Sauce

One person reminiscent of another person. Time has passed. Passive tense. I have passed the time. The people may look or not look similar. Can’t remember. They have different accents. One Long Island, one Pacific Northwest. One thing they have in common is they both give me shit. Another thing is this unrelenting generosity. And they generally are not interested in folk music. And they are much older than I am. And they say such wonderful things. And they are women. More than that, they are tough cookies. Also, they teach me. In the kitchen, they teach me.

I met M when I was 20. J when I was almost 29. One kitchen in Pennsylvania, one kitchen in Massachusetts. Tomato sauce in both. Tomatoes are amazing because when you watch closely enough, you can see the colors change before your eyes. When you pick tomatoes, they can makes your hands itch, and stain your fingers black. If you are wearing long sleeves, they stain your sleeves. When you make tomato sauce, they can easily stain everything you are wearing. For this reason, the whole process is affective. It affects you. When you eat tomato sauce in winter, you can remember September. The women are different, as tomatoes are different, but they affect me in that they help me remember something important.

It shocks me sometimes, when I’m in the kitchen with J. For a split second or less even, I think I’m in the kitchen with M. She is unwrapping fava beans for me from their soft pods, and she’s asking me to eat them raw. I look out to something, to some field somewhere, they taste rich like butter. Maybe I’m reading Ulysses. She asks why are you reading that. Why aren’t you in school. I give her some vague answer about the type of education I’d rather receive, but mostly I am silent. I don’t think the silence bothers her because she fills it with stories. When there aren’t stories, there are instructions. Can’t say if I’ve ever peeled an onion before, certainly not fifty at once. While I’m peeling, I’m not trying to think about the light in September but I do anyway. She buys me a black long sleeve v neck shirt from a gas station so that I won’t get sauce on my regular clothes. There’s nothing written on the shirt, no town name or anything like that because we are in the middle of nowhere.

The kitchen was clean, we kept it so meticulously clean. The stainless steel countertops were cool in there, even on warm days. There was a broom and a mop and a sink that was just for washing produce. When I made a mistake, M would say, Page, you know nothing about nothing. When I washed the produce, my back was to M. While my hands were working away in the cold water, M was singing whatever we had just been listening to on the car radio. Tomatoes in water with round plump edgeless-ness. I have been conditioned to touch a tomato and think of M.

Over the next ten years, I processed tomatoes every September. So many tomatoes, that now I really know how to cook. If M is 40 years older than I am, then I have 40 years to become as competent in the kitchen as she is. But at least I’m a decade more knowledgeable than I was then. Now with J, once again in a kitchen in nowhere with a mop and a broom and stainless steel countertops that stay cool on warm days, she stops me in a hectic moment. She takes a bite of a sauce that I’ve made and says, Page, I love that you know how to cook.

What she says gives me butterflies. My eyes swell with tears and I look away.

It’s something like a coincidence to meet women who are so alike. I’ve been asking people about the difference between a coincidence and a miracle, one person says gravity, another says intention. I think the difference is time. Like a coincidence could be a split second or less, and the miracle is what you do after. A symptom of how deeply you cherish someone is how you continue to live with them.

The coincidence becomes a miracle once you live it.

Because the living is the miracle anyway.

And the coincidence is the frame that makes the living visible.

In the present, in the kitchen, J whispers to me, be careful, the woman coming in right now out of her Mercedes Benz convertible is a bitch. Sure enough, she comes up to me and she treats me bad.

I told J that I love the things she says. She’s so observant, she helps me observe. I told her she should write her thoughts down. She says, Page, I can’t be put two sentences together, you should write for me. I know she was kinda kidding but I will.

As a joke, M asked me to write a book about her so I did. The last line goes:

The sauce we made tasted like this.

Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl was playing on the grocery store stereo. Hannah and I were eating a slice of chocolate cake. I made up a dance move that was the motion of a clock. I didn’t realize it, but Hannah started laughing because my hands were accidentally moving counter clockwise. Then she asked, what if the hands of a clock moved like this? And she moved her hands fluidly. And then what about like this? And we blew kisses to each other. Or this, or this?