Mercy Matters. Mathew N. Schmalz
her dreams. But she’s also understanding.
She accepts that I am not a handyman.
But I am a cook.
Veronica, Joy, and Caroline can tell you that. They hate to cook, but love to eat.
My specialty is Indian food. I’m comfortable with lentils, chickpeas, and lots of turmeric and garam masala. I can also do Italian—spinach lasagna is probably my best dish. I’m less handy with meat, but I can grill a steak and can manage a pork chop or tenderloin every now and then. Fish presents a special challenge—it’s a little delicate whether fresh or frozen—and I’m not a finesse cook.
But I am a cook.
I fix breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and get the groceries for good measure. I know I don’t repair things too well, and I make more messes than I clean up. But I’ve always thought that it’s a mercy in our home that things are divided up in a way that we each do what we can.
As I remember it, things went like this:
It was winter. A winter Daddy-Day, the day I stayed home to take care of Veronica and Joy who then were about six and four years old, respectively—so it was about eight or nine years ago as I write now. Work that week had been draining. I was pre-tenure at my college, so I really felt under scrutiny: my every interaction with students and colleagues had a potentially cosmic significance that could affect my job prospects, and hence the life of my family. Daddy-Day was a brief respite from that—and a different experience of being a “provider.” It also allowed Caroline to go to work at a local nature sanctuary.
On a normal day, everyone would wait for me to come home from work—I’d cook, and we’d have dinner. Things would be different if I was working after hours—attending a lecture, moderating a discussion, consulting with students about their papers in the library, on and on. On those days—which happened fairly frequently during those pre-tenure years—Caroline, Veronica, and Joy would have to fend for themselves.
In any case, it was Daddy-Day, and I was waiting for Caroline to come home so I could cook dinner. We’d then prepare our daughters for bed—read to them and watch them go to sleep. Afterward, I’d have some time to catch up on work.
I waited for Caroline. And I waited. It must have been at least an hour and a half. The kids were hungry. I was hungry. But more than that, my feelings were hurt. Dinner was something important, something that I could do beyond my job, part of my identity. I wanted to make it fresh; I didn’t want to serve anything cold.
Caroline finally arrived. She entered with a big, “Hello, my beauties!” and the girls ran to hug her.
I was in the kitchen—still waiting—and moved to get some salmon burgers from the freezer.
I was silent—I might have said “Hi” to Caroline, nothing more, but I probably didn’t even say that.
The salmon burgers were frozen together. It would be a meal that I could prepare quickly, but I needed to get the burgers apart. I jabbed a knife hard between two patties, then an expert flick of the wrist. But the knife slipped and caught my index finger. I glanced down: a bloody gash.
The cut looked deep.
“I have to go to the hospital,” I said to Caroline. I was matter-of-fact, but I was serious. I grabbed a wad of paper towels and wrapped them around my finger.
The towels quickly became soaked bright red.
The urgency hit me.
“We have to go now!” I said.
Caroline got the kids together. Veronica and Joy picked up some storybooks as we exited the living room, went out the door, and navigated the slippery walkway to the car. We drove down to Urgent Care, near the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Hospital.
As Caroline remembers it, things went like this:
It was summer. A summer Daddy-Day—the one day when I would take care of the kids. The rest of days were hers with the kids, from morning until bedtime.
She was returning from work and arrived a half-hour late.
Given all the times that I arrived late, and given that this was her only day free from child-care responsibilities, it was a half-hour she felt entitled to. In any case, she knew, I’d drop most of the child-care duties once she got home, so Daddy-Day wasn’t exactly a free day for Mommy.
She was hungry, looking forward to dinner. She hurried to the kitchen, excited to be home.
“You’re late!” I shouted as I stabbed whatever I was cutting, stabbing myself in the process.
Then I said, “I need to go to the hospital for this cut.”
As we were leaving the kitchen, she was so hungry from working for the day that she grabbed one leaf of a steamed artichoke and ate it.
She looked up to see me gazing at her with absolute disgust—as though she were putting her own petty need for sustenance before my own immediate need for medical attention.
So she put our toddler in the car seat and drove me to the Urgent Care Clinic.
When I first heard Caroline’s version of “the night of the salmon burgers” I was surprised—and concerned. I thought that it was a relatively straightforward observation that Caroline and I had a rather merciful arrangement when it came to household chores—we both were in our comfort zones.
But our memories were so different, and it was clear that neither of us was feeling very merciful toward the other. This memory—thinking about it, talking about it—brought tensions to the surface that we avoided confronting.
Memories have blind spots—that much is certain.
Search the Internet or—if you have a little more time—explore any scientific database and you’ll get reams of information about how people process information and record memories. Memories are flexible and fallible things: smells and sounds influence them as does diet—at least according to some studies. Maybe one reason why my memory and Caroline’s differ is because we didn’t have the opportunity to actually eat the salmon burgers—assuming I’m remembering the meal correctly—and get all those brain-building omega-3s.
But what’s probably more to the point is that the content of a memory depends on the context when we recall it. We color our memories with distinctive emotional hues—it’s not so much that we recollect memories as much as we paint them. Memories are landscapes and still lifes that portray our own sense of not necessarily how things were but how they must have been: certain elements stand out vividly while others are relegated to a shadowy background or an indeterminate space outside of the frame.
Marriages have blind spots, too.
In our busy lives, intimacy often becomes a set piece—we sit down and make time for discussions, for togetherness, for sharing. But sometimes the most intimate parts of ourselves—our desires, our fears, our needs and sensitivities—are revealed most strongly in the course of our mundane routines. Sharing in those daily activities can be the most profound experience, but it all too easily can become simply the experiencing of life side-by-side, mere coexistence. If you’re distracted, if you’re not in the moment, you often don’t notice the obvious, let alone the often-coded communications that lie just below the surface of everyday life.
In thinking about how Caroline and I told the “night of the salmon burgers” story over the years, it was clear that we weren’t just remembering things differently; we were also trying to give each other a message about the ways