The Sunday Roast

The remains of the family's meal.

You always catch the aroma half way up your block. The conjoining of thyme and garlic with the long melting strip of suet on top drawing the flavors down through the meat. Without any scent of their own, the other houses you pass may just as well be invisible.

You trail into your house your own fragrance from your afternoon in the Wissahickon woods. Wet leaves and dirt, the metallic nature of the creek, the chill of a late autumn Sunday. It intrudes on the orderly living room, everything in its assigned places but you. Your dad is sometimes there reading the newspaper, other times he’s upstairs watching the folly of an Eagles football game on TV. Your brother, two years younger than you, bounces about with more energy than you ever envision mustarding. Your sister, four years older, stays in the attic you share, doing whatever things a teenage girl does besides homework. Your mom, behind her bedroom door, takes her Sunday nap.

Your trail through the Wissahickon.

The woods are the only place where you feel competent, where you are fearless, where all the awkwardness of being a wayward twelve-year-old is a skill not a fault. Every free moment you have is spent back the woods and, by now, your dad says proudly that you probably know it better than anyone else. Other people usually keep to the wide gravelled bridal path. They jog or bike through the serene beauty of the overarching trees, not seeing the creek’s small silvery rapids or exploring the ruins of old mills. They don’t know about the trail that runs across the steep hill on the opposite side of the creek. In parts, it narrows to no more than two feet across and sometimes less with only a slim outcropping of rock left from a landslide to hang on. Here are the Indian caves, the deep stone pool fed by cold ground water, and the huge tree trunk felled by a storm that now serves as a bridge over a shallow gulch. The only time you felt uneasy in the woods was when you spent a day with a friend swimming down the length of the creek, not noticing the man who followed abreast of you from the banks until a shoal brought you and your friend into the open. But even then, when he was able to reach you in a few leaps, you knew you could run toward the the deepening water under the nearby bridge where you would dive under and away.

The woods is the world you know how to navigate.

You close the front door behind you. Your dad in his big arm chair or on the small couch upstairs hears you come in. “Patty?”

“It’s me.”

Sunday, the one day when he stays home from work and happily accedes to his husbandly duty to take the children out of the house so that your mom may have her hard-earned Sunday rest. He corrales his kids into the car and drives them to the museums or the historic colonial landmarks in Center City, or to the Valley Forge battlefield, or to the airport where you watch the planes take off to somewhere else. When she is finally alone, your mom pours whiskey and a slick of orange juice into a glass full of ice cubes. She gathers the Sunday newspaper and takes them upstairs to her bedroom. She closes the door behind her and lies down on the bed for the rest of the afternoon.

Around four-thirty your mom comes down from her room to refresh her drink, ,season the roast, and put it in the oven. You have learned to judge time by the lowering sun and try to be home by five o’clock when you’ve been taught that the roast should begin to be basted. Lately, you have gotten it into your head, and for no reason other than it sounds good, that pouring red wine over the meat would make it even more flavorful than it already is. The problem is your mom doesn’t drink wine and there is only cooking sherry in the laundry room’s liquor cabinet. Your mom has already told you that buying a bottle of wine simply to baste meat is a waste of money so you make do with cooking sherry and give the meat a good dousing. The pan sizzles and sends steam infused with herbs: it surplants the last residue on your skin of your day back the woods.

There is an hour before dinner, an hour to complete the homework you’ve forgotten and try to care about more than listening to the albums your sister plays on her side of the attic. At some point near six o’clock your dad drops the newspaper or turns from the football game to shout up to the attic: your mom hasn’t opened the bedroom door and he figures everyone is getting hungry.

“Sue!” he yells.

You can just make out her curse as she tramps down to the kitchen.

It is time to make gravy. Your mom has given your sister unbendable directions. Draw down the fat until only a slick remains in the roasting pan. Add just enough flour to gather the fat into a paste. Be careful not to add too much flour or you’ll have to start over again and will probably lose the essence of the flavors. Begin adding water from the tea kettle while scraping up the bits of meat, fat, and herbs sticking to the bottom of the pan. Keep stirring to smooth out any lumps of flour. Add more water until you have enough gravy for dinner and weekday leftovers.

By now, your sister is proficient in gravy making. She is the oldest, the one who is charged with taking over when your mom cannot. She will always be the family’s best gravy maker.

Your mom finally appears. The roast rests on the serving plate under a crinkle of foil. The potatoes stay warm in the oven. The plush gravy simmers and thickens. Your mom may be groggy or have a headache from her nap, you can never distinguish between the two. You and your sister turn away busy with other aspects of the Sunday dinner while your mom pours the melting ice cubes from her drink into the sink. The woods in all its beauty and your sense of authority have receded.

The sky has lost its radiant light and shadows intrude upon the house. The living room lamps are turned on. The dining room table is set with linen and your mom’s wedding china. Everyone is hungry. Everyone is ready to eat.

Your dad takes his place at the head of the table, your brother beside him. You and your sister bring in china bowls filled with vegetables or maybe an iceberg lettuce salad. Your mom carries the platter covered with layered slices of roast beef and a heap of potatoes. You and your sister sit across from one another and the family waits for your mom to return from the kitchen and take her chair closest to its door in case anything else is needed for the meal. She lingers, putting everything to right in the kitchen again—wiping down the stove, putting away the herbs, freshening her drink.

“Come on,” your dad calls impatiently and she finally settles down, her drink on the far side of her plate away from your dad.

What a fine Sunday dinner it is, the family gladdened by the heady balm of thyme and garlic and roasting meat on an autumn night with the breath of winter already detected upon it. The troubles of the week ahead do not weigh down the sibling’s ribbings, your dad’s stories, your mom’s sharp, perceptive and sometimes funny observations about nearly everything. The table is cleared of the meat and still you all linger over a pot of tea and the night’s dessert—a cake or pie or a bowl of Danish pudding your mom made in the morning after Mass. It is years away from the last Sunday roast and your last walk in the woods.