by Suzan Colon
Grandpa was a big, barrel-chested guy with blue eyes and wavy hair the color of iron. He was robust and strong well into his seventies. Mom gave him a fishing captain’s hat one Father’s Day, and he wore it always, tilted at a rakish angle. My grandfather brought a lawn lounge chair into the living room and parked it by the windows facing the bay, and from this command post he would scan the waters with his binoculars. When he saw a particular type of churning, he’d shout, “The blues are running!” I never saw him move as fast as when a school of bluefish was coming into our part of the sound. He’d run and grab his fishing rod, go tearing downstairs, shout to his friend and landlord, “Ted! Ted, the blues!” and head around the house, down to the concrete patio at the end of the yard. He’d cast his line before he came to a stop, knowing he didn’t even have to bait the hook—the bluefish, in a vicious feeding frenzy, would bite down on anything. He’d haul up one for me, one for him, maybe another to freeze; if he hooked another fish before the landlord arrived, he’d give it to him on his way back upstairs. Then the churning school would move on, the whole event taking less than five minutes. My grandpa was the Ernest Hemingway of the Bronx.
He also caught flounder, which was less exciting but just as delicious. And when the tide was low, he’d take me clamming with him. His equipment consisted of a pronged clam rake and a laundry basket with an inner tube around it, which he tied to his middle with a rope. My tools were a diving mask and a toy shovel. We’d wade out until the water was waist-deep on him, which was over my head—I hung on to the floating basket.
“Think this is a good spot, kid?” he’d ask.
“I’m not sure,” I’d say, frowning. “Let me check.” And I’d take a deep breath, dive down in the murky water, and have at the sand with my pink shovel. If I resurfaced with a clam—“Found ’em!”—Grandpa would start digging, putting the mollusks into the plastic basket. He never took too many, about two dozen or so, but they went a long way. After a successful clamming expedition, I knew we’d be having clam fritters, spaghetti with clam sauce (always red, never white), and his variation on Aunt Nettie’s clam chowder recipe. (He wasn’t much on parsnips, and he added a bottle of clam juice to the water for flavor and put the clams in at the last stage to keep them tender. I like the parsnips and keep in all the vegetables, and I add about a quarter of a cup of white wine and some salt and pepper.) But Grandpa would use the clams only after keeping them in the vegetable bins at the bottom of the fridge to clean them out, lugging a bucket of fresh seawater upstairs every day for a week.
When I had nightmares, or woke up crying after having a dream about Nana and remembering she was gone, Grandpa would bring his command-post lawn chaise into his bedroom, put it next to the bed, and fix it up for me with my pillow and blankets. “Okay, kid, all set. And I’m right here. Did you say your prayers?”
“I don’t know any,” I said.
“What?” Even in the dark I could see his eyes pop and practically hear him making a mental note to talk to his heathen daughter. His grandchild didn’t know the Rosary, or even the “Our Father”? Grandpa was what Mom called a Christmas-and-Easter Catholic, but he still thought I should know at least a few of the usual prayers. “Never mind, I’ll teach you. I’ll say a line, and you say it back. Ready?”
“Ready!”
“‘Now I lay me down to sleep …’”
On Sundays, Mom would come up from the city to get me. First she’d go to Cake Masters and pick up a blackout cake—chocolate cake embedded with cherries and covered with dark chocolate frosting—and a seeded rye, which was put in a big machine that chugged blades down on the bread until it was sliced perfectly. Then she’d take the 6 Train to the end of the line, Pelham Bay in the Bronx, and take a Crosby Cab to the house. We’d all go for a swim or a walk on the beach, and after dinner Grandpa would send us home with quarts of clam chowder and beef stew.
For a child being raised by a young woman who was herself still growing up, and with both of us going through a dark period of mourning for Nana, Grandpa was pure security: a strong substitute father who doted on me and could literally catch dinner in our backyard. As long as I was with him, I thought, nothing in this unpredictable world could hurt me.
• • •
At home in Manhattan I was a fearful kid. Our apartment was on the Upper East Side in Yorkville, not far from where the Guibes had lived before they moved to the Bronx. The neighborhood was great around 86th Street, okay in the upper eighties, and went from dicey to dangerous the further up you went in the nineties. We lived on 89th Street.
Life was occasionally scary, stable only in its instability. A friend from school had a schizophrenic father, and one day the parents were warned to watch out for him because he’d been seen wandering around armed with a hunting knife and a Bible. Another friend was evicted from the apartment she lived in with several relatives newly arrived from China. She had to fight off kids we went to school with as they tried to steal her clothes from the piles the landlord threw out on the street. A boy in my third-grade class told me that a neighbor had been murdered during an attempted robbery: “They beat her up and killed her for a lousy dime,” he reported flatly, with none of the childlike glee that would indicate a fib.
On the home front, things were less dramatic but still unsettling. Mom’s salary as a secretary/apprentice perfumer at a fragrance company just didn’t go that far, and when my biological father missed even one of his sixty-dollar-a-week child support payments, my mother’s brow would furrow with worry. The difference between worry and panic was about a hundred and twenty dollars.
One night when I was eight years old, the pin in the old bolt on our door slipped, locking us inside our own apartment. We couldn’t call anyone because we didn’t have enough money to pay the phone bill that month, so the line was dead. We beat on the door and screamed until a neighbor came and called a locksmith.
I had a series of babysitters who watched me after school until Mom came home from work. I remember a few lovely ones, like Mrs. Wittick, who kept her support hose up on her swollen legs with rubber bands and read the most violent Bible stories to me as many times as I wished. When I was about nine or ten, old enough to spend the afternoons by myself, I didn’t usually play with other kids. I preferred to read or watch Bugs Bunny cartoons while slowly, methodically eating almost an entire Entenmann’s fudge cake, square by square. I always saved one last piece for Mom. By the time she got home from a long day at the office, though, she generally needed something a little stronger than cake.
And on Friday nights, thank God and Nana in heaven, I’d be sent back to the Bronx. Grandpa would pay for a cab to bring me there, but not a Manhattan taxi; he had a Crosby Cab come down from the Bronx to get me. He trusted only that band of men who Mom said handled their cabs like getaway car drivers. They smelled of cigarettes and referred to me as “Chollie’s gran-dawtah,” and they were not averse to driving on the sidewalk to cut around a traffic jam. They always got me to Agar Place safely and in record time.
If it had been too cold to fish and get clams, Grandpa would have beef stew bubbling in the cast-iron pot on the stove, or he’d make hamburgers. He’d get a pound or so of ground meat and roll it out on the cutting board like thick dough and use a tumbler to cut small, perfect burger shapes. He’d serve them with fried onions, two little burgers for each of us, his with a beer. I might even get a shrimp cocktail, the kind that came three to a pack in parfait glasses. We kept those little fancy glasses for my milk, and for my occasional inch of beer.
And the cereal! I had a stash of about five boxes of cereal, which both Nana, when she was alive, and then Grandpa made sure I never ran out of. The idea that there were five boxes of cereal waiting in a cupboard in the Bronx just for me was an incredible comfort.
• • •
DECEMBER 2008
HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
One of the most seductive things about my husband-to-be, I remember, was his cupboard.
Nat
han had a lot of things going for him: He was handsome, spiritual, intelligent, a great listener, and had a hot yoga body. He seemed like the total package. After a few weeks of dating, he invited me to his place for dinner. Some men, when having a woman over for the first time, will buy fancy, seductive foods like oysters, pâté, maybe truffles. Nathan wooed me, and won me over, with a stable dinner of salad, pasta, Italian bread, and cookies for dessert.
As I helped him in the kitchen, I took note of his fridge full of eggs, soy milk, yogurt, chicken sausage, cheese, ravioli, and chocolate. He’d get something out of the cupboards and reveal boxes of couscous, many jars of spices, granola, oatmeal, at least seven different kinds of tea … He hadn’t gone shopping that afternoon because I was coming over—the guy had food on hand. One of the sexiest parts of that meal was knowing there was more where that came from, and maybe always would be.
Breakfast the next morning was even better.
As much as Nathan’s full larder reminded me of my grandparents’ comfortably stocked kitchen, he differs from members of my family in one major respect: He throws food away. Not just moldy food either. It’s like when dinner guests stay a little too late, and Nathan will say, “Well, it’s been lovely having you here, and I hate to say good-bye.” Any food that’s been hanging around our fridge too long is promptly escorted to the garbage can.
This never bothered me before, but today I can feel myself snapping over half a banana. What next—will I start keeping pieces of string because they might come in handy someday?
I sit there and stare at the garbage can for a while, considering whether I should take the banana out, even though it’s been in there long past the five-second rule, but more because I’m wondering how I can get out of this grip of fear. Technically I’ve only lost my job, but I feel like I’m also losing my footing and the sense that, somehow, everything will be all right. The bad economy causes shifts within my industry to accelerate as more print magazines fold and go online, run by a quarter—a young, tech-savvy quarter—of their former staffs. I worry that I won’t be able to make a living as a writer anymore; at forty-five years old, what will be my Plan B? I used to tell my parents they’d never have to worry about their old age, that I would take care of them. Can I say that now?
When I call my mother to say good-night, I lie to her and tell her things are looking up. She’s upset enough watching her own business slowly starving to death; I don’t need to add my misery. It occurs to me that my family has been worrying about money for over a hundred years now. This is one tradition I had hoped I wouldn’t carry on.
10
FINE VASES, CHERRIES IN WINTER, AND OTHER LIFESAVING DEVICES
Quick Apple Cake
1 egg
¼ cup milk
1 cup sifted flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
¼ cup butter or margarine [plus about 1 tablespoon, melted]
2 apples, peeled and sliced
2 tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a small bowl, beat the egg with the milk. Sift together into a second bowl the flour, baking powder, salt and tablespoon of sugar. Cut the butter or margarine into the dry ingredients with a pastry blender or two knives until the mixture is the consistency of cornmeal. Stir in the egg and milk. Spread batter in a greased pan (8 × 8 × 2 in.).
Press apple slices into batter in rows. Brush top with part of the melted butter or margarine, sprinkle with the combined sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg and top with remaining melted butter or margarine. Bake in a quick oven until the cake leaves the sides of the pan and is nicely browned on top, twenty-five minutes or more. Serve warm or cool cut in squares.
• • •
DECEMBER 2008
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
I’m standing in front of Fairway, a high-end market famous for its cheese and olive selection, fresh fish, fine meats, and house-made matzo ball soup, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If it’s not the Tiffany’s of food, it’s close. Aside from the high quality of their stock, the location alone adds an extra thirty percent to your grocery bill. The people who live in this neighborhood aren’t exactly worried about money, and in the past I would have shopped here without giving it a moment’s thought. In fact, being able to do that was one of the signs I’d made good, or as Grandpa would’ve said, “You’ve done pretty well for yourself, kid.” Today I’ll be shopping there with my unemployment debit card.
The only reason I’m going in at all is for the bread and the fish. I was visiting a friend in the neighborhood and walked by Fairway—and almost kept walking because I can’t afford to go in there anymore. For a person who loves food, being in Fairway is like being a kid loose in a toy store, and now I was going to tell that kid, “You can have whatever you want, as long as it costs under ten dollars.”
But I think about how nice it would be to come home and present Nathan with a loaf of their fine, crusty French bread and for us to have fish—not the kind in our local supermarket that was inexpensive but had been farm-raised, fed pellets, injected with dye to make it look like wild fish, and shipped here from far away. I want real fish that has been caught nearby and cleaned before my eyes, almost like the fish my grandfather caught for me. (Now I can add something else to the list of things that show my age: “When I was young, a plain old flounder caught out of the water wasn’t a specialty item!”) So, seduced by the lure of simple, pure food, I formulate my plan: Get in, get the bread and a cheap piece of fish for dinner, and get out.
The only thing I hadn’t counted on was the raisins.
I never thought I could be seduced by a raisin—they’re the fruit world’s version of sensible shoes—but these are unlike any raisins I’ve ever seen. The label reads, “French Raisins: No dried fruit of this quality has ever been in New York,” and I believe it. Raisins are usually small, dark, dried up, and unremarkable. But these are plump and juicy-looking in a way a normal raisin wouldn’t dare to be, still sassy with colors of gold, deep purple, and a full-bodied black. They have joie de vivre.
They’re also $5.99 for a small container. Utterly ridiculous. I’m on unemployment and have had practically no freelance assignments or job prospects for weeks. Our heating bills are up. Our health insurance costs almost as much as our rent. I’ve been cutting laundry dryer sheets in half to make the box last longer, for goodness sake. I should be watching every penny I spend.
At this moment I suddenly feel poor. Not technically, because I have a savings account and a zero balance on my credit card. But this feeling isn’t about money. It’s why Nana always said, “We may have been broke, but we were never poor.” By monetary standards, there have been plenty of times my family came close to the definition of poverty. But now I finally understand what Nana meant.
As I stand there in the market aisle holding the French raisins, I can hear my mother’s voice telling me, from the time I was little, the stories of how our family defied poverty not of the wallet but of the soul.
• • •
DECEMBER 1890
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
When Peter arrived home from work, it took him a moment to figure out what was missing: the smell of dinner.
“Matilde?” he called. Little Carrie came running to hug him, holding baby Willie in her arms. He picked them both up, kissed them hello, and went looking for his wife. He found her in the kitchen, but there was nothing cooking on the stove. “Where is our supper?” he asked.
“This is it,” she said, nodding toward a loaf of bread and a bowl of cooked apples she was mashing.
“Bread and applesauce?” Peter asked. “But why? I gave you money for food this morning. You said you were going to the market today.”
And Matilde had been on her way to the market with her list of what she’d need for the week. She’d had every intention of using the wages Peter earne
d as a stonemason to buy food for the family. And then she’d seen the vases.
The shop sold fine linens, dishes, silver, and other household goods. Matilde had passed by it many times on her way to the butcher’s. If she had a moment, she’d stop and look in the window, and then go on her way. In fact, she’d never even been in the store before—there wasn’t any money for pretty, but unnecessary items. But these vases …
“Good morning,” said the shopkeeper. “May I help you?”
“The blue vases in the window,” Matilde said, traces of the French and German territory still lingering on her words. She didn’t have to say any more; the man smiled and reached for the vases, carefully putting one on a counter and handing her the other.
Matilde could feel the smoothness of the cobalt glaze on the porcelain through her gloves. She admired the fine detail on the front of the vases, the painted scenes of a lady wearing a high white wig and a billowy dress and a gentleman in uniform, both of them in a garden. Matilde carefully held the small gold-painted handles as she turned the vase over. On the bottom in red ink was a number and the words made in austria. Not that far from home. Matilde had been in America for a while, but this smooth, elegant piece had pulled her back to a place she missed too much.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” said the shopkeeper.
• • •
“Yes, they’re beautiful! They’re lovely!” Peter shouted.
“But Matilde, a week’s wages? What were you thinking? What are we going to eat?”