Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  “If nobody minds terribly, we’re going to have a slight change in the menu—I mean, the curriculum—for tonight.” As I spoke, I poured the lobster butter through the strainer into one of the two bowls set over ice. “Anyone who’s interested can check in a little while to see that the lobster butter has really become solid enough to spread. Or to do a lot of other interesting things with. In the meantime . . .” I erased the recipes on the blackboard and wrote, PASTA.

  There wasn’t a sound.

  Under PASTA, I wrote: Flour, eggs, salt, and water.

  “I know most of you live in the Village, and you can get fresh pasta whenever you want it, so probably the last thing on your minds is bothering with your own. But I’d like to make a case for doing it occasionally. Nothing to do with where you live, or what you can buy, or whether you have one of those machines that are all over the place. It’s a case for making pasta because you happen to be in the mood.”

  The salt box and the flour canister were already on the counter. I got the eggs from the refrigerator.

  “This isn’t going to be our usual class M.O. If we have one. I’m just going to demonstrate. I’ll be glad to repeat it as a regular lesson sometime, if you decide you want me to.” I measured the flour onto the counter, made a well in it, broke in the eggs, added the water and salt. “Actually, enjoyment isn’t precisely what’s on my mind.” I folded over the flour and began kneading it into the eggs. “Except to the extent that eating and breathing . . . or hitting a punching bag . . . are enjoyable because you need to do them. You need to knead, you might say.” I held the ball of dough with one hand, and with the other, pushed it away, digging in deeply with the palm of that hand, then folding the dough back toward me and doing it again. “Bread can serve the same purpose. There’s a recipe in the first Times cookbook for something they call Cuban bread. All you need to have in the house is flour, salt, and yeast instead of eggs. I just happen to be in the mood to do something Italian right now. Five or ten minutes of dealing with something Italian, or with the whole world, in a ball of dough, and the world never knows.” I continued kneading and folding the dough as I spoke. “There’re people who use pasta machines, and bread machines, and the bread hook on the KitchenAid, but I don’t know why you’d bother to make bread or pasta if you were going to use machines instead of knocking out, kneading—that is, K-N-E-A-D-I-N-G—your own dough.” I divided the dough in half, rolled out one-half, stretched it around the pin, sprinkled a little flour on it to keep it from sticking, and so on, until it was somewhat transparent and I could leave it stretched out over one end of the counter while I did the other half, then left both to rest for a while.

  A little calmer now, I filled my big pasta pot with water, put it up to boil, then discussed a few possibilities for dressing the pasta, beginning with simple butter and Parmesan, going on to, say, lobster butter. Finally, I cooked the pasta and gave them a choice of dressings, warning them not to offer the buttered one to a Sicilian. “There’re a lot of Sicilians who, if you offer them butter in any form, will act as though you left a dead cow on their plate.”

  They were all enchanted with the class that evening.

  “It’s been a pleasure,” Lance said, with something between a bow and a curtsy, as he picked up his coat from the sofa near the door. “You should ask your daughter to come in more often. She really livens things up.”

  He threw me a kiss and followed Chris out, having jolted me back into my anger so that I didn’t fall asleep until six in the morning.

  Livvy was in school by the time I awakened. She came home while I was giving my afternoon class, went to her room. When the last of the women had left, I cleaned up, rehearsing in my mind what I wanted to say to her. Then I knocked at her door. There was no response. I knocked again.

  “Livvy? I have to talk to you.”

  “I’m doing my homework.”

  “Well, stop for a minute.”

  There were sounds as of a heavy book being dropped, a chair being scraped back heavily, the button-lock knob turning. (The door was never unlocked now when she was inside.) She opened it, stared at me angrily.

  “We need to discuss what happened last night.”

  “What happened last night?” she repeated. “Oh, you mean . . . It was an accident. I was hungry. I thought we were eating at Mayumi’s, but she thought we were coming here.”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe you forgot I had a class, but you knew they were here when you said, ‘Oh, shit, she must have one of her idiot classes.’ ”

  “Okay. I won’t do it again. Now can I go back to my homework?”

  I hesitated. My heart was beating as wildly as though she had a knife in her hand, but I felt I had to talk to her.

  “No,” I said, trying to steady my quivering voice. “I . . . We . . . We really have to talk, Livvy.”

  “My name is Olivia!” she yelled. (It was the first time she’d objected to Livvy.) “And I have a biology test to study for!”

  “All right, Olivia,” I said. “Then we’ll have our talk tomorrow. When you come home from school.”

  She turned around and slammed the door behind her.

  “And until then,” I shouted, rage bursting loose, “stop slamming the fucking door!”

  “You know that you embarrassed me in front of the class, and I was very upset,” I said the next day, having succeeded in cornering her before she could lock herself in her room.

  Her eyes narrowed as though she were estimating whether it would be worth the enormous effort involved in saying she was sorry.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “It just came out.”

  “It came out loud and insulting. Not just to me. To my students. It must never happen again. Either the insult or the coming into the kitchen. Except in an emergency.”

  She was bored. “You said that already.”

  “You’re still going to have to sit down and listen to me.” I beckoned to one sofa, sat on the other.

  She waited.

  I took a deep breath.

  “I was very angry with you yesterday. Furious. But I didn’t shout until you slammed the door in my face. It’s not that I held back because of what you said about shouting, it just didn’t happen. I was under pressure, but not the same kind as when you were young and I was cooking in the restaurant. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “I slammed the door,” she said after a long pause, “because I could tell what was going to happen.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or go to the airline office and buy her a one-way ticket to Rome.

  “I see,” I finally said. “So, it’s not that anything you do ever makes me mad, it’s just that I’m mad all the time. How can you imagine living with someone like that?”

  “Maybe,” she said after barely a moment’s pause, “I can live with Grandma and Grandpa.”

  You had to admire a kid who didn’t fool around about sticking a knife into you. I don’t know what my face registered, but she felt obliged to say something.

  “At least,” she said, voice quivering, “they like me.”

  “They love you,” I told her. “But it’s different from the way I love you. With grandparents it’s much simpler, it’s—”

  “You never loved me,” she said.

  “What on earth are you talking about?” I asked, my headache back from its vacation. I’d had more headaches in the past year than in my entire life. “I adored you! I loved you more than I ever loved anybody! When you were a few months old and I had to go back to the restaurant, I kept you in a car bed in the kitchen so I could look at you. I couldn’t stand to be twenty feet away from you. I was jealous when your father took you someplace.”

  “He told me he took care of me all the time.”

  “Oh. Is that what he told you.” I instructed myself not to speak until I could keep my voice steady, but I couldn’t obey my instructions. “Well, if he said that, he was lying. Not about taking care of you. He loved you and he took care of you a
lot of the time. Especially once you were walking, and I couldn’t keep you with me in the kitchen. And I loved you and I took care of you a lot of the time. I adored you. I used to go crazy because you said all these wonderful things, and I wanted to write them down so I’d remember them, but I was always in the kitchen with stuff in my hands.”

  “All I remember is the yelling.”

  I gave in, or something gave in, and I began to cry. It didn’t matter anymore. As a matter of fact, I forgot about my headache. Or it forgot about me. I just kept crying.

  “I can’t help what I remember,” she finally said.

  “I guess you can’t,” I said when I was able to. “But you might listen to what I remember, too.”

  Her mouth twisted as though to suggest that my memories were no more than attempts to deny hers.

  “Do you understand, at least, that I don’t lie to you? I mean, I’m not a big liar in general, but I never lie about anything important.”

  Her expression remained skeptical. My smile was so bitter I could taste it.

  “Or did your father tell you I was a liar, too?”

  “He didn’t have to tell me,” she said before standing to go to her room. “I remembered.”

  We moved around the apartment as though a clothesline of white flags were strung between us. My father called me during school hours to say that Livvy had asked if she could live with them. He and my mother had explained why they didn’t think this would work, aside from the matter of its hurting me, which Livvy claimed was ridiculous. I didn’t tell my father that at the moment the idea was not without its appeal. Friday night, when we’d planned to go to my parents’ for dinner, Livvy said she had too much studying to do and stayed home.

  The following Monday, Perry Marcus called to ask if he could bring a visitor to Tuesday’s class. Sheldon Halstead lived out of town but was moving to New York. He was interested in a sample session for which he would, of course, expect to pay. When I demurred, Perry pressed me, claiming that Halstead would want to enroll for next fall. Finally, I consented. A stranger’s presence could be a welcome diversion from what had happened, might even assist me in regaining the assured self who’d been in easy control.

  On Saturday I made brownies with Annie and Ovvy, joked with them about making no-cook cookies when it got hot out. I felt something resembling panic when they reminded me they would be in camp during July and August.

  “Oh, no!” I said. “Where’s your camp?”

  It was in the Berkshires, but it might as well have been in California. I felt bereft. They saw, and rose from their seats to come around to hug me.

  “I’m going to miss you so much,” I said, my voice trembling.

  “Maybe you can visit us,” Annie said.

  “Oh, dear, I don’t think so.” I hugged them tighter. “That’s just for parents.”

  “You could come with Daddy on Visiting Day,” Ovvy said.

  It was tempting to ask Leon if I could, but I knew I wouldn’t.

  “We’ll write,” I said. “You give me your address and I’ll give you mine in Connecticut. I’ll write to you and you can write back as often as you like.”

  Beatrice’s kids would be around. Somewhere nearby there would be kids, a kid, who loved me, enjoyed me, who would fail to recognize the picture of me my daughter drew.

  Mayumi called after school on Tuesday to ask if it was okay for Livvy to stay at her house through dinner. They had to study for a test. Her father would bring Livvy home. I said that would be fine. For my class, I prepared the next scheduled lesson, on some of the wonderful main-course sauces Italians made with walnuts or hazelnuts as a base. The previous year, on my father’s birthday, I’d invented in his honor one I called Academia Nut Sauce, but when I wrote it on the blackboard now, my old joke seemed dumb, so I erased it and left the standard stuff. I couldn’t read or look at the television news or do any of the things I normally did before a class. Finally, at ten minutes to six, I erased the rest of the blackboard and wrote two recipes from a new favorite I’d found at Kitchen Arts and Letters, a wonderful store devoted to books about food and wine which, if it had existed when I was in school, I’d never have gotten as far as I did. This one was called The Northern Cookbook. The first recipe I wrote was for Squirrel en Casserole with Biscuit Topping and began, “Skin and clean squirrels. Remove scent glands from inside forelegs. Wash thoroughly and cut into serving pieces.” The second was for Reindeer Pot Roast with Vegetables. I need not go into cooking details here.

  Class members came in somewhat tentatively, as though uncertain, or so I felt, whether the class would be taught by Dr. Jekyll or Mrs. Hyde. As was their custom, they left their coats on the sofa, then joined me at the kitchen end of the room, where I’d lined up their folding chairs. When the first three looked at the blackboard—it was Chris Ganbarg and then Perry with his friend Sheldon—there was a moment of silence, and then hearty laughter.

  “That’s wonderful,” Perry said. “Caroline, please let me introduce you to Sheldon Halstead.”

  When he reached to shake my hand, as men had come to feel they had to do or you’d sue them for sex bias, I sighed.

  “Sheldon, if you’re really interested in cooking lessons, you might have come to the wrong place.”

  He took my hand between his and said I shouldn’t worry about it, that the recipes on the board were worth the price of admission.

  Sheldon was a pleasant-looking man of average height, jogging-maintained weight, frizzy hair, and glasses. In those days he wore a black T-shirt, black sweatpants, and new-looking white sneakers so regularly that they might have been attached to his skin. If he caught anyone glancing at his feet he announced that you could take the boy out of California but . . . I’ve come to suspect he would have preferred to wear Gucci except he then wouldn’t have had a chance to tell everyone that no matter how he sounded (like a Brooklyn Jew with the awful speech everyone had in Brooklyn), he was from California.

  The rest of the class had filtered in, laughed, settled in the chairs. I erased the blackboard, told them we were actually going on with the lesson we’d originally planned.

  Lance asked, “Who’s going to make her mad so we can have more fun?”

  “There’s no guarantee it works that way,” I said, wondering what the newcomer must be thinking. “I can be a tough sombitch when I get mad.”

  Ask my daughter.

  “Show us,” he said.

  “You and me. After class. Alone,” I added with a wicked grin, as uncertainty about whether I was serious silenced him. “On the other hand, if you behave yourself, maybe I’ll read you some more stuff from the place where I got the squirrel recipe. Like Moose Sukiyaki, Fried Woodchuck, Casserole of Seal. And one for Stuffed Muskrat that begins, if I remember correctly, ‘Clean the rats well.’ It’s an interesting question, actually, why people are repelled, amused, whatever, by any meat they’re not accustomed to eating. And then, of course, there’s the matter of food that takes on some symbolic meaning, for one reason or another.

  “This evening, we’re going to talk about nuts. And nut sauces.”

  “I really appreciate your letting me come tonight,” Sheldon said, when the class was over and he and Perry were the only ones remaining.

  “Think nothing of it,” I said with a yawn.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any coffee left.”

  It served me right.

  Perry laughed, shook his head.

  “I wanna have a little talk with you,” Sheldon said, ignoring him.

  I was curious. He didn’t sound like someone who was considering taking the class. In fact, he sounded like someone who, as the old expression went, couldn’t boil an egg. And didn’t want to learn.

  “I can make some,” I said, awake now.

  Perry dropped the coat he’d picked up from the sofa and followed us to the kitchen, where I started some water as Sheldon delivered a disquisition on the jerks who thought coffee would keep you awake any longer than you wa
nted it to.

  “First of all,” he said, when I’d cleared the table of the remaining dishes and we were sitting, “let me tell you what a good time I had. You know, I was a kid in the sixties when I saw Julia for the first time. I never cooked a meal in my life, but from that time on, I was crazy about her. Never missed a show. Gave all my wives her books.”

  I nodded. “They’re excellent. Especially the first one. When I came back from Italy, all I read were Julia and Escoffier and a wonderful book called American Food.”

  “I package shows for television.”

  Naturally, it took my breath away. Never mind my breath, it took my brains. I looked at Perry.

  He said, “I didn’t want to make you nervous.”

  I laughed. “I’m smarter when I’m nervous.”

  “See what I mean?” Sheldon asked Perry, as though he’d brought Perry, instead of vice versa. “She’s a natural.” He turned back to me. “There’ve been okay food shows, but nobody that held a candle to Julia. Nobody who had a personality to compare. As soon as Perry told me about the class last week, I knew I found her.”

  “The class last week?” I repeated.

  Sheldon nodded happily. “So the first question is whether you can do it again.”

  “Do it again?” Still not understanding.

  “You know, the whole tzimmes with the pasta.”

  Tzimmes, for those who don’t know it, is a carrot and prune pudding eaten by Jews at holiday dinners, but it has come to mean a fuss, a big deal. It was just dawning on me that last week’s tzimmes with Livvy was what had brought Sheldon to my class. With the realization, I became upset and angry.

  “You mean, you want me to get hysterical so I can be on television?”

  Sheldon nodded happily. It was called acting. People did it all the time.

  Perry placed a hand on my arm.

  “You mustn’t be offended, Caroline. It’s not about craziness, it’s about spontaneity. I told Sheldon about you as soon as I began the class, because you were charming in a spontaneous way. Funny. Even last week, when you were so upset, you were funny. It was hearing about last week that convinced Sheldon to take a look.”