When I get my bearings, I realize that the screaming children are outside in the garden behind the house. Out the window I see that some silly fight has broken out between my cousins’ kids under my mother’s pear tree. Little Megan and her twin Rosie tug on opposite ends of a doll while Jessie and his brother Adam throw hard green pears from high in the branches of the tree. My cousin Angela stomps out the back door, shaking her finger and scolding the kids. As quickly as it started, it’s over. Megan gives up the doll, Adam and Jessie stop throwing pears, and they all go back to happily playing again.
The noise of the kids out back is the sound of my childhood in this house. Before my parents died, all my cousins, Manellis and Calabrias, congregated here every Sunday. Even though many of my cousins had bigger yards or better toys or Atari, everyone loved coming to my grandmother’s house. There were always cookies or cakes, and my grandmother gave us free rein of the entire house and yard.
We’d find old clothes in closets and put on plays. Make jalopy cars from abandoned toys in the basement and race them down the quiet street. Hold huge games of hide-and-seek from the basement to the attic. Those were the times when I was the happiest and missed my parents the least. Then they died, and the rift between the families happened. From then on, I had to choose where to go on Sundays. No matter what I chose, I felt bad. As if I’d let one side down. Plus, I was always sure that the other side was having more fun without me. In a way, it was a relief when the Manellis started moving away a few years later.
Now it’s another generation out back. I’m the only one beside Trina who hasn’t done my part to keep the Calabria family going. Even my mother (the black sheep, the oddball, the one who claimed she would be childless forever) had me when she was twenty-three.
I glance above Grandma’s dresser, where two pictures of my parents hang with all the other family portraits. One photo is the formal black-and-white glossy from the cover of the only album my parents recorded. My father cradles his upright bass with a lit cigarette between his first and second fingers as my mother looks over her shoulder from the piano. Both gaze seriously out at no one. This picture was used at their funeral, on an ornate plant stand between the two closed caskets.
The other picture is their wedding photo, snapped by a friend as they walk out of City Hall. My mother wears a short yellow dress and carries a lazy bouquet of daisies. My father’s in a natty blue pin-striped suit and black Chuck Taylor sneakers. She smirks at the camera, and my father tosses his head back, laughing, as if she were the funniest thing in the world. I’m in that picture, too. Hidden beneath the empire waist of my mother’s yellow wedding dress. Every time I look at that picture and the beguiling grin on her face, I wonder what made my mother do it. Marry my father and have me. Was she happy?
Everyone else in the family made lives that revolved around their kids. My aunts quit whatever jobs they had as soon as they got pregnant, then got down to the business of being wives and mothers. I’ve known since I was a kid that I’m too much like my parents to want that life for myself.
My parents left me behind with my grandmother from the time I was a year old. They’d tour with their jazz quartet for a few weeks, come home to play clubs around the city, then take some time off to rehearse and be with me. Even as a small child, I resented them for this arrangement and convinced myself they didn’t love me enough to stick around. My grandmother would have none of my complaining, though. “Of course they love you,” she’d say when I’d question why they weren’t home with me. “They just have other lives.” I couldn’t help but imagine those other lives as much happier without me.
My aunts did nothing to dispel that notion. I overheard them, more than once, talking snidely about my mother.
“Anyone heard from Norma lately?”
“Has she made plans for Lemon’s birthday?”
“She never has in the past.”
“Remember when she tried to bake a cake?”
“It was more like a chocolate brick.”
“I can do a party.”
“I can bring the cake.”
“I’ll decorate.”
And they would. Every year, every event in my life, my aunts orchestrated, sometimes overelaborately, in an effort to make up for what they perceived as my parents’ lack of interest. What my aunts didn’t understand was that I wanted whatever my parents had to offer, no matter how lame. But my parents rarely had a chance to arrange anything because my aunts were usually in the way, and then my parents died.
When I was thirteen, I decided that they weren’t really dead. After all, I’d never seen them dead. My mother’s casket was empty and my father’s closed. The only evidence of them was the photo between the coffins. For all I knew, both of them were still alive and living some incognito life where I couldn’t find them. Maybe they’d gone off to Tokyo or Paris, where American jazz musicians were lauded as gods. Or maybe they were right across the Bridge, in Manhattan, playing bars at night, while I grew gawky and awkward out of their sight.
My adolescent explanation for their absence made more sense to me than their horrible deaths. Could someone’s parents really die in a train wreck? And not just any train wreck, but a train that smashed through a bridge and plunged into a swollen river in New Jersey? That sounded more like a bad movie or urban lore or something I would’ve made up to explain their absence in my life.
Before I can get too dark and brooding about my parents, I’m interrupted by my grandmother calling me. “Lemon,” she yells from the bottom of the stairs. “Dinner’s ready.”
This is the fabric of my life. Since I was a kid, whenever I’d delve too deeply into what it meant not to have parents, my grandmother would pull me into the family. I know what they’re doing downstairs. Moving purposefully around a table full of sustenance, laughing, joking, arguing. I’ve always been a part of this ritual, but separate, too. Trying to find my place in the midst of all the people while everyone else (including Eddie, who slipped into my family so easily) seems certain of where they belong. I look at my parents’ pictures once more. They hardly knew me when they died. To them I remain forever a grubby six-year-old trying desperately to make them stay. To me they are infinitely vibrant, distant stars who never had a chance to show me where I fit in.
“Lemon?” Grandma calls again. The stairs creak beneath her steps.
It’s no use trying to figure it all out now, and I don’t want to make my grandmother wait. I rouse myself from the bed, run my fingers through my hair, and haul myself up. “Coming,” I yell back.
Embryo
At four weeks you are tiny. Nearly microscopic. You have no eyes or fingers or toes. You are just a blob of tissue and a bundle of nerves. Your mother knows just how you feel. Still, she refuses to suspect you. She has too much to do. Too many steaks to sear, salads to dress, pears to poach in wine. She refuses to question. Blames all the signs and symptoms on other things so that she will not imagine you into existence.
Except that she does. At night. Lying in bed with thoughts and worries ricocheting around her mind. Some sneaking suspicion lurks. No, she thinks. Not now. Not yet. I have too much to do. You are unconcerned with her agenda. You have your own. It’s made up of spinal cords and arm buds and eye bulges. You are making yourself into a person. One layer at a time. Preparing yourself for life. Forming your yolk sac from which to feed, you suck her dry. Your head tapers to a point, like a teardrop. The first of many times that you will break your mother’s heart.
When she thinks of you at all, for those slender moments before she drops off to sleep, she confuses you with her own mother, who lives at the bottom of the ocean. It might have taken millennia for the ancient flow to move her. Mountains had to melt, streams had to join up to form rivers carving tricky switchbacks through the land, scooting her remains over the rocky riverbeds out to that great expanse of water spreading from continent to continent. Her bones picked clean by the kisses of fishes. Her hair bleached white by the salt. No matter. She alway
s loved to travel. So is it you that your mother thinks of when she’s drifting, in your watery home deep inside her belly, or her own mother, forever at rest in her aquatic grave? And are you two so different?
Chapter
Four
I am woozy, dizzy, muzzy-headed, and grouchy. I’m full, bloated, enormous, and on the verge of puking. I’m sick of food. Sick of cooking. Every smell is a rancid assault. Every taste turns bitter on my tongue. The thought of walking into my restaurant makes me want to lie down and sleep for days. I thought I would never burn out, but I can feel it in me. Slowly I’m sinking.
“God, I’m tired,” I say to Makiko. “This week’s been a bitch. I thought things would’ve calmed down by now.” It’s seven A.M., and we’re walking the quiet streets of the East Village on our way to the Union Square Farmer’s Market.
“I think all the press for the first anniversary stirred things up again,” she says through a mouthful of Hostess Sno Ball. She brushes pink and black crumbs from her denim jacket.
“We were so busy last night that Lyla completely forgot a table,” I say. “They sat there for fifteen minutes. We’re making stupid mistakes like we just opened.”
“At least people are coming,” she points out. “It’d be worse if no one showed up.”
Although Makiko’s right, I can’t figure why we’re still not turning a profit. Why I can’t get the ordering right. Why Franny and I get on each other’s nerves in the kitchen. I worry that the menu’s wrong. That my food will fall out of favor, become passé, or be imitated to the point of oversaturation. A few weeks ago, I was on top of the world, so sure of myself; now every anxiety about how the restaurant could fail wakes me every few hours all night long. Orders not filled. Rotting meat crawling with maggots in a warm and muggy walk-in. Irate customers. Jeering critics. Creditors nipping at my heels.
When it’s all too much, I get up. Stumble to the bathroom, nearly delirious, my bladder ready to burst. My stomach in knots, feeling like I’m going to retch. Maybe I have a bladder infection. Stomach cancer. A kidney problem. A liver dysfunction. Some horrible disease that will render me a babbling incontinent imbecile. These are the kinds of thoughts that dash around my mind as I lie awake for hours, worrying.
Until I finally give up, put on my clothes, and go back down to the kitchen to get a jump start on the day so that I don’t fall any further behind. This morning I was up by five-thirty and in the kitchen by six. Makiko was already there, staring at the pantry shelves. We decided to go to the farmer’s market together, hoping to be inspired by the fresh spring produce.
We walk side by side, dragging our rattling granny carts across the craggy sidewalks. Taxis cruise silently by. Shopkeepers yawn while lifting their iron gates. Garbage trucks crawl by like babies in heavy diapers. And a few blinking souls wander the streets sipping paper cups of coffee and holding folded newspapers tucked beneath their arms.
“This neighborhood looks completely different in the morning,” I say. Already we’ve passed a Dominican bodega with porno magazines in the window. A Ukrainian sausage shop full of pig heads. A church with a homeless man sleeping on the stoop. A housing project, a kosher bakery, and a Chinese nail salon.
“It’s changing, though,” says Makiko.
“I know. Used to be, you could buy crack or mangos or chocolate babka and a New York Times, all in the same block.”
“I remember,” says Makiko. “My first apartment was on Avenue B and Eleventh. Every night when I came home, I thought for sure I’d be mugged. But it was kind of exciting, too.”
“Now there are two Starbucks, for God’s sake.”
Makiko pulls the rest of her Sno-Ball out of its cellophane wrapper. “It’s getting so tame,” she says. “Just like any regular neighborhood in New York.”
“Except that past nine o’clock everyone here is twenty years old. I feel like such an old woman next to all the kids coming in and out of bars with their tattoos and piercings. Jesus, listen to me. I sound like an old woman. I think that’s why I put blue streaks in my hair, to prove that I’m not so old yet.”
Makiko laughs. “I acted just like all those kids when I first came here. I thought the East Village was heaven.” She shoves the Sno Ball in her mouth then pulls a Twinkie out of her bag.
“God, it’s embarrassing to remember myself at that age,” I say.
“I imagine you were very, very serious.” She wags the Twinkie at me to make her point.
“Hell no. All I wanted was to get as far away from Brooklyn and my family as possible. As soon as I graduated from high school, I was out of here. I went to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to this little college called Antioch.”
“I didn’t know you even went to college,” Makiko says as she nibbles around the end of the Twinkie, exposing the cream in the center.
“It was such a ridiculous choice,” I say. “I was the only meat-eating, non-Birkenstock-wearing person with a vowel at the end of my name on campus. Needless to say, I didn’t fit in. I only stuck it out for two years, then I got into a junior-year-abroad program in Nice.”
“That’s where you met Franny, right?” Makiko asks.
“Yeah. We both told our families we’d be home after a semester, but then we spent the next year and a half migrating around Europe in our pseudo-hippie gear. I had bracelets up my arms and toe rings on my feet. And bells. For God’s sake. I was into tiny bells on the ends of my clothes. I jingled like a naughty cat wherever I went.”
Makiko laughs and licks a huge dollop of cream from her finger. I catch a whiff of the sugar, and my stomach gurgles. “How can you eat that crap?” I ask, nodding to the Twinkie.
“What?” she says. “It’s good.”
“You’re a pastry chef, for God’s sake. My pastry chef.”
She studies the little cake. “I’ve been trying for years to make a fancy Ding Dong, or maybe a Ho Ho.” She sighs. “But they’re just never the same.”
“If you perfect it, we’ll put it on the menu,” I tell her sarcastically.
“You would though, if it was good,” she says, and I nod. “In Japan, no one would ever let me try to make something as weird as this.” She pops the rest of the Twinkie in her mouth.
“Is that why you came over here?” We pass Pak Punjab, my favorite Pakistani deli, where turbaned cabbies double-park for the seventy-five-cent samosas. My stomach rumbles when I think of the starchy potatoes and bits of red chili wrapped inside the flaky deep-fried dough.
“Sort of,” she says. “I didn’t get into college. It’s really hard in Japan, and I was never good at school. I knew I wanted to cook, but the system in Japan is horrible. You have to apprentice for years and years, sweeping floors, chopping vegetables, before you ever get a chance to make something. I told my parents I wanted to come to New York to learn English and go to cooking school.”
“That’s really smart,” I say. “You had a decent plan. My so-called plan in Europe was to whore myself to any restaurant that would have me. Franny and I’d march into some little tourist town, survey all the restaurants, decide which one had the cutest waiters, then bug the chef until we were hired for any slop job he’d give us. We thought it was great, though. Living in hostels, drinking with the locals, learning to cook all kinds of different food.”
“Sounds fun,” says Makiko, then she takes a bottle of Yoo-hoo out of her bag and shakes it. “Why’d you leave?”
“Long story,” I say. Truthfully, I thought that I would stay in Europe forever, but it all ended quickly for Franny and me. I was back in Brooklyn eighteen months later, burned out, broke, and certain I’d never speak to her again.
“When I got back, I tried to stay in Brooklyn for a while,” I tell Makiko. “But my family drove me crazy. They hoped cooking was a phase for me. That I’d at least finish college or do something normal, like marry a hairy goomba from our neighborhood and have twenty-seven kids.”
“Sounds like my mom.” Makiko wipes a Yoo-hoo mustache from her upper lip. “She wan
ts me to move back to Japan, find a husband, have two kids, and live in her house until she dies.”
“Do you ever go back?”
“I haven’t been in two years,” says Makiko. “I’m a bad daughter.”
“I’m not much better,” I say. “My grandmother can’t believe I willingly live in this neighborhood instead of Brooklyn. To her, this is the place her parents tried to get away from. But I love the tin ceilings and the bathtub in my kitchen. I imagine my great-grandmother giving her seven kids a bath, then scrubbing potatoes, in that kind of tub.”
“Does your grandmother want you to live with her?” Makiko asks.
“No, it’s not that. She can’t figure out why I won’t move in with Eddie. He’s got a gorgeous two-bedroom co-op in Park Slope on a quaint little tree-lined street a block from Prospect Park. My aunts all palpitate at the thought of his parquet floors.”
“So why don’t you move in with him?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “Probably because it would be the smart, respectable, adult thing to do.”
We both laugh.
“Anyway,” I say. “I can’t beat the commute right now. Five flights of stairs, and I’m at work. Do you like your place?”
“My neighbors are crazy, but my rent’s cheap and it’s close to work, so I’m happy,” she says.
“Poor Franny has the worst commute.”
“All the way from Washington Heights,” says Makiko. “That’s like an hour each way.”
“She never lets me forget it,” I say. “That’s why, despite all my bitching about the East Village, I’ll never leave.”
At the corner of St. Marks and Second Avenue, I have to slow down because my stomach flip-flops, then tightens. All of a sudden, I think that I might barf. I reach out for a mailbox and steady myself.
“You okay?” Makiko asks. She holds me by the elbow.
The feeling passes quickly, and I’m ravenous. Now one of Makiko’s Sno Balls sounds good. Or a doughnut. Maybe a croissant. Maybe a pain au chocolat. “I think I’m just hungry,” I say. My stomach growls. I look around, desperate for a greasy, sugary doughnut fresh from bubbling oil. But there are no bakeries on this block.
Luscious Lemon Page 4