Kicking Back

Rose took a week off to can vegetables. She didn’t let anyone know her plans.

What are you going to do? an officemate asked.

I’m going to kick back, Rose said.

Kick back. A peculiar idiom. She imagined reading her father’s science fiction collection (Asimov, Moore, Wyndham, Tiptree) and eating Hershey’s chocolates. Kickback. She pictured herself meeting a bewigged stranger in a hotel lobby, James Bond-style, and going home with a briefcase of money (a kickback for information she couldn’t imagine having).

Kicking back. She didn’t tell anyone she was planning to can vegetables. She had never canned vegetables before. The garden was out of control: it had almost reverted to the wild, yet daily she gathered more vegetables from scraggly vines. She was not a domestic diva, but she envisioned jars of applesauce, tomatoes, peppers, and strawberry jam lined up on the shelves in the pantry. After reading about canning in a cookbook, she purchased jars, a boiler, a rack for the bottom of the boiler, and tongs.

Monday was the first day of canning. She woke at eight because her officemate forgot Rose was on vacation and telephoned to dither about a building project. Rose said a few comforting words--she was too groggy to remember what she said--and then took the phone off the hook and unplugged the computer. She did not care if the building fell down: she was on vacation. She would fix it next week. Better yet, leave it to the firm. She washed her face. The house was quiet. She turned on the radio and listened to something by Philip Glass on the classical music station. Wearing her oldest jeans (which only sporadically fit her) and an Elvis Costello T-shirt which she had purchased at a concert in 1984, she reread the directions in THE JOY OF COOKING and the instructions that came with her boiler.

THE JOY OF COOKING warned her to can with “a clear conscience” lest spores of botulinus develop in her home-canned vegetables. One ounce of the germ, she read, could kill 100 million people.

My conscience is clear, she said. If I screw up and poison someone, I’ll write a best-selling mystery about food poisoning. Food judges at the County Fair falling down dead. The Case of the Canned Currants.

A watched pot never boiled. While she waited for the water to boil, she read another ghost story in a Dover anthology. Then she scalded tomatoes for a minute, plunged them into cold water, and peeled the tomato skins. Quartering them was, as she had known it would be, a mess. Juice squirted all over the cutting board and dyed a corner of her paperback.

It was, as she had known it would be, chaotic.

She pressed the tomatoes into hot jars and screwed on the lids. She stuck them in the boiler. The kitchen steamed as she repeated the process.

She felt like a character in a PBS reality show: COLONIAL HOUSE or the frontier one set in Texas. Except her costume was wrong.

Why had she wanted to do this?

After a morning’s canning, she relaxed. She didn’t clean the kitchen till 4:00. She was exhausted.

When Ben came home, he asked, What’s cooking?

Nothing. Just tomato sauce, she said.

The canning was a secret. She had to make sure it was a success.

Tomorrow: applesauce.