by Sasha Martin
“I wonder what size ring you wear,” she said, sliding off her gold wedding band, a smile trembling at the corners of her mouth. “Want to try mine on?”
I scanned the room, willing a waiter to send his tray crashing to the floor, or for the kitchen to set off the fire alarm. No dice.
John’s mother slid the ring across the varnished wooden table. I smiled weakly and placed it on my finger. It felt cold against my skin.
“Interesting!” she said, and then took the ring back nonchalantly. “How are things with your mom?”
A week later, I broke up with John.
I was only 22, and though I loved John, I still had no idea how to be in love—to trust the feeling, own it as mine, and believe in it. Faced with the possibility of wearing that ring, I knew my only option was to run. This was more than fear of commitment: This was certitude that unconditional love could never exist—not for me. Good though John had been to me, his mother’s hint of a proposal pushed me to end the relationship—in self-preservation.
That night I called Mom to tell her about the breakup, but she had something else on her mind. “Listen, I’ve been working through some of the loose ends—trying to piece together why Michael … had such a hard time.” She lowered her voice. “Have you been following the sex abuse scandal in Boston?”
“Those kids suing the Catholic Church?” The story had been in all the papers, but I hadn’t given it much thought.
“They’re not kids,” she replied, “These are grown men now. But the ‘boy within’ never recovers—these men can’t hold down jobs, their emotions are all out of whack. Some never survived: When they hit puberty the trauma came flooding back. They get angry, depressed—many of them ended their lives. So it’s the parents who are suing for their lost boys.” She was quiet a moment. “The patterns are all there, Sasha.”
I thought back to Michael’s weekly counseling sessions with the priest he wouldn’t let me near.
“Sash? Are you there?”
I shut my eyes and sighed. “Yeah …”
“I’ve been going through old papers, some of his medical reports. But I could use your help. Is there anything you can remember—anything that seemed off, that might help?”
I was already nodding.
CHAPTER 15
Moving On
SOMETIMES THE VERY ACT OF RUNNING entrenches the spirit more than it liberates. Two years later, not much had changed except my age. I was 24, haunting Wesleyan as a web designer long after most of my classmates had scattered. Mom continued to crash into my life with exhausting persistence while we worked on Michael’s case against the Catholic Church, which by now had moved into arbitration. And—perhaps to insulate myself—three days after I broke up with John, I’d become involved with another man, a full-lipped Swedish weight lifter named Greg.
Mom hated his buzz cut, his motorcycle, our “shacking up” together, and how my years with him had turned me into a road-chasing GI Jane: “You’re never going to figure out who you are if you don’t get out from under these boys,” she scolded.
Perhaps she was right that I’d leaned too much on my boyfriends. But on this sticky summer day, I was on my way to attend an older cousin’s funeral in Boston. The highway propelled me into the city’s inner circle just 30 minutes before the viewing was scheduled to begin. Disoriented by the knotted roads, I parked the car, unfolded a large city map, and squinted over the tiny print until a spark of something red caught my eye.
Patricia was walking down the street.
Though Pierre and two of the girls had come to my college graduation, Patricia had phoned in her congratulations. That was the last time we’d spoken.
The six years since we’d lived in Luxembourg had been kind; Patricia was slimmer than I’d ever seen her. A pair of black-and-white tapered slacks skimmed along her hips, stopping just shy of her gold flats; an orange silk blouse draped loosely along her torso. The shirt only served to ignite her scarlet hair to an even more furious shade than I’d remembered.
I flung open my car door right into the honks and whines of busy traffic and narrowly missed a passing bus.
“Patricia!” I waved as I caught up with her, stunned by the coincidence of seeing her in a city teeming with more than a half million people.
When she turned around, I rushed her with an enormous hug.
She stiffened, her hands fixed to her side, and pulled back. I let go, embarrassed.
“I’m sorry …” I began again. “Hi! How are you?”
“Sasha … w-what are you doing here?” She looked at me with widened eyes.
“I’m lost,” I said, holding the map up high in my hand, “late for a funeral.”
Her eyes softened slightly. “I’m so sorry, what happened? Are you OK?”
“It’s one of my cousins—cancer. She fought for a long time but … yes, I’m fine.”
“Do you have someone who can help you?”
I paused. “I can probably call my mom.”
Patricia’s gaze flickered. I winced, wishing I hadn’t mentioned Mom. I flushed, too, as I remembered the gift Pierre had given me at graduation: a prepaid phone card. I’d looked at the plastic dumbly, wondering at what such a gift implied, but had been too uncomfortable to clarify its meaning.
I’d kept the card in my wallet for months, taking it out occasionally, trying to come up with a good excuse to contact the Dumonts. I must have done that a hundred times. When I got a new wallet, I moved the unused phone card to a drawer. One day I noticed it had expired.
Patricia looked at her watch, “Well, you’re in good hands with your mom. Take care of yourself, Sasha.”
“You, too …” I said, searching for the right words that would keep her there a moment longer. Suddenly, I realized we’d spent all the years since Michael’s death in some variation of this game: she trying to keep my ticking time bomb emotions in check, me fixated on the mother and brother I’d lost. I never saw Patricia. She pressed her lips together in an ironed-on smile, and then stepped briskly past me.
She hadn’t walked 20 feet before my shoulders shook and tears coursed down my cheeks. I knew better than to hope that our paths would cross again. Dozens of suits and skirts passed me by as I sobbed.
Though I felt the shame of their stares, I couldn’t make myself stop crying. I was 9, I was 12, I was 19—a lifetime of endings, a lifetime unmoored.
“What happened?” Mom asked when she came to retrieve me, taking in my blotchy eyes and frizzy hair. “You look like a ragamuffin.”
“I bumped into Patricia.” My voice was monotone.
“What?!” she scanned the sidewalk, turning this way and that, as though she might still be nearby.
“She was walking down the street when I pulled over to read the map.”
“Wow! This is fantastic, Sash. What are the odds?” She beamed at me. “You’ll finally be able to heal, the two of you.”
“No, Mom, it was just a minute on a sidewalk. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I didn’t tell her I was sorry, I didn’t make it ri—”
“Sorry for what? We should send her a note, maybe we can get some lunch—”
“Sorry for being a pain in the neck. Sorry for making her miserable. Sorry for being a brat. Sorry for being too scared to call.”
I stood up, “Anyway, why do you keep stepping all over yourself, trying to make sure they’re at the center of my life? They don’t want to be. They want you to be my parent. It’s over, Mom.”
I gulped. “What happened in Luxembourg wasn’t a mistake. I need to let them go. They want me to let them go.”
On my way back to Connecticut I called Greg, unable to get the encounter with Patricia out of my head.
“You’ll get through it, Sasha. You always have.” He sounded weary, as if this latest drama was too much.
Perhaps it was. Running into Patricia made me stop and reconsider. At 24, I’d been in Connecticut for 6 years—2 years longer than I’d lived anywhere since I was 11. When I
got the word that Michael’s settlement from the church had finally come through, I was more than ready for change – both physical and emotional.
“It’s not much,” Mom said. “But he would want you to have the money. You two lived through so much together.”
But instead of feeling vindicated on Michael’s behalf, I felt tremendous responsibility. I’d seen enough of life to know that his bequest was a humbling gift, to be treated with care and respect. I wasn’t going to piddle it away on lattes. I was going to honor his memory.
One day a light bulb went off as I watched the film Babette’s Feast. The heroine wins the French lottery, 10,000 francs, and must decide how to spend the money. She could return to her hometown, Paris, and spend it on excess and entertainment, or she could spend it on a lavish French feast for her loved ones in rural Jutland, where she had arrived as a refugee years earlier.
She decides on the latter, celebrating her community but also honoring her past. She cooks her way through an opulent, sensual menu stocked with the most expensive ingredients in France. There’s caviar and champagne, turtles and quail. Her simple guests swoon at every bite, dissolving into supreme pleasure.
By the time the film ended, I knew what to do with Michael’s money. I’d immerse myself in the one thing that had kept me going through all the upheaval: cooking. And I’d do it at the Culinary Institute of America, one of the greatest cooking schools in the country, located in upstate New York. Though Mom had taught me a lot, there was so much more I wanted to know. I could use half the settlement toward the first year and half toward the second. When the money was gone, I’d carry what I’d learned wherever I went.
Greg didn’t try to talk me out of it, but Mom did.
“What on earth do you want to go to the CIA for? You know how to cook,” she said. I could feel her roll her eyes, even through the phone.
“Do I? I don’t know, Mom … there’s always more to learn.”
I looked down at the shiny pamphlet, smiling at the photos of students in crisp white chef coats and checked pants serving up perfectly plated scallops, the crisp edges glistening with butter. “I want to figure out everything—the proper way.”
“What’s wrong with how you do it now? New York is too far away, Sash. That’s a five-hour drive for me!” Her voice was getting louder. “You know that I can’t help you from there.”
“It’s not like I’m going across the ocean, Mom!”
“Why don’t you go to a school like Johnson & Wales, practically down the street from me? You could live with me.” Mom was still living among the nuns in Newton, baking their daily bread.
“In a convent? Really, Mom? And then I become a nun?”
We both laughed.
“Come on, Sasha, what’s this really about? Why are you running away again? Family is supposed to stick together.”
She was trying so hard to rebuild our relationship, but with every push I just wanted to get farther away. “This is for me, Mom. It has nothing to do with … anything. I’m just doing something I’ve always wanted to do. Why can’t you see that?”
“If you say so, Sash.”
CHAPTER 16
The Other Side of the Kitchen
THE CIA WAS ORCHESTRAL. Its gilded halls swelled with the sounds of chopping, mixing, searing, a daily ensemble that began at 2 a.m. with breakfast cookery and continued well into the night. High-speed blenders trumpeted while the deep bass of Hobart mixers spun hypnotically. Here was the whoosh of running water, the staccato of lids on pots, the thump of wooden spoons on metal pots. Even when a foot and a half of snow frosted the Hudson Valley, the classrooms were steamy and warm. Their melodies played out in rounds, corresponding to the array of service times.
The school was originally a Jesuit seminary; in the early 1900s, young seminarians paraded these halls, heads bent in solemn prayer on their passage toward priesthood. I could still feel the hushed holiness of this place, though now the air had a succulence never intended by the original occupants. On day one, the outgoing class served us a four-course supper in Farquharson Hall. The arching, stain-glassed, frescoed walls revealed their former life as a chapel. We sat on the old chancel, 12 to a table, dotted around the draped tablecloths. Moving in somber procession, six crisp waiters delivered our food under silver domes, placing the plates before us in unison. Each dome reflected the vaulted, cloud-painted ceiling above us, more cathedral than mess hall. To this day, I cannot remember what we ate—only those shiny domes, the puff of steam when they were lifted, and the quiet adoration of the moment.
I worked my way through the prescribed course load, each class in three- to six-week blocks. Everyone, whether a seasoned chef or a rookie, started in the same place: “Introduction to Gastronomy.” No longer could I cut into a plate of food, bring it to my lips, and smile with simple discovery. Chef Rosenblum taught us concentrated, studious awareness; she awakened all of our senses.
Blindfolds were de rigueur. One day we sampled ten kinds of lettuce until I found, with surprise, that I could distinguish romaine’s crunchy sweetness from iceberg’s watery bite, arugula’s peppered tendrils from the slightly bitter petals of baby spinach.
It didn’t stop there. As future chefs, we needed to glance down at a cup of white liquid and know whether it was skim milk, whole milk, or cream. Recognizing the slight curve of thick cream or the flat lines of skim milk soon became second nature. We learned to sniff out the difference between oregano and marjoram, a skill that could save us on a busy day in a disheveled kitchen. We stood in the humid, chilled stockroom, feeling for the long green point of an Anaheim pepper or the rounded nub of a jalapeño. Proper identification would keep us from inadvertently overspicing a dish.
Once our senses had been awakened, we were allowed into the kitchens. Each classroom released from under its door its own, signature scents: white wine and garlic, syrup and bacon, lemongrass and ginger. Behind those walls, I learned how to chiffonade basil, cut neat batons out of even the wonkiest potato, and make gallons of perfectly clear broth called “consommé” by removing impurities with a gelatinous web of egg whites.
In breakfast cookery, our drill-sergeant chef taught us how to make a perfect French omelet, tidy as a neatly folded blanket. There was one catch: I had only 90 seconds to create and deliver the dish to him on the other side of the busy kitchen. We lost marks if the buttercup-colored blanket was soiled with any flecks of brown or, like a Victorian showing her ankle, was crass enough to reveal any filling. I never thought I’d be able to do it, but, as Mom likes to say, practice really does make perfect.
I did it in 75.
The Perfect Omelet
A too-brown omelet, Chef always said, was never the fault of the hot pan but a lazy cook. This recipe is for those brave souls who may already have a delicious omelet recipe in hand, but enjoy the challenge of speed. Though we used clarified butter at the CIA (because it doesn’t smoke at high temperatures), I’ve substituted more readily available ghee (look for it in the dairy case). A recipe like this, simple though it seems, takes several Saturday mornings to perfect. Once the basics are mastered, fillings such as fried mushrooms or peppers may be added.
A few tips from the trenches:
• Have everything ready to go (eggs, ghee, filling, topping, plate, paper towel).
• Keep the eggs moving or they’ll set too quickly.
• Julia Child was right: Flip the pan with conviction. Otherwise the omelet might slide to the side or, worse, to the floor.
• The times indicated are mere suggestions—variations in burner intensity and pan thickness will affect how quickly the eggs cook. The shape of the eggs, whether they’re watery or fluffy, stiff or dry, is the best road map to a perfect omelet.
3 large eggs
1 good pinch salt
1 teaspoon ghee
Small handful of shredded cheese, like cheddar or Gruyère
Finishing touches:
A sprinkling of fresh, chopped parsley or chives
In a medium bowl, vigorously whisk the eggs with a pinch of salt. Add ghee to a 10-inch nonstick skillet and preheat over high heat for about 2 minutes.
0:00 Pour in well-beaten eggs—they should cackle like a hungry chicken when they hit the pan. Immediately stir them, making quick, tight circles with a heatproof spatula—keep them moving—until creamy curds form.
0:36 Use the spatula to smooth across the top of the wet curds until they are flat and even. Sprinkle the cheese down the middle. At this point, any other precooked fillings may be added, such as sliced mushrooms or peppers. By now the eggs should be mostly set. Prepare to fold the omelet in thirds. Make the first fold by lifting one edge and bringing it to the center of the omelet. Flip onto a plate.
1:15 To complete the fold, use a paper towel to tuck the final third under the omelet, toward the center. Enjoy this neat, rectangular roll with a happy sprinkle of parsley or chives.
Enough for 1 omelet
When Greg broke up with me, I’d been at the CIA for two months. Even after three years of dating, I knew it was for the best. But for the first time since I was 14, no boy was waiting in the wings to catch me. Instead of reveling in my newfound freedom, I staggered. One Friday after class, unasked and unannounced, I drove the 200 miles to his front door.
When I arrived, I waited for him to invite me in, but instead he came outside. We sat a few feet apart on the top step of the stoop. I didn’t say anything right away, though I’d rehearsed the entire drive.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” he finally said. His voice was flat.