Good Apple

by Elizabeth Passarella

  But then. The blessed moment comes, after confession, when the pastor stands up to make announcements. “Please greet those around you. And children are dismissed to their classes,” he says. My kids drop their pens and bulletins and shimmy past me to the aisle. As I’m shaking the hands of the people next to me and then sitting back down, Michael slides into the pew. We scoot toward each other across the cool, smooth surface, across the empty space the kids have vacated. He extends one arm around my shoulder, and I settle against his chest. We both take a deep breath and sigh at the same time. He picks up the bulletin James was drawing on. In addition to the filthy language, there’s a heart on one page. It’s a series of hearts actually, a big one with a smaller one inside, and a smaller one inside that, like Russian nesting dolls. On the edge of each heart is written the name of a person in our family. “Bibbie and Irsh,” he’s written sideways along one heart. “Susan,” Michael’s sister, along another. “Nan,” “Luke,” “Julia and Sam.” Grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings. On the smallest heart, nestled inside the others, he’s written, “Me and Mom.” I start to feel better.

  He’s even written “Jesus” on one heart. Jesus is on an outer line, but he’s there. And suddenly, the devil is not.

  EIGHTEEN

  LET THERE BE ICE

  YOU KNOW THAT DREAM WHERE YOU find an extra room in your house that you never knew existed? Where you are walking down the hallway that normally leads to a bathroom, only there’s a door to your right that opens into a huge family room or—in my case, because my dreams are, sadly, this limited—a laundry room? And it’s as if the room was always there, and you can’t believe you never opened the door?

  Do people outside of New York have that dream? Or is it just us, whose subconscious minds can’t help but invent more square footage? Waking up from that dream is the worst; the guest room or the wood-paneled library always feels so real. It’s breathtaking and tragic at the same time, the idea that something that valuable was right there, right under your nose, but undiscovered.

  I have a laundry room. A laundry room!

  But I’ve missed out on years of enjoying it.

  It’s happy-sad, that dream. But I always hold on to the happiness, because, whatever, it’s just a dream.

  Except, one day, in the fall of 2019, the dream sort of came true.

  It was Monday, November 4, a few days after Halloween. My kids’ buckets of candy were still sitting on the counter at the entrance to the kitchen, mostly full, and starting to succumb to the law of diminishing returns. Nothing tasted good anymore; the chocolate was absorbing a Skittles flavor. I was distracted and in a bit of a bad mood—this will be relevant later—because Halloween is my least favorite holiday, and it takes me several days to get over it. For those of you leaping to the conclusion that I don’t like Halloween because I’m a Christian, and a lot of Christians avoid it because it celebrates the devil, believe me, that has nothing to do with it. We all know the devil is real, and I for one give him props for brainwashing a bunch of adults into thinking that costumes are cute on forty-two-year-olds. (He is also responsible for family Christmas pajamas, in my opinion.) My Grinch-ness about Halloween stems from the fact that it’s become bigger business—for adults—than it has any right to be, evidenced by the proliferation of (expensive, elaborate) outdoor decor and parents dressing their toddlers up as Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Magnum P. I. for everyone’s enjoyment except the toddler’s, who would prefer to be a puppy. It’s a chaotic night, when Michael and I both have to rush home from work to help with costumes. Costumes which always, without fail, cause tears, because they are itchy or too tight or not tight enough, and somehow this is my fault.

  Monday, November 4. Seeing the candy spilling out onto the kitchen counter caused my Halloween Grinch heart to contract, making an already hectic Monday morning more painful. Our regular Monday babysitter, Talysha, was out of town, so we had a substitute coming: Anna, a sitter who used to help out a few years ago, when Julia and James were little. That change is critical; Anna will also become relevant, as you’ll later see.

  The day went smoothly enough. Michael took Julia and James to school. I tidied up around the house, waited for Anna to arrive, passed Sam off to her, wrote out instructions for picking up the big kids from school, and left for work. When I got home at 6:00 p.m., everyone was happy, one-third was bathed, and, despite his best efforts, Sam had not broken any furniture or bones. I filled a glass with water from the sink and opened the freezer to get some ice. That’s when I noticed something strange: about a dozen smooth, half-moon-shaped ice cubes in the bottom of the plastic trough.

  We, like a vast number of New Yorkers, make ice in trays. There are certain modern conveniences that simply aren’t standard in New York apartments, due to a lack of space, arcane construction rules, or the fact that so many apartments are rentals, furnished with cheap appliances. And neither Michael nor I had ever lived in an apartment with a refrigerator fancy enough to make its own ice. I won’t say we were indifferent to the hassle of filling and emptying ice trays. Nothing annoyed either of us more than opening the freezer to get ice for a cocktail and finding none there. We have complained about someone picking the last cube out of its well with his or her finger, leaving an empty tray sitting in the freezer drawer. The wrist-aching task of twisting inflexible plastic to release the cubes into the bin was exasperating, every time. But what choice did we have? An ice machine? Who were we, Mike Bloomberg?

  So, yes, it was a little weird that there were these pristine, machine-generated-looking ice cubes in our freezer, but I didn’t think much of it. Remember: I was distracted and a little grumpy. It was dinnertime, children were hungry, everyone was trying to talk to me, and also, Anna had been there all day, and Anna had a history of messing with our ice. Okay, messing is the wrong word. Anna had a history of making ice appear unexpectedly. Here’s the backstory: Anna has a lot of wonderful qualities. She’s upbeat and optimistic. She is patient and loving with children. She’s a talented actor and dancer (if you took a Norwegian Cruise Line around the Hawaiian Islands in 2015, you might have seen her in the ship’s nightly performance of Moulin Rouge). I’ve never seen a bad picture of her, and she has impeccable taste in vampy, dark lipstick. She also used to make ice for us every time she babysat. Back when she was regularly at our house a couple of times a week, when James was two and three, Michael or I would come home in the evenings to find a mountain of craggy cubes in the ice bin. Anna intermittently dumped and filled the trays all day. It was some sort of mitzvah. We never asked her to; she just liked doing it, she said. Her gift was well-known enough that other family members would come to our apartment, see a full ice bin, and ask, “Was Anna here today?” Which is why, when I saw the funny ice cubes—not at all, mind you, the shape or texture of our normal, rectangular hunks—my brain waved it off as normal, because Anna had been there, and Anna does magical things with ice. Maybe she had a thermos of ice with her from home, and she dumped some extra into our bin, I thought. Maybe she bought some ice when she was out with Sam. I got sidetracked, forgot about it, meant to text Anna about it the next morning, forgot that, too, and woke up on Tuesday and left the house.

  Tuesday was a little nuts. It was Election Day, and because the city uses public schools as polling places, school was closed. Our Tuesday babysitter, Carla, came in the morning to keep Sam, and I left the house early with the big kids to go vote, then run a couple of errands, then drop Julia and James with Michael’s aunt Jeanne, who was taking them to lunch and to hang out with their other great-aunt and some cousins while I worked. That night, everyone got home around the same time. I relieved Carla at 6:00 p.m. Jeanne walked in with the big kids around 6:30. Michael was close behind. I was in our bedroom, looking for one of Sam’s books, when Michael called to me from the kitchen.

  “Elizabeth, you need to come in here,” he said.

  He was standing with the freezer drawer open. The light was making a hazy, upward glow, the way a treasure c
hest full of gold shines in a pirate cartoon. Our ice bin was full, almost overflowing, with those smooth, semi-clear, half-moon ice cubes.

  “What’s going on?” Michael asked. “Did you do this?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What did YOU do?” I answered.

  “I didn’t do anything. What did you do?”

  “Nothing. Is this a prank?”

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t understand. Are you playing a prank on me? Did you buy that ice?”

  “I didn’t buy any ice! Where did this ice come from?”

  We stood there, over the ambient light and chill of the open freezer, staring at each other, dumbfounded.

  James ran into the kitchen. “I made that ice!” He smiled widely and started giggling nervously. “I pranked you! I made the ice!”

  “James, seriously. This isn’t funny. What are you talking about? What prank?” I said.

  “I did! I made that ice! I’m serious!” he insisted. “Yesterday, I was hiding from Anna, and I opened the refrigerator and stood on the bottom shelf and hid inside the door and pushed that button.”

  “Button?” I asked. “WHAT. BUTTON.”

  Michael’s face went pale.

  “That one,” said James. He pointed to a panel of buttons at the very top of our refrigerator. We’d never paid any attention to it. Occasionally I glanced at the temperatures displayed next to the buttons, to make sure the interior was properly cooled. But we’d never had a problem, not a single glitch, with the refrigerator in the eleven years we’d lived in our apartment, and therefore, I’d never inspected or touched one of those buttons.

  James was pointing at an illuminated square in the middle of the panel that said, very plainly, ICE: ON/OFF.

  “We have an ice machine,” I said.

  “We have an ice machine,” Michael repeated.

  A few things happened in the moments after this realization. We were excited, euphoric, even, at the idea that we had an automatic ice maker we never knew about. It was the dream come true. The impossible was real. We’d stumbled upon a highly impactful, luxurious amenity, and it was a miracle. The kids began whooping wildly and touching the ice, tossing a few pieces into the air, like they’d lifted a floorboard and found stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Michael and I hadn’t moved. The reality was so unbelievable, so unimaginable, that both of us had leapt to the conclusion that it was a prank rather than assume the obvious: we’d possessed an unused ice machine for eleven years. And part of us was paralyzed with another feeling, one that engulfed us like a second wave, the wave that pins you to the sandy ocean floor, just after the wave of euphoria. The tragedy of it all. We’d lived in this apartment for more than eleven years. For eleven years, we’d filled and emptied ice trays. For eleven years, we’d calibrated the ideal water pressure to fill the small wells most efficiently without overflowing, experimenting with sliding the trays back and forth under the faucet versus holding it at an angle and letting the water overflow down the line. For eleven years, we’d rationed ice cubes—“Julia, you don’t need to fill your cup. Just take a couple.”—and reminded each other to put the kids’ soccer water bottles in the refrigerator the night before to get them cold, because the necks of the bottles were too narrow to fit our fat ice cubes. Knowing I was always thirsty when I woke up, Michael would fill a glass with water many nights and leave it in the refrigerator before he went to bed. Countless afternoons, I had opened the freezer to find that one of the kids had dumped the cubes but not refilled the tray, and I’d do a quick calculation to determine if the refilled trays would freeze before Michael got home and wanted a drink. We had done all of those things for eleven years. How much time and energy had we wasted over ice? How resentful had we felt over whose responsibility it was to refill the trays or who was selfish and used too much? How many small, insignificant arguments had we had? It was staggering to process.

  I turned slowly and looked at Jeanne, who was still standing in the foyer of our apartment, her mouth open, staring at us.

  “You have an ice machine and didn’t know it?” she said, very slowly.

  “We have an ice machine and didn’t know it,” said Michael.

  A third wave came. Embarrassment. How could we not have known? What kind of blooming idiots were we? The button was right there. Ice: On/Off. Right in front of our stupid faces. The seven-year-old saw it.

  It’s astonishing how quickly my mind can begin to justify things when my stupidity is laid bare. It’s a self-preservation mechanism, I know, throwing up a shield so that I can quiver privately behind it. In terms of justifying this, I will offer the following, because I know you are wondering:

  When we bought our apartment, it had been hastily renovated by a real estate company. The previous occupant was a rent-controlled tenant, who died, so the company was eager to gut and redo the apartment to sell. On a final walk-through, when the contractor was still finishing up the kitchen, putting in some mismatched granite on different counters, we asked about putting a washer/dryer somewhere in the kitchen or a front hall closet. He explained that there was no water hookup along the wall in question—the same wall our refrigerator was on. That stuck in my head: so-so renovation and no water hookup on that wall meant that they must have cheaped out on a lower-tier Sub-Zero without a working ice machine. Of course. Just our luck.

  After we moved in, we opened the freezer of our (loser, one-of-a-kind) Sub-Zero unit to find two complementary plastic ice trays on the top shelf. They came with the freezer! And there was no ice in the bin, meaning, in our minds, we were to use the trays to make ice.

  Having lived in multiple New York City apartments, where an ice machine was a pie-in-the-sky, unattainable thing, our default assumption was not to have one. We simply never thought of it as a possibility, and there were ice trays in the freezer already, and we’d always made ice, and we’d always be destined to make ice, and that was our lot in life.

  But I’ve decided, after talking through these justifications with multiple people, that I’m not going to be embarrassed or ashamed, because honestly, I’m just too happy. I have so much beautiful ice. Do you have a sprained ankle? I have ice. Sore shoulder? Come on over.

  Later that Tuesday night, while watching TV, I asked Michael if he could bring me some water. He returned to the living room with a glass full of ice and water and a large mixing bowl filled to the brim with extra ice.

  “Because I can,” he said.

  . . .

  I’m not one to ignore a life lesson slamming me in the face, and I’m convinced there’s something to be learned here. If a rare bird starts landing on your windowsill every morning, chirping while looking you in the eye like a creep, or you discover after eleven years that you have a fully functioning ice machine you never knew about, you should perk up and pay attention, yes? I just can’t figure out exactly what the lesson is.

  The most profound one that I came up with, the capital-L Life Lesson, if you will, was about God, and I’m obligated to tell you about it, because that’s the kind of book this is. There’s a passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory that reads:

  It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

  The mud puddles were the first thing that came to mind. My ice trays were the mud puddles. Not that I was pleased, necessarily, with them, but I accepted them as the best I could possibly hope for. The ice machine was a reminder that God has better plans for us than we can imagine in our wildest dreams, that, as Matthew 7:11 said, “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” He longs to give good gifts to his children. Sometimes they are delayed or
don’t come on our terms. Sometimes we simply don’t notice them for eleven years. What have I missed because I’m too preoccupied? What have I not asked for because I assume it’s impossible, even for God?

  My next thought was an old familiar one, the truth I’m constantly slamming into, unwillingly, I must say, but necessarily. I’m very smart and capable but also overlook buttons in my refrigerator that say Ice: On/Off. Humility. It winds its way into my heart in strange ways. The next time I hear a story and think, “How could she not know . . . ,” I will pause and empathize and keep my mouth shut. Perhaps it will be full of ice cubes.

  There’s an extremely practical lesson, which is to pay attention to your appliances, have them regularly serviced, and take a look at all of the buttons. Be a grownup.

  All of those lessons are good ones. I’ll tuck a piece of each into my back pocket and carry them around. But what I really think the universe is trying to tell me is actually this: We can’t possibly move away from this apartment. Not anytime soon. Not until I’ve made up for my years of lost ice and enjoyed this dream come true to the fullest.

  NINETEEN

  UN-COMFORT ZONE

  THE FIRST TIME MY MOTHER WONDERED aloud why I chose to live in a city that, to her, made my life more difficult was Thanksgiving 2003. My friend Murff and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Amsterdam Avenue and 84th Street that was a substantial step up from my first apartment, where the bathroom sink was the size of the spittoon at the dentist’s office. In this new, more spacious apartment the bathroom was off the kitchen, so if you happened to take a shower while you had guests, you’d have to scurry in front of people sitting on the couch watching TV to get back to your room. But it was renovated and charming, and, with Murff back in Memphis for the holiday, empty enough that my parents could stay with me instead of at a hotel. That Thanksgiving morning my mother was in the kitchen sorting through the ingredients I’d bought to make her cornbread dressing. I came out of the bathroom and caught her staring at the sausage.