by Julia Pandl
High school was marked by World War II, and after graduation, George enlisted in the army. He was an infantryman and a radio operator, and it’s safe to say he hated just about every minute of it. The war was essentially over by the time he landed in France and made his way to Germany. He participated in one battle on the Ruhr River, where, he said, “The Germans gave up in a hurry.” It was April 1945.
I’m grateful that it all went well. Grateful that my family was left with boyish letters about eating candy and ice cream until fillings fell out, playing poker and Ping-Pong at the Red Cross, sitting under cherry trees watching dark-haired German girls in red dresses hang silk stockings on the wash line, drinking cheap wine and expensive beer poured with a pathetic head, and standing guard in the rain, arguing politics with the random English-speaking prisoner.
George had the luxury of disliking the army for its food, politics, and bureaucracy and because it took him away from home, not because it forced him to kill. Though I never asked him, I suppose he was thankful too that he never had to take a life or give one. He knew others had afforded him the ability to simply witness, for the most part, the aftermath. Humbled, I believe, by the fact that his predecessors had paid the ultimate price, he never spoke much of the war.
Back home, George had his heart set on the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but there were so many GIs flooding college campuses in 1946 that he couldn’t find housing, so he stayed home and worked for a year before deciding to give Cornell University a try. He inherited a little of Grandma’s moxie. After being accepted to Cornell, he took the train to upstate New York without any formal housing set up. When he arrived, he dragged his army-issue duffel bag around Ithaca, knocking on doors until he found a room for rent. In contrast, my parents dropped me off at college three different times: once in Madison, once in Omaha, and once in Chicago. Schlep around town knocking on doors? I don’t think so. Every time I went to college the Buick was loaded to the ceiling with sweaters, books, tapes, linens, and a bunch of other shit I just couldn’t live without.
My mother’s life ran parallel to my dad’s all those years. They crossed paths a thousand times and connected, I guess, on one thousand and one. Terry grew up on Shoreland Avenue in Whitefish Bay, less than a mile from the Inn. She attended St. Monica’s grade school, went to daily Mass, cherished the smell of Monsignor Dietz’s cigar, and learned the Palmer method, all just one year behind my father. She had two sisters, Betty Lu and Dorothy, two brothers, George and Bobby, and a dog named Mickey. My mother was number four, sandwiched between the two boys. She grew up a tomboy and developed an impish charm that could disarm the devil.
Terry wasn’t much for jobs, at least not ones that paid. She graduated from Mount Mary College, became an occupational therapist, and got a job at a psychiatric hospital in northern Illinois, which, as she remembers it, was not a new millennium mental health facility. In fact, she called it two parts One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, one part Psycho. Whenever Terry spoke of the job, I laughed as if she were telling some ridiculous story about a complete stranger. Something about her working with the mentally infirm just never seemed right.
She stuck it out at the job for exactly eight weeks, throwing up every Monday morning. The breaking point was the day a sedated schizophrenic male patient escaped after ripping open the front of her blouse, scattering the tiny buttons across the tile floor and exposing her utility bra. She wasn’t the type to sacrifice modesty, advances in mental health be damned.
Her father, also named George but affectionately known as Daddy, died of a heart attack at fifty-nine. Daddy, having the benefit of being dead, was forever eulogized, while her mother, Nana, because she lived, was often criticized. Life and death are strange that way.
Nana and I had the chance to meet on several occasions. Her skin, flawless even after eighty years, fit her round, childish cheeks like an old friend. She smelled of Emeraude. She arrived at our house on birthdays and holidays with a box of Russell Stover chocolates in one hand and her turn-of-the-century hearing aid in the other.
She had trouble remembering I existed. But I was the last in a line of twenty-three grandchildren, so I couldn’t really blame her. When I was eight, she was eighty-six. After school one afternoon, I hopped on my bike and rode down to visit her at the Shorewood Hospital. Hospital in those days was code for nursing home. It was April or May. There was a chill in the air, thick with the smell of the first grass clippings of the season. I coasted down Prospect Avenue with my coat open, letting the breeze glide down the front of my plaid jumper, excited about surprising my Nana. I tossed my bike in a bush outside, took the marble stairs two at a time, rounded the corner, and headed down the hall toward her cauldron of a room. The radiator threw off enough dry heat to bake a cake, but Nana sat in a high-back chair next to her bed, wearing a thick wool sweater around her shoulders and an afghan over her knees.
“Hi, Nana,” I said, leaning in and planting a small kiss on her doughy cheek.
“Who’s there?”
“Julie.”
“Julie who?”
“Julie,” I said louder, directly into the receiving end of her handheld hearing aid.
“I don’t know any Julie.”
“Yes, you do, Nana, it’s me.” I could see by her vacant stare that she had no idea who I was, so I took a step back, hoping I’d come into focus, set my hands on my shoulders and said again, “Look, Nana, it’s Julie.”
“I don’t know any Julie. You don’t belong here.” She stood up, grabbed me by the arm, and led me out the door. For a second I thought she might be right, and she was not my grandmother after all.
We shuffled down the carpeted hall toward the oval desk at the top of the stairs. I saw the look in her eye. She planned on turning me in. I caught a glimpse of the nurse on duty. In my mind’s eye she looks like Nurse Ratched.
I shook my arm, looked my grandmother in the eye, and said, “Nana, it’s me, Terry’s daughter.” She and my mother had the same full face, the same smooth and satiny white Irish skin, and the same blustery gray-green eyes.
“I don’t know you,” she said.
Wobbly tears of invisibility bulged over the corners of my eyes, hugging my nose as they slipped down my own silky skin. “Nana.”
Then she stopped, looked down, and laid her thick fingers on my cheek. “Oh, Julie!”
“Yes.” I let out a deep sigh.
“Julie! You’re Terry’s daughter.” She took my hand in hers and led me back down the hall as if nothing had happened.
It’s about time, I thought, rolling my eyes.
I still feel like the anonymous Pandl at times, even now, the one who looks like the rest but nobody remembers. Whether it’s your grandmother turning you in to the nurse on duty or the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department chasing you down the beach, being what’s-her-name has its advantages, believe me.
5
Bon Appétit
It’s true what they say about the shoemaker’s child never being properly shod. While the restaurant brunch was a heavenly extravaganza, the food in our home refrigerator was mostly rotten—not completely, but mostly.
My father was very careful about what he served the restaurant customers. Their food was perfect: fresh, pretty, and delicious. Our food at home, though, was big, grayish brown, frankly a little scary. Nothing ever smelled quite right. Things liquid, like milk and juice, were thick and lumpy, and things usually chunky, like tenderloin tips, managed to break down and become brown, green, and viscous.
The only notable exception was beer, which in our house was a food group. My father enjoyed a head on his beer the way most people enjoy breathing. The perfect pour was a work of art, as in Michelangelo’s David, only slightly more awe inspiring. In other people’s homes or in other restaurants, he tolerated a lifeless pour in a dirty pint glass, but on his own turf it had to be served in a squeaky-clean frosted pilsner, stein, or even wineglass, and it had to have a thick, foamy head, ready to slip over the
rim. Beer had to be pretty. An imperfect pour was a disaster, as in the Bubonic Plague, only slightly more frightening.
So my siblings and I, and our friends, approached everything in the fridge except beer with trepidation. You didn’t just grab something and stick it in your mouth. This I learned at age four, after I popped a ham roll-up in my mouth and, while leaning against the open refrigerator door, promptly threw up on the kitchen floor. Eating in our house was a process. First, food was eyeballed with an attempt to identify; then it was smelled and, finally, rinsed, scraped, or cut.
Our food came home not through the normal grocery store channel but via the backseat of my father’s car. Eggs came by the flat of thirty; cheddar cheese came in a ten-pound block; cottage cheese came in a five-pound white bucket; tenderloin tips, spaetzles, red cabbage, and curried chicken drummies came in glass gallon jars. Our hamburger patties did not arrive frozen in neat packages with appetizing pictures and nutritional information; no, ours had been removed from the back of the refrigerated drawer on the cooks’ line, wrapped tightly in bloody plastic wrap and tossed in a Becker meat box next to a bunch of celery, a pint of strawberries, a few pieces of crusty cheese, a pile of loose mushrooms, and a stack of invoices that needed filing. And everything weighed a ton. I used a wagon to move the summer sausage from the fridge to the cutting board; the same wagon was used when the neighbor kids borrowed our gallon of maple syrup.
At home, my father enjoyed the sport of trying to slip rotten food past unsuspecting persons and creatures. Depression-era desperate to have food consumed rather than thrown away, he toyed with recipes. He tried to re-create my mother’s macaroni and cheese using crinkle-cut clumps of moldy, unmeltable mystery cheeses leftover from the Wednesday night buffet. He put ancient Vienna beef hot dogs that he found in the back of the freezer in a batch of beautifully fresh spaghetti sauce. When no one fell for it, he retrieved the hot dogs, along with a box of waffles he’d recovered during the same freezer expedition and nailed them to a tree outside the kitchen window. We learned to be very careful about what we put in our mouths, but the birds and squirrels were on their own.
Even houseguests were not safe. George and I busied ourselves in the kitchen at the Oostburg house one night while my mother and her best friend, Ellen Noonan, sat chatting in the living room. Katie was downstairs switching a load of laundry. Dad opened the upper oven and said, “Whoops.”
“What?” I looked over.
His brow furrow in a brief moment of hesitation. Then he clicked his tongue in his cheek as if to say, Oh well . . .
“What?” I asked again.
“The chicken wings from last night,” he said, staring in the oven. “I put them in here when we were cleaning up and I never took ’em out.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if to ask permission and then smiled.
“No, Dad.”
He closed the door, turned the oven on, and chuckled quietly.
“Dad, you can’t. Mrs. Noonan—she might get sick.” I guess my mother was already immune.
“Oh, c’mon, don’t be ridiculous, they’re fine. I’ll turn the oven up and kill anything that’s in there.”
“Dad, no.”
“Ah”—he raised his finger—“don’t say another word.”
Katie brushed past me a few minutes later and I whispered, “Don’t eat the chicken wings.” But Mrs. Noonan, like the birds and the squirrels, was on her own.
Occasionally food items passed the eyeball and smell tests with flying colors, only to fail miserably upon hitting the taste buds. George made me a rib-eye one night when my mother was out of town. A hint of suspicion crossed my mind when I saw only one steak in the sauté pan, surrounded by a pile of soft mushrooms and sweet onions. But the thing looked and smelled so delicious it immediately put me at ease.
“Aren’t you eating?” I asked.
“No, I’ll eat later.”
“Do you want part of that steak? I can’t eat the whole thing.”
“No, no, it’s okay. Just eat what you want and I’ll eat the rest later.” Just eat what you want—another big red flag.
But I only shrugged and went into the sunroom to grab a TV table.
My mouth watered. He had seared the meat to perfection—dark brown on the outside and pink and juicy on the inside—placed it on the heated plate just so, with the onions and mushrooms spilling down at six o’clock, and sprinkled it lightly with seasoned salt and pepper. He even garnished the plate with a sprig of parsley. “Wow, Dad, this looks amazing. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Bon appétit,” he said as he sat down to do his paperwork.
It cut like butter—a little too buttery for a rib-eye. I speared a forkful of the steak along with a mushroom and a few onions, popped it in my mouth, and knew instantly that something was amiss. It was like chewing the gauze off a festering open wound. The onions and mushrooms did little to disguise the noxious flavor as the meat slipped down my throat. I looked over and saw my father watching me.
“Dad!” I yelled, gagging.
“What?” He raised his eyebrows and shoulders, trying to look innocent.
“How old is this steak?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s got a little age on it.” He chuckled.
“Ugh.” I spit out the bit still in my mouth. “Seriously, you’re laughing? It’s not funny.”
“Oh, c’mon, it’s not that bad. Don’t be such a baby.” He laughed again. “What do you think they did in the covered-wagon days?” George loved to throw the covered-wagon days at us, as if he had single-handedly pioneered the West.
“Honestly, Dad,” I said, wiping my tongue with my napkin. “Did you have to save it from the covered-wagon days?”
He never learned. Once, a few weeks after Easter, I caught him peeling eggs that had been boiled and dyed on Good Friday and used as part of the centerpiece on the dining room table. “What are you doing?” I asked. Of course I knew, but I desperately wanted to be wrong.
“Making egg salad.”
“No, Dad, you can’t.”
“What do you mean, I can’t? Why?”
“Those eggs have been sitting on the table for weeks.”
“These eggs are perfectly good. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. Look.” He held out one that he had just peeled.
“It’s pink.” I fumbled through his finished pile and picked up another. “This one’s purple.”
“So?”
“So, you don’t think anyone is going to be a little reluctant to eat rainbow-colored egg salad?”
“So what? A little dye’s not gonna hurt you. Gad’s sakes, you kids, how do you think the West was won?”
“I think, maybe, they didn’t have time to dye eggs when they were busy winning the West.” I walked away. No warning required on the egg salad. Anyone stupid—or blind—enough to eat that had it coming.
All these peculiarities in the food department ironically created a family of adventurous, unfussy eaters. How this happened remains a great family mystery. Instinct, survival, hunger—who knows? One would think that we’d be skittish around food, but we respected it, no matter how it smelled, whether it was veal saltimbocca, pheasant under glass, or some petrified nugget found hiding in the butter.
Food was sacred, not to be toyed with or thrown away. We discussed it, complained about it, and even cried over it, but somehow we knew it was bigger than a basic necessity. Food did much more than satisfy our appetites. It put a roof over our heads and shoes on our feet, sent us to private school, and paid for college. Sure, we all hid our fair share of gray tenderloin tips under the radiator against the wall, but eventually food taught us the basics: how to entertain, how to clean up after ourselves, how to behave. It worked.
That’s as simply as I can put it. Rotten, fresh, messy, pretty—it didn’t matter: my family came together around food.
6
Goddamn It, Jeremiah
As a family approaches double digits, chaos happens. It’s inevitable. S
omewhere around the fifth or sixth kid, parents completely lose control. Mine did. They showed no signs of surrender; there was no white flag, only big brown drinks. Then they disappeared.
Survival was the key word for all of us. I have no idea how any of us managed it, as life in our house was an every-man-for-himself scenario. You never revealed a weakness, such as thumb-sucking or bed-wetting. God forbid you developed acne or BO or put on a few pounds. You’d never hear the end of it. One well-placed blackhead could render a fairly healthy self-esteem paralyzed for months, even years.
Memories of growing up are chaotic. They’re mental snapshots, really, random, not linear at all. I remember stepping off the curb in front of our house on Prospect Avenue; the screech of tires; the iron grill of a car so close to my face I could lick it; the gray hair, green eyes, and ashen face of the woman behind the wheel; my mother’s knee pressing into my stomach and her right hand slapping my bare butt. I remember throwing up stuff—vegetable soup, chocolate chip cookie dough, Rice Krispies treats, salami and cheese and tenderloin tips—sometimes on my bedspread, sometimes on the bathroom floor, inches from the toilet. I remember sitting on a lap at the kitchen table while the friend of one of my siblings tried to teach me how to smoke. I remember being afraid the ash would burn my blankie. I was a chunky baby, with thick thighs, like loaves of French bread, and I had wispy, dark brown hair, eyes almost black, and big full lips.
