Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (23 page)

“I told you not to cook,” he said, and went straight out back to the garage.

I stood there, momentarily paralyzed with shock. I was a satirical photo still from a 1950s advertisement with my perfect dinner, my fancy table setting, my dress and lipstick. An image on a spoof postcard. I looked down at my arms, and they were glittering ludicrously—like I was an alien lifeform. Then it hit me. I was being an alien. What was I doing groveling like this? All I had done was try to be true to myself. Life was a journey, marriage a learning process and this incident with Ronan had just been part of that. Dan would just have to get over it.

I left the mixer on and followed him out to the garage.

“Don’t you walk away from me like that,” I snapped.

“I said not to bother cooking.” He was standing over an engine on the bench, but had not changed into his work clothes. He was pretending to work. Hiding.

“So I have been slaving all day, trying to make things better, trying to say ‘sorry,’ and you are just going to walk away from me.”

He didn’t look up. “Whatever. I told you not to cook.”

My day’s efforts, frustration, disappointment tumbled out and I shouted, “I cooked because
I love you!”

Dan looked up from the bench, and for a second I thought he was going to fold me into his arms and make everything better. Then I saw his eyes were flat and cold.

“No, Tressa. You cooked because it’s what you do. I’m just the excuse.”

His hands were gripping the wooden corners of the bench and his chin was shaking with fury. I felt very afraid suddenly and fell into a childish sobbing.

“How can you say that? How can you be so cruel?”

I knew he was right. I always cooked my way through crises.

Apologized with a batch of iced buns or a pile of buttery potato cakes. I was an expert in comfort food.

When Dan had told me not to cook, he had meant that it was going to take more than a batch of boxty to ferry me out of this fix.

So it was time to beg.

“Please, Dan—I can’t stand this. I am so sorry. Please say you forgive me. Look at me.”

He stopped working, but would not look up. His arms made a straight triangle with the bench and his eyes were closed. He was trying not to cry. I thought I might be getting somewhere.

“Please, Dan. Look at me.”

He looked up, and his eyes flew across me briefly, then back down again.

“I can’t, Tressa. I can’t look at you.”

It wasn’t until that moment that I truly realized what I had done. I had planted a picture in Dan’s head of me with another man. It was making him crazy. Dan didn’t hate me. He loved me, but he couldn’t stand what I had done, and that was all that he could see when he looked at me. Me having sex with another guy.

“I didn’t sleep with him, Dan.”

“You kissed him.”

“Yes. But I didn’t sleep with him. I swear I didn’t.”

I stared hard at the top of his head as his face was stuck firmly on his boots. He looked up briefly.

“You have to believe me, Dan. I did not have sex with Ronan.”

Finally, he turned away in disgust. “Jesus, Tressa.”

It was the first time I had used Ronan’s name. The guy I hadn’t slept with now had a name. I had to be firm, so I didn’t back away. I had to keep talking. I wasn’t going anywhere, until this barrier between us had been dismantled.

“We have to get past this, Dan.”

He shook his head, and now it was his turn to be sorry as he looked up at me, and his eyes were filled with tears.

“I don’t know if I can, Tressa...”

“But it was just a kiss...” the petulant wail came out of me before I had the chance to stop it. Dan shook his head and busied himself again to indicate the discussion was over.

Dan went out. He did not say where, but I think he went to his mother’s house. And I was alone in the kitchen we had made together, wondering if I had ruined our marriage for good. When he wanted it, I was unsure. Now that I was sure, he moved away from me, and all because of my stupidity.

But there are no easy answers, and maybe no answers at all. All I could do was wait and waiting is the worst thing. Waiting is just doing nothing, and I am a doer. I wanted to make things better. I wanted to make things work, and it seems that I couldn’t do either of those things without Dan. Making a marriage work is something you do together.

Isn’t it?

I had no choice now. I had to accept that I had hurt Dan, and I couldn’t make that go away. I couldn’t undo what I had done, and I couldn’t really make it better. I may have had the power to hurt him, but that didn’t mean I had the power to take that hurt away. If he wanted to hold onto it, I couldn’t wrestle the bad feeling from him.

Like he said, I couldn’t cook my way out of this one. But I could still cook. And I guess that’s just what I had to do. Keep going. Keep doing my thing and just accept the way things were for the moment. Do what my grandmother used to do when something bugged her: Throw her hands in the air and offer it up to God.

The most expensive gift a man can give you is his pride.

Slow Roasted Clove Ham

To get the salt out of a good ham and a delicate flavor into it takes time and patience, but a decent joint will then last you a few days.

Take your 3- to 4-lb joint and soak it in cold water for up to twenty-four hours. If I was cooking a ham for Sunday dinner, I would put it in to soak on the Saturday afternoon. Keep changing the water every few hours.

Next day, put your joint in fresh water and bring it to a boil. After that first boil, change the water again, add a bay leaf and a slither of onion to it, and allow the joint to boil slowly for three quarters of one hour. While the joint is on its second boil, prepare a roasting dish by lining with tin foil. In a teacup, mix 2 teaspoons ground cloves, a dessert spoon of honey, and a pinch of brown sugar. Add boiling water to the top of the cup and stir until everything is dissolved. Put your boiled ham on the foil and cover in the best mustard you can afford. Then pour your cupful of mixture over it, seal the foil around it, and bake in a medium to hot oven. For the last half hour of cooking time, unwrap the foil, baste the joint in its own fat, spear with a dozen or so whole cloves, and leave to crisp. Serve hot with boiled potatoes and cabbage, or cold, as you like it.

In the summer of 1979 I saw Michael Tuffy again.

I also saw the Pope.

If the apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1879 was the first miracle at Knock, the Pope’s visit in 1979 felt like the Second Coming. The whole of Ireland, and much of the world, was looking at us. Emigrants flocked home in the thousands, Americans with the vaguest relative connections rang ahead, looking for beds. We were at the center of the universe, where it was all happening. It was a magical time.

Achadh Mor, our sparsely populated, sprawling parish, was usually invisible. There was no obvious drama in our scenery. Tourists who ended up here thought they had taken a trip back in time. Even after a wrong turn, they rarely ventured onto our winding boreens, where our small farming communities were carved into the landscape. Cheery new bungalows perched hopefully on the edge of ancient, bleak bog. Old homes beside them, no more than stone sheds. Two-story farmhouses, windows like hollowed eyes, some patched shut with chipboard, made virtually derelict by bachelor farmers barely surviving their parents’ deaths. The melancholy was broken in the summer, when the sun shone. When the hedgerows were heavy with fuchsia, banks of orange monbretia, and cheeky hollyhocks, there was nowhere more beautiful. Yet while we now enjoyed all the modern conveniences— washing machines, televisions, and their like—Faliochtar (our townland, which is within the Achadh Mor parish) was still an outback. There were still women between my mother’s generation and mine who refused to get electricity. Men lived alone in cottages with no toilets. We were still a hidden people, not
in
hiding but rather living in an older part of Ireland that many of our countrymen would sooner forget.

The Pope’s visit gave us our moment in the spotlight.

The shrine had been there all of my life, and most of my mother’s, too. The Virgin Mary had appeared to fifteen local people against the gable wall of St. John the Baptist Church in 1879.

Pilgrims traveled to the church from all over Ireland and talk of miracle cures was commonplace in our homes. “He was carried there on the back of a cart, and he walked home to Limerick!” “He crawled on his belly to kiss the gable wall, then sprung up like a frog!” If you were living in Ireland and looking for a miracle, Knock town was the place all right, but it had little benefit for those of us who lived in the area, except for keeping us entertained.

Until Father Horan came along. James Horan was an energetic priest who had previously served in our neighboring village, where he had built a huge parish hall. Dances were held there, and many a Mayo marriage was made in St. Mary’s Hall, Toreen, throughout the fifties. When Father Horan was sent to Knock in 1963, the shrine was simple: a few statues, offerings of weathered crutches of the formerly afflicted left as mementos against the gable wall.

Over the next ten years, Horan built the place up to colossal proportion. Raising enormous sums of money, he had the gable wall encased in a glass chapel with giant marble statues depicting the scene of the apparition. He built a huge church to accommodate a crowd of forty thousand, and it sat at the center of rolling lawns, like a well-appointed spaceship. Watching the transformation of Knock was like a miracle in itself. A modern feat of mismatched architecture incongrous against our barren, rural backdrop. I was a bit cynical and secretly wondered how many of the miracles were real and how many a result of the spiritual mania the Blessed Virgin seemed to inspire in my guilt-ridden peers. But whatever you thought, nobody could deny the energy or commitment of Father Horan. As the centenary of the apparition in Knock drew in and the pontiff announced he was coming, even the atheists were quieted by his achievements.

*

The woman who had first set her cap at James, Aine Grealy, was around at that time, having come back to Faliochtar from a career teaching in Dublin when her mother fell ill in 1972. She was unmarried and clearly unhappy about the fact, because she made it her business to flick moments of misery in my direction, whenever she could.

“Michael Tuffy is home—you’ll be wanting to see him.”

I am a country woman; I don’t mind gossip. In fact, liking gossip is a prerequisite for living in a small community. You gossip about your neighbors and they gossip about you, but there is a code. A good gossip requires subtlety. A story is made all the more interesting with a gradual, reluctant release. But there should always be a particular gentleness when you impart information that directly relates. You give all the information you can, without assuming anything or searching the other’s face for a reaction. Aine was always smart when it came to academic matters, and pure thick in dealing with people.

It was a few days before His Holiness arrived, and our small church was thronged with irregular churchgoers, hungry for news from the altar. There were shuttle buses to the basilica, picking up at the local shop, Rogers, on the morning of Sunday, September 30, and people were being discouraged from keeping vigil in the surrounding fields overnight. For any of the older generation who were disinclined to brave the weather, St. Mary’s Hall in Toureen would provide television coverage and light refreshments all day.