It seemed almost overnight that we had transitioned to a whole new way of life, almost as alien to me as a community of Mormons in far-off Utah. We now had two cars—a Jeep Range Rover and a Camry—in our immaculate and spacious garage. (“You can have any car you want as long as it’s a Camry and as long as it’s gray,” said the husband to me, in an echo of George Bush Senior’s directive to Dubya: “You can go to any college you want as long as it’s Yale.”) Golf clubs appeared in the foyer. We had a mailbox with a little red flag, a sun porch off the dining room, and a powder room. We had a big green lawn tended by a landscaper every week in the summer.
The trouble was, I didn’t want any of this shit. Not even the car.
I had always prided myself on being an urban woman, in particular, a New York woman (there was even briefly a magazine devoted to us, New York Woman, for which I later wrote an article on foot fetishism, as you may recall from “Rotten Romance”). As those who have followed these posts from the get-go may remember, I moved to Manhattan with my parents when I was thirteen. I went to snooty little private schools, followed by snooty little Princeton. I got my M.A. at Columbia and after that newlywed year in the wilds of Vermont, moved back to the city—I thought for good—and worked on smart urban publications. I tolerated cockroaches, loved Greek-owned coffee shops, and navigated mass transit with ease. I knew the subways, knew my way around the whole farking city from Graves End in Brooklyn to Washington Heights at the north end of Manhattn. After a few lean and hard years, I thought Mr. Landi and I were the kind of hip couple who went to off-Broadway plays and occasionally dined at upscale restaurants like the Four Seasons and Aquavit. We were the kind of couple who bought the Times on Saturday night and knew the best places for take-out. We were the kind of couple who lived next door to Norman Mailer, fuh chrissakes!
I never, ever imagined myself with dogs and kids stuffed in a late-model minivan, which seemed the norm among my age cohort in Weston. Nor did I really know how to behave like a corporate wife, a role occasionally expected of me as the spouse of one of the “top guys” at IDG. When I was introduced to the capo di tutti of the organization, he kept shaking my hand up and down and muttering, “Princeton, hey? You really went to Princeton?” I finally slid out of his grip, baffled by his fixation on my college education.
“Why did you stop shaking hands with Pat?” my husband later demanded.
“He wouldn’t let go! He was about to break my arm.”
As corporate wife, I also felt it was my duty to entertain the Nazi boss and his wife. We invited them for dinner, hoping to serve cocktails before a cozy fire. Mr. Landi, however, was not aware that you need only a couple of “fat sticks”—not half a dozen--to get a blaze going in the fireplace, and so a few minutes before their arrival we were fighting the flames with a fire extinguisher. I thought I finessed the situation nicely by declaring, “The next time you come, we’ll burn the house down. It’ll be just like Auschwitz.”
Somehow I wound up driving Frau Landmann to a corporate function on the Cape, several hours away. She wanted to be best buds, in spite of a 20-year age difference, and shared with me all the family dysfunctions—like the shoplifting daughter and a dropout biker son—along with her favorite recipes for banana nut-muffins. I was close to screaming by the time we arrived.
Mr. Landi and I decided we needed couples friends other than the Landmanns, friends like we had in New York. We missed having Jewish friends, and though I’m sure there are many of the Hebrew faith in the Boston area, they seemed not much in evidence. I asked Mr. Landi’s dear friend Freddy if there were any Jews in Boston. “There are two,” he quipped. “They own everything.”
Nonetheless we learned of a golf club in the area that was exclusively (or predominantly) Jewish and thought that might be a way to find community. Given my husband’s recent enthusiasm for the sport—he took it up to play on Sundays with his buds from work—I hoped I might find a way around my aversion (golf? aren’t they all Republicans?), so I could learn the game and join in the fun. Mr. Landi made inquiries. It turned out the “dues” entailed a $50,000 donation and women could play only on Fridays.
Okay. So we then pivoted in the opposite direction and started to attend Harvard’s Memorial Church in Cambridge, where the preacher and theologian Peter Gomes was the main attraction. He once from the pulpit described himself as “a fat little black man,” but in truth he was a mesmerizing speaker (in 1979, Time magazine had named him one of “seven stars of the pulpit”). The problem was, I am not and never really have been a churchgoer, and I am not even sure I am a Christian, so this seemed a rather phony ploy to insinuate ourselves into the culture.
Of course, there was rampant tension in the marriage because of the move and maybe, as well, some dark subterranean currents that never got properly excavated in therapy. We had never talked through what the flight from Brooklyn Heights would mean for the both of us, and most especially for me. Mr. Landi had the automatic community of his corporate job. I had virtually no one and no sense of purpose. There were fierce arguments, accusations. My mother moved often for my father’s career, he pointed out, why couldn’t I? (Well, for one thing, we had no kids, which can help ease a transition like ours.) When I broke down in tears in my brand-new Camry, he was unsympathetic: “Oh, look at the little baby cry, oh too bad.” And another time: “There are women who would kill to have your life!”
After one particularly heated row, I took off my wedding ring in the kitchen and slipped it into a bowl of fruit. When the fruit started to rot, I slid the whole mess into the garbage. By the time I remembered where I’d put the ring, the trash had been collected for that week.
Since the ring was a simple gold band, I replaced it easily with one from the jewelry store in downtown Weston. He never knew or noticed.
It felt like an omen.
Lemon Basil Gnocchi with Zucchini
Gnocchi (don’t ask me the correct pronunciation—you’ll have to look it up and practice clicking the “g” and “n” together) are amazingly versatile little dumplings of Italian origin. Most are put together from potato, wheat flour, and eggs, and of course you can make your own but they are readily available vacuum packed, by the pound, in most food markets. You can toss them in any kind of tomato sauce, mix them with vegetables, fry ‘em up on the stove, even use them in sheet-pan recipes. This recipe is unblushingly simple and good year-round as a one-dish meal, but after making it now for the second time, I think I will add some sun-dried tomatoes and lemon zest and let you know how that works out. If you’re not vegetarian, you can add a few tablespoons of diced and sauteed pancetta, and I’m imagining that could be divine in this recipe, which is adapted from gimmesomeoven.com and serves three generously.
INGREDIENTS
SCALE1x2x3x
· 1 (1-pound) package of uncooked gnocchi
· 4 tablespoons butter, divided
· 2 medium zucchini, diced
· 4 cloves garlic, minced
· juice of 1 medium lemon
· 2/3 cup freshly-grated Parmesan cheese, plus extra for topping
· 2/3 cup roughly-chopped fresh basil leaves, plus extra for topping
· fine sea salt and freshly-cracked black pepper
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Prep the water. Bring a large stockpot of salted water to a boil for the gnocchi.
2. Sauté the veggies. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the zucchini and sauté for 4-6 minutes, stirring occasionally, until nearly cooked through and tender. At this point, go ahead and add the gnocchi to the boiling water. Then meanwhile, add the garlic to the zucchini and sauté for 2 minutes, stirring the mixture frequently, until fragrant. Remove sauté pan from heat but set aside a half-cup of pasta water.
3. Mix together. Once the gnocchi float to the top of the surface of the boiling water, use a strainer to transfer them to the sauté pan with the zucchini mixture. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter, lemon juice, Parmesan, basil, plus a few twists of black pepper and toss until evenly combined. If the mixture seems a touch dry, add in 1/4 cup (or more) of the starchy gnocchi water.
4. Season. Taste and season with salt and pepper as needed.
5. Serve. Serve immediately, garnished with extra Parmesan, fresh basil and black pepper.
This is quickly becoming one of the most interesting Substacks I'm subscribed to. There's always been something unique about the juxtaposition of the personal with the practical when it comes to food blogs, but your stories are especially intimate, harrowing, and poignant. I'm not sure if I'll ever regularly get into these recipes, but I'm for sure strapped in for the stories.
P.S.: I'm glad this is written in the past tense. I hope you never again settle for someone who speaks to you as unkindly as your partner did in this memory.
For some bizarre reason, I never realized your Boston Burb was WESTON. The same place Fred's parents lived. No wonder you were miserable....but the recipe is very, very comforting.