I’m greeted immediately with the smells of garlic and oil and herbs. I follow my nose to the back of the house, where Sylvia isin the kitchen chopping onions and sautéing sprigs of rosemary—almost certainly from the garden. She turns around when she hears me, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
“Mamashana,” she says. “Let me see you.”
She takes me into a hug, and I feel her bony body in my arms. She’ll be ninety-two this fall, but the woman acts like she’s sixty. She let her hair go gray in her forties, so I don’t remember a time before it was silver—although it’s shorter now than it ever used to be. Her skin bruises, so she wears long sleeves, even in the summer, and she’s thinner, but she’s still so quintessentially Sylvia. She still wears mala beads in heavy strands around her neck, and canvas hats nearly everywhere, even inside, and wide-legged Indian-print pants. And she’s always barefoot. “The secret to a long life is to feel the ground,” she always tells me.
“Hi, G-money,” I say. I’ve been calling her that since childhood. Likely because she used to give me an extra allowance, although, like all things from memory, hard to know. “Where is everyone?”
I look around the house. A cookie jar—a butler, holding a bottle of champagne—sits proudly on the kitchen counter; I can remember it being stocked with knobby granola bars as a child. From the kitchen you can see straight back to the entry and directly out to the water. To the left of the kitchen is the living room with large, oversize paisley-print sofas, mismatched plaid and floral pillows, and an antique wood credenza. There’s also a grandfather clock that stands proud in the corner and a glass hutch that displays what feels like hundreds of different dishes and glassware. Sylvia has always loved to thrift.
She gives the oil and herbs a good stir.
“Your mother went for a walk; your father’s upstairs.” She setsthe wooden spoon she is using down. “And you are here. You want to help an old lady?”
I move to wash my hands at the sink. “I’d love to.”
She hands me some eggplant to skin and chop and then points to a basket of vine-ripened tomatoes. “I thought about putting together a little salad,” she says. “What do you think?”
I pull open the fridge, already searching.
“Top shelf,” she says, and I pull down the burrata. We grin at each other. Exactly what I was looking for.
Sylvia always cooks with a glass of wine, and in her hand now is a glass of white, beads of sweat running down the glass.
“You want one?” she asks me.
I pull a cup out of the china cabinet—something porcelain and round—and hand it to her in answer.
The kitchen has a door that leads to a bleached-out wooden deck that hangs over the sea, with steps down to the ocean. It’s still early—only five o’clock in the summer—and the sun is blazing high. The water is a stunning, sparkling blue.
“Where’s Leo?” she asks me.
I pick up an eggplant and start to skin it with a knife. “New York for work. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
When I was growing up I’d watch my grandmother in the kitchen every day. She always fed our family. My mom was never really that interested in cooking, and Dad can’t tell an orange from a spatula, so Sylvia did all the meals. Salads were from the garden, the wide array of ingredients dependent on the time of year. There’d be cucumbers in May, tomatoes in July, delicata squash and snap peas in September. Potatoes and zucchinis as the weather got cooler. When I started cooking, it felt like a language I’d once known as a child but had since forgotten.
I chop shallots, mix a tangy lemon-and-mustard-seed dressing with tarragon and olive oil. As I cook, my eye keeps being pulled out to the water. Sylvia notices.
“Why don’t you go find your mom?” she says. She takes a long sip of wine. “It’s early, yet. There’s plenty of time.” She sets her glass down. “You know Marcella. She’s probably out there worrying about the tide.”
“Ha,” I say.
My grandmother raises an eyebrow at me. “Worry gets you nowhere.” Another familiar refrain.
I laugh again. “Might be too late for that.”
She puts a hand tenderly on my shoulder. “It’s not ever too late,” she whispers. “I just took up Pilates.”
Sylvia has never told us what she used her do-over for, only that it happened a very long time ago. “Maybe a night with Kennedy,” she sometimes says. “You think Marilyn was the only one who shot her shot?” Or: “I once sold this house, regretted it, now it’s like it never even happened.” Or: “Oh, there could have been a small plane crash. Who would remember.”
The answer is always the same:It’s none of your business.
I give Sylvia a kiss on the cheek. She smells like her Pond’s cream, like she always does. The two most comforting scents in the world: the ocean and Pond’s face cream.
“Don’t lift the pots. They’re heavy,” I tell her.
She swats me away with a dish towel. “Still my kitchen. Get out!”
I follow her instructions, setting my shoes at the door and walking out onto the deck. My parents had the stairs redone about a decade ago because the sand had receded so much that the last step no longer reached the ground. It hung midair, and for a whilewe jumped, but as my parents got older it became less desirable—and of course Sylvia couldn’t visit the sand at all, so they sprung for some new stairs.
