No Place I'd Rather Be

by Cathy Lamb

  “I want to ask you again. Was Bambi a hooker?” I asked.

  “No!” my father snapped. “She was not a hooker.”

  New Wife was pissed. We’d hit a nerve.

  “Chloe Rossbach, Olivia Rossbach—” he started, trying to reprimand us. “Don’t you talk to me like that—”

  “My name isn’t Rossbach anymore,” I said.

  “Neither is mine,” Chloe said, that stabbing fork edging closer to him. He moved his hands. “I’m Chloe Martindale now.”

  I stretched out my hand to my father to shake it. “I’m Olivia Martindale.”

  The boys started to wriggle around in their seats. One got out and climbed between Chloe and me. He was cute.

  The waitress came by, smiling. Chloe and I ordered lemon meringue pie. “Can we get whip cream on top?” We could. “A lot?” Yes.

  When she brought it, Chloe and I knew what to do. We both picked up the pie with our fingers and tossed it at him. We had admirable aim because of target practice and our archery skills.

  He was spluttering and swearing when we left, New Wife steaming mad.

  Three years later he came back with another new wife and a baby. For one day. We had no use for him. We met them for lunch again. This time it was cherry pie. Guaranteed to stain.

  His phone calls, over the years, have been sporadic. I never called him. I have currently not spoken to my father for three years. He called to tell me he was getting married for the fourth time and said he was sorry he couldn’t invite me, but they were going to get married in Hawaii.

  “Barney,” I said, “I don’t care that you’re getting married. Why should I? You deserted and abandoned Mom, me, and Chloe. You walked out. You didn’t pay any child support. You didn’t call. You’ve abandoned two other women and your other children. If I had children I would sooner cut off my own feet and walk on my knees the rest of my life than leave them. You are a narcissistic, selfish, horrible man with no morals. I don’t want you in my life. At all. All you do is bring pain to everyone.”

  “No, I don’t—”

  “You do. Every family you have created you have hurt. You have done nothing in your life that is worthwhile. I heard your second set of kids are both on drugs. I met them in Kalulell years ago, remember? They were cute. Your third set is having trouble in school. Both dropped out, right? And now you have a three-year-old with this woman. When will you desert her? You can’t seem to stop shattering people’s lives. Your children do not deserve it.”

  He sighed. Pompous. Smug. “You don’t understand this situation. You lack maturity and insight. Your mother filled you with hate for me—”

  “She never did that. You did, Barney. And I do have maturity and insight. You’re simply throwing those words out so you can be condescending and shut me down. You don’t even know me. You are not a true man. A true man is a kind father to his children. You are not kind to any of your children or their mothers. Don’t contact me again. Every time you do, I have to go through the hurt and anger again. I don’t need it, or you.”

  “Show some respect to your father and do not talk to me like that, Olivia Rossbach!”

  “I am Olivia Martindale Rivera. You are not my father, Barney. Granddad is. I will speak to you how I wish.” I hung up.

  I don’t feel compelled to have a relationship with Barney because he shares the same genetic material as I do. I think sometimes that’s where people make a mistake: because we’re blood related, because he’s our father, or she’s our mother, or that’s our sister or brother or cousin, or half brother, that we have to have a relationship with that person.

  As if it’s enshrined in the Constitution, or part of being American.

  It isn’t.

  Toxic is toxic. We cannot choose our family members, and when one of them is only going to bring a wrecking ball of destruction and hurt, I feel no obligation to have a relationship with them. Blood is blood, they say. And usually the person who’s saying it is the toxic one and using emotional manipulation to sneak their poisonous self back into your life.

  I will not buy into it.

  I will, however, buy into cooking.

  Cooking and baking are therapy for me. There’s no anger, no abandonment. It’s peace. It’s order. Beautiful food art.

  Measure. Mix. Stir. Whip. Bake. Invent. Imagine. Nourish the ones you love, including yourself.

  Chapter 6

  On Wednesday evening my mother and grandma invited the girls and me to the farmhouse for homemade vanilla ice cream that my grandma made. My mother ended up talking to the girls about how emergency room doctors get to “see everything. I mean, everything. If you want action in your life, girls, become an emergency room doctor. I was in the emergency room in a hospital in New York and let me tell you the types of injuries I saw there . . .”

  “Mom, shhh . . . they’ll have nightmares.”

  She glared at me. “I’m preparing them for medical school and how to treat emergencies, Rebel Child. This is an age-appropriate lesson.”

  “I want to know about the action,” Stephi said, grabbing my mother’s hand.

  “What kinds of injuries?” Lucy asked, her face lighting up. “How bad?”

  I groaned.

  * * *

  I saw my grandma’s leather-bound cookbook later that night. What did the two heart-shaped, gold lockets; the red ribbons; the sun charm; and the white feather mean to her? So many questions, and I knew all the answers would be painful.

  * * *

  Joan the caseworker dropped by. I had no idea she was coming. The girls were in aprons and we were icing a confetti cake with sprinkles. The scene was so perfect it seemed rigged. She helped eat the cake, then she and I had a glass of wine and made a toast to “Feminism, confetti cake, and wine.”

  * * *

  On a snowy morning, Jace walked into Larry’s Diner with three of his friends. I knew all of them. They were fishing/hunting /skiing buddies. They had all gone to school with Jace, two years ahead of me, and they’d been friends forever. I liked all of them. They were loud, fun, and respectful to me when Jace and I were married.

  Jordan is a screenwriter. He writes romance movies. He and his wife, Maria, have five kids. Michael owns a hardware store, and his wife, Rynnie, is a pediatrician, who my mother respects and likes. They have three kids. Ryan part-owns and manages the largest ski resort in town. His wife, Kelly, owns the city’s craft store. They have two kids. Their kids are all unofficial cousins to each other.

  We used to hang out with them. When I left Jace I lost contact with the six of them. The wives had all called and e-mailed me. So had Jordan, Michael, and Ryan. Friendly calls, how are you, we sure miss you, Jace misses you. Anything we can do? Are you two thinking about getting back together? Jace is so unhappy.

  Now and then I responded, but hardly ever. The friendships eventually fell off. I take full blame. It hurt to talk to Maria, Rynnie, and Kelly. They were with their husbands, their children. I was not.

  But the four musketeers were back and in the restaurant: Jace, Jordan, Michael, and Ryan. I knew I would not venture outside of the kitchen, I was not brave enough for that, but I would make sure that what they ordered was perfect.

  The restaurant was full and we were flying in the back, but I watched the orders come in and snatched theirs right up. My hands were shaking from lack of sleep as both Lucy and Stephi had had nightmares about living with their parents, in a dark house, and being in a basement alone for days on end. They ate dog food and they could smell cigarette smoke. People were always smoking in their home, which makes Lucy and Stephi feel sick to this day when they smell it.

  Let’s see . . . mushroom and goat cheese omelet . . . French toast with our homemade raspberry syrup . . . scrambled egg, bacon, and chive western skillet . . . and Jace’s. His was the eggs Benedict with hollandaise sauce with blueberry muffins on the side. He loved my eggs Benedict and my blueberry muffins.

  I whipped . . . I scrambled . . . I sautéed . . . I spiced
up . . . I added a dash of this and a shake of that.

  I pushed the bell, Dinah hustled over, winked, as she knew why I was hiding in the kitchen like a fool, and delivered their food. I went back to slicing, chopping, and frying and tried to pretend that my soon-to-be-ex, hot husband with the hard eyes that softened up every single time he was around me was not in the restaurant with his loud and funny friends who were married to women whom I had rudely dropped and ignored. I am an awful, awful person.

  “They want to compliment the chef,” Dinah said about thirty minutes later.

  “Who?” But I knew who.

  “You know who.”

  “No. I don’t want to be complimented.”

  “Get out there, Chef Feisty,” Larry boomed. “Those guys haven’t been in here ever. I want them to come back. They want to tell you that you flipped their eggs like their momma used to do or the bacon made them drool or the pancakes made them hard, then you go listen to it. Now, Olivia. Go. Move that butt.”

  I took off my apron, which was slathered in egg yolks, blueberry muffin batter, and sugar icing from the cinnamon rolls, then slipped into the bathroom. I groaned. It appeared that death had come and messed with my face. I was white-gray. No makeup. I was, at the same time, flushed from the steam in the kitchen. I resembled a sweating ghost. My hair must have been brushed by mice. I put my hands on the sink and leaned over it. I didn’t want to chitchat with Jace and his friends. I had no confidence. None.

  Larry pounded on the door. “Out you go, woman. Say hi, try to pretend you’re polite, make it snappy, and get your butt back in here.”

  I washed my hands. I washed my face because I had pancake batter on my chin and my homemade raspberry syrup on my forehead. I leaned in. Egg on my collarbone. I had dark circles under my eyes. What? Was I part raccoon? I took my hair out of the ponytail, and it tumbled over my shoulders. I tried to fluff it up so it wouldn’t hang like a brown rag.

  I rinsed out my mouth. Dug lipstick out of my purse and put it on. It was the best I could do. I appeared slightly less deathly. One thing I learned from my grandma, though: When you feel you look your worst, be “so friendly they think they’ve been hit with a friendly hammer, and ask people how they are. They’ll walk away thinking you looked fantastic because you made them feel cared about.”

  I opened the bathroom door and headed out to Jace and my ex-friends. I plastered a fake smile on my face.

  “Nice fake smile,” Larry said.

  * * *

  “Olivia! Give me a hug . . . so good to see you . . . we missed you . . . we heard you were in town . . . Rynnie will be so happy you’re back . . . have you talked to Kelly yet? No? Give her a call . . .”

  I was enveloped in three hugs by three men. Jace had stood when I came over, let the men out of the booth, and smiled at me. Gentle. Serious. Calm. And . . . blank. He didn’t give much away when he didn’t want to.

  “It’s so nice to see all of you.” They were all politely covering up the awkwardness of my being back, but not with Jace. They were not intrusive people. “How are you all, how are the kids?”

  “Sit down, please . . . please . . .”

  “I can’t right now, I’m so busy in the back, but tell me.”

  They told me about their kids, their wives, they laughed and chatted. I knew I had to get back to the kitchen because we were swamped, but also because this conversation was making me feel like I wanted to sprint out of the restaurant and not stop sprinting until I got to the top of a mountain and could scream. I used to be friends with these men. I knew their children. I had held their babies, I had hugged their toddlers, I had cooked with their kids.

  They hugged me again before I scooted back to the kitchen. I avoided Jace’s eyes when I said, “Nice to see you, Jace.”

  “And you, too, Olivia.”

  As I turned toward the kitchen, I heard the abrupt silence at the table.

  Then I heard Jordan say, no doubt trying to whisper but he is so naturally loud he doesn’t know how to, “Jace, buddy, you two have got to get back together.”

  “Yeah, man,” Michael said. “Do not let that one get away again.”

  * * *

  As I have done for years, I cooked to block out what I felt for the rest of the day, but I cried on the way to get the girls that afternoon. Cried like I had two streams pouring out of my eyes. I have to stop crying so much. I pulled myself back together in Portland, but now I was a wet mess again, my emotions a tumbling cacophony of shrieks.

  Jace was still so sexy. So huggable. So broad and serious and stable and loyal.

  He should hate me. I would hate me if I was him, but he didn’t. I could tell. He was a forgiving man, a smart man. I have hated myself, for many things.

  * * *

  My grandma and mother had both asked gently, on several occasions over the last two-plus years, if I wanted to talk about Jace. Gentle is hard for my mother, as she is part bull, so I appreciated her efforts. I said yes, and we did, and we moved on. It is what it is: a wreck that can’t be repaired.

  * * *

  “Will you tell me about Ida Zaslavsky, Grandma?” I traced the signature written on the inside cover of the leather cookbook.

  “She’s my grandmother, Cinnamon, your great-great grandmother.”

  We were at the farmhouse, at the table my granddad built, the girls reading by the fire, my mother still at the clinic.

  “My great-great grandmother.” I studied, in awe, the neat, precise handwriting and the detailed pictures she’d drawn. I looked at the recipes—my grandma translated for me, as they were written in Ukrainian and Yiddish—for beet root soup with pepper and onions. Braided egg bread. Potato pie.

  “She was a Jew from Odessa. It was Ida’s mother, Sarrah Tolstonog, who gave her the book. She worked as a house cleaner for a wealthy man who made books.” Grandma smiled and flipped through the pages, so old, stains here and there, black burned around the edges. “Sometimes she spoke and wrote in Ukrainian and sometimes in Yiddish. It’s how I learned both languages, through my grandma, Ida, and grandfather, Boris. Ah”—she sighed—“it has been so long since I’ve spoken their names.”

  “You speak Ukrainian and Yiddish?” I had never known that.

  “Yes. Although not well anymore. That’s what happens after seventy years. But she and my grandfather spoke to me in those languages when I was growing up in Munich. They started me off with Yiddish because they didn’t want me to forget our people’s language, then they started speaking to me in Ukrainian when I was about six.”

  “So you speak Ukrainian, Yiddish, and German.” That explained her accent, or should I say accents. Her English was a blend of British and American, mostly American, with a dose of German and a dash of something else. That something else was the Yiddish and Ukrainian.

  “And I do okay with English.” She elbowed me and smiled. She took a deep breath when she came to a picture of the family. I knew I was looking at Ida and Boris, their two little boys, one girl, and a baby sitting on Ida’s lap. “Ida wrote the recipes in Yiddish if they were from her mother or grandmother, and she wrote them in Ukrainian if they were hers.”

  Ida had long, thick dark hair, much like mine, Grandma’s, my mother’s, and Chloe’s. She wore a skirt to her ankles and a buttoned shirt to her neck. Black boots. Her eyes tilted upward at the corners. Cat eyes. Like mine.

  “Ida was much more beautiful than this,” Grandma said. “She didn’t draw herself with all of her beauty, as I understood it from my mother, Esther, her daughter. Her eyes were green, like ours. She was modest. Gentle. Kind. But strong, oh so strong, to have lived through what she did.”

  She turned the page to a stone and wood home with a brick fireplace.

  “This was Ida and Boris’s home that was burned to the ground during the pogrom. The men, evil men, came in the night and burned much of the neighborhood down. It was outside of Odessa, on the edges, so it felt like a village to them. My grandma told my mother that it was very quiet that
night, too quiet, but that Odessa had been dangerous and tense for a long time. They murdered and raped Jews and destroyed businesses and homes. Their baby”—she tapped the smiling face of the baby in Ida’s lap—“died in the flames in the bedroom. They couldn’t get to him. That baby would have been my uncle Liev.”

  I pictured that sickening scene. I put a hand to my heart as it lurched, pounded. I leaned against the table and took a breath. “Grandma, I’m so sorry.”

  “With their house on fire, they fled into the woods to hide. Boris and Ida couldn’t find the boys and my mother for an hour because they pushed the children out first while they tried to save Liev. The black smoke hid them while they ran. Finally they found the children in a log. They didn’t go back home for two days, to salvage what they could. Ida found her cookbook. Our cookbook. She told my mother that it had been on the windowsill during the attack. Maybe it was blown out. Who knows? But it survived. They had nothing after the fire, except the clothes they were wearing, the cookbook, the menorah that Ida found in the dirt that was made by her grandfather, Aron Bezkrovny, and the tools that Boris used to make saddles and harnesses.

  “What they did to the Jews during the pogroms was never punished. The government allowed it, encouraged it. Attacks against Jews were accepted.” Her mouth tightened, and I saw a flash of true anger from a woman who rarely angered. “Ida was pregnant when they escaped from Odessa. On their way to Germany—it took them fourteen months—she lost her fifth child, a girl. She was going to name her Talia.” She turned a page and tapped it. “She had a stillborn birth on the side of a dirt road, at night, and they buried her the next day in the forest. Broke her heart. This forest with the sun shining through the trees and the meadow was the baby girl’s burial place. The two deer are for Talia and for Liev.”

  Ida, my great-great-grandmother, had lost two babies. My whole body hurt for her.

  “Grandma.” I pointed to the picture of the menorah in the windowsill I’d seen before. “Is that the menorah in the box?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Incredible. From Odessa to Germany to England to Montana. It had survived all those years, four countries, one ocean between them.