To gauge doneness he didn’t poke the steaks, as a pro would, and he didn’t slice into them like an amateur; he watched them. As the steaks seethed over the flames, the heat drove its force from the edge to the center of the steak until the middle began, ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, to bulge with juice. That’s how you know they’re done—when they begin to puff. My dad stared rudely at the steaks, never leaving his post. Sometimes I stood a few feet behind him and watched him watch them. Ever since, I’ve never understood how someone could put a piece of meat on the grill and walk away. Beyond the risk of overcooking, why would you ever want to miss the sight of the transformation?
As my dad grilled, my mom finished the steaks’ pea-pod-and-mushroom garnish, which had been perfuming the house and driving me mad for what seemed like hours. She cooked the white button mushrooms slowly with a ton of roughly chopped garlic and a grenade-size lump of butter, and when they’d shrunk to the size of brown flower bulbs and began to stick to the pan and caramelize, at least forty minutes later, she threw in the pea pods. The second the pods turned bright green, the mixed buttery juices of both were ready to be spooned out next to the meat.
At the age of ten I was considered a full person, due a whole steak, so I sat down to an entire rib eye splayed out across my plate. (That was my mom’s style: finding the space to put the potatoes and vegetables was your own problem.) Through some dogged knife work, you were expected to reduce the meat to scraps and to chew on the burned edges of the fat, too, which my parents rightly insisted was the best part. My steak was perfect, cooked just slightly—a mere shade—south of medium rare, at the point when the livid juices ran and pooled in the slash of your first cut.
When we sat down to the table, my parents were uncharacteristically quiet. My family mumbled the prayer. Bless us so lord and these eye gifts for what we are about to receive from our bounty through Christ by lord Amen. Mom looked at us expectantly, desiring our cogs to start turning and pass the food around while it was still hot. My dad wordlessly assisted by spinning his hand in a fast spiral from the wrist. Despite the cooperation, I could tell that their tempers were up. My parents were silently antagonizing each other, my mom’s every mundane comment an elbow to Dad’s ribs, his reticence gathering in pressure. This night would not end as some others had, with them rocking together in the living room to Neil Diamond booming from the hi-fi.
My brother Bob, whose overboiling enthusiasm was usually irrepressible, stared at his plate, disappointed. He was easily disappointed—unless he was happy, and then his optimism was so great it bordered on fictive. When we watched TV, he was startled to see the same actors in different shows and sometimes asked me if I thought the actor was really going through the same struggles in real life. How can you not know this? I thought, my grip on narrative reality never wavering. He was largely viewed as the honest one, the one all the women in our family considered our shining hope for the priesthood; I knew him as the one who pinched me slyly and never got caught. I was thought of as the craftier of the two, mostly because I never learned to hide behind my emotions; I was the perpetually naughty three-year-old who had bitten her baby brother on the back when he arrived to steal her spotlight, and I could never live it down. But—touché—I wasn’t as much of a believer as he was, either.
I looked at my brother Marc, his precocious youngest-kid wit now failing to crack up the table as it usually did. His smile waned, as if he just realized that not everything was funny. I ate my rib eye and chewed the last bit slowly, surprised to find that the growth of negative space in my gut hadn’t been resolved by twelve ounces of beef. I looked over at Bob’s uneaten steak, asked him if I could have it, forked it from his plate to mine, and ate most of that as well.
Up to this point, I’d never overeaten. Like a wild animal’s, my body met its need/use ratio and there wasn’t an ounce of anything extra hanging on my muscles. My legs were like smooth tan saplings with joints. I was starting to dabble with obsessive snacks like butter-logged bagels, scrambled eggs overcooked until they formed a brown crust, spicy giardiniera pickles, and canned black olives, but they were still aberrations in a mostly birdlike daily diet. But in this new uncomfortable fullness I could feel the shape of a second kind of hunger, one that reached past borders of appetite. In addition to need, there was this heavy sensuous thing called want, and it was both thrilling and terrifying.
That night after Bob and I went to sleep in our basement bedroom, I was woken by the sounds of my parents’ subsumed fight from earlier unfurling its flag. I opened my eyes in the buzzing blackness and crawled into my comfort cove of distant observation. I luxuriated in their voices, in the predictable accelerations, the well-worn volleys, the familiar notes of their outrage. Rubbing the husks of my dry heels together beneath my blankets, I listened hard and kept score, making notes on character motivations like a dramaturgist watching from the wings.
When I turned over, I saw my brother Bob sitting cross-legged in the triangle of light coming in the doorway, his back straight and at attention. Having had to listen to this for two years and two months longer than he had, the dream of the perfect family had begun to fizzle in me; but it was still actively churning in Bob. I got up and joined him in the doorway, but I knew that we were sitting too close, paying too much attention, and that it was more tolerable if you closed your eyes.
A cloud of acrid grill smoke drifted in on their voices, smelling like a clump of rib eye had fallen between the grates to smolder into a petrified knot. The smoke in the house was a benevolent cover, the lingering symbol of their extravagant passion, the beauty that made their surges tolerable—and honestly, probably the only reason I remember this moment with such clarity.
Like the charred fat on the steak, like the mushroom juices that seeped into my potatoes, their dark nighttime emotions felt familiar, comfortable, and essential. Like a gold standard, their fighting provided a heavy counterweight to our mostly lighthearted childhood.
I wouldn’t fully understand the importance of sadness until later, when I learned to achieve a precarious balance in the kitchen, in the bowl in front of me. The joy of lemon cannot stand alone; it needs sugar or olive oil, something to bring it back to earth. Vinegar literally cries out for fat. Fat falls flat without salt or sugar. Chile heat sings with brown sugar. And bitterness, well, that needs it all: acidity, bacon, butter…and a little caramelized, crusty scudge from the bottom of the pan—a bit of sweet, dark sorrow—doesn’t hurt.
9
THE PERPETUAL POPCORN POT
Thielens work twelve-hour days. Six days in a row. Fifty-two weeks a year. With a hangover or without. Thielens, by nature, are not lazy.