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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Ever since I dumped my eighth-grade boyfriend, I've been single on Feb. 14. I also couldn't make homemade pasta. Turns out, these things are related.
By Rebecca Traister
Read more: Romance, Cooking, Valentine's Day, Rebecca Traister, Life
Feb. 14, 2008 | I. In the eighth grade, I dumped my boyfriend on Valentine's Day. He was my first boyfriend, and when I say "boyfriend," I mean he was my best friend. The fruits of our romantic liaison included: one meal at a flowery restaurant of indeterminate European origin (my first experience with both veal cannelloni and steak tartare), one school dance, one viewing of "When Harry Met Sally" while sitting awkwardly on a couch, and hours and hours spent obsessing over the romantic comedies of the 1930s. We did not kiss. We may once have held hands.
I dumped him because, sometime that winter, I also made a new female friend, who asserted that my faux-relationship was silly. She was, in many ways, correct. As Valentine's Day approached with all its humiliations and hormones -- the in-class carnations and kissing and public tallying of desire! -- she and I cooked up a plan to spare me any awkward proclamations of affection from a boyfriend with whom I had no sturdy romantic bond: I would ditch him first. I fooled myself that my actions were both kind and direct, but in truth I had veered carelessly into the barbaric margins of adolescent femininity. I was tone-deaf to romance. And in the tenderest of years, on the most nervous-making of teenage days, I broke up with my closest friend.
I feel so bad about what I did that I have effectively scrubbed all of the most shameful details from my memory. (Though I don't believe my ex-boyfriend has; he remains a friend, the most talented person I know, and often calls to wish me a happy Valentine's Day.) What I recall is that the exchange took place in our school library, and I think there might have been a poem, and possibly a piece of music he had written in my name. Whatever he gave me, I promptly returned to him, along with a few frosty words. He was surprised and saddened. I was determined and unmoved. Whatever happened in the Friends Free Library that Valentine's Day, I emerged a single woman.
And a single woman I have remained, on each of the subsequent 18 Valentine's Days. It's not that I haven't been in relationships since. But remarkably, never on Feb. 14.
I lived through the rest of high school without dating; all white carnations for me. College, of course, was a four-year Valentine's Day joke. I didn't have any long-term boyfriends, and if I had, everyone was way too cool (and broke and drunk) to mark it in any earnest way. During my 20s in New York, I was mostly single, and even during a nearly four-year relationship, my boyfriend and I managed, rather inefficiently, to break up annually just before Christmas and reunite in the spring, leaving us single during the cold Januaries and Februaries of our acquaintance.
Don't misunderstand. I have never given a good goddamn about Valentine's Day. Only intermittently has it had any emotional impact. Once, in the midst of a particularly agonizing winter breakup cycle, my jaw went slack during a sushi dinner with a girlfriend who was devastated that her swain would be out of town on business for the big day. "I'll know I have a boyfriend, but I'll feel so pathetic when all the women in my office are getting ready to go out for dinner and it'll look like I have nothing to do!" she said, as I quietly wondered if I could drown myself in a shallow pool of low-sodium soy sauce.
I recall a few limply defiant all-girls gatherings, designed to take the sting out of being single on the biggest Hallmark holiday of the year. But most of those ended at a dive bar, gossiping about jobs and boys. Putting energy into hating Valentine's Day is as hackneyed and old hat as hating New Year's Eve. There's no traction or originality there.
At the same time, it would be disingenuous to say I haven't noticed my singlehood each year, that I haven't joked about my Valentine's Day curse. As the stores begin to look as though someone hosed them down with Pepto-Bismol, as the lingerie store around the corner fills with more heart-shaped cone bras than anyone needs to examine on her morning commute, I think back to my eighth-grade bad behavior. Every Feb. 14 is a minor milestone, another year affirming what has long been clear to me -- that I am a person who does exceptionally well on her own and has never shown much aptitude for romance.
Not showing aptitude for romance has, all in all, not been such a bad thing. Especially in recent years, I have been rather exquisitely happy single. Of course I have hoped that I would fall in love, find a best friend, perhaps someone with whom I could discuss the romantic comedies of the 1930s. (News flash to my callous eighth-grade self: These men are not, as it turns out, so easy to find.) My Valentine's Days are spent like any other day -- working, eating dinner with friends, drinking a few glasses of wine, reading a book, watching "The Daily Show," getting a good night's sleep. I am very lucky, and I enjoy my life, even if it does occur to me, around this time of year, that I may never work off my bad junior-high juju.
II. Around the time I dumped my boyfriend on Valentine's Day, I became obsessed with cooking. I cooked constantly, with the compulsiveness only a teenager can muster, preparing certain dishes over and over again and driving my mother batty. This may be a common observation in a post-Nigella universe, but those cookbooks were a form of pornography, bursting with tastes and textures, images of raw ingredients and dirty fingers, the suggestion of appetites and the promise of satiety.
I especially loved making pasta, a big pot of which, bathed in sauce, spoke to me of delicious plenty. I worked through my mother's basic meat sauce and then memorized Marcella Hazan's Nazi-strict recipe for a classic Bolognese. I made fusilli with sausage and cream, tortellini with artichokes, penne with vodka, shells with Canadian bacon and four cups of onions, and some Alsatian thing with carrots and cream. In the summer I poured hot pasta over fresh tomatoes and basil and mozzarella; in the winter I combined it with St. Andre cheese, walnuts, pancetta and parsley.
What I really wanted to learn, though, was how to make my own pasta dough. I was at that earnest age when I believed anything short of complete mastery of a meal was a cop-out. I'd study the line drawings of pasta preparation in Hazan's books, so clean and direct -- a mound of flour, or semolina, or potato, hollowed out in the center, into which you would drop an egg or two, or some water. You'd work from the inside, mixing the flour into the liquid, until it formed a dough; you'd knead it until it was smooth, work it until it stretched a bit, till it bit you back. Then you'd roll it out very thin, cut it into strips for fettucine or parpadelle, or squares to fold over filling for ravioli, or maybe roll it into little ears for orecchiette, or grooved dumplings for gnocchi, letting the board on which you worked give the dough texture to which the oils and creams and rendered fats of the sauces would cling.
Next page: Of course, this never worked for me
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