Stir (11 page)

When I asked René Becker of Hi-Rise Bread Company if he would share his almond macaroon recipe for this book, I had no idea that his own father had died of a ruptured brain aneurysm more than three decades ago. René's father experienced symptoms for years before finally seeing a doctor. By then, the aneurysm had grown too large to repair in surgery. He died four months later, when the aneurysm burst. René's recipe appears here in memory of his father.

For this recipe, you'll want to get your hands on Solo brand almond paste. Other popular brands are higher in sugar, which causes the macaroons to spread in the oven. With Solo, your macaroons will turn out nice and plump, just like René's.

One more thing: An oven thermometer is especially important when you're baking at a low temperature. Even ovens that are spot-on at higher temperatures can struggle to hit the mark at 300 degrees. Trust the thermometer and adjust the temperature accordingly.

1 pound Solo brand almond paste

1½ cups (300 grams) granulated sugar

¾ cup (90 grams) confectioners' sugar

⅛ teaspoon almond extract

3 large egg whites

About 30 whole almonds

Confectioners' sugar for dusting

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix the almond paste, sugars, and almond extract on low for 2 to 3 minutes, to form a crumbly, pebbly mixture. The largest almond paste pieces should be the size of small chickpeas. Add the egg whites and mix on medium-low for 3 minutes, pausing once to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Using 2 level tablespoons per macaroon, scoop the dough onto the prepared baking sheet, 1 to 2 inches apart. A cookie scoop comes in handy here because the dough is sticky. (I use a 1½-tablespoon scoop because it's all I have and it's close enough.) If you're using a measuring spoon instead of a cookie scoop, roll the dough into balls between your palms before placing them on the baking sheet. Press one almond into the top of each macaroon, and sift a generous amount of confectioners' sugar over top. Return the remaining dough to the fridge until you're ready to scoop the next round.

Bake for 28 to 33 minutes, rotating the baking sheet halfway through, until the macaroons are rosy on top and lightly brown on the bottom. Slide the parchment paper with the cookies onto a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the remaining dough, making sure to begin with a room temperature baking sheet.

Makes about 30 cookies.

I
checked out of rehab in late September. I'd missed the season between summer and fall that feels like neither and both. Just skipped right over it, like an arm on a record player that lifts up from its groove, travels a few rings toward the center, and touches silently back down.

Eli was with me, and the walk to our car felt familiar and sweet. We might as well have been coming out of the movies or the grocery store.
I love this,
I caught myself thinking. Walking to the car was great.

I heard the keys scrape together in Eli's pocket when he reached for them and the beat of silence before he pressed the button on the fob. The locks thumped open like four tiny fist pumps and I felt the sound in my chest. I popped the handle on the passenger-side door, lowered myself onto the seat, and snapped the seat belt into its buckle.
Amen.

Eli slammed my door shut and drove us out of there.

 • • • 

An hour south of Burlington, my friend Julia called. She and her husband, Eitan, were coming over with dinner that night, and she wanted to firm up plans and find out what else they could bring.

“Tell me what you want,” she instructed. “You need to have exactly what you want.” I told her which yogurt, which olives, which bread, but Julia would have gotten it right on her own.

Julia is a political fund-raiser who knows how to get things done. She's intuitive about what matters and what doesn't, which makes her decisive and quick, exactly the person you want planning your event for hundreds, or on the other end of the phone to advise you on anything. Julia has the best taste. Plus a keen understanding
of
taste. She once gave me a scarf, just because, that was unlike anything she'd ever seen me wear. It was perfect of course, just as she knew it would be.

Julia calls Eitan “homie.” He's tall and thin, like Julia, but while she has olive skin and long black hair, he's rosy and fair, with blond hair and blue eyes. Eitan is easygoing, but no slouch. He was a PhD candidate in political science at Harvard when we met, and is the most efficient worker I know. He is also a total goofball. Once, in a debate with friends over the commonly accepted name for chocolate sprinkles—or would that be jimmies?—Eitan contended that an ice cream server would know what you meant no matter what you called them. He then marched up to the counter and, with a straight face, ordered a scoop of ice cream with “chocolate yum-yums, please.” The server went right for those yum-yums. She didn't blink.

It's funny to think that we had met these two only eight months before I got sick, because they already felt like old friends. They had turned up in Cambridge the previous fall and we'd invited them to our Chanukah party. Eitan helped himself to a second plate of latkes while Julia proclaimed her love of sour cream. We liked them right away. They joined us for dinner one night not long after that, then we went to their place, and pretty soon we had an unspoken date almost every Friday evening at their table or ours.

Our friends Jonathan and Hila, who lived downstairs from Eitan and Julia, would join us, too. Jonathan was a fellow graduate student studying ancient Judaism and Christianity, warm and soft-spoken, and an intuitive cook. His wife, Hila, is Israeli, with a deep voice and a heart as big and fierce as they come. She was teaching second grade when we met, marveling daily at the American obsession with antibacterial hand sanitizer.

Potlucks make me nervous at best (lasagna with a side of pasta salad, anyone?), but with this crowd, they worked. Jonathan was our bread man, and I was in charge of dessert, and we juggled around the tasks of main dish, salad, and sides. These were three-, four-, five-hour meals, the kind where stories of rogue eBay sellers, and landlady drama, and impressions of professors and colleagues began all at once over soup, then stopped, started, and stretched through to the very last bites. There was always plenty of wine.

I hung up the phone. I wanted to go back to that table. I wanted things to be exactly as they had been. That feeling of forgetting yourself when you're swept up in conversation, joking and eating with friends, of being entirely at ease. It felt impossible now. I would miss things because of my eye. I was clumsy and slow. What if I felt that way forever? Eli cupped his hand around my knee.

“It's going to be okay,” he said, reading my mind.

I put my hand on his. “Say more, say better.” This was Eli's high school Talmud teacher's line after a student's first stab at explaining a difficult passage. We said it to each other all the time.

“Dr. Tranmer said six to eight months until you'll feel like yourself again. It sounds like a long time, but it's not. We just have to make it through the winter.”

When he put it that way, it didn't sound so bad at all.

 • • • 

Eli unlocked our front door and I walked in. It smelled exactly right. Like us, though I hadn't been there in a month. It was late afternoon, my favorite time of day to come home. Orange light spilled through the south-facing windows onto the hardwood floor. I felt shy but welcome, as though I'd shown up late somewhere important to find that someone had saved me a seat.

This was the same apartment we had moved into that fall almost three years earlier. I stepped from the doorway into the long main room. We'd set up the near end as our living room, our handsome wooden bench opposite the green, down-stuffed sofa that I'd bought secondhand in Seattle. Over by the windows, on the other side of the fireplace, was our dining area. There stood our square, rust-colored antique table, and four wooden chairs that had been a craigslist find, one red, one lavender, and two pale green. I'd intended to paint them over in a single color when I bought them for my first apartment, but I'd never gotten around to it, and on second thought, I liked them the way they were. The bedroom was off to the right. I peeked in, eyed our blue and white quilt, and imagined myself slipping between the covers. I was glad for a bed to be just a bed again, and not a home base. I would sleep there at night and make it up in the mornings. During the day, if I had to lie down or sit, I'd do it somewhere—anywhere—else.

Our small, yellow-tiled bathroom was still small and yellow-tiled, and my little office was just as I had left it. A stack of books on deck for exam prep, a pack of sticky tabs, the yellow highlighter on its last legs that I needed to replace. My notebook was open to the to-do list I'd made up the night before I'd left for the conference.
Catherine the Great article. Revolution stuff. Fellowship paperwork. Revised reading lists to R. W. and J. H.
I'd written the call numbers of the next round of library books I needed on Post-it notes and stuck them along the bottom of my computer monitor. One had fallen onto the keyboard. I picked it up and flipped it over but didn't stick it back on.

Through the main room to the left was the large space intended as a dining room that we used instead as Eli's office and the catchall for an assortment of overflow dining and living room things. The enormous combination desk-bookshelf-filing-cabinet that Eli had built in his Seattle woodshop staked out the office side of the room. A long, narrow sideboard held our ceramic serving bowls and platters. And a sofa, a hand-me-down from Eli's parents, sat beneath the windows. The room made no sense.

So annoying,
I thought, as always, shaking my head but smiling.

Eli came up behind me. “You hate this room.”

I turned to face him. “I really do.”

He looped his arms around my waist and I rested my elbows on his shoulders.

“Hey, lady,” he whispered.

“Hey.”

I gestured with my head to the kitchen behind me.

“Would you go in there with me?” I asked. “I want to make a cup of tea.” The words came out like a proclamation.
I hereby assert that I, Jessica Kate Fechtor, shall make a cup of tea!
Eli followed me in.

Our kitchen was a mere cubicle, tacked on to the hip of the dining-room-turned-office like a sidecar. The floor space measured thirty-five square feet, with just a small stretch of counter between the sink and the wall. The rest of the apartment had been preserved, more or less, in its original, early-twentieth-century design. Hardwood floors, high ceilings, a tiled working fireplace. There was even an old wall safe in the bedroom.

The kitchen, though, had been renovated and it no longer fit in. The cabinetry was made of cheap wood, in the style of bachelor-pad kitchens for the newly divorced. The cupboard doors were clunky with oddly rounded corners. Anything natural looking about the wood had been buffed out and stained over in a “honey color,” you might generously call it, though really it was a dull tan. The counter was beige Formica and absorbed stains, and the floor was a grayish white linoleum that never looked clean.

But the oven had a gas range. It was old with worn dials and kept its heat beautifully, and glory be, there was a dishwasher. A garbage disposal, too.
This kitchen is a workhorse,
I decided when we first moved in. We just had to figure out how to make it so.

We started by rolling a small wooden cart against the back wall, trading a couple square feet of floor for a postage stamp of additional counter space. I did all my chopping there, and ingredient measuring, and mixing by hand. Eli installed a single shelf for spices on the wall above the cart and, from the ceiling overhead, he hung a pot rack. He'd found the studs in the ceiling and tested their strength by hanging from them in his climbing harness. “Hey, Jess!” he'd called across the apartment, and I'd walked in to find him dangling there, grinning. I gave him a gentle push, and when he swung back, he wrapped his legs around my torso, and I craned my neck upward and kissed his chin.

The refrigerator filled an odd little closet that led to the emergency stairwell. Or almost filled it. Shoved a few inches over, the fridge left us enough room to mount some shelves and baskets on the wall, and just like that, we had a pantry.

As renters, these things were the most we could do, but it was exactly enough.

We kept nothing in that kitchen that we didn't need, a pleasant side effect of which being that everything we had was both useful and used. There is a special kind of satisfaction in owning but three mixing bowls, a single favorite wooden spatula, and one each of the few pots and pans you actually like to cook in. You always get to use the spoon that feels best in your hand when that's the only one you've got. Our kitchen was kosher, so we had each of these things times two (one for dairy, one for meat), but even then, it all felt beautifully contained.

Peek in on a typical Friday afternoon, and you'd see everything in action: the floury top of the wooden cart where I shaped the challah dough; the stand mixer on the counter with its head reared back and cake batter dripping into the bowl; a pot of soup, nearly done, on the front right burner. All of these things happening not quite at once but in overlapping succession, baked, cooked, and spit out onto the sideboard in the “office” to cool.

This Friday afternoon was different. I'd make tea.

I opened up the cupboard and reached for the handle of a large blue and white mug, but when I closed my hand, I grasped only air.
Damn depth perception
. In a swift, fluid motion perfectly aligned with his target, Eli reached for the mug I'd just missed. I swatted at his arm and missed that, too.

“Don't help me.”

I pressed in closer to the counter and focused my gaze on the mug. I was afraid I'd knock one of its neighbors to the ground, so I moved my hand slowly, as though casting a spell, until my fingertip bumped its rim. With the handle of the mug securely in my fist, I turned the knob on the sink and practiced finding the stream of cold water with my empty hand. Every time I went back in, the water met my fingers a fraction of a second sooner or later than I expected, based on what my eyes, no, my 
eye
, was telling me. I tried to fill the mug, but I misjudged the distance and I clunked it into the faucet instead, which knocked it out of my hand. The mug dropped into the sink, and when I reached to grab it, my knuckles struck the bottom of the basin, too close, too soon.

Eli was standing on my left side, my blind side, but I could feel him looking at me. He picked up the mug and filled it with water, and I let him. I needed to sit down. Eli helped me to the sofa in his office by the window and I stretched out my legs along the cushions.

“Lady—” he started.

“Tell me what you're thinking,” I demanded. I was afraid it was something horrible, that this wasn't what he'd signed up for, that he didn't think things would ever be normal again. Eli sat down on the sofa by my feet.

“I'm thinking about one day in the future when your brain has sorted things out and your eye is no longer an issue. When we don't even talk about it because you don't think about it.”

I bit my lip and stared out the window. The sun was a splinter of fire above the trees. “Do you really believe that will happen?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I comforted myself with the thought that Eli is usually right.