Cleaving (18 page)

Eric didn't have that. Eric had our old, hideous apartment, which in my four-month absence quickly acquired a male mustiness.
Overripe bananas languished, not only in the kitchen, but also on side tables and in his briefcase. Kitty litter got ground
into the rugs. A crack mysteriously appeared in the picture window in the living room--not the spiderweb left by a piece of
gravel kicked up by a semi rumbling down Jackson Avenue, but rather a long, straight fissure right down the center of the
pane. It ran along the same axis as a ridge in the linoleum floor stretching the length of the loft; a flaw in the foundation,
we guessed, perhaps also responsible for the unnerving way that the stairs down to the street seemed to be pulling apart,
gaping at the juncture of the risers.

I'm holding my phone to my ear as I talk to Eric, in defiance of legality and driver safety. "You got plans tonight?"

"You know. Clean the house. Beer.
Battlestar Galactica.
What about you? You having dinner with Josh and Jess?"

"Nuh-uh. Steak. Wine. Sleep."

Worse than the detritus and the disrepair, though, for Eric, was the inescapable flood of memory. We have always been pack
rats, both of us, and we've lived together for ten years. Our apartment is crammed to the gills with all the stuff of our
lives. Books and photo albums and furniture and art and more books. He couldn't get away from it. While I sat serenely in
my monk's cell, he was in a place with no spot for his eyes to rest on that didn't remind him of what it was that was cracking
apart.

"Can you hear me now, honey?"

"Barely... You're cutting out."

"Okay. I'll try to call you later tonight."

"Okay, babe. I'll see you in a couple of days."

And now I'm doing it to him again. We are not separated, technically. But I'm still running away.

"I love you."

"I love you t--" And the connection is lost.

C
HRISTMAS IS
just a few days away now. The plan is to meet at the shop in the afternoon--my parents and brother in one rental car driven
up from JFK, Eric in another with Robert the Dog. I'll give them the big tour of the shop. Then, taking off together in our
three cars like a flock of fossil-fuel-guzzling geese, we will head back to their rental cottage. We'll be together, and I
will cook with my mother and wrap presents with Eric on the floor of my apartment and play-wrestle with my brother and do
the crossword with my dad and rub my dog's belly, and we will decorate a tree, and I will let myself be part of a family again.

Until then, I wallow in my solitariness. I don't do constructive things with it. Sometimes I simply stare out the windows.
Or indulge in crying jags. I resort to a bit of stalking, which I convince myself, as stalkers probably always do, is actually
charming and, ultimately, irresistible. The scarf I've been holding onto for nearly a month now, I pack in a box. I buy a
large candy cane and attach to it a piece of white cloth, meant--adorably, I think--to resemble a flag of truce or surrender.
I contemplate with all seriousness, as if there were a rational choice, where to mail this little care package. D's work?
His apartment? His mother's house? I wind up reasoning--as absurd as the word
reason
might seem, applied here--that the last choice makes the most sense. I mail it to Massachusetts from the tiny Rifton post
office on my way to work one morning. Swallow a lurch of shame and fear, and also of wild hope and anticipation, as it leaves
my hands.

Josh and Jessica, being Jewish, don't go in so much for all the Christmas hoopla, and they insist that Thanksgiving is a much
bigger day for them, businesswise. Still, after a bit of a lull between holidays, things are picking up.

Josh, with major assists from Aaron, Juan, and Tom, is constantly working to perfect his pate and chopped liver and double-smoked
bacon, his roast turkey and smoked pork chops, and an endless array of sausages--bratwurst, sweet Italian, chorizo, merguez,
chicken Thai. Each batch a little different until he gets it right. With Colin, the enormous redheaded CIA grad and ex-navy
guy who Josh has recently hired as an extra cutter--and with whom I have instantly bonded over our shared love of Willie Nelson
and Hank Williams III--I have cleaned out a closet in the back. We've hung dowels, and now sausages dry there, fat salamis
and skinny "jerky sticks," always some new experiment. And they are all snapped up by customers, especially now, during the
season of cocktail parties. I roll eye rounds in seasoning and pack them in rock salt, then take them out a week later, brown
and dry. I brush off the salt and tie them the way Tom has shown me, with one long piece of butcher's twine, ending with a
loop on the end. They go in the curing closet, from whence they'll eventually emerge as bresaola. I taste liverwurst with
a spoon, straight from the chopper that Josh is so proud of, a big steel bowl on a rolling stand, with blades like a circular
fan, only terrifyingly sharp. They turn meat to a sticky pink puree in a matter of seconds. We ponder whether the liverwurst
needs more salt. We decide yes.

J
OSH'S
L
IVERWURST

Josh, of course, makes his liverwurst in vast quantities, but if you have a food processor you can replicate it on a smaller
scale, about three pounds' worth, at home.

1 pound pork liver, cut into several pieces

2 pounds pork belly, cut into several pieces

1/2 teaspoon marjoram

1/2 teaspoon sage

1/2 teaspoon white pepper

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

4 tablespoons finely chopped onion

Pinch onion flakes

2 teaspoons salt

Preheat the oven to 350degF. Lay out the pork liver and belly on a roasting pan and cook in the oven until the meat and offal
are rare to medium rare--the liver should still ooze just a bit of blood, the meat should be cooked through but still good
and pink, the juices not entirely clear. Let cool just slightly, perhaps five minutes.

Place the belly meat and liver in the food processor along with all the remaining ingredients. Puree on high speed until the
mixture is completely smooth, stopping now and then to scrape down the sides of the food processor.

Let come to room temperature, then cover and chill.

I break down whole lambs. I take off the heads first (Juan will sometimes take one home with him; someday I need to ask what
he does with them). Then the back legs come off the creatures (and they are very much still creatures, skinned and cleaned
and with their feet cut off, but utterly recognizable). To do this I simply balance them on their backs with their rear legs
sticking out past the edge of the table. I slice through from the edge of the slit belly down to the backbone, just above
the hip on either side. Then, reaching into the cavity, I press down on the backbone, anchoring it to the table, while with
my other hand I grab the lamb's ankles or whatever you call them on a lamb and pull sharply down, splitting the backbone with
a satisfying crack.

Occasionally Josh waltzes with a lamb. Its head back, eyes lidless, looking like a ghoulish debutante in a hideous swoon.

I cut and cut and cut. Rounds, shoulders, ribs, loins. I bone out hams and peel out skirts and break through joints and cut,
cut, cut. Hours at the table, on my feet. My back gets sore, my eyes blear. My fingers freeze. And my wrist. My wrist.

"Julie, have you eaten lunch?"

"Not really hungry."

"Julie, would you take a fucking break already?"

"I'm good."

Josh finally puts his foot down. He stands in front of me and whispers. "Julie. Put the motherfucking knife down, or I'm not
letting you near the table again." Then a roar: "Eat a damn sandwich!"

So I reluctantly take off my apron and hat, pick up one of the sandwiches Josh has brought in a big white bag from the deli
next door. (Josh is constantly buying lunch for his employees--sandwiches or Chinese food or barbecue. That is when he isn't
corralling Aaron into cooking a "family meal." I find it so far above and beyond as to make me somewhat uncomfortable, like
when he gives me piles of meat and refuses to let me pay. For what he's allowing me,
I
should be buying
him
lunch.) I sit at the battered round table in the rear of the shop, unwrap my lunch, and munch halfheartedly, drinking from
a huge plastic glass of water. I've not had any all day, and realize, once I stop for air, that I'm parched. I also realize
that every bit of me aches. I feel like I could close my eyes and sleep here in this straight-backed chair. It is such a shame
that I don't feel like this at night in my lonely room.

Aaron plops down in another seat. In addition to his sandwich, he has some chicken soup he's ladled up from the big pot burbling
away on the stove.

"How you doing, Jules? Got the thousand-yard stare going there."

I know it. I can feel the strange intensity with which I'm poring over a tile of linoleum a few feet away. "Ehn." I chew slowly.

"It's only three thirty! We got miles to go!"

"I know, I know. I'll be fine. I am fine. God, this sandwich is good."

"What kind did you get?"

"No idea." I look down at my sandwich, stare at it for an inordinately long while. Time feels like taffy. I can hear that
my conversation is strange, pocked with odd pauses. "Something white. Turkey."

"Yeah, that reminds me, we gotta bone out those turkeys. They've been thawing in the cooler a few days. Should be unfrozen."

"Boning out turkeys, huh? Sounds..." I try to come up with the word. "Hard."

"Every day you learn something new." He rises to get seconds on soup. The black-and-white of his chef's checks make my eyeballs
quiver a little in their sockets as he walks by. When he comes back, as he sits down he says, "And tomorrow we make your crown
roast."

"Oh. Yeah. Cool."

"Hey, Aaron, can I take my break now?" Jesse is ambling back from the counter, his fingers already reaching to his waist for
his apron strings.

"Give me five minutes, Jesse." Aaron dumps his dishes in the kitchen sink, then strides to the back door. He'll now roll himself
a cigarette and sit on the metal back stairs in the brick alley behind the store to smoke it. "Three minutes."

Jesse looks to the front of the shop, where Hailey is helping the only customer. A brief respite. He just stands there for
a minute, staring out over the counter to the front door. "I am fucking
exhausted.
"

When he glances over at me, I'm gazing sort of more at his chest than his face, half-dazed, not saying anything but nodding
absently like a bobblehead doll some minutes after having been bobbled.

"But then you're right there with me."

"... yeah."

It seems like far less than three minutes later that the big emergency door in the back bangs shut and Aaron has returned,
as chipper and bright-eyed as ever. "Turkey time!"

* * *

B
ONING TURKEYS
is not exactly an overnight trip to Paris on the Orient Express, but neither is it such a terrible ordeal. I remember the
first time I boned a whole duck. It was a terrorizing experience, but incredibly satisfying once correctly done. The turkeys
are like that, only bigger and less delicate and therefore less frightening. Start by slicing down the length of the backbone,
then just work down the rib cage toward the breastbone, keeping your knife edge in against the bone rather than out so you
don't cut into the meat or, more important, through the skin. For the leg, work the meat off the thighbone, which you leave
attached to the carcass, then separate the thighbone from the drumstick, at the joint. Once you've loosened the meat from
the drumstick, you can just poke up from the bottom end and pull the bone clean out, like taking a shirt off over your head,
turning it inside out in the process. The wing comes off in basically the same way, though it's a bit tougher to wiggle out.
Do the same on the other side, until the skeleton is connected to the flesh only at the thin ridge of cartilage running down
the center of the breast. This is the only slightly tricky part, because the skin is thin here, and you don't want to tear
it--especially if you're working for Aaron, who prides himself a stickler for such niceties. A bit of care will generally get
you through with no harm done. And that's that. Bones in one bin for making stock, flesh cleaned up a bit (as anyone who's
ever celebrated an Oktoberfest knows, turkey legs have some heavy-duty sinews, so you have to get those out), and you're done.
Simple.

Except. It turns out that these particular turkeys, leftovers from the Thanksgiving rush that have been languishing in the
freezer ever since, are not, despite several days out of the freezer and in the cooler, what you'd call entirely thawed. Colin
and I stand side by side, trying to get into the birds. Some are simply too rock-hard to cut. Others we can work with, but
within seconds our hands are frozen to the bone. I have to take frequent hand-shaking breaks, flopping wildly around to get
the blood circulating, a mixed blessing, since blood turns the frosty ache to burning needles. "Jesus good God Christ. Yowch."

Colin is running his hands under hot water, wincing in a much more manly, understated way than I am. He tosses me a pair of
latex gloves from the cardboard box that sits behind the counter. "Desperate times..."

And the gloves do help, some, with the cold. But there are so many turkeys to get through--about a dozen, I judge, looking
at the overflowing bin--and all so very, very cold. And about three birds in, the inevitable happens. The tip of my knife slips,
splits latex and then thumb flesh. And I don't notice until I pull my hand out of the bird to warm it up. "Dammit." Colin
just looks up and gives me a sympathetic grimace. Gloves in the trash, it's back to the kitchen sink and first-aid box for
me.

For some reason, different animals cause differing amounts of pain and infection. Pork is the worst; a scrape against a bone
immediately turns an angry, itching red. It stings like crazy when you wash it, and the mark of it remains, often for weeks.
Beef, on the other hand, never seems to cause me problems at all. Turkeys are somewhere in the middle. I squeeze the cut,
rather a deep one, to try to stop the bleeding. It doesn't really want to stop, though. I find myself shifting in a slightly
panicky way from one foot to the other. Though my brain does a fair job of handling cuts with gritty composure, my body still
recoils at the sight of my own blood. I tend to get dizzy, my heart races. I do my best to suppress these shameful physical
indications of squeamishness. Squeamishness is weakness. So I take a couple of huffed breaths, will myself to stop dancing
about like a child who needs to pee. When the blood finally slows, I dab it with oregano oil--it does seem to prevent infection,
hippie shit or not--and wrap it tight in a Band-Aid. Immediately have to replace it when blood soaks through it in seconds.
Squeeze some more. Decide to sit down. This is not a major thing, of course--nothing at all really. I just need to sit.