Previous installments of Jessica Valenti’s “Eat Me” column can be found here. Most recently: Sunday Sauce.

I grew up in a house in Long Island City, Queens that my great-grandparents bought almost 100 years ago. There was an apartment upstairs and over the years the downstairs was a paint store, my grandfather’s butcher shop, and a candy store that turned out to be a front for a fraud and hijacking ring. (My parents got wise when they found the house surrounded by armed FBI agents. Their phones were tapped for about three months afterwards.) After my sister was born my parents took over both floors, knocked down all the walls and called it a loft.

Despite its name, Long Island City is not a part of Long Island (hmph) – but is the area of Queens closest to Manhattan, right over the 59th street/Queensboro bridge. Before LIC was condos and 20-somethings dancing at Warm Up, it was factories that everyone knew were sweatshops and sex workers lined the blocks as soon as it hit 6pm. Most mornings, my mom put on gloves and picked up used condoms thrown from car windows in front of our house and into our yard. Our ‘yard’, really – 250 square feet of uneven concrete. It doubled as a parking space after my parents poured cement on the curb to make a ramp and built swinging gates to open it up the street – a not so legal move to stop our car tires from being stolen and the windows smashed.

There was a lone space of dirt at the cracked intersections of concrete. When I was a toddler, my parents planted a cherry tree there that grew bigger than they ever expected. Its branches reached over the gate so fully that people walking by could pluck off cherries without breaking their stride. My sister and I would watch for the cherries – the greening of the branches, then the white flowers, then the fruit – and fought over who would climb highest on the ladder to pick the “best” ones.

Continue reading and there will be a cherry pie recipe in it for you!

Jessica Valenti’s “Eat Me” column appears every other Friday at 3pm. Previous installments can be found here.

My grandmother was not the cookie-baking kind. Don’t get me wrong, she was supremely loving: my mother was her youngest, the baby, and my sister and I held special places in the grandchild hierarchy. She brought over gifts and cared for us while my parents worked. But Nanny Ann took no shit.

When my sister and I misbehaved, she would point out the window to a random man on our Queens block and say, “See, the man is coming for you! You better be good before the man comes!” We had no idea what the man would do should he come, but were not willing to find out. She talked a lot about the devil, babysitting backlash to my parents’ decision not to raise us Catholic. She made up for it by letting us watch All My Children.

She talked freely about her life, relaying tragedies matter-of-factly. Her mother died of pneumonia when she was an infant. They were poor, and her father often brought her to the neighborhood pub, propped her on the bar, and had her sing while he passed around a hat. He died of alcohol related illnesses when she was 10. She went to live with an aunt and uncle but only stayed a year. The uncle sexually assaulted her, and the morning after she told her aunt about the abuse they sent her to St Joseph’s Orphanage in Brooklyn. She was 11.

She had no tolerance for abusive men. Once while she was cooking, my pregnant aunt was being berated in the next room by her husband. Nanny Ann told everyone in earshot she was going to “stick a fucking knife right in his heart,” and the family took her seriously enough to clear out. “She was crazy like that,” my mom says.

When I was growing up, my parents owned a women’s clothing store in Queens named “Nancy’s Shoppe,” after my mom. I assume the extra ‘pe’ on ‘shop’ was a fancifying effect. They sold bras and underwear, the unsexy kind – huge, industrial-strength bras that only came in black, white, and beige and that were stacked in boxes behind the counter. The clothes were generally bedazzled sweatsuit sets, and wool pants with elastic waists. There was the occasional “fashionable” item, but their clients were old Italian ladies in the neighborhood – so it was very occasional.

Their customers yelled at them, tried to return clothing that had clearly been worn for years, and sometimes pissed themselves in the dressing rooms. But my parents were thrilled to own their own business – they made their own hours and took time off during the summers. Besides, small businesses ran in the family. The house I grew up in was once my grandfather’s butcher shop.

Meanwhile, they built a house in Woodstock, NY together – my mom did the wiring, my dad the plumbing – and would take off days whenever they could to fix it up and create vegetable gardens on the surrounding land. My dad would come back to Queens with lettuce and give it as presents to my friends’ parents. One woman didn’t wash it well enough one night and served a salad full of tiny slugs to dinner guests. His favorite thing to grow, though, was garlic. He started with small amounts and started working up. Soon they were growing a few hundred pounds of garlic a year. Our house in Queens was filled with hanging dried garlic stalks, baskets of bulbs everywhere. They were reminders of this other life my parents had waiting for them, smelly signifiers of their split personalities: hippie Buddhists who dropped the f-bomb with abandon in thick outer-borough accents.