Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,123
long luxurious meals with high-end wines. I have eaten staff meal in restaurants at odd hours my whole life and now I am geared to have my main meal at four-thirty. It’s the new eight-thirty as far as I’m concerned. Every week or so an outraged woman or somebody’s grim personal assistant trying to get an eight-thirty reservation at Prune scoffs at our offer of six p.m., which we more generally have available, saying: Who eats at six o’clock? Amateurs! Amateurs eat at six!
It may be amateur, but a restaurant at an early hour is my kind of joint. Maybe especially with Michele, as we were always just leaving the beach around then and we would ride the motorcycle to Astoria and have a late lunch of grilled fish, octopus, skordalia, and a bottle of retsina. Or at four o’clock, we were scratching at the door of Bar Veloce for two sweet salami tramezzini and two hot speck panini and a bottle of gruner veltliner. After, there was still time for an eight o’clock movie. This was all during courtship, though, and I think my attachment to a four o’clock lunch is about clinging to a past, a deep nostalgia for a time when we rode motorcycles, drank negronis, and smoked cigarettes.
But here we are in a Volvo station wagon fitted with not one but two child seats, the motorcycles long ago sold or stolen, and our responsibilities commensurately graver than they’ve ever previously been. I have worked very late the previous night and didn’t get home until three in the morning. I was awoken by the littler one, Leone, at seven-thirty, a mere four hours after I had put my head down on the pillow. I’ve had coffee but no breakfast, and now we are in trouble. Code Red. Michele—who eats indiscriminately and in his good-natured Italian way thinks everything is “nice” and “good”—tries to get me to pull over and park and go to one of the pretentious restaurants on Smith Street, that minor-league stretch of Brooklyn that always disappoints—and I just can’t. I would rather starve and kill my children—Medea-like—than eat the truffle oil omelette with chorizo “foam” and piquillo peppers at Soleil or Blue Bird or whatever those restaurants are called on that stretch. And that’s where we find ourselves, at that particular impasse—Michele trying to get me fed and me putting my foot down, with two whining children in the backseat. I am shouting shit into the backseat of the wagon that I’m not proud of and that would make it hard for anyone, anyone, to be attracted to me if they heard me shouting at them, when suddenly Michele tells me to pull over at the bus stop and turn on the hazards.
“What?” I say.
“Go,” he says, pointing. We are in front of a pork store on Fifth Avenue.
As soon as I get in the door I can smell that it’s a good one. It’s a knockout. The smell of cured Italian meats and scamorza and dried oregano hits me as soon as I enter, and immediately I feel warm fluid resume its course through my spine and my veins and I realize I am in fact made of blood, warm blood, and I can’t believe how perfect Michele can be. He has a way, frequently, of letting a crisis build to its peak and then just casually dropping in front of you exactly what you want and need when you most want and need it. The meat cases are eight feet long and packed and there are three of them. I’ve thrown on the hazards, left the kids howling, and their dad coping in the backseat and run into this old-school place where big Italian-American guys in flannel shirts under their long white coats make huge sandwiches with mortadella, soppressatta, prosciutto, salami, capicola, and the works of marinated peppers, mozzarella, and pitted, chopped olives. They use good olive oil and good semolina rolls. I’m watching the guy slice the meat to order. I’ve got my eye peeled out of one corner for a traffic cop and out of the other for the meat slicer man to get on with it already with his artisanal, neighborly Italian manner. He’s taking the customers one at a time, making light neighborhood conversation. I smile, keeping quite still while in my mind an unkind monologue runs, until at last, at last, the guy hands over three meat-packed sandwiches that weigh so much my bood sugar creeps back