Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  On this evening, once I’d cleared the dinner dishes, I proudly set before him the lists I’d made: pots and equipment we’d need; suppliers and cleaning help that still had to be found; and, finally, the menu. Three pages, headed Antipasti, I Primi and I Secondi.

  Angelo remained at the table, with Olivia, three-quarters asleep, on his lap, as he looked at my lists. After a while, he stood up slowly so he wouldn’t awaken her, and carried her to the bedroom. When he returned, he refilled his wineglass, sat down, looked at the menus again. Had he noticed the Sicilian classics Anna never made, most notably Emir of Catania’s Chicken, in which the chicken is baked in a loaf of hollowed-out bread instead of with rice? I thought he would be particularly pleased with this dish because, though he didn’t care for chicken himself, he didn’t hate it, and it was economical.

  Now he handed me back my pages and said, without looking up at me, “No risotto.”

  “I don’t understand.” I warned myself to stay calm. “I mean, I know you don’t eat it but—”

  “This is a Sicilian restaurant,” he said. “No risotto.”

  “So many people order it,” I began. “We always—” But before I could finish, he’d stood up and was folding his plans.

  “Where are you going?” A question I didn’t normally ask.

  “What difference to you?”

  “What difference is anything to me?” I asked. “We both want Trattoria Angelo to be a success, we both—”

  “No Trattoria Angelo,” he said. “It stays Lambino. Like before.”

  My tears were checked. It must have been the owners’ insistence. Was he already having trouble with them? But why couldn’t he even have told me?

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

  It did matter, but I knew better than to insist.

  “Where’re you going?” I asked again as he headed for the door.

  “What difference to you?”

  “If you’re taking a walk,” I said desperately, “I wouldn’t mind going with you.”

  “Olivia is sleeping,” he said as he opened the door. “Only one can go.”

  Lambino, seating forty comfortably, another six to ten in a pinch, and with a long bar, an extremely good collection of Italian wines, some unavailable elsewhere, a genial bartender, and a chef who apparently received a great deal of praise from the diners, though it was seldom relayed to her, opened on July first and did extremely well so quickly as to banish from the chef’s mind all thoughts not connected to its kitchen.

  I had no hired assistant, although one of the two waitresses, Benedetta, assisted me between lunch and dinner with the washing and slicing of vegetables and other prepping chores. The second waitress was Isabella, who was young and pretty and who’d come up from Naples to live with her aunt. Isabella did not stay in the restaurant between the time we finished serving lunch and six P.M., when she returned for dinner. The only men on the premises, aside from Angelo, were the dishwasher, a sad, elderly gentleman named Salvatore who was permanently hunched over from a life at the sink, and Tomaso, a small, wiry Neapolitan who came to Rome on Friday afternoons, worked at the bar with Angelo Friday and Saturday nights, and returned to Naples on Sunday. During the week, Angelo handled the bar by himself.

  He also made the almost daily trips to the Mercato Generale for meat and produce, and to the small seaport beyond it, Fumicino, where the fish prices were better than Rome’s. Other suppliers came to the restaurant. Once or twice I’d told Angelo I wanted to accompany him to the markets to get a better feeling for what they sold, but he’d always claimed I was too busy and there wasn’t anything he hadn’t told me about. Certainly the first part of this statement was true. Actually, it was only when he took Livvy with him that I could work without interruption. In fact, during those last, frantic days before we opened, and then in the crush of our first tourist season, I went from being a mother whose greatest pleasure lay in being with her daughter to one who was constantly trying to get her out of the way.

  These are the days Livvy remembers when she talks about her childhood. When she recalls the fountains and statues of Rome, she remembers her father as having taken her to them. When she began to tell her tales about the mad monster of the kitchen, I could never say any particular story was a lie. Only that the whole picture was wrong. Nowhere in it was the mother who adored her, hugged and kissed her, read her stories, was easily patient when not cooking dinner for forty or fifty people at a time. That mother seemed to have vanished from her memory so thoroughly as not to have existed.

  During the incredibly busy summer months, Angelo kept Livvy out of the kitchen altogether, carrying her meals to the dining room when we were closed, to the little room in back of the bar when we were open. It was a great relief not to have her underfoot downstairs, and the truth is that since it was midnight by the time I’d finished wrapping and storing or throwing away unused food and dragged myself upstairs to bed, I only dimly registered, for a while, that she was avoiding me. I first felt her distance in a more than momentary way when October had come and gone and the number of meals had diminished to a point where they could be prepared by a mortal. Isabella began working Friday to Sunday only. Benedetta could handle the Tuesday-to-Thursday crowd. I calmed down some. Livvy began occasionally to look at me when I spoke, allowed me to kiss her good night, though she never kissed me back. Given the choice of a walk for gelato with me or a ride with her father to the fish market, she invariably selected the latter, but that seemed natural when she was accustomed to being with him. It took time for me to become upset about the continuing gap between us. I’ve learned that most little girls go through a period of preferring their fathers, but even if I’d known it then, I doubt I could have separated her coolness from what happened in the kitchen. How can I separate them now, when they are still simple cause and effect in her mind?

  As business slowed, I became friendly with the wife of the couple who ran a framing shop a few doors from us. Vera. They had two stores and her husband was normally at the other one. More important, they had a daughter, Bettina, who was only a little older than Livvy. Vera was happy to have the girls play together in the back of her shop and, later, at her home. I could reciprocate painlessly by making them welcome in the restaurant during all but peak hours. Often, when there were no customers, Vera would hang up her sign and bring over Bettina, who’d play with Livvy while the two of us had coffee and pastry, or a glass of wine.

  Vera and I didn’t complain about our husbands except in that general Aren’t-Men-Impossible? way. But as the years passed and Livvy was in school all day, Angelo grew casual about using our apartment with whomever he was screwing. Even then, if they were careful and I didn’t have to notice specifics, I could make believe it wasn’t happening. But at some point I began to find hairpins on the floor and the bed remade in a careless fashion. And then I found an unfamiliar lipstick on the bathroom sink.

  The following morning I left a note, written with the lipstick, on the mirror: Attention Occupants—Please clean up this bathroom and leave the bed as you found it.

  My husband was furious.

  “What if I didn’t see it and Olivia came home?”

  I stared at him, astounded, after so many years of living with him, by his ability to ignore the crucial aspects of any question.

  “First of all, she can’t read that well,” I said, then cursed myself for entering the fray on his grounds even as he was leaving, slamming the door behind him. The door had become his standard last word to our arguments.

  “I was very naive,” I said to Vera the next afternoon. It was four o’clock, the restaurant was closed, we’d had lunch and were sitting inside with our espressos while the girls played on the narrow sidewalk outside. “When Angelo used to disappear, it never occurred to me that he was screwing around.”

  Vera shrugged. “They all do it.”

  I laughed. “They can’t all do it. There have to be some who’re happy
with just . . .” She had three other children, ranging in age from eight to sixteen. “When did you . . . did you always assume it would be that way?”

  “Each wife thinks she will be different,” Vera said. “Each thinks she’s the first to drive him wild. Vincente was crazy for me. I was sure he would never want anyone else.”

  “And what happened?”

  Another shrug. “Nothing happens. The craziness passes, and then they want it back, and they look someplace else.”

  “So, what do you do?” I asked, feeling stupid, but it was the question on my mind. What do I do? How do I live?

  “What is there to do? You tell yourself the Isabellas, too, will get married and have children and the same thing will happen to them.”

  “Isabella?” I was startled.

  Now Vera was confused and upset. “I thought . . . Mother of God . . . I thought that was who you were talking about.”

  “Because you thought—or because you knew? And you thought I knew?”

  She looked down at her lap for a long time.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” I assured her. “I’m not sure it matters who . . .” I let the words trail off. I was remembering how eager to please me Isabella had been until a month or two after she’d begun, when, I could say now, she’d ceased volunteering help, stopped speaking to me except when she had to, no longer met my eyes. I hadn’t thought twice about what had been a not uncommon trajectory at Anna’s, from new employee, eager to please, to old hand who didn’t bother to look at you. Some came to understand and tolerate the kitchen’s tempo, others never did. They stayed if they needed a job and there was nothing better around. Isabella lived with her aunt, which gave her the flexibility to accept part-time work when that was all we required, although it deprived her of a place to go with Angelo.

  Oh, my God! The little room in back of the bar! There was a sofa bed in it, ostensibly because one of the owners might want our apartment occasionally for a night and we’d have to sleep downstairs. I’d heard nothing about the owners since we bought the sofa bed. Angelo, when I’d finally questioned him, had told me they’d decided to stay at the Hassler rather than disturb us. At the end of a night’s work, when I dragged myself upstairs and had to force myself even to wash and brush my teeth before I fell into bed, Angelo could easily put Livvy into hers and go back downstairs.

  Tears came to my eyes. Right in our real home. The restaurant. The part of our home where I lived.

  I told my parents the next time they came. They advised me to keep silent on this matter. Pretend not to be aware, but keep track of what I knew. Just in case. It was excellent advice. Discussion was futile. Angelo wasn’t going to change and he wasn’t going to let me take my daughter with me if I left him, which meant I wasn’t going to leave.

  I dealt with Isabella by pretending not to hear her when she spoke to me. I thought she might feel too guilty to complain to Angelo. It was a calculated risk that worked. She left after being paid on a Sunday night and wouldn’t come to the phone when Angelo called to find out why she hadn’t shown up the following Friday. He feigned puzzlement but immediately replaced her with someone slightly older and somewhat less pretty. Someone I might have assumed he wasn’t screwing if I hadn’t begun to comprehend the range of his taste. Or lack of it.

  Each year Angelo spent more time away from home. At some point I began to wage my rebellion through food. I bought my first chunk of sweet butter, storing it, like a fourteen-year-old hiding a diaphragm, in the back of the refrigerator bottom, bringing it out, when Angelo had left on one of his trips, to play with various risotti (a Venetian dish, risotto di secole, with leftover bits of roasted beef and veal, and then a Milanese favorite, with beef marrow, another item that hadn’t previously seen the inside of our kitchen). Eventually I began to experiment more broadly, making dishes like a northern-style stoccafisso, in which cod is layered with artichokes and potatoes and covered . . . with milk. This last I didn’t dare leave in our refrigerator but gave to Benedetta to take home.

  On a Friday when Angelo hadn’t returned from the market by noon, and I was growing frantic about who would manage the bar at lunch, Tomaso, who usually came at four, appeared. He said he’d come up early on an errand and would just hang around. A few minutes later, Angelo called to say he was having car trouble and would be late. We were years past the time when I believed in such coincidences.

  It was a holiday week. The girls had been at Vera’s and she’d brought them back for lunch. As I stirred sauce on the stove, I suggested without thinking twice, an understudy who’s been waiting for months to hear that the star had a cold, that they try something new I had in the refrigerator. It had pancetta. I reheated the risotto for all of them. Vera was amused but nervous. I’d long since told her about Angelo and risotto. Livvy wanted more but didn’t care about the name of what she was eating. Her brain had no interest in food.

  Angelo arrived home at four with the fish and vegetables. He was in a jocular mood as, in Tomaso’s presence, he told a dramatic story of the car’s stopping dead in the middle of the highway. When I failed to respond, he said he hadn’t had lunch. I told him there was a meat-leftovers risotto he might care to try. He laughed as though I’d gone slightly mad. Nothing so serious it had to be tended to. He had a meatball and eggplant sandwich and a large glass of Cerasuolo, a Sicilian rosé of which there was half a bottle in the bar refrigerator. He asked where Livvy was and I said she was probably with Bettina but they might have gone to another friend’s.

  I sat down with him at the table closest to the kitchen, poured myself the remainder of the rosé, was reminded of how little I liked it, threw it away, and poured a glass of the Tuscan wine that was then our house white, although Angelo wouldn’t touch it. He finished eating, stood, stretched, said he was sorry there’d be such a rush with the fish. I said that my sauces were done and I wanted to talk to him. He sat down.

  “So?”

  If I told him I just felt like talking, he’d think there was something wrong with me, a sort of risotto of the brain, so I reminded him that there was a time when we’d spoken of expanding the menu. We’d been so busy all the time since we’d opened that we had both sort of forgotten about it. But I’d been cooking almost the same dishes, year after year, and I needed to try something new. Not necessarily risotto, though I was making some terribly good ones these days. But something. I was bored.

  He nodded, doubtless because his brain wasn’t engaged yet. He stood up.

  “I thought we were going to talk for a couple of minutes.”

  “So? We talked.”

  “We didn’t settle anything. I mean, not in my mind, and I’m the one who’s bored with the cooking.”

  He looked at the ceiling, went to the bar, came back with a bottle of Chianti, sat down. He filled his glass.

  “So? What do you want from me?”

  I’d accomplished something; his good mood was gone.

  “I mean . . .” It wasn’t the way I’d meant to say it, but there was something so aggressive about his boredom, he had so little interest in whether my life was reasonable. “I’m used to the fact that you never say anything good about the food, tell me you couldn’t have a restaurant without me. But if I want to put a risotto on the menu, the least you can do is discuss it with me.”

  “Risotto?” For the first time he realized it was serious. “Are you crazy?”

  “No, I’m not crazy, but I’m crazy about risotto and I know people ask for it and I’m the chef and I want to make it sometimes.”

  “You’re crazy about it, you make it. You make it, you eat it.”

  “Livvy’s crazy about it, too.” It had been there, waiting, from the beginning. “She had it for lunch today. She likes rice.”

  He stared at me. He sipped at the wine in his glass without ceasing to stare.

  “So,” he said after an interminable time�
�a stranger hearing him would have thought I’d just sold Olivia to someone who liked little girls—“I’m away, you give my daughter risotto.”

  (I knew at the time this was funny, but it took me years to laugh over it.)

  “She loved it.”

  “You don’t know that. You only know she ate it. I was away.”

  “Exactly. You weren’t there, telling her it was terrible.”

  “So, now I tell her.”

  “Oh, Jesus, don’t you see what you’re doing, Angelo?”

  He stared at me, hatred unlike anything I’d ever seen in his eyes. “Jesus? Jesus? Don’t you call for Jesus!”

  Someone closed the door from the kitchen side.

  Remarkably, the matter hadn’t arisen in our nine or ten years together. Well, not so remarkably. A reasonable delicacy had always prevented me from invoking Jesus in Anna’s presence, and I’d lost the habit, having acquired acceptably profane substitutes along the way. Now that I’d gotten what I was looking for, I grew calm.

  “I wasn’t calling for him. I was cursing.”

  “You stay away from Jesus when you curse!”

  “Listen to him, the big churchgoer! Once a year on Christmas Eve he goes to—”

  “That’s nothing to do with it, Ebrea! Just stay away from him! He’s not yours!”

  I sank back into my seat, beaten in the first round. The only fight we’d ever had that carried a weight much heavier than the weight of the moment, and instantly I’d turned into Ebrea.

  “And stay away from the fucking risotto! You want a risotto, make it in the apartment, not in my restaurant!”