The Pierogi We Pinched With Grandma

Grandma looked down the table at her granddaughters, sleeves pushed up. Her eyes were very bright. “Well,” she said. “There’s a lot of you.”

Someone laughed. Someone else sniffed.

“We’ll do it the way my mother did it. Nobody leaves a pierogi half done. And nobody talks about their husbands while their hands are in my dough.”

That got a roar.

“Roll it thin,” she said, and she took a ball of dough and showed us, her heel pressing, her palms sliding. “Thin. You should see your hand through it.”

“I can see my whole arm,” Jess said, holding up a gray, nearly clear sheet.

“That is too thin. You are a heavy hand, Jessica. Go slower.”

We cut rounds with the jelly glasses, pressed down and twisted. Nicole stood at the counter with the filling and a teaspoon. “Heaping, not a mountain,” Grandma told her. “This is not a burrito.”

Then came the pinch. I had done it as a girl a hundred times, standing on a chair at this very table, and I had forgotten how much of it lives in the fingers.

You fold the round over the filling. You press the edges together with thumb and forefinger, working from one end to the other. Then, Grandma taught us, you go back and pinch it again, until the seam is flat and tight as a seam on a good pair of boots.

“If it opens in the water,” Grandma said, “it opens in front of company. Pinch it twice.”

We worked. The radio played polkas, the real ones, from the station out of Wilkes-Barre. Somebody started to hum. Somebody else started to sing. By eight, half the kitchen was singing a song nobody could name, in a language only three of us had ever spoken.

Lisa took the big steel stockpot on the white stove, the same one that has held pierogi water since before I was born. She dropped them in by the half dozen, watched them rise, and lifted them out with a slotted spoon.

Heather brushed the boiled ones with melted butter. Michelle laid the pinched ones on floured sheet trays to wait their turn, and when she ran out of trays she used the leaves from the kitchen table.

It took an hour to find our rhythm. After that, nothing could have stopped us.

At nine, Sophie came to sit beside Grandma. She did not sit there by accident. “The little one,” Grandma said. “Come here by me.”

Sophie sat. She is nineteen and looks about fifteen, with long light-brown hair and bangs. She looked at the dough in her hands as though it might bite.

“I’ve never done one,” she whispered to me across the table. “Not a whole one. I only ever watched.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I’ll ruin it.”

She did not ruin it. She did something that felt worse to her. She made it very carefully, and lifted it, and the filling squeezed out the side like toothpaste.