A work of creative nonfiction that ponders the notion of where one can confidently call home…
by: Katlin Singh
They say the truth comes out when drinking. For me, it is a very specific truth, revealed by a very specific drink.
The bartender sets an Old Fashioned on a coaster in front of me, the one oversized ice cube clink-clinking against the sides of the glass. The first sip burns, and I consciously tense the muscles around my lips and eyes, bracing, to not let it show. It traces a heated, liquidy path down to my stomach, settling warm and golden.
It should be noted, I am a New Yorker. I am, after all, sitting in a bar in the West Village, in the city I have lived in for well over ten years. And it is common knowledge that after ten years of unwavering residency, you officially become a New Yorker, the city claims you.
My husband returns from the bathroom and we cheer our drinks. I slide the orange peel around the rim of my glass, knowing I’m making my fingers sticky. A few more sips and my body is tingling, the light vibrations of a buzz in my shoulders, my face, and my knees. I’m simultaneously humming with alcohol-energy and feeling that whole-body loosening that allows truths to slip out.
We finish our first round and I lean heavily on the bar with my forearms, lifting myself off the barstool by an inch, so I can look down the bar and make eye contact with the bartender. It’s easy to get his attention, this place isn’t crowded yet, but I know it will be later. It’s the type of New York bar I love: low-lit and cozy with dark, artistic wallpaper and wall sconces with flickering fake candles, the music a little loud even though its early, a hum of anticipation of the night ahead. It’s pretending to be a fancy speakeasy, but the coasters are cardboard, the antique artwork fake. Later in the night, they’ll move the barstools to the edges of the room and this area will be crowded with people, maybe some dancing.
“We’ll do two more,” I say to the bartender, dropping the orange peel into my glass and sliding it towards him. “That was really good.” I can feel the vowels growing thick in my mouth, my short A’s elongating and my O’s melting, the truth escaping.
The bartender turns to pull the expensive whiskey off the shelf. “Where are you guys from?” he asks, but I know he’s really only asking me, because now he’s heard my accent.
“Here,” my husband says, and I Iet them chat while I watch the bartender make our next round. He drops a few dashes of bitters into a glass, measuring in a small amount of simple syrup. Sugar is optional in this drink, though, like most forms of sweetness in the city, it is often deemed unnecessary. With a long-handled cocktail spoon, he stirs, then measures and pours two shots of the whiskey, filling the shot glass precisely each time before tipping it in, the liquid rising steadily in the glass. Last is the one large ice cube and a final stir, the liquid whirlpooling around the ice cube. He artistically drapes an orange peel on each rim and that’s it: a half-full glass of pretentious whiskey, velvety amber, slightly accessorized.
The bartender sets a fresh coaster in front of me, places my drink on it. “What about you?” he asks.
My New Yorker facade, which felt so real when I first walked into this bar, has been chipped, exposed by my accent. But after that first drink, it feels heavy and I’m ready to shed it. “I’m from Wisconsin,” I say proudly. “In Wisconsin, we make real Old Fashioneds. This,” and I gesture to the drink he just made, “is not a real Old Fashioned.”
My husband shakes his head, he’s heard this all before, but the bartender raises his eyebrows, so I tell him about real Old Fashioneds.
Real Old Fashioneds are what the grownups drink on Christmas Eve at my grandma’s house in Pulaski, Wisconsin. They are made with an array of cheap ingredients but absolutely no whiskey. They are sipped, orange and fizzing, standing in Grandma’s small kitchen thick with the smell of hot oil while blood sausage and borscht simmer on the stovetop and my grandma fries Polish perogies, flipping them with her fingers despite the popping oil, the room sweaty and stuffy while winter swirls outside the dark windows.
A real Old Fashioned is made with brandy, sugar, bitters, 7UP and maraschino cherries. Nothing expensive, nothing fancy. Every Christmas Eve my grandma arranged these ingredients on a small side table in the kitchen, next to the Christmas cookies. As a kid, I would stand in front of that table, pretending to look at the cookies, and study the drink ingredients: the liter of 7UP would often be oddly shaped from someone squeezing it while pouring and then capping it before it could reconfigure, the brandy bottle looked like it was filled with maple syrup, the bitters bottle looked like it was made for doll-play. There was an ice bucket, filled with ice cubes popped out of the freezer tray, which was constantly being drained and refilled in the hot kitchen. If no one was looking, I would sometimes pretend to be picking a cookie but instead sneak a cherry, slipping it into my mouth and holding it in my back teeth for a moment, then biting down for that satisfying, sugary pop.
The first year my aunt offered to make me a real Old Fashioned was my freshman year of college. Though I was still seated at the kids’ table, I could sense the significance of the moment. She mixed it precisely and intentionally but without any measuring, relying on tradition and muscle memory. She eyeballed a pour of simple syrup, then bitters, added a cherry, then tipped the cherry jar over the glass, allowing a dribble of the juice to spill in, staining everything red. Using a kitchen spoon, she did a quick muddle-mix, crushing the cherry against the side of the glass while she stirred. Next, she poured the brandy in, a strong pour, the liquid swirling orange and bright. She topped it with 7UP, the liquids quietly fizzing and whispering together in the glass. She gave it one last good stir, added a few drippy ice cubes and a fresh cherry, and presented it to me with a flourish.
“Your first drink!” she said with a wink.
It was not my first drink, but it was my first Old Fashioned, and I didn’t know what to expect. I tensed for the brandy-burn, but that initial sip was surprising — all sweetness and fizz, the liquor expertly, almost completely, hidden. The drink went down so easy, I was surprised to feel the lightness of a buzz in my head, the heat of brandy settling in my stomach. My aunt did not offer a second one and I didn’t ask. I was seated at the kids table, after all.
The Brandy Old Fashioned, sweet and easy, has been part of Wisconsin culture for generations, served in supper clubs and family kitchens across the state. It is the unofficial drink of Wisconsin weddings, family gatherings, Christmases and Easters. It was the only drink offered at my Grandma’s 90th birthday brunch.
I am compelled to tell the bartender, really anyone who will listen, about real Old Fashioneds, because the differences between the two drinks are important to me. A New York Old Fashioned is direct, there is no hiding the alcohol. It is also pretentious, made of expensive whiskey and small-batch bitters and giant, fancy ice cubes. A Wisconsin Old Fashioned is strong, too, but much sweeter, the alcohol hidden, perhaps a bit passive-aggressively, behind sugar and cherries and 7UP. It’s humble, not showy at all, with its base of cheap brandy and freezer-tray ice cubes. And this is important because I, too, am much sweeter than the average New Yorker, and certainly less pretentious. At least that’s what the alcohol pulsing through me says.
When I moved to New York City, I was unaware that other versions of the Old Fashioned existed. I was unaware of a lot, including my own accent. I had never been to New York before, but I had been accepted into a national teaching program and been placed there, despite requesting the Midwest. I went on a whim. It felt serendipitous and adventurous, maybe a bit romantic, and I was young.
I was assigned to teach first grade deep in Brooklyn. On the second day of teacher training, the assistant principal pulled me aside after watching me practice-teach a phonics lesson and told me I couldn’t teach phonics until I fixed my vowel pronunciation. I needed to learn to say vowel sounds without my Wisconsin accent.
“I love that you’re from Wisconsin and you have a Midwest accent,” she said kindly, seeing my embarrassment. “It’s just, we can’t teach kids the wrong vowel sounds.”
I nodded and forced eye contact, but my cheeks were hot with unexpected embarrassment. I had never thought of myself as having an accent.
For the next two weeks before school started, I was given homework: watch Youtube videos of phonics teachers modeling vowel sounds, videos intended for struggling Kindergarteners, and teach myself to make those sounds.
In one video, a cheery woman said in a sing-songy voice, “Watch the shape my mouth makes! A, apple, aaaa! A says aaaa.”
I watched her mouth, sitting cross-legged and cramped, laptop on my legs on the floor of the tiny bedroom I was subletting in the East Village. I looked into the mirror I had propped up next to me to watch the shape of my own mouth. “A, apple, aaaa,” I whispered, praying my Craigslist roommate, sitting in the other room, couldn’t hear me. It was not the romantic start to New York that I had imagined.
But I was a good student. I learned to pronounce all the vowel sounds without an accent and was approved to teach first grade. Initially, controlling my accent was a concerted effort that I dropped as soon as students left the building, but over the course of that year my new pronunciations became easier and more natural.
I did not reinvent myself like they do in the movies. My accent faded but otherwise I remained the same. My favorite thing to do at bars was tell people I was from Wisconsin, I loved being a Wisconsin girl in New York City. I loved the city: the previously-unknown world of subways and gridded, walkable streets and endless restaurants and cat-guarded bodegas. I loved that I could lose myself in the city while fully being myself. I reveled in the idea of a dual identity, of having two places I belonged, two homes.
I went back to Wisconsin often, to the peace and slowness of staying in my childhood home. In the summers, I’d eat dinner with my parents on the back patio, watching the sun set slowly and lazily, the light melting down between the tree trunks in the wooded area behind the house. I used to go exploring there as a kid, running between the rows of trees, pretending to be lost. After dinner, we’d sip Miller Lites, the cans growing warm and wet in the summer air, and I had no desire to leave.
On Christmas Eve, a new tradition emerged: my aunt would make me an Old Fashioned and, handing it to me, ask, “So, when are you moving back?”
I’d look into my glass, watching the small ice cubes shift, melting into the drink, and say, “I will eventually. I don’t plan on living in New York forever.” It was my honest answer for many years. But every time I considered moving home, I moved to Brooklyn, or back to Manhattan instead.
School years and Christmas Eves passed, accumulating silently, heavily like winter snow. The idea of home became a tricky one. Every year that I returned to New York City felt like a betrayal of sorts, and yet I was pulled back. Did I belong to both places, or neither? Did I have two homes, or none?
On a hot summer night back in the city, at a dark bar with sticky floors that pulled at the soles of my shoes and an energy that pulled me in, I met my now-husband. It was with him, a year later, at a cozy cocktail bar, different from the dive bars I frequented, that I ordered my first Old Fashioned in New York.
“Where’s the cherry?” I asked when the waiter brought it over.
My now-husband laughed. He thought it was some sort of joke. People in New York don’t even know that Old Fashioneds come in other forms.
I liked the drink, and that made me feel like a traitor. Every time I order one in New York, I feel the twist of guilt, the confusion of my identity, the need to tell someone about real Old Fashioneds.
A college friend recently whispered about me, behind my back, “She’s lost some of her Wisconsin.” It was meant as an insult and I took it as such. But the worst part is, it might be true. In gaining my New York identity, I may have lost some of my Wisconsin. I mourn that loss. I don’t know if a person is able to hold two complete and competing identities at once. I will never be fully New York, as a transplant, but I fear I will never be fully Wisconsin again, either. It leaves me with the lingering feeling I have something to prove.
Sometimes, after my first Old Fashioned, I convince myself that having two homes, two identities, makes me interesting. But later, sober, I worry that it simply makes me an imposter in two places.
My brother still lives in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, a two-hour drive from my parents. Unlike me, he never left. He is local and loyal.
“Do you want an Old Fashioned?” he asks me one night when we’re both home staying with my parents. He starts to pull ingredients from around the kitchen while I sit at the countertop, watching. “I’ve been trying to get the recipe just right.” His back is to me as he clinks bottles out of the way in the liquor cabinet above the fridge, trying to find what he is looking for. “And making them is kind of therapeutic.”
To my surprise, he turns around holding a bottle of whiskey, not brandy.
“Aren’t you supposed to use brandy?” I ask.
“I’m not a big brandy guy,” he shrugs. “I think they taste better with whiskey.” He does not appear to be plagued by disloyalty to Grandma. His identity is not tied to this drink, he has nothing to prove.
“Mom, do we have 7UP?” he calls into another room of the house.
“In the basement fridge,” she calls back.
He makes the drinks the way I remember, complete with cherry juice and 7UP, moving slowly and methodically, not measuring anything. He takes a tentative sip, pauses thoughtfully, then shrugs. “Maybe a little too sweet,” he says, sliding my glass to me, leaving a wet smudge on the counter. I run my finger through the smudge, changing its shape, dampening my skin.
I take a sip. “It’s good,” I say, taking a second sip. “You’re right, maybe a little sweet.”
For me, this is what nostalgia and guilt and grief over my Wisconsin identity taste like: something too sweet and too strong mixed together. It burns the back of my throat, delicious at the same time.
I gingerly pull the cherry out of my glass, the ice cubes sliding cold against my fingers as I fish it out. I eat the cherry, relishing the sugariness, and lick the sticky residue off my fingertips. Then I pick up the whiskey bottle and pour just a little bit more into my glass, to cut the sweetness.
Katlin Singh was born and raised in Wisconsin and remains a Midwestern girl at heart. She’s a former first grade teacher and a current full-time mom. Her work has appeared previously in Pithead Chapel. She now lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
