Free A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

I wrote it down so I don't forget.
    After lunch Rich always takes his old place by the sink and begins to wash the dishes. No part of him has forgotten the slow circling of the sponge on the face of the plate, or the careful rinsing of glasses or cleaning between the tines of a fork. When Sally and the baby leave to go home, Rich and I hold hands and wave good-bye from the porch. Later he will put on his reading glasses and take up the paper. The dogs will deposit themselves near our feet. The afternoon will slide into evening, and before it gets dark I will take him back to the place where he lives, but not yet. For now, he will look at the paper and I will look at him, and let what's over and done with disappear into the here and now.

IV

Filling What's Empty
    An old refrigerator came with the house. It contained a half bottle of ketchup, a squeeze container of ballpark mustard, and an open jar of pickle relish. I appreciate how hard it is to throw such things away, and harder still to pack them up and move them with you, but other people's condiments are depressing. On top of that, unidentified odors leaked into the freezer; if you pulled out a vegetable drawer a shelf collapsed; and the outside was made of some wrinkled Naugahyde-like material you can't clean. (I don't know who invented this stuff, but it was surely not the hand that holds the sponge.) Anyway, I just never warmed up to this appliance, and I blamed it for the fact that except for Thanksgiving I never bought food. So two years later, armed with statistics from
Consumer Reports,
I marched off to Sears and three days after that, a brand-new, spanking clean appliance arrived in my kitchen.

    This new baby gleams. The stainless steel exterior cost extra and it came with a bottle of special cleaner and instructions in three languages. The vegetable drawers have choices for degrees of crispness. The door can hold two half-gallon containers of milk side by side, the freezer is spacious and smells only of cold. There is even a separate shelf for eggs. The first week I bought yogurt and cottage cheese and apples and chicken and lettuce and cream. I had milk and orange juice and seltzer, and for my visiting daughter and her friends, beer. I even put water in the ice cube trays. I invited friends for supper and made my mother's famous potatoes—Gruyère cheese, heavy cream, red-hot pepper flakes, salt and pepper, nutmeg. And oh yes, potatoes. I made hot fudge sauce and stocked up on four pints of vanilla ice cream. And then a week went by and another and now the icebox is empty again. You won't find the makings of a ham and cheese sandwich, or even peanut butter and jelly. There's precious little in the way of greenery although a head of iceberg lettuce has stayed unnaturally crisp for several weeks in the vegetable drawer. I try to make up grocery lists but never get very far. I do always have coffee and dog food
(I love to buy dog food) and usually there's a pound of butter in the freezer. But I can't blame my poor shopping habits on the refrigerator anymore, this new one is begging to be filled.
    Maybe it's because I'm a WASP. This reminds me of the cookbook I started to write years ago. It was to be a WASP cookbook and I was going to call it
The Goy of Cooking.
In a preface I never finished I noted that WASPs are not bad cooks, and we have lots of great recipes (think
popovers,
think
standing rib roast,
think
fudge).
Our problem lies in the fact that we never buy food. I abandoned the project, and never got to the bottom of this failing. (A friend offered me Marianne Moore's recipe for custard. I thanked her and said I had a recipe for custard already. "Oh but this is very WASPy," she went on. "It's custard
for one.
") On the other hand, when my kids were small my refrigerator was far from empty. I remember a lot of yogurt, cream cheese, jelly, peanut butter, American cheese slices, cheddar cheese, Roquefort, leftover apple pie (if there were leftovers),