I light a cigarette and inhale menthol smoke as often and as deeply as one cigarette will allow, all for that two-second dopamine buzz that makes space in my brain for the belief that life won’t always feel like this.
I am a very good dancer. But I will never be a great one.
All I want is to go home and eat my mom’s roast chicken.
It’s small. It’s filled with roaches. It’s coated with the stink and stickiness of the previous ten tenants. But it’s mine. My first kitchen. With a gas stovetop and an oven with a broiler drawer. The freezer has a two-inch border of ice but it’s big enough for two pints of ice cream for my new roommate and me. I have a place to collect condiments. I buy a dish towel and an apron. I open my mom’s recipe book and follow her cursive through the chopping of the onion, the toasting of the rice, the never ever lifting of the lid until the timer goes off. I end up with a pot of brown rice. Her words work.
An actor or a stockbroker or a film director sits across from me at a diner or a bar or on a park bench reciting his overused script of it’s so nice to be out with a beautiful girl, you are so different, so special, so cultured. And off we go to watch a foreign film or see an art exhibit at the Whitney or visit his favorite drama bookstore. We end up back at his teeny tiny apartment or black marble penthouse or West Side brownstone where we roll around and talk and roll around and talk, pressing body parts to body parts because sometimes that’s enough. And then he reminds me of who is hanging over us: the beautiful homecoming queen or aspiring model who never ventures uptown or fiancée back in Charlotte. He says I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I really shouldn’t until bam he lets go and says she would probably be fine with us having sex because she is a very open girl and in that moment I get mature and moral beyond my eighteen years and say this is not right, let’s just fall asleep and see how we feel in the morning. I leave before he wakes up and do the walk of shame through Lincoln Center with my smeared mascara and the previous night’s carefully chosen dress, feeling like the best person in the world because I’ve saved his relationship. I power through the forty blocks home with my light coffee and a slow-building regret: why didn’t I just sleep with him because at least I’d have that.
For my second Thanksgiving away from home, I take the train to Pittsburgh to visit friends at Carnegie Mellon.
The air is bitingly cold. The landscape is bleak. The East Coast just feels fucked up.
But there is a comforting sameness to our failed romantic entanglements, our lack of focus, our existential angst. We have taken a few too many steps outside our comfortable worlds and we’re all ready to run back home to California.
Their apartment is huge, two floors perched above a pizza parlor. The kitchen is large enough to comfortably accommodate our dysfunctional group. We fumble our way through planning our first Thanksgiving dinner. Even though I have never done this before, I find myself in charge.
Before bed, I tear up the challah so that it gets stale for the next day’s stuffing. I study the map of recipes written by my mom. My entire childhood Thanksgiving experience is on paper. Mashed potatoes. Mincemeat pie. Creamed onions.
I can’t sleep. I am scared to begin.
I get up early to take the turkey out of the fridge and bring it to room temperature. I dice onions and sauté them with a stick of butter. I add celery and seasonings, the stale bread, and chicken stock. I can hear my parents’ and my grandparents’ voices. More salt. Taste. More liquid. Taste. More poultry seasoning. That’s it. Now stop. The bread will soften. The turkey juices will flavor the stuffing. Don’t overdo it.
I carefully separate the turkey skin from the flesh, making room for slices of cold butter. I press the stuffing in both ends of the bird, sew it all up with large scrappy stitches, and wrap the string a few extra times around the ends of the drumsticks. Just in case. I don’t want a blowout. And then I tie a knot and hope for the best. It all feels very fragile, intimate.
But I don’t know when it’s done. How long it should rest. How to carve it. What’s safe. What’s dangerous. All the things that aren’t written down on the recipe pages. I call my parents with questions every hour until the turkey is on the kitchen table.
He buzzes me in.
I walk up the lopsided stairs, hearing the clanking of dishes from each apartment, smelling three floors of family dinners.
He doesn’t know that I have been crushing on him for weeks, following him around school, getting as close as I can on the stairs, trying to hear what he is listening to on his Walkman, once almost reaching out and touching his shirt.
He is waiting in the open door. I slip past him. I already love his faded Levi’s, his white T-shirt, his smell.
There is no table, no bed. There are no chairs. Just French movie posters on the walls, a futon, a jar of tomato sauce in the kitchenette, a pile of Doc Martens in the corner, a stack of The New York Times that comes up to my knees.
I feel unsteady from the steaming furnace, the tilting floorboards, my racing heart.
We get stoned and watch The Big Blue, a movie with dolphins and deep-sea diving and Rosanna Arquette. Halfway through, he pauses the VCR.
Are you hungry, Phyllis?
I sit on the floor and watch him melt fourteen cloves of finely chopped garlic into olive oil. As he pours the jar of tomato sauce into the hot oil, it splatters up the white high-gloss kitchenette wall. He sets the floor with black plastic place mats and carefully folded cloth napkins.
The snow blows sideways past the windows. We fall asleep back to back, hands to ourselves.
Six weeks in and he is shaking.
Phyllis?
I am one large heart.
Matthew?
I get up early before dance class just to experience the in-love version of my morning routine. The sky is bluer. Cheese Danishes taste better. My grands jetés are higher.
When we’re not kissing, M and I talk about food.
We walk around the West Village and peek into the French bistros we can’t afford.
We wait in line on the Upper West Side for over an hour to eat apple pancakes, buttermilk waffles with bacon, paprika home fries, and cream biscuits with strawberry butter.
We spend a week’s worth of food money on a dozen ravioli filled with butternut squash and sage. We carefully boil the precious pillows and then drown them in garlicky tomato sauce.
I can’t get through the Juilliard lobby fast enough. I wait for the elevator with musicians, their instruments glued to their bodies.
I throw The New York Times and a pack of Marlboro Lights down on my favorite corner table in the cafeteria and pull out the crisp food section. I don’t want to read it yet because then it will be gone and I’ll have to wait for another week.
I eat the streusel top off my enormous blueberry muffin and sip my light coffee. I look out at the yellow-cab blur at the intersection of Sixty-Sixth and Broadway. The morning light makes me hopeful. I finally let myself open the food section and flip through until I find the latest restaurant review. I read it over and over again.
I head one flight up to the dance studio and start my warm-up. As I demi-plié, demi-plié, grand plié, I am thinking only about grilled monkfish and chocolate soufflés with molten centers.
I walk through Manhattan with a warm six-month-old baby strapped to my chest. I walk to stay awake. I walk because that’s what nannies do. Playing mom comes naturally to me, but parenting someone else’s child is the loneliest of boredoms. I am twenty-two.
I tell the baby my thoughts on everything. The never-ending winter. How much I love the sticky buns at the bakery on Chambers Street. How bored I am with my café job selling hazelnut coffee and oat bran muffins. How frustrated I am by the previous day’s audition.
I failed before I even walked into the room.
The tenth one I’ve been to since I graduated from Juilliard. How they pin a piece of paper to my chest. How one small group at a time, we walk out into the middle of the room. How the producers have us t
urn to face the back of the room so they can see the shapes of our asses.
So humiliating, little one.
Pirouettes on the right. And the left. And then they teach us the audition sequence. How I step out into the middle of the room. How my mind goes blank.
I panicked. I ran up Broadway. All the way home.
I stop under a passenger bridge that straddles two buildings and stare up at an airy loft filled with a life that I think I want.
Someday, I will have morning glories weaving up my very own fire escape.
My rocking and yammering have put the baby to sleep. I turn the corner and see models and lawyers and Wall Streeters slipping out of limos and into a restaurant. I sneak in the front door. The air smells fancy, fermented.
I leave before anyone sees me and go around to the back. Cooks slip out to lean against the brick wall, to take quick drags of cigarettes. They all seem rushed and guilty. Each opening of the kitchen door lets me sneak a peek into their bright world.
I watch an army of cooks in crisp white shirts and aprons, red-faced, sweating, barking out orders, heads down, arms reaching and stirring, plucking herbs and flipping fish and testing sauces with tasting spoons.
The industrial kitchen fan pumps a mash-up of lunch fumes out into the alley.
I want my hair to smell like chocolate and garlic and fish.
I want to lean in and carefully place the roasted beets next to the potato purée.
I want a purpose.
I rock the baby, hugging him tight, his back to my belly. All I want is to unstrap him, hand him to the next person walking by, enter the kitchen, and never look back.
M and I have been together for three years. For my twenty-third birthday, we indulge in a four-hour restaurant marathon of Belon oysters, rabbit, pigeon and foie gras wrapped in Savoy cabbage, quince purée, eggplant and goat cheese terrine, wild striped bass, monkfish, lobster with vanilla bean, sweetbreads, snippy discussions about the actress who keeps leaving M poems on the drama board, venison, potato purée, crème fraîche, balsamic reduction, quark and chocolate and passion fruit soufflés, a solo walk around the block, crème brûlée, angry tears, pine nut tarts, Concord grape and chocolate sorbets, hand-holding, prune Armagnac and vanilla bean ice creams, the tracing of M’s life lines on his palm, three tiers of petit fours, homemade chocolates, more tears, Sauternes, a staggering bill.
We cab home. I try to kiss M. He says he might throw up on me. He is so full. I am so altered.
M guides my body down until the back of my head rests in his lap. I bend my knees and tuck my feet under me. Midtown flashes by. He gently drags his fingers through my hair. I tell him I want to be a chef.
When my grandmother Phyllis is working full-time toward her Ph.D. in psychology, my mom does much of the cooking. She is seventeen.
She and my grandmother mutually mark up the margins of Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. TOO RICH. ADD EXTRA VANILLA. LESS SUGAR. MORE SALT. DON’T OVERMIX. GREAT RECIPE! GOOD FOR A LARGE GROUP. BLAND.
Every day, after work at the café, I continue cooking my way through Lindsey Shere’s Chez Panisse Desserts, Julia Child’s The Way to Cook, The Culinary Institute of America Cookbook, and Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible.
On the weekends, I volunteer at a French bakery, writing down everything I see and hear.
Wait for the flourless chocolate cakes to rise, drop, and then crack.
Warm the egg whites before beating for greater volume.
Wait for the sponge cake to pull away from the sides of the sheet pan.
The lemon cake is done if it springs back when you press it with your finger.
Knock on the bread to see if it sounds hollow.
I think I am ready for a restaurant kitchen.
I am in the way.
Hot behind you.
Everyone is yelling.
Coming through. On your left.
It’s my first day as a pastry assistant at a large restaurant that has one of the busiest lunch services in Midtown. Lawyers and agents fill the tables. Arugula salads and chicken breasts stuffed with goat cheese fill their plates.
Pick. Up. Pick up now. And eighty-six the foie.
While plating desserts, the Pastry Chef tells me what to do.
When you’re done with lunch service, please bake off the chocolate chip cookies. You will need to peel and core a minimum of twenty apples a day. I’ll talk you through the tarte tatin when we have a little more time. For the ice cream custard, you’ll find the chinois and the bain-marie downstairs by the walk-in. Oh, and the 10x is in the pantry next to the linens. Oui, Chef! VIP desserts coming up. Pick up table ten!!!! Fuck. I need some runners. Would you bring me a few hotel pans? Someone keeps taking my stash.
I don’t understand.
Read off the dupes for me, will you? I want to make sure we have enough cheesecake to get through service. How many all day?
I am panicking.
How. Many. Cheesecakes.
She points to the tickets that are lined up above the pastry station.
I try to decipher the scribbles. Five cheesecakes?
She double-checks the orders.
Five. Yes. All day. That’s right. You should put your hair back or Chef will say something inappropriate. Buy some boots or clogs. Something with a hard toe. Knives fall.
She yells to the dishwasher: Por favor. Can you wash tres sheet pans? For the new girl. She has a thousand cookies to make. Gracias. Oh, and Phyllis, please chop these pecans while I get some family meal. You want some? Looks pretty decent today.
I ask where I can find the knives to chop the nuts.
You don’t have your own knives?
I stop asking questions.
Six months in and I have experienced the obscenely long hours and witnessed the fire hazards, rampant drug use, and misogynistic everything. I have also learned that I am allergic to flour when it’s in the air, which is constant in the pastry room. I sneeze a lot.
I still want this more than ever.
On my day off, I go back to the restaurant where M and I had the marathon meal. I eat lunch and drink enough wine to work up the courage to meet the Pastry Chef. He invites me into the kitchen and shows me around. I ask him if he is hiring. He tells me to call the following week. I do. Nothing. I call the next week. Nothing. I call every Friday for three months. And then:
Phyllis. Thanks for calling. Someone just quit. Can you start Monday?
I float up on my tippy-toes, lengthen my arms as far as they will go, and reach up to the highest rack of the pastry oven to check on the mini tart shells. My jaw is tight. My stomach is a circle of knots. It is my third day working in pastry. The fish line watches me.
I hear she’s a ballet dancer.
The shells are held in place with small weights to keep them from puffing up into balloons. I tip the sheet pan toward my face. I can almost see. Just one more inch, just a bit more, I almost have it.
The heavy sheet pan is more than I can support. A hot mess of dough and metal slides down my body—the tumbling avalanche so loud the entire kitchen stops and stares. I drop down to the ground to clean up, burning my fingertips over and over again as I pick up the weights.
I hike my pink bike up on my shoulder and walk down the stairs to the basement.
I pass a line cook and ask him what kind of fish he is carrying. Can’t talk, can’t talk, can’t talk, Chef needs this now, Felicia. Sorry.
A prep guy squeezes past me, hugging a large bag of mesclun to his body.
The dishwasher—covered in sweat and grease and a mist of dirty water—leaps up the stairs two at a time with a stack of sheet pans.
Someone is always running.
A dozen voices welcome me: Felicia! They are The Family. They wash every vegetable that hits every plate. They scrub the floors. They lift the heaviest pots. They clean up the vomit in the bathrooms, in the hall, on the sidewalk. They fix the mistakes.
There is always too much to do.
I shove my bike in the storage room behind flats of eggplants and tomatoes and raspberries that need to be inventoried. The chef shirts have fallen down into a puddle of dirty water. There is a large clean one on top. I remove my sweatshirt and quickly button the scratchy starchy white shirt up over my white tank top and sports bra. I pull down the remaining chef pants from the top shelf. All extra-smalls.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I dig through my locker and find a large pair of chef pants tucked behind my work boots. I tear off a three-foot piece of plastic wrap, swing it behind me like a jump rope, pull it into my lower back, and yank the two ends out in front of me until they won’t stretch anymore. I thread it through the belt loops and tie the ends into a plastic bow. My body is hidden. I can work.
I listen.
Chef lives at the flat top next to the pass. He barely lifts his head. He moves his arms over pots and plates, glancing up to motion to a cook to bring the sauce, or flashing two fingers in response to How long on the bass?
I live twenty feet away in pastry.
Chef speaks softly but his voice travels across the fish line, down the pastry line, over the roar of the convection oven, straight into my ear.
Felicia, what did you do last night?
I can’t even remember what day it is. I yank the sleeves of my chef shirt down to hide dozens of red, blistery burns that line my inner arms.
Felicia, I’m going to need passion fruit for the VIP fish dish.
Oui, Chef.
Full-tilt run downstairs to the walk-in refrigerator. I close the heavy metal door and sit down on an overturned plastic bucket. The piercingly cold air slips through my nostrils and down into my lungs, making me cough. I eat a handful of raspberries from Chile.
Everything Is Under Control Page 2