Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (7 page)

Aside from being the more practical of the two of us, the one who looks before he leaps and sniffs before he drinks, Nathan has lived here longer than I have. He knows that after heavy rains our tap water needs to be boiled due to flooded sewers.

“Can we filter the water?” I asked.

Nathan shook his head. “It’ll probably dissolve the filter.”

Now that I’m home, I’m going through a lot of bottled water. I’m one of those people who believes in drinking eight glasses a day, even though I couldn’t
find a source for that prescription or any evidence to back it up when I researched it for a magazine article. Still, I’m thirsty, and I’m going through our three-gallon jugs of pure mountain spring water too quickly.

It occurs to me one day that we drink our questionable water in tea and coffee—once it’s boiled, it’s fine. But there’s only so much tea I can drink, so when it starts getting cold in the house, I have an idea that kills two birds with one stone: I start drinking boiled tap water to quench my thirst and stay warm. I add a little lemon to mask its taste (which decent water usually doesn’t have) and hope that the citrus will kill whatever the high temperatures don’t. I’m not sure I’ll be able to find any research to prove that, either.

Nathan finds all of this disturbing, and, of course, illogical. “How much water could you possibly need? And if you’re cold, why don’t you just turn on the heat?” he asks.

“Are you crazy?” I say, perhaps a little harshly. But he knows I’m a thin-blooded person; if I turned up the heat every time I got cold, we’d be living in a tent in the parking space where our truck used to be.

• • •

#4: Save money on gas, parking, and insurance: Get rid of your vehicle
.

Four years ago, when Nathan and I were supposed to go on our first date, I was on a fierce deadline. I had a choice of either rescheduling or going to dinner with him and returning to the office afterward to work until midnight. The last time I’d seen Nathan was a week prior, when we’d just returned from the Costa Rican yoga retreat where we’d met. We talked and held hands for the duration of the five-hour flight home. I thought about his quick smile and how easy and good it felt to be with him, and I remembered his handsome face and the sweetness that seemed to radiate from him like a light.

All of these things were the same when we met for dinner the night of my deadline.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said at the end of an evening of more easy conversation and hand-holding.

“Actually, I have to go back to work,” I said. “We’re shipping tonight, and I have pages to read.”

“Well then, I’ll drive you to the office.”

He led me to a truck the color of a ripe cherry. He opened the passenger side door for me, and I had to hoist myself up into the cab. The interior was clean,
the seats big. A Tweety Bird air freshener hung from the gearshift. The truck was like him: strong, sexy, but with a sense of humor. Nathan drove me back to the office, and we made out like teenagers in the front seat before I went up to the office with blushing cheeks and my hair on crooked.

“Well,
somebody
had a good night,” said one of the editors.

On a summer evening two years ago, we drove into the city for dinner at Lombardi’s, a pizza joint that’s been serving crispy, thin-crust pies in Little Italy since 1905. We were having a deep discussion about what toppings we were going to get on our pizza when Nathan shut the driver’s side door of the truck and said, “Oh, crap.”

“What?”

He sighed. “I just locked the keys in the truck.”

While we waited for the triple-A guy to come with a slim jim, I had a brainstorm. “Be right back,” I said. Twenty minutes later I returned with a mushroom and olive pizza and a large bottle of soda. We ate one of the most romantic dinners we’ve ever had in the flatbed of the truck, watching the line for tables at Lombardi’s snake around the block.

For some people, a truck is a convenience for
loading groceries and those bales of toilet paper from the box store. To me, our truck was a two-ton metal scrapbook full of our memories and stories. Last fall, after I got laid off, we drove it to my brother-in-law’s house and came home with six thousand dollars to put toward our new health insurance bills. The money we’d save on gas, the garage fee, and having the truck insured and maintained would help out as well.

“It’s okay,” Nathan said. “You do what you have to do. Besides, the memories aren’t in the truck. They’re in us.”

4 slices bacon

1 cup diluted vinegar [½ cup vinegar plus ½ cup water]

¼ cup sugar

6 good-size cooked potatoes, diced

3 onions, diced

Cut bacon into small pieces and brown in frying pan. Add vinegar and sugar and allow to cook together until heated and sugar is dissolved. Add to cooked diced potatoes and diced onions and allow to heat through
.

• • •

AUGUST 1989

MIAMI, FLORIDA

“My wife and I don’t get along too well,” the barfly slurred at me.

I took his empty glass away but didn’t refill it. “You might get along with her better if you spent more time at home instead of here,” I said tartly.

I was a terrible bartender. The beers I pulled were all foam, the local strippers hated me because I didn’t know they drank two-for-one when they brought in “dates,” and I clearly didn’t have the sympathetic bartender schtick down. Considering that I was tending bar to make extra money, I was obviously in the wrong business.

But this was during my first recession as an adult, when any job—even the kind I was woefully, horribly unsuited for—was better than none. There was little or no work in my industry, so when my parents announced that they were moving to Miami, I went with them, figuring that I might as well be unemployed in good weather.

There was even less demand for writers in Florida, so I worked as the receptionist in my
parents’ carpet showroom. Each morning I’d get in my car—the one I’d gotten cheap because the A/C was busted—and arrive at the Miami Design Center a few minutes before nine, just enough time to air out the clothes I’d sweated through and get a café con leche. I catalogued berbers and sisals and answered the phone until five o’clock, when I got back in the Schvitzmobile and drove to the fish shack where I tended bar until midnight. Then I’d drive home, occasionally getting pulled over in ritzy Bal Harbour for going over the 35-mile-per-hour limit. I’d explain to the officers that it was because I was falling asleep and that it was a choice between speeding and a collision. They let me go either because I made sense or they felt sorry for me in my Bloody Mary–stained T-shirt and shorts. At home, I’d make a bowl of spaghetti and pour Cardini’s Caesar salad dressing over it, the poor girl’s version of fettuccine Alfredo. And I’d fall across my pull-out couch, which I was too tired to pull out, for four or five hours before getting up to do it all over again.

Between shifts I managed to squeeze in a small nervous breakdown, but at least I never had to ask my parents for a dime. I had enough of those in my tip jar.

• • •

There’s a lot of negativity about being laid off, but I’ve discovered one of the major benefits: time. More time with Nathan, since I used to get home from work at around eight-thirty on a good night, and now I’ve got dinner going when he walks in at five-thirty. And more time to make the three-train trip up to see Mom whenever she’s got a day off from working at the furniture showroom she runs with Dad. In this economy, when my parents may go half a week without seeing a single customer, Mom and I are spending a lot more time together. Sitting with her at Nana’s antique dining table, learning about our history over many cups of tea, is something my old impressive salary couldn’t buy.

Mom’s got her own stories about heading down south with more hope than money, but they’re much happier ones. “It was right around this time of year,” she says one night at dinner, “just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, that your Nana reached her breaking point with the farm …”

• • •

NOVEMBER 1949

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK

In a way, Matilda thought as she peeled potatoes by the sink, waiting for Charlie to come home, her husband’s impulsive decision to buy the farm had been something of a blessing. If they had stayed in the Bronx, they would have suffered through unemployment and food rationing during World War II. But between the income from Charlie’s job at the factory and living on what was essentially a very large victory garden, they’d done better than most.

Which wasn’t to say life had been easy—that first winter especially. But Matilda had learned her way around the farmhouse’s ancient kitchen thanks to The Grange ladies (who were thrilled with their new hairstyles and makeup), and there was some more income from selling milk, butter, and eggs. Which was also extra work: Charlie had to milk the cows when he got home from a full shift at the plant, and Matilda made the butter herself with a churn operated by a foot pedal. It was exhausting work, but it kept her legs good. She’d swing the milk pail
around and around over her head without losing a drop, just as she had with Grandpa’s beer pail when she was a kid, to make Carolyn laugh. When the chickens had gotten old enough to lay eggs, they’d started selling those to the distributor too, candling them in the basement and trying to keep them safe from the large, egg-thieving rat that lived down there.

The chickens also provided plenty of meat, if not a lot of variety; Matilda routinely scoured the newspapers and magazines for new variations on the chicken dinner theme. Then they’d had to leave off of it for a while after Carolyn’s pet chicken Ferdie, who was born with a peg leg, was accidentally served for a family supper one Sunday.

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” Matilda had hissed at Charlie as she held up a drumstick noticeably shorter than the others in the pan.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Charlie had cried as Carolyn howled. “He was with a whole gang of other chickens—how was I to know?”

“For crying out
loud
, didn’t you see him trying to limp away from you?”

Matilda now looked over at Carolyn, who was sitting at the kitchen table and keeping her company as she peeled. Her daughter had gotten over the loss of Ferdie after a few weeks of ignoring even the mashed-potato houses her father built for her, the rooftops studded with peas.

Matilda had never been one to shy away from hard work; that wasn’t her problem with life on the farm. Adjusting to the isolation had been much more difficult—especially the night she’d woken up to the sound of tires on the gravel driveway.

“Is Daddy home?” Carolyn asked sleepily. She was allowed to sleep with her mother in her parents’ bed since Charlie was away nights.

Matilda rubbed her eyes and checked the clock—it was too early for Charlie to be back, unless something was wrong. She looked out the window. Becoming clearer in the pitch-blackness of the country night was a car, its motor turned off and headlights out, coasting up to the house.

“Who’s that?” Carolyn whispered, feeling her mother go stiff.

The car sat in the driveway for a few minutes.
Maybe
they’re lost?
Matilda wondered. Then two men got out, looked around, and began slowly walking around the house.

The Kallahers had no phone, and the closest neighbor was a mile away.

“
Happy!
” Matilda whispered for the dog. “Happy, where the hell are you? Get out there and bark, you son of a bitch.” As she dragged the mutt out from under the bed, she felt his heart thudding and skipping as badly as her own.

There were four entrances to the house: the main and back doors, and two doors in the servants’ quarters where the kitchen was. Matilda and Carolyn quickly tiptoed downstairs and began pushing furniture—tables, chairs, a chest of drawers, anything—in front of the doors. There was nothing they could do about the windows. Matilda grabbed a poker from the fireplace and ran with Carolyn to the very back of the house. She hid her shaking daughter under a couch and put her finger to her lips. Then she stood by a window, wielding the poker like a baseball bat as they heard a doorknob rattling.