Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  I could get accustomed to being miserable, what I couldn’t get used to was feeling weird. Disembodied. It wasn’t just missing my daughter, I missed myself. It was as though I’d had surgery to remove Italy from my brain and everything else had been taken instead.

  I hadn’t been in Manhattan for eleven years. I walked around it more than I did anything except sleep. I recognized everything old, could differentiate it from the new if my father, say, was walking with me and asked. But without someone’s asking, nothing registered. Certainly none of it interested me. The buildings under construction that he deplored, I could only shrug at. In my absence, the mental hospitals had been emptied and the homeless had begun to appear on the streets. My father, a good liberal, spoke of the various horrors attendant upon the situation for people who should be hospitalized or “put up someplace,” as well as for those of us who loved the city. But when he divided the two groups, I was briefly confused; my brain had set me with the homeless. I looked at girls Livvy’s age so intently that a couple of times one of them grabbed the hand of the person she was walking with; I’d made her nervous.

  My parents had told me to prepare our meals only when I felt like it. I’d assumed I would cook all the time, but I didn’t. I wasn’t even at ease in their kitchen. I couldn’t find things. The stove was too small. And I had no desire to adapt to it. Or to anything else. Or to eat, for that matter. The only thing—person—in New York who interested me was Beatrice and Larry’s son, Max, now an adorable two-year-old.

  My sister had never shown me a simple, competitive hostility but had been, rather, bossy-friendly, condescending, overly concerned for my health and welfare. When I was really young, a splinter in my finger had been enough to cause her concern for my very survival, while the briefest attention paid me by our parents had caused her concern for her own. Like Gus, she was academically accomplished. If Gus’s physicist’s brain was usually out to a not-so-solid-state lunch, Beatrice lived in a real world that extended as far as the dining room, but not the kitchen. She had always treated me as though I were sweet but dumb, smiling condescendingly when anyone praised my cooking. As though, in the absence of any reasonable skills, I were weaving baskets or selling pencils on the street. Now she was a psychologist, married to another who taught at NYU, and she was more content with the world, friendlier to me. Particularly when it turned out that I was crazy about her son and was available to take care of him any day or night.

  I had left Rome at the end of October, right after Livvy’s birthday. I wasn’t making my futile phone calls anymore, but I wrote once or twice a week. She didn’t write back. At Christmastime, I called. She said she was too busy to talk, they couldn’t even go down to Sicily, so Mirella was coming up to Rome. I told her I’d call in January and she asked if that wasn’t a little too soon. Maybe I could just keep writing.

  That day I baked cookies with Max for the first time. It was the pleasure he took in helping roll out the dough and press down the forms—I was able to find a Christmas tree, a “gingerbread” man, and a star—that led me back to cooking, in a modest way, both at Beatrice’s and at my parents’. But I couldn’t yet imagine cooking in a professional kitchen, nor did I have any idea how I’d go about finding such work, if I wanted it. It was 1984. If there was a professional female chef in Manhattan, I wasn’t aware of her. My parents thought I ought to use this “period of adjustment” to begin working toward a degree, but when I thought about school, I could only see myself with my head on a desk, fast asleep, dreaming about my daughter. On the other hand, I had to think about earning a living. My parents had made it possible for me to keep nearly intact the money I had from Angelo, but I couldn’t live on (or off) them indefinitely.

  On a Sunday morning in January or February, when I’d slept at Beatrice and Larry’s after baby-sitting, I opened the Times help wanted section.

  Accountant. Administrative Assistant. Advertising. Auto Sales.

  Auto Sales?

  I stopped, looked back, looked forward, and saw what I hadn’t noticed before, that the ads were no longer divided by sex. I was utterly thrown by this radical change in a world I was sure I’d intended to enter sooner or later. How was I to look for a job if I didn’t know whether they wanted a man or a woman?

  The whole idea, idiot, is that they’re supposed to be looking for someone who can do the job, not for a man or a woman.

  Yes, but everyone knew they were looking for a man or a woman most of the time, even if there was plenty of work either one could do. Like chef. Problem was, everyone who was looking for a chef was looking for a man or a woman. Well, maybe not everyone, but almost. Look at Angelo! Look at a lot of other Italians who weren’t even thinking about having an employee they could screw, and they still wanted a woman . . . or a man.

  I picked up the paper again. Bank. Bilingual. The bilingual ads were for Spanish- or French- or Japanese-English-speaking secretaries. Or administrative assistants, as they were now apparently called. Sometime during the decade I’d been away garbage collectors had begun to believe that if you called them sanitation engineers they weren’t collecting garbage anymore. Cabinet Maker. Cashier. Chef.

  It was ridiculous not to read the chef ads, even if I couldn’t imagine myself going to work in a strange kitchen.

  Kaiseki Chef—Experienced Japanese food specialist.

  Sous Chef—Min. 2 yrs. sous-chef experience.

  Did chef experience count as sous-chef experience? Probably not. Anyway, they doubtless wanted someone who knew French food better than I did. Besides, did they want a male or a female? Chefs usually had strong feelings on the subject.

  Chef Executive. Head Chef. Pastry Person.

  Pastry person. Shit. Lingual revolutionaries never understood the comforts of the status quo, in which I tended to wallow. The one old friend I’d been mildly pleased to run into was Evelyn Fox, a history major now deeply involved in and teaching about the women’s movement. A capsule description of my life in Italy had filled her with sympathetic horror—“Oh, my God! Chained to a stove!” was the line I remembered. I’d started to tell her that you couldn’t appreciate being chained to a stove until you’d come unchained, but the look of horror on her face had stopped me. We’d exchanged numbers but neither of us had called.

  Chemist. Clerical. College Grad.

  Maybe clerical wasn’t such a bad idea. I could stand at a file and stick papers into it like the zombie I was.

  Construction. Dental Asst. Dental Hygienist.

  I pictured a burly construction worker with hands like prosciuttos, and short, blackened nails applying for a dental hygienist’s job and being told they’d be perfectly happy to hire him, if only he had experience.

  Driver. Editor. Engineer.

  Driver didn’t actually sound like such a terrible thing for a woman to do. At some point I’d have to learn how to drive; it had never seemed important in Florence or Rome. But driving reminded me of the last time Angelo, Livvy, and I had driven to Genevra and Walter’s for one of their kids’ birthday parties, and I put it out of my thoughts.

  Executive Secretary. So secretaries of a sort still existed, even if they had to be called executives to admit it. Finance. Food Buyer. Food Manager. Food Service. When you read the rest of the ad, the job never seemed to have anything to do with food. This was all very well except I couldn’t imagine anything I was qualified to do that wasn’t about food. Well, maybe with one exception. Next year Max would be in nursery school half a day and I was already panicky about his being unavailable during those hours. If there were some way to teach nursery school without going back for a lot of awful classes that would turn out to have very little to do with teaching young children . . .

  When spring came and I’d still made no serious move to find a job, my parents suggested I spend the summer with them in Westport. Several of their friends had said it was the best time of year for them to take cooking lessons. Perhaps I could conduct classes out of the house up there, which had a full kitch
en, and see how teaching felt.

  There was no way for me to refuse even to try.

  It was part of the reluctance with which I came to the idea of teaching that my classes, on and off television, were conceived of more as conversation than instruction. If I’d thought of myself as a teacher, I doubt I’d have been so comfortable with an audience that was encouraged to interrupt me at will, and that was to be an important factor in the show’s success. Of course, this casual geniality that drew people to my classes and, later, to the show, infuriated Livvy, who claimed that my benign personality was manufactured for the occasion. What her deep quarrel with me kept her from seeing was that no manufacture was required. I’d grown up with parents who treated my cooking as though it gave me an understandable but inappropriate pleasure, like a loud fart at a formal dinner party. I’d left home for Angelo Ferrante, who valued my culinary skills above any other, at least once we were married, but apparently thought that a pat on the head would cause me (or him) to lose all control. Only with my classes would I discover that I was a show-off, an entertainer, much cleverer in my stage kitchen than in everyday life. More rather than less likely to find the bon mot when many ears were waiting.

  The classes and the work they involved helped me to keep thoughts of Livvy at bay. One of the women in the first group wrote a glowing column about it for the Westport News, and in the autumn I set up classes in Manhattan, which several of the Westport women came in to take during the rest of the year. Through the friend of a friend of my parents, I’d found a mildly dilapidated loft in a more than mildly dilapidated block of West Fifteenth Street. The neighborhood was grungy but said to be getting better, and, most important, there was a full (unwalled) kitchen along one end that was ideal for cooking classes. My parents’ housewarming present was a coat of white paint over the whole place, and with various hand-me-downs and junk-shop purchases, I made the place cheerful if not elegant. I supplemented what I earned with the (barely touched) money from Angelo.

  By the second year I was doing three daytime classes in pasta and sauces, each with six students. The suburban women managed complicated lives and were mostly delighted to sit back and let me run the class. My evening students were a more varied lot.

  My six o’clock Tuesday class, Fish and Their Sauces, was all male, none heterosexual. There were a couple of mannered fairies who described themselves as housewives; a charming English professor who’d just come out and felt, for the first time, that it would be all right to cook; Perry Marcus, the kind and sharp advertising man who was the first link in the chain that led me to television; and Lance Garfunkel, a coat buyer for Macy’s who, it became clear during the pre-course “coffee,” would be my most difficult pupil.

  I’d baked two chocolate cakes and I asked the group to sample each. All confessed to preferring the moister of the two. Then I revealed that I’d used the same recipe for both but had taken one out of the oven earlier than the recipe specified. This had become my standard gambit to persuade students that religious awe interfered with cooking’s pleasures as thoroughly as it did with life’s other offerings, with the obvious exception of religion.

  Lance was upset.

  “Surely,” he said, in a tone both fatuous and aggrieved, “there are rules that must be followed. I mean, Hollandaise comes to mind, but there are plenty of others. . . .” He fanned himself with the mimeographed outline for the course.

  “Indeed,” I replied, “in almost everything there are rules that are proven to work, and that are very helpful. And there’s a lot to be said for letting people learn from experience. But you can probably try over and over and never find out that the Hollandaise is separating because you’re adding the butter too fast . . . or the risotto is soggy because you added the broth all at once . . . or whatever. What I have a problem with is thinking you can’t play with it. Or you have to throw it away because you made a mistake. I think you should try to fix it. Change it. Maybe you’ll end up with something interesting. And don’t fail to try out some combination that appeals to you because the book doesn’t promise it’ll work.”

  Lance was silent for a while, but he began again when I asked for their ideas and reactions to my outline. The first session listed was a visit to my fish market in the Village, with a discussion of what was available seasonally, what to look for and to avoid, and how to have the vendor prepare fish for you.

  “Oh, God,” Lance said with a fatuous sigh, his eyes closed, his nose covered by one hand. “Right into the mouth of the whale!”

  “It’s not a whale market we’re going to,” I said, “although these days you can find a re—”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of!” Lance interrupted. “What we can find. I mean, the smell of what we can find. I mean, fish markets!.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Well, smell is always an important issue in choosing which fish to buy, and that’s one of the reasons—”

  “What about to eat? I mean, is there any hope I’ll get to like something besides shrimp and lobster?”

  I paused. It was the kind of moment I might have backed away from in my first year, but I now knew it was best to meet head on. Lance’s boyfriend, Chris, sitting beside him, looked miserable. The others looked uneasy. As though they shared Lance’s sentiment but knew it was unacceptable.

  I took a deep breath. “Fish are like women,” I said. “You have to begin by acknowledging their variety before you can start to think about which ones you might like.”

  Lance’s eyes opened. The class was quieter than quiet as it waited to gauge the extent of my hostility.

  I smiled. “Also, live ones smell better than dead.”

  Everyone else smiled. The tension was gone.

  “She has a sense of humor!” Lance exclaimed, feeling that the class was now with me and not wanting to be left alone at the Anti-Female side of the road. He pressed his wrist to his forehead in a manner he might have thought of as Garboesque. “Everything’s going to be all right. I’m going to learn to cook fish. I’m going to like to eat fish. After all, anyone who can make a superb Beef Wellington should be able to handle a piece of goddamned fish!”

  Simple frying and broiling would be my next lessons, and then we would move on to fish stew. I pointed out that among the virtues of the various stews, whether it was the one-d burrida of northern Italy, the two-d’s burridda, a French bouillabaisse or a San Francisco cioppino, was that if they were less than perfect, there were many easy ways, beginning with aioli and rouille, to improve them.

  I was having fun with my classes, but over the next year my life improved in other ways as well.

  Beatrice and I remained close. Partly because I spent so much time with Max, she and Larry were able to do more writing connected to their work, and they’d invested in their first computer. On the morning when the computer was to be delivered, both had appointments, and I stayed with Max at the apartment to supervise the young man, Jim Whatney, who came to install it.

  Jim was from a small town in Mississippi. A math whiz whose family had been too poor to send him to college, he’d come to New York, where his first job was as a repairman for Con Edison. Then he’d gotten into computers and found a home. He’d repaired IBMs for a couple of years after breaking up with a girlfriend who’d gotten him the first job. (When I asked why they’d broken up, he shrugged and said there was no particular reason, an important clue to who Jim was, if only because from his point of view, it was true.) Then he’d gone to work for Fastrack, the company that had sold Larry the computer. Jim seldom went home to Mississippi and said the only thing he missed about it was the food.

  He had, of course, come to the right place.

  With my old index cards from Suallen, as well as the wonderful Evan Jones book, American Food, and Princess Ida’s Soul Food, I made Southern fried chicken, beaten biscuits, and collard and beet greens, then went on, though Jim claimed he could eat that chicken every night for the rest of his life, to Creole shrimp, Charleston shrimp pie, seafood gumbo, a
nd a good jambalaya. Unlike Angelo, Jim enjoyed any dish said to be from the right territory. No authentication was required, no dish rejected because he was unfamiliar with it, though he loved best the fatty, highly seasoned foods he remembered from his childhood.

  Jim was a very tall, very skinny paleface type whose intelligence was substantial but even narrower than his taste in food. It was, in fact, limited to those functions that might have been performed by one of the computers he installed, repaired, and talked to when he thought they were alone.

  “You sound as though computers are people,” I’d teased him after his instruction session with Larry.

  He’d stared at me in that way people have when they don’t see what’s funny about what you thought was a joke. Why wouldn’t he think so? his expression asked. And he failed to comprehend my amusement upon discovering that in computerese, a table of contents, for example, was called a menu.

  “Maybe that’s why I learned it so easily,” I said.

  He nodded.

  Nor did he chuckle when, having polished off a bottle of wine between us, we rolled into bed for the first time and, finding me moist and open, he slipped right into me and I murmured that I seemed to be user-friendly.