Our Fridge/Ourselves

I arrive past midnight after a long day of traveling – a one day round trip from Chicago to San Francisco and back – and the house is still. Only the dogs are up to greet me, but instead of the appreciative thump of a tail on the floor, they just fuss about me with whimpers and agitation. I am stale from the endless plane ride, so I don’t want to sit down, and I am still a little jazzed from the trip, so going to bed is not an option either. What to do to regroup and feel at home? The refrigerator beckons, I fling open the door and look inside. My husband has fond college memories of the well-stocked refrigerator as a homecoming beacon and the feeling is still the same.

I close my eyes and remember the refrigerator of my youth, which we called the “ice box.” Milk came in glass bottles then, delivered by the milkman Lou, who would arrive at breakfast, step over the idle dogs and peek into the fridge to see what we needed. My mother always marveled that he got it just right, knowing that we needed more milk during vacation, or that my brother was the only one who really liked cottage cheese. There was always a pyrex bread dish filled with individually peeled and cut up carrots floating in icy water, and a bowl of jello in bright carnival colors like lemon yellow, lime green, cherry red. All of that is gone now. Milk comes in a plastic jug, quart sized now because we are empty nesters, my mother’s carrots have been replaced by identically milled carrots that sit in a bag, and the unrealistic jello is no longer in style.

My cousin tells me that the gender identity of the kitchen and refrigerator, a.k.a. the domestic sphere, has been the subject of PhD theses. In my parents’ entirely traditional marriage, the domestic sphere was clearly the responsibility of my mother, who faithfully made my father three meals a day for over 50 years. Other than the occasional foray to get a glass of ice tea, I bet that my father could go days without opening the refrigerator door, and months without going to the grocery store. When he became a widower, the domestic sphere became his by default. One day I was trying to help him make a grocery list and plan some meals. He suddenly said, “I have always liked coconut, but I have not had any since I was a kid.” Now coconut was something that my mother would never let into the house, “It reminds me too much of toenail clippings,*” I remember her saying. I wondered if my mother’s refusal to buy something that my father loved was a symbol of her domestic dominance or my father’s passiveness. That Christmas I got him a whole array of coconut creations to try and make up for 50 years of unrequited love – home made cookies and brownies and other overly sweet store bought goods. His coconut phase was very short-lived when it became apparent that he had no interest in the domestic sphere and he turned over responsibility to a Polish housekeeper. Now the fridge was filled with interloping ingredients such as sausage, sauerkraut and other Polish favorites.

I open my eyes and look at our fridge to see what it says about our family. I immediately notice the large jar of black olives, which to me symbolize a shared domestic sphere and the inevitable compromises one must make in a marriage. A blossoming relationship is marked by one partner achieving a dedicated drawer in a bureau, progressing perhaps to a shelf in the fridge, but with marriage a refrigerator definitely becomes shared space, hence the olives. I abhor olives, to me they look like tiny shriveled and necrotic body parts, perhaps stored as grisly trophies by some serial killer.* But I try to be a loving wife and look away instead of throwing them away. On the other hand, I am besotted by raspberries, but Nick hates them insisting that the seeds always get caught in his teeth. In the winter, I never buy raspberries for myself since they are so expensive. But I am blessed with a loving husband who thinks I’m still worth it, and tonight I find a small container of raspberries greeting me home.

There is one non-food item in our fridge, a small container that looks like leftovers from a Chinese restaurant, but in it are two cubes of shredded wheat. Fortunately, the label is prominently displayed; these are actually the eggs of a praying mantis, which at some exact moment in summer should be placed in our garden to stave off bug infestations. I have stored the eggs for several years now, and I have yet to wake them from their deep slumber and give them their moment in the sun. Two times I have tried to foist them off on family members during our large Christmas grab-bag gift exchanges, but when everyone leaves the praying mantis eggs are left behind.

My mother stored various non-food items in the large freezer in the mudroom. When we would dive into the freezer looking for popsicles, we often had to paw past piles of frozen laundry. This was my mother’s ingenious tactic for postponing ironing by taking wet clothes from the washer and simply dumping them into the freezer. When extracted and allowed to thaw, the clothes would be the perfect dampness for steam ironing. The most unusual thing in my parents’ refrigerator was a dead bird, a Connecticut Warbler to be exact. I can imagine the moment, my mother sitting in the sun porch, startled by the sickening thud of a bird hitting the window. She looks down and sees the agonal flutters of the distraught bird, the small lively eye suddenly glazes over and the fluff goes out of the feathers. The dogs might be pawing at the door, seeking an opportunity to stalk prey that is still warm. My mother does not want to subject the bird to this ignominy, particularly since a Connecticut warbler is an unusual bird, and one that she has never seen on her many bird walks. So she scoops the bird up, stores it in the freezer compartment and occasionally shows it to other bird watching friends. It remained there for decades, and I was ready to transfer the warbler to my freezer when we cleaned out the house after my parents died. But the bird had mysteriously vanished, perhaps at the hands of a surprised caretaker who took control and neutered the family refrigerator.

The side doors of our fridge are clogged with an astonishing array of mustard and salad dressing. Growing up, there was only the sickly yellow container of French’s mustard and maybe two bottles of salad dressing – syrupy French and Wishbone Italian. Now I count 4 different types of mustard and 7 different kinds of salad dressing, and I know there are more unopened bottles in the cupboard. I think that we are suckers for any comfort food of our youth that has been gussied up as “gourmet.” Certainly we have succumbed to the gourmet pop corn and potato chips that have replaced Jay’s and the gourmet/decadent chocolate sauce to replace Hershey’s syrup.

We also buy in bulk, which is totally ridiculous considering that on most days we are a household of two. But Nick, who does most of the shopping, finds it hard to resist Costco bargains. There is a large container of “Spring Mix” salad, a definite improvement over the iceberg lettuce of my youth, but the restaurant quantity is far beyond anything that we could eat. I notice that some of the leaves have turned the wrong color green, some have gone limp, and there is some sort of brownish green liquid beginning to accumulate in the bottom of the container. There is a brick of cheddar cheese the size of a door stop, which has a creeping white mold, and an enormous chunk of parmesan that has acquired the color and texture of the jumbo callous on my right heel.* There is also a mysterious vegetable in the drawer that might be a jicama, the detritus of a failed attempt to make a more interesting meal. The sheets of phyllo dough in the freezer have been there as long as I can remember. The three containers of sour cream reflect my inability to make a grocery list. We use sour cream rarely, typically mixed with horseradish when we have corned beef, but when I get to the grocery store, I can never remember whether we already have some, or if we do how old it might be. The sour cream is in an opaque container that drifts to the back of the shelf. So I never know what I am going to see when I pry off the top. Tonight I see a shimmering fur-bearing slime the color of an vivid bruise,* and I pivot and chuck the container into the garbage.

There is also a jar of homemade Mayhaw jelly, for the past 20 years an annual Christmas gift from my uncle. I was surprised to keep receiving the jelly even after he died; it took me a year or two to realize that his namesake, my cousin, had continued the tradition. We have a large extended family, and it makes me smile to think of jars of Mayhaw jelly in kitchens all across the country. When I was visiting my 88 year old aunt, she asked me to get some crackers from her cupboard. When I opened it up, there must have been 8 jars of Mayhaw jelly in there. Family unity expressed in jelly.

I also spot a large baking dish of left over lasagna that is a source of some irritation. It has been picked at for several days and only a smidge remains, but no one will finish it off, since that person would then be responsible for cleaning the dish caked with stubborn cheese and sauce. So the dish will sit there for a few more days until someone finally succumbs. However, the eater can always dodge the cleaning bullet by deciding that the lasagna dish might need soaking for a day or two. So it will sit in the kitchen sink at the bottom of a pile of dirty dishes that are slowly accumulating until someone volunteers to empty the dishwasher.

Even though a careful family could probably live out of our refrigerator and freezer for weeks, I conclude that there is not much to eat except a slice of bread with my cherished raspberries. I close the refrigerator door, which has nothing on it except for two taped pictures of my children’s’ footprints from the day they were born. When we moved into this house, one of the first things I wanted to do was to transfer the refrigerator art. I put up one footprint and was stunned to see the magnet slip straight down to the floor. I grew up before someone had the bright idea to spawn an entire knick knack industry of refrigerator magnets and turn the refrigerator into the family bulletin board and ephemeral photo album. Apparently we had inherited a high end unit, whose manufacturers deliberately created a non-metallic door to avoid trashing up the sleek lines of the family fridge. But I have grown to like the bare refrigerator door, which projects an image of cleanliness.

Before people come by, I dedicate a good chunk of time beating back the creeping clutter. But it is all a façade, because if any one opens any door, including the refrigerator, they will find a jumble of this and that. When I am a guest, I assume that a door – whether closet, bedroom, medicine cabinet, refrigerator – defines a personal space that should be respected. It’s not that I am embarrassed by anything in my fridge – the food is healthy enough and there is no disturbing excess of liquor or cookie dough – but I might not be proud of the disarray, and outdated food might undermine confidence in my party-night cuisine. I remember one particular incident with my mother at her friend’s house, who asked her to go upstairs to find something. On the landing of the stairs, we could see into three bedrooms at once, and all of them had unmade beds. My mother whispered to me, “Mary doesn’t make her beds.” I would not call my mother a neatnik, but there was never an unmade bed in our house, and I think that she assumed that this was a routine standard for a housewife in the 1960s. She was appalled and I truly don’t think that she ever looked at Mary in the same way again, but at the same time regretted what she had found out. I tried to keep up the bed making standard for years, but recently have given up, preferring to just close the bedroom door. Same thing with our fridge. Our fridge/ourselves.

*I think that I have inherited my mother’s ability to demonize food by using unappealing human analogies. Her take on snails was, “they remind me too much of cleaning out my ears!”