Heartwood

I
ris Stern turned her car into the parking lot in front of the supermarket and sighed; there wasn’t an empty place to be found. Of course not. It was three days before Thanksgiving! What was worse, she was going to be back here all over again tomorrow when she came to pick up the fresh turkey the supermarket was holding for her. She’d have to get up at the crack of dawn to make it ahead of the crowd.

A more organized woman would not have found herself in this predicament. For instance, Iris’s daughter, Laura, would have been shopping and cooking and freezing side dishes for weeks. “You make the holiday so hard for yourself,” Laura told her once, “doing it all at the last minute.”

Iris had tried to explain that she couldn’t make herself think about sweet potato casseroles and cranberry sauce when her mind was still full of the classes she was teaching at her college.
She was a professor with a full course load, and she wanted to have all the exams graded, all the lectures given, and all the office appointments cleared from her calendar; then she could focus on sweet potatoes.

“But you need to learn to compartmentalize,” Laura said. “It’s simple.” And for Laura it was.

It certainly had been for Iris’s mother, Anna. Even today seven years after Mama’s death—she’d died in 1972—Iris could still remember the ease with which Anna had run her home and family while devoting hours to her charities, and somehow always managing to look as if she’d just stepped out of a bandbox. There had been a time when Iris had compared herself to her mother and had felt woefully inadequate. And if she was honest about it, she still did a little, but not nearly as much as she once had, because she’d finally gathered up her courage and gone to graduate school to earn her PhD. Her degree was in special education—she’d always been a gifted teacher—and now she trained young people who were planning to go into the field themselves. To her surprise and delight, she’d become one of the most popular professors on her campus, and this success had made it easier to remember her mother’s formidable skills as a cook and hostess. Skills that Laura, who looked exactly like Anna, had inherited.

If it hadn’t been for Laura, Iris would not be racing back to the supermarket tomorrow for that fresh turkey. “We can’t serve one that’s been frozen, Mom!” Laura had protested, making it sound as if Iris had proposed feeding the family fast food from a hamburger place. Since Laura would be flying in from her home in Southern California the following evening and doing most of the cooking for the holiday meal, Iris had bowed to the voice of authority and ordered the unfrozen bird. Today
she was shopping for the rest of the items on a list that Laura had dictated to her over the phone.

If she could ever manage to find a parking space! She’d already reached the end of the first row of parked cars with no luck. She made a careful turn around a blue station wagon that was sticking out slightly in the line of traffic and started down the next row at a snail’s pace. Thank goodness she had plenty of time today.

Thanksgiving was Iris’s favorite holiday; there was something so … undemanding about it. There were no presents to be bought and wrapped and then opened with false exclamations that this was exactly what you had wanted. There were no tiny candles to be blown out as you tried to smile about the creeping passage of time. And there were none of the more complicated feelings Iris sometimes had during the traditional Jewish holidays. Holidays that Iris’s husband, Theo, refused to hold in their home. Theo had been born into a prominent Jewish family in Austria in the 1900s, and he had lost everyone, including his young wife and child, in the Holocaust. It had been more than three decades since those horrors, but he still could not forgive the God who had allowed such things to happen.

So it was Iris’s second son, Jimmy, who, with his wife, Janet, did the honors for the Sterns on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hannukah and Passover. Theo did go with Iris to Jimmy and Janet’s home to celebrate these holidays, as he had gone to her parents’ house before Anna and Joseph died, and Iris had always told herself she was content with that; marriage was a series of compromises after all. And Janet did the holidays efficiently and smoothly, as she did everything. But lately Iris had started to feel … a little … well, “cheated” was probably the right word.

She remembered her mother on the holidays. Anna had
presided over tables that groaned with the food she had cooked; the pot roasts with rich dark gravy, and crisp potato pancakes, the stuffed fish in silky jelly, carrots sweet with prunes, and apple strudels wrapped in crisp buttery crusts and running with cinnamon-flavored juices. On the holidays Mama’s table had gleamed with the fine china, sparkling silverware, and crystal that had been bought for just such occasions. The grandest of grand occasions, because they were for the family.

Of course Iris would never manage that level of splendor, she knew that. But there were times when she thought perhaps she would like to create her own traditions. And perhaps her grandchildren would remember them fondly. She was in her fifties, with sixty looming, a middle-aged woman, although that was a misnomer because how many people lived to be a hundred and twenty? She had two grandchildren already, and hopefully there would be more. Suddenly it seemed very important that they have fond memories of her. Funny, how you woke up one day and wanted immortality when you never had it before.

But her feelings went deeper than that. Her religion, and the holidays that were such an integral part of it, had always been precious to her. She was like her father in that way. She could still see how his eyes would shine when he watched Mama bless the holiday candles on the first night of Passover. That moment was the best time of the year for him. It had been that way even during the Depression when they had to scrimp to get by—although Papa had been happier when Mama presided over their Seder table wearing the huge diamond ring he’d bought for her. He’d had to pawn it when they were broke, but when his fortunes had finally turned, the first thing he’d done was redeem it.
When Passover came that year and the ring was once again sparkling on Mama’s hand as she served food and poured wine, Iris knew that had been the proudest day of her father’s life.

That was what the holidays were truly made of, little scraps of memory like that one. Some of them were purely joyful, some were more somber if there had been pain and loss during the year, but when you put them all together, over time they became the story of a family. And on the holy holidays your personal story was then added to the bigger one of your people that stretched back for four thousand years. It was a story that children absorbed without even knowing they were doing it, especially if it was told with humor and love over food cooked from old family recipes. Sometimes Iris felt that Janet’s efficient gatherings, catered and served by professionals, were rather bloodless. Or maybe she was jealous.