If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (9 page)

“What about an outdoor kitchen?” Joe asked one night as we stood on the freshly tamped mound of dirt where my overpriced Pottery Barn double-wide lounge chair was supposed to go. You know how they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach? I’m thinking a knife to the chest would be a lot faster.

“Ooh, just what I always wanted,” I said with an extra dose of sarcasm. “
Two
kitchens!”

“Jenna, you know I love to barbecue,” he replied. “I’d totally cook all the time if we had a kitchen outside.”

I didn’t believe him for a second, but he had some compelling arguments. First of all, our inside kitchen sort of sucked, so this would make life better for both of us. Second, if we built a kitchen instead of putting in another pool, I wouldn’t have to play neighborhood lifeguard, which—now that it was a little cooler outside—sounded like a relief. In the end I negotiated an al fresco fireplace in exchange for a beer tap, and the whole thing sounded way better than the current dirt pit I was tired of looking at, frankly.
It’s all about resale value
, I justified to myself. If I wound up getting an occasional cheeseburger or veggie kabob out of the deal, it would be one of those unexpected little delights of life, like finding that something you were already going to buy is on sale, or discovering one last Tic Tac stuck to the inside lid of the box when you thought it was empty and you were desperately craving one and a half calories of minty freshness.

I call him the food economist. This has nothing to do with nutrition or
finances or cooking. No, it is all about the way he eats his food. No
matter what he eats, he plans it out in his mind so that each item on
his plate is eaten in one of two ways, and which way depends on how
much he is enjoying his meal. For instance, if he loves everything on
the plate (say a nice rib eye, potatoes au gratin, and grilled asparagus),
he will eat everything in unison, rotating bites of each but maintaining
the exact proportionate quantities of each so that his last bite may
include all elements of his dinner, or at least, so he can then decide
which to eat last. It’s maddening. Sometimes I have to reach over and
grab that last mushroom just to fuck with his organization.

ELIZABETH

 

 

Within a year’s time we had a new baby and a new kitchen.

“What do you want me to cook tonight?” Joe would ask eagerly several nights a week, the picture of the helpful, enlightened superdad.

“Something, anything, I don’t care,” I’d mutter resentfully. I know, he was offering to cook and I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t. I was a ravenous nursing cow, and here we were with
two kitchens
and I was still having to make the dreaded call on what we were going to eat for dinner. Only now I had to do it balancing a squirming newborn on my padded, postbaby hip while yellowish milk dripped from my nipples. (Forget the condom talk.
This
is the image they should show in high school sex ed classes.)

For a while this was how it worked: I’d shop for all of the food and assemble the day’s menu. An hour or so before dinnertime, I would hand Joe a platter containing a hunk of the marinated animal flesh du jour, then proceed to sauté the veggies, toss the salad, boil the requisite starch, assemble the necessary condiments, fold the napkins, set the table, and dole out an assortment of beverages. Proudly manning a shiny variety of high-tech appliances with a frosty draft beer in hand, Joe would gingerly lay the meat onto the hot grill (five to thirty seconds, ranging from a single small pork loin to multiple chicken breasts or some nice carne asada). For the next ten to forty minutes, he would be free to talk on the phone, check his e-mail, watch a few snippets of the news, catch some ESPN highlights, or play with the kids until it was time to “check the meat” (fifteen seconds). He might have to repeat this burdensome inspection phase two or three more times (thirty to forty-five seconds) before it was officially time to remove the cooked flesh from the flame (ten seconds) and carry it to the table (twenty-five seconds).

Make no mistake: If I sound like a bitter, miserable hag as I reminisce about this time period in our marriage, it’s
because I was a bitter, miserable hag during this time period in our marriage
. I may have tried to hide it—I genuinely can’t recall if I had any will at all at the time—but even on a good day, I am sure my miserable hagness was never far from the surface. Like many modern-day moms, I was working, shouldering approximately 98 percent of the new-baby burden, keeping up the house, sleeping an average of two hours a night, and still trying to fulfill what I felt were my wifely duties (provide sex and dinner, mainly). So while he was “helping” with dinner, Joe’s total time contribution to any meal averaged about two minutes and five seconds, and that’s being patently generous. If you factored in the time I spent doing related meal-preparation minutiae like circling the grocery store looking for a parking spot, comparing prices, reading ingredient lists, waiting for the ninety-eight-year-old lady in front of me to painstakingly
write out her goddamned check and record it in the accompanying check register
(Dear God, why? I mean, I know she has nowhere to go and nothing to do, but does she have to bring me down, too?), cruising the neighborhood for an hour because the kid had fallen asleep on the way home and she needed her nap so there was no other choice, loading and unloading the groceries, and searching online for recipe substitutions when I opened the lid on the sour cream container to find a mass of furry blue goop where creamy white deliciousness should have been, let’s just say it’s pretty clear who was doing the lion’s share of the work. (Ahem. Roar.) Compounding my agony was the fact that my friends, my mother, my stepmom, and one very envious sister constantly, woefully bemoaned how “lucky I was” all the flipping time because my husband “cooked.” I began to think they should congratulate me on how much “money I’d made” each time I traipsed down to the bank to deposit my beloved’s latest paycheck.

“Most guys don’t cook at all,” Joe would argue if I dared to suggest he step up his efforts a notch or two.

As much as I hated to admit it, he sort of had me there. Still, I wasn’t about to let him off the hook.

“Big deal,” I’d huff. “Most women don’t work
and
take care of the kids
and
keep the house as immaculate as I do!”
So there!

“Yeah, but you’re the only one who cares about the house being immaculate,” he’d point out with an annoying combination of accuracy and matter-of-factness.

It was usually right around this point that I would come to my senses and realize that things were never going to change, so I’d better learn to just suck it up and be grateful for whatever measly contribution I could get. The vocalization of this highly evolved sort of epiphany usually sounded something like this:
“Oh my God I fucking hate you and I am totally not ever doing your stupid laundry or shopping for goddamned groceries again EVER so good luck with that, jackass!”

Of course that was a total pack of lies, and I kept doing the stupid laundry and the goddamned grocery shopping and the hateful, mind-numbing meal planning because apparently I was the only one who cared about a clean house and also not getting scurvy. (True story: When I met Joe, the only food in his house was a twenty-pound bag of pierogies. If you’re like I was and have no idea what a pierogi is, picture a potato-filled ravioli dumpling, your basic nutrient-free, white flour gut-bomb. Purchased in bulk, the lowly pierogi may be the one convenience food that is even cheaper than and inferior to ramen noodles.)

This is where my story of culinary deliverance takes on an ironic edge Alanis Morissette would appreciate. If you recall, we now had
two kitchens
merely because what I originally felt was my home’s most compelling feature turned out to be a mirage. To my great disdain I continued to serve as the primary kitchen wench—until the fortuitous day that Joe discovered the convergence of food and television in the form of the Food Network. I wasn’t there when it happened, but imagine how you’d feel if you discovered that two of your favorite things in the world—like petit fours and pedicures, or
Dancing with the Stars
and dirty martinis—had somehow been rolled into a delicious model of one-stop shopping. Talk about televangelism!

I didn’t even notice it at first, because as I may have mentioned, I don’t watch much TV. But one day I was scrolling through the TiVo lineup looking for something to occupy the girls and I noticed a bunch of strange titles:
Boy Meets Grill. Throwdown with Bobby Flay. 30-Minute Meals. Diners, Driveins and Dives
.

“I saw a bunch of cooking shows scheduled on the TiVo thingy,” I mentioned casually later that day. “Do you watch any of those?”

“Sometimes, a little, I don’t know, yeah,” Joe stammered. He sounded guilty, like I was his mom and I was grilling him—so to speak—about the baggie full of funny-smelling parsley I found in his jacket pocket.

Relieved that the only breasts he was ogling after I went to bed belonged to dead chickens, I let it go. Then my birthday rolled around.

Joe likes to wrap presents in newspaper. To be extra ironic, he likes to wrap
my
presents in the sports pages. Anyhow, as I tore through a piece about our local high school football team, I very nearly went into early cardiac arrest when it became clear that I was now the proud owner of the latest Williams-Sonoma cookbook, simply titled
Grilling
. If the steak on the cover had been a man, it would have been Hugh Jackman, his bronzed body dewy with sweat and wearing nothing but a smile. My mouth immediately started to water. But really? A fucking
cookbook
?

“I know what you’re probably thinking,” Joe said, rushing to preempt my disappointment. “But I am going to make everything in that book for you. Every week I want you to pick something new and I’ll make it.
And
shop for all of the ingredients.
And
clean it all up.”

For once, I was speechless. I didn’t even screw it up by pointing out the still unfair six-to-one weekly division of labor. I gushed and fawned appropriately, and proceeded to dog-ear the pages of the most delectable-looking recipes.
Something is always better than nothing,
I reminded myself.
And those scallop and mushroom brochettes better rock my little world.

My husband makes these gross things I call “scrumples” where he
crumples a napkin at the end of a meal and sometimes blows his nose
in it and sometimes even kind of wipes his tongue with it if he has
snotty mucus. I hate it. He leaves the crumpled napkin on his dirty
plate. If he hadn’t cooked the meal (he’s a chef)—and he does cook
every meal—it would be grounds for divorce or a Lorena Bobbitt move
at the very least. I hate the scrumples but I love him.

DIANA

 

 

Before long I noticed that Joe was cooking—or at least, contributing to the cooking—more than once a week. A lot more than once, in fact. I started to get cocky, even grocery shopping without a list. As long as I bought some sort of meat, he could figure out what to do with it and make it taste good. The positive impact of this skill on our marriage truly cannot be overstated. The kids became so accustomed to our tag-team efforts in the kitchen that rarely did we enjoy a meal without having some version of this conversation:

Kids: “Who made the steak?”

Us: “Daddy did.”

Kids: “Who made the asparagus?”

Us: “Mommy did.”

Kids: “Who made the rice?”

Us: “We made it together.”

And that’s pretty much how it worked. Until one night, something funny happened: I made a casserole. There was nothing inherently amusing about the casserole, but the conversation that followed was one for the books.

Kids: “Who made the chicken?”

Us: “Mommy did.”

Kids: “And who made the noodles?”

Us: “Mommy did.”

Kids: “But . . . then who made the broccoli?”

Us: “Actually, Mommy made that, too.”

They looked at each other, then back at us, not for one moment buying this preposterous story.

“Mom, you can’t make a whole dinner
all by yourself
,” my six-year-old finally blurted.

“Yeah!” her four-year-old sister agreed, as if that settled it and we were just a pair of liars in cahoots.

Was this really happening? Did those years and years
and years and years
of doing all of the miserable grunt work by myself mean nothing to the little ingrates I had birthed? Did they
really
think that I was incapable of pulling off a simple supper without their father’s help?

“Actually, it’s not that I
can’t
make an entire dinner by myself,” I finally replied. “I just don’t usually want to.” As understatements go, that may have been the mack daddy. But at least I’d gotten across the message that I was relinquishing some of the cooking by choice and not out of incompetence.

Joe’s gotten to be a creative and almost intuitive cook. No longer does he have to measure out the requisite teaspoon of salt or tablespoon of olive oil. Gift-giving occasions have become a delightful excuse to purchase exotic kitchen tools (who knew you needed different spatulas for fish, burgers, and veggies?) and splurge on frivolous but fun items like a panini press or a bamboo pizza peel. Sure, now that he’s a “pro,” there is some suffering to endure. “Did you put more salt in this than usual?” he’ll ask after dipping a spoon into a pot of something-or-other that I’m simmering, clearly implying a leaden hand. “Want me to flip these?” he’ll offer, inspecting the pancakes I’m making and all but suggesting that I don’t recognize when a bubbling circle of batter is ready to be turned. He’ll stir my sauces, adjust the stove burners, add and remove lids, even suggest additions and substitutions. As annoying as it is to be micromanaged by him, I take great comfort knowing that if anything tragic should happen to me, at least my children won’t be eating Lucky Charms for dinner every night.