TREYF (2 page)

•   •   •

M
y father liberated the silver set from my mother right before their divorce, before she had a chance to change the locks; he kept it for me for fourteen years, hidden away deep in his mother's walk-in closet in Coney Island, next to an ancient bottle of Slivovitz and a shopping bag stuffed with photos of long-dead cousins from the old country, taken right before the Nazis marched in.

“So you just
took
it?” I asked, when he guiltily came clean about it one Saturday when I was sixteen, during his parental weekend visitation. We were having dinner at The Praha Restaurant in Manhattan, and he was nursing his second Gibson and poking
at a plate of warm, apricot-stuffed palascinta. It was a bitterly cold night; ice rimed the windows like a frozen beer mug.

“She'd hock it if I didn't—” he said, his eyes red and pleading, “and then you'd
never
know who you are. I'm keeping it safe and sound until you get married; then, it's yours.”

After I lied for years whenever my mother went on a tear about her missing silver serving pieces—
You know, don't you?
she'd say to me;
“You know that he stole them, you're protecting him,”
her brown eyes fierce with rage—my father handed them over to me unceremoniously when I turned thirty after I told him I preferred women to men.

“No use in waiting anymore, then,” he said wistfully, stroking the mahogany case. He turned and walked out, leaving me standing alone in the middle of my tiny studio apartment, cradling the purloined box in my arms like an infant. The premarital giving of the family silver set marked me both as an adult, the family's most ardent rule-breaker, and the family's certain failure; I would never marry a man, and the traditional handoff on my assumed wedding day—what I was taught as a child would be a big affair at a country club on Long Island with a tall white multitiered cake and my Aunt Sylvia dancing a Russian
sher
—would never happen.

“Who do you think you are, to cheat us out of joy, to break the chain?” Aunt Sylvia whispered to me quietly in her kitchen the Thanksgiving after I came out, when I helped carry in plates from her table.

“I don't know,” I said.

And I didn't.

I had no idea who I was.

For almost two years, the silver pieces sat hidden and covered in a blanket of thick dust on the bottom shelf of my television armoire, tucked behind a stack of ancient VHS tapes. I opened it only on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, when WQXR's simulcast of the Kol Nidre services from Manhattan's Temple Emanu-El began at sundown. The cantor chanted and I opened the box and released an angry Pandora: a musty, acrid pong rushed out of it like a wave and wrapped itself around me. The smell of the past—a gamy, transportive scent of despair and schmaltz and Aqua Net—made me woozy. I'd close the lid quickly and put the box back where my mother would never find it, complicit in my father's pilfering.

The Greek Key signified our wandering path, our twisting course, our constant searching and moving forward while always turning back. It was a pattern of repetition; a tether to the past.

“Without it,” my father warned when he handed it over, “you'll never know who you
are.”

PART I

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

—Don DeLillo,
Underworld

A
hundred and fifty pounds. Maybe closer to two.”

Two hundred pounds?

The phone is tucked between my ear and my shoulder; I am feeding the dog. There's silence. The man on the other end of the phone coughs.

“Look,” he tells me. “You ordered half a pig. They're animals. We can't predict.”

I am standing in the center of the cluttered kitchen in my early-1970s ranch house in a bucolic part of Connecticut, now famous for its murder and its beauty. I move the phone to my other ear and wash out the dog bowls. A mundane, ordinary activity—feeding the dog; talking on the phone—but it starts when I least expect it; it hasn't happened for years. Out of nowhere, my heart begins to pound and slam against the inside of my chest; it's late autumn, and although we keep the house at a cool 66
degrees, my back is sticky with a thin layer of sweat. I put the bowls down in the sink and grab the kitchen towel from where it hangs off the refrigerator handle; I drag it across my forehead.
Breathe and hold; breathe and hold
. My pulse slows, and I look around the kitchen; I need to make sure that it's really there, that I'm really standing on my own two adult feet, in it. A smell, a picture, an inherited dinner plate, a piece of gefilte fish, can send me hurtling backwards, ass over elbow, to a place and time where I observed rather than lived, where safety was an illusion. I belong
here
—with my wife, our dog, our house in New England; I've worked so hard to get here, to this place of calm and peace, where my life and my beliefs are my own—but I'm from
there
. And
there
is where it starts.

•   •   •

I
t's early evening, October, dusky; I haven't turned on the schoolhouse lights over the island, and so everything around me is wrapped in a gray, muddled cast, like a dream. The kitchen hypnotizes and grounds me, and I gape with wonder at this space, filled with life and history and sustenance.

Here, in the physical center of the house I share with my wife of fifteen years, there's a Viking six-burner stove—it has old-fashioned dials and knobs, not the fancy digital dashboard that the salesman tried to convince us to buy; the words BAKE and BROIL have melted with time—sandwiched against a heavily used, stained yellow laminate countertop that wraps around a matching chipped yellow sink and a single-arm faucet stiff with years of lime buildup, set on top of birch veneer site-built cabinets
that we painted white eight years ago. A crank-arm casement window looks out over the backyard to where our vegetable garden was planted and cultivated before we expanded it to six boxes from four, and moved it to the front of the house. A harvest calendar dangles from a magnetic hook attached to the side of the stainless-steel refrigerator; a cherry console table sagging under the weight of a stand mixer and a massive English ceramic mortar and pestle is propped under a wall-mounted, hand-hewn iron pot rack given to us by a famous French chef from Manhattan; it is laden with stainless sauté pans blackened with years of use.

A pile of ancient cast-iron Griswold pans, inherited from Susan's Aunt Ethel, is stacked up on the shelf under the island. An old cream-colored, glass-front cupboard that I bought years ago from a Westport consignment shop leans against one wall, packed with two dozen ironstone platters crazed with time; a smaller walnut cupboard, which sat in my paternal grandmother's Coney Island kitchen for almost seventy years and for decades gave off small clouds of chicken fat every time its doors were opened, is filled with hundreds of spice canisters. After my grandmother died in the early 1990s, her daughter, my Aunt Sylvia, took possession of the fragrant cabinet; she had it refinished a mossy army green, the color of the dangerous forest in a Grimms' fairy tale, and used it to hold the delicate flowered porcelain tea service that her own grandmother carried over from Romania in 1893. Eventually, Sylvia tired of the cupboard and passed it along to her daughter, Lois, who refinished it again, stood it in a darkened corner of her Long Island home near her powder room and used it to store twenty-five Passover Haggadahs and her physician
husband's collection of vintage white china invalid feeders. After a few years, Lois didn't want it either, but needing to keep it in the family, she passed it along to me.

There was no question that I'd take it; of course I would, even though I didn't much like it any more than anyone else did. It was like a particularly hideous piece of heirloom jewelry that everyone fawned over when it hung from the neck of its owner, but secretly loathed. Nobody wanted the cupboard, but nobody would dare turn it down either, or break the family chain, as if saying
no
was tantamount to rejection of our bloodline and our history. It's lived for years in my kitchen—longer than at Lois's house, and longer than at Aunt Sylvia's. I've made it mine; it's unrecognizable now, with new pulls and its Napoleonic finial unscrewed, removed, and long discarded; it's filled now with the stuff of comfort—glass canisters holding everything from Lebanese za'atar to hot pimentón and dried heirloom Chimayo chiles and brown mustard seed from India. On top of it is perched a copper stockpot from Dehillerin in Paris and a black clay soup tureen from Colombia. My grandmother's cupboard, which was passed from home to home out of duty, has landed here, where it is cherished; I can do nothing but smile every time I look at it. What had long been an albatross of obligation, the cupboard has become a kitchen witness, a repository of nourishment and life.

This is my sanctuary, my refuge, my safe room; when Susan and I bought this otherwise unremarkable ranch house twelve years ago, in 2004, we did so because the kitchen sits at its center. It's unavoidable and inescapable and the physical heart of our
home. Meals are made here; rules are broken here; new traditions have begun here.

“I'll come on Friday,” I tell the man on the phone, stirring a tablespoon of canned pumpkin into our ancient Labrador's kibble. I toss in an anti-inflammatory for Addie's groaning hips and prednisone for her allergies and set it down in front of her. It's gone, Hoovered up like a dust bunny under a bed before I turn around. My panic has receded; it's just another day.

“Come on Friday,” he repeats. “Three o'clock, so we have time to process and package everything.”

“Okay,” I say, “three o'clock.” And then I hang up.

Two hours up to western Massachusetts, two hours back. I drive my old red Forester through the lower Berkshire hills at the height of leaf season; it's late fall, and I fight meandering buses full of fanny-packed leaf peepers as I head north up Route 8 through Torrington and into what had been the industrial mill town of Winsted, now a jumble of small antique shops and churches and a Goodwill. I pass through quiet, rolling Norfolk, where Yale holds its summertime classical music series, and over the Massachusetts border into Sheffield, where the road widens to a broad ribbon of dove gray nestled amidst a sudden, abrupt, nearly hysterical burst of explosive color. This is New England in autumn, a time of year that has been immortalized in calendar photographs and on L.L. Bean catalog covers; it's what everyone thinks of when they think of this part of the world. It's bucolic, American, Waspy, comfortable, predictable. It has become my home.

I have folded down the backseat and packed the car with six
coolers of varying sizes: Susan's late father's red and white plastic Coleman cooler from the early 1960s is shoved between two soft-sided insulated bags. Massive Styrofoam beer coolers are nestled into each other like Russian dolls, and Susan has thought to line the cargo tray with black plastic industrial contractor bags in case of leakage. Twenty miles into western Massachusetts, not far from Stockbridge, where, in six weeks, like the song says, the first of December will be covered with snow, I pull into a gravel driveway that curls around to the side of a cavernous red-painted barn, a silver silo, and a small, ominous-looking cinder block building whose wood-burning stove is belching plumes of white, fatty smoke into the air. The place belongs to the man I talked to—a middle-aged, beer-bellied butcher wearing stained, caramel-colored Carhartt overalls and a red woolen cap. He's old-school, the best, everyone has told me. He opens the back hatch of my car and packs my coolers with bags of ice and half a custom-butchered Tamworth hog: giant cuts of fresh ham and butt for the Christmas holidays, two dozen three-pound blocks of fatty, boneless pork belly, baby back ribs, country-style ribs, a standing rib roast, chops, cubed stew meat, four shanks, four trotters, two ears, and a tail.

“Everything but the squeal,” he says through a yellowing mustache, wiping his hands on his pants.

I hand him a check; he squints at it, folds it up, shoves it in the breast pocket of his coveralls, shakes my hand, and I leave for home with roughly two hundred pounds of heirloom pork in the back of my car.

I weave my way back south through the hills; I take the rural
route, avoiding the towns, and consider what I will make for dinner, given the beast—a nod to food trends and excess more than to
need
; no couple actually
needs
half an adult pig—that I'm carrying home to my kitchen. The sun begins to set slowly and I remember that it is Shabbos, and the prayer I spoke nearly every Friday night during my childhood summers echoes in my head—it's been forty years since I learned it—and I whisper it to myself:

Thy Sabbath has come
.