Every Day is Marne Gras
Mixed Media
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It is three in the afternoon on a Monday, but she is just arriving home from the grocery store that she left for fifteen minutes ago. She took her corduroy purse her mother bought for her (at age seventeen, the last purse anyone ever bought for her) to the store because it is perfect for carrying the amount of groceries one person needs, which is how many people she is usually cooking for.
She struggles to open the front door because it has been humid and hot this week and the lock has swelled and the small part doesn’t fit with the big part quite right anymore and the corduroy bag full of groceries awkwardly restricts her range of motion so her right arm flails uselessly as she slams the left side of her body against the swollen door to force it open.
She leaves the groceries in the bag on the kitchen table and goes to check her e-mail even though all of the groceries are perishables. Butter, cream cheese, sour cream, and mushrooms all sweating and breeding bacteria all over themselves in her bag. Are mushrooms perishables?
She remembers that everything is perishable except honey and styrofoam.
She is on a vacation. She has been on a vacation since 9am this very morning. She is not out on the Olympic peninsula or on the road to California or flying to the other coast to visit her family because she can’t afford to leave, so she is using her empty Monday to bake. She is busily embarking upon a four hour cooking odyssey that will keep her from verbalizing exactly how trapped she feels being too poor to travel, making mushroom turnovers for a dinner party.
The recipe for the turnovers is simple: 1. make a cream cheese based dough with four ingredients: cream cheese, butter, flour, and a little salt. It will roll out like a dream, not like pie crust dough, which would much rather be a ball than a nice flat sheet. She likes how cream cheese dough gives in, how it amicably rolls out. It doesn’t even stick to her jar-for-a-rolling-pin.
2. Make the filling, which is just chopped up and sauteed button mushrooms (why roll up better tasting mushrooms in something as overwhelming as cream cheese pastry, she concludes at the store, putting the criminis back) with some spices and sour cream.
3. The assembly is not very difficult. Roll out the dough and use the lid from the sour cream container to cut circles out of the dough. Put a teaspoon of filling (just a teaspoon, even though it looks like nothing and makes her wonder why the store she used to make these at sold them for the price they did) in the bottom half of the circle. Fold the top half over the filling, press the two halves of the dough together with the fork so it makes a half moon shape. Like big raviolis or circular Hot Pockets. Brush their tops with egg yolks and bake at 350 degrees for twenty minutes. Simple.
Mushroom turnovers are about as dignified as pigs in blankets, but they sure do look pretty.
She chops the mushrooms with a cleaver that is so gigantic and bulky it looks like it should be in a cartoon or she should be decapitating live chickens. She can barely get her fingers all the way around the handle so her chopping is clumsy and haphazard; the button mushroom tops squeak and shoot out from under the cleaver onto the floor, but the cleaver is her favorite knife and the only one she uses. She likes its weight and has used it so many times that all of the other knives feel like toys when she tries to cut with them. Now when she cooks at other people’s houses she uses their cleavers too, if they have them.
She loves mushrooms but hates chopping them, and she is glad no one is around to watch, because she likes to pretend she is a great cook, even though her knife skills give her away immediately. When she did kitchen prep in the cooperative kitchens during college she always hoped no one would be around when she had to chop mushrooms because it took her such a long time to chop them, twice as long as it took her to do any of the other prep tasks. She used to offer to trade chopping mushrooms for dicing onions with the other prep cooks (who were happy to oblige because everyone else hated chopping onions the most). One time a head chef chastized her in front of other cooks for not getting anything else but the mushrooms done in an hour’s time.
She gets all of the mushroom turnover mushrooms chopped and realizes she has forgotten to dice the onions, which are supposed to go in the pan first. It would have made a lot more sense to do them first, and she hates that she has made a mistake. She puts a heavy skillet on the back burner, turns the gas on to medium, throws a stick of butter in the pan and challenges herself to dice the onion before the butter melts.
The melting butter smell reminds her of smelling her mother’s cooking at nine years old, sitting at the kitchen table plodding through her spelling workbook while her mother worked through dinner each night.
She doesn’t quite finish with the onion before the butter melts and burns a little as she cups the pieces into her hands from the cutting board and drops them in. She picks up the bits of onion she dropped on the floor en route, looks around to make sure no one is watching her disregard all her knowledge of health codes and sanitation, and drops them into the pan too.
Before she salts, peppers, and thymes the onions, she turns on her roommate’s I-Pod stereo. She is feeling a little lonely and quiet, cooking alone in the afternoon, even with the sounds of the onions releasing their juices in the butter.
Neko Case starts crooning out of the speakers. She doesn’t believe in owning Mac products, but she enjoys having housemates who do. “Old John the Baptist…”
She is cutting up chunks of butter for the crust as she wails along: “Old John Diviiiine…”
The last time she heard this song was a month ago when she was making breakfast for a friend. She was whisking eggs for an omelette. When the song came on she belted out the Old John the Baptist part. Her friend belted out the “Old John the Baptist” part too. This surprised her. Their friendship was new and she didn’t know her friend liked Neko Case. They sang together as she moved around the kitchen, making eggs.
She was overflowing the cuisinart with butter and cream cheese when she realized she would always think about whisking eggs and her friend who also liked to pretend to be Neko Case whenever she heard that song again. This was not the sort of conclusion that excited her.
As the dough mixed without her help in the machine, she added the heap of mushrooms to the pan with the onions, spilling a few (again) onto the floor that had not been swept in weeks. As the mushrooms cooked and the dairy products combined with the help of modern technology, she was moved by a wave of productivity so she found the broom to sweep up her and everyone else’s mess. She poked at the corners of the kitchen, swept the stray mushrooms and onions and old bits of dust and food into a pile in the middle of the kitchen floor.
The sun was not shining anymore. Neko Case was in the background. She was quiet. As she searched for a dustpan, she thought to herself ‘Miranda July’ would kill to be filming something like this right now’, and she immediately felt ashamed of the way she associated everything, even the quiet humanity of her life, with representations in pop culture. She finished cooking the filling and mixing the dough, but she did the assembly and the baking without stopping to think again about how beautiful life was even though it was sometimes too quiet, afraid that if she did, she might begin to model her life after a director’s overcompensatingly earnest artistic vision
When she arrived at the dinner party much later that evening, turnovers cooled and perfectly colored and perfectly arranged on a small platter, she assured the rest of the guests that it had taken hardly any time or effort at all.
Tags: cooking, dinner, friends, life, miranda july, mushroom turnovers, parties, personal, seattle, self-portrait, third person
tell me that you’ll wait for me
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I know I tend to make unreasonable assumptions about men based on distrust and fear, but Joshua was truly a smarmy, jerkface asshole. Joshua didn’t really give a damn about what I was looking for or where I was going. He didn’t get my jokes; I hate it when people think I’m weird instead of funny. He didn’t really know how anything was supposed to fit. He talked like a used-car salesman. He didn’t believe me when I said things weren’t quite right. When I finally realized my time would be better spent elsewhere, he had already run off with some other girl, as if we had never spoken, leaving me more confused than I was when we’d met, with thirty pounds worth of sandbags uncomfortably and incorrectly tethered to my torso. I guess I shouldn’t have expected as much as I did from someone whose actual job title is ‘backpack salesperson’.
My only current tie to the rest of the world, my AmeriCorps job, ends in roughly a month, so I have been making plans to deal with that cantankerous little subject, the REST OF MY LIFE. Since December I’ve been set on farming my way around the world (to learn how folks grow vegetables and raise sheep). Sort of like backpacking and camping, only without all of the camping.
I had not actually done anything to achieve this goal other than tell lots of people “oh, yeah, I’ll be traveling around the world beginning in November, starting in New Zealand and probably working my way through Eastern Europe and over to the british isles over the course of a year or two” (and then we laugh together like we know where the british isles are). So on a Sunday when I was feeling particularly go-getterish, I decided to take the logical first step, and buy a backpack.
I hate buying new things. I have used the same backpack for nine years; a tan and orange bookbag with a gigantic star of david that I doodled in permanent markers when I was sixteen. I still use the grey felt wallet that I received as a Chanuka present from Lauren Sarakos in the seventh grade, even though all of the lining has ripped out of it and my coins get sticky when I put them in the coin purse spot, though I’m not sure why.
I have having more things. I hate the idea that I might need something that I don’t already have. When I am in a store and I am considering buying something frivolous (like, say, deoderant), I often wind up thinking about Kirsten, the little Swedish girl in the American Girl book series who emigrates to Minnesota with her family and is able to amuse herself with her own handsewn dolls and handwhittled spoons etc. ie, I am generally always overwhelmed by guilt. …It is not especially easy for me to buy things, nor is it especially easy for anyone to sell me something. Hence, I was not expecting my REI shopping adventure to work out in my favor.
The REI flagship store is one of Seattle’s major tourist attractions and during their ‘everything except the thing you want to buy is 20%’ weekends, the store is absolutely crammed full of white people with expensive, plastic glasses in the market for another Thule rack. People actually take trips out to this corner of the west coast in order to pay homage to the great, big gear store.
People here don’t camp or hike or ski more than anyone anywhere else, but folks here are really concerned about being correctly outfitted for their semi-annual walk in the woods. Being concerned makes them feel very good. There is a palpable giddiness surrounding the collective awareness that we in the PNW are enlightened enough to understand the imperative for high-tech camping shit. In the past year I have had two guests visit from the east coast, and both said, when asked what they thought of Seattle “People here are really into their gear…”.
I am not the first person to make fun of this, but it doesn’t seem to be working; the folks donning bike spandex and cycling shoes for their 2-mile jaunt around the lake still seem to think we’re laughing with them.
When I am in an REI store, especially when I am in the big flagship store with the fireplace and indoor climbing wall, it takes a lot for me to not approach strangers to ask them if they know they are being taken because they are buying into this poorly conceived notion that they need highly specialized equipment to correctly enjoy activities like walking or riding a bicycle. Usually I can curb this urge by reminding myself that these people can afford to be taken, and they probably sort of enjoy it, and then I can hop up and down in my head about capitalism instead, which is generally much easier for me to get angry but keep quiet about.
Anyway, I might have bought the $250 bag Joshua tried to pawn off on me had I a real salary or a need for a storage device with loops for my ice ax and hydration pack. As it was, I had a budget of $100 and the only bell/whistle I wanted was a zipper on the bottom of the bag so I could unpack my stuff from both ends (I feel like there’s a great sex joke waiting to come out of that?), and my mental wallet firmly closes whenever a smarmy man is doing the selling.
Joshua was assigned to be my pack specialist. When you get to REI and you want to buy a backpack, you are welcome to do it yourself, but everyone will look at you angrily to let you know that you are doing it wrong. The correct way to buy your backpack is to sign up for a fitting and wait for a pack specialist to come work one on one with you. Your pack specialist will ask you what you are looking for, but the answer is clearly irrelevant as they have run off by the time you open your mouth to say “er, I have no idea?”.
Joshua measured my torso (which involved him bending my neck so he could count the vertebra in my spine; folks, I didn’t let my last girlfriend touch my spine when she tried to give me a massage. this was not what I would call welcome or pleasant touching.). but now I know I have a 15 1/2 inch long torso. One by one, he demonstrated the features of four different packs, which mainly involved zipping and unzipping the different pockets.
The process went something like this: Joshua points at the wall to something flashy and pastel colored and designed for those womanly hips of mine, runs away, and comes back with something that costs a month’s rent without a bottom zipper. His main shtick was to zip and unzip the top part several times, count the number of ice ax loops, say the word ‘load lifters’ a few times, and then attach the bag, which would inevitably not fit (this mere fact would contradict my whole theory about being told we need specific equipment when we actually don’t…conundrum!) to my posterior, I would walk around the store in pain, and then we would move on to something more ill-fitting and expensive.
After four bags and two hours of listening to Joshua talk about his load lifters, I finally tried on one pack that fit my torso. REI says that the pack should feel like a monkey that has jumped on your back if it fits right. I don’t spent much time around monkeys, but I felt stable and there was nothing jabby going on around my back end. I was tired enough that I almost said those magic words every salesperson yearns to hear: ‘I’ll take it”, but then I was quoted a price ($250), promptly squawked like a chicken, realized I was wasting my life away, and left the store to find that the sunshine had turned to rain, and life was not good at all. I walked towards home, backpackless and dejected.
I was hopelessly confused. Did I need to be custom fitted for a backpack? What if I bought the wrong one? What if I just took a duffel bag instead? Is it possible that I didn’t need a fancy sleeping bag or tent but I did need a fancy bag? Was I buying into the specialized gear hype that I so enjoy making fun of almost every day in Seattle, even more than people’s awful driving habits?
On my way I stopped in a secondhand sporting goods store that happened to have three used backpacks for sale (this story does not end with me buying a used model and making some aphoristic observation about consumerism or recycling, but this is a nice twist just the same). One model came close to fitting. Nothing special, not worth the price, and a little smaller than what I wanted, but a plain, friendly looking, no frills type bag. No special spot for earbuds or carabiners. …Something a Canadian would buy.
I hadn’t bothered to look inside any of the bags in REI; I just let Joshua fill them with sandbags and lift them onto me, but I looked inside this one bag to make like I knew what I was looking for in a bag, and the enormity of what I had been talking about doing for months finally hit me as I looked around the tiny main compartment.
This, I thought, is where my life goes for the next year. My life goes in the bag; the bag goes on me; we go around the world. “This is where my life goes”, I whispered. Nobody heard; the store was empty. All I could think was that it was a lot smaller than the tiny bedroom closet I already complain about all the fucking time. The only thing that would accompany on all of my impending travels, the only companion I would have in for the next year or however long I end up being gone, will the canvas sack attached to my back. I couldn’t help thinking that the way in which I acquired the bag would set the tone for the trip itself. I didn’t want to purchase the full price fancy yuppie bag, but I didn’t want the too small, stinky, fit for a Newfoundlander bag, either.
For a few hours at home that night I convinced myself I didn’t really want to go around the world with my life in a bag on my back, and then one of my housemates, the seasoned world-traveler, came home and talked me down from my I-am-moving-to-suburbia-forever perch. My housemate, who actually does things like ice climbing and camping in the wilderness for months, who actually has needed to be custom fit for things like backpacks, reminded me that I would be taking buses and trains with my backpack, staying on farms, and sleeping in hostels, not walking the length of Eastern Europe, as I had been wont to imagine in my mind at my computer desk in my office.
She said “You’ll put the bag on, walk to the bus, take the bag off, and put it in the overhead rack. All you need is something with the zippers you want. You’ll pack light. It’ll be great.”
She encouraged me that I did not need to be custom fit for a bag, and that I was right in thinking that people who get custom fit for weekend jaunts in the Olympics are fruitsy-nutsy. She also encouraged me to be twentysomething and reckless and not worry too much about my big, reckless jaunt. You can’t be reckless if you’re going to get custom fitted for your pack.
Later that night I found the brother model to the backpack that had fit at REI on a clearance closeout website for a price within my meager budget. I didn’t think twice, clicked ‘purchase’, and a week later it arrived.
My backpack is dark green, and it is a size extra small, because that is the height category I have always belonged to. We (the backpack and I) have gone grocery shopping together and returned videos to the movie store together, so we can get to know each other before the big day arrives. It is exactly what I wanted, which was nothing special in particular, just a big bag that isn’t too big to fill with my farm khakis, my photos of my family, and my scrum cap (in the hopes that I will find some good rugby). It isn’t flashy, it has no bells, no whistles, no hydration pouch, and no motherfucking ice ax loops (though it does have some sexy load lifters). It does, however, have a top, bottom, and a front zipper, making a grand total of three access points from which to pack, unpack, and repack my shit while I am godknowswhere this time next year.
