Stir (3 page)

This is the almond cake that met me that night in Ohio. It's my secret weapon in the kitchen, one of those cakes that comes together in no time from practically nothing, but is so pretty and tastes so good that no one ever believes you. Amy got the recipe from her friend Patricia, who clipped it from
The Columbus Dispatch
, and I've adapted it here. For short, Amy and I call this cake “Marcella's” after its creator, Marcella Sarne, who entered it in a baking contest sponsored by C&H Sugar and won, to the tune of a grand-prize custom kitchen.

My friend Janet suggests sprinkling a pinch of salt over the batter together with the toasted almonds and sugar. My friend Janet, by the way, is a genius. Covered and stored at room temperature, this cake keeps well for several days.

Butter and flour for the pan

3 heaped tablespoons sliced almonds

¾ cup (1½ sticks; 170 grams) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled

1½ cups (300 grams) granulated sugar, plus 1 tablespoon for finishing

2 large eggs

1½ teaspoons pure almond extract

1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon fine sea salt

1½ cups (188 grams) all-purpose flour

A pinch of sea salt flakes, like Maldon, if using (see
headnote)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and butter and flour a 9-inch fluted tart pan with a removable bottom.

Spread the sliced almonds in a single layer on a baking sheet and toast them in the preheated oven for 5 to 7 minutes, until fragrant. They should color only lightly.

Whisk together the melted butter and 1½ cups sugar in a large bowl. Add one egg, whisk until fully incorporated, then add the other and whisk some more. Add the almond extract, vanilla, and salt, and whisk well, until smooth. With a rubber spatula, fold in the flour until just combined.

Spread the batter evenly in the prepared pan and scatter the toasted almonds, sea salt flakes, if using, and 1 tablespoon sugar over top. Bake for 35 minutes, until the cake peeking through the almonds takes on a faintly rosy color (this cake blushes more than it browns), and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool on a rack until nearly room temperature, then ease the cake out of the pan and cool the rest of the way.

Serves 8 to 10.

A
t first, I didn't understand what all the fuss was about. I was in the ICU. The Pit. Okay. But the scans had shown nothing broken in my brain, and this sounded like good news to me. A doctor stopped by my corner of the Pit and basically confirmed as much. He said that sometimes, for unknown reasons, there is a spontaneous bleed, and then the brain just heals itself up.

I liked how he called it “a bleed.” As a noun the word was far less forbidding, like how smoking can kill you but going for “a smoke” sounds all right. A bleed was no big deal. A dot of blood from a finger prick, a scraped knee. He said I'd be out of there in a few days.

Meanwhile, I lay in bed feeling not bad at all. The nurses brought me foam lollypops dunked in water for me to swipe around my mouth, since I wasn't yet allowed to drink. The first one was a revelation, but I was over it by the fourth or fifth, and getting thirsty. So that wasn't great. Mostly, though, I felt okay—and vaguely guilty about that, like when you're home sick as a kid and the Tylenol kicks in, and you suddenly feel quite well, but get to go on watching
The Price Is Right
and eating all the Jell-O you want.

Everything had taken on a sheen of novelty—the monitors, the buttons that adjusted my bed. When you turn eight in my family, you get to go on a trip somewhere by yourself with the grandparents. They took me to Toronto. It was only Canada, but it was still a foreign country, the first I'd ever visited. I adored the marks of foreignness: the highway signs in French, the kilometers per hour, the colorful money, the black squirrels. I liked the feeling of heightened curiosity that came with being somewhere new. Living amid the unfamiliar made me feel up for anything.

The hospital had a similar effect, at first. I'd seen a lot of these things in the movies or on TV, but never up close. Electrodes stuck to my chest measured my heart rate. A glowing red meter taped to my index finger checked the oxygen in my blood. (My “E.T. finger,” Eli called it.) A catheter emptied my bladder into a baggie at the foot of the bed. An IV machine hooked up to my right arm would beep when the liquid neared empty, and often for no reason at all.

While I wasn't exactly comfortable with all those tubes and wires poking into my body, it was too soon for them to be anything more than a nuisance. Meanwhile, it was all so interesting. I'd hold my breath to see if I could get the numbers on the screens to jump around. I'd lift an arm and watch the lines on the EKG spike. It wasn't the end of the world to be stuck here for a few days. I was just passing through, a tourist on my way home.

My family started arriving early that evening. Eli's parents drove from New Jersey and got there first. I'd been keeping myself occupied by translating songs into Yiddish in my head, and I was in the middle of “Over the Rainbow” (
ergets, ibern regnboygn
) when they arrived. I asked my mother-in-law, Sarah, a native Yiddish speaker, if she knew of a specific word for “chimney tops.” “Rest,” she said and patted my arm.

I
was
resting. This was the longest I'd done nothing in years. The previous semester, in addition to studying for my exams, I'd finished up my coursework, taught two classes, organized a conference with a colleague, and written a paper that I'd presented there. No wonder my brain had sprung a leak.

My father showed up next. I was feeling so well that I was just plain old happy to see him. “I'm okay, Dad,” I said. “Really, I'm fine. Could you tell him?” I asked the nurse.

Finally, my mother arrived. She'd gotten a call from Adena first thing that morning. When she hung up the phone, she grabbed a few things, got in the car, and drove. It's almost eleven hours by car from Orange Village, Ohio, to Burlington, Vermont, but this didn't surprise me. Her response to potential crisis is locomotion. When she arrived, she looked awake, alert, and beautiful—especially so, even—as though she'd been staying at an inn around the corner, heard I was laid up, then showered, dressed, and walked the two blocks over. I remember her by the entranceway of the Pit, scanning for me while the nurse pointed. I hoped hard she wouldn't cry. When she didn't, it seemed a great act of kindness.

After my parents had come and gone, my overnight nurse appeared. She was petite and pretty with blond hair to her chin. Like everyone I'd met that day, she put me right at ease. She told me that since nothing had come up on my scans, it was now official that I wouldn't be having surgery, and I could put something in my stomach.

I began with a sip of water. I couldn't believe its softness, a silk ribbon tumbling down my throat. I could have a lemon ice, she offered, and when it came, I smiled in recognition. It was a brand called Luigi's, the same kind that my in-laws stock in their freezer. Eli and his siblings prefer the strawberry, which is sweeter, and softer against the spoon. I say there's nothing like lemon after a Friday night meal of meat, more meat, and potatoes, and my father-in-law, Steve, agrees. He stomps up the steps from the basement freezer, calling, “Luigi's! Luigi's!” in a fake Italian accent, hands over the strawberry cups to the others with equally phony disdain, and sits down next to me with the lemons. The others empty their cups first, and we're left scraping away together, just us two. That I had a lemon Luigi's in my hand that first night in the ICU felt like a very good sign.

When I finished eating, the nurse suggested I sleep. She said that, if I wanted, she could rub my back for a while. She helped me roll onto my side, slathered her hands with lotion, and stroked downward between my shoulder blades. Her hands were cool. I relaxed. Exhaustion tugged at my eyelids. I felt so comfortable there, so taken care of, with my family tucked into motel beds down the road. The pain was gone. There would be no surgery. That there was still blood of unknown origins pooling in my brain didn't faze me.

But my nurse that night, she knew. She must have. She knew what happens when the body tries to reabsorb blood that's where it never should have been. As she smoothed the lotion over my body, I let myself sink into sleep. I looked forward to waking up the next morning. I looked forward to going home.

E
li and I met at the table. It was the first Friday night of my first week of my freshman year of college in New York City, and I had walked the three blocks from my dormitory to sit in the common room of another dormitory and eat a proper family-style meal. Yes, you read that correctly. I was eighteen years old with my parents five hundred miles away, the entire city at my fingertips, a loaded MetroCard that my grandparents had given me for graduation, and, TGIF, I was going to spend my evening in the faintly damp-smelling common room of a college dormitory eating chicken.

The invitation was for a traditional Jewish Friday night dinner, the first of many student-hosted Sabbath meals I'd attend over the years. The table that night was actually several tables, dragged from neighboring suites and pushed together into a long banquet-style strip by the wall and covered in overlapping paper tablecloths. There were a lot of us, sixteen at least. We had to squeeze to fit around the table, and those of us on the wall side had to inch our way to our seats, single file. Across from me was a skinny boy who'd brushed out his curls into a wavy, sideways flop.

It was Eli, of course. He was totally annoying.

He sat all crooked with his left arm draped over the back of his chair, and when he spoke, which was often, he'd cock his head to the side and hold out his right hand, palm up, as if expecting a tip. He wasn't loud or rude, in fact, he seemed smart, but he was talking about the gap year he'd just completed in Israel, and all he could do was complain. Let me rephrase that: His parents had just paid for him to live for an entire year overseas, and all he could do was complain.

Eli grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community where the norm is to spend a year after high school in Jerusalem at a yeshiva, a religious academy for the study of Jewish law. Eli's parents are educated, left-leaning intellectuals. His father, Steve, is a psychiatrist who adores German opera and studies Hegel and Kant for fun. His mother, Sarah, is a social worker who once chained herself to an embassy in the name of human rights. The Orthodox Jewish schools that Eli attended as a kid were fairly liberal. Somehow, though, he ended up in a yeshiva in Israel that was not. According to the rabbis there, university could lead only to sin and blasphemy. They urged him to give up secular pursuits, spend his days studying Talmud and little else. Eli resisted, to say the least.

He skipped class. He found a bookstore that sold Penguin Classics, those paperbacks with the yellow covers, for just ten shekels each—no more than two or three American dollars—and picked up one after another. He read
The Iliad
,
The Odyssey
,
The Secret Garden
, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Daniel DeFoe, Dickens, Jules Verne, Proust. Any English-language anything he could get his hands on over there. He made it through the year that way.

I didn't know any of this that night at the table. All I saw was a thankless kid, rocking back and forth on the hind legs of his chair. We didn't exchange a single word that night. Sometimes, in the dining hall or around campus, I'd pass him, just a chest and a head floating above the giant black portfolio he carried around for his drawing class and two legs sticking out below. We never waved hello.

The following fall, he joined the choir that I'd been singing with all freshman year. He had come into the audition with a yellow Discman, stuck one headphone into his ear to find his starting note, and, looking very serious indeed, busted out a colossally earnest rendition of “Brian Wilson” by the Barenaked Ladies. He had never sung in a choir before.

Between us, he was just okay. But we'd lost a tenor to graduation, and Eli had potential.

“He's a cutie,” my friend Robin said after he left the room. I shrugged and said he wasn't my type. (As though I had one. I was dating my first-ever boyfriend at the time, the same guy who'd been my first kiss at age eighteen and a half, less than a year before.) More to the point, everyone agreed that Eli seemed like a good guy, which, when you're a group of only sixteen singers with away gigs most weekends, is important. Eli was in. And after a few rehearsals even I had to admit he was kind of likable.

For one thing, he brought the best snacks. Sunflower seeds, salted, still in their shells, pints of fresh berries, sugar snap peas, dried cherries. These things are expensive, splurges on a college budget, but he shared. I'd never even seen a dried cherry before, nor had I ever been particularly moved one way or the other by a dried fruit. Dried cherries, though! Intense like you'd never expect from something so shriveled and small. A single cherry could launch its sweet-tart flavor straight up into your soft palate. Wake your salivary glands right up.

Eli was taking a sculpture class that semester and would often come to rehearsal straight from the studio with smudges on his white tee and his chin-length curls pulled back into a ponytail. It surprises me how much I remember about him from the early days of our friendship: his stride, how he was always leaning back slightly, even while walking, his skinny silhouette, his hands crammed into the pockets of his wool coat. “Hey, Jess, howya doin'?” he'd say. I liked that.

The following semester, I enrolled in a basic drawing class. I didn't know the first thing about sketching pencils, charcoals, or vinyl erasers, so I asked Eli, the only visual arts major I knew, to accompany me down to Pearl Paint on Canal. We'd never hung out just the two of us. It's a long subway ride from 116th to Canal Street and back, and we talked the whole way.

I told him about how coming to school in New York had felt like coming home, even though I'd moved away from the city when I was five, about these classes called “ear training” that I had to take as part of my music major to learn how to transcribe music the way you would a spoken dictation, and how I wasn't very good at it. He told me about his own drawing classes, what made his instructor so good, his frustrations when he put pencil to paper. His second major was computer science, and he talked about coding in terms I'd never considered. It was a form of art, too, he said, a way of bringing something beautiful into the world that hadn't been there before. Eli knew stuff about buildings and architecture and the history of squatters' rights. In fact, he seemed to know something about everything. He didn't lecture or flaunt. Rather, it was as though his whole life he'd been quietly gathering treasures. Little nuggets and gems of things he had heard or seen or read, and he was just uncurling his fingers to share them.

I want to pause here to cross my heart and swear that the thought of Eli Schleifer as love interest never entered my mind. Not once. Yes, he was easy to be around, and he made me laugh, and think, and taught me new things all the time. Whenever we spoke, my skin felt more like my own. But, you know, that's all.

Besides, he had a girlfriend. A smart, sexy, funny, gorgeous girlfriend named Rebecca, someone he'd agonized over for months until they'd finally gotten together and who, in my estimation, was his perfect match. Then there was the matter of my own sweet, handsome boyfriend. Which wasn't a “matter” at all except, perhaps, for the fact that I was secretly having to convince myself to love this very good man.

People sometimes ask me if there were signs—a faint hum of attraction, a “what if?” moment in the privacy of my mind—and if, looking back, I can see them. Nope. Sometimes it takes time to know what you know.