me
for having remembered wrong. Which would be annoying but not unlikely, as he's always tweaking. It can be hard to keep up
with the changes. "Let's try for one thirty. It's going to continue to cook after it's come out of the oven, as it rests."

" 'You're like a textbook with arms. I
know
this.' "

"What?"

"It's from
Buff
--. Nothing. Just riffing, sorry."

"Don't forget to baste. We want all those juices from the marrow to soak into the meat."

"Yup."

"Okay. So now." He slaps the ribs onto the table. "Now you're going to practice for your Christmas crown roast bonanza. You're
going to make what's called a 'half crown.' Usually with a crown roast, you use both racks of ribs, but this time you'll just
use one."

("Racks of ribs"--yet another of the many unbearably euphemistic terms in butchery, suggesting that the bloody cage that once
held in this dainty creature's innards can be transformed into a neat something to hang your hat on.)

"I'll talk you through it." He pushes the ribs toward me. "You're going to separate out the ribs. Band saw."

First he shows me how to chine the rack, using the rotating blade to shave off the chunky edge of the spine, get rid of excess
bone. Then he tells me to lay the rack out flat, resting on the broad curve of the ribs, hold one end of the rack firmly in
each hand, and run the blade just into the vertebrae at the junctures between the ribs, without cutting too much into the
eyes of the chops. I don't worry about standing in front of the blade anymore, don't think about cutting off my hand or sending
a bone flying into someone's face. Well, not too much.
Respect the band saw,
after all. Within a minute or less I've got it done. The rack is still in one piece, but the backbone has been split between
each rib, which makes the whole long piece as flexible as an accordion.

"Now you're going to French the ends of the rib bones."

I do not look cross-eyed at Aaron when he says this, because I know that he doesn't mean
that
kind of Frenching. "Frenching," to butchers, is the action of cleaning and exposing the bones of a rib roast, which will,
in the end, stick up from the bound meat in a proud circle. Aaron demonstrates with the first rib. He begins by scoring all
four sides of the bone with a knife; the tough film adhering bone to flesh has to be compromised. From the place he's scored
to the end of the rib, he slices through the meat on either side. Then, where the rib has been scored, he loops around a length
of twine, up through the intercostal meat, and ties it with a butcher's knot. Cinches it tight, then wraps the string around
his palm a couple of times and pulls sharply toward himself, along the length of the bone. All that meat comes off in a clump,
leaving the bone perfectly smooth and dry. "Simple." He scoops up the meat scraps and throws them into a lugger of lamb meat
that will go into Juan's second batch of sausages. "Now you try."

All doesn't go quite so easily for me. I score the bone, make slices in the meat, get the twine up tight around the rib, yank
and yank. Still the string hangs up on those stubborn gobbets. What's more, each time I yank, the string pulls tighter around
my hand and digs in, cutting two furrows, at the base of my pinky and in the meat of my thumb. These are soon oozing blood.
I'll be damned if I'm going to say anything about it, but it does hurt, and I know I'm hesitating, afraid of hurting myself
more.

And then I break the string. "Shit," I mutter, I hope too quietly for Aaron to hear. He's now a few feet away, leaving me
to my own devices. I pull off the string embedded in the flesh of my hand, snip the now-impotent circle of twine from the
meaty rib, then walk as quickly as I inconspicuously can, and grab a couple of Band-Aids, which I slap on. On my way back
to the table I reach into a bin below the counter and find a cutting glove. We rarely use these bulky things in the shop (if
a bit of latex gets in the way of your cutting skills, imagine what a thick layer of braided stainless steel will do), but
now I pull on the glove and set out to try again. Aaron has noticed my brief absence, or heard my cursing, or has just espied
my glove. He doesn't say anything, but now he's watching. Making me nervous.

I knot another length of string around the rib. I yank. Nothing. "Dammit."

"Use inertia. Start with the string stretched away from you. Then give it one hard pull toward you, along the line of the
bone. Like this." He takes the twine from me.

"I can do--"

"Calm down. I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to show you." With the string gripped in his fist he pantomimes the motion,
starting with his arm straight out, past the far edge of the rack. Then, slowly, he moves his arm in, elbow into his side.
"But instead of pulling the string just horizontally, pull it up a little so that you're pulling the string right along the
upward curve of the rib. Otherwise, you're fighting the bone as well as the meat. That's why the twine breaks."

"Ah. Okay. I get it." I grab the string back from him. Yank.

Yank.

Yank.

On the fourth try, the meat finally comes away. And the Frenched bone is perfect, white and bare. I did it!

"Oh my God."

"Now you've got it."

"I don't think I've ever done anything so satisfying in my entire life."

"Let's not get carried away."

"Okay, you're right. I can think of one or two things. But with my clothes on? In a butcher shop? This is pretty much it."

Well, it never gets that good again. The next bone is too thick for the twine technique. The string snaps once, twice, three
times a lady.

Josh waits until Aaron's gone back into the kitchen, then says, "Don't listen to that dumb-ass. Just use your knife like everybody
else in the world does." And so the rest of the rack I clean the dull, slow way, scraping, scraping, struggling not entirely
successfully to get off every last shred. It's not glamorous. But when I stand the rack on its end, bend it into a circle,
and tie it tight with another skin-biting pull of the twine, like a tug at a Southern belle's corset, the crown roast is a
thing of beauty, emphatically female. "Eye candy," Aaron calls it, setting it in the case. It looks rather sluttish there,
nestled amid the more pedestrian pork chops; I feel almost as exposed as a Frenched bone, just looking at it, as if anyone
walking in could reach certain conclusions about the person who made it.

"Jules, you been basting?"

"Shit. Right. Sorry."

I want to see who winds up buying my sexy little she-roast, but when it goes I'm in the back, scooping marrow out of the bones
that until moments ago had served as the rack for the roast beef, and spreading it on toast.

"H
EY
. H
OW'S
the meat?"

"It's good. I'm freaking exhausted. Driving home--I mean, to Rifton. My connection might cut out here in a minute."

"Okay. I miss you."

"I miss you too."

During our separation, when I had my Yorkville sublet, I made it my own. Bought a brightly colored futon, a new big-screen
television. Brought a couple of plates, a few pots and pans, from Queens. My kitchen was tiny, tinier even than the one in
which I'd cooked through five hundred and twenty-four Julia Child recipes a couple of years before. Which is saying something.
But I didn't mind, because it was mine. I had two small windows that looked out into the ailanthus-green row of overgrown
garden patches that filled the center of the town-house-lined block. I could look into other people's windows, watch the woman
who meticulously made her bed in bra and slip every morning, the more erratic goings-on of a family of four in their breakfast
nook. I had snapshots of Eric, the pets, my family, that one my father took so long ago of D, small reminders of my history
and my connections to the world. But the tiny apartment was just for me.