How to Change a Life

by Stacey Ballis

  But more importantly? Two weeks after he was gone, she stopped by on a random Wednesday evening with a pot of beef stew, a bowl of liberally buttered egg noodles, a pan of lemon bars dusted in thick powdered sugar, and two bottles of zinfandel. The three of us ate and drank and caught up, and never once talked about my dad or the loss. She just came and fed us and was good company. I went to the kitchen after dinner to make coffee, and when I heard murmuring in the dining room, I peeked around the corner. Mrs. O’Connor had both of my mom’s little hands clasped in her long ones, and both of them had their heads bowed, foreheads nearly touching. Mrs. O’Connor was saying something I couldn’t hear, and my mom had tears running down her cheeks. I let them be; I loaded the dishwasher and cleaned Mrs. O’Connor’s serving pieces to ensure that they had ample quiet time together. When she left, she hugged us both very tightly and told us we were warrior goddesses and that she would check on us again soon.

  Later, I asked my mom about it and she said that they were praying together, that Mrs. O’Connor had offered prayers for my dad in his peace, and for my mom and me. She said that it was so comforting, not overtly religious as much as it was a prayer to the universe that we all move forward with as much ease as possible. She came by again about a month later with another dinner, and she dropped off a sweet potato pound cake a few weeks after that, and then for rest of the year, she would check in with us every other month or so, to see how we were faring. It always seemed to magically coincide with a difficult time: a holiday, Valentine’s Day, one of our birthdays, or Mom and Dad’s wedding anniversary. On the first anniversary of his death, my mom and I each got a note in the mail saying that she was thinking of us.

  It had meant so much to us both how quietly present she had been, not just in the immediate chaos of loss when all friends and family are on deck, but for that extended time when everyone goes back to their lives and forgets that the ones left behind grieve through that first year in a roller coaster of emotions.

  For a while I would check in with Mrs. O’Connor fairly regularly, but when I started with the Farbers, the first year flew by in a whirlwind of figuring everything out and building those new relationships. I remembered to send her a batch of the Brazilian caramel fudge balls I was gifting people that year for the holidays, and I got a lovely note back. That was the last time I saw her or reached out. There is not a decent or justifiable excuse in the world.

  The idea that she had been so amazing to us, to me, ever since I was a kid, and I let it just fall through my fingers out of laziness makes me so deeply ashamed. The thought of her suffering, of her poor lovely husband suffering, and that I didn’t know and wasn’t able to make her soup or send him cookies, or support either of them in any way, the very idea of it makes the tears finally come hot and fast and my mom pulls on my hand and moves me out of the chair and onto the love seat between them, where they can both rub my back and comfort me.

  • • •

  Good God, woman, what happened to your face?” Marcy says as she comes through my front door and thrusts a pastry box at me, leaning down to give Simca a dog biscuit. My little fluff monster takes the treat delicately in her mouth and trots down the hall to eat it in her dog bed in the kitchen, her wide tush swaying side to side with the gait of her stubby little legs. “You’re welcome, Simca,” Marcy says, and the dog stops in her tracks, turns around briefly, and then heads back up the hall. “Cheeky bitch,” Marcy says.

  Marcy was my best friend in culinary school. I was top of our class in all the savory courses and she took top honors in all the pastry and bread work. Marcy is also small, not quite tiny, but maybe five-three, and slim as a whip. Considering the amount of baked goods she consumes on a daily basis, she must have a helluva metabolism. She’s as fair as I am dark, with strawberry blond hair that she keeps shoulder length, often with streaks of hot pink or teal blue running through it. Pale jade green eyes with nearly invisible blond lashes, and masses of freckles. We love to dress up together for Halloween. One year we were Fiona and Donkey from Shrek; the next, Xena and Gabrielle. Last year we went all out and were Brienne of Tarth and Tyrion Lannister. We both hate the whole “sexy/slutty” Halloween costume thing and prefer to make a hilarious tableau. Plus, she, like me, is solidly single and not really looking. So we spend Halloween with Lawrence and his friends, who love a good costume and don’t intend to get drunkenly lucky. At least not with us.

  Marcy is the pastry sous chef at the Astor Place Hotel, working under the amazing Sophie Langer. She will be the head pastry chef at the new outpost bakery café, Sophie’s, that Sophie and the hotel are opening in Logan Square in a few months. It will be part of Little Astor, the small boutique bed-and-breakfast they are creating in a historic six-flat just off the square on Kedzie. So Marcy gets the whole married-to-your-job thing, and while she is four years younger than I am, she is middle-thirties enough to own the part of her that likes being a homebody for the rare hours she isn’t working.

  Unlike me, she also has a healthy and active sex life, and has confessed that for every third or fourth wedding they cater at the hotel she ends up with a groomsman or single guest. Since my boy options at work include one elderly gay man, one happily married father of four, a sixteen-year-old, and a ten-year-old, I am both a homebody and a celibate one. Marcy disapproves, but accepts this about me and doesn’t nudge, unlike my mom and Claire, and Shelby. And Lawrence.

  “I’ve been a little upset,” I say, weighing the box, which is labeled with the Astor Place logo and is surprisingly heavy for its size.

  Marcy looks puzzled. “Crying upset?”

  “Yeah.” I hate crying. In no small part because I am an ugly crier. Like, off-her-meds-Claire-Danes-in-Homeland-on-steroids ugly crier. My whole face gets red and splotchy, my eyes swell up like a pug with a thyroid condition, and my nose runs with thick trails of snot, and I end up spending the better part of six hours looking like I’ve been hit in the face with a bouquet of poison oak.

  Marcy follows me into the kitchen, where I put the box on the island, and Simca, having finished her treat, comes over to Marcy for petting. “Oh, now you love me, do you?” Marcy says, hoisting my beastie into her arms, getting some delicate face-licking and ear-nibbling love, and perching them both on the love seat bench I have at the counter. Simca finishes her snuggling for the moment and leaves Marcy’s lap to curl into a pile of fur on the bench beside her, while I open a bottle of pinot gris. I toss Simca the cork, since she loves to chew them, and she catches it deftly in her mouth, then clasps it between her paws to get some purchase for good gnawing.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry in all the years I’ve known you,” Marcy says, reaching over to the bowl of giant green Cerignola olives I have put out and popping one whole in her mouth, looking like a chipmunk smuggling an acorn.

  “I try to avoid it if possible.” I pour us two glasses. We clink and take a sip of the cool, crisp wine.

  “I mean, you didn’t even cry that time you took the whole underside of your middle finger off with the mandoline and bled all over your mise en place,” Marcy says, matter-of-factly.

  Ugh, that was an awful wound and a long recovery. I instinctively run my thumb over the slightly shiny underside of the middle finger on my right hand, devoid of all fingerprints and only barely creased at the knuckles. “Nope, and you can see why.” I gesture to my face.

  “What happened?” she asks, taking a small piece of the Parmesan that I have broken into craggy shards on the small wooden board I’ve laid out, with a wedge of triple-crème Délice de Bourgogne Brie, some nuts and dried fruits, a homemade quince and plum membrillo paste, and some tiny little German wild boar sausages that I’ve been hoarding since my trip to Berlin last year.

  I take a breath. “My favorite teacher from high school died.” I can feel the tears wanting to come back. I don’t cry often, but when I do, it’s like breaking the seal of something ponderous. The emotions st
ay right at the surface, threatening to bust through at the slightest provocation.

  “Oh, honey, that sucks, I’m so sorry. Had you stayed close?”

  I shake my head, knowing if I tell her about how shitty I was to let the relationship die on the vine for no good reason, I’ll lose it all over again.

  Marcy seems to sense this and shifts tactics. “What made her your favorite?”

  I tell her about freshman year, and how she made me feel good about being tall. About how it was her class where I met and bonded with the people who became my most important friends in high school. I tell her about Mrs. O’Connor also being the assistant track coach, where I was a presumptive Olympics-bound shot-putter until I blew out my knee junior year and ended my athletic career. I tell her about how Lynne and Teresa and I were so lucky and got her again for English senior year, and that she was the one who convinced me to go to college even without the athletics, to test the wide world instead of just going straight to culinary school, even though I suspected it was what I would want to do with my life. That she wrote the most amazing letters of recommendation for me with all my college applications, and then again when I applied to culinary school after graduation. I stop there. I can’t tell her about what happened after Dad died; it would be too much.

  “Wow. Cool lady, sounds like. I’m so sorry for your loss. So did you talk to them? Your friends? Are they in town?” She plucks a sausage from the platter and peels the powdery white skin off before popping it in her mouth.

  “I don’t know. We haven’t seen each other in . . .” I start to do the math. “Seventeen years?” God, that sounds like a long time. Too long to even be possible. But that is about right. Teresa’s wedding was New Year’s Eve 2000, and that was the last time we were all together. Lynne was on the West Coast full-time by then, and I was in France until my dad got sick in 2009.

  “Damn.” Marcy spreads a piece of baguette with the gooey Brie and then adds a thin slice of the membrillo and chews it thoughtfully. “Think either one of them will be there? At the visitation?”

  I haven’t even thought of that. “No idea, frankly. I presume Teresa is still in Chicago. I was at her wedding a zillion years ago, and I’d have to guess that by now she has a houseful of kids. Lynne was living in L.A. then, and seemed really happy, so I doubt she would have come back here. I don’t even know if either of them would know that Mrs. O’Connor has passed.”

  “Someone must have let them know on Facebook.”

  “Possibly. You know I’m not on it.”

  Marcy shakes her head. “I know. I just still can’t really fathom why.”

  “You forget I was abroad for nine years. Most of it in a town where we were lucky to get the landline phones to work consistently, let alone Internet. When all this social media hooey really hit huge, I was working my ass off in a flyspeck village in Burgundy.” My standard excuses. Why am I so skittish about social media? Because the one time I toyed with the idea of Facebook, the first thing I did was look up Bernard and saw a picture of him with three kids in his lap, all of them the spitting image of him, and my heart shattered into a zillion pieces and I had to call in sick to the Farbers, because I couldn’t stop crying for three days and in those days I ate three huge bags of Doritos and a box of Ho Hos and mashed potatoes and an entire gallon of ice cream washed down with a bottle of bourbon.

  • • •

  I left Chicago with the ink barely dry on my BA in English lit from Northwestern, the week after Teresa’s enormous wedding, and headed straight to Paris for culinary school, having done a semester abroad there junior year and fallen in love with the city. I did the Grand Diplôme at Le Cordon Bleu, and then staged around France for a year at various Michelin-starred restaurants. Michel Troisgros recommended me to a friend of his who had a small Relais and Chateaux property in a little town in Burgundy, near Beaune, that had a restaurant shooting for its first star, and a sous chef who had announced an imminent departure to open his own place. On Michel’s recommendation I was given a one-week tryout at Chez L’Ami Bernard in the Auberge D’Ortolan, and by the end of the third day had been offered the job. And there I stayed until my mom called to tell me Dad was sick.

  “Okay, but you’ve been back for, like, seven years? More? Pretty sure the Wi-Fi works fine here.”

  “I hate the idea of all that shit. All the time suck, the inane crap that everyone seems to get obsessed with. What am I really missing, Candy Smash?” I have to admit to myself, my lack of computer participation has much more to do with my being something of a technophobe. But it sounds so much better to just be dismissive of the negative aspects of such a plugged-in life, kind of like those people who say they don’t have a TV because they love to read. Not nearly as worldly to say you don’t have TV because you don’t know how to work a remote control and would be too afraid to try to hook up a DVD player.

  “Crush. Candy Crush. You’re a wonder, my friend, a true wonder.” Marcy stayed in Paris after graduation to do extensive continuing pastry courses and then worked at the legendary Patisserie Stohrer before moving to Chicago to work at the Peninsula Hotel, partially because I had always raved about how much I loved the city. While she was still in Paris, I would always go back and stay with her in her little flat in the 9th between stages, and she would always take her holidays to come see me wherever I was. Sometimes we would meet for weekends in other European cities, exploring the markets in Amsterdam or the food halls in London together, sharing pitiful tiny rooms at shitty hotels so that we could afford to eat at the best restaurants. I was sad when she left Paris, but relieved she landed in Chicago, and we were fairly good about staying in touch in the years she was here and I was still there.

  “Speaking of wonders, what’s in the box?” I say, desperate to change the subject.

  “Some testers Sophie and I are working on for the new place. Want your opinion,” she says, pulling the box over and slicing the tape open with her thumbnail.

  I look inside. There is a large roll, a miniature pie about four inches across with a golden crust that is sprinkled with large crystals of sugar, a stack of cookies, a square of what looks like bread pudding, and a small tub.

  “Okay, what am I looking at?” I say.

  “This is the rustic roll I was telling you about last week, the one based on the classic Poilâne bread.” My favorite bread of all time, with its dark, almost burnt chewy crust and the tangy, fermented chestnut-colored crumb.

  “Yum, very excited about that.”

  “Us too. I think we’ve finally nailed it. This is what we are thinking for pie service, all individual whole pies instead of slices. This one is classic apple.”

  “Because you still can’t stand it when the servers don’t get the pie slices out of the pan perfectly.”

  “True. The cookies are cornflake snickerdoodle, Black Forest, and ginger lemon cream.”

  “Cornflake snickerdoodle?”

  “Sophie’s thing. She wanted a cookie that tasted like the top of a good noodle kugel.”

  “She’s fucking brilliant, that woman.”

  “I know, right? This is a piece of the palmier bread pudding, and that is the vanilla semolina pudding.”

  My mouth is watering.

  “Is this an official tasting?” I ask. Marcy and I often just cook for each other, and might offer some generic notes and suggestions on things after, if the other asks for feedback. But officially tasting during recipe testing is a whole different beast.

  “Yep, if you are up for that.”

  “Of course. Let’s finish our wine and snack and then we can get to work.”

  I’m relieved, since if we do a tasting officially, we are doing it by essentially competition standards. We take sips of water and nibbles of plain bread to clear our palates between bites, and we make careful notes about every aspect of the item: texture, flavor, balance of elements. Looking for anything that
can help take the recipe into the realm of perfection. This means there will hopefully be no more talk about the various important relationships that I have let simply fall like so much sand through my open hands, and I won’t have to think about why it never occurred to me to simply close my fingers and try to save at least some of them.

  Three

  El-o-eeeze,” Geneva singsongs as she hops into the kitchen. “Why are you so faaannncccyyy?”

  I look down at myself. I’m wearing a gray pencil skirt that pulls a little too tight around my midsection, but my black wrap-style sweater covers that part fairly effectively. Black tights, and my tallest pair of shoes, a wedge-style black suede, because Mrs. O’Connor was the first person to make me feel good about owning my height, and I want to be as tall for her as possible. My hair is twisted up into a chignon, slightly more polished than my usual messy bun, and I’m wearing a little bit of makeup. As soon as I finish dinner for the Farbers I am heading straight to the funeral home for the visitation. Mom will meet me there.

  “I have to go somewhere after work, peanut,” I say to her as she climbs up onto one of the stools, and I reach over the counter and tweak her nose.

  “Where you goin’?”

  I think about this. The Farbers are pretty honest with their kids about most stuff, but in the time I’ve worked for them there has not been a death to deal with, as far as I know, so I err on the side of caution. “I’m going to a kind of a party.”

  She looks me up and down and makes a face. “You don’t look like a party. You should have pink!” She throws her arms open wide to indicate exactly how much pink she thinks I should have. Geneva loves pink.