From Scratch Page 5

  AFTERTASTES

  Sicilian sea salt boils faster than Morton’s. Add fresh basil near the finish, not the beginning, when simmering tomato sauce. Laurel will bring out bitterness. Soak garbanzo beans overnight, a pinch of salt in the water. That was the extent of what I knew. Years spent with a chef, and how salt boils and when to add basil were the centerpieces of my culinary education. I had never planned for this day, the day I would stand at the stove and cook my first meal alone.

  Early-April light filtered through the windows of our Silver Lake home and into the kitchen Saro had designed—galley style with a four-burner stove, deep industrial sink, and granite countertops the color aptly called “coastal green.” Those features lined up along a wall with a picture window onto our back-yard garden. The window was framed with an Italian marble backsplash of hexagonal tiles that reached the ceiling. I thought about all the cooks in whose kitchens I had stood before meeting Saro. None of those cooks had left much of an impression. With the exception of my father, Gene, and my grandmother in rural East Texas, I essentially hailed from a long line of pot watchers, people content to have someone else cook and feed them food. I had enjoyed the complacency of knowing hunger satiated by a ready-made plate.

  Sure, I knew some things, perhaps more than many home cooks. I had been lazy, but I hadn’t been blind. I could approximate. But that is not the same as intuiting. Could I cook with his essence? Would I ever taste his alchemy at the end of a spoon again? Or was my empty palate evidence of a grief that would never leave?

  I looked out the window at the hundred-year-old fig tree that stood just outside the kitchen door. Then I reached for his knife.

  The first thing that took my breath away was its weight. Instinctively, I had selected the largest knife in his collection. It was on top of the other knives resting in the block and the one knife in the kitchen he handled most. It was seamlessly crafted steel, and each nick in the handle told the story of a meal, an emotion. It had divided, sliced, and julienned a thousand raw ingredients. The weight of it in my palm forced me to sit down; a wave of dizziness and nausea bore down on me. My husband is dead. He is gone. Saro is gone. It was something I had had to process over and over again in the seven days since he had taken his last breath.

  Hours before, I had taken Zoela, our daughter, to school for the first time since her dad died. Returning to her first-grade classroom after a week at home was a first big step into a new but strangely familiar world. She needed to climb trees, hang upside down over a sandbox with her friends. She needed time away from a home life that had lost its tether.

  I wasn’t ready to return to my career as an actor. I couldn’t imagine breaking down a script, trying to push my grief aside to burrow inside the life of someone else. I couldn’t see myself walking across a studio lot, I couldn’t imagine standing before a camera and showing up for an audition in any cogent capacity. Acting had always been my creative salvation. I was proud of the career I had built as a working actress with worthy film and television credits and a well-earned pension, but now I feared that maybe my career had died with Saro. He had been my soft-landing spot, my constant in the steady stream of rejections the industry doles out. My agents and managers knew I was in the undertow of grief, barely able to leave the house. “Tell us when you’re ready, and we’ll send you material,” they’d said. That had about a snowball’s chance in hell of happening at that moment.

  I was in the land of the newly widowed, which felt like floating in the outer rings of Mars while my body was tied to Earth. All morning it had been like having one language in my head while the world spoke another that pierced my ears like hurried gibberish through a scratchy loudspeaker. My senses were jumbled. Sound was a bitter taste stuck to the roof of my mouth, and sight was a rough touch grazed against my eyelids. At ground zero of grief, up was down and down was sideways. I didn’t remember where we kept the salt; holding a knife took effort. I looked down at my feet because I didn’t trust the earth underneath me to be there. Nothing, absolutely nothing, made sense in the known and unknown world. Except being at home, near my bed, in Saro’s kitchen and in the room where we had said our last good-byes.

  From the kitchen I could see my former office turned hospice room, which now held an altar, the soul center of the house. That night, Zoela and I would do what we had done for the last six nights: gather in the room, read poems by Rumi, play Saro’s favorite music—bluesman Albert King and jazzman Paolo Conte, burn sage, and say prayers for the newly dead from a book of candlelight rituals. Those rituals were our desperate attempts to find a way out of the darkness.

  * * *

  Our undoing was cancer. Saro had first been diagnosed ten years before with leiomyosarcoma, a rare soft-tissue malignancy that had initially appeared in the smooth muscle of his left knee and metastasized into his femur.

  Because we had weathered so much over the last decade—so many ups and downs, clinical trials, remissions—I had no way of knowing that a series of hospital stays in a single month would be a sign of the end. A kind of medical chaos had begun to ensue after he had had an adverse reaction to a new drug. Suddenly we had descended into a medical landscape of dueling specialists, expert professionals each of whom saw one piece of the puzzle that was Saro’s body. I was the only one looking at the whole of his life, his body, his heartfelt desires. I tried to humanize the patient behind the chart. His name is Saro. Call him Saro, not Rosario, his given name. Not Spanish, Italian. A chef, a father. Married twenty years. As the heads of hepatology, endocrinology, immunology, gastroenterology, and orthopedic surgery made their rounds, I succumbed to writing my name on the hospital room whiteboard: “CARING FAMILY: Tembi, wife. Black woman sitting in the corner.” It was my response after two nurses had asked me if I was “the help.”

  I employed everything I had learned as a caregiver in the face of escalating symptoms, conflicting diagnoses, and the longing of a daughter whose father was away from home more and more. I put books of poetry in each hospital room. I brought him an eye mask, a sound machine, a flameless candle. I sprayed aromatherapy in each room to balance the scent of disinfectant and rubbed Bach Flower Remedies on his temples at night and on his abdomen while he slept. I brought meals from home, from our own stove top, because hospital food is both nutritionally vacuous and psychologically oppressive. Especially for a chef. He was put first on a salt-restricted diet, then another diet high in protein. I purchased high-protein organic shakes in three flavors and kept them in an ice bucket at his bed.

  Each night, I kissed his heart chakra before I left the hospital. Then I watched Beverly Hills fall away behind me so that I could be home for Zoela when she awoke in the morning. In the mornings I’d rise early and call the charge nurse for an update, I’d feed Zoela breakfast, assure her that Babbo (Daddy) was okay, and take her to school eastward, only to turn around and drive westward back across the city to Saro. I would spend the days trying to understand what was happening in his body, trying to ease his way.

  Somehow in all the chaos that month I managed to put myself on tape to audition for the producers of two TV pilots because it was the network hiring season and we needed the money. Then I called my agents to say I was “booking out” until further notice. I had never, in twenty years, done that. I was taking a leave of absence from jobs I didn’t yet have and might never get. I was pulling myself away from possibilities. Because I had to make space for another possibility—that Saro would be leaving me.

  When Saro had almost died of congestive heart failure on the operating table, it had been a turning point. I couldn’t look away from a growing awareness that this was likely the beginning of the end of our cancer fight. He had woken up in the ICU after surgery, taken one look at me, and said, “Vittoria—Victory.” It was the victory of a dying man.

  I smothered him with kisses. I wanted to crawl into the bed with him, to feel his skin next to mine. I wanted to soothe his body with my touch. If it had been possible to make love to him, I might hav
e done it then and there. But I couldn’t let down the guardrail. He was hooked up to an IV and monitors. The best we could do was hold hands. The best I could do was lean in and make him a promise.

  “I will get you out of here. I will get you home. My love, I promise you our story will not end here.”

  As he drifted off, I made other promises, too, the kind of promises the living make to the dying when we have the sudden realization that we are all, in fact, “the dying.” That life is fleeting, capable of bending the other way at any moment. We reach hard for life.

  I promised him a road trip to the Grand Canyon and another up the Alaskan coast. If he could just get out of the hospital, maybe those things would be possible. I would have promised him the moon and stars, if I thought I could deliver. In the short term I focused on two things I knew I could make happen right away: “I will make sure your sister comes to visit, and I will bring Zoela to see you.”

  After two days in the ICU, Saro was in a regular room. Everything inside had the stench of institution, including me. The trench coat I hadn’t taken off in weeks reeked of it all. I stank. I carried the worry of a woman who felt the love of her life slipping away. I walked the halls while Saro rested. The sound of the heels of my winter boots clomping on the floor rose up and pierced my ears. A new father passed me in the hallway, he had an IT’S A GIRL balloon in one hand and takeout from The Ivy in the other hand. In my hand, I had two hospital-issued ice pops for Saro that I had retrieved from the tiny box of a kitchen galley on the fifth floor of the hospital’s pediatric ward—one lemon, one cherry. In my other hand, I cradled my cell phone.

  I was talking with his mother, my mother-in-law, Croce. She was a widow, having lost her own husband to cancer three years earlier, choosing to wear black and leave her house only to go to church. Saro called her “Mamma,” but since the birth of our daughter, I had called her “Nonna.”

  Nonna’s voice was loud and frantic; it billowed in the space between my ear and my shoulder. I tried to picture her some six thousand miles away in her living room, one small room in the wildness and foothills of a mountain in Sicily.

  “How is he?” she asked me in Italian, our only common language.

  “I am taking him something to eat.” I stopped to lean against the wall.

  It was an answer without being a real answer. But I knew the power of visuals. So I gave her one I knew would let her picture me feeding her son. It meant he was still well enough to eat.

  She had told him she was having dreams in which the Blessed Mother visited her to tell her that her son was being called home.

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “They are watching. They want to see how his liver stabilizes.” I pulled myself off the wall and continued the walk to Saro’s room. “Please tell me Franca is coming.” Franca was Saro’s sister and only sibling. She had never in all our years of marriage come to the United States to visit.

  “She is.”

  When I got to his room, Goodfellas was playing on the TV above his bed. A red-framed school picture of Zoela sat next to him. The hospital had a policy that children younger than twelve years old couldn’t go past the lobby. It was infuriating, disheartening. One time in those days, I had been able to bring Saro down to her in a wheelchair. They had had to embrace in a public lobby to the sound of a whirring Starbucks coffee grinder and the lobby piano playing “Rocket Man” on a baby grand. The first thing she asked him was why he was wearing a dress, then if she could sit on his lap. The first comment made me laugh, the second question made me cry. When they parted fifteen minutes later, I knew he might never see her again if I didn’t find a way to bring her to him.

  As the days turned to a week, I learned how to sneak my daughter into the hospital to see her dying father. When she got there, she kicked off her ballet slippers and crawled into bed with him.

  “Babbo, let me tell you about a story I wrote about a wolf who likes ice cream.”

  I had watched them in bed, each lit up by the presence of the other, and I wanted to take us away. I wanted to hold on to the tenderness of that moment for all eternity. But things continued to speed up. The end of life goes slowly and then fast and then slowly again. We were in a hospital waiting game.

  * * *

  Then a chief of staff came to visit Saro. I had stepped away for a moment and returned to find them in midconversation.

  “The only option left would be a liver transplant,” she said.

  Saro looked away, then back at her. “I don’t think so. Save it for someone who can use it,” he said, his skin sickly yellow with jaundice.

  I felt the earth give underneath me and had to lean on his hospital bed to stay erect. The only option left wasn’t really an option at all. Before I could fully process that, she was leaving the room, going on to her next round. It took me a few seconds, minutes, to fully register her absence, take in what had just happened.

  I left Saro’s bedside and chased her down the hall, quickening my pace to catch up with the doctor and a resident who had been with her. My boot heels clicked rapidly on the marble floor as I caught up with her in the hallway.

  “What exactly are you saying?” When I saw her eyes avoid mine, any lingering hope I had had that he might bounce back or even stabilize disappeared. She had said it all without saying a word. Still I needed to hear it. The sound of my own voice scared me as I asked, “Is he dying?”

  She looked up, then down again. She nodded.

  Then. Slowly. Finally.

  “Yes, he is dying.”

  You are never prepared for those words, no matter how long the illness has been. Part of me splintered in that moment.

  “And if there is nothing left to do . . . then how much time?” I needed to know.

  “Two weeks, perhaps, two or three. At best.”

  “What will it look like? Will he be in pain?” With each question that formed in my mouth, I was moving myself closer to a world without Saro, closer to widowhood.

  “Liver failure is a relatively pain-free way to die. He won’t have pain, he’ll just get really tired until he is gone.”

  That was the first time it was actually said out loud: Saro was dying. I heard it there on the marble floors of a top hospital, expensive art adorning the walls, a meal cart wheeling by.

  I went back to his room, where he was falling asleep. I leaned over him as he slept, kissed his forehead, and, filled with determination, made a new, fervent promise: “Our story will not end in this hospital. I’m gonna get you out of here.”

  I went out into the hallway and up to the nurse’s station. “What do I do? I have to get him home. Please tell the attending we want palliative care,” I said to the charge nurse. She could see my desperation.

  “I’ll let him know the family is requesting hospice. He’ll have to write an order for it.” The way she said it gave me no sense of assurance.

  Sometime between the ICU and the conversation about a transplant, Franca had arrived with her husband, Cosimo, from Sicily. Saro could not wait to see his sister. When she showed up, it was clear that she was not prepared to see her brother so frail, his breathing labored. My stoic sister-in-law cried openly at the first sight of him. She spoke to him in his native tongue, and I knew it was a salve to his soul. She knew she was bringing him comfort. He would get to say a personal good-bye, hold her hand, see her face.

  When Franca kept Saro company at the hospital, she made him smile with childhood reminisces about Sicily. She brought him lentils she made in our kitchen and transported to him in a glass jar. She pushed aside the hospital food and spooned a serving onto his lunch tray. From morning to evening, they tried to cheer each other up. But each night, she wept silently when I drove her back to our house and he remained there. When I returned to the hospital later in the night, he’d tell me he was worried about her.

  “When will they release him?” she asked as her stay was ending. I tried to explain the procedural steps in a medical system that was more complica
ted and bureaucratic than any with which she was familiar in Sicily. “Saro needs platelets so he can be stable enough to leave the hospital. Getting him home requires a precisely timed transfusion, immediate discharge instructions, and EMTs waiting on standby.”

  She was crestfallen. “Do you think it will happen?”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  Two days later, the moment came. We exited through the ER off the back elevators. The EMTs guided the gurney through corridors and secondary hallways. After years of seeing the flurry of hospital activity in one direction, seeing the same hallways in reverse felt as though I were moving in slow motion. I held on to Saro’s gurney, as if it might roll away if I didn’t hold on. He had never left the hospital on a gurney.

  When the glass doors slid open, the air felt crisp, a harsh assault on my lungs. I could not breathe the air of normal life. Under the overhead lights of the parking garage, Saro looked more ashen and jaundiced than he had just a second before. I took off my coat and put it over him. As the paramedics took great care to hoist him into the back of the ambulance, they warned me that it would be a slow drive. No sirens.

  The doors closed behind us with a heavy thud, as though they were vacuum sealed. I held his hand. The vehicle began to move. Soon I watched the lights of Beverly Boulevard shimmer past. People emptied out of late-night restaurants, others walked in duos and trios laughing along the sidewalk. We had once been the couple who tumbled out of restaurants laughing; we had ridden bikes across the Arno in Italy. Now holding his hand was the only thing that mattered. He didn’t have the energy to speak. Not even a word. When we crossed Vermont Avenue, I realized that we were almost home. Hospice would be waiting. Zoela would be asleep upstairs. I was bringing Saro home to die.

  * * *

  In Silver Lake, that March was cold and wet. Still, the fava beans in our front garden were going strong. Fava beans are sacrosanct in Sicily. They are eaten around Easter. The bean is associated with resurrection, renewal, sustenance. Saro had taught me that favas are the only plants that actually give back to the soil, they don’t deplete it. They enrich it with nitrogen, spreading generosity and determination with every sprout. The fava beans that spring stood tall in the garden, the last connection to Saro’s culinary life, his culture, the garden of his construction. Years earlier, while he had followed his doctor’s instruction to rest and let his body recoup from the chemotherapy until his immune system was strong enough for his next surgery, he had made it his mission to design a front-yard garden. He had spent two weeks rendering its landscape in a sketchbook—raised-bed planters in diamond formation around a central fountain with a gravel pathway to move between each planter. Within a month he had transformed our front yard, with the beans as a centerpiece. And here they stood now, verdant and swaying in the wind, impervious to my husband dying in the next room.