Cooking as Fast as I Can (4 page)

When the Karagiozoses came through Ellis Island in the 1930s, the name was shortened to Cora. Grandpa Pete Cora settled in Greenville in 1935 and opened a little place called The Coney Island Cafe, a name he chose because he thought it sounded American.

There was another important Pete in my family, Peter J. Costas, otherwise known as Godfather Pete, whom everyone called Taki, and who owned a white-tablecloth restaurant called the Continental. Godfather Pete was one of my father's great friends. Before the Continental, he'd owned the popular
Shamrock Drive-Inn, where he introduced the concept of the take-out slice of pizza to Jackson and my parents to each other. My dad managed the place and had a reputation for flirting with the nursing students who frequented it. Before my mom, he dated a girl in the class behind her—William Faulkner's niece, Avis.

The Continental was magical, with its big red leather booths, the clinking of the silverware and china, the
whoosh
of people racing around with purpose, the smell of fish seared in a pan, steak tossed on the grill, the garlicky bread smell of pizza baking. People could smoke in restaurants back then, and a glamorous cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the dining room. The menu was what was then called continental. Spaghetti and meatballs, shrimp scampi, crab Louie, and London broil.

My parents, a schoolteacher and a nurse, didn't make much money, so they were frugal. The Continental was for special occasions only, the most common one being their wedding anniversary. They always brought my brothers and me along, reasoning that if they were going to have to fork out money for a babysitter anyway, they may as well pay for us to enjoy a good meal.

My dad liked to walk me back into the kitchen, where he would set me on the counter. I would swing my legs and the cooks would ask, “What do you want to eat, baby?” I was no prodigy of haute cuisine. I wanted fried chicken or a hamburger, but my dad would coax me into expanding my palate. “You can have a hamburger anytime!” he'd say (not entirely true). “Order shrimp, order steak!”

My dad wasn't merely urging me to expand my palate. He and my mom believed that enjoying a wide variety of food was part of being a cultivated person. Even though we didn't
have much money, it was important to them that my brothers and I learn to appreciate culture. They saved up for season tickets for the symphony one year, and another time we drove to New Orleans to see the King Tut exhibit. My parents were always interested in furthering our aesthetic education, as long as it was within driving distance.

As children, we have no point of comparison for our parents. All I knew was that my mom was always there for her family, no more devoted to her nurse job than any other grown-up with a job. Only much later would I learn the degree to which she was devoted to her profession. My mom was a model of hard work. I sensed her intelligence, stamina, and great reserve of energy. I knew that she never missed a day of work, and didn't believe in burnout. She believed in
rest
, but she also found nursing to be invigorating. One of the post–master's certificates she eventually earned qualified her to teach the same courses she'd just aced to new nursing students. Once someone asked her why she took on this job and she said, “We needed someone to teach that curriculum, I was interested, so I just put my head down and did it.” Her final degree count is a bachelor's and two master's degrees from the University of Mississippi School of Nursing, a master's from Mississippi University for Women, and eventually, a doctorate from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

If my mom showed me what it was like to live with passion for your chosen profession, my dad gave me a taste of being a citizen of the world. I knew we were “half Greek” because of Dad, and that knowledge made him more glamorous than the other dads in the neighborhood. Often, perhaps once a month, during some strange time of the day—very late
at night or early in the morning—I would hear him talking on the phone to his family in Greece. He would be speaking loudly, in another language, and nothing struck me as more exotic.

He owned a huge atlas and we'd sit down at the kitchen table and he showed me where the Karagiozoses lived, on a little island called Skopelos. I loved that big, full-colored atlas. I can still see the irregular outline of Europe. France was spring green. Greece, just east of pale yellow Italy, was dusky purple.

If there was one thing I loved more than food, it was stories that would carry me to somewhere far away from Swan Lake Drive. Among my peers I felt alone in my perception that loving literature was a way of loving the larger world. I had big plans, and these plans made me something of an outcast. I had a secret list of goals and dreams. I would live in New York, travel to Paris.

My dad indulged my curiosity, even when it cost him. I liked to make things with junk I came across in the storage room. Once I made a sculpture of a woman out of plaster with one of my dad's drill bits. Any other child would have received a good whuppin'. That was a thirty-dollar drill bit. He was dismayed at my ingenuity but also impressed, and I think maybe he felt the cost had been worth it.

three

T
he same year I started high school my mom went back to school. She once said that whenever she reached a crossroads in life, she would add either a baby to the family or another degree. In this case, the crossroads was having three children in high school and needing more income. When she'd gone back to school before, I'd been in grammar school, and she'd been able to attend the local Jackson medical center affiliated with the University of Mississippi, but they didn't offer a nursing doctorate. The nearest place she could matriculate was at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, a good three-and-a-half-hour drive one way, so she couldn't commute. Instead, she planned to move to Birmingham, where she would live in the dorm just like any other student.

I was anxious about who was going to take care of us. In the morning I would wake up with a nervous stomach and plunge into my day as quickly as possible so as not to dwell on it, a habit I've carried into adulthood. It was one thing for a mother not to be home if she had a job, but to not be home because she decided to become a college student again? Whose mother did such a thing?

I had no idea then that all of her additional degrees were directly tied to the family income. Money was always tight and somehow just kept getting tighter. My brothers and I
received one present at Christmas, one on our birthday, and a new outfit for Easter. Those gifts were the canaries in the coal mine of our family economy; the more lavish the present, the better my parents were doing.

We spent months making our Christmas lists, always from the big J. C. Penney catalog that arrived in the late spring. We knew that we would get one “big” present, which was usually our second or third choice, so we agonized over our decision, trying to figure out where on the list to put the thing we wanted most. Some years, right after Thanksgiving, my parents sat us down and said, “Kids, this isn't going to be a big Christmas.” We knew they meant it. My parents always meant what they said. They saw no reason to spare us the truth, as hard as it may have been for them.

In our stockings, we always got some candy and an orange. Every year I hoped the orange was a ball, but it was always an orange. What we lacked in presents we made up for in tradition. Regardless of our finances, my parents always went the extra mile to make the holiday special. We decorated our tree while drinking hot cocoa and listening to Christmas music. We baked cookies and went caroling, and I always wound up feeling as if I had had plenty of Christmas.

To supplement our income, our dad, in addition to teaching full time, worked the high school football games, weekends at J. C. Penney, and delivered bouquets for a local florist. He especially loved the delivery job, because unlike his tenth-grade world history students, everyone was always glad to see him when he showed up with a floral arrangement. Sometimes he would even earn himself a kiss on the cheek from some extra-happy recipient.

I was equal parts scared and irritated about Mom going back to school. My parents were partners, but there was no doubt in anyone's mind, including Dad's, that Mom kept the
locomotive that was Cora family life rolling forward. Without Mom, who would flip on my bedroom light at 6:00 a.m.? Who would make our dubious jelly and mayonnaise sandwiches? Who would buy the correct laundry soap that made our clothes smell clean and familiar? Who would come out onto the porch on Saturday evenings, just as it was getting dark, and blow a whistle to summon us home?

Then one day my mom and dad sat us down on the couch and shared the solution: Grandmom Alma was going to come to live with us and run the house and keep my brothers and me out of trouble.

Both Alma and her husband, my granddad Clyde, had served in the army, and met when they were stationed at the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. He was a medical doctor and a first lieutenant. She was a nurse and a captain, and outranked him, a fact that tickled my mom and also inspired her.

Alma was tough, but from the moment she laid eyes on me I had her under my spell. Our mom was a firm believer in the character-building value of chores, a set bedtime, and a strict schedule. By the time we hit junior high we were doing our own laundry. We all knew how to properly set the table, load and unload the dishwasher, and mow the lawn. Before we were allowed to get our driver's licenses, we had to prove to her satisfaction that we were confident changing a flat tire. She created a trio of duties, categorized by location: kitchen helper, house helper, yard helper. It wasn't gender specific and every Sunday night we rotated to the next assignment.

But when Grandmom Alma moved in during my freshman year of high school, she dispensed with all that. She delighted in taking care of us. She moved into the guest bedroom and
did it up to her liking, complete with floral wallpaper and a dust ruffle on the bed. She spent her days producing a nonstop stream of classic egg salads and chicken salads, stupendous cheesecakes, and for our birthdays, her silky Italian cream cake with not-too-sweet cream cheese frosting. She did not belong to the church of Chores Build Character, and merrily washed and folded our clothes and deposited them in our drawers and in all other ways spoiled us.

As her only granddaughter I was her favorite. There is no sense pretending otherwise. I reveled in her presence. I appointed myself her assistant cheesecake maker. I assembled the ingredients, dusted the springform pan with sugar, and grated the lemon zest.

I loved her beyond measure, and one of my cherished early memories is of her feeding me. I'm sitting on the floor in front of a TV. Bright colors, a warm ocean breeze on my naked arms. Suddenly, a white bowl descends from above my head like a spaceship and lands in my lap. The feel of the plastic is smooth on my knees. I scoop up one of the cold, pale orange squares in the bowl and press it into my mouth with the flat of my hand. The juice squirts out over my bottom lip and down my chin. The taste is sweet, but light and slippery. Not cookie sweet, not rough and dry. Fresh. Grandmom has given me my first taste of cantaloupe, freshly cut and cubed. I am no older than three.