Blue Plate Special (33 page)

After my mother’s radical hysterectomy, she was now cancer-free and didn’t have to undergo chemo or radiation. She and Susan met Jon and me at an Italian restaurant in the East Village to reunite, celebrate her recovery, and give my mother and sister a chance to vet my new boyfriend. It was an easy, comfortable meal, despite our recent history. Jon’s presence made it feel warm and uncomplicated; he charmed them both and openly showed them how much he loved me.

That spring, we all went to Australia to see Emily. After such a good reunion among ourselves, we couldn’t wait to see Emily again. Also her divorce from Claus was now final, and she was planning to marry a man she’d met in the community, and we wanted to look him over. I invited Jon to come with us; I wanted Emily to look him over, too.

When we arrived in Sydney, Jon and I found out that, because we weren’t married, Emily’s community wanted us to sleep apart in their single men’s and women’s dorms in bunk beds, which was not an option for us. So we got to stay in a hotel room with a balcony in King’s Cross while my mother and Susan shared the big guest room in the community house, a sprawling Victorian minimansion in a suburb just outside the city.

The group, which evidently existed in communities all
over the world, was called the Twelve Tribes. They lived the way they imagined the first-century Christians had lived, sharing all their possessions, celebrating Shabbat, meeting at dawn and dusk for intensive group prayer sessions. The women wore their hair in braids down their backs and dressed modestly in long-sleeved blouses and long skirts; the men all had beards and ponytails and wore loose pants and smocklike shirts. They obeyed the literal words of the Bible, as interpreted for them by their prophet, a former carnival barker from Tennessee named Elbert Eugene Spriggs who’d rechristened himself Yoneq. His followers believed that they would bring about the second coming of Christ once all Yoneq’s edicts were fulfilled. Everyone who joined got a new name: Emily was now Ishah, and Campbell, Emily’s fiancé, was called Yotham.

“They’re a cult,” said Jon when we got back to our hotel. “They give me the creeps.”

I suspected that he was right, but even so, it was a joy and a relief to see Emily again. She had been a painfully missing piece of my life for ten years. But she had changed drastically from the headstrong, opinionated girl I’d known. She had become meek, humble, obedient, and devout. All the women and children in the group were. The women worked hard together from dawn to dusk, were never allowed to be alone, and rarely saw their husbands, except at night, in bed, to procreate. I later learned that they were required to hit their children with balloon sticks to make them behave, starting when they were six months old. Children were hit for asking for seconds at the table, hit for playing make-believe games that would distract them from recognizing Christ (Yashua) when he returned, hit for questioning authority, hit for any mischief or disobedience. Meanwhile, at the twice-daily prayer meetings, people informed on one another, Stasi-like, and were punished.

But we didn’t know most of this at the time. And they certainly weren’t starving in the Twelve Tribes. The women
seemed to be perpetually preparing feasts of fresh vegetables, meat, homemade bread, and rich desserts which they ate communally, of course, at long tables in their large, airy dining room or under the trees in the yard when the men returned from their carpentry jobs in the city.

Although all the men in the group seemed self-righteous and intense, we loved Campbell right away. He was completely different from Claus—dynamic, smart, charming, and seemingly in touch with reality. And he clearly adored Emily. All in all, Emily seemed healthy and happy and surrounded by friends, much better off than she’d been with Claus in New Zealand, and so we tried not to worry too much about her, although something in the back of my mind warned me that she had not returned to our family, not really: this group, whatever its true nature, dictated her actions and behavior. In any case, she wanted to stay where she was, and that was her choice.

A
few months after we got back, on my thirty-fourth birthday, Jon proposed to me at the same place he’d taken me for our first date, an outdoor restaurant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk called the Cafe Moscow. I accepted in tears. On November 8, 1996, we had the official part of our wedding at my mother’s house in Woodstock on her back deck, under a chuppah Jon had made. We found a conservative rabbi willing to marry us in a Jewish ceremony, even though I wasn’t Jewish, because I was planning at the time to convert. My mother graciously opened her house to Jon’s family, none of whom she’d ever met; she hired a photographer and a caterer. I had a dress made by an Ecuadorean seamstress I’d found by asking around—she had rushed it, and it wasn’t finished with the row of seed-pearl buttons up the back she’d planned, but it was satiny and formfitting and a glowing, ethereal ivory, and I felt beautiful in it.

Only our immediate families were there. Susan was my maid of honor; Jon’s father was his best man. My mother walked me down the flower-strewn aisle, both of us on the verge of tears. It was November but warm, windy, and dark; there were tornado warnings that day. Standing next to Jon under the chuppah, looking into his eyes, I trembled so visibly, everyone could see. As the rabbi said the prayers invoking God, the chuppah roof whipped up and down in sudden strong gusts. As he pronounced us husband and wife, a flock of blackbirds rose like one thing from the tossing trees into the stormy sky. It strikes me now as a perfectly accurate omen.

After the ceremony, we all drove down the mountain for a feast at a cozy streamside restaurant my mother had rented for the night. We had filet mignon and red wine, and afterward, champagne and a wedding cake the restaurant owners, a married couple, had made us. The next day, we all drove down to Brooklyn for a huge party in an old bank on Grand Street in Williamsburg with Mexican food, a wild klezmer band, an ocean of booze, and a roomful of people we loved.

The transition from dreamy, passionate courtship to fraught, contentious marriage was immediate and shocking. For our honeymoon, Jon and I had decided to take a three-week road trip to New Orleans and back in a rented car. It was not a romantic trip, to put it mildly.

“Which way do I go?” Jon barked at me as we approached the end of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge on our way out of New York, headed toward New Orleans. For the two years we’d been together, he had never raised his voice with me, ever, even a little.

“Which way?” I repeated, dazed; I had no driver’s license and no concept of New York’s highways or any highways, for that matter. Before we’d left, he had asked me to look at the map because he wasn’t sure where we were going; I had failed to figure it out in time.

“Look at the map!” he shouted. “Quick! Which way do I go?”

Cringing, I unfolded the map, turned it right side up and looked ineffectually at it while Jon swept past our exit.

He pulled the car over. “Look,” he said, jabbing the map with his forefinger. “We’re right here. Don’t you know how to read a map?”

“Yes!” I lied. “But not if you yell at me.”

Of course, this was not really about my map-reading abilities,
or lack thereof. We were both freaking out. How were we going to navigate this new marriage together? Was I going to ride along while Jon did all the work? Was he going to blow up whenever I didn’t hop to fast enough? We sat there for a moment, trying to get our bearings, internal and external. Yes, we had missed our exit. But worse, now that we were married, we’d suddenly turned into two strangers. It was as if an evil fairy-tale witch had cast a spell on us and turned us into clichés, a dithering, smoldering wife, a hot-tempered, critical husband.

Luckily, we had decided to bring Jane and Michael Stern’s
Roadfood
with us. Although we fought constantly the entire trip, what could have been a disaster turned into a culinary orgy of American regional classics. On our first night, in Baltimore, at the Lexington Market, we glutted ourselves on crab cakes, clam chowder, and raw oysters. In Nashville, we ate pulled pork and drank bourbon and danced drunkenly to live bands. Just off the interstate, somewhere in Alabama, we found a barbecue shack with pulled pork so tender and good we moaned as we ate the sandwiches, our chins and wrists running with sauce. In Mobile, we had dozens of big, briny, fresh raw Gulf oysters for lunch, dinner, breakfast, and lunch, despite headlines warning of red tide. In New Orleans, we ate muffulettas from Central Grocery and jambalaya, red beans and rice, and fried chicken at Coop’s Place. In Memphis, we ate all the barbecue we could stuff in our pieholes. On our way north, we stopped in Missouri for the famous throwed rolls and unlimited free sides at Lambert’s.

All this food distracted me from my dawning realization that we might have made a mistake. And this set the tone for our entire marriage. Food and drink, which had been so central to our courtship, our shared passions, and the things that had brought us together and cemented our romance, now sustained us. When we were unable to connect any other way, when the distance between us felt too wide to cross, we could always
share a table, a meal. Filling our bellies, tipsy, we could say the things we needed to say to each other, cry and laugh, and feel temporarily bonded again, in love again. We had a joke about this: we called the phenomenon a “food-inspired rush of love.”

B
efore heading back to New York at the end of our honeymoon, we made a stop in St. Louis for one night to visit Jon’s grandmother Fan; she and I had loved each other from the instant we’d met almost two years before. She had severe emphysema after a lifetime of heavy smoking, and her health was declining. She was thrilled that we’d come to see her on our honeymoon, almost beside herself with happiness. That night, we ate our first home-cooked meal since before our wedding: Jon cooked a roast chicken with mashed potatoes, I made a salad, and we opened the wine we’d brought. The three of us stayed up into the early hours of the morning, and Fan talked about her life. She had traveled a lot with her husband, Jon’s grandfather—to the Far East, to Europe and South America—and her tiny apartment was crammed full of the things they’d brought back. She looked around her little living room, pointing at a mask, a carved mahogany table, a piece of embroidered cloth on the wall, telling the story of where it had come from, how they’d found it.

The next morning, Fan was so tired she could hardly get up to see us off. As we drove away, I said with sad certainty, “That’s the last time we’ll see her.”

She died a few months later. After that, there seemed to be an unending stream of deaths. My aunt Aillinn was next, of a rare, aggressive form of breast cancer, and then my grandmother Ruth of complications from the flu at ninety-three. Two close, longtime friends of Jon’s died, one of esophageal cancer, one of a heroin overdose. Then, horribly, Jon’s younger brother, Mathew, was diagnosed with ALS. Taking turns with
the rest of his family, Jon and I nursed him in his Idaho cabin near the Canadian border through a painful, terrible three years, until he died. Meanwhile, Jon’s beloved stepfather, Richard, succumbed to colon cancer. Then September 11 happened; the towers fell. I had a breakdown. Shortly after that, Jon’s father, who had been sick for years, died of lung cancer and complications of diabetes.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

W
hen we got back from our honeymoon, I left my big, cheap, beautiful apartment in Greenpoint and moved into Jon’s loft on Metropolitan and Wythe in Williamsburg. It was a huge, low-ceilinged industrial space he’d carved into rooms, with a big studio where his improvised industrial-noise band rehearsed and where he painted. There were interior windows and exposed brick painted white, a bathtub on a plywood platform to hide the plumbing, a small outdoor deck built over the tiny one-story garage next door, which we got to by climbing out our big bedroom window, and a kitchen he’d built himself with things he’d scavenged from construction jobs—orange metal overhead cabinets, a little gas stove that had once belonged to Rudy Giuliani, a table whose top was the smooth, sanded slate from an old pool table, and a porcelain farmhouse sink. We had a very comfortable long red couch and a less comfortable pink-brown armchair where we watched TV late at night.