These manila folders full of recipes have so many memories. There is no organization to them, they’re just thrown together in the order I found them or used them. I need some ideas about what to make for Thanksgiving, so I thumb through the yellowing, torn clips from newspapers and magazines and see evidence of so many dinners over the years. The Muscovy duck with cilantro, honey and pine nuts I made for a New Year’s Eve dinner for Elliot, for just the two of us. We had it with champagne by the fire, sitting on the floor with candles on the coffee table, all dressed up, but not for long. Here’s the recipe for sweet potato fries, “popular with the Pinsleys,” reads my note to myself. Here’s shrimp with lemon and capers. That one barely sounds familiar. When did I make that? So many things are lost, forgotten. That’s why I write down what people say, or take videos, or keep seashells. I need them to remember. What vast swaths of experience have I lost because I didn’t write them down?
We are having Thanksgiving on Saturday, two days after the real one, so Devon and Alex can be with their dad and the Pinsleys can be with their mom, and I can have them together when they are all free. I order butterflied leg of lamb from the Italian butcher. I just started going to Rosario’s shop. He’s one of the few men in my life now who says he wants to please me.
“It’s nice the way our group is growing,” Devon says while we get ready. She’s right. There will be ten of us, thanks to Kate’s boyfriend, Anthony; Aaron’s fiancé, Sallie, and Sallie’s sister, who is bringing her pint-sized mutt, Leroy Brown, a stray she found stranded on a golf course. Even without Elliot there will be more of us at the table.
I suggest they all come in the mid-late afternoon, maybe 4:00 or 5:00?
“We were thinking of pushing it earlier,” Aaron calls to say. “How about 1:00? Then we can take a walk and hang out before dinner.”
“Great,” I say. “I was just going to be cooking and cleaning up.”
“We’ll help you,” he says. It’s so touching they want more time with us. I had said late afternoon so they wouldn’t feel I was pressuring them – Aaron and Sallie are in from Chicago for only a few days and like to catch up with friends, and the last thing I want to be is an obligatory chore. And here they are the ones stretching out our day.
It is always a wonder to see how boisterous the Pinsleys are, even without their father here. We take the gentle mutt and our Sadie to the dog park, then come home and build a fire, and take videos of all the hubbub as everybody helps me bring up another table and chairs from the basement. I unfold a new gold tablecloth thinking maybe a change would be good but Elliot’s mother wants the crimson one that I have always brought out for holidays. It’s the one my mother used when I was little and it’s showing battle scars like the rest of us. Who knew Elliot’s mother would be as sentimental about it as I am? A year ago, when she needed to keep her hands busy while her son’s body was falling apart, she spent a day darning the tablecloth with tiny black stitches. Maybe she needed to see there was something she had the power to fix. She reminded me of Penelope in The Odyssey, who kept weaving to keep away suitors until her husband came back. As if, by bending over that deep red fabric, Helen could keep away the worst kind of loss.
Aaron and Anthony have brought good wine. They are grownups now. They know to bring something to a dinner party. Aaron grills the lamb. He likes to be the man of the house. He does a beautiful job. It is charred on the outside but perfectly pink and juicy on the inside. It smells of garlic and rosemary and smoke. There are beets with goat cheese, and green beans roasted with radicchio, and saffron rice. We talk about when Max will graduate from college in May and what to do in Chicago when we fly out for Aaron and Sallie’s wedding. Everyone interrupts each other but nobody seems to mind. I go upstairs for a minute and I hear them, laughing and unruly. And I realize I’m upstairs in my bedroom with my husband, his ashes are right here with me in the dresser drawer. I pretend he is with me for real. We are a couple, and we are listening to our family having a good time, and we are so proud of what we have built. I try to believe this is a sane thing to do.
Later, I am in bed, and I am tired, and I want to taste again how all this began. I open my box of Elliot’s letters and pull out the first ones from the days we started dating.
“I think you entered my dreams for the first time,” he writes. “What I remember is the two of us, reading the Sunday Times together…I was sprawled out on the couch, my feet up on the coffee table, reading the arts and leisure section, and you were lying lengthwise, your head in my lap, reading the magazine. There was sunlight on your face and I was running my hand through your hair. That’s it. I suppose I could have told you that I grabbed you and ripped your clothes off and we rolled onto the floor and made wild love in a frenzy of passion. An appealing thought, but it didn’t happen that way. I’ve thought about that picture all weekend, and in some ways right now, the peacefulness makes it more appealing to me. I want to do simple things with you.”
I love that vision, so tender and serene. And here is another one from before we married. This one makes me cry. It is so full of yearning for our future.
“This relationship we have, it’s like a delicate living thing, something to be enjoyed and treasured and protected. I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize what we have because I want you in my life. I can’t imagine it without you. I don’t want to. What I want is to make you happy…
“I want to learn all I can about you because that place where you are is the best place I’ve ever been. I want to see how we are together, how we can be, and how far we can go and just enjoy that, to play and have fun and make love and be in love …and for that Leslie, I will always be grateful.”
Grateful, I think. And I am grateful too. I had him, and I am trying to trust that I will find a way to feel him with me still as the years wander on. We could have gone a lifetime without finding such a marriage. We were lucky. I know I am even now.
“You have to make a new life for yourself,” his mother tells me again on the phone. I understand what she means. But I have a life, a good life. I have our family, I have friends, I have a satisfying job. And that is enough, for now.
“If we are to live ourselves,” Didion wrote, “there comes a time when we must relinquish our dead.”
That time will come, I suppose, and maybe I will be thankful for that too.
But there is no rush. I am still pulled backward into memory, and that is something to cherish.