Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (15 page)

I roll up the shades and get enough sunlight to work by, but days that it rains and snows are the worst, cold and dark. I had always liked rainy and snowy days, but now they depress me.

“We hated them too,” Mom tells me one day when the chill drives me upstairs for a morale-boosting phone call. “When we moved back up to Saratoga from Florida, your grandpa was in construction. It brought in decent money, but they were working high up—twenty stories, sometimes—and if it rained or snowed, they wouldn’t let the workers go up. Too dangerous.”

The men only got paid when they were on the job. Bad weather meant no work, and that meant no wages for the week. Because Charlie and Matilda were living hand-to-mouth, a period of stormy weather meant trouble. “People always say, ‘Oh, the snow is so
pretty,’ ” Mom says in a saccharine tone. “Well, it scared us. I still hate snow.”

• • •

Right around the time I discover how hard it is to reboot a computer while wearing fingerless gloves, the laptop struggles back to life and dings feebly that I have a new e-mail:
Please come to the office to pick up your Mr. Crump check
.

Oh my God. I got a Mr. Crump check.

The legend goes that when the namesake of our company was just starting out and the holidays came along, she realized she didn’t have enough money for Christmas. Just as she was about to send apologies instead of gifts to her family, her boss, Mr. Crump, announced that he was handing out bonuses to all the employees. Then and there our leader-to-be made a vow: if she ever became a boss and had the means, she’d give her staff bonuses in December in honor of Mr. Crump’s generosity. And even though I’d been laid off a few months ago, my Mr. Crump check was at my old office, waiting for me. A check that would pay for a new Wi-Fi-capable laptop computer.

When I tell Mom the good news, she’s pleased, but not all that surprised. “That’s not the first time money’s come out of the blue when it was least expected and most needed,” she says. “Remember Nana’s black coat?”

• • •

DECEMBER 1970

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

It wasn’t long after Nana died, suddenly and unexpectedly one night in November 1970, that Mom got fired. She’d been doing well at the perfume company, but when she took off more than the three days allowed for mourning, her boss said, “I needed you here, and I’m sorry you weren’t happy with us.” The severance check kept us afloat for a while, but that, and the money from Nana’s insurance policy, eventually ran out.

Aching for her mother, Mom put on Nana’s black faux-lamb coat one night and wrapped it around herself like a hug. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said, the words becoming more like howls as she sobbed. She put her hand in the pocket of the coat. “I don’t know how—”

She stopped talking, and when she pulled her hand out of the pocket she was holding a bankbook with a wad of bills folded in the middle. Five hundred dollars in cash, twenty-five hundred in the account. Nana had never mentioned her secret stash to Mom, but she sent it to us just when we needed it the most.

• • •

Upstairs the warm, comforting aroma of beef stew fills the kitchen, and the winter sun is so bright it’s making me squint. But I won’t move, even though this new computer can go anywhere in the house and do practically anything a writer could ever need it to do.

One tender capon (5 lbs.) disjointed

One cup vegetable shortening, melted

One loaf bread (16 oz.) dried, crust removed, grated

One cup grated Parmesan cheese

One-fourth cup minced parsley

One-eighth teaspoon paprika

One-eighth teaspoon pepper

One-half tablespoon salt

Two cloves garlic, minced

Oven temperature: 350 degrees

Baking time: One and one-half hours

Servings: Six

Have the capon disjointed in the market. Wash; dry. Melt the shortening in a saucepan. Dip each piece of chicken into the shortening then into the grated bread mixed in a pan with the cheese, parsley, seasonings and garlic. Place in a large baking pan. Bake in a moderate oven until a golden brown, turning several times. Serve hot with mashed potatoes and stewed tomatoes
.

JANUARY 2009

HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

“Okay, hold still and don’t breathe,” says the technician as she sprints to the computer that runs the mammogram machine.

With a breast clamped firmly in a plastic vise, there’s not a lot of moving I can do, and breathing is limited to the gasp I sucked in when the technician pulled skin from my back to get enough flesh to put on the machine. (I have the same slight bust that Nana had, while Mom got all the va-va-va-
voom
in the family.)

While I wait those interminable, still, breathless seconds for the mammogram to be taken, I think about
the core biopsy I had a few years ago. “If you take any more pictures, my boob is going to glow in the dark,” I told the doctor.

“We found something,” she said. “We’re just making sure before we schedule the procedure.” After that she didn’t have to remind me to hold my breath.

The biopsy was relatively simple—a morning in the doctor’s office, a lot of local anesthesia and pressure from the needle, and I was even allowed to breathe. “You’re doing fine,” the nurse said. “But there’s a lady in the waiting room who looks like she’s going to pass out.” Dealing with Mom’s anxiety over my biopsy was far more difficult than the surgery itself.

Her fear that I would be the first member of the family to have cancer was fueled by old memories from when she was fifteen and her mother had to go into the hospital for a biopsy. Nana hadn’t handled the news well. She was so convinced the procedure would become a mastectomy that she bet the doctor ten dollars she’d wake up without her breast.

After the operation, the doctor laughed when he told her that she’d called his ethics into question by talking about the wager as she came out of the anesthesia. She forced him to take her money when he gave her
a diagnosis of benign cysts, saying it was the best ten dollars she’d ever spent.

“How many more?” I ask the technician.

“Only four more images to go,” she says. “Just to make sure.”

• • •

When I’m done with the mammogram, I make my ten-dollar copayment, grateful for our health insurance, and come home with an aching chest and an empty stomach—never a good combination. My evening appointment meant there was no doctor on duty to give me a preliminary reading, so now I get to wonder for the weekend.

I need a distraction, and tonight it comes in the form of making Chicken Roman, one of the
$5 DAILY FOR FAVORITE RECIPE
winners among Nana’s newspaper clippings. There’s no date on the recipe, but I can tell it’s pretty old because it calls for dipping the bird in melted shortening. I hope I’m not affecting the authenticity of the creation by using a beaten egg, but we ran out of shortening in the early 1970s.

After that, I coat the chicken pieces in a mixture of store-bought breadcrumbs (my lazy substitution for
“one loaf bread, dried, crust removed, grated”), Parmesan cheese, parsley, minced garlic, salt, and pepper. I don’t notice until all of this is done that the baking time is an hour and a half in a “moderate oven,” and I’m starving. So I set the oven to an immoderate 425 degrees, put the roasting pan in, and look up chicken cooking times on the Internet. I don’t want to see a second doctor tonight because I’ve given myself Chicken Romanosis, but I’m hungry and edgy.

Nathan is on the couch, either asleep or passed out from hunger. This is good, because most of the cooking times for chicken on the Web say to keep it in a 350-degree oven for at least 45 minutes. A few recommend an hour to be on the safe side. I wonder if boosting the temperature to 475 degrees will cut the cooking time. I wonder whether I’d be playing chicken roulette if we didn’t still have health insurance. I wonder about my breasts. I watch Nathan napping peacefully and remember the time he came home from work with a second-degree burn on his hand after a blowtorch he was holding slipped. The chicken cooks a little longer as I wonder what we’ll do when my COBRA runs out and we either have to dial down our medical plan or come up with more money.
I remember Mom, pale and frightened after my biopsy procedure, and Nana being convinced she was dying. And then I decide to slow down.

There’s a lot to be said for not knowing. It’s a pause during which I get to choose how I spend my time until I get an answer. Now, give me a solid reason to be scared, and I’ll lose my thin coating of composure faster than any chicken. I’d been fairly steady until the oncologist told my beautiful friend Marnie there was nothing more they could do for her. Then I held her hand for my own comfort as much as hers, and I rarely let go until the night she took her last, long breath.

I don’t blame Nana for having been afraid, and I love Mom for being afraid for me. But I’m surprised at how these two women, both so strong, could fall apart over a possibility when their realities were so often downright scary.

In my family, trying to avoid some sort of bad time was, as Mom puts it, “Like running through raindrops”—we were going to get wet no matter what. Good health has always been the limbo stick under which negativity must try to pass. If a boyfriend broke up with me, Mom would say, “Listen, at least you have your health.” When I was particularly whiny about some
disappointment or another, she’d pull out her tough-love variation on the theme: “Look, you have all your teeth, don’t you? All of Nana’s front teeth had to be pulled because she was malnourished during the Depression!” It was true; she wore a bridge, and the tooth story always shut me up quick.

Nana had seen wars come and go and the stock market go up, come crashing down, and climb again. She’d never had much money, so the idea of being perpetually broke never fazed her. But just the thought of being ill undid her. This is the first chink I’ve ever seen in her shocking pink armor, and the first time I have aspired to be different from my Nana. Until I have something to be scared of, I’d rather turn the chicken down, have a piece of bread and cheese to tide me over, and watch my husband’s chest rise, fall, and rise again.

An hour later Nathan and I agree that Chicken Roman absolutely deserved its five-dollar award. And a week later I get the results of my mammogram: all clear. Ten dollars well spent.

I wish when my daughter was little, someone had spoken to me as I am trying to speak to you now. The time goes too fast. If your children are small, enjoy them as much as possible. They need and want your company now. Never again in their lives will you be so close and so important to them. Color with them, or make small clay animals—but you do it, too. Don’t just give them a batch of toys and say: “There you are—now go play; mother’s busy.” I think just the way a child looks at you when you get down on the floor with him or her is a wonderful experience. Watch the little crooked smile you get
.