by Suzan Colon
By fall of the following year, we had enough money for our Bermuda vacation, and off we went on our big trip—not only my first plane ride, but Mom’s as well. We were so excited, and every bit of scrimping and saving we’d done seemed to be worth it. We even had a little extra left over since the plane tickets and hotel had been cheaper than Mom had expected. Nobody mentioned that rates to tropical locations usually are lower during the hurricane season.
We were trapped in the hotel room with no television but plenty of entertainment in the form of gale-force winds knocking down palm trees outside, along with some hail. Not that we saw any of this—metal storm shutters were sealed tight behind the tropical flower-print curtains. We sat in that tiny space reading, rereading, and re-rereading the local newspaper that had been left before deliveries were halted due to the weather.
After three days we’d had enough, and the skies were clear enough for us to fly home. The only things I remember from that trip are how sweet the Bermuda butter tasted, and that Mom and I laughed until we were gasping when she said, “We ate all that stinking liver … for this?”
• • •
NOVEMBER 2008
HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
I don’t have an empty coffee can because the one in the fridge is still half full, and I’m making that coffee last as long as possible. But Nathan has a can covered with vintage soda ads that’s about the right size, and it makes the same satisfying metallic clunk! when a coin hits the bottom.
“What’s that for?” Nathan asks when he hears the clunk! one morning.
I tell him about how we’d used the coffee can to save for the trip, and then again to put money away to get a new TV set. “A black-and-white Motorola,” I say proudly as I put our new can on top of the fridge. “Mom got the floor model at a discount. The thing was huge, and when we got it home she carried it up three flights of stairs herself because she didn’t have enough to tip the cab driver to do it.”
“Don’t you think our extra money would be better off in a bank?” Nathan asks.
“Which one: a bank that’s been seized, or maybe one of the banks that’s being bailed out?”
“Point taken,” he says. “Well, we have a TV, and I’m guessing you don’t want to go back to Bermuda. So what are you saving up for?”
“I don’t know … I hadn’t thought about it yet. Maybe a bottle of perfume, or a romantic dinner at a nice restaurant for us. By the time I have enough, we’ll figure it out.”
I know that Nathan is right; any spare money we have would be better off collecting interest in a bank. But as the days go by, the financial news continues to get worse, and logic be damned—there is something very reassuring about the simplicity of tucking away a dollar here or a nickel there in that can. Mom and I would cheer every time we heard that clunk! Today, it just sounds so much better than the yawning, empty silence of my retirement plan.
A few weeks later, Nathan presses sixty dollars into my hand—a tip from a client he did repairs for. “Put this in the can,” he says.
6
DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE
Chicken Pie à la Mississippi
OLD FASHIONED METHOD
Start with a 4 pound chicken. Cut the chicken up as you would for frying and simmer the pieces in boiling water until tender. About 30 minutes before the chicken is done, add a chopped onion or two. Add a dash of pepper, a dash of salt, and a little Worcestershire sauce. Leave the bones in the chicken. When it’s tender and in a pan, add dumplings. Then make a sauce … melted butter and flour, and about 2 cups of chicken broth. Pour it over the chicken and dumplings.
For the top, make a good baking-powder biscuit dough, rolled thin, cut in finger-length strips one inch wide. When the pie is covered, put it in the oven to brown.
MODERN RECIPE
Start with a 4 pound chicken. Simmer with 1 tablespoon of salt, 2 stalks of celery and one bay leaf. Add onions, too. When the simmering is done, bone the chicken and place in a two-quart casserole. Make the sauce of butter and flour in a double boiler. Add salt, pepper, mace, and perhaps sherry wine. Then, instead of strips of dough, cover the pie with small baking powder biscuits and brush with top milk or cream. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, at 450 degrees.
• • •
JANUARY 2008
HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
In addition to the recipes Nana wrote down and collected, I found booklets in the old brown folder. Famous Recipes in the Philadelphia Manner, for example, was “Printed in limited edition as a tribute to all lovers of fine living.” It includes directions for preparing rabbit ragout, shad roe salad, and Philadelphia hash, and it implores, “Don’t call hash ‘lowly,’ please. It’s a dish raised to an aristocratic level by cookery as it was practiced in early Philadelphia.” We haven’t been doing much fine living in the New Jersey manner lately—vacations canceled, restaurants off limits, curtain’s down on the theater, the fat lady’s sung on the opera … So now I’m really looking forward to whipping up some of that hash.
A few of the booklets are promotional materials from food companies: Fun with Coffee from the Pan American Coffee Bureau; Old-Fashioned Eating Pleasure from Pepperidge Farm; and Mealtime Magic with California Long White Potatoes, which features a tantalizing recipe for Potato-Ham Fiesta Cakes. Nana dog-eared the “Winter Salad” page from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Cookbook, and she paid thirteen cents for 250 Ways to Prepare Meat in 1943. Its companion volume, 250 Ways to Prepare Vegetables, looks less used.
“When we lived on the farm, our vegetables came right out of our garden,” Mom says. “We didn’t do much to them, just cooked them with a little butter. They were so good—and huge! The tomatoes and the strawberries, especially.” Their secret was an old farmer’s trick: put the outhouse by the garden. “It sounds disgusting now, but the natural fertilizer made that soil practically atomic,” Mom laughs.
Nana also saved a little book called 1003 Helpful Hints and Work Savers to Help You Beat the High Cost of Living, which was published by the National Newark and Essex Banking Company in 1947. It was written before the postwar boom, when homemakers like my grandmother had to stretch food dollars far, old clothes were mended and kept in as good condition as possible because there wasn’t much money for new, and everyone was looking for ways to save on gas, electric, and phone bills. Some of my favorite tips include
#23: For longer girdle life, fasten garters straight and in the center of the stocking’s hem.
#339: Stale, dried-up cheese turns into a delicious spread when placed into the meat grinder with chunks of raw onion.
#924: It’s the rightest kind of thrift to lubricate your car every thousand miles. The friction “gremlins” in your automobile are the little devils that steal the power and waste gasoline, bearings, and other parts in a hundred different ways. This is one case where spending a little saves a lot.
Aside from the hint about girdle maintenance, this booklet is as relevant for my life today as it was to Nana’s over sixty years ago.
My family eventually lived off the fruits and vegetables from the atomically fertile soil in their garden, but Mom tells me that during their first winter in Saratoga, she, Nana, and Grandpa just barely got by on his paycheck from the plant. Nothing could be grown in the winter, and the animals were expensive to feed and keep warm in the barns. Fortunately, the chickens could be eaten after several weeks. “And we ate a lot of chicken,” Mom says. “A looooooot of chicken.”
Even when Grandpa started selling milk, butter, and eggs to the local distributor, it didn’t bring in as much as it cost to run the farm. “Our neighbor, Truman, sold his butter and eggs as specialty items to the hotels in town, so he got more money for them,” Mom remembers. “He’d been farming longer, so he had more crops. And in addition to that, he bred collies to make extra money. Your grandpa just didn’t know how to do these things, and it was rough up there. Nana had to figure out every way she could to save money.”
Lately, I’ve had to come up with
a few of my own hints to help beat the high cost of living. I think they’re a little too unorthodox to have made it into Nana’s booklet, but she would have understood them.
• • •
#1: Need more money for food and bills? Offer to walk your neighbor’s potentially vicious dog.
Arthur lives downstairs from us. He was an adorable bull terrier puppy when his owners saw him in a pet shop about a year ago. The proprietor said Arthur’s freshness date was just about up—he was getting too old to sell and was headed back to the puppy mill, and an uncertain fate, if someone didn’t buy him soon. It was a great sales pitch, and Arthur was a bargain at seven hundred dollars, marked down from fifteen hundred.
When Arthur started teething, his puppy bites were cute and harmless. Then he got bigger. One night on the way home from work, I ran into Arthur and one of his mommies. “Hey, Arthur, you handsome boy, how aaaaAAAAARGH!”
“Arthur, stop that!” his owner said as she pulled on the leash, which made Arthur dig his teeth into my hand a little deeper so he wouldn’t lose his grip. “He’s just really excited to see you.” So excited, in fact, that in addition to trying to eat my hand, Arthur was simultaneously peeing on my suede boots.
“How was work?” Nathan asked when I got upstairs.
“Only slightly less dangerous than home,” I said as I wiped off my boot with my dented hand.
That was last year. A week ago we ran into one of Arthur’s mommies in the neighborhood, and she mentioned that they were interviewing dog walkers. “How much do they charge?” Nathan asked.
“Twenty-four dollars per forty-five-minute walk,” she said. “And we need a walker twice a week for when we work late.”
I did a quick calculation in my head—forty-eight extra dollars a week, cash. “I’ll do it!” I said, almost peeing with excitement on Arthur.
• • •
#2: There’s extra cash in your closet—auction off your aerobic shoes!
“I want you to eBay my sneakers.”
Nathan looks up from the computer. “You want me to what?”
“Put my sneakers on eBay.”
He gives me the Mr. Spock raised eyebrow, his logical Vulcan mind once again fascinated by this human he’s living with. “What’s so special about these sneakers that would make someone want to buy them?”
“They’re tush-tightening sneakers,” I explain. “And I paid two hundred and fifty dollars for them.”
Now both eyebrows are raised. “Okay, let’s get these magic tushie sneakers on eBay and see if anyone wants them.”
Three days later, we are a week’s worth of groceries richer. It’s just a shame that we had to sacrifice one bottom line to raise another.
• • •
#3: Why buy pricey water when you can drink for free from the tap? (Just remember to boil it first.)
Bottled water is expensive, not to mention taxing on the planet, what with the fuel to ship it and the plastic to recycle. But we use it because the tap water where we live is questionable.
For Nathan, there is no question. “Don’t drink that!” he says if he sees me filling anything from the sink besides the plant watering can. At first I thought he was just being paranoid. We’re both native New Yorkers who grew up drinking top-rated tap water and ridiculing everything about New Jersey—until we had to move here after we got priced out of our hometown. Now we boast about our quiet, friendly neighborhood and our cheap, roomy apartment to harried Manhattanites who fret about their living expenses but ask, “How do you even get to New Jersey?”
Aside from being the more practical of the two of us, the one who looks before he leaps and sniffs before he drinks, Nathan has lived here longer than I have. He knows that after heavy rains our tap water needs to be boiled due to flooded sewers.
“Can we filter the water?” I asked.
Nathan shook his head. “It’ll probably dissolve the filter.”
Now that I’m home, I’m going through a lot of bottled water. I’m one of those people who believes in drinking eight glasses a day, even though I couldn’t find a source for that prescription or any evidence to back it up when I researched it for a magazine article. Still, I’m thirsty, and I’m going through our three-gallon jugs of pure mountain spring water too quickly.
It occurs to me one day that we drink our questionable water in tea and coffee—once it’s boiled, it’s fine. But there’s only so much tea I can drink, so when it starts getting cold in the house, I have an idea that kills two birds with one stone: I start drinking boiled tap water to quench my thirst and stay warm. I add a little lemon to mask its taste (which decent water usually doesn’t have) and hope that the citrus will kill whatever the high temperatures don’t. I’m not sure I’ll be able to find any research to prove that, either.
Nathan finds all of this disturbing, and, of course, illogical. “How much water could you possibly need? And if you’re cold, why don’t you just turn on the heat?” he asks.
“Are you crazy?” I say, perhaps a little harshly. But he knows I’m a thin-blooded person; if I turned up the heat every time I got cold, we’d be living in a tent in the parking space where our truck used to be.
• • •
#4: Save money on gas, parking, and insurance: Get rid of your vehicle.
Four years ago, when Nathan and I were supposed to go on our first date, I was on a fierce deadline. I had a choice of either rescheduling or going to dinner with him and returning to the office afterward to work until midnight. The last time I’d seen Nathan was a week prior, when we’d just returned from the Costa Rican yoga retreat where we’d met. We talked and held hands for the duration of the five-hour flight home. I thought about his quick smile and how easy and good it felt to be with him, and I remembered his handsome face and the sweetness that seemed to radiate from him like a light.
All of these things were the same when we met for dinner the night of my deadline.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said at the end of an evening of more easy conversation and hand-holding.
“Actually, I have to go back to work,” I said. “We’re shipping tonight, and I have pages to read.”
“Well then, I’ll drive you to the office.”
He led me to a truck the color of a ripe cherry. He opened the passenger side door for me, and I had to hoist myself up into the cab. The interior was clean, the seats big. A Tweety Bird air freshener hung from the gearshift. The truck was like him: strong, sexy, but with a sense of humor. Nathan drove me back to the office, and we made out like teenagers in the front seat before I went up to the office with blushing cheeks and my hair on crooked.
“Well, somebody had a good night,” said one of the editors.
On a summer evening two years ago, we drove into the city for dinner at Lombardi’s, a pizza joint that’s been serving crispy, thin-crust pies in Little Italy since 1905. We were having a deep discussion about what toppings we were going to get on our pizza when Nathan shut the driver’s side door of the truck and said, “Oh, crap.”
“What?”
He sighed. “I just locked the keys in the truck.”
While we waited for the triple-A guy to come with a slim jim, I had a brainstorm. “Be right back,” I said. Twenty minutes later I returned with a mushroom and olive pizza and a large bottle of soda. We ate one of the most romantic dinners we’ve ever had in the flatbed of the truck, watching the line for tables at Lombardi’s snake around the block.
For some people, a truck is a convenience for loading groceries and those bales of toilet paper from the box store. To me, our truck was a two-ton metal scrapbook full of our memories and stories. Last fall, after I got laid off, we drove it to my brother-in-law’s house and came home with six thousand dollars to put toward our new health insurance bills. The money we’d save on gas, the garage fee, and having the truck insured and maintained would help out as well.
“It’s okay,” Nathan said. “You do what you have to do. Besides, the memories aren’t in th
e truck. They’re in us.”
7
SOUTHERN COMFORT
German Potato Salad
4 slices bacon
1 cup diluted vinegar [½ cup vinegar plus ½ cup water]
¼ cup sugar
6 good-size cooked potatoes, diced
3 onions, diced
Cut bacon into small pieces and brown in frying pan. Add vinegar and sugar and allow to cook together until heated and sugar is dissolved. Add to cooked diced potatoes and diced onions and allow to heat through.
• • •
AUGUST 1989
MIAMI, FLORIDA
“My wife and I don’t get along too well,” the barfly slurred at me.
I took his empty glass away but didn’t refill it. “You might get along with her better if you spent more time at home instead of here,” I said tartly.
I was a terrible bartender. The beers I pulled were all foam, the local strippers hated me because I didn’t know they drank two-for-one when they brought in “dates,” and I clearly didn’t have the sympathetic bartender schtick down. Considering that I was tending bar to make extra money, I was obviously in the wrong business.
But this was during my first recession as an adult, when any job—even the kind I was woefully, horribly unsuited for—was better than none. There was little or no work in my industry, so when my parents announced that they were moving to Miami, I went with them, figuring that I might as well be unemployed in good weather.
There was even less demand for writers in Florida, so I worked as the receptionist in my parents’ carpet showroom. Each morning I’d get in my car—the one I’d gotten cheap because the A/C was busted—and arrive at the Miami Design Center a few minutes before nine, just enough time to air out the clothes I’d sweated through and get a café con leche. I catalogued berbers and sisals and answered the phone until five o’clock, when I got back in the Schvitzmobile and drove to the fish shack where I tended bar until midnight. Then I’d drive home, occasionally getting pulled over in ritzy Bal Harbour for going over the 35-mile-per-hour limit. I’d explain to the officers that it was because I was falling asleep and that it was a choice between speeding and a collision. They let me go either because I made sense or they felt sorry for me in my Bloody Mary–stained T-shirt and shorts. At home, I’d make a bowl of spaghetti and pour Cardini’s Caesar salad dressing over it, the poor girl’s version of fettuccine Alfredo. And I’d fall across my pull-out couch, which I was too tired to pull out, for four or five hours before getting up to do it all over again.
