Julia calls Eitan “homie.” He’s tall and thin, like Julia, but while she has olive skin and long black hair, he’s rosy and fair, with blond hair and blue eyes. Eitan is easygoing, but no slouch. He was a PhD candidate in political science at Harvard when we met, and is the most efficient worker I know. He is also a total goofball. Once, in a debate with friends over the commonly accepted name for chocolate sprinkles—or would that be jimmies?—Eitan contended that an ice cream server would know what you meant no matter what you called them. He then marched up to the counter and, with a straight face, ordered a scoop of ice cream with “chocolate yum-yums, please.” The server went right for those yum-yums. She didn’t blink.
It’s funny to think that we had met these two only eight months before I got sick, because they already felt like old friends. They had turned up in Cambridge the previous fall and we’d invited them to our Chanukah party. Eitan helped himself to a second plate of latkes while Julia proclaimed her love of sour cream. We liked them right away. They joined us for dinner one night not long after that, then we went to their place, and pretty soon we had an unspoken date almost every Friday evening at their table or ours.
Our friends Jonathan and Hila, who lived downstairs from Eitan and Julia, would join us, too. Jonathan was a fellow graduate student studying ancient Judaism and Christianity, warm and soft-spoken, and an intuitive cook. His wife, Hila, is Israeli, with a deep voice and a heart as big and fierce as they come. She was teaching second grade when we met, marveling daily at the American obsession with antibacterial hand sanitizer.
Potlucks make me nervous at best (lasagna with a side of pasta salad, anyone?), but with this crowd, they worked. Jonathan was our bread man, and I was in charge of dessert, and we juggled around the tasks of main dish, salad, and sides. These were three-, four-, five-hour meals, the kind where stories of rogue eBay sellers, and landlady drama, and impressions of professors and colleagues began all at once over soup, then stopped, started, and stretched through to the very last bites. There was always plenty of wine.
I hung up the phone. I wanted to go back to that table. I wanted things to be exactly as they had been. That feeling of forgetting yourself when you’re swept up in conversation, joking and eating with friends, of being entirely at ease. It felt impossible now. I would miss things because of my eye. I was clumsy and slow. What if I felt that way forever? Eli cupped his hand around my knee.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, reading my mind.
I put my hand on his. “Say more, say better.” This was Eli’s high school Talmud teacher’s line after a student’s first stab at explaining a difficult passage. We said it to each other all the time.
“Dr. Tranmer said six to eight months until you’ll feel like yourself again. It sounds like a long time, but it’s not. We just have to make it through the winter.”
When he put it that way, it didn’t sound so bad at all.
• • •
Eli unlocked our front door and I walked in. It smelled exactly right. Like us, though I hadn’t been there in a month. It was late afternoon, my favorite time of day to come home. Orange light spilled through the south-facing windows onto the hardwood floor. I felt shy but welcome, as though I’d shown up late somewhere important to find that someone had saved me a seat.
This was the same apartment we had moved into that fall almost three years earlier. I stepped from the doorway into the long main room. We’d set up the near end as our living room, our handsome wooden bench opposite the green, down-stuffed sofa that I’d bought secondhand in Seattle. Over by the windows, on the other side of the fireplace, was our dining area. There stood our square, rust-colored antique table, and four wooden chairs that had been a craigslist find, one red, one lavender, and two pale green. I’d intended to paint them over in a single color when I bought them for my first apartment, but I’d never gotten around to it, and on second thought, I liked them the way they were. The bedroom was off to the right. I peeked in, eyed our blue and white quilt, and imagined myself slipping between the covers. I was glad for a bed to be just a bed again, and not a home base. I would sleep there at night and make it up in the mornings. During the day, if I had to lie down or sit, I’d do it somewhere—anywhere—else.
Our small, yellow-tiled bathroom was still small and yellow-tiled, and my little office was just as I had left it. A stack of books on deck for exam prep, a pack of sticky tabs, the yellow highlighter on its last legs that I needed to replace. My notebook was open to the to-do list I’d made up the night before I’d left for the conference. Catherine the Great article. Revolution stuff. Fellowship paperwork. Revised reading lists to R. W. and J. H. I’d written the call numbers of the next round of library books I needed on Post-it notes and stuck them along the bottom of my computer monitor. One had fallen onto the keyboard. I picked it up and flipped it over but didn’t stick it back on.
Through the main room to the left was the large space intended as a dining room that we used instead as Eli’s office and the catchall for an assortment of overflow dining and living room things. The enormous combination desk-bookshelf-filing-cabinet that Eli had built in his Seattle woodshop staked out the office side of the room. A long, narrow sideboard held our ceramic serving bowls and platters. And a sofa, a hand-me-down from Eli’s parents, sat beneath the windows. The room made no sense.
So annoying, I thought, as always, shaking my head but smiling.
Eli came up behind me. “You hate this room.”
I turned to face him. “I really do.”
He looped his arms around my waist and I rested my elbows on his shoulders.
“Hey, lady,” he whispered.
“Hey.”
I gestured with my head to the kitchen behind me.
“Would you go in there with me?” I asked. “I want to make a cup of tea.” The words came out like a proclamation. I hereby assert that I, Jessica Kate Fechtor, shall make a cup of tea! Eli followed me in.
Our kitchen was a mere cubicle, tacked on to the hip of the dining-room-turned-office like a sidecar. The floor space measured thirty-five square feet, with just a small stretch of counter between the sink and the wall. The rest of the apartment had been preserved, more or less, in its original, early-twentieth-century design. Hardwood floors, high ceilings, a tiled working fireplace. There was even an old wall safe in the bedroom.
The kitchen, though, had been renovated and it no longer fit in. The cabinetry was made of cheap wood, in the style of bachelor-pad kitchens for the newly divorced. The cupboard doors were clunky with oddly rounded corners. Anything natural looking about the wood had been buffed out and stained over in a “honey color,” you might generously call it, though really it was a dull tan. The counter was beige Formica and absorbed stains, and the floor was a grayish white linoleum that never looked clean.
But the oven had a gas range. It was old with worn dials and kept its heat beautifully, and glory be, there was a dishwasher. A garbage disposal, too. This kitchen is a workhorse, I decided when we first moved in. We just had to figure out how to make it so.
We started by rolling a small wooden cart against the back wall, trading a couple square feet of floor for a postage stamp of additional counter space. I did all my chopping there, and ingredient measuring, and mixing by hand. Eli installed a single shelf for spices on the wall above the cart and, from the ceiling overhead, he hung a pot rack. He’d found the studs in the ceiling and tested their strength by hanging from them in his climbing harness. “Hey, Jess!” he’d called across the apartment, and I’d walked in to find him dangling there, grinning. I gave him a gentle push, and when he swung back, he wrapped his legs around my torso, and I craned my neck upward and kissed his chin.
The refrigerator filled an odd little closet that led to the emergency stairwell. Or almost filled it. Shoved a few inches over, the fridge left us enough room to mount some shelves and baskets on the wall, and just
like that, we had a pantry.
As renters, these things were the most we could do, but it was exactly enough.
We kept nothing in that kitchen that we didn’t need, a pleasant side effect of which being that everything we had was both useful and used. There is a special kind of satisfaction in owning but three mixing bowls, a single favorite wooden spatula, and one each of the few pots and pans you actually like to cook in. You always get to use the spoon that feels best in your hand when that’s the only one you’ve got. Our kitchen was kosher, so we had each of these things times two (one for dairy, one for meat), but even then, it all felt beautifully contained.
Peek in on a typical Friday afternoon, and you’d see everything in action: the floury top of the wooden cart where I shaped the challah dough; the stand mixer on the counter with its head reared back and cake batter dripping into the bowl; a pot of soup, nearly done, on the front right burner. All of these things happening not quite at once but in overlapping succession, baked, cooked, and spit out onto the sideboard in the “office” to cool.
This Friday afternoon was different. I’d make tea.
I opened up the cupboard and reached for the handle of a large blue and white mug, but when I closed my hand, I grasped only air. Damn depth perception. In a swift, fluid motion perfectly aligned with his target, Eli reached for the mug I’d just missed. I swatted at his arm and missed that, too.
“Don’t help me.”
I pressed in closer to the counter and focused my gaze on the mug. I was afraid I’d knock one of its neighbors to the ground, so I moved my hand slowly, as though casting a spell, until my fingertip bumped its rim. With the handle of the mug securely in my fist, I turned the knob on the sink and practiced finding the stream of cold water with my empty hand. Every time I went back in, the water met my fingers a fraction of a second sooner or later than I expected, based on what my eyes, no, my eye, was telling me. I tried to fill the mug, but I misjudged the distance and I clunked it into the faucet instead, which knocked it out of my hand. The mug dropped into the sink, and when I reached to grab it, my knuckles struck the bottom of the basin, too close, too soon.
Eli was standing on my left side, my blind side, but I could feel him looking at me. He picked up the mug and filled it with water, and I let him. I needed to sit down. Eli helped me to the sofa in his office by the window and I stretched out my legs along the cushions.
“Lady—” he started.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I demanded. I was afraid it was something horrible, that this wasn’t what he’d signed up for, that he didn’t think things would ever be normal again. Eli sat down on the sofa by my feet.
“I’m thinking about one day in the future when your brain has sorted things out and your eye is no longer an issue. When we don’t even talk about it because you don’t think about it.”
I bit my lip and stared out the window. The sun was a splinter of fire above the trees. “Do you really believe that will happen?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I comforted myself with the thought that Eli is usually right.
CHAPTER 17
Badass
Eitan and Julia arrived soon after dark. I’d moved to the sofa in the living room by the front door, and when Eli went down to let them in and help bring up the food, I practiced appearing normal. I sat up as straight as I could and relaxed my shoulders. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I wanted to look like myself for my friends.
They were coming down the hallway now. I could hear Eitan laughing. I took a deep breath, raised my eyebrows, and tried on a big smile. Then I saw them, and with a jolt of adrenaline the smile turned real. My body instinctively jumped up to greet them, only the “jump” came out more like a slow-motion stagger.
“Hey!” Eitan shouted. He was wheeling one of those collapsible luggage carts, piled high with a vat of chicken soup, challah, and wine. Julia was right behind him carrying a roasted chicken.
“Jess . . . ” she sighed. “I’m putting this in the kitchen. Homie,” she said to Eitan, “homie, stop, you’ll spill the soup. Unpack it right here.”
“Oh, you guys, thank you so much,” I said. “And hi!” I couldn’t stop smiling.
“You look great, Jess. How do you feel?” Julia asked, still holding the chicken.
“Very happy to see you,” I said.
She smiled back, her eyes wide, and shook her head. “Hold on, let me put this down.”
Eitan stretched out his arms, then hesitated. “Uh, can I?”
“Yes, yes!” I said, but when I went in for the hug, he just barely laid his hands on my back, as if I were a mannequin whose limbs might fall out of their sockets. “I won’t break.” I laughed. So he squeezed, but only a little.
“They didn’t shave your head. I can’t even see your scar.” Eitan was right. Dr. Tranmer had shaved only the slimmest line of hair before he’d made the incision. It was still a bit sore, and it itched a lot, and where the nerves had been cut my head felt tingly and numb, but even I had to admit when I saw myself in the mirror that it didn’t look half bad.
“Oh, it’s there,” I promised him. “Here.” I sat back down on the sofa and felt for the bumpy strip of scalp that ran from temple to temple an inch behind my hairline. Eitan bent down for a closer look.
“Holy shit,” he said. “You are a total badass.”
I liked that. I was badass.
Julia and Eli were getting things together in the kitchen.
“El, can I use this knife? I’m making the salad.” Julia was all business as usual, and it was the best thing in the world. My friends were here! And if Julia was Julia, and Eitan was Eitan, then maybe I was, in fact, me. We all sat down together around the table. Eli blessed the wine and the challah, Eitan ladled soup into bowls, and Julia tossed the salad. Meanwhile, I sat, just sat, a guest at my own table yet unmistakably home.
Julia fretted about the chicken. She always does. About how it’s never as good as her mother’s, despite following precisely the same recipe. Julia’s mother does, indeed, make a terrific chicken, but Julia does, too. I’ve told her that one million times, over every bird of hers we’ve ever eaten. I was thrilled that I’d almost died and still Julia said it, and we got to have that talk again. It was a welcome sign of normalcy. To care again about cooked chicken meant that the coast was clear.
Being sick is supposed to come along with grand realizations about What Really Matters, but I don’t know. I think deep down, we’re already aware of what’s important and what’s not. Which isn’t to say that we always live our lives accordingly. We snap at our spouses and curse the traffic and miss the buds pushing up from the ground. But we know. We just forget to know sometimes.
Near-death forces us to remember. It pushes us into a state of aggressive gratitude that throws what’s big and what’s small into the sharpest relief. It’s awfully hard to worry about the puddle of milk when you’re just glad to be here to spill it.
Aggressive gratitude, though, is no way to live. It’s too easy. We’re meant to work at these things. To strive to know. Our task is to seek out what’s essential, get distracted by the fluff, and still know, feel annoyed by annoyances, and find our way back. The so-called small stuff actually matters very much. It’s what we push against on our way to figuring out how we wish to think and to be. We need that dialectic, and illness snatches it away. A stubbed toe, a too-long line at the post office, these things and the fluster they bring are signifiers of a healthy life, and I craved them.
At the end of the meal, Julia started to clear. I watched the way she pushed herself back from the table and floated effortlessly up from her chair, a plate in each hand. It looked like a dance to me. I wondered what it would take for me to move that way again. What was stopping me, exactly? There was weakness, for sure. My muscles were still remembering how to behave. I was sometimes nauseated and very, very tired. Plus th
is vision thing was so weird. The half-darkness, the tip of my own nose that I could see now all the time, the distrust of where things were in space, and thus, of where exactly I stood. I felt hemmed into my body, and at the same time, far removed. Yet there I was, sipping soup and talking chicken with our friends a month after I was, statistically speaking, supposed to be dead. Anything was possible.
Roasted Chicken
In The Zuni Café Cookbook, Judy Rodgers tells you everything you need to know about how to roast a chicken: Start with a small bird so that it will cook quickly and evenly. Dry it well, salt it early, and roast at high heat. No trussing—you want as much skin as possible exposed in the hot oven—and no rubbing down with butter or oil. In return, you get the perfect roasted chicken, juicy throughout with crisp, golden skin.
A word about salting: Rodgers advises “salting early,” one to three days before cooking, to tenderize and flavor the meat. Kosher chickens have already been salted and have thus already reaped the tenderizing benefits of salting early, but for flavor, I season it with a bit more salt, as indicated below. A kosher bird still benefits from sitting a day or two uncovered in the fridge. The skin will turn out especially crisp. I serve this chicken with crusty bread and a simple salad.
For the chicken:
1 3- to 4-pound chicken, giblets removed
4 sprigs fresh thyme, rosemary, or sage
¾ teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt per pound of chicken (¼ teaspoon per pound if you’re using a kosher chicken)
About ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Pat the chicken very dry, inside and out, with paper towels. Slip a finger beneath the skin on each breast near the edge of the cavity to form a couple of pockets, then do the same on the thickest part of each thigh. Slide an herb sprig into each of the four pockets.
Season all over with the suggested amount of salt and black pepper, and sprinkle a bit of each just inside the cavity. Refrigerate, uncovered, for 24 to 48 hours. Remove from the fridge half an hour prior to roasting, and give it another few pats with a paper towel to get rid of any excess moisture.
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