Preserves

And so, our recipes shall be the same, as sacrosanct as any other grand rule or code from the oldest of religions. In my bloodline, it is elevated to the greatest heights of familial importance and tradition. Year after year, we gather just outside the old covered bridge in Wakefield to begin the process of preserving. Other families, not ours, call it canning.

I stopped for gas on the way and grabbed a few bottles of Gatorade. This holy engagement was a terrible choice of morning activity after a night of over-drinking; my head pounds despite the two ibuprofen I knocked back. I had tried to rid myself of my duties with the laziest of half-hearted text messages, only to be confronted by that unique brand of French Canadian guilt that only the women of my lineage could spread on so heavily, like butter.

Ding!

I made the mistake of not turning my phone off before walking to the designated area, a row of picnic tables attached at their sides. They appear to have been recently varnished, carelessly. Why bother, I think. There’s something therapeutic about picking at the table’s epidermis, year after year. Something healing about pretending I’m busy twisting lids, doing anything to avoid meeting the judging eyes of my family members.

Ding!

“Cam!” That will not be the last time my name rings out so jarringly, barked by the true Matriarch. Louise, my mother’s mother, the woman I have always been paired with throughout this grueling day-long endeavor. This game was rigged long before I even took my first steps.

Louise is different, from an older stock. A heavy-set woman with thick wrists, and just as thick hair that seemed like it had always freshly come out of curlers. Julia Child, if she could throw a punch—less pleasant, louder, more Quebecoise. The way she comfortably holds a knife brings me back to the time I watched her and her brother carve their way through a deer carcass; my parents’ idea of a teachable moment.

Ding!

“Camille, turn your phone off. This is family time,” Louise says sternly, pushing her right index finger forward across the table, then wagging it slowly from side to side disapprovingly for all to see. “Here we go,” I mutter under my breath, but really I find the chastising familiar, almost comforting.

I switch my phone to vibrate for Louise’s sake. I worry Abigail’s name will pop up on my screen. My heart drops into my stomach when I think of what I did.

This game was rigged long before I even took my first steps.

If I had been paired with my great-aunt Rose, Louise’s sister, this morning, things would have moved much smoother for me. She would have probably been able to smell the fumes from last night’s bourbon shots exhausting out my pores, and she’d be OK with it. It’s no secret to the family—Rose loves her drink. During my sixteenth birthday party, I found her leaning against the counter by the fridge. She filled my glass with sherry, her rosary half-tucked away in her pocket, its link of gold beads dangling freely. Part of me believes Rose wants to watch the world burn from her kitchen. Or maybe her first drink was a little too early as well, poured by her mother standing in the same spot. It could be because my great-uncle Maurice, the love of her life, died liberating the Dutch. I’ll never really know; Rose mostly just mumbles to herself. Seemingly unbothered by the outside world.

In a way, I think Louise rebelled against the mold Rose fell into. My mother once showed me a black-and-white picture of Louise at Pink Lake in an old-school, full-body swimsuit, back when you could still swim there. She had an hourglass figure, a strong build even then, and a long neck. I couldn’t see her eyes or make out her expression because of her sunglasses, oval-shaped and clearly à la mode. Lying by the lake, she possessed a renaissance beauty: elegant, unconcerned by all the movement and action around her. I tried to picture Ron, her then-new and controversially Anglo husband, steadying the camera, counting to three, clicking the switch, framing her so beautifully on the beach that day. Now, when I see her, it’s usually in her dirty white apron, slightly hunched over, racing around the kitchen shouting the names of family members, making sure all is in order.

Bzzz. My stomach does a somersault. Fuck, why’d I get so drunk. I ignore my phone, again.

“Camille! Viens ici. Bring the milling machine over to this table!”

The contraption is ancient.

“C’est mieux de même, sont pu faites pareilles,” Louise says. There is a cork board nailed to a big oak tree where our recipes are pinned. Tomato sauce is always first. There’s something satisfying about doing it by hand, separating the skin from the flesh. It used to make me gag, but now I’ve grown accustomed to the bumpy, uneven texture underneath the soft, tight skin.

Preserving is a meticulous process. Today, I’ve been assigned to the boiling station. We boil the jars to cleanse them of unwanted bacteria. We bring the contents to a high temperature so that when they cool, the desired vacuum is created. And then we seal them to guarantee their preservation. “Botulism,” Louise says, “should remain in the past. You cannot see, smell, or taste it. It can be slow, a silent killer, not knowing you’ve poisoned yourself until it’s too late.”

Bzzz. I shift my posture. Abi came to preserve with us a few years back, when we were in high school. We’d been out together the night before so I had a co-conspirator, to commiserate in our hangovers, which were never as bad back then. We had run out back to the forest for an hour to escape the heat and talk about our crushes. When we returned, Abi questioned Louise about every step of the process, keeping her too engaged to question our absence. I knew the answers by heart.

Each recipe has an assigned jar size. One litre for tomatoes, pickles; five hundred millilitres for beets, carrots, green beans; two hundred and fifty for jams, jellies, purees. When the jars have cooled, and each seal has been checked by Louise herself, the children are called in to haul them down to the cellar. The little jars of sweet apple jelly are Louise’s favorite. She gets first dibs on everything.

The process is tried and true; there is little room for deviation. Save one exception. Four years ago, we had to move the entire operation from Louise’s Chelsea home and country yard to my mother’s house in Wakefield. It had been decided Louise would now occupy the nanny suite. My mother didn’t truly understand why Louise put up such a long fight, which was naïve of her. “The choice to move her in was to include her more,” Mother stated, fingers steepled together.

When moving day arrived, Louise ran her hands across the wood paneling of her old home like a carpenter appreciating her beloved work—she must have been devastated but she kept it in, her tear ducts levees threatening to burst. I stood silently in the kitchen, watching her friend, Francine, go through the house with her, triaging glassware, memories, decades of life. And she was soft with Louise; light-hearted when needed, funny when appropriate. In return, Louise seemed different than she was with us. Less hard. Almost vulnerable.

I often think my mother should’ve excused herself from the departure ritual; she can be so technical and task-oriented. It wasn’t the wrapping of belongings or taping of boxes that Louise needed help with. It was assurance that her fondest memories weren’t bound by those four walls and that they could, like her, move into the nanny suite. My family whispered to each other as if we had all done the right thing, and maybe we had. We all agreed to never mention the move again in front of Louise.

About a year later, my mother received a call from the young couple who had moved into Louise’s house. Their seven-year-old found a large crate of what she said looked like homemade tomato sauce tucked neatly away in an upstairs crawl space. My mother didn’t go to retrieve them, instead told the young couple to do what they wished with the cans. It was nice that they had called; I didn’t think people picked up the phone for that kind of thing anymore.

Bzzz. Maybe someone saw me with Luke. I wasn’t aware of my surroundings last night.

I switch my phone to the other pocket and look up to see Louise and Ron adjusting the big carcass on the spit. The only part of this day I ever really enjoy is the pig prep, and the pig roast at the end. Louise orders the pig directly from the butcher. Last year, she complained throughout the entire roast because the pig was on the smaller size, weighing in at only thirty pounds. So this year, she asked the butcher for a bigger one, around fifty pounds, and what she got was a sixty-eight-pound pig. Louise was proud of her pig, bragging about how it needed its own fridge this year. “Y peut jamais y avoir trop d’cochon,” she grins. Francine makes a dirty joke, and Louise bursts into a deep belly laugh.

The pig had taken an hour to get on the spit. Its weight had to be evenly distributed to allow for a good cook-through. Low and slow for several hours.

I always help Louise with the rub. That part wasn’t annoying or laborious. There was something peaceful, grounding, about doing it with her, running our hands along something she was proud of. I could turn my brain off, forget about last night. All this, in a way, was her contribution to the world. The pig, the annual preserving, bringing the family together. We knew this wasn’t going to be a forever thing. Her hand crossed over mine at one point. I felt the rough edges of her wedding ring against my sauce-soaked and rub-covered hand. She squeezed and held on for a second before letting go. She knew it too: traditions die.

Once the pig is a deep red-brown, Louise’s community member invitees roll in. They mix well with the family, who have been working all day and want to break with a cold beer or nice chilled glass of white wine while the sun starts to lower.

I can see Ron admires his wife. “Louise is really something, isn’t she? A rebel, isn’t she?” Ron says in his valley twang, louder than he really needed. I found it funny, a mischaracterization of sorts. To me, she was more of a guardian of bygone ways. “You know she once boycotted mass at St. Francois d’Assise. For a whole year. She didn’t like the looks she got from some parishioners,” Ron continues, a big smile across his round face.

Bzzz! I couldn’t picture Luke ever saying anything sincere or nice about Abi… or about me. Sarcasm and jabs are the new flirting.

The night plays back in my head like a bad nightmare. Come to the Men’s bathroom. No emoji, no punctuation. When I walked in he locked the door, hiding us. He picked me up onto the sink. I had already had too much to drink and was forced to steady myself on the empty paper towel dispenser. It smelled horrible, but we still fooled around. My skirt offered easy access, our hands covered in each other’s fluids. I got a whiff of what smelled like old wet garbage. “I can’t,” I told him, but I stayed until we were spent. “Forget about Abi, we knew each other first, remember.”

I shake my head and focus my eyes back on the roast. Behind it, Ron is trotting to keep up with Louise’s socializing from group to group. I try to picture Ron’s initial courting. I wonder if they wrote each other letters, or if it was a matter-of-fact kind of thing because Louise was a practical woman and Ron was sensible and had already snagged a steady, reliable job.

I’m watching Louise to see if she is caught up in some remembrance too but her focus is elsewhere, cradling a finished jar with Francine, her hands over hers, whispering something inaudible. Francine laughs. I pull my phone out for the first time, ignoring the notifications and looking past them at my screensaver; Abi and I making stupid faces in animal-shaped towels.

Louise senses my gaze, and she shifts to lock eyes. I can see it all: her in her honesty and I think of the picture at Pink Lake. She is still so striking, sharp. I want to hold this moment forever. She smiles at me, the first one she gives me all day, and it can crush me under its weight. But I can’t help to think that she can see through me, into last night, into that bathroom, and into my guilt.

Leaving Wakefield, I muster the strength to finally click open the notifications. There is no message from Abi. Just from Luke. You off tonight? It’s a half-hour ride home. Enough time for me to think of how to tell Abi. Tonight, I’ll hang the recipes Louise rewrote for me on the little corkboard next to the microwave. Tomorrow, I will stack the jarred preserves in my makeshift pantry.

Abi used to add these little red bows around each jar lid. I would scoff, but truly I adored how much Abi cared, and made time for my tradition.