Chapter Four
I started cooking sometime in the pandemic, when my main source of nutrients was frozen-food packages and then produce boxes from Jon & Vinny’s, an Italian restaurant on Fairfax that became a grocer during those early months.
Every week a woman named Miranda in purple plastic gloves and a paisley-print face mask would load into my back seat a box filled with beet greens, radishes, once a yellow cucumber—whatever the farmers had harvested that week—and I’d google what to do with them.
The kitchen is a stone’s throw from the couch, but Dad still comes over to the counter to sit closer to me. He peels open the newspaper as I take out a pot, organic rolled oats, cinnamon, and some wild blueberries from the freezer.
Pea cozies up to the doorframe to see who is here and then backs out as quietly as she came in. She doesn’t love visitors.
“I love when you cook for me,” he says. “Yes, Chef!”
“It’s just oatmeal.”
Dad looks up at me. “You’re my daughter,” he says. “Everything you do impresses me.”
Dad has always been effusive with his love.
He’ll tell me “I love you” twelve times a day.
I both revel in it and at times find it challenging.
Not the love or praise, but the insistence on it.
The need to make every moment have some kind of meaning.
I don’t get these kind of displays from my mom.
She’s practical and careful but not necessarily warm.
All the liquid in our family comes from my father.
I’m also not particularly impressive. Except, I would say, in my ability to take care of him. My mother and I have always looked after dad. Since that car accident we’ve stood around him like security guards—warding off any possible danger.
My mother wishes he would stop surfing—it’s dangerous and physical, that’s for certain. I worry about it less than she does, though. Maybe because for so many years I was out there with him.
“You need to relax a little about your dad,” Leo will tell me. “He’s good! Let the man live.” But Leo also doesn’t know. He doesn’t know about the accident, or the remaining silver ticket that sits locked away in Malibu. It is not his secret, it’s ours.
The water boils, and I drop the oats in, turning the temperature down to a simmer. Dad likes thick oatmeal, so do I, and I wait until it starts to pop and bubble before adding in raisins and blueberries and giving it a good stir.
I load the contents into bowls, heap cinnamon and maple syrup on top—plus a little Trader Joe’s granola for crunch—and pass one to him. Steam rises off the top in aromatic waves. Dad takes his glasses off to eat.
“Oh, wow,” he says. “This is delicious. You do it better than Urth, that’s for sure.”
I join him at the counter as the sun creeps farther across the floor, like a teenager trying to sneak in unnoticed.
We eat in silence for a few moments.
“So what’s on the docket for today?” he asks.
“A few meetings,” I say. I take a lot of them virtually from home these days. “Probably leftovers for lunch. And then I thought I’d spend the night at the beach.”
Dad’s eyes twinkle. “We’d love that,” he says. “Shabbat pasta.”
Sylvia’s Friday night special. Sometimes I wonder how my dad feels about still living with his mother-in-law all these years later.
I’ve never asked him. I’m sure if I did he’d say “You know I love her,” or “Sylvia is Sylvia!” There are few situations Dad doesn’t find the good in.
He’s broken his leg, dealt with disease, lost both of his parents, and abandoned the hope of having a tool shed. He’s never lost his smile.
It wasn’t until two months after Dad’s accident that my mother and grandmother told me about the tickets.
Right after it happened my mother fell into a depression.
She’d sit at home… inside, never out, never on the beach—too much air, breath, movement—and stare at the television.
No one knew anything had occurred, so no one knew what was wrong. No one except Sylvia.
“Something has happened,” my grandmother told me, although she didn’t say what, or to whom.
It was only when I found my mom in the shower, slumped over, skin rubbed raw, that I demanded an answer. Marcella had always been a little nervous, yes, but never catatonic, never absent, never this.
“What happened?” I asked her. “What is happening?”
They sat me down in my bedroom, Marcella and Sylvia. I remember because there was a Kelly Slater poster on the wall that still hangs there, peeled and yellowed at the edges—that I can’t look at without remembering that day. The one when my whole world changed.
“She’s too young,” my grandmother said. She’d been saying it since I’d found Marcella, since she’d come up the stairs, since she’d forced Sylvia to sit down on my bed.
“She needs to know what she has,” my mom said.
Sylvia shook her head. “It’s not the right decision.”
“You don’t know what the right decision is.” My mother turned on her. Marcella was sullen sometimes, but I rarely saw her angry, never heard her raise her voice. She wasn’t that kind of mother. You knew her anger in her silence.
“Please,” I said, both to get them to stop and to get them to just say it.
Sylvia looked at me. I saw her head imperceptibly nod.
She came toward me and took my hands in hers. Sylvia’s hands were always cold, but that day they didn’t feel like cool, familiar relief—they felt like shock.
“We’re different,” Marcella said, and Sylvia’s grip on my hand’s tightened. “We have something other people don’t.”
My mother pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. I could see her physically deflating.
“Go ahead, then,” Sylvia said, and I thought it was the most unattractive she had ever looked.
I remember thinking I didn’t recognize her. That someone else was in the room with us.
“Sweetheart,” my mom said, her tone changing. “Do you know how lucky you are?”
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I did know I was lucky. I knew in all the ways they tell you to be grateful.
Two parents, enough food, good health. My hair was frizzy, but so what, right?
Most of the time it was wet anyway. I was lucky for my proximity to the water, that I could admit.
How did people grow up in big, wide swathes of dry land?
I knew that my parents, even then, were far more concerned with each other than with me.
But I had an eerie sense that was not what she meant.
I all at once was not sure I wanted to know what came next.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Sylvia smiled. And then she laughed. A big, wholehearted laugh.
I loved her laugh. Every time she laughed I felt it was in delight—at life, and sometimes, in some precious moments, at me.
But this laugh was different. It was maniacal.
This laugh was not in excess of joy but in reaction to inevitability, to ridiculousness, to the unimaginable reality that this was her life, her family, this moment.
She set a hand on my cheek. It was still cold.
“You get a do-over,” Sylvia told me. Simple, brief, clean.
I felt the air slice with her words. Next to me, Marcella exhaled.
I asked the only thing I could think to. I was pretty sure, after all, that I understood the answer. “For what?”
“Something happened recently,” my mother said.
“Use the real words,” Sylvia said. Her voice was powerful, defiant. She spoke as if she were holding Marcella to the fire. She opened her mouth again, to say what came next, and Marcella leaped in.
“She’s my child,” she said simply.
My mother looked at me. I could see how red her eyes were—she looked like she hadn’t slept in days. There was intention in them when she spoke. When I look back on her words, the way they transformed, it appears almost cruel, the way she said what she did next.
“Your father died in a car accident,” Marcella said. She didn’t hover. She didn’t trip over the words. Out they came. “But I took it back, and now he’s here. And now here we are.”
Sylvia looked at my mother with a mix of pity and what I thought might have been regret. It looked like maybe she was going to hug her, or at the very least set a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t.
I felt my heart rate quicken. I had no idea what they meant, but also, strangely, I did. I knew in the way you know when things are true.
Truth is easy to understand, even when it is unbelievable.
“That’s why you’ve been depressed,” I said.
My mother looked to my grandmother, who nodded.
“Anything that happens, that you want to undo, you get to,” Sylvia said. “One time.”
I could think of plenty of things to undo. I had forgotten to use deodorant during track practice last week. I’d brought an egg salad sandwich to school—big mistake. I’d told Carlie that Phil wanted to go out—that one backfired.
But I understood that was not what they meant, that was not what I was being told. My mother had just saved my father’s life.
I looked at Marcella. She started to cry. I felt her grief move out of her and into me like a kind of virus, infecting everything in spit distance. I understood her grief and pain and terror—because somehow it was mine, too. I could see that it connected us and would connect us from now on.
When I look back and think about the moment I became an adult, it was not the following year, when I lost my virginity, or going to college, or my first job or paycheck or any of the markers people use to denote the passage of time. It was this.
What is adulthood if not the recognition of responsibility?
We left that bedroom three women, tethered, however reluctantly, by our one, singular fate.
My mother recovered, slowly, but she was never quite the same.
And I held on to that, what it meant, what she was, without words, telling me.
Everything awful is on the other side of that ticket.
Because on the other side of that ticket you had no more cards to play.
On the other side of that ticket was just the relentless, mercilessness of life.
From that point on we were different, but we were also united in this dance around my father, this drive to protect him.
Dad and I finish our oatmeal, and he does the dishes, stacking them neatly on the drying rack before smacking his hands together.
“OK, babycakes, I’m out of here. Going to see about some waves.”
I make a face, somewhere between joy and concern, and my father rolls his eyes. “I’m always careful,” he says. “You don’t even have to say it.”
But I do anyway. This is my story.