The Way Life Should Be (18 page)

On any given day, Nonna has these ingredients in her larder: fresh and smoked mozzarella, provolone and Pecorino Romano. Occasionally
impestata,
a dry ricotta, from the local Italian market. Soppressata, hot and sweet, and pepperoni. Thin-sliced prosciutto. Cherry peppers,
peperoncino,
roasted red peppers in oil. Sicilian and Greek olives. Tomatoes, in season. Extra-virgin olive oil and virgin olio, a mild olive-oil blend she makes herself by combining extra-virgin olive oil and canola oil. Canned cannellini and garbanzo beans. Dried pasta of all kinds—ziti, penne, orecchiette, linguine, fettucine. Sea salt and peppercorns.

A surprising number of these things are available at Shaw’s. I gather a mound of fresh mozzarella, plump as a water balloon, a knotty salami, Sicilian olives, and a jar of fire-roasted red peppers—not as nice as fresh, but they’ll do—for an antipasto platter. For the chicken I find button mushrooms and prepackaged prosciutto; at the in-store bakery, two baguettes. Tonight I won’t make pasta from scratch, so I buy two boxes of dried linguine. For the marsala I substitute merlot. My total at checkout is $104; I’m already operating at a deficit. I leave the store at four-thirty, and the drive to Dory Cove takes forty minutes. People are due
at six. I run through a quick checklist in my head; the shack is clean enough. All that remains is the prep work.

Driving across the scant stretch of road that grafts the mainland to the island, I exchange one civilization for another, like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia. Though only a breath away, the island’s weather and terrain are different. The landscape is exposed and bleak; snow doesn’t linger. Glowing lights in the windows of the houses I pass remind me of long-ago settlers, homesteading craggy patches of inhospitable earth.

Pink granite, slate gray, patches of ice: the island mimics the colors of sea and sky. Driving into its depths is like diving into a shipwreck; it is quiet and eerie and feels haunted by ghosts. It feels timeless. Rocks shift, trees fall, people come and go; the island remains.

CHAPTER 18

It’s 5:39, there’s a knock at the door, and my hands are covered
with raw chicken goo. Oh,
shit
. I rub my hands together under the running water in the sink, and dry them on a bath towel. Before I can get to the door, Flynn opens it. “Thank God it’s you,” I say.

“Are we having fun yet?” he asks. He deposits a bottle of wine on the counter with a clunk. “White burgundy. Chardonnay is
so
last year. And I brought forks,” he says, pulling a bouquet of white plastic utensils out of his jacket.

“Flynn. These are sporks.”

“I know, I took them from the shop. Handy, huh?” he says.

I’m too frantic to be hospitable. Grocery bags litter the floor, boneless chicken breasts flop over the edge of the cutting board like mutant slugs. Water runs in the sink, splashing over vegetables onto the floor. “Can you—?” I motion spastically toward, well, all of it.

Flynn gives me a look of mock exasperation and starts swiping plastic bags off the floor.

“I didn’t plan my time right,” I mutter, slicing a breast in half lengthwise. “I forgot how long all this takes.”

“Didn’t you do this kind of thing for a living?”

“That was different!” I say, getting down on hands and knees
to mop water off the floor. “I just devised the game plan. Other people did the actual
work.
”

“That sounds nice. And you left why?” Flynn says.

“Because I got fired. Thanks for bringing it up.”

“Whoops. Forgot that little detail. Well, tonight’s going to be just fine. No worries.”

Despite myself, I look up at him and smile. “I’ve been waiting to hear you say that since I met you.”

“Saving it for a special occasion.
Hakuna matata,
baby,” he says. He wads the plastic bags together in a ball and steps around me to stuff them under the sink.

I’m lighting votive candles,
the better to disguise the shabbiness of—well, everything—when the first real guest knocks on the door: 5:58. I take a deep breath. Okay, I can handle this. “I’ll butler,” Flynn says, and springs to the door like a kangaroo. “Rebecca! Welcome to Casa di Angela,” he booms.

“Hi, Flynn,” she says. She squints into the semidarkness of the living room, and I see the space as it must appear to her: rustic, cramped, haphazardly decorated, way too many cheap candles. “What a cozy space,” she exclaims.

“What a forgiving adjective,” Flynn says.

Rebecca has a cat’s quiet watchfulness. Her clothes are tastefully conservative: a pink Talbot-y sweater set and black jeans and black suede boots, a string of pearls.

Upper East Side, I think. After chatting for a few minutes, I ask where in New York she lived.

“Gramercy Park,” she says, and I know what that probably means: young old money, key to the park, Town Car and driver, live-in nanny.

“And you’re here year-round now?”

“Yes.” Long silence. “What about you? Will you be staying year-round?”

Now I’m the reticent one. “Umm, well, I don’t know. Basically my life fell apart, and here I am.”

“Yeah, that’s my story, too,” she says, smiling. She seems relieved by my frankness.

Another knock on the door, and soon the little house is full of people: Tom-the-woodworker and Lance-the-ex and Eileen-the-gray-braided-librarian. Tom and Eileen clutch bottles of wine, and Lance holds a six-pack of Mug root beer.

“Nice place,” Tom says, eyeing the room.

“Why, thank you,” says Lance.

“Are you being sarcastic?” I ask. “It’s a wreck.”

Tom grins. “I like wrecks. I like—potential.”

Once everyone has settled in, I usher them to my rickety table. Earlier in the day, Flynn brought over three discarded metal chairs to add to my three flea-market finds, and we crowd around the table as Flynn opens Eileen’s red zinfandel and doles it out in wineglasses I bought at Marden’s. “I can’t pretend to be a real chef,” I say by way of welcome. Flynn gives me a
what the fuck?!
look, and I amend my approach. “But I think I might be able to show you a few things.”

I talk about how I grew up peeling potatoes and kneading dough in my grandmother’s kitchen while she told stories from her past, from Italy. My grandparents’ village of Matera, in a region now known as Basilicata, was a place of
cucina povera,
the cuisine of poverty. They lived in houses with wood-burning hearths where the women baked their own bread, grew tomatoes in the backyard, made mozzarella from goat’s milk, picked olives off the trees to marinate in oils and spices. But the land was parched and rocky. Wine was cheaper than water. Flour was
so scarce that even the bread was poor. My grandparents were called
terrone
—of the land, a term Italians from the north used to describe the other Italy, southern Italians, whom they considered crude, uncultured, ignorant.

In hard times my grandparents learned to live with hunger; they made soup from root vegetables, salads from bitter herbs. They ate stale bread soaked in water and olive oil. Each family had one pig a year, which they rationed carefully, using every scrap to make the spicy sausage of the region called
lucania,
the garlicky pressed salami called soppressata, the
pezzente,
or beggars’ salami made of the least desirable parts. They made lard from the pig and flavored it with
peperoncino
, small pickled peppers, then stored it in jars to use for cooking or to spread on bread.

As I talk, I rub garlic between my palms to remove the stubborn papery husk. I pass around an ordinary plum tomato, explaining, as my grandmother explained to me, that while it might be as waxy and tasteless as a raw potato, its dense heft makes it the best kind for sauce. Though the tomato is familiar to everyone, my guests handle it as if they’ve never seen one before, examining its eggy shape and weight, nestling it in their hands. With surprise, I note genuine curiosity on their faces, and it dawns on me that these things that have come to seem intuitive to me aren’t necessarily obvious to everyone.

The small space is filled with bodies, and for a few minutes we bump clumsily around each other as I devise tasks for people to do. Lance opens the olives and roasted peppers and removes the mozzarella from its filmy sac; Tom slices the salami and cheese and cuts a baguette into chunks, which he tosses in a basket. Rebecca cuts the boneless chicken breasts lengthwise, into medallions. I help Eileen arrange a classic antipasto platter, layering the cheese and meat and vegetables and olives so they appear unstudied and yet pleasing to the eye: fresh mozza
rella, sliced a quarter-inch thick, rolled into a cylindrical shape. Plain and spicy soppressata next to it, then cubes of provolone, cherry peppers,
peperoncino,
wedges of roasted peppers, and sliced pepperoni, with oil-cured olives heaped in the middle. I drizzle the olive oil that I brought from the Italian market near my dad’s house in Nutley and place the platter on the table with the basket of bread.

As we discuss the menu, I nibble a piece of soft mozzarella. It is tangy, tougher than the barrel-fresh cheese I’m used to. The rest of the antipasto platter isn’t much better, the peppers limp and the olives bland. But there’s nothing I can do about it; I just have to let it go. The shack is warm, everyone got here, and, miraculously, they seem to be enjoying themselves.

“What should I do with this lemon zest?”
Before tonight, Eileen thought lemon zest was a soft drink. Now she lifts the snowdrift of grated rind on a paper towel as I direct her to the whole milk simmering on the stove. “You said your grandma doesn’t use recipes, but I wish you would,” Eileen tells me. “I’m a methodical person. I like to know what I’m doing every step of the way.”

“I understand. I’ll write out some recipes next time. Stir the custard so it doesn’t stick,” I say, watching Lance as he rolls out a marzipan pie crust, leaning into the rolling pin like an expert. Tom flattens chicken breasts with a Progresso soup can, and Rebecca combines flour, salt, pepper, and crushed oregano in a bowl. She dredges the chicken pieces in the flour mixture before placing them in sizzling butter. Tom nudges her aside to check the root vegetables roasting in the oven. When the chicken is cooked on both sides, Rebecca removes it to a plate under a wide lid to keep it warm.

I demonstrate how to parboil the button mushrooms with lemon, and slice garlic the way Nonna taught me,
taglilo sottile.
Lance combines the mushrooms and garlic with slivers of prosciutto in the pan and the juice from the chicken, cooking it all quickly. I deglaze the pan, adding seasoning and then wine. When the sauce is reduced, Lance adds a long, slow stream of chicken broth, whisking until it thickens.

Meanwhile, Flynn sits at the table helping himself to wine. “We’re cooking with gas!” he remarks. “No need for me to get in the way. I’d be as useful as tits on a bull.”

“Just sit there and entertain us with charming Australian colloquialisms,” Lance says.

“I’m a fabulous taster, if anyone needs an opinion,” Flynn says. Eileen offers him a spoonful of lemon custard, which he accepts, looking serious as he considers the balance of flavors. “Needs Tabasco,” he pronounces. Eileen clucks and turns away, putting a quick end to Flynn’s tasting career.

When the chicken is back in the pan and the pasta water is simmering, we sit down for a salad of field greens with roasted peppers, walnuts, and goat cheese. The antipasto platter and two bottles of wine are empty. For the first time all evening, I begin to relax. By the time we get to the chicken marsala, I’m on my second glass of wine, and I’m not the only one; candlelight glows on flushed, animated faces. It feels like a major accomplishment to have assembled a collection of virtual strangers on this frigid night.

Rebecca is tapping her wineglass with a spoon. “I didn’t know what to anticipate,” she says, looking around. “I have to admit, my expectations weren’t very high—I just thought it would be something different, and that’s always welcome at this time of year, isn’t it? But I actually learned something. And the food was delicious. So thank you, Angela. I’m looking forward to the next time.” She raises her wineglass in my direction.

Flynn stands up and leads a little round of applause. “And a
standing O,” he says, circling his arms over his head like a preschool ballerina.

It’s been so long since I’ve been thanked for anything—since I’ve done anything worthy of thanks—that I don’t know how to respond. I stammer, “The truth is, I only did it to make friends.”

Flynn rolls his eyes.

“There’s one more thing,” Rebecca says. “I’d like to offer my kitchen for the rest of the classes. If you’d consider it, Angela. This little house is charming, but I have a big empty place in Egret Bay with a kitchen I barely use and a huge range my husband insisted on. And a dishwasher. And a seven-year-old son who won’t need a babysitter if we relocate.”

“Are you sure?” I ask. “It’s a lot of mess.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll all clean up,” Flynn says quickly.

“I’m not worried about that. It’d be fun. If everybody likes the idea.”

People nod and shrug with controlled enthusiasm. Afraid of hurting my feelings, or possibly Lance’s, I suspect they don’t want to appear too elated at the prospect.

“What’s not to like?” Flynn cajoles. “C’mon, people!”

“I say yes,” I tell Rebecca.

“Settled,” she says.

At the end of the evening, after the
torta al limone
and the good-byes, Flynn and I collapse on the lumpy couch and survey the damage. “You were right. What a mess,” he says. Flour dusts the floor, oil spatters the wall, dirty dishes and silt-glazed wineglasses are everywhere. Flynn wants to gossip, but the evening is such a blur that I have little to say. I’m relieved to have made it through without a disaster—an oil fire or salmonella poisoning, or, worse, being exposed as a fraud.

“There’s something mysterious about Rebecca,” he muses. “What happened to the husband?”