Category Archives: food, literature, travel

Folk medicine was not wholly incorrect when it first engendered the notion that garlic wards off vampires. It wards off most other frightening things. Certainly, garlic thwarts cancers and weak immune systems; it also promotes healthier blood pressure and builds stronger, more discerning palates. Garlic, collected in its frail, translucent sac, is like a bundle of gems, collected for the celebration of long life. A lesser-known bit of folklore decrees that two people predisposed to garlic should never fall in love. Like most Mediterranean gems, garlic is a hot weather creation, dependent on heat to release its juices and reach the sweet apex of its flavor. Two hot-weathered people eating roasted garlic engage in a highly combustible activity, due at any time to explode.

I’d roasted countless pots of those aromatic clusters in the oven – how the oil popped and crackled as it infused the hot cloves! While the garlic roasted, I envisioned long rows of grapevines sloping the Italian alps as some young man named Sandro or Niccolo walked desolately among them, whistling Italian folk songs and daydreaming about the poetry in a naked woman’s form. Oh Niccolo, I wondered, why are you so elusive? When Niccolo finally entered my life, he may have changed his name, but I recognized his song and slipped gratefully and without hesitation on an oily garlic skin into his poetic and crazy arms.

I knew he was troubled before we started dating. I’d sat in his office and listened to his unusual notions countless times, doing my best to sympathize with ideas I didn’t really understand and suspicions I didn’t necessarily share. He talked and I listened, and one day I found myself sitting on his lap, my hands hopelessly tangled in his long, dark hair, kissing his lips like my life depended on it.

The details lose focus, days that seemed to pass languidly and with a lot of laughter blur into the background. Over the course of a year, I rarely realized that what went on in my head was not the same as what went on in his. Sometimes, though, realization hit – and it seared, like the sting of garlic juice in a fresh wound. I could put his demons out of my mind and imagine him as my ideal companion, which in many regards he was, but he would never be able to move beyond the trials in his head. We split abruptly, cleft our bond rashly.

Some 8,000 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea flooded the Caspian Sea, which later became the Crimea and still later the Black Sea. When the flood subsided, the two seas separated, receding to their original corners of the world. I suppose that all things happen for such reasons, including the separation from my Niccolo: garlic lovers as we were, doomed to tempermental flights of fancy and connected by a secret deluge several thousand years old. Garlic has since become less central to my cooking, perhaps because it forces me to recall a very potent sting from many years ago. Each time I smell garlic now, my eyes water and I want to shout his name. And then I think of his kisses and a frail, cloistered part of my heart sparks with buried memory.

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I always wanted to be the sort of person who likes country music. The movie plays over in my mind. This gal walks into some roadside diner in Colorado… Montana… Idaho… where two different country music songs play, one from the jukebox and one from the radio behind the counter, where a waitress named Jo leans over the counter, pouring coffee in Tiny’s cup – one last swig before he heads back to the ranch. The gal sits down. The gal notices that Jo is twenty pounds underweight, wearing bobby socks and beat-up sneakers. Jo takes the gal’s order: coke, burger, extra fries. The gal says, Hey, Jo, how’s your little boy?

Jo shrugs and says, Ok, I guess… But he’s still got that wheeze.

That’s too bad, says the gal. Although she’s never met Jo’s boy, she knows his health has been awful, Jo picking up all kinds of extra hours to pay for his medical bills. The gal frowns into an empty coffee mug.

A few minutes later, after countless big rigs have barreled by, the diner’s windows quaking as they pass, Jo brings out the gal’s food, setting the plate down softly in front of her. Heat wafts up, and the food smells wonderful. The gal is suddenly ravenous; she didn’t realize how hungry she was. The coke fizzles in her nose, sweet and perfect as she sips from the straw. Her foot taps on the floor and she hums along to all the songs because she knows every word. She hums even as she chews her tasty burger and nibbles on her fries, one by one, dipping each in a swirl of ketchup and mustard, making sure the ratio between the two is kept equal.

The diner empties out. Light beams fall onto the red vinyl seats, dust mites dancing. Behind the counter, Jo counts her tips, slowly fingering each bill and placing them into purposeful piles. She sees the gal watching and pipes up: Damn cheapskates! They smile at each other.

A song comes on the radio that the gal remembers from a time when she thought she was in love. She turns her head so that Jo can’t see she’s crying. As some guy’s voice croons through the airwaves, the gal thinks how different things might be if only he hadn’t left so soon. But then, someone comes in the diner. The gal hears the door swoosh behind her. She turns to see who it is, just in time to see the stranger smile and tip his hat at Jo, saying Howdy ma’am.

A truck horn blares. The gal turns again to watch the truck as it passes, but she misses it. The song changes. She takes another look at the stranger, in his dusty, worn Wranglers with the shiny gold belt buckle, and thinks, Trouble. Rugged, handsome trouble. She gets up to leave, leaving an oversized tip for Jo. Jo’s got her eyes locked thoughtfully on the stranger, so the gal leaves quietly, gets in her truck, and pulls out onto the road like a thief at night. She flips on the radio and toys with the dials as the truck picks up speed.

The DJ says, Here’s an old favorite. James Taylor with Sweet Baby James.

The gal thinks, Who’s James Taylor? But she recognizes the song and her thoughts drift off towards rocking-a-bye with Baby James. Thunderheads roll over the land, casting shadows over the Snake River Gorge, but otherwise the sky is clear from the Owyhees to the Sawtooths. She turns onto the interstate and drives, as the comfort of a soft James Taylor song carries her out into the dusty horizon and far, far away from me.

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In 1608, while Henry Hudson tried to find a northern route to the East Indies, two of his crewmembers reported sighting a mermaid.  Hudson’s log read, “From the navill upward, her backe and breasts were like a womans… her skin very white; and long haire hanging down behinde, of colour blacke; in her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a Porposse, and speckled like a Macrell.”  In 1842, PT Barnum took over New York’s American Museum and made his first exhibit the Fiji (or FeeJee) Mermaid, an embalmed human head attached to a fish body.  Today, one can still sight mermaids from Coney Island’s shore during the annual Mermaid Parade, which occurs on the first Saturday after summer solstice.  The parade circles Astroland and the Stillwell Avenue station, culminating on the boardwalk.  According to parade propoganda, the event hosts “hundreds of mermaids, mer-men, mer-babies, mer-animals, and thousands of spectators,” all of whom on this particular day clamor for faux pearls, clamshell bras, flippers, and long, iridescent green tails.

Coney Island chose its two icons wisely.  The mermaid and the smiling, freckled face of a young man, commonly associated with Nathan Handwerker, founder of Nathan’s Hot Dog Stand, adorn most of its storefronts, hotels, and casinos.  These icons have seeped into the area’s cultural philosophy, establishing a status quo of leering males and dazzling, but miserable sirens.  Indeed, Coney Island girls shine with hair gel and slick lip gloss; they wear too-short skirts and too-tight tops.  They mainly live for melodrama and they drip attitude as they saunter down the street, be it Surf, Mermaid, or Neptune Avenue, all of which evoke the seaside atmosphere.  Most of them move away to “better” places, places where even mediocre living is better, somehow more wholesome and green.  Only the true mermaids stay by their sea.  At night, the fishermen off the 17th Street Pier dream of their siren songs.

Coney Island’s main spectacle occurs at its shore, where, on an average summer day, one observes a remarkable and elaborate exhibit of human pleasure-seeking.  Flesh abounds in a wide, glorious spectrum, from the palest pale to the richest, deepest brown; and it peeks from elastic waistbands and bikini bottoms.  Straps slip, strings dangle.  These spectacular creatures shine with suntan oil and wriggle to the tunes.  Children run amok, kicking sand behind them and splashing uproariously into the water.  Entrepreneurs lug about with coolers and sell ice-cold soda to parched sunbathers at a premium, while hot dog vendors wheel silver kiosks close to the beach and people meet them halfway, forming a sweaty, coiling line down to the sand.  A peculiar air of coconut oil and beer wafts toward onlookers promenading Riegelmann’s boardwalk.

When my friend Susan and I went to the beach together, we felt like anything but ordinary girls.  My mother dazzled in her red bikini, as did Susan and I in our seashell suits.  We girls had curves in places hardly suitable for 12-year-olds, and we giggled when men walked by gawking.  We rushed into the water over and over, shrieking at its cold shock, flinging ourselves onto warm towels in between and digging our toes in the hot sand.  We fancied ourselves mermaids or sirens or selkies, and lamented our impractical bodies: legs that couldn’t kick fast enough to torpedo ourselves past the buoys, eyes too sensitive for underwater viewing, hands without webbing to keep water in our palms, and birthmarked skin that held neither beautiful green scales nor dark brown fur, skin that couldn’t withstand our late bouts with chickenpox.  We longed to glow blue like moon jellyfish.

As Susan and I bobbed in the sea, her biggest fear was being stung by a jellyfish, though most varieties of sting are harmless to humans.  We gazed at the far-away sand, then at each other: Susan’s eyelashes glimmered with droplets of water, her skin dewy.  Seagulls floated past us.  “Oh my God!” she suddenly shrieked.  “A jellyfish!” And we squealed, dashing back to the shore and falling on our towels, howling with laughter.

A child living in the urban jungle can not be expected to start life with a large lexicon of terms for nature beyond bird, mouse, tree, flower, and dirt, but probably comes to know more words as natural situations arise.  Coney Island had small treasures, little doses of nature: the ladybugs at Seagate, the spring’s first honeysuckle, and the long worms that emerged after heavy rain.  A trip to Luna Park or Asser Levy Park involved grass, dogs, and maybe robins, taking the visit out of the “normal” realm of Brooklyn’s natural environment. 

Those are the moments easiest to forget: when my hands smelled of metal from the swings, when my knees turned brown and green from an impromptu picnic of hot Brighton pieroshki.  Little white moths weaved through the air, stopping briefly on dandelions and then darting back into the air and fluttering away.  Samaras propelled down from the maple trees along the walkway, begging for someone to feel the two even, ridged wings, the symmetrical seeds in the center.  Fattened squirrels dawdled by, frenetic yet zen, tails fluffed in seemingly endless activity.  Birds twittered and sang.

Maybe if I’d taken the time to dig deeper in the soil, I might have learned the treasures that Coney Island buried beneath its grass.  I think I never saw a thing, or if I did, it was the wrong thing, the superficial thing.  Did I ever see a glorious blue dragonfly hiding amidst the tall grass and daisies?

The opulence that built Coney Island in the late 1800s remains, if plastered over with dirt. One need only to peruse Coney Island’s other fine wares: the Tilyou/Culver gambling houses and hotels, the remains of which sit blacked by fire and weathered by salty air. One still feels the ghosts of 1895’s Sea Lion Park, Coney Island’s first amusement park, and its 1904 predecessor Dreamland, both of which suffered dubious arson accidents. One also feels the excitement that must have prevailed when the Wonder Wheel didn’t break or burn to the ground, or when the Boardwalk was built, or when the Cyclone moved to the neighborhood to set the scene for quick adrenaline for the generations that followed. The parachute jump remains, a World’s Fair skeleton, standing in Steeplechase Park to peer down on empty racetracks where the wealthy once bet on the area’s renowned horses.

In a The New Yorker piece, Adam Gopnik speculates on the nature of New York landmarks: “If they do have a symbolic meaning, it is not about the meaning of a symbol but about the right to symbolize, to think expansively and metaphorically in a city given to thinking economically about nearly everything.” This resounds especially in Coney Island, whose glory days have passed. Today, the neighborhood is just a symbol: a picture of mermaids bobbing in the sea, a metaphor of marine pleasures and thrills that have all but evacuated the surrounding slum. One feels this strongly in Coney Island – the air of decay that forces nature to one-up itself constantly, where even nature must glimmer with drama that requires being greater, bigger, sexier, better. And yet, Coney Island will never forsake its mermaid iconography, perhaps silently suspecting that without it, some essential part of New York might disappear.

Most folklore indicates that merfolk, though astoundingly beautiful, are usually detrimental to humanity. Perhaps they offer too much temptation for escape; perhaps through their extraordinarily long lives they act as omens to the painfully mortal. Perhaps they are a constant reminder of things that elude humans: existence in two equally wonderful realms, unearthly passion for music and love of song. Whatever their function, they hold an essential place in the human imagination, an admonition of the exploitation of the unusual or bizzare, and an evocation of life’s possibilities.

I suspect Coney Island aspires to be a mermaid, but I am not sure which half of the body it resembles more. Like the mermaid, Coney Island’s history is as much legend as it is real, the visibly human corpus hints something green and spectacular below the surface. The neighborhood alone is hard and human, but that waterline encircles the peninsula on which the neighborhood rests, softening its hard edges, reminding those who live there of nature’s occasional triumphs. Sometimes, though, the human half battles with its long, unfurling tail, swatting at it and seemingly unsure of how to react to its shimmering, scaly beauty. I fear that one day the two halves might succeed in breaking apart completely, causing both of them to die.

Thinking of Coney Island now, my brain tries to focus on the happy things: watermelon juice dripping down my chin as my mother lathered Noxzema on my sunburned back; morning cereal and toasted bagels after sleeping over at Susan’s house, which bustled with Italo-Judaic life; the armies of superhero balloon figures that vendors sold on sticks along the boardwalk. But the sad things creep in: I remember the ocean, its luscious salty breeze blowing through my bedroom window, when suddenly the image of a gyrating man on the subway, stroking a hard-on and leering at me, rises up in my head. I envision the Cyclone, and suddenly think of a dead jellyfish, washed up on the shore after high tide.

Coney Island’s natural world exists in this way: it is looked at, ogled, fondled, smelled, pinched, and chewed, but remains a mystery to most of its inhabitants. I didn’t learn soon enough that the washed up jellyfish that I had poked with a stick carried inside a mass of algae that it used to feed itself, like a perpetual evolutionary juice pack, squeezing and sucking and consuming just enough for its bursts of high energy. I didn’t learn soon enough how I’d belittled and tortured the corpse of a seaqueen who once glowed blue in her acquatic kingdom. I’d rhapsodized the ocean that I once called my world and hadn’t known a single critical thing about its habitat and biodiversity beyond the fact that many bags of hospital syringes once contaminated it.

In the early morning hours, the sun peeks over the Atlantic to the Coney Island shore and paints the clouds in shapes of roaring animals and laughing faces. A soft breeze blows. In the summer, it seems, the humid wind blows soft and moist as the breath of a sleeping giant. The ocean, still at low tide, mumbles along the sand. Sandpipers waddle by, leaving a double-Y shaped trail. Seagulls lunge and soar over the water, calling out sea sea sea. Tire tracks mark the cool, packed sand; somewhere, a car horn blares. The pinkening sky casts shadows over the water, hinting of the porpoises that once migrated along the shore. If one stares long enough, the slip of a tail or fin might come into view. Momentarily, a sliver breaks the surface, leaving a circular ripple that smoothes to nothing.

There are perhaps nicer beaches in the world: shores lined with palms, coconut, bougainvillea, and freesia; where the water is clear and blue, and the sand blanches under a hot Equatorial sun. My mother blissfully recalled the white Tanzanian shores and the warm Indian Ocean, whose tide washed up crab, conch, and urchin shells. She and my sister retreated there often, turning dark as ginger cookies. By contrast, I imagine my mother looked at New York’s bleak grey sea and grimaced. My sister has not yet acclimated to northern waters; each year, she makes long pilgrimages to tropical countries, habitats familiar to her spicy, clove-scented soul, where she swims until the salt webs her skin. But I was too young to remember our Africa days, when my mother and sister dunked me in shallow tidal pools and minnows encircled my chunky, crab-baby legs, so I recall Coney Island as my watery salve. In our respective sea environments, you can find us lounging in the early morning water, breaking the surface only to breathe. A mermaid strain trickles down our family tree.

Dutch settlers must have founded Coney Island to address their need for indulgence and abandon. They pushed out the Konoh Indians, then the konjin hares, and eventually they pushed themselves out. They encroached, razed, developed, built, and then abandoned the land, leaving it abundantly infested with only nature’s renegades: cockroaches, rats, and pigeons. And then they pushed their poor onto the land. The place remains a relic of its own optimism. That’s the nature of Coney Island: it exists to make a spectacle out of itself. But can anyone who sees it and experiences it daily begin to know what the place is really about?

Dutch settlers built Coney Island as an elegy to its own self-image, but they forgot one thing when they left the land for dead: in it lingered the battered, still-breathing spirit of the sea and, somewhere almost forgotten, love.

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My mother’s curse predates my life. Perhaps by now, so many decades later, her curse is not even worth mentioning: she’d lost all she was going to lose. The psychiatrists and psychics have thrown their words at the curse, rationalizing and explaining it away, attributing her problems to too many drugs [which I seriously doubt she ever took, knowing my mom], too many mysterious copper pennies placed in the cups of my mother’s tea. I suspect that my mother continued to write letters well into her retirement, imploring the witch to recall the curse, to return all that she has lost, though my mother insisted that she stopped doing that years ago. My mother tried to convince herself that what little she earned in life was the best, but she remained inexplicably sad. She begged me to keep this secret. “Yulichka,” she whispered. “Please don’t tell.”

As a child nursed on Russian folklore, it did not occur to me until I was much older that people did not regularly drown themselves in lakes or walk through snowy, crystalline fields at night in only their nightgowns. And that often those who did deserved some psychiatric consultation. One of my most treasured books came from my mother’s homeland and was given to me by her childhood best friend, my namesake. The book had witches and swans, princes and peasants like the more traditional fairy tales I was accustomed to, but I returned to it even after I outgrew my Brothers Grimm. After repeated translations from my mother, I could reconstruct the tragedy I found on each page. The witches in my mother’s fairy tales called to me, entrapping me in their stone cottages, and turning me, invariably, into a black swan so my princes wouldn’t recognize me. By the time they realized that they’d been duped, the tangerine dawn of realization looming over their heads, the witch had already roasted my ‘foul’ form on a fired spit. How I yearned for the tragedy and magic of those pages!

“Your mother was a magician,” said my father one summer. “She was always doing disappearing acts. I had no idea she intended to leave Africa until three months after she left, taking you guys with her.”

She met her first husband, the father of my eldest sister, at a Ukrainian polytechnical college,where she studied for many years. She studied economics and he studied international affairs. When his visa expired, he returned to Tanzania, and several months and a great many administrative hurtles later, my mother joined him with their honey-skinned daughter, my sister Angela. The reunion didn’t last long. Sometimes in the 1970s, mom separated from him, taking Angela with her.

Shortly thereafter, mom met dad and they settled together, but again not for very long. In 1978, my mother’s Tanzanian visa expired, not to be renewed. My mother made plans to flee to Austria as refugees; my mother, sister, and I subsequently ‘disappeared’ to Vienna. We stayed with mom’s friend for half a year. Eventually, my grandfather managed to coax mom to America by offering her refugee sponsorship. She rented the house next door to my grandfather’s in then-underdeveloped Boise, Idaho. A few years later, my mother thought it prudent to leave Boise, which was as stifling to her metamorphic nature as frost to an exotic flower. She moved my sister and me to Little Rock, Arkansas, then to Brooklyn, New York. Finally, we settled in Manhattan, where my mother, a born runner, decided to stay put. “Don’t tell, Yulichka,” she said. “Nobody needs to know about us.”

Perhaps indescribable, the only word that adequately described my mother is ‘unlikely.’ She never fit anywhere – a self-proclaimed unlikely wife; an admitted unlikely mother; an unlikely American, Ukrainian, or African; unlikely in the city or in the mountains or on a farm, and absolutely unlikely in a suburb, which requires inhabitants to drive, which my mother did not. An unlikely modern woman, my little, white-haired mother walked to and from her part-time job at an educational non-profit in gilded, low heels. She read her books with bug-eyed glasses that made her eyes look too large, then returned to her velvet- and gold-plated apartment for the evening. It is unlikely that she had a boyfriend, a retired Ukrainian maintenance man named Stephan, and that she only referred to him as a ‘friend.’ He routinely proposed marriage, and she routinely declined: “Niet, Niet. Ya ne hochish.” No, no, I don’t want to.

When I think of my mother, I think of the dates and times of her life. Born during the Ukraine’s battle with Russia, she was fiercely nationalistic towards the Ukraine, but preferred to speak Russian. A child during World War II, she grew up too early for the social activism that moved the 1960s and too late to be Old World. Still a proud socialist, she often complained of America’s problems: the lack of universal healthcare, the contradictions of democracy and bureaucracy, the disparity between the rich and the poor. Her beloved home was no longer founded in socialism; sociopolicial strife and terrible poverty tainted the safety she once found there. When I dream of her, she is running, running, always running, but has no place to go.

When my mother lived in Africa, she experienced many strange things, which she continually forbade me to share with even my closest friends. She lived next door to a couple, who befriended her and offered to take care of Angela. My mother spent a good deal of time in their company, drinking and laughing. Very soon, though, strange things ensued. She found copper coins in the bottom of the cups of tea she drank at their house; she saw shadowy men following her, who were visible one minute, gone the next. For several days straight, while pregnant with me, she refused to get off the bed without being lifted, convinced that if she set her tiny feet on the wooden floor, the snakes under her bed would lash out and bite her ankles. (There were no snakes, but I’m sure she believed there were.) Finally, one day, my mother emerged from the couple’s bathroom and found her friend, the woman, standing just outside the door with a cassette tape in her hands. The woman placed her finger in one of the holes and twisted the brown, waxy tape reel backwards, as if she were rewinding it. She whispered a prophecy to my mother, there in the dim hallway of the house, something that my mother repeated so often that I could recite the phrase in my sleep. “If you do not love me,” said the woman, “I will follow you all your days and make you lose everything.”

My mother never spoke to her again, but in later years, she wrote long beseeching letters to the woman, pleading with her to call off the ‘curse,’ to return the things she had lost. The woman never replied. 

“Yula,” my mother would coo. “Please do not tell these stories.”

As a child, I looked into my mother’s eyes and saw the magic of existence. Her brown-green eyes gave me glimpses of the Ukraine – the heavy green trees, crimson berries, thick underbrush, sparks of golden sunsets and icicles. In 1995, she lost the one job that paid well and that she really liked, after so many years of being underestimated as an immigrant. That evening, she sobbed in my arms and taught me about fear, pain, and pride, which I have discovered often travel in the same circles. Her eyes turned dark olive green, flecked with copper streaks, and never appeared the same since. How often I gazed into her eyes hoping to find hints of her exuberance returned to her, but instead found the dull gaze of a tired woman.

My mother had insomnia since she left Africa, all those thirty two years ago. She slept for a few hours a night, if she was lucky, waking at two in the morning to the sounds of muted traffic and arguing neighbors. She also dreamt prophetically, so that her few hours of rest were fraught with foresight and anxiety. Since insomnia tends to run down matrilineal lines, I too have started experiencing fits of insomnia, so I know that when well-meaning people suggested “making the best of the situation” and finding something to do at two or whenever it is my mother woke, it was hard for her not to get a little cranky and resentful.

I knew that she laid on her back awake at night with an arm drawn over her eyes, sighing; I had seen that posture many times before. She replayed her dreams and decoded them; she tried to trick herself into sleep by playing the relaxation game, in which she started at her feet and worked upwards, progressively trying to relax and bed down each muscle of her body. She ran over the spectrum of pleasing colors in her mind’s eye; she counted the possible combinations of letters and sounds lost to the American vocabulary; she thought about work and how to find a way to see an arthitis doctor and pay the rent on minimum wage, part-time. She remembered the curse and the laughing face of the woman who was once her friend.

My mother knew that she would never sleep well again, the long hours of night stretching out before her like a bleak, blackened tunnel, marked only by the gleam of new copper blinking in the distance.

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He went to Polynesia with the girl who should have been me.

He bought me a dress on our first date. And peeled naked out of a wetsuit on our second. He wanted me to meet his cool hippie friend who lived on the mountain by Bear Lake; its cerulean expanse glittered as we drove alongside. He ogled me at a friend’s wedding while I smoked cigarettes outside with professors, my father’s peers, and I begged them not to tell dad. When he smiled, I heard the ringing of far-off wind chimes.

He broke my heart in triplicate, peeling back each layer with thin, deft strokes: once saying I was too young, twice with the phone numbers I found scrawled on bar matchbooks next to his bed, and finally leaving just when I felt closest to him. Still, he appeared on my birthday, offering me a self-fashioned smiley face made out of mashed potatoes and rendered on a stolen cafeteria plate. I trembled all afternoon. 

When I worked in a local market, we kept herbs and spices in gleaming Kerr jars. There, tucked between Indian Spice and Kudzu, we kept a jar of dried juniper berries, which we sold for what I considered to be a hefty sum. The shriveled berries sold very slowly. Occasionally, I liked to walk by the juniper jar, unscrew its lid, and inhale the spicy perfume. After him, I left the jar alone.

Sometimes I envision him back in Logan Canyon, poised on all fours atop a patched, black innertube, his hair drizzling wet against his forehead. He bobs in the current, laughing. I hear that laugh even today and turn around suddenly, only to see the river and China Rock through juniper brambles: dark, pungent berries obscure him as he drifts downstream, yelling, “Come on!”

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My mother filled my childhood with terrifying food experiences. A native of the Ukraine, she relentlessly quested to make her children appreciate their heritage. She hated cooking, but nevertheless conjured up exotic dishes to put on the table: pickled herring, pickled tomatoes, rasolnik (cucumber barley soup), tasty meals that I would do no justice trying to translate from Cyrillic. Without a doubt, borscht was the most terrifying – the Bela Lugosi of Russian gourmet.

Borscht is not for the weak of heart. It is made from the blood of beets, which turns the soup and its ingredients the color of merlot, staining fingers and tongues in the process. An amalgamation of onion and cooked ground meat; shredded cabbage; diced carrots, potatoes, and beets, nuanced by tomato juice, salt, and pepper, the soup is heavy and dark, and it warms the stomach fiercely. My mother enhanced her recipe with pickle juice, which she slipped into the soup by carefully measured spoonfuls.

This was the food that heralded all special occasions: a good report card, a day spent in Central Park feeding the ducks, a snowy holiday. Borscht even came to be a personal request on those days when something was lacking – it was the colorful gap filler that warmed my stomach and eased my growing, insecure mind.


These days, borscht reminds me of Danielle, a friend from high school, whose long auburn hair and orange-gold eyes bewitched me in my junior year. Danielle played the bass and was friends with all the punks. We wrote each other countless letters and exchanged them in the halls between classes. We skipped out on lunch to play tag on Ocean Parkway, cars rushing past us. She lured me in, inviting me to sleep over at her house, which I did regularly because my mother thought sleeping over was an evil thing. Her parents let her have boys over, which my mother did not, and my heart irrepressibly leapt when I developed a crush on one of the boys and Danielle did her best to help me not look like a total idiot… though I’m sure I did anyway.


We spent nights under the gloops of her lava lamp, some soft album playing. Late at night, she slathered rose-red goop on her hair and mine, and as I rinsed my hair out in her bathtub, the water from my head ridiculously colored, I felt like I could have died a happy girl. When we walked to the corner store in the morning, our hair glistened like rubies.

In the winter, she wore fishnets under her ripped jeans, and for two winters I watched her scrunch up the fishnets, pull them gently up her freckled leg, and climb into them, wondering what it would be like to touch that leg, or even better to be her, Danielle, the Rhiannon of Abraham Lincoln High School. Now when I scoop up a spoonful of borscht and see that lovely magenta, I think of Danielle and something deep inside me draws tight. I last heard from her a few years ago, through a scrawled letter. Back then, I couldn’t predict that I would lose her friendship through the fallout of my error of loving a stupid jerk of a man. I only knew what I felt when her long hair blew in the breeze, how cherished I felt when I received that first approval that led to our friendship, how she and her boyfriend stopped me in the hallway and she complimented my smile.

I eat borscht by myself now that I live so far away from my mother. I get lonesome. Sometimes I call her to ask about the exact number of spoonfuls of pickle juice, and we end up talking for a while. She is nice enough not to make me feel guilty for leaving New York, a decision I have not regretted. I often think of Danielle. These days, I put sour cream in my borscht, trying to soften the memory of Danielle’s fierce pink hair, mixing the sour cream in until the soup is the color of a drug, and then I eat the soup quickly and wait for the drug to take effect.

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