No Place I'd Rather Be

by Cathy Lamb

  “Ida was not only a cook, who I’m sure did the best she could with what limited ingredients she had, but she was an artist, too,” my grandma murmured, running a finger over the drawings.

  “I can see that. The drawings remind me of how Kyle draws, intricate, down to the expressions on the people’s faces, the hair on the animals, the cuts in the pies.”

  “Yes, it’s uncanny. It’s like looking at Kyle’s work. There is the same amount of detail, the style is the same, the proportions, the perspective. They each have a flowing hand. It’s genetics. It’s not only the brown, thick hair and green eyes that have been passed down through our line.”

  We came to a picture of another home, in the city, elegant, brick, three story, with a red door and red geraniums in front in flower boxes.

  “So it was Ida who started our tradition of planting red geraniums?”

  “Yes. She told me it brought a spot of color to her home in Odessa. She and Boris struggled so much as a young couple. When she moved to Munich, as soon as she had a home, she planted red geraniums to celebrate life, her new life, in Germany, in peace and prosperity. So my mother, Esther, planted them at her home to honor Ida, which is why I plant red geraniums every year, to honor Ida, and your mother took up the tradition, not knowing why, as you did, too, as does Chloe.”

  Amazing. I had red geraniums all over Martindale Ranch. Jace had joked that we should have called it Geranium Ranch instead of Martindale Ranch. I was following a tradition but hadn’t known the truth of its beginnings.

  “Did she live a long time? Did Boris?”

  “They should have lived much longer.”

  “When did Ida die?”

  “She died on January 2, 1942.”

  “What about . . .” I hesitated. “What about your grandfather Boris?”

  “He died on November 14, 1942.” She made a raw sound of anguish. So much hurt there.

  “How?”

  She waved a hand. “Not now, darling Olivia.”

  “Okay.” I put my hand on hers. “I’m sorry.”

  I drew my finger down the edges of the cookbook, blackened, crisp, a few bits came off. It was a surreal moment. This was the fire that had killed Liev and made my ancestors run for their lives to Germany. It was an overwhelming moment for me. I was touching the cookbook and the recipes and the pictures drawn by my great-great-grandma Ida Zaslavsky, born Jewish in Odessa, in the Russian Empire.

  I turned a few more pages. On the left side was a picture of Ida; her husband, Boris, four young boys; and a young girl.

  “Ida had two more sons after they fled to Germany,” Grandma said. “Their names were Grigori and Solomon. They were my uncles. Grigori was so funny. He played the piano, and Solomon played the guitar. All four of the boys worked for their father, Boris. Harnesses and saddles first . . .” Her voice faltered. I put an arm around her bent shoulders. “And then he sold women’s handbags and wallets. He had a successful business . . .” Her voice trailed off, and I hugged her. I think I knew what happened.

  “Grandma, let’s make one of these recipes. Let’s make it together. Do you want to?”

  My grandma smiled, then the tears came, and she smiled and cried at the same time, so I did, too. “Enough of these silly tears. Yours and mine. Buck up, Olivia. You’re too emotional.” We both laughed. “And I’ll buck up, too. Montana women don’t go around whining. Let’s not irritate ourselves.

  “Ah.” She smiled at a recipe. “This pampushky bread with garlic is actually a recipe that Grandma Ida remembered her own grandmother, Tsilia Bezkrovny, making. See? The name Tsilia is here, and this is a picture of her. And her husband, Aron.

  “I remember when my Grandma Ida and I made pampushky together, in Munich, in her house. Ida had a huge bakery. It was decorated in pink and white and took up half a city block. My mother worked there, too, as I did when I was a teenager. They specialized in cakes. They loved making cakes.”

  “Cakes?”

  “Yes.” She clasped my hands in hers. “Ida and Esther made cakes for their bakery, they loved baking cakes above all else, and we make cakes together, too, the women in our family. And you, my lovely Cinnamon, you love baking cakes more than anything, like me, my mother, and grandmother Ida.”

  I felt a sudden, intense closeness to Esther and Ida. We were bound by cake baking.

  “Let’s bake, shall we?” my grandma said, her green eyes shining. “I think we should make Ida’s strudel. She learned how to make it in Germany. There is not better strudel in the world than Ida’s.”

  We made strudel. There was a red stain in the corner of the recipe. Could that be wine? A few of the words were smeared, perhaps from water? Or tears?

  July 1921

  Munich, Germany

  Ida Zaslavsky, great-great-grandmother of Olivia Martindale.

  Ida Zaslavsky smiled and pushed her brown hair back from her face, only a few streaks of grey in it.

  Her red geraniums were blooming in her flower boxes and in her garden in pots. In Odessa she had spent their hard earned money, every year, for two red geraniums. They brought her such happiness, as she loved the color red, and they chased away a tiny bit of the poverty and the danger they were living in. So here, in Munich, in her elegant home, she made sure that she bought at least twenty geraniums a year to celebrate life and to remind herself how far they had come from the deprivations that they had been born into.

  When Boris and she arrived with their children years ago, they were exhausted and traumatized. It had taken them fourteen harrowing months to get to Munich, working along the way, trying not to starve or freeze to death. They shared a three-bedroom apartment with two other Jewish families from Odessa. One bedroom per family.

  Boris, with the tools he had managed to save after their home was burned to the ground, went to work the morning after they arrived. He got a job in a factory, and they saved their money to buy the supplies for him to make a saddle. It was one of his best saddles ever. He took it door to door, to farmers out in the country, taking orders, and within six months he was able to quit his factory job.

  She took her bread-making skills to a bakery. The manager hired her for the night shift. One of the other men they lived with went to work immediately in a textile factory, one in a factory that made machines. One of the wives worked as a maid, the other as a seamstress. Together, with the two other families, they shared childcare and food.

  All of their children immediately went to school.

  Within a year, all the families had their own apartments in a better part of town, but near each other, then they later bought their own homes, again, within a block of each other. They considered themselves family. The homes all needed work, but the men and the women knew how to fix things, repair, paint. They helped each other. Soon the three homes were tidy and clean. Ida and Boris had two more children, Grigori and Solomon, and they saved their money.

  Within two years Ida opened a tiny bakery, hardly bigger than a box, and Boris’s business making harnesses and saddles eventually expanded to purses and wallets.

  Nothing was easy, they worked all the time, and all five of their children—Esther, Moishe, Zino, Grigori, and Solomon—helped out with the businesses after their studies and school, but they had love. Ida’s love for Boris only grew, and he for her. Soon they had a nicer car, nicer furniture, and the children were well dressed. Boris bought this beautiful home for her as a surprise. He had even planted red geraniums in new flower boxes to celebrate life, and he painted the front door red because red meant freedom to Ida. They bought silver Shabbat candlesticks and Kiddush cups, and another menorah.

  Their beloved daughter, Esther, ran the bakery with her. They had so much fun together, cooking, trying new recipes, talking to their customers. Their pink and white bakery now took up half a block. Their specialty was cakes. Oh, how they loved to bake cakes together. Black forest gateau with cherries, German apple cake, Kuchen bars with vanilla custard, apple chocolate trifle, Leipzig carrot cake, an
d cinnamon mousse.

  They also loved making raspberry tortes, strawberry cream rolls with powdered sugar, chocolate pecan bars, bee-sting cake, and so many cookies. Ida and Esther’s strudel, filled with apples and brown sugar, flew out the door. They could not keep up with the demand. They specialized in bread, too. Hot, crisp, thick bread.

  Soon Esther would marry Alexander, the fine son of Aizik and Raisel Gobenko, one of the couples they lived with when they first arrived in Munich, all of the families desperate and destitute. All four parents could not be happier. Esther, her passionate, opinionated, brave daughter who had survived the attack in Odessa, rushing her younger brothers out the door and into the woods, was wildly in love with Alexander, and he with her.

  Ida smiled and sat down at her kitchen table with her special cookbook and drew their brick home here in Munich, with the red door, and her lush garden. She added a few more recipes from her mother, Sarrah, and from her grandmother, Tsilia, who were buried long ago in Odessa. She included recipes for pampushky bread with garlic, rich beef stew, dumplings filled with mashed potatoes and chives, yushka soup made with carp, stuffed duck, chicken Kiev, and sauerkraut. She drew pictures of the cakes, cookies, and bread they made, and she drew pictures of her parents and grandparents.

  The cookbook would be the perfect wedding gift for Esther. Esther loved the cookbook and she loved her mother’s drawings. “You’re an artist,” Esther told her all the time. “You should paint and let me run the bakery for you.”

  But Ida loved to bake, loved the bakery, loved her customers and having a job. And she loved being with Esther every day. She had built that bakery herself, she couldn’t give it up, no matter how well Boris did with his business.

  Tears filled Ida’s eyes and she reached for her wineglass. It was a gift to have Esther marrying such a fine man, but it did tug on her heart. The wine spilled on the cookbook, right on her strudel recipe, and she quickly shook it off, then dried the pages. It would stain. The tears rolled off her cheeks and smeared the words. How silly of her!

  She turned the pages and looked at the pictures of the children that she had drawn. Esther, Moishe, Zino, Grigori, Solomon. All so sweet. She had drawn them around the recipes as they grew, and had written their names beneath the drawings. On another page, near the front of the cookbook, she looked again at her drawings of baby Liev, burned alive in their home, and she felt her eyes fill. Precious boy, still missed, as was baby Talia.

  Ida looked up when she heard laughter. Ah! There they were, coming in for family dinner. Alexander was with Esther, holding her hand. Her brothers were behind her. Yes, she was blessed. Boris waved at her through the window. He was so handsome.

  He was still enthusiastic in the bedroom, not quite as enthusiastic as when he was a young man, but my. They loved being in bed together.

  “Ida!” he said, arms outstretched, as if he hadn’t seen her in days, instead of only a few hours. “My beautiful wife,” he whispered in her ear. “Let’s go and take a nap shall we, darling?”

  She laughed and hugged him back, hugged her sons, then hugged Esther and her fiancé. Esther would love the cookbook. She would treasure it always, she knew it.

  * * *

  When I picked the girls up from their art class on Monday, we had more problems. Lucy whimpered, “Kaila told me I have a nose like a turnip. Do I have a nose like a turnip?”

  Stephi said, kneading her fingers into her green frog sweatshirt, “I don’t like it here. Too much snow. Too cold. No friends. Megan told me that I’m ugly. Am I ugly?”

  Lucy said, “I don’t want to go to school anymore.”

  Stephi said, “I miss Grandma Annabelle.” She grabbed a handful of rocks out of her pocket.

  Lucy cried. Stephi cried. I missed Annabelle, too.

  We made chicken tacos with a dash of paprika and homemade salsa. My mother and grandma came over to eat with us when I called. My mother said, “I need a shower. Dang. Had a bloody one at the office. You know Bangor Reeves? Clean cut off two fingers with an ax. He’s never been that smart. I sewed them back on again. He insisted that your grandma be in the room so she could tell him how to, and I quote, ‘heal me the natural way, without all these newfangled medicines.’” She swore. “We’ll be over after we get our clothes in the wash. Can’t have blood stains, makes our patients nervous.”

  Chloe came over, too. She said, after hugging the girls and watching them scoot off with Kyle to play in their tent, “I need to get laid. I do. It’s been a long time. Feels like decades. So I’ve been thinking about Chase McConnell.”

  Chase spends part of the year fishing in Alaska and the other part of the year in construction. He’s built like a tree. He doesn’t say much. I think he might be shy.

  “I stalked him accidentally on purpose by driving by his house. Got out of my car this time when I saw him, the last three times I haven’t been able to gather up my Montana woman courage, but this time I did and I told him he was a tall and strong son of a gun and he said, ‘Thank you, Chloe,’ and I said, ‘When you need a woman who can handle all of your gun, you can take me to dinner,’ and he said, ‘Would you like to go to dinner?’ and I said, ‘Hell yes,’ and I told him I’d pick him up Friday at seven o’clock and that I respected his blatant masculinity. He couldn’t say anything after that, he blushed, so I patted his arm until he settled down and wasn’t so embarrassed about his blatant masculinity and then I wished him a pleasant evening and I left.”

  “His blatant masculinity?”

  “Yes. You should see it.” She bashed her fists together. “It practically radiates off him. I told him that, too. I said, ‘Your masculinity radiates off of you.’”

  “What did he say?” I had never noticed radiating masculinity around shy Chase.

  “He said, ‘I had no idea,’ and I told him, ‘It’s true, you have an aura.’”

  “I cannot wait to hear how his aura and your aura blend,” I said.

  “Me either. I’m a tough-talkin’, hip-rockin’ Montana woman. I am. Starting over. I’m a woman. I can do this. I can.”

  “You betcha.” She leaned on me, and I gave her a hug.

  “I gotta get my Montana moves back. My groove needs a new beat.”

  Chloe next raved about the three orangutans at school—Eric, Jason, and Juan—picking on Kyle and how she told him to “beat the hell out of them with your karate chops, son. Come on. Man up,” and how he said, “Intellectual dialogue should solve problems, not violence, Mother.”

  My mother and Grandma talked about the clinic over tacos. My mother said things to Stephi and Lucy like, “We’ll discuss what medical school will be best for what type of medicine you want to specialize in . . . I think surgery would be a strong fit for both of you . . . Yes, cutting into people, taking out what shouldn’t be there, sewing them back up and making them healthy again is gratifying . . .”

  Kyle has zero interest in being a doctor and has expressed that to my mother, much to her unending disappointment.

  Kyle listened to the girls talk about school and how they had no friends and how Lucy thought she had a nose the size of a turnip because of what Kaila said and how Stephi thought she was ugly because of what Megan said. Kyle fiddled with his glasses, leaned toward Lucy, stared closely at her face, and said, “It is false.”

  “What is?” Lucy said.

  “Kaila’s declaration of your having a nose like a turnip is false. I would like to prove it to you. May I?” She sniffled, nodded. He took out a tiny tape measure from his shirt pocket and measured her nose. “Your nose is smaller than the average girl your age. It is unfortunate when people make statements that do not have any basis in fact, especially if it brings on negative emotions within the person they are disparaging or ridiculing.”

  “I don’t understand what you said,” Lucy said. “But it sounds right.”

  “I will try a different explanation. Your nose cannot be conclusively labeled as large. Kaila has made an unsubstantiated statement.”
r />   Lucy still didn’t understand the whole sentence, but she got the first part. “Really?”

  “Yes.” He turned to Stephi, leaned forward. Stephi eagerly leaned over the table and went almost nose-to-nose with Kyle. “Stephi. Megan, too, is incorrect. You are not ugly. In fact, based on societal norms of beauty”—he tilted his head—“you are pretty.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes.” He did not smile, but his face was not unfriendly. Simply scientific. “Society can often dictate who is pretty. I, personally, believe that that is ridiculous. Nonsense. For example, a woman’s BMI in different countries determines her attractiveness. That BMI number is radically different from place to place.”

  “What is Bees My I?” asked Stephi.

  “It’s a measure of weight.” He shook his head. “More important, Stephi, Megan’s statement is erroneous. I don’t know how to prove this to you, as you obviously engage in studying yourself in the mirror to prepare yourself for your day. That you do not see that you are pretty is an analytical mistake on your part.” Kyle’s brow furrowed, and he muttered, “This problem will require proof, as they are both very young and are, currently, judging by the tears, emotional. Mother says when people cry, give them a hug.” He stood. Gave them perfunctory hugs. He patted their backs. Three times. He seemed surprised when both girls clung to him. He adjusted his glasses. “I will think of a solution to this problem forthwith.”

  He got out his Questions Notebook and started writing.

  Later we played Scrabble. Of course Kyle won.

  * * *

  In Portland, after I left Montana, I was depressed and a wreck. I had fallen into a pit where I could hardly move, hardly breathe. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. My chest was tight, my heart raced, and I had trouble swallowing. I felt as if I was choking. All anxiety crap.

  Working at Carter’s restaurant ended up being my salvation in that it forced me out of my sleeping bag/coffin and out of the apartment in which I was still sleeping on the floor. Carter’s restaurant was fast, steamy, all encompassing. Cooking started to heal me, as it had so many other times in my life. Chopping, slicing, sautéing, mixing, stirring, blending, pouring, making food look like art, it took me away from Jace and from a future that seemed hopeless and black.