No Cheating, No Dying by Elizabeth Weil

Author:Elizabeth Weil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

9

Food

“H oney, I have to tell you something,” Dan said to me a few years earlier, after setting a bowl of homemade turnip and turnip greens soup with fresh croutons on my desk for lunch. “I bought a whole lamb today. It’s a really good lamb, grass fed, organic. And I promise I won’t tyrannize you with it. I just got a great price on it, and it’s the same kind of lamb they serve at Chez Panisse....”

Then he sat there staring at me.

At that point, we had thirty-five pounds of cow and fourteen pounds of deer in our basement freezer. We also had some duck breast prosciutto curing in the refrigerator and a heritage pork belly dangling above the washer-dryer. It was blue with mold.

When Dan and I first met he made himself exactly one serving of pasta each night. It consisted, regardless of season, of one quarter of a bell pepper, half a red onion, half a tomato, and four or five cloves of garlic, which Dan now recognizes he browned until bitter. And his cooking remained more or less at that level—in fact, we shared the cooking—until Hannah was born. Then we started having the same conversation every night: Do you want to cook or look after the kid? Dan always picked cook, I always picked kid. So in his extremely male, obsessive way, he decided if he was going to cook, he might as well acquire some skills.

I should have been scared—Dan does not take skill-acquisition lightly. He’d lived out of his truck in Yosemite for three summers so he could learn to climb big walls. He chose the literature Ph.D. program at U.C. Santa Cruz based on its proximity to good surf. The flamenco guitar obsession (immediately preceding the cooking obsession, when I was pregnant and Dan began realizing our life would require more time at home) is painful to remember. Dan grew out and shellacked his nails. The vocals sounded like primal screams. With the cooking I did notice, during Hannah’s infancy, that Dan was trying to perfect his tofu-frying technique with a level of twitchy mania I’d only ever seen in a pyromaniac mixing homemade rocket propellant in the Mojave Desert. (“Here I go with my bad self, adding potassium nitrate!”) But at least Dan’s efforts led to dinner.

As I now know, we were slogging through that high-risk patch called “transition to parenthood.” Experts used to claim that children guaranteed a happy marriage. (A deluded editor at Better Homes and Gardens wrote, in 1944, once a child arrives “we don’t worry about this couple anymore.”) But then the war and the 1950s ended, and since that time not a single peer-reviewed study has found that children make married couples happy. Actually, one study did. But then researchers found a coding error and issued an erratum.

Psychoanalysts offer many theories, including new fathers becoming enraged at both their infants and their wives, as the child has caused the wife to go AWOL from her previous post as the husband’s mother-replacement figure.

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