A Homemade Life (20 page)

M
y father was not known for having a particularly impressive memory. If you had something important to tell him, there was no need to hurry, because at least eight times out of ten, he wouldn't remember it anyway. In most cases he promptly forgot, or else he buried it beneath another wisp of information, never to be seen again. Someone might have called with exciting family news, but my mother and I would never hear it. Burg was a dead end. My uncle Arnie took to facetiously calling him “Radio Free Wizenberg,” because he was anything but. He would have made a terrific career criminal, the kind who conveniently forgets which bank he robbed and who his accomplice was. He not only failed to remember his children's birth dates, but he also occasionally referred to my brother David as “Midnight,” the name of the family dog, circa 1965.

So it didn't surprise me that he forgot about the diamonds. Sometime during college, I think it was, he had called to tell me about them. He'd just come from an estate sale where he'd found a pair of small diamond studs that were relatively cheap, as these things go. He knew I didn't have my ears pierced, but he bought them anyway, figuring that I might want to use the stones for something else. He would give them to me, he said, the next time I was home.

But then, of course, he forgot. And lo and behold, I, being his daughter, forgot, too. (With that kind of genetic stock, I didn't stand a chance.) Years went by, and those diamonds might as well have never been.

We could have been a terrific slapstick duo, the two of us. I can see it now, the first episode of our show. We're walking down the street, both in oversized pants and suspenders, when we stumble upon a suitcase with a label on the side that says CONTENTS: GOLD. We leap on it, slapping our thighs and cheering, and set to work jiggling the latch. But after a few minutes, when it still hasn't budged, boredom starts to set in. We lose interest. We forget why we were there. We stand up, shake out our coats, and while the audience squeals in disbelief, shouting for us to turn around, we set out cheerily in search of some doughnuts.

 

The year after Burg died, my mother, my brothers, my sister, and I met in Oklahoma to go through his belongings, his clothes and shoes. Mom found the diamond earrings in his bathroom drawer. He'd put them in his cufflinks box, apparently, a clear plastic case with small compartments built for fishing flies, now filled with knickknacks and lapel pins. They were hidden in a silk bag, but she recognized them. She gave them to me, gently prodding my memory, and I brought them home to Seattle. I put them in a drawer under my bathroom sink. I didn't know what to do with them, but I liked having them there. They felt like a secret that only my father and I would know.

I told Brandon about the earrings earlier than I meant to, maybe two months after we met. It just slipped out. He was in town to visit and, while walking around the neighborhood one afternoon, had found six vintage champagne glasses, the wide, shallow kind with a hollow stem, for fifty cents each. They were glamorous and pretty, the sort of
thing a flapper would hold in one gloved hand. They reminded me, I told him, of something my father would have brought home. They reminded me of the costume jewelry he bought for my mother, and of the diamond studs in my bathroom.

 

Several months later, in January, Brandon was in Seattle again. When I got home from work, it was already dark outside, and he was in the kitchen, working on dinner. While we waited for the timer to ring, we sat down on the couch. My hands were cold, and he rubbed them for me. In the little apartment I lived in then, my desk was directly across from the couch. On top of the desk I kept a row of photographs. The largest, taller than all the rest, was a 5 × 7-inch black-and-white shot of my dad in his doctor's coat in one of those wobbly plastic frames. This is probably way too precious to admit, but I always felt like he was watching me from up there, looking down over the living room with its hopeless, stained carpet, making sure everything was safe.

“I had a talk with your dad today,” Brandon announced, nodding toward the desk.

I guess it would be smart, or maybe just minimally sane, to say that I was surprised. Or that it was creepy to have my boyfriend tell me that he'd been chatting with my dead father. But I wasn't surprised. I was charmed. Brandon had always asked questions here and there, wanting to know more about Burg. It didn't surprise me that he might sit down at my desk one day while I was at work and study the face in the photograph. I wanted him to.

“What did you two talk about?” I asked nonchalantly, smiling a conspirator's grin.

“Oh, nothing,” he said shyly. Then he stood up and pulled me into the kitchen.

I don't like mysteries very much, not outside of movies or books,
but I decided to let it be. In fact, after a day or two, I'd completely forgotten about the entire conversation. Brandon is lucky I didn't start calling him “Midnight.”

 

It seems a little strange to tell the story this way now, when, as I was living it, it didn't feel so neat and chronological at all. Even though I had wanted for months to marry Brandon—and had been, in small, subconscious ways, waiting for him to hurry up and ask me—still, it caught me by surprise. I didn't put it all together until well afterward. When Brandon walked me across the Brooklyn Bridge that afternoon in March, almost a year after we met, and steered me up the hill to Brooklyn Heights, to a bench on the promenade, I had no idea. When he knelt in front of me and put his head in my lap, I had not the foggiest. I was thoroughly absorbed, in fact, in staring at a fleck of dandruff tangled in one of his curls. When he pulled out the blue leather box with a ring inside, a dainty, antique ring with two triangular sapphires and a small diamond in the middle, I still didn't understand. Even when he said, “It's one of your father's diamonds,” I didn't put it together. I didn't understand that, that day when he had talked to my father, he had been asking if he could marry me.

What I did instead was yell, “Are you
crazy?”
Then I looked at him, and then behind him, at the water, and up and down and all around, and giggling, out of breath, said yes.

When I tell people the story of our engagement, that Brandon took the diamonds from my bathroom that January and carried them around New York City for two months, looking for an antique setting that would fit them—or one of them, at least—because he knew that was what my father would have wanted, they never know what to say. Sometimes they swoon. Sometimes they sigh. But sometimes they look at me hard. Wasn't I upset, they ask, that
Brandon took them without telling me, that he
stole
those diamonds from me?

I never know what to say to that. It didn't even cross my mind. They were never mine, I say. I was just their caretaker. They were meant for him all along.

SLICED SPRING SALAD WITH AVOCADO AND FETA

a
fter Brandon and I got engaged, we went to his apartment and opened a bottle of champagne, and then we took the subway to Avenue J for pizza at DiFara. On the ride home, we shared a couple of chocolate truffles and leaned sleepily into each other over the hard plastic seats. It was strange and surreal, and just right.

When I went back to Seattle a few days later, I ate this salad for two weeks straight. My binge of sorts had nothing to do with wanting to fit into a wedding dress (we weren't getting married for almost a year and a half, anyway) or with any nervous lack of appetite. I was just overwhelmed. I couldn't do anything else. So I made salad, and then I made more salad. I ate it straight from the serving bowl while sitting on the floor, my back against the couch, watching
Jeopardy!
and shouting answers at the screen.

The components of this salad are not the most obvious partners, but don't let that dissuade you. Tossed together in a classic vinaigrette, they meld almost seamlessly: crunchy with creamy, bitter with mellow. Anytime I serve it to someone, they ask for the recipe.

You can eat this salad as a starter or side dish, but I like it best as a light meal, with a hunk of crusty bread or a few roasted potatoes on the side.

Note that there will be more vinaigrette than you need for one salad. Extra vinaigrette can be stored in the refrigerator indefinitely and used on almost any salad.

FOR THE VINAIGRETTE

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

½ teaspoon salt

5 tablespoons olive oil, plus more to taste

FOR THE SALAD

8 red radishes

1 medium radicchio (about 10 ounces)

4 Belgian endive (about 1 pound)

A good handful of cilantro leaves, from about 20 sprigs

1 medium avocado

½ cup crumbled French feta, or more to taste

 

First, make the vinaigrette. In a small bowl, combine the mustard, vinegar, and salt. Whisk to blend well. Add the olive oil and whisk vigorously to emulsify. Taste, and adjust as needed. Depending on your vinegar, you may need more oil. I often add 2 additional teaspoons, but it varies. This is a more acidic dressing than some, but it shouldn't hit you over the head with vinegar.

Keeping your serving bowl close at hand, prepare the vegetables. Once sliced, some of them will brown more quickly than others, so I work in a certain order. First, trim the radishes and slice them very thinly into translucent wafers. Toss them into the bowl. Next, quarter the radicchio from stem end to tip, and peel away any raggedy outer leaves. Working with one quarter at a time, slice it crosswise into ribbons roughly ¼ inch thick. Toss the radicchio into the bowl. Next, slice the endive crosswise into ¼-inch-thick strips, discarding the root end. Add it to the bowl. Add the cilantro leaves and toss with vinaigrette to taste.

Quarter the avocado from stem to base and discard the pit. Cut each quarter crosswise into ¼-inch-thick strips. Distribute them evenly over the salad, and top with the feta.

Serve immediately.

 

NOTE:
This salad takes very well to substitutions and additions. If you can't find French feta, which is creamier and less salty than the Greek kind, try some crumbled fresh goat cheese instead. If you have a fennel bulb, cut it into slivers and toss it into the bowl. Leftover roasted chicken, torn into bite-sized pieces, is delicious here, too, as is smoked trout.

 

Yield: 4 good-sized servings

Y
ou know the old saying. “Women marry their fathers,” it goes, with a cheery undertone of doom, the idea being that women choose men who are, in certain ways, subtle or not so much, like the men who raised them. I always thought I was different. I thought I was original. I chose a composer, a vegetarian with long hair. My father was a doctor and a lifetime meat-eater. I doubt he ever, not even accidentally, let his hairline consort with his shirt collar. But then there was the issue of the maple syrup. When I agreed to marry Brandon, I had no idea about that.

I don't know how I could have missed it, but I did: the way he poured it onto his plate, in puddles big enough to drown in, like India during monsoon season. Or the way he inspected the label so carefully, and the liquid inside, as though it might contain impurities or an impostor. Or the fact that he brought his own maple syrup when he moved from New York, a little metal can with a sticky screw-top lid and a horse and buggy on the side. The syrup had been made, he told me proudly one morning, by a friend of his grandfather's who owns a “sugarhouse,” as they're called, in Putney, Vermont.

My god,
I thought,
I'm marrying a maple syrup snob.

And then, a few seconds later,
OH SHIT. I'm doing it. I'm marrying my father.

Don't even get me started on the way he ties his shoelaces (in bunny ears, just like Burg), or the way he laughs at his own jokes (with an approval-seeking ear-to-ear grin, just like Burg), or the way he revels in other people's junk, thrift shops and antique shops and estate sales. Really, don't ask. I don't know.

But you should see him with his maple syrup. He's kind of adorable. I'm allowed to say that, right? Apparently, he made maple syrup as a project in elementary school, and if that's not adorable, I don't know what is. (They also made butter and bread.) In high school, his favorite after-school snack was a toasted sesame bagel dipped in a bowl of maple syrup. And his favorite dessert was a plain sliced banana, abundantly sauced with it.

“We kept multiple grades in the house at all times,” he told me dreamily one night, just before drifting off to sleep. “Grade A Light Amber, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber, Grade B…” It was like he was counting sheep. I do love this man.

His mother's signature dessert is a whole wheat angel food cake sweetened with maple syrup instead of sugar, and frosted with maple whipped cream. It's been the family birthday cake for years. It even won a prize at a bake sale once. I've got my work cut out for me.

But Brandon's very favorite vehicle for maple syrup is almost no work at all. It's a tender, open-crumbed corn bread with a ribbon of cream through its center, and it's a cinch to make. It begins with a fairly basic cornmeal batter, but it gets turned upside down, literally, by the addition of a cup of cream just before it goes into the oven. The thick liquid seeps down into the batter, forming a layer of smooth, milky custard sandwiched by corn bread. It's magic. And it soaks up syrup better than any pancake, bagel, or banana.

Served warm on a Sunday morning, or reheated, even, on Monday, it's the sort of breakfast that good marriages are built on, I hope.

CUSTARD-FILLED CORN BREAD

t
his corn bread, inspired by a recipe from Marion Cunningham's classic
The Breakfast Book,
is also sometimes called Spider Cake. I've seen many formulas for it, but this one is my favorite. We like it for breakfast, of course, but it might also be nice with a bowl of soup. Just be sure, whatever you do, to have some maple syrup on hand.

Also, don't be worried by how runny this batter is. That's just how it is.

 

3 tablespoons (1½ ounces) unsalted butter

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

¾ cup yellow cornmeal, preferably medium ground

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

2 large eggs

3 tablespoons sugar

½ teaspoon salt

2 cups whole milk (not low fat or nonfat)

1½ tablespoons distilled vinegar

1 cup heavy cream

Pure maple syrup, for serving

 

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan. Put the buttered dish in the oven to warm while you make the batter.

In a large microwavable bowl, melt the butter in the microwave. Take care to do this on medium power and in short bursts; if the heat is too high, butter will sometimes splatter or explode. Or, alternatively, put the butter in a heatproof bowl and melt it in the preheated oven. Cool slightly.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and baking soda.

When the butter has cooled a bit, add the eggs and whisk to blend well. Then add the sugar, salt, milk, and vinegar and whisk well again. Whisking constantly, add the flour mixture. Mix until the batter is smooth and no lumps are visible.

Remove the heated pan from the oven, and pour in the batter. Then pour the cream into the center of the batter. Do not stir. Carefully slide the pan back into the oven, taking care not to knock it, and bake until golden brown on top, 50 minutes to 1 hour. Serve warm, with maple syrup.

 

NOTE:
Covered with plastic wrap, this corn bread will keep at room temperature for 1 day. Covered and refrigerated, it will keep for up to 3 days. Leftovers are delicious both at room temperature or warmed in a low oven. Brandon likes to put a slice into the toaster oven and let it get a little crispy on the edges.

 

Yield: 6 to 8 servings