Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (17 page)

• • •

When I was thirty-seven, my gynecologist told me, “If you want to have a baby, it’s now or never.”

This was not the kind of thing I wanted to hear when my legs were in stirrups and there was a plastic speculum lodged in what I’d hoped would one day be part of a baby-construction site. “Uh … my boyfriend doesn’t want to have kids,” I admitted.

“Well, if
you
do, you should find a new boyfriend fast.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, shifting my bare butt on the crinkly paper covering the exam table when she removed the speculum. “You’re telling me to break up with my boyfriend, find a new one ASAP, and get pregnant, all within the space of a year—that’s your professional advice?”

She shrugged and pulled off her rubber gloves with a snap of finality. “All I’m saying is, you’re running out of time.”

I ended up getting a new gynecologist before I got a new boyfriend, and by the time I met Nathan, when I was forty-one and he was forty-three, we’d both given up on the idea of having children.

But this new, committed love made us hopeful. One day, I asked him, “What if we tried to have a baby?”

He thought about it for a moment and said, “Then I guess we should discuss names.”

“Okay, what should we call the baby—if we have one?”

“Tex.”

“What if it’s a girl?”

“I meant Tex if it’s a girl,” Nathan said.

From then on, we referred to our future baby as Tex. Even though I was a statistical long shot, we were officially Trying. And why not? As my mother said, “If you could find a smart, sexy, straight, available man—in New York, and you over
forty
, no less—anything is possible.”

• • •

Two years of trying the good old-fashioned way resulted in a few near misses in the form of periods that came late and heavy. I decided to seek help from an acupuncturist. Twice a day I drank a mixture of Chinese herbs designed to keep my childbearing hormones active. It tasted like someone had swept up the forest floor and made a brew of it, but I distracted myself as I gulped it down by thinking of middle names that would go with Tex. Twice a week I played human pincushion at the acupuncturist’s office. At least twice a month someone would encourage me with a story
about a woman over forty years old they knew, or had heard of, who’d gotten pregnant without IVF. (Nathan and I had discussed the in vitro option, but our hearts weren’t in it.) I added a specialist to the team. Two times we did what we called the “March of the Penguins”: Nathan “delivered” his contribution to our effort into a sterile plastic cup, which I would then shove into my bra to keep warm as I raced to be artificially inseminated at my fertility doctor’s office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—not far from where Mom brought me up by herself, and the same neighborhood where Matilde had lain bedridden after thirteen pregnancies.

And every month, I got my period.

• • •

Suzan’s Execution (in every sense of the word) of Nana’s Lemon Meringue Pie

5 eggs, separated

1½ cups sugar

1 tbsp. grated lemon rind

¼ cup lemon juice (not tart enough; do about ⅓ cup)

4 tbsp. cornstarch

1½ cups boiling water (?? Seems like a lot …)

1 tbsp. butter

10 tbsp. sugar

Small pinch salt

1 nine inch baked pie shell (Can I use a store-bought one?)

Put yolks into bowl and add the 1½ cups sugar, lemon rind, juice, extra juice, and cornstarch. Mix well. Add a little boiling water, but don’t combine mixture with remaining water even though it’s in Nana’s instructions because it just seems like too much. Pause to vacuum up shards of glass from breaking lid of double boiler. Cook and stir, losing patience when mixture refuses to thicken. Transfer mixture from double boiler to regular metal pot—okay, NOW it’s thickening! Add butter and salt because mixture still tastes too sweet. Remember that you have a head cold and taste buds are off. Argh. Cool mixture. Pour into proudly home-baked pie shell (hooray for me!). Using a fork, beat whites stiff but not dry. Wonder why whites won’t stiffen, dry, or even maintain a decent level of froth, and switch to a whisk. Beat them more. Beat them senseless. Become frustrated and put whites in blender. Tell husband that you know very well his mother used an eggbeater, thank you for the information, and so would you if you had one. Dump
liquid meringue down the sink and only then recall a friend saying something about adding a pinch of cream of tartar to egg whites. Ask husband if he’ll settle for a lemon tart. Admire his diplomacy when he assures you that the pie is fine the way it is
.

• • •

How did she do it? How did Nana get those egg whites to form perfect peaks, which she’d then let toast to golden brown perfection in that ancient hearth in Saratoga? How had she found the courage to risk her life to have a baby? Maybe she did it because she saw the day when she and her four-year-old daughter would go outside to those overgrown berry bushes on the farm in Saratoga and pick tiny wild strawberries to put on top of the meringue when the pie had cooled. Maybe she knew there would come a time when her daughter’s daughter would sit in a kitchen and hear how sweet the strawberries tasted on that pie.

• • •

“What are we doing wrong?” Nathan asked, his voice catching.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all. We’re fine.” It was the truth; we were fine, I realized. We were fine before we started trying, and we would be again, when we went back to just being.

I said good-bye to my doctors. I gave up drinking forest tea. And now I stop trying to beat egg whites that, for whatever reason, aren’t meant to be meringues.

• • •

FEBRUARY 2009

HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

I take the lemon pie from the oven. Without the meringue topping, it’s fairly glowing from the egg yolks in the curd and the butter in the crust. I bring the tart close to my face; it’s warm. I sniff: tangy, sweet. It even makes tiny crackling noises as it continues to bake, a group of formerly separate ingredients humming together to form something new. I put it on the kitchen counter and wait for it to cool.

I know now that there were many things Nana wanted to do in her life—go to college, become a teacher like Miss Bumstead, be a writer, and at the very least stop having to worry about money. And
there are probably some other things I don’t know about because she made a practice of acceptance. If she was able to change her situation, she did. If she wasn’t, she did the best she could and didn’t waste time complaining.
How’re you doing, Tillie? Fabulous, never better
. This is yet another lesson I have learned from her that will serve me well, in this case especially.

I had always pictured the day when I would pass my family’s stories down to my child. I imagined telling Tex about Matilde mashing applesauce as she admired her new vases. And about Carrie, who quietly served a fried round steak and a boiled potato to her husband every night before he went to the bar. And about the wrenching irony of Riordan, lying in a hospital bed after a drunken fall with his estranged daughter Matilda by his side, saying to the nurse, “Look at my baby—did you ever see a daughter who looked that much like her old man?” And about Grandpa broiling the bluefish he’d just caught for us, or how Mom did my hair on my wedding day while my dad watched
Old Yeller
on TV and wept …

Now I have to accept that, for whatever reason, this isn’t meant to be.

There will always be a sadness in me over this, but it won’t cancel out the joy I feel over what I do have. The love between me and Nathan fills this house. We have people, family as well as friends who are as close as blood, with whom we build more love. And I’ve had the privilege of spending thousands of days following my heart’s desire and making a living from it.

My family may have reached the end of the line, but they will be with me always, through hard times and good. And they sit with me now in the kitchen.

Nathan and I share a slice of the tart that had hoped to be a pie, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

3 lbs. ground beef

Saltines or similar crackers

2 eggs

1 cup milk

Salt and pepper

2 large green peppers

2 medium-sized onions

Butter or olive oil for sautéing

About a quarter-pound of button mushrooms, sliced

1 large can diced tomatoes

1 large jar prepared spaghetti sauce

Put three pounds of ground meat in a large bowl
. “Your grandpa liked to use chopped chuck,” Mom says. “He was a big believer in the power of fat. I use chopped sirloin, which is leaner. But when we really didn’t have much money, we used chuck too.”
Make a bowl shape in the middle of the ground meat and add saltine crackers
.

“How many?” I ask.

“Um …” Mom looks at the amount she’s holding. “About a handful. A good handful.”

Crumble the crackers by hand and add to mixture. Beat the eggs and add them on top of the crackers, then pour in the cup of milk. Season with a few shakes of salt and pepper and smush everything together with your hands
.

Cut the peppers into one-inch chunks and chop the onions. Sauté peppers and onions in a small pan with a tablespoon of butter or olive oil until just tender, about five minutes. Add about a third of this to the meatloaf mixture and set the rest aside for the gravy
.

In a separate bowl, crush a generous handful or so of saltine crackers. Form two large or three small loaves out of meatloaf mixture and roll each in crushed crackers to coat. Melt about a teaspoon of butter or olive oil in a large, deep pan and brown meatloaves over medium heat for about fifteen minutes or so, then flip
with a long spatula to brown the other side, covering with lid both times
.

While loaves are browning on the second side, sauté sliced mushrooms in a teaspoon of butter or olive oil, about five minutes. In a medium-sized pot, combine a large can of diced tomatoes, a jar of prepared spaghetti sauce, the mushrooms, and the rest of the sautéed peppers and onions. Stir and let simmer for a few minutes, then pour over meatloaves. Cover pan, turn heat down to low, and let loaves cook through, about an hour. Serve with blanched green beans and white rice
.

MARCH 2009

WESTCHESTER, NEW YORK

“Nana wore
black
to her wedding?”

“That was her color back then,” Mom says, crushing the crackers with a fork. “She wore a black dress and a little hat with a black veil, and she and Grandpa were married in a Catholic church in the neighborhood.”

“I thought Nana was Lutheran …”

“Her family was,” Mom says. “And at some point, one of the cousins became Presbyterian, so Nana tried that. For a while, she was Lutheran and
Presbyterian—she liked to say she was ‘Loose-beterian.’ Then she met Grandpa, who was Catholic, so she went to his church. When we lived in Saratoga, we went to the local Holy Roller church led by the Reverend Curtis and his wife, Aunt Miney—that’s what everyone called her, Aunt Miney. Reverend Curtis would say, ‘Someone among us has been fornicating—does this sinner want to come forward?’ And all us kids would get wide-eyed. We didn’t know what fornicating was, but based on the look on the parents’ faces, it wasn’t good. Then, someone would come down the aisle, sobbing and saying, ‘Yes, yes, it was
me
!’ And Aunt Miney would say, ‘Okay, children, go outside for playtime.’ She and Curtis were much better orators than fund-raisers, and they got pretty thin in the winter. So Nana and Grandpa brought them bread and chicken and vegetables, and Reverend Curtis would say, ‘Thanks to Brother Charles and Sister Matilda for the kind donation of food.’ That started the rest of the congregation bringing them something every Sunday, so after that, Curtis and Miney were okay.

“Anyway, at some point, Nana decided that any house of worship—church, temple, whatever—worked when she wanted to say a prayer. Later, she said
prayers wherever she was, and she didn’t feel the need to identify herself as belonging to any one particular faith or another. She just believed.”

As I slice the mushrooms (“Not too thin,” warns Mom) I try to remember how we got on the subject of Nana’s daring choice of wedding dress or her open-armed spirituality. I can’t, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve learned that there’s a difference between showing up for dinner at my parents’ house and making dinner with my mother: as the ingredients go into the food, the stories come out of the making.

• • •

MARCH 2009

HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

I knew it was going to be a good day when I found half a banana waiting for me on the cutting board instead of sitting in the garbage.

Nathan watches the news every morning while he eats breakfast, but today we make an executive decision to limit our intake of negativity and hysteria, and we turn the TV off. What little we saw, though, was good: It’s going to be almost 65 degrees today.