If she fails to drink her usual three cups during the morning, by noon she will be as fidgety as a frustrated fly buzzing against a windowpane. If she doesn’t pour down eight by bedtime, she lies awake, so mentally active that she not only counts sheep by the thousand but also names them and develops an elaborate life story for each.
Dad believes that Maddy’s topsy-turvy metabolism is a direct result of the fact that her father was a long-haul trucker who ate Nō-Dōz caffeine tablets as if they were candy.
Maybe so, Mom sometimes answers my father, but what are you complaining about? When we were dating all you had to do was get five or six cheap coffees into me, and I was as pliable as a rubber band.
As September 15, 1994, drew near, my father’s worry expressed itself in fallen cakes, curdled custard, rubbery pie crusts, and crème brûlée that had a sandy texture. He could not concentrate on his recipes or his ovens.
I believe that I handled the anticipation reasonably well. In the last two days leading up to the first of those five ominous dates, I might have walked into more closed doors than usual, might have tripped more often than is customary for me when climbing the stairs. And I do admit to dropping a hammer on Grandma Rowena’s foot while trying to hang a picture for her. But it was her foot, not her head, and the one instance when a trip led to a fall, I only tumbled down a single flight of steps and didn’t break anything.
Our worry was kept somewhat in check by the fact that Grandpa Josef had given Dad five “terrible days” in my life, not just one. Obviously, regardless of how grim September 15 might be, I would not die on that day.
“Yes, but there’s always the possibility of severed limbs and mutilation,” Grandma Rowena cautioned. “And paralysis and brain damage.”
She is a sweet woman, my maternal grandmother, but one with too sharp a sense of the fragility of life.
As a child, I had dreaded those occasions when she insisted on reading me to sleep. Even when she didn’t revise the classic stories, which she often did, even when the Big Bad Wolf was defeated, as he should have been, Grandma paused at key points in the narrative to muse aloud on the many gruesome things that might have happened to the three little pigs if their defenses had not held or if their strategies had proved faulty. Being ground up for sausages was the least of it.
And so, less than six weeks after my twentieth birthday, came the first of my five ordeals….
At nine o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, September 14, my parents and I met in their dining room to have as heavy a dinner as we might be able to stand up from without our knees buckling.
We were also gathered to discuss once more the wisest strategies for getting through the fateful day that lay just three hours ahead of me. We hoped that in a prepared and cautious state of mind, I might reach September 16 as unscathed as the three little pigs after their encounter with the wolf.
Grandma Rowena joined us to speak from the point of view of the wolf. That is, she would play the devil’s advocate and relate to us what flaws she saw in our precautions.
As always, we took dinner on gold-rimmed Raynaud Limoges china, using sterling-silver flatware by Buccellati.
In spite of what the table setting suggests, my parents are not wealthy, just securely middle class. Although my father makes a fine salary as a pastry chef, stock options and corporate jets don’t come with his position.
My mother earns a modest income working part-time from home, painting pet portraits on commission: mostly cats and dogs, but also rabbits, parakeets, and once a milk snake that came to pose and didn’t want to leave.
Their small Victorian house would be called humble if it weren’t so cozy that it feels sumptuous. The ceilings are not high and the proportions of the rooms are not grand, but they have been furnished with great care and with an eye to comfort.
You can’t blame Earl for taking refuge behind the living-room sofa, under the claw-foot tub in the upstairs bath, in a clothes hamper, in the pantry potato basket, and elsewhere during the three interesting weeks that he adopted us. Earl was the milk snake, and the home from which he’d come was a sterile place with stainless-steel-and-black-leather furniture, abstract art, and cactuses for houseplants.
Of all the charming corners in this small house where you might read a book, listen to music, or gaze out a many-paned window at a bejeweled winter day, none is as welcoming as the dining room. This is because to the Tock family, food—and the conviviality that marks our every meal—is the hub that turns the spokes that spin the wheel of life.
Therefore, the luxury of Limoges and Buccellati.
Considering that we are incapable of pulling up a chair to any dinner with less than five courses and that we regard the first four, in which we fully indulge, as mere preparation for the fifth, it is miraculous that none of us is overweight.
Dad once discovered that his best wool suit had grown tight in the waist. He merely skipped lunch three days, and the pants were then loose on him.
Mom’s caffeine tolerance is not the most significant curiosity regarding our unusual relationship to food. Both sides of the family, the Tock side and the Greenwich side (Greenwich being my mother’s maiden name), have metabolisms as efficient as that of a hummingbird, a creature which can eat three times its body weight each day and remain light enough to fly.
Mom once suggested that she and my father had been instantly attracted to each other in part because of a subliminal perception that they were metabolic royalty.
The dining room features a coffered mahogany ceiling, mahogany wainscoting, and a mahogany floor. Silk moiré walls and a Persian carpet soften all the wood.
There is a blown-glass chandelier with pendant crystals, but dinner is always served by candlelight.
On this special night in September of 1994, the candles were numerous and squat, set in small but not shallow cut-crystal bowls, some clear and others ruby-red, which fractured the light into soft prismatic patterns on the linen tablecloth, on the walls, and on our faces. Candles were placed not only on the table but also on the sideboards.
Had you glanced in through a window, you might have thought not that we were at dinner but that we were conducting a séance, with food provided to keep us entertained until at last the ghosts showed up.
Although my parents had prepared my favorite dishes, I tried not to think of it as the condemned man’s last meal.
Five properly presented courses cannot be eaten on the same schedule as a McDonald’s Happy Meal, especially not with carefully chosen wines. We were prepared for a long evening together.
Dad is the head pastry chef for the world-famous Snow Village Resort, a position he inherited from his father, Josef. Because all breads and pastries must be fresh each day, he goes to work at one o’clock in the morning at least five and often six days a week. By eight, with the baking for the entire day complete, he comes home for breakfast with Mom, then sleeps until three in the afternoon.
That September, I also worked those hours because I had been an apprentice baker for two years at the same resort. The Tock family believes in nepotism.
Dad says it’s not really nepotism if your talent is real. Give me a good oven, and I am a wicked competitor.
Funny, but I am never clumsy in a kitchen. When baking, I am Gene Kelly, I am Fred Astaire, I am grace personified.
Dad would be going