Stir (12 page)

E
itan and Julia arrived soon after dark. I'd moved to the sofa in the living room by the front door, and when Eli went down to let them in and help bring up the food, I practiced appearing normal. I sat up as straight as I could and relaxed my shoulders. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I wanted to look like myself for my friends.

They were coming down the hallway now. I could hear Eitan laughing. I took a deep breath, raised my eyebrows, and tried on a big smile. Then I saw them, and with a jolt of adrenaline the smile turned real. My body instinctively jumped up to greet them, only the “jump” came out more like a slow-motion stagger.

“Hey!” Eitan shouted. He was wheeling one of those collapsible luggage carts, piled high with a vat of chicken soup, challah, and wine. Julia was right behind him carrying a roasted chicken.

“Jess . . . ” she sighed. “I'm putting this in the kitchen. Homie,” she said to Eitan, “homie, stop, you'll spill the soup. Unpack it right here.”

“Oh, you guys, thank you so much,” I said. “And hi!” I couldn't stop smiling.

“You look great, Jess. How do you feel?” Julia asked, still holding the chicken.

“Very happy to see you,” I said.

She smiled back, her eyes wide, and shook her head. “Hold on, let me put this down.”

Eitan stretched out his arms, then hesitated. “Uh, can I?”

“Yes, yes!” I said, but when I went in for the hug, he just barely laid his hands on my back, as if I were a mannequin whose limbs might fall out of their sockets. “I won't break.” I laughed. So he squeezed, but only a little.

“They didn't shave your head. I can't even see your scar.” Eitan was right. Dr. Tranmer had shaved only the slimmest line of hair before he'd made the incision. It was still a bit sore, and it itched a lot, and where the nerves had been cut my head felt tingly and numb, but even I had to admit when I saw myself in the mirror that it didn't look half bad.

“Oh, it's there,” I promised him. “Here.” I sat back down on the sofa and felt for the bumpy strip of scalp that ran from temple to temple an inch behind my hairline. Eitan bent down for a closer look.

“Holy shit,” he said. “You are a total badass.”

I liked that. I
was
badass.

Julia and Eli were getting things together in the kitchen.

“El, can I use this knife? I'm making the salad.” Julia was all business as usual, and it was the best thing in the world. My friends were here! And if Julia was Julia, and Eitan was Eitan, then maybe
I
was, in fact, me. We all sat down together around the table. Eli blessed the wine and the challah, Eitan ladled soup into bowls, and Julia tossed the salad. Meanwhile, I sat, just sat, a guest at my own table yet unmistakably home.

Julia fretted about the chicken. She always does. About how it's never as good as her mother's, despite following precisely the same recipe. Julia's mother does, indeed, make a terrific chicken, but Julia does, too. I've told her that one million times, over every bird of hers we've ever eaten. I was thrilled that I'd almost died and still Julia said it, and we got to have that talk again. It was a welcome sign of normalcy. To care again about cooked chicken meant that the coast was clear.

Being sick is supposed to come along with grand realizations about What Really Matters, but I don't know. I think deep down, we're already aware of what's important and what's not. Which isn't to say that we always live our lives accordingly. We snap at our spouses and curse the traffic and miss the buds pushing up from the ground. But we know. We just forget to know sometimes.

Near-death forces us to remember. It pushes us into a state of aggressive gratitude that throws what's big and what's small into the sharpest relief. It's awfully hard to worry about the puddle of milk when you're just glad to be here to spill it.

Aggressive gratitude, though, is no way to live. It's too easy. We're meant to work at these things. To strive to know. Our task is to seek out what's essential, get distracted by the fluff, and
still
know, feel annoyed by annoyances, and find our way back. The so-called small stuff actually matters very much. It's what we push against on our way to figuring out how we wish to think and to be. We need that dialectic, and illness snatches it away. A stubbed toe, a too-long line at the post office, these things and the fluster they bring are signifiers of a healthy life, and I craved them.

At the end of the meal, Julia started to clear. I watched the way she pushed herself back from the table and floated effortlessly up from her chair, a plate in each hand. It looked like a dance to me. I wondered what it would take for me to move that way again. What was stopping me, exactly? There was weakness, for sure. My muscles were still remembering how to behave. I was sometimes nauseated and very, very tired. Plus this vision thing was so weird. The half-darkness, the tip of my own nose that I could see now all the time, the distrust of where things were in space, and thus, of where exactly I stood. I felt hemmed into my body, and at the same time, far removed. Yet there I was, sipping soup and talking chicken with our friends a month after I was, statistically speaking, supposed to be dead. Anything was possible.

In
The Zuni Café Cookbook
, Judy Rodgers tells you everything you need to know about how to roast a chicken: Start with a small bird so that it will cook quickly and evenly. Dry it well, salt it early, and roast at high heat. No trussing—you want as much skin as possible exposed in the hot oven—and no rubbing down with butter or oil. In return, you get the perfect roasted chicken, juicy throughout with crisp, golden skin.

A word about salting: Rodgers advises “salting early,” one to three days before cooking, to tenderize and flavor the meat. Kosher chickens have already been salted and have thus already reaped the tenderizing benefits of salting early, but for flavor, I season it with a bit more salt, as indicated below. A kosher bird still benefits from sitting a day or two uncovered in the fridge. The skin will turn out especially crisp. I serve this chicken with crusty bread and a simple salad.

For the chicken:

1 3- to 4-pound chicken, giblets removed

4 sprigs fresh thyme, rosemary, or sage

¾ teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt per pound of chicken (¼ teaspoon per pound if you're using a kosher chicken)

About ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Pat the chicken very dry, inside and out, with paper towels. Slip a finger beneath the skin on each breast near the edge of the cavity to form a couple of pockets, then do the same on the thickest part of each thigh. Slide an herb sprig into each of the four pockets.

Season all over with the suggested amount of salt and black pepper, and sprinkle a bit of each just inside the cavity. Refrigerate, uncovered, for 24 to 48 hours. Remove from the fridge half an hour prior to roasting, and give it another few pats with a paper towel to get rid of any excess moisture.

Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.

Place a 10-inch cast-iron or stainless steel skillet over medium heat for 4 minutes. Set the chicken breast-side up in the pan. You should hear it sizzle. Transfer the pan to the oven. If the skin doesn't begin browning within 20 minutes, raise the temperature to 500 degrees until it does. If, on the other hand, the skin begins to blacken or smoke (blistering is fine and welcome), lower the temperature to 450 degrees.

After about 30 minutes, turn the bird over and roast for another 15 to 20 minutes, then flip one last time and roast breast-side up for another 5 to 10 minutes to recrisp the skin. The chicken is done when a thermometer inserted into the hip meat (between the leg and the breast) reads 165 degrees. Transfer the bird to a large plate or carving board, and let rest for 15 minutes before cutting it into pieces.

Serves 3 to 4.

I
'd been promoted. For weeks I'd been a professional sick person. Now I was a professional recovering person. In some ways, it was a lateral move. I still slept a lot, stayed mostly indoors, and ate food that other people prepared, but I appreciated the new title. Plus, there were perks. My own bed, for example, and a dresser full of clothes.

Before I was discharged from the hospital, a nurse, or maybe a social worker, had come to talk to me about this mysterious thing called recovery. Even after rehab, she explained, there would be a ways to go.

“Each day, you'll be able to do one thing, and it will totally wipe you out. That might be the case for a while.”

“What do you mean by ‘one thing'?” I wanted to know. I envisioned a trip to the grocery store or baking a cake.

“That's hard to say,” she said. “It might mean a phone call with a friend. A shower.”

Not possible,
I thought. But she was right. In fact, forget a shower, an event which to me includes washing my face, scrubbing my body, shampooing and conditioning my hair, plus, because I do some of my best thinking in there, a few minutes of standing around. A shower means all of these things. When I first got home, though, I'd get in and have to choose. I could wash my hair
or
my body, not both, before exhaustion sneaked up and kicked me behind the knees. I'd call through the wide-open bathroom door to Eli, who'd wrap me in a towel and help me to the bed, where I'd sit with my heart pounding, sipping cranberry juice until the waves of nausea passed. Then I'd need a nap. This “one thing” thing was no joke. Apparently a healing brain takes its sweet time. A physical therapist came a couple of times my first week home and we practiced climbing stairs. That counted as a thing and a half, at least, as did a visit from a friend.

If I was feeling physically better each day, I couldn't tell. I was wiped out. Sometimes my body ached, like at the beginning of a flu. That was new. No wonder, though, I figured. Recovery was hard work.

“You know what?” I said to Eli one morning. “It's okay that this happened to me.”

“Is that so?” he said.

What I meant was that I felt—I was suddenly quite sure—that I could handle this. That my life could handle it. An energizing gratitude crept into my bones.

 • • • 

“Does my face look swollen to you?” I asked Eli. I was standing in front of the mirror in our bedroom.

“Does your face look swollen?” Eli has a way of repeating a question before he responds.

“I asked you first,” I said. “I mean, more swollen. Differently swollen.”

He looked at me. “Nope.”

I wasn't so sure. I'd been home for a week, and I thought my left eye looked strangely, I don't know, buglike. Only sometimes, though. On and off. A lot of the time my eye looked normal. Or maybe all of the time it looked normal, and I was imagining things. Probably.

“You can call Dr. Tranmer if you're concerned.” Eli obviously wasn't.

“Yeah, okay. Maybe.”

Before I had a chance to, Dr. Tranmer called me to check in. I mentioned the bulging eye and the body aches that came and went.

“A little bit of swelling is still normal this far out,” he assured me. “But otherwise you should be feeling pretty darn great.”

I wasn't.

 • • • 

My father arrived from Ohio late that afternoon with my youngest sister, Anna. Half sister, technically, but we've never emphasized the half. I have a half brother, too, named Caleb. My stepmom, Amy, is their mom and we share a dad. My younger sister, Kasey, and I share a mom
and
a dad. In descending birth order it's me, Kasey, Caleb, and Anna, and now you know the whole family.

Anyway, Anna. She was fourteen then, and through the hospital system she'd sent me e-mails bursting with exclamation points and all the latest very important news about her classes and the JV tennis team. “I know that you have been hearing nothing but stuff about your brain, so I'm gonna try to keep it as non-brainy as possible,” she wrote, which was excellent. She hadn't seen me yet.

I opened the front door myself when they arrived. I was wearing the new clothes my mother had picked up for me in Burlington—jeans one size down that actually fit and a short-sleeved, dark green turtleneck with three buttons along the collar and pleats across the chest. I caught a glimpse of Anna's wide eyes and nervous smile in the doorway, then watched relief register and her face relax.
Good,
I thought,
I must look okay.

Anna, Eli, and I sat down on the green sofa and my dad placed a cardboard box on the coffee table in front of us.

“Mom made you these,” Anna said as I folded open the top flaps. Chocolate chip cookies. Eli took one bite and said, “Toll House.” He'd called it right: the recipe from the back of the yellow chocolate chip bag. Toll House cookies are chewy and flat, faintly rippled like unsmoothed bedsheets, with a sugary crumb and those unmistakable Toll House “morsels.” I recognized them, too. They were the only chocolate chip cookies I had ever baked. That's because they were, in my mind, a certain kind of best. Not “best” as in the best in the world, or even the best I'd ever eaten, but “best” in the sense that I'd choose them, at least some of the time, over ones that actually are. They were “best” because they meant something to me.

I made Toll House cookies for the first time when I was eleven years old, with Amy. My sister Kasey and I had met Amy a couple of years earlier, in 1989, at a Dairy Queen in Cleveland. (It is a wise man who stages his daughters' initial encounter with his soon-to-be fiancée over ice cream.) She wore silver howling-at-the-moon coyote earrings and ordered a Blizzard. I liked her, which was good, because in 1991, she married my dad.

They moved into an old house in Cleveland Heights, and that was where the cookie making began. Amy had a wide-mouthed yellow plastic pitcher, and we'd mix the dough in there by hand with a wooden spoon. I'd never used a wooden spoon before. My mother called them unsanitary, but I thought it was beautiful, and soft and warm, besides. Cookie making became kind of our thing, Amy's and mine. I liked that we had a thing.

I had baked with my own mother as a kid, but this was something new. My mother and I made sugar cookies, cupcakes, and brownies galore mainly as projects, fun things to do together that might have been replaced by any number of other fun things. Baking was special because it wasn't part of our everyday. When we pulled out the mixing bowl and electric beaters, it was an occasion. With Amy, it was different. She baked all the time, whether I was around or not. When we baked together, she was sharing with me this thing that she did and loved. She was letting me in, and I her. We were becoming a family.

At some point that weekend it was just Anna and me, and I asked her how things were at home. She told me how nuts it had been with Dad and her mom flying back and forth, how they were so annoying, always talking about me and the surgery, so stressed out, crying.

“They made such a big deal out of it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I mean, it's not like you were going to die or anything.”

I appreciated the vote of confidence.