True Confections (9 page)

Howard reported to me that his mother had sighed heavily and would only say she knew this was coming, knew it from her first glimpse of me in that ridiculous ice cream
shmatta
, when she should have recognized me as that scheming Arson Girl from the newspapers, a part of my résumé that I had failed to disclose to Sam, and perhaps I could fool everyone else, but not Frieda. She knew trouble when she saw it.

Although Frieda didn’t want me to convert, as I have already
mentioned (and how deeply strange is that, seriously?), I really tried to embrace the Ziplinskys and their beliefs. Which turned out to be my beliefs about their beliefs. I studied all aspects of the Jewish religion, all the rules and meanings. The more I learned, the more confusing it was, because nothing I could find in a book ever precisely matched the Ziplinsky methods for observing Jewish tradition. Were they Reform? Were they Reconstructionists? Howard was useless, because though he found my efforts touching, he would just laugh at my questions and say, “How the hell should I know?” even though he’d had a bar mitzvah, to please both his grandmothers.

Howard was much better versed in the quirky Malagasy
fady
taboos in some of the small villages on Madagascar, especially in the south. Even more nuanced than the Ziplinsky family definitions of kosher law, the
fady
beliefs varied from one village to the next. Here, it might be
fady
to touch chameleons, which could bring misfortune, there, it is
fady
to mention crocodiles. The prohibition of wearing red clothing was a common
fady
. All over the island there are certain
fady
rivers and streams in which one must never swim because they harbor evil spirits. There are
fady
days of the week on which one must never, ever, work, but those, too, varied from one village to the next. A deeply entrenched
fady
tradition the Madagascar government has been working to prohibit is the abandonment or separation of twins. When, during one of Howard’s idyllic summers, the cat belonging to one of the kitchen workers on the vanilla plantation gave birth to just two perfectly matched kittens, one of them was killed instantly.

Howard admitted to me that he was such an indifferent Torah student that his bar mitzvah preparation was the quick and dirty kind, featuring a phonetic, easily retained Torah portion that would allow him to “read” while dragging the Torah
pointer over random text. At his bar mitzvah, as Howard parroted his memorized Hebrew and performed this pantomime reading from the Torah, the crotchety rabbi had repeatedly grabbed the end of the pointer and slammed it down on the proper words on the scroll.

So Howard wasn’t much of a Jew. I tried so hard, oh my God, for decades I tried to act like a good Jew myself. I was a parody of a good little Jewish wife, especially in those first years, when I went crazy memorizing all the rules, like the thirty-nine
melachot
, the categories of forbidden Sabbath activities. Do you know how hard it is for someone with my background even to pronounce a word like that? The “aacccchhh” does not come naturally to a Tatnall throat.

I probably did break many of the thirty-nine each Saturday, just the same (igniting a fire, extinguishing a fire, writing two or more letters, erasing, tying, untying, making two loops, transferring between domains), but as a member of the Ziplinsky tribe, I foolishly thought it was important to know the rules I was breaking. My favorite
melachot
among the thirty-nine? “Applying the finishing touch.”

And the holidays! Ask me about Shavuot! Or how about that Tu Bishvat! I’ve got the scoop on Purim, the word on Haman and his tricorner hat, represented in those lead sinker cookies, hamantaschen, which I whip up in the Cuisinart, thanks to a Martha Stewart recipe.

Take Sukkot. There’s a holiday. Ask me about the Lulav and the Etrog! The plural of Etrog, I happen to know, is Etrogim, not that I have ever been able to work that into a conversation, because you only need the one each year.
These Etrogim are so lovely it is hard for me to choose just one Etrog. Look, those Etrogim over there are even nicer
. I am sure Irene wouldn’t know a Lulav from an Etrog from a Halloween pumpkin, but of course, that is
what makes her a real Ziplinsky, her entitlement to her own indifference, the privilege of not noticing her own privilege.

T
HE FIRST TIME
I hosted the Seder at our house was the year Sam died, when Passover was just a couple of weeks later. For some reason we thought it was too much for Frieda to manage the whole thing at her house so soon after Sam’s death, so we decided to move the Seder to our house on Everit Street instead. Frieda resented this plan, but her resentment was in itself an activity that was very fulfilling for her. Logically, we should have gone to her that year, as always. She had that big, seldom-used dining room, and she had all that Waterford crystal she obsessed over (my failure to covet her damned crystal was yet another bone of contention between us), and she had those heirloom, gold-rimmed Pesach dishes that had once belonged to her aunt Pep in the Bronx. Frieda also maintained a fourth set of dishes, beyond the usual three for meat, dairy, and Pesach. This was a shelf of miscellaneous plates that were known as the trayfe dishes, which were reserved for pizza and other technically forbidden foods, a necessary accommodation when Irene and Howard were in high school.

I come from a family that believed one would never
buy
silver, because one simply
has
silver. My mother’s second cousin Molly in Wilmington lays the table with her grandmother’s service for twelve, which, she recalls fondly and frequently, was salvaged when Daddy’s yacht sank off Nantucket in a squall in 1924. The loyal butler, Cope, had very nearly gone down with the ship. Family lore has it that he was thought to have drowned until he was seen staggering out of the surf, embracing the carved wooden chest containing this famous family silver. The
family story does not include his first name, though the silver pattern, Sulgrave, is usually mentioned.

F
RIEDA LOVED TO
cook and bake and freeze. How many times did she confound my kids by inviting them over with a promise that she was baking her delicious walnut cookies, only to offer them semithawed, dried-out walnut cookies from the freezer? These they were expected to enjoy while sitting at the kitchen table breathing in the wafting aroma that lingered from the day’s baking, while racks of soft, warm, fragrant walnut cookies cooled all over the kitchen in preparation for layering in wax paper and entombment in those plastic freezer boxes she cherished, as if they too were her legacy from Aunt Pep.

Frieda had three freezers in her basement. For most of the years I knew her, even when she was still working admirably long days at Zip’s at a point when she would have been entitled to cut back her hours at the factory, she cooked and baked large quantities of food several times a week, preferring to freeze each sour-cream Bundt, each batch of mushroom soup, in appropriately segregated and labeled containers in these freezers, with meat in one, dairy in another, and whatever Seder foods she could prepare in advance, stashed in her Pesach Tupperware (I’m not kidding), in her Pesach freezer. What’s especially impressive and odd about this was that she didn’t exactly keep a kosher home, though she made a lot of inconsistent gestures in that direction. (The Ziplinsky style of kosherness was like some encrypted dress code so difficult to understand that it would make you yearn for uniforms.) Because she did so much cooking in advance, one of the hallmarks of big family meals at her house was the eerie spotlessness of her kitchen.

Three-Freezer Frieda (as Howard secretly called her at times) vowed to give me all her Seder recipes. The day had come, after twenty-two years. She told me she knew it was her duty as a good Jewish woman to provide me, her only daughter-in-law, with all the knowledge she had about how to make a Seder, so that I could make a proper Jewish home for her son and for her grandchildren. Though of course I could only fail, she didn’t say out loud, because a proper Jewish home for her son and her grandchildren would not have had me in it.

She made a big production out of this, the handing over of The Book of Frieda, as she dictated every single thing she could think to tell me about this annual event that went by three interchangeable names so I always worried I was using the wrong word, no matter which one it was: Seder, Pesach, Passover. (I have come to believe that I can never get it right, because it is like growing up a native French speaker, with the masculine and feminine identity attached to each word as you learn it, so you have a natural knowledge of gender, while the rest of the world can never get it quite right. Intuition is insufficient for French, a language in which a word for
penis
is feminine.) I wrote it all down, word for word, in the same notebook I had last used just a few weeks earlier for what turned out to be my final lunch at Clark’s with Sam, when he could barely eat a little soup and I had to drive him there and help him into and out of the car, and he nearly fell stepping off the curb when we were getting back into the car after lunch. The last thing he said that I wrote down was this: “A good person never falls into the trap of loving things and using people—people should be loved, and things should be used.”

Now here it was just two weeks after Sam’s death, and we sat at Frieda’s kitchen table, surrounded by the remains of various eastern European carbohydrates of mourning that had been
brought by family, friends, and business associates calling on Frieda. She would soon banish them all, all the coffee cakes and strudels and rugelachs and kugels of sadness, even though the Seder would not be taking place in her house this year, in her great annual pre-Passover cleansing of the forbidden chometz. Paradoxically enough, Frieda’s solution lay in giving them all to me in a few shopping bags when I left that day with my Pesach marching orders.

“Offer them to the employees, take them home, suit yourself,” she said to me. This dovetailed nicely with her ongoing secret plan to tempt me at all times to eat calorie-laden foods so I would get fat. Also it was sending extra chometz into my house so as to sabotage any possibility that my Passover Seder could possibly be legitimate. And it was her way of handing off her chometz to a goy, part of her ritual that she thought I didn’t understand, but I understood her perfectly.

And so I took a bite of a gummy raspberry rugelach I certainly didn’t need, and I turned to a fresh page, and I wrote while Frieda dictated with great precision all of her extremely detailed bits of advice concerning the tiniest aspects of each recipe.

We began with the precious Ziplinsky family charoset recipe, which went well, though her charoset, an apple and walnut Ashkenazic formula, as she called it, was, in my annual experience, plausibly derived from the actual mortar used to build the pyramids when we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. Year after year at the Ziplinsky family Seders, with various Bridgeport cousins and a couple of old Legion Avenue quasi relatives of Frieda’s in attendance, as we got to that part of the group recitations, I would feel all the eyes around the table swivel my way in anticipation. Look, the shiksa wife is going to say it! Here it comes! There she goes!
“When we were slaves to
Pharaoh in Egypt…
” If I do say so, my own charoset, featuring raisins, dates, ginger, dried pears, walnuts, pignolis, and almonds, is far superior. Also? Forget the Manischewitz. A good grapey pinot noir is best.

For her matzo balls, Frieda revealed that the secret to their being so light and fluffy (and truly, they really were—that woman was a very competent cook at certain moments) was that she used seltzer in the dough. The little seltzer bubbles aerated the matzo balls, she said, before adding sharply that I shouldn’t think of using Perrier; it had to be true seltzer water, from a siphon, like for an egg cream. (Do I look like someone who would put Perrier in matzo balls?) Our household, like hers, had a weekly seltzer delivery, a Ziplinsky family necessity, so I didn’t even keep Perrier in the house, as she well knew, since Zip’s Candies paid all the Castle Seltzer bills for all those years. Then she got to the ingredients and instructions for the chicken broth for the matzo ball soup.

“Take boneless chicken breasts,” she said.

“How many?” I asked.

“Oh, whatever you think you need,” she replied with uncharacteristic vagueness, which should have been the tip-off. “Five, or six, maybe.”

“Boneless chicken breasts? Skinless?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. Let me repeat. She said,
It doesn’t matter
. Those were her words.

“Are you sure?” I asked, pen poised on the page. “Boneless, skinless chicken breasts?”

“Do you think I wasn’t making chicken soup for the Seder every year since I was a little girl growing up on Legion Avenue and my mother taught me her recipe, and now all of a sudden I don’t know what I’m talking about?” she said tartly. “Okay, fine, you know better, you do whatever you think.”

I wrote down the remaining ingredients for the soup as she enumerated them, the carrots, the onions, the garlic cloves, the celery stalk, the bay leaf, and we went on to other elements of the meal until I had everything she thought I needed to make the Seder.

She had the family Haggadahs stacked up on the table for me to take. She would bring along the gefilte fish and the freshly grated horseradish, because it was impossible for me to learn to make either of these things, Frieda had decided. Irene would be bringing fruit. Knock yourself out, Irene. When I was leaving, as I bent to take from her the last shopping bag of coffee cakes, to carry all the chometz out of her house and into mine, there on her doorstep, Frieda leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. This was uncharacteristically warm, but it was probably fueled by her ebullience over the chicken soup recipe she had just foisted on me.

Howard thought I should invite my parents up from Chapel Hill. He liked them, and didn’t quite believe me that they were as cold and distant as I said they were. If you have had Frieda and Sam Ziplinsky for parents, you probably just cannot imagine the true coldness of Kay and Edwin Tatnall. You think you see something that isn’t there. As a consequence of being loved sufficiently by your parents, you normalize, you fill in the blanks. For Howard, my parents were so Other that he mistook one kind of Other for another kind of Other. In his own way, feeling fond and unconflicted about my parents as he did, Howard has always denied me the right to my outrage at them for their minimal devotion to me.