One day, my mother told me she wanted to go to Shopsin’s. Kenny Shopsin, whom I’ve known for forty years, is legendary in New York City for many reasons: because he is one of the great short-order cooks of all time, because his various restaurants have all been tiny but he never has had less than a five-hundred-item menu, because he creates unique and extraordinary dishes like mac-and-cheese pancakes and an egg dish called Blisters on My Sisters. But his fame has largely spread because he terrifies his customers. He won’t seat more than four people at a table. If you try to circumvent this rule and, say, sit with two of your friends at one table for three while two other friends sit at another, Kenny will throw you out of the restaurant. If you try to order a standard dish—one you’ve never tasted—but ask for him to, say, do it without the onions, he’ll throw you out of the restaurant. If you just seem like the kind of person he doesn’t like, he’ll throw you out of the restaurant. Kenny’s motto is “The customer is almost never right.” I love Kenny Shopsin.
Kenny is quite a profound person, but without question he is also the most profane human being I’ve ever met—another reason he can make strong customers cower in fear. He cannot get through a complete sentence without using several nine- and ten-letter words that would make a sailor blush. He will say anything to anyone and not give it a second thought. So the idea of putting him together with my mom made me tremble just slightly. But I promised her we’d go. Before we went, however, I called Kenny.
“My mom’s eighty-five years old,” I said. “So try to be on your best behavior.”
His comeback was: “I’m always on my best behavior.”
True enough. That’s what I was afraid of.
I took my mom down to Shopsin’s and Kenny came over to join us. He knew my mom’s food background and they discussed that for a bit. He was charming and friendly. I relaxed. Then my mom said, innocently, that she’d had dinner the night before at Daniel, Daniel Boulud’s restaurant, which many people think is the best restaurant in New York. Kenny nodded politely and said, “Do you want to hear my theory about Daniel Boulud?”
I wanted to say, “No,” but I was too late.
“I think he’s a great chef. I don’t have any argument with that. But my palate isn’t nearly good enough to appreciate how fine he is. And I think most people are like that. They don’t really understand how good his food is. They just go to his restaurants because they’re famous, and everyone tells them they’re great, and people are sheep, so they go to the place that has Michelin stars and they tell everyone they’ve eaten there. But they don’t really have a clue about the food.” My mom nodded, not disagreeing, and then Kenny made his final point. “It’s like fucking a five-hundred-dollar hooker with a ten-cent dick, you know what I mean?”
There was a decent pause. I worked up the nerve to look at my mom. She was staring blankly ahead. Then she nodded and said, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.”
* * *
I THINK THE main reason my mother came back to NYC was to be near her sister Belle. The two of them had gotten even closer after my dad died. They enjoyed each other’s company, could reveal things to each other that were deeply private and personal, and had fun together. My mother, although the younger sister, felt a certain pride that she had helped lift Belle out of the narrow life she had led for many years—bringing her into the more sophisticated world in which my mom thrived—and she liked the idea that, having moved back to Manhattan, she could keep Belle on a closer tether to that world. But soon after my mom’s return, Belle was diagnosed with cancer and a year or so later, she died at the age of eighty-two.
I was asked to speak at her funeral and, although I humiliated myself by being unable to get through more than three or four consecutive words of the eulogy without bawling like a baby, I did manage to make one thought clear: Belle was a better, kinder, and more interesting person at eighty than she had been at forty.
My most rigid theory about people is that as we age we become more and more like our true selves. At first I thought that Belle had broken that mold. Then I realized she hadn’t. She had fought for decades to tamp down her true self—partly out of familial duty, partly out of fear, partly because that’s all she knew how to do. But with my parents’ help—or more likely, with my parents as a kind of escape hatch—the older she got, the more she allowed that true self to emerge. By the time she died she was one of the funniest, sharpest, most interesting, most moral people I knew.
Belle’s death was another blow to my mom, but she continued to amaze me with her resiliency. In Belle’s absence, she grew closer to her sister Lil. As did I. Lil was as steely as my mom and Belle, possibly even more so, without the softer side. She was tough, tough, tough. But very smart and fascinating. She would tell stories about living in California as a young girl pre–World War I and talk about going to speakeasies in New York City (and drinking the psychedelic absinthe) during Prohibition. Well into her nineties, she could still tell you the exact address of her favorite 1920s speakeasy.
My mom also began traveling even more often. One of the places she now went, along with her niece Beth and one of my mom’s oldest friends, Esther (Esther had been married to Albert, the frustrated garment exec/Dixieland drummer who played at Arthur’s in the West Village), was a restaurant in Sicily that had become near and dear to my heart: Gangivecchio.
In 1991, Janis and Norton the cat and I spent a week traveling around Sicily. Before we departed, we read a New York Times article by Mary Taylor Simeti about a place called Tenuta Gangivecchio. The intriguing elements in the article were: this was the best restaurant in Sicily, it was housed in a thirteenth-century abbey, and it was nearly impossible to find. Eating at Gangivecchio immediately became my quixotic quest.
Amazingly enough, considering my total lack of any sense of direction, we found Gangivecchio and had the best lunch imaginable: veal rollatini, pasta with five-nut pesto sauce, and, most memorably, small turnovers fried in lard and stuffed with warm lemon cream. Three days later we were in Agrigento and instead of spending the day among the magnificent Greek temples, I insisted we make the three-hour drive back to Gangivecchio so we could repeat our lunch. It was even better the second time around. The food was just as extraordinary but we also sat and talked with Wanda and Giovanna Tornabene, the mother-and-daughter team who owned the abbey and ran the restaurant. Wanda didn’t speak a word of English, although she seemed to understand everything we said, and Giovanna spoke a lovely, fractured English that made me swoon. She was also brilliant, charming, and captivating. Wanda was mostly scary. She was like my aunt Belle on steroids—if Belle also had a shotgun and a history of fending off local mafiosi trying to collect protection money.
Wanda’s and Giovanna’s lives changed quite a bit as the result of our second lunch. I convinced them to write a cookbook, which they did, and then they wrote two more. Their first two books won James Beard Awards. They promoted the books throughout America, turned their stables into a lovely nine-room inn, and, as a result of their publishing success and ensuing publicity, people started to come from all over the world to eat and spend a few days there. My life changed as well.
I bought the renovated 150-year-old stone caretaker’s cottage on the abbey’s property after the six weeks I spent holing up there to finish writing my novel. My daily routine for those six weeks was: wake up early and go for a run in the mountains. Upon my return, Pepe—the man who did everything imaginable for the Tornabenes—would knock on my door and say one of the three phrases he knew in English, “Breakfast is ready.” I’d have some strong espresso and fresh fruit, then write until one o’clock, at which time Pepe would again knock on my door and utter phrase number two in his English vocabulary: “Lunch is ready.” After lunch, I’d write for a few more hours, then exercise like a lunatic because I knew what was coming, and then at around eight o’clock, I’d hear the final words of Pepe’s trilogy: “Dinner is ready.” I would then go to the abbey and, night after night, eat more than a pou
nd of pasta. My pasta eating became somewhat legendary. Years later a friend stayed at the cottage, came back to New York and incredulously asked, “Did you really eat over a pound of pasta every night?” At first I denied it but, under pressure, was forced to capitulate. It was on the final day of that six-week writing and pasta-eating jag that I called Janis, who was in New York, and we agreed to buy the cottage.
My mom, Beth, and Esther spent a few days eating and cooking with Wanda and Giovanna. My mom fell in love with the place, as I had—the rusticity and occasional lack of heat and hot water in the cottage didn’t faze her one bit—and she came back raving about one pasta dish in particular: Buccatini with Cauliflower, Pine Nuts, Currants, Anchovies, and Saffron. My mom was a pasta lover and she thought this was as good as it got.
I don’t use this word lightly or flippantly, but my mom, as she approached eighty, was “cool.” And I don’t say this only because she was willing to rough it in the Sicilian cottage. She understood instinctively why, at the age of thirty-eight, I quit my relatively high-powered publishing job and took off for Provence. She appreciated nonconformity, didn’t place much value on material possessions, didn’t care what anyone’s net worth was. She had long outgrown her Pollyanna-ish view of the world yet, with a remarkable lack of cynicism, saw life for what it was and people for who they were. She inherently understood people’s actions. She knew immediately when someone was bullshitting her—a word she came to use more and more; she loved saying “bullshit”—and she had a real sense of whether someone was fake or genuine. She had an unerring radar when it came to assessing other people’s motives. I think it was because hers were usually pure.
She had one absolute blind spot, to which she was entitled: her grandson. She never said no to Morgan, the product of my brother’s second marriage. My mom loved him without equivocation and with no strings attached. He understood that from a very young age, grew to appreciate it and depend on it, and he never abused that love or took advantage of it. He was unfailingly polite to her, which was particularly sweet, and he not only took great interest in the things that interested her, he gently forced her to take interest in the minutiae of his own life. She was always attracted to young people and the immersion in his world and interests helped keep her young. My nephew—as I have told him many times—has done a lot of dumb things and things of which I’ve disapproved, but he never, not once, treated his grandma with anything but genuine love and respect.
Part of my mom’s blinding love for Morgan was an extension of my dad’s near-insane and manic captivation with him when Morgan was just a baby, a way of keeping my dad’s feelings and wishes alive. But my mom’s love was real and heartfelt, no question about it—and it stayed that way even as she began to also disapprove of some of his choices. But disapproval had nothing to do with how much she loved him and how much she supported his choices.
His parents divorced when he was young. During Morgan’s teenage years my mother, approaching eighty, became his rock, the one thing he could count on and know would never disappoint him.
And when Morgan was twelve or thirteen years old, he became very interested in food and cooking. In college he took cooking lessons. My mom brought him to good restaurants on his New York visits and kvelled when he experimented with tastes and fearlessly tried the unknown. Morgan has inherent taste when it comes to food.
He has my mom’s taste.
* * *
ON OCTOBER 5, 2008, a Sunday, a couple of months after my mother’s eighty-sixth birthday, she, Janis, and I had lunch with some of my cousins (on my dad’s side). My mom was in good spirits. She loved and enjoyed her nieces and nephews and the feelings were mutual. There were also plenty of great-nieces and great-nephews and my mom liked keeping tabs on them and knowing that she was, to a degree, a part of their lives.
After lunch, we had our usual taxi argument. The way it worked is that I’d hail a cab and my mother would insist that Janis and I take the first one. Even when it was snowing or pouring rain. Once when it was so windy we thought she might blow away if we didn’t hold on to her arms and keep her feet on the ground. We’d explain that she was in her eighties, somewhat frail, and that she should take the first cab that came by. She’d shake her head and insist. I’d roll my eyes and insist back. She’d insist more vehemently. Finally, Janis would wind up saying, “Judy, get in the damn cab!” On this particular Sunday, we put her in the taxi around three in the afternoon and she headed uptown.
Around one o’clock the next afternoon, I got a call from my mother’s close friend Jan (not to be confused with Janis). Even though she was thirty or so years younger than my mom, they were inseparable. Jan checked in with her every day and they saw each other constantly. On the phone, Jan told me the following:
Knowing my mom was a psychotically early riser (she refused to ever stay in bed much past six a.m.), she called my mother’s apartment around eight. No answer. She assumed my mother was already out and around. By eleven in the morning, she was concerned that they hadn’t yet connected, so she went over to my mom’s building. The doormen let her up to the tenth floor and, stepping out of the elevator, she saw that my mom’s newspaper was still in the hallway outside the door. She knew something had to be wrong—there was no way my mother could still be in bed at that hour. Jan had a key and let herself in. She found my mother on the floor of her den, unmoving, unable to speak, but alive.
Her bed had not been slept in so doctors later estimated that my mother had her stroke sometime between three thirty and nine p.m., which is when she might have normally turned in for the night, or at least gotten under the covers to watch TV. My mom did have one of those “Help, I’ve fallen and can’t get up” things that she wore at home since she had her first stroke, but this attack came so suddenly and violently that she hadn’t had time to press the button. Once down, she was paralyzed and couldn’t move to reach it. She had been alone, overcome by the stroke, unable to budge, for at least fourteen hours, perhaps as many as nineteen. To recover from a stroke of this magnitude, the medical consensus is that the stroke victim must be discovered and treated within an hour of the attack, two at the most.
My mother was rushed by ambulance to Lenox Hill Hospital—conveniently one block from her apartment—and taken to the emergency room. I left my office, frantically hailed a cab, and met Jan there. Although she wasn’t related and thus met some resistance from the hospital staff, she had refused to leave my mother’s side.
My mother spent much of the afternoon lying on a mobile cot in the ER hallway. They were waiting for the right doctor; they were waiting for the MRI to become available; they were waiting to get her in the line for a CAT scan. She’d finally get one scan taken, then back she went to the hallway. No matter how much I yelled, insisted, or even tried to bribe, my mom spent at least eight more hours strapped to the gurney in the hall. Somewhere around nine p.m., she was finally under proper doctor’s care and taken for more tests.
Jan and I went to a restaurant a block from the hospital. All I remember is that it was a French bistro and we both downed a decent amount of wine and neither of us ate much. Around ten o’clock, we went back to the hospital. It was difficult to attract anyone’s attention or to get answers about my mother’s condition. One of the attendants was absorbed in Monday Night Football on the TV at his desk and was loath to look away or respond to my badgering. Around midnight, we were told that she would not regain consciousness that night and there was no real reason for us to stick around. Quite a few of those hours at the hospital are blurry in my memory. I know that Janis joined me for a good part of the time, as did Beth. I know that it didn’t occur to me to call or e-mail anyone else to reveal what was happening. I was able to focus on only one thing.
The next morning, I was back at the hospital, first thing. One of the doctors came over to tell me that there was too much swelling for them to be absolutely certain, but it looked like the stroke had been very powerful and had hit my mom in the worst possible spot,
the dead center of her brain. As a result, it was likely that she would have locked-in syndrome—she would not be able to speak or move a muscle for the rest of her life.
The doctor told me I could see her and I found her in a curtained-off cubicle in the ER—she still had not been admitted to a real room in the real hospital. Her skin color was a faded and pasty green, her hair was sweat soaked and matted to her head. She looked to me as if she had died several hours ago. But when I stepped in, her eyes opened.
“Lookin’ good, Mom,” I said. And she rolled her eyes.
That roll said, “Don’t be a smart ass.” Her eyes also said: “How did this happen?” They showed humor and defiance. And utter exhaustion.
The next day, finally in a real room, she moved her left arm. The left arm they said would never move. Her finger crooked and made a slight motion that I should come closer. The finger they said would never move. And then she spoke, which they also said would never again happen. The words she spoke were: “What a lot of shit.”
The next day my mother began physical and speech therapy—much to the shock of everyone in the hospital. They said that it was impossible for my mother to be doing what she was doing. I shrugged. I’d seen it before. The physical aspect was arduous and extraordinarily difficult. Straightening her head, aligning it with her spine, took a Herculean effort. Speech therapy was frustrating agony for my mother and fascinating for me. Her speech therapist was remarkably patient and gentle. She would start by asking my mom to fill in the blanks in a sentence. She would say, “I went to the store to get some ________ for my cereal.” And my mother would say, “Cows.” I couldn’t help it, I’d laugh, and so would the therapist and so would my mom. But the therapist would explain that it was a good answer because it was close enough to one real and obvious answer—milk, and cows produced milk—to show that the brain functions were working.
My Mother's Kitchen Page 21
