Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (5 page)

“Why'd you put it in my suitcase?”

“It seemed like you had something to say.” He returned studiously to the dishes.

“Right.”

Chloe took the notebook back to the changing room and thrust it in her pack. She tied on her apron, kicked off her tennis shoes, and put on her cooking clogs. As she closed her locker, she spotted the corner of the blue notebook sticking up out of her backpack. Chloe shoved it all the way in and zipped the top.

•   •   •

CHLOE AND ISABELLE
were walking around the neighborhood between Sunday afternoon rain showers. The streets were black and freshly washed, the air liquid cold, finding its way into collars, behind ears, tightening the fillings in their teeth. Isabelle was wearing the new black merino coat her oldest daughter, Abby, the one in San Francisco, had sent her for Christmas. Chloe had been appalled that Isabelle had spent Christmas without her children, but Isabelle's younger daughter was in Australia and her son was on an archaeological dig in the Southwest. And Abby had her own family now, Isabelle explained. Chloe, who had chosen to spend the holidays with Isabelle rather than go to her parents, who lived only a few miles away, realized she had no right to judge, even as she did.

As they walked, Chloe had to smile at the way Isabelle seemed incapable of talking without using gestures; hands shoved firmly in the pockets of her coat for warmth, she simply resorted to elbows and shoulders for expression. Chloe moved her fingers experimentally within the confines of her own pockets, feeling the rough edges of cookie crumbs, a quarter. A child's life, she thought.

As they passed the Bernhardt house, the front door opened and two of the sons raced out the front door, forgetting to close it as they dashed for the side yard. A smell followed them out into the air, warm and round, onions and garlic, meat and cloves.

“Meat loaf,” said Isabelle. “I used to make that.”

Chloe inhaled. “That doesn't smell like my mother's meat loaf.”

“Let me make it for you,” Isabelle said suddenly.

“You do plenty for me,” Chloe assured her, but then, seeing Isabelle's face, she added, “That'd be great. Let's go get the ingredients.”

The grocery store was brightly lit and full of people, sounds bouncing off the glass panels of the freezer section, ricocheting down aisles lined with cereal and detergent boxes. Chloe could see Isabelle's face tighten, her gaze quickly scanning from right to left. They headed their cart down an aisle lined with tomato sauces and rice and pasta, then walked through the produce section. Isabelle picked up a bouquet of parsley, put it down, slowed as they passed the mushrooms, the tomatoes, and then shook her head. She wandered over to the meat department and stared at the shrink-wrapped rectangles of beef and pork, chicken and ground veal.

“I can't remember,” she said finally, her eyes full.

Chloe looked around. “Let's get some coffee,” she said. She left the shopping cart in the aisle and walked Isabelle over to the bakery that adjoined the grocery store. They sat at a round table next to a window, looking out at the people running by in the rain that had begun to fall. The bakery was warm, the air filled with the scents of sugar and yeast and chocolate.

“When my kids were little, I always liked to cook on days like this,” Isabelle said as she sipped her coffee. “We didn't get this kind of weather much in Southern California, but when we did, I would make meat loaf and mashed potatoes. It was the closest I could get to winter.”

Chloe dug around in her backpack and found a pen. Paper, however, was more elusive; the pack was stuffed with old flyers and to-do lists, but all of them already had notes on one if not both sides. Finally, she grabbed the blue notebook and pulled it out.

“Here,” she said, opening the notebook and setting it in front of Isabelle, along with the pen. “Close your eyes. See what you remember.”

•   •   •

HAMBURGER. PORK. VEAL. WORCHESTER.
Crossed out.
Worcestershire sauce.

“I used to practice spelling that one,” Isabelle said with a laugh, opening her eyes. “When my son Rory was little, he thought Worcestershire was where King Arthur's evil older brother lived, and the bottle contained a magic potion. He'd sit under the kitchen table and make up stories while I cooked. I'd hear him acting out the different characters; he thought I couldn't hear him when I was chopping.”

Celery, onion, garlic, carrot
falling onto the page in a rush of produce.
Bread crumbs
—the letters crunchy, scattered.

Isabelle closed her eyes. Breathed in.
Allspice. Cloves.

“What a mess I've made of your book,” Isabelle said, looking down at the page.

“It's perfect,” Chloe said.

•   •   •

SITTING IN THE KITCHEN,
listening to Isabelle hum as she stirred the onions and carrot and celery in a sauté pan, Chloe opened the notebook to a new page.

Chocolate Chip Cookies,
she wrote. She remembered the first time she made them, the thrill of the oven knob in her fingers, the sound of the gas lighting, the
whoosh
of heat. She remembered the shiny yellow package of chocolate chips, the red-and-black instructions. Butter and sugar creamy against her tongue, the way the eggs turned the mixture shiny and off-limits to taste-testing. Flour, pillowing into the bowl, rising back up. The smell of the cookies as they melted in the oven and then found their shape.

Her first charred batch, when she went off to play and got distracted. Her second. The time she forgot the salt. The eggs. The baking soda. It seemed she never did it right, her mother's face flat with disappointment as she opened the windows to let out the smell. Which didn't stop Chloe.

“Do we have more?” Isabelle asked, an empty bottle of Worcestershire sauce in her hands.

“I think so,” Chloe said, and rose to fetch it.

Standing in the pantry, she looked at the bottles of almond and orange extract, the cans of tuna and soup and diced tomatoes. She could remember putting them in the cart at the grocery store, just in case Isabelle wanted them. She liked to think of Isabelle going into the pantry, finding something she wanted but didn't expect to be there, realizing someone had thought of her.

Chloe stopped. She'd never thought of it before—how, as a child, whenever she had gone to make a batch of cookies, there was always a new package of chocolate chips in the cabinet.

•   •   •

MEMORIES TURNED INTO RECIPES,
recipes turned into stories. Chloe found herself filling the pages of the blue notebook after work or in the morning, her egg boiling well past soft as she forgot to turn on the timer, turn off the stove. Isabelle teased her that forgetfulness seemed to be catching, and yet Chloe had never felt more full of memories.

The taste of strawberries, warm from the sun, plucked from their hiding places in the overgrown garden of her grandmother's house, where Chloe would visit for two blissful weeks during the summer. The clomp of the strawberries hitting the bottom of the metal bucket, until the layers deepened and the sound became a muffled plop, while the sun heated her shoulders and the fruit that didn't make it into the pail dissolved in her mouth. Back at the house, she would wash and hull and slice the berries, dropping them in a big blue bowl while her grandmother made shortcake and whipped cream into clouds.

When her grandmother had died, twelve-year-old Chloe had stolen money from her mother's wallet and gone to the grocery store and bought three huge plastic cartons of strawberries, not caring that it was March and the strawberries came from somewhere almost as far away as her grandmother was now. When Chloe took the first bite, the fruit was so hard and tasteless she truly believed her grandmother had been able to take all of the flavor with her. Chloe hadn't eaten a strawberry since.

But writing about it, she remembered summer afternoons in her grandmother's kitchen, sprinkling sugar over the strawberry slices, the way the smell of the juice came out until the very air around them felt soft. And she thought about what it would be like, a row of strawberries tucked in the midst of Isabelle's carrots and lettuce and tomatoes.

Soon, Chloe started taking the notebook to the restaurant with her. When she had an idea for a new dish, or a thought about an old one, she would write down notes, a word or two that she could develop later. Sometimes she wrote down an ingredient simply for the way the syllables rolled in her mouth.
Chanterelles. Edamame. Mahimahi. Crustacean.

One day her notebook was still out on the counter when Finnegan arrived. He said nothing, just smiled and went to put on his apron. But the next Monday, when the restaurant was closed, Chloe awoke to a knock at Isabelle's front door. Finnegan was standing there, in jeans and a brown sweatshirt.

“There's somewhere I'd like to take you,” he said.

“She'll be ready in five minutes,” came Isabelle's voice from behind Chloe's shoulder.

“It's like, what, eight a.m.?” Chloe said.

“I like a man who's an early riser,” Isabelle said. “Hello, Finnegan.”

“How do you know Finnegan?” Chloe asked.

“I met him the other day, when I came by the restaurant.” Isabelle looked at Chloe blandly. “I introduce myself to people; it's a nice thing to do. He's nineteen, by the way.”

“Isabelle . . .” Chloe started.

Finnegan turned to Isabelle with an apologetic expression. “It'll take all day,” he said.

“I'll be fine, thank you,” Isabelle said. “And in any case, Lillian just called and asked me over for dinner.”

Isabelle looked at Chloe. “Well, get going,” she said. “It looks as if clothing is casual.”

•   •   •

FINNEGAN'S CAR WAS OLD,
but the heater worked. Chloe lounged in the passenger seat, watching the miles go by on the freeway, lulled into a kind of second sleep by the motion of the car, the sound of the windshield wipers sloughing off the rain that had started to fall.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“A place my aunt used to take me to,” Finnegan said. “It's a ways, but it's worth it.”

Remembering her verbal tsunami on New Year's Eve, Chloe determined that she would not be the talker on this journey. It was his turn. She let the silence unfold in the car, curl around the steering wheel, slip through Finnegan's long fingers and stretch out in the backseat. Silence didn't appear to bother Finnegan, the way it did some people, who seemed to think that airtime should be claimed like property. Jake had been that way, always reaching for the conversation as if it was the last slice of pizza in the box and the next meal was uncertain.

But Finnegan appeared content simply to drive, letting the wipers talk their way across the windshield. It was nice to be driven, Chloe thought. Taken care of. Jake had driven, but in a different way, stepping into her opinions and needs and rearranging them into his own. And with Isabelle, Chloe was often the caretaker, a role she enjoyed on the average day, but sometimes it was rather luxurious to be in the passenger seat. You could let your mind wander.

Odd how, when he was in a car, Finnegan seemed even taller than he was standing up. He had to tuck his head to see through the windshield.

“Does it hurt your neck?” she asked. “Having to drive like that?”

“I guess,” he said. He paused and Chloe waited, curious to see what might happen.

“You know,” he said, “I always wondered how short people did it—reached the pedals and all that. You see those little old women, right up against the steering wheels. It looks like no fun.”

Chloe counted to four in her head, imagining a big, empty field waiting for his words. Then, carefully, “What is it like, being tall?”

Finnegan shrugged. “I've always been tall. So mostly, I have to deal with other people not being used to it.” He paused again. “If you stand really still and pretend you're a tree, they generally just walk around you.”

Chloe almost laughed, and then realized he wasn't joking.

“People say all kinds of things when they forget you're there,” Finnegan said.

Chloe thought about all the times she and Lillian had talked while they cooked, never thinking about Finnegan standing at the sink, quiet as leaves growing.

“Where are we going?” she asked again. They had left the highway and were traveling through evergreen trees that made a tunnel of the two-lane road. The rain had softened to a mist, the wipers on the slowest intermittent speed, the windshield gradually filling with drops until, with one smooth motion, the blades cleaned it all away.

“Here,” Finnegan said, as he pulled to the side of the road. The wipers clicked off and Chloe saw a brown sign with an arrow pointing to an almost invisible trail.

“Better put on your raincoat,” Finnegan said with a grin.

•   •   •

CHLOE HAD NEVER REALLY
been a hiker. Her father had loved it, storming the slopes of mountains and tramping across valleys in his thick, Vibram-soled hiking boots. He would stride ahead, Chloe's mother doubling her pace to follow, while Chloe decelerated in equal proportion, a tactic that was effective when the hike was a straight-in-and-back, but less so on the circular routes.

Chloe's father had always said he could not be expected to adjust his pace to hers, but Finnegan's long legs stayed at her side as they walked the hard-packed dirt trail beside a thin river, his fingers occasionally pointing to the shingled gray bark of a towering lodgepole pine, or the moss-soaked branches of an ancient maple. When they reached a narrow point in the path, he slipped ahead or behind, a movement so effortless that Chloe soon found herself trying it, enjoying the shift in rhythm, the feeling that she was dancing with the path, the trees, with him.