I’m still on the phone when the timer goes off. The kitchen is a hodgepodge of open flour and sugar canisters (for the Guinness Stout chocolate cake) and the cutting board with chopped garlic and tomatoes (for the pasta). How did everything get so disorganized? I need to end this call! Where is that oven mitt? This is my kitchen in Minneapolis, far more modest than my Tucson kitchen. I moved here after Roy died and this smaller space reminds me of how my life changed then, how much it both narrowed and expanded.
This chaos makes me think of Lillian, my old friend in Tucson. When I told Lillian that I was purchasing a house in Minneapolis with a galley kitchen and expressed concern about the size and whether I would be able to adequately entertain there or have those lovely conversations which inevitably seem to happen in the kitchen during parties, she laughed. “Patricia, people in New York City have been having parties in galley kitchens for years and it works out just fine. If they can do it, you can do it!” Lillian was a New Yorker, had lived and entertained there for years. She was also a judge and quite comfortable with being right. As it turns out, she was right. My record so far is an opening night cocktail party of 45 people.
On Sunday nights, when our family gathers for dinner, the kitchen is delightfully crowded. My son-in-law is getting ice from the fridge for the cocktails while the toddler is taking the pans out of the cabinets so that he can “cook”. My son is telling me a story about work as the cat is trying to figure out how to escape the toddler. My daughter stands at the threshold and offers to help and notes that she will wait her turn to get into the kitchen. I adore these evenings; and when the kids leave to get the babies tucked in and I’m faced with the stacks of dishes, I also enjoy the solitude of putting things back together. There is a poignancy to this, though. It inevitably makes me think of Tucson and Roy.
In our large Tucson kitchen, Roy and I had many parties and dinners. We loved that kitchen; we had replaced all the generic countertops with Mexican tile. Roy and I liked to entertain together; we cooked in a kind of parallel play in which we each did a portion of the meal. For this to work well, we each had our own work area.
We delighted in creating experiences for colleagues and friends and family. That might be a hamburger party for the teenagers who were coming of age at the Unitarian Church; just the two of us and twelve of them. The Ralph Waldo Emerson birthday dinner party in which our guests took turns drawing Emerson quotes from a basket and sharing a story from their own lives connected with the quote.
For a while, we had a group of friends who would do a musical salon in our living room about once a month. There was a bass, saxophone and keyboard next to the fireplace. A soloist with a lovely voice sang moody, sexy songs. Roy, who did not like to dance, but knew that I did, would grab me in the kitchen. Lights off, he and I would sway to the music in our own private little moment. After our guests left, he and I had what we called gossip time. He would wash the wine glasses and fill the dishwasher while I changed the tablecloth, blew out the candles and put the furniture back to order. We discussed everything: Lillian’s mood. Could we tolerate Angelica one more time? Did that appetizer really work? And then, my favorite part of the evening: no matter how many dishes or how late the hour, we would have a glass of wine on the couch together. The camaraderie and fun and love of those moments were the hardest to let go of when he died.
As I end the phone conversation, find the oven mitt, clear a space for the cooling rack for the cake, I return to the present: I think of the flow of the last eleven years, the meals, the parties, the tears. I think of how we hold the presence of those we love even as we create new memories in which they are absent. I start a new stack of dishes.