The Best American Essays 2016 (12 page)

N
OW AND THEN
I click a link to find out what the hipsters are up to. The hipsters are raising chickens and slaughtering them at home, I read; the hipsters are distilling hooch. This is trendy and far out and probably how we should all live, despite being smelly and arduous. No doubt they have it right, the hipsters, and if they are fermenting cheese and spritzing meat into sausage casings in Brooklyn, then surely we will soon follow them in the lesser metropolises. But the romance of do-it-yourself is tainted for me. I cannot muster up the enthusiasm to kill my own rabbit and pickle it. There is a droning voice in my head that says, You do this because you never had to. You do it because you do not know the humiliation and occasional physical danger of an immigrant father who held on to his past using food. You do this because the ethics of the undertaking are clear to you, and you don’t—yet—understand the exquisite liberation of food that comes from a supermarket.

First, and last, and every time, above all things, was The Wine. It was never just wine, it was always The Wine, that year’s massive household production, the gravitational pull of which none of us could escape. This is not because my father came from the country. He was a city boy par excellence, but he could remember days when Bucharest had dirtier hands, or at least cleaner dirt on its hands. He used to tell me with a grin how when he was a child, chickens were always bought alive. The housewives would go out to the street with a knife and flag down a passing man to kill the bird they wanted to cook for dinner. Businessmen who wanted to display their machismo refused the knife and wrung the chicken’s neck barehanded. This was the old Bucharest, when my father’s father still had his sausage factory, when salami still hung in their attic to cure and my father was responsible for tending to it. It was when my grandfather still made his own wine.

After we had moved through two new countries and multiple apartments in each, after we had finally settled in a house in the blandest cookie-cutter suburbs we could find, my father started to talk about making wine. Enough moving around and you’ll want to reach for a bit of what was good back home. Enough moving around and you’ll want to drink, I suppose. The decision to start making wine was helped along by the fact that alcohol sales are controlled by a government monopoly in Ontario, the LCBO, leading to small selection and high prices for a liquid as essential to Romanians as milk is to white-bread North American families. My father saw this as the oppressive fruit of Canadian puritanism, and he set about staging his own private revolution. In this, he had the help of “the Italians,” purveyors of everything needed by the suburban vintner with Old World sensibilities: massive bottles, special corks to let the gas out, industrial quantities of grapes, and the facilities for turning them into must. I was in my early teens at this point, still excited by the enterprise and even a little proud. As my father studied the chemistry of winemaking with the assiduousness of the university professor he had once been, I designed wine labels on the computer with the title
CASA DUMITRESCU
, and struggled to align a sheet of sticky labels in our dot-matrix printer so that the graphic would come out right. It was not very good wine, though back then I couldn’t tell, but it was ours and it was cheap. My father calculated the cost per liter to two dollars, a magnificent savings to our family over retail wine, and clearly a wise financial move.

A fifty-gallon barrel cut in two will provide two excellent stomping vats. The heftier children and maiden aunts with heavy bottoms will be delighted to do the treading to the accompaniment of a tarantella or lively Irish jig.

Soon enough, our own Casa Dumitrescu became more crowded, as my surviving three grandparents came over from Romania and moved in with us. My grandfather was aged and absent by then, but I still remember him making sausage once, his trembling hands struggling to work the sturdy old meat grinder. My father became more ambitious in his winemaking, deciding that the Italians were good for grapes but that he did not trust their pulping machines not to adulterate his must with traces of other varietals. He went to Price Club, the daddy of Costco and perennial favorite of immigrant families in search of a deal, and bought a giant gray plastic garbage bin. This he carefully washed out, set up in our garage, and filled with muscat grapes. And then, for days on end, my two grandmothers and I stood around this bin and squeezed grapes. With our bare hands. I do not know if you have any experience of making must in this way, but muscats are tough, tight little berries, and you have to strain to crush every last one, and each bunch of grapes made our hands ache even more. My grandmothers and I tried to work out how we might get one of us into the garbage bin to apply feet to our common problem, but it was narrow and had two wheels at the bottom, and hopping in seemed an unsafe, if tempting, proposition. So we squeezed on into the night, tired but not thinking to question my father’s imperative. This was, after all, The Wine.

At some point it occurred to my father that the price-gouging, racketeering deviousness of the Ontario government was not limited to wine; a greater injustice was also being perpetrated. A typical Romanian meal begins with plum brandy,
Țuică
in Romanian, or
slivovitz
as it is more widely known in Eastern Europe. Now, while fine wines could be had at extortionate prices, Țuică was hard to come by at all in the LCBO stores, and even when available, it was inevitably industrially produced and tasteless. The situation has improved over the years, but if you wanted a decent Țuică in the nineties, you had to smuggle it back from Romania, nonchalantly lying to the customs officer at Pearson Airport and hoping she did not discover the four quarts of hard liquor in plastic bottles and various massive country salamis and cheeses nestled among, and stinking up, your clothing.

But my father, an engineer who had designed a bridge to go over the Danube and paper-light satellites that went into space, and who, even more breathtakingly, had failed two terminally stupid students with parents high up in the Communist Party—failed them not once, not twice, but three times, until the dean took the exams out of his hands to protect him from his own probity—my father was not going to be frustrated in his basic, Romanian male desire for plum brandy at dinner. My father could design a joint for the Canadarm and a wind tunnel for testing airplanes. My father could assemble Ikea furniture efficiently and without error. My father sure as hell could put together his own still.

Now here was more treacherous territory, for while Ontarians were allowed to make wine and beer to their hearts’ content, hooch was another matter. You couldn’t just have a bunch of grandmas and a teenage girl making it in open daylight. This was closed-garage-door business. The garbage bins multiplied. Now there were some for fermenting plums, some that held a mix of fruit from our own backyard, and just to make any foray into the garage as confusing as possible, a few with enough pickled cabbage and cauliflower to keep a Transylvanian village free of scurvy for a winter. A metal boiler appeared from somewhere, as did a large plastic bucket and some copper tubing. And a spout. My father explained to me the physics of the thing (he was always so good at teaching what he wanted to teach): how the alcohol would be first to vaporize in the boiler due to its lower boiling point, how it would travel up through the copper tubing he had painstakingly coiled and, upon reaching the bucket filled with cold water, would condense and drip out of the spout into a waiting bottle.

The experiment was a success. After his first year of lonely distillation, my father’s friends began fermenting plums in their homes too. Groups of them gathered in our garage in the evening, in the hazy yellow light of the one bulb hanging from the ceiling, and took turns boiling their own Țuică in his still. They smoked and talked for hours, watching single drops emerge from the spout. It took ages to fill a bottle, and they probably consumed the liquor much faster than they made it. But even then I suspected the true draw was the solitude of the process, the absence of nagging wives, children, and elderly parents, the heavy fumes of hot alcohol, the trancelike peace of drip, drip, drip.

In many regions, blackbirds, sparrows, catbirds, robins, and larks are purely destructive and a menace to crops. People now and then complain that their cherries, raspberries, strawberries, or blueberries are entirely eaten by the birds.

Making liquor happened also to be an ecologically responsible hobby, as my father insisted on using the sparse fruit that grew in our yard for experimental blends: a few cherries produced by our insect-decimated trees, some bruised strawberries I had painstakingly planted and tended, the riotous bounty of a raspberry bush that grew beyond our expectations. And then there was the grapevine. Our dining room opened out onto a tiled patio covered by a wooden trellis. My father planted grapevines at the base of the posts that held up the sides of this trellis, and after a while, with a bit of care and nudging and wires to guide them in the right direction, the vines worked their way up the posts and over the wood slats. Their leaves grew large and gave cool shade in the summer. They even grew fruit. But the berries never really ripened; the grapes disappeared or fell to the ground still hard, a source of unending frustration to my father. We found out that the culprit was a raccoon that liked to clamber all over our trellis, disturbing the delicate grapes. Thus began the feud between one, or perhaps more, Upper Canadian raccoon and an East European professor of engineering, and if you have ever had any dealings with raccoons you probably already know who won.

My father began by hanging bells from the trellis, hoping to scare the beast away with noise. Raccoons are not frightened by the tinkling of bells. Then he bought a foul-tasting substance that he painted around the bottoms of the posts, so as to prevent the raccoon from climbing up them. But the trellis was attached to the roof, so the raccoon could reach the vine that way. Clearly it was time for more extreme measures. My father went to Price Club and bought two weapons, a plastic pellet rifle and a pellet pistol. These he placed on the dining room table, so that if he happened to hear or see a raccoon he could quickly grab a firearm on his way out. When we protested, he insisted he did not want to kill the raccoon, simply to scare it away from the grapes, which had, after all, been destined for greater things. After a few weeks of having two plastic guns lying ready on our table as if we were the Hatfields expecting a visit from the McCoys, my mother put her foot down and made him take them back to the store.

Things were at a standstill when I came back from school one day to find my father covered in blood. Covered in blood, and angry. The story went like this. He had been in the kitchen chopping onions with a large chef’s knife when he heard a rustling on the patio. He rushed out of the house, knife still in hand, and there it was: the raccoon. He looked at the animal. It stared right back at him, unfazed. Exactly what happened next is unclear, but there seems to have been a skirmish. My father lunged at the raccoon with his knife, and at the last moment the animal moved out of the way. The knife tip stuck in the wooden post, the blade broke off from the handle, but my father’s hand kept going in its trajectory along the blade. The raccoon escaped unharmed. My father never tried to salvage any of the grapes again.

This was the way things worked in the logic of do-it-yourself. What began as an eminently practical proposition would soon get out of hand. Always, behind the inanities of our everyday existence there were two unassailable arguments: it was cheaper to do things this way, and it was authentically Romanian, part of our identity. I found it easy to argue against the first. Few normal families buy at retail the amount of wine we produced in a year, so it was hard to be convinced of the great savings involved. We would have simply drunk less, and had fewer authentically Romanian family fights in the middle of dinner, if our wine had cost ten dollars a liter instead of two. But the nod to tradition was harder to counteract because it spoke to something I felt too. True, I longed to eat out in restaurants and use ready-made salad dressings, as native Canadian families did. Still, even then I could tell there were dishes in our cuisine that were better than anything Canada had to offer, and that they were worth extra effort, a bit of sweat, a few burns and cuts. There was an element of community in it too, because you made massive amounts of food and drink partly so you could serve it to other Romanians at parties. Even in a huge city like Toronto, with its thousands of immigrants, there were few Romanian restaurants, and no good ones. If we wanted the food of home we had to make it or have friends who made it. Ideally, everybody prepared his or her own version, and the evenings after a gathering could be spent in fruitful discussion about whose recipe for cabbage rolls was best, whose cooking had too much Hungarian influence, which live-in grandmother was the most gifted baker, whose wine was never going to be as good as my father’s.

I think this feeling of diasporic togetherness is part of why my father got involved with the lambs. He had a younger coworker who ran a farm north of Toronto, an Italian, and therefore automatically a kindred soul. More important, he raised sheep. The succulent memory of a party where a bunch of Romanians set up a spit in their yard and roasted a lamb on it must have gotten to my father because he set about coordinating a mass purchase of lambs for the coming Easter. Fourteen families were in: each would buy half a lamb, and my father would organize it all with his Italian engineer-cum-farmer friend. The deal got messy, for predictable reasons. There were seven lambs ordered for fourteen families, but every family wanted the front part. It was not unusual at that time to hear my father furiously slamming the telephone down and yelling, “I told them at the start,
they
have to decide who gets the ass and who gets the head!”