With Love and Quiches (2 page)

My mother kept a kosher home, and most of the cooking in our house was quite simple—not too many sauces and nothing exotic. Ketchup was often the only condiment in the pantry. Even peanut butter was a bit too “out there.” Nevertheless, there was always a lot of very delicious food around—a Jewish tradition—and our extra refrigerator in the basement held the overflow of fruit and other goodies from the
two
refrigerators we had in the kitchen and pantry upstairs. Friday night dinners featuring two and sometimes three kinds of roasts weren’t thought of as anything special. And it was a family tradition
that we would turn on the record player and practice ballroom dancing before dessert. My parents were great dancers, and my brother and I followed suit; we would practice the mambo, tango, the Lindy, and even the Charleston!

In Bensonhurst, we had lived as one family with my mother’s oldest sister, and after our move to Neponsit, the sisters pined for each other. So within a year or two, my Uncle Phil, Aunt Mollie, and cousin Syril followed us across the Marine Parkway Bridge and built a house just two blocks away. We were once again living as one big family, only now we had to cut across the lawns of the two intervening houses to get back and forth, sort of like a grassy hallway between rooms.

My Aunt Mollie, like Evelina, spent all day in the kitchen cooking and baking, but she always rushed and had no patience for the rules. When making butter cookies, for example, she would never form even rolls and chill her dough to allow for nice, neat slicing; she would just break off pieces and press them onto the cookie sheet at random. So Aunt Mollie’s butter cookies always had crevices and thumbprints all over them when they came out of the oven, and because the thicknesses were so random, many of them featured dark little burns. But somehow Mollie’s Burnt Cookies, as we called them, were delicious anyway. I hung around Aunt Mollie’s kitchen a lot, as fascinated by her improvised methods as I was by Evelina’s careful culinary masterpieces.

I had plenty of cooking to watch, and I was captivated by all of it. Everybody was always cooking. Eating out was only for special occasions (that went for most American families at the time, not just ours).

When I was still quite small, before air travel became commonplace, we would travel by train once a year to Florida. We would take a Pullman compartment where the seats were made up into beds at night; very fancy, I thought. Once we got down South, there were orange groves as far as the eye could see, and the delicious fragrance of oranges permeated everything. We took all our meals in the dining car, where the tables were set with crisp linens and fine china; it was another time, another world. Though touted as Continental, the
cooking was largely Southern, and it
almost
rivaled Evelina’s cuisine. Even at my young age, I knew this was all quite special.

The Rockaways were a good place to be a kid. I grew up around a large group of neighborhood children from all walks of life, but we saw no differences among ourselves. We ran around in gangs, not cliques. We swam in the ocean until almost November, when our mothers would start screaming.

Once we were all in high school, we would congregate on Friday nights in one of Far Rockaway’s two movie theaters—either the RKO Strand or the Columbia. Far Rockaway was a good half-hour bus ride from where we lived, and on the way home, the bus driver would wait at each stop until we had all run down the block and into our houses. We were safe, but he did it anyway. A different world.

The Rockaways were so close to the city but a world away. Just across the Marine Parkway Bridge, in Brooklyn, were two nightclubs—Ben Maksik’s and The Elegante—that used to book the likes of Harry Bela-fonte and Frank Sinatra. At Ben Maksik’s, I once saw a grown woman crawl onto the stage to grab at Harry Belafonte’s bare feet before she could be stopped, a forerunner to later wild behavior at rock concerts. This club also booked Judy Garland for a two-week stint and, to our delight, rented my Aunt Mollie’s house for Ms. Garland’s family. I assume Liza Minnelli, still a young child, was part of that entourage. Sadly, it took less than one week for Ms. Garland to break her contract and
total
my aunt’s house. The nightclub agreed to pay for all the repairs and damage.

Many of my friends would one day have their Sweet Sixteen and engagement parties in these two nightclubs. The best one was my friend Cynthia’s party at The Elegante, where the show starred the then-unknown Supremes, with Diana Ross singing her heart out. They took the house down, and the rest is history.

My parents would take my brother and me, and sometimes my cousin Syril, nightclubbing on occasion, too.

These and many other nightclubs in the city used to serve Chinese food exclusively. In the fifties, Chinese food always meant Cantonese
cuisine: egg rolls, egg drop soup, spare ribs, egg foo young, chow mein—familiar Chinese “comfort food.” When my friends and I started dating, we would go in groups to various nightclubs, including the iconic Copacabana and the Latin Quarter in the city. They all served Chinese food and we ate a lot of it, as much as we did pizza. No sophisticated palates quite yet. This was all before disco took over.

This was the environment in which I grew up—happy but insulated. I wanted for nothing, but I knew nothing of the world. And as preparation for real life, my sheltered childhood worked against me precisely because nothing was expected of me. I had no role models and nothing to strive for because everything had already been worked out. My parents had no aspirations whatsoever for me. I was merely a girl. Their expectation was that I would graduate from college, maybe teach for a few years, and then get married, have my family, and become a housewife. I don’t blame them for this, as this was the norm nearly sixty years ago. Did it ever cross their minds that I could start my own business? Not in a thousand years.

I first laid eyes on Irwin Axelrod when I was thirteen and he was sixteen. I stepped into the school cafeteria and saw him sitting there, hair slicked back but with one long curl hanging down his forehead, T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve near one shoulder, leather motorcycle jacket hanging off the other shoulder. I immediately knew he was the one. The only problem, as I soon found out, was that he had a stable of other girlfriends. To my chagrin, it took me a while to prevail; he had two other girlfriends and would only call me every third day. He would pick me up in his father’s plumbing truck, and my favorite date would be to go to Coney Island or to walk the boardwalk in Far Rockaway with all its concessions. I liked Irwin so much that I waited out all the competition and finally got what I wanted.

Irwin was a rebel by nature, especially in school, but he always managed to get by through acing his final exams. But his work ethic was another matter. He’d gotten his working papers when he was fourteen, and he had a plum job at the movie theaters in Far Rockaway where all our friends hung out on Friday nights. It was the early fifties at the time (no computers), and his job was to take the train into the city with all the ticket stubs and bring them to the RKO offices in Rockefeller Center to be counted. He would sometimes be trusted to bring back the large cans of films to be shown that week, as well as the placards to be displayed out front with the coming attractions. He was also an usher. So we had undoubtedly crossed paths before we first met on that fateful day in the Far Rockaway High School lunchroom.

As Irwin’s dating pool dwindled down to just me in high school, I got to know his family. He did not come from wealth; the welfare kids had better baseball gloves than he did, and he would tell me it was hard to find a pair of socks that his brother’s feet hadn’t already been in. His mother was a very colorful character, a true eccentric, and mundane parental responsibilities like a supply of socks simply didn’t resonate with her. She didn’t own an iron, and once she even decided to break all the dishes rather than wash them. If Irwin got in trouble in high school, her idea of discipline was to go to the dean of boys with a bottle of scotch—a strategy that actually worked very well.

Looking back after many years of marriage, Irwin and I realized with great amusement that his family was in the food business long before I was. His grandmother was widowed while quite young, and she opened a kosher chicken market on Prospect Place in Brooklyn to support herself and her eight children, seven boys and one daughter. Thanks to her product, she earned the nickname Bubby Chickie.

Her husband had been a tailor and worked in the garment district in New York, but he never contributed much to the household. Decades after his death, a granddaughter asked Bubby Chickie for details about the man she had married but about whom so little was known. Through a relative who translated for her, the matriarch frankly replied, “He drank, he played cards, and that’s all you have to know.”

Bubby Chickie’s language was Yiddish, and she never learned or spoke any English at all. She was still in the poultry business when Irwin was a young boy, and he would hang around in her shop or in the horseradish stall next door, where the pungent odor of the freshly grated vegetable was something of an intoxicant. Once, Bubby Chickie allowed him to try his hand at flicking a chicken (i.e., plucking it). He got into big trouble because he broke the skin on the breast, a very bad thing to do because it rendered the chicken unsalable at full price and it had to go into the discount bin. The memory of the crime remains with him to this day.

Long after Bubby Chickie’s shop had become an institution, Irwin’s father also opened a chicken market, Louie’s Fresh Killed Chickens, in East New York, another part of Brooklyn. Bubby Chickie had given him $100 of seed money to get started. That business didn’t last too long, though, and Irwin’s father eventually became a plumbing contractor. More successful was the pickle truck owned by one of Irwin’s uncles; he would always allow Irwin to climb into the truck to choose any pickle he wanted out of the lined-up barrels. It was a long-ago forerunner of the current food-truck craze.

Regardless of his family’s experience in the industry I would adopt as my own, I remain eternally grateful that I met Irwin. His sense of humor is legendary, and through all that was ahead of us, he always kept me laughing.

Irwin and I married young. That wasn’t unusual in those days, but when I announced to my parents that Irwin and I had gotten engaged, they fought me tooth and nail. From the beginning, they had lobbied very hard against our match. I was rich and he was poor: it was as though I was marrying out of my religion. Of course they were right about me being young, but I knew I loved Irwin, and I was ready to marry him no matter what anyone said. I stubbornly argued my position and got my way—and I wouldn’t change a minute of it.

My parents finally gave up arguing, and just a few weeks short of my turning twenty, they gave us an elegant wedding in the grand ballroom of the famed Plaza Hotel in the city. Inevitably my father and mother came first to accept and then to love Irwin
almost
as much as I did. I had always known they would. I wouldn’t let anything get in the way of the end game, a stubborn streak that has always served me well—especially later, during my business life.

Irwin and I moved into our first one-bedroom apartment in Far Rockaway, a mixed neighborhood near to but a world away from exclusive Neponsit. In little more than two and a half years after the wedding, our family was complete; one boy and one girl had joined us in our 450-square-foot apartment. This was quite a bit sooner than we had planned. Little Andrew took the living room, and we joked that we kept his little sister, Joan, in a kitchen drawer. That actually wasn’t far from the truth: we kept her bassinet on the kitchen table except when we were eating, at which point Joan got moved to the linoleum floor. I had just gotten my undergraduate degree, but with the arrival of the children, my plan to teach high school English had to be shelved for the time being.

In the first years of our marriage, Irwin and I did what was expected of us. We became junior members of an exclusive country club on Long Island by virtue of my parents being members there. (We would
withdraw eventually, years later, after we realized our schedules, budget, and temperaments weren’t in tune with the country club life.)