The Sauce

1. Stare at the photo of your grandmother. Stare at it. Imagine her voice telling you that you will never make her sauce the way she did. Never. Hear her cackle. Remember the time you tried to rollerblade in her driveway and fell on your face. Remember the cackle. Steel yourself. You will make this sauce and it will be better than hers. Imagine her saying ‘If ghosts were real, I would come back and crack an egg on your head just for the hell of it.’ Tell yourself that you’re not really smelling her cigarette smoke. It’s all in your head.
2. Look up how to slice tomatoes. You know you can slice up tomatoes any way you want, but remember when you were a little girl, and your grandmother insisted that one of the secrets of the sauce was the way the tomatoes were sliced up? How many ways can there be? Youtube has thousands of videos. How is that possible? Hear the cackle. Tell yourself that your grandmother was just messing with you. She knew one day you’d try to replicate her sauce. She wasn’t worried about your mother trying it. Your mother was not a blood relative. She was the wife of a son that your grandmother called “Lumpy Head” even though your father’s head is not really all that lumpy if you don’t count the three or four small bumps on it. Your mother warned you against trying to cook the sauce. “That sauce is cursed,” she said, over the phone, your father wailing in the background because his water polo team traded away its best player and he just got the email about it, “Why don’t you just make something of your own?” You didn’t bother explaining to your mother that it’s not simply about making a good dish or a tasty meal. It’s about besting your grandmother. It’s about (posthumously) proving to her that she was not special, and as someone who was not special, she had no right to go around making everybody else feel that they were not special. “Mom,” you said, speaking loudly to overcome your father’s wailing, “She used to call you Shoulder Woman, remember? She said your shoulders were too long. Didn’t that bother you?” You noticed the silence on the other end of the line. “Is that what she called me,” your mother said, as you realize that you’ve never talked about this before, and your mother might be hearing this information for the first time, and then, “I’m sorry, dear, I have to go.” You pray she’s not going to a mirror to stare at her shoulders for an hour or two, but you know that’s probably what’s going on.
3. Heat the pot. It needs to be medium heat. Try not to engage the ghost grandmother you’ve conjured in your head. Fail when she says--

“The pot isn’t hot enough.”

“The knob is at the halfway mark.”

“I don’t care if the knob is singing ‘Runaround Sue,’ I’m telling you it’s not hot enough. You need to turn it up.”

“If I turn it up, the onions will burn. I need to sweat them.”

“You need to what?”

“Sweat them.”

“They don’t sweat! They’re onions not long distance runners.”

“It’s a cooking term.”

“Oooooooh, we got Anthony Bourdain over here telling me all about cooking terms.”

“Never mind. I’m going to turn up the heat.”

“Why don’t you turn off the stove and go roller blading. You have more potential as a roller derby girl than you do as a chef.”

Don’t listen to her. The pot is hot. The onions are ready. You bought them pre-diced from the store. You felt like you were cheating, but not really. Just because your grandmother diced the onions herself, that doesn’t mean it’s what made the sauce exceptional. What does it matter who dices the onions? People say cooking is about love, but that’s all fluff and candy. Cooking is technique. It’s precision. It’s doing the right thing at the right time the right way. Your grandmother locked all that into her muscle memory. She could do it instinctively the way she knew exactly who was going to win mahjong before the game even started and how she knew whenever one of her ex-husbands was having a medical episode. “Hey, are the onions sweating yet? Should we toss them on the treadmill?” Don’t pay attention to the cackle. Ignore the cackle.

1. Blend the tomatoes. It can’t be right. It isn’t right, but it doesn’t matter. The tomatoes just need to be pureed. You’re supposed to put them in the pot with the sweating onions and the garlic and the sauce slowly builds over time, but you just remembered that you have couples therapy with this guy you’ve been seeing for about two weeks. “Why the hell are you going to couples therapy after only two weeks?” This is none of her business. Do not--”Because relationships take work you don’t just throw people away when they upset you or when they belittle you or when they hook up with your boss and then tell you about it and then get upset when you get upset, because when did you ever say you wanted monogamy?” Hit the “Puree” blender on the button each time you feel yourself losing control. You are in control. You are in charge of this blender. The tomatoes look like sauce now. Runny, watery sauce. But sauce. “It looks like tomato soup.” What’s the difference between tomato soup and sauce? There is no difference. It’s the same thing. She’s trying to get in your head. She’s already in your head, and now she’s building a condo there. A little city. A metropolis of doubt and shame. Pour the runny, watery sauce into the pot. You’re almost there. The seasoning is the real secret. That’s what you know. That’s what you’ve always known. “You don’t know anything, little girl.” You are forty-three years old. You are not a little girl.
2. Keep an eye on the sauce. You’ve added the secret seasoning mix. Don’t write down what it is. You found it on a piece of scrap paper in your grandmother’s jewelry box. It was the missing piece. It was the reason nobody else could ever make her sauce. Until now. Now it’s your sauce. You will never tell anyone it’s hers. You’ll tell them you came up with it. When you have children, you’ll tell them it’s your sauce, and they’ll tell their children it was your sauce, and nobody will ever remember your grandmother, let alone believe her to be someone who could make a good sauce. “Are you having these kids before or after you enter a nursing home?” Laugh at her. Cackle at her cackle. She’s just nervous. She’s panicking, because she knows you’re about to crack the code. It’s almost ready. The moment has arrived.
3. Dip a wooden spoon into the sauce. Blow on it. Bring it to your lips. Take in that first puddle. That tender liquid. Be ready to revel in your success. Something is about to be yours. Something that was stolen and not earned. Something that should feel like a hollow victory, but doesn’t. Admit to yourself that stealing it successfully means more. That it says something about you. That you’re not a hard worker or clever or all that pretty, but you’re capable of cooking a sauce if you know exactly how much basil and oregano go in it. Taste. Go ahead. Taste.
4. ……………………………………………………
5. Don’t try and ignore the cackle. There’s no ignoring it. It’s too loud. It’s in your eardrums. It’s in your nostrils. It’s biting down on the back of your neck. “I left that scrap of paper there on purpose. I knew somebody would find it. Either you or that long-shouldered mother of yours. I knew one of you would try to make my sauce. I knew I might need some entertainment in the afterlife. I knew it. I knew it all. I knew everything. Can you drop some cigarettes off at the cemetery? Leave them with the guy at the front. No need to come to the grave.”
6. Ask yourself where you put your roller blades.