The Refrigerated Thought: On Time and Writing

Say I am sitting with my mother and grandmother at the square kitchen table patterned over by vinyl-cloth apples, having just eaten lunch. Our elbows crowd the breadbasket, in which remains one solid slice and one pockmarked. My pointer finger corrals the crumbs. My mother stares at her elbow, where a metal rod, much like bone, stretches the skin.

Say we are telling stories. My family—like or unlike yours?—is not one to speak openly with one another but if we were, perhaps my mother would tell the story about breaking her arm at a young age while swinging at a neighbor’s. My grandmother might add to it the terror she felt when she saw my mother’s arm, the rush to the hospital. It’s possible they start arguing now, about why my grandmother didn’t take my mother back to the hospital to have the metal splint removed.

But you and I, reader, are not at that kitchen table now. When I retell the story, even summarily, it has changed, because the medium has changed, and with it, our relationship to time and to each other. “Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to her agent. “Then I have to say it over again.” In a similar vein, in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion notes, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking […] what I want and what I fear.”Whether story or essay or something in between, the written text often begins with a single thought, a vague but persistent desire. Is it possible to trace the beginnings of that desire?

Here is a scene that did happen: For my thirtieth birthday, I wanted to pull off a culinary end-of-summer celebration. Lush salads, creamy soup, farmer’s market breads. It was a large party, so I thought I would add a pot of tomato beans for good measure. The recipe was easy enough, only four ingredients, and I could make it the night before. Once everything was in the Dutch oven, the ceramic lid clinked snug atop the pot, I let the beans simmer. Later, while cleaning the kitchen, I turned the burner off but left the pot on the stove to cool. I forgot about it and went to bed.

When I saw the little red pot on the stove the next morning—ten hours or so later—I rushed it to the fridge. It smelled fine to me, if a little sour. Was I imagining that part? All that had gone into the pot was olive oil, garlic, tomato paste, and cannellini beans. It didn’t seem right to serve it to my guests, but perhaps I could eat it still. The logic was wishful: I had tried my luck like this in the past, and nothing bad had happened. Besides, I thought, what a waste it would be to throw the beans out.

A thought is an organic thing. It is born, grows in time, in our bodies, within the history of our families and our societies. Once it becomes substantial enough to partially surface into consciousness, the writer may attempt to follow it with the hope of imprinting it—the three-dimensional chronology of its desire—onto the page. But the thought keeps moving, proves slippery, because it is diachronic. It intersects with other ideas. When and where it will stop, the writer does not know. She must be patient. “Time passing is not just time passing,” Hilary Leichter once said during a workshop. “It’s the infra-ordinary array of minutiae that accumulates on the edges of our prose.” In other words, it’s a connective fourth dimension that bridges life and art, reader and writer, the real and the imagined.

I finished the pot of beans over the course of a week (a contradiction of character) and nothing happened (a contradiction of food-safety advice). I have always been bad at finishing leftovers, even as I am good at consuming raw ingredients and take pleasure in emptying the fridge with impromptu recipes that use the last stalks of celery, that old apple, the two pickles remaining in the jar. When I was a child, my mother’s house was a place of abundance, especially in the kitchen, but I didn’t really notice this until I left for college. I might return home one weekend and rummage through the fridge or pantry to discover three goat cheese logs and expensive olives and sun-dried tomatoes (a dream for a student living off campus-market sandwiches) but also weevils hiding in an opened pasta box, shriveling carrots, a sealed jar of red bell peppers with a two-year-old expiration date. While my grocery trips as an adult are planned, needs considered and cataloged, hers have always been spontaneous, following a childlike logic of see-and-want.

My mother’s youth did not include endless aisles of produce and pantry goods. She left her parents’ home in a mountain village, where my grandmother still lives, to get a university education. Eventually she departed her former-communist country altogether, found fortune in American middle-class life. Maybe her overstocked kitchen is an assurance to her former self and a promise to her future self, twenty-four years in the making, that her good fortune is here to stay.

In 2021, my grandmother and I traveled to the Black Sea together, a vacation paid for by my mother, who knows how much sun- and mud-bathing support my grandmother’s well-being. Educated only to the fifth grade and orphaned by eighteen, my grandmother is a superstitious woman. For the four-hour journey she tucked boiled eggs and fruit into her purse, insisted on carrying a bag of old bread. What she didn’t eat—most of it—was stored in the hotel room’s minifridge. By the end of the week, the fridge would be full of her to-go boxes. This happened a year after I started writing “Spoiled”—a short story that appears in AGNI 101, about a grandmother who prepares for her emigrant family’s annual visit—but I began to stitch together the memory of this trip with the story’s initial idea in my mind, so that by the time I finished, I was certain I wrote the story specifically about her food-hoarding habits.

Though my grandmother’s house in the Romanian Carpathians had no paved road and no plumbing for a long while, I still think of it as a place of fundamental abundance, at least in alimentary terms. When I visit, always there are eggs from the chickens, and when I was younger, milk from the cow. Now as then, blackberry bushes line the road up the hill. Every year, her gardens yield buckets of tomatoes, a cellarful of potatoes, garlic, onions. Bunches of lettuce and parsley and dill. Orchards of plums and apples and walnuts. I can imagine the landscape, and I can imagine my mother and grandmother. But I sometimes have trouble seeing us all in one place.

While drafting this essay, I kept thinking about my general inability to finish leftovers, trying to contextualize the behavior in a way that made sense. All I can really say about it is the more I see something in the fridge, the mushier it becomes in my mind, the more questionable its origins. (Did I put it there Tuesday or Saturday? Is that congealed fat or mold?) Now when I read “Spoiled,” I can see that it’s as much about my own neuroticism—around wasted food, time passing—as it is about my grandmother’s. But what began as a single consciousness was transfigured by process, that fourth temporal dimension of prose, into something we call “character” and “story.” It could easily be my mother tucking the boiled eggs into her purse, preparing for her first transatlantic flight to an unknown place. It could be me storing my leftovers in the minifridge. I’m reminded of the closing line to Jenny Xie’s poem “Invisible Relations”: “Far off, you are being stitched into a storyline in the smooth lobe of another’s mind.” It’s through these storylines that we connect to each other.

At some point I know I will sit around my grandmother’s vinyl-clothed table again, where she will serve enough food for six though it’s just the two of us, and the extra sausage will end up in a Tupperware while the soggy fries get thrown to the dog. Hoping for the bigger picture, I will ask about the details. She might tell me about the pair of shoes she had to share with her brother to go to school. Or the way her three-year-old daughter, my mother, walked by herself to the bakery, proudly hauling two loaves home on her back. And what else will she say? When I come back here to tell you, perhaps I’ll find out.