I’m sitting in Katz’s Delicatessen a few tables away from where Harry met Sally, and my fingers are wrapped around a corned beef sandwich smothered in Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard. The rye bread is warm, and the beef is sliced as thin as paper. As I start to take my first bite, I wake up.
Instead of being in New York watching people impatiently wait in the line at Katz’s for dill pickles and chopped liver, I’m in my childhood bedroom, which is a shade of burnt orange I proudly chose for my twelfth birthday, and it hasn’t changed since. As I shake off the haziness of the dream, I can still smell the corned beef, and I want to hop on the next plane to New York. But, I can’t. I’m at home trying to protect myself and my family from Coronavirus, which empties the streets from Georgia to Katz.
Repeating the same monotonous routine of waking up, setting up my laptop for Zoom, and snacking at every free moment, I stumble out of bed and head to the kitchen, and as my feet hit the chilled wooden floors, I’m jolted awake. I push open the swinging kitchen door whose hinge always hits the same high note, and my eyes focus on the white sheets covering the kitchen floors. More sheets are taped to the ceiling and touch the ones on the floor. A singular piece of cardboard on the counter beacons me. My kitchen has turned into a kill den. Am I still dreaming? I try to wake myself up. As I rub my eyes, nothing changes. I call out to my parents, but their cars are gone. I’ve just stepped into a horror movie or an episode of Dexter. Dexter Morgan is going to appear at any moment and slice me into a million cubes of flesh.
I hesitantly move to the middle of the room, the pungent and infamous smell of bleach murders my nose. This is my worst nightmare: a sterilized torture chamber. As my heart rate spikes, my parents walk in with a meat slicer that can cut through bone.
“Can one of y’all tell me what I missed?” I ask my parents.
“We’re cutting corned beef,” my mom says with her typical smile: head cocked to the right and teeth so straight she could be a dental office’s advertisement. She pulls pounds of corned beef out of the freezer.
“Why? The sale was cancelled.” I say.
“Well, we still have all the meat from New York, so we thought we might as well cut it and deliver it, so people can have it to put up while all this is going on,” she responds as if this should have been my first guess.
Every year, our synagogue Temple Israel has a corned beef sale, and people from all over town flock to the Temple to get their hands on the sacred meat shipped from New York. All of the members of the congregation gather to make the sandwiches and pack the lunch boxes, which include the necessities: Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard, a cookie, chips, and most importantly a dill pickle. You can’t have a true corned beef sandwich without a pickle. My dad and Mr. Philip, who is practically family, slice the meat, and even if they don’t acknowledge it, I think they compete for fun. My dad complains about the sale every year, but I know it’s his favorite part of the year because it’s the only time the whole congregation is together.
“Is anyone else doing this?” I ask.
“No, just your dad. The meat’s going to go to waste if we don’t cut it, so he thought we might as well package it and give it to some people, like the older members of the congregation, so they can have some food and don’t have to go to the store,” she says.
My dad walks downstairs fully dressed in his “meat-cutting” apron, gloves, and mask. He prepped and ready to kill. He places the meat on the slicer, and our kitchen becomes a butcher shop, better than a kill den. My dad has made our home the corned beef dispensary of South Georgia.
After six hours of work, my parents delivered the corned beef to friends and family around town. When they got back, they took down the sheets even though my dad protested because he relished in having a scene from a horror movie as a kitchen. He even liked how the scraps looked on the floor. A little flesh left over, and with one bite, I’m back in New York.
Lozupone, Alex. “Katz's Diner, Slightly Further Shot, in New York City.”Wikimedia Commons, New York City, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lozupone_katz2.png.
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