Stir (15 page)

I
was home but I wasn't. This was our apartment. Same red table, same bench, same sofas, same chairs. Same smell, presumably, though I wouldn't have known. The difference was me. I was sicker now, and my home only reminded me of that. The chair in my office demanded that I take a seat and turn on the computer, but I couldn't sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. I couldn't look at the bright screen without a lump of nausea lodging itself in my chest or read a page of text without my eyelids slamming shut. Everywhere I looked, I found evidence of my own absence, even as I stood right there. Loud things had gone silent and things that moved stood still: the mixer on the counter, the squeaky oven door, knives and napkins, notebooks and pens.

Before I'd gotten sick, I'd touched these objects every day. They were the tools I used for work and for play. From where I sat propped up on the sofa, a helmet on my head and a PICC line in my arm, they felt like artifacts of a previous life.

I didn't say a word to Amy about any of this when she arrived that first week in November after my mom went home. I didn't have to, because she knew.

 • • • 

Home is a verb. It's not only where we live, but how. I learned this as a little girl from Amy by watching her in her own home—especially in the kitchen.

Amy's kitchen and how she ran it were among the first things I noticed about her. The room was more like a studio of sorts, with its tools and towels and three kinds of flour. She kept her sugar in an old tinted glass canister with a metal lid and funneled whole black peppercorns into a ceramic mill. Her spoons were wooden, her pots heavy and worn. At eleven years old, I had never seen anything like it. I hoped that someday I'd have a kitchen like that, too.

Amy made uncomplicated meals that left you feeling the good kind of full. Her food, like everything about her, was straightforward, exactly what it seemed. A salad of black beans, red onions, cilantro, and corn cut straight from the cob. Grilled chicken with parsley and lime. Long before I'd ever heard of Chez Panisse or Alice Waters, I learned from Amy that the best food is food that tastes like itself, simple and clean. A potato at its utmost is a potato; a green bean, a green bean. To cook, Amy taught me, is only to help our ingredients down the path toward becoming their truest selves. It's no surprise then that she is a champion of vinaigrette, whose very function is to amplify what's already there. Splashed with vinaigrette, beets taste beet-ier, leeks, leek-ier.

Making vinaigrette is easy, but before Amy, I'd never seen anyone do it. She'd start with a near-empty Grey Poupon jar, spoon in some oil, then some vinegar, sort of measuring, sort of not. She'd screw on the lid and shake and taste, shake and taste, adjusting accordingly, usually in the direction of vinegar. Then she'd add some parsley or chives, a minced shallot, whatever she had on hand. I was thrilled by the efficiency of it: how those scrapes of mustard helped emulsify the oil and vinegar into a uniform dressing, how a jar at the end of its life had one more job to do.

Things happen fast in Amy's kitchen, though she never seems to hurry. She just moves quickly, casually along, from the cutting board to the stovetop, from the mixer to the oven door. Each task takes only as long as it takes. I hadn't known this was a way to be.

Amy taught me that butter should soften on the counter before it hits the table, how to toast pine nuts in the oven and say your own name out loud with proper exasperation when they burn. She was the first person I'd ever met who believed in cooking for its own sake. She'd page through a magazine, spot a cake, and bake it, for no other reason than that it was something she wanted to do.

I loved flipping through her recipe file, a binder thick with photocopies, torn-out magazine pages, and newspaper clippings that peek out on all sides. She stores it flat on a shelf in the cupboard above the oven, and when you pick it up, you have to squeeze so that its guts don't slide out onto the floor. You might think there is no method to it, but from constant use, a natural organization has developed based on what she likes to cook and what our family likes to eat. Recipes made most recently and most often gather at the top of the heap. Recipes made for a holiday meal, she slides back into the pile together, informal family histories of July Fourths and Thanksgivings.

Amy is the one who showed me that even when it seems like there's nothing good around to eat, there almost certainly is. Thaw a tub of chicken broth, open a can of tomatoes, empty the crisper drawer: soup. Fold last night's greens into omelets, chop a lone scallion into a nub of soft cheese. Grab a box of crackers, maybe a bunch of grapes. You have lunch.

Yes, home is a verb. To feel again that my home was mine, I'd need to set it back in motion. Amy understood that, so when she showed up in Cambridge that November, there were suddenly things to do. She made sure of it.

Rearranging furniture was at the top of the list. Amy is notorious for the pleasure she takes in moving things around. A bed turned ninety degrees and pushed back against the far wall, a dresser here instead of there: a new room. We decided to tackle the office-kitchen-overflow room (the one that drove me nuts). Amy and Eli nudged a filing cabinet into position, then lifted the long wooden sidebar away from the wall and slid it up against the windows. I shuffled around, taking stock, relieved by the movement, the newness, the extra floor space.

Amy spotted the philodendron in the other room. It had grown too big for its pot and was shrugging its leaves up and over onto the table. Amy suggested a several-block walk to the hardware store for soil and a larger pot, and I prepared myself the way I once had for my long Sunday runs. A few bites of food. Some sips of water. I tied on my running shoes, and Amy grabbed me a Gatorade from the fridge. We moved slowly, stopping twice so that I could rest and drink.

Back at home, I lay down on the sofa, the muscles in my thighs twitching from fatigue. Amy spread some newspapers on the floor right beside me. She crouched down, dug out the plant and its roots, transferred it to its new home, and pressed the soil into place. As she brushed off her hands, she looked up, and a puff of satisfaction blew through me.






Until I met Amy, potato salad meant mushy peeled potatoes, maybe some celery and onions, and lots and lots of mayonnaise. Amy took a different approach, mixing skin-on red potatoes with crisp green beans and tossing them with scallions, chopped basil, and a mustardy vinaigrette. Over the years, I've tweaked things here and there: radishes instead of scallions; some combination of parsley, chervil, chives, and tarragon in place of basil. I've added hard-boiled eggs, too, which make me feel entirely justified in helping myself to a big bowl of this potato salad and calling it a meal. I like to eat it for dinner with the potatoes still warm—they're nice against the cold, snappy beans—but it's great from the fridge, too, for picnics and packed lunches.

You can boil your eggs for this recipe however you like to boil your eggs. My method is to put the eggs into a pot large enough so that they lie in a single layer, cover them with cold water by an inch, bring to a boil, then immediately remove the pot from the heat, cover with a tight-fitting lid, and let sit for 9 minutes. When the timer goes off, I fish out the eggs with a slotted spoon and drop them into an ice bath to stop the cooking. I recommend starting with eggs that are a week or two old. They're easier to peel than fresh ones.

For the vinaigrette:

6 tablespoons olive oil

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

½ a large shallot, finely chopped

1 tablespoon of chopped fresh herbs, any combination of parsley, chervil, chives, or tarragon

For the salad:

2 pounds red waxy potatoes, scrubbed under cold running water and quartered

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

Diamond Crystal kosher salt

1 pound green beans, washed and trimmed

6 radishes, washed, dried, and thinly sliced

5 large eggs, hard-boiled and quartered

Freshly ground black pepper

Combine all the vinaigrette ingredients in a jar with a tight-fitting lid, shake well, and set aside.

Put the quartered potatoes into a large pot and cover with cold water by an inch. Add a few generous pinches of kosher salt, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are fork tender, about 10 minutes. Drain the potatoes, transfer into a large bowl, and toss immediately with 4 tablespoons of the vinaigrette. Meanwhile, bring a second pot of water to a boil, salt it, and fill a large bowl with water and ice cubes. Blanch the green beans in the salted boiling water for 60 seconds, then transfer them to the ice bath.

Dry the beans and add them together with the sliced radishes and quartered hard-boiled eggs to the potatoes. Add the rest of the vinaigrette and mix gently. Serve right away, or chill it first if you prefer.

Serves 6.

O
n Amy's last evening in town, I wished out loud that I could bake an apple pie. The presidential election was the next day, and we had friends coming over to watch the television coverage. An apple pie seemed fitting.

Amy had only a couple of hours before leaving for the airport, but soon she was cutting cold butter into flour, flicking ice water at the shaggy heap, and patting it into disks. Eli peeled apples. Amy's cousin Sue Lena arrived to drive Amy to the airport and she picked up a peeler, too. My major contribution was holding myself upright in a chair wedged into the kitchen doorway and watching the pie take shape.

It was my grandmother Louise's pie, the apples seasoned simply and splashed with brandy and just enough lemon to help them hold their shape. My grandmother swore by Oronoque frozen piecrusts and kept a neat stack in the freezer in the garage. I'd updated the recipe with a homemade bottom crust and a crackly sugar shell-like lid in place of the one on top. From my chair in the doorway, I told Eli how to make it: Melt the butter over a low flame. Stir in the sugar, then the flour and nutmeg. He tipped the pot in my direction so I could sign off, then painted the soft paste over the bare fruit. When the oven door snapped shut with the pie inside, it was time for Amy to leave.

“I don't want you to go,” I said, wiping my eyes with my knuckles. When we hugged, my helmet clunked against her skull. She gave me four quick pats on the shoulder, her signature “there-there.”

“I'll come back,” she said. “We'll rearrange more furniture.”

Soon after Amy left, the pie came out and Eli placed it on a rack to cool. I stared. Without its aroma, it didn't seem real. It was like seeing a picture in a glossy magazine or an image on TV. For a moment, I actually thought I could smell it, but no. My brain had been fooled by a lifetime of memories that knew just what the scent should be. This pie smelled like nothing.

It's hard to explain what it's like to smell nothing. We have the word “silence” to describe the opposite of noise, the complete absence of sound. But what's the opposite of scent? As far as I know, there isn't a word for it.

Smelling nothing is not the same thing as not smelling anything. I think that's why I'd known right away that something in my nose had gone wrong. You won't smell anything in an odorless room, but you will still detect something inside of your nose, something you'd never notice, let alone think to identify as an actual sensation, if you have never felt its absence. At least I never did. For a smelling person, air has weight, and while you can't smell weight, you can feel it. Much more so than the missing odors all around, the absence of this weight told me every day that my sense of smell had not returned.

I drew my face in close to the pie and inhaled. Still nothing. But the hot steam on my cheeks worked my memory and there they were again, the outlines of scents: apples, cinnamon, brown sugar. I imagined my grandma Louise crouching by her open oven door, checking on her pie. I could conjure the scent of her, too. Like blueberries, first night's sheets, a screen door in the breeze.

She and my grandfather lived just outside of Hartford, Connecticut, up on a hill that had no grass, only trees. It was a long rectangle of a house, low-slung like a highway motel, a single floor that, because of the hill and the two-story drop from the wraparound deck to the ground, felt lodged high among the branches. The nineteenth-century writer and designer William Morris said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” I think my grandparents must have lived by this rule. The décor was midcentury modern, lots of clean, straight lines, plenty of open space. My grandparents traveled to sixty-eight countries together over the course of their marriage, and the treasures they'd brought home were on display all over: a life-sized wooden rocking pig in the living room by the piano, a painting of a naked man smoking a long black pipe over the sofa, and, my favorite, a full miniature orchestra carved from polished stones under glass in the den.

When we'd visit, we'd come in through the garage, usually late at night. I'd squint into the fluorescent light and step into the kitchen. It was our landing pad. The Formica counters and metal cabinets were blue, the walls and floor were white, and the ceilings were the highest I'd ever seen in a house. On the island across from the sink there would always be a basket of fruit with a Post-it note stuck to one of the plums that said, “Washed.” My grandmother would be standing next to it, and I'd run to her and press my forehead against her cheek while she'd hum-grunt into my ear, the same sound she'd make when eating sweet corn. “Hi, pussycat,” she'd whisper. I'd breathe her in, and when she let me go, I'd inhale again and smell something else. It was the scent of arrival, the way our noses tell us, even in the absence of a scent we can name, that we've walked through a door and are now someplace new. Because even without a cake in the oven or flowers on the table, there's skin and dust, the faint aromatic echoes of everyone and everything that's passed through, a scent that's nondescript but for the precision with which you can remember it in your own nostrils.

My grandma was terrific in the kitchen. She made a killer zucchini bread, applesauce by the gallon, and jammy little cookies called coconut walnut delights all from scratch. She could cook. But she also knew how not to, and when not to so that she could get to the eating part sooner and with less fuss, and generally have more fun.

My grandmother was a big believer in the kitchen shortcut. That doesn't sound like the most flattering way to describe a woman who was serious about food, but it all depends on how you understand the word “shortcut.” It's easy to think that shortcuts are for lazy people or people who can't do any better or are okay with second best, but that wasn't my grandmother at all. There's an artistry to cutting corners, to knowing which ones are dispensable and which ones have to stay. Call it intuition or very good taste (I think the two are related), my grandmother had it. Her shortcuts were about being smart, efficient, and direct, exactly as she was in any case, and not only in her kitchen.

Shopping meant going in with a list of precisely what she was after. I never saw her browse. The summer before my junior year of high school, she marched me into a small clothing store and announced, “We're looking for a pair of jeans with plenty of room in the rear.” I fought back tears that night as I told Amy what had happened, but when I walked into school the following month wearing the best-fitting jeans I'd ever had, I felt like a million bucks.

This was why my grandmother loved to shop. It wasn't materialism that drove her, at least not in the shallow sense. It was the awareness that whether we like it or not, the physical objects that we surround ourselves with, the clothes on our bodies, the crackers in our pantries, the art on our walls, are an extension of who we are.

Some people might have a usual sandwich, something they order again and again so that, although all they've done is to consume what's on their plate, they become known for it. Grandma Louise was that way with a lot of things. She had a habit of finding something in a store or a restaurant or a grocery aisle and making it her own. The chocolate mint candies in the crystal jar by the piano, the sugar cubes with delicate flowers made of frosting painted on. She got her corn from a woman known as Mrs. Shmutz.
Shmutz
means “dirt” in Yiddish, and I'd say that my grandmother liked buying her corn from a woman whose hands bore evidence of the farm where it was picked, but honestly, I think what she really liked was how the Mrs. Shmutz moniker made that corn a “thing,” something special and, by way of her profound appreciation of the kernels on those cobs, hers. Everything else was cow corn, she said.

All of this is to say that my grandmother took as much pride in the products she purchased as she did in what came out of her own oven. She knew that something didn't have to be homemade to help make a home.

So I don't think she would have minded that when I think of her kitchen, I remember mostly what she bought. Like the mini pecan rolls in white boxes, tied with string in the way that forms a plus sign across the lid. If the string was loose I could squeeze my hand into the box and slide one out, scraping my wrist against the box's edge. I knew that my grandmother didn't make those pecan rolls, but I thought of them as hers. They were more crust than crumb, burnished, caramel-candied knobs that fit in the palm of my hand. These rolls, my grandmother's rolls, were from William Greenberg's bakery on the Upper East Side. She had discovered them once on a trip to New York City, and since then she would bring them back several dozen at a time for herself and her friends, who were hooked on them, too. The pecan rolls, the mint candies, the whitefish salad she bought for Sunday brunch—the affection I felt for all these things taught me to never underestimate the power of a well-purchased edible.

Years later as a freshman in college, I'd think of her while shopping for student potluck meals. I'd stand in front of the refrigerated case, scanning the rows of hummus, baba ghanoush, and vegetarian chopped liver. The handles of my plastic basket would cut into my hand as I contemplated the relative merits of each tub. I had no kitchen, not a fork or a knife to my name, but when I pulled something of my own choosing off the shelf, a little piece of that dinner became mine.

My grandmother was nineteen years old when my father was born and forty-eight years old when I was. As a kid, those numbers thrilled me. I had the youngest grandmother of all my friends, and I was constantly doing the math. When I graduate from high school, she'll be sixty-six! When I graduate from college, she'll be seventy! I could have a kid before she's eighty. And because in our family people live on and on, she'll have another decade or two to go! I knew four of my great-grandparents, and three of them lived until I was in high school and college. That was normal, to me. But when I was twenty-three years old, and my grandmother was seventy-one, she died. It was all wrong. In my family, you're supposed to get more time. I thought Grandma Louise was the kind of person who lived until a hundred, as if that were a “kind of person” at all. I thought I was, too.

When I was visiting my grandfather a few years later, right after Eli and I were engaged, I found her wedding dress in the basement and put it on. It fit perfectly, as though it had been tailored precisely for my body—for my slender wrists and waist, for my bony shoulders and small breasts. There was plenty of room in the rear.

 • • • 

My doctor had said that my sense of smell would not recover, and I believed him. That was before I knew that doctors sometimes say things like that when actually, they don't really know. It's rare, but olfactory nerves do sometimes recover.

I suspected as much one day, sometime in November, when I walked into the lobby of our building with Eli and felt a rush of something curl up through my nose. I didn't smell it as much as I felt it swirling in my nostrils, pressing against my sinuses, and I had no idea what “it” was. I froze. I asked Eli if there was something in the air, if he smelled anything. “Yes,” he said, “wet paint.”

A few weeks later, Eli came home with sushi, and when he opened the bag, I said, “Oooh, smells cucumbery,” as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I didn't even realize what I was saying until the words spilled out of my mouth. I was getting better. My sense of smell was coming back.