TREYF (21 page)

I
'm leaning against the brown laminate counter at Aunt Sylvia's house on Long Island, both of my hands stuffed up the asses of two kosher chickens.

Clouds of gloom float in and out of the kitchen and swirl around me.

“How could he die,” I hear someone moan, “when he was so healthy?”

“What will she do now?”

Muffled gasps; tears.

Healthy?
I think.
He was healthy?

My head is down; I don't respond.

Where there is grief, there is delusion.

I feel around for the birds' rib cages and swallow the walnut of sorrow that's been lodged in my throat since Lois called to say that her father was gone. The sleeves of my starched black linen tunic
are pushed up to my elbows and I've wrapped myself tightly like a sausage in an old, flowered waist apron left behind two decades earlier when my aunt's longtime Bavarian housekeeper retired, packed up her copies of
Staats-Zeitung
, and went back to Germany. On this hot day in July 1998, my cousins are exhausted and napping; my aunt is in her bedroom, resting her broken heart. Strangers walk around the house and drape every mirror they can find with bedsheets: an ancient Orthodox practice requires mirrors be covered as a reminder for the mourners to look to others for sympathy and support. Vanity at such a time is unimaginable. Someone puts a crystal Tiffany pitcher filled with water on the front stoop, for every visitor coming from the cemetery to wash away evil spirits and reaffirm life. Shiva, the ancient laws say, is a Talmudically sanctioned time to grieve, to look inward, to remember, to receive the compassion, love, and tender care of others without having to ask for it.

When the funeral was over, I took my father's car keys and went to the butcher in town. Not the regular butcher, where Sylvia had been going since she and Uncle Lee moved here, after leaving the split-level they'd lived in when I was a baby. Instead, I go to the kosher butcher, the one whose tzitzit hang out from beneath his stained apron. The meats he sells are strictly glatt—literally,
smooth
, from animals whose lungs are free of the adhesions that would classify them as treyf, or according to Exodus,
torn in the field
, violently ripped apart, causing death. I buy two huge birds and a first-cut brisket big enough to feed an army; I bring only kosher foods into this house of mourning. It feels instinctive and primal, as if we, myself included, are suddenly devout. Our God,
the Talmud says, watches over the hearts of the grief stricken; but, I think—
Did I hear Grandpa Henry say it one day when he was talking about Hashem? Did it get stuck somewhere in my brain?
—perhaps he watches with even a little more attention if the halachic rules and regulations are followed. All of us: we love our French towers of boiled prawns eaten at the Café de la Paix in Paris, our steamed lobsters at the Jolly Fisherman during a birthday celebration, our bits of bacon that cling to the blue cheese in the Cobb salads that we order at our ladies' luncheons, our piles of red-glazed pork ribs at The Tung Shing House. But during shiva, we follow the rules; death is too close not to.

I hunt around the cool, damp chicken cavities for the giblets: the liver, the heart, the
gorgel
, the stomach.

Nothing.

I turn the birds around on Aunt Sylvia's glass cutting board and peel back the long flaps of skin that drape over the place where the necks used to be, and I search for them there; nothing.

I plan to do what I always do when I roast a chicken, and something I always find soothing: I put the giblets in a small pan, shower them with a pinch of salt and black pepper, and cook them separately for a quick snack while the bird is roasting. If I'm not hungry, I save them for later. Or I chop them up and add them to pan drippings, with white wine, tarragon, and a little cream. But on this day, with a rabbi sitting in Aunt Sylvia's living room drinking a cup of coffee,
cream and chicken—
the combination of milk and meat—won't be happening. Even if the rabbi wasn't here, there will be no such treats; the small nuggets of fleshy, meaty flavor—the comforting bits of bird considered
by some kosher Jews to be questionable in terms of their cleanliness—are nowhere to be found.

•   •   •

S
hiva; seven days. The weeklong period of mourning for first-degree relatives—parents, children, siblings, spouse; in Hebrew, the
avel—
of someone who has died. Prior to the funeral service, the rabbi will pin the
avel
with a black, cloth-covered button attached to a short black ribbon, which is torn in half by the rabbi, representing the rending of garments. First-degree mourners wear the ribbon over the right breast; children are the only ones who wear it over their heart. Food for the shiva is provided by friends and extended family; first-degree mourners are not allowed to serve food to visitors, who are taken care of by others.

We are sitting shiva for Uncle Lee, who, after two years of valiantly fighting congestive heart failure, succumbed to it; it is the day of the funeral and I'm alone in my aunt's vast kitchen, turning out the most mundane of dishes so that the primary mourners—Aunt Sylvia and her daughters—don't have to concern themselves with sustenance while in the throes of grief. The Talmud says to treat mourners gently and with kindness, as though their hearts have been broken, which they have.

The food I produce is plain and unadorned, kind to digestion, more fuel than flavor, and entirely kosher. This is a time of devotion, and we change the way we eat and cook accordingly; death itself brings us closer to God, and so we become who we're supposed to be and we eat how we're supposed to eat as if our sudden observance of halachic law will compel God to make the
transition easier for the dead, and easier for us. If Aunt Sylvia and her daughters get hungry, sustenance will be there, waiting for them: two kosher chickens made the familiar way my grandmothers made them—massaged with a nondescript vegetable oil and paprika and roasted for longer than they by rights should be, because that's the way kosher chickens are cooked in Ashkenazic homes (bloodless; dry). Next to the chickens will be a pot of kosher chicken broth, twice skimmed and crystal clear, ready for the addition of Jewish egg noodles or bits of white meat or kreplach—the meat-stuffed dumplings I once confused with the pork-filled Chinese purses I ate every weekend as a child at The Tung Shing House. There will be a kosher brisket; after I unwrap it from its brown butcher paper, I hunt around Aunt Sylvia's kitchen drawers—it feels wrong to do this, like I'm a thief; I've never felt comfortable taking even a glass of water here without asking first—and come up with a narrow, flexible fillet knife, which I use to make deep slits in the meat, and into which I insert narrow slivers of garlic, the way Grandma Bertha used to do. Rubbed with salt and pepper and garlic powder the way Sylvia likes it, the meat will braise for five hours—drenched in a bath of tomato sauce and water, and set down on a bed of thinly sliced white onion, the ancient roasting pan tightly sealed with a sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil—after the chickens come out for a rest. Once they're cool, I will cover the birds in more foil and put them on the shelf in the fridge above the vegetable crisper where, beneath a head of shrink-wrapped broccoli and a bag of green beans, someone has inadvertently left a package of Black Forest ham from Zabar's.

Phyllis, a neighbor who I only ever see at funerals, comes into the kitchen, heads for the nearly-empty Westinghouse coffee urn that was turned on by a neighbor just as the service was starting six hours ago; she eyes me groping around the birds like I'm trying to deliver a foal. She's tall and thick, her chemically straightened shoulder-length hair dyed an unnatural mahogany, teased up into a tall crown and sprayed into place as if to belie her seventy-five years, her lips smeared with a violent swipe of dense magenta lipstick, wearing a snug Norma Kamali wrap dress left over from the eighties.

“I need more coffee,” she demands, thrusting her Styrofoam cup at me.

I nod over my shoulder to the urn across the room, where it's been set up on the oak kitchen table; I'm up to my elbows in chicken juice. She knows exactly what I'm looking for.

“You should know by now,” she adds, imperiously, “that kosher birds don't always come with their giblets intact.”

“How would I know?” I say, turning around again to look at her.

“I thought you knew everything,” she says. “Make more coffee. People are waiting.”

She walks out of the kitchen clutching her lipstick-smeared cup.

Fucker,
I mumble to myself.

Fuck. Her.

Once, as a child at one of Aunt Sylvia's cocktail parties where I'm playing hide-and-seek in the basement with my younger cousins, I overhear Phyllis call someone a
demon seed
; there is a tentative, coughing laughter until I walk into the living room to grab a
fistful of Jordan almonds for myself from the silver candy dish on the coffee table. My father's face is red; my mother is in the bathroom, touching up her makeup. After the divorce, after my mother and Ben are married and I spend my holidays and weekends with my father, I long to be a member of this clan, and they cautiously, tentatively let me in; I can taste the sweet essence of family and acceptance, even though somewhere in the recesses of my heart, I fear that I'm a fact of obligation—I am my father's daughter, and when he dies in three years, so will the commitment—who ought to be grateful for being allowed into the pack with everyone else, like a lone wolf who can be shunned at any moment, for the slightest infraction. The demon seed is the imperfect; the treyf; the one who doesn't fit the uniform.

•   •   •

I
am forever on the outside, looking in, forever searching and looking for an anchor.

So I cook; I cook to feed them and to nourish them. I cook to feed and nourish myself. I cook as a way to crack open the shell of acknowledgment that I crave. Like my customers at Dean & Deluca, I cook to re-create the past. I cook as a way to sanctity and peace.

I cook for the living; I cook for the dead.

The cemetery mud cakes the soles of our fancy black dress shoes; Phyllis's conduct breaks the laws of the Talmud—I don't know this for sure, but certainly it must, I think—that say that the grief-stricken, primary mourners and secondary mourners alike should not be treated cruelly and carelessly. But no matter the
occasion, happy or sad, birth or death, Phyllis's behavior is always vile, always inappropriate, always bitter, and the subject of discussion among family members who whisper to each over prim layered cakes from William Greenberg's in Manhattan and endless cups of Martinson coffee. But no one will ever be brave enough to call her on it; not her. When Phyllis orders me to make more coffee on the day of Uncle Lee's funeral, I'm gripping one of the chickens from the inside by its rib cage; it's perched on the end of my right hand like a boxing glove. It is greasy and orange with paprika, its legs and wings trussed to its body in bondage, and I imagine flinging it at her like a basketball. I can see it cartwheeling through the air, end over end, and bouncing off the back of her hair-sprayed Jackie Onassis helmet as if off a trampoline, as she sashays coolly out of the room.

•   •   •

T
he house is filled with nieces and nephews and grandchildren and neighbors who, like me, also loved Uncle Lee, along with my father and his longtime companion—after fifteen years, calling Shirley his girlfriend feels wrong—and Aunt Sylvia, who sits in her favorite beige velvet armchair, in a daze. We have all been to the chapel, the one where every deceased member of the family has been memorialized, and then, the cemetery, where they are and where the rest of us will be buried—a family plot where my late cousin Maya and Grandpa Henry and Grandma Bertha lay shoulder to shoulder in a sea of Jewish immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe. We keen and we weep; the rabbi chants The El Malei Rachamim, begging God for Uncle Lee's rest upon his
wings, and my father is inconsolable—his well of sorrow is bottomless, his face twisted with grief. The rabbi, a mottle-haired, slender, gaunt young man not yet forty, dressed in a navy blue suit that gives off a slight shimmer, davens the familiar Mourner's Kaddish that I first heard on the mornings after my grandfather died, when my father and I took the elevator down to the basement with the dog and he walked me to the school bus stop at the top of The Champs-Élysées Promenade.

My younger second cousins and I join the rabbi in reciting the prayer for the dead; I am the only one who has to read it off a card, phonetically. My father's mouth moves in silent devotion; tears cascade down his face onto the front of his business shirt as Uncle Lee's kosher casket—all wood, held together with pegs rather than nails, devoid of any metal that is Talmudically prohibited and symbolic of war—is lowered into the ground. Each of us is handed the shovel, and one by one, we participate in
chesed shel emet
; we shovel clumps of earth onto the casket, the ultimate act of love and kindness for which the deceased can't ask for himself, and which signifies finality. This is tribal, a five-thousand-year-old ritual and the fulfilling of what is considered the greatest mitzvah as decreed in the Talmud. When the service is over, we search the grounds surrounding our family plot for small rocks and pebbles to place on top of Grandma Bertha's, Grandpa Henry's, and Maya's tombstones, an ancient tradition, an earthly connection to an afterlife that Jews aren't supposed to believe in. Unsuccessful, we scratch around in the warm dirt surrounding the graves of total strangers, to unearth something, anything, to leave behind. When she thinks we can't see, Phyllis palms a rock
from the top of a nearby tombstone belonging to a stranger named Pessie, whose grave is inexplicably located within the fringes of our plot. Phyllis calls her an interloper; this, Phyllis believes, gives her the right to take the token that was left perhaps by a grandchild, or a stranger, for this woman, herself a stranger in a strange land, buried alone.