Beneath the veneer of her cleaning, Grandma Dion’s hospitality was a lot like my mom’s—aggressive, good-natured, and generous—but possibly a little more insistent. She was a bit of a food pusher, Grandma.
“Want some sauerkraut hotdish?” she’d ask, pointing to a layered casserole of noodles, ground beef, sauerkraut, and cheese. If you declined, she snorted with genuine shock. Despite the name, it was quite good. The rusty browned shoulders of ground beef bobbed in the sauce, and the lingering tartness of the kraut made the pads at your jaw shudder and tingle. Digging up a deep forkful made a rich sticky sound, as if the hotdish were taking a deep breath, and that sound was a comfort in itself. No one with any sliver of hunger inside them would rightly turn down her sauerkraut hotdish, which she often served to us kids to-go: in Dixie paper cups impaled with plastic forks. This she considered a snack, and we were strongly urged to take it.
She had a word for people who turned down food just because they weren’t particularly hungry, who denied themselves the pleasure of eating in the interest of keeping themselves fashionably bony: gemikli. It sounds like its definition. “You know, not thriving,” she’d say with a scornful smirk, “undernourished.” The implication was that people, especially women, who kept themselves thin didn’t know how to feed themselves, had no appetite for life, and, worse yet, were vain. The subtext here is that when you really know how to cook and to feed yourself, food is not your enemy.
Her behavioral code was forged during a time when “getting your fill” was an art, not a caution. This included drinking, too. Uptight she was not. If anything, she pretended to drink more than she actually did, just to foster a spirit of generosity and goodwill. Like a speck of dirt in her house, all excesses around her table were swiftly swept away. Temporary muck, nothing to worry about if you could function in the morning.
And that’s exactly what she was doing the morning after I brought Aaron to meet her: flipping strips of bacon stacked three deep in a cast-iron pan, calmly making breakfast like we hadn’t all been hanging out around her table until three in the morning. She was clanging things around to make noise, to let some of us know that she was already up and working. The sound of her whacking her spatula against the pan’s edge, along with the familiar scent of that bacon’s sharp smokiness, dragged me from sleep.
So did her voice. “Aaaay-meee…Are we going to make this bread in my lifetime?”
She was in her late seventies, so I got her point. I clomped down from the bed and stumbled across the hall to find Aaron. He was sleeping in what was known as “the green room,” for it was unspoken that we shouldn’t sleep together as we had for the previous year out of respect for the Catholic church I so rarely attended. I looked into his eyes. His face, against the backdrop of the foliage-printed drapery, was tinted limey. “Your skin looks green,” I said, my speech slow. “But maybe it’s just this room.”
“I don’t know, but you don’t look so good, either.”
“Holy shit, I have to go make bread now. I don’t think I can do it.” I fell backward next to him on the bed.
“Kidlets!” Addie barked sharply from the kitchen. “It is time to rise and meet the day! We have got to get this show on the road.”
“How can she be up? What time is it?” Aaron asked. We had been up half the night drinking with Addie and her boyfriend, Izzy. Tall and lean like Aaron, with a vintage-looking ivory forelock, Izzy was a retired salesman who had a stockpile of personalized freebies at the ready: pens, money clips, pads of paper. His positive energy was best described as rollicking, a whitecapped wave that spilled over to consume my grandma’s occasional dourness. Izzy’s high cheeks shone pinker every time he said, “Well, that is just wonderful!,” which was often.
At twenty-one, I had never been more in love with Addie and her larger-than-life outline, or with her ebullient Izzy, or with my own boyfriend, who had been willing to accompany me for what would be the final episode of my informal cooking training. Addie called these sessions “workshops” and in my early teens I had come to her house to learn how to make pie, and fermented pickles, and poppy-seed coffee cake—the most renowned things in her repertoire. Now I was here to make her white bread, for which she was not too shy to say that she’d earned the grand champion ribbon at the Minnesota State Fair when she was just a teenager, triumphantly beating out a bunch of outraged middle-aged women. I can’t say I wasn’t afraid of screwing up the bread. I knew that she wouldn’t let me off easy. Of her six grandchildren, she often reminded me, I was the only girl of the bunch.
At one point the night before, I had gotten up to change the record in her enormous turntable console. The last thing I remember clearly was cranking on the turntable’s arm to start the second side of Anne Murray’s Greatest Hits and feeling pretty sure that I had broken her record player. Then, somewhere in between the beers we’d cracked at happy hour and the brandy Manhattan nightcaps we’d sipped at the kitchen table, we had driven to the bar—which now, the next morning, I was starting to isolate as the moment we got into real trouble. After dinner, as my grandma and I did the dishes—she carefully washing, me drying every crevice in each crusty glass with a flour-sack towel that was simultaneously stiff, bleached with holes, and overly fabric-softened—Aaron, the human jukebox, played his guitar. He pulled out the old country hits he knew she and Izzy would like, his clear tenor bouncing around the linoleum kitchen and surrounding us until we felt like we were back in a rural dance hall in 1952. One of his own songs really fired Addie up. “I love the Ponsford life—I heard Marie—she was hollerin’ loud, she was just calling her dog’s name out—dumb dog got sprayed on the porch once again, when will that dog learn the skunk won’t give in.”
“Whoooo!” she called, cranking her rag hard to wring all moisture from it and slapping it over the faucet neck. “What do you think? I’m pretty sure we can make last call at the Rooster!”
The next thing we knew we were piling onto the wide bench seats of Izzy’s Buick and floating down the highway to Genola, one town over. Just as we liked the same music, we all liked a spacious Buick. We spilled out at the Red Rooster, where Aaron played his guitar and held the bar’s frontline captive—or they held him captive, depending on how you look at it. His stack of wooden chips (good for future drinks) piled up dangerously in front of him as the crowd begged him to play “Small Town Saturday Night” over and over again. When we got home, we handed over the chips to Addie, who officiously dumped them into a small urn full of drink chips sitting on her dresser.