Being Esther

by Miriam Karmel

  While Toots prepared the cookies, Esther watched from across the table, as she’d done so often in her own mother’s kitchen. Unlike Toots, Esther’s mother never consulted a recipe. In fact, not until Esther received the cookbook from Toots had she considered how instinctively her mother prepared the dishes that had been passed down from one generation to the next, as if she hailed from a primitive culture with an oral tradition. Mrs. Glass threw in a bit of this, a bit of that, tasting as she went along.

  Toots lined the cookie sheets with small chunks of dough and chatted in such easy tones that only later did Esther feel the sting of her mother-in-law’s acid tongue. “Marty isn’t like you, Esther,” Toots said, as she gently rocked the back of a fork over a spoonful of dough, creating decorative ridges like shoes leaving impressions in freshly fallen snow. “My son doesn’t have the stomach for peasant food,” she said, in the same even voice she might have used to report that she’d just run out of milk.

  Then with her free hand, she picked up a burning cigarette (there was always a burning cigarette) and took a drag without, miraculously, Esther thought, dropping ashes onto the dough. Squinting at Esther through a cloud of smoke, Toots said, “You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  Esther nodded. And though she was too young and inexperienced to understand what Toots was up to, she sensed it was best not to reveal that the first time she brought Marty home for dinner, he ate two helpings of her mother’s luxen kugel. And when he agreed to an extra serving of brisket, her mother turned to Esther and beaming, said, “He eats like a horse!”

  Mrs. Glass prepared homely food, in shades of brown and beige—thick soups with barley and lima beans, heavy poppyseed cookies, noodle puddings that sat in your stomach for hours. Beet borscht, the lightest dish in her repertoire, happened also to be the most colorful. Even her desserts—yeast cakes with plums, stewed figs, and prunes—were as drab as the shtetl from which she hailed. Still, Esther believed that blindfolded, her mother’s cooking would have earned blue ribbons at the state fair.

  Yet Esther never learned to cook at her mother’s side. The few times she asked how to prepare a dish, her mother would shrug and say, “You shid a rein,” which sounded like something one would not want to associate with either the preparation or the consumption of food, but which merely meant throw in a little of this, a bit of that. Each of her mother’s dishes was an improvisation, a jazzy riff, a variation on a theme. Like snow-flakes, no two were alike, yet each iteration was remarkably similar to the one that preceded it, and each was received with pleasure.

  And so Esther, who could neither shid a rein nor bake a butter cookie, started marriage with a handicap her mother-in-law clearly intended to rectify.

  Esther prefers not to think of her early experiments with cooking when, shaken by Toots’s remark about Marty’s delicate stomach, she enrolled in the Antoinette Pope School of Fancy Cooking.

  By the time Esther arrived (she took two buses and walked six blocks), Madame had measured the ingredients into Pyrex bowls and lined them up, in order of their introduction into the dish du jour, on a long counter that looked more like a bench in a chemistry lab than the red Formica table in Esther’s kitchen.

  Esther came prepared to roll up her sleeves and put on an apron. But Madame did all the cooking. Once again, Esther found herself sitting on the sidelines.

  At the first class, Antoinette, or Madame, as she preferred to be called, demonstrated how to make marble cake by running a chocolate swirl through the center of a pound cake. In time, Madame demonstrated egg rolls, shrimp de jonghe, and chicken Alfredo. There was nothing particularly Chinese or French or Italian about these dishes, though Esther wasn’t to discover that until years later, when she and Marty had money to travel.

  Madame had a fondness for molded creations with an oddly anthropomorphic bent: Colonial Doll Salad (molded shrimp salad with a doll’s head on top); Mock Chicken Legs (a piece of pork, wrapped in a strip of veal, to resemble a chicken leg); and Snow Man Salad (three scoops of rice, with raisin eyes and a red pimento mouth).

  On the last day of class, Madame set the students loose to make Bird-of-Paradise salad, an elaborate concoction involving, among other things, fresh pineapple and a potato. Madame deftly quartered the pineapple, while the students followed along. “Careful. Careful. Careful,” she chirped. “You must not cut off the top, because soon, I am going to show you a trick.” But first, Madame did something with the potato, and when she was finished, she beamed. “Voila! The head. La tête.” Finally she revealed the trick, tugging and pulling apart the leafy pineapple fronds, in a vague approximation of ruffled tail feathers.

  Esther tried following suit, but pricked her finger on the pineapple leaves and had to take time out to tend to the bleeding. And hard as she tried she couldn’t keep the potato from flopping off and rolling onto the floor. After the last beheading, Esther looked around the room and saw that the other students had grasped something that she had not, for she was surrounded by a covey of pineapple birds.

  That afternoon, Esther slipped out of class without saying goodbye to her classmates and without, though it had been her intention, asking Madame to sign her copy of the cookbook. And she left behind the card upon which Madame had typed the recipe du jour.

  In time, Esther became a confident cook, willing to experiment with new ingredients and the latest recipes, though for years she avoided anything fancy or French.

  When Ceely asks her mother why Mrs. Singh’s arm is in a cast, Esther says, “It is?” She has been playing solitaire at the kitchen table and continues riffling through the deck while her daughter charges around unloading groceries. Esther, who doesn’t recall asking Ceely to deliver groceries, is beginning to feel like an unwelcome guest in her own home.

  “It’s not hard to miss,” Ceely says, as she shelves some cans.

  “She’s a very private woman,” Esther replies, then directs Ceely to set the soup on the lower shelf. If Ceely insists on delivering groceries, despite Esther’s pleas that she can buy her own, then the least she can do is store them in the right place.

  Ceely slams the cans onto the lower shelf before turning to face her mother. “There’s nothing private about a cast,” she says.

  “She fell, I think. Tripped on the hem of her sari.” Esther hums as she slaps a red jack on a black queen. “That was an accident waiting to happen.”

  Ceely narrows her eyes at Esther. “Why don’t I believe you?”

  Esther recalls the young doctor’s interrogation, the way he stood over Marty’s bed shouting, “Marty! How many fingers do you see?” Marty’s desperate eyes darted from the doctor’s hand to Esther’s face. She mouthed the answer, praying that he would repeat it and the doctor would proclaim him cured and send him home. But the doctor wouldn’t let up. “What year is it? Who’s the president? What’s the date?” Finally, Esther intervened. “Please, doctor,” she pleaded. “Leave him be. My husband has taken enough tests in his life.”

  Esther frowns at the cards, looking for a place to set the three of clubs. “Believe what you want,” she says. “I didn’t make the world.” Then she looks up at Ceely. “Sit a minute. We’ll have tea. Or coffee. I’ll make a pot.”

  Ceely says she doesn’t have time. Ceely never has time.

  For a while, the two women work in silence. Then Esther says, “Mrs. Singh probably has osteoporosis.”

  When Ceely counters that even then, something had to cause the fracture, Esther reminds her that Helen Pearlman’s fifth and sixth vertebrae snapped while she was lying in bed. “Doing nothing. Just lying there.” Again, she looks up from the cards. “At that fancy place where you want to send me.”

  “Mrs. Singh isn’t old enough to be spontaneously breaking apart.” Ceely wrings out the sponge as if she were strangling it. “And I’m not sending you anywhere.”

  Esther sets down the cards and considers her daughter, who is now wiping the counter. She’d be prettier if she weren’t so tightly woun
d. When had she become so overbearing, so, Esther hates to think, so insufferable? She imagines Ceely penciling sex onto the calendar.

  “Listen,” Esther says. “Listen to me.” Surely, Ceely will listen to reason. “That place reminds me of a Holiday Inn . . . or worse, a well-appointed funeral parlor.” Does Ceely really expect her to live there? Cedar Shores! Bingoville. The warehouse of the living dead. What else would you call a place where people line the lobby, slumped over in wheelchairs or staring into space? The spry ones shuffle along on canes or walkers, some with oxygen canisters trailing behind them, tubes up their noses. All the silk flowers, all the tasteful upholstery, can’t disguise the stench of resignation that fills that place. The hospital where Marty died wasn’t as bad. It, at least, offered a whiff of hope, a chance for release. But nobody escapes Bingoville. No exit. No way out. No way, Jose. Esther is having none of it. For what? To ride a van to the supermarket on senior citizen Tuesdays? Attend the weekly ice cream social?

  But Ceely isn’t listening. “You’ll have fun,” she insists, as if Esther might confuse Cedar Shores with a Princess cruise to the Bahamas. Ceely is like a yappy dog, the kind that won’t let go once it sinks its teeth into your calf. “I forgot! There’s concierge service. Twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Well, I have Milo,” Esther sniffs.

  “Milo?” Ceely cries, in disbelief.

  “Do you have a problem with Milo? Last week he fixed the toilet when it wouldn’t stop running. And he has such nice manner. He takes his Cubs hat off whenever he sees me.”

  After Marty died, Esther worried that she relied too much on Milo. More and more she called on him to repair the things that once she might have overlooked—running toilets, clanging radiators. She enjoyed watching him work, the way he held the light-bulbs with the tips of his fingers, as if he were handling quails’ eggs. She noted the way he set a faded beach towel on her kitchen floor and arranged his tools on it, before tending to the leaky faucet. He hummed while he worked, but rarely spoke. Perhaps he was reluctant to speak a language he could not command. Yet when he misappropriated verb tenses and turned simple declarative sentences into questions, Esther gently corrected him and he didn’t mind. At first, Esther thought he might be Russian, but then, through the grapevine, she learned that Milo Belic, his wife Lena, and his mother, had moved to Chicago from Serbia three years ago. It was rumored that in Belgrade he had worked as a lawyer or a doctor.

  Now Ceely is saying, “It’s not your faucets that concern me.”

  “Then I don’t know what you’re worried about.” Esther slaps a six of hearts on a seven of diamonds. “Besides, he used to be a doctor.”

  “He used to be a paramedic.” Ceely exaggerates the words and rolls her eyes.

  “Doctor. Paramedic.” Esther shrugs. “And another thing.” She pauses to set a nine of spades on red hearts. “What was last Thursday about? You showed up out of the blue, hustled me into the car, and drove me to that place with the mauve napkins. You wouldn’t even give me time to change.”

  “You looked fine, Ma.”

  “I suppose for a place like that, I looked fine. But nobody would have mistaken me for Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

  “Trust me. You looked fine. We were just going to check it out.”

  “Aha!” Esther slaps down an eight of diamonds. “So you admit it. You kidnapped me.”

  “Kidnapped?” Ceely rolls her eyes. “We had a date. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember plenty. I remember staying up all night with you when you had the croup. And how about that episode in Vermont?” Esther doesn’t mention the time Ceely moved back home to find herself, having had enough of that commune in Vermont. Papers and books, suede boots and turtleneck sweaters were strewn from one corner of the house to the other. For three months, Ceely camped out at the dining room table translating poems by Fernando Pessoa, a writer Esther has never understood, not even in English. But why bring all that up now?

  “I won!” Esther cries, as she sets down another card. Then she sweeps up the deck and as she sets up a new game she volunteers that Mrs. Singh was mugged. “There. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “Satisfied?” Ceely cocks her head to one side, as if trying to make sense of a child’s musings. “I wouldn’t say that. But it goes to prove that the neighborhood isn’t safe. You’ll be much better off moving.”

  “Safe, schmafe,” Esther says. “Now sit a minute.”

  Ignoring her, Ceely draws a box of All-Bran from the bag as if she’d pulled a rabbit from a hat. “Ta-da!”

  Esther sighs and rolls her eyes. How many times has she told Ceely that she likes Lucky Charms. She enjoys guessing whether the sugary pellet melting on her tongue is a star, a clover, or a moon. “But this is better for you,” Ceely would say, sounding like a TV commercial nobody believed.

  On Mother’s Day this year, Ceely gave Esther a portable phone with colossal buttons that Esther at first mistook for a toy. Ceely’s gifts are like that: lights activated by the clap of a hand; a call-for-help device Esther is supposed to wear around her neck; an ergonomic can opener; a large-print edition of Newsweek, which Esther barely has time to read, as it takes most of the week to get through the New Yorker. Esther has tried explaining that her glaucoma, which is under control, does not interfere with her reading. But Ceely knows best.

  Esther would prefer a silk scarf, perfume, even a box of chocolates, or that old cliché—flowers. She imagines telling Ceely that though she is old, she hasn’t lost her capacity for the sensual. But then Ceely would coo, as if Esther were a child who doesn’t understand that what she really wants is the whole-wheat fig bar and not the chocolate cupcake with buttercream frosting.

  Ceely pours the All-Bran into Esther’s favorite blue bowl, and as she slices banana on top she lectures her mother on the benefits of potassium.

  Esther, who doesn’t recall asking to be fed—she’s already eaten—says, “I’ll bear that in mind. And by the way, nice haircut.”

  “Thanks,” Ceely says, sweeping her bangs back with a forearm.

  Ceely has thick auburn hair, cut short, at odd angles. Esther once had hair like that, hair she could do something with. Then one day, she couldn’t. Now every time she looks in the mirror all she can see is a woman well past her prime, with hair that resembles a collapsed soufflé.

  As she sets the bowl in front of Esther, Ceely reports that her in-laws have just sold their house for over three hundred thousand dollars. “They paid eighteen for it in 1954.”

  “I remember when gum was a nickel,” Esther says.

  “You remember everything,” Ceely snaps, then suddenly brightens as she seizes the opening her mother has unwittingly provided. “You remember everything,” she repeats, “except where you left your purse, your glasses, and . . .” She pauses, picks up an empty bag and, skillfully as an origami master, begins pressing creases into it. “And your keys,” she says, as she creates another fold.

  “Oh boy,” Esther mutters. Then she considers the bowl Ceely set in front of her, never mind that she’d been in the middle of a game. “First I’m moving. Now it’s the keys.”

  “Yes, the keys,” Ceely says. “We need to talk about that.”

  “What’s there to talk about?”

  “You don’t want to end up on a guardrail?” Ceely’s voice rises. Her speech is halting, deliberate, like Esther’s when she speaks to Milo, who studies English for Newcomers at the community center. “Do you?”

  Esther wishes she had a hearing aid to turn off, but despite the other infirmities of aging that plague her—glaucoma, arthritis, and slightly elevated blood pressure—her ears are in good working order. “People die when they give up the keys,” she says. She picks up her spoon, eyes the cereal, and sets the spoon down. “But don’t worry. I’m not driving.”

  “You could kill someone, Ma. Remember the man who stepped on the accelerator instead of the brakes and drove into a pedestrian mall?” Furiously, she creases the bag. “Eight people dead
.”

  “I’m not driving,” Esther lies. She looks down and considers the cereal, which even in her favorite bowl resembles kibble.

  “Then sell the car. Get rid of it.”

  Ceely holds out her hand, as if she expects Esther to fork over the keys this very minute. Ceely is as sure of herself as Dr. Levenson. The two of them are probably in cahoots.

  At her last appointment Esther could tell, by the nutty brown dome of his head, that Dr. Levenson had been somewhere warm. “You’ve been traveling,” she’d said.

  “Acapulco,” he replied, as he peered into her eyes. “Next winter we’re going to the Galapagos. To see the turtles. The kids are old enough now.”

  After switching on the light, he cleared his throat and looked down at his tasseled loafers. “Esther.” He cleared his throat again, paused, and still looking down at his feet, he said, “You shouldn’t be driving.”

  When Esther replied that she didn’t drive much, and never at night, he said, “That’s good. That’s good.” He let a few seconds pass. “But I’m talking about the daytime, too.”

  There he was, the picture of health, full of pronouncements and sunshine. His tan would fade soon enough, but next winter he’ll swim with the turtles and acquire a fresh glow. Dr. Levenson was a good man. Still, Esther resented the assurance with which he spoke of the future. What’s more, he knew nothing about her past.

  The day Marty brought the car home he tooted the horn until she had to go out front and see who was making such a racket. There he was, sitting behind the wheel of a silver convertible, sporting dark glasses and a fedora. “Come on Essie.” He tapped the horn in a syncopated riff. “Let’s go for a spin.”

  He drove for miles, hugging the lakeshore, winding down Sheridan Road, snaking through the ravines all the way to Winnetka, where he pulled into a spot overlooking the beach. After shutting the engine, he pulled her close and kissed her. Seventy-something years old, and he was taking her to a lovers’ lane.