Julia's Child (9781101559741)

by Pinneo, Sarah

  The idea for Julia’s Child had started simply. My idea was pure and true—to make a great product and do things my way. But the process had become overwhelmingly complex and perverse along the way. The very idea that I’d end up waiting for a multinational conglomerate to bail me out would have been unthinkable only a few months ago.

  The turkey was done—and the side dishes weren’t. I turned the oven temperature way down and tried to think of a plan.

  I turned my attention to the undercooked corn pudding on the rack below the bird. The center wasn’t set—it jiggled when I tapped the dish.

  My thirty-year-old range had two ovens side by side. So I turned on the other one, the littler oven that I never used because the dial wobbled. I set it to what I hoped was four hundred degrees, hoping to preheat it fast enough to finish the corn pudding in time.

  Still lingering in the kitchen, watching me work, my mother said, “You should have sprung for a Butterball. With that pop-out thing that tells you when it’s done.”

  I could barely unclench my teeth to answer her. “Mother, this is a locally raised, organic bird from heirloom breeding stock. They don’t come with a pop-up.”

  “That’s my Julia, always doing things the hard way.” My mother sighed.

  I bristled, throwing down my oven mitt. “I know you don’t care, but I do. Conventional turkey farming is disgusting.”

  She laughed. “Turkeys aren’t pretty birds. Your great grandfather used to keep a couple. And they always tried to peck at us.”

  “Well, industrially raised turkeys wouldn’t have bothered. They’re too docile to notice you. They’re bred for one trait alone—to get so fat that their legs break and they end up dragging themselves through their own poop by the wings.”

  “Gross, Julia. Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because it’s true, Mother. And it gets worse. Inbreeding has completely erased the turkey’s sex drive. They don’t even remember how to reproduce.”

  My mother rolled her eyes. “Then how do the evil farmers get more of them?”

  “The female turkeys have to be artificially inseminated, which is weird enough—”

  “People do that too. So what?”

  I turned to her. “Yes, but for them it’s voluntary. And they don’t have to hire a professional turkey wanker to extract the semen. By hand.”

  “Eew! Julia. Talk about doing things the hard way.”

  I turned my back on her and stirred the cranberries violently. But she addressed me anyhow.

  “Something’s got to give, Julia. You can’t possibly take perfect care of the turkey and the people who are going to eat it and the strangers who buy your muffets. No wonder you’re stressed out. Here—have some sangria.”

  Stirring my cranberries, I ignored her. But she didn’t take the hint.

  “The thing I’d really like to know is—why,” she said. “Why do you care so much about the turkeys? It isn’t even like Save the Whales. You’re going to eat them, anyway!”

  She laughed at her own joke, and I finally turned around, my face reddening with fury. There were only about ten things wrong with her logic. “That’s the point!” I sputtered. “You’re going to eat this, right? You put food in your body. How can you not care what it is? How can you not understand that I don’t want to feed just anything to my”—I paused to remember how she’d put it—“two beautiful, healthy children?”

  She leaned against the wall, sipping her sangria. She didn’t seem bothered that she’d upset me. “But what are you afraid will happen? So what if we eat something we can’t even pronounce.”

  I just shook my head. There was apparently no way to make her understand. “It’s . . . the journey,” I mumbled, poking at one of my boiling potatoes with a fork. If we handed over the business of our food to the factories, my children would never grow up knowing the taste of a ripe summer peach just off the tree. They’d never know the smell of yeasty dough as it rose on their own kitchen counter.

  “Ah, the journey,” my mother scoffed. “Julia, we all die someday. Even if we follow your regimen. Meanwhile, you’re trapped in the kitchen, or your office God knows where. Your journey doesn’t look so great. I might die from too much . . . maltodextrin or whatever. But I’m going to try to have a little fun first.”

  I finally thought of a plan to shut her up. And not a moment too soon. I dumped the pot of boiling potatoes into the colander, filling the kitchen with starchy steam. My mother, with her heavily applied makeup, was forced to run for cover.

  Luke stuck his head in the door. “Julia? I smell smoke.”

  “It’s probably coming out of my ears.” I’d smelled something burning too. But it couldn’t be coming from the turkey, because I’d just checked it. And it couldn’t be the underdone corn pudding or the cranberry sauce. “It’s just the left-hand oven, honey, it’s preheating. Some old crumbs must be burning up in there.”

  Luke sniffed the air. He crossed the little room and forced open the old double-hung window over the sink. The rain was still pouring down outside, but the air smelled wonderful—freshly scrubbed. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a lot of smoke for a few crumbs.” He opened the left-hand oven, and black smoke billowed out. But otherwise, the oven was empty.

  Then we noticed that the smoke seemed to be leaking out from underneath the oven. Luke jerked open the old broiler drawer. “Aha!” The handle of a wooden rolling pin peeked out. It had been so long since I’d used that oven, I’d forgotten things were stored under there.

  Luke grabbed the handle of the rolling pin and yanked it out. “Ow!” The other end was completely aflame. I backed away from the sink to give him clearance, and Luke lunged. But instead of dropping the pin into the sink, as I expected him to do, he hurled it completely out the window.

  “Honey!” I shouted. “We live on the sixth floor! Why didn’t you throw it into the sink?”

  “It was on fire,” he said. “Would you rather have a fire in our kitchen?”

  Both children came running into the tiny room, drawn by the sound of our raised voices.

  “But you could kill a person with that,” I gasped. “What if you hit someone down below?”

  “Is somebody killed?” Jasper asked, all concern.

  “No!” Luke said quickly. “Julia, there’s that . . . garden down below,” he said. “The one that nobody sits in. Especially in November. In the pouring rain.”

  I looked out the window. From our height, the little seating area wasn’t visible. The space between buildings was so tight; we could only see the neighboring wall. Though he was right about the garden. It was a forlorn little alcove.

  Still, a hurtling rolling pin would make a fiery missile for any unfortunate souls below. I pictured a little old lady, flattened as she bent down to feed the pigeons. “Just go and retrieve it, okay? So I can know for sure.”

  Luke rolled his eyes and left the room. Just one more person who thought I was crazy. “Boys!” he called. “Who wants to run an errand downstairs?”

  There was a chorus of “Meeeeee!” and the apartment door clicked shut on them.

  I turned the cranberries down to a simmer, stirring them. I moved the corn pudding into the preheated left-hand oven. I scurried into the dining room to see if Jasper had complied with my request to set the table.

  He had. Mostly. As I straightened out the forks where they’d been flung on the napkins, my mother addressed me from the sofa. “I thought you told me that the fireplace was gas. It smells so,” she sniffed the air, which was still permeated by a faint aura of wood smoke, “genuine.”

  Wordlessly, Bonnie gulped her sangria and then poured herself a refill from Luke’s pitcher. The doorbell rang as I folded the napkins. It rang again, and then it rang three more times. Wylie adored the doorbell.

  Luke entered, holding the unburnt end of a blackened rolling pin. “I hit a Japanese maple.” He started to laugh.

  The phone rang, but I was distracted by the boys, still lingering
in the hallway.

  “My turn!” Jasper said.

  “Mine!”

  “Boys, come inside, please.” The phone rang again, and I grabbed it off the hallway table. The caller ID read “GPG.”

  I bolted for the kitchen, pressing “talk” only when I was almost there. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Julia. This is J. P. Smith.”

  “Mr. Smith, how can I help you?” The doorbell rang loudly again, accompanied by a wail from Wylie, who must have been shoved aside. I pressed my finger into my free ear, but even so it was easy to hear the ding-dong, ding-dong—like the soundtrack to an insane asylum.

  “Do you need to get that?” he asked.

  “Uh, no.” I closed the kitchen door with a snap. It dampened the family mayhem behind me. “J. P.” I took a deep breath. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I have a document I’d like to messenger up to you,” he said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be swapping documents on Thanksgiving. “I need Marta’s full name, though,” he said. “Since she is part owner of your company, there’s a set of papers for her too.”

  “Oh,” I said. “The papers . . . they are . . .”

  “An offer for Julia’s Child,” Smith said cheerfully. “You can think it over for the weekend. Actually, take until Tuesday, because you’ll want your lawyer to review the language.”

  “Um, great! Thanks! Wow . . .”

  “Her name, though?”

  “Oh! Right. Marta Florinda Rodríguez.”

  “Thanks, Julia! We look forward to working with you.” He hung up.

  I set down the phone, my hand shaking, just as Luke carefully pushed the door open and entered the kitchen. He took one look at my startled expression and closed it behind him. “Who called?” he asked.

  Instead of answering, I picked up my neglected glass of sangria. The ice had melted and it was a little sad looking, so I dumped it down the drain.

  Luke clutched his chest in mock horror. “What’d you do that for?”

  “Honey, open up a bottle of champagne.”

  Chapter 25

  By Monday morning, the flush of victory still hadn’t worn off. And it wasn’t just me. Opposite me, in our small office, Marta was all aglow. I could tell she’d treated herself to a few hours in the salon over the weekend. Her curly hair had been cut into an attractive frame around her face. It also had taken on a suspiciously lighter tone, with caramel highlights that I’d never seen before.

  “That’s $285,000 in stock,” our attorney’s voice rang out, on speakerphone, “which breaks down to $28,500 for Marta and $256,500 for Julia.” It gave me pleasure to hear the sound of my quarter million dollars bounce off the walls of our office. While Nina read aloud the terms of GPG’s offer, we listened happily, like two junior high school girls at an awards ceremony.

  “Well done, ladies,” she paused. “But of course you won’t be getting the money in cash. You’ll be getting shares of GPG’s publicly traded stock.” She paused to read ahead. “And you won’t be able to sell the last of them until three years from now.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, so she would know that we were sort of listening.

  “That’s risky because GPG’s share price might decline before you can sell.”

  “Okay, Nina.” I thought she was belaboring the point. But I suppose that was what I paid her to do.

  “The good news,” our lawyer continued, “is that the additional fifty thousand dollars of debt extinguishment is in cash. All the money that Julia has lent the Julia’s Child Corporation will be repaid in December, by check.”

  This was indeed good news. So good, in fact, that I could weep with joy. I would no longer be a fool who bet the ranch on her business the very minute a major recession blew into town. Our original egg would be returned to its nest, safe and unbroken.

  “You are each offered a three-year employment contract as part of the deal. Julia will receive a salary of one hundred thousand dollars per year plus a performance-based bonus, Marta will receive a salary of forty-two thousand plus bonus. Payment is biweekly, in cash. Health benefits equivalent to other GPG employees . . .” The lawyer droned on. The two of us swiveled happily to and fro in our chairs and smiled at the ceiling.

  “Julia’s title will be CEO and brand manager of Julia’s Child. Marta’s proposed title is vice president for the brand.” She stopped reading. “Ladies, titles are often more negotiable than the financial terms of the deal. Are there any changes you’d like to stipulate?”

  Marta opened her mouth to say something but then hesitated. She hit the “mute” button on the phone, preventing Nina from hearing her question. “Do you think I’ll get business cards that say ‘vice president’ on them?”

  “I’m almost positive it won’t be a problem,” I said. When I’d worked at the bank, just about everybody with a pulse had eventually become a VP. With business cards.

  Marta unmuted the phone. “That’s fine,” she said breezily.

  “Moving on.” Nina cleared her throat into the phone. “I’d advise you to take a hard look at the ‘brand control’ language.”

  “Why?” I asked. It would be hard for Nina to ruin my mood with something as trivial as contract language.

  “It’s a potential source of difficulty whenever an entrepreneur is subsumed into a big organization. You might have unanticipated differences of opinion. You might have different standards.”

  “But if I’m CEO of the brand, then I’ll be able to determine—”

  She cut me off. “That’s just a title, Julia. The contract states that you’ll report to the head of Food Brands. It’s pretty clear that you won’t have de facto control over everything. So you need to give this some thought. At the very least, we should try to specify veto power over the things you feel most strongly about. Say, changes to the package design or advertising copy.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling the day’s first wave of uncertainty. Obviously, I cared very much about the product. But GPG had just thrown me one hell of a lifeline, and I very much intended to take it.

  I checked the clock. It was nearly eleven. Usually, the waves of uncertainty hit me well before breakfast, so I figured I was already ahead. And it was all thanks to GPG. “Nina, I hear you. But part of selling the brand to GPG is trusting that they’re ready to do the right thing. The only change that might give me a serious case of heartburn would be inferior ingredients. Why don’t we ask them to give me power over that?”

  “Okay,” our lawyer said. “I’ll add veto power . . . changing ingredients.” I could hear her scribbling. “Do you ladies have any questions so far?”

  “I have one,” Marta said. “Do the benefits kick in right away?”

  “You’re pari passu with the other employees of GPG as soon as you sign. That usually means health and dental immediately. The 401(k) plan might start after a few months, though. Any more questions?”

  Marta shook her head.

  “I think that’s all,” I told Nina.

  “Okay! So let’s review the contingencies now, and then we’ll be just about done.”

  “Contingencies?” Marta asked. She had received her own set of documents over the weekend, but I imagined she’d gone starry-eyed from the numbers on page one. It was doubtful that Marta had read all the way to the end.

  “The group has given itself a couple of loopholes that would allow it to cancel the contract. The first contingency refers to product-packaging claims. GPG reserves the right to declare the contract null and void if any of Julia’s Child product packages contain information that is untrue or misleading.”

  Marta harrumphed. “We are as pure as the driven snow.”

  I laughed. “You are not.”

  “But the product is,” she argued.

  Then I felt a pain in my chest, like indigestion. I stopped laughing as I remembered the great vanilla caper. That made for at least one batch of organic muffets that wasn’t strictly by the book.

  There was also the far
m.

  I halted my swivel chair to think it over. Luckily, I’d already asked the new organic inspectors to step in. Because if the farm certification wasn’t complete, I could not legally claim that the muffets were organic. And a stickler might find the word “organic” on every package of muffets to be . . . How had they put it? “Untrue or misleading.”

  I would call the organic inspectors immediately. “Is that all, Nina?”

  “There’s one more thing here. The terms of this contract will prohibit Julia from using her name again on a food or children’s product.”

  That was easier. “So if it doesn’t work out with GPG, I can’t quit and start a company called Julia’s Other Child?”

  “That’s what they’re driving at,” Nina cautioned. “But this clause is far too broad,” she scoffed. “I’m going to change the language to refer only to your first name.”

  It was hard for me to imagine a world in which it could possibly matter. As if I’d have the energy to ever try to start another company from scratch. “Thank you, Nina. What do we do next?”

  “Sit tight while I talk to their lawyers about some of this language. Are you going to make a counteroffer on the price?”

  I chewed on my lip. “I really don’t know.”

  “Think it over, and I’ll be back in touch at the end of the day.”

  I hung up, pondering the question. “Luke thought it wouldn’t hurt to try to get them to raise their offer a little.”

  “Really?”

  “He said that 285 sounded like it was just begging to be rounded up to 300.”

  “So are you going to ask them for 300?” Marta admired her manicure.

  “I really can’t decide. Does only a sucker say yes to the first number? But of course I have no leverage. I can’t really pretend I’d walk away at 285.”

  “You’re the one who used to work on Wall Street.”

  I shook my head. “In the accounting office.”