by Sarah Gorham
The expression “falling into the schmaltz pot” refers to plain old blind luck, like being born into a good family. Anyone this lucky is called “a schmaltz.” How lucky we were to have a father, less distant than the standard fifties’ and sixties’ models, who taught the overhand crawl, bicycle riding, who drank socially but not excessively, who earned a stable living in upper-level U.S. government. For my thirteenth birthday, this MIT- and Stanford-educated “whiz kid” economist gave me a biography of Madame Curie. For my seventeenth it was Edward O. Wilson’s The Insect Societies, with its glowing yellow cover and enlarged ant. Both gifts flattered my intelligence, implying I might share in his interests. They were books I carried with me everywhere like honorary degrees.
In the mid-1930s, schmaltz developed a pejorative sense, evoking excessive sentimentalism. The alternate usage is no doubt a reference to the fat itself—duck, chicken, or goose—overly rich, sickening. To the serious-minded, schmaltz is the kiss of death and can be applied in thick layers to art, music, literature, film, painting, conversation, interior decoration, and so on.
Most of us are sentimentalists about something; what provokes it can vary from decor to idea, from old-fashioned juke-boxes to Das Kapital. We give in to emotion till it clouds what we are actually seeing, hearing, or smelling. The scent of an apple pie (even if it’s baked by Kroger) will provoke happy sadness; a tearjerker film will lead us to, well, tears. Everyone is subject. If the conditions are right, even the high-minded will allow a trickle of schmaltz to seep in.
Every night except Sunday, the Imperial Palace at Holiday Manor Mall features China Joe the piano player on a shiny black-lacquered baby grand, which sits at the center of a large dining area. The aquarium is full of carp and viscous water, the rug is sticky, and maroon napkins are annoyingly nonabsorbent. We ask for a balcony table with a bird’s-eye view. Drinks appear in little amber glasses, and chopsticks are the cheap kind, fused together, splintery when broken apart. Jeffrey requests the steak and broccoli and I always ask for wonton soup with extra julienned vegetables, though the waiter sometimes defers: “No special orders.” Finally, Joe slinks in, wearing a tuxedo and tossing his glossy black hair. The tip jar is an enormous brandy snifter where two one-dollar bills and a few coins puddle. He begins playing with a shrug.
“Climb Every Mountain” opens with a stiff, instructional tone. Moments later, Joe ascends with flourishes in the right hand. Soon he’s leaning forward, full weight thrown against the keys as he reaches the steep rise to the refrain. He arrives with an enormous crescendo, rocking back and forth, full pedal on the big chords, his bangs now falling into his eyes. “Till you find yoooouuuurrr …” he pauses there, face down for a beat, and finally, “dreams” molto, molto tremolo.
Polite applause. “The Wind beneath My Wings” and “People” follow. I’ve never heard him touch the Golden Age standards—”They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Dancing on the Ceiling,” or “Mood Indigo,” many with a dose of vinegar splashed in with the sugar. His preference? The owner’s?
Here’s Joe, launching into my favorite:
Tale as old as time
True as it can be
Barely even friends
Then somebody bends
Unexpectedly
Just a little change
Small to say the least
Both a little scared
Neither one prepared
Beauty and the Beast
In the air, bottle-green sprites, wisps of periwinkle, gold, and pink swirl above the piano like a whirlpool or gentle tornado. As if on cue, they uncoil and race throughout the restaurant, wrapping about the diners, warming, drawing them away from the particulars of their meal, company, day. There is a fraction of involuntary silence and hands hover in midair above plates and wine glasses, skin tingling, lifted by a thousand hairs. Inside voices hush, withholding the darling you are deluded. There will be wedding bells and gold necklaces, castles and longed-after champion horses.
If a song were edible, “Beauty and the Beast” would taste like Pop Rocks, candy rumored to make your stomach explode. China Joe knows exactly what he is doing; his is one of the few professions where sentimentalism might be specified in the job description. But I’m momentarily and deliciously unaware as he winds up the song with right-hand arpeggios, another pause and tossed-back hair. Dramatically, his hands drop off the keyboard to his side. I am the only one to applaud.
My soup arrives in a clever, egg-shaped bowl. Glorified chicken noodle with not nearly enough julienned vegetables.
It’s OK. Just.
More sweet than savory. Saccharine tone, sappy movie, sugar-coated proposal, syrupy smiles, treacly get-well cards, and a mwah air kiss—all empty calories.
There are times when sweet will make you cry. I’m speaking of Bea’s “Ho-made” cherry pie in Gills Rock, Door County. The area offers a mixed bag of delicacies. Cherries in all forms—fresh-picked from trees, freeze-dried, canned, frozen, or baked into scones and Danishes. Beer from Milwaukee, cheese curds, bratwurst, and traditional fish boils, where restaurant diners gather round a huge bubbling pot of whitefish, onions, and potatoes. Captain Jack throws gas on the open fire, flames leap, and suddenly, water boils over in a whoosh, taking with it any impurities. We line up with partitioned plates for our coleslaw, bread, and big hunk of fish doused with butter.
A slice of Bea’s cherry pie is included in the deal. Mind you, this pie will not appear in the pages of Bon Appétit. The filling’s canned, the crust merely acceptable and slapped on unceremoniously. Bea sprinkles granulated sugar to make it fancy, but the real blessing is ice cream, which blurs the whole thing into soup. Some days I’m willing to drive forty-five minutes down the twisty, evergreen-lined back roads for the pleasure, well worth it to no one but me. This is the pie I inhaled as a kid, pie I remember before slow food and artisan pizza, pie my parents used as prize for good behavior.
Nostalgia, like sentimentalism, suffers from a lack of rigor. Stops short at warm and fun. “Render the world, see it, and report it without loss, without perversion,” said critic Mark Van Doren. Aim for economy, precision, clarity.
In the boutique restaurant, above the open grill, hang three white plaster goats. They are life-size, disconcertingly lifelike, attached by actual nooses tight around their necks. Death has drained them of color but not texture. Their heads tilt to the side; Xs over eyelids. Their bellies bulge. The menu features bison, beef, rabbit, quail. The artist is a member of PETA. Or not. The most obvious suggestion stands: Animals are objects; we kill them for our clothes, experiments, food. They taste good.
The sculpture is an experiment; the owners favor art that forces us to “reflect.” They recognize that postmodernism with its sense of contradiction, indeterminism, and lack of sentimentality is hip. The delight we feel as soon as we fork a juicy bite of medium-rare grass-fed buffalo, locally grown; the twinge that follows, looking up from our plates at the goats, ghostly and corporeal. It’s a risky way to decorate, particularly in a restaurant. Guilt is not a sentiment conducive to gustatory pleasure. But better this than teddy bears, ducks with bonnets, and fake fireplaces stirring up the good old days.
How do we separate sentiment—mere feeling and thus acceptable—and sentimental, with its exaggerated, misplaced emotion? “Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road,” wrote Frank Herbert. “Being sentimental is when the same driver, swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.” The driver in the first instance commits no crime. In the second, he demonstrates a grotesque moral hierarchy. Rabbit trumps human. Sentimental reveals its darker side.
David Barbarash and Darren Thurston of ALF (Animal Liberation Front) were charged in Vancouver with sending letters filled with razor blades to twenty-two hunting-trip guides. One executive received a letter saying, “You have been targeted for terrorist attack.” Members of ELF (Earth Liberation Front) burned down a Vail ski resort, includ
ing seven separate fires, causing $12 million in damages. In their communiqué, they announced, “putting profits ahead of Colorado’s wildlife will not be tolerated…. We will be back if this greedy corporation continues to trespass into wild and unroaded [sic] areas.” Ecoterrorists are rough-edged sentimentalists: poor little animals, terrible people! People, who decimate rain forests, slaughter chickens and cows, burn holes in the atmosphere. We’d be better off without them, an earth overrun with innocent furry creatures. And, of course, members of PETA.
I was eleven when I had my first taste of raw beef. Observant Jews will only eat beef killed by a shochet, or “ritual slaughterer,” then drained of blood, soaked in water, salted, washed, and cooked. But my Jewish father was not observant. He chopped the tenderloin himself, feeding it into an old-fashioned hand-cranked meat grinder, seasoned it with salt and pepper, stirred in egg yolk, capers, parsley, and minced onion. He singled me out for this delicacy, an unspoken affection. No sloppy kisses or bear hugs; my father had a fundamental distrust of sentimentality. Instead, I watched while he prepared the beef in our small kitchen, then we snuck out to the backyard and sat on the patio with one plate and two forks. Just the meat itself, no crackers or bread. No siblings crowding in or mother clucking her tongue. Just Sarah and Dad. It was better than a birthday. Sunny and cool. The meat was delicious.
Ever the educator, my father spoke its proper name—steak tartare, which, according to one legend, was first prepared by Mongols, who placed slabs of meat beneath their saddles to tenderize it before eating. On the run, of course. Dad left it at that but later confessed the real source was a condiment—tartar sauce—served alongside. Early chroniclers had misunderstood: That Mongol meat was intended to ease a horse’s saddle sores. Thoroughly saturated with horse sweat, it would have been completely inedible.
The dish now appears in numerous countries, including Nepal, France, Slovenia, Poland, and Germany, where it’s known as Mett, “ground raw pork without bacon.” It is commonly served on slices of bread or small rolls called Brötchen. In the seventies, German restaurants spread their buffets with Zwiebelmett, in the shape of hedgehogs, decorated with onion quills and olives for eyes.
How adorable! And possibly stomach-turning, though strict local controls insist only the freshest pork is used, sold the day the pig is butchered. By law the fat content must be less than 35 percent, which is high enough, but as everyone knows it’s the fat that makes it taste so good. Like a schmear of schmaltz on unleavened bread. Or oily chicken broth with dumplings.
What if we remove Joe the piano player and his rapt audience. Scratch the entire family enjoying a northern clime for ten elongated days. Eliminate sculptor, artist, conflicted diners, and ecoterrorists too. Let’s make this a dry, uncontaminated story, ohne Gefühl. A fact-based account recited by Spock, a Vulcan who couldn’t fathom human action motivated by emotion. Eat your baby? Illogical, and patently harmful to the baby.
Let’s go further. Disengage my father from Judaism, Judaism from love, love from food, food from loss and longing. We could try an essay from the point of view of the mixing bowl or salt and pepper shakers or a pair of long fluorescent bulbs buzzing on the kitchen ceiling. Tame our instinct to anthropomorphize with a scientific inquiry into natural versus artificial light and its impact on the preservation of meat. Thermometer and microscope required to track the development of bacteria. Describe the consumption of unleavened bread, broken down into carbohydrates/sugars by amylase, the digestive enzyme found in your mouth, churned by your teeth into a bolus, when it’s ready to swallow.
Let the data speak for itself.
It could be done. You first.
PERFECT
Conversation
That which has attained its purpose.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
The Shape of Fear
She squatted against an outside brick wall, sweating on an un-seasonably cool day. Camp was still in session, but her task this morning was protecting her belly, pressing her arms against it, trying to create a counterache that would distract her from the real ache. She mumbled, climbed into my car. Her whole body mumbled, a definite blip on the taciturn scale. “Have you had anything strange to eat?”
There was a nasty bug running around so I took her home.
Saltines with jelly, toast with margarine, and plain old Melba Rounds—all tossed into the garbage. I unwrapped her favorite processed cheese, sliced it into strips. Bought flexible straws and a bright green plastic cup and filled it with ginger ale. Stood with arms folded begging, finally raised my voice, “You must drink. You cannot go three days without drinking.”
Girl took a little sip. OK?
Later at the hospital, a physician breezed into the examining room, unfolded her on the table as if she were a dinner napkin. He leaned on the child’s abdomen, then released with exaggeration. It’s called “rebound tenderness,” sharp pain with the let-up of pressure, rather than application. Sign of trouble in the appendix. He checked off his mental list. Deep palpation over the descending colon, in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen. Rovsing’s sign? His movements were inorganic, rote. Turned the patient on her side with right hip flexed to determine presence of psoas sign. Negative. Ditto the obturator sign; no pain in the hypogastrium. The girl was definitely sick but unfazed in any specific way by specific prodding.
“Not surgical,” his conclusion, “probably just flu. You can go home now.”
That night I dreamed my child in a cup of milk. Looked down to see the milk rise up to her nose. Took a quick swallow to keep her from drowning.
It is a fine example of faience—a porcelain box with cabriole legs and ormolu fittings, hand-painted in the Romantic style. On the lid, a man embraces a woman, her bared breast a pink pastille, flowers flung aside now that they have got down to the heart of the matter. Underneath, someone has replicated the Meissen mark, implying that the box was fit for Augustus Rex, more likely his queen.
Technically a jewel casket; I made good use of it. Not for jewels, for I had none. Not for decoration at all, unless you call scraps of paper covered with anxious scribblings decorative.
But let me backtrack a bit. Before it came into my possession, the jewel casket was filled with great-grandmother’s necklaces, bangles, a gold watch she intended to refinish. These were wrapped in white Kleenex so as not to chafe against each other. The box sat on her dresser, a nice piece itself of inlaid wood and brass pulls.
When she died, the casket was emptied of jewels in preparation for great-grandmother’s ashes. Refined, beloved Marianne—matriarch of an enormous clan, fit to be buried in decorated porcelain lined with blue velvet. Until one cousin came to her senses. The box was ready to go, perched on a French writing desk in the front hallway. Family idling, coated and sad. One cousin turned to the other, saying, “What are we doing? Are we sure we want to bury this thing? It’s over a hundred years old.”
And thus the ashes were tipped into a FedEx envelope, later into a conventional urn, still later that morning buried properly with a scattering of Lutheran prayers, and for those who didn’t believe, fidgety silence.
Again the ER. Again the girl was unfolded on the table, dressed in a gown covered with blue fish. Two more days—making five—without much sustenance and only thimblefuls of Kool-Aid.
This time we were simmering. We pleaded our case to the receptionist and still hung five hours for someone from surgery. The surgeon arrived, ducking in for a few minutes between her own patients. She proposed a pelvic and rectal exam to get a better look inside, deliberate probing for sensitivity. If the appendix lies entirely within the pelvis, there’s often complete absence of abdominal rigidity, so her investigation was shamelessly thorough. I asked if my daughter might need privacy, turned abruptly to leave, only to have the surgeon grab my arm and order my return. “She needs her mother right now. Please.”
But the patient was underresponsive, except to the indignity of it all. Or she w
as holding it in, holding out for a lesser diagnosis. I too edged into denial that anything more serious than flu was at hand. After all, that first doctor with the unpronounceable name, hadn’t he confirmed it two days earlier? The flu. Could we go home now?
Another two-hour wait and finally, by ultrasound, the appendix was sighted, tucked behind her uterus. It was indeed ruptured, flailing like a snipped hose, spreading little pellets of excrement into her gut. The patient was whisked into surgery, promised she would be sleeping like she’d never slept before. There followed an uneventful forty-eight hours blessed by on-demand morphine and as many popsicles as she wanted. She was only thirteen. The other food she craved was French fries, which of course were verboten.
In 2006, a graphic designer from the United Kingdom named Orlagh O’Brien conducted a survey she called Emotionally} Vague. The aim was to create a graphic or visual representation for each of five emotions: anger, joy, fear, sadness, and love. Two hundred and fifty men and women from over thirty-five countries between the ages of six and seventy-five responded. The sample was a mix of friends, their friends, colleagues, and strangers.
Q1: What makes you feel this emotion (let’s say “fear”)? Write it down.
After articles and prepositions, abstractions topped the list: “being,” “death,” “alone,” “heights,” “people,” “dark,” “darkness,” “control,” and so on. O’Brien arranged them into a stack, a box of words, with the most common in black, fading down to the least common in light silver: “spaces,” “unfamiliar,” “past,” “think,” “war.” Where were the specifics? The rusty nails, dysplastic cells, rotten eyeteeth, and wandering eyes? I half expected the list to work like a microscope, from general to particular, group to individual, but most of us, even the solitary fearful soul, never get beyond the broadest description. Language was a soft, floppy tool for this group trying hard to communicate what it felt. The result was like a fading Beckett monologue.