Eat Two Pints, and Call Me in the Morning

About a year ago, my oldest sister was having a hard time. We don’t always get along; I think the trouble started when she left for college. That was—oh, give or take—eighteen years ago. Still, I love her enormously and fiercely. In a way, how crazy we drive each other is not in conflict with how much we love each other; it’s actually indicative of how much we love each other.

Nevertheless, JR and I have the unfortunate habit of hurting each other when we’re mostly trying to help. As a result, when I understood from our mother that her life was getting jostled around in a most distressing manner, I found myself a little stuck. On the one hand, I wanted to call her and tell her how much I loved her, and how sorry I was that things had taken a turn towards sucking. On the other, I also knew that we give and receive comfort in very, very different ways, and the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally set off a small nuclear disaster on top of everything else.

The solution came to me in a remarkable flash of insight.

Say it in butter.

My signature cookie was once known as the Witch’s Hat, before I started tinkering with it. Now it is commonly referred to as the Peanut Butter Orgasm. (With all due modesty, I think the name change indicates a certain level of success in my tinkering.) I tend to make these monstrosities for birthdays, breakups, and the occasional well-timed seduction. They're my go-to, but in this case, I wanted to make something a little less common, a little more historical. I settled on our grandmother’s Coconut Oatmeal cookies, which start with two sticks of butter and only improve from there. I shipped them off in a converted Kleenex box, held together with duct tape, with a short note telling my sister how much I loved her, how sorry I was that things were hard, and how these cookies were the best way I knew how to communicate both of those things.

A week or so later, she emailed me to thank me. She told me that when her daughter asked for one of the “special cookies” as a treat in her lunch box, my sister had to physically brace herself for the blast of narcotic coconut smell as she opened the ziplock, because if she didn’t, she would fall upon them with abandon and have to explain to her daughter why there were none left.

Which was, more or less, exactly what I had intended.

This particular mechanism came full circle about two weeks ago, when I effectively raised the red flag, via text, to my closest friends in Boston:

Woman down. Send reinforcements.

I had broken up with my boyfriend.

Their response was immediate, and along the lines of, “We’re on our way five minutes ago.”

They circled the wagons, and they brought supplies.

Stine, whose exceptional timing and intuition brought her to my door about two minutes after I had finished needing an hour alone, folded herself up next to me on the couch. Abbie, when I went down to let her into my apartment building, started pulling out pints of Ben and Jerry’s from her purse before I had even opened the atrium door. Back in my apartment, Stine found the spoons in short order.

A little while later, after I had singlehandedly demolished the Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, one of them asked me what I wanted for dinner. I was still thinking somewhat disjointedly, and said absently, “I have two chicken breasts thawing… I should cook them before they go bad…” After all, I may be injured from heartbreak, but wasting food is downright insulting.

Abbie turned on my computer, searched briefly, and proceeded directly to the kitchen: a woman on a mission. From my kitchen, the occasional hollers would issue forth as I nursed my second (or third, but who's counting?) Manhattan.

“Are you particularly attached to this pepper?”

“Do you have… oh here… wait—why do you have two canisters of seasoned salt?”

“I’m so glad you buy your cream of mushroom soup in four packs—do you mind if it’s expired?”

As a matter of fact, I didn’t mind at all.

What emerged from my kitchen a short while later was comfort in a casserole dish: a cheese-encrusted, chicken, pasta, and cream of mushroom miracle of love. We ate it while watching Aladdin, and when eventually (and with some misgivings) they left for the evening, they made sure I had enough hugs and Sun Chips to get me through until morning.

Never will it cease to amaze me how the combination of excellent friends and cream of mushroom soup can truly soothe the soul.

It is possible, when we whip up casseroles and ship off batches of cookies, that we are, at a very instinctive level, trying to stultify the emotions with excessive caloric intake. In The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love, which is one of my favorite books of all time, there is chapter dedicated to this very notion, entitled: “What to Eat when Tragedy Strikes.” My friends and I did not originate the concept; we just honor it and perform it as needed.

There are plenty of times when I eat my emotions. My emotions last night manifested themselves in the impulsive purchase of a filet mignon—I find that I mourn better with red meat in my system. I would be the first to admit that my relationship with food is a little bit fraught, and I am working towards a place where I can combat distress without defaulting to a system of adding more steak or (more economically) adding more Goldfish crackers. However, when I shipped my sister cookies and when my friends brought forth ice cream and casserole, there was a bit more going on than the simple math of “if you consume more calories than you have emotions you might just feel better.”

The cookies I made my sister were our grandmother’s recipe. Our grandmother was, even for two people as different as her granddaughters, the ultimate source of safety and uncomplicated affection for both of us. I was sending her love the way Grandma used to express it, because I knew that kind of comfort would never get lost in translation.

Abbie made me casserole because she knew that I consider casserole (especially with cream of [anything] soup in it) to be the best incarnation of home any Corningware could ever contain. Stine made sure I had plenty of Sun Chips because those were the staple junk food treat of my childhood.

Don’t get me wrong: the food was great, and my emotions were sufficiently blunted. I’m smart enough to know, though, that the most comforting thing that happened that weekend was not the procurement of grieving supplies. It was the circling of the wagons, the rallying to the wounded party, and the fact that I really do have the most wonderful friends in the world.