Tomato Ghosts

At the end of each summer our kitchen became a shepherd for tomatoes at different stages. Two baskets, just picked, sat on the counter next to the sink.  Pulp and seeds sat pooling on the cutting board. Quartered ones had been moved in handfuls to the tall pots on the stove. Ripe ones laid in wait-still tethered by ripped strips of old sheets- out back in the garden. That little garden was very prolific with tomatoes, a testament to my mother’s generosity with compost.  But in my mind those fruitful plants ruined every single August.

I would wake up in the morning, listening. I would wish my mom was vacuuming and playing The Carpenters, Close to You, like she did in spring. But in August she wasn’t humming along to the hi fi. Instead she stayed at the sink cutting up tomatoes; sometimes my dad would help by grinding them through the food mill. It smelled like the dirty earth when I came down in the morning, pieces of tomatoes in different stages, my eyes settling on the worm holes that had been cut out and left in the sink along with any hope for an interesting summer day. I couldn’t tell her there was nothing to do and that I was so bored because she was so busy with all the tomatoes before they went rotten. Canning all those tomatoes became a yearly emergency.

Something terrible happened with those tomatoes one summer. I must have been six or seven. I was old enough to know about danger. But too young to really understand how the details of danger fit together. Facts were like puzzle pieces in my brain but sometimes the pieces didn’t fit. I would keep working on it, privately, trying to make it work. There was no internet to find explanations, only the Merck Manual.  My mom sometimes read it at night or in the middle of the day. I always noticed when she looked something up. She studied the pages as if she were studying for an important exam. Flipping the pages back and forth, concentrating.

She was getting more Mason Jars from the basement that late afternoon because the tomatoes had finally relented, releasing their juice, metamorphosing into smooth red sauce. They were almost ready to be canned. I stood there, alone, just tall enough to see into the pot. And then I stuck my finger in, to try just a taste. The sharpness hit my tongue, unexpected sourness that made me take a step back as my mom pushed open the basement door with her elbow, jars in both hands.

I was thinking how the taste did not remind me at all of the sauce on the homemade pizza my mom made in winter. She must have changed it somehow. I did not ask her about that because she always told me to stay back when she was boiling the tomatoes. She was putting the jars in the oven along with a thermometer that she balanced on the rack.  Why are you doing that, I asked, forgetting about the bad taste of tomatoes lingering on my tongue. She explained to me that she needed to sterilize the jars because tomatoes can grow germs if they don’t have a proper seal and that’s why they had to be boiled and canned just so. She used another word to describe the germs, a word that came into the conversation like an unwanted thief. It stole my thoughts for years.

Botulism, she said.

And that is the moment when I hurriedly assembled the puzzle of tomatoes and botulism, canning and heat, germs and my finger together in a rush. It all fit together in the worst possible way. I couldn’t tell my mom, I decided, in the smallest of seconds. She had worked on that batch all day. And now it was contaminated. Which jar would the botulism be in? Would everyone die? I pondered the situation over and over again, in the middle of spaghetti and on (what used to be) happy pizza nights all winter long. I watched for signs of illness after meals.  Every time my mom sent me down to the cold cellar to get another canned jar of sauce, I held it in my hand with dread.

Was this the one?

These thoughts went on for two years, at least, until I could be sure the entire batch had been eaten. Until my secret no longer mattered because we were all still alive. I felt some relief after that. At least with canned tomatoes.