The Cabbage Incident of 1989
which is about so many things apart from cabbage, including bad housekeeping, shared spaces, iconic posters, chemical changes in organic substances, and how everything is connected to everything else
Thanks to all of you who took me up on last week’s invitation to share your experiences with contested household spaces. There is enormous validation in reading about a phone in a laundry basket, a closet that looks like Carrie Bradshaw had a nightmare, books arranged by mood and cover design, a near-miss involving unlabeled jars, and a motto I shall henceforth adopt as my own: “The fridge is a dimensional space” (to be directed at those who don’t like to move things to look for other things). And, not to get all sappy, but my husband, who reads everything I write on Substack but has never commented on any of my posts, was the first to comment. I think it was my reference to his clicky four-color ballpoint pen that did it. Here’s what he wrote:
“Hahaha. I still have that pen. In a plastic storage drawer labeled "pens." Which is above the drawer labeled "label maker" which—no kidding— has the label maker in it. You know, just in case I'm not home and for some ridiculous reason you might want to use a label maker.”
And I thought: that, right there, is why I married this guy. He’s funny and smart and self-aware and ORGANIZED because Jesus Christ, someone in our family has to be. Is that not true love, to want someone to know where the label maker is, even if you know they will probably never use it? And then I thought some more and started wondering whether our marriage could have survived the Cabbage Incident of 1989.
We were not yet living together in 1989 because my now-husband-then-boyfriend was at Cornell and I was at UCLA and we were conducting a long-distance relationship via letters and occasional phone calls on Saturday nights, when the long distance rates were lower, and wow, typing this sentence made me feel approximately 800 years old. And because we were 3000 miles apart, I ended up with a crush on a guy named Marc Grossman and a gallon-sized Tupperware container full of sweet and sour cabbage.
Okay, I’ll admit it: I should never have taken the cabbage from Marc Grossman.
In my defense, Marc had curly reddish-brown hair and black framed glasses and a poster of Chekhov on his door and the cabbage was a perfect marriage of tart and sweet, and it tasted a little bit like the sauce my grandmother made for golubt’si, labor-intensive cabbage-wrapped packets of meat and rice, and I was a little homesick.
I had been living on my own for over two years, but in fall of 1988 I felt the absence of home keenly. Not necessarily the three-bedroom ranch house I grew up in in Sunnyvale, but a place that felt, I dunno, cozy. Remember hygge? I wanted that. (Fun language fact: the equivalent of hygge in Russian is uyut, which means roughly the same thing and which comes from the proto-Slavic jǫtъ, the word for “roof.”)
That year, my roommate Shana and I lived in a cramped studio apartment in Westwood Village, diagonally across Landfair Avenue from the Bayit, a Jewish co-op where Marc Grossman lived with about two dozen Jewish students of varying degrees of religiosity. (Bayit means “house” in Hebrew, because of course it does.) This particular house—beige, sprawling, ramshackle—contained a motley assortment of bedrooms, an industrial-sized kitchen, and an atmosphere of good-natured disorder. The residents took turns cooking Shabbat dinner every Friday, and anyone was welcome to join. Shana and I took this as a standing invitation. We did not particularly care for our studio, whose haphazard decor epitomized what we were—two young adults utterly incapable of dealing reasonably with the transactions of daily life. Originally, we wanted an apartment next door at El Cielito, a beautiful 1940s brick building with a green front door and apartments featuring wood floors and charming built-in bookshelves. But there were no available apartments at El Cielito, and we settled for living in a cramped studio in the the nondescript, ‘60s-era apartment building next door. Our studio was on the second floor, above an underground parking garage one of our friends described as “something out of a German expressionist film.” Our studio wasn’t much better. (Among other things, it was so small that it couldn’t hold two twin beds, and we had to resort to a single twin bed and a fold-up futon chair, on which we took turns sleeping).
Not shown in the above photo is this poster in our living room/bedroom/study, which was pretty much obligatory for every undergraduate dorm room or apartment between 1985 and 1995:
Neither Shana nor I were much for cooking. We subsisted mainly on hot dogs, Kellogg’s pop tarts, General Foods International Coffee (French vanilla cappuccino, which came in a red, white, and blue striped box), and frozen croissants we baked in our barely-functional oven. These we ate at the one nice piece of furniture in the apartment—a wooden kitchen table wedged between the window and the matchbox-sized kitchen, which overlooked an interior courtyard and some rooftops, and if you squinted hard enough you could delude yourself into thinking that you were drinking café au lait and eating a croissant while gazing at the rooftops and courtyards of Paris.
But breakfast was one thing and dinner was another, and we spent most Friday nights at the Bayit, where it was noisy and fun and the food was usually good (and even if it wasn’t, someone else cooked it, which was already a win). That particular day in October, it was Marc Grossman’s turn to cook. It turned out that among his many merits, he was surprisingly adept in the kitchen: he made a brisket and, to go with it, a giant bowl of sweet and sour cabbage with raisins, allspice, and apples. The cabbage was unctuous but bracing, yielding but firm, and I consumed plateful after plateful. Eating the cabbage felt almost like being at home. So when Marc chivalrously piled the leftovers into an industrial-size Tupperware container (apparently, no one else was nearly as enchanted by the cabbage as I was) and gave it to me to take back to our apartment, there was nothing to do but say yes and thank you.
I meant to eat the cabbage, I really did. But a couple of days went by, and then a week, and then several months, and the Tupperware was shuffled into the back of our refrigerator and forgotten. That year—1988 to 1989—was an eventful one, full of intellectual, social, and political ferment. (Ferment: remember that word.) I took a Russian poetry class with Valdimir Markov, a courtly, eloquent, sharp-tongued Russian emigre who taught poetry with the lyricism of a violinist and the precision of a diamond-cutter, and spent a great deal of time obsessively muttering lines from Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Blok, and Mandelstam under my breath. I met Al Gore when I covered the Bush-Dukakis presidential debate at UCLA for the Daily Bruin. I voted in a presidential election for the first time. The Ayatollah Khomeini died. Shana and I were both promoted to senior staff writers. I got tired of pining after Marc Grossman and wrote long, elaborate letters to the Cornell boyfriend. Shana got a boyfriend who had a soulful, chiseled face and gorgeous corkscrew curls down to the middle of his back. He played guitar and sang beautifully and when he stayed overnight, I slept across the street at the Bayit, on my friend Naomi’s floor. One morning in June I came back to find Shana sitting on the floor in disbelief with the LA Times spread all around her. While I had been sleeping, a man stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square and two Russian trains caught fire, killing almost 500 people, and it felt like the whole world changed in the blink of an eye. In May, the Cornell boyfriend came to visit because his school year ended earlier than mine and we slept huddled together in the single bed, squished but happy, while Shana slept on Naomi’s floor across the street. And then it was June and time for us to move out.
Packing up revealed a number of housekeeping deficits on our part. We had murdered neglected all our plants and as a result had to dispose of an entire plant cemetery on our windowsill. A fern on top of our bookshelf had become so desiccated that when Shana stood on a chair to take it down, it spat dried leaves all over her, like the saddest confetti in the world. We had let dust accumulate on surfaces. There was a library book under the bed that was due months earlier, but at least now I wouldn’t have to pay a book replacement fee. And then we turned to the refrigerator.
Our refrigerator typically held some milk, hot dogs, perhaps a bag of English muffins, some butter, raspberry jam. How a gallon-sized Tupperware container full of sweet and sour cabbage eluded us for eight months was unclear, but elude us it did, until from the depths of the refrigerator Shana said, “Ewwww” with what sounded like a question mark at the end, followed by an actual question. The question was, “What the fuck is THAT?”
I came over to look. It was the Tupperware Mark Grossman had given me in October of the previous year, but the cabbage inside no longer looked like cabbage; in fact, it took us several minutes to identify it for what it was, or rather what it had been. When I brought it home in the soft dusk of autumn, it was an intense, deep, jewel-like fuchsia. Now, in the bright light of spring, It no longer looked like a jewel. It looked like a living thing, restless, seething, possibly breathing. It had gone from fuchsia to an angry, mottled purplish-black, and there was definitely some kind of respiratory action going on, because during its lonely sojourn in the back of the fridge, it had expanded. A lot. The Tupperware lid was still sealed, but now it was bowed upwards, like a volcano about to blow.
According to Wikipedia, my go-to source for simple explanations of concepts I don’t understand, fermentation is a metabolic process in which enzymes produce chemical changes in organic substances. In food production, it may more broadly refer to any process in which the activity of microorganisms brings about a desirable change to a foodstuff or beverage.
Let’s assume in this context that “desirable change” means cabbage into kimchi. Milk into yogurt. Sourdough starter into bread. What was in the Tupperware may have been desirable once, but no longer. It wanted out, and quite possibly, it wanted revenge for eight months of neglect, and Shana and I had to get it out of our apartment before it blew because no way would we ever get our security deposit back if that lid came off.
We didn’t say anything. We exchanged glances and came to a silent understanding. I grabbed a kitchen towel, Shana grabbed a potholder, we picked up the Tupperware with the utmost care and walked down the hall to the garbage chute. Then we slowly, carefully opened the chute door and slowly, carefully inched the Tupperware inside and let it go.
There was no noise, no explosion, no cloud of noxious stench. It was like the cabbage had never been. Like an echoing void rose up and swallowed it whole.
Except it still exists, because now, there’s a story. First law of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Stories are weird like that: you don’t know what wants to be written until you start writing. I thought I was going to write a funny story about forgetting a Tupperware full of sweet and sour cabbage in the fridge for eight months, but writing about that led me to write about the refrigerator as a contested space and about being married to a person whose brain works very differently from mine. That’s what stories do: leave them in the dark for a bit and something starts to stir. Something turns into something else. Something grows, starts to tentacle out. Someone says, “This fridge is out of control.” Someone says, “Try scanning.” The universe tends toward entropy, but the one with the clicky four-color ballpoint pen and the label maker wants to make order out of chaos. So does the one with the leaking fountain pen who doesn’t know where anything is but loves stringing words together. It’s contradictory and counterintuitive, but then again, so is love.
"Stories are weird like that: you don’t know what wants to be written until you start writing." Needed to hear this today. I once left a hard boiled egg in a small, lunch sized ice chest for weeks. Sadly, I had no idea this happened until I finally opened the ice chest to use it again. That is a day, similar to the cabbage incident of 1989, that I will never forget.