I first went to Toscanini’s on an August afternoon with my father when I was nineteen. It’s a café in Cambridge, Massachusetts nestled on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and MIT’s brooding campus, Toscanini’s is the hub for study sessions and Central Square locals alike. The halogens are dimmed a little too low for it to be a family joint probably, because there are rarely families around. My dad ordered rocky road, which Toscanini’s calls “Chocolate Sluggo,” and I got a lemonade. I couldn’t tell if it was the smell of ice and caramel or the guy behind the counter, who for whatever reason, smiled and nodded at the tip jar instead of charging us, but I wanted to work there.
Although I grew up in a small city in Western Massachusetts, my Cambridge bloodline begins at a 5n’10 shop that was once on the corner River Street and Mass Ave. My grandparents met there when my grandmother was eighteen and my grandfather was twenty-one. Their children clung to Cambridge, never leaving the outskirts of the Red Line, except for my father. Instead of planting dead roots like his brother and sister, he rambled, trying to make a career in the music business, moving from state to state and eventually going to New York, where he became a mail clerk for EMI records.
My father didn’t stay in New York for long. He came back to Boston and at age twenty-three and started college. Growing up we would take day trips there. We would eat at the pizza shop he used to go to in Harvard Square and walk by the house he squatted in on Hampshire Street. Cambridge was where he joined his first band and met my mother. However, my Cambridge wasn’t the same vagabonding music-making haven as it was his. My Boston was a gray stress pit where I was just meant to study. Radiating boredom, a quiet city for only the academically obsessed – my struggle began the moment I moved there.
Moving to Cambridge after a summer of working overtime in retail in Provincetown was more of a respite than I expected. There was no ocean breeze, but I didn’t have a job so I spent my summer money on reubens from S&S Deli, half-nocciola half-chocolate milk shakes from Toscanini’s, and paint for my new bedroom walls. My father and his friend drove a van filled with furniture to my new apartment. I was going to start college that fall and study theater design, a teenage dream of mine. But I couldn’t ignore the feeling that my move to Boston felt like a shuddering mistake – one where there was no escape mainly because I was in school. College was a binary fear. The monotony, the requisite classes, the tests and the social posturing were all things I secretly dreaded. Yet, at the same time I was terrified of what it meant to not go, to never have a college degree.
At nineteen I was an impeccably packaged mess. I was in love with Buddhism and meditated two hours a day, ran two hours a day, and I went to class and work in between. Once I went out to brunch with a girl from class and I remember thinking how bizarre it felt to just hang out. My roommate was my only friend and we spent the better part of our time at home battling a mice infestation. Also, my dad was dying of cancer, and there wasn’t a single part of me that wanted to believe it.
Growing up, my father was obsessive in the most deliberate, caring way. He ate the same vegetarian frozen dinner every night. He adorned the kitchen windowsills with an array of empty Vitamin Water bottles that he had refilled with water of various food colors. My father always stayed up later than my sister and I – playing music or out performing with his band at bars. He coaxed me into making bumper stickers that said “peace train take me home again” with a picture of Cat Stevens in jest of our hippie neighbors. He worked compulsively, often sixty hours a week at his therapy practice, and my sister and I would half-joke that he cared more about his patients then us. One Christmas, he gave his state-appointed patients Cuban cigars that the three of us had smuggled back from our vacation to Jamaica. Sometimes he paid me to sew and patch up ripped stitches on the stuffed animals that belonged to his child clients.
I don’t think Toscanini’s has the right to call itself a non-profit, but for as long as I was there a profit was never made. Every night the till was under. Gus, the portly middle-aged owner, encouraged us to give out ice cream to those who seemed nice or attractive, worked in academics or a liberal media outlet, or were just our friends and regulars. Perhaps half the people were paying customers but during slow hours when tips were low, we might act a little soft – doling out ice cream and coffee to just anybody in exchange for extra tips.
The people who know Gus are the people who romanticize the smell of the ink from the Boston Globe wafting down Mass Ave on the weekends. They’re also the ones who actually get the paper delivered. Gus is a portly guy breaching the end of middle age, a kind weird uncle figure. The way he made ice cream was like an old Indian woman cooking chai: he would measure the ingredients in handfuls and chuck them into the ice-cream machine, usually while telling a story or singing along to a Smokey Robinson record.
I was unstable but so was everybody else who worked at Toscanini’s. Propped up on a cot in the ICU, my father was my unconscious audience as I recounted stories about my coworkers. There was Steve, the long-time manager and closeted heroin addict, Henry, a fifteen-year old bulimic dancer who had been kicked out of his home in the projects and now lived with a teacher. Sara, a pathological liar, who would enthrall us with her incredibly tall tales of her adventures in the army, multiple abortions and famous musician boyfriends. And Rory, who owed nearly $100,000 in student loans, worked eighty hours a week between two jobs and was the most miserable person I’d ever met.
Two miles away from Toscanini’s at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, my father slept, eighteen, twenty hours a day. He would awake in startled fits, always alarmed that he was stuck in a hospital bed. His motor skills had withered to the point where he was hardly mobile and his speech had become mute and hollow. He was like a pancake on a hot skillet – bubbling and animate for maybe a minute or two and then silent and still. Now nearly unrecognizable, my father, who as long I had been alive had never worked for anybody but himself, whose loud laugh and howling temper once threatened the tense silence of Brigham Circle, was now a human pancake.
During the last handful of years of his life my father became one of those unruly cool dads, perhaps exceptionally unruly. My sister and I had no curfews and he would congratulate us when we regaled him with stories of crazy nights out. After he and my mother divorced, he bought a house that he spent hours decorating. Each wall was covered in framed photographs, pictures of Red Sox players, portraits of musicians, and paintings. On weekends, his band would rehearse in our living room, beckoning complaints from the neighbors. Months before he died, he suggested that I drop out of school and do something worthwhile, like make a film or bicycle cross-country. Things that I wanted to do, but were always stifled by the feeling that college was some inexplicable gift, a privilege, and I should get it over with.
When you’ve led a life marred only by inconveniences it’s hard to imagine something actually awful happening. Time hit my father’s body fast. He went from a fifty-eight to a ninety-eight over the course of a few months. The stem-cell transplant had deflated his immune system. He was frail, and his thoughts were slow, muddled with medicine. When we went on walks he was like a fly treading through water, slow and persistent. Still, I thought it was a phase that his body would eventually drift out of. Then pneumonia hit, a storm that rendered him unconscious for nearly two months.
On July 11th, I woke up to a voicemail from my dad’s fiancée. Things are very grave, was all she said. I hopped on my bike and bolted over the Harvard Bridge, down Longwood Ave, ignoring all lights and my peripheral vision. I told myself that the ride to Brigham and Women’s would be a metaphor for my father’s health: If I survive then he will too. It was a superstitious prayer. I arrived unscathed, but my father had suffered a stroke in the middle of the night and was in his final hours.
After my father’s wake, Gus told me I could come into work as much or as little as I wanted. I finally took my dad’s advice and dropped out of school, and I started working all the time. I would let customers’ orders spin around my brain and push out the thoughts of my father. I liked it when people would ask me how I was, and I would churn the word “OK” around in my mouth, suck on it a little and hope that when I finally spit it out it might become a little true.
I started eating egg and cheese sandwiches every day. I ate grapenut ice cream for breakfast during the morning shift, and salty caramel ice cream for dinner when I worked nights. I got fat. A few times I walked instead of drove the three miles to work in a savagely gusty snowstorm. I slept no less than eleven hours every night. I dated an alcoholic insomniac who talked about music in the same incessant, annoying way my father did.
It was winter and there was no heat in our apartment. I was mourning in a quiet, icy city. I would wake up every day under seven layers of blankets too cold to cry. Then, one day, in the midst of my depression, it realized I could leave. I could quit Toscanini’s. I could abandon Cambridge: the infinite distance of Mass Ave, the still numbingly bleak nights, and the swamps of students. And so I did. I went to New York, perhaps a subconscious way to follow my father’s path, but maybe because I just liked it better. I never returned.
[Illustrations by Julie Morse]
Tags: death, family, food, julie morse
This was beautiful.
And if I know Cambridge, I bet Toscanini’s is a fucking Chipotle now.
I know it’s not important to the story that Tosci’s sells the best ice cream there is, but it really does. Head and shoulders better than standard good ice cream.
Oh good!! I haven't been back in a couple years.
Beautifully written. Evoking and heart – wrenching, I can only imagine that in writing this, every moment and thought was just as fresh and real as when it happened. It’s funny the things that stick with us. Congrats on leaving the situation and life that made you unhappy, it sounds like it’s exactly what your father would have wanted. It took a lot of courage to write and share this – great work, Julie.
Beautifully written. Evoking and heart – wrenching, I can only imagine that in writing this, every moment and thought was just as fresh and real as when it happened. It's funny the things that stick with us. Congrats on leaving the situation and life that made you unhappy, it sounds like it's exactly what your father would have wanted. It took a lot of courage to write and share this – great work, Julie.
This is a beautiful story! I think I have always been charged for my ice cream at Toscanini’s, but that’s OK! Thanks for writing, and I hope we see more of you around here!
Yeah I used to loooove Cafe Luna but now I never go there 🙁 But thank goodness Toscanini's is still around and serving the best damn chocolate ice cream of my life.
*wince* I loved Cambridge and Boston for trapped, separate reasons. This resonates. Particularly the sickness, which is… plausibly deniable, until endlessly, always, isn’t.
This was beautiful. And sad. Thank you for writing it.
(And thank you for taking me back to my post-college days in Cambridge, when I would run along the Charles and bike to my temp job in Kendall Square, right past the Central Square Toscanini's. I miss their orange-chocolate ice cream the most, although the grapenut-raisin was also great. But that was more than 20 years ago, and I know my sketchy neighborhood is now all condos and rehabbed homes for people working in the Financial District…)
Toscanini's is forever, dammit.
"I dated an alcoholic insomniac who talked about music in the same incessant, annoying way my father did."
Either there are a lot of those guys here, or maybe we're just all passing around the same one. I don't think I'm going miss Cambridge.
My deepest sympathies for your loss. It’s wonderful but weird to read about people and places I know in real life on The Toast! I’ve eaten crushed Hydrox cookies out of a barrel in the Tosci’s kitchen and been fed weird experiments by Gus. He’s full of boundless enthusiasm for people and things he thinks are cool. Obviously they do enough business to stay open, but yeah…if you get to know people there, your money will be going in the tip jar more often than not.
Tosci’s did nearly close in 2008, only to be saved by customers’ crowdfunding.
A wonderful piece on family and expectations and a sense of place– thank you.
Wow, I totally missed that! I guess it was before I met Gus. Doesn’t surprise me though.
I’m so, so sorry for your loss. This is a beautiful testament to your father.
That moment when you realize you don’t *have* to keep doing something or being somewhere that is making you miserable and fighting you every step of the way is so important. And I say that as someone who’s lived in Somerville for 10 years and loves it here (despite ongoing gentrification). Cambridge/Boston wasn’t good for you, and you realized you could leave. That is awesome. Lots of people never get there. I hope you’re happier now.
I'm so, so sorry for your loss. This is a beautiful testament to your father.
That moment when you realize you don't *have* to keep doing something or being somewhere that is making you miserable and fighting you every step of the way is so important. And I say that as someone who's lived in Somerville for 10 years and loves it here (despite ongoing gentrification). Cambridge/Boston wasn't good for you, and you realized you could leave. That is awesome. Lots of people never get there. I hope you're happier now.
‘the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream”
lovely piece!
I am sorry for your loss. I also wanted to say- I worked at JP Licks, and we gave out ice cream to whoever was cute.
Your hard work flows effortlessly. This is only a glimpse into the depth that your mind works. There's a level of perfectionism when wanting to honor someone and I think you met it. Great work, but I'm not surprised.
E
Wonderful piece. (One of the stranger episodes of my life was at a friend’s gallery opening on a freezing cold night in Somerville, being fed by Gus from a vat of experimental poached pears.)
When I was nineteen, a man from the internet who had been for years a place to put all my wistful romantic pain kissed me on a sun-dappled bench outside my apartment in Chicago. My dream came true. I had never been so happy. He lived in Cambridge, though, and I started doing a lot of staring out windows and sighing heavily. I took a job as a live-in aide for a woman with MS and moved to Brookline, sight unseen, a month after he told me he wanted me. I didn’t tell him I was moving to town until two days before I left, though my intentions must have been crushingly obvious from his side.
Boston was miserable. It was the first time I had ever left the Midwest, and I worked every weeknight from 7 PM to 9 AM. The only person I knew in town was the man, and he worked a desk job so we only overlapped on the weekend. I felt uncomfortable being in the sick woman’s house when I wasn’t working, so I would leave at noon on Friday and walk around Cambridge until he got out of work at 6. Sometimes he went out with his co-workers after, and I’d pretend when he texted me that it didn’t mean I’d be sitting in the park alone until he was done. I didn’t want him to think I was needy.
I started spending a lot of time at Toscanini’s during those hungry ghost afternoons. The ice cream was unbelievable, and there was no pressure to hustle out the door after you finished it. The staff seemed a little broken and kind, and, to borrow a phrase, there was a lack of sweetness in my life. Maybe you were there then, it was some time ago. I eventually realized that I was wasting not only my Friday evenings on someone who didn’t really love me. When I left Boston that blood-red raspberry sorbet was the only thing I missed.