Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  The week passed. I waited for a call from the children’s mother, explaining that she’d made family plans for Saturday afternoon. No such call came. On Friday night Livvy slept at Mayumi’s. The girls were going to spend Saturday together. I had a fantasy: It turned out that everyone in the building except me knew everybody else. They’d thought I was standoffish. Aloof. Now they were thrilled to learn that not only was I friendly, but I loved to cook for friends. We became like one big, happy family. In Italy I’d been closed off from people by a kitchen door. Here nothing closed me off except the size of the city, the nature of my work, and having returned in a period where you could no longer imagine striking up an acquaintance with a man who talked to you in the park, or to you and your girlfriend in a bar. Maybe some member of my new family would introduce me to a nice man. Surely many married couples in New York had single male friends who wanted to meet a woman who cooked.

  By a quarter to one on Saturday the table was set, the soup had been skimmed and was heating on a low flame, the matzo-ball mixture (I’d used the recipe on the back of the matzo-meal box, as had my one grandmother who cooked) had been chilled and molded into dumplings I’d drop into the soup. At two minutes to one, I dropped them into the boiling broth. At one I welcomed the Kleins, minus Mother Klein. Nobody offered an explanation for her absence.

  The children were wide-eyed but demure—as though they’d found themselves inside a diorama at the Museum of Natural History. They were Rennie (Bernadetta), Annie (Anastasia), and my friend Ovvy, whose proper name was Ovid. I asked whether their mother would be joining us. I was greeted by silence. Leon was dumbfounded because, while he hadn’t had any difficulty getting laid since his wife had left him, it hadn’t occurred to him that a single woman in New York might make a meal for someone with a wife.

  “The kids’ mother lives in California,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought you . . .”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m sorry, too. I mean, I thought that blonde woman I see you with . . .”

  “She’s my girlfriend,” he said, giving Rennie a warning look as she pantomimed throwing up and the other two giggled.

  “Well,” I said, “uh . . . Why don’t you come sit at the table and we can talk while I finish up.”

  It was a dark, rainy day and I’d turned on all the lights so the place would look cheerful. I’d set six places. I removed one. There was Zito’s bread on the table and butter, along with chunks of Reggiano and an aged Gouda I thought kids might like. Salad waited on the work counter. The matzo balls would be ready in another ten or fifteen minutes. I finished the dressing for the salad, using the real balsamic vinegar and Mostoli Venturelli olive oil that were my steady, guilty extravagances. Every time I looked up I found the Kleins staring at me or at the pot of soup with a raptness that at some point struck me as extraordinary.

  “You can talk, you know, if you feel like it,” I said. “If you’re wondering how come I do this so easily, it’s because I was a professional chef. I lived in Italy for eleven years.”

  “You mean you’re not Italian?” Leon was astounded. “I thought you just had terrific English.”

  I laughed. “Ferrante’s my married name. I’m a Jewish girl. New York. I see you’re like me, you can’t tell who’s Jewish. Jews from outside of New York can, you know. Anyway, I was married to an Italian. We had a restaurant. I have a daughter. . . . She’s fourteen. She’s—”

  “Yes, of course,” Leon said. “Olivia’s our baby-sitter. I just thought you were Italian.”

  The children giggled but I was, of course, dumbstruck.

  Leon realized that something peculiar was going on, apologized.

  “I assumed you knew. I thought that was why . . . She’s been wonderful, and of course it’s so convenient for me, having a sitter I don’t need to take home.”

  I went to the kitchen bulletin board, lifted up a couple of recipes from the Times. There it was. Dr. Klein, with the phone number. No address. I read aloud the number, asked him if it was his. It was.

  “Well, there you are,” I mumbled, horribly embarrassed.

  “Teenagers,” Leon said. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about what I have waiting for me.”

  “I just thought . . . I just thought . . .” I hadn’t thought. Certainly it hadn’t occurred to me . . . Certainly Livvy had conveyed the impression that there was a Mrs. Blonde Klein. And they lived nearby; I’d never actually asked how nearby.

  “Are you a doctor?” I asked, returning to the table.

  He nodded.

  “Beth Israel. I don’t put M.D. on the doorbell because I don’t want someone thinking there are drugs up there. Anyway, I don’t practice at home.”

  Fortunately, lunch was ready. The Kleins were rapt as I ladled matzo balls and chicken soup into their bowls. At one point Rennie asked if anyone remembered when Mrs. Borelli used to cook, before her back got bad, but the other children didn’t. Leon explained that Mrs. Borelli was the housekeeper, who’d once cooked for the children. He knew I was in shock and he was being particularly careful.

  “Does anyone want some juice?” I asked, then wondered if I should offer them soda.

  Annie solemnly shook her head. “We have that all the time.”

  I perceived for the first time the sadness of the child, who was then eight. (Ovvy was six, Rennie, eleven.) I said it was nice to be doing something special and told them that Livvy also liked things different than I did them at home.

  “You mean,” Annie asked, her eyes widening as though I’d been reading from Ripley’s “Believe It or Not,” “Livvy doesn’t like chicken soup with matzo balls?” (She hadn’t tasted them yet, but due to Leon’s fond descriptions, matzo balls had achieved mythic proportions on the family’s dream menu.)

  “Well,” I said, putting down the last bowl, then sitting with them, “what Livvy likes is a long story, and I’ll tell it to you sometime, but first let’s see if you like the soup.”

  To say that their (and my) first chicken soup with matzo balls was a raging success would be to understate the case. They only stopped when the big stockpot was empty of soup as well as dumplings, Leon as eager and childlike as his children, all of them making the most gratifying noises and paying me the most heartwarming compliments throughout the meal.

  For my part, I talked. I told them how I’d always liked to cook and how I’d gone off to Italy for Christmas and ended up married to someone, cooking in restaurants there. I told them how Livvy had grown up in restaurants and had never had any interest in food, and how, coming to live with me, she’d wanted only hot dogs and anything else American. I said that even if matzo balls were more Jewish than American, I was glad that, thanks to them, I’d finally made some.

  “You’re not trying to tell me you’ve never made them before,” Leon said.

  “Not with matzo meal.” I laughed. “You know, it’s not one of the world’s most difficult dishes.”

  He shook his head disbelievingly. Leon was one of those men who still believed there was a sex-determined gene for cooking, and no number of stories about the great male chefs who didn’t think women could prepare haute cuisine would dissuade him. He pointed out, on a later occasion when I made an issue of it, that there was a disproportionate amount of homosexuality among male chefs. But when I asked what it meant, he wouldn’t answer except with something vague about genes. He placed a nearly unbounded faith in the notion of genes, the corollary of this being that Rennie, the Difficult Daughter, had her mother’s genes, while Annie the Easy possessed his own. He tended to worry less about such issues with his son. In fact, it would be fair to say that he tended not to worry about Ovvy because he was a boy, or to see his son’s idiosyncrasies in the same light as he saw his daughters’. If neurosis was born in the womb, it remained there, seldom choosing to resettle in the less hospitable climate of the male body.

  Of course, I knew none of this on the Saturday afternoon when the Klein family lingered so happily over chicken soup and salad that I sudd
enly worried because I had nothing for dessert, and asked the kids if they’d like to bake cookies. Leon, whose wife had run off to California with another woman when Ovvy was two, and who thought of himself as an available male, didn’t realize I did not yet view him in that light. I think he would have insisted they all leave had he not understood that I was in shock about Livvy. As it was, he said he really had too many errands to do, the shopping for the week, and so on, but, if they liked, the kids could stay and bake cookies with me. The two younger ones liked. At the door, he thanked me again, said he’d just go along with Livvy as though nothing had happened and leave it to me . . . He trailed off because he didn’t know any more than I did what “it” was going to be. On the other hand, there were three children involved, and even if it had been my inclination to let the matter go, I couldn’t take the chance that one of them would mention our lunch before I did.

  “Can I ask you one question? Did you—did Livvy find the job through her school?”

  He shook his head. “We’d pass her in the hall, or on the street. She was always nice to the kids, and one day I asked if she did any babysitting. She said she had cousins she baby-sat for.”

  I went uptown to talk to Beatrice, whose baby, Rebecca, was now a couple of months old. Max greeted me happily as he always did when Livvy wasn’t with me. I, in turn, made it a point not to pay too much attention to Rebecca, whom he still found intolerable. When he and his father left the house to go to the park (he wanted me to take him but I explained that I had to talk to his mother), I could happily hold Rebecca, change her, kiss her soft tush.

  Beatrice was less smug and sure about Livvy these days. If she didn’t like my daughter any more than she had before, she was less certain she could have handled Livvy better than I. With Rebecca’s birth, Max had turned from a lively, adorable little genius into a maniacal brat who couldn’t be managed by anyone but his father, who was at once firmer and more phlegmatic than Beatrice. This, in turn, made it possible for me to consult her about what was happening with Livvy.

  She went into her psychological mode, gave me a long story about Livvy’s recreating a family for herself, a more bearable family with no infants in it. Doubtless, Livvy had formed an Oedipal attachment to Leon, which was why she’d had to keep the family secret from me, lest I compete with her for the attention of . . . and so on . . .

  At first I was interested, then I was patient. But as she continued, I got more and more upset. Everything she was saying seemed to suggest that I mustn’t talk to Livvy, mustn’t interfere in this new family she’d found for herself, but I could see no way to maintain such a charade. I left more confused than I’d been when I arrived, even less certain of how I would handle my daughter.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, the matter was already out of my hands. Leon had suggested to the kids that they not talk about our lunch until I’d had a chance to do so. Ovvy had interpreted this literally, to mean that they shouldn’t talk about The Lunch, so that when Livvy passed them on the street as they were coming home from their late-afternoon bike ride, he had called out, “Guess what, Livia?” (She’d always used Olivia with them, though she didn’t insist upon it at home until later.) “We made cookies with your mama!”

  Leon told me later that she’d stopped short on the street, stared at them for a moment as though she didn’t know who they were or where she was, and then run into the house ahead of them. He’d been uncertain of what to do about his plans for the evening, and had given her some time to cool off, then called. No answer.

  But she was home, and stormed out of her room when I came in, wanting to know how I managed to ruin everything in her life.

  I stared at her, open-mouthed. Where was the embarrassment I’d thought would make it difficult for her to face me? Where were the shame-faced explanations, true or false, of why she’d been lying to me all these weeks or months, since she’d gotten the job?

  I asked her what she was talking about.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about!” she shouted. “I’m talking about the way you poke into everything. You think I couldn’t tell you poked into my suitcase? You think I don’t know why you weren’t surprised when I stayed?”

  I should have been relieved that at least there was a shred of sanity there, but I wasn’t, of course. I was trembling.

  “And I suppose I knew,” I said after a long time, “that the people you were baby-sitting for lived upstairs.”

  “Of course you did. It was right there on the bulletin board! All you had to do was look in the phone book!”

  The trick was to act calm. “It never occurred to me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I see. You’ve been lying to me all along, so I must have been lying to you. Is that it?”

  She let out a wordless scream, but then the words came.

  “Can’t you just stay out of my life?”

  “No. I can’t. If you want me to stay out of your life, the place for you to be is with your father. You’re only fourteen years old and someone has to watch out for you and—”

  I stopped because I could tell, from her expression, that I’d said something terrible.

  She burst into tears.

  “I know that’s what you want!” she cried, heading for her room. “You think I don’t know it?”

  “Oh, my God, Livvy, that’s not true!” I called. “All I’m trying to—” But the door had closed behind her and no begging of mine could make her open it, no tears of my own could convince her that she was wrong.

  Leon called again.

  Livvy wouldn’t come out of her room.

  I told him that I wasn’t doing anything that night and if she didn’t come up, I would. He was embarrassed but he had no choice but to accept; he and Christina had theater tickets, couldn’t find another baby-sitter at this hour (five-thirty P.M.), he hadn’t been able to get Mrs. Borelli, and it was out of the question to leave the younger kids with Rennie; I must have noticed that she and the other two didn’t get along.

  I baby-sat. Rennie stayed in her room. I played all the card games I had thought I’d forgotten with Annie and Ovvy. Then they watched television in their rooms and went to sleep. Leon was so grateful, I was embarrassed, asked him if he thought it would have been easier for me to stay in my own apartment with Livvy that night. We laughed together and he stayed away from both of us (Livvy refused to work for him anymore) for some time. In fact, it was only when the school year had passed, with the younger kids coming by to bake cookies and without his hearing from me either on pretext or with good reason, and we’d gone through another summer when he hadn’t seen us, that Leon would become willing to think of me as a friend—or at least to let me cook for all of them again.

  It would be difficult to exaggerate the difference the children’s visits made in my life—and I, if I may say so, made in theirs. If the classes were pleasant work, Annie and Ovvy were my play. And I became the motherly person who delighted in them as their own mother had not. Mrs. Borelli was nice to them but had several grandchildren of her own and didn’t have the feeling for them that I did.

  If Livvy entered the apartment when the kids were there, she went to her room without acknowledging that she’d even seen them. Leon told me that if they passed her on the street she nodded, her eyes downcast. Life in my own apartment had become, and remained, an armed camp. When I suggested to Livvy that we could have an argument and be done with it, she asked if I had bought her return ticket, because she couldn’t afford to, she had no job. But with all her unpleasantness, with all the arguments about any and every issue that arose, she had, until several weeks after our Leon debacle, stayed out of the way when my classes were in session.

  The previous week’s Tuesday-night group had done a Sicilian ghiotta, in which swordfish is fried in olive oil, then baked with a sauce consisting of the same oil, tomatoes, olives, raisins, capers, and pine nuts. Ghiotta means dripping pan, and we’d talked about differences and similarities between w
hat the French and Italians did with sauces, how they utilized drippings. Two of the men were going to Maine, they were hipped on lobsters, and they’d offered to buy them for the whole class if we’d steam them and then do lobster butter, à la Julia Child. Now we had steamed and shelled the lobsters, then decided, giggling, to eat them with melted butter, rather than wait for our usual after-class dinner. The men were clustered at the burners, taking turns stirring the shells, along with a little meat and coral, in the butter. I was setting up strainers, large bowls of ice cubes and small bowls. I explained that the lobster butter would harden faster over the ice cubes.

  “Just like the Duke of Windsor,” Lance said.

  The rest of the class cracked up. I smiled, trying to think of who could explain the joke to me.

  The apartment door opened and Livvy’s voice loudly exclaimed, “Merda! She’s got one of her idiot classes!”

  As everyone turned to see who was speaking, and I stood, struck dumb by anger and embarrassment, she disappeared for a moment, then came back in, closed the door. She smiled shyly, an adorable little girl.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I was so hungry, and I had no money, and I just wanted to get something to eat.”

  I didn’t respond. The class looked back and forth between us, as though they were at a tennis match. Livvy grew smaller, her voice, lower.

  “Could I just . . . Could I take a little something to eat?”

  Please, sir, can I have s’more?

  I couldn’t speak.

  She came toward us, head bowed, took a can of Coke from the refrigerator, then began rummaging in the cupboard, where she eventually located a bag of Fritos and a box of Oreos, both of which had been just above her eye level. Walking back toward her room, she told everyone in a tremulous voice how terribly sorry she was to have interrupted the class. Then she fled.

  I felt everyone standing close by. My hand was still on the sponge I’d been using to clean the counter. It didn’t want to move. I looked at the lobster shells in their butter. Even Lance held his tongue. I looked at the clock. It was seven-thirty already. After an incalculable amount of time, I took a deep breath, threw the sponge into the sink, and asked the men to take their seats.