Comfort Food (2 page)

Gus Simpson
was
going to be fifty.

Not, in and of itself, a remarkable event. It happened to other people every day. Surely. But Gus had blithely assumed getting older wouldn’t quite happen to her. After all, she was slim (if not exactly a devotee of exercise), had a thriving career, a chunk of money in the bank (well managed by David Fazio, a top financial adviser Alan Holt had recommended years ago), a closet bursting with pricey clothes—Gus’s signature look was a comfortablyelegant collarless silk duster, layered over a smooth shell, with wide-leggedsilk georgette trousers—and a convertible in her garage, dammit. She listened to Top 40. She used a digital camera. She had an incredibly tiny cell phone. She knew how to send text messages. She still dressed up at Halloween to give out candy. Wasn’t all that enough to keep maturity at bay?

Turning forty-nine had had a jaunty ring to it; fifty felt like she ought to buy a pair of orthopedic shoes.

“It’s quite impossible to figure out how to act these days,” she told her producer, Porter, who had several years on her. “My mother had settled into being a grandmother at this age. But today some women are still having babies at fifty—babies, Porter!”

“Do you want a baby, Gus?” he’d asked, joking.

“No! What I want is to figure out this disconnect between a number on a piece of paper and how I feel inside,” said Gus. “Do you know that the women from
thirtysomething
are now fiftysomething? And they’re still young. What about Michelle Pfeiffer? Meryl Streep? Jane Seymour? Oprah? They say fifty is the new thirty.”

“So it should be no problem then,” reasoned Porter. “You look great.”

“And yet it is an issue,” admitted Gus. “I have wrinkles. Real wrinkles, not those little crinkles I used to moan about when I turned forty. Porter, I think fondly about turning forty! I mean, I just can’t stop wondering, How did I get here?”

“Where did the time go?”

“Yes, really. Where
did
the time go?” asked Gus. “And when do I get to hit ’pause’? ”

And so, she reasoned to herself, it had been natural to fall behind on planning her birthday party. It had been easy to just put it off. Any other year she’d have begun organizing her birthday party immediately after Thanksgiving, deciding first on her cake flavor, arranging the food, sending formal invitations in the mail. (No, Gus Simpson simply did not appreciate the informality of E-vite, thank you very much. The little details were what made guests feel most welcome, she knew.) She could have picked one item or concept—a pomegranate, an orchid, the color puce—and built the entire festivities around it as a theme. Her ability to decorate and entertain was so innate that she simply assumed anyone could throw parsley on a dish and make it look better than a haphazard explosion of green.

But not this time; not this year. Suddenly it felt like too much effort: Gus Simpson, one of the most popular entertaining gurus on television, didn’t want to throw a party. In fact, she’d have preferred canceling her birthday altogether.

She poured a stream of rich hazelnut-scented coffee from her large French press into an oversized blue-and-white-striped pottery mug. With care she carried her drink to the speckled gray-and-black granite breakfast bar, perching herself on the counter-height navy chair. Gus took a sip, just a little almost-slurp (since no one else was around) so as not to burn her tongue, and flipped through the
New York Times
, trying to jolly herself out of her gloomy mood. But her natural habit—it was Monday, which meant the weekly Media section, and she loved to follow her industry—led her to a large article above the fold of the paper.

“The New Faces of Food TV,” Gus read to herself, feeling a whoosh of anxiety in her chest. “Food is the new fashion and the latest crop of program hosts look as delicious as their culinary creations.”

Gus tapped her teeth against each other as she always did when she was tense and scanned the large photo with all the up-and-coming hotshots in cooking television: there was that
young
surfer chef who always wore shorts and looked barely old enough to be in college, the
young
Midwesternhousewife who only made dishes that took up to six ingredients, and the
young
Miss Spain who had turned a gig promoting her country’s olives into an Internet cult following on YouTube. From there, Gus read how Miss Spain had created her own ten-minute Web show,
FlavorBoom
, which was also downloadable to TiVo, and had edited a small cookbook that had just come out at the holidays a few weeks before. It had already been a top seller online. The story continued on page two of the section, where there was a glamour shot of the gorgeous, black-haired Miss Spain in her crown and far too much mascara, with a large caption underneath: “Carmen Vega: From Beauty Queen to Foodie Queen.”

“I bet she can’t even cook,” Gus announced to her coffee mug, quite ready to close the paper in disgust. But then a familiar line caught her attention,and she found herself scanning the words carefully.

“Imagine there are only a certain set of ingredients and that’s all there is to use,” says Gus Simpson, the CookingChannel’s ubiquitous program host and star of the well-known
Cooking with Gusto!
in a recent interview in
Every Day with Rachael Ray
. “But we don’t all create the same thing. So it’s not really about what you put in a dish—it’s about how you make that meal taste. It’s not about how you make it but about how eating it makes you feel. Cooking, like life, stays interesting when you keep the experience fresh.”

Blah, blah, blah went the article. On and on about these exciting new voices in the world of food television, all seemingly sanctioned, via the clever use of already reported quotes, by none other than Gus Simpson. Oh, how she hated that! Being interviewed for one article—which had been published over a year ago—and then finding those same words popping up in every other journalist’s food story.

The lesson she’d learned: Don’t ever say anything, cutesy or cutting, that you don’t want to hear parroted back to you for the rest of your life.

Gus thought about crumpling up the paper and tossing it in the bin, but there was no one around to see her dramatics and she always felt that grand behavior wasn’t really worth the energy when there was no one to witness it. Television had trained her well. Instead, she sighed and left her spot at the breakfast bar for more comfortable surroundings. She shooed her white cat, Salt, out of an overstuffed wing chair in the bay window and watched her pad her way over to lie in a ray of sun with Pepper, who was black and had a somewhat pungent attitude.

Then, coffee in hand, she settled herself down on the sturdy white twill (for Gus had strong faith in her guests’ ability to not spill and in the power of Scotchgard if they did). The large kitchen was a space in which Gus keenly felt a sense of home and was where she did all her important thinking, be it coming up with new recipes or sorting out the endlessly complicated lives of her daughters. The wing chair closest to the French doors, long ago dubbed her “thinking spot” by Aimee, was perfectly positioned to lend a view of the flagstone patio. She could enjoy the color of her divine garden come spring—currently a bit of leftover snow and slushiness from a Westchester winter—as well as have full range of her gleaming kitchen. Sitting in this chair provided what she always called the “viewer’s-eye view” because it was how her home appeared on television.

Hers was a dream kitchen, with a deep blue Aga stove, a marble-topped baking area, those granite counters, a deep and divided white farmer’s sink, the artfully mismatched cabinets designed to look as though they were pieces of furniture added over time (assuming every flea market and antique shop would miraculously contain wood pieces with precisely the same bun feet and crown molding), and a bank of Sub-Zero freezers and refrigerators along one wall. The
pièce de résistance
? The substantial rectangular island, with eight-burner cooktop and raised backsplash, ample counter space, and breakfast bar to one side (though not immediately in front of the cooktop, of course, where it might ruin the camera shot). The island was the part of her kitchen most familiar to her viewers.

What a great idea it had been to suggest filming at her home when she began her third CookingChannel program,
Cooking with Gusto!
, in 1999. It certainly cut down commute time and, much more important, had turned the reno into something she could write off. And Gus, for all her professionalsuccess, was a devotee of socking away money. For a rainy day. For her retirement. Which had always seemed way, way off, on account of the fact that she was so tremendously, eternally, divinely young. A someday worth planning for but nothing that seemed as though it was about to arrive soon. She was too busy.

In the early years when she first started on television, long before the plump paychecks and the merchandising deals, Gus hosted a half-hour programcalled
The Lunch Bunch
based on her menu at her gourmet spot The Luncheonette. It filmed in a studio in Manhattan and she took the train home to the small two-bedroom home she shared with Aimee and Sabrina. It was the same compact Westchester bungalow that she had initially moved into with Christopher, after they’d returned from their overseas Peace Corps stint and had given up living in Manhattan, back when they were barely married. When he’d raved about every dinner she burned and she made him brown-bag lunches, with sexy little notes tucked inside. When they were too new at life and marriage to comprehend the bad that could come. Would come.

The tiny place had been home with their two little girls, and Gus had tried out a variety of careers—taking photographs for the local paper, doing part-time camera work for the local cable station, and making a line of homemade candles—while baking cupcakes for Sabrina and Aimee’s school and carpooling the neighborhood kids. Still enjoying the luxury of figuring out what she wanted to do.

Christopher’s accident had changed things, of course, spurred her to open The Luncheonette, which attracted the attention of Alan Holt and his cable network. Gus’s little restaurant, in Westchester County, just north of New York City, specialized in quick bites and tea parties and the like. She was close enough to the station that commuters popped in for beverages and snacks before catching a train. The decor—bright and light with distressed off-white tables and comfy Parsons chairs upholstered in a wide red-and-creamstripe—had been spruced up to lure in the soccer moms with time between errands and school’s end. The small but thoughtful selection of gourmet groceries was selected to entice the adventurous home cooks, both the commuter and soccer mom variety.

It had been a gamble when she opened, a chunk of her late husband’s life insurance money dwindling in a bank account and her two young daughters.It seemed as though running her own business would provide her the type of flexibility she needed with two young girls, and she’d always loved to cook. Loved to experiment with flavors and cuisines and making things look pretty. Her friends, though well meaning, disapproved, encouraging her instead to invest and live off the interest. But there wasn’t really enough to quite do that, and besides, Gus had wanted the risk. She needed the jolt.

However, taking chances did not translate into being sloppy. No, indeed. And meeting with Alan Holt was a tremendous opportunity she couldn’t afford to screw up. She had, in fact, served him several pastries and more than a few sandwiches, never knowing him as more than a regular customer. Until the day he handed her his card and suggested he wouldn’t be averse to a home-cooked meal over which they could discuss a business proposal. Gus’s fervent hope had been that he was interested in showcasing The Luncheonettein an episode or two.

She remembered vividly when Alan came for dinner in the spring of 1994, when Aimee and Sabrina were both young teens and she was a harriedsingle mom, still keenly missing Christopher though he’d been gone six years by then. It was as though she’d hit the “hold” button on her life when he died, waiting for something she couldn’t quite place her finger on that might make it somewhat better, and had instead filled up her days with working and organizing her girls. She hadn’t much energy left over, which had been her intention. Just enough to wish for the ability to provide her daughters with the life their father would have wanted for them.

All Gus had asked the day Alan Holt came for dinner was to be left alone in the kitchen and for her girls to go out and cut some flowers. Somethingbright and cheery they could bring to her so she could do up a vase. Her oldest daughter, Aimee, had promptly walked outside to the back patio and flopped into a wicker chair, arms crossed, while Sabrina slowly wanderedoff through the front door, with a look Gus couldn’t discern between sulking and concentration.

In fact, Gus had been quite prepared for the girls to come back empty-handedfrom the garden and had put together her own centerpiece hours earlier, working efficiently while her just-turned-into-teenagers slept away a gorgeous sunny Saturday morning. She’d tucked her arrangement onto a shelf above the washing machine, knowing her girls were hardly about to go near anything that seemed like a chore. Her request about gathering flowershad really been a mother’s trick to get the kids out of her way while she seasoned and sampled in the kitchen.

And then she saw it: seven stones and one feather.

That’s what Sabrina had placed on the center of the polished rosewood table.

“What do you think, Mom?” asked the thirteen-year-old, brushing her glossy black bangs out of her eyes as she gestured to a lineup of polished river rocks arranged by size and a random piece of gray fluff that looked, at a distance, more similar to dryer lint than to something that once winged through the sky.

Gus Simpson had chewed her lip as she pondered her younger daughter’s contribution that day and cast her eyes down the length of her table, covered with her good ivory linen place mats, clean and crisp, her collection of qualitychina—the artistically mismatched pieces of creamware she’d collected at estate sales and flea markets and the occasional full-price purchase at a department store—and the genuine crystal goblets and glasses she’d brought back from Ireland years ago. Red, white, water. They’d cost more than three months’ worth of mortgage when she’d made the splurge and Gus felt both guilty and exhilarated every time she saw them. Every mouthful—even plain old tap water—tasted better, too.