Terroir Read online

  Behavior

  In the summer, Auntie and I gathered cornflowers, spider-wort, daisies, and dandelions from empty lots and parking strips for me to make a short-stemmed table arrangement in a juice glass. I pulled the wire shopping cart or held the leash of Mask, her well-trained boxer. “One too many in the kitchen” was his cue to leave the room, no matter which room. But he sat on my command only when Auntie was there.

  We were always back at her apartment by 1:30 p.m. for As the World Turns. We cooked French toast and macaroni and cheese and chocolate chip cookies, tossing in bonus chips at the end. Buying an extra package of chips to enrich the last cookies seemed luxurious. Auntie taught me to keep my napkin and my hands in my lap (instead of on the table, like my parents did) and to butter my dinner roll in pieces. “It’s not a sandwich,” she said. And, “Don’t lick the ice cream off the spoon in layers.” It was my joy to clean Auntie’s silver, wiping each piece with a polish-soaked sponge.

  “All nice things require some care,” she said as she lowered the ironing board so I could iron napkins. But she had no airs about anything, and in retrospect, I realize she owned nothing except the things in her small apartment. Yet her lack of money and higher education were irrelevant to her manners, which came from a deep well of consideration for others.

  Card and Board Games and Hobbies

  1. Gin Rummy, Parcheesi, Monopoly, Checkers, Poker

  “Why can’t I end the run with an ace?” I asked. My parents put the ace after the king as well as before the deuce, I was sure.

  “We don’t do it that way.”

  “Why not?” I asked, my voice insistent, louder.

  “Because those are the rules,” Auntie said.

  “I don’t like the rules,” I shouted, and then the phone rang.

  Auntie answered. “It’s okay,” she told my mother. “She’s not misbehaving; we’re playing a game.”

  2. Auntie’s Florida hobby was ornamenting mirrors and purses with seashells. From her dresser, she took out rolls of cotton filled with plastic bags of small shells: angel wings, lettered olives, cockles, bay scallops, sundials, and slippers. I learned the names and held the shells with my fingers while she squeezed on a bead of glue. Then we placed the shells on what looked like a miniature picnic basket. It was less practical but more calming than my mother’s mania for sewing and painting walls and refinishing furniture.

  Books

  My German grandfather in Uffing sent me Struwwelpeter. In the title story of this collection, a slovenly boy who does not brush his hair or cut his nails is shunned by other children. Because my hair was thick and curly, this was my mother’s nickname for me, although she made sure I was never slovenly. In other stories, a girl who plays with matches burns to death. A boy who sucks his thumb has it cut off. Hans fails to look where he’s walking and falls into the river. Kaspar refuses to eat his soup, wastes away, and dies. The stories appealed to me in all their gruesomeness, missing in American books of the time.

  Though it is true enough that everything we do has consequences, the book instilled a fear in me that if we do something bad, we deserve something bad to happen to us. There are no accidents. I learned to be careful although I sometimes refused to eat my mother’s tomato soup, thickened with flour. The starch ruined the taste for me. I sat at the kitchen table staring at a cold bowl of it until my mother tired of watching me and snatched it away. “Go to bed,” she said, roughly pulling the chair with me in it out from under the table. She scraped the soup back into the pot. “I starved during the war and you won’t eat. Why did God give me such an ungrateful wretch for a child?”

  Celebration

  Neither my thirty-four-year-old mother nor my forty-seven-year-old father thought to have a party for me—in Europe, children’s birthdays were celebrated in the family. But Auntie did, on my sixth birthday, with a bakery cake and ice cream. We played “pin the tail on the donkey” using rubber suction cup darts in her living room, the furniture pushed against the walls. A photograph shows my pale face between those of my best friends, Thomas and his brother, Emmanuel Cristodaro, who had cerebral palsy. In 1961 immigrants were placed in classes with children with disabilities. The party noise probably drove my mother crazy. She would also have been distressed by the mess, which Auntie and I had fun cleaning up together. We established a rhythm. On Fridays after school I headed upstairs with a change of clothes, coming down only on Sunday night. “Are you sure she’s not a bother?” my mother asked, the answer clear as the gleam in Auntie’s eye.

  Dewey Decimal

  In second grade in Indiana, where we moved because of my father’s job offer from Studebaker, standardized test results placed me in the gifted class. During recess, my classmates asked me to teach them German. They ran back into the classroom saying guten morgen to one another and calling out rot, grün, blau, weiss. For the first time, I felt that my immigrant status was more interesting than odd. We created a supermarket out of empty cans, boxes, and plastic fruit, and we learned to weigh produce and make change. I loved school so much that I tried to hide, successively, the symptoms of measles, mumps, and chicken pox. On the toy box in my room, I displayed my ten or so books, plus books borrowed from the library, and my own animal stories with construction-paper covers and hand-sewn bindings. Rocks were bookends. I alphabetized by author and taped index cards inside the back covers so that patrons (my parents and my stuffed animals) could borrow them.

  Displacement

  In winter, snow covered the doors and windows of South Bend. It was like being smothered. In my three years in Indiana, Auntie and I talked on the phone often, and we saw each other when she visited us and when I visited her during the summers.

  Then the Studebaker plant closed and my father joined Mercedes-Benz of North America, which was building a headquarters in New Jersey. As in the move to Indiana, my father bought a house without my mother or me seeing it first. On the drive to our new house my mother asked me to read a theater marquee. I couldn’t see the letters to read it. Later I learned about a theory that children develop bad eyesight when there’s something they don’t want to see. What didn’t I want to see? That my father could, and would, decide everything? One good thing about moving was that Auntie and I no longer needed to fly seven hundred miles to see each other. The Victorian house had been torn down, but she was living in an apartment around the corner from her sister, a forty-minute drive from our new town.

  Excelsior

  “You can throw away that excelsior,” Auntie said. I’d never heard the word before, and rarely since. It sounds like a mix of “excellent” and “superior” but refers to something cheap. I couldn’t find it in the dictionary because I looked under x. A trademarked word for wood shavings, once used to fill mattresses, then as packing in boxes. How strange to coin a word for something that can already be named. How American to make it sound special. To commodify it.

  The Freys

  One summer afternoon, surrounded by three generations of Auntie’s family (her sister Bertha and husband, Fred; their four grown children and spouses; and their grandchildren), I wore a brown, green, and red plaid dress made by my mother. The scoop neck had half an inch of lace ribbon sewn into the seam and around the short sleeves. With a white apron, it could have been a dirndl. I felt the honor of Auntie having chosen me, different from her love for her family.

  I knew the older generation because of poker nights, when I played Auntie’s hand with her, the only child there. Sometimes she had a whiskey sour that I got to taste. Upstairs, the Freys’ small 1920s house smelled of mothballs, downstairs of cake. It was crowded with old and comfortable upholstered and slipcovered chairs and couches. A glassed-in front porch had wicker furniture and stacks of the Daily News, TV Guide, and women’s magazines.

  One of the men grilled hot dogs and hamburgers to be placed in soft white buns that seemed exotic because we ate rye bread at home. A folding table held side dishes. I was mad for the orange gelatin with grated carrots, cann
ed crushed pineapple, and tiny marshmallows.

  A boy my age, ten, was whispered to by an adult and I was invited to play ball. I felt awkward, so instead I brought dirty dishes into the kitchen and gathered paper napkins for the trash. I liked the sound of the wooden screen door as it slammed. Being around this large American family, assimilated for generations, reminded me that my family was just my parents and me and our strangeness.

  Grandmother Hypothesis

  Anthropologists point to grandmothers—or their substitutes—as fundamental to human evolution, filling in the gap between a child’s weaning and independence, and contributing to our species’ economic productivity. I am not the only immigrant child who benefited from a stranger’s care. My friend Jackie mentors a girl she has known since birth. Her Bulgarian parents, neighbors at the time, overwhelmed by having to negotiate medical care and schools for a child born with brittle bone syndrome, relied on Jackie for babysitting and medical research.

  Auntie took eleven-year-old-me on a train trip to visit her niece in Maryland. The midcentury modern house in the woods shines in my memory: a house that couldn’t be seen from the road, a house filled with books and a piano, too. Jackie took thirteen-year-old Didi to Washington, DC, for a lesson in democracy that included hearing oral arguments at the Supreme Court and meeting Ruth Bader Ginsburg in chambers. It might not “take a village” to raise a child, but in a culture that emphasizes parents and peers, the consistent and loving presence of one stranger is an unforgettable gift.

  Inmost

  I washed Auntie’s hair in the kitchen sink with the spray attachment using Prell shampoo—a pearl suspended into the bottle of thick green stuff. A clean soapy smell, not like flowers or herbs. I wrapped her hair around bristled curlers, painted on setting lotion, and positioned her head under the hair dryer with its inflatable pink hood. She took her hearing aids out first, little machines the size of walnuts requiring batteries that constantly needed changing. Before antibiotics, Auntie had suffered an infected mastoid bone.

  We soaked her hands in warm water with a drop of Palmolive dish detergent, just like the commercial showed us, then I cut the nails and let them dry. Then filed them with emery boards. Then polished with pink Sally Hansen polish, a pink that was neither too pale nor too bright. April tulip pink. The pink of her dentures. The fizzy tablets in the blue plastic case. Soaking overnight. The pink plastic imitation of the roof of the mouth. The glue that never worked, affecting speech. A slight click in Auntie’s mouth when her dentures were in and a slur when they were not. Brushing out her hair after it dried was like cutting into a frosted cake.

  With our TV dinners (my favorite was fried chicken with the square brownie) on TV trays, we watched the Mets. Auntie cheered so energetically she rubbed out two foot-sized ovals on the beige wall-to-wall in front of the TV. I learned to respect a game where the only violence is between a bat and a ball. Where a player can walk between bases and score a run.

  Then I got into my pajamas and slept in Auntie’s full-size bed. She snored. Past participle of Latin intimare: “impress, make familiar,” from intimus, “inmost.”

  Kinesthesia

  In the seventh and eighth grades, I was bullied by a couple of girls from the “slow” class who wore dirty clothes and lots of makeup. One held the girls’ bathroom door closed so no one else could enter while the other threw water and garbage on me over the stall door or as I was trying to exit. They didn’t care if they were late to class. I told the assistant principal, who shook his head, but nothing changed. The girls walked home in my direction. To avoid them I took Wyckoff Avenue—a busy street lined with strip malls. When I chose the less crowded and more direct Prospect Avenue, they sometimes followed me, and in the tunnel under the railroad tracks, a tunnel that stank of urine, with broken lights and broken glass, the girls positioned themselves at each entrance, armed with towels soaked in filthy water. They ran up behind me to hit my legs and back with the towels. I stood frozen in the middle as they established their dominance over me. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell the school. I was embarrassed to be vulnerable.

  “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure,” writes Emerson in “Self-Reliance.” I didn’t know how to conform. I wasn’t sure what prompted the bullying, perhaps an amalgam of my foreignness and good grades. Despite the bullying, however, I experienced no depression, no loss of interest in school, no health complaints. If my parents’ focus on me was the raw wool of my childhood, the weft was my rebellion against them, and the warp was Auntie’s steady presence, weaving me into a person who determined her own self-worth.

  Maternity

  I knew that Auntie’s lack of children of her own made her sad, that she was wistful about her sister’s luck. When we first met, she encouraged me to “pray for a little brother or sister.” Grateful that prayers could be silent, I did not pray for a sibling. I enjoyed my status as “only.” I didn’t play with dolls, and I didn’t play “house.” In fact, I disliked being around children younger than I was, but I realized early that this was unusual in a girl and that I should not advertise it. I also didn’t babysit except for a couple of Saturday nights for my father’s German boss and his wife, Anneliese. When Anneliese asked me to watch their two sons while she went skiing during Christmas break, I agreed because I understood that I helped define my father’s status as a good employee.

  At Anneliese’s house that morning, I was confronted with three more women standing in the kitchen, surrounded by six children, four more than I’d ever cared for. My heartbeat quickened. I wanted to object, but I worried about jeopardizing my father’s relationship with his boss. Or my parents’ social life?

  “Give them hot dogs for lunch, and there’s baby food in the fridge,” Anneliese said, as she and her friends piled into a car, chic in their hand-knit hats and shiny nylon jackets. “We’ll be back by four.”

  Their mothers gone, the children rampaged through the house as if stung by bees. The baby tried to hold herself up by doorknobs and furniture, crying each time she was trampled. Knickknacks tumbled off shelves, bottles in the liquor cabinet rattled, the cat hid.

  At the top of the stairs, I caught up with seven-year-old Jan, the oldest. Grabbing his wrist, I said, “Stop. Someone will get hurt.”

  “No, we won’t,” he yelled, using his free hand to throw a bath towel down the stairwell. It landed on a child’s head below. A peal of laughter.

  I tightened my grasp. “I’ll call your father.”

  He looked at me with disgust. But he stopped struggling and we went down the stairs. The other children saw his resignation and fell quiet.

  I herded them into the large playroom with its sliding glass doors that led to the yard. Within minutes, a child picked up a baseball bat and started swinging. I tore it out of his hand and hid it behind me, alert to the dangers they posed to each other and themselves.

  At lunchtime, I took the baby (and the bat) with me. I closed the playroom door and pushed a heavy chair against it, trapping the rest of the children inside. Trying not to breathe in the stink, I changed the baby’s diaper. I heated her food and tried to feed it to her, but she sealed her lips tight. From the playroom, there were yells and thumping.

  I carried a tray of food and drinks into the playroom. The baby reached for a hot dog, but I’d read about toddlers choking on them and didn’t let her have it. She howled. We went back to the kitchen where I minced a piece of hot dog for her. She refused it.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I watched the children from my position by the door of the playroom. I imagined telling the mothers, “You’re lucky no one died.” Why would anyone put themselves through the torment of being responsible for other lives, I wondered. Doctors save people at controlled intervals called “work,” but I could not imagine the weight of responsibility for a child’s well-being twenty-four hours a day, year after year after year. How could mothers go skiing? How could they sleep?

  When the women returned, chee
ks flushed from fresh air and sun, they hurried to retrieve their children and leave. No one asked about my day. Anneliese did ask me to wait until her husband could give me a ride home—another hour. I sat on the couch and read magazines, trying to unwind my hypervigilance. I vowed never to babysit again. When Anneliese paid me, I stared at the five-dollar bill: the same seventy-five cents an hour I earned babysitting her two sons on Saturday nights.

  Boys didn’t babysit back then, just as girls didn’t cut grass. The women would not have taken advantage of an adult babysitter, except perhaps for a recent, brown-skinned immigrant. The horrible day lodged in my head the fact that I couldn’t trust women to be fair to me simply because we were both female.

  Questions

  Writing this, I get in touch with Auntie’s great-grandnephews and -nieces to ask if they found it strange that I bonded with their great-aunt. They don’t remember me. Before he died, I should have asked my father about how he felt working for the Germans he’d fought against. Before her Alzheimer’s, I should have asked my mother if she ever disobeyed my father. I have no questions for Auntie. I knew her beyond language, beyond remembering her soapy Blue Grass perfume and her dentures. The shape of her heart matched exactly the emptiness in mine.