Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (10 page)

When Nana died, I was suddenly hungry all the time.

• • •

I could tell myself that I’d over-washed my jeans or that the nice man at the dry cleaner had shrunk my skirt, but tight underwear doesn’t lie: the truth of the matter was that I’d gained weight. The metabolism that had served me so well had apparently clocked out, exhausted, on my fortieth birthday.

I parked my wide load in a chair at a well-known diet center. I followed their strict eating rules and cut out bread, butter, cookies, pasta, ice cream before dinner, and many other things that make life worth living. Instead I ate mulch.

The results were quick and encouraging, and I developed little tricks to speed things along, like eating only salad (without dressing) for dinner the night before and nothing at all the morning of my scheduled weigh-in. I watched a woman strip down to a tank top and gym shorts before she stepped on the scale and took note: no more heavy jeans and sweaters for me. From then on, when I got my weekly reading, I wore only as much as would keep me from getting arrested for indecent exposure.

And then I met Nathan, whose love of food was exceeded only by his enthusiastic metabolism, and who had a nightly habit of eating cookies and milk while watching hard-hitting news. And he wanted to share that ritual with me.

I’d known all about the pleasures of eating, and then the pitfalls. New to me was the romance of it, the intimacy of having someone break off a steaming hunk of toasted Italian bread and hand you half, or of splitting a cupcake, or of being served a croissant with your morning coffee (complete with full-fat milk). I reacted to these previously forbidden fruit pies by devouring them like a starving locust. A few months of this, and I felt like a chubby locust.

I went back on the weight-loss plan, suddenly declining bread at dinner, and Nathan reacted as though I’d refused to make love:
Not tonight, honey, I’m on a diet
.

One rainy afternoon in April, Nathan wanted to go to a shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that specializes in exotic flavors of rice pudding with names like Sex & Drugs & Rocky Road. We’d shared our first kiss there the year before, and I could still remember how Nathan’s mouth had tasted of cream and oven-roasted cherries.

Now he ordered up a large dish of Coconut Coma while I calculated how many crunches it would take to keep my belly from turning to pudding.

“Let’s eat it now,” he said.

“Right after lunch?” I asked, stalling. “I thought we’d save it for later, at home, for dessert.”

“C’mon, let’s have some now.”

I was about to argue, but it was ridiculous to have a fight about rice pudding. So I let Nathan feed me a spoonful, and then he handed me a tiny bag. Inside was a jewelry box with my engagement ring.

I had almost messed up his proposal.

The wedding date approached, and now there were dress fittings to think about. I felt schizophrenic in the
company cafeteria, bouncing indecisively between the salad bar and the pork tacos. “I can’t diet again,” I said to one of my coworkers. “I love food too much.”

“Of course not,” she agreed, because she was the food editor at the magazine. “But then again, you’ll be looking at those wedding photos for the rest of your life.”

I remembered the single beautiful black-and-white portrait of Aunt Midge and Uncle Eddie on their wedding day, he so handsome in his sailor uniform and she prim and pretty in a suit. A very tiny suit, because at the time Aunt Midge had a nineteen-inch waist.

• • •

These days I can make an unemployment check go for miles at the supermarket. I can save even more money by baking. What I can’t do right now is diet. I’m already cutting back and counting every penny—I just can’t face counting calories too.

“How did Nana stay so slim?” I ask Mom one day as I fold up yet another pair of skinny jeans and put them in the back of the closet.

“She ate half,” Mom says.

“Half of what?”

“Anything delicious. If it was a liverwurst sandwich—I know you don’t like those, but she loved them—she’d eat half of it. If it was a piece of cake, she’d have half, or just a bite. She’d have one drink, not a couple. She did pretty well that way.

“Also,” says Mom, “Nana always said that a thin woman should gain a pound or two every year as she got older to smooth out wrinkles in her face. Besides, she wasn’t so skinny. She was a size ten, but she was tall, so she looked curvy.”

Gain a pound or two a year? A size ten? All of this is music to my hips. I take out some photos of her, and in them she looks … womanly. Satisfied.

That night, on the couch, the news of the day is not so good. But it’s buffered by crisp, light butter cookies, which taste especially good when shared with Nathan.

1½ dozen chowder clams

¼ lb. bacon, in one piece

4 large onions

Bunch curly parsley, celery, leeks, parsnips

3 carrots

3 potatoes

1 large can tomatoes

Thyme

Clean clams; cook parsley, celery, leeks, onions, parsnips, in enough water to cover. Add salt. Cook one hour. Fry bacon in small cubes. Put clams, bacon and fat into water
strained off vegetables. Add thyme. Add tomatoes and diced carrots. Then potatoes. Simmer
.

• • •

DECEMBER 2008

HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

“Why’d you throw that away?” I ask Nathan, pointing to the half-eaten banana in the garbage. “Something wrong with it?”

“No,” he says with a shrug. “I’d just had enough.”

I realize I’ve crossed over into a bad state of mind when I have to keep myself from turning into his mother and asking him if he’s nuts, throwing away perfectly good food like that. With one of us out of a job, the insane cost of health insurance, and my retirement plan and his stocks both practically worthless, who on earth would throw away half a banana? Even though I knew I was overreacting, I could swear I heard Grandpa tsk-ing in solidarity with me, all the way from the sweet hereafter.

Salvaging food is something that my grandfather, Nathan’s mother, and anyone who went through the Depression did. In fact, I don’t remember anyone in
my family throwing away food, either because we ate everything before it spoiled or because there was never so much that it had a chance to go bad in the first place. Occasionally we’d nearly lose something, but Grandpa would refuse to let the patient die. “You just cut the moldy part off the cheese,” he’d say, wielding his scalpel. “See? It’s fine.”

“It was
green
,” I’d say, all wrinkle-nosed eight-year-old. “I don’t want it.” As far as I was concerned, eating a piece of cheese that was clearly on its last gasp was one of Grandpa’s weird food habits, right up there with chomping on raw potatoes. Whenever he made mashed potatoes (which, since he was Irish, was often), he would take a big bite out of an uncooked spud like it was an apple. “That’s what the French call it—
la pomme de terre
,” he’d say. “ ‘The apple of the earth.’ That’s the way I ate potatoes when I was in France.”

“He did that to keep from starving to death during World War I,” Mom explains. “And did you know that he, not Nana, was the real cook of the family? She learned to cook when we moved to Saratoga, but he’d been doing most of the cooking before that.”

“Wait—how did Grandpa learn to cook?”

“His stepmother,” Mom says. “She told him, ‘Men should know how to do everything well,’ and she taught your grandfather and his brother, George, about the thread count in bed sheets, how to mend clothing, how to select the best cuts of meat, and how to cook. It was good advice, because your grandpa was a bachelor for a while—after he was married …”

• • •

APRIL 1915

THE BRONX, NEW YORK

Fifteen-year-old Charlie Kallaher thought his father, Edmund, would be proud to hear that he’d left the military academy to fight in World War I, enlisting with his older brother, George. But Edmund merely sighed with disapproval. “Well, Charles, you’ve done things your own way.”

Charlie was sent to France, where he was shot at and gassed, and on one terrible day he had to amputate a buddy’s leg right on the field. Sharp beyond his years and determined to stay alive, he defied a commanding officer who, whether knowingly or not, was ordering his men out of a foxhole and directly into the line of
enemy fire. “Over the top, Johnny! Over the top!” he shouted as the men leaped out and were killed, one by one. “Over the top, Johnny!”

“After you,” Private Kallaher responded.

“
What
did you say, soldier?” the officer demanded.

“I said ‘After you,’
sir
.”

The argument ended when a shell landed nearby. The commanding officer was killed, and the soldiers scattered away from the hail of artillery fire and flying shrapnel. Charlie and his buddies hid from enemy troops in a barn, and in the morning he woke up with rats nestling against his body to stay warm. For food, the men ate potatoes straight out of the dirt.

“You’d think he would have hated eating them raw again, considering the memories that must have brought back,” I say to Mom.

She shrugs. “The taste reminded him of how they kept him from going hungry,” she says. “That’s a good memory.”

Charlie came home alive but no longer a kid, having seen too much of the war before he was even of legal age to fight. A few months after his return his girlfriend Molly got pregnant. Edmund was painting trim
on the side of the house when Charlie told him he was getting married.

“Well, Charles,” Edmund said, his paintbrush evenly skimming the wood, “you’ve done things your own way again.”

“Will you come to the wedding, Pop?”

“I think not,” his father said.

The marriage was brief; Molly died of influenza just a few years later. Charles was a war veteran, a widower, and the father of two small children—Charles Jr., nicknamed Chick, and Mary, who was called Midge—all by the time he was twenty-one years old. (No longer a stranger to medical events, he’d delivered both babies himself, at home.) Molly’s sisters took the children to live with their families in Connecticut, and Charlie spent the next ten years or so as a bachelor. Able to live quite well on his own with the skills his stepmother had taught him, he felt no hurry to find a new bride.

“Your grandfather was a happy widower for years—it was almost a career with him,” says Mom. “When he got the job as a milkman and the Depression hit, not only was he making steady money when nobody else was, but he got to visit all the lonely housewives. He was famous in the dairy company as ‘The Heartbreaker
of Sheffield Farms’ by the time he met your Nana at Orchard Beach in 1930.”

The only beach in the Bronx—a stretch of sandy coastline on the east side of Pelham Bay Park—Orchard Beach was packed during the typically hot New York City summers. Matilda was a regular visitor; her uncle Hil was a lifeguard there, as was her boyfriend, Frank, and his friend Charlie.