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Pickled

A few years ago my mother asked me to help pickle her uterus. As she had imperiously informed the hospital, she had already left an appendix in Manhattan, a placenta in Boston, another in Pittsfield, and the thought of dropping one more body part in a Vermont lab was Òsimply not an option.Ó After all, she pointed out when she called to enlist my help, it had been my home once.

"Don't you hold any affection for it?" she asked, reminding me that I had indeed enjoyed nine months there - much to her discomfort.

"Not really, no," I responded. She was genuinely surprised.

While another might have leapt at the chance to drive six hours for what amounted to glorified canning, I found the idea bizarre and, quite frankly, nauseating. I began racking my brain for a previous engagement of equal magnitude. Nothing came to me.

"What do you want to do with it, once pickled?" I asked, buying time.

"Plant it."

"Plant it - like in a garden?" I was incredulous, imagining taking the yearly summer tour of the parsley, sweet peas, uterus, and zucchini.

Her thought had originally been to keep it in the freezer until the ground thawed and she could bury it, but the man at the hospital lab told her that one should not contaminate the freezer with formaldehyde. Still, she was resolved to wait until spring and bury it safely among the perennials.

"The question is how to preserve something if you can't freeze it."

"You could smoke it." I suggested, chuckling at the image of the two of us bumbling around in a faux colonial smokehouse, coughing, waving our arms, surrounded by hanging meat.

"I will not smoke a precious piece of my body as if it were a McKenzie ham." She didn't find this at all amusing.

The surgery was in late February and I took a long weekend to drive up. I had hoped that she might be too groggy afterwards to go ahead with the plan, but I was out of luck.

"Can we swing around to the lab on our way out?" she asked as I packed her into the passenger's seat of her car. The lab technician trailed me to the car with the small cooler. She settled it on her lap and winked at him. I remembered why I had moved out of town.

We put off the pickling until the next day, refreshing the ice packs around the rosy package before we tucked in for the night. But the next morning, we set off again, this time for the liquor store.

"Nothing too extravagant, but nothing tacky either," she explained. I begged her not to ask the counter person for advice.

"Can't we just keep this in the family?" I pleaded.

"Of course we can." She smiled at me and patted my knee, so proud that I understood the significance of this thing we were doing together. And for a moment, I actually did.

"How about Wild Turkey?" I suggested with newborn enthusiasm.

"Nope. A nice, clean gin." I was wrong. This was nuts.

As promised, my mother kept her mouth shut in the liquor store and we were soon standing at the kitchen counter with a cooler, a large glass jar, and a quart of gin. At this point, we both realized that we hadn't considered the actual pickling process. As in all true culinary emergencies, there was only one source to trust: my grandmother's no-nonsense Joy of Cooking, copyright 1942. It is a seasoned book, spotted with butter stains, chocolate fingerprints, and full of flour. I love how the baking recipes have maple syrup and molasses alternatives for World War II sugar rationing. We took the book from the shelf and poured through the descriptions of pickling.

"ÔFor best results,'" my mother read, "Ôit is imperative that vegetables and fruit are in prime condition and were harvested no longer than 24 hours in advance.' We just made it," she said, relieved.

The Joy of Cooking suggested all sorts of added ingredients, a variety of vinegar options, and salt solutions, but all of this was meant to ensure crispness and clarity, both of which were irrelevant to our task. After some debate about the importance of a scientific process, we slid the object into a jar and sloshed on the booze. My mother secured the lid, screwed on the golden ring, and handed it to me for a final tightening. I gave it my best squeeze and set it down on the counter. We both bent down to get a good look. As I peered into the side of the jar, I saw my mother's face magnified. She smiled at me through the glass, her uterus between us, floating serenely in a Safire sea.

Phoebe Damrosch-Williams is a member of the Dispatch editorial collective and editor of Coltura. This is first piece in her new Fact & Fiction column.

(c) Copyright 2002 Phoebe Damrosch-Williams