Stir (8 page)

The nuts and bolts of this cholent are Sarah's mother's. When Sarah got married and moved to suburban New Jersey, she made some changes, following the lead of her neighbors. “We added the American stuff,” Sarah explained when I asked her for the recipe. “The tomato sauce.” (I nodded.) “The beef bouillon.” (I wrote it down.) “The onion soup mix.”
The what?
It's true. This cholent is a mere whisper of itself without a packet of Goodman's onion soup mix (I've tried), so don't skip it.

Like Sarah, I make this cholent in a 6-quart slow cooker. While everything in the pot will be cooked through and very likely delicious after 5 to 10 hours, you need the full 18 to 24 hours for the flavors and texture to come together as intended.

For the cholent:

1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 pounds flanken (bone-in short ribs) or stew meat

1 packet Goodman's onion soup mix

2 potatoes (I use 1 baking potato and 1 sweet potato)

⅓ cup each dried pinto beans, red kidney beans, and navy beans

½ cup barley

1 15-ounce can tomato sauce, preferably Muir Glen

1 beef bouillon cube, preferably Telma, dissolved in 2 cups hot water

For the kugel:

5 large eggs

2 tablespoons canola oil

¼ cup water

1 large onion

2¼ cups (281 grams) all-purpose flour

A generous pinch of fine sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Assemble the cholent:

Put the chopped onion into a 6-quart slow cooker and cover with the olive oil. Turn the pot on to its lowest, slowest setting. (It's the ten-hour setting on mine.) Lay the meat on top of the onion, and cover evenly with the onion soup mix. Peel the potatoes, cut each one into eighths, and arrange them on top of the meat in a ring against the sides of the pot. Fill the center of the potato ring with the beans and the barley, and dump the can of tomato sauce on top. Pour in the water with the dissolved bouillon cube, then add water until the ingredients are just barely covered. Be sure to leave enough room at the top of the pot for the kugel. Do not stir. Cover the pot.

Make the kugel:

Two to three hours into cooking, once the cholent is quite hot, whisk together the eggs, oil, and water in a large bowl. Coarsely grate in as much of the onion as you can without hurting your fingers, add the salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and stir. Add the flour, a little at a time, and stir until a loose dough forms and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Pour the kugel dough into the center of the cholent. It will spread some as it cooks. If you notice that your water level is low, add some more. Cover, and cook for 18 to 24 hours.

To serve, lift the kugel out of the pot and slice it into squares. Spoon the cholent with its juices into a large casserole dish, then pile the kugel squares on top.

Serves 8 or more.

I
closed the eye that worked and strained into the resulting darkness. I tried to look around inside of it for something, anything, but there was only black. When the panic hit, my right eye flew open and the room sprang back into perfect position, like a page from a pop-up book. I caught my breath, then closed my seeing eye again and thrust myself back into darkness. And again and again. I couldn't help myself. I was checking, I guess. Can I see something now?
Now?

It was Sunday, three days after the surgeries, and I was sitting up in bed. My E.T. finger, the one that glowed red from the taped-on oxygen sensor, was on my left hand. I reached across my face with it to the side of the world that showed up. Then I pulled my hand leftward and stared straight ahead as my glowing fingertip disappeared over the bridge of my nose like a tiny sunset. I was playing with my new body the way you play with a new toy, figuring out which button does something cool and which one does nothing at all.

According to my father, I'd returned to a room in the ICU one over from the one I'd left. I hadn't believed him. There were the chocolates and seltzer bottles lined up on the windowsill in the same order they had been. There was that creepy stuffed flower, propped up against the wall by the sink. My black sketch pad was just where I kept it on the bedside table, and beside it was my pen.

“Patty arranged the new room for you so that it would look exactly the same,” my father explained.

I was furious. It was the kindest gesture, but it felt like a trick. I wasn't angry at Patty. I was angry at myself for falling for it. That I couldn't tell the difference terrified me. Was it the missing field of vision that threw me? Or had my brain been damaged in surgery after all? I was mad at my body and tired.

Eli called late that afternoon from New York. He'd just finished his hundred-mile ride and he was tired, too, but good tired. Great tired. He sounded like himself for the first time in weeks. I felt as though someone had slid open a manhole cover at last and lowered the phone down to where I lay stuck underground. I pressed the receiver to my ear with both hands.

Eli told me about the rain thumping against the car's windshield and the speeding ticket he had earned as he'd hightailed it away from Burlington. I pictured him making his getaway, driving as fast as he could with his bike strapped to the trunk. He told me about the crush at the starting line, how the space between riders gradually equalized and each rider pedaled on, as if in his own invisible chute. Eli began the ride with our friend Megan, but they split up early on. Some miles in, he and another man fell into pace. One would pull ahead and the other would fall back, then they'd wordlessly switch. They rode at least fifty miles that way. All the way through, Eli's legs never protested. At the end he was happy, and ready for a cold beer. I wanted to clap a bell jar down over him there, let him stay in that space for a while as I looked on.

Earlier that summer, just before we'd left for New York, I'd gotten my first road bike. It was a birthday gift from Eli, who was excited for me to join him on his rides. I'd never ridden a bike with drop handlebars or the kind of pedals you have to clip into with special shoes. We'd practiced that summer in a park on the Lower East Side. More than once, I'd rolled to a stop, tried and failed to free my foot from the pedal, and tipped over onto the ground, still one with the bike. I would stand up, laughing, and get back on. From my hospital bed I wondered if I'd ever feel safe on a bike again, now that half of my world had gone black.

 • • • 

One of my last days in the ICU, Dr. Tranmer stopped by to explain what would happen next. Eli was back from New York now. He stood by my bed, while Dr. Tranmer assumed his usual position, slouched in one chair with his leg propped up on another. He folded a sheet of paper to stiffen it for writing, laid it against his thigh, and drew us the blood vessel and its attendant aneurysm as he'd done before the surgery. Again, he penned the straight wall of the vessel, then the aneurysm ballooning outward from it in the shape of a kidney bean. Only now, he added another line across the base of the aneurysm, separating it from the vessel. This was the clip. He ran the pen back and forth a couple of times so that the clip stood out in bold. Until he pointed it out, we didn't notice that he hadn't drawn it flush against the vessel. There was a sliver of the aneurysm still beneath it.

A residual aneurysm is common after clipping a bean-shaped aneurysm, he explained. Most likely, the clip would stay firmly in place and the minor deformity of the vessel would spend the rest of its days unchanged until I died an old woman. (Peacefully, in my sleep, arm in arm with Eli, of course.)

There was unfortunately also the chance that pressure would build beneath the clip and a new aneurysm would form out of the bit that remained. It would need to be monitored. That meant an angiogram every six months for a year, then yearly for five years, then every five years after that.

Okay. But how was I supposed to understand all of this in terms of my actual life? That was what I wanted to know. Was it safe to run? How far? How fast? Was pregnancy an option for me? When? These questions were impossible to answer, but Dr. Tranmer spoke kindly and did his best. Pregnancy would probably be safe one day, though it was too soon to say so for sure. Pushing would not. I looked at Eli and tried to read his face. It had taken us years to know with certainty that we wanted to be parents. The feeling of sureness was still new. Maybe I could make myself not want it anymore. I groped around for the old familiar doubt, but I couldn't find it.

“No marathons,” Dr. Tranmer went on. “The occasional short run should be fine.” But how occasional was occasional? How short was short? Three miles? Five? What do words like “probably” and “should be” even mean when the potential reality that lies beyond them is death?

Dr. Tranmer was in one-step-at-a-time mode, the only mode appropriate after brain surgery, when the body is just beginning to heal and the first follow-up scan is still six months away. I, on the other hand, wanted an operating manual, and a lifetime warranty to boot. What
exactly
do I need to do to make sure I'll be okay?

My official prognosis, it seemed, was that I was going to be either absolutely fine or not, based either entirely or not at all on whether I crossed certain red lines, sketchily drawn—that may or may not be red lines at all. This is the prognosis of every human, of course, from the healthy and strong to the gravely ill, every single moment of our lives. We forget that. (And thank goodness.) One inconvenience of having just been nearly dead was that I could no longer help but remember.

 • • • 

I moved out of the ICU and onto a regular floor that night. Eli was sitting at the foot of my bed when an e-mail came in on his phone.

“Josh and Melissa are splitting up.” He said it before he'd had a chance to process the news himself, and from his offhand tone I was sure I'd misheard.

“What?”

These friends of ours had been together for ten years, married for six. We'd met them for drinks before leaving New York a few weeks earlier. They had just bought a place in the city. In another year, they told us, they were hoping to have a child.

“No,” I sobbed. “No, no, no . . .” Everything was broken. This was too much. I kicked at the sheets and pounded the mattress with my fists.

“You have to calm down,” my father said gently, but I couldn't. For the first time since I'd fallen from the treadmill, I cried with all my might. Eli was with me on the bed now. I flung myself at him, tucked myself into a ball on his lap with my knees up under my chin and my face pressed into his chest. Then, out of nowhere, a riptide of gratitude.

“I am the luckiest,” I croaked into Eli's T-shirt between ragged breaths. “I have everything. I am the luckiest one.”

Before Eli left for the night he leaned in close to my head, a changed landscape with its ear-to-ear stitches along a strip of bald scalp, its temples swollen and bruised. I knew the forehead kiss was coming, but the nerves had been cut. I couldn't feel his lips at all.

“M
ake sure you get a window seat on the left side of the plane,” Eli told me. He'd been living in Seattle for two months, and I was flying out to visit him for the first time. He wanted me to see Mt. Rainier as the plane passed by. I was afraid I would miss it, so once we crossed the Mississippi, I barely peeled my eyes from the window. You get far enough west, and lots of mountaintops pop up through the clouds. I wasn't sure I'd know which one was Rainier. Eli assured me that I would.

Truly, there was no mistaking it. The peak was enormous, grand, snow swept, catching the light along its slopes and grooves. The contours of the rock appeared sketched and shaded in with pencil. In fact, the whole mountain seemed drawn, painted, the backdrop for a movie set. Framed by my tiny bubble of a window it looked like something I could hold in my hand.

Eli picked me up from the airport and we drove to the little apartment he'd found in Capitol Hill. It was our first time really alone, ever. This visit would be our last before I moved to England for graduate school, and we were determined to make the most of it. We wandered from Eli's place down to Pike Place Market and ate Beecher's grilled cheese sandwiches by Puget Sound. We climbed to the top of the water tower in Volunteer Park, then snacked on chocolate-covered cherries in the grass. My dad had given me an old fully manual film camera for college graduation, and I shot my first rolls on that trip. While Eli was at work, I wandered the neighborhood, grateful for the weight of the camera around my neck and the click, whirr, click that told me I was indeed right there.

At the end of my stay, we hiked up along the White Chuck River and spent a few days camping near Glacier Peak. I awoke in our tent on the first morning to find Eli peering out at me over the top of his sleeping bag.

“I'm thinking about the ring I want to make for you,” he said. “It's beautiful.”

I didn't know what to say, or what to do with myself, so I pulled the sleeping bag closed over my face, curled up like a potato bug, and butted him in the shoulder with my head. Then I poked my face out, and we lay there for a while in silence, listening to the rain on the leaves.

I was so glad for that visit. This way, I could picture Eli in his space, doing his thing, as I scratched off phone cards from half a world away. When I thought of Eli, I thought of Seattle, and vice versa. I'd travel back there a few times over the next two years, first from England, and then from Israel, where I lived during my second year abroad. And when I finally bought a one-way ticket back to the U.S.A., it was to Seattle. The city already felt like home.

I've often felt as though Seattle were in on some kind of secret back then, a secret about who we were, who we would become, and the life that would be ours. Seattle is the city where Eli learned how to climb mountains (he'd summit Mt. Rainier years later), how to build big things out of wood, and where I ran my first 5K. It's where we started plotting, together, the rest of our lives.

It's also where I lived, for the first time, in an apartment all my own and learned that from inside of me, and me alone, I could spin this thing called home. My place was just a couple of blocks from Eli's and I saw him most days, but I loved living alone. Just me and my green-and-yellow-tiled kitchen, my bedroom window that I could climb out of onto a wooden balcony, and my copious closet space, most of which remained empty, since at twenty-four, I didn't yet have much stuff. I bought a kitchen table for twenty-five dollars from a woman whose husband had made it in college. I wrote the lesson plans there for the fifth grade class I was teaching and served my first solo-hosted meal there: cream of asparagus soup, zucchini quiche, and a baguette that I picked up from a bakery in Pike Place Market and stuffed with butter, garlic, and thyme. I didn't have a blender, so I borrowed Eli's to purée the soup, a soup I liked so much that I bought myself an immersion blender for all the puréeing I knew was yet to come. It was the first kitchen tool with a motor I'd ever owned. (Also, at twenty bucks, the first I could afford.)

One morning in April, three Aprils after that first conversation on his dormitory steps, and nine months after I moved to Seattle, Eli told me to meet him by his car. He wouldn't say where we were going. I should have known that something special was about to happen—he isn't usually one for surprises—but I didn't have a clue.

We parked on First Avenue, about a block from Pike Place Market, and Eli led me into a storefront I'd never noticed before. There was jewelry on display, and suddenly I understood. He'd picked out a ring. He was about to propose. I'd forgotten about our conversation in the tent by the river, the ring he said he'd mapped out in his mind. I still didn't remember when he introduced me to John, who looked more like a craftsman than a salesman, nor did I remember when John guided us behind the counter and handed Eli a small metal box. Eli opened it and removed a ring made of green wax, and that was when I got it. He hadn't
picked out
a ring. This was the model for the ring he had
designed
.

“So . . .” he said, “what do you say?”

We cast the ring together.

We wanted a fall wedding, and six months later, on October 30, we had one. We were moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I'd been accepted into graduate school, so we decided to have the wedding not far from there, right outside of Boston, on the North Shore. My family came from Ohio, and his from New Jersey, and close friends from all over.

The first snow of the season fell the night before the wedding, but by morning the temp had reached the midseventies, so we moved the ceremony outdoors and set up the chuppah facing the ocean. There was French toast and bluegrass and baskets filled with pomegranates, and several ladybugs that found their way into my veil. I could say more about that day, but I want to rewind a bit, to a morning in July a few months earlier, July 14, to be exact, when Eli and I went down to the Seattle courthouse and got married, just us.

I refer to it now as “our first wedding,” though when we set out for the courthouse that day, we didn't see it as a real marriage at all. I just needed a few months of health insurance between the end of my teaching job and the start of graduate school. I'd be going on Eli's plan once we were married, anyway, so why not? Let's get civilly married here in Seattle, right now, we figured, and save the thousands of dollars in Cobra fees. It was a formality, that was all. The real wedding would be the ceremony a few months later, with a rabbi and a long white dress and all the people we loved best.

It was a Thursday morning, and we went down to the courthouse first thing. I wore a cream linen skirt and a green shirt with a small pineapple embroidered on the breast. Eli wore jeans and a black tee. We waited in line for the license and got our time slot with the judge. We were visibly nonchalant and giggly, and when we told the clerk that we were there without witnesses or rings, she looked at us hard, as though we should maybe take some time to think through this decision and come back when we were responsible adults. We told her that we didn't mind paying the fee to hire two witnesses on the spot, then dashed downstairs to the kiosk in the lobby to find something in place of rings to exchange. We chose a FireBall, for Eli, and a Lemonhead, for me.

A few minutes later, Judge Richard D. Eadie married us, with a clerk and a secretary, our paid witnesses, standing solemnly by. We explained more than once that, honestly, we didn't care which ceremony from the giant binder Judge Eadie read. He could pick it himself. Really. Just choose the shortest one. Eli had to get to work.

We stood on either side of Judge Eadie clutching our penny candy. I spoke first, reading the words from the laminated binder sheet. Even the shortest, simplest script included some basic things about love, a lifetime of it, commitment, and a version of 'til death do us part. That was fine. No big deal. We were only stating the obvious. But in the presence of a judge and two witnesses, standing face-to-face and saying these words out loud felt unexpectedly powerful. Eli gave me the hairy eyeball when my voice started to shake—this wasn't our actual wedding!—but his face softened as he, too, began to hear the words, feel them, and know that they were real. When it was his turn, his voice shook, too.

We left the courthouse hand in hand, me sucking the Lemonhead, he the FireBall. We kissed with candy breath and he drove off to work. I stuffed the candy wrapper into my skirt pocket. Then I made my way to Pike Place Market to replenish my cheese supply. It was early for lunch, but I was suddenly ravenous. I bought a grilled cheese sandwich from the shop and found a spot on the grassy hill overlooking Puget Sound. The fog was burning off by now and the eastern slopes of the Olympic Mountains came into view. Ferries set out for the islands, a ship steered into the harbor, and orange cranes stretched their dinosaur necks toward the sky.