How to Cook a Moose (9 page)

I was meant to be here. I was suddenly in tears.

I wiped them away and introduced myself to Monica, the kitchen supervisor. She was only twenty-six, fresh-faced, with an ebullient, easygoing, laughing nature I would come to love and admire. She had been a chef at one of the most popular restaurants in town. When she realized that she wanted to make a difference in the world rather than pursue a career as a chef, she applied for the job running the Florence House kitchen, and got it. She was from an old Maine family, but her
parents were peripatetic; she and her brother had grown up all over the country before her family returned to Maine.

She was also an amazing cook; I was almost twice her age, but during the year or so I worked my Thursday lunch shift at the Florence House, I learned a lot from her about both cooking and life.

She put me to work right away. I assembled about sixty cheese sandwiches and toasted them in butter on the grill and set the container into the steam table, loosely covered, to await lunch service. Then I peeled and diced a box of carrots and stored them in the refrigerator in a “fish tub.” I learned that local supermarkets had donated almost all the ingredients in the kitchen—Hannaford, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods. Much of the produce was organic, and it all looked fresh.

From twelve to one p.m., I stood by the steam table and served two kinds of soup, both made from scratch (broccoli cheddar and tomato basil), along with the sandwiches I'd made, while Kim, my fellow new volunteer, served the salad she'd made, and Monica started the prep work for that night's dinner.

Kim and I talked while we served. I learned that she was a Jersey girl, a former heroin addict and rock guitarist. She'd moved to Portland after rehab to live in a halfway house with several other female recovering addicts and start a new life, far from her old druggie friends and copping places. She seemed raw and vulnerable, not quite sure what to make of this northern seaside town where she found herself alone and sober. She was funny and quick-witted and warm, and I rooted for her to succeed here. I never found out what happened to her; after that shift, she had a job interview. She must have gotten the job, because I never saw her again. She was the first of several recovering addicts I worked with at Florence House. Volunteering was clearly curative for us all. My suspicion that it did us more good than them was confirmed over and over.

During that first lunch, Monica told us that the other volunteer on that day's shift, Diane, had just been given the Volunteer of the Year award; it was not hard to guess why she'd been awarded the honor. Diane spent the entire shift washing dishes in the corner. Every time I needed more, there she was, restocking soup bowls and sandwich plates by my elbow. She did this with immense cheer, unobtrusively.

I stood in my apron and dished up lunch for all the women who came shuffling up to the service window. Some of them didn't make eye contact. Many of them looked as if they had been through terrible things, formidable struggles. A few of them had black eyes, bruised mouths. Several were obviously strung-out or tweaking. Some limped badly, sat in wheelchairs, used canes. Others hunched in their coats, huddled into themselves, almost catatonic.

Even so, they knew what they wanted in their lunch, and they were not shy about demanding it. One of them said, “Not that sandwich; give me one that's not so burned.” (None of the sandwiches, it must be said in my own defense, was burned, but possibly some were a bit more well-done than others.) Several of them asked for seconds, even thirds. They all loved the broccoli cheddar soup.

At the end of lunch service, Monica went out and made the rounds, sitting at each table, talking and laughing and lending a sympathetic ear. They all clearly loved her.

The Preble Street shelter system, I learned from Monica, had a strong ethic of service, or “mission,” as they called it, that wasn't religious or didactic but was humble, without ego or judgment. One of the rules of the place that I agreed to observe when I volunteered was not to reveal identifying details about anyone there. This is not a writer's favorite promise to make, especially because the singular details and specificity of people are a novelist's bread and butter. Even so, I could see the usefulness of protecting the anonymity of women in
a shelter. But as I stood there dishing up their lunches, I was dying to know all their stories, their histories. I would be lying if I pretended otherwise. But they didn't owe me that, or anything.

Every week during the time I volunteered at the soup kitchen, Brendan and I were working (which is to say, writing) ourselves into puddles of melted butter to be able to pay for the renovations on our house. The upstairs two bedrooms and bathroom and the downstairs foyer had been restored to a stripped-down elegance; the old claw-foot tub we'd found in the basement was installed in a corner of our bedroom; the original pine-plank upstairs floors had been uncovered under many layers of linoleum, carpet, and tar paper, and had been refinished; and all the walls were freshly painted in warm colors and off-whites instead of the awful institutional pale blue we'd inherited. Now, in the second phase of the Yankee Palazzo renovation, our entire kitchen and dining room had been gut-demolished down to the joists and beams and brick.

When we bought the house, the kitchen was all pink granite counters and white melamine cabinets, white appliances and a horrible Brazilian cherry floor, and the walls were painted the same cold sky blue as the rest of the house. The huge side window was Sheetrocked over, so the room was dark. We hated that kitchen, hated cooking and eating in it, and it seemed to us that the house chafed and protested against this bullshit with every joist and beam; we could almost hear it.

To help offset the cost of the new kitchen, we sold the old, clinical melamine cabinets, the cold-as-tombstones granite countertops, and less-than-stellar appliances on craigslist; people came and carted them
away and gave us a lot of money for them, which struck us as an amazing deal.

In their place, we envisioned old wood everywhere, a copper bar top, butcher-block countertops, and a Mexican tile backsplash. While Patrick's guys banged away in there for weeks, taking down the old posts from the wall that separated the dining room from the kitchen, we drove around southern Maine and scoured the Internet, hunting for materials. It was a great adventure from start to finish. Brendan found a hardworking, straight-talking guy up in Poland Spring who took barely used appliances out of rich people's summer houses in Cape Elizabeth or Bar Harbor when they traded up for new ones, and resold them on consignment out of his barn for a fraction of what they would have cost new. One thrilling day, he delivered our butter-yellow Viking stove with gas burners and electric oven, plus a Bosch dishwasher whose didactic beeping mechanism he'd dismantled for us, and a beautiful stainless-steel Viking fridge with a bottom freezer drawer and luxury of luxuries, an ice maker (I'd never had one before).

Most of the materials we used were old—“repurposed,” as they call it. Brendan found the 1880s tin ceiling tiles for sale online in Ohio and had them shipped here; we bought the wide, weathered first-growth pumpkin-pine floorboards that graced an old 1770s barn wall from an old-wood purveyor in South Portland; and the stacks of hundred-year-old maple boards, which were used to build the kitchen cabinets, the base of the bar, the refrigerator encasement, and the wainscoting in the dining room, had served as the flooring in an old mill in Biddeford. All these materials were full of history, rich with age. It was exciting to see them installed in our old house instead of the soulless new crap that had been there when we'd bought the place. We felt as if we were restoring the house's beauty and character.

The contractors never once quailed at these materials, never complained about the unorthodoxy of using them. In fact, we felt, and
they evidently did too, as if we were all collaborating on an interesting project. They seemed to approve of our choices, our vision for the house, because we were restoring it, using as much old material as possible, rather than trying to make it into something it hadn't been intended to be. Also, we were obviously not rich brats dripping with money; we made a point of waiting for each subsequent step in the renovation until we'd earned and saved enough so we wouldn't fall behind in our payments. We tried to make decisions knowledgeably and decisively and change our minds as little as possible. And we respected the fact that nothing can happen overnight; we trusted them to work at their own pace.

If we upheld our end of the deal, they exceeded theirs. They were fun to talk to, merry and funny and darkly wry, in that (by now familiar) Maine way. They embraced every challenge: they scraped and sanded and then painted the ornate old squares of ceiling tin they'd had to carefully jigger into place and cut to accommodate the overhead recessed lights; they planed and sanded and endlessly polyurethaned the rough, weather-beaten dimensional countertop planks into smooth, richly golden expanses. They weren't put off by the patinaed old copper from the 1906 bathtub Brendan bought from a guy north of Waterville. After scratching their heads and discussing the matter for a while, they flattened it overnight under heavy weights, then they cut it into separate sheets and siliconed them to the bar-top plywood with sandbags and clamps. They carefully cut out the old drain and made a beautiful medallion in the middle of the countertop and jointed the separate pieces neatly with copper nails.

By the beginning of summer, after months of hard, painstaking work for our contractors, our new kitchen was finally finished. Everyone had been remarkably patient and coolheaded throughout, maybe because we all knew we were creating something beautiful, and that doesn't happen overnight. On the very last day, the contractors
grouted the Mexican tile backsplash, replaced the glass in the door to the mudroom, shaped the copper edges around the bar top and affixed them, and then they were done.

After they'd swept the wide-board pumpkin-pine floor and packed up their tools and driven away, we wandered around the big, airy, dazzling room, slightly befuddled, dazed with the joy of having our kitchen and dining room, which had been so coldly ugly before, be so warmly beautiful now, all one big room instead of divided, with two more windows and the brick chimney exposed, the walls freshly painted a warm neutral buttery yellow, everything gleaming and rich with history, every detail exactly what we'd wanted. The finished kitchen looked eccentrically, cozily resplendent, at least to us. There was wavy semi-opaque glass in the upper cabinet doors. The stained-glass window we'd designed and had built at a glass place on Forest Avenue was installed in the enormous side window the contractors had uncovered when they gutted the room. They'd also punched a fourth window through the newly exposed brick chimney, so the room was flooded with natural light. The (new) porcelain sink had been set into the countertop and hooked up. The tall wooden door with beveled glass and carved details that used to hang in the front entryway was now a swinging door between the kitchen and the foyer.

The kitchen felt as if it had been in the house forever; our aim all along had been to have people walk in and assume that, feel it instinctively, and say, “How lucky that you didn't have to renovate when you moved in!” Our house was old and tall and beautiful, and it wanted to feel comfortable and attractive in its outfit; it also wanted an outfit befitting its dignified age, its 1850s vintage. Ridiculous as it sounds, I couldn't help thinking that the house was rejoicing in its new duds, even preening a little, and I didn't blame it.

As for me, I was awash in a contented happiness so powerful it almost made me melancholy. After more than four fun, passionate,
adventurous years together, Brendan and I had found our home and had made it our own, together, and now we had the amazing good luck to live here. The feeling was so unfamiliar, I had to think about it to parse out what it was. After a moment, I realized it was the utter rightness of where I was and the person I was with. I had never experienced this before in my life. My marriage, though good, had been fraught; the house my ex-husband and I had renovated together, doing all the work ourselves and fighting all the while, had always felt like it was his, not mine, because he had controlled the decisions. Now, I felt nothing but rootedness and contentment. Brendan and I had never once argued during the buying and renovating of this house; we hadn't lost our patience or good humor or mutual excitement about the whole process. It had been a joyful, fun experience, like everything we did together—exploring Maine, discovering Portland's restaurants, walking Dingo on the Eastern Prom, sitting and writing at the same table in perfect harmony, driving back and forth from the farmhouse, talking and singing and laughing, and, most of all, cooking together.