Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Sheldon, after several days of yelling that he couldn’t believe what I’d done, convinced the cable people that not only had I turned down Bob Kupferman, but I wasn’t dying to do another year with them and might forget the whole thing if they didn’t give me more money. He was pretty much leaving me alone. He asked me for the names of various cooking schools and, unless I’m mistaken, got busy trying to find a gorgeous actress who could talk and cook at the same time.

  I was far from certain I had another season’s worth of shows in me. The subjects I was drawn to now were ones Sheldon had already deemed uninteresting or unacceptable for television. Or insufficiently visual. Some time back I’d bought a black-and-white hardcover notebook (nothing to do with television; no electricity required in the daytime), on the first page of which I’d written, ORDER: How to Find, then I’d crossed out Find and written Make. But at the moment it seemed that before I thought about developing order, that was to say, group habits, I would have to know for whom I was developing them. At the moment it was easiest for me to imagine a group whose nucleus consisted of me, my daughter, and a granddaughter, around whom various female friends would gather, eat, talk, and laugh over a time when we’d thought we needed men. I was interested in jokes and folklore that would sustain me in this position. Among my current favorites were, first, the ostensibly true one about the Mafia ex-wife who says that her husband left her because he didn’t like her idea for a Halloween costume; she’d wanted to go as a widow. Try as I might, I couldn’t link that or my second favorite to food.

  Adam: God, why did you make Eve so beautiful?

  God: So you would love her, my son.

  Adam: And why did you make her so charming?

  God: So you would love her, my son.

  Adam: And why did you make her so stupid?

  God: So she would love you, my son.

  “The question of taste is pretty interesting. Part of it’s surely what you grew up with, especially for men, many of whom appear to be incurious and unadventurous about food. Whoops! I hope nobody’s going to get mad at me for suggesting a difference between men and women. You know, I was thinking of making shortbread today, but I opened my little Scottish cookbook, not one of your bal-uh-back-breaking feminist tracts, and it said that men like shortbread thick, and women, thin, and I was afraid I’d forget and mention this and get into trouble. . . .”

  Someone suggested that since I’d brought it up, I talk about the difference between male and female tastes.

  “Well . . .” I began, faking hesitation, “in my experience men don’t like to gnaw on bones the way women do. I’m not saying it’s genetic. And if you walk into a Kentucky Fried Chicken, you’re going to see men eating chicken off the bone. All I’m saying is, if you put a bunch of men and women around a home table, the women are more likely to pick up the bones and gnaw at them. I’ve never seen a man do it except at a fast-food place or a picnic, and they mostly don’t like picnics. Of course, I don’t like picnics, either. That’s where you get into trouble, making distinctions. Any one you make, you can always find exceptions. I’m not sure that means they’re not valid. Unfortunately, we’re not allowed even to ask these questions anymore. Somewhere there might be men who hate flan and love to eat raisins and nuts and crunchy things, but I don’t know them. At least they’re not of my generation. The kids now . . . A lot of the rules seem to have changed. Not just food. Sex. Living arrangements . . .”

  “That’s because the rules didn’t make sense!” someone yelled from the auditorium.

  “Sometimes, for sure,” I acknowledged. “I mean, there’re the ones drawn from experience, like men can lift heavier things than women can because they’ve got a heavier pelvic girdle that doesn’t have to leave room for a baby to grow inside. Or, if you let the dough rise for too long, it’s going to fall again. But then there’re the ones someone decides must be true. A lot of those were written by woman-haters like H. L. Mencken. Mencken said that all the best cooks and dressmakers were men. Tell that to M. F. K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, Julia Child, Shirley King, Alice Waters, Marcella Hazan . . . the list goes on and on. Italy’s a country with an extraordinary range of cuisines and a relative lack of rigidly codified recipes. Invention in the kitchen isn’t just encouraged, it’s the basic way of life. And there are far more women than men cooking in and out of restaurants.

  “Oh, well . . . Men want either to keep women in the kitchen or keep them out of it, but they want the choice. Maybe they figure they don’t have a choice about whether to have babies. The trick is to figure out where life would be better if we broke down the barriers, and where it would just get dull. I think the world was more interesting when you could tell if it was a male or a female walking ahead of you down the street. But I can’t see where professional woman chefs would do anything but increase the competition for good jobs. Today we’re going to try two similar recipes, one from a woman’s cookbook and one from a man’s, and see if we can find significant differences without knowing which is which. . . .”

  It wasn’t one of my great shows, but it drew more mail than any before, and the cable people gave in to Sheldon’s pressure for more money. All they asked for was more of the same. Nobody believed that more of the same would get boring. I couldn’t imagine that in the year ahead I would be inventive. On the other hand, there was no way to consider giving up the show when everything else was so uncertain. I told Sheldon I’d stumbled upon a terrific book called Cooking Wizardry for Kids, which had inspired me to try some programs for children. At first he brushed off the idea, but after talking to the cable people, he said they’d like to hear about that, too.

  I had the impression Livvy wasn’t doing much homework, but until Open School Night, in March, I had no confirmation that she had fallen off in her studies. It could almost have been a hopeful sign that she’d stopped obsessing about Harvard, the problem being the reality element: If she were to go back to school at some later point, her senior year’s grades would be more important than they would be if acceptance came before they were in. I urged her to concentrate on getting through this school term with the best possible marks. But it wasn’t until she called Sheldon “just to find out what was happening,” and he informed her, apparently in the most abrupt possible manner, that she should forget about it, she wasn’t going to have a TV show, and she should stop bugging Rick, that she cried hysterically for an hour or so, then began to talk, for the first time, as though the wedding was really going to happen. She also began to ask me about money. She expressed interest in how much I earned from the cable show. I didn’t mind telling her, or discussing money in general, except that it seemed to be tied in to the matter of whether she’d need to work while she was in college.

  Upon my parents’ advice, I urged her more strongly than I had before to talk to a professional counselor. She thought it was dumb to discuss what was going on before she knew what it was. I said she did know she was going to have a baby, and she said that I had a genius for making a big deal out of everything. I talked to a psychiatrist Leon knew at the hospital. I described how the possibilities seemed to be living separately in my daughter’s mind, but the baby wasn’t there at all. He, too, thought it might be useful for her to talk to a therapist, but meanwhile, I seemed to be extremely agitated; would I like him to prescribe a mild tranquilizer?

  I talked to an analyst my sister recommended who got me to urge Livvy one last time to talk to someone about the choices she had to make. She said she had no choices to make; they were all being made for her.

  “Hi, everybody. Some of you will remember my show on an Italian wedding feast. Tonight we’re going to play with another wedding dinner, this one for a couple of Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage. For hors d’oeuvres, we’ll do miniature versions of a sandwich Cubans love. The basic one has layers of roast pork, Swiss cheese, and boiled ham with mayonnaise, mustard, butter, and pickles, all toasted together. On the blackboard I’ve listed some new ingredients I thought would be interestin
g. I’ve got Chinese roast pork and prosciutto, a variety of olives from an Italian grocery, some interesting cheese, and real sour pickles that you can find only in the city’s Jewish appetizing stores. Delis, as people call them now, although an appetizing store isn’t a deli. Often the opposite, since I understand from my parents that the real, quote, appetizing stores didn’t have any meat at all.”

  I’d needed to get in something Jewish, as well as Italian, and that was the best I’d been able to do.

  “In the meantime, we’re going to be preparing Ropa Vieja, the recipe for which is also on the board. Ropa Vieja means ‘old man’s clothes,’ and when I show you the completed dish, I don’t think you’ll have to ask why someone thought to name it that.

  “As you can see, I’m pouring a little oil into the casserole and now I’m going to heat it, then brown the meat on all sides.”

  I began making the sandwiches, but then the oil was smoking in the pan. I set in the chuck roast, but I was awkward and I had nothing funny to say. I’d planned to point out that dishes like the ones I was preparing were perfect for this cold, wintry March day, although they came from beautiful tropical islands we associated with sunshine and warmth, at least when we weren’t thinking about politics; that, in fact, many of the dishes we longed for in the dead of winter, from Indian curries to Cuban black beans and the various thick soups and stews of Puerto Rico, came from places we associated with swimming and piña coladas. But all that was a jumble in my mind and I concentrated on preparing the onions, garlic, and pepper.

  Someone asked if I was acting nervous to make it like a real wedding. I laughed and said that was it, it was always an act when I was nervous.

  But I couldn’t find my normal insouciance, and I breathed a sigh of relief after I’d concluded by showing the audience, with a roast I’d cooked the day before, how I shredded the meat into something they might think resembled a poor old man’s clothes.

  When I got home, there was a message from Sheldon on the machine that the cable guys wanted to talk to me about Cooking Wizardry for Kids. I told him they should talk to the authors, Margaret Konda and Phyllis Williams. We then had an argument which Livvy heard and which disposed her to talk to me. Sheldon’s very name had been enough to send her into a rage since their no-show conversation, which he’d reported to me proudly as a lesson in how to handle a difficult kid. He was, she said now, a pig.

  “Definitely someone his parents wouldn’t’ve approved of,” I said, mock-serious. “Or his grandparents, anyway.”

  I’d said it without thought. Livvy stopped pacing, asked what I meant.

  “Oh, well, it’s about pigs not being kosher.”

  “Kosher?” she repeated. “Oh, you mean, Jewish?”

  I explained briefly about the kosher laws, and that “not kosher” had come to have the meaning of not quite right, and that I’d said grandparents because with each generation, fewer Jews obeyed those laws, many of which had lost their everyday purpose, as opposed to their ceremonial one. What was astonishing was that she listened respectfully, asked questions, and at some point interrupted to ask what I’d meant about an appetizing store not really being appetizing.

  “Well,” I said, “it was really a grammatical point. The Yiddish word forshpayz is appetizer, the food you have before the main course—smoked fish, that kind of thing—so it should’ve been appetizer store, but my father says it never was.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, asked the name of those wonderful little cakes she’d had at Grandma’s, wanted to know whether you could get them in our neighborhood.

  I was, of course, pleased by my daughter’s first interest in the large group of people who’d given her half of her genes. I said that maybe we could try to bake some rugelach at home, even for the wedding party. She nodded, but immediately retreated to her room. When she came out hours later, her mood was distinctly different. She stood on the other side of the counter, watching my hands cut and break broccoli florets as though I were picking fleas off a Steiff dog. I steeled myself, or, rather, tried to think of myself as an endlessly flexible surface, a bow toward Jewish history, a bend backward toward—toward what?

  “When you were pregnant, before Papa married you, did you think about having an abortion?”

  Take your time, Caroline.

  “Yes.” I smiled. “Before I married him I thought about having an abortion.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Her voice was calm. Neutral.

  “I told you. I wanted to have a baby.”

  “Did he?”

  “Absolutely. He was very happy about it, said that now we had to get married.”

  “Just like Pablo.”

  “Mmm.”

  “You were in love with him, weren’t you?”

  Thank God for broccoli.

  “I liked him a lot. We had a good time in bed.”

  She leaned against the counter, still looking at the broccoli.

  “I don’t understand why you never told me any of this.”

  “Mmm. Well, I guess there was no right time. You were too young, then you were always mad at me, and then, suddenly, you were pregnant yourself.”

  “Maybe,” she said, her voice thick with meaning, “it would’ve been a good lesson for me.”

  “You used to get mad,” I said, “any time I tried to teach you a lesson.”

  “You have an answer for everything, don’t you,” she said, though without the rage of the old teenager facing an enemy. “No wonder I never tried to talk to you.” She rummaged in the cupboard for food, found an unopened jar of hazelnut butter, brought it to the counter with some crackers, and began making and devouring sandwiches. “I really should’ve asked how come, if you’re so big on babies, you don’t want me to have one.”

  “It’s not what I want you to have. It’s what you want. If I thought . . .”

  “If you thought what?”

  Her mouth was full, her manner increasingly frantic. I told myself to be very careful.

  I said, “You tell me, sweetheart.”

  She burst into tears.

  Startled, I went around the counter to embrace her.

  “Talk to me, Livvy.”

  “I don’t want to get married! I don’t want to have a baby!”

  I waited quite a while, then I said, “If you’re serious, I don’t think you have to do either.” What month was she in? Fourth? Just the beginning. Barely past the first trimester. Many good obstetricians would still perform an abortion.

  “I don’t want to have a baby,” she repeated, sobbing now.

  “Is there something you want me to help you with?” I asked after a long time.

  It felt as though she’d stopped crying. She asked if I had a tissue. I gave her a napkin from the counter. She wiped her eyes and nose.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said after a long time, her voice dull. “Pablo wouldn’t let me.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Doesn’t what you want count? You’re the one who’s having the baby.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said again. “Pablo wouldn’t let me do it. It’s a sin against God.” And she went to her room as I called after her that having a baby you didn’t want might be a sin against yourself. And the baby.

  When Pablo came home, in Livvy’s presence, I repeated her words to him, asked if he would try to prevent her from having an abortion or backing out of the wedding if she wanted to.

  He was very angry with me, asked what I was doing, with everything set, all their friends and family invited. He’d thought I liked him.

  I said, “I do like you, Pablo. This isn’t me. It’s her. We were talking about something else, and she started crying, and then she said it to me.”

  “Olivia?”

  She wouldn’t look at him.

  “Did you say that to your mama?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Then she looked up. “I mean, I did, but I didn’t mean it. I was nervous.”

  He looked at me to see if I was satisf
ied with this explanation.

  “No,” I said. “She wasn’t just nervous. She doesn’t want to have a baby.”

  “Olivia,” Pablo asked, “is there anything you want to say to me or to your mama?”

  She looked down again, shook her head.

  “It’s natural,” he said to me, “for a girl, a young woman, to be nervous.”

  She was such a radiant bride, in her grandmother’s crowned veil and the satin Empire-style gown concealing her swollen belly, that nobody could have believed me if I’d reported our conversation. She looked at Pablo adoringly, repeated the marriage oath unwaveringly, held his hand and smiled happily as they came out of the church and we returned to the house and the small mountain of flowers her father had sent. He couldn’t come. (He’d asked me if she was pregnant. I’d told him to ask her and he’d hung up on me.)

  Now the apartment was crowded and lively with families meeting one another, eating, dancing, Pablo’s relatives exclaiming how they couldn’t believe I’d cooked the Spanish food as well as the Italian, TV program or no TV program. I’d intended to make chopped liver or do something else Jewish, but in the last mad rush, I’d forgotten. Then, in what could have been the only bad moment of the afternoon, I remembered.

  Livvy, having cut the first slice of wedding cake, moved it on the cake knife toward the plate Pablo held for her, but dropped it on the floor instead.

  There was a collective gasp.

  She stood looking down at the cake as though it were a baby she’d dropped.

  The room was quiet.

  “Hooray!” I exclaimed. “It happened!” And then, as everyone around me stared, I said that I’d been worried. “The one thing missing from the wedding until now was something a little bad. I mean, they always say, ‘for better or for worse,’ but at many weddings, there’s no symbol. At a Jewish wedding, they wrap a wineglass in cloth and the bride and bridegroom step on it. I remember I got upset when it happened at the first wedding I went to. My father explained to me that the broken glass was a symbol of the difficulties in life they’d face together. Well, now Pablo and Livvy have their symbol of life’s difficulties. A big mess of cake on the rug. And I say, Hooray, and let’s clean it up and go on with the celebration!”