Fiction

From But Not For Long

Karin arrived at ten thirty, pulling up a long unpaved drive and finally parking in the shadow of a massive dark-stained wood house. She couldn't tell if there was any electricity available, and it frankly didn't seem to matter. Madison, its weird empty stores and quiet roads and murky rooms, felt as far away as the Middle East.

She gathered her notebook and pens and recorder, looked briefly in the mirror, and poked at the inner corners of her eyes with a pinky. She looked a little tired but natural. She never wore makeup for visiting farmers. It was bad enough that she was young and inexperienced. If she wore lip gloss they might not even bother.

Outside the air was grassy-smelling, warm and heavy but cooler this far north. She stretched and shook out her legs, listening for sounds of machinery or voices. She heard nothing at all. Before her the house loomed, windowpanes shining and inscrutable. Her shoes were loud in the gravel. The trees arched over her; fields stretched into woods on either side.

There was motion further up the driveway. She looked up and saw a huge animal regarding her. Some kind of hound, iron gray and wiry-haired, a long-legged creature that approached her so lightly its paws barely skimmed the ground. It never barked. As it neared, Karin slowed and then froze, realizing the dog's jaws were easily as high as her waist.

The silence—the dog's silence, the silence of the landscape around them—was deeply unnerving. The breeze moved through the branches of the trees, the surrounding grass was uncut and lissome, bending in one direction and then another as if in pleasant indecision, and at the end of the pathway rose the farmhouse, its window boxes filled with fire-colored petunias. The grey dog trotted toward her, caramel eyes agleam beneath a rakish flop of fur. Karin had the feeling she had entered a fairy tale at the wrong time. The scent of grass and manure drifted by.

She put out a hand to the dog, palm out, as if to stop it, but the dog simply kept coming and let its great head collide with her hand. She felt the knob at the back of its skull, its coarse fur. The arch of the dog's back rose almost to her chest. Yet its warm, wiry fur beneath her fingers was a relief, breaking the peculiar spell of the silence of the hilltop, its soundless guard. It was just a dog. A dog on a farm was hardly a shock. They were everywhere.

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Essays

Aphrodisiacs

(See also: magic, elves, winning lottery tickets, and other elusive dreams.)

The word derives from Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and sex. And as with many potential aphrodisiacs, her origins prove disturbing on second glance. Conventional wisdom says she simply appeared in the ocean waves on a roomy scallop shell, but Hesiod's Theogony reveals a gorier birth: the goddess of sexual desire was born where the severed testicles of the god Uranus were hurled into the sea. Uranus suffered this loss during a heated coupling with his rebellious wife, Gaea, who had exhorted their son Cronus to ambush his father with a sickle. After years of bobbing in the sea water and generating much white foam, the testicles were gone forever but the goddess swam ashore.

Now consider the famed Spanish fly, or cantharides, an erotic treat derived from the pulverized bodies of the North African blister beetle. As the Marquis de Sade and his unlucky prostitute cohorts discovered, Spanish fly can deliver more than a strategically-placed rush of blood: it is an inflammatory agent, the effects of which include irritation, vomiting, and kidney damage. Spanish fly literally creates an itch one has to scratch. Frankly, when you think about it that way, you can buy a cream for that.

Humans have contributed other shortcuts to bliss, but they're often just as graceless, even crude, whereas nature's gentler aphrodisiacs are merely direct. Man-made Viagra and other "ED" treatments go right to the source and engorge it; the commercials are all smug silver-fox boardroom types, waltzing or suggestively hurtling a football through the placid hole of a tire swing. We've also come up with pornography, of course, which walks a fine line between ridiculous and effective. A few shutters in the brain must close before a dirty film can work its magic, and the effort required to overlook the mullets and simian dialogue disqualifies porn as a transporting sex-enhancer.

Other so-called aphrodisiacs abound, it's true, but I am sorry to tell you that you probably know them all: time and vacation and doors that lock, a little wine, a few tokes of good weed, but not a stuporous amount of either, a fig and a square of chocolate but not a belly-full. You want that first flush of heat, the hibiscus-flowering of blood vessels. You want the throb that fills the eardrums and everything else. And you can have it, but it's a bit like when your mother told you Santa Claus is a spirit of generosity that lives in all our hearts. It's not what we were hoping to hear.

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Essays

The Tastiest Cheese Ever

When I was 26 I got married, moved to Yonkers, New York, and tasted devastatingly fresh mozzarella for the first time. The cheese remains the most vivid memory of the three.

It came from the tiny Little Italy neighborhood in the Bronx, which is far superior to Mulberry Street's gaggle of hawkers and shamefaced tourists. My husband, Steve, and I would make the 20-minute drive there every month for olive oil, pasta, cured meats, and mozzarella. The store we always went to, Casa Della Mozzarella on East 187th Street, is essentially a long, packed hallway, and at the back men stand over vats of water, stirring and ladling balls of cheese. The choices are large or larger, salted or unsalted. I tried unsalted once, thinking vague thoughts about purity and simplicity, before remembering that if anything improves pure and simple foods, it's salt. No one bothered to tell us to eat the cheese immediately, or not to refrigerate it, both of which we learned through trial and error. At the height of my devotion I would save that store for last and dash back to the car, cradling my cheese like an infant.

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Essays

Beach Food

Steve and the lobster and I were standing, sweating, in the little beach house kitchen in Delaware. On the counter the lobster arched its back and raised a knowing claw in our direction.

I thought we should kill it with a sharp knife slid into the back of the shell, where the head and sectioned carapace meet, then cut it up and cook it.

"I heard that's more humane," I said. I also thought, for some obscure reason, it might make the meat taste better. I should give this fresh lobster the most delicious death I could. Yet I hoped I might con Steve into being the killer. In the past I had persuaded him to cook and dismember a lobster for paella without any of the requisite tools. It turned out those tools were both well-designed and necessary. A hammer and pliers from the garage were just not the same.

At least here we had the claw crackers, the little silver picks. No respectable beach house, not even this tiny, outdated and slightly musty one, could do without them.

"There's no way I'm stabbing the lobster," Steve said. I lost my nerve too and opened the pot of steaming water.

It was the last night of our honeymoon and we were making seafood soup. (I'd done this back in Wisconsin but it was never what it should be with Midwestern seafood.) We boiled the lobster, cut apart the scarlet carapace and kept it for stock. The rosy-speckled meat we cut into discs. I looked vainly for roe, hoping I could mash it with butter and swirl it into the soup at the end. We added more garlic, the lobster, the shrimp, the crab, and the tomatoes. At the end we threw in tarragon. We cooked together, Steve peeling the shrimp and slicing the garlic into sticky rounds. I chopped and skinned tomatoes and steamed the corn.

When we finally sat down, it was dark, the day losing its heat. We lit candles, opened fresh beers. For an appetizer I had poured the clams in a pot with garlic and shallot and butter, decanted a small river of wine and steamed them open in it. We cooked so many we had to eat them from a mixing bowl.

But the soup - the soup was scarlet, flecked with green leaves and ivory lobster, the yellow ruffled edges of the clams peeking above the surface amid the shreds of crab. It tasted splendid - heavy on the garlic and the red chilies, the briny scent of the seafood, the browned crumb of the bread we'd toasted to go with it. It wasn't delicate, except for the texture of the fish. It's not a soup to get elegant with - no purees, no cream or tiny spoons. It was messy, heady, spicy, speckled with olive oil and herbs.

It was not a dish for someone with a newly diagnosed, unpredictable seafood allergy. A week earlier, I'd discovered - via swelling, itching, and a trip to the ER as my throat began to close - that I was one of those people. I was telling myself the culprit was only a specific type of cheap frozen crab Rangoon. So far on this trip I had eaten shellfish but no crab Rangoon, and nothing had happened. I hoped to continue my streak of luck with the soup, but I suspected the allergy was not as limited as I wanted it to be.

As we began to eat, Steve watched me for signs of a reaction. I was watching him too. It was true I should have been more cautious with seafood, but neither should he have been drinking the beers we'd just cracked or the gin and tonics we'd sipped beforehand. I had just begun to suspect that as well.

Interviews

Interview with Jennifer Uhlich

JU: Let’s start with the writing of the novel. How long did it take? What sort of feedback did you seek out along the way? How was it expanding a short story? That, to me, seems like one of the hardest things to do - I always have a tendency to view stories that get good receptions as done deals, varnished and ready for display.

MW: I first wrote the story in graduate school, I think the very first semester. I kept returning to it and messing with it for a few months. This was around 2000, 2001. Then I let it sit till after I finished school. I knew it was time to try to write a novel, and I thought I might ease the way a bit if I worked with characters I already knew. I’d written nine or ten stories in school but this is the one in which I was aware that I was only catching the characters in a portion of their lives. Other stories, as you say, were over and done for me, but I thought there was more here.

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Essays

From ODE to an EGG

The Garden of Eden was not a good book, but I was so busy reading Hemingway's descriptions of food, especially eggs, that it took me several years to notice. Like so many things, the book begins with eggs: As newlyweds, Hemingway informs us, the Bournes eat them each morning, excited just to contemplate the manner of cooking them. The husband never abandons his joyful consumption of oeufs au jambon and eventually finds happiness in love and work. The wife begins to skip breakfast about midway through. Things turn out badly for her.

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Essays

The Last Great Drinkers

Detectives and rock stars linger - grizzled, undaunted, and occasionally crossing paths professionally - as the last great drinkers. The rest of us have begun to abide by the rules, limiting ourselves out of vanity or medical necessity, but not these people. Whether cops, private investigators, or unlucky but bull-headed citizens, they spend their days delving into depravity and violence, faced with lies and venality on every side. Their stresses are greater, their view of humanity crueler, their need for numbness stronger. I don't know what the rock stars' excuse is.

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Fiction

From You’re Not You

Not long after I saw Evan at the farmers market, he called. Kate and I were in the kitchen making a list of people to call for the ALS Society's phone drive. I still disliked making these calls, and when her telephone rang I was relieved to have a moment's reprieve before I had to phone strangers and explain myself through a chain of prepositions: My name is Rebecca, and I am calling for Kate Norris on behalf of …. Sometimes I found myself speaking to another caregiver, and with Kate at my side and the other employer on the other end, we two caregivers would carry on a conversation by proxy.

I was looking over my list of potential donors for ones I recognized when the phone rang. I looked at Kate, who shook her head. Lately she had been screening calls. Her parents, upset about the split, had been leaving long tremulous messages on the machine, reminding Kate that she had "the future" to worry about. "Your father and I are not as strong as you might think, Kathy," one message had said. "Our house has so many stairs."

We heard the answering machine pick up and Kate's voice come on. It was always startling. No matter how many times I heard this greeting, recorded three years ago and never updated, I always stopped and listened. So that was her voice, her true voice: a lower pitch than it was now that her breath was forced into a higher register as her muscles froze up. A tendency to elide the digits of the phone number into each other. She lacked the Wisconsin accent that showed itself in the vowels, like the exaggerated and almost glottal O you heard in smaller towns, like mine. Kate's voice had been accentless, Midwestern, and fast, a little impatient to finish the message and move on. In a way she hated to hear the old greeting, she'd once admitted, but she couldn't bring herself to erase it.

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