Stir

by Jessica Fechtor

  Eli worked from our adopted home each day, designing software and finishing up a public art piece with a friend. I took Yiddish classes at NYU and prepared for my doctoral exams. Something was shifting for us that summer. We were on the cusp of something, and we felt it. We made a plan for our return to Cambridge: I’d knock out my exams. Eli would look for a tech job out west. We’d move in the spring. I would begin writing my dissertation on the fellowship I had already secured while, with any luck, a human started growing in my belly.

  Our last night in New York we took ourselves out to an Italian wine bar on East Fourth. It was small and cavelike, with exposed brick walls and glowing naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The host led us to a corner table at the very front of the house and swung the giant casement windows open over the street. I sat with my back to them, propped my elbows on the sill, and leaned into the warm night air.

  There was shaved fennel salad, fried artichokes, and porcini ravioli to share. We drank wine. Earlier that day, I told Eli, I’d mistakenly referred to him as “my boyfriend.” It had just slipped out. But it still felt that way sometimes, didn’t it? That he was my new boyfriend and I was his girl? We’d been together six years, married half as long, but it felt as though we’d just made that leap, half toppling, half sailing from the solid ground of our friendship into something new. He knew what I meant, he said. Nothing seemed to age us.

  The next day we packed up our car, spent a long weekend with his family in New Jersey, and drove home to our one-bedroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It had felt good to be back in my kitchen again after a summer away, to stand at my counter squeezing tomato slabs and mayo between the familiar slices of a baguette from down the block. I set our table with the napkins we never bothered to iron and burned almonds in the oven I’d forgotten ran hot. I did some baking, too, just for fun, then parceled things out to our neighbors. Drop biscuits, a berry crisp, chocolate chip cookies. I was home.

  • • •

  They slid me from the ambulance at the small hospital in Stowe and hoisted me up on shoulders again. My face felt too close to the ceiling. I was embarrassed by the drama I’d kicked up around me. Surely, if I were sick, it was a wimpy little sick. Dehydration, maybe? Low blood sugar? And if this were something worse, we were on it. We. Ilana had kneeled at my head; Or had called 911; a paramedic had come. Cindy, on faculty at the conference, had ridden with me in the ambulance, up front. Adena, my friend and conference roommate, was on her way. These people would keep me safe. I would keep me safe, by the simple act of marching thoughts across my brain.

  Up on the stretcher, I kept nodding off the way you do on an airplane or long road trip. The pain was excruciating, the drifting in and out of consciousness almost pleasant. I remember the room we entered, the doughnut-shaped machine, the technician, and how his gray curls and deep-set eyes made me feel he was up to the task. I don’t remember the ride that followed to Fletcher Allen hospital in Burlington, a Level I trauma center equipped to handle what he saw: There was blood in my brain. And not neatly inside the vessels, where it’s supposed to be. There had been a spill.

  • • •

  Cindy and Adena sat to the left of my stretcher in the Fletcher Allen ER. Machines beeped on my right. The beige curtain pulled closed around us parted and a grave-looking doctor stepped in, held out a clipboard, and asked me to sign. I was overcome with the desire to do a Very Good Job. The pen felt cool in my hand. I wrote my name slowly, as carefully as I could: Jessica Kate Fechtor. I was still wearing my workout clothes, the same Adidas shorts on the same legs that had carried me through the New York City half marathon a few weeks before. Cindy peeled the clothes from my clammy body and helped me into a gown.

  “Hello, lady.”

  I looked up. Eli was there.

  He was in his standard uniform, jeans and a black cotton tee, and was digging around near the machines looking for a place to plug in his phone. No luck, I guess, because he was back up now, darting around the foot of the bed, crouching on the other side.

  His phone was dead. It had died at the start of his drive, just after he’d heard from Cindy, when no one knew anything at all. He’d spent the better part of four hours pushing a hundred miles per hour, distracting himself with the thought that it was kind of cool to have an excuse to drive that fast, rather than dwelling on what might be going on with me. When his mind did wander to what was waiting for him at the end of that trip, he imagined a supremely embarrassed Jess laughing with him at this big, noisy fuss over nothing.

  He disappeared to the other side of the curtain and sneaked his phone charger into the USB port of a nurse’s computer when no one was looking. I needed him to stop moving, sit down, give me his hand. But I also needed him not to, to keep being the speck of normal in a scene that made no sense.

  A resident appeared. Young, serious, handsome. I trusted him right away. I assumed he was mine, my doctor, as though I’d have only one and he’d shepherd me through whatever happened. He confirmed that, yes, there was a hemorrhage. I had blood in my brain. They just weren’t sure where it had come from. I asked him if I could die, and he looked me in the eye and said yes.

  Well, as long as they know, I thought. As long as the worst possible thing was on their radar, they’d be able to ward it off. I assumed the doctor’s “yes” had come with a silent clause: “Yes, if you weren’t under our care.” “Yes, you might have, but now you’re here.”

  • • •

  The ICU was ready for me. All the rooms were full, so they wheeled me into a large, brightly lit room with floors like the ones in my middle school cafeteria. Beds were perpendicular against the wall with curtains drawn around them, little islands of sick. I got a corner slot, all the way down on the left. Two nurses were there, smoothing the sheets, drawing back the curtain. They lit up when they saw me, as though they’d been expecting me, and maybe I’d been running late, and they were so happy I was finally there. They waved and smiled and said hello.

  The nurse with the long red hair was Patty. She reached out both arms to me, and I felt suddenly quite happy to see them, too. It helped that their faces betrayed not a wink of pity or fear. They had the stance of people about to take very good care of me, but more in the way of hosts looking after their houseguests than nurses tending to the ill. Patty welcomed me to “the Pit” in a faux dramatic voice and smiled. That was what the nurses called this room where the overflow ICU patients stayed, she explained. I liked being in on the joke. I felt well enough to scoot from the stretcher to the bed myself, and I did. I threw up. Patty rubbed my back. I was sure it would all be okay.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Cake

  When I tell people that I am writing the story of a bloodied and broken brain—and oh, by the way, there will be recipes, too—I get some strange looks. Food is not supposed to top the list of things you think about, apparently, when you’re recovering from a near-fatal brain explosion. The thing is, I did think about food. A lot.

  And it’s not really all that strange. Thinking about food means thinking about everything that goes on around it. The dash from the breakfast table out the door, the conversations that shape us, the places and faces that make us who we are. What besides food could I think of that would encompass my life so roundly?

  Illness takes away plenty of big things. You can’t work; you can’t play. Worst of all, though, is the way it robs you of your everyday. That’s true whether you’re sick for three months or three days. If you’ve ever had a shower after a fever breaks, a first bite of solid food, traded your bathrobe for your favorite sweater, then you’ve felt it, too. Getting well means finding your everyday. I found mine in the kitchen.

  In the years before I got sick, I spent a lot of time in there. Kitchen business is physical. That was important to me during my first, healthy years of graduate school. After swimming around and around in my brain all day long, looping through the library after each paragraph written or c
hapter read so that I could remember what my legs were for, I wanted nothing more than to rub butter into flour, to feel the mild burn in my wrists and dough between my fingertips. I brought cakes to seminars, soups to neighbors, and mailed biscotti to faraway friends. I talked about food with anyone who would listen. I wrote about it, too: in the margins of my research notebooks, the pages of my journal, and summertime missives sent from study programs abroad.

  Food has powers. It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together. It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block. At the same time, it draws us inward. Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people. A parsnip, for me, is Friday nights. It’s a soup pot simmering with a chicken inside, silk curtains, and my grandmother smelling brothy, salted, and sweet.

  But there’s also something simpler going on, I think, namely that it feels so good to eat. Because we’re hungry, yes, but also because food allows us, in some small way, to act out who we are. My aunt puts cream in her ginger ale. I put peanut butter on a spoon. And cottage cheese on baked potatoes, and milk in tea, and yogurt on top of granola, not the other way around. My brother has a recipe: “Mustard. Bread. Mustard sandwich.” Eli comes from a family that puts ketchup on pasta and fries French toast in oil. He cuts off the crusts and saves them for last and eats them like bread sticks, with jam.

  Food—like art, like music—brings people together, it’s true. It begins, though, with a private experience, a single person stirred, moved, and wanting company in that altered state. So we say, “You have to taste this.” We say, “Please, take a bite.”

  It is a pleasure not only to taste, but to have taste, to feel our preferences exert themselves. It feels good to know what we like, because that’s how we know who we are.

  • • •

  I was born in New York City. My parents weren’t “foodies” in the all-too-narrow sense we think of when we hear that word today, but lovers of food in the broadest, most democratic way. My mother gets excited over a glop of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt and bran flakes. My father has been known to extol the virtues of a Nestlé Chunky bar. You see what I mean. They are, in the words of Calvin Trillin, “serious eaters,” which, if you ask me, is a much more fitting way of describing people who have a thing for food. They don’t eat terribly much or make any big deal about it. They just eat what they like and like what they eat. It’s a matter of enthusiasm, really, a way of being that they took with them out into their city—to the hot dog stand, the ice cream counter, the kosher deli—and in so doing, taught me to do the same.

  I baked with my mother when I was young. Butter cookies, brownies. “Don’t forget to keep it in the bowl,” she’d say as I stirred. But more important than anything I might have learned in the kitchen, what I inherited was a way of thinking about food, an openness to it, a hunger for it in all its forms.

  We lived in a two-room apartment at Seventy-fifth and Third, my mother, my father, a cat named Spike, a shih tzu named Cheeseburger, and a baby me. It was a squeeze, so the functional took priority. The coffee table converted to dining height. The sofa pulled into a bed. That was where my parents slept, in the living-room-dining-room-turned-second-bedroom, when I was born and took over the only room with a door. “We were getting our money together,” my mother once told me. They were getting their lives together.

  My great-great-aunt Frances lived a few blocks away in an apartment three times the size. My memory of it begins in the living room, enormous and bright, with east-facing windows and bookcases that stretched floor to ceiling along the entire northern wall. In the dining room was a long table and, according to my mother, a buzzer on the floor that Aunt Fran would press with her foot to signal the housekeeper to bring the next course. If I’d eaten many meals in that room, I’d surely have remembered that, but I ate mostly in her kitchen, on a green vinyl stool with two steps up that folded out from beneath the seat cushion.

  Rosemary, the housekeeper, slept in the adjoining room, and the kitchen was her domain. It took me years to understand that the cooking and cleaning Rosemary did was her job. As far as I could tell, she and Aunt Fran were roommates, Rosemary living there and helping as she did because Aunt Fran was old, not because she was paid to. It seemed a lovely thing to do.

  Anyway, it was Rosemary who would seat me on that stool, tie a clean white dish towel around my neck, and hold out a bowl of bean-flecked vanilla ice cream with a grown-up-sized spoon. I can’t quite picture Rosemary’s face, but I remember a neat hairline and soft arms. I didn’t yet know about the herb called rosemary, so her name made me think of roses instead.

  Rosemary died when I was six, and when my parents told me, I cried. I wasn’t sure if I had a right to, but I think now of something the British chef Nigel Slater once wrote, that it is “impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.” I think the same can be said of the person who scoops your ice cream into a dish and stands, smiling, as you eat.

  We saw Aunt Fran all the time, but each visit felt like an occasion. She was my first old person, a pale woman with dark hair that hung to just below her ears. I can picture her charging down the sidewalk toward me, her trench coat billowing behind her like a cape, my mother doing her full-arm wave, as though trying to get the attention of someone not staring right at us.

  Aunt Fran never had children, and by some standards you might say that she didn’t know how to be with them. I thought she was great. Instead of talking to me in the labored way people sometimes do to bridge the adult-child divide, she operated as though there weren’t one. Her voice was raspy and low, her eyes bright behind huge plastic frames. She would wait for me to speak, with a faint grin on her closed lips, then smile widely, with teeth, when I was through. She was observing me and, yes, judging, but only because she was listening for real.

  I have a memory of sitting with Aunt Fran and my parents at a low table in a candlelit, wood-paneled restaurant. The white linens are crisp, and a waiter sails by with a plate of something delicate and dark. Aunt Fran points and tells me they’re snails. She says it matter-of-factly; not how grown-ups sometimes say this kind of thing to children—what do you make of that!—but just to let me know. I am four years old and I do not flinch. She orders me escargots, and they arrive with a tiny fork, and no one makes a fuss, and I eat.

  • • •

  It’s funny how the foods that inhabit our childhoods turn around to house our childhoods when we’re grown. Snails, vanilla ice cream, minestrone from a can. I come from these things. From the croissants my mother would pull from white paper bags, tear in half, and stuff with Smucker’s grape jelly, from her omelets, oozing with American cheese, from tiny amaretti that came in a red square tin. A babysitter first brought them over, and though there was nothing special that I can remember about that night, those amaretti made an impression. The tins, with their Italian lettering and fleurs-de-lis, made the cookies seem fancy, but really they weren’t. They were just bite-sized buttons of egg whites and sugar, flavored with apricot kernels. I had a vague sense that being grown-up meant appreciating a thing like that, a thing so simple. And while being grown-up was not necessarily something to which I aspired, I enjoyed being a kid who appreciated grown-up things.

  When I was five, my family moved from New York to Ohio, just east of Cleveland, and I brought the empty tin with me. The scent of the cookies clung to it for years. Sometimes I’d lie on my bed beneath the sloped ceiling of our farmhouse, pry open the lid, and inhale. It triggered not so much a memory as an awareness of something I’d forgotten. Eventually, I forgot the tin, too.

  Fifteen years later, I was home from college on winter break. And by “home” I don’t mean that farmhouse where my parents, baby sister, and I had lived; nor, God forbid, the apartment with green shag carpeting my father moved into two years later when my parents split; nor the contemporary suburban home where my mother, sister, and I
moved a few years after that; nor any of the houses where my father lived with his new wife and, within a couple of years of their marriage, two new kids.

  This home was in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. My father and his family had settled there before their kids were school age and stayed, and because most of my people lived there, it felt like my home, too. I entered the house through the side door that winter and dropped my bags. I smelled it before I saw it. The toasted nuts, the floral note of the almond extract, the butter. It sat in a fluted tart pan beneath a veil of sliced almonds and sugar.

  A cake.

  My stepmother, Amy, had baked it for later that night. There had been no occasion, just a recipe from the paper she’d wanted to try, which for her is occasion enough. The recipe is as simple as they come: just sugar, butter, eggs, flour, and salt, with a splash each of vanilla and almond extract. It’s a rich cake with a tender crumb, dense and delicate at the same time, humble despite its fluting. From its aroma alone, I knew that it was somehow mine, and when I took a bite, I knew why: Those cookies. Those amaretto cookies.

  It was a clown car of a cake. My aunt Fran was in there, her coat flapping in the wind, our city street, and a rush of warm air forced up through the subway grates. A block party in Brooklyn where the big kids drank soda, the backseat of a taxi, a playground tire swing, my parents, hand in hand. Amaretto is made from apricot kernels, not almonds, but something about the way that cake looked, how it smelled, how it tasted, how it felt, how I felt, home from college with it on my plate—that old sense of being small but grown-up, that new sense of being grown-up but still small—bridged the flavors in my mind.