TREYF (16 page)

“You look gorgeous,” my father says, as I crawl into his car when he picks me up on The Champs-Élysées Promenade; my mother has already left to celebrate Thanksgiving with Ben's friends in a loft downtown.

“Very Hepburn,” he adds, looking over at me.

At dinner, I clasp my hands tightly at the table, which is gleaming with my aunt's Greek Key silver. We pass her our plates; Uncle Lee, his tie tucked into his shirt, carves the turkey with the precision of a surgeon. My cousins' conversations weave back and forth and over and around each other like a loom; in a moment of silence, Aunt Sylvia turns to me.

“We are so glad that you are here,” she says. “Tell me; how are your boyfriends?”

I get home that night and my mother is sitting in her robe on the living room love seat with the dog, reading
Cosmopolitan
.

“How was Thanksgiving?” I ask, putting my bag down.

“You look like an old woman—like Dame May Whitty, walking on the moors,” she answers. “Come give me a kiss.” She holds her arms up; an invitation.

•   •   •

O
ur weekends are ruled by food and eating: there are greasy spoons in Hell's Kitchen and German biergartens in Queens and the Brasserie in midtown Manhattan, where we sit at the immense horseshoe-shaped counter and the Gruyère melts and drips down the sides of the onion soup crocks and hardens like cement. We go downtown dressed in wool flannels and cashmere, and my father parks his new car—a silver GMC lowrider sports car with a black racing stripe down the hood—on Barrow Street, and we walk north, towards Fourth Street, and past the Cubbyhole, where short-haired women are outside in a throng, waiting to get in; they look at us and I glance away quickly, across the street, at my feet, at anything but them. We walk over to Bleecker Street together, my arm snaked through his; he positions me on the inside, away from the curb, because, he says, the man should always be closest to the street in case a passing car splashes puddle water up and onto the curb. We walk to the Five Oaks, where every other couple in the room is comprised of two men in snug polo shirts and low-slung, tight jeans, their hair shorn close and their beards shaved down, and the energy
of the room is a throbbing knot of hormones and flirting and snark. Manhattan's trendiest new dish is on every table: salmon and vegetables encased in a pinch-sealed envelope of foil that is baked and slit open at the table, where it releases a cloud of steam and herbs and sea. At Randazzo's Clam Bar in Sheepshead Bay, we eat massive trays of shrimp and lobster fra diavolo with platters of spaghetti in white clam sauce, seeded yellow semolina loaves, and carafes of cheap Chianti. They bring one small water glass for my father; he asks for a second one for me, and we sip the wine together until the din in the cavernous space softens and clouds like I've got my head under a pillow and my ears begin to ring.

It's at Randazzo's one Friday night that I get up to use the ladies' room; a wave of chilly queasiness passes through my chest and I stand and the floor tilts under my feet like an amusement park ride; I make it to the bathroom, holding the backs of the dining room's chairs and pulling myself forward, hand over hand, like a Marine on an obstacle course, until I push open the ladies' room door, pull at the monogrammed collar of my white turtleneck, and pass out slowly, slithering down to the tile floor.

“You all right?” I hear in a hard Brooklyn accent, and I am propped up against the bathroom wall by a gum-smacking girl in a satin baseball jacket and high-tops, who hauls me up by my armpits and splashes water on my face. I've spiked a 105-degree fever exactly seven hours after eating a sour tuna sandwich at the greasy spoon across the street from my father's Manhattan office; it's crept up on me slowly, like a pickpocket, and then, defenses down, attacked. That weekend, while my mother and Ben escape the city for his country club in Armonk, I lie shaking on my late
Grandpa Henry's horsehair mattress in Coney Island while my father sleeps on the sofa in the living room. The pain is relentless; I feel as though I'm being repeatedly skewered by half a dozen dull bread knives, and it makes me want to die. For seventy-two hours, I hallucinate in vivid and gorgeous detail; my cousin Maya the ballerina, dead before I was born, the family myth—she had been so beautiful and so kind, everyone said—lifts the hem of her white ballet skirt and steps out, first one foot and then the other, of the gilt-edged frame that hangs on the narrow wall between the two bedroom closets where she has been living on poster board. She floats around my grandfather's bed in a crinkling cloud of voile and lace before gathering up her skirts and climbing back inside the frame; she turns and waves at me over her shoulder, her black-lined Cleopatra eyes blinking slowly. I hold my hand up to wave, and her long dark hair, stuffed into a ballerina's chignon, becomes a soft aureole of black filament swirling around what is now an older, unsmiling face staring back at me, and I smell Jean Naté and turkey gravy and it's Aunt Sylvia. I snap back to consciousness, and Brooklyn, and my father is sitting by my bedside, staying there all weekend with a cool dishrag on my head, like a handkerchief on a lampshade. Every time I wake up, I'm wearing different pajamas; I've soaked through them all—first my own, and then my grandmother's from the 1940s, and then my father's starched, button-down Brooks Brothers shirts. I've been washed down with rubbing alcohol and changed repeatedly, like a baby; I'm grateful that he's there, and sickened that he's seen my teenage body, and I pass out again into a haze of blackness. Each time I open my eyes, we gape and stare at each other through
the murk of obligation and regret; the fever has muddled my brain, like I'm in twilight sleep.

“I'm sorry,” he says, the morning my fever begins to break.

“Don't,” I say. I tell him I'm exhausted, that everything is foggy, that I can't think straight, that I need to sleep.

“But I want you to know,” he says. His face is red and beginning to twist.

“I can't absolve you,” I say.

“Do you love me?” he says.

“Daddy, I'm here, aren't I?”

I will never know if what we say is real or imagined.

•   •   •

W
hen the weather turns warm, we become regular weekend guests at Sugar Maples; my father handles the advertising for the family who owns the place, which includes white-and-green clapboard residential buildings, the lobby, the bar, tennis courts, shuffleboard, basketball, an archery range, softball fields, and hiking trials. The hotel's cavernous, freestanding dining room is flanked on both sides by two tiny churches, which restrict alcohol from being served on the property anywhere but in the bar. There is no wine with dinner, no martinis on the patio behind the main building, no cold beers during the annual employee–guest softball game.

At sixteen, I'm too old to attend camp and too young to be a counselor, and my mother is spending every weekend at Ben's country club. My father has called the hotel owner and gotten me a job in the snack bar, until school starts in September and I have
to return home. For the next two months, I am paid minimum wage, room and board included, and given one day off per week. I sleep on an old, lumpy striped mattress covered in starched sheets that stink of bleach and feel like sandpaper, in a single room upstairs from the lobby. I eat in the employee dining room—the EDR—three times a day, family-style. On my days off, I tag along with the older employees who have cars—olive green Plymouth Dusters and rusting-paneled Country Squire wagons into which we illegally pile nine—with glove compartments packed with rolling papers and roach clips, and sticky half-empty pints of Southern Comfort and blackberry brandy. Sometimes we go to Woodstock and sometimes to Lenox; sometimes, when the weather is hot, we go to the Esopus Creek in nearby Phoenicia, where we tube languidly down the river for hours, stripping off our wet cut-off shorts and T-shirts and bake our naked, glandular selves dry on the massive flat rocks that dot the bank.

I don't know these people, but the body armor I have worn like a shell dissolves around them like sugar in water. Safety, when she arrives, feels loving and kind; I don't recognize her, even as she wraps herself around me like a swaddling blanket.

All summer, I will never think of home, except for Gaga, who I call every few days from an office rotary phone. The village operator patches me through to Forest Hills, free of charge, like I'm phoning from Mayberry. If I listen closely, I can hear the Long Island Rail Road rumble behind Gaga's voice, which I miss so much that I actually gasp.

D
uring the school year, she makes potato latkes and diaphanous matzo meal pancakes the size of saucers. She makes salty matzo brei egg scrambles with caramelized onion and a shower of black pepper. There are kugels sweet and savory, roast chickens kneaded with vegetable oil and paprika, their metal kosher certification tags dangling from their ankle cartilage like charms from a bracelet. There is stuffed breast of veal sewn up with a carpet needle she bought special from a flooring store on Queens Boulevard, and in the heat, chef salads into which she slices neat triangles of cold cuts: long sheets of Swiss cheese differentiated from American only by virtue of color and hole; bologna; Hebrew National salami; Oscar Mayer boiled ham. There are television snacks of saltines and spray cheese; grilled cheese and bacon at McCrory's on Sixty-Third Drive served to me by a strawberry blonde shiksa wearing a peach-toned, triple-weave
polyester apron who Gaga introduces to me as
my lady friend
. There are frozen fish sticks cooked in a smoking toaster oven that always catches fire; doughy French bread pepperoni pizzas; Weaver fried chicken drumsticks; Swanson's Hungry-Man dinners; blueberry blintzes topped with dollops of sour cream; cold leftover brisket stuffed into soft onion pockets; chopped chicken livers on Russian black bread so dense and dark that it looks like a starless midnight sky.

What shall I make for your return?
she writes to me in her letters, when I'm at sleepaway camp and, then, working at the hotel. The question feels formal, asked in the old-fashioned style of a mother writing to her son off fighting at Gettysburg or the Somme.
What would you like me to have waiting for you?
she says, and I believe at that moment my universe is comprised of just the two of us: Gaga, whose daughter's attention has turned towards a new life as a single woman in late-1970s Manhattan, and me, whose world is stitched together by her grandmother—the foul-tempered, unsmiling woman who once loved another woman. After the divorce, Gaga and I spend our days together quietly at the kitchen table while my mother is out with Ben, and my father is living in Brooklyn with his mother, who after sixty years is still trying to feed him the borscht that he has hated since he was a baby. He rails and fights with her as though nothing has changed for them; nothing has.

Gaga and I are heretics, watchers, quick to temper, broken-hearted. Our lives begin and end in the kitchen, connected to each other by love and the fraying cords of domestic madness
and disappointment: I am my mother's daughter. My mother is Gaga's daughter. Together, we form a triangulation of anger and disappointment that dissipates only when Gaga and I are alone together. She is my safety net and my world, even with her temper that leaves our apartment door slammed, our drinking glasses broken, my sneakers—when I choose to spend Saturday nights with my father rather than with her after the divorce—once spat upon in a torrent of fury that we both choose, somehow, to forget.

What shall I make for your return?
she asks, and I live for this question as much for the food as for the love, because the food is the love. I dream of her goulash—a mosaic of sinewy kosher chuck roast that she cubes by holding large pieces of the meat in her left hand and slicing it with a cheap flexible serrated steak knife held in her right like she's sectioning an apple. More than once she nicks herself, dropping tiny beads of scarlet blood along with the cubes into her lime green plastic mixing bowl. There is a long massage with ancient paprika and the addition of slivered onions and smashed garlic cloves, half a can of Del Monte tomato sauce, and then the dump into a squat, avocado-colored Teflon pot into which she slices unpeeled nuggets of floury potato to thicken the contents into the consistency of slow, meaty sludge.

What shall I make for your return?
she asks me in a letter, and I write back and say,
Goulash
, even in the heat of the late summer
,
and she writes back and says,
All right, my darling, I'll make it for you.

“She never called
me
‘darling,'” my mother snarls in the car on the way home from meeting the camp bus with my father. She
folds down the makeup mirror and glares at me sitting in the backseat while I read Gaga's letters, which I carry in my knapsack, aloud. I never read them out loud again.

Gaga doesn't come with my parents to pick me up from the camp bus. A year later, after the divorce, she won't meet my father's car downstairs as it pulls into The Champs-Élysées Promenade after the long drive home from Sugar Maples. Instead, I find her upstairs at our white Chambers stove, stirring her pot in silence, droplets of sweat dripping down her lined forehead. She folds and turns and mixes and blends and after an unfathomable, shocking hug when I burst through the door—she isn't a hugger—I sit down at the breakfast counter in our narrow galley kitchen with my mother's mostly forgotten, half-empty boxes of Ayds diet candies in front of me, and Gaga reaches over my shoulder and puts down a small melamine bowl and a spoon and I eat in silence with her standing over my shoulder, clacking her false teeth together to keep them from slipping, and my heart bursts open.

There is goulash on toast; goulash on spaetzle; goulash on rice; goulash on challah. There is leftover goulash—goulash that I eat alone in the early morning hours before my mother returns from an evening out with Ben, goulash at midnight, goulash at four in the morning when I wake up and can't sleep. The pot, its contents slowly receding like the ocean, takes up the entire bottom shelf in our fridge, but I never think to decant it into a smaller container. When the silver slashes of the dinged Teflon begin to peek through, I ration the stew, pulling the shards and shreds of meat into strings, adding meager tablespoons of hard New York City
tap water to the leftovers in order to lengthen the sauce, and her love. When the pot is nearly empty, its sides and bottom lacquered with the remnants of meat juice and tomato and dried white potato starch, I heat it up to melt them into a final puddle the size of the half dollars I collect, and I use a small piece of stale challah to sponge down the sides and the corners of the pot, like its content was pure gold.

What shall I make for your return?
Gaga asks in her letters. Goulash—the food her Hungarian immigrant mother made her—ties us together, grandmother to granddaughter, outlier to outlier.

Make me your heart
, I think, and she does.

•   •   •

S
he was born with a mean mouth,” my mother says about Gaga.

“What's that?” I ask when I'm a young teenager.

“I don't know,” she says. “But just look at her.”

Instead of a downturn of sad resignation, Gaga's mouth is pulled taut as a wire, rarely smiling or moving. I have a cousin with a mouth curled into a perpetual snarl like a mountain lion. Mine is crooked and unsure, like my father's and his father's. But Gaga's is a tight red line, a boundary so straight that I expect it to creak like an old floorboard when she opens it to speak or to fight with anyone who dares cross her: the grocery store delivery boy, who she accuses of shortchanging her; the sixth-grade teacher who bullies and torments me in front of a classroom of laughing
schoolmates; my mother, when she stays overnight at Ben's and skulks back into our apartment just before sunrise.

Gaga came into the world in 1901 on the precipice of a new century, almost a year to the day after Queen Victoria's death: she inherits her mother's love of music and her father's ferocious disposition. A massive, barrel-chested six-foot-four Budapest-born Hungarian hussar turned kosher butcher who wrings the scrawny necks of kosher chickens in the feather-covered back room of his Williamsburg store, he sets six-year-old Gaga on a ladder over an immense cauldron of boiling water and instructs her to submerge the dead birds by their feet, to loosen their feathers. I imagine her holding the creatures, the hot water splattering up onto the dress that her mother, Esther, has sewn for her; she accidentally drops one whole chicken into the water—it slips out of her sweaty baby hands—and her father chases her around the store, taking off a blood-splattered boot and throwing it at his oldest child until she runs out the door and down Broadway, tears of frustration caught in her throat. Every afternoon, she tries to fix her mistake, and to please him, to make things right; she spends her days after school singing to herself while sitting outside the store on an upturned wooden crate, plucking feathers from piles of birds, ankle-deep in viscera and plumage, directly across the street from what will become, a century later, Marlow & Daughters, the greatest pork emporium in New York.

Gaga is the oldest of six—five girls and a boy, Herman, who will die during the 1918 flu epidemic—and their mother, Esther, a tiny smallpox-scarred homemaker with a sweet soprano voice who turned her brownstone into a boardinghouse after her
husband died at forty-two. The only way she can keep the family together and keep the roof over her children's heads is to house and feed perfect strangers for five dollars a week. Day and night, while World War I rages on the other side of the Atlantic, Esther stands in her kitchen cooking for her family and the German and Austrian and Irish and Italian and Polish boarders who sleep and bathe and eat side by side with her Jewish children, coddling and loving them, and teaching them the languages of their homelands just so that they can hear them spoken by innocent voices: by the time Gaga marries Grandpa Philip in 1934, she is fluent in German and speaks Italian as if she herself came directly off the boat from Palermo.

There is a dusty, dog-eared photograph of Esther that I am shown over and over again, and this is how I imagine her whenever I imagine her: her thinning, graying hair pulled back in a loose bun, smudged round Emma Goldman glasses perched on the end of her nose, black bump-toe shoes, and an apron covering a thin cotton dress laden with petunias. Every day, before the boarders come home, she takes an afternoon break and ushers Gaga and her sisters into the parlor and teaches them how to sing
And the Band Played On
in harmony around the massive upright Kranich & Bach piano that stands in the middle of the room.

“She was always working,” Gaga told me when I was older, “always working. Always in the kitchen; always feeding people, whoever came by.” When one overnight visitor, an opera singer who was performing that night in Manhattan, gave an impromptu recital in the parlor for the other boarders, the man's manager, Gatti-Cazza, found Esther sitting on a stool in the kitchen, taking
a break from her day's work, a damp dishcloth in her hands, her head resting against the doorjamb and listening to the overnight guest sing Puccini.

“Take your apron off, Mrs. Gross, and please come into the parlor—” Gatti-Cazza said, holding his hand out. She took it and followed him into the long, cavernous room, and quietly sat out of view while Enrico Caruso sang
Vecchia Zimarra
. Gaga said that her mother hummed it sweetly to herself for the rest of her life, even when the asthma was killing her, when she could barely breathe and they had to bring an oxygen tank into the apartment she shared with my mother, Gaga, and Grandpa Philip, thirty years later.

•   •   •

A
religion; it was like her religion,” Gaga would say while she cooked for me, telling me this story of her mother, Esther, who died in 1948, and who made it her life's work to feed and provide nourishment and sustenance to perfect strangers, even as the only worlds they knew, thousands of miles away, were imploding.

“Maybe because,” Gaga says. She speaks through lips as tight as a cord, putting a bowl of goulash down in front of me one day after school. Chronically soaked with perspiration, even in the dead of winter, Gaga wipes her eyes with a greasy, flowered terrycloth dish towel and goes back into the kitchen.

“But why?” I ask her. “Why would she want to feed people she didn't even know?”

I have been taught over the years, by Aunt Sylvia, by my
mother, that cooking for other people is labor, that it's nothing to be proud of or ever to aspire to; the act of providing sustenance is something to be embarrassed by, the downstairs to our upstairs. The need—the desire—for sustenance and nurturing is even worse: it's shameful.

After my family has fallen apart, after my father has left and moved back to Brooklyn and my mother is out every night, the only thing I want or need is Gaga, just the two of us, alone together, sometimes listening to music, sometimes not. She tells me the story of her mother, Esther, and the boardinghouse, and the time that Caruso came to stay and sang Puccini, and she feeds my heart and soul, plate after plate, bowl after bowl. When she is in it, the kitchen is my safe room, the place where I am most secure, protected, sustained.

“Do you know that you were named for her?” she repeats
,
and I say, “Yes, I do.”