by Maggie Felisberto
The crash made the news all over New England. Six car pileup on the Braga bridge, five wounded and three dead. The dead–Antonio James Martins and his wife Adelaide Queiroz Martins of New Bedford, and George McGurdy of Taunton. McGurdy had caused the crash by getting on the bridge going in the wrong direction and plowing directly into Toninho’s car, and the January ice on the bridge caused the rest of the cars to slide into the crash. They had been on their way to Providence, and Julinha was at her daycare. The daycare called me while I was on the phone with the police, and I accidentally hung up on them both when I dropped my phone. My hands were shaking so much when I picked it up that I thought it would crash to the floor again and shatter like the windshield on my brother’s car
The thing about Toninho is that long before Adelaide came along, he was ready to be a father. Toninho was a big bellied, big bodied guy, but he was a softie at heart, and that was already showing on his face when we were still in high school. Adelaide was the one who took some time to get used to the idea of motherhood; she hadn’t left Lagoa just to get knocked up by some Portuguese guy on the other side of the ocean–if that’s what she wanted, she said, she could have just gone to Nova in Lisbon. Adelaide was older than Toninho, a year or so older than me, too, and she had plans: she was in New Bedford for her Ph. D. at UMass Dartmouth, and some undergrad’s dreams of parenthood were not going to get in her way.
That is, until they did, and in 2016, Adelaide became Dr. Maria Adelaide Vasconcelos de Queiroz with Toninho–now a MAT student–in the audience making faces at Julinha that Adelaide tried her best to ignore. I remember Julie starting to fuss, and Tony looking at me in a panic, not sure whether to leave the room and miss Adelaide’s defense or try to get the baby back to sleep in his seat. I took the baby then, and she settled in my arms. Titi Magica, they called me, the magic auntie.
Toninho and I never looked that much alike. He took after our mother’s side of the family, was practically her spitting image, whereas I had the same diminutive, angular features of our father. Our great-grandmother used to say that’s why Tony was going to be a good parent and why I was going to be a dyke. She’d been saying for so long that when I finally did come out to the family, they thought she’d put me up to it to prove some kind of point. It wasn’t until Melissa and I got serious that it finally hit them that I wasn’t joking, and it wasn’t until Toninho and Adelaide asked us to be the godparents that they realized I was committed to the whole lesbica thing.
Godparent is supposed to be a simple role: you show up for the kid’s special occasions, you spend a little extra on gifts, you spoil the kid when their parents aren’t looking. In the church, I guess there’s even more to it–being a religious role model, preparing for first communion maybe, but we were only Catholic in name by the time we were in middle school and we never even did first communion, so I don’t remember. What I can say, though, is that it’s a culturally significant role in a child’s life, so I was honored. Melissa even cried when he asked her to be part of it, since we weren’t even married yet. No one agrees to be the godparent of a child expecting the worst, after all. It’s supposed to be a glorified Fun Aunt position. No one wants to say what the role is really for; you’re just meant to be Titi Magica on the sidelines of your brother’s regurgitation of Dr. Spock until the kid’s suddenly an adult of their own.
Melissa and I were prepared to be godparents, not parents. Just like how Toninho and Adelaide were prepared to be parents and not dead.
—
Melissa took on the brunt of the work, which she didn’t have to do–the kid’s my niece, right? She’s my flesh and blood. But Melissa just patted me on the shoulder and told me to take my time and she would take care of the rest. I work from home, but the St. Luke’s nurse ferried Julinha from our apartment to daycare and back, navigating her lunches and breaks to make sure Julinha always had someone at the door for her. When she dropped Julie back at our apartment before rushing off to the ER again, Julie would crawl into my bed and burrow under the covers against my chest like a kitten. Who could blame her? She was four and an orphan, and I was catatonic for ninety percent of the day. This lasted until the middle of February before Melissa caught a wickedly nasty flu, which forced me out of bed.
I brushed my teeth, took Julie to daycare, made giant pots of soup for Melissa and folded myself into a ball on the couch while Melissa’s fever skyrocketed. Finally, after two full weeks of chaos, Melissa’s fever broke.
“This tastes like nothing,” she said when I brought her another bowl of soup. “You can’t cook for shit.”
“Yeah I know.” She was right, all I’d done was boil the hell out of a flat of boneless chicken thighs in a bunch of store bought chicken broth. Between that and the dino nuggets that Julie liked to play with, it was all any of us had eaten all week. And then, before I knew what I was saying, the words formed in my mouth, “I should probably fix that.” I swear I’d never seen Melissa look so relieved.
“Oh that’s a great idea, babe,” she said. She was so excited that I knew I was about to commit to cooking, but then she really cemented it by saying, “You could be the real Emeril of the family.”
And Bam!
That’s how this whole thing really started.
—
The thing about Toninho is that he looks just like our Tio Antonio, which is really a coincidence because you don’t know what your baby is going to look like as an adult so naming your kid after your brother is no guarantee that you’re creating a mini-me. What I’m saying is, mom had no idea that Toninho would look just like her brother, she just wanted to pass down the name and thought Americanizing it to Anthony was akin to blasphemy. So Toninho is like Antonio’s clone, and Tio Antonio looks like Emeril Lagasse. I know a lot of Portuguese people probably say that about their Tio Antonio, but ours really did. Tio Antonio looked so much like Emeril that he won three look-alike contests and almost got hired to body double him on two separate occasions. So by extension, Toninho always looked like Emeril did about thirty years ago. He’d even perfected the art of the Emeril impersonation just like Tio Antonio had before him. The biggest difference was that Toninho, like me, couldn’t cook for shit.
There was no way I was going to win any Emeril look-alike contest, but if I put my mind to it, I could learn how to win a cook-alike. If anything like that even exists, which it probably doesn’t.
Regardless, that was my new goal, so I headed to Wilks library and checked out all three of Emeril’s cookbooks that they had on the shelf. I took them home and studied them, made a few attempts at some of the easier recipes, but still found myself fumbling. I lacked the flare, the pizzazz, and even though Melissa and Julie both ate the food without too many complaints, I could sense their disappointment every time I tried to produce something more complicated than scrambled eggs–which thankfully I’d stopped burning.
The books alone weren’t working for me, so I moved the small TV from our bedroom into the kitchen, found a playlist of Essence of Emeril with episodes from a bunch of seasons arranged out of order, and started watching. It started with season one, episode two: eggplants. I could never stand eggplants, but I wanted to dive in, and I think I made a mistake because like I already said, the thing about Toninho is that he looked exactly like Emeril did at the same age. So when Emeril started talking about his uncle’s farm outside of Fall River, a farm that–who-knows-might’ve only been a few miles from where Toninho died, I lost it. I started crying so hard that I had to brace myself on the counter, and I still ended up in a puddle on the floor while Emeril went on and on about how to decrease the bitterness of eggplant, how to cut kernels off a cob of sweet corn, how to make ratatouille. I couldn’t escape the feeling that somehow behind Emeril’s voice, Toninho’s eyes were staring at me through the screen. Which is crazy, because Tony wasn’t even in preschool yet when this episode was filmed.
I have no clue what else happens in that episode of Essence of Emeril; I think I blanked out about five minutes in when he was starting to tease a crispy addition to his ratatouille recipe. All I know is that a new episode was starting when I finally snapped myself out of my sorrows enough to pause the video and pull myself off of the floor. I dropped my body into my bed, spread out on a diagonal so that my feet were on Melissa’s side, and draped myself with two of the heaviest weighted blankets I own. Cocooned under fifty pounds of glass beads, I fell into a dead sleep.
—
I woke with a start to the shrill-sharp screech of “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” coming from the kitchen. It was dark in the bedroom, and as I blinked myself back into an awareness of what day it was, I could hear Melissa halfway whispering, “Shh, Titi is sleeping.” I groaned while my brain caught up with my body, extricated myself from under the blankets, and emerged from the bedroom into the kitchen, wincing against the light.
Julie ran to me and grabbed my hand. “Titi, look, it’s Daddy!” she yelled, pointing at the TV screen. There on the screen, Emeril Lagasse was frozen with his arms wide open and a wooden spoon in hand.
“No, meu amor,” I said as I hefted her onto my hip. “That’s Emeril, he’s a chef. Daddy was a teacher.”
“It’s Daddy!” she said again, now flailing her arm in the direction of the screen. “Tell him to come home, Titi! Tell him to venha pa ca!”
“I can’t sweetie,” I said. I tried to hold her tighter, but she just squirmed until I had to put her back on the ground. “Daddy can’t come home.”
“No!” she screamed again, “He’s right there!”
Melissa turned the TV off, and Emeril blinked away, dragging Toninho’s spirit with him. “Oh, Julie-bird,” she said, scooping the writhing child up, and I never loved her more than in that moment. “Why don’t we look through Aunty’s phone at real pictures of Daddy, okay? Then maybe if we settle down, we can get pizza for dinner?”
Julinha stared at the blank TV screen for another moment, then nestled her head against Melissa’s chest. “Okay.”
Melissa is better with Julinha, okay? I didn’t resent her for it–not yet, at least–but I was already starting to feel the niggle of betrayal that my Titi Magica touch had seemingly passed on to her while I’d been sleeping. I knew I needed to try harder, but even thinking that felt like having a cannonball chained to my neck while trying to tread water. I know it’s cliché but I dreamt about drowning so often that if I woke up covered in sweat, I believed it was real. I really only had two options, let Melissa take care of everything despite having an arduous career, or drag myself back into being a suitable partner and godparent kicking and screaming. Cooking didn’t have to be the solution, I know that now, but once the idea had gotten into my head, I just couldn’t shake it.
I ordered from Salonika’s even though they take twice as long to deliver as Ma Raffa’s, and while I waited for the call that the driver had arrived, I took a scalding shower. I came out pink from the heat, dried and dressed with time to spare. I joined Melissa and Julie on the couch. Pictures of Daddy had turned into Peppa Pig, and Julie was trying to draw Peppa with pink crayons while the show played. Eventually the pizza came, and we ate in front of the living room TV. None of us wanted to carry our food into the kitchen that had betrayed us earlier that evening.
After I put Julinha to bed, I went to my own room and found Melissa already sound asleep. I wanted to reach out to her, touch her, hold each other with less than an inch between our faces, but the bags under her eyes were so dark that the rest of her face looked sallow, and even in her sleep, her mouth contorted into a frown. I didn’t want to disturb her, so I went back into the kitchen, pulled out my phone, and started watching Emeril.
Shit was about to get a lot worse, but you know that already if you’re doing the math. A nurse with a two-week flu who can’t taste in February? Needless to say, come March our apartment was full-blown biohazard for everyone in the building, but especially for me and Julinha. The daycare closed, leaving me and my charge trapped together for 24 hours a day while Melissa ran herself ragged pulling 16 hour shifts as the influx of patients grew and grew and grew. People were dying all over the city. They were dying all over the world. The whole planet was suddenly plunged into collective grieving, and all I could think was how fucking dare they. How dare anybody mourn anything, because nothing in the universe was more painful than Toninho’s death. Nothing was more tragic, more violent, more senseless than what had happened to my brother, and now suddenly nobody would possibly ever care again. If I tell somebody now that my brother died in 2020, they assume what they think is the worst, an iron lung in a sterile hospital bed, which would have been a fucking mercy.
Then Melissa said that some of the other nurses were planning on quarantining together to keep their loved ones safe, and she wanted to join them.
“You were already sick,” I said. “And neither of us caught it. We’re fine.”
She shook her head. “It’s more complicated than that,” she said. “Every single day I’m in contact with it again and again and again. It’s not just hovering around us while I’m sick in bed for a few days–”
“Two weeks–”
“Yeah, two weeks. Two weeks and I’m pretty sure I’m a lucky one. Don’t you get it? I’m walking around here like a loaded gun and I don’t have control over the trigger unless I do this. I can’t let you get sick. I can’t let Julie get sick. She’s already lost two parents, babe.”
“And now you want to take a third out of the equation.”
“Only to make sure she doesn’t end up with none.”
Melissa hadn’t meant to raise her voice, I could tell by the look on her face after she’d snapped at me. Her own eyes widened, her own lip trembled with unfallen tears. She was too good for me, too good in so many ways. And I was too angry–and too scared–to care.
“Fine,” I said.
“Fine,” she said, though it was more of a resigned whisper. This self-sacrificing abandonment, this is when I began to resent her. I couldn’t understand, still can’t understand, how she could have left us alone like that for the sake of the world. The thing about Melissa is she’s perfect, too perfect, and next to her I look like a greedy grubby child swiping nickels from the coffee shop tip jar.
At first, I tried to hide my growing Emeril obsession from Julinha. I watched his show on my phone during her naps then read his recipes while she was absorbed in her hour of Peppa Pig. There’s only so much British pig a woman can take before she wants to down a pound of bacon or stab herself in the ears, so the cookbooks became my focus. I couldn’t cook the way I wanted to because I couldn’t get to the grocery store with any frequency, and I couldn’t afford the Instacart fees on a regular basis, so we ate a lot of canned staples and cereal in the first month or so of our isolation. When the books became due at the library, I decided to let the fines pile up, only to find out that the library was going fine-free for the shutdown.
I had even less incentive to leave the apartment when we got the first stimulus. I used that money to shop Instacart to my heart’s desire. Everyone else on the internet was learning how to bake sourdough bread, so why couldn’t I? I’d highlighted a few specific recipes that I wanted to try and got everything together to make those dishes.
Cooking from the book was hard. Even though I’d learned what a lot of the language meant, I’d always been more of a visual-kinesthetic learner, so my attempts failed from the book. Well, they were passable. Julie didn’t throw anything to the floor. I knew I wanted to try cooking along with the show, but I didn’t want Julinha to get upset at the dad who was not hers, the man who was not Toninho on the screen. One day I laid her down for a nap, pulled up an episode of Emeril, and followed along. The results: a perfectly delicious kale soup, something I could verify from experience tasted exactly right.
—
When Julinha woke up from her nap, I immediately sat her at the table with a warm bowl of soup in front of her. “Titi made caldo verde,” I said. “Try some.”
Julinha eyed the soup cautiously before taking a hesitant spoonful. When the food hit her tongue, though, her eyes grew bright and wide. “Titi, this is yummy! Did Daddy teach you?”
I shook my head, “No, sweetie, I learned it from Emeril.”
And you know what Julie did? She had the four-year-old audacity to roll her eyes. “Daddy did teach you,” she said. “You don’t have to lie.”
“I’m not–” I started to say, but I could tell that she wouldn’t listen to me. “Why do you think your daddy taught me?”
“Because,” she said, with all the certainty of her age, “You said Daddy was a teacher, so he’s teaching you. Duh. He’s on your phone all the time.”
“That’s Emeril, not Daddy. Emeril Lagasse the chef.”
“Titi, that’s Daddy. Emeril Lagasse is my dad. It’s not fair that you’re hogging him.”
I didn’t know what to do. At least she wasn’t screaming or panicking like the first time she saw Emeril, right? I could tell that she was convinced, and that nothing I could say or do would shake her conviction. Emeril and Toninho were the same person to her, and honestly, what could I have possibly done to stop it from being true? As I stared blankly at Julinha’s tiny, serious face, I decided there was only one thing I could do. “So you want to watch Emeril with me is what you’re saying?”
Julinha nodded her head. “Yes.”
From then on, Julie and I would cuddle up on the couch with Essence of Emeril playing on the TV, and she would pick which recipes I would try. It became a game, with Julinha watching intensely until a recipe clicked in her mind as something delicious, and me watching her trying to guess what would pique her interest the most. At this point, I had already watched most of Essense of Emeril and had moved on to Emeril Live!, but I went back to Essence with Julie. Toninho was always a big softie, and the way Emeril presents on Essence is so calm, so gentle, he really does remind me of my brother.
The thing about Emeril is that he has this way of carrying himself on screen that’s just completely and utterly disarming. He’s gentle and kind, a little bit bumbling. He speaks in run-on sentences that don’t stop so much as peter out into a half-formed thought before picking up again with just the slightest bit of intention missing, so you have to pay attention. The more I watch him, the more his movements strike me as similar to Toninho. It’s really uncanny, the way they don’t just look alike, but move alike with those jovial, whole-body gestures. The way they share that gentle inflection when they speak, interrupted only by the occasional “Bam!” (or “Epa!” from Toninho). It was uncanny, really. I don’t know how to explain it. But somewhere between our first take on fish and chips and our crowning glory etouffee, I began to understand Julinha’s insistence that Emeril was, in fact, her dad. I almost believed it myself.
One day in late April, I made po-boys for lunch, and I could tell they were perfect because Julinha ate every bite of her child-sized sandwich and asked for more. The next week, Julinha helped me by rinsing all of the vegetables for a jambalaya dinner. We saw other kids her age on TikTok learning to chop vegetables and bake cookies, so I ordered a child-safe cooking knife on Amazon. Julinha became my sous-chef as we carefully worked together to dice onions, carrots and celery for a classic mirepoix, and I helped her keep her fingertips holding onto the vegetables tucked in under her knuckles.
__
At the beginning, Melissa called every night. We’d facetime for an hour before going to bed, talk each other dirty until we were both sticky with our own sweat. Even though we’d physically parted on a sour note, it seemed like the distance was actually going to revitalize our relationship. But as her work got even more stressful, the daily video chats became every few days, the regular phone calls became texts, and it was almost like we didn’t exist to each other at all. The rare occasion when we did facetime, she’d grown gaunt from stress, her now-pale skin stretched taut over the bony frame of her face. On the other end of the call, I was getting rounder, my sharp cheekbones softening under an increase in buccal fat as I climbed ten, then another fifteen, pounds in weight from the surplus of healthy food I was whipping up with Julinha and Emeril. We were starting to look like the people you mistake for an old high school friend from across the street only to find out they were a complete stranger all along.
Melissa and I had been together for seven years at that point, living together for five of them. We liked to say that we didn’t believe in marriage, that focusing on marriage equality was just cis-hetero-normativity in disguise and that we were beyond that. We even claimed to be poly every once in a while, but the truth was we could never really commit to anything outside of each other. The only reason we hadn’t gotten married yet was that neither of us wanted to admit to our friends and family that we both wanted a big, beautiful traditional wedding that would cost thousands and thousands of dollars that we didn’t have. We could’ve easily gotten a marriage license without much effort, and Adelaide was always teasing us about tax breaks and lower insurance premiums, but neither of us ever forced the issue.
The truth is, I missed her terribly, but the truth is also that I was jealously guarding this time that was just me and my niece and our kitchen. Cooking was becoming something that I could do well, and do on my own without Emeril’s watchful presence guiding me through each meal step by step, and while other preschool kids were probably still watching Peppa Pig for six hours a day, Julinha was dicing vegetables and stirring soups and kneading pastry dough at my side. Once it got warmer out, we would go to the park with ziploc bags full of cookies that Julie had made, and she’d run around with her little mask hanging off her too-tiny nose handing them out to the other kids’ parents hovering in the different quadrants of the park. If the parents asked where we got the cookies, Julinha would always say, “Titi and Daddy helped me bake them!”
We’d gotten into a new routine, is what I’m saying, a new routine without Melissa. I didn’t resent her very much because I just wasn’t thinking about her. I still loved her, but the horrified pit in my stomach that formed when she abandoned us had shrunk to a small, bitter pill that only occasionally brought bile to my teeth. I almost wasn’t even happy when she texted and said she was finally allowed to take her vacation days starting on the fourth of July.
As June came to a close, I started to stress about Melissa coming home. In particular, I stressed about what to serve her as a welcome back meal. The last time she’d eaten anything I’d cooked, she’d grinned and kept it down as a mercy, but now? I’d been studying at the school of Emeril for over two months, and I wanted to wow her with something she’d never forget.
I said to Julinha, “Aunty Mel is coming home in a couple of days, what should we cook for her?”
“Let’s ask Daddy,” she said, and I nodded. I opened the playlist, scrolled to a random video, and tapped play. Essence of Emeril Season 1 Episode 25 – Lamb began to play. The first option, the leg roast, seemed perfect: ridiculously simple to pull off, with startling results. It was certainly more my speed than grilled kabobs. I jotted down the list of ingredients–chevre, spinach, oregano, fresh mint for the meat and for the pilaf, rice, oranges for zest, apples, green onions, and regular onion because Emeril confessed to cheating and starting with some onions. Two dishes that seemed simple enough, but fancy enough, that they struck the balance of exactly what I needed.
I took Julinha with me to Shaw’s, where we got the produce, the goat cheese and what the internet suggested as the best rice for a pilaf. We also picked up some oat milk for Melissa, a bag of dino nuggets for Julie, and a bottle of inexpensive cabernet to go with the roast. They didn’t have the bone-in leg of lamb like Emeril did on the show, but they had the deboned roast wrapped in twine just like he’d suspected. I guess in some ways, so little has changed since 1994.It’s almost nice, considering how much everything has changed.
When the fourth came, Julinha helped cook from doing the mise en place for the pilaf all the way up to seasoning the lamb. I popped the roast into the oven then started to clean up. I was just starting to carve the slices of meat when I heard the apartment door open.
“Babe?”
“In the kitchen! Dinner’s just about ready.”
“I’m going to hop in the shower and disinfect, okay?”
I was a little disappointed that she hadn’t come rushing into the kitchen to give me a kiss, but I pushed it aside.
“Meet me at the table when you’re done.”
I plated the food, garnished with sprigs of parsley delicately arranged in perfect places. I set the table, made sure that the forks and knives were on the right sides of the dish and that the water glasses were full. Fifteen minutes passed before Melissa was in the dining room, hair wet from her shower. She stared at me, and I stared back. I couldn’t tell whether she’d lost more weight or I’d gained more.
I wanted to rush to her, wrap my arms around her, cover her in kisses, but I couldn’t make my feet move. Eventually, I was able to pull her seat out for her, and she sat. “Holy shit,” she said. “This looks incredible. You really did it. You really learned how to cook.”
“My brother taught me,” I said with a wink.
“Your broth–oh. Right. Where’s Julie-bird?” she asked as she took a second bite.
Just then, Julinha came running out from the kitchen holding my cell phone in her hands. “Titi, Aunty Mel’s calling. Can I answer?”
“Can I see that?” I took the phone from Julinha; Melissa Work was dialing. I looked at Melissa across the table from me. “Don’t tell me they’re calling you in on your vacation,” I said.
“Babe, just ignore it,” Melissa said.
I answered the call. “Hello?”
“Ms. Martins? This is Jill at St. Luke’s. Please don’t hang up again, we need to talk to you as Melissa’s next of kin.”
I looked at Melissa. Julie was sitting at her place at the table, and Melissa was standing behind her, next to Emeril, who had his hand on the back of Julinha’s chair. I dropped my phone, and the screen cracked as it hit the table.
About the Author
Maggie Felisberto is a queer nail polish enthusiast with a PhD in Portuguese literature and an MFA in creative writing. Her work has been published by Bridge Eight Press and Change Seven Magazine. She lives in Massachusetts with her sister and nine pets.