Alone at Night in the Kitchen

Laughter, like peeling tomatoes for sauce, is sometimes easy, sometimes messy –and succulence is everything.

I've been cooking tomato sauce. It's an annual activity that starts in September when the tomatoes finally ripen on the vine, and goes through October when the last tomatoes, picked green before a frost, ripen on my kitchen table. I add parsley, oregano, basil, all fresh from the garden. And then I can it in pint and quart jars. I also can zucchini relish, pickled beets, dilly beans, and various kinds of jams, and by the end of October my pantry shelves, lined with gleaming jars of summer produce, are impressive to anyone who doesn't get involved in such labors. But compared to a rural woman in her seventies, who was a girl in the days before every farmhouse had a chest freezer, my canned bounty is minimal. I have a neighbor, for instance, who puts up sixty quarts just of pickles. 

            [So began an unpublished essay I wrote thirty-five years ago, when I was in my middle thirties. Reading it now, on a late September day, I realize how much has changed. The only thing I can now is tomato sauce and this year, all of the tomatoes had blossom end rot because there was so little rain this summer the plants couldn't uptake calcium from the soil. The other change is that because of warmer temperatures, the tomatoes ripen in August and frost doesn't happen until late September or October so green tomatoes ripening on a table in my kitchen is a ghost from the past. They ripen on the vine during the warm September days. I can remember how in those years, I was eager to become a rural woman: canning, pickling, having babies. I thought I could do it all and write as well. But the confession in the next line shows that I was only trying on that persona. I wasn't truly dedicated to the domestic rigors of country life.]

            The truth is that I hate canning. And tomato sauce most of all, because it's a longer, more tedious process. If I start it at five in the afternoon, I'm not done and in bed until eleven. When my husband's home, he helps, and with his extra hands the process goes more quickly. But he's often out of town and at those times I try to elicit the help of the teenagers. Oddly enough, there always seem to be other, more pressing activities that need their attention and last night it was homework.  Which they both wanted help with, so my canning was interrupted for an hour.

            When I got back to it finally, it was nine thirty. The house was quiet. The only lights were in the kitchen where I was still on step one, blanching the tomatoes to loosen their skins. After the tomato is washed, it's dropped whole into a pot of boiling water. But only for a few minutes.  Then it's plunged into a pot of cold water. After that, the skin can be slipped off easily.

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I work with twenty pounds of tomatoes at one time. Some are deep rosy red, some are orange. Some are perfect, and some have wounds and spots which I cut out. When some are dropped into the boiling water, they appear to be utterly unchanged. The skin seems to be tight still, but if I slip a knife underneath, it peels away immediately.  Other tomatoes come out with a cracked skin. This I can peel away with my fingers.

            Last night, standing by the stove, darkness pressing in through the windows, I ladled a large tomato into the boiling water and watched for the moment the skin cracked. I was aware of a similar reflex in my facial muscles and realized that cracking was a sensation I was familiar with, as if my skin, like the tomato skin, could peel away too. Then something peculiar happened. I lost myself. I could feel the tomato, her days under the sun when she was growing soft and red, fulfilling the potential of her ripening body. I could feel how she had to hold on tightly so all the juices would stay under her skin. The boiling water was the first opportunity she had to relax and let go. In the tomato's life span, it came as a moment of total consent, the time she could abandon control and let the water take her over.

            Or something like that. It was night, another summer had passed, and I was alone again with the last bounty of the garden. It meant that I was a year older and my children were a year older. [In those days I wanted to stop time because in my own life, I was flirting with the idea of another child. Thank goodness that didn’t happen.]

When I ladled the next six tomatoes out of the boiling water, all of them had cracked skins. I could feel the thin jagged cut on my own face. I knew it so well, but why was that?

            Then I realized. Of course, it was laughter. I hold on, day after day, and then when something happens to make me laugh, really laugh, my body heats up and my face cracks. It's just like the tomato skin and it's the sign that despite any practical intentions to maintain control, my body has rebelled. The crack in the face is the signal that all is lost. My mouth slumps grotesquely, my laughter becomes high and choked, my nose runs, my eyes tear, and I am given over completely to a leaky, choked weeping. Every time I laugh, really laugh, I start to cry.

            Of course, this only happens in public and often at times and in places where everyone else just titters politely. Often it is the kind of situation where, if I could hide my collapse, it would be beneficial. But just as a tomato can't ignore the boiling water, I can't button up my dishevelment.

            In the end, such public display is cathartic. When I take the tomatoes out of the water and peel off their skins, I imagine they are glad their days in the sun are over and their only remaining purpose in the world is to meld with each other and the garlic and herbs and be united in one sauce, indivisible, lumpy and pungent.

            That's what I want each time I laugh. But it's difficult to find the right situation and sometimes this desire clashes with the prevalent atmosphere. The most embarrassing time my face ever cracked was in a classroom in Vermont. I was a newly hired adjunct at a well-respected college and I was observing a writing class where the students were presenting the work they had done for the semester. One student had written comic monologues and as he performed the first one, I started to laugh. I thought it was funny, but everyone else in the class only tittered.  Once I got going, I was unable to stop. I had been up most of the night before, standing in lines at the airport.  My husband, children, and I had just moved from the outskirts of a wealthy suburb to a simpler, more rural environment. The exhaustion from that move and my delayed flight the night before, as well as the lingering panic that any large change brings with it, were still with me.

            I quieted down by the time the student had finished, but like any good performer, he had saved his best piece for last. In it, he took on the role of a landscape gardener having a phone conversation with one of his clients, a woman with a lot of time to spare and a lot of money.  I could picture the situation immediately, having walked past showy estates in the area we had just moved from. The gardener's lack of scruples and the woman's boredom and desire for attention were played out in a wonderfully clever monologue. First, I chuckled, warily, but then I couldn't help it, I had to laugh. When the gardener told his client that the only way to condition the lawn properly...although it would mean going to great additional expense so he was certain she wouldn't even consider it...but, if she truly wanted to make the lawn flat and free of dandelion and crabgrass, he proposed taking down the house so that he could plow up the entire half-acre, roll it till it was level, fertilize, reseed with good quality Kentucky bluegrass, and then rebuild on the same spot. All of that was for an enormous sum of money which he named as nonchalantly as though he were talking about a tab for dry cleaning, and when it became apparent that this silly, bored woman was about to tell him to go ahead, my face cracked. I was as helpless as tomatoes in boiling water. My mouth wobbled, my eyes leaked, my nose ran, and my laughter hit an abnormal pitch where it teetered on the edge, and then transitioned into weeping. Nothing could call me back from this extremity. Hastily, I blew my nose, covering my face with a handkerchief I was lucky enough to have in my pocket.

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It is now eleven PM and there is a row of naked tomatoes on my counter. They are pulpy, misshapen, and there are bits of their skin lying in puddles of water. As I slice them into the pot, juice running over my fingers, I realize that this succulence is at the heart of everything. The fruit has been released from the container of its body and soon will exchange the singular noun "tomato" for the more general and democratic noun, "sauce."

It's a familiar process, this movement from the solitary to the shared. It's what we all want, and from our various corners of life, we wait for it to overtake us. As I amble through ordinary days, observing the landscape, finding adventure in an afternoon walk with the dog (which disturbs the teenagers who believe that adventure requires money and cars and places far away from home) I watch for the moment I can laugh. 

[Now, thirty-five years later, the teenagers are seasoned adults! They too have such restraints in their lives they have learned to find satisfaction in ordinary things.]

Like laughter. It’s a pleasure equal to the pleasure of sex, but it gives you the chance to lose yourself with your clothes still on. That’s the catharsis I seek, because what is the purpose of all of this control if it isn't finally to let that tiresome singular self get lost (for a while at least) as you dive happily into the great, indivisible sauce?   

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 Megan Staffel is the award-winning author of six books of fiction, the novels, The Causative Factor, The Notebook of Lost Things, She Wanted Something Else, and three collections of stories, most recently The Exit Coach and Lessons in Another Language. She taught for many years in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and writes a book review column, What I’m Reading, available on her website. You can also find her on Substack as Page and Story.  

Images:

Author photo by Brian Oglesbee

Kitchen by Ehud Neuhaus

Tomato (light) by Kate Laine

Tomato (dark) by Joanna Stolowicz