TREYF (19 page)

When we returned to New York, I moved into her bedroom. We told no one. At Christmas, we decorated the tiny tree I had
always secretly lusted for like many Jewish children—I told my father it was Julie's when he came over for dinner and glared at it—with cheap folk art ornaments we bought by the handful at the Pearl River Market in SoHo: there were Santas made from wooden blocks, angels fashioned from cornstalks, snowflakes macraméed in glittery silver polyester.

We played house; I craved the peace and happiness I found in Gaga's kitchen, and I was certain that if I cooked, I would find it—I would find
her—
again. During Thanksgiving, we stuffed pumpkins with vegetables procured from the Union Square farmers' market and roasted them for our friends in New Hampshire; they exploded in the oven and dripped their innards all over our friends' newly stripped heart pine floor. We threw dinner parties and brunches and one Saturday night became chanting Buddhists at a crowded apartment gathering on Avenue C, where we were separated from each other the minute we arrived; a rail-thin man whose exuberance could only be attributed to huge amounts of cocaine thrust into my hand a sheet of paper containing the primary chant that, if I did it correctly, would give me anything I wanted.

“Really,” he said, emphatically. “Anything. You just have to do it loud. You could get anything. Even a new car.”

Four years later, it was over: anguished with Lutheran guilt that no amount of positive energy from her glimmering forest of crystals that covered our living room could stifle, Julie began to bring men home. I moved out to the couch, which backed up to her bedroom wall; for six months, I slept curled up in a fetal position between our two blond wood Conran end tables crowded
as a subway car with massive geodic chunks of purple amethyst and citrine quartz and a wooden bowl filled with the Herkimer diamonds that were guaranteed to clear the electromagnetic pollution in our living room; I meditated to Shakti Gawain's
Creative Visualization
tapes on my Walkman while Julie fucked her way through Manhattan on the other side of the wall. I closed my eyes and visualized what I wanted: I wanted us to be a happy family. I imagined having dinner around a long pine rectory table with our perfect little towheaded children, celebrating birthdays and holidays with massive standing ribs of beef and special, peanut-fed Virginia hams; I visualized vacations on Martha's Vineyard and lobster boils around burning campfires on the beach near Menemsha. I could taste the promise of sustenance and peace and happiness away from my history, away from my past, the way a junkie tastes smack, as if our life together was clipped from the Martha Stewart magazines that piled up in every corner of our apartment. Ours would be spent together in celebration, at the table, like the family I was certain we would be. And no matter what I saw on the great slide show of my brain, when I opened my eyes and took off my headphones, Julie was still on the other side of the wall, fucking every man who walked into her life.

•   •   •

B
oxes were crammed into my grandparents' living room from end to end.

A mountain of cookbooks in moving company cartons sat piled in front of the windows. Edna Lewis, Julia Child, Paula
Wolfert, Deborah Madison, Richard Olney, Jane Grigson, Marcella Hazan, Madeleine Kamman, Alice Waters, Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, Christopher Idone, Mollie Katzen, and the splattered pages of
Laurel's Kitchen
were jammed together like sardines, the result of my two years as a book department manager at Dean & DeLuca, where I spent twelve hours a day trying to help customers inevitably replicate some version of their past at the table.

“I want it to be just like it was when I was a kid,” they'd say, and I knew what that meant: I searched for Gaga in the kitchen. So together, we'd search the shelves to help them find just the thing that might enable them to re-create their favorite childhood Christmas dinner, had Daddy not gotten drunk and passed out face-first into the wassail before the roast was carved. Or the Passover seder where Grandma dumped a Waterford goblet of Manischewitz on the section of the Haggadah about the matriarchs and the patriarchs. One famous SoHo art dealer, who wore heavy black Wayfarers on top of her shoulder-length ginger perm, wanted to re-create her beatnik mother's lentil nut loaf, which she remembered eating while wearing Dr. Denton's and watching
The Donna Reed Show
.

“It was the only time,” she blithely whispered to me like I was her new best friend, “that Papi wasn't beating on me.” She pulled a copy of
The Vegetarian Epicure
off the shelf, tucked it into her shopping basket along with a twelve-dollar bag of ebony beluga lentils, said, “Ta-ta,” and was on her way.

The world careened around us; it imploded, fell apart, turned
angry and uncontrollable, and at the table, everything could be fixed and made whole the way it had been for me ten years earlier at a lackluster hotel in the middle of upstate New York, surrounded by people I barely knew; it was there that I discovered the inviolability of sharing food together—“the modern tribal fire,” Marion Cunningham once called it—even if there was no DNA involved.

The table could sometimes breed violence and it could be the backdrop to the proscribed and the forbidden and the perverse, the way it had been the night my mother blacked out her tooth at the Tung Shing House. But feeding people made them happy; it made me happy, and grounded me. I had not been able to get home to say goodbye to Gaga, but doing for others what she had done for me—providing me with sustenance and love—kept her alive. Food filled our hearts as well as our bellies, and it pacified our soul. There was Edna Lewis's boiled pork shoulder, which I made one Easter when Julie's family came east from Edina; Richard Olney's chicken gratin, which I packed up and carried to my boss's apartment, clear across the city, when his mother died suddenly and he was too bereft to think about cooking; Deborah Madison's baked polenta with fontina, which I made when Julie became a vegetarian and I, desperately in love with her, became one, too. There was Anna Thomas's thick, earthy chestnut soup, which I fed to twenty friends at a vegan Thanksgiving dinner in Woodstock around a farmhouse table long enough to serve the Osmond family. And there was Alice Waters's lobster mousse vinaigrette, which I presented to my mother and Ben at their
apartment in matte black champagne flutes, each one accompanied by a massive boiled prawn hooked over the side of the glass like an umbrella handle, while they just stared at me.

Cooking became my religion, the key to my sacred, the path to sanctity and peace.

In front of the boxes of books sat cartons of cookware: a set of heavy, tin-lined, cast-iron-handled copper that I'd collected in individual pieces and hung off a pot rack from the white brick kitchen wall of my Chelsea apartment; an aluminum fish poacher I used on the infrequent catering jobs I took to offset my pathetic retail salary; muffin tins and black iron half-sheet pans and egg poachers and a vinyl roll holding fifteen knives I'd amassed over the years of cooking for myself and for anyone I could get to sit still long enough. Food became the air that I breathed, my right foot in front of my left, the wall around the side of the pool that I clung to to keep from getting sucked down and under. It took the place of Gaga herself.

But at 602, my knives, my cookware, my cookbooks—my tools of sustenance and safety and peace—would remain packed for the eighteen months I lived in my grandmother's apartment.

•   •   •

T
he first night I stayed alone at the apartment, my father's phone call set off the ringer amplifiers that he'd left attached to the ceiling in every room—my grandmother had gone stone deaf in her later years—and when he checked in on me, the walls and windows shook and my cats shrieked and hid in the bowels of the coat closet. He was calling, he said, to give me some advice.

“Whatever you do,” he said, “don't turn on the stove.”

“What if I want to cook?” I said.

I stood in the foyer, in front of my grandmother's Sony Trinitron, sucking down a glass of the Bombay Sapphire gin that my father had deposited on the kitchen shelf next to a rusting 1947 Tzedakah box raising money for the new State of Israel, after dropping me off.

“Use the top burners, but never more than two at a time. And don't light the oven. I'll take you to Macy's tomorrow to buy a microwave.”

I was suddenly single, alone after a bad breakup, living in my long-dead grandparents' apartment with all of their things—their clothes, their pictures, their hairbrushes, their lipstick—and I couldn't even roast myself a chicken without blowing the place up. I couldn't bake a pie or a loaf of bread. I couldn't broil a piece of salmon or make a lasagna or a brisket or oven-braise root vegetables or a leg of lamb. I couldn't make a frittata or a pizza or brownies or a pork roast.

I couldn't even bake a potato.

We went to Macy's the next night, and my father bought me a microwave big enough to be an end table.

“There's a roast chicken setting,” he said, pointing to its front panel. We took it back to 602, plugged it in, heated up a mug of water, and instantly blew one of the two fuses that powered the entire apartment. Lights flickered. A popping sound and a faint whiff of electrical smoke filled the air and we stood in the kitchen in our winter coats and stared at each other in silence, not knowing what to do, like two children.

“We should go out,” he said.

We went to a nearby Chinese restaurant called Karr's; we ate at a small table near the bar and got drunk on gin Gibsons.

“So where do I buy food?” I asked him over a platter of pork-fried rice.

Julie had been a selective vegetarian; I once found a mustard-stained Gray's Papaya hot dog napkin in her jeans pocket while I was doing the laundry. When I brought home a porterhouse, she said that I was judging her, and that was the beginning of the end. I couldn't be any more a vegetarian than a hyena on a kill, and from the point where our relationship ended, I gorged myself, happily and willingly, on enough meat to feed an army. I filled our freezer with Manhattan strips and lamb chops, petite fillets and veal breasts and skirt steaks. And pork: enormous quantities of pork. Every time I cooked one, Julie lit a sage smudge stick, waved it around my head, and prayed for the soul of the animal I just ate.

Sitting at Karr's with my father, I plucked the dark red cubes of hong shao rou, familiar to me from our Sunday night dinners at the Tung Shing House, from between a tangle of sprouts and slivered carrots and celery and I ate them one by one.

“There's King's Highway,” he said, shoveling shrimp and lobster sauce onto his plate.

“Is there anything closer?”

“Avenue U. Near the F train. Your grandmother never went there.”

“Why not?”

“Italian.”

Grandma Bertha once stole a piece of bacon from my breakfast plate when my father brought her up to Boston to visit me at college. She ate steamed lobster at The Jolly Fisherman on Long Island, during Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee's family gatherings. She ate prawn cocktails and ham and Swiss sandwiches and cheeseburgers. But 602—where my grandfather had raged and my father had longed for love and Aunt Sylvia silently planned to live a different kind of ordered, beautiful life—was off-limits to anything that hadn't been prayed over, sanctified, and koshered, as if the very roof over their heads was tenuous, and hanging by a slender, fraying thread directly connected to God.

Avenue U was a four-block walk from 602; there were no taxis or buses involved in getting there. But during my first week in the apartment, it didn't matter, because I didn't cook. After work on a Friday night, I came back to the apartment starving for pizza, and ordered a pie from a nearby pizzeria; Lipshitz gasped when the delivery guy passed him in the hallway carrying the grease-stained, white cardboard box with the word “SAUSAGE” stamped on its side. I ordered cartons of Szechuan pork from a local Chinese take-out place and ate them at my grandparents' flowered oilcloth-covered kitchen table with the Parachute Drop hovering behind me out the window; I dumped the clumps of cheap, double-fried meat onto a mountain of steamed white rice I'd spooned onto my grandmother's magenta-flowered brain plate, and shared the dinner table with the smudged black-and-white pictures of the marching Israeli children that wrapped around her Tzedakah box, which stood dusty and forgotten on a corner cupboard shelf since she began stuffing it with folded-up dollar
bills after the war was over. I put my fork down and shook the box; it rattled like a maraca, noisy with hope.

•   •   •

A
week after moving in, I got sick with the kind of flu that makes you want to die: the kind where every joint aches and your fever spikes and every orifice is clogged and stuffed like a drain, and any sense of smell or taste is flattened and it no longer matters what you eat because it might as well be a couch cushion. When the moving van left, I had dragged my suitcase into my grandfather's bedroom for the east-facing windows and the breezes that I would get in the spring and summer; I slept on the crinkling horsehair mattress where I had hallucinated years earlier, when the painting of my long-dead cousin had come alive and stepped out of her frame and swirled around me in voluminous ballet skirts before climbing back into the past. When the flu hit, I retreated to the massive bed and stayed there for days, until a dull ache in my stomach reminded me I had to eat. Feverish and achy, I pulled on a sweatshirt and jeans and stumbled across Ocean Parkway towards Avenue U. I found myself navigating a wall of marching, tight-lipped, unsmiling older women pulling empty grocery carts behind them. I followed them south, under the elevated F train, to the Italian neighborhood where my grandmother never went.

There was a cheese shop and a tiny greengrocer selling baskets of fresh fava beans and bunches of spicy, bitter puntarelle. There was a pork and sausage store that also sold fresh and dried pasta, and massive round cans of salted Sicilian anchovies; a bakery
selling fresh semolina bread dotted with sesame seeds; a fishmonger; a butcher whose window display included ducks with their heads on, chickens with their feet attached, and rabbits that had been skinned down to the circles of fur around their feet, like the booties on Phyllis Diller. The women with the pushcarts methodically popped in and out of the stores; they ordered loudly, paid for their groceries, and moved on.