by Suzan Colon
“You got lucky with that raffle,” I say.
“That’s the truth,” Mom says. “We were lucky with the whole trip. When I think of it now—driving down there in that broken-down car with a hundred dollars in our pockets, not knowing where we’d live or what we’d do for money—it sounds crazy. But your grandparents had been through the Depression; what was worse than that? This seemed like a reasonable plan by comparison.
“And you know what?” she says, smiling. “It was warm and beautiful in Miami. Nana had people to talk to, and I had kids next door to play with, and Grandpa worked during the day, came home at a normal time of night instead of at the crack of dawn, and had dinner with us. We were together, and we were so happy.”
8
HAPPY WIFE, HAPPY LIFE
Butter Cookies
1 stick and ½ of butter
1½ cups of flour
1 egg
1 teaspoon of vanilla
1 cup of light brown sugar
¾ teaspoon of baking soda
A pinch of salt
Sift the baking soda with the flour and the salt. Get egg and sugar and beat until light. Have butter at room temperature and add to the egg, sugar, and vanilla. Add the flour. You may also add ½ cup of coarse walnuts. Divide into two parts and roll in wax paper. Keep in freezer overnight.
Slice and bake 10 to 12 minutes. 350 degrees. Makes about 4 dozen.
• • •
During our wedding toasts, Nathan’s friend Jason took the microphone in one hand and balanced his two-year-old son in the other arm. “Nathan, this advice was shared with me on my wedding day, and now I’ll pass it along to you: Happy wife, happy life.” Then we cut the wedding cake, and Nathan smushed the piece he was holding all over my face. I licked off the frosting and we went back for seconds.
When the mâitre d’ presented me with the top of the wedding cake, Nathan wrinkled his nose. “I’m not sure I’m going to want to celebrate our first year as husband and wife with old, thawed-out cake,” he said, so we ate it later that night. The restaurant had given us the leftovers, too, so we ate wedding cake again the next night.
When people said this was the best cake they’d ever had, I knew they weren’t just being nice—those layers of airy dark chocolate and sweet vanilla resting on a hazelnut filling and finished with pearly white fondant were incredible. And, like most brides-to-be, I’d been dieting like a crazy person for weeks. After two months of naked salad, steamed vegetables, and plain fish, I think even a cake made out of nuclear orange Circus Peanuts would’ve tasted divine.
• • •
I was never a picky eater as a kid. Mom remembers that even as a toddler I had a curious palate. “You loved martini olives,” she says.
“What were you doing feeding martini olives to a two-year-old?” I ask.
She shrugs. “It was the sixties …”
When I was five and discovered that our local Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs stand sold frog’s legs—and that they were really the legs of frogs—I had to try them. (Yes, they did taste like chicken, probably because they were cooked in the same oil as the chicken, and the French fries, and every other fried item they served.)
Surrounded by good food made by Mom, Grandpa, and Nana, I rarely said no to anything, but I didn’t gorge either. I was in tune with my body’s rhythms in a way that I envy and miss today: I ate when I was hungry, slowly, tasting the food, humming a little song I’d made up, and pretending I was a giant eating broccoli trees.
My family had no rules about eating. I was never forced to clean my plate, and when I heard the ice cream truck’s tinny chimes, Mom would give me a quarter for a strawberry shortcake pop. One of the neighbor mothers would ask, “Isn’t that going to spoil her supper?” and Mom would say, “So she’ll eat a little later. It’s no big deal.”
When Nana died, I was suddenly hungry all the time.
• • •
I could tell myself that I’d over-washed my jeans or that the nice man at the dry cleaner had shrunk my skirt, but tight underwear doesn’t lie: the truth of the matter was that I’d gained weight. The metabolism that had served me so well had apparently clocked out, exhausted, on my fortieth birthday.
I parked my wide load in a chair at a well-known diet center. I followed their strict eating rules and cut out bread, butter, cookies, pasta, ice cream before dinner, and many other things that make life worth living. Instead I ate mulch.
The results were quick and encouraging, and I developed little tricks to speed things along, like eating only salad (without dressing) for dinner the night before and nothing at all the morning of my scheduled weigh-in. I watched a woman strip down to a tank top and gym shorts before she stepped on the scale and took note: no more heavy jeans and sweaters for me. From then on, when I got my weekly reading, I wore only as much as would keep me from getting arrested for indecent exposure.
And then I met Nathan, whose love of food was exceeded only by his enthusiastic metabolism, and who had a nightly habit of eating cookies and milk while watching hard-hitting news. And he wanted to share that ritual with me.
I’d known all about the pleasures of eating, and then the pitfalls. New to me was the romance of it, the intimacy of having someone break off a steaming hunk of toasted Italian bread and hand you half, or of splitting a cupcake, or of being served a croissant with your morning coffee (complete with full-fat milk). I reacted to these previously forbidden fruit pies by devouring them like a starving locust. A few months of this, and I felt like a chubby locust.
I went back on the weight-loss plan, suddenly declining bread at dinner, and Nathan reacted as though I’d refused to make love: Not tonight, honey, I’m on a diet.
One rainy afternoon in April, Nathan wanted to go to a shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that specializes in exotic flavors of rice pudding with names like Sex & Drugs & Rocky Road. We’d shared our first kiss there the year before, and I could still remember how Nathan’s mouth had tasted of cream and oven-roasted cherries.
Now he ordered up a large dish of Coconut Coma while I calculated how many crunches it would take to keep my belly from turning to pudding.
“Let’s eat it now,” he said.
“Right after lunch?” I asked, stalling. “I thought we’d save it for later, at home, for dessert.”
“C’mon, let’s have some now.”
I was about to argue, but it was ridiculous to have a fight about rice pudding. So I let Nathan feed me a spoonful, and then he handed me a tiny bag. Inside was a jewelry box with my engagement ring.
I had almost messed up his proposal.
The wedding date approached, and now there were dress fittings to think about. I felt schizophrenic in the company cafeteria, bouncing indecisively between the salad bar and the pork tacos. “I can’t diet again,” I said to one of my coworkers. “I love food too much.”
“Of course not,” she agreed, because she was the food editor at the magazine. “But then again, you’ll be looking at those wedding photos for the rest of your life.”
I remembered the single beautiful black-and-white portrait of Aunt Midge and Uncle Eddie on their wedding day, he so handsome in his sailor uniform and she prim and pretty in a suit. A very tiny suit, because at the time Aunt Midge had a nineteen-inch waist.
• • •
These days I can make an unemployment check go for miles at the supermarket. I can save even more money by baking. What I can’t do right now is diet. I’m already cutting back and counting every penny—I just can’t face counting calories too.
“How did Nana stay so slim?” I ask Mom one day as I fold up yet another pair of skinny jeans and put them in the back of the closet.
“She ate half,” Mom says.
“Half of what?”
“Anything delicious. If it was a liverwurst sandwich—I know you don’t like those, but she loved them—she’d eat half of it. If it was a piece of cake, she’d have half, or just a bite. She’d have one drink, not a
couple. She did pretty well that way.
“Also,” says Mom, “Nana always said that a thin woman should gain a pound or two every year as she got older to smooth out wrinkles in her face. Besides, she wasn’t so skinny. She was a size ten, but she was tall, so she looked curvy.”
Gain a pound or two a year? A size ten? All of this is music to my hips. I take out some photos of her, and in them she looks … womanly. Satisfied.
That night, on the couch, the news of the day is not so good. But it’s buffered by crisp, light butter cookies, which taste especially good when shared with Nathan.
9
HOW LONG WILL IT KEEP?
Aunt Nettie’s Clam Chowder
1½ dozen chowder clams
¼ lb. bacon, in one piece
4 large onions
Bunch curly parsley, celery, leeks, parsnips
3 carrots
3 potatoes
1 large can tomatoes
Thyme
Clean clams; cook parsley, celery, leeks, onions, parsnips, in enough water to cover. Add salt. Cook one hour. Fry bacon in small cubes. Put clams, bacon and fat into water strained off vegetables. Add thyme. Add tomatoes and diced carrots. Then potatoes. Simmer.
• • •
DECEMBER 2008
HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
“Why’d you throw that away?” I ask Nathan, pointing to the half-eaten banana in the garbage. “Something wrong with it?”
“No,” he says with a shrug. “I’d just had enough.”
I realize I’ve crossed over into a bad state of mind when I have to keep myself from turning into his mother and asking him if he’s nuts, throwing away perfectly good food like that. With one of us out of a job, the insane cost of health insurance, and my retirement plan and his stocks both practically worthless, who on earth would throw away half a banana? Even though I knew I was overreacting, I could swear I heard Grandpa tsk-ing in solidarity with me, all the way from the sweet hereafter.
Salvaging food is something that my grandfather, Nathan’s mother, and anyone who went through the Depression did. In fact, I don’t remember anyone in my family throwing away food, either because we ate everything before it spoiled or because there was never so much that it had a chance to go bad in the first place. Occasionally we’d nearly lose something, but Grandpa would refuse to let the patient die. “You just cut the moldy part off the cheese,” he’d say, wielding his scalpel. “See? It’s fine.”
“It was green,” I’d say, all wrinkle-nosed eight-year-old. “I don’t want it.” As far as I was concerned, eating a piece of cheese that was clearly on its last gasp was one of Grandpa’s weird food habits, right up there with chomping on raw potatoes. Whenever he made mashed potatoes (which, since he was Irish, was often), he would take a big bite out of an uncooked spud like it was an apple. “That’s what the French call it—la pomme de terre,” he’d say. “‘The apple of the earth.’ That’s the way I ate potatoes when I was in France.”
“He did that to keep from starving to death during World War I,” Mom explains. “And did you know that he, not Nana, was the real cook of the family? She learned to cook when we moved to Saratoga, but he’d been doing most of the cooking before that.”
“Wait—how did Grandpa learn to cook?”
“His stepmother,” Mom says. “She told him, ‘Men should know how to do everything well,’ and she taught your grandfather and his brother, George, about the thread count in bed sheets, how to mend clothing, how to select the best cuts of meat, and how to cook. It was good advice, because your grandpa was a bachelor for awhile—after he was married …”
• • •
APRIL 1915
THE BRONX, NEW YORK
Fifteen-year-old Charlie Kallaher thought his father, Edmund, would be proud to hear that he’d left the military academy to fight in World War I, enlisting with his older brother, George. But Edmund merely sighed with disapproval. “Well, Charles, you’ve done things your own way.”
Charlie was sent to France, where he was shot at and gassed, and on one terrible day he had to amputate a buddy’s leg right on the field. Sharp beyond his years and determined to stay alive, he defied a commanding officer who, whether knowingly or not, was ordering his men out of a foxhole and directly into the line of enemy fire. “Over the top, Johnny! Over the top!” he shouted as the men leaped out and were killed, one by one. “Over the top, Johnny!”
“After you,” Private Kallaher responded.
“What did you say, soldier?” the officer demanded.
“I said ‘After you,’ sir.”
The argument ended when a shell landed nearby. The commanding officer was killed, and the soldiers scattered away from the hail of artillery fire and flying shrapnel. Charlie and his buddies hid from enemy troops in a barn, and in the morning he woke up with rats nestling against his body to stay warm. For food, the men ate potatoes straight out of the dirt.
“You’d think he would have hated eating them raw again, considering the memories that must have brought back,” I say to Mom.
She shrugs. “The taste reminded him of how they kept him from going hungry,” she says. “That’s a good memory.”
Charlie came home alive but no longer a kid, having seen too much of the war before he was even of legal age to fight. A few months after his return his girlfriend Molly got pregnant. Edmund was painting trim on the side of the house when Charlie told him he was getting married.
“Well, Charles,” Edmund said, his paintbrush evenly skimming the wood, “you’ve done things your own way again.”
“Will you come to the wedding, Pop?”
“I think not,” his father said.
The marriage was brief; Molly died of influenza just a few years later. Charles was a war veteran, a widower, and the father of two small children—Charles Jr., nicknamed Chick, and Mary, who was called Midge—all by the time he was twenty-one years old. (No longer a stranger to medical events, he’d delivered both babies himself, at home.) Molly’s sisters took the children to live with their families in Connecticut, and Charlie spent the next ten years or so as a bachelor. Able to live quite well on his own with the skills his stepmother had taught him, he felt no hurry to find a new bride.
“Your grandfather was a happy widower for years—it was almost a career with him,” says Mom. “When he got the job as a milkman and the Depression hit, not only was he making steady money when nobody else was, but he got to visit all the lonely housewives. He was famous in the dairy company as ‘The Heartbreaker of Sheffield Farms’ by the time he met your Nana at Orchard Beach in 1930.”
The only beach in the Bronx—a stretch of sandy coastline on the east side of Pelham Bay Park—Orchard Beach was packed during the typically hot New York City summers. Matilda was a regular visitor; her uncle Hil was a lifeguard there, as was her boyfriend, Frank, and his friend Charlie.
Frank was crazy about Matilda and desperately wanted to marry her. Unfortunately, his wife back in Germany refused to grant him a divorce. This stalemate opened the door to Matilda accepting an invitation from Charlie to go kayaking from Orchard Beach to Hunters Island one day.
Time passed, the tide rose, and the kayak drifted away, leaving them stranded. Their friend Bruno Hauptmann found the boat and brought it back to them. (A few years later Bruno would be tried and executed for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby; Charlie always maintained that his friend had to be innocent.) When Charlie and Tillie, as he called her, got back to Orchard Beach, she told Frank it was over.
“Frank wept hysterically,” Mom says. “He was prone to that. For some reason he remained a friend of your nana’s, and during the family functions he was invited to, he would either ask Nana to dance and dissolve in tears, or he’d pick me up and cry and say, ‘You should have been mine.’ Your grandpa would turn red in the face but just look at the floor. He felt guilty.”
Tillie and Charlie married, and Chick and Midge, now teenagers, were sent for. Midge arrived with
a suitcase full of hand-me-downs from a family that had taken her in more out of obligation than desire. Matilda, who at twenty-one was only a few years older than her new stepdaughter, threw all the old clothes away and immediately took Midge shopping and did her hair. Chick came with some apprehension about this new arrangement, but when he saw how his sister was being treated, he was won over as well.
• • •
NOVEMBER 1970
THE BRONX, NEW YORK
When he was sixty-eight, Charlie once again became a widower caring for a small child: me.
From the time I was a toddler up until I was thirteen years old, I spent every weekend with my grandparents in the Bronx, and whole summers when school was out. At that time, Nana and Grandpa lived in a middle-class neighborhood in a modest, three-family house at the eastern edge of the Bronx. Long Island Sound was in our back-yard, so at high tide we could swim or take the dinghy out for a row, and at low tide there was a nice quarter mile of beach to walk on. It was a safe, close-knit neighborhood with lots of kids for me to play with.
Aside from the obvious benefits for a city child like me, the weekend and summer arrangement worked very well for Mom. She was a devoted mother who worked hard during the week, but when the weekend came, she was still a young, beautiful, single woman who wanted to go out. (And dressed to go out my mother was something to behold. This was the late 1960s and early ’70s, so she had the long blond fall cascading around her shoulders, the hot pants, and the boots made more for dancing than for walking.)
After Nana died when I was seven years old, it was just me and Grandpa, and I’d sit on his lap while he wiped tears from his eyes and sang to me:
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are grey …
I was too young to understand the reasons behind his taste for raw potatoes or why he felt the need to save food by any means necessary, and, anyway, he had many more eating habits that met with my approval. He kept big Hershey bars in the fridge, took sweetened condensed milk in his coffee, and always had Entenmann’s Crumb Cake on hand. (I routinely pinched all the crumbs off, which drove him crazy, but he never tried to stop me.) He also provided for me and took care of me in a way that I could understand on a simple, almost primal level.
