While I cooked, the sun sank rapidly, as if someone were drowning it under the waterline of the horizon. I lit the two oil lamps in the kitchen and shoved all my dirty dishes behind a curtained cupboard.
We sat down to a caveman pork chop flanked by two hills: a sliding pile of bacon-slicked potatoes and a collapsed heap of zucchini noodles. My perfect zucchini, the ones that I’d babied from seed, slumped in an olive-green heap, slicked with burned garlic oil and studded with possibly wormy pine nuts. Why had I cooked it so early and let it sit? What a rookie mistake.
Aaron read my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “This is fine!”
He nailed it. It was fine. No matter how pristine my raw materials were, I ended up with one thing: a fine plate of supper. It wasn’t bad, but the composition was hardly artful. The flavors weren’t roped together in any kind of meaningful, memorable way. Individual notes don’t a song make, I thought and melted into my chair. My food obsession was growing at a disproportionate rate to my stalling skills, and every fresh trip to the garden followed by every night’s disappointing dinner just made it worse. My cooking was starting to feel like blind groping: I could feel the shape of the thing I wanted to make, but I couldn’t see it.
No question: Ours was a beautiful, simple life. I felt safe here, in our vegetable kingdom, in knowing that the asparagus and the rhubarb would return in the spring; that the chokecherries would come on the branch in early August and sugar would erase their woolly mouthfeel; that the wild rice growing on the creek—right in our front yard—would ripen around the time that summer came to a close. These things would continue to grow, with us or without us. The place wasn’t going anywhere.
And I finally had to admit it: Neither was I.
Aaron was spending his evenings making art; he was on track. I was spending mine reading vintage cookbooks, filling the pages with scratchy marginalia, fishing around in the peach-colored lamplight for some motivation.
I found it, or a fraction of it, at my diner job. The weekend breakfast battle—so named because the horde of summer tourists could order anything on the six-page menu, from glorified hash browns to taco salads to hot beef sandwiches—ignited me. Hot in the middle of it, I opened the triangular points of a hot beef sandwich, nestled a big ball of mashed potatoes into its crotch juncture, poured a blanket of leather-colored gravy over every inch of it, right up to the plate rim just as the head cook told me to do, threw it up on the counter, banged the bell, and went on to the next thing. And the next. There was no time to pause or to think. The food at the diner wasn’t the best (and certainly wasn’t the worst), but remarkably, I loved that greasy, madcap world so much that it never occurred to me to question the tactical wisdom of returning to my rural hometown after college to become a short-order cook.
Gardening, canning, and dinner-making began to occupy so much of my waking brain that I thought I might as well try to get paid for it. Maybe it was time to merge my worlds—the heirloom vegetables and the hot grease of the diner griddle. Maybe the New York cooking school I’d spotted in the back pages of a food magazine could be my graduate school. Moving to the big city, with its fast pace and high cost of living, would surely cure my motivation problem.
Aaron was less enthusiastic about leaving the backwoods live/work space he’d built for himself but admitted that New York City—the center of the international art world—was probably where he needed to be. His best friend, Rob, also a sculptor, had already moved there from Minneapolis. And I seemed pretty hell-bent.
In September of 1999, after we put our garden to bed and harvested our wild rice, we made our own surprise chess move—a big frog’s leap through the tall leaves—to Brooklyn.
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We packed Aaron’s art materials, all of my prized cookbooks and pots and pans, and the sixty-pound burlap bag of wild rice we hoped to sell, into a U-Haul and drove straight east until it came time to locate the studio apartment we had sublet on honking, congested Fulton Street in Brooklyn. The key the lease holder gave us in exchange for the three months’ rent we’d given him a few weeks before, nearly all the money we had between us in the world, burned hotly in my hand. I just hoped it would open the door.
“Don’t even say that,” said Aaron, clutching the wheel as he navigated the map, his eyes scanning for house numbers amid the casual street bedlam that was Brooklyn.
Our dramatic move, from a log cabin in the woods to the hive of New York, was surprisingly painless, like riding a raft into a fast current. As soon as Aaron and I unpacked our few things—we used cardboard boxes in the closet for drawers, so that was pretty quick to set up—he called a friend of his from college and scored work with his art-handling crew at a museum. He started on Monday.
“That was easy,” he said, setting down the phone, a bit suspicious of his instant job. Getting a show of his artwork would be another matter, especially without a proper, separate studio. I flopped down on the ratty couch, surveyed the one-room space, and, as is my nature, felt immediately at home. But given Aaron’s sensitivity to fluorescent overhead lighting and wall-to-wall carpeting—actually, the dirty navy rug gave us both the heebie-jeebies—our apartment felt disarmingly foreign. His work-in-progress, the eight-foot slab of bowling-alley flooring he’d lugged in to carve, took up one of the four walls of our living space, and he started immediately to chink away at it in the evenings. As he reduced the surface into shapes, the wood chips flew, some of them landing squarely into my cardboard underwear drawer. (I sometimes found one later, as I walked to the subway, inside my panties.)
That same Monday, I started cooking school in Manhattan, the five months of which flew by more quickly, and less eventfully, than I had expected. I entered with wide eyes, hoping for a marinelike basic training with a bossy, brilliant French cuisinière, but instead found myself trudging through foundational European sauces with an unwieldy group of twenty. I was even more disappointed to find a fellow cookbook nut in my class whose grasp of culinary nerdery outmatched my own.