Julia's Child (9781101559741) (16 page)

I closed my eyes and reached deep down, finding the last shred of calm in my soul, along with a tiny speck of remaining ingenuity. “Wylie,” I whispered. “Would you like your
own
batch of dough? You could mix it up with a spoon.”

He relaxed, nodding and sniffling. Not wasting a second, I grabbed a saucepan from the pot rack, scooped half a cup of wheat flour, and spilled it into the pan. When Jasper was a toddler, once or twice we'd made playdough together. I could almost remember how. I grabbed a carton of salt and poured some over the flour. Then I handed Wylie a spoon. He began to stir slowly, tracing salty circles into the brown flour.

You have to make hay when the sun shines. So I turned my back on him and rolled that pizza dough out in about thirty seconds flat. I flipped it onto the baking pan just as Wylie made a complaint. “Not gooey.”

“Oh!” I said brightly. “You want
gooey
dough.” I raced a can opener around a can of organic pizza sauce like an Indy 500 entrant. “Why didn't you
tell
me?”

“
Need
gooey dough.”

I turned on the faucet with my elbow and poured a bit of water into Wylie's saucepan. He attacked it with his spoon. I began spreading tomato sauce over the pizza before he could notice or insist on helping. The work in front of me was finally beginning to resemble a pizza, and my blood pressure dropped accordingly. I had fifteen minutes left in the kitchen.

“Gooey!” he pronounced.

I took a package of shredded mozzarella from the refrigerator, tore it open with my teeth, and began to sprinkle it furiously over the sauce.

“Stuck!” Wylie gasped. The dough had begun to tighten up on him.

I scattered diced red pepper over the top of the pie, looking over his shoulder. Then I got out the olive oil, which I intended to sprinkle over the pie like a true Italian. “I'll bet your dough could use a drop of this, kiddo.” I gave him a dollop.

He stirred but then turned to give me a funny look. “It smell funny now.”

“Ah,” I said, thinking that nothing smelled finer than olive oil. But it was his concoction. “What do you want it to smell like, then?”

Wylie's round cheeks were set in concentration. “Tookies.”

I stuck my nose in his soft hair and kissed him. “You got it, buddy.” I reached for the cinnamon. I eased his saucepan onto the stove and lit the flame. “Don't touch the pan now, okay? But here—add this to your dough.” I handed him a teaspoon of cinnamon, and with a shaky hand he tipped it into the saucepan. Then we added some ginger, and I stirred like hell. By the grace of God, he didn't fight me for the spoon.

The heating dough began to hold together. And suddenly the kitchen smelled wonderful, like pumpkin pie or apple strudel. “Wylie, your dough is great.” Seasoned playdough! It had never occurred to me. And not only was Wylie happy, but I felt the same tickle of delight that I always got from recipe development. It was a source of constant excitement for me—familiar ingredients recombined as a surprise. Discovery was my favorite drug. Perhaps Tookie Playdough would be a cheery addition to the Julia's Child website.

I moved the pizza out of the way and turned Wylie's steaming dough onto the countertop. “We'll just give it a minute to cool, okay? And then you can touch it all you want. This dough is
yours
.”

“Mine!” His favorite word.

Together, we put slices of pepperoni on the pizza while we waited for Wylie's dough to cool.

Chapter 13

I
grasped the handle of the freezer case and looked fondly through the glass. The Autumn Harvest Muffets looked back at me, at eye level, from their excellent position between the pizzas and the frozen organic vegetables.

Perhaps Marta suspected my ulterior motive when I'd volunteered to pick up lunch, but I didn't even care. It had taken long enough to finally get Julia's Child into the store of my dreams, and I would steal this moment to admire my muffets, shining under the expensive Whole Foods lighting.

It was impossible to see, from this side of the glass anyway, just how many costly rookie errors I'd made. But Kai and his team had been quick to point them out. Stacked cases of muffets didn't fit well on standard warehouse delivery pallets. Furthermore, we'd been told that the typeface we'd used to print the ingredients list on the side of our package wasn't kosher.

The only solution was a pricey redesign of our packaging. So I'd closed my eyes and agreed to spend the money. Last night I'd lain awake worrying that it wouldn't matter, that Kai would fit the glass slipper onto some other princess—one whose bar code was already perfectly aligned on her packaging for a good scan in the checkout aisle.

On the other hand, after a gut-wrenching two-week silence, the trade show had finally admitted us to its roster. So now Marta and I were hurriedly designing appropriate display materials. If Whole Foods dropped us after our probationary period, we'd need to snag another big order—Safeway, Price Chopper, or Piggly Wiggly—just to recoup all the cash we'd spent trying to impress them.

Unable to help myself, I opened the freezer door and squared the corners of the packages. There weren't very many muffets left. That might be good news. Or perhaps the store was just slow to replenish the shelves. I had no way to know.

“Just a few more minutes, sweetie! If you're a good girl, we'll head over to the playground.”

The mom rolling toward me used the roof of her stroller in lieu of a shopping cart. Beneath the flap of fabric, which was sagging under the weight of organic yogurt and all-natural diapers, her infant daughter wore a look of squirmy protest.

Whirling around, I feigned interest in the items opposite the freezer case. There's always a chance . . .

The mother slowed in front of the freezer. As I pretended to scrutinize the jars of salsa, she opened the door and reached in.

I held my breath while she grasped a package of muffets, reading first the front and then the rear of the package.

“Eeeeekkkk!” her daughter shrieked.

The mom sighed. “Okay, pumpkin.” She pushed the muffets back on the shelf, allowed the freezer door to snap shut, and moved quickly toward the checkout aisles.

I watched her walk away, feeling snubbed. She hadn't even bothered to set the rejected carton properly on the freezer shelf. It pitched pathetically toward the frozen flatbread pizzas, a situation I quickly remedied.

With one more proud glance at my babies, I headed for the deli counter.

“May I help you?” The team member behind the counter snapped a fresh pair of latex gloves onto his hands.

“Could I please have a half pound of . . .”

The organic roast beef that I often chose was $12.99 a pound.

“Yes?”

“Turkey, please.”

“Organic honey roasted, organic smoked, all-natural roasted, pepper, or maple?”

I picked the cheapest price tag and pointed. If things didn't turn around soon, I'd be eating Spam out of a can in order to fund my investment in the world's most pristine organic toddler food.

My phone rang as soon as I left the store.

“
Hola, chica
. You answered your phone!”

“Of course. When my phone rings, I answer.” The trouble wasn't my phone etiquette, rather my lazy phone. It habitually refused to ring. Hours later it would always confess its sins, guiltily blurting out its string of omissions: “Five missed calls.” Marta had been leaning on me to buy a new one, but cell phones contain a mineral called coltan, and Congolese miners had lately been killing off gorillas right and left to get to the mineral deposits. Anyway, I didn't have two hundred bucks.

“Uh-huh.
Chica
, I'm picking up
un café
. You need one?” Marta sounded exhausted.

“No thank you, Marta. I'll be back with the lunch fixings in just a couple of minutes.”

When I arrived, I found that my partner looked just as tired as she sounded on the phone.

“Morning,” she grunted. I looked at the clock. It was twelve fifteen. Marta now spent nearly every night cooking at Zia's with her cousin Theresa. She got only a few hours of sleep before it was time to see her son off to school. Then, when Carlos had boarded the school bus, she caught a couple of more hours sleep before coming into the office for the afternoon.

“Greetings!” I put my shopping bag down on my desk as she put a giant cup of coffee down on hers. When I'd met Marta, she was caffeine free. “Is that really coffee in there?”

“Sí,” she said tiredly. “I think they call this size the bladder buster”—she shook the computer mouse so that the system would come to life—“which is a problem for a lady who is too busy to go to the bathroom. So, any customer e-mails today?”

Now that our website was up and running, the first few consumer comments had begun to trickle in. We were riveted by the feedback. It didn't even matter to us that, by volume, most of it was negative. We'd learned that people usually kept their thanks brief. “The baby loves muffets! Keep up the good work!” Whereas people took their time with critiques. We'd received a couple of missives from people who felt that the packaging for the Apple and Cheddar Muffets was too similar to the Autumn Harvest flavor and who had bought the wrong one by mistake.

“Maybe they should swap,” Marta cracked. “We'll tell the lady who accidentally bought apple about the one who bought the pumpkin.” Instead, we'd added the problem to the list of packaging fixes.

I opened my e-mail now with the same hope as a child opening a birthday gift from a crazy elderly aunt. It would probably be another pair of socks, but there was always the chance of a shiny new toy.

The first letter was short and plaintive. “I really miss you” was all it said.

“Eh?” asked Marta.

“This one is from Luke. He promised this morning to look at our site and see if he could spot any bugs.”

“Ay! The only bug he has is with you,
chica
. You should do something for that man.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “On one of my many days off?”

She shrugged wearily. “I'm just sayin'. Are there any more?”

There were two more messages. One was a brief “We love the new pumpkin flavor.” The other one was short but nasty.

“What the hell!” I yelled, leaping to my feet beside my desk. “What is wrong with people? Marta—please take this down.”

Although her job did not usually involve taking dictation like a secretary from the 1960s, Marta walked slowly over to her own desk and took up a pen with an air of exaggerated cooperation.

“Dear Ms.”—I checked the screen—“Veertema,” I began. “For thousands of years, the only way to grow food was what we now call ‘organic.' The human race steadily increased its agricultural output and also its lifespan. Then in just the last hundred . . . No, less than that. In the last sixty years, big agriculture money-grubbers decided that it's”—I made my fingers into quotation marks—“‘conven-tional' to pour noxious chemicals all over crops. Suddenly our society is beset by higher rates of cancer, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.”

I took a breath. “You have allowed yourself to be brainwashed, and therefore
you
are what's wrong with food in this country.” I ran out of steam. “Did you get all that?” I asked Marta.

“Sí,” she said. She held up a piece of paper with a lot of scribbling on it. Then she very deliberately tore the paper into four pieces.

“Marta!”

“
Chica
”—the exhaustion was evident in her voice—“you do not really want to send this message, even if it is all true.” She held two of the torn pieces together. “I may not have a fancy MBA, but I'm pretty sure that ‘
you
are what's wrong with food in this country' is not going to sell any muffets. What happened to ‘the customer is always right'?”

I put my forehead down on the desk. Some days the mountain seemed insurmountable.

“Why don't we have some lunch?” Marta changed the subject.

“Okay,” I said weakly. “I'll do the honors.” I peeled myself off the desktop. From our mini fridge I extracted a jar of mayo and a loaf of bread. On a couple of recycled paper plates, I began to assemble our sandwiches.