I’m not sure if I remember the taste of the currant berries that bloomed against my grandmother’s fence, their red-and-gold gleam. Or maybe I added those details during some long-ago daydream. I unwrap the memory, trace its soft edges, and tuck it away like treasure, like the silverware my grandmother’s cousin Hans tried to smuggle into a bomb shelter. Or did he smuggle it out of the shelter? Was Hans even his name? Or was he turned away at the door for refusing to part with a silver-filled suitcase? A bomb shelter that was later blown up, that same wintry evening?

The house on Lion Lane is still there, but it’s no longer my grandmother’s. When it was my cousin’s, briefly, he moved in two restored motorcycles and a pile of lightweight archery equipment and a fish tank from his stint at Petco. Now the house belongs to a realtor, and my grandmother has moved to Gurwin, Long Island’s premier retirement home for Jews.

We brought her chocolates, the orange blossom almond Lindt bars that she loved to buy from CVS, as a housewarming present. My grandma, my Sapta, has a tooth so sweet it could give itself a cavity. She hoards her recipes, which are parceled out to us in birthday cards lined with terse prose and shaky penmanship. “When you finish making this apple cake,” she says, “you can use the dough to make cookies. Very good cookies.”

 

Rosh Hashana Apple Cake

Flour. Butter. Sugar. Baking powder.

The real sugar, not the stevia drops my sister Abi squirts into her coffee. Not the moldering monk fruit packets my Dad refuses to travel without.

At least ten apples, chopped and not cored.

“You know Grandma,” my mother says. “So particular. Everything has to be cut the same way.” She’s never commented on my cutting.

Add a pinch of salt. Eggs.

My sister will not eat an egg. She will not eat anything with a texture that is slimy, or too-thin, or that tastes particularly gamey. She is a vegetarian now and has been for years. She even dove into a limiting veganism until my mother begged her to stop, citing her iron levels. When we were five, Abi would wail if she found a vein in her chicken breast. She’d screech and flee the table, the legs of my grandfather’s heavy dining set groaning against the floor.

Grease a tin with butter. Combine wet ingredients into the dry. Press into a pasty dough. Press again, into the smooth bottom of  your pre-greased pie tin.

It won’t work if you try to get creative and substitute coconut oil or the ghee my mother sneaks into my sister’s dinners. Just use butter.

Bake. 350 degrees.

It’s just butter. This shouldn’t be such a production. The world doesn’t revolve around you, Dad liked to say. And it doesn’t (you know this now). But the spinning is comforting.

While the crust bakes, chop apples into crescents. Use Honeycrisp and Gala, Golden Delicious if you’re daring. Remove the crust and let it cool. Soak apple slices in lemon juice to keep from browning. Dust with Ceylon cinnamon and brown sugar. Arrange apple slices in a circle, a flower, a heart. Punch out leftover dough for cookies you and your sister won’t touch.

I could bring a container of cookies for my grandmother, package her a slice of pie.

When my grandmother’s house was her own, there were always plants on the kitchen windowsill. Ferns and shrubs and spider plants. Now she has to look outside for a view of the  manicured shrubbery, a pale green echo of her garden.

“Your grandparents have green thumbs. I kill everything I touch,” my mother confessed. While my grandmother’s home was crowded with shades of sage and lime and forest, the only plant on my mother’s kitchen table was a sprouting avocado pit suspended over a jam jar half-filled with water. We prodded it with toothpicks. “Soon we’ll have an avocado tree!” my mother promised. “Fresh avocados for breakfast, every day!”

We never ate avocados at my grandmother’s house. I think that’s why my mother craved them. Why she’d suck on the pits and scrape the rinds. My Sapta could never give my mother what she craved, what she needed.

When my mother was my age, eight and ten and twelve, the line for the municipal pool snaked “down and around the block.” In the summers, when we visited, we marched seven minutes to the pool gates, swinging my grandmother’s pass on its green plastic band. We walked carefully, cautiously over the cracked sidewalks. Tripping here hurt. I scraped my butt on the concrete lip of the pool, gained a deep-seated fear of warts, and marveled at my cousin performing “egg drops” off the high dive. My grandmother kept watch from a lounge chair.

When we got over-heated, we went to Carvel. At Carvel, on a Wednesday, you could get two sundaes for the price of one. Two sundaes, two twins, one price! Vanilla swirl and chocolate sauce. Rainbow sprinkles for my sister, chocolate for me.

My grandmother used to keep tubes of dollar-store toothpaste under the bathroom cabinet. She once showed me how to use a fingertip-sized squeeze of toothpaste to shine silver. We rubbed her old brooches until they gleamed. We cleaned spots out of the cherrywood-bound silver set that my mother coveted. My Sapta loved to shop at the dollar store. Why would you shop anywhere else?

My grandmother kept an Edward’s Key Lime Pie frozen in her freezer, for visitors. Abi used to love key lime pie – anything lime green. My grandmother would take it out, let it defrost, and cut out a few slices. She kept a jar of wax yellow soup crackers that tasted like year-old Cheez-Its. She kept half-eaten bags of crystallized ginger in her bedside drawer. “My grandmother,” she whispered, “taught me to love it. She kept sugared ginger in a little velvet bag.”

 

Candied Ginger

1-pound fresh ginger root. 5 cups of water. 1 pound of granulated sugar.

Line a sheet tray with parchment paper. Peel the ginger root. Slice into inches and slice again into eighths. Boil.

Remove ginger, once tender. Drain. Add sugar?

I don’t know this recipe.

I don’t remember.

I’ve never succeeded at dehydration or rehydration. It’s easier to buy in bulk, to trust in my grandmother’s supply.

“She’d take it out for us, for the children,” my grandmother smiled. A secret, but a sweet one.

 

Plum Soup

Take ten plums from the fridge. Look at the black-and-white photo of your grandfather on the door as you take out the plums. Your Saba. Look at him. So young, so handsome. Can you believe that he once ate a pear right off the tree? His brother warned him not to touch a single fruit. But your grandmother was hungry, starving! He still ate a pear, but he didn’t use his hands. He nibbled around the core and left the stem attached.

Cut the plums in half at the old pine table. No, no. Slow down. Get your hair out of your eyes. There. That’s better, isn’t it? Now, chop them into quarters. Perfect. Isn’t this so much easier with your hair out of your eyes? You should always wear your hair like that, it looks better that way.

Find me the good pot. The one in the left lower cabinet, the drawer that sticks a bit. Pull it gently,  so it won’t fall out. Add the chopped plums to the pot. Have I ever told you about your great grandfather’s store? He sold everything, before they had to leave. Pots, pans, sure, but I liked the section with needles and ribbons and thread the best. Sometimes he would have me stand there, your great-grandfather, to make sure no one was stealing. All those women in winter with their long skirts, their hungry pockets.

Add half a cup of water. I never caught anyone stealing, you know. Sometimes I would steal, actually, slip ribbons or buttons into my pockets. Isn’t that funny? Do those pants of yours need a new button? I have a shoebox full of buttons, beautiful buttons. It’s just down the hall. No? Okay. Don’t forget to add the sugar! A cup. No, wait. Make it a cup and a half. We like things sweet.

Cook over low heat. Are you hungry? Can you wait? Yes? Okay. Are you sure you’re not hungry? Let it simmer. Here, set the table. Use the lace tablecloth. The pretty bowls. Isn’t that nice?

It’s important to know things like this. The right way to set a table. That you can polish silver with toothpaste. That lemon juice will give you beautiful highlights. Do you want some, some lemon for your hair? You looked so pretty with light hair. No? Okay. Remove from heat. Use the potholders. No, not the brown ones. The soft ones. Did you hear that your Cousin Amos thinks that your sister would get better if she ate one meatball per day? She’s a vegetarian!

Using a wooden spoon, push the plums through a sieve. There, nice and smooth! And that color! Your Mom once had a dress that color. She looked beautiful, she performed in it. She always was a dancer, your mother. She used to charge the kids in the neighborhood for a show. She’d hop onto the patio table and dance to the Beach Boys. Let cool until chilled – at least four hours.

Now the best part. Serve. Do you like it? Good. Have I ever told you about when your grandfather ate the pear?

Chicken noodle soup is comforting. Split pea is a classic. But I remember plum soup. The broth, tart and tender, violet and maroon. The spoon digging through the taut skin and pressing into the flesh. The sour bite in a tide of sugar water.

When I visit my grandmother now, we can’t cook. There’s no room, not in the cramped kitchen of her nursing home apartment. We find other things to do. We play pool in the game room (we don’t know the rules, so we just swing the sticks around). I bring her watery hot chocolates from the cappuccino machine. She tells the same stories, more and more and more now, rewarmed on low heat, as we flip through shuffled photo albums. I bring her half-melted ice cream scoops she can no longer eat. “Your mother takes such good care of me,” she says.

My mother rubs my grandmother’s calves where her compression socks leave patterns on her skin. She teaches herself about the oxygen tank. She takes my grandmother to the eye doctor and the hair salon and the dollar store for mango juice. She waits every night for my grandmother to fall asleep, safely cocooned in her child’s hands and the folds of her duvet.

I watch my mother care for my grandmother, watch the woman who raised me and loved me love another woman who loved me. My mother takes care of my grandmother, and my grandmother takes care of me, and I take care of my grandmother, and one day I will rub my mother’s feet and tuck my sister into bed. And I will remember, I promise I will remember. I will tell them how to make plum soup.

Eliana Gruvman

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Eliana Gruvman is a passionate reader, editor, and writer. She graduated from Fordham University with a degree in English and Spanish language and literature. She currently serves as Editorial Feedback Consultant and flash fiction editorial assistant at CRAFT, and previously interned for Gallery Books at Simon & Schuster and Ladderbird Literary Agency. Her work has been published on Fordham’s platforms—the Ampersand, MODE Magazine, Bricolage, and RELISH—and has been performed by Free Pizza Sketch Comedy.