Aftertaste (19 page)

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Authors: Meredith Mileti

BOOK: Aftertaste
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I nod, and take a deep breath, silently damning Richard, my father, and Fiona.
“I didn't mean to upset you. It was an honest mistake, wasn't it?”
“Yes, of course,” I say, taking another deep breath. Don't start hyperventilating, I tell myself.
“Now, what do you think?” she asks, glancing at her watch and giving me a tentative look.
I look at her blankly.
“Mira, I was asking you if you felt ready to begin another chapter in your life.”
“Another chapter?” I stare at her, having no idea of what to say.
“Yes. Are you ready to begin another chapter in your life?”
Then, as if reading my mind she says, “Mira, I know that you may not feel particularly ready, but you've taken an important step in coming here today.” She leans forward, resting her forearms on her knees, and looks directly at me. “Now, I'm going to suggest something pretty radical. Even if you don't feel ready, I'm going to ask you to pretend that you are. Sometimes feelings follow behavior. If you act a certain way, then very often you actually start to feel that way. We are going to jump-start your life.”
With a final glance at her watch, she tells me, “We should probably explore why this was so hard for you, but unfortunately we are out of time for today.” I leave the office with specific instructions as to what I need to do before next week. Dr. D-P, as it turns out, is big on lists. My first assignment is to buy a “Life Notebook,” in which I'm to record my assignments, the first of which is to write down five things that would make me happy and to do at least two of them before next week. In addition to that, I'm to write down five professional goals and five personal goals and a description of where I see myself in five years. She also apparently is big on the number five. Dr. D-P says that it's not at all unusual for women in my position to feel lost and unsure of themselves. I'll figure out what I want eventually, she tells me. When I give her a dubious look, she laughs and tells me that she has seen far worse cases than mine. It makes me wish that I'd come clean about having basically failed at my court-ordered rehabilitation.
I want to believe Dr. D-P. I want to believe that doing the things she asks of me will make a difference. She seems so cool and confident, so in control of things. Would it be so wrong to believe that she might be right?
chapter 17
The following week, Ruth and I are sitting at the Coffee Tree on Walnut Street. When she heard I'd been sick, she'd brought me some matzo ball soup. After the last Gymboree class, I suggested meeting for coffee the next day, and she'd accepted. She made me swear not to tell her Jewish mother, whom I've never met and who doesn't even live in Pittsburgh, that she'd bought, rather than made, the matzo ball soup.
“No seriously, there's a mafia-like code of conduct among Jewish mothers everywhere governing the cooking and dispensing of matzo ball soup,” Ruth says with a nervous backwards glance. “If it ever leaked out that I bought it,” she says with a wry smile, “I could be excommunicated.” Can Jewish people really be excommunicated?
“Okay, here's what you need to do,” Ruth tells me. We are working on the second part of my assignment for Dr. D-P, the “where do I see myself in five years” part.
“You need to come up with a plan that allows you to do the thing you love—obviously cooking—while being able to balance and maintain a significant family commitment. That's easy,” she says, pausing to take a sip of her double latte. “There are probably lots of things you could do. How about being a caterer or a personal chef? Hell, you're practically mine. Or maybe you could come up with one thing and make it and sell it mail order. There's probably a huge market for online foodstuffs. Fudge, fruitcake, things like that.” Carlos toddles over to a neighboring table and proceeds to gnaw on the edge of one of the chairs. In one fluid movement, Ruth retrieves him, wipes down the section of the armrest Carlos has drooled upon, and apologizes to the annoyed woman sitting there. “Or how about gourmet teething biscuits?” she asks, reclaiming her seat.
“No way,” I tell her. Apart from the fact that I cannot bear the thought of wasting my excellent culinary education hawking chocolate chip cookies or Rocky Road fudge from my home, one of the many problems with Ruth's plan is logistics. Where am I to do this catering and cooking? There are probably zoning laws or Board of Health constraints that prohibit cooking for wide distribution in one's home. Even if there aren't, my father's kitchen is too small and antiquated. When I tell this to Ruth, she just shrugs.
“Don't worry about that. The assignment is where you see yourself in five years. First think about where you want to end up, and then you can figure out how to get there. So, what do you think about getting bangs?”
“What? How is getting bangs going to help me get where I'm going?”
“Not you. Me. I'm thinking about changing my hair, something soft swept across the forehead. Look at this,” Ruth says, pulling her hair severely back from her forehead and furrowing her brow. “Wrinkles. I read in
More
magazine that getting bangs is the poor girl's facelift. Cheaper than Botox, for sure.”
I consider Ruth's face. She has curly, shoulder-length hair, dark and peppered with wisps of gray. It's soft and pretty. When I tell her so, she rolls her eyes. “You're no help,” she says, bending to retrieve Carlos's pacifier, which has rolled under the table.
“I don't know,” I tell her. “Maybe I'm not the best person to ask. I've had the same hairstyle since the seventh grade.”
“That's because you have perfect hair. Long and thick and straight. I hate you.” Ruth laughs. “But seriously, how am I going to get Gym-Dad to notice me looking like this?” she asks, pulling her hair in tight fists away from her face and groaning.
“You're fine,” I repeat, “You've got great eyes, an intelligent face, and you probably don't have any stretch marks. I'd trade good hair for no stretch marks,” I say, picking up a piece of hazelnut biscotti and dunking it in my latte.
Ruth considers this a minute and smiles. “Yeah? Well, maybe.”
“All I know is that whoever this guy is, he can't possibly be worth all this fuss,” I tell her, surprised that she's clearly given him so much thought.
“That's because you haven't seen him yet. He's adorable, boyish, you know? The kind of guy you look at and know exactly what he looked like in the third grade. But he's graying at the temples, which is good because that means he's in the right ballpark agewise. Why is it that gray hair is sexy on men and on us it just looks old?”
“So where was this phantom Gym-Dad yesterday? For all you know, he's married and his wife was there yesterday. Maybe she just couldn't make it last week.”
“No. For starters, the kid wasn't there. I'd have recognized him, a cute little redheaded boy a little older than Carlos. Besides, the buzz in the gym last week was that he's a widower.” Ruth says this breathlessly, as if she's just found out the Dow had risen three hundred points, leaving me to ponder the particular brand of buzz that widowerhood engenders among the Gymboree set.
“Hello, we're supposed to be planning my life, remember?” I tell her, waving my Life Notebook in her face.
“Okay, okay. I'm on it,” Ruth says, picking up the Food section of the
Post-Gazette.
“Hey, what about teaching a cooking class? Look,” she says. “There are all kinds of cooking classes being offered. Low-Fat Indian Favorites, Guiltless Gourmet Party Stoppers, Ground Beef 101.” Ruth looks at me over her newspaper and raises one eyebrow. When I shake my head, she goes back to her newspaper.
On the back page of the Food section is a restaurant review. Just looking at one, even for a restaurant I don't have anything to do with, is enough to give me a stomachache. The restaurant is being reviewed by the Nibbler, the anonymous Pittsburgh restaurant reviewer whose byline is a trademark picture of a person holding a knife and a fork and wearing a checkered napkin bandit-style, the rest of the face obscured by a fake nose and glasses. “Hey, look at this,” Ruth says, waving the paper in front of me. “Do you have a pair of scissors? I want to cut out this recipe. It looks like something my mother used to make.” The recipe is from a column entitled “Five Ingredient Recipe Wonders” and involves cream of mushroom soup, a package of Lipton's dry onion soup, and a chuck roast. The other two ingredients are carrots and potatoes.
“Hey, didn't you say your mother would kill you if she found out you bought matzo ball soup? Now you're telling me she made things with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom?”
“Of course. All the time. Lipton's onion soup mix, too, the powdered kind. The matzo ball soup is definitely an exception. That's because it's basically part of the religion. Seriously, I learned to make it in Hebrew School,” she says, when I give her a doubtful look. “That's how my mother cooked. Her famous brisket recipe calls for dry onion soup mix and a bottle of Coke.” She laughs when I shudder. “Snob. Actually, it's delicious.”
She gives the recipe a surreptitious rip. The paper belongs to the Coffee Tree. “I think I'm going to make this,” she says, pocketing the recipe.
That night, about ten, Ruth calls me in desperation. “Did you know that crock pots have two settings?” she asks me.
“Well, yeah,” I tell her. “Why?”
“Because I didn't. I put it on low, and the meat still isn't done, and it's late and I'm starving. Besides, I'm not sure I want to eat it. Is the meat supposed to be gray?”
“No, gray meat isn't usually a good sign. But I don't know. I've never cooked with cream of mushroom soup. It's kind of gray, so maybe that's the way it's supposed to be,” I tell her.
“Are you sure you're a real chef?” Ruth says, obviously cranky and hungry.
“Well, does it look like what your mother made?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“Did you brown the meat first?”
“No, the recipe didn't say to.”
“Okay, it's just that browning the meat first allows a nice crust to form on the meat, which lends a certain depth of flavor, not to mention color, to the dish. It's probably gray because you didn't brown it first.” So much for not sounding like a chef.
“It didn't say to,” Ruth stubbornly repeats.
“Well, I don't know, then. Call up your mother and ask her if she browned her meat. I'll bet she did.”
“No, forget it. I'd just get a lecture on how I should have paid attention to her cooking and that if I had, I'd be married now. Who needs that?”
After hanging up with Ruth, I rummage around in the den for today's newspaper, looking for the recipe that Ruth has obviously mucked up. I find the Food section and, sure enough, Ruth was right—the recipe didn't call for browning the meat. I end up reading the entire section cover to cover, including the restaurant review that I had avoided reading at the Coffee Tree, which I could tell from the first sentence was going to be a bad one.
The restaurant being reviewed is Koko's Caribbean Bistro, which right away the reviewer had pounced upon as evoking an alarming image. Bistros were French, and the notion of a Caribbean bistro obviously troubled the reviewer, who had apparently forgotten that part of the Caribbean was, in fact, settled by the French. In addition, he griped that too many of the dishes served were overly sweet and used too many exotic ingredients. The sweet dishes might not have been to his taste, but the cuisine of the Caribbean is heavily dependent on sugar cane, as well as several indigenous starchy vegetables that, when cooked, release their latent sugars. Alligator was on the menu, as was conch, both of which the reviewer said he had tried (they both tasted like chicken), but I'm not sure I believe him.
In the hallway I hear Dad and Fiona saying good night. Their voices fall silent after a minute. Maybe they are kissing. A few minutes later, I hear my father climb the stairs to bed.
I always thought that restaurant reviewers had cushy jobs, but in New York I'd actually known one. She reviewed mostly sandwich shops and Chinese buffets, so it wasn't like she was eating out at three-star restaurants every night of the week, hobnobbing after hours with Joel Robuchon and Mario Batali, but still, how bad could it be?
Why hadn't I thought of it before? The hours would be great, and I could do the writing at home. An added bonus would be that, as a reviewer, I'd have the potential to influence the trends in Pittsburgh, a heady prospect. By the time I climb the stairs to bed, I've convinced myself I'm poised to become Pittsburgh's own Frank Bruni.
I peek in on Chloe and then tackle the boxes under the eaves, tiptoeing around so as not to wake her. I finally hunt down what I'm looking for:
Tastes of the Caribbean
. It's been a long day, and the cool sheets feel good against my skin. I open the book and leaf through it. I can't remember ever having read this particular book or having prepared any of the dishes in it. It probably had been Jake's. The author seems to know her stuff, displaying an academic interest in the food and the culture of the islands, while writing vividly, capturing the nuances of sight, smell, and taste. In the middle of the book there is a large color spread of photographs depicting some of the more ambitious dishes. I find myself looking at pictures of rich and beautiful food, sensually displayed against the lush and verdant backdrop of an island paradise. If nothing else, I'm hoping to dream of conch fritters and deep blue seas.
 
I need someone to watch Chloe during my weekly therapist appointment, and Ruth is also desperate for time alone—some relief from Carlos. Time, she says, where she can go and sip coffee or get her nails done, all the while wallowing in guilt about the craven need she has to escape her own child. And so, we have made a deal. One day each week, we will watch each other's children.
It's her turn on Tuesday so, after dropping Chloe at Ruth's, I'm able to spend the entire morning at the Squirrel Hill Library preparing for my life coach appointment at noon. First, I do some research on the Pittsburgh food scene (which takes about five minutes), then I spend the rest of the time updating my résumé and drafting a cover letter to the food editor, whose name is Enid Maxwell.
Dr. D-P is pleased with my progress and doles out another set of tasks for next week, mostly having to do with résumés and mass mailings.
On the way home I decide to stop and visit Richard, whom I haven't seen or spoken to since last week. He'd deliberately hurt me with his comments about my mother, which I now have to admit, may have been helpful. He's probably avoiding me, thinking I'm still angry.
Richard's shop is on Ellsworth Avenue, occupying the first floor of an old turn of the century row house, sandwiched in between an elegant ladies resale shop called Plan B and a used CD and record exchange called Astro and the Jetsons. The shop is empty, but I can see Richard look up in his office as the bell on the door gives a metallic tinkle. He's on the phone, which he places in the crook of his neck, as he beckons me back into his office. He reaches over his desk and removes a stack of fabric samples from the guest chair. He tries not to show that he is either surprised or pleased to see me, but I can tell by the flash of his eyes that he's glad, maybe even relieved, that I've come. I can also tell by the way he is doggedly biting the inside of his mouth that he is probably dealing with a difficult client, one who is refusing to bend to Richard's rather implacable decorating will.

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