Julia's Child (9781101559741) (5 page)

I shouldn't have worried. Within weeks, Bonnie had discovered the Williamsburg music scene. Most evenings, as the rest of us sat down to dinner, Bonnie would kiss the boys and then vanish on to the subway.

I resumed wiping down the counters. “So you caved in and read him a story after all?”

“Of course,” he admitted. “And his eyes were rolling back in his head by the time Sam-I-Am ate the green eggs. Then he went down without a peep.”

“Nice work, honey,” I said as I sprayed hot sudsy water all over the pasty substance in the mixing bowl. “But Sam-I-Am is the other guy. The pusher.”

“Oh. Whatever.”

I shut the water off suddenly. “You know, that should
never
have worked,” I said forcefully.

“What shouldn't?”

“
Green Eggs and Ham
! What a loopy, drug-induced story. It's genius, of course, but just think of the marketing pitch: ‘Buy my book about a lumpy guy trying to feed unnaturally colored food to another weirdo, in rhyme!' I mean—really! ‘Could you, would you, with a goat?' Oh—and it's for
children
.” I scrubbed the bowl rather more violently than was necessary. “Gosh! Let's go ahead and print ten million copies! I'll bet even Whole Foods carries it.”

Luke gave me a worried frown. “Honey, I think you need to unwind. How about we go to Vermont for the weekend?”

I sighed. “That sounds like a great idea.”

Chapter 3

M
y mother was a harried, indifferent cook who looked upon dinnertime as a chore. We ate plenty of tuna casserole at our house—the sort that's made from cream of mushroom soup. And vegetables always came out of a can.

But my father's aunt Odile was French. She taught me to clean leeks when I was four, standing at her sink on a wooden crate. She taught me to make polenta at five. I stirred the coq au vin when I was six. We made duck à l'orange when I was seven. By eight, we were blowtorching the tops of crèmes brûlées in ramekins. It was the seventies, when women were supposed to eschew cooking for liberation. But to me cooking
was
liberation. And I cooked, in my bell bottoms, singing along with Gloria Gaynor on the radio, which Aunt Odile called “the wireless.” Those were my fondest memories of childhood. Great Aunt Odile died when I was fifteen. But I can still picture her beautiful kitchen with its enormous farmhouse table and rustic apron sink.

Lately, I did my cooking in a far less charming room. The next night found me surrounded by the linoleum and stainless surfaces of our production facility, La Cucina. I unwrapped blocks of cheese, while Marta washed organic apples in the giant steel sink.

Marta shut off the water and looked around. “
She's
not here, is she?”

I shrugged. “I haven't seen her.” Things were decidedly more peaceful when the Cucina's ironfisted matriarch was not on the premises.

The scuttlebutt around the kitchen was that the government paid “Auntie” Maria to teach employable skills to welfare mothers who were losing their benefits. With one hand, Uncle Sam had slashed aid to poor mothers. With the other, he paid Zia Maria to educate them.

Zia, ever enterprising, had then hit on the idea of renting out the kitchens at night and on weekends to earn even more money. To fill these off-hours slots, she turned to another vulnerable population—hopeful entrepreneurs. There were now ten struggling businesses like mine renting time during the graveyard shift at the Cucina.

Zia's frugality was legendary. To force one enterprise to support the other, she required her welfare mothers to work several shifts a month for the entrepreneurs, at less than minimum wage.

And that's how I'd met Marta. By the time I arrived on the scene, she was nearly a graduate of Zia's program. She could peel ten cloves of garlic in ten seconds flat and mince onions without shedding a tear. More important, Marta knew how Zia's kitchen worked—which burners on the overused stove lit evenly and how to run the clanking flash freezer.

Marta's many talents announced themselves to me immediately. I could see that she was her own gum-cracking variety of superwoman, able to leap tall egos in a single bound. As soon as I was able, I hired her—full time. We were a tiny company, so Marta's job was to be my gal Friday. I paid her a salary of forty thousand dollars, which was a hell of a lot less than she was worth but more than I could afford.

Marta was not without her quirks. She was full of old wives' tales. She thought cold water from the tap would come to a boil faster than warm water, in spite of the obvious physical impossibility. She also thought that too much stirring drove the vitamins out of food. But I hadn't hired her for her scientific insight. I was after her skills with both kitchenware and diplomacy.

Into Zia's industrial food processor I fed great hunks of organic cheddar. The machine was deafening but quickly produced five pounds of cheesy smithereens.

“Did you get a nap?” I asked Marta.

“No. I got coffee instead. You?”

I smiled. “Same. Who's sitting with Carlos?” On our production Thursdays, Marta bribed a rotating collection of little old-lady neighbors to spend half the night on her living room sofa, keeping an eye on her son.

“Señora Díaz tonight. Carlos likes her well enough. She lets him pick all the TV shows.”

“Groovy.”

I dropped the cheese into a mixing bowl the size of a Roman tub and looked around for a paddle. I didn't mind our late nights in the kitchen. Making the actual food was for me the part that made all the bureaucratic nonsense bearable. Still, there was no time to waste when your workday ended in the wee hours.

“I made the flyers,” Marta announced. She wiped her hands dry on her apron and then pulled a colorful page from a Kinko's envelope. “Julia's Child Sold Here!” There was a pretty photo of our packaging. But I also saw a small inset photograph of me cuddling Wylie against the leafy backdrop of the playground.

I blinked. “My picture? Where'd you get that?”

“Luke,” she said breezily. “The colors work—don't you think?” She admired her work. “Green words, green trees, green product. Green mommy. Save the world. Get it?” She pulled on a hairnet.

“Subtle,” I said. I wasn't sure about having my picture pasted up in store windows, but I had to admit that it was a punchy document.

Marta cracked her gum at me. “Where's
your
flyer, then?”

“It looks great, Marta. It's perfect. Do you think any of the stores will object to putting our signs in their windows?”

“I don't plan to ask permission,” Marta answered, pulling on her latex gloves. “I'm going to tell them you're sending a hundred new customers their way.”

From across the room, we heard a shriek. “Ay! You no can put in there! You stink up my churros with your stinky pickles!” Lila, of Lila's Churros, was hollering at Bob, of Bob's Old-Fashioned Garlicky Dills.

More than three hundred years into its history, the Brooklyn melting pot was still going strong. Most of the entrepreneurs who used the Cucina made ethnic specialty foods, selling the flavors of home to their countrymen. Aside from Lila and Bob, we'd worked alongside producers of Brazilian empanadas, Polish pierogi, and Indian chutneys.

Marta and I were the only ones cooking for the toddler nation. We always got along well with the others. But tonight's skirmish was repeated often enough—a familiar UN standoff over refrigerator space.

Lila looked in our direction for support. “You
see
he do this? Put garlic pickles in with churros?”

“I'll
move
'em!” Bob roared. “Just quit yer hollerin'.” He poked around in a neighboring refrigerator, rearranging things.

“But I have to make all over again! Churros taste like garlic now!” Lila looked ready to weep.

I trotted to their end of the kitchen. “Let me taste one, Lila. I'll bet they weren't in there together long enough to cause a problem.” She handed me one of the delicate cinnamon-flavored donuts, and it melted in my mouth. “Fine,” I told her. “Not a whiff.”

“I'd better taste it to be sure,” Marta said from the other end of the room.

I broke off a piece of my churro and walked back toward Marta. “Lila,” I said. “Watch this.” I tossed the piece toward Marta, who caught it in her mouth like a trained seal, all without breaking her rhythm with the apple peeler.

Lila's eyebrows went up in surprise. She forgot her anger and smiled.

“¡Muy bien! Delicioso,” Marta declared. “Toss me another bite,” she demanded. I turned my back to her and tossed it over my head. I heard Lila gasp with surprise when Marta caught it. It was just one of my assistant's strange skills. Once, I'd nearly choked to death on a grape while trying to imitate her.

“Nice light touch with the cinnamon,” Marta complimented the chef.

“Gracias,” said Lila happily.

“See, I ain't such a bad guy,” hollered Bob from his corner of the kitchen. We ignored him.

“So all this cheese is for muffets?” Marta asked me, getting back to business.

“Double batch,” I explained. “Ms. Aranjo mentioned them specifically in my introduction at Park Slope Parenting. Her son loves them.”

“Let's hope he's hungry,” Marta grumbled.

“Ha. After these, we're going to make the Carrot and Black Bean Muffets, and if there's time, we'll do a batch of Gentle Lentil.”

The muffet—a savory baked good made from unexpectedly healthy things—was our most popular and innovative product. No child could resist a baked good, even one containing protein or vegetables.

We made hundreds of muffets. While Marta stirred batches of batter, I filled the muffet tins, placed them into the commercial oven, removed them after exactly eighteen minutes, and then started all over again. After four hours, my motions began to feel robotic. The muffets cooled on racks. When the first ten batches were cool, Marta cranked up the flash freezer and began zapping them into frozen little muffetsicles. I stood at the other end, mechanically placing them with gloved hands into our packaging, until the packaging and the product began to blur together.

“That's the last of them,” Marta finally said.

If there had been a chair in the kitchen, I would have collapsed into it, but Zia Maria allowed no chairs in the kitchen as she was generally opposed to rest and comfort. So instead I leaned heavily against the stainless steel countertop. I took a moment to eat a broken muffet. “I'll get the coolers,” I announced, heading sleepily toward my car. Outdoors the air was refreshingly chilly, a genuine fall evening. Perking up, I dragged the coolers out of the hatchback while droning cars rushed past on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which ran practically overhead.

Back inside, Marta and I packed the frozen muffets among ice packs. Each shiny package, clean and perfect, was the result of our labor. Even with heavy eyelids, I admired their beauty. I had never once, in my years as an accountant, felt this way about my work. Holding the packages in my hands, it barely made a difference whether or not Julia's Child would turn a profit. Moms would buy these very packets, tear them open, and hand the contents to their children. What could be more important than that?

With a satisfied sigh, I zipped everything up. I grabbed the handles of the rolling coolers and took a few steps toward the door. “You could make the delivery if you'd rather.” I made my usual offer to Marta. It was a quicker job than the cleanup. But she never took me up on it.

She waved a hand at me. “You go. I'm fine finishing up here.”

I winked at her. “I'll give Mr. Pastucci a kiss for you.”