Stuffed Read online

  Nana was the person you came to when you needed help. She was a problem-solver. She found jobs for people. She lent money with no expectations. Every Thanksgiving, Morgen’s Sandwich Shop at 1214 Broadway and Morgen’s Grill at 176 Fifth Avenue would officially close, but Nana would patrol Ninth and Tenth Avenues distributing two hundred Morgen’s meal tickets to the “needy and destitute of the community,” according to the Evening World. Morgen’s would be open for anyone she could find who needed a turkey dinner. Once, she saw a man leaving the store with no coat. “Here,” she said, handing him my grandfather’s new vicuna. “This will keep you warm.” My mother’s birthday parties were celebrated at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York on Amsterdam Avenue and 137th Street. She’d share her cake with the “inmates,” as the World Telegram & Sun referred to them. Whatever birthday my mother had, my grandmother doubled the number in inmates. When Mom turned nine, there were eighteen. The newspapers liked to cover the event and would name the orphans in print: Arthur Engel, Herbert Zuckerman, Morris Ennes, John Goldberg, Estelle Cohen, Morris Levy, Gertrude Marlin, Ruth Stork, Nathan Katz, Maggie Finkle. Everybody got presents. They’d tell stories and play games.

  Long after she didn’t have to save money, my grandmother kept saving it. All leftover vegetables went into succotash. She rinsed out tinfoil and hung it up to dry. Grapefruit seeds rarely made it to the garbage. She sprouted them on wet cotton balls, then planted them in pots filled with free dirt from Central Park. She never gave up the dream of a fruit-bearing grapefruit tree on a New York windowsill.

  Like Ethel Volk, Nana was seventeen when she married my grandfather. They met on a blind date arranged by her older sister, Gertie. At the end of the evening Herman turned to Polly and said, “I recently met a woman, and I’m in love with her. I’m going to propose, and if she says no, I’m leaving town.”

  “Kiss me, darling,” Nana said. “I know you mean me.”

  She’d already had two proposals. One from a dentist named Irving. She accepted, then changed her mind. When he yelled up from the street for her to come down, she flung her engagement ring out the window.

  Maurice she never said yes to. He took her for a ride in Central Park at night, then stopped the car in a dark place.

  “I ran out of gas,” he said, sliding his arm around her.

  “Take me home!” Nana pulled away. “My fortune is my reputation, and my reputation is my fortune!”

  I loved this sentence. It was perfect. Not only could you learn from it, it was reversible.

  Maurice proposed, but Polly turned him down too. Then she went to city hall with my grandfather and got a marriage license. His name was Herman Morgenbesser (Morning Kisser), but after studying the way it looked, she said, “Herman, your name is too long for America.” She drew a line through the “besser.” From then on, they were Polly and Herman Morgen.

  They married on September 10 in Arverne, Queens, where Polly’s parents had rented a summerhouse. Her braids were still wet from a morning dip in the Atlantic. Like most women of her day, she didn’t swim. She waded out holding a knotted rope tied to a pier. As Herman was driving Polly to the ceremony, Maurice jumped on the running board. He hung there, rapping on the window, begging my grandmother not to go through with it. Herman swerved him off. In the backseat, his future in-laws, Jenny and Louis Lieban, sat holding hands. They needed a vacation so they came along on the honeymoon. The four of them passed a pleasant week at the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island.

  I wear the bracelet Great-grandma Jenny had made before she married Louis. Nine dimes, linked, each engraved with the initials of a friend. Elaborate hand-carved initials on the “tails” side of a Liberty dime. They don’t immediately read “dimes.” Polly had the bracelet dipped in gold. She loved all things gold: doré lamps, bangles by the armload, glittery glasses, ormolu.

  Herman Morgen was so grateful to have won my grandmother’s heart, he promised God he would give something up. It had to be something he loved, something he’d miss every waking day. It had to be a genuine sacrifice. And so it came to pass that my grandfather gave up pork, his favorite food in the world. No more spareribs, no more roast loin, no more bratwurst, choucroute garnie, grilled pork chops, hocks in brown sauce, trotters, pigs’ knuckles, or Italian pork sausage. No more fricadeller or knockwurst in beer or tourtière (pork pie). No more nonkosher salami! No more holiday ham! No more bacon! That was it. In exchange for the gift of my grandmother, he would satiate the jealous gods by giving up something of equal worth. He officially gave up pork and all pork by-products. So the fact that he continued to eat liverwurst baffled me. Did he, the restaurant man, not know that liverwurst was made from the liver of a pig? Was it possible that he blanked that out, had a little blind spot? Or was it that he gave up pork with one exception, that it was enough to give up the majority of pork. No one asked him. No one talked about it. Once, watching him bite into slabs of liverwurst squeezing through the edges of ebony pumpernickel slathered with Thousand Island dressing from Morgen’s that was so rich we called it Million Island dressing, I said, “Poppy, what’s liverwurst made of?”

  “Liver, darling,” he said.

  I watched his face. He was loving that sandwich. I thought about saying, “Liver of what?”

  To prevent slipping, the terra-cotta tiles on the kitchen floor at Morgen’s were covered with wood pallets. Somehow my grandmother fell on some fat. Doctors nailed her hip back together. She would break it once more, this time tumbling down the stairs at our house. I was there. I saw her land. Splayed on the carpet, she said, “Don’t worry, darling. I won’t sue.” She laughed. From then on, she limped. She described herself as “lame.” She learned to live with the compromise of pain. It was a mean irony that the woman who was voted “Best Legs in Atlantic City” in 1916 should have one turn against her. Although I was five or six the first time she broke her hip, I couldn’t remember her walking without hiking the bad hip up and swinging the leg forward. Then we had the family Kodachromes transferred to tape, and there she was, skipping down a flagstone path, laughing, her black curls bouncing, raising her skirt, showing the kind of leg that used to be called well turned, a leg carved on a lathe.

  “Bubbaleben, rub my leg!” she’d call from her gray bedroom. I’d run in and dive my hand up to the elbow in a gallon jar of Pond’s cold cream. She’d be stretched out in her bathrobe, her housekeeper, Lilly, watching from the door.

  “Harder! Higher!” Nana would say. Or “Oh, my laben-on-the-kepaleh, my zeeseh kinder, that’s good!”

  I’d rub from the ankle to the hip. She’d moan. The rubbing would last until the last whiteness of the Pond’s sank into her shiny shin. Then she would flap the robe closed.

  “Did you ever do the leg?” I ask my sister.

  “I loved doing the leg,” my sister tells me.

  I must have loved doing the leg too, or I would have found a way out of it.

  Her pain got so bad she took pills that sounded like miracle fibers, Darvon and Percodan. When it became unbearable, she began the New York medical hejira. She took her hip X rays to all the orthopedic stars in the city. The “top men” all said the same thing: It was hopeless. The pin had deteriorated and the bone too. There was nothing they could do. If they tried to take the pin out, the bone would shatter and she’d never walk again.

  If you look long and hard enough in New York, you can always find someone to say yes. Dr. Bosworth at St. Luke’s was willing to give it a shot. During the procedure her hipbone crumbled into gravel. She spent her last six years in bed with round-the-clocks. Lilly would greet us at the door, and I’d smell the smell. It wasn’t the rich kitchen smell anymore. It was the stale smell of medicine and cold cream and dust in the drapes mixed with food ground into the wall-to-wall by nurses who knew they weren’t coming back.

  “Put an ice cube in my tea!” Nana would call to them.

  “Put more hot water in my tea!”

  “Who made the tea?”

  “F
luff my pillows.”

  “Bring a cookie for the baby!”

  “Not that kind of cookie!”

  “Not that kind of cookie!”

  “Where’s the Arrowroot? Who ate the Arrowroot?”

  I would sit by her bed showing off my son, asking what I could do. I couldn’t do anything.

  “AN ARROWROOT FOR THE BABY! SOMEBODY! PLEASE!”

  Violet or Sabina or Lucille would scurry into the kitchen and come back with the wrong cookie.

  “Nana,” I told her, pressing her hand against my belly, “if it’s a girl, I’m going to name her after you. I love the name Polly.”

  “Is that right, darling? Tell Violet I need more tea.”

  My Polly was born four months after Polly died of kidney failure from a rampant staph infection. Mom buried her in her favorite robe, white eyelet with a blue satin bow at the neck. Jewish law dictates that a body be interred without delay. When possible, Jewish people bury their dead within twenty-four hours. My grandmother’s will stipulated that we wait three days. She was born in 1899, the time of Queen Victoria. There was no medically reliable way, except putrefaction, to be sure a person was definitely dead. So many people had been buried alive, so many coffins had been opened with scratch marks inside the lids that English coffins came with an aboveground bell, the pull placed in the hand of the deceased, just in case.

  On February 8, 1964, the Beatles came to town for their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. They were going to stay at The Plaza. My younger cousins Joanie and Marcy convinced Nana to take them to Fifty-ninth Street in hopes of catching a glimpse. Mounted police high-stepped through the screaming crowd. Barricades were everywhere. Nana and the girls couldn’t get closer than The Sherry-Netherland. A rumor spread that the Beatles were going to wave from a window. It was freezing cold. My grandmother stood for almost an hour. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Look!” Nana shouted.

  “Where?” Joanie and Marcy yelled.

  “Look! They waved!” Nana said. “You saw them!”

  “We did?”

  “Yes, girls! You saw them! Okay, who wants hot chocolate at Rumpelmayer’s?”

  When we got lost in a bog last summer, my sister said, “If I die first, you can eat me.”

  HERSHEYETTES

  My mother calls to tell me my sister weighs 150 pounds: “I don’t think her husband could like it very much,” my mother says. "Do you"?

  My sister calls to tell me she’s starting Jenny Craig: “I met with my diet counselor and told her she could have every piece of jewelry I had on if she could get me thin enough to wear her jeans.”

  The next morning my sister calls to tell me the diet’s not working: “You have to buy all the food from Jenny Craig, and it’s horrible.”

  “My friend Brenda is on the English Red and Green Diet,” I tell her. “You eat five fruits and five veggies every day. But on green days you add things that grow. And on red days you add things that walk.”

  “I don’t need a diet,” my sister says. “I know every diet. Here’s the trick, okay? Here’s all you have to know: Eat less.”

  Since my sister and I like to invent things—Cuzzles, the Cookie Puzzle for Kids; the 10 Meals in 10 Minutes for 10 Dollars Cookbook revised to the 20 Meals in 20 Minutes for 20 Dollars Cookbook; the book about sisters somebody else did; the movie about sisters we didn’t know enough about movies to make; reading glasses that beep when you press a locator button so you can find them; the Hoseable Apartment, where floors gently slope toward a drain and everything is waterproof, even the books; Airplane Dating so when you book your seat, you get to say what kind of person you’d like to sit next to—since we like to hatch schemes, I say, “Why don’t we do a book of all the diets we’ve been on? Fifty-two diets, a new one every week.”

  We start naming diets: The Nine-Egg-a-Day, the Grapefruit, the Beverly Hills, the Atkins, the Modified Atkins, the Ornish, the Pineapple, the Scarsdale, the Sauerkraut, the Red Soup, the Mayo Clinic, the Duke Rice Diet, the Vanderbilt Rotation Diet, the Hilton Head Metabolism Diet, the Substitution Diet, Weight Watchers, Weight Watchers Quick Start, the Watermelon, the Loma Linda, Fit for Life, Sugar Busters!, Dr. Hevert’s Famous Diet (modified Atkins), the Chew Everything 30 Times Diet, the Blood-type Diet, the Bloomingdale’s Eat Healthy Diet, Dr. Berger’s Immune Power Diet, Dr. McDougall’s 12-Day Diet Meal Plan, the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet, the Hollywood 48-Hour Miracle Diet (ten pounds in a weekend), the Cyberdiet, the Still-man, Optifast, Dexfenfluramine HCI, the Nutri/System Diet Plan, the Zone Diet, Medifast, Metrecal, Slim-Fast, Ultra Slim-Fast, Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal, the 8-Glasses-of-Water-a-Day, the Pritikin Diet, HMV, Horse Hoof Protein, the Liquid Protein. I especially like the one where you eat nothing but fruit till noon and then all the protein you want. Or all the protein you want till noon, and nothing but fruit the rest of the day. One diet my sister was on allowed her to eat unlimited bacon. Microwaves had just come out. She kept those rashers going in on paper towels. DING! Four rashers came out, four rashers went in. For dinner she ate steak with a sooty black crust. The weight fell off. Her breath smelled like nail polish remover. “That was the Acetone Breath Diet,” my sister says. “Do you think I have A.D.D.?”

  “Attention Deficit Disorder?”

  “Attention Diet Disorder,” she says

  When you watch your weight, you literally watch it. We are masters of the scale. Bend one knee, you weigh less. Lean sideways, that’s worth a pound. If you weigh yourself before breakfast after going to the bathroom and walking twice around the reservoir, that’s the least you’ll weigh all day. You weigh less after a shower than you do before, provided your hair is dry. If you hold your breath and suck in your gut, the needle on the scale heads west. You can weigh less from blowing your nose, brushing your teeth, cutting your cuticles, and thinking light thoughts. You can lose (or gain) weight stepping off the scale, then getting right back on.

  People like my sister and me know our weight at any given time. The sixth grade, before the musical at camp, during the SATs, first day of college, first date with husband-to-be, wedding weight, post-honeymoon weight, pre- and post-baby weights, weight at grandmother’s funeral. Give us a year, we’ll give it back to you in pounds. Give us a day.

  “We’ve had thirty years of fat and thin,” my sister says.

  “I’ve got a distorted body image,” I tell her. “I think I look good.”

  Weight was never not an issue. It was there, every morning, like the New York Times. At Weight Watchers they tell you, “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.” But my sister has decided she prefers eating to looking skinny, that eating gives her more pleasure, even if she wears only bespoke black. Once, when we rented a movie, she bought a bag of Hershey’s Hugs. I told her not to buy anything Hershey, because when I’d done the advertising for the company, I’d invented the name Hershey’s Hugs for a candy to be sold alongside Hershey’s Kisses—Hugs and Kisses—and I never got credit for it. I did get credit for inventing the name “Whatchamacallit” for a new candy bar. “Hershey’s Whatchamacallit. You can ask for it by name,” the logo line went. It was my major contribution in eighteen years of advertising. But Hershey stole the Hugs name, so I’ve been boycotting them for twelve years. “If you buy Hugs,” I told my sister, “it’s the same as crossing a picket line. If you buy Hugs, you’re a scab.”

  She bought the Hugs. In the car she unwrapped eight and palmed them into her mouth.

  “Why are you doing that?” I asked her.

  “I love the sensation of the chocolate filling my mouth, the area around my teeth, of it melting on my tongue, and sliding hot and liquidy down my throat. I love the taste. I love the feel.”

  What could I say? By the time she pulled into her driveway, the bag was empty.

  In 1996, while cleaning out a dresser drawer, I came across a small locked metal box. The box had moved to four apartments with me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it. I shook it in my hand.
Something was inside. It sounded like paper. A hundred-dollar bill? A secret? A last will and testament? On top of my dresser there’s a small tray filled with mystery keys. I tried the little ones. None of them worked. I got a screwdriver. That didn’t work either. Finally I pried the box open with the claw of a hammer. Inside, there was a yellowed three-by-five card. Written on it were the words “All-time High: 143.”

  By the fourth grade my sister was taller than all her teachers. She’s still tall. Recently she had her skeleton weighed. A doctor glued electrodes over key bones and ran a charge through them. “It felt prickly,” she says. “Like when your foot falls asleep, then starts to wake up.” A strip of paper chattered out of the machine. My sister’s skeleton weighed 117 pounds. The doctor was stunned. “For a person your height,” he said, “your skeleton should weigh eighty-eight. This is the largest female skeleton I’ve ever seen.” So now at least we have proof: My sister is big-boned.

  In high school we dieted in earnest. We wore full skirts with crinolines made rigid by soaking them in a bathtub full of sugar water. Then we’d tuck in a sweater or blouse and buckle on a four-inch cinch belt. Because the skirts ballooned out, our waists looked tiny. My sister could get hers down to twenty-two inches. I could get mine under twenty. Still we thought we were fat.

  There was an obstetrician/gynecologist in town who stopped doing ob/gyn to become a diet specialist full-time. Dad went to him and started losing weight. We convinced Mom to take us. The doctor prescribed a small pink pill. A lot of girls in our high school were taking the small pink pill. It made you not interested in food. You just didn’t think about it. When you went for fries after school, they lacked appeal. When you went for pizza after the movies, you couldn’t finish a slice. The weight fell off. Desserts lost their glow. Our waists got smaller. People stopped us to tell us how thin we were. The first week, I lost 8½ pounds, my sister, 7. The doctor praised us. He prescribed more pink pills. Mother seemed pleased. Even so, she kept our chocolate shelves loaded.