Aftertaste (7 page)

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Authors: Meredith Mileti

BOOK: Aftertaste
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Tonight the kitchen is so busy I hardly have time to breathe. My body is in constant motion, and I can feel it in my muscles as I reach up to pluck another head of garlic off the braid above the stove. I inspect every plate as it leaves the kitchen, making alterations in garnish, while continuing to cook and plate orders myself. When three orders of sea bass are overcooked and have to be chucked, I break my rhythm long enough to yell at the poor line cook, whose name I don't even know but who is responsible for ruining fifty dollars worth of fish. I don't stop until my throat hurts and she's crying, although she tries not to let me see.
By eleven thirty we're winding down. I ask one of the sous-chefs to put together a tray of biscotti and some limoncello for the members of the remaining corporate party, who are still lingering over coffee. They've ordered several bottles of expensive wine, in addition to appetizers and desserts, so the biscotti and digestif are a small, but important, gesture. I put on a fresh tunic and take them out myself. Making personal appearances is also part of the job, though one I've never relished. I've been on my feet for sixteen hours straight, and I can barely stand. So, I sit and schmooze for a few minutes, answer questions about what they've eaten and enjoyed, and, by the time they leave, Ellen informs me that they've taken an available date in early December for their office Christmas party.
It's well after midnight by the time the cooking staff has cleared away their stations and prepped for the next day. Tony pours some house wine for everyone, while Ellen, an apron over her elegant, black dress, serves leftover pasta from a big serving bowl. We sit around the table eating, drinking, and relaxing for the first time all evening, enjoying the camaraderie that follows the sharing of difficult experiences. Around this table, we are equals. I make a point of sitting next to Kristin, the young woman whose name I've learned from Tony. She avoids meeting my eye at first, and I know she's still embarrassed about the fish and angry at me for humiliating her in front of everyone. But we've had a good night, and the loss of the fish is no big deal. I tell her so, and thank her for all her hard work. I mean it, and she knows it. She gives me a shy smile before she leaves, and I know that she will come back tomorrow, that I haven't managed to kill the spirit that has motivated her to believe she could be a professional chef, though she seems hardly old enough to be out of high school.
I slip my feet out of my clogs and pour myself another glass of wine. I've long missed Chloe's bedtime, and Hope doesn't expect me until at least one. Besides, I'm so tired I can barely move. Tony moves over to the spot Kristin has just vacated. He unties his apron and uses it to wipe his meticulously shaved head, which glistens with sweat that drips in ripples down his smooth brown face, before tossing it in the general direction of the laundry bin. Helping himself to some more of the pasta, Tony offers, “We had a good night, eh?”
“I think so. It felt like a good night. I don't think I stopped moving—I must have plated over two hundred dinners. This makes lunch look like a breeze.”
“You worked both, remember?”
“As did you,” I tell him, raising my glass in salute.
“It felt good having you back for dinner. There's a, I don't know, a different feel to the kitchen.”
“That's for sure,” I snort. “Just ask Kristin.”
“Who?” Tony asks with a puzzled look, apparently having already forgotten her name.
“The girl with the fish.”
He grimaces at me and waves his hand as if swatting a fly. I suspect he's thinking I've gone soft. Maybe I have.
I want to ask him what he meant by his remark about the kitchen's having a different feel, but I'm suddenly too tired, exhausted by the realization that I will have to be back here in a mere seven hours. And that Chloe will be up in about four hours.
“Mira, go home. We're okay here for tonight. I'll hang around and wait for the cleanup crew to finish, and then I'll lock up.”
I don't argue with him, and as I stand up I put my hand on his shoulder and give it a squeeze. “Thanks, Tony, are you sure?” He makes that fly-swatting gesture again, and I can tell my small suggestion of intimacy has embarrassed him.
The night is cold, but I walk home with my coat open. The heat in the kitchen was intense, and the cold air feels good on my flushed skin. For the first time today I have a moment to think about Jake's not showing up tonight. Jake hasn't missed a day at the restaurant since we opened, and I know he is not in bed with food poisoning or the flu or anything remotely medical. Something happened to him yesterday. I wasn't exactly sure what, but it's something Jake isn't ready to let me see.
chapter 8
Last week, when I dropped Chloe off at day care, her teacher handed me a flyer announcing the Christopher Street Kids Annual Thanksgiving Luncheon. On the flyer there was a space in the middle of the page where someone had filled in Chloe's name, followed by “has volunteered to bring,” and then another space, where she has handwritten
three dozen corn muffins, individually wrapped!
This morning when I arrive at the day care, I find a printed reminder about the party, along with the news written in very small type at the bottom of the flyer, which I'd missed the first time, that the center will be closing early tomorrow, directly following the luncheon.
Standing next to me at the row of cubbies where we stow our children's things is Isaac's mother, Laura, whose reminder flyer I glimpse just before she shoves it into her briefcase. Isaac, who stands by his mother's side discreetly picking his nose while his mother unloads his backpack, has apparently volunteered to bring in two bags of miniature marshmallows, reminding me that it's probably not too early to talk with Chloe about volunteering her mother for school activities, as Isaac's mother clearly already has done.
I wonder how I'll even be able to make it to the lunch, and whether, at eight months, Chloe is old enough to miss my being there. Everyone eats out the day before Thanksgiving, and we are booked solid for both lunch and dinner, so there's no question I'll have to work all day. In addition to shopping and cooking for Thanksgiving dinner, it now seems I'll have to deal with baking and wrapping three dozen corn muffins
and
finding someone to watch Chloe on Wednesday afternoon. Life, I reflect morosely, would be infinitely simpler if I weren't a professional chef. I could take the afternoon off like all the other corporate moms, don my construction paper Indian headdress, and take my rightful place at the Thanksgiving table. More important, I could buy the muffins. No busy corporate executive mother can be expected to bake muffins. But everybody at day care knows I cook for a living and will probably be expecting muffins in the shape of ears of corn, warm and buttery, wrapped in colored cellophane and tied with raffia. I'm instantly depressed at the thought of delivering a case of individually wrapped Otis Spunkmeyers and allowing Chloe to sit unaccompanied at her first Thanksgiving feast. It reeks, not only of bad mothering, but of bad cooking as well.
As soon as I get to Grappa I call my father. I haven't heard back from him about Thanksgiving, which is unusual. When Richard called me back to let me know that he was still planning on coming, even though I hadn't been able to scare up a ticket to the Steelers-Jets game, he mentioned that my dad hadn't returned his call either—stranger still. Although it would be impossible to get a flight out now, the drive isn't too bad. Even though it's only a little after seven in the morning, I get my father's machine. Since when does my father leave for work before seven? I also try him at the university, but he isn't there either. I leave messages at his home and office, all the while trying to fight the rising panic at the idea that something terrible has happened. He could be lying dead in the bathroom, felled by a dropped bar of soap. He
is
getting older. Maybe he shouldn't be living alone. Around nine, I finally reach his secretary, who tells me that he just got in and has gone straight to a meeting. Well, at least he isn't dead. I tell her to have him call me when he breaks free.
I offer to sell my soul to Tony in exchange for an hour during lunch service on Wednesday so that I can deliver the muffins and attend the day care party. While kneading the pasta dough I make a mental list of all the things I still need for Thanksgiving dinner. Richard has promised to make the stuffing, which he insists has to be made with Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, because that is how his mother made it and if he doesn't eat it on Thanksgiving he will die. Hope is making “ambrosia,” a concoction involving Cool Whip, sweetened coconut, and canned fruit. It's her mother's recipe, and apparently another holiday essential. I try not to cringe, particularly since she has volunteered to watch Chloe tomorrow afternoon so that I can finish up at work and do some last-minute grocery shopping. In addition to the free-range bird that I have reserved at the Union Square Farmers Market, I add a few other necessities to the list: fresh Brussels sprouts, red and white pearl onions that I will serve creamed, and chestnuts for roasting, as that is what
my
mother used to serve on Thanksgiving.
Several hours and thirty-six muffins later, when I'm giving Chloe her bath, my dad calls back. Since we are both in the bathtub, I let the machine pick up, but as soon as I hear his voice, I wrap Chloe in a towel and we sprint, dripping, into the living room to pick up the phone.
“Dad—I'm here,” I say, picking up the receiver, causing the answering machine to emit a high-pitched squeal. “Chloe was just in the bath,” I tell him, reaching over to turn off the machine.
“Oh, okay. I'll call you ba—”
“No, no, it's okay. Hey, listen, I've been trying to reach you. Where were you this morning?”
My father doesn't say anything for a moment, and when he speaks his voice sounds unusually clear and crisp, as if he is taking special pains to enunciate each syllable. “I had a breakfast appointment, and I left the house early this morning,” he replies.
“Well, I talked to Richard earlier, and he's arriving on the six fifteen flight tomorrow evening. I've been trying to call you to see if you'd like to come out for Thanksgiving too. You know, see Chloe. Spend some time?”
There is a long pause. I wonder if he's forgotten about the invitation. That wouldn't be surprising. My father has always been a bit absentminded. It also fit with the picture I was beginning to develop that my father, at the ripe old age of sixty-four, was suffering the earliest signs of dementia.
“You know, Thanksgiving?”
“Oh, Thanksgiving! Well, Mira, I don't think I'm going to be able to make it, honey. I'm having dinner with some friends.”
Friends? Friends are where you go when your children couldn't have you over. Doesn't he know that any self-respecting father drops whatever he is doing to be with his daughter and granddaughter? And besides, since when does my father have friends?
“Oh,” is all I can think of to say.
“That, and I also have to work on Friday. A big grant proposal is due in Washington on Monday. No rest for the weary,” he says with a chuckle. “You know,” he continues, nonplussed, “I think I'm getting too old for this nonsense. I have a good mind to retire,” he says with a laugh, and we both know that nothing could be further from the truth. Suddenly my father is talking about RFPs and government contracts and his voice is chipper and peppy, which doesn't exactly fit with my picture of a partially demented senior citizen.
“Sounds like you've been busy. Are you sure everything is okay, Dad?”
He hesitates before continuing. “Well, I have a bit of bad news, actually. You remember Debbie Silverman?”
I'd gone to high school with Debbie's brother, Ronnie, and Debbie had been a few years ahead of me in school.
“Her husband—an orthopedic surgeon, I think—died unexpectedly. A heart attack at forty-eight. Dropped dead right in the operating room. Well, anyway, I don't mean to upset you, but I thought you should know. You might want to send her a card.”
“Thanks, Dad, I will. Poor Debbie.”
But what I really want to say is, “What about me?”
One of the many differences between being divorced and being widowed is that when you are a widow, everyone sympathizes with you. You get condolence cards by the bushel; people send you flowers and make you casseroles. But, if you've been jilted, and particularly when you have been spurned in favor of another woman, the underlying assumption is that
you
are somehow lacking. It makes me wonder, if Jake died now, would I be entitled to call myself a widow? And to all the rights and privileges thereof?
Not if the death looks too suspicious, I suppose.
By Wednesday evening, I've convinced Chloe's peers and their parents of my cooking prowess and dutifully eaten my sweet potato and marshmallow casserole while wearing a Pilgrim's collar and cuffs. I've also taken an entire roll of pictures of Chloe eating her first pumpkin pie, supervised the service of over two hundred lunches, finalized the winter menu, shopped, cooked, and cleaned the apartment. The complicated machinations that have allowed me to achieve this delicate balance between family and work have left me looking and feeling like a stale Krispy Kreme donut, glazed and pasty on the outside and filled with jelly. I'm in the midst of setting the table when Richard calls to tell me that his flight has been delayed. Instead of taking advantage of the extra time I have to sit down and relax before he arrives, I put Chloe to bed and start baking biscotti, because I think it's a nice hostessy thing to do.
Even though my mother had been a Cordon Bleu–trained chef, it was not she who taught me to cook—that I learned from Mrs. Favish, our next-door neighbor. It was during the first spring my mother was away, drying out at the expensive retreat center in New Hampshire. I was ten years old. Some people might have found it intimidating teaching the daughter of a professional chef to cook, but it hadn't seemed to bother Mrs. Favish. In fact, she undertook my culinary education with extraordinary zeal, teaching me first to bake because she believed that one must learn to follow the rules, culinarily speaking, before one could break them.
Chefs, I've found, can generally be divided into two groups: those who bake and those who do not. Baking is for the rule bound, the people who sat up front in cooking class and paid attention, who wrote things down, rather than relying on the
feel
of a recipe. I did none of those things, which was why it was unusual that I initially found my niche in the cooking world as a pastry chef. I think it was because Mrs. Favish taught me to bake first, and at a time in my life when I was craving predictability, looking for rules, for reasons why things should work.
I bake biscotti, dozens of them. Hazelnut, pistachio, cornmeal, anise, and black pepper. Before long the soothing aroma of anise and toasting nuts fills the kitchen. While I'm waiting for Richard, I sample one of each, along with a pot of tea, strong and very sweet, because that is how Mrs. Favish taught me to drink it. Sometimes I think my only chance for happiness is in a kitchen, that any life I live outside is destined to be a shadowy, half-lived sort of life. It is, after all, where I've spent the better part of my adult existence, and a decent chunk of my childhood as well, a place where things both tragic and wonderful have taken place. Maybe the only place I really know how to be me.
 
I'm shaping the last of the biscotti logs when the doorbell rings. Wiping my floury hands on my jeans, I run to answer it. I open the door and fling myself into Richard's arms.
“Sweetheart, watch the coat. Is that dough on your hands?” His words are light and teasing, but he holds me tightly.
“Yes, and I'm going to get it all over your expensive cashmere coat.”
“This old thing? So, where is she, the divine Chloe? It's her I came to see,” he says, ruffling my hair. I can smell his cologne. Bay Rum. A smell so comforting it makes me want to bury my face into his shirt and weep.
I take his coat and hang it on the coat rack while Richard meticulously folds his Burberry scarf and places it in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. At fifty-four years old Richard is still a good-looking man, due in part to two decades of near obsessive devotion to exercise and healthy eating, made necessary by a reckless and degenerate youth. In fact, the only clues to his age are a hint of silver in his golden hair and a few extra lines around his mouth and eyes.
We tiptoe into Chloe's room so that Richard can sneak a peek at her. She's sleeping on her back with her arms flung over her head in a gesture of complete surrender. Richard leans in, his palms to his cheeks in an exaggerated gesture of delight.
“She's gorgeous,” he whispers, taking my hand.
She stirs, and I shush him. “Come on, you'll wake her,” I tell him.
“Pleasant dreams, sweetie,” he says, gently brushing a wisp of hair from her forehead.
“Come on, I've made biscotti,” I tell him, hustling him out of the room. “And a pot of tea.”
“I just survived the flight from hell. I think we're going to need something stronger than tea!”
In the kitchen, I watch as he opens the antique china cupboard and helps himself to two delicate demitasse cups and saucers. He opens another door and takes out the old-fashioned stove-top Italian coffee maker, for Richard's idea of something stronger—espresso. He does these things with a minimum of looking around. Although he has been here only a handful of times, somehow Richard knows his way around my kitchen.
We work side by side, in companionable silence. It doesn't seem to matter how seldom I see Richard, because no matter how long it's been, we are somehow in sync. He rolls up the sleeves of his expensive shirt, revealing two strong, tanned arms and a Rolex watch. The antique business was obviously doing well.

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