81
" Last night I had a dream that I was about halfway up a sheer cliff, endlessly high. Up ahead of me was, it seemed, everyone I’d ever known—the guys at the shop, my family, Gwen, Eric, D—and they were pulling ahead, climbing fast, leaving me behind. I tried to call out but found I had no voice, that my words slurred and died in my mouth, that I could not be heard. I awoke with a terrified lurch, unable to scream. I have this dream all the time. "
― Julie Powell , Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
83
" So this happens, only very occasionally. Someone who’s read my book and has somehow managed to recognize me. Generally it’s pretty thrilling. But the problem is that that first book is about, among other things, the sweet certainty of my love for my sainted husband and the particular perfection of our union. It wasn’t a lie, what I wrote. But things are not so simple anymore. It may be that they never were, that I just ignored the complications. In any case, I have either way made a mess of a relationship that people I don’t even know look to as a paragon of the genre, and being spotted making out with some strange man in front of a Mario Batali restaurant strikes me as a dread occurrence. My mind races as the woman chats about my book, how she loved it and gave it to her best friend, and asks what am I doing now? "
― Julie Powell , Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
84
" Kesuma translates, the women ponder my answer. Another woman asks, “But if you don’t have age groups, how do you know how to show and receive proper respect?”
“Um… respect? I don’t know. I guess maybe respect doesn’t mean as much to us. Or it isn’t the same somehow. I respect someone for what he’s accomplished or who he is as a person, not because of how old he is.”
The women look horrified. “But respect… respect is what makes us people. It’s what holds together families. Respect is the most important thing!”
“For me, respect is nice, but I’d rather have, well—love, I guess.”
For some minutes we try to bridge this terrible gulf between us; they are too polite to confess they think me a dangerously insolent heathen, and I am too polite to say I think they’re trapped in some benighted patriarchy. But then I have a sort of revelation—more of an instinct than a reasoned explanation.
“You say respect holds people together. I say love. I think—I don’t know how to explain this. I think when I love someone, really love someone… not, um…” I turn to Kesuma. “Not, you know, sexual love, or a crush or something?” He translates, and the women giggle again. “But when I really love someone it’s because I respect him. Or, my respect for him comes out of my love. I think maybe they’re the same, really.”
I don’t know if this actually means something or not. But it seems to satisfy the women. There are smiling nods all around. "
― Julie Powell , Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
85
" Eventually I say my good-nights and return to my tent. I should stay up, it’s not late and I’m not even terribly tired. I just suddenly want to be alone. So I lie down in my tent, staring up through the near pitch-black at the vague dim rippling of the nylon. The women have begun to sing, separately—I can hear that they are farther away, perhaps as far as the school tree. They are overlapping with the men, perhaps competing with them, or just complementing them. It is ravishingly beautiful, fiercely joyful and yet somehow evocative of yearning, and it goes on and on for hours into the night. I think of my phone, put away, its silence almost a part of the music. Lying there, sleepless, listening, I feel maybe the most peaceful I’ve felt in years, in forever. "
― Julie Powell , Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
86
" When Hans asks for more volunteers, half a dozen people step eagerly forward, but I am not one of them. I tell myself it’s because I should let the tuition-paying students, those who are here legitimately, get the experience, but the truth is that somewhere deep inside I don’t want to be a party to this slaughter, that I feel somehow less culpable as an observer than as a participant. Nonsense, of course. "
― Julie Powell , Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
95
" Over a period of two weeks in late December 2002, at the exhortation of Julia Child, I went on a murderous rampage. I committed gruesome, atrocious acts, and for my intended victims, no murky corner of Queens or Chinatown was safe from my diabolical reach. If news of the carnage was not widely remarked upon by the local press, it was only because my victims were not Catholic schoolgirls or Filipino nurses, but crustaceans. This distinction means that I am not a murderer in the legal sense. But I have blood on my hands, even if it is the clear blood of lobsters. "
― Julie Powell , Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
