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 No respectable beach house, not even this tiny, outdated and slightly musty one, could do without them.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.

Essays

Shock

I am sitting at an upended barrel in a dark bar in the East Village. Every part of me is touching someone else; we are wedged atop our bar stools and servers jostle us as they ease their way through the crowd, holding plates of food above their heads. Aloft in their hands, the wedges of omelet and the dull eyes of grilled sardines nearly touch the fishing nets that droop from the ceiling.

On our barrel is an open bottle of red wine, several empty beer bottles and the remains of our last round of food: empty cockle shells; octopus tentacles sliced into thick white sections, smeared with paprika and stabbed with toothpicks; the feathery spines of small fish whose cheeks have been hollowed out by our forks. A waiter’s disembodied arm nudges a basket of bread aside and sets down a plate of grilled shrimp.

The shrimp are as long as my hand and sausage-fat inside their carapaces, scarlet antennae curled insensible on the plate. Each eye gleams like a lone pearl of caviar. We split their shells with our fingers, tongue the meat from the cavity. We break off the heads and turn them upside down like thimblefuls of soup. Their antennae brush questioningly against our palms, but, unrepentant, we curl our mouths around them and suck the insides from their little skulls. It’s infinite shrimp, tasting of smoke from the grill and the coral-streaked white meat of their bodies, the oceanic sweetness of their shells curving, tough as fingernails, against our tongues.

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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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