We Came From Away, page 4
“What about St. John’s these days?” I said, considering my sweater choices. Although I’d spent some summer vacation time in St. John’s, I wondered if global warming might have altered the summer weather.
“Twenty in the daytime,” Maddie said, tapping away as she sat down on my bed. “But that’s just the average. It could be colder.”
“Or hotter,” I said, thinking about what kind of attire might be appropriate for a grandmother’s one-hundredth birthday party.
In the end, I opted for jeans, sweaters, a packable puffer jacket, some T-shirts and two possible outfits for the party—I still couldn’t make up my mind.
“Hey, Mom, did you read this?” Maddie was now looking at the printout I’d made of the emails. If I was going to spend time with my extended family, I wasn’t going to get this wrong.
“I think I read everything, Maddie. What grabbed your attention?”
“Two words, Mom. Hiking boots.”
“What?” I said, turning toward Maddie and grabbing the page from her hands. “Where does it say that?”
Maddie pointed out the offending line. Hiking boots? I didn’t own anything remotely resembling hiking boots. I sighed. “I don’t know what kind of tour this is supposed to be, but I suppose I should take a pair of sneakers I can walk in, right?”
Maddie’s eyebrows raised. She looked so much like her father when she did that.
EARLY MORNING FLIGHTS were something I avoided at all costs—at least when I was in control of the itinerary. My teeth were already on edge when Mom arrived at my front door in the back seat of an airport limousine at four-thirty the following morning. Mom had insisted we needed to be at the airport two hours before our seven am flight. I had thought one hour would be enough, given that I assumed we were flying with carry-on luggage only. Mom had other ideas.
“I’m not dragging a slightly oversized piece of carry-on luggage on a plane and heaving it over my head like some stingy Scrooge. It's bad enough that we have to fly economy. I plan to take only my handbag on the flight. I will be checking a bag,” she had said when we were planning our departure time.
So, I had dragged myself out of bed at three-forty-five and had managed to shower and dress just in time to be at the front door to see the limo pull up in the dark.
Needless to say, we arrived early and managed to finesse the security line with our trusted traveller cards. However, it hadn’t really been necessary since there were so few people in the airport at five o'clock in the morning.
Once we found ourselves a couple of seats near a window in the departure lounge—Mom liked to be able to see her aircraft—I settled myself down to get used to waiting. Did I mention that our flight to Montreal arrived twenty minutes after eight am, but our onward flight to Newfoundland did not leave until one-thirty pm? No, perhaps I didn’t. Five hours at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport in Montreal were too much to have to think about in advance. I hoped Phillip would arrive early to relieve some of the monotony and that everything was on time.
When we were finally airborne, Mom patted my hand and said, “Catch that little flight attendant, will you, darling? I want a drink.”
I looked at Mom, incredulous. “Mom, It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”
She shrugged. “It’s nine o'clock in Newfoundland.”
Oh, that made it so much better. So, this was the kind of vacation it was going to be.
BY ELEVEN AM, WE HAD already been in Montreal for two and a half hours. Mom and I were sitting in The Ice Bar—where everything was white and sparkly—near Gate 47 with a bottle of Prosecco and a cheese platter between us on the table. I had decided Mom had the better approach to this trip—eat and drink and get through it.
It was almost noon when Mom poured the last of the bubbles, and my phone pinged. It was a text from Phillip.
“At the gate,” it read. “Where the heck RU?”
I quickly texted him our location, and he was there within five minutes.
Phillip looked good. He was wearing a pair of narrow, faded blue jeans that looked expensive with a pristine white T-shirt and a taupe-coloured linen jacket that was expensively wrinkled. On his feet, he was wearing the only kind of shoes I ever saw on him in the summer—taupe suede Louis Vuitton driving shoes. As I looked at them, I started laughing as I thought about the email containing the words “hiking boots.”
“Hello to you, too, sis. What’s so funny?” Phillip said as he embraced Mom.
“I’m thinking about those shoes you’re wearing and the email that said we needed hiking boots.”
Phillip looked down at his feet. He shrugged. “You know I don’t do hiking boots, Erica. If we need them, I’ll sit that one out.”
“Good luck with that,” Mom said sotto voce.
“I heard that, Mom,” Phillip said, sliding in beside me on the bench seat. “What gives with this trip anyway? Not that I’m complaining about the chance to spend some quality time with my sister and my mom. But what about all the rest of the sordidly assorted extended family group?”
“Phillip, that’s not a very nice thing to say about your relatives.” Mom was trying to get that stern look on her face that we used to see when we were kids, but it was coming off as more like a zombie grimace. She hiccupped.
“I’ve heard you say worse,” I said wryly as I sipped the last of my Prosecco.
Phillip turned to me. “I see that your dear cousin-friend, Eliza, has also been summoned.” I made a face at him—I may have childishly stuck out my tongue—and he started laughing. “I think the last time I saw that face was the summer you two seemed to have started to loathe the sight of one another. I never figured out why.”
He hadn’t figured out why, and I had no intention of telling him. “Teenage girl things,” I said.
“What time is it?” Mom said, checking her watch.
Phillip drew back his cuff, revealing what looked like a new Cartier watch. Before he could tell us the time, or I could ask him if Marcus had given it to him, Mom said, “For the love of god, Phillip, don’t let your grandmother see that watch.” My mother knew an expensive watch when she saw one.
“What?”
“You know how she feels about people she thinks have money.”
“I’m not sure I do, Mom. What’re you talking about?” Phillip said. Even at age fifty, he was still pouting like he used to when he was a kid, and Mom had caught him doing something she’d told him not to. I also happened to know that he was baiting her. He certainly did know what she meant.
“I think the word disdain covers her feelings quite well,” Mom said. She looked like she was sucking on a lemon. “Contempt comes a close second, followed by disapproval.” She looked at her watch again. “It’s almost time to board. Let’s go.” She got up, picked up her purse and coat and headed in the direction of our gate.
Phillip and I hurried to keep up.
“Erica,” Phillip said as we spied the morass of humanity waiting to board the plane for Deer Lake, “are we going to have any fun on this trip?”
“If you and I have anything to say about it, we certainly will.” As we reached the gate, I looked around at the crowd. “Dear god, Phillip, why do you suppose all these people are going to Deer Lake, Newfoundland?”
“Maybe they all have a pestiferous grandmother turning a hundred.” He smirked boyishly.
Pestiferous? Is that even a word? I’d have to look it up. Anyway, I realized we were both regressing into our childhood personas. We were going to have some fun if it killed us.
Four
Eliza
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE line, my editor had been possessed by a demon. That is the only way I could describe it. At some point after the wild success of my second cookbook, A Schmear on a Bagel: Jewish Cooking for Everyone Else, wherein I introduced the tasty basics of Jewish cooking to the Jewish-curious and everyone else who loves a good nosh, Margot Talbot, my non-Jewish editor had a brain wave—at least that’s what she called it. I considered it more like a break from reality as in a psychotic episode. What else could you call it if your editor, who by all accounts has loved the two bestsellers one of her authors has produced, tells that author to take the next book in a different direction? What was wrong with the direction we were going?
I had taken Julia Child’s view of cooking. She had once said that the only real stumbling block to producing something fantastic in the kitchen is fear of failure. “In cooking, you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude,” she said. I had taken that view, and my two books had encouraged my readers to do the same. I had—I thought successfully—melded life as a recovering Catholic with my more recent decades as part of the Jewish community on both occasions and shared my well-tested recipes and tips. Now Margot, in her wisdom, had a new idea. She wanted narrative. What the hell is narrative in a cookbook?
When I asked her this very question (mind you, she told me this after I had signed the contract for my next book), she smiled across her cluttered desk. Helen Becker, my agent, and I were sitting in the middle of Margot’s chaotic office with its piles of books on the floor and the stacks of files everywhere (had she not learned the joys of going digital?). The disarray was sucking all the air from the room. I had now been acquainted with Margot for the better part of a decade, and I found her to be an incredibly detailed editor with whom I had generally enjoyed working, despite our occasional arguments about the placement of a comma in recipe instructions. Now, she sat there, running a hand through her wild red hair, hunching toward us as if she were telling us she’d discovered the secret of the universe. Her hair was always a source of vexation for me since its colour resembled my own natural colour. When I turned twenty-one, I’d put a quick end to the red curls with an every-four-weeks, eyewaterinlgy expensive colourist who did wonders covering the red. And her assistant did wonders with shilling for companies that made those hair straightener gadgets. Over the years, the technology had improved to the point where not a single person I knew even realized I had curly hair—with the possible exception of Jake. We had gotten caught without an umbrella one day early in our relationship, and he’d had the bad taste to opine thus, “You have curls! I love curls!” I have always believed that only men of distressing taste appreciate the promise of a bohemian free spirit suggested by wild hair. Anyway, I digress. I was talking about Margot’s new fixation on “narrative.”
“Narrative, Eliza, hun, narrative is the ticket.” Margot always called everyone “hun,” a throwback to her early life in England, I guess, when it was probably a term of endearment in her world. It was just one more thing that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“And what, precisely, would you mean by narrative, Margot?” I said as I sat there with my hands clasped firmly on my lap, tightening their grip by the second. I could smell the problem that was coming.
“Of course, you know what narrative is, Eliza, hun.”
There it was again. “Well, Margot, if I knew, it’s highly likely that I might not have asked you. Perhaps we should define the term just so that we have a shared understanding. I would not want to go off to create something in error.” My neck was bristling with rising indignation.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Margot said, leaning in again. Now she, along with her mess, was sucking what was left of the air from the room. “I’m talking about stories.”
“Stories? I’m not really understanding this. I don’t write stories. I discover, test and perfect recipes, then write cookbooks. I’m a cookbook author.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Margot said, sitting back and waving her hand around as if to swat away my displeasure that I was sure she was beginning to perceive. “But everyone these days is looking for stories. Adding stories to cookbooks is the way of the future. It will bring in a whole new demographic to the cookbook target market. It’s bloody brilliant, don’t you think?”
I did not think it was brilliant then, and months later, as I sat in my office struggling with the concept of “story” in a cookbook, I was even less convinced. My recipes told the stories as far as I was concerned, and that was the end of it. Margot disagreed and sent the first section of my new book back to me with the admonition, “You’re not getting it, Eliza. But you will.” I was not convinced that I would.
I thought I’d trick her, so I decided to try using AI to write about the raptures of cooking and send that on to her. We’d see how that worked out. Of course, I edited it, but here’s what I came up with.
You must listen to the sizzle and crackle of ingredients meeting heat, whether in a pan or the oven, as they create an enticing symphony that promises culinary delight. Those are the sounds you will come to know as well as you know the sounds of your children’s breathing. You will recognize each one and what it means. The transformation of raw elements into a symphony of colours, textures, and aromas is nothing short of magical and is yours for the taking. The alchemy of cooking is an art form, and the kitchen, a canvas where flavours are painted with precision and passion.
I then dared to send the new draft, including the computer-generated material, to Margot. Here is what she said. “Now you’re getting it! Now, you’re onto something. Now we’re cooking!” Ha-ha. Was that supposed to be funny? Was she serious? I found it humourless in the extreme if you must know. I never did tell her that it was written mainly by a computer, and I was somewhat offended by the idea that what she was asking me to do—me, a talented cookbook writer—was done better by a non-human. It was mortifying. And yet, I had a contract, so I persisted. Without the benefit of AI—thus the problem I was having.
So, when that Angela person, the travel agent from Newfoundland, called, I was in no headspace to even contemplate going on a frivolous trip to visit my obnoxious grandmother, whether for a milestone birthday or not. However, as I mentioned, my husband thought it was essential that I appear at such a family gathering. My mother-in-law, Esther, was also so inclined, an opinion she elaborated on ad nauseam one Friday evening when Jake had the bad manners to mention my family matters to her. She even had the nerve to tell me that I should be grateful that I still had a grandmother, and I should be ashamed that I saw her so infrequently. She had then asked me when was the last time I’d seen my father. That was the point when I believe I might have suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, developed gastric upset and had to leave, thus cutting the evening short. So, Jake called me a cab. On the bright side, if I went to Newfoundland for ten days, I could skip at least one and perhaps even two Shabbat dinners at the in-laws where we were expected to appear every Friday evening. It wasn’t the Shabbat I wanted to skip since I enjoyed the ritual and its promise of peace in the home. It was the people. Dear god, the people I was required to spend it with. Were there no families one would wish to inhabit? Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they say. That was all I seemed to have accomplished by moving from the Houlihan clan to the Cohen.
AFTER THE FIRST TELEPHONE call from Angela and the appearance of airline tickets in my email inbox, the instructional emails kept coming. Each one was more unnerving than the one before.
There were who, what, where and when instructional emails, but there never was one that answered the all-important question: why? Why was my grandmother summoning us? Why was she summoning only her children and grandchildren? Surely, a party of this magnitude warranted the complete line of descendants. Perhaps I’d been part of Jake’s family for too long because this was how they approached celebrations. Every cousin, no matter how far removed, was invited and, I might add, happily attended even the most mundane of family gatherings. If there wasn’t a momentous occasion to celebrate, such as a Bat Mitzvah or Bar Mitzvah, then Esther would cheerfully come up with another reason. Whereas this kind of random family togetherness was a Cohen thing, it most certainly wasn’t a Houlihan thing—at least not in my experience. Then there was the tour.
Why were we all required to participate in this tour? Then, I was especially baffled and annoyed by two specific emails: the email detailing the luggage requirements (far too small for a ten-day trip, in my view) and the one detailing the tour itinerary. The latter was infuriating, mainly because, although it provided a mapped touring route, there was no mention of accommodation. Was this a deliberate oversight? I decided to ask.
As the time for the trip approached, I emailed Angela to ask her if she could provide specific information on the hotels where we’d be staying. (I wanted to look each of them up online to determine their suitability.) Her response was less than helpful.
“Such a card you are,” the email said. “Nora was specific that we should stay loose on the accommodation. Gordie will know where to take you.”
I had gleaned from the previous email exhaustive details on where to assemble at the airport and who would be meeting us. I had also learned that our tour guide’s name was Gordie, a personal selection of Nora’s, no doubt. However, all the communication to date had also left me still in the dark as to what I should wear while on tour.
I considered tours Jake and I had done in recent years. We had toured Spain and Portugal, Turkey, Ireland and the south of France. I was having difficulty determining which of these would most closely resemble a tour in Newfoundland.
I eliminated Spain and Portugal because of the weather. Newfoundland, at least according to my father’s recollections of his home province, was cold all year round. I remembered him saying that summer arrived on July 10 at noon and left at four pm the same day. I had never really considered what this meant, but it was now going to be a guiding principle. As a child on vacation in the summer in Newfoundland, I don’t suppose I’d paid much attention to what I was wearing, and my only memory was of the weather vacillating between rain, fog and sun. Whether I’d worn a sweater or a jacket seemed to elude me.
