And his sweetest spot—a large underground wine cellar. The walls were made of special stones brought from Hungary’s winemaking region. On them grew a black mold that imparts taste to the wine.
In that cellar, Feri made magic—red, white, sweet, dry, and a Hungarian firewater called pálinka. In no time, we were taste-testing.
“Relieve your glasses of their air!” he shouted. “It’s so good you’re here. It’s like you never left.”
All of Hungary was around us. All our memories. The opera. The historic buildings. The Parliament. The countryside. Yet there was no place I’d rather be than the wine cellar with my husband and our best Hungarian friend.
The occasion called for a special Hungarian stew, Feri said. Traditional, cooked over an open fire. “Tomorrow we slaughter the rabbits. John, you will do so as well.”
“You going to do it?” I asked the next morning in Feri’s guest room, as John buttoned me into my coat.
John is a gentle soul—never hunted, never handled a gun nor wanted to, and certainly never bashed in a rabbit’s head, strung it up by its hind legs, and slit its throat.
“I guess,” he said with a deep sigh.
John helped me into my long black coat, my boots and brace, and parked me outside on the porch so I could watch.
After some pálinka shots, Feri selected the first rabbit to die, a twelve-pound gray-and-white, the largest of his collection.
He bashed it to break its neck, strung it up, and sliced.
“You now,” he said to John.
Together they killed three rabbits, skinned and gutted them, chopped them in pieces, John grimacing most the time.
As I watched, I thought more of John than of the kill, of how bizarre it was to see him doing something I had never seen him do before. And how comforting the sense it gave—that he will have another life one day, without me, full of new adventures.
Feri’s partner, Vikki, brought fixings for the stew: a mound of chopped onion, tubes of spicy paprika cream, a block of lard.
She made dumplings by hand. Feri boiled the rabbits in a cauldron over the fire, adding wine and water and the fixings.
He brought one of his finest wines from the cellar, a cabernet, liquid velvet. We huddled round the fire, our glasses propped in the snow.
I am so glad to be here, I thought. I am so glad to be alive.
Feri spent several days with us, laughing, breaking into show tunes, playing his accordion. He took us to public medicinal baths, drove us around his city, helped suit me up in winter gear. He was a constant presence who lifted our spirits—and occasionally my body, too.
He stuffed us—with wild boar, a smorgasbord of kolbász from venison and other animals, and sour cherry dumplings he fell in love with while working in Russia.
“Eat, eat,” he would say. “There is always more.”
Feri had been an executive with Avon, soaring to success on ingenuity and pluck. As their general manager in Russia, he raised sales by $100 million.
“The Russian women, they must eat lipstick for breakfast,” he said, grinning.
Feri told John and me of a seemingly intractable personal problem he was having.
“Well, if you can’t change the situation, change your attitude,” I told him. “You are the master of your mind.”
“That’s so American,” Feri said, rolling his eyes.
But he kissed and hugged me all the same.
It snowed hard. That was another difference in Budapest this time around, the big, wet snow. John and I had been in Budapest snows before. But we had never seen her gray, gray streets frosted pure white.
We wanted to be out in the enchantment, even though walking in snow was like walking through cookie dough for me.
No bother. You only live once.
John suited me up: coat, brace, boots. This was another good thing about living in Florida, we realized. Warm-weather clothes are easier than cold, especially when you cannot use your hands.
I’ve kissed cold weather good-bye forever now.
But that day it was magnificent. White. New. Barely touched.
We set out in the city to hunt for a restaurant we had eaten at many times. We couldn’t remember its name, only its enormous portions of goose and sweet cabbage with apples worth traipsing through anything to eat again.
And I remembered the location, on a small avenue off a large central square called Deák Ferenc Tér—a place I passed daily when we lived here.
We traipsed and traipsed, around icy spots on the sidewalks, down cobblestone streets, trying not to slip, trip, or otherwise fall. I grew tired. Could barely lift my feet. John wiped snow off a bench and left me there to scamper ahead and scout the scene.
But no matter how we approached Deák Tér, we could not get our bearings. We could not find the little avenue. The billboards on the square and new shops made it unrecognizable to me.
We abandoned the search, saying, “Ah, well, probably closed anyhow.”
After all, the newspaper I’d helped start, the Budapest Sun, had folded three years before.
One day we met up with a former colleague from the Sun, Steve Saracco. We asked about the restaurant. He pointed it out, exactly where it had always been, as he walked with us to the subway at Deák Tér.
John and Steve helped me down the stairs to the subway entrance. It smelled just as it had twenty years ago, of fried dough and fuel. We bought the same little flimsy ticket, punched it in the same little machine, boarded the same grimy escalator cycling too fast. We waited on the same platform, underneath the same hideous orange ceiling for the same blue train.
Sadness hijacked my spirit. We bid good-bye to Steve, and I wept uncontrollably.
“Why are you crying?” John asked.
“I can’t even find words to explain.”
On our wedding anniversary—Valentine’s Day—John and I set out alone. A special night, arranged by Feri, in a suite at the Hotel Gellert.
The art nouveau Gellert, completed in 1918, was like a beautiful grandmother. Worn, outdated, but with classic style. Its stained glass and wrought-iron accents were a delight, even overlaid with Soviet-era eyesores, fluorescent lighting, and bulbous sign lettering from the 1970s.
Feri had snagged us the Richard Nixon suite, so named after the president who laid his head there twice.
“I know. I know. No Tricky Dick jokes,” John said to me.
The room’s small balcony overlooked the Danube River, ice floes drifting upon it.
We donned the bathrobes provided, and John carried me down the stairs to the spa. We parted into the steamy, sex-segregated indoor baths.
I sat alone in the 100-degree water, nestled as close to the font of the thermal mineral spring as possible. Above me were blue-and-green mosaic-tiled domes. Honeyed light streamed through glass ceiling tiles into the steamy, cavernous room.
I studied the women—young and old, bulbous and sinewy, naked and suited. I studied how they glided across the wet tile floors, how they descended the steps into the water so gracefully, how the light glistened upon their muscled limbs.
And I wondered how the hell I was going to get out.
My trips weakened me. I realized that even before Wreck Beach. They broke down muscles that would never grow back.
But they strengthened my mind. My heart.
A fair trade?
By Budapest, I was limping badly. Every time I lifted my left foot to step, the front of it dropped, causing me to trip on my own toes.
I wore a brace, which helped prevent that. But there in the women’s-only bath, I had no brace.
And no husband to lean on.
I sat back in the pool. I had time. This, after all, was the Budapest I loved. The city sits on a vast network of hot mineral springs and is renowned in Europe for its medicinal baths. Baths centuries ol
d, saunas and thermal pools, salt rooms and steam rooms designed to cure any number of ills. Baths are such an integral part of health care that some offer dental services on-site.
I thought of that day in Canada’s Yukon Territory with Nancy, and our magical dip in the outdoor hot spring. There, for a moment, I saw myself old.
Here, I felt myself young.
I exited the pool, clutching the brass handrails at the stairs. Stepped onto the wet tile in the honey-lit center of the room. The ladies in the pools stared as I struggled in the spotlight on the slippery stage—focusing my cosmic zoom on each step, trying not to eat the tile floor.
This is one of those moments I have to choose, I told myself. To feel sorry for myself or not.
I chose the latter.
“How’d ya do?” John asked when we met up again.
“Fine,” I said, excising any drama.
Upstairs in our Tricky Dick suite, we bathed, our first moments completely alone and at peace in a long time.
As he shampooed my hair, I asked John if he was okay with our decisions thus far—not to go Google crazy and hunt false ALS cures, not to clamor to be part of a clinical trial only to receive a placebo, not to falsely hope a drug would come.
Our decision to just be. Accept. Live with joy. And die with joy, too.
“I don’t know how you do it,” John said. “If I were you, I would probably drive myself into a tree.”
“I have thought of that,” I said.
“Please don’t.”
“I won’t. Because the children would never understand.”
“Good.”
“Absent that, I would free you of this burden.”
“It is not a burden,” John said. “The least I can do for you is everything.”
He lifted me from the tub, dried me, combed out my snarled hair, fastened my bra. “This is the one I hook on the loosest notch, right?”
“You are getting good at this!” I smiled.
For the first time, John put stockings on me—silken black ones so sheer he could easily punch a thumb through. “Careful!” I said.
He slipped a sweater dress over my head, knelt, and directed my feet into my brace and boots. “Toe curled?”
My toes had no muscles. Putting on shoes could curl them under my foot, causing considerable pain when I walked.
“No.”
Once again, John negotiated me into the long black coat, bum arm first. “Thumb bent backward!” I said. I didn’t have the strength to push it through the sleeve myself.
And finally a black hat. “Flower not fully forward, please. Looks like I have a bunch of broccoli on my forehead.”
On the way to dinner, I tripped and fell, tearing a hole in my stockings.
“Wanna go back to the room and change?” John said.
“No. I just want to eat and enjoy.”
And there, in a quiet corner of the hotel restaurant, we did.
We feasted on five courses, each with its own wine, laughing at the English translations—“flap mushrooms”—looking back at the menu descriptions, tasting for every ingredient described.
The walnut polenta and ginger of the carrot soup.
The green mussel inside ravioli.
The mangalica pork, from a Hungarian pig with twice the flavor of regular pork.
The marzipan and raspberry gelatin of the dessert tray.
We savored each sip—red, white, pink, dry, sweet.
We talked of the things and people we had to be thankful for. We laughed at how on that same night twenty years ago, after we married, we both had said, “What the hell did we just do?”
We talked of how going abroad had catapulted us into life together and what good partners we had made.
The waiter asked if he could go ahead and bring the check, as the restaurant was closing.
We ended with a glass of fine champagne.
As we walked out, I leaned heavily on John, knowing there was no way I could make it back to the room on my own.
Finally there, he undressed me, piece by piece, and carried me to bed.
The Cruise
March
My Sister Steph
The cruise ship seesawed on the roiling ocean. Passengers tottered sideways, arms stretched to balance, stumbling to handrails.
I clung to my sister Steph like a koala on a tree.
It was less than three weeks since Hungary, a trip that both energized and tired me. At this point in my illness, I couldn’t balance alone on terra firma. That ship, on that windy night, was like dancing on a hammock.
“What brain surgeon thought of a cruise?” Steph said.
“You, my dear.”
Sweet Steph. I think she saw my other trips and decided, Uh-uh, not for me. Steph is a homebody who doesn’t like to fly.
Yukon? No. Hungary? No way. Cyprus, the trip I was planning next? That was my special thing. Steph has promised to take my children there one day, and I believe she will, white-knuckled the whole flight. But that’s for after I’m gone.
For now, Stephanie and I didn’t have a special thing, at least not travel-wise. We were close as kids, though rarely did our social lives intersect. And then, before ya know it, I was traveling the world, and she was married with two babies.
“I thought about what I was missing,” Stephanie says of those days when John and I were traveling in Europe and South America. She was living less than a mile from Mom’s house, raising two kids. “But that’s not me. I’m a nurturer. I like being a mom. And I’m good at it.”
She’s right. Just ask her two fabulous boys, William and Stephen. Her second husband, Don, is the happiest man I know.
And her first husband, Bill, still adores her.
Ask my children. When I began struggling with walking after the Yukon, Aunt Stephanie started coming over every day after her job teaching respiratory therapy at a local college.
Sitting in the backyard, sipping some girlie drink. (But only sipping; Stephanie has the alcohol tolerance of a mosquito.) Watching my kids. Talking about Mom, which helped us love her more. That was our thing.
So for our journey together, Stephanie chose the simplest trip possible. She treated me to a cruise that left port a few miles from our home. It was our first trip together as adults.
I had no clue she had never been on a cruise.
“I envisioned umbrella drinks, sun, and smooth sailing,” Steph said, trying to hold us both upright. “This is a freaking nightmare!”
It was so rough, we beelined for the dining room well before dinner to minimize walking. We sat in the low leather chairs of the bar. “Let’s have a drink. A brandy,” I said.
“Gosh no!” she said.
I looked over. Steph was sitting with her eyes closed, her chair bobbing with the sea.
“I’m just trying to go with it,” Steph said. “I keep telling myself it’s like a hammock. Try to go with the rolls.”
“Do you get seasick?”
“I go green looking at boats.”
We sat silently awhile. An entertainer took to the mike, singing, playing guitar, joking with the audience.
“I’ll go to the room for our dinner reservation card,” Steph said suddenly. And just as suddenly she staggered out, leaving me alone in the bar.
She didn’t make it to the room. Her stomach bum-rushed her on the elevator. She had to pinch her lips together with her fingers to keep the rising tide down.
She made it out of the elevator, thank goodness. And ten steps away to an ashtray, where she erupted.
Some sympathetic soul handed a barf bag over her shoulder, avoiding the line of fire. Bag in hand, she stumbled down the hallway, the staff already heading toward the ashtray with vacuums and towels.
She heard a man upchucking and crying two cabins away. “Man up, will ya
?” she muttered.
She crashed onto the bed and closed her eyes. Each time she opened them, she vomited.
She panicked at the thought of me stranded at the bar, knowing there was no way I could walk on my own, or even push myself out of the chair.
She crawled to the door. Opened it. Called out. Our steward, an Indonesian man named Budi, answered.
“Sister. Susan. Bar. Needs help,” Stephanie said, pausing to quell the queasiness. “Can’t walk. Black pants. Poncho.”
“Poncho? What’s a poncho?” a bewildered Budi said.
“Like a cape. Superman.”
Budi looked more bewildered.
“Ponytail. Go!”
She sent Budi with my dinner card and an antinausea pill.
By this time, I knew she was sick. For fifteen minutes, I had struggled to rise on my own from the low chair, stumbling back time and again.
“Cut her off!” hollered the entertainer.
Good thing I can’t lift my middle fingers, I thought, else that entertainer would be getting a two-fisted bird. I had not had a drop to drink.
But the music was so loud, I couldn’t project my voice enough to ask for help. I slumped back, accepting my fate. What will be, will be.
Eventually, an Asian ship employee approached and handed me a pill. Budi.
Budi gestured as if vomiting. I understood. Stephanie was down for the count.
This is gonna be interesting, I thought.
I placed Budi’s hand on my shoulder, to signal I needed help standing. He fumbled with how to hold me, nearly knocking me over when he placed his hand across my lower back and pushed forward.
“Just get a wheelchair!” called out another employee.
At the cabin, Steph answered the door, hunched over, a green ghost. “Thank goodness you’re here,” she said.
We both lay on the bottom bunk, neither able to climb the ladder to the top. Steph’s legs quivered as she lay, eyes closed, trying not to vomit again.
“There is water here. Drink some,” I said.
“I can’t keep it down. Want me to take your shoes and braces off?”
“No,” I said. “Just rest.”
We lay with our eyes closed, rocked back and forth by the ocean, listening to the waves crashing aside the ship, and fell asleep.
Until I Say Good-Bye Page 12
