Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (21 page)

In any case, state divorce was meaningless to our generation. You married once and for life as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, and that was the only kind of marriage there was.

When Maureen Tuffy came to Achadh Mor to claim her brother-in-law’s land, she quickly discovered that there might be a bigger fish worth hooking in my Aunt Ann, and set about after her cash.

I was the bait.

Ann was suspicious of the Tuffys from the first, and had her vast network of New York biddies check them out. It took but a return telegram to warn her off.

Ann told my mother, and was punished for being the bearer of bad news by my parents estranging themselves from her. Catholic shame cut a strange path through the conscience in those days; my mother would have blamed Ann for carrying that information, and herself for merely receiving it. Although they made it up again, I know the rift hurt them both. Even if I had known the reason for Ann refusing my dowry, I don’t know that I would have forgiven her anyway. The pain of losing him had affected me so deeply that I had needed somebody to blame, and even in knowing the truth I found it hard to blame him. My parents never told me Ann’s side, and I understood that their silence had been a misguided testament to their love for me. As my future husband, they would have felt duty bound to tell James. He was well-connected and if he had ever found out about Michael Tuffy, it would have broken their moral contract with him. After all, he had agreed to take on their daughter with no dowry. His silence on the subject up to that was testament to his tolerance.

I don’t know what hurt most of all: the fact of Michael’s betrayal, or James having kept the truth from me for all these years.

It came out of him in a short, spiteful stream. How my parents had virtually fallen to their knees with relief when he had approached them; their relief when he had been dismissive of my shocking history. My mother had sold me to him as a hardworking, gentle prospect. Even as he said those words, I could hear his voice break over his regret in having hurt me. He paused and added gently, “And you have been that.”

James’s fury crumbled away into the dry air, but I would not wet it with my tears, and so went about my business.

Late that night, I walked out to the back field and I looked up at the stars and I tried to make myself believe that my husband might have lied. I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t. I knew him too well, and a lifetime of courtesy and affectionate kindness in the face of my cruel indifference would always set the balance in his favor.

I wanted my Michael back. Not the man—he was so distant from me now that he might as well be dead—but the dream of him. The daring, handsome young lover with the furious blue eyes and the black, black curls. I wanted to close my eyes and be able to see myself in a soft lavender dress spread out on a pea-green hill and my lover spinning in the breeze ahead of me, his eyes flashing sapphire splinters against the sun that would cut a girl’s heart asunder. I wanted the fresh, vivid colors of youth that my dreams of love had brought me.

Soon I was going to be old, and everything seemed so gray.

Acceptance is the first step to unconditional love.

Boxty Pancakes

Peel and finely grate some large potatoes, then put the mush into a sieve and squeeze out most of the excess water, but not so much as to leave them bone dry. To each cupful grated potato add one level teaspoon salt and between a quarter and a half cup flour. I favor less as I don’t like a doughy consistency, but the flour binds, so the less you use the harder the mix is to manage in the cooking as these pancakes have a terrible tendency to stick. Add sufficient milk to make a stiff pancake mix, one that will drop from a spoon rather than pour. Heat lard or bacon dripping in an iron pan to smoking point, then fry the pancakes until darker than golden brown on both sides.

I nearly burned the house down making boxty pancakes last night. Bacon dripping in an iron pan—hello? Is there any more dangerous kitchen feat I could perform late at night, while feeling as on edge and nervous as I am now? What does a girl cook when her husband of eight months has threatened to leave her?

I told myself it was just for work, but in some old-fashioned part of me, I was hoping that the smell of my crispy cakes frying in bacon fat would bring him puttering down the stairs for a late-night tasting session. It was what he always did, lumber into the kitchen in his jocks and grab a tidbit from the top of a carefully prepared pile. Dan treated my cooking as if it were just for him, and while he had that in common with every single person who has ever come into my working kitchen, it annoyed the hell out of me. At least, I thought it did. Tonight I wasn’t so sure.

It reminded me of the stray kitten I had once rescued from the street outside the apartment. We weren’t supposed to keep animals, so I called Pet Rescue to come and take her. After they had gone, I missed the little thing, and wondered why I hadn’t made a case for keeping her. For months afterward, I felt this vague guilt, except one day passing a pet shop, I realized it wasn’t guilt at all. It was simply that I would have liked a kitten for myself. I was lonely.

This was much bigger, obviously, but the principle was the same. Now that Dan was threatening to leave, I decided that I wanted my marriage to work.

The brief encounter with Ronan had sorted out a lot of the nonsense in my head and made me clearer about my husband. Excitement, drama, that heart-pumping, skin-tingling desire, was not for me after all. It had led me down too many relationship side roads in my life and was no more than a temporary, unsettling dynamic. When your emotions are being squeezed, you are filled with this passionate certainty. Something that is so powerful that it affects your body. Your stomach churns, you heat up, and you think—what is this if it’s not love?

Newsflash, Tressa—it’s a little thing called sex.

It can dress itself up as passion, but when you come right down to the nuts and bolts of it, it’s just sex looking for its own way.

That ten-second revelation had taken me from the idealistic fantasy of wild passion, to the sometimes dull but always safe love of the married woman. A ten-second revelation that it had taken me thirty-eight years to get to.

Maybe I had paid a price in settling for one without the other.

Or maybe, just maybe—you had to choose. In which case, I chose Dan.

Dan was the safe option, the easy option. He was honest, reliable, and would never let me down. Dan made me feel good in a manageable, everyday way. I may not have always felt good about him, but I always felt good about
myself
when I was with him. This was what I needed, after all. This was right.

And now I had screwed it up.

*

I didn’t go up to bed last night. I stayed up cooking, then lay down on the sofa with a throw around me. I must have slept, because I was woken by Dan in the kitchen.

Dan is a tall, broad man—heavy with muscle. His noise is usually soft and muted like tomorrow’s thunder. This morning he was clattering, the stressed sound of metal on metal, doors slamming. He was defiantly preparing a cooked breakfast, even though it was unlikely he was hungry. Even though it was my kitchen and he hadn’t a clue where anything was. The thought of that dared a smile out of me, and a slither of fondness. If I held onto that, perhaps everything would be all right. Perhaps I could ride through this disaster on a chariot of love.

OK, who was I kidding with the chariot? A skateboard then—but it was worth a try.

I caught him picking a potato cake from the top of my pile. I kept my voice light and sunny and said, “Hey buddy—hands off.”

He gave me a look that said he was gone.

The innocent, affable, harmless husband I thought I had was no more. The one I assumed I could afford not to love, because he was this bottomless source of innocent adoration. That meant he would forgive everything, right? I was the complicated, passionate one, he was what? Earth to Tressa—reality check. What
did
you think Dan was—a stupid, worthless fool?

That’s how I had treated him. And his look said that he knew it.

He dropped the golden sphere as if it were rotten and went back to the pan.

I had the nerve to feel hurt. “There’s no need to be like that.”

He stared up at me from under his bed-head hair. His eyes were hard and mean. Impenetrable. He looked like he hadn’t slept all night. Alarm and lust fizzled through me simultaneously.

“To be like what?”

Dan was being openly confrontational. I had tried to break the ice by being playful and light. Work through this unpleasantness in a gentle, jovial way. And now he was responding with anger.

That was not very mature, I thought, not very helpful. I didn’t like this game and I wasn’t going to play it.

“Forget it.”

“Forget what, Tressa? Forget that you slept with somebody else, or forget the marriage?”

He was being unreasonable now. Making me out to be a slut.

“I did
not
sleep with him.”

“Kissed, fucked—whatever. That’s not the point.”

“Well, it is the point, actually. I could have slept with him and I didn’t. I chose you.”

A sudden, speedy seesaw of triumph and doubt went whizzing up and down in my head.

“You
chose
me?”

“Yes...” And very stupidly mistaking his tone for a positive one, despite Gerry’s sage advice, despite knowing I was in the wrong, I added with gravitas, “Yes. I chose you.”

He raised his chin and said, “Fuck you, Tressa.”

Then he walked out of the room.

The pan was smoking on the gas, so I leaned over and switched it off.

My head felt heavy on my neck, and I realized I was exhausted. My mouth tasted like there was a dead mouse living under my tongue and when I reached up to move my hair out of my eyes, it was matted and dishevelled.

I looked and smelled a mess. At age thirty-old-enough-to-know-better, I had been a bit unfaithful less than a year into my marriage. And I had chosen my husband.

Lucky Dan.

There was a patch of grease on the hob from last night’s frying, so I went to the sink to wet a cloth. As I was there, I thought, what the hell am I doing worrying about a patch of grease when my marriage is falling apart? My face turned into my chest in a silent grimace; a line of fat tears dropped straight into the sink. A wedge of self-pity dislodged itself from my throat, and as it made its escape, I realized I hadn’t even said that I was sorry.

I could not let go of Niamh.

When she was twenty-five she announced that she was moving to America. It was 1964.

She didn’t ask, or consult or defer to us in any way. She just announced it, as if our feelings didn’t matter. As if she wasn’t ripping out our hearts; as if now that she had taken everything we had to give her—a good upbringing, endless love, an education, gifts of money, clothes, a car—she was quite happy to leave us behind and go on about another life. I could scarcely believe her capable of such an act of selfishness.

I was furious. And you might assume that I wasted no time in telling her so.