The Dynamic Plane of Eggplant Parmesan

DD texted me:

Bringing what I can carry

This was in the evening. In the morning, I opened the refrigerator door and found 8 or 9 deep purple eggplants piled up above the crisper. I gathered them in my arms and found that this was the exact amount I could carry as well. Carrying this many eggplants is a little bit like trying to hold a collection of buoys. Deceptively light, but slippery and hard to handle. I dropped a couple and was impressed that DD was able to bring all of these from the farm. An armful of eggplants for a party’s worth of eggplant parm.

The kitchen was stuffy and I was overwhelmed. Despondent, perhaps. There was so much I had to do to prepare for the day, and even if all the plans unfolded perfectly, I was still dreading it. That’s because I was making dinner for my best friend Joe's going-away party. Which turns out is not my favorite kind of party.

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I’ve been thinking lately about static and dynamic planes in a painting. The static plane is flat, almost like a wall you are facing. The wall could be a person, a plant, a mountain, an abstraction, so long as its spread evenly on one level of depth. The dynamic plane moves forwards and backwards in space. When you stack two static planes on top of each other, the tension between them creates a dynamic plane. And it’s not so simple, because some colors read closer than others. You could place a big bright color deep behind many layers of static, and it would pull forward, collapsing the space.

My memories are like static planes. They are piled. The space between each, that dynamic space, is so gorgeous that sometimes I just sit around and remember. What pulls forward from the past is often something like a symbol. So when I write about eggplant now, I am breaking down a plane. Breaking it open, effortlessly, like opening a door.

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I decided to make eggplant parm for the party because Martha asked me to please use up her old cheese. I also wanted to make eggplant parm because I figured it would be an involved process, and would distract me from the pain of the party.

I put the eggplants on the wooden counter. I thinly sliced each lengthwise, salted each side, and lay them out to rest and sweat in a colander. While that was happening, I went to the grocery store to buy the rest of the ingredients. A vegetable oil with a high smoke point, tomato paste, things like this. When I got back home, my housemates were all awake, puttering about and making mid morning feel very comforting. For example, Elin had pushed the colander full of eggplants aside to make room for a carton of eggs. He and DD were eating breakfast in the other room, everything smelled like breakfast. And then Martha and Jody had to go some place, they left the kitchen door wide open while they shepherded their belongings to the car. I was just enjoying all the motion. Then, somehow at once, everyone was gone.

I noticed that the quality of light and sound was different in the kitchen when the screen door was open. So I kept it open, and told myself I was keeping it open in case the room filled with smoke. But that’s not true.

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I knew when I was flouring the eggplants and making a sauce that I was in my kitchen. I knew that. There was the white wall, leaky ceiling, open window and open door. But when I took a deep breath, I felt as though I was actually standing in a doorframe somewhere else. Years and years ago. I was standing in the doorway and it was the summer before I met Joe.

I was engaged in motions that made sense for that moment. I got the frying pan hot, I got the sauce simmering. But something rose up in that room from many static planes ago. It’s not like I had a memory. It was like, for a split second, I believed in beauty again, and had hope.

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Imagine that the collapse of the planes is not destructive, but inviting like an entrance.

For the majority of my 20’s, I built a life with Joe. In the thick of it, when we had a kitchen that was just ours, I cooked through most of Marcella Hazan’s vegetarian recipes, I wore red lipstick while I cooked, and played big brass bands on the CD player, and Joe sat there on the love seat and read, and we’d talk about funny things Marcella said, like that she could smell when a sauce was seasoned with enough salt, and we’d sniff the air and make out, and night after night the meals were more profoundly fabulous, handmade pasta, steaming our faces, and that was the entirety of our life, except for of course everything else that happened. Hard to remember what happened before all that.

It is not lost on me that I chose to make Marcella Hazan’s eggplant parmesan as a goodbye gift for Joe. I love symmetry. I love harmonious compositions. I patted each eggplant dry and lightly floured each piece right before placing it in the hot oil. The tomato sauce was gently simmering on the back burner. Periodically I tasted it because I am not Marcella. I dropped a whole stem of basil and a bay leaf right in there. Not all at once, the planes collapsed. In paintings, colors do that. In kitchens, aromas do.

I could smell the fresh air coming in from the open door. I could remember my life before Joe. Before I knew how to cook. Before I enjoyed tomatoes or eggplants at all. I was twenty. My cheeks were chubby and my hair was tangled. I was in Pennsylvania with a chef named Mary Anne. We were in the middle of nowhere, in a small industrial kitchen, in the back of an abandoned bar, in the center of a field. We were making a massive vat of tomato sauce to sell. The room smelled like sauce. Like garlic and tomato and basil and this and that and whatever.

Mary Anne refused to close the kitchen door. Even in the early fall, when it was chilly. No screen door, nothing separating the kitchen from the field. The smell of the sauce mixed with the smell of the grass and with the sound of the grasshoppers and the heat that came from the sun even though the air was cold.

She’d keep the door wide open. Even though the black flies would come into the kitchen. And the hanging tape strips were all already so filled with dead flies that they would not catch more. Everything was new to me. Vividly, this old plane pulls forward. While the sauce simmered I’d lean my body against the doorframe and just look out. No separation between the kitchen and the field. God, the sauce we made tasted like this.

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I put the eggplant parm on the picnic table at Joe’s goodbye party. I sliced it up and everyone ate it quickly. The eggplant parm was a painting. One could say, a masterpiece. Piled high with layers of eggplant, sauce, and cheese. It’s a collection of everything that’s happened. Well then I opened a bottle of cheap Merlot and hugged some friends. It was sunset. My best friend Joe could not stop smiling. Willis stood on the picnic table and gave a speech. Someone handed out sparklers. We danced. I wasn’t thinking about the past or the future or anything. When it got dark, I returned to the picnic table and the eggplant parm was gone. In it’s place, an empty casserole dish.

Moving into and out of each moment. Letting the old ones approach you, like a surprise. Just keeping the door open while the eggplants fry. All I really mean to say is that the open door helped me remember the breadth of my life. The moment is composed, inevitably, with everything. There have been good times. It hasn’t only been loss after loss.

In the morning after the party, I lay in bed with my friend Hannah. Oh my god I was so hung over. I wept and dry heaved because Joe was moving to California that morning. Hannah cried because I cried. Between rounds of tears we laughed about nothing. My stomach was so upset from that damn oily and acidic eggplant parm. Still the morning light was gentle. Hannah lay there and looked off and said:

What a miracle to love for so long that you get to witness transformation.