by Suzan Colon
“We hated them too,” Mom tells me one day when the chill drives me upstairs for a morale-boosting phone call. “When we moved back up to Saratoga from Florida, your grandpa was in construction. It brought in decent money, but they were working high up—twenty stories, sometimes—and if it rained or snowed, they wouldn’t let the workers go up. Too dangerous.”
The men only got paid when they were on the job. Bad weather meant no work, and that meant no wages for the week. Because Charlie and Matilda were living hand-to-mouth, a period of stormy weather meant trouble. “People always say, ‘Oh, the snow is so pretty,’” Mom says in a saccharine tone. “Well, it scared us. I still hate snow.”
• • •
Right around the time I discover how hard it is to reboot a computer while wearing fingerless gloves, the laptop struggles back to life and dings feebly that I have a new e-mail: Please come to the office to pick up your Mr. Crump check.
Oh my God. I got a Mr. Crump check.
The legend goes that when the namesake of our company was just starting out and the holidays came along, she realized she didn’t have enough money for Christmas. Just as she was about to send apologies instead of gifts to her family, her boss, Mr. Crump, announced that he was handing out bonuses to all the employees. Then and there our leader-to-be made a vow: if she ever became a boss and had the means, she’d give her staff bonuses in December in honor of Mr. Crump’s generosity. And even though I’d been laid off a few months ago, my Mr. Crump check was at my old office, waiting for me. A check that would pay for a new Wi-Fi-capable laptop computer.
When I tell Mom the good news, she’s pleased, but not all that surprised. “That’s not the first time money’s come out of the blue when it was least expected and most needed,” she says. “Remember Nana’s black coat?”
• • •
DECEMBER 1970
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
It wasn’t long after Nana died, suddenly and unexpectedly one night in November 1970, that Mom got fired. She’d been doing well at the perfume company, but when she took off more than the three days allowed for mourning, her boss said, “I needed you here, and I’m sorry you weren’t happy with us.” The severance check kept us afloat for a while, but that, and the money from Nana’s insurance policy, eventually ran out.
Aching for her mother, Mom put on Nana’s black faux-lamb coat one night and wrapped it around herself like a hug. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said, the words becoming more like howls as she sobbed. She put her hand in the pocket of the coat. “I don’t know how—”
She stopped talking, and when she pulled her hand out of the pocket she was holding a bankbook with a wad of bills folded in the middle. Five hundred dollars in cash, twenty-five hundred in the account. Nana had never mentioned her secret stash to Mom, but she sent it to us just when we needed it the most.
• • •
Upstairs the warm, comforting aroma of beef stew fills the kitchen, and the winter sun is so bright it’s making me squint. But I won’t move, even though this new computer can go anywhere in the house and do practically anything a writer could ever need it to do.
13
A TEN-DOLLAR BET AND A FIVE-DOLLAR WINNER
Chicken Roman
One tender capon (5 lbs.) disjointed
One cup vegetable shortening, melted
One loaf bread (16 oz.) dried, crust removed, grated
One cup grated Parmesan cheese
One-fourth cup minced parsley
One-eighth teaspoon paprika
One-eighth teaspoon pepper
One-half tablespoon salt
Two cloves garlic, minced
Oven temperature: 350 degrees
Baking time: One and one-half hours
Servings: Six
Have the capon disjointed in the market. Wash; dry. Melt the shortening in a saucepan. Dip each piece of chicken into the shortening then into the grated bread mixed in a pan with the cheese, parsley, seasonings and garlic. Place in a large baking pan. Bake in a moderate oven until a golden brown, turning several times. Serve hot with mashed potatoes and stewed tomatoes.
JANUARY 2009
HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
“Okay, hold still and don’t breathe,” says the technician as she sprints to the computer that runs the mammogram machine.
With a breast clamped firmly in a plastic vise, there’s not a lot of moving I can do, and breathing is limited to the gasp I sucked in when the technician pulled skin from my back to get enough flesh to put on the machine. (I have the same slight bust that Nana had, while Mom got all the va-va-va-voom in the family.)
While I wait those interminable, still, breathless seconds for the mammogram to be taken, I think about the core biopsy I had a few years ago. “If you take any more pictures, my boob is going to glow in the dark,” I told the doctor.
“We found something,” she said. “We’re just making sure before we schedule the procedure.” After that she didn’t have to remind me to hold my breath.
The biopsy was relatively simple—a morning in the doctor’s office, a lot of local anesthesia and pressure from the needle, and I was even allowed to breathe. “You’re doing fine,” the nurse said. “But there’s a lady in the waiting room who looks like she’s going to pass out.” Dealing with Mom’s anxiety over my biopsy was far more difficult than the surgery itself.
Her fear that I would be the first member of the family to have cancer was fueled by old memories from when she was fifteen and her mother had to go into the hospital for a biopsy. Nana hadn’t handled the news well. She was so convinced the procedure would become a mastectomy that she bet the doctor ten dollars she’d wake up without her breast.
After the operation, the doctor laughed when he told her that she’d called his ethics into question by talking about the wager as she came out of the anesthesia. She forced him to take her money when he gave her a diagnosis of benign cysts, saying it was the best ten dollars she’d ever spent.
“How many more?” I ask the technician.
“Only four more images to go,” she says. “Just to make sure.”
• • •
When I’m done with the mammogram, I make my ten-dollar copayment, grateful for our health insurance, and come home with an aching chest and an empty stomach—never a good combination. My evening appointment meant there was no doctor on duty to give me a preliminary reading, so now I get to wonder for the weekend.
I need a distraction, and tonight it comes in the form of making Chicken Roman, one of the $5 daily for favorite recipe winners among Nana’s newspaper clippings. There’s no date on the recipe, but I can tell it’s pretty old because it calls for dipping the bird in melted shortening. I hope I’m not affecting the authenticity of the creation by using a beaten egg, but we ran out of shortening in the early 1970s.
After that, I coat the chicken pieces in a mixture of store-bought breadcrumbs (my lazy substitution for “one loaf bread, dried, crust removed, grated”), Parmesan cheese, parsley, minced garlic, salt, and pepper. I don’t notice until all of this is done that the baking time is an hour and a half in a “moderate oven,” and I’m starving. So I set the oven to an immoderate 425 degrees, put the roasting pan in, and look up chicken cooking times on the Internet. I don’t want to see a second doctor tonight because I’ve given myself Chicken Romanosis, but I’m hungry and edgy.
Nathan is on the couch, either asleep or passed out from hunger. This is good, because most of the cooking times for chicken on the Web say to keep it in a 350-degree oven for at least 45 minutes. A few recommend an hour to be on the safe side. I wonder if boosting the temperature to 475 degrees will cut the cooking time. I wonder whether I’d be playing chicken roulette if we didn’t still have health insurance. I wonder about my breasts. I watch Nathan napping peacefully and remember the time he came home from work with a second-degree burn on his hand after a blowtorch he was holding slipped. The chicken cooks a little longer as I wonder wh
at we’ll do when my COBRA runs out and we either have to dial down our medical plan or come up with more money. I remember Mom, pale and frightened after my biopsy procedure, and Nana being convinced she was dying. And then I decide to slow down.
There’s a lot to be said for not knowing. It’s a pause during which I get to choose how I spend my time until I get an answer. Now, give me a solid reason to be scared, and I’ll lose my thin coating of composure faster than any chicken. I’d been fairly steady until the oncologist told my beautiful friend Marnie there was nothing more they could do for her. Then I held her hand for my own comfort as much as hers, and I rarely let go until the night she took her last, long breath.
I don’t blame Nana for having been afraid, and I love Mom for being afraid for me. But I’m surprised at how these two women, both so strong, could fall apart over a possibility when their realities were so often downright scary.
In my family, trying to avoid some sort of bad time was, as Mom puts it, “Like running through raindrops”—we were going to get wet no matter what. Good health has always been the limbo stick under which negativity must try to pass. If a boyfriend broke up with me, Mom would say, “Listen, at least you have your health.” When I was particularly whiny about some disappointment or another, she’d pull out her tough-love variation on the theme: “Look, you have all your teeth, don’t you? All of Nana’s front teeth had to be pulled because she was malnourished during the Depression!” It was true; she wore a bridge, and the tooth story always shut me up quick.
Nana had seen wars come and go and the stock market go up, come crashing down, and climb again. She’d never had much money, so the idea of being perpetually broke never fazed her. But just the thought of being ill undid her. This is the first chink I’ve ever seen in her shocking pink armor, and the first time I have aspired to be different from my Nana. Until I have something to be scared of, I’d rather turn the chicken down, have a piece of bread and cheese to tide me over, and watch my husband’s chest rise, fall, and rise again.
An hour later Nathan and I agree that Chicken Roman absolutely deserved its five-dollar award. And a week later I get the results of my mammogram: all clear. Ten dollars well spent.
14
WE WISH YOU A MERRY TUESDAY
I wish when my daughter was little, someone had spoken to me as I am trying to speak to you now. The time goes too fast. If your children are small, enjoy them as much as possible. They need and want your company now. Never again in their lives will you be so close and so important to them. Color with them, or make small clay animals—but you do it, too. Don’t just give them a batch of toys and say: “There you are—now go play; mother’s busy.” I think just the way a child looks at you when you get down on the floor with him or her is a wonderful experience. Watch the little crooked smile you get.
From “Time Out” by Matilda Kallaher
• • •
JANUARY 2009
HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
My husband is a spiritual man who feels, as Nana, Mom, and I do, that his faith is too large to be contained or defined by any one formal religion. But if he were to convert, he would most likely become a Jehovah’s Witness. “They don’t celebrate birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, or any other forced-affection holidays when, if you don’t buy someone a present, you’re in trouble,” he declares.
So, although I’ve never received a gift from Nathan in December, he has come home on a random, garden-variety Tuesday, when the calendar is free of red ink reminding us of some major event or other, and presented me with a black pearl suspended from a clasp studded with tiny diamonds. He’d prefer for me to know that he loves me every day, not just the day that I, or even Jesus, was born.
• • •
DECEMBER 1968
THE BRONX, NEW YORK
Nana set out the milk and cookies for Santa. “You have to go to bed, or he won’t come in,” she said, shooing me off to the pullout convertible bed we slept on.
“How’s he going to get in here, anyway?” I asked. I was looking at my grandparents’ mantelpiece, which housed a wonderful fake fireplace—tinfoil crunched on a rotating rod, with a small lightbulb that shone behind a red plastic “ember” in the center of a bunch of “logs.” I would stare at the “fire” as mesmerized as if it were real, but tonight it presented a problem: There was no actual chimney for Santa to come down, just a small hole at the back for the electric wire to go through. “He’s not gonna make it,” I said doubtfully. “Maybe we should wait up and let him in—”
“Santa’s smart,” Nana said. “He’ll figure out a way—but not if he sees you awake. Come on, let’s get to sleep.”
In the morning, my five-year-old jaw dropped at the sight of a half-eaten cookie and an empty milk glass on the kitchen table. Next to those was a note:
It was delicious. Thank you—S. Claus.
“He was here!” I gasped at Nana, who just nodded.
But Christmas wasn’t the only special day at my grandparents’ house. Nana always figured out a way to mark the occasion of my just being there, or of my just being. She made houses out of sheets and chairs—something she’d done when Mom was little—and she’d crawl under them with me. Lunches were always fancy tea parties where she served our food on special doll plates and we wore her long satin gloves. For someone who hadn’t been played with much as a child, she knew how to show a kid a good time.
Every time I was with Nana was special. Or maybe every time I was with her, she made me feel special.
• • •
JANUARY 2009
HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
“I can stop by the market on the way home from work,” Nathan says. “Do we need anything?”
“Just some fish for dinner. Nothing else. We don’t need anything else, okay?” I hate my false tone of assurance that everything we could possibly want or need is already in our fridge; it’s just a ploy to keep Nathan from spending money on the former necessities that are now luxuries.
An hour later, Nathan comes home with the fish—two thick slices of Chilean sea bass, certified sustainable, which made it politically correct and added a few dollars to the cost of each already expensive piece. He also pulls out a half pound of fresh shrimp; a bottle of pink fizzy limonade, imported from France; an artisanal cheese; not one but two containers of olives; and a box of truffles—organic, no less. At the bottom of the cloth shopping tote was the receipt: nearly seventy dollars, for one dinner at home.
“The truffles were on sale,” he says cheerfully, kissing me on my suddenly pale cheek.
I’ve made it a practice never to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when it brings me food. Horrified at the price of our dinner, I run downstairs and make love to my husband immediately. Then I free myself from pointless fretting about money that’s already been spent with a simple rationalization: Christmas can be any night—like tonight.
In the past few months I’ve learned a lot from Nana, and one of the most important lessons is acting on the knowledge that time spent with people we love is the best gift; the catch is that it’s temporary. There was no warning before Nana died. We thought we were going to see her that weekend. One night she was in the bathroom, setting her hair, getting that lovely swoop over her eyes just so. Then Grandpa called us to say that she was gone. Being seven years old, I didn’t understand what an aneurysm was. I only knew that people—no matter how important they were to me—could disappear in a second. Every day I’d spent with her became incredibly meaningful in retrospect, since I now knew that there were no more to come.
So tonight, an ordinary Tuesday, I start preparing not a dinner, but a party. I carefully arrange the shrimp in patterns on the salad. I place the olives—plump purple beauties and sharp Greek cured black ones—in a special ceramic dish. The Drunken Goat cheese, aged over sixty days but still stark white against its plum-colored rind, goes on the good china, along with warmed Italian bread. I broil the sea bass with a touch
of butter, salt, and pepper until the skin is crispy. After dinner, we try the truffles, dark lumps of cocoa-dusted cream that send the mouth, and the spirit, into ecstasies as they melt and disappear.
We fill our glasses with the tart French lemonade and toast the fact that we are here, together. That’s reason enough for a celebration.
15
WHEN IN DOUBT, BAKE
Nana’s Lemon Meringue Pie
5 eggs, separated
1½ cups sugar
1 tbsp. grated lemon rind
¼ cup lemon juice
4 tbsp. cornstarch
1½ cups boiling water
1 tbsp. butter
10 tbsp. sugar
Small pinch salt
1 nine inch baked pie shell
Put yolks into bowl and add the 1½ cups sugar, lemon rind, juice and cornstarch. Mix well. Add a little boiling water, combine mixture with remaining water in top of double boiler. Cook and stir until thickened. Add butter. Cool. Put into pie shell. Beat whites stiff but not dry. Add slowly, while beating, the 10 tbsp. sugar and salt. Cover lemon custard with this and brown for 10 mins. in very hot oven.
• • •
When in doubt, bake.
I didn’t come up with this concept; people have been doing oven therapy for ages. Mom says that Nana baked constantly during that first winter in Saratoga. It kept the house warm and her from going crazy.
When I’m so anxious that my atoms are vibrating visibly, I bake bread. I read in a cookbook that to get a flakier loaf, you punch the dough down more each time it rises. For me, the process is reversed: the flakier I get, the more I punch the dough down. But that’s for extreme cases of anxiety. For more average or ongoing stress, I prefer making sweet things, like cake, muffins, or pie.
• • •
SEPTEMBER 2007
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
