The Pierogi We Pinched With Grandma

It was a sad little pierogi. Sophie put it down on the table as if she had been caught stealing. “I can’t do this,” she said, very quietly. “I’m sorry, Grandma. I’m just going to get in the way.”

Grandma did not say anything. She reached over, picked up Sophie’s hands, and held them in her own.

I want you to see this. I think about it every week.

My grandmother’s hands were ninety-two years old. The skin on them was thin as tissue paper, the knuckles swollen, the veins blue and raised. They trembled. Everyone could see them tremble. And they covered Sophie’s hands, and went still.

“Like this,” Grandma said. She guided Sophie’s thumb along the edge of a fresh round, slowly, one small fold at a time. “You don’t squeeze. You press. As if you were pinching the cheek of a baby you love.”

Sophie breathed in.

“Your grandfather used to say something, every year when we started. He’d say, Paula, the pinch is the only part that’s love.” The kitchen had gone quiet. The radio kept going, but all of us had stopped. “He said the rest is only potatoes. Nobody sees the inside of a pierogi. But everyone feels the edge.”

Sophie had tears running down her face by then. She did not wipe them. She kept pinching, with her grandmother’s hands over hers, and the edge came shut tight and flat and perfect.

“There,” Grandma said. “Now you know.”

I looked away. I had to. Across the table, Rose was crying quietly into the filling, and Emily had her hand over her mouth.

It was the leaky one I remember best, though. Grandma took it from the table, the sad one with the filling squeezed out the side, and wiped it with her thumb, and put it in her apron pocket.

Later I saw her eat it cold, standing at the window with the winter sun on her white hair.

“That is the best one so far,” she said, when she caught me looking.

At half past nine, the old landline on the kitchen wall rang, and Grandma picked it up. It was Pam. I heard one side.

“Yes,” Grandma said. “No. I’m fine. I’m resting. I’m sitting down, Pamela. Yes, sitting. Go on about your business.”

She hung up and looked down the table at fourteen women in flour up to the elbows. She did not say anything else about it, and neither did I, though I wanted to.

I think about that call a lot. It was not a lie.

She was resting. She was sitting in her chair with her granddaughters around her, and it was the most restful morning she had spent in years.

She had not carried one thing across that kitchen herself. We had carried every bit of it. That was what the dough had meant, I think, though I did not know it yet.