Sex and Bacon by Sarah Katherine Lewis

Author:Sarah Katherine Lewis [SARAH KATHERINE LEWIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2012-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

SUGARTOOTH 2

IT WAS TOO MUCH.

It was too much sweetness, too much care. Too much love. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like a rangy alley cat, scooped up and groomed into humiliated misery—a pretty bow and a tinkly bell around my neck proclaiming my fealty. I felt conquered. I lapped up her cream, but I couldn’t get comfortable sleeping at her feet.

Also, it was complicated: I’d been seeing a man in Seattle. It had been casual and my girl had known all about it—until all of a sudden it wasn’t casual, and I had to do the right thing, which was the most horrible thing I could possibly do to someone who had trusted me to do no harm.

I broke her heart into approximately ten million tiny pieces. It was a clumsy murder, and I was ashamed. Insipid words dribbled down my chin like warm milk as I extricated myself from something most people would have killed for: a good woman, a warm hearth, a home. All of that was offered to me, and I turned it down. I could have had a different kind of vinaigrette for my salad every night of the week.

Then I took my strappy heels and slunk back to Seattle, dazed and culpable, secretly relieved to leave the wintry Midwest to its own bluster.

AT HOME I baked white Betty Crocker cake and frosted it with canned chocolate icing. I ate chunks of it from my hands, licking my fingers.

I drank champagne, but it wasn’t the same. There was something unpleasantly fey about champagne refrigerated to a civilized chill, instead of barbarically semi-frozen. I drank half the bottle and poured the rest out.

WHEN YOU NEED to feel busy—creative, instead of destructive —

—when you need to get your hands dirty—

—when you need to feel scoured clean after a blundering slaughter—

—and, when you need the cracked-out mood elevation that only a large amount of sugar can provide—

—that’s when you make yourself a big stack of cor ncakes for breakfast.

Well, that’s what / do, anyway. It beats starting a lonely morning with last night’s champagne.

THIS RECIPE LIVES in my scrapbook, annotated “Noah—January 1993.” Noah was my best friend in high school. We cooked together constantly, when we weren’t dropping acid and listening to Pink Floyd. 1993 was a year of good food and lots of glassy-eyed giggling, till Noah set his parents’ kitchen on fire melting saltpeter into sugar to make a low-tech smoke bomb. At that point we stuck to dropping acid. It seemed safer.

I believe Noah adapted this recipe from his copy of The Joy of Cooking, but I can’t swear to it. So many recipes are like playing Telephone—one person whispers his or her recipe to the next person, who whispers his or her version to the next person, and so on down the line. I don’t want to look this recipe up because I like the Telephone version I’ve got.

Some days it’s good to remember that somebody loved you enough to whisper in your ear.

START WITH ONE cup of cornmeal, a quarter cup of sugar, and a dash of salt in a small mixing bowl.

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