Two autumns ago, on the wide avenue where I live in New York City, I abandoned a bicycle, a bulky blue gift from an ex that had never been quite right. The news in my country was so bad I could hardly speak, and I was single and living alone for the first time and feeling afraid, distracting myself most days with rides through the lacework of tree shadows – but, one day, the chain came loose on my way somewhere, so I locked up the bike and began to walk. This made one less distraction from the question of my tiny apartment, where I was intent on being very happy but where, despite being someone who had once prepared octopus on Tuesdays, I could not bring myself to cook. The issue seemed outright personal at first, the shock of cooking for one, instead of two, but soon I realised it had as much to do with the outer world as the inner, the mornings I woke up to the sounds of children marching in protest against their president. We had just elected a man who thrilled at the mistreatment of women, and somehow anything traditionally female had begun to repulse me.
The collection of vintage cocktail dresses in my closet, printed silk and ruched chiffon, went untouched. As the autumn fell away, I wore a burgundy leather jacket with a sheepskin collar and ate without taking it off – seated in Polish diners where I ordered kielbasa and something called Peanut Butter Pie, standing in the pizzerias under the stained photos of celebrity patrons. From the backs of bodega freezers I pulled mysterious off-brand popsicles, summer’s refuse, and ate those too. I must have thought that by eating this way –a diet strange and piecemeal, a far cry from wholesome – I was disguising my body from the inside out, changing it into something no one could want.
The guilt that I felt about avoiding my kitchen was borderline Catholic. I cringed whenever I glanced in my refrigerator, which looked like a place destroyed by war, some carrots I’d failed to roast gone limp in the crisper, one shelf or another bearing the bloody smear of the jam I was always eating in the middle of the night to make up for the meal I hadn’t managed. But when I pictured myself cooking, the grandiose dinners I’d hosted, I could not keep from wondering which conversations I had missed when I was caramelising the onions, ferrying the ramekins back to the kitchen. What power had I lost, which ideas had I not followed, what conception of myself as an individual had I given up in the name of a generalised feminine silhouette? I hated the memory of the apron around my neck, the wooden spoon in my hand, the accommodating apology in my mouth. In his criticism, John Berger writes about how the woman is always the spectator and the spectated, trained to see herself as how she must appear. Ravenous in my scab-red jacket, I saw the truth in this and wanted to become the exception. Ceasing to cook was less a decision I made than a series of happy choices I could not.
My kitchen itself, barely deserving of the name, didn’t make things any easier. When I first saw the apartment, even the unsavoury landlord made an admission to its pathetic state. If you want to use the oven, he said, patting his combover back into his scalp grease, you’ll have to call and have the gas turned on – but you could just use it for storage. About as big as a closet, the kitchen contains so little counter space that a necessary drying rack takes all of it. Only an anxious, determined child could fit between the counter and the stove, which hugs a wall on which the nearness of flames has painted a brownish patina. The refrigerator has broken twice, always giving an incredible performance beforehand, a hum and then a jungle-cat roar.
As the winter deepened, I forced myself to cook, listening as I did to news about the Muslim ban and imperilled abortion clinics. Anyone listening at the window – when I dropped my immersion blender in the sink of water, rendering it inoperable, or the flame went out again on something simmering, given the burner’s general refusal to stay on any level below medium – would have imagined, from the sorts of curses and shouts issuing forth, not a single woman of relative sanity, but a couple on meth rigorously considering divorce. “Fucking fuck me,” I cried. “I can’t do this any more.” The knob on my oven told tremendous lies about the temperature, and the first cake I baked inside it, a simple standard of raspberry and buttermilk, resembled some less-visited ruins. Even salads seemed a risky proposition, given the lack of a counter on which to chop, and my rickety round dining table wasn’t a great alternative. When its wobble coincided unfortunately with a slice of a knife, I cut myself badly enough that I had to lie down. Dating was going about as well as cooking. A man who had behaved perfectly in public said something so vile, once his apartment door closed, that I ran out while he was in the bathroom, feeling at once the hunger of loneliness and the clarity of nausea, the wish never to eat again. I passed my bicycle every day, and I kept telling myself I’d go unlock it and get it fixed, and then I misplaced the key.
Twice that year, I left my life, renting out houses in forested places where the only local business was the post office. This was to finish my novel, I told friends, but also, I told myself, to cook in a proper kitchen. In both of these places – a damp cabin in the Californian redwoods with a view foggy until noon, a farmhouse in disrepair on Maine’s Saco river – I was without things I had come to believe were essential: some tongs, a ladle, a blender, a beater. Both stoves were electric, prone to sudden flame with even a modicum of grease. But the longer I was there, the more I seemed to thrive under the limitations, enjoying the pull in my deltoids as I beat things by hand. Panna cotta seemed like something it was not excessive to prepare for oneself if chilled in grubby old jars, rather than precious ceramics, so I did, and when it was ready I ate it outside, one foot on the deck and the other high up my inner thigh as I considered the age of the trees. On a particularly bad news day during a sudden lifetime of them, my honey cornbread batter gained jalapeños and cayenne pepper, a fierce heat that did not feel unreasonable. I was using the kitchen to express myself again, culinary eloquence the underside of my political frustration, and it was something I had to do in solitude. My female resentment was wild during this time in my life, a bad dog that might snap in public and, like all snapping animals, it needed to be trained alone.
If women are taught to evaluate their effect on others before they evaluate others’ effects on themselves, I am no anomaly, often incapable of ascribing value to anything whose merits are not immediately confirmed by another person. Like most bad habits, this is an old one, and I flinch to remember an early expression of it, a Saturday afternoon when I was five. Before me some imaginary meal on a bright blue platter, my hair neater than it ever was because of a trip to the salon that morning, I waited, arranged just so at the little plastic table on my porch, for a certain boy from down the street to walk by. In the front yard was a swing I loved, a single two-by-four that went dangerously high if you kicked enough, and across the street in the yard of the unhappy blind neighbour a thicket of blackberries I often pillaged until I looked like a badly bruised knee. I should have scraped the trees as I kicked toward them, that day, and I should have been purple with juice – but I never got on the swing, and I never crossed the street. Instead, I pined for the male voice that would talk to me about the things on my plate, describe how new I looked, until the dark called me in.
If cooking for company is aspirational, cooking alone might be anything but, something like the first glance in the mirror early in the morning, unpolished and uncensored. There are the plain things I make for myself that I wouldn’t for another – beans in cocoa powder and coconut milk, the only spice a bay leaf – and ways I behave while cooking and eating that I wouldn’t consider in the presence of anybody else, a leg I cock right across the table to stretch a muscle I often pull running. I believe in risotto prepared in pyjamas, and also in following the strangeness of one’s tastes to their total exhaustion. Last month, craving a combination of salt and sweet, certainly overcaffeinated, I crumbled some potato crisps into my chocolate cake batter. That there was no one to bat an eye at this was as delicious to me as the thing itself.
Last week, a male friend made me a very surprising cup of coffee, sharp and woodsy. Is that chicory, I asked. No, he said, cardamom. He’d ground it into the beans, and the private ceremony of this moved me, how he had not asked for my approval. We began to talk about our grandmothers, the hobbies they wished had been something more, and then about colour, how right the pale blue mugs looked next to the orange of the pitcher. I remembered something Kandinsky wrote – “Orange is like a man convinced of his own powers” – and then I drifted from the conversation. It might be the female curse and blessing both, I thought: save the boats and cars that we buy and must repair, very little of this world is ever compared to a woman in general. A powerful man is often thought of in the same sentence as other powerful men, but a powerful woman is almost always described only in terms of her own life.
Soon my lease will be up on this squalid kitchen, and soon after that will be the two-year anniversary of an open misogynist’s presidential inauguration. There are ways I have learned to adapt to both: avoiding the electric beater that spatters the too-near walls and relying on muscle instead, opting not to kiss any men who say they don’t cook because their mothers do. I replaced the kitchen table with something less striking and more sturdy, heavy walnut I found at a flea upstate, and I haven’t drawn blood yet. I think I qualify as some kind of civic criminal for never rescuing that bike, and it’s on my to-do to cut the lock before I go, but strangely it’s been important to watch it rot, different pieces carried off by the week, and I like imagining the day it’s completely gone, the ways I was unhappy gone with it.
Kathleen Alcott is the author of Infinite Home (Borough Press, £8.99)
