My Fat Dad

by Dawn Lerman

  Mohn Kichlach/Poppy Seed Cookies

  Yield: approximately 48 cookies

  3 eggs, beaten

  1 cup granulated sugar

  1 cup unsalted butter, softened, or vegetable oil

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  3 cups all-purpose flour

  4 tablespoons poppy seeds

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  1⁄4 teaspoon salt

  Parchment paper for rolling out the dough and lining the baking sheet

  1 egg yolk thinned with 2 tablespoons of water for a thin egg wash

  In a large bowl beat the eggs and sugar with an electric mixer until the mixture is a light yellow color. Continue beating while adding the softened butter and vanilla. Mix well.

  Combine the remaining dry ingredients in a bowl, and with a fork mix so that the poppy seeds are evenly distributed throughout. Then add the dry ingredients into the egg mixture until the dough just comes together. Form it in a ball and roll out the dough between 2 parchment papers about an inch thick. Place on a sheet pan and refrigerate the dough until it hardens, about 20 minutes.

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper.

  Take the dough out of the fridge and peel off the parchment paper. Cut into desired shapes using a knife or pizza cutter. Place squares on the prepared baking sheet and brush on the egg wash. Bake in the middle of the oven for 10 to 12 minutes, or until slightly puffed and golden.

  Cool on a wire rack. The cookies will harden as they cool.

  2

  My New Baby Sister

  Aunt Jeannie’s Apple Strudel, Chocolate Chip Mandel Bread, Russian Borscht, Sure to Make You Feel Special Shirley Temple

  I was the only person in Miss Duckler’s kindergarten class without a sibling. I had wished so long for a sister. But I had also wished on a star for a Baby Alive doll, and that wish never came true. So when my aunt Jeannie woke me early on a freezing-cold winter morning a week before Valentine’s Day to tell me that my parents and grandparents had left to go to the hospital to deliver my new baby sister or brother, I couldn’t really believe it.

  I knew my mom had been pregnant for nine months, but I didn’t know what nine months meant. And most of my friends’ mothers had big bellies and ate a lot of ice cream when they were about to have a new baby. My mom bragged that she gained only twelve pounds, and her belly was barely noticeable, so it was hard to believe this special day was really here.

  Jeannie, Beauty’s younger sister, famous in our family for her blond wavy hair and her talent for playing the piano by ear, but mostly for her delicious cookies and strudels—that my dad said could make a grown man cry with joy—comforted me that morning with a warm breakfast of scrambled eggs with lox and sweet onions, and the rare and wonderful sight of a full refrigerator, which she had stocked with white fish salad, an applesauce meatloaf, and carrot coins swimming in a honey sauce.

  I didn’t want to go to school for fear of missing the call from the hospital, but my aunt assured me I didn’t need to hover by the phone, that she would notify my teacher if there was any news. She then zipped my coat, adjusted my earmuffs, and off we went to my elementary school, Anshe Emet on the North Side of Chicago, where I spent my morning learning Hebrew and waiting for news about my mom. I was so nervous I couldn’t tell the letter Gimel from the letter Bet.

  Finally, during my favorite school lunch of broiled kosher chicken with stewed tomatoes and black-and-white cookies for dessert, they announced over the loudspeaker, “Dawn Lerman has a new baby sister.” I just couldn’t believe it. I screamed so loudly, so gutturally, that I was sent to the back of the line and lost my star for the day. I always received a gold star for being a good girl—standing in line quietly, raising my hand, and never talking out of turn. But on this day, I couldn’t stop jumping up and down and screaming in my loudest, happiest voice, “I have a sister, I have a sister!”

  At three o’clock, when the lineup bell rang, I dashed for the door where my aunt was waiting for me in her long, black mink coat. She was trying to meet my friends and see my classroom, but I was so excited I rushed her out the door, dashing as fast as I could toward her silver El Dorado Cadillac with crushed velvet interiors. It was so cold outside that I could see my breath. Aunt Jeannie kept trying to hold my hand with hers in a leather glove, but the glove was slippery and I managed to wiggle free, chanting, “I have a sister, I have a sister!” As we drove off, the song “Aquarius” from the musical Hair was playing on the radio. My sister April was born in February, and my mom had told me her astrological sign would be Aquarius (mine was Gemini). I remember thinking how appropriate the song was, but how inappropriate the name April was, given the current weather conditions.

  I asked my aunt how long it would take to get to the hospital, as every second was a second too long.

  “We need to wait till morning before we can see your mom and sister,” she said, rattling off all the things we needed to buy before my mom and my precious little baby sister came home. “Diapers, bibs, bottles, laundry detergent, maybe even one of those cute mobiles that go above the crib. I hear they stimulate brain activity.”

  “But I want to see her now,” I whimpered, trying as hard as I could to hold back the salty tears.

  “No time for long faces. We have some serious work to do, and I need you to be my big girl helper.”

  I was disappointed, but I knew she was right. My dad’s home office, which was now going to be my new baby sister’s nursery, looked nothing like any baby’s room I had seen in my dad’s commercials. There were no baby murals, or painted clouds on the wall, no fancy baby furniture, or stuffed animals sitting on a dresser. It had old movie posters that my dad collected, a big metal desk, a gray filing cabinet secured with a metal combination lock, where my dad stuffed and secured emergency stashes of Yodels, Twinkies, and Devil Dogs, and a mini fridge with a sign posted on the front that said in big red letters, “Keep Out.” There were also lots of unpacked cartons of books, and records, and stacks of Playboy magazines. My father saved every publication to which he contributed. He wrote close to a hundred reviews in his three years at that magazine—so there were several stacks of the naked lady booklets.

  In the center of the room stood my old mahogany crib that my grandmother had retrieved from her basement and a space heater that you had to sit close to if you didn’t want to freeze, since the room was a converted porch. Beauty always feared that the sleeves of my nightgown would catch on fire. But my mom thought she was a worrywart and scolded her for instilling fear in me.

  Sitting in the backseat of the car watching all the cars speed past us, I became lost in thought—daydreaming about finally having someone with whom I could share my thoughts. April would be the only person in the world with the exact same life as me. She would understand our shared reality without words or explanation. My aunt glanced at me, and asked if I would like to stop and buy a giant poster board to make a welcome home sign for April’s room.

  Normally, I loved doing crafts with Aunt Jeannie. She knew how to paint, crochet, knit, and do origami, but today the thought of sitting still was extremely painful. I was fixated on the fact that Beauty, Papa, and my dad were all at the hospital, and I was being driven thirty-five minutes in the opposite direction. It would be a whole day before I could meet my new baby sister and I was dying with anticipation. I wanted to see what April looked like, hold her, and be one of the first voices she heard. At the stoplight, my aunt pulled out a bag of her just baked chocolate chip mandel bread.

  “They’re still warm,” she said in her usual enticing tone.

  Biting into one of the heavenly biscuits, still somewhat moist in the middle, with puddles of melted chocolate, I remembered how Beauty admired her so. “If you could grow up and be like Jeannie, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.” Beauty loved to brag and talk about her sister Jeannie. In fact, my mother thought it w
as a bit of an obsession, and that she should focus less on Jeannie and develop some more of her own interests.

  Beauty would lament that she had had to leave school after the eighth grade to help care for her younger siblings. She said she didn’t mind because she never thought she was very smart. “But your aunt Jeannie went all the way through high school, often making the honor roll for math.”

  Beauty admired Jeannie’s talents and believed there was no better way to spend an afternoon than to watch her sister roll out the strudel dough so thin that you could read through the dough the many love letters she had received from men, or to dance to “Hava Nagila” in her living room while Jeannie played the Jewish melody on the piano. Even though they were in their fifties, when they interacted, they seemed like giggly little girls—laughing and gossiping. I imagined that was what April and I would be like when we were older.

  Arriving at my aunt’s house, which Beauty always called the Enchanted Cottage because once you arrived you never wanted to leave, my mood lifted. The house was warm and cheery, decorated with beautiful French furniture, my aunt’s original paintings, antique dolls, a player piano, and an organ. But best of all were the many mirrors that somehow made everyone look beautiful and happy as the light reflected from the velvet curtains. Even my father thought his diet was working when he caught his reflection in those mirrors.

  Jeannie gave me special slippers, which she called peds, and we tiptoed down her carpeted stairs to her newly finished basement, which had been under construction for the last two years. Uncle Louie, who was a general contractor and an artist, had turned what was a regular basement into a miniature city. He had re-created Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he had imagined taking my aunt Jeannie for their honeymoon. But they were married in the winter, and were snowed in, which is why nine months later my cousin Linda was born.

  One of the walls housed a three-dimensional, twelve-foot-long mural that went from floor to ceiling. The mural featured wood carvings and a neon sign that flashed “Bourbon Street.” There were also cafes, gift shops, old apartment buildings, seafood restaurants, and street performers. Every structure and character was hand-carved and carefully painted by my uncle, and individually decorated with multicolored Christmas lights that were continuously twinkling.

  On the other side of the basement, there was a real bar covered in hand-painted mosaics, a jukebox, a real movie screen, a big popcorn machine, and a mini kitchen where Jeannie combined butter and brown sugar to coat the popcorn. We sat at the bar drinking Shirley Temples with pink paper umbrellas, clinking glasses and toasting April’s birth. The bubbles tickled my throat when I drank the fizzy drink. Listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong play on the jukebox, my aunt shared tales about Beauty and her when they were kids. I always found it intriguing how Beauty’s and Jeannie’s stories were so different, and how I learned about each of them through the other.

  “Growing up, Beauty and I lived with a bunch of boarders in addition to our parents and our siblings: Nooti, Hymie, Billy, Harry, and Bevy. Our house was on the West Side of Chicago, directly across from Kim Novak’s home before she became a movie star. We didn’t have the biggest house on Springfield Avenue, but we had the grandest cherry tree in the neighborhood.

  “During the early summer months, we’d spend all day in the hot sun picking the cherries off the trees. They were so sour they would make your mouth pucker. Around sunset, my dad, the big goof, would show up with his big hose and spray us down. ‘This should clean you guys up a little,’ aiming the freezing water at each of us, till our feet showed no traces of dirt. With clean feet we gathered in the cramped tub, jumping up and down, as hard and as fast as we could, until the cherries were smashed and the pits popped out. My dad used the extracted juice for wine. And my mom used the pitted cherries to make preserves for the wintertime. Sometimes even a pie with a perfect lattice crust.”

  Imagining the tartness of those cherries, the crispiness of that crust, entertained me enough to quiet my discomfort about not being with my mom and sister. Keeping me busy, Jeannie pulled out crayons and markers from a Folgers coffee can. We started decorating the pastel-pink poster board that Jeannie had laid out for my masterpiece. She showed me how to write “Welcome Home April” in bubble letters, and I drew little hearts all over the sign, which I then decorated with purple and gold glitter—making my words look extra special.

  Jeannie soon began making the dough for our strudel. Whenever there was a special occasion, you could count on my aunt Jeannie for her baked goods and lavish spreads. When it was someone’s birthday, an anniversary, or a holiday, she would often spend weeks baking and coming up with ways to outdo herself from the previous year. She even had an extra freezer that she called “Just In Case”—just in case she was invited somewhere or someone just popped in unexpectedly. There was never a shortage of strudels, hamantaschen, cakes, and challah breads in my aunt’s freezer.

  While Beauty relied on her instincts when cooking and the power of fresh ingredients, Jeannie was very precise with her measurements and presentation, and entertaining was very important to her. A whiz at math, she could double and triple recipes without even using a piece of scratch paper, and she could make chopped liver look like fresh strawberries by shaping it with bread crumbs, adding a touch of food coloring, and inserting parsley. Everybody thought it was real fruit until they bit into the liver.

  Aunt Jeannie handed me a bowl of peeled and cored apples to slice with a butter knife for the filling. She made me wear gloves so if the knife slipped, even though it wasn’t too sharp, I wouldn’t cut myself. Working on the apples, I watched my aunt pour the measured flour, water, eggs, and melted butter into the bowl before she mixed the dough. She began throwing the dough against the table—kneading it and rolling it, and kneading it and rolling it.

  “You have to beat the dough hard if you want to get rid of all the air bubbles,” she said.

  She then made a ball of dough and placed it into a buttered bowl to rest. Next, it was time to chop the nuts.

  “This is your job; it is a trick you should never forget,” she instructed, filling two Ziploc bags, one with walnuts and one with pecans. “Always leave a little space for air to escape; otherwise, the bag will explode.” Once the bags were filled and properly sealed, she showed me how to crush the nuts with a rolling pin.

  It was now time to perfect the dough. Jeannie took the dough and began stretching it across her worn, wooden kitchen table, which was lightly covered with flour. She pulled the dough from all sides, stretching it as if she were making a bed, making sure all sides were equal.

  “This is the most important step,” she said, making me stretch the dough until it was hanging down the sides of the table. Helping her knead and pull the dough until it was paper-thin, I had to stop to shake out my hands. They were beginning to cramp.

  “The more you practice, just like the more you play the piano, the better and quicker you will be at making dough. At your age, Beauty and I would make two hundred varenikas at one time. When we would run out of room on the table to cut the dough and fill them with the mashed potatoes and onion mixture, we would spread a large sheet across our parents’ bed to hold the finished varenikas.”

  I kept my eyes on Jeannie, concentrating as she demonstrated how to make a sample varenika with the scraps from the strudel bowl. “Your turn,” she said enthusiastically, placing my palm on the bottom of a tall glass and adjusting my wrist just hard enough to cut the dough. But before I had the chance to perfect the art of using the glass as a cookie cutter, or figured out how to make my hands stop shaking when working so hard, my uncle burst in the door with a bunch of shopping bags.

  “Do you know what’s inside?”

  I shook my head no, secretly hoping there was something for me. My uncle let me open two bags. One bag contained a set of bumpers with little puppies and kittens on them; the other bag held a s
et with a moon and stars. “Pick your favorite.”

  “I pick the one with the bright yellow stars. I love it. April will think she is a star every time she looks at it.” Uncle Louie let out a hearty laugh at my answer and gave me a big hug, throwing me in the air in the process. Then he performed his usual trick of pulling coins out of my ears. I loved Uncle Louie, and I loved the way he smelled, like fresh-cut lumber and lemon-lime aftershave, his beard always a little scratchy when he held me close.

  Jeannie took off his coat, then fed him a taste of our sweet apple filling. Savoring the bite, Uncle Louie made me guess how many guys he had to fight off to win my aunt as his bride. “Many,” he announced, watching Jeannie finish the strudel by rolling it up and placing more butter, cinnamon, and sugar on top before pinching it closed and placing it in the oven.

  While the strudel was baking, Jeannie worked on dinner—hot Russian borscht with shredded beets, pureed tomatoes topped with sour cream, and trout with a pecan crust. I helped Jeannie dip the fillets first in the eggs, then the flour, then the eggs again, and then into a Ziploc bag of pecans. Jeannie had me shake the plastic bag with the fish fillets like a maraca, to coat them evenly, while Uncle Louie relayed the story of how they met at the Veterans Hospital after he returned from World War II.

  He had been a paratrooper. She was a secretary and was engaged to another army man. He bet her two dollars that after a cup of coffee with him, she would break off her engagement. They married six weeks later. The two-dollar bill was framed and proudly hung above the kitchen table where we enjoyed our dinner.

  I struggled to keep my eyes open during supper, so Uncle Louie fed me a couple bites of borscht and carried me into bed. It had been a long day—my last day as an only child. I slept in my cousin Linda’s room. She had already moved to California to pursue her dreams of being in film, but Jeannie had saved every Barbie, every puzzle, every piece of Linda’s dress-up clothes, and her wooden dollhouse with the spiral staircases and flowered window boxes from when she was a little girl. She had even saved one of her flannel nightgowns, which she gave me to put on. It was snuggly and warm, and I slept peacefully through the night dreaming of my little sister.