I’d also started to write op-ed pieces about the inscrutable demographic pie-slice that people were just starting to call Generation X, and some of those columns—one about my wish for two sets of winter holidays, so that children of divorced families wouldn’t have to split their time; another considering the efficacy of Take Back the Night marches—had been picked up by bigger papers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
By 1994, all of this was good enough to get me a job as a feature writer at the Lexington Herald-Leader. I came to Lexington in February 1994 and stayed long enough to join a synagogue, date both of the Jewish guys my age, and cover the Kentucky Derby—and, more important, the Derby parties, where I shook Ivana Trump’s hand.
That fall, there was a rare job opening at the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the flagship papers in the Knight-Ridder chain. (I loved working for Knight-Ridder, primarily because my Nanna pronounced it Knight Rider, and I’d have to explain to her, over and over, that I was not, in fact, employed by a sentient car.)
The Inquirer had been running my Generation X columns, and I’d talked to the editors there, who’d wanted to hire me, but had to wait until someone else left. When I came on board, it was with the condition that I give up my perch on the op-ed page and settle into writing features for at least a few years. That was a bargain I was happy to make. I’d learn everything I could about how to write a great feature, a Nora Ephron–esque feature, and then either I’d resume my column and become the next Anna Quindlen, mining the specifics of my own life for generational truths, or I would write a novel or a screenplay or a novel that turned into a screenplay, and I’d finally have enough money to have kids and not freak out about being penniless.
The Inquirer was my dream job. No more news. No more numbers. No more school lunches. Back then, the paper had a budget to let a reporter spend a week or even longer reporting a single story, or travel to do it. So off I went, on trains and planes and company cars, in search of stories.
I wrote about a group of factory workers in Michigan who were on the verge of losing their jobs when a lottery ticket they’d bought as a group won them millions apiece. I covered the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, hanging out with Philadelphia’s delegates, and I traveled to the presidential inauguration in Washington, where I saw Bill and Hillary Clinton slow-dance in Union Station’s grand rotunda. I went to Atlantic City for the Miss America pageant, and to Deerfield Beach, Florida, for a report on my Nanna’s gefilte fish, and I did my best to add whatever celebrity coverage I could muster.
I saw Kathie Lee Gifford having her eyelashes combed out on the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, where she and Reege had come to tape. I interviewed Wendy the Snapple Lady on a promotional swing through town. In general, though, not many stars came to Philadelphia. When it was announced that the 12 Monkeys director had picked Philadelphia to stand in for its dystopian city in ruin, Philadelphians whipped themselves into such a frenzy that features reporters were dispatched across the city to cover Monkey Madness and hunt for Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. The assignment I pulled was gay bars. “Do you know something we don’t know?” one of the patrons at Woody’s, a venerable watering hole for men who prefer men, responded when I asked if there’d been any Pitt sightings.
Sometimes the movie studios or television production companies would come to New York and make their stars available to the media—even reporters from Philadelphia. The publicists would stick their celebrities and director in hotel suites, where the talent would endure what were officially called roundtables and were less politely known as “gang bangs,” fielding questions from reporters from all over the country who’d made the trip, sometimes on the production company’s dime (the paper always paid my way).
Getting one-on-one time was the goal . . . and, if I couldn’t get that, I would try my hardest to get an actor to say something original, something that a dozen of my competitors weren’t also going to report. I once followed Shannen Doherty, in New York to promote the Kevin Smith opus Mallrats, into a ladies’ room, where she unburdened herself to a publicist. “Why do they all keep asking me the same things?” she demanded. Locked behind a stall’s door, I think I pretended to pull out the world’s smallest violin to play for her.
Sometimes the stars were lovely. Sometimes they were depressed. Adam Sandler, promoting Happy Gilmore, seemed so unhappy that I offered to bring him home to Philadelphia and make him chicken soup, even though I knew that his corporate minder in the next room could very well have chosen to have me removed. Sometimes they were boring, so programmed that they seemed less like people than like creatures that had been built in a lab, for the express purpose of entertainment. Brandy, who was then best known for starring in Moesha (as opposed to being a singer and eventually the big sister of the guy who’d costarred in Kim Kardashian’s sex tape), was especially robotic. And sometimes I never got to meet them at all. I had a scheduled interview with Minnie Driver yanked out from under me after I’d made the trek to New York, because I refused to take a blood oath and promise not to ask her about being dumped by Matt Damon on Oprah, an incident I’d eventually deploy in fiction, where Minnie Driver became Maxi Ryder (#geniusatwork).
I also covered the larger world of entertainment. I wrote about the phenomena of South Park and Iron Chef, and the brand-new genre of reality TV, ushered in by Mark Burnett’s Survivor. When the Oxygen network debuted, I watched Lifetime, which had previously been the only existing network for women, for twenty-four hours straight and wrote about what I saw. When a publisher dropped a book called Cooking with Friends, I cooked a week’s worth of recipes and wrote about whether eating “misery meatloaf” or “stay-at-home pasta” made me any more sleek and hip and amusing, like the stars on the NBC sitcom.
I was happy. I was making enough money to live comfortably. I loved my job. I loved my apartment. I had a best friend and a nice Jewish boyfriend I’d been dating for two years. Aside from my ongoing, mostly fruitless efforts to lose weight, I was content. I thought I had nearly everything . . . but of course that’s not how that story went.
Nanna’s Gefilte Fish
This Special-Occasions Dish Is an Acquired Taste. And Making It at Home Is a Tall Order. An 81-Year-Old Expert Describes the Process—Which Includes Airing Out the House Afterward.
By Jennifer Weiner, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
December 8, 1996
DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla.—There are Jews who serve gefilte fish maybe once a year, decanted from glass Manischewitz containers, garnished with a carrot or two, served, picked at, and whisked away so they can get on to things they like better.
There are Jews who recook the canned stuff in their own broth; or who make their own from pre-ground fish.
Then there is my Nanna.
And if you are my Nanna you do neither of those things. You buy your own fish, fresh. You have Mike the fish guy save the heads, bones, and skin, so you can make your own broth. You grind the fish yourself. You cook it all day, with your fan running and your AC turned up. Afterward, you dot your surroundings with little bowls of vinegar “to get rid of the stink.”
And when you fly to one of your daughters’ houses for one of the Jewish holidays, you and whichever grandchild comes to pick you up wait by the baggage carousel for a Playmate cooler—the plastic kind that college guys keep their beer in—triple-wrapped in newspaper and garbage bags, enrobed in masking tape and labeled, simply, FISH.
Gefilte fish, which means, literally, filled fish, is a special-occasions dish mostly because it’s incredibly time-consuming to make, requiring pots, pans, fresh fish, a fish grinder, and an especially high tolerance for the smell of simmering fish heads.
The dish often is a combination of whitefish, pike, pickerel, and carp (if you like carp, which my Nanna does not), ground and mixed with eggs, onions, and matzo meal, formed into patties and boiled for hours in a vat of fish broth.
The finished product looks like hamburger in black and white, if you’re feeling charitable; lik
e brains if you aren’t. It’s an acquired taste, considered a delicacy by adults who grew up eating it, and a fate worse than death by children who grew up eating Happy Meals.
My Nanna’s is out of this world, and it’s much in demand, so she’ll make it for special dinners as well as big Jewish holidays, turning out enough to donate to friends, coconspirators, and her down-the-hall neighbor, who can’t help but smell the boiling fish.
Recently, I wandered into the gefilte-fish-making process by accident. I’m in Florida on business, a concept which my Nanna doesn’t quite get. “So if they’re paying you to be here . . . does that mean you still get paid for a week’s work?”
“Yes,” I say.
My Nanna—Faye Frumin—is 81, but she looks just the way she’s looked all my life, a small, trim woman with her face set in the same determined lines that you can see in her wedding photographs. She lives in a South Florida compound called Century Village East, home to about 15,000 senior citizens, spending their golden years sitting in the sunshine, sustained by the occasional, all-too-rare visit from a child or grandchild. Or great-grandchild, of which my Nanna has none. This lack will be a major topic of conversation in the hours ahead.
When I arrive, she’s sitting by the window and looks startled when I tap, which is typical, because a long time ago my family decided that I was a complete incompetent in terms of real-world dealings, which means that everyone’s delighted whenever I manage to turn up anywhere at all.
“You’re here!” she says, and hugs me.
Today is Wednesday. On Sunday, she’s giving a dinner party for a few friends, plus “that nice young couple that used to live next door.” (Careful questioning reveals that the members of this nice young couple are both in their 60s.) Tomorrow, she’s making fish.
Shopping is our major activity: mostly, I think, because my mother, her daughter Fran, hated it so much, and Nanna feels the need to compensate.
When my mother’s four children were young and defenseless, she was known to dash up and down the aisles of the local Marshalls, a shopping cart in front of her and a determined look on her face, grabbing indiscriminate fistfuls of children’s clothing off the clearance rack and muttering, “This’ll fit someone.”
Nanna, on the other hand, likes to shop. And she’s much more careful. She considers fit and style. She follows trends.
In the dressing room she clucks her tongue at my sunburn, pokes my stomach. “Stop eating so much!” she says. Then she redeems herself by ferreting out a terrific pair of black suede loafers from the size 10 rack, and paying for everything.
Back at the Village, Nanna is wiped. We call my mother. I report on my activities in Miami. I got a sunburn, I tell her. And a blister from Rollerblading.
We have dinner at a big, noisy steak house. “You can order the chicken without skin here,” Nanna says helpfully. So I do.
She is delighted when I pick up the check: “I like going out with you!” she says.
Back home, we get ready to sleep. Tomorrow is a busy day, and Nanna’s got the menu and schedule, on the phone pad, to prove it:
(1) Soups: Borscht or Bean?
(2) Gefilte fish, kugel, pickles, beets, olives, red peppers, bread, and rolls.
(3) Coffee and Cake.
* Thursday: Pick up fish; pick up bread.
* Thursday: Make fish.
* Saturday: Make kugel and soup.
* Sunday: Finish kugel, set table, make iced tea and coffee.
On Thursday at 7:30 a.m., I wake to the smell of chopped onions.
“Get up,” says Nanna. “It’s time to get the fish.”
But first we have breakfast with Nanna’s friend Helen from the thrift shop. Helen is beautifully attired, perfectly accessorized, carefully made up, and completely deaf. She communicates with my Nanna by talking directly into her face.
Me, she communicates with by grabbing both of my hands and getting psychic emanations. “I see success!” she proclaims. “Do you see any babies?” asks Nanna.
Then it’s off to Pops’, where Nanna buys her fish. Rows and rows of recently deceased bluefish and monkfish and catfish stare up at us in regimented, iced lines.
Nanna asks after the whitefish, debates the merits of buying a frozen pike, which is brought out from the freezer for her inspection. Eventually, she decides on just the fresh whitefish.
“No carp?” I ask.
“I don’t like carp,” says Nanna, tapping the glass case disparagingly, right above where a big red blank-eyed carp reposes. “Such an ugly fish, I couldn’t stand to look at it.”
What happens next?
If you are my Nanna, you go to Dora’s and grind the fish in her Mixmaster. You add the onions and matzo meal. You also add eggs and whip it all into a frenzy. This will bind the fish.
Then go home to make your broth. Combine your fish heads, bones, and skin with water, onions, and carrots, sliced horizontally, so that when you serve, each piece of fish gets a pretty carrot on the plate.
How much water? How many onions? Nanna shrugs. “Enough,” she says.
Simmer the broth until everything’s soft. Add water until the pot’s full. Bring everything to a boil. Form your ground fish/egg/onion/meal mixture into little balls (“or big ones, if that’s what you like”). Boil the fish balls for “two, two and a half hours.” Fish them out. Then strain your broth, retaining the carrots, and put everything in the refrigerator and chill, and “it turns out delicious.”
Air the house out for three days.
Renaissance Fran
This is how I found out that my mom had, at age fifty-four, decided to, as her kids now say, park on the alternate side of the sex street. I was twenty-six, sitting at my desk at the Inquirer, writing a story and minding my business, when my phone rang. It was my brother Joe, who’d come home from college to do his laundry, as one does. Searching in my mom’s bathroom for toenail clippers, he’d come across a cache of love letters. Actually, they were love Hallmark cards . . . and they were all signed with a woman’s name. There were female belongings in the guest room, weird new foods in the fridge.
“There’s a woman living here,” Joe reported.
Huh? I called Fran and said, “What’s going on?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, cheerful as ever.
“Joe says there’s a woman living in the house.”
There was the briefest pause. “Oh,” said Fran. “That’s my swim coach.”
I consulted my calendar. “Fran,” I said. “It’s not an Olympic year.”
There was another pause, this one longer. “Actually,” said Fran, her words tumbling together, “I met a woman and we’re in love and she moved in.”
Then I was holding the phone, a dial tone buzzing in my ears, my jaw probably somewhere around my chest, stunned and numb and thinking the same thing I’d thought eleven years previously, when my mother pulled off the New Jersey Turnpike to tell me that my father wasn’t going to live with us anymore. I don’t know anything. Not anything.
• • •
Looking back, there’d been signs, signs that had been there even when she was still married, if we’d known enough to look. The short hair. The lack of makeup and high heels and interest in fashion. (Then again, there are a great many straight women in New England who go around barefaced in their L.L.Bean parkas, so many of them that my ex-husband and I used to play a game called “Lesbian or Just from Vermont?”) The Holly Near concerts. The vacations in Provincetown.
I was in my twenties, no longer living at home, technically too old to be too freaked out by anything my parents did—at least, according to the guidebook that, oh, wait, does not actually exist for adult children whose parents come out!
The idea that my mother had been lying about who she was—unable, perhaps, even to be honest with herself—was deeply disconcerting. What must her life have been like? How had she felt all of those years? And what did it mean for all of us, going forward?
The truth is that I was freaked ou
t. And confused. And—if I’m being honest—upset. It wasn’t entirely, or even largely, the same-sex thing, although it did put an interesting spin on the situation: no child, not even an adult one, wants to spend any length of time thinking about a parent’s having sex, and that’s especially true if the parent is having more interesting, edgier sex than you are.
It felt like everything was suddenly backward, reversed, the street signs written in some foreign language, the road maps torn in half. My brothers and sister and I, we were the ones who were supposed to be out there sampling different romantic partners and trying to get our futures figured out. My mom was supposed to have answered all of her questions . . . or at least, presumably, the big one, the one about which gender she preferred. Certainly divorced women dated, but they didn’t just all of a sudden start dating women, did they? And what did it mean about our history? Did it mean that, for all the years of her marriage, through the birth of four kids, my mother had been living a lie?
What was the deal with Dad? we’d ask. And, Why did you marry a man if that wasn’t where your interests were? And, Did you even want kids in the first place? Would you have just been gay if it had been more of an option? And was the sex awful? Like, was every thrust a stab of shame?
The four of us had questions. (Those last two were Molly’s.) Unfortunately, Fran did not have answers. She was like a swoony teenager, whispering and holding hands and giggling and sneaking off with her girlfriend, who was unpleasantly gruff and triangle-shaped, with a tiny head topped with tight blond curls and a body that widened as it descended. We did not see the appeal of this woman, who, in lesbian-joke fashion, had moved in somewhere between their second and third date. Fran was behaving in the tremendously irritating way I’d probably behaved with the first boys who’d reciprocated my interest; doing the things I will likely find tremendously irritating when my own daughters have their first loves. When the four of us came home for that first post-revelation Thanksgiving, we found my mother’s new ladyfriend permanently affixed to her side, except for the few minutes every hour when she’d go stand on the deck to smoke Marlboro Lights and hate men. Suddenly there were motivational posters on the walls—an artistically lit shot of dolphins leaping out of the water with the phrase TEAMWORK: EVERYONE PULLING TOGETHER—and the house smelled like sandalwood incense and Opium and cigarette smoke. My mom had never liked cats—we’d always had dogs—but now there was a cat in the house, a six-toed, mostly feral creature that shredded the furniture and hissed at my brothers. Self-help books lined the bookshelves, with titles like Healing Your Inner Child and The Art of Transformational Suffering and It’s Not What You’re Eating, It’s What’s Eating You alongside Fran’s fiction and the medical textbooks my father had left behind.
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