The Tao of Martha (10 page)

Small dreams, people. Small dreams.

Fletch was in charge of dinner, which, coincidentally, you don’t have to be Martha to prepare. The filet requires a salt, pepper, and garlic rubdown, but the trick is to warm the meat to ninety-five degrees in the oven before pan-searing it. Doing so dries off the outside, which means the entire inside stays pink, yet allows the perimeter to form the most gorgeous char crust.

(Wait, I learned this trick from watching Martha. Oh, well.)

While the filet rests under a tent of tinfoil, top with a layer of goat cheese, which should be crisped until it’s golden. I normally pop the whole thing under the broiler for thirty seconds, or I use my little crème brûlée torch if I’ve remembered to refill the butane. Goes without saying, of course, that I almost never remember to refill the butane. But, really, who keeps excess butane on hand? What am I, a welder?

(Related note? Fletch wanted to buy a full-size blowtorch for our future brûlées, but as I don’t want to see our home reduced to a pile of smoking rubble, I put down my foot on this one.)

Anyway, back to my First Choice in Last Suppers—so, goat cheese on a filet is fine, but the step that turns the meal into magic is the balsamic vinegar reduction. The sweetness of the sauce contrasted with the creamy sourness of the cheese is nothing short of transcendent. Plus, the sauce is so easy to make, a helper monkey could do it.

I take four parts of high-quality balsamic and mix it with one part sugar. Placing the mix in a saucepan on low, I cook it down for twenty to thirty minutes. The key is constant whisking as it reduces, which would be especially easy for a monkey, as he could also stir with his tail.

Once the sauce is thick and syrupy, the bittersweet tang is the perfect complement for anything from roasted vegetables to ice cream.

Most recipes don’t mention this, but it’s important to understand the downside of making this miraculous elixir: reducing vinegar makes your house smell like feet.

For a week.

Also, without constant whisking, the sauce will overcook and then your house will smell like
burned
feet.

For a week.

Martha would say that this is the opposite of a good thing, particularly because that stench gets in the walls.

As Fletch cooked that fateful November day, I wandered in and out of the kitchen, one wary eye on the reduction. He promised me he was on top of it and continued to shoo me away.

I was down the hall watching something
Real Housewife
–based when I caught a whiff of the familiar trace of burned vinegar foot. In the time it took Fletch to pick out the wine, the sauce overheated and was ruined.

As we sat down to my unsauced steak, I felt an unbearable, yet completely unwarranted sense of sadness. My issue wasn’t the dinner. Fletch tried, and I love him for making the effort.

Rather, there’s something about finishing a book that leaves me feeling depressed. You’d think I’d be all celebratory and overjoyed to have the deadline off my back, but that’s never the case. When I turn in my manuscript, the
absence
of having that pressure feels like a loss. That’s why when people complete a marathon, they run past the finish line. The human body can’t handle the drop from one hundred to zero. For me, it’s always jarring to go from that which consumes my life to nothing with the sending of one e-mail attachment. Without a mental cooldown period, I’m left feeling like I have the worst case of PMS ever.

And it’s because of this that I started to cry while eating my stupid balsamic-free filet.

“Are you okay?” Fletch asked, voice full of concern.

“I’m fine,” I promised, sniffling into my napkin.

“Clearly you aren’t.”

“I just…I just…I just wanted my balsamic. That’s all I wanted for my birthday. I just wanted my stupid sauce.” And then I began to sob in earnest, not because I was sad, but because the book—and really the whole awful year—had been so stressful.

Fletch moved next to me and patted my hair. “Jen, I’m so sorry. I stopped stirring for a second; I swear. I can make more.”

“No, I’m just tired,” I wailed. “That’s it. I’m fine. I’m just tired.”

“What would make you feel better?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to go out to dinner?”

“NOOO! I can’t go out in public; I’m hideous.”

“Do you want your cake now instead?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to watch your stupid housewife show with you?”

“No. You’ll just make fun of it and then I’ll be even sadder.”

“True.” Then Fletch squared his shoulders and took some deep breaths, like he was wrestling with something internally. “Do…you want to go to the shelter tomorrow and pick out a new cat?”

I sat up straight and narrowed my gaze. “Do not toy with me right now. I’m in no mood for toying.”

He looked right into my eyes. “I’m not toying with you. I’m serious. I’m giving in. You win. So, do you want to adopt a new cat tomorrow for your birthday?”

My tears stopped and I began to collect myself, suddenly forgetting all my monkey dreams. “I would love that. Thank you.”

“Good.” Then he gave me a big kiss and went back to his seat.

I began eating my filet with renewed vigor.

After a few seconds I said, “Hey, Fletch?”

He smiled at me. “Yeah?”

“We should adopt two.”

H
ere’s something Martha never tells you: Don’t go to an animal shelter and ask for the two hardest-to-adopt cats they have.

Because you’ll get the two hardest-to-adopt cats they have.

I’m not sure why I believed that I’d somehow be rewarded by requesting the cats most in need of a good home. Maybe I thought all the volunteers would be so moved by my compassion and bonhomie that they’d, in fact, point me to the two most awesome felines.

When we arrived at the shelter, we sat down with a volunteer and began to complete adoption forms. She’d handed me a clipboard with a stack of paper, and after I finished the first page, I turned to what I thought was the second.

“Are there more pages?” I asked, gesturing to the stack. “This is just the first sheet over and over.”

“No, no,” she assured me, “this is it.”

Huh. Turns out it’s way easier to get a shelter cat than a rescue-group pit bull. Libby’s adoption required six double-sided pages of essay questions, three character witnesses, and affidavits from Maisy’s oncologist, surgeon, hydrotherapist, and primary-care vet.

One would think that
employing
a canine oncologist, surgeon, hydrotherapist, and regular vet would exempt us from the home visits and interviews, but no. We had to run the whole gamut. At the shelter, we had to promise only that we wouldn’t use our new kitties as clay-pigeon substitutes when shooting skeet, like, if at all possible.

While we waited to meet candidates, my attention was drawn to the
huge glass wall at the end of the hall. Easily what were three hundred cats peaceably coexisted in a maze of indoor/outdoor rooms filled with a million toys, scratching posts, and multilevel beams. An entire feline kingdom lounged, waiting to meet us.

Fletch nudged me and pointed. “It’s like looking into your future.”

“Not funny,” I replied.

“But not untrue,” he countered.

I scowled in return.

My first clue that things were about to go horribly awry should have been when the volunteer pulled two cats out of a small cage they shared, and not the big kitty commune. But at no point did it occur to me that maybe there was a reason that these two particular cats had to be kept separate from the three hundred others.

The volunteer handed me a bite-size tortoiseshell cat with green eyes that took up almost half her face. Fletch took her plump counterpart, a gray Siamese mix with slightly crossed eyes of cobalt blue and the pink nose of a bunny. “What’s their story?” I asked.

“Someone adopted them from us and had them for a year. Then they had to move, so they brought them back here. They’ve been with us for…” She checked their file. “Oh, dear. They’ve been here for two and a half years.”

Oh, my God. These poor little babies had a home and then were forced to live in a cage again? That’s awful!

“But why hasn’t anyone taken them? They’re beautiful!” I exclaimed, hugging the little one to my chest. The cat gazed up at me with huge liquid eyes straight out of a horrible velvet painting. She leaned into me and purred.

She shrugged. “I’m not sure. But it’s really hard to adopt out a pair. We’re about to break them up to see if that helps.”

Um, not on my watch.

“We’ll take them!” I exclaimed.

The volunteer said, “We have other pairs. Maybe you should meet some of them before you make a decision.”

“Have any of them been here longer?”

“No.”

“Then, SOLD!”

“Whoa, hold on. We need to see how they are with dogs,” Fletch reasoned.

We waited and held the girls while the shelter workers brought a variety of dogs through to test the cats’ temperaments. Fletch’s cat stretched out on his lap, content as could be, and mine snuggled up into my neck.

I melted.

“They’re totally fine and they’re totally ours!” And with that, we paid the adoption fee, bundled the cats into their carrying cases, and brought them home to their new family, at no point realizing these sweet, docile cats had pulled a con on us worthy of Wall Street.

Because of their coloring, I named them after my all-time favorite characters: Patsy and Edina from
Absolutely Fabulous
. In the past, I found that cat naming is really prophetic. Our first cat, Maggie, had the most twee moniker I could think of back in the day, and she turned out to be just as dainty and delicate as her name dictated. Tucker was thus christened for a really fun, friendly college bartender (who’s still our buddy today), and Jordan for the crabby ice princess in the movie
Cocktail
. Point is, I firmly believe that your name goes a long way in determining your personality.

So I should have known better than to saddle the girls with the names of the two most cantankerous, pugnacious, backbitingly vicious vodka-soaked assholes on the planet.

Should have, anyway.

Not long after bringing the new girls home, we discovered that they had an adorable little party trick.

“Jesus!” Fletch shouted.

“What happened?”

“The little one took a chunk out of me!” Fletch barked, looking up at me over the side of the bed and clutching the meaty part of his hand. We’d been trying to coax the cats into their carrier for a vet appointment for a solid ten minutes at that point.

“Her name is Eddy, and she was just saying hello,” I argued unconvincingly. “You know, like those T-shirts that say, ‘Sharks hug with their mouths.’ She was hugging you with her teeth, being friendly.”

He shot me a dark look. “My
friends
don’t bite me.”

“Oh, stop being so melodramatic. She weighs four pounds. How hard could she bite?”

“
This
hard.” He waved his bloody hand at me before getting up to the bathroom for heavy washing and disinfecting.

As it turned out, Fletch wasn’t the only one who wasn’t in love with the new girls.

Aside from me,
no one
likes Patsy and Edina to this day, which is exactly why Fletch is afraid to be alone with them. The dogs are okay around them, but they aren’t buddies like they are with the Thundercats. Libby and Gus chase each other all day, and Odin and Chuck are perpetually using Maisy and Loki as their big canine mattresses.

Anytime a dog comes too close, Eddy does her best Mike Tyson impersonation, smacking the dogs’ muzzles with eight hundred lightning-fast uppercuts
before scampering up the bookcase to hiss, while a shell-shocked Libby or Maisy looks at me as if to say, all Will Ferrell–style, “Am I taking crazy pills?”

(Loki doesn’t get involved. He’s like Murtaugh in
Lethal Weapon
, walking around, shaking his head, and grumbling, “I am too old for this shit.” He steers clear of the girls and sees them only at night, when we go to bed.)

Patsy and Eddy presently live in the connecting bedrooms on the first floor, where they’ve been for the past six months. That’s right,
six months
. Our attempts to mainstream them into the rest of the pack have been unsuccessful, much like one could consider the final flight of the
Hindenburg
unsuccessful.