Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (16 page)

From “Time Out” by Matilda Kallaher

• • •

JANUARY 2009

HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

My husband is a spiritual man who feels, as Nana, Mom, and I do, that his faith is too large to be contained or defined by any one formal religion. But if he were to convert, he would most likely become a Jehovah’s Witness. “They don’t celebrate birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, or any other forced-affection holidays when, if you don’t buy someone a present, you’re in trouble,” he declares.

So, although I’ve never received a gift from Nathan in December, he has come home on a random, garden-variety Tuesday, when the calendar is free of red ink reminding us of some major event or other, and presented me with a black pearl suspended from a clasp studded with tiny diamonds. He’d prefer for me to know that he loves me every day, not just the day that I, or even Jesus, was born.

• • •

DECEMBER 1968

THE BRONX, NEW YORK

Nana set out the milk and cookies for Santa. “You have to go to bed, or he won’t come in,” she said, shooing me off to the pullout convertible bed we slept on.

“How’s he going to get in here, anyway?” I asked. I was looking at my grandparents’ mantelpiece, which housed a wonderful fake fireplace—tinfoil crunched on a rotating rod, with a small lightbulb that shone behind a red plastic “ember” in the center of a bunch of “logs.” I would stare at the “fire” as mesmerized as if it were real, but tonight it presented a problem: There was no actual chimney for Santa to come down, just a small hole at the back for the electric wire to go through. “He’s not gonna make it,” I said doubtfully. “Maybe we should wait up and let him in—”

“Santa’s smart,” Nana said. “He’ll figure out a way—but not if he sees you awake. Come on, let’s get to sleep.”

In the morning, my five-year-old jaw dropped at the sight of a half-eaten cookie and an empty milk glass on the kitchen table. Next to those was a note:

“He was
here
!” I gasped at Nana, who just nodded.

But Christmas wasn’t the only special day at my grandparents’ house. Nana always figured out a way to mark the occasion of my just being there, or of my just being. She made houses out of sheets and chairs—something she’d done when Mom was little—and she’d crawl under them with me. Lunches were always fancy tea parties where she served our food on special doll plates and we wore her long satin gloves. For someone who hadn’t been played with much as a child, she knew how to show a kid a good time.

Every time I was with Nana was special. Or maybe every time I was with her, she made me feel special.

• • •

JANUARY 2009

HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

“I can stop by the market on the way home from work,” Nathan says. “Do we need anything?”

“Just some fish for dinner. Nothing else. We don’t need anything else, okay?” I hate my false tone of
assurance that everything we could possibly want or need is already in our fridge; it’s just a ploy to keep Nathan from spending money on the former necessities that are now luxuries.

An hour later, Nathan comes home with the fish—two thick slices of Chilean sea bass, certified sustainable, which made it politically correct and added a few dollars to the cost of each already expensive piece. He also pulls out a half pound of fresh shrimp; a bottle of pink fizzy
limonade
, imported from France; an artisanal cheese; not one but two containers of olives; and a box of truffles—organic, no less. At the bottom of the cloth shopping tote was the receipt: nearly seventy dollars, for one dinner at home.

“The truffles were on sale,” he says cheerfully, kissing me on my suddenly pale cheek.

I’ve made it a practice never to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when it brings me food. Horrified at the price of our dinner, I run downstairs and make love to my husband immediately. Then I free myself from pointless fretting about money that’s already been spent with a simple rationalization: Christmas can be any night—like tonight.

In the past few months I’ve learned a lot from Nana, and one of the most important lessons is acting on the knowledge that time spent with people we love is the best gift; the catch is that it’s temporary. There was no warning before Nana died. We thought we were going to see her that weekend. One night she was in the bathroom, setting her hair, getting that lovely swoop over her eyes just so. Then Grandpa called us to say that she was gone. Being seven years old, I didn’t understand what an aneurysm was. I only knew that people—no matter how important they were to me—could disappear in a second. Every day I’d spent with her became incredibly meaningful in retrospect, since I now knew that there were no more to come.

So tonight, an ordinary Tuesday, I start preparing not a dinner, but a party. I carefully arrange the shrimp in patterns on the salad. I place the olives—plump purple beauties and sharp Greek cured black ones—in a special ceramic dish. The Drunken Goat cheese, aged over sixty days but still stark white against its plum-colored rind, goes on the good china, along with warmed Italian bread. I broil the sea bass with a touch of butter, salt, and pepper until the skin is crispy. After
dinner, we try the truffles, dark lumps of cocoa-dusted cream that send the mouth, and the spirit, into ecstasies as they melt and disappear.

We fill our glasses with the tart French lemonade and toast the fact that we are here, together. That’s reason enough for a celebration.

5 eggs, separated

1½ cups sugar

1 tbsp. grated lemon rind

¼ cup lemon juice

4 tbsp. cornstarch

1½ cups boiling water

1 tbsp. butter

10 tbsp. sugar

Small pinch salt

1 nine inch baked pie shell

Put yolks into bowl and add the 1½ cups sugar, lemon rind, juice and cornstarch. Mix well. Add a little boiling water
,
combine mixture with remaining water in top of double boiler. Cook and stir until thickened. Add butter. Cool. Put into pie shell. Beat whites stiff but not dry. Add slowly, while beating, the 10 tbsp. sugar and salt. Cover lemon custard with this and brown for 10 mins. in very hot oven
.

• • •

When in doubt, bake.

I didn’t come up with this concept; people have been doing oven therapy for ages. Mom says that Nana baked constantly during that first winter in Saratoga. It kept the house warm and her from going crazy.

When I’m so anxious that my atoms are vibrating visibly, I bake bread. I read in a cookbook that to get a flakier loaf, you punch the dough down more each time it rises. For me, the process is reversed: the flakier I get, the more I punch the dough down. But that’s for extreme cases of anxiety. For more average or ongoing stress, I prefer making sweet things, like cake, muffins, or pie.

• • •

SEPTEMBER 2007

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

My fertility acupuncturist and I talked about a lot of things—movies, the weather, Zen Buddhism. He was a funny guy, and our conversations would have been fine cocktail chatter if I hadn’t been lying on a table with my bra and panties strategically covered by towels while he stuck pins into my body.

“I’ll tell ya, that last scene in
GoodFellas
 …,” he said as he flicked a pin into my foot. “And then when he says …” Pins in the belly now, all around the womb, flick flick flick. “BAM! And he’s dead in the trunk …” And BAM, a pin to my head, right where the third eye is supposed to be. That’s the only one I ever really felt; my acupuncturist did great “insertions,” as he called his voodoo routine.

Yes, we talked about a lot of things, my fertility acupuncturist and I, just not much about the reason I kept coming back to see him. Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, I’d return to his office to keep whatever eggs I had left in good shape and my period regular. On that last score, we were too successful.

I realize I’m asking too much of him the day I’m getting dressed and I pick a white hair off my black turtleneck. I wonder how one of my mother’s hairs could have gotten onto my sweater and survived both the washer and dryer. Then I realize that this is one of mine.

• • •

Nana married when she was twenty-one, but she didn’t become pregnant for a while; her doctors had advised her against it because of a heart condition she’d had from a young age, something she had in common with her namesake grandmother. Nana wrote that her earliest memory was of crawling up on the bed to the frail, white-haired woman, propped up on pillows, who called her “my little pussycat.” Matilde survived multiple pregnancies, but Nana was told she might not live through even one:

That was my mother. Nana didn’t tempt fate again.

Mom had me when she was twenty-one, and there are no photos from her quickie wedding. She was always honest with me about the fact that I was a surprise, because she saw no point in lying to a kid who could tell there was no love lost between her divorced parents. On my thirty-fifth birthday, Mom laughed as she told the story of going to the hospital and getting wedged in the cab between the backseat and the front when the nervous cabbie made a short stop. Looking back from an adult perspective, I knew she’d never had it easy as a young single mother, and I also knew she’d had a choice in the matter.

“Why did you have me?” I asked suddenly.

Mom thought for a moment, still smiling from the cab story. “I don’t know,” she finally said, but the look on her face showed that she was pleased with the outcome.

Both Nana and I were raised by our grandfathers. Hers died when she was fourteen, and mine when I was thirteen. My mother didn’t remarry until I was seventeen, when she finally found the right man, a man who was not my father by blood but who became something far more important to me: my dad. One of the most loving things he could ever have said to me, a pained and irascible teenager, was “Where the hell do you think you’re going at ten o’clock at night?” This was something Grandpa would have said. Here was a man who cared about me, and who told me so in the lovingly blunt language of my people.

All turned out well, but the absence of a father figure between Grandpa and my new dad left its mark on me. When I started thinking about marriage and children, I vowed I’d wait for a man who would stick around and be a husband and a father. I didn’t realize that, in my case, waiting for the former might mean having to give up on the latter.