Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Leon asked if anything else was doing. I said no, not really, except that we hadn’t been through our Christmas lists to see who was getting what for the kids.

  “It’s just as well,” Leon said, “that you’re not thinking about, you know . . . I mean, there can be psychosomatic delays in the onset of menstruation.”

  “That’s very interesting,” I replied. “Would you like to know what you can do with it?”

  He whistled. “I was just trying to prepare you for a disappointment.”

  “You’ve done very well in that area,” I assured him, slamming down the phone.

  For a few days I didn’t hear from him. I knew I’d been nasty, understood that he was mad at me, but felt he didn’t understand how frustrated I was by his refusal even to consider letting me have this baby. Not that he could stop me if I were determined to do it, but after all, one of the lessons of life with my daughter had been that children needed both parents to be there. Nothing I’d seen of single-motherhood had convinced me otherwise.

  On Wednesday morning I woke up with my period.

  For a while I was too upset even to get out of bed. Let the sheets and mattress pad and the mattress itself, for all I cared, get stained. What did I care, if I wasn’t going to have a baby? Finally I got up, washed, changed the linens and had some breakfast, but I remained in a state. I didn’t call Leon, though I knew I should. I told myself it was more important for me to come up with a reasonable show for the next day than to let Leon know what wasn’t happening. If I wasn’t going to be a mother again, I’d best attend to the work I would be doing.

  The problem was, I was still too mad at Leon, at the entire male race, to settle into some reasonable program that Sheldon, noticeably a man, would like. I flipped through my notes, looking for something he’d hate that would bring in hundreds of phone calls so he’d have to live with it. I wanted to do a piece on winemaking in California, where women had made important and interesting contributions, but I’d barely begun research on it. The director of the Wine Society Service had observed, in my one conversation with her, that when you dealt with wine people, you got good food, but when you dealt with food people, you often got bad wine. Something interesting was there, but my brain was still too bound up with Leon and babies to wander along the path where it might be found.

  “Seymour has a weight problem and he’s been bugging me to do a show about diets. Since a lot of people still have leftover turkey in the refrigerator, today we’re going to do Nancy Pike’s world-famous turkey potpie. She says her secret is a bit of thyme, T-H-Y-M-E, in the filling, but I think there’s more to it than that. While I’m preparing the pie, I’m going to talk a little about diets.

  “In between the time I left this country and the time I moved back, a lot of people got hysterical about food. Either about eating it, or not eating it, or eating it and working it off with exercise. See-more has a weight problem, and I thought I’d found him an easier solution. He tends to go for teensy, skinny little girls who make him feel huge, not to say old. I told him he should try going out with a nice big chunk of woman so he’d feel thin, but he didn’t buy it. So. Diet program. I went out and bought everything from the Pritikin Diet to the McDougall Diet to the Scarsdale Diet. That’s the one by the doctor who fed a woman loads of amphetamines when he wanted her to be thin for his dinner parties, then, once he had another girlfriend and he didn’t need her there, wouldn’t give her more no matter how depressed she got, and she went off her rocker for long enough to kill him when she thought she meant to kill herself. In a lighter mode, there’s Prince Wen Hui’s Cook Chinese Dietary Therapy, which includes lovely items like Ginger Beef and Ginger Seitan Beef, which it says are, I quote, ‘stomach/spleen tonics, but with the seitan the dish is also a treatment for Hyper Yang Liver,’ and Apple Agar Dessert, ‘specifically to cool Hot Lung Syndrome and disperse phlegm. The agar cools the lungs, the peaches tone the Qi.’ And so on. Then there’s Never Satisfied, A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat by a guy who writes well, but every time he gets close to the food-sex connection, he arches away from it. When he talks about anorexia, one of the more obvious signposts at the food-sex crossroads, he compares a food-filled belly to a baby-filled belly without ever saying what the anorectic who gets pregnant with food and aborts it thinks she’s doing. That is, he never draws the conclusion you’re waiting for him to draw even if you don’t exactly know what it is.”

  I was measuring the crust ingredients into the Cuisinart, but having to talk about diets while I was thinking about Leon and men who didn’t want you to have babies left me unable to describe what I was doing to the viewers. I just babbled.

  “Which brings me back to the neighborhood of my earlier observations. Everyone needs there to be something they want and can’t have. For a lot of people that used to be sex. At some point sex became—I mean, it wasn’t just permissible, it was mandatory. Maybe something had to replace it as, you know, the thing you longed for. And maybe food, its variations, endless, its specifics often sublime, was the obvious choice. When I was young, we talked about who was doing what to whom. Now when I hear young girls on the street, they’re comparing chocolates or fancy ice creams and complaining about their weight. The whole world’s on a diet. Nobody’s obsessed with sex, but everyone is getting weighed!”

  To the accompaniment of a few titters from people who heard the pun, I took the dough from the refrigerator, rolled it out, dropped it into the pan, brushed it with a little oil, spoon-poured the filling, set it in the oven.

  “Let’s see. Where was I.”

  “You were talking about food and sex!” someone called out.

  “Ah, yes. Well, what is there to say? Food is sort of sex above the neck. If only it would stay there.”

  I’d been preparing the turkey filling. Now I poured it into the baked shell.

  “Or maybe what you’re really interested in is food and gender? I once started lists of food men like—puddings and such—and women like—bones, seeds, and nuts. Crunchy things. Is that about sex or just about gender?”

  “The bone’s about sex,” the same man called back as his wife—I’d now located the young, chubby couple in the row behind Sheldon—and everyone else giggled. “The rest is just about gender!”

  I laughed. “My goodness, you’re a lively one, aren’t you. Maybe you’d like to write me a letter; we don’t have too much time now, but I’d like to hear your opinions about who likes which kind of diet, since I promised Seymour that that’s what this program would be about. Oh, yes, and I’d also like your opinions on the matter of whether biting your nails makes you a cannibal. Or biting someone else’s.

  “Now, here’s my diet for you, Seymour.” I pulled the prebaked pie out of the second oven, held it up, then sliced it into four parts, pointing out that each of them made a nice portion. “Or maybe I should address this to Lee-nora.” Seymour’s girlfriend, invented during a recent program. “When you cut Sheldon’s—whoops, See-more’s piece, just do this. . . .” I cut one of the quarters into halves. “And fill up the rest of the plate with green stuff. And there you have it, he’s on a diet.

  “I’m going to close with a quote from the great Brillat-Savarin: ‘It is not a great disadvantage for men to be lean . . . but . . . thinness is a horrible calamity for women: beauty to them is more than life itself, and it consists above all of the roundness of their forms and the graceful curves of their outlines.’ ”

  I winked and said good night.

  Sheldon wanted to know if I was trying to make some kind of goddamned fool out of him. I thought he was upset about my slipping and using his real name, but it was my suggestion that he had a weight problem. Only someone’s telling him the phones were ringing off the hook, far more calls than there’d been for Hitler (there were far more viewers now), caused him to stop haranguing me.

  I didn’t worry about it a great deal. I had too much else to think about. Leon and babies. Leon and no babies. I’d been pretty snotty to
Leon. Maybe I’d end up without Leon or a baby. Maybe I’d been wrong in thinking Leon and I had reached a stage where I could say whatever I felt like saying. Maybe I would lose Leon. Maybe I’d lose everything. Sheldon and I were scheduled for a conference with Bob Kupferman. It sounded ominous, I wasn’t sure why. Yes, I was. For all my battles with Sheldon and the cable people (it sounded like a science-fiction movie, actually, Sheldon and the Cable People), I’d been mostly in control of what I did on the program. Something he’d said made me think that wasn’t going to be true much longer. Maybe they’d want something I couldn’t do. Maybe they’d found someone who could do it. Maybe I’d have nothing left of my life except a couple of cooking classes. And someone had told me classes weren’t doing as well as they had when the economy was better. Maybe I’d have to work in a restaurant. Maybe my TV celebrity would at least make it possible for me to get a chef’s job. Oh, God! It was unimaginable that I should again work in a place where I had to take someone’s orders all day. Even if he wasn’t an Angelo. No. If I worked in a restaurant, it would have to be my own. If I hadn’t been on TV long enough to earn the money myself, maybe I’d be able to raise it. People started restaurants all the time. A restaurant was much easier than a TV show. If you had a restaurant and you made a wonderful dish, people wanted you to make it again, not find something different but the same for next week.

  I began a new file on the computer: CASACARA. Casa Cara would be a family-style place. No bar. Bars took up an enormous amount of space and were extremely expensive to install. Of course, they were also the place where Anna’s, and then Angelo’s trattoria had earned the most money. Well, I’d said no bar, not no drinks. I would have big round tables where people could drink together, eat together, whatever. Maybe people who’d thought they just wanted to drink would end up having a bite because they liked the way someone else’s food looked. Just as they talked at bars when they’d thought they only wanted to drink. The kitchen would be open to the dining room so I wouldn’t be cut off from everything. No matter how small the restaurant was, I would always have an assistant so I could get out of the kitchen and mingle with the guests as I’d need to, especially if Leon . . .

  That was what I was doing with my fantasy restaurant. Creating a shelter against the loss of Leon. Anyway, I’d started with something that wasn’t true; my quarrels with both Angelo and Sheldon were about serving the same fare week after week. Still, I could have fun with a restaurant. If I could stand to have fun right now. I was saved from considering the question when the phone rang. It was Ovvy. He had a cold and had stayed home from school. Mrs. Borelli no longer came every day but his father was going to check on him at lunch.

  “It’s so good to hear your voice, sweetheart,” I said. “Even when you sound like that.”

  He began to cry. “Daddy said maybe you wouldn’t have time for us anymore.”

  “WHAT?” I howled. “What on earth was he talking about? Ovvy, hang up the phone. I’m coming up.”

  I turned off my computer, got my keys, which now included the ones for Leon’s apartment (he hadn’t felt he needed the ones to mine), and went upstairs. Ovvy had gotten back into bed. I hugged him, told him that whatever in the whole world happened, I would always have time for him. He said Daddy had told him not to get too close to anybody with that cold and I said I didn’t care, if I got his cold I’d do a program about what to cook when you had a cold. He loved that. He relaxed against his pillow. I told him that I was going to go down and get some chicken soup for his cold, then I’d be right back up. I met Leon on the steps.

  “Where do you get off telling your kid I don’t want to see him?” I asked.

  There was a long pause, then Leon said, in a voice even lower than mine, “I had the impression that you didn’t want to talk to any of us.”

  “Neither did you want to talk to me,” I said. “Not if I was pregnant, anyway.”

  If he’d noticed the past tense, he wasn’t sure yet what to make of it.

  “I told you that from the beginning,” he said in a low, troubled voice. “I might get married, but I’m not having any more babies.”

  “Well,” I said angrily, “you can talk to me. Because I’m not having a baby, either.” I edged past him and down the stairs.

  “Look,” he said, following me down, “I want to talk to you, but I just have a few minutes and I promised Ovvy—”

  “Then I think you should go talk to Ovvy. Don’t worry about me. I’m just getting him some soup.”

  But he followed me into my apartment, where I took a container of soup from the freezer and put it in the microwave.

  “How about we just sit for a minute and—”

  “I don’t think we should sit for a minute,” I said. “We both promised Ovvy we’d be there. And Ovvy was the one who wasn’t ready to wipe me off the slate altogether.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Leon said. “I wouldn’t have gotten a divorce if I wanted to wipe you off the slate. I’m the one who thinks about getting married. I just don’t want any more children.”

  “You’re right, it’s the opposite for me,” I said. But my anger was gone. “Although I’d surely get married if I could have more kids.”

  “You haven’t raised three of them already.”

  “No kidding. I barely got to raise one,” I pointed out. “And she doesn’t even remember that I was there.”

  “I understand all that,” he said. “But it doesn’t change the way I feel.”

  So. There we were. I got the chicken soup out of the microwave. He opened the door.

  “Did you mean it? You’re not pregnant?”

  I nodded.

  “And since you’re not pregnant, there’s no reason to get married?”

  “Well, there certainly isn’t the same kind of pressure,” I said as the door closed behind us.

  “Why do we need pressure?” he asked.

  I couldn’t think of an answer, so I started upstairs with the chicken soup.

  “What’re you afraid of?” he asked, following me. “That I’ll turn into Angelo? Am I anything like Angelo? Am I going to have a brain transplant? Or is it just that all males are alike?”

  He opened the door for me and we walked in.

  “If you think we are,” he whispered, “please don’t tell Ovvy. He thinks you think he’s going to be a terrific man.”

  I had a dream in which I’d turned gray and Leon passed me on the street without recognizing me. He was with Christina. I awakened clutching my hair, had to stop myself from running to the mirror to make sure I was still blonde.

  I had a conference with Sheldon and Bob, who were pushing about the matter of arranged programs. Bob had suggested that I make notes, of ideas I had for giving the show continuity beyond what it had from my “lovely personality,” and I was trying to do this, although everything in me rebelled.

  I had a dream about a Casa Cara with one big round table at its center, and an empty high chair. Sometimes I thought it was Livvy who was supposed to be in the empty high chair; other times I thought it was my baby with Leon. My nonbaby. I had a dream in which Livvy disappeared and I had no idea of where she was.

  Livvy had taken and done beautifully on the PSAT’s, the rehearsal, as it were, for the SAT’s she would take in her senior year and that would be the single greatest determinant of whether she got into a good college. Her adviser thought she had a chance of getting into Harvard if her interview the following year went well.

  I’d grown accustomed to the fact that Livvy’s mood swings, the differences in the way she talked to me, were seldom about anything that had happened between us. Now it began to seem as though the same was true of Leon. We hadn’t spoken in a couple of days because one or the other of us had always been on the phone. Now he called to ask, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, whether I could spare the time to have dinner with him that night. I said I’d love to cook something wonderful for everyone, and he told me he wanted to speak to me alone. He sounded so angry, it w
as as if I’d turned out to be pregnant and refused to have an abortion.

  He was waiting for me at the Tiger’s Eye at 7:02, looking as though I’d arrived an hour late instead of two minutes. I took off my parka, kissed the top of his head, said I felt as though I hadn’t seen him in a year and a half. He didn’t acknowledge my presence. I sat down facing him, said hello. He just nodded. I ordered a very dry martini.

  “Maybe you should tell me what you’re mad about, Leon. Instead of inviting me to dinner and acting as if you’re sorry I came.”

  There was a long pause. He squinted at me as though he were trying to decide whether to take a chance on the vacuum cleaner I was peddling at his door. The waitress brought my martini, which was terrible. I’d forgotten that with gin you always had to specify the label. I sipped some more. We ordered cheeseburgers.

  “So? What’s up?”

  “I practically ask you to marry me, and you’ve been dodging me since that day and you want to know what’s up?”

  I could only gape at him. Was it possible? Did love turn everyone into an asshole?

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

  I smiled. “I seem to stand guilty of saying no when you haven’t really asked me any questions.”

  “All right,” he said after a long time. “So, what if I did ask?”

  Love was the opposite of a card game, your advantages were irrelevant.

  “I imagine I’d say yes to nearly anything you asked me.”

  It stopped him cold. Maybe it was the first time he’d had to think about what he actually did want, instead of worrying about what I didn’t. I spoke again only when it was clear he wasn’t going to.