Sleeping to the sounds of the Yankees being slaughtered by the Texas Rangers is nearly impossible.
“Can you bring the volume down just a hair?” is my typical request, as I nuzzle into the sheets, like a cat kneading its paws into a comfy sweater. I listen, a sleepy captive audience, to the announcer rattling off batting averages, anxious for the moment when, my live-in boyfriend, John, might turn on his wireless headphones. In the background, the stadium organ is winding up, but instead of a fiery foot- stomping rendition of “We Will Rock You,” the organist reels off a few drawn-out bars of a song that sends me back thirty-five years.
“Can you name that tune?” I ask softly, without opening my eyes.
“Sounds familiar,” he offers.
John is an insomniac who thrives on alpha waves and is vigilant about rooting for his favorite team -- right up to the last inning of the losing game. But, would a guy raised by a German immigrant father and a Native American mother recognize a Greek cultural anthem? I tell him it’s called “Zorba the Greek.”
“It’s a person, a song, and the title of a movie, I add, reaching for the earplugs, which are never too far from my side of the bed.
“Ever think of being on Jeopardy?” John asks dryly. He’s probably wondering if this is the movie starring the actor that looks like Aristotle Onassis.
Pulling a pillow over my head to blot out the flickering light of the television, I drift off and hear the music from memory.
Some days, Stacey Tillman and I walk home from school together. Today the aroma from Mom’s kitchen makes it all the way up Concord Avenue meeting us full on when we open the front door. She is baking something because the air is thick with browned butter. Dance music plays in the background. We set our books and coats down in the front vestibule.
“What music is that?” Stacey asks, completely dumbfounded.
“That’s ‘ba-zook-key’ music,” I answer, ashamed. While other housewives on our block are listening to pop, my mother is bustling around the house to Greek Muzak.
“I didn’t know you were Greek,” she says matter-of-factly.
“We’re not,” I reply flatly.
My father had recently started taking mandolin lessons, and every Thursday after he put in his eight hours selling cosmetics to “mom-and-pop” drugstores, a tutor would come to the house and wearily try to get my uncoordinated dad to manipulate the tiny strings. My sister and I had a running bet to see how long it would take before the beautiful mandolin with its rosewood neck became kindling. The year before, he had wrapped his nine iron around a tree out back, and the golf lessons were history.
My mother was up to her elbows in sheets of filo dough. The kitchen table was a wreck, scattered with wet dish towels and baking sheets. She pulled a tray out of the oven; it was full of triangular-shaped parcels that looked like apple turnovers but had a savory rather than a sweet smell. I curiously lifted one of the wet towels to see what was underneath.
“No, don’t touch!” she snapped, pulling the wet rag down. “It’s very important to keep the moisture in. Otherwise the sheets will break before I roll them.” She rarely improvised, following a recipe to the letter. “So, kiddo, how was show-and- tell, did anyone guess it right?” She looked up briefly and blotted her eye makeup with the back of a finger. She wasn’t exactly June Cleaver in pearls, but Mom was a definite looker. She had perfectly arched eyebrows above hazel eyes and wavy black hair, made even fuller with an additional “fall” that sat on the top of her head and cascaded down her back.
“Mom, no one knew they were rocks from the Acropolis,” I said acerbically, punishing her for making the suggestion in the first place. She was a Sunday archaeologist, and our house was filled with artifacts that surpassed common antique furnishings. Her style of decorating was eclectic. Ours was the only house where framed gravestone rubbings from ancient cemeteries hung beside crystal sconces and Mexican bark art.
“They thought I picked them off the street. I looked like an idiot!” I said. She swept her bangs to one side with the back of her wrist and in one motion pushed away my testiness.
My parents had recently returned from a trip to Athens and the Greek Islands. Had the Ministry of Antiquities known my mother had heisted a few pebbles from a national monument, they may never have let her leave the country. But they were smuggled past customs in the bottom of Dad’s cigarette pack. She loved the fact that a small piece of ancient Greece now resided on Long Island. On a previous trip to the Middle East they had returned with a Ziploc bag full of soil from Jerusalem. It had carefully been packed in their suitcase, sandwiched between layers of clothing, eluding airport security. “Isn’t it against the law to bring soil from a foreign country -- something about disease and bacteria?” I pointedly asked my father.
“Unless you want me to go to prison, don’t ever tell anyone it’s here!” he said with life-threatening seriousness. The bag of dirt remained well hidden in my father’s basement office for several years. It was a relic that we never spoke of until the day my grandfather was buried. Standing above the casket vault, my father pulled the bag from his overcoat and scattered the contents over the simple wooden box. They were straight, law-abiding citizens, but each of them had a passion and for this they bent the rules.
“Can Stacey stay for dinner?” I asked, picking at the dried scraps that sat in a heap on the table. “What are we having?” The stuff was paper-white and dry as parchment paper. I figured this was the mistake pile that got too much air.
“Oh my, I didn’t even get the chicken in the oven. It’s Friday!” she blurted, dropping her pastry brush, sticky with oil, and covering up her pastry sheets with the delicacy of handling a Fabergé egg. “Chicken, noodle kugel, and cantaloupe, same as every Friday,” she recited by rote, moving into multitask mode. We weren’t a religious family by any means: we ate bacon on Sunday mornings and only attended synagogue on the High Holy Days, or for an occasional bar mitzvah. Both of my parents were Jews who believed that the way to keep the religion alive was to eat the food their parents ate. The only requirements for my siblings and me as we grew to adulthood would be to eat roast chicken and kugel every Friday night -- and to marry Jewish.
“So what’s this stuff for?” I asked, looking at the odd pastries and moving over to the pan of kugel that sat on the stove. The tops of the thin egg noodles were golden, and the rich smell reminded me of grandma’s kitchen.
“The borekas are for the girls,” she said, dragging a five-pound roaster out of the fridge. She quickly assembled the ingredients and starting rubbing it down with a paste of garlic powder, paprika, and vegetable oil. It was always a big chicken on Friday nights. Dad spent the rest of the weekend picking at the cold meat, washing it down with Old Milwaukee beer.
“The canasta girls?” I asked.
Mom was moving her trays of dough around the kitchen, looking for any available counter space, balancing them wherever they wound up. She reminded me of the guy that spun plates on the Ed Sullivan show.
“No, not canasta,” she said, licking the garlic from a finger, the way I would if it were frosting. She’d been spending more time with a group of sisterhood gals, whose Sephardic parents had come over from Greece and Turkey. Unlike her longtime canasta friends, Diane and Barbara, whose parents were Ashkenazi, these new friends were colorful and loud, with names like Joya, Ida, and Gay. They wore heaps of gold costume jewelry, which highlighted their angular features and almond-shaped eyes. The religion was the same; the differences in interpretation were subtle enough to be dismissed. The Yiddish-raised “girls” were conventional in style and infinitely dissimilar to the foreign “girls”, whose lineage had been born of assimilation.
“The mah-jongg girls?” I asked.
She placed the bird into a pan and lavished it with some more garlic, the way some ladies used talc.
“No, not mah-jongg,” she replied.
Stacey picked up the phone receiver and dialed her mother to let her know that she was home from school.
“You staying to eat?” I asked, while the numbers were still spinning on the rotary dial. It seemed that every night was spaghetti-and-meatball night at their house. It may have been the only thing that Bunny Tillman knew how to cook -- or that because of its simplicity she could work on her abstract paintings up until the last second before feeding her family. When Stacey had a sleep-over party for her ninth birthday, we were allowed to hang out in her folks’ room, out of the way of the older brothers, while Bunny and Hal watched television by candlelight in the den. We locked the door for privacy, and twelve of us crammed onto their king-sized platform bed to play strip poker. We laughed at each other’s underwear, and stayed up all night. We sang, “Come on...come on...come on and touch me babe. Can’t you see that I am not afraid…?”
Bunny wouldn’t let her daughter watch the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows thinking that it would give her daughter nightmares. But for Bunny, the idea of a bunch of flat-chested girls jumping up and down in their Carter’s was just fine.
I noticed a travel brochure stuck behind the phone, advertising a hotel in “the beautiful Catskill Mountains” where your “vacation awaits you.” A blue-paper insert had the word L-A-S-H-A in bold type and Greek Get Away underneath that. Now it was all making sense, I thought. These newly found friends had enlisted my parents into some cult. Was the Ladies Auxiliary Sephardic Home for the Aging responsible for this strange immersion in Greek culture? I quickly assessed that their leader had brainwashed my parents under the pretense of Judaism. I felt suddenly sick, and the temperature in the kitchen rose so quickly I could feel my ears burning. I just wanted my family to be like everyone else’s. I missed the days when Johnny Mathis was the only record Dad listened to. And what was the story with all the dark eyeliner and mascara that Mom was wearing? I wanted to go to Disneyworld, not the boondocks of upstate New York with a bunch of bazuki-loving senior citizens! I glared at my mother as if she were a Stepford wife.
Stacey was speaking quietly to her mother around the corner of the kitchen, the long phone cord stretched beyond recognition to reach the next room.
“Nah, we’re having leftovers,” she announced. By that she meant second-day spaghetti and meatballs. But it won out over our traditional Jewish menu and whatever Greek side dish --which were our leftovers.
Stacey always had to be home before 4:00 p.m. That’s when I dutifully watched the newest episode of Dark Shadows; Bunny knew that if Stacey stayed she’d be captivated. She’d leave our house and hit the local Carvel for a thick shake on the way home. It would fill her belly and stave off her appetite for one more serving of Italian food.
I ran into the bedroom I shared with my sister and, like a tight-rope speed walker, paced the invisible line that ran down the center.
“Don’t even think about it,” Lisa growled without taking her nose out of a book. She must have sensed that at any moment I would pounce.
Oblivious to her mood, which was distinctively pensive; I wanted only for her to keep me company. She was a serious girl with long black hair, dark eyes, and an acute set of boundaries. I wasn’t allowed to join her friends when they came over to the house, and was by no means supposed to speak to her when we passed each other in the corridor at elementary school. Lisa was three years older and light years aloof. She had been on the defensive since my parents brought me home from the hospital; repulsed by my in-your-face style of affection. We were nothing alike and I adored her. She managed through nine years with as little contact with me as possible. Then my parents had a baby, and I was forced to move into her room.
“Come on…it’s four o’clock!” I pleaded from my side of the line.
She snapped the box closed and looked at me with contempt. “Okay, and then leave me alone!”
We did have one thing in common: the mystery of the alluring vampire Barnabas Collins and his beautiful wife, the haunting witch, Angelique. The show was pure escapism from our day-to-day confines; an exotic realm miles away from split-level suburbia.
In 1970 it seemed everyone, young and old, was looking to escape somewhere, somehow. The death toll from the war in Vietnam was over 34,000, the Ohio National Guard had opened fire, shot, and killed four students at Kent State, and even though the album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, by Simon & Garfunkel won three Grammy awards, Vice President Spiro Agnew stated that the song was about heroin addiction.
Mom was scooping up the last of the filling for her borekas; a slurry of chopped spinach, eggs, and feta cheese. I took a quick count of the number of pieces she had prepared. There were several dozen, with a tray still in the oven.
“What girls are these for?” I asked.
“The belly dancers,” Mom said with a wink.
Tomorrow she’d walk through the doors of Isadora’s Dance Studio, armed with borekas and a heap of gold jewelry; she’d leave the status quo and enter the sublime.
Joya’s Spinach Boreka Filling
Ingredients:
1 (16 ounce) bag frozen, chopped spinach,
thawed and drained in a colander
2 eggs, beaten with 1 tablespoon water, divided
1/4 pound feta cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
Salt and black pepper, to taste
1/2 teaspoon za'atar (a Middle Eastern spice mixture), optional
1 box prepared filo dough (frozen food section of market)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Combine all filling ingredients, reserving 1 tablespoon of the egg wash for the tops of the borekas.
3. Spray a large cookie sheet with non-stick cooking spray.
4. Remove filo dough from it’s box, unroll entire package and using a pair of sharp kitchen scissors or knife, divide dough in half creating two long stacks. Immediately cover with a dampened towel.
5. Remove one sheet of dough at a time. Brush with vegetable oil. Place 3-4 heaping tablespoons of filling at one end of dough strip. Form the borekas into a triangle by lifting the right corner up to the left. Continue folding parcel up the entire strip of dough until a triangular parcel is formed.
6. Paint with the egg wash and sprinkle with the za'atar or sesame seeds.
7. Bake the borekas in the center of the preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until puffy and golden brown.
Makes 10 large borekas.
As puberty crept up and I became a passive passenger on a roller coaster of hormones, there’d be days that I just couldn’t shake the blues. It was a Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario that would haunt me for most of my fertile years. I never thought to look at the cause; my body was gearing up for a wham-bam of reproductive activity. I only saw the symptoms, which were moodiness and the ability to bite someone’s head off. My mother, Champion of Chocolate, held the key to my happiness. We were driving in her car one night, a flame-red Cadillac sedan DeVille, when she turned to me and said, “How’s about a hot fudge sundae?” They were words of salvation.
