Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (18 page)

After breakfast, I race outside, leaving behind my hat, thick gloves, parka, and the rest of the abominable snowwoman getup I’ve been wearing for months (sometimes indoors). Snowstorms could still come—we aren’t done with winter yet—but I can’t think about that right now because there’s warm sun on my face.

At the corner I run into Arthur, the bull terrier from downstairs, straining at his leash. He bounds up to me, jaws agape and ready to clamp onto my hand—with love, but a loving clamp is still a clamp. I hold up a finger and say, “Ouch, Arthur,” the code phrase his mommies taught him. The dog quickly closes his mouth and nuzzles my hand instead. “Oh, you are such a good boy!” I tell him, and he wags his stubby little tail.

Reluctantly, I return home, but for a good reason: I actually have an assignment to work on. At lunchtime I have a root beer and a sandwich made from leftover meatloaf, which is even better the next day, while I write.

A few months ago I thought things couldn’t get worse. Now, I feel fabulous—never better.

Nothing has changed. There’s still a lot of fear in the air, and rightly so. The life we knew before the
collapse continues to melt and change, and people we know who once made good livings take jobs as nannies, look into food stamps, leave their homes and move in with friends, and wait, and hope.

But I feel no sense of loss. If anything I’ve gained something over these past few months as I learned to cook and found out where, and who, I came from. I think about Nana as a scared but determined kid working during the Depression, and Grandpa living through the war, and my family heading down to Florida with nothing but a hundred bucks and a hundred hopes, and Mom saving every available dime in that coffee can, and I feel better. I think to myself,
If they got through that, we can get through this
. And it wasn’t all bad—sometimes what looked at first like more rotten luck turned out to be fate’s little crooked smile.

In 1952, when my mother was ten years old, there was a major slowdown in construction, so Charlie was out of work more often than not. Nana saw an ad in the paper for a typist at the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, and she decided to apply for the job.

She was a little rusty after years of being a stay-at-home mom. The reports she had to type were done
with layered carbon paper to make copies, and at first Nana made mistakes. Not wanting anyone to see all the pages in the trash, she took them with her into the ladies’ room and stuffed them in her girdle. Mom said that when Nana came home from her first day at work, she looked like she’d gained fifteen pounds.

But she was soon hired full-time, and Nana loved that job. She worked with Robert Moses and others who were shaping New York, and she climbed the ladder higher than she’d ever thought she could go. She went from being a temp typist who had one dress (and a girdle with sturdy elastic) to an executive assistant whose wardrobe included a floor-length black fringed gown and other glamourous items, which she wore when her bosses took her along to fancy cocktail parties and white-tie dinners. She may not ever have become a published author, but she was able to use her intelligence and creativity, and she was held in high esteem by those she worked with. And she never got rich, but she was finally secure. She worked at the Coliseum very happily, right up until the day she died.

The funeral home had to open a second adjoining room to accommodate all the visitors. And then a third for the endless arrangements of flowers. People
attending other funerals poked their heads in and asked, “Who’s in there? A dignitary?”

“Yes,” said Nana’s boss.

• • •

I don’t say formal prayers, but every night, I make a mental list of things I’m grateful for. Tonight, as always, I’m grateful for Nathan, who’s snoring away beside me, and for the knowledge that my parents are healthy and whole, worried about their business but generally in good spirits. I give thanks for the spring rains breaking and for the end of the leaks pouring into the living room. I say thank you to Nana and Grandpa and tell them I love them. I’m grateful that I got to go to college—I was the first woman in my family to do so—and that I became a writer—that I’ve been able to realize almost all of Nana’s dreams, the ones I never knew she had until I found the recipe file. Now she’s inspiring me to go further, to aim higher than I thought I could go. Who knows, maybe I’ll even become a teacher like her beloved Miss Bumstead …

There’s more, so much more that I’m grateful for, that I start falling asleep before I can finish.

I want for nothing. I feel rich.

A small piece of advice, and one of the best, that I’ve gotten from Nana, who died at the age of fifty-seven—too young, but having never wasted a moment of her life:

I was not, and am not, the best housekeeper in the neighborhood. The competition of getting the first line of wash out on Monday morning has never interested me. Putting the dishes in the sink “until later” was, and still is, my practice. There are so many more important things than dishes
.

Sometimes the house is such a mess that I think, “On Saturday I must do this—or that—or whatever is most in need of doing.” But when Saturday comes along, and it is a
delightful, delicious day, and my husband says, “Let’s the three of us go fishing,” we all look at each other—guiltily—and of course they stick me with the decision
.

I look at the house, at their faces, at what is outside of our hazy windows, and, knowing we are all only here for an unknown time, and how precious every minute is, I say: “Let’s go.”

Wipe the meat with a damp cloth. Sprinkle the inside of the pocket with salt and pepper. And, if you like, rub the inside … or the outside … with a clove of garlic. Pile in the dressing lightly and skewer or sew the edges together. Rub the outside of the roll with salt, pepper, and flour. Place the roast on a rack in an uncovered pan without water in a hot oven. Cook for 30 minutes and then reduce the temperature and finish cooking. But about half an hour before the cooking is finished, between two and three hours total, the roast should be based
[sic]
with an apricot sauce
.

Add ¾ of a cup of sugar to 2 cups of apricot juice and fruit, cooking slowly. Some of the apricots should be rubbed
through a colander. Some halves of the fruit should be saved for garnish. Use your own favorite recipe for dressing
.

• • •

“Guess what I’m doing right now?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Mom says, her tone of delight coming through clearly even though I’m on a cell phone in an underground supermarket. “Okay, what are you doing right now?”

“Shopping for dinner,” I tell her, “for my new husband.”

It’s spring of 2007, and my arm is aching from the weight of the basket I was just going to put a few things in; as usual, I went a little crazy when confronted by fresh vegetables (asparagus!), chocolate, and the thought of lamb for dinner. The long line to the checkout inches forward into suppertime, but I still have the grin of a goon on my face. You see, I’ve just gotten married.

The day before, a Sunday in April, Nathan and I were lost on a highway. I’d also been on my cell phone then, not with my mother but with the reverend who was to marry us at two o’clock at his home. “I don’t
know
where we are!” I shouted;
Oh God
, I thought,
I’m
shouting at a reverend
. “We made the turn by the gas station, and now we’re back on the highway heading north!”

“You’ll need to head south,” the reverend said as gently as he’d said it the first two times. “And please, try not to worry.”

Try not to worry. Four weeks before Nathan and I were to promise to love and honor each other in front of eighty of our clan, I realized that our marriage would be null and void. The dear friend I’d chosen to preside over our wedding was licensed as a minister in the state of California; we live in the state of New Jersey.

“We need to get married, like, right away,” I told Nathan one night when he got home from work.

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll go to city hall first thing Thursday morning, and I’ll go to work a little late.”

“That’s it? You’re going to get married and then just leave for work? You’re not even going to have breakfast with your new wife and in-laws?”

Nathan stared at me, clearly having a
My life used to be so simple
moment. He blinked twice. “In-laws? Why would your parents be there?”

“Be-
cause
,” I said slowly, “their
daughter
is getting
married
. Of
course
they’re going to want to be there.
And we should all go for breakfast afterward to celebrate.”

Staring was replaced by frowning. “Excuse
me
,” he said. “Did we not just plan a whole
wedding
with a dress and a suit and flowers and a
cake
and everything for next
month
? If the marriage part is a formality because Charles can’t legally marry us, what’s the big deal?”

All of it was a big deal: I was getting married. Something I’d wanted and waited for most of my adult life was finally here—frowning at me right this very moment—and I was both elated and terrified I’d screw it up. Already I’d belly-flopped on a technicality; we might have been celebrating our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, only to find out that we had never been legally married. And even though this little wedding was only a formality, and the real deal would take place next month, I didn’t think that saying, “I do, see you tonight, we’re having fish for dinner,” was the way to legally start our lives together.

Hence the highway. When I’d spoken with the reverend on the phone about my aversion to the impersonality of getting hitched at city hall, he offered to perform the wedding on his front lawn, where he
could marry us by a lake beneath tall pine trees. My parents and Nathan’s brother Caleb could be there too, and afterward we’d have brunch at Caleb’s house. It was just what I’d had in mind.

Getting hopelessly lost hadn’t been part of my fantasy. (This was the incident that would lead my future brother-in-law to gift Nathan with a GPS.) Nor was a stonily silent husband-to-be. He was so frustrated I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d wilted the tulip I’d pinned on his lapel, a bud from the cellophane-wrapped bouquet I’d bought at the deli. Another lesson learned:
My fiancé hates getting lost and stuck in traffic
. I made a mental note and added it to the list of things (allergic to penicillin; doesn’t care for spaghetti squash) I needed to know in order to be a good wife.

The clock on the truck’s dashboard now read 2:39. We’d gone out of our way—apparently quite literally—to avoid a quickie, impersonal wedding, and now my vision of a relaxed exchange of vows by a picturesque lake was ticking away. I rolled my eyes at the obvious metaphor of navigation: How would we find our way in marriage if we couldn’t even find our way to
get
married? I rolled down my window to let some of the irony out of our truck.