Stir (9 page)

I like crème fraîche as the “cream” in this soup for its extra tang, but heavy cream here is also lovely. The soup improves after a night in the fridge, so I recommend making it in advance. Reheat it before adding the lemon juice.

1 large yellow onion

2 pounds asparagus stalks, their tough bottoms snapped off

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Diamond Crystal kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

4–5 cups vegetable broth

½ cup crème fraîche or heavy cream

1 teaspoon fresh-squeezed lemon juice

Coarsely chop the onion. Cut the asparagus into 1- to 2-inch pieces.

Melt the butter in a 4-quart pot over medium-low heat, add the onion, and cook, stirring, until softened. Add the asparagus pieces, a couple of pinches of salt and a few grinds of black pepper, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Add 4 cups of vegetable broth and simmer, partially covered, until the asparagus is very tender, 15 to 20 minutes.

Purée the soup in batches in a stand blender, or use an immersion blender to purée it in the pot. (If you go the stand blender route, wait for the soup to cool a bit and fill the blender only one-half to three-quarters of the way full with each batch. Return the puréed soup to the pot.) Stir in the crème fraîche or heavy cream, then add up to another cup of broth, if necessary, to thin the soup to the consistency you prefer. If you refrigerate the soup overnight, you'll likely want to add the additional broth before reheating.

Taste, and season with salt and pepper. Stir in the lemon juice just before serving.

Serves 4.

A
grocery list is a crystal ball of sorts. You sit down with an empty page and see your table, your lunchbox, your pie plate as they soon will be. A list is pure potential. It means believing in the future, that there is one, and you're in it. It means getting to think about what sounds good, beyond what you're hungry for now to what you might like tomorrow.

I spent my last days at Fletcher Allen hospital making lists. “Food, first week home,” I wrote at the top of a blank white page. I wasn't hungry, but that was beside the point. Sooner or later I would be, and I wanted to be ready.

I organize my grocery lists by department: produce, dairy, center aisles, specialty. My stepmom, Amy, taught me this trick for moving through the store at maximum speed, crossing off items in order. Part list, part map, it's wonderfully efficient. In the hospital, I watched the words appear in my handwriting, the letters slanting and curling in their familiar way, and had the sense that I was tracing, guiding my pen along the grooves of the lists I'd made so many times before. Only this was no ordinary list. I was plotting my escape.

carrots

kale

green apples

yogurt, 2%

milk

sharp cheddar

sardines

rice cakes

almond butter

olives (with pits)

In the bottom right corner of the page I listed my favorite breakfasts and drew a box around them.

crispy rice and eggs

oatmeal

toast with tahini and honey

I'd coax myself back to the table with these things. Surrounded by what she liked to eat before, that same person was bound to turn up.

Here on a normal floor of the hospital, for normal patients, dressed in my own pajamas instead of a johnny, I figured the rest of my recovery would look familiar. Like those draggy days after a stomach bug, maybe, or the end of a bad cold. I was surprised when Dr. Tranmer suggested rehab.

“Just for a week or so,” he said. “To get your strength back. You'll love it there. It's like a hotel.”

The day the two nurses arrived to transport me to the rehab center was not a good one. Or maybe it was just a bad hour. It was like that, one moment sitting up in bed, giddy with thoughts of the produce aisle, the next, nauseated, curled on one side, so heavy with exhaustion I thought the bed might give way.

The nurses strapped me to a wheelchair like a piece of cargo. They lifted my hands and legs into place and draped a blanket over my knees. I let them. I was a lump. Dead weight. My arms were free, but they felt tied into their position, one folded on top of the other across my lap. One of the nurses came around behind me, grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, and we were off, fast. Past patient rooms with open doors, past nurses' stations and orderlies stacking meal trays into carts. There was an elevator, double doors, and then, for the first time in a month, I was outside.

I lowered my eyelids to half-mast and tilted my chin toward my chest. Daylight was different from indoor light. There was more of it, and it came from everywhere. It
was
everywhere. Except for where it wasn't, the conspicuous black hole where the world on my left was supposed to be. I hated that darkness more in the everywhere light of day.

The nurse rolled me into a van that smelled of cigarette smoke. I thought of my grandmother Louise. This was the way she'd traveled after her stroke, in a van with a wheelchair slot. The nurses locked my chair down into the floor the way I'd watched my grandfather do so many times. I felt as though my body had calcified into a hard shell, so rigid that I could climb right out and leave an intact fossil behind. When the van turned, the chair tugged against its anchors, and I feared it would come loose and tip me onto the floor. A few minutes later, we were there. The nurse wheeled me inside. It smelled like a nursing home, medicinal, sterile, musty with the odor of sick people. It smelled like freezer burn.

As far as rehab centers go, it wasn't bad. It was clean. The people were nice. Still. I wouldn't need my shopping list there.

We passed some patients as the nurse wheeled me to my room in the brain injury wing. A guy in his early twenties was wearing a metal brace like a cage around his torso. It connected to a pole that ran along the back of his neck, which in turn connected to several bowed pieces flush against his scalp. Rods shot out of the contraption from there, up and over his head, like a crown. He jerked down the hallway with his legs in a too-wide stance and his arms out to the sides. Someone else walked with a bar across his shoulders that seemed intended to help him balance. Another person was in a wheelchair with her face drooping off to one side. A couple of patients had guards sitting outside their doors to make sure they didn't leave.

These were my neighbors in the neuro wing. I did not want to be these people. I did not want even to be in the same category as these people. And I wasn't, not really. But I'd come awfully close.

I soon realized that I was in the best shape of anyone there. Not because of anything I had or hadn't done. What happened, what hadn't, what could have, what should have—none of it had been up to me. The thought terrified more than it comforted: My health was as much a fluke as the next person's illness.

“Whoa,” people would say when they heard my story. “You're one lucky girl.” They were right, of course. But the relief in their pronouncements unnerved me. There was a ring of finality to them, as though I'd fortuitously stumbled to the side just as a runaway truck barreled past, and I could now go on my merry way. I was still so in it, though. At once wishing myself away from the mess I was in, and throbbing with gratitude that I was there to wish anything at all.

My room looked just like the hospital room I'd left not an hour before. Same stiff sheets, same blanket, same sink by the foot of the bed with the same antibacterial soap dispenser fastened to the wall. The only difference was that, now, I shared a bathroom with a diarrheal logging accident victim one room over. This was no hotel.

A nurse helped me onto the bed. I sat sidesaddle, with my feet dangling a few inches off the floor. A neurologist came in and ran me through the usual tests, shining lights in my eyes, having me touch my nose with one finger, then the other, with my eyes open and closed. “Follow me,” he said, slapping his thigh with his palms a few times, then with the backs of his hands, then alternating between the two, front back, front back, faster, faster. I did what he did and for a few seconds we slapped away together, like something out of a Three Stooges routine. I felt a laugh creeping up on me, pressing itself against my pursed lips. I looked over at my parents, who had just arrived. They were smirking, too, and my laugh pushed its way out.

 • • • 

The day I checked into rehab was a Friday. My mom would be heading back home to Cleveland that afternoon. First, though, she would help me take a shower. I hadn't had one since the surgery, since I'd lost the vision in my left eye.

She wheeled me down the hallway to the shower room, spread a towel on the plastic seat beneath the showerhead, and helped me undress. She turned on the water and lowered me onto the seat.

I love a long, hot shower at home, but here it was all wrong. The numbness of my forehead and scalp was disorienting. I couldn't tell when my head was fully beneath the stream of water, and I was too weak to turn around and look. In a few places with faint sensation, the water didn't feel wet or even warm; it was just pressure, which, aside from feeling strange, made me nervous. I imagined the droplets hammering into my scar, loosening the stitches, and my head filling with water like a fish bowl.

I tried to do things myself. I squirted some shampoo into my palm and felt around on the top of my head for where to shampoo. There were clumps of blood in my hair. My arms ached and I let my mom finish the job. I wanted to shave my armpits and wondered if now I'd always have to twist my neck around, as far as it could go, in order to see the left one.

The heat in there was beginning to be too much. I felt sleepy and nauseated. My mother quickly scrubbed my back and did some work on the glue that still clung to my arms and torso from a month's worth of IV tape and electrodes. Then she wrapped me in a combination of johnnies and towels, wheeled me back to my room, and got me dressed. She combed through my hair, picking out wet flakes of blood as she went. Then she rearranged my shoes along the far wall, straightened the soda water bottles on the windowsill, lined up the tissues, the call button, the hand sanitizer, and the can of ginger ale on my rolling bedside table, and left.

Crispy rice and eggs was at the top of the breakfast list I made that day at Fletcher Allen. The recipe is a plan of action for any rice you may have left from the previous night's dinner. I usually add whatever other leftovers I find lurking in the fridge: sautéed greens, roasted carrots or brussels sprouts, chickpeas, anything that looks as though it would be at home on a bed of crisp rice beneath a runny fried egg. I eat my rice and eggs with hot sauce and a big spoonful of tangy yogurt on the side of the plate.

Olive oil

½ cup cooked brown rice (Go ahead and use white if that's what you've got.)

2 large eggs

Diamond Crystal kosher salt and black pepper

Plain, whole milk yogurt and hot sauce for serving, if you'd like

Pour a generous slick of olive oil into an 8- or 9-inch cast-iron pan and place over medium-high heat for 3 minutes. Scoop the rice into the hot pan and spread evenly across the surface with a spoon or rubber spatula. Reduce the heat to medium and cook for 60 to 90 seconds. Do not stir. While the rice is frying, crack the eggs into a small glass.

In the center of the rice, dig two holes, each one a little larger than an egg yolk. Pour one egg into each hole—some of the whites will seep into the surrounding rice—and cook for 2 minutes. Still, don't stir. Season with a generous pinch of salt and a couple grinds of black pepper. Turn on the broiler, and slide the pan beneath it for 1 to 2 minutes, until the whites are set and the yolks are warm but still runny.

Shimmy the rice and eggs onto a plate, helping it along with a spatula, if necessary. The whole thing will transfer like a pancake. Top with a few shakes of hot sauce and a generous dollop of yogurt, if using, and serve immediately.

Serves 1.