Not That I Need Saving

It was the soup that saved me. (I much prefer the typewriter to this thing, but I fear the noise.)
I cut with scissors, since I have no good knives, the plastic casing of the chicken, pink with diluted blood, inoffensive; a matter of fact. I rinsed it, pulled it’s insides outside, thoughtlessly on the counter, and then back in the bag not to be bothered with. Water high in a tall pot, in went the bird, bottom stretched open to fill and sink rather than float, bobbing as it would, a mockery it would be. Ridiculous. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (as they sing), rainbow peppercorns, pink salt. Any salt would do; it just happened to be pink, so all right. The onion half, diced as I’d been taught, heat, lid, a book. (Not just any book, it should be said that this book was written by a poet in France, written, even, about a poet in France. The book itself was a gift. A first edition, though I can’t stand to read anything in sleeves.) There is a slipperiness that a good book will lend me, an ease on my feet, time lubed up. I move more fluidly, more, it seems, importantly. There is a meaning to my motions, my endless reaching, tidying, surviving little by little, for I have not finished the chapter yet, and really, I must get back. My voice wakes up, too. I narrate myself along, as if all I needed was a soundtrack, some background noise, something against which I can stand in relief.
But it was, really, the soup which saved me. I pryed off the lid, stuck as it was with hot water and steam, more powerfull than we credit it. With a great metal set of tongs with teeth, a wonderfully utilitarian machine, a tool for doing Things in the Kitchen, I pulled out the chicken’s body, now cooked and soft, and disintegrating itself from the great structure beneath. Careful was I to tilt the cavity down, pour out the soup, and then splat the thing onto the plate. Plucking, plucking, I pull the two femurs snap out of thigh meat like the release of a suction, relief. Thump in the trash, thump. I am tugging and poking and tearing the meat in search of bones and I think that we think of muscles more in terms of dinner than of body. A rib breaks like a toe. I tug at the skin which slaps back against the meat which had before been so well protected by it. It is slimy, shiny, and its wetness is sexual, not like the muscles. When it falls back into the soup, I think of the sounds of a neighbor and his lover through thin old walls in an apartment building where no one speaks to each other. Bone by bone I tear the meat into pieces and in tongfulls splat the meat back into the broth. I have a steaming skeleton on the plate on the range, and I laugh thinking “What if a neighbor sees this in my trash and thinks it is a human baby corpse, and that I am some devil-bowing witch! Ha!”
After some time, a good amount of time, celery, carrots. Another carrot. I so like cooked carrots. More thyme, bunched as it is in clumps on its twigs, and it appears to me to be right that it should be called something which is so difficult to get a grip on. I think to myself, that, indeed is a universal struggle, is it not? It can’t be just me, no. Rosemary, rosemary, how I admire your intensity. How, sometimes intimidating, and yet always a comfort, never so mean as I fear an herb of your grandeur could be. When, as it happens, I find too much of the sprigs in my spoon, or on my palate, I am never, as I am wont to be with other things, ashamed to fish it out, splay it half-muddled on the lip of my plate, a napkin, the bare table. Not so with chili flakes, not so with garlic or mint or that curly parsley when raw. I feel a pressure to imbibe it, but rosemary, so strong as it is, is perfectly happy to be thumbed out of the gums, and wiped on the brown paper bag which lines the trash can beneath the table. Along with the carrots and celery stalks, I poured the grains of orzo from their plastic. They heaped atop the chicken meat like sand in an hourglass and I shook my head. It’s just soup.
Stirrr. Feel the steam, herbacious on my face, against my eyelids, a slight burn in my nostrils. More pepper, salt. I sit again with the book, the gift, and tap my foot. Ten minutes. Or so.
When I have gotten my bowl, and sit again on the couch, legs crossed like a child sitting but too excited to sit, I arrange the pillows beneath the bowl, the spoon, wide in my right hand and the book in my left, and my smile is loose, effortless, and honest. The broth is thick with the starchy orzo, minimally diluted, and so fatty. I slurp some skin. Sexual. I discover, with relish, the single carrot piece which I had cut differently than the rest, a treasure, silly and satisfying. It is true that its better for your soup be wanting salt than in excess of it. I think, “I’ve got to write.”

A la Prochaine!

A Moment in the Paris Metro

Fluff

When I tell you that nothing else has been on my mind but my frustration with and resentment towards my recent writings, it is not true, but only a slight exaggeration. I have also been thinking about meringue. And colors!

To write about meringue seems insane. It has been the pillow of my life's sleep, a texture more familiar to me than most others. The tradition of the family meringue was, for years, one of the only measures I had for time and season. Winter smells like burning wood, feels like long-john silk, bright white mornings, and it tastes like the family meringue. The strange fluffy tear drop cookie with one very surprising ingredient specific to my family's recipe. The lecture on humidity, and the tearing of brown-paper bags. I rolled my eyes at my father and his insistent jubilance, but I would marvel at the sloppy batter, this thick wet snow just as sweet as I could bear, and sometimes more than I could. I would elbow my sister to throw the chocolate chips, and to lick the bowl. I have never, ever made these cookies on my own. I have a recipe for my grandmother's cookies which I've made on occasion and which I adore, but these cookies, my father's family meringue has been spellbound for years. Left to the family's resident Expert.

But meringue is a world, fluffly, and thick, and sweet. I am not a flitty character, but this.. this thing.. meringue, is, really, magical. A blend of egg whites and sugar frenzied into a mousey, tar-like sapcloud. The Italians, actually, do it best by first making a syrup to add to whipped whites, giving a firmness the French technique can't promise.

But what the French have done with meringue? Glorious. Decadent. Did you expect elsewise? There is a liberty to food coloring I'd never had the guts nor the opportunity to embrace and if there ever was an opportunity to embrace it, it is with meringue, in the macaron. Let it rest to say, like everything, everything else, it is a wonderful tool! The beauty of the macaron is in it's versatility. The rules are simple, and if followed will not disappoint in providing a vast and sweet canvas for creative feasting of both eye and mouth. Crunch and goo! As with the souffle, and with, I think all baking, the science and precision of consistency and texture, and temperature and timing holds the world in its orbit and allows it to spin and spin and evolve and be beautiful over and over again. Oh, what fun!

We made a dark chocolate ganache with orange zest, a butter cream with coffee extract, pineapple
compote with rum, and a vanilla bean pastry cream on macarons of both Italian and French meringue styles in red, blue, purple, green, and yellow. Can you guess my favorite?

At least now I've got something to share with my family.


*check the gallery for more photos!

Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard

The lounge chairs were huddled in groups circling the low and large pool of water with the giant golden ball seemingly floating or rolling in the center. They were deep bucket seats with a reclined back that bid you watch the clouds, forcing your head to hang too far back. The lad with smokes slid slowly and stiffly into the seat, hesitant to turn his belly up leaning back, and smacked the pack of cigarettes against his palm, turning the box and smacking the opposite end in nervous time. He had, because of his sunglasses, the impression of the gold ball being rather pink and he eased a bit in his seat, grateful for the protection not from the sun (which was in fact not a threat today), but from the terror of accidental eye contact with these strange people who walk in gardens in afternoons. He could watch safely the old man crooked in a constant bow shuffling his slippers (the man was wearing slippers!) across the dirt. Pigeons at his feet huddling like conspirators. A loneliness overcomes the boy, the weight and doom of time having bent this old man and he shifts his gaze back to the large pink ball to try recovering the easiness it gave him just a few moments ago. No avail; he is crushed and panics. Whipping his head round now, he's sat up straight and is ready to run, wants to scream. He opens his mouth, on his toes. The adventuress stutters a "bonjour!"
Stunned, he melts as if tranquilized back into the lounge chair despite how ill-proportioned it is to his height. He nods, weak.
"donc, uh.. ... Ca va!?" she tries hopeful, blind to his nausea. Nothing. Not nothing; another nod, and she smiles, screeching another metal disequilibrial chair against the sand and poises herself with one hand on the opposite knee, and one hand holding her chin. Feeling herself lubberly, she repeats to herself "What lovely company I am!" but having spent the morning talking with herself she unfortunately mouths the words silent as they were. Dammit.
Strange, he thinks, and glances through his eyeshades. She looks pink.
"Ca va." he says the two words separately, like two blocks brought up by coughing in his mouth, shyly. Plucking a cigarette from the pack sufficiently smacked, he tips the box toward her and thinks of sneaking his eyes over the glasses but thinks better of it; let her be pink..
The tobacco stink startles her, it seems wanting to burn. Violent, no? It occurs to her that she has smoked before seeing the comfort of her fingers as they pinch the filter. Leaning towards a light with mouth invariably pursed, saying, "if you please," with eyes glancing up, it seems difficult to retain grace or dignity. "Merci," and the smoke hurries up her nose, into the eyes, she winces, coughs, smiles. Dammit.
Hearing the word, he sighs, another stranger! He mentally beats himself on the back with a birch branch for not recognizing her sooner! Yes. She is like himself, strange, clumsy, here, and asks her name. "Al. Can I call you Betty?" She is not surprised at being found out, not surprised at his words and their language, she is not honestly surprised by anything. He shrinks, and nods, shy again though not as before.
She knocks the ash from the end of the smoke and watches herself as if she were the pink, or gold ball. The round surface spreads her wide, erases the details of her skin, the texture of her scarf, the discomfort of the chair, but magnifies one eye, the cigarette and it's smoke. Fascinated, she stares at herself this way. Seeing herself large, looming, deformed, unsurprised. She sees thus behind her a funeral procession. Squeezed onto the north pole of the golden ball, it is stretched thin and wide, the wheels of the hearse huge, the casket on shoulders thin like Italian meats. Her breath catches suddenly as she sucks the stub of cigarette burning fast and strong, the smoke more confidently now runs into her nose. Burns her eyes. Someone sings carols like dust from their mouths in the cold air and she remembers. Suddenly so, so sad.

I Can Be Your Long-Lost Pal

Taking for granted that we've no need of logic, we can rightly understand how someone without a proper home can well be tossed to the melancholia of homesickness, that even one well without memories or the furniture of habit around them can be made cold by the unfamiliar even when the warmth of his customs were barely felt. Considering, naturally, that we are all at some point, or to varying degrees at all times, foreign, as it were, we may regard as worthwhile the practice of adventure.

As a matter of habit, our adventuress, as well as I, avoid the coddling of children and the raffish tendency to paint them as a bunch of angels. In one way, however, some of these little things may well be an example of something good. For children will usually prefer to play than anything else, and if given their range of all the foolish accoutrements and stuff piled round them, they will unfailingly want, first of all, to play with you, over the mechanic contraption, and also to play pretend in any variety of archetypal identities invariably where they find themselves wielding a kind of power. At once 'Doctor,' and then 'Maman,' or if the role's been claimed, 'big sister,' and on to 'Teacher,' and back round again to try on the faces of these giants in their world. There is pleasure and learning for them in playing at influence and malleable self-hood, and you'll notice just as well that it doesn't satisfy enough to declare themselves the mother of the game, but they don a new name for you, too, for the pretend must be complete and completely different, as granted by the very lack of logic.

We do sometime learn contrary to our childhood pretendings that we won't mature into firefighters and princesses; only one will be the fate and likely neither of the two. And what foolishness it is that we learn this! That we grow to deny the glorious promise of being just one intricate person. For though it is true that we can only bother ourselves concerning the way this cookie crumbles, we can be sure that this one will hold the flavor of as many as ever were, and what a joy to be given such a dough to experiment, such a vehicle for adventure!

This darling walked the gardens of Tuileries without much sense of the thousands of memories she had forgotten of herself; the long-lost intimidation she had harbored of butter and bread, the way that her legs would once always be shaking, or the months spent trying never to sleep alone; walking as she was with an even step and steady pace, her shoulders slid away from the ears and even though the temples were pounding, she did not remember the teachings she used to give, nor that most embarrassing moment of her life in Mexico 3 years prior, neither of course did she recall the previous night and how she came to be, serendipitously, here in the gardens. She smiled, thirsty. Seeing a gentleman about to sit on a lounge chair in the garden with a pack of cigarettes, she thought, "I'll call him Betty, and me, Al."

If You'll Be My Body-Guard

The corner of her bottom lip was swollen and gray. It was sometime in the afternoon when she woke to find a thin gray cover of sky over the Grande Roue. Standing now, she shakes her head and wags her cheeks on her face wondering wha-...why? The immediacy of being awake in the afternoon in public impels her to do something, but being senseless as she was at the moment, all she could bear to do was to fumble hands in her pockets, and press her tongue to the welt on her mouth.
So often when we wake to find the world a stranger we fashion from our memories an excuse or explanation and from our habits some solution. We could call it a shame that this one had not the faculty at the time to remember of herself as a smaller child, sick to the stomach at the Taj Mahal and the photo taken of her frowning with arms barred across her chest, uncomfortable and angry as one could expect. Such a memory might have granted her the timely use of a tool well within her repertoire for exactly such encounters as these.

Alas, as she scanned the sky and scenery, the people strolling past her, and those vending hot wine, she happily found her gloves and hastily put them on for as well as she could not provide a reason for her being there, she also could not summon a reason for her to be anywhere else and away from need of logic, she knew that she was cold.
Without the need and indeed the capacity for reasoning, left in quite this state of desolation and fumbling as all she could do in her pockets, she produced a few coins and started towards the man with the vin chaud. Smiling at the man's bright white face, she let the coins clatter on the counter of his booth and asked with shrugging shoulders for a small cupful. His skin sagged heavily from his eyes that his smile was such relief, and she coughed back laughter, but the vinchaudman took the coins, and said to her, "Donc et voila, it's cold today! Wine...biensure c'est comme ca...you sleep...!" His meaning muddled and flung at her so violently and with such beneficence, she seemed to need to blink several times to see clearly that he was presenting her with her cup and some change. With a thank you genuine and meek, she walked away. Without having sipped yet, she sat down knowing that he was a good man and that it was good wine.
Simply enough, she found herself soon warm, and again watching the baskets of the wheel swept smoothly, swiftly up into the cold. Speakers stand embedded in the streetlamps showering "vive le vent" down upon the ramblers, the words themselves lost upon the girl; the tune, more powerful, unlocked nonspecific memories of cheerfulness, the feeling itself. Being alone as she was, blank as she admittedly was even with the reemergence of some memory, self-hood and context, and being also happy, she began to sing quietly to herself. First it was the American version of "vive le vent," but halfway through, the assertion of Paul Simon's "you can call me Al," was too strong to resist even if she had had reason to. The song made her laugh even without specifically remembering that time in West Virginia.
The quiet self-soothing of singing gave way to a quiet conversation just of her own. Someone's passing glance lingered longer than happenstance, and realized to the girl the visibility of her lips' movement, the impression it gives, and, as in a forced farewell, how happy it had made her to speak aloud to herself. "What lovely company, I am," she said as in finale, and wiped the grin from her face with the last sip of hot wine.
Warm, happy, and in Paris; no one could say she was lost. Not knowing for sure if she was a smoker, she set out for a cigarette, or a cigar, whichever came first, because, she said, "I might be."