The Secret Ingredient (2 page)

I start to boil some water for eggs, and I feel my uneasiness begin to drift away with this familiar act. Poaching eggs is harder than you might think. The key is to put a little bit of vinegar in the water, to keep the egg from losing its shape. And I know it’s a cliché, but this is a case in which timing is everything. I decide to also make what I call Red Is the New Black Potatoes. I take lots of fresh garlic and sauté it with extra-virgin olive oil. Then I slice some new red potatoes so thin they’re just slivers. I fry them slowly until they’re blackened at the edges. There’s a fine line between blackened and burnt, and I know where
that line is. It’s all about texture. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing worse than undercooked breakfast potatoes. You know, the watery, tasteless kind you get in a diner?
“Quelle horreur,”
Bell would say.

Enrique’s phone rings, and I can’t believe how quickly he gets it together, answering like he’s been up for hours. I can tell it’s a work call. He’s a freelance stylist now, which means he buys clothes for actors. Sometimes I go with him, and he lets me pick out stuff too. The shows he’s involved with are pretty low-budget, but once he worked on a movie that was shot in Hawaii and starred Demi Moore. We all thought his career would take off after that, but he just went back to doing bad reality shows and working with his soap opera clients, living paycheck to paycheck. If you ask me, I’d say Enrique was in his prime when he was dancing all over the world. Being a stylist is just something he ended up doing. He doesn’t even like nice clothes for himself—he basically wears khakis and polo shirts, which seems like an obvious play to defy stereotypes. His name is Enrique, not Biff, and even though he looks the part, he will never go sailing in Nantucket.

He comes into the kitchen and picks at my potatoes.

“Ollie, these are dreamy-like.”

“Thanks, Papá.”

Even though Enrique has been in America for almost twenty years, he still has his own way of speaking. Most people find it charming, but Bell tends to correct him.

I place my poached eggs on seven-grain toast, garnish them with fresh Pecorino, sprinkle some rosemary on my
potatoes, and sit down by the kitchen window. Every time I finish cooking a dish, I feel this swell in my chest when I look at the finished product, at this thing that I’ve created. We skimp on everything in our house except food; I need my supplies if I’m going to do what I do best. Enrique makes a smoothie, pours us each a glass, and joins me. A few minutes later, Bell comes in and goes straight for the coffeemaker. His hair seems to be living in a different area code than his head. Thick and wavy, it has a little gray in it, but Enrique says it’s one of Bell’s best physical qualities, and he always has his hands in it, though not as much recently. Bell doesn’t look at either of us and just says, “Monday, Monday.”

I need a job, not just to help out with money, but because, as much as I love our little house, it can also feel like the walls are closing in, especially when my dads are acting distant toward each other. And now that Jeremy has moved out, I have no one to roll my eyes with.

Jeremy is eighteen and thinks he’s going to be a rock star. He’s been playing gigs since he was fifteen, basically anywhere they’ll book him. He’s roommates with his drummer, a janitor named Phil who Bell calls “a real winner.” Neither of our dads were too happy when Jeremy announced that he was deferring college for a year to try and get a record deal, but they’re doing their best to be supportive. Jeremy practices all the time, and his latest demo is actually pretty good. He also had a decent crowd the last time he played at Silver Lake Lounge.

Bell kisses my head, then heads out to the restaurant. I
asked Enrique not to tell him about the interview in case it doesn’t work out, so he doesn’t know to wish me luck. Enrique is running out too and gives me a secret thumbs-up sign and mouths “Go for it.”

I finish my breakfast and leave my dish in the sink. One thing I don’t like about cooking is doing dishes. But the great thing is if you cook for someone, they will most likely beg to do the dishes for you. And although Enrique always leaves dried toothpaste in the sink and his polo shirts draped over all the chairs, he loves my cooking and is pretty good at “washing up,” as my best friend, Lola, would say. Lola’s from England and knows a lot more about the world than I do. I’m meeting her for coffee before my interview to take my mind off it.

Before I leave, I go to my room and switch to my black sunglasses. If I’m going to get a job, I need to look a little older and exude confidence. I look in the mirror, trying to see a different side of myself. When I was little I didn’t talk much, but one day in third grade, when we got to make cinnamon rolls with the sixth graders in home ec, my teacher told my dads I wouldn’t shut up. That was when Bell started cooking at home with me. The next day we made pastries from scratch, and for the first time, something clicked, and I became fascinated by how incredible it is to make something from practically nothing. I realized that almost everything starts in a bowl, with flour and eggs—it begins with the human hand. My whole outlook on food changed. Ever since then, cooking has felt
like the most natural thing. It’s also a way to get out of my head for a while. Some people find it tedious, but for me, it’s an escape. Plus, when I see someone’s eyes slowly shut in bliss after a bite of something I made, it makes me feel like I can do anything.

CHAPTER 2

Our street is called Maltman Avenue, and it’s so steep it could be in San Francisco. The houses are painted colors like butter-yellow, sky-blue, and burnt orange, and there are always kids playing and barbecues going, international spices hovering in the air. Our house is a two-bedroom bungalow, which is another name for “very small house.” But we do have a garage, where Jeremy lived through most of high school, practicing his electric guitar and drinking too much Red Bull. Before that, we shared a room, which was beyond cramped. Being in junior high and sharing a room with my brother was pretty much a nightmare, but we somehow got through it.

At the bottom of our street is the eastern part of Sunset Boulevard, not the famous part with the shiny billboards
and tourist traps. There’s the 99-cent store, a Korean tailor, and a place called Mack Video (which Bell calls Crack Video because of the sketchy people who congregate in the parking lot next to it). I pass the trendy new Indian restaurant and several retro-themed cafes and vintage clothing stores that seem to have popped up in the last few months.

I meet Lola at the coffee shop on Sunset and Fountain, and before I have a chance to sit down, she starts filling me in on her current crush, the Asian kid who works at the taco place.

“Duality,” I say, kind of under my breath.

“What are you on about, Livie?”

Lola grew up in London but has lived here since she was twelve. I love having a British best friend. It makes me feel intercontinental even though I’ve never left California.

“I’ve just been noticing duality in everything lately.”

“Well,” she says, wiping her upper lip, “as you should.”

Lola’s mother runs a yoga studio in Atwater Village, and her dad is a documentary producer for the BBC. She always has way more money than I do and pays for everything. It sometimes makes me uncomfortable, but she’s not the type to hold it against me. Apparently, her father still gets his salary in British pounds, which go way farther than the dollar. Especially when you’re buying fish tacos, which we do on a regular basis, not only because we like them, but because they are served by her crush, a guy named Jin.

“So what is it about him, anyway?” I ask her.

“He just seems like he could clean up well, you know? Put him in a dinner jacket, and he might just hit the mark.”

“Lola, he’s like, fifteen.”

“A girl can dream.”

I smile, thinking of Jin serving tacos in a suit.

“And I know it’s a bit of a stereotype,” Lola says, “but he seems very intelligent, you know? Like he’s solving math theorems on his breaks from … tortilla rolling or what have you.”

“Kneading.”

“Right. Well, what you ‘knead,’ darling, is a job.”

So much for keeping my mind off my interview.

“Yeah. I saw an ad for a babysitter—”

“No offense, Livie, but you’re a bit on the mellow side for that, don’t you think?”

“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. When I called, they said they wanted someone who had experience with children. But actually, I have a lead on something way better. Papá set up an interview for me with a casting agent who needs an assistant.”

“Now we’re getting warmer. You’re always on about nuance. You’ll need that for casting, don’t you reckon?”

This is why I love Lola. She always seems to say the right thing. And even when she doesn’t, it still sounds great in her accent. I pull out the address Enrique gave me and look at my watch. “I’d better get going, the interview’s at eleven.”

“Right. Why don’t you come by the studio after? I’ll be taking roll for all the pudgy ladies at Mum-yoga. We can go get tacos!”

I try to leave some money for my chai, but Lola waves my hand away.

“Okay, we can get tacos only if you let me buy them,” I say.

“We’ll just see about that. Good luck, Livie!”

She kisses me on each cheek as we get up to go, then leaves in a flourish, her scarf trailing behind her. Lola is glamorous, funny, and so naturally beautiful that some people find her intimidating. I’ve had a fair amount of friends growing up, but she’s the first person who really got me. When she transferred to my school two years ago, all the popular girls wanted to become her friend because she’s British. But she didn’t really care for them. It’s almost like she has this X-ray vision that can see through fakeness. We became lab partners in science, and when I named our frog Toast, she took a shine to me. I invited her over after school and taught her how to make oatmeal cookies from scratch. I added dried cranberries, which she thought was the coolest thing ever. Even though it’s only been two years, I can’t imagine my life without Lola in it. It’s like I used to live in black-and-white, and when Lola came along everything was suddenly in color.

*  *  *

Walking up Sunset toward Vermont Avenue, I pass a random schizophrenic discreetly talking to himself, a Hispanic family, and a couple of twentysomething dudes with guitars on their backs. When I get to the building, I realize it’s the tallest one for miles.

The lobby is shiny and stark, with hard sofas that look more like warped benches. I slip my sunglasses onto the top of my head and step into a huge elevator with white walls and a metal ceiling, and press 17. It stops at the twelfth floor, and a woman is revealed, as if the automatic doors were theater curtains dramatically drawn. She’s probably early forties, draped in loose-fitting, earth-toned clothes. She has a clear complexion and alert eyes. There’s a streak of gray in her otherwise black hair. She clutches a small leather bag.

“Going down?” she asks.

“No, up to seventeen.”

She draws a circle in the air with her finger, as if calculating the journey, and says, “Oh well, I’ll take the scenic route.”

The doors close with her inside, and I can immediately smell her. Cloves and lemon. As we ascend, I notice her perfect posture. She stands so straight you can almost imagine a wire pulled taut from the bottom of her spine to the crown of her head. Lola’s mother has it too. She does yoga every day and only eats blueberries for breakfast. I usually don’t talk to strangers, so I’m surprised to hear myself say, “Do you do yoga?”

Before she can answer, the elevator stops abruptly. After a few seconds, we both realize we’re not on a floor.

“I believe the word is
practice
, but yes,” she answers sweetly.

I look around the elevator stupidly, like there’s a trapdoor or something. The woman is very calm, as if this sort of thing happens all the time. We decide to wait a minute or two before pressing the emergency call button.

“Maybe it’ll just start up again,” I say, trying to be positive.

The woman pulls out some grapes and offers me one. I take it to be polite, but then realize it has seeds—awkward. She notices my discomfort and says, “You can just crunch and swallow them, like a nut. They actually have more nutrients than the grape itself.”

A grape doesn’t have a self
, I think. But instead I say, “Good to know,” and stare at the red button.

The woman steps closer and puts her clear eyes on me acutely, and suddenly I feel exposed. Since we’re trapped, I can’t really claim personal space.

“I was only stuck in an elevator one other time,” she says, crunching on a grape seed, “and believe it or not, it was with the queen of England.”

Yeah, right
.

“Really?”

“Yes. I was hired by her estate manager to do some channeling work.”

There are a lot of bohemian types in Silver Lake, and
I’ve heard about channeling—basically when people summon spirits of others who then speak through them—but it still seems a little far-fetched to me.

“You’re a … channeler?”

She gives me a look so sharp I wouldn’t be surprised if darts start shooting out of her pupils. I move out of her way just in case.

“I like to say visionary. I do psychic work, but I also do guided meditation and past-life integration. I get called to consult with, well, powerful people.”

I think of Enrique and what he’s always saying about the class system. “So the fact that you’re a psychic for people with money makes it more credible?”

I can’t believe I’ve said something so rude. I reach out to push the red button, but before I can, she grabs my wrist, not too tight, but enough to make me tremble a little.

“Hang on a minute,” she says.

I wonder if this is some sort of setup, if she knew we’d be here all along. I try to remain calm and wait. She looks at me like she’s examining a lab rat, and I can feel my forehead getting moist. Then she says something that makes everything else disappear.

“I know what it’s like not having a mother.”