whipped cream); or, on birthdays, my favorite, Auntie’s chocolate cake, a moist, sour-milk, two-layer concoction spread thickly with Jennie’s soft, white frosting and covered in grated coconut. As a child I loved to watch the vinegar—Heinz’s white, not my grandfather’s red—start to sour the warm milk. If I stared long enough I could see the milk begin to thicken and coagulate from the chemical reaction with the vinegar. When the cake was pulled from the oven, leaving moist, dark crumbs on the toothpick tester, I loved the sight of it sitting on a cake plate in the center of any of the tables from my childhood, whether it was my birthday or somebody else’s.
Jennie and Tony, Great-Uncle Pete, Great-Aunt Philly, Deedee, Auntie and Uncle, Cousin Jo, Cousin Al, my mother: all are gone today, along with all the other great-aunts and great-uncles, and nearly all the second and third cousins who used to join us on special occasions. My grandparents’ generation produced few children, my parents’ generation even fewer. Aside from me, the only ones left from that great crowd of family that used to celebrate Sundays and birthdays together are my father and brother, and Auntie’s son, my lone first cousin, Paul.
I never lost the recipe for Auntie’s birthday cake, no matter how many times I have moved. The recipe, stained with melted chocolate and vanilla, travels with me to each new country, each new kitchen. I make Auntie’s cake at least once a year. A single bite of that cake still conjures up the days when all the characters of my childhood used to sit around Jennie’s kitchen table on Whitney Avenue celebrating the joy of birth, when I was little, when my parents were young, when my grandparents were still only in their sixties. It keeps those Sunday dinners alive in my memory, keeps alive my family dead.
B efore John was discharged from the hospital in Munich, a gray-haired orderly named Werner walked into John’s room, read his medical chart, and pointedly asked him when he was born. When John responded, Werner—who had acquired a certain wisdom about traumatic wounds while working aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Vietnam—shook his head to disagree. “You’ve got a new birthday now,” he said gently, referring to the date of John’s shooting. “December twenty-third, nineteen eighty-nine. It’s a new birthday for your new life.”
John and I both understood that Werner was not just chatting idly, though at the time we caught but a whiff of what he was trying to convey. It took us a good fifteen years to understand the simple truth he was hinting at, and will probably take years more before we truly, utterly accept it: that the arc of a single bullet finding its mark was not just a shocking, passing incident in our lives but a life-changing one that would make us dramatically different people. Because that single bullet so thoroughly changed John and me, it changed the lives of the children as well, and it will in turn change the lives of any children they have one day, as the memory of that bullet drifts in a slow-moving spiral down the generations. That spiral drifted up the generations, too: my mother never quite got over the shock of John’s shooting, the fear that her new son-in-law might die before she got to meet him.
A single bullet started it all. A single bullet fired by a roadside sniper in a nondescript city suddenly convulsed by revolution. Just one bullet found John that night, a bullet that pierced the passenger door of a little red Peugeot before tearing into John’s right side and exiting through his left.
But even a single bullet takes at least two paths: one through a body, the other through life itself. The first path is visible, gory, dramatic. All the same, it is the simple route. The second path is imperceptible, hidden, and therefore far more fraught. The second path cuts through a once seamless life, splitting it in two: the old life before the
Jennie and Tony, Great-Uncle Pete, Great-Aunt Philly, Deedee, Auntie and Uncle, Cousin Jo, Cousin Al, my mother: all are gone today, along with all the other great-aunts and great-uncles, and nearly all the second and third cousins who used to join us on special occasions. My grandparents’ generation produced few children, my parents’ generation even fewer. Aside from me, the only ones left from that great crowd of family that used to celebrate Sundays and birthdays together are my father and brother, and Auntie’s son, my lone first cousin, Paul.
I never lost the recipe for Auntie’s birthday cake, no matter how many times I have moved. The recipe, stained with melted chocolate and vanilla, travels with me to each new country, each new kitchen. I make Auntie’s cake at least once a year. A single bite of that cake still conjures up the days when all the characters of my childhood used to sit around Jennie’s kitchen table on Whitney Avenue celebrating the joy of birth, when I was little, when my parents were young, when my grandparents were still only in their sixties. It keeps those Sunday dinners alive in my memory, keeps alive my family dead.
B efore John was discharged from the hospital in Munich, a gray-haired orderly named Werner walked into John’s room, read his medical chart, and pointedly asked him when he was born. When John responded, Werner—who had acquired a certain wisdom about traumatic wounds while working aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Vietnam—shook his head to disagree. “You’ve got a new birthday now,” he said gently, referring to the date of John’s shooting. “December twenty-third, nineteen eighty-nine. It’s a new birthday for your new life.”
John and I both understood that Werner was not just chatting idly, though at the time we caught but a whiff of what he was trying to convey. It took us a good fifteen years to understand the simple truth he was hinting at, and will probably take years more before we truly, utterly accept it: that the arc of a single bullet finding its mark was not just a shocking, passing incident in our lives but a life-changing one that would make us dramatically different people. Because that single bullet so thoroughly changed John and me, it changed the lives of the children as well, and it will in turn change the lives of any children they have one day, as the memory of that bullet drifts in a slow-moving spiral down the generations. That spiral drifted up the generations, too: my mother never quite got over the shock of John’s shooting, the fear that her new son-in-law might die before she got to meet him.
A single bullet started it all. A single bullet fired by a roadside sniper in a nondescript city suddenly convulsed by revolution. Just one bullet found John that night, a bullet that pierced the passenger door of a little red Peugeot before tearing into John’s right side and exiting through his left.
But even a single bullet takes at least two paths: one through a body, the other through life itself. The first path is visible, gory, dramatic. All the same, it is the simple route. The second path is imperceptible, hidden, and therefore far more fraught. The second path cuts through a once seamless life, splitting it in two: the old life before the
Similar Books
