Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (15 page)

My need for constant change and improvement in our standard of life was as much to do with boredom as anything else. I loved my child, I had grown used to my husband, I knew I had a good life, and yet part of me always felt cheated out of the dreams I’d had as a young woman. As I got older, the fantasies I had nurtured seemed more and more ludicrous, until, reluctantly, I had to let them go. My young man wasn’t coming back; I was never going to work as housekeeper to a Hollywood starlet or twirl around a lamppost on Park Avenue in a pink satin skirt.

All my life, I had been able to cut myself off and escape into the world of my imagination, a place where I was eternally smiling into a warm sun, Michael’s arms closing around my waist. Sometime in my early forties I lost my ability to daydream. The clouds that used to carry me off had grounded; when I closed my eyes to conjure an escape, all I saw was my own stern face looking back at me, telling me not to be such a stupid fool. It seemed that as I got older, reality was determined to own me. Perhaps it is our dreams that keep us young. Older women who cling to youth may look ghoulish, but perhaps they are happier than those of us who grow old and crotchety before our time. Whatever the case, the routine of life grated on me, wearing me down and aging me before my very eyes. I longed for something to shake me out of it. We took trips to Dublin, changed the wallpaper, moved the furniture around in the parlor, got electric lights put in, tiled the fire surround. Always wanting more, more, more, desperate for distraction.

Truthfully, I was bored beyond belief. This really was how it was going to be for the rest of my life. In this house, with this man. The only thing I wanted to stay the same was Niamh, and she was the one thing sure to change and leave. I could see it stretching on forever—the routine, the rituals of our lives. Housework, marking exam papers, meeting parents, mealtimes, Mass, bread making every day except Sunday: comfortable, cozy commitment. Marriage—forever and ever, world without end, amen.

I remember clearly looking at James over the supper table one evening—he was buttering his bread left to right, left to right— and thinking that I was so thoroughly sick of the sight of him that I wanted to scream. Day in, day out, buttering his bread left to right for how many years? I didn’t dare count. I felt like hurling a plate at him for no other reason than to crash through his fog of contentment that was suffocating me.

If Niamh had not been around, I might well have thrown the plate, and who can say what difference such an unreasonable outburst of passion might have made.

I decided to paint the hen house instead.

My wish for dramatic change did come true shortly after, but in a way that was to test my tolerance further still.

When you’re around something every day, you stop seeing it. I can’t make bread like my grandmother’s and it drives me crazy. How many hours did I stand at the kitchen table in Faliochtar watching her make bread? She would do it every weekday, with the last loaf of the week baked on Saturday night, so that she would have the pleasure of rising late on Sunday morning with no other task but to prettify herself for eleven o’clock Mass.

For years now I have tried to draw up details in my mind’s eye of how she did it, but my bread still falls so short of hers that I have all but given up.

I can remember the smell of the buttermilk on a summer’s day as the heat from the range steamed the windows of their cottage; opening the back door to feel the freshness of the misty rain on my bare skin. I can remember waiting by her side, my chin barely reaching the tabletop, as she unfurled a linen tea towel from the fresh loaf; I can remember her favorite knife with the scorched, yellow handle, the blade concave from years of sharpening, slicing through the fleshy crumble, then the fresh butter melting to a salty dribble. I remember how the sweet jam mingled with its sour flavor and burst my baby taste buds.

But I cannot remember anything that will help me make the damn stuff. How she handled the dough or any of the little tricks she must have shown me. One thing I do recall is how, when she was finished, her fingers sped across the Formica tabletop picking up every last shred of errant dough to add them to her final loaf.

“Waste not, want not,” she used to say.

I have already wasted a veritable mountain of flour and gallons of expensive buttermilk trying to replicate my grandmother’s bread.

For punishment as much as anything else, I decided to bring one of my efforts over to Ma Mullins for Sunday lunch.

Yes.
Another
Sunday lunch party.

Part of me could not believe this was still going on.

That first Sunday lunch had been dreadful for us both, and I felt sure an understanding had been reached. Me and your mother just don’t mix—so don’t mix us. Little Deirdre’s first communion was a one off.

But then it was some nephew’s birthday, an anniversary, the first good barbecue day this month. One time, he begged me to go, saying his mother was “lonely” after the twins had left for a three-week vacation. I put together a special gift basket to cheer up this lonesome old lady and found the house full of the usual horde of relations. With one thing and another, that Sunday was to be the
seventh
time that we’d had Sunday lunch chez Ma Mullins. It had gotten so that going was the norm and not going was a big treat. It should have been the other way around.

My dread had turned into sarcasm.
Are we going to be treated to organic lamb, rack-roasted with rosemary and cracked black pepper and served on a bed of wilted spinach?
I thought to myself.
Are we talking pot roasted chicken with pistachio-buttered baby carrots and new potatoes? Or perhaps there will be traditional roast beef, served rare with fresh horseradish and mini Yorkshire puddings?

No.

There would be what there was every week: the usual revolting platters of fried, bite-size bowel-blockers, with some ready-made supermarket salads drenched in synthetic mayonnaise-based dressing.

And I was worried about my bread not being good enough?

The really scary part was that I thought I might be getting used to it. Dan was getting complacent and starting to assume that we could go each week, and I was getting lazy about objecting. Extended exposure to the awfulness of these family get-togethers had upped my tolerance levels. The last time, I had skipped breakfast so that I would have enough of an appetite to be seen eating. I ate my own body weight in sausage and survived. I didn’t like going, but I could stand it. And it seemed that I needed to be adamant in order to get out of it. But then, why should I have had to get dizzy and nauseous in order to get my point across? Surely just preferring not to be there should have been enough of an excuse not to go? I seemed to be running out of steam on this issue, and frankly, I was really afraid that I was getting too used to Dan’s family. Once you become attuned to a family’s dysfunction, it means you have become a part of it.

I always thought that my background was really messed up: wannabe artist weirdo for a mom, no dad. But now I was beginning to realize that it was just unconventional. There’s a difference. I knew I was loved, my grandfather was a stable father figure in my life, and, although my mother had her faults, I could always talk to her. My school friends were jealous of the open communication between us, and a mother can commit worse crimes than making you call her by her Christian name and having a propensity to tie-dye your wardrobe.

Dan’s family gave good small talk, but there was a poisonous aftertaste that I couldn’t put my finger on.

OK, yes, I could put my finger on it.

It was Eileen. She was cold; she was critical; all she did for her kids was get on them about coming over so she could shove junk food into them and glower disapprovingly at their spouses.

Hostess with the mostest, huh?

Dan’s father was the nonevent in the corner; he just sat quietly in front of the TV hoping that no one would notice him. The twins were cute, but they were on vacation (otherwise known as escape from Alcatraz). Dan’s younger brother, Joe, ran a car-parts shop and his wife, Sarah, was a small, plump, smiling woman— nice, but wouldn’t commit herself, just nodded and agreed with everything I said. Tom was in real estate, just a year older than Dan, and his body double. A fact that appears to confuse his wife—braless Shirley—whom I had seen literally lick her lips when the two of them stood together. Shirley’s age was blurred by collagen use and a body stuffed into the wardrobe of a teenage girl. She was the type of woman who would be buying
Glamour
magazine and experimenting with this season’s makeup looks well into her fifties. I could rant about Shirley ad infinitum, but briefly? She gave me a pain.

*

On our way over in the car, I decided to give it my best shot and have one more go at getting my point across.

However, it was a ten-minute journey and I took five minutes to work out what I was going to say. Which gave me two minutes to say it, a minute for Dan to think about how to respond, and two minutes to discuss and resolve the whole issue.

I took the self-help guide approach and said something rehearsed and diplomatic along the lines of: “I feel really uncomfortable with the number of Sundays we are spending at your mother’s house.”

“Why?”

He was just being aggressively obtuse. We had had this conversation before, and so he was goading me into saying what I really thought, which was, “I hate your mother!”

“It’s not that I dislike your mother, Dan, but...”

Whoa. But. Not a good word on the end of a mother sentence.

Dan’s face tightened into a worried scowl and I was starting to backpedal when suddenly it hit me like a brick: Damn you and your damn mother. That miserable old cow has been vile to me. She summons us to her house every single Sunday, then spends three hours ignoring me. She puts on this twisted, sarcastic face when I hand her over the cakes and canapés I bother my stupid ass to bring with me, and generally goes out of her way to make me feel like a worthless piece of shit. I hate her, and I hate you— you weak, stupid, hapless ape—for not standing up to her, but most of all I hate myself for having married into this awful woman’s family!

But before I got the chance to edit my anger into a more palatable version that I could actually say out loud, Dan pulled up to his mother’s house.

“But what?” he said.

Bastard! I was boiling inside, but there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t explode there, in the car, outside his mother’s house. I just had to keep it together, get inside, get through the next few hours—then go home and say it like it was. Because I was never, ever,
ever
going to put myself through the purgatory of that pretend-happy family fiasco again.

I plastered an unconvincing smile across my face, and sang, “Nothing!”

Then I unclicked the seatbelt, folded myself out of the car, and let him follow me up the path.

Shirley opened the door.

“Hi folks!” she said, all curly eyelashes and cleavage. Then she looked sideways at my husband and said, “Hi, Dan.”

Dan looked delighted, and my rage rose another notch when I saw how easily he was distracted from the fight we almost just had.

They were all there, sitting in silence around the TV. As well as family, there was a middle-aged couple that nobody bothered to introduce me to and a woman in glitter capri pants with dyed orange hair who could only be a friend of Shirley’s.

“This is Candice,” Shirley flicked her nails in the woman’s general direction. “Her husband just left her for her sister.”

Candice spit, “Slut,” but I took it she meant her sister and not me.

At that moment, I did not think I would make it through the whole afternoon. The key was to keep busy and not sit down.

So I went straight out to the kitchen to prepare some food that I had brought with me. It was one of my tricks to tolerating these events: preparing food, working. It kept me occupied and away from the TV-induced silence. Infiltrating Eileen’s kitchen was never easy and she gave me her customary sideways grimace and shrugged when I said cheerily, “Brought some nibbles, Eileen— do you mind?”

I took as long as I could. There was sports on TV, and I could hear the men calling out occasional shouts of encouragement or abuse.

I worked as slowly as I could and took forty-five minutes to pile the soda bread with tomato chutney, shredded Parma ham, crumbled goat’s cheese, and a drizzle of aged balsamic dressing. Eileen didn’t turn to me once while I was working, out of curiosity or encouragement. She just kept shaking her bags of frozen hors d’oeuvres onto foil trays.

Holding on to my forced good humor as hard as I could, I started to work the room with my tray of canapés. Dan grabbed one and stuffed it into his mouth without moving his eyes from the TV; Sarah giggled a profuse “thank you,” but looked uncertain as how to handle this alien concoction; her husband took one and put it to one side. But—surprise, surprise—it was Shirley who finally caused me to snap.

“Oh no,” she said, pushing me away with her palm as if I were a waitress, “I hate that lumpy Irish bread.”

If I was looking for a person to bury in my displaced anger, I could not have found a more deserving candidate than Shirley Mullins.

It was as if every slight I had ever received in my lifetime, from the cool girls at school laughing at my tie-dyed pants to a bad review three years ago, had all pooled together with my doubts about Dan and my reservations about his family. All those nasty little niggling gnomes I had been trying to keep under wraps had got dressed up in their loudest, fanciest gear and were holding a carnival.
IT
’
S PAYBACK TIME
! their banner read, and so I let rip.

I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I could make a fairly accurate guess based on what had been simmering away in my head all afternoon. The starting point was calling Shirley a stupid slut and accusing her of coming on to Dan. I don’t know where that came from; I certainly hadn’t thought it was something that bothered me sufficiently to lose my cool like that. I threw the tray of canapés on the floor, declaring the assembled group “unappre-ciative ignoramuses.” When I caught sight of myself losing it in front of relative strangers and three actual ones, I resorted to a teenage tantrum, shouted, “Oh piss off!,” grabbed my bag from the table, and stormed out of the house.