Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Sharon far preferred more healthy and creative vegetarian cooking—she’d been doing a lot of experimenting since Vanessa announced she would no longer eat anything that once had a face—to meals like this, but she could certainly do formal and traditional. She appreciated Simone Beck just as much as Marlene did. Traditional—or conventional, as Sharon called it—was what Marlene favored, and that was the kind of party Marsha Epstein, wife of Felix Epstein, Mondale’s advance man, had wanted tonight. Many luminaries would be at the event; it was already circulating in the kitchen that Mondale was in town and that he just might show.

  Sharon put several baking dishes of her new potatoes in the preheated oven. The trick with potatoes was to add just a little water, steaming them before they browned. That Sharon knew from her own experience; you wouldn’t read that in Simca’s Cuisine.

  Sharon had stopped in the office on the way in to pick up her knives and retrieve her messages from the new machine, as she’d obsessively done of late. I’m sorry, Mrs. Goldstein, the only message said, but I can’t make it today. No reason, no solution, and, thought Sharon, no concern as to whether they would even get the message in time. Sharon couldn’t imagine just not showing for any job, but she hoped she had raised her own children better. No-shows had happened far more when their business was just starting out, when she and Marlene, in an attempt at both selfish and altruistic hiring, had relied on their kids’ friends. Even though they were being paid, the kids acted as if they were doing Food Matters a favor by simply waltzing through the door. Sharon watched in astonishment as one lithe, long-limbed girl with more split ends on a single head of hair than Sharon thought possible scooped a cherry tomato into the spinach dip, set perfectly in the head of a beautiful unfolding red cabbage, leaving a crater in its wake. And Ben’s pal Jared, a lovely boy headed for Harvard, ate a chunk of chicken right off the tip of her skewer, then set it back down on the tray. These kids showed up unkempt, and she could tell sometimes they were stoned. They befriended the bartenders and snuck tequila shots behind the makeshift bars. Then every once in a while someone arrived showered and shaved, clean and sparkly as a razor blade, and did exactly what Sharon and Marlene asked of her.

  But the gamble became far too stressful, and given their growing clientele, they needed professionals, or at least kids with experience, and now they had enough money and sufficient wherewithal to hire them. Tonight was an unusual glitch as they had a terrific and fairly stable waitstaff, which meant Sharon and Marlene could concentrate instead on making excellent, healthful food, setting a beautiful, welcoming table, and continuing to ingratiate themselves to the elite of Washington. Her father’s town—Hollywood, USA!—might have run on money, but her husband’s ran on pure power, and Sharon could see it tick and breathe each night.

  No one on staff was available to fill in for the missing server that evening, and even more unbelievably, no one seemed to know a soul who could turn up, do a few spins around the room with a doilied silver platter, serve the rack of lamb without dripping blood on the Oriental carpet, and pick up the rim-kissed glasses at the end of the night. The old Sharon would have panicked. Or maybe she would have thrown her dish towel down and wept, made Marlene figure it out on her own. But that was the old Sharon, the unfinished Sharon. The new Sharon could attack problems with passion and find viable solutions. The new Sharon, though she still had her doubts, was completed.

  And she made decisions quickly. Thinking about it no further, Sharon picked up Marsha Epstein’s kitchen phone and called home.

  “Hello?” Vanessa grunted into the phone.

  “Darling?” Sharon was going to ignore the afternoon’s fight and start fresh.

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Sharon could hear her daughter breathing. “Yeah?” Vanessa said after a moment, sniffling.

  “Do you have a cold?” Sharon asked.

  “Nope,” Vanessa said flatly.

  “Thank goodness! Listen, I know you are probably busy this evening—or maybe you’re going to Jason’s?—but I need to ask you a big favor. Would there be any way you could help me tonight? One of the servers just didn’t show up. Just did not show. Can you believe it?”

  More silence. “Mom,” Vanessa groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Sharon noticed Vanessa had not exactly refused, and seeing this window of opportunity, she forged on. “It would mean the world to me. I really need your help tonight, sweetie.” She had not blamed her for eating the canapés, and she’d been firm and open, vulnerable and calm, just as she’d always wished she could be with her daughter.

  “I can’t.”

  Sharon felt it in her gut. It was more than the potential of the ruined party; it was the out-and-out rejection. “You know I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t really need you.”

  “Uh-uh,” Vanessa said. “No way.”

  Sharon clenched her teeth. Then she saw Vanessa, an infant in her crib, who hadn’t needed her mother at all; she’d just lie there cooing happily to herself. Benjamin had cried and cried—he seemed to suffer terribly until she came for him, cradling his head and lifting him to her heart. Who was this terribly independent child? Sharon had been so depressed after her daughter’s birth, she could barely rouse herself to feed her. Now she reasoned that Vanessa had been born this way, utterly unknowable to her.

  But her daughter’s body was so familiar. In retrospect, Vanessa, as she grew, even bored her with her sameness. Of course a girl had come from her; but a boy? This was strange and miraculous. Sharon had spent so much time watching her son lope across a soccer field and fling himself on the couch, his long arms draped to the floor, so many hours watching his limbs grow, that her daughter’s body had escaped her.

  “Listen here, Vanessa.” Sharon had reached the point she nearly always went to—anger, white anger, that touched down like a match igniting in uncontrollable flashes—and there was no turning back. “You ate all my fucking crab cakes.” Sharon remembered unsuspectingly opening the freezer only to be met by the black hole where her canapés once were. “All of them. There was not one left. And don’t think I don’t know about the cheese sticks. You owe me.”

  Vanessa breathed heavily into the phone.

  “I’ve had about enough. If Daddy’s not home yet, you call a taxi and you be here in the next twenty minutes, do you hear me?” Sharon said. “You be here, Vanessa.”

  “Dad’s home,” Vanessa said.

  “Well, terrific. Now put on some black pants and a goddamn white button-down shirt and get in the car and get down here!” Sharon shut her eyes tightly, as if this would somehow allow her not to hear her own voice. She had so wanted to be good and strong and in control. “Now.”

  Marlene turned from the trash with a look that asked if everything was all right.

  “Okay, Mom,” Vanessa said. “God.”

  “Great.” Sharon nodded to Marlene. “It’s on Kalorama at Columbia. Right on the south corner. Thanks, sweetie, see you in a bit!” Sharon squeaked.

  The florist had come in, and so had three of the servers, all waiting to be told where to place the nuts, what would be passed, what would be stationary. Sharon tried her breathing: I choose to, I choose to, Sharon said to herself on the exhale. She imagined she was seated on a folding chair in a hall at the Marriott off Rockville Pike, one among so many human travelers on like journeys.

  “Marlene?” Sharon called to her partner, who was now ever-so-patiently patting the mushroom caps with a damp paper towel. “Can you manage the servers for now? Vanessa is going to help as well. She’s on her way.”

  “Vanessa?”

  “Yes,” Sharon said defensively, as if Vanessa had been the best choice on earth. “Yes, she’s offered to take Mary’s place.”

  “How nice of her,” Marlene said sincerely. She folded her towel in quarters, placed it carefully by the sink, and wobbled across the room, motioning the small group over to the flower-strewn table.

  “It was nice,” Sharon said afte
r her, trying to fend off the gloom that, no matter where the occasion or how powerful or kind her client, always pervaded in these hours before an event. There was something depressing about being in someone else’s kitchen, preparing for someone else’s party. Here, among the silver and English china and crystal, the calla lilies and gardenias spread out on the kitchen farm table waiting for the florist to arrange, she couldn’t help but think of her mother’s disdain at her chosen career path. But don’t you want to go to these parties? Helen would ask. Not be the hired help, for God’s sake. Don’t you want to help your husband’s career?

  Now Sharon had the tools to say, My image of my own success goes beyond such meaningless symbols. But yes, of course she wanted to help, and she believed she could, and had; she believed that people responded just as much to a sublime meal as they did to scintillating conversation. At the least she was providing a canvas, a platform for discussion. And wasn’t food a central issue now? Dennis said it was only a matter of time before the whole world just starved to death, but that, even Sharon realized, was just how they talked at USDA.

  When her mother asked such questions—more indictments—Sharon did wonder whether she should take the business further, open a restaurant, say, or write a cookbook. She had a whole goddamn shelf in the den filled with the Moosewood Cookbook, Mollie Katzen’s recipes from her vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca. Sharon’s friends, and her mother’s friends, as well as many of her clients, had all sent her a copy when it came out last year. Each one was inscribed with a note to the effect of You’re next! Or, Who’s this woman who stole all your ideas!—which rendered each book nonreturnable.

  Sharon had felt misunderstood; Moosewood wasn’t her style at all. Something about the cooking was frumpy; it was neither refined nor beautiful. Reading that cookbook had made her run to her copy of Ma Gastronomie, with its recipe for blood sausage made just from pigs who had eaten only pears. As ridiculous as this was—how would she know about the pears? Was she to feed the pig herself? She wasn’t a bloody farmer—Sharon believed in cooking with great care, not throwing a bunch of garlic into a dish and calling it layered with flavor.

  Sharon’s aspirations had been so markedly different from her mother’s. Whereas her mother had wanted to slip in among the powered and moneyed of Hollywood, during the Eisenhower administration Sharon couldn’t wait to escape it and headed to D.C. Washington, she had foolishly believed, was where change happened. Yes, she’d been naive and misguided—what young person with ideals moves to Washington during the reign of Ike?—but only four years later she was there marching on the Mall on that stifling August day with massive crowds of people listening to Martin Luther King, Jr. Ben was strapped to Dennis’s chest, and as the three of them, and Louise, stood with all the marchers, Sharon had felt nothing short of thrilled with her decisions.

  That day she had felt like an adult, but now Sharon saw herself then as the young, immature girl she had actually been. She could not turn her head toward the memory of her husband, his impossibly young face, his hand, the slender gold ring glinting as his palm lighted on Ben’s tiny head. Dennis mouthed the words to “We Shall Not Be Moved” so as not to wake their son. Like a tree that’s standing by the water . . . Then later, the march for the mobilization to end the war, the four of them now, Louise far too radical to stand with a suburban family, Vanessa and Benjamin both reaching up, begging to be held on their father’s shoulders so they could rise up above the crowd. The turned leaves—mustard, red, unthinkable oranges—were just beginning to fall off the trees lining the Mall, and it had been the kind of bright, crisp day that can only happen after a day of rain. She had looked up to Vanessa kicking at Dennis’s chest, assuring Ben he would be next, and again felt a surge that everything she had done had been correct.

  Sharon began to doubt her memory. Had she not thought then of all that had happened? There had been secret bombings in Cambodia. The Weathermen had just blown up that statue in Chicago. Hadn’t she been afraid? Dennis had held Ben’s feet and said, to Sharon or to himself, she didn’t know then or now, “This isn’t going to do anything. Pete Seeger can sing until he’s blue in the face, but it’s just a goddamn song.”

  In any case, Sharon thought now, turning away from both memories, two images split apart by history. At least, she rationalized, she had not spent her life chasing down invitations to this fund-raiser, or that producer’s party, as her mother had. When they lived in that little bungalow with the tiny pond out front on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, her mother had all the invitations she’d wanted. By the time they’d moved to Beverly Hills, though, the invitations—to the right parties—stopped coming.

  Sharon would always associate the move to Beverly Hills, where Herb and Helen still lived, with her father’s downward spiral. We’re on the up-and-up! Helen had cheered as she rolled up her shirtsleeves and went to pack up the highballs from the sticky kitchen cabinet. Each time she set some glasses in a cardboard box, she’d pass by the window over the sink that looked out into their little garden, crammed with bougainvillea and jasmine and bottle washers. Sharon remembered that window now, plants nearly bursting through the glass, and how her mother wore a scarf on her head like a Bolshevik.

  The Weissmans moved up to the Hills, just as the rest of Hollywood stopped working. That’s when Herbert and that cigar-chomping, commie-hating Dick Yates not only worked through the hearings and the blacklist, but started producing more profitable westerns than ever before. Sharon had eaten dinner with Roy Rogers! Her father had made a huge show of ordering her a Roy Rogers that night, which had made her pout; she loved Shirley Temples. And it had changed the course of Sharon’s promising youth. Once, on a dare, she and a boy drove out into the desert. They went out to the middle of Death Valley. Rattlesnakes shook their way across the desert floor, and the sun was so damn hot it was as if they were on the very face of it; only reach a hand out of the car and you would touch its bleeding border and would likely burn to bits; why, the sun too felt nuclear. Sharon gripped that boy’s arm and told him to drive like hell and get them out of there, as if it were the A-bomb itself they could flee. This boy, his hair combed to one side with pomade Sharon thought would surely melt, burning his scalp the way all those Japanese faces she saw in magazines had been burned, his car idling in the desert, called her a traitor. Traitor! he’d said, as if he had been dared to bring her out into this blinding brutal world just to tell her this. She had thought he would leave her there, and her skeleton would be found, snakes wriggling out of her eye sockets.

  But that boy had not left her there, and maybe everyone stopped partying once the hearings had begun. Or maybe television was taking over just as her father always said. Now the Mary Tyler Moore Show was filmed on that same lot where her father had filmed Sheriff of Sundown. God, how she wanted to throw a hat up into the sky that way; it was what she’d thought of when she’d started LEAP! I want to feel like Mary Tyler Moore, she’d thought when she’d found that blue card in her night-table drawer and called in that day. And when the phone was answered so brightly on the other end, Sharon’s eyes leaked with tears: You’re gonna make it after all.

  Sharon might never have bolted from Los Angeles had her father been on the right side—which is to say on the left—of politics. With a father like Lester Cole, one of the original ten who’d refused to talk. He’d done time, and even by mere proxy his son was a hero at school. With a father like that, with the correct principles, there might have been a reason to stay. Then she could have been one of those earth women in Laurel Canyon baking bread for the neighborhood, spinning her own yarn and doing yoga beneath a picture of her very own guru.

  Sharon knew now that Herbert Weissman hadn’t been asked to name names, but she also knew that he would have wanted to be asked. She held an image of him waiting in the den, mumbling about the socialists from his old neighborhood. That’s where they all come from, he’d said, my own goddamned street. He’d drum his fingers on the laminated phone table. What other c
all could he have awaited? From where she sat now, she saw her father clinging to his irrevocable immigrant fear of being sent back, sent home.

  She pushed the cutting board aside, placed her head in her folded arms on the granite counter, and tried to conjure up her Essential Training. Sharon had almost completed Level 1 of her training, but still she remained unsure. Or more, she was not yet a believer. When had Sharon ever been able to give herself over to something? The consciousness-raising sessions she took part in a decade before were just women rapping—it was good, but there was no surrender in only talking. She’d wondered if she could really let go as the LEAP! session leader had stood at the lectern and described her own journey to self-actualization. The setup had felt very much like synagogue, which had made Sharon think of Marlene’s initial advice: maybe Sharon was taking the wrong path and she should have gone back to Temple Sinai, as when the kids had been young. Perhaps the answer wasn’t forging new ground, but treading backward, returning. Her father had revisited his faith only in his middle age, and she wondered if he was cheating death or if something more than thoughts of his own mortality, something true, had brought him back. Perhaps her father had been a stranger to himself and maybe now he looked in the mirror and could see through his aging—the brown spots and bits of hair, the sagging chin, and the puffiness below his eyes—to himself, to the boy he once was. How else does one age but like a tree, an entire past—fire, drought, flood, lightning attacks—all held within its maturing trunk, everything that ever happened to the tree evidenced by its growth rings. Every age we’ve ever been stored in our bodies. This is what Sharon had told Ben when he was learning about tree rings in the fifth grade, but she had said it quickly, to explain science to her son, and she had not really seen its import.