Everything Is Under Control

by Phyllis Grant

  For the hundredth time that day, I tell myself that I am not cut out for this, that I am not strong enough, that I shouldn’t be here. I plan my escape: I will take a right at the top of the stairs instead of a left. I will head north up the alley, underneath the passenger bridge, and walk all the way home. No one will notice.

  I hear someone opening the door and I remember why I am here. I lift up the bottom corners of my apron, fill the cloth with a dozen passion fruit, fly out of the walk-in, up the stairs, and make a left back into the kitchen.

  Chef watches almost every single dish go out at the pass. And then he wants to see the plates as they come back. If a customer leaves behind more than a few bites of her dish, the server will get questioned. Is she just full? Did you ask her if she liked it? Please go find out.

  We are all caught up in Chef’s meticulousness. The pressure to deliver the perfect pine nut tart, the freshest ice cream, the loveliest berries, an impeccable tower of petit fours. That service, that hour, that minute, that dupe; it all matters more than anything in the world.

  Out of the blue one night, after three months of working in pastry, Chef puts me on the fish line. I don’t talk, I just follow the hands of the cook on my left, using my fingers to press the pink skin of the rainbow trout down into the searing hot oil in the pan. Just as the flesh turns opaque at the edges, a quick flip and it’s done. Right onto the plate with toasted pine nuts, mesclun, and sweet balsamic dressing. And then twenty more. And then they need me back in pastry.

  I feel like I’m on the wrong side. I want the heat. I want to touch the food more.

  Three months later, I ask Chef if he would consider moving me out of pastry and over to garde-manger.

  We line up shoulder to shoulder with our plastic cutting boards secured on moist kitchen towels, our faces locked and focused, our knives a frenzied militaristic blur, chopping the vegetables that The Family has just cleaned.

  The basement radio is cranked so high that we can’t hear our own breath. We just feel the music vibrating in our bones, the Spanish lyrics so loud and familiar and thought-obliterating that we all fall into line and get shit done.

  Chef hovers, watching our technique, so close I can smell his aftershave, so close I can feel his breath on my neck. Goose bumps travel down my triceps.

  Felicia, you are a mess.

  I retie my plastic-wrap belt, smooth out my apron, and wipe down my cutting board. As I chop my way down a bunch of chives with my left hand, I copy my neighbor’s technique: blade at a slant, fingers tucked under. My thumb cramps.

  You are bruising the chives.

  Oui, Chef.

  And you look really tired.

  A server taps me on the shoulder. Felicia, first order is in.

  I pack up my knife bag, stack the quart containers of prep on a sheet pan, and bound up the stairs to my garde-manger station.

  The morning prep guy is making the salad dressing in my station. His alcohol stench is more powerful than usual and makes me gag. As I unroll my knife bag, he reaches around me for the olive oil, his firm crotch pressing up to my ass, his breath exhaling into my ear. I push him off. As he squats down to place the salad dressing in the open low-boy refrigerator, his fingers trail down along my hamstring, knee, calf, his strong hand landing firmly around my ankle.

  I look down and ask him about his wife and kids. He snaps at me: Hurry up, Felicia, you are always late.

  On this, he is right. I am always late. I didn’t used to be. I have been working in garde-manger for what feels like years. But when I count the days, it’s fewer than thirty.

  I miss the Pastry Chef. I miss the chocolate soufflés. I miss scooping quenelles of ice cream. I miss the relative calm. I want to step it back. I don’t want this version.

  I bang out the remaining prep: chopped chives, parsley, and shallots. Once the dupes roll in, I can do nothing but plate.

  I lug buckets of oysters up from the basement and stack enough plates for the first twenty orders. I plug in my mini burner, retie my plastic-wrap belt, and ignore the electric ache that has been flashing in my heart every day this week before service.

  Without hesitation or self-doubt, the extern next to me brunoises the carrots for the soup and then juliennes the fennel for my salad. He’s only here for a few months. So helpful. So careful. So skilled. So ready to fly out the door the moment he can. He freaks when I borrow his knife. Careful. Phyllis. Wait. You never slide the knife edge across the cutting board. It will fuck up the edge. He lends me a copy of Marco Pierre White’s White Heat. He wants to be a rock-and-roll chef. I just want to make it through the next dinner service.

  Chef sneaks up behind me and tickles my lower back. He gently pulls my ponytail.

  You look like a cheerleader today, Felicia.

  He pulls yellowtail out of my low-boy refrigerator and asks me to smell it.

  No smell, Chef.

  He picks up one of my knives and slices off a piece of the fish to prepare a dish for a VIP. Without looking up, he says, Felicia, your knives are never sharp enough.

  Oui, Chef.

  He shifts his weight from side to side, mumbling to himself, furrowing his brow, components moving together as if he’s gathering ideas from the air. He does this every service. I only know how to follow a recipe. But he is making shit up as he goes along. And I love watching.

  He whisks together crème fraîche, fromage blanc, sherry wine vinegar, chopped chives, almond oil, salt, pepper. Never stop tasting, Felicia.

  He scoops some up with his finger to taste. I do the same. And then I wait for the next step. Sweat drips down the backs of my legs and into my boots.

  Do you have some blanched beans?

  Oui, Chef. Fava, lima, Romano, yellow wax, haricots verts.

  All of them, please.

  I follow his every move so that I can repeat the dish over and over again throughout the evening. The way he examines the beans, gently cradling them in his fingers before dropping each one down into the bowl. How he coats everything with the creamy, nutty mixture by quickly shifting the bowl away from his body and yanking back, away and back, away and back, as if he’s flipping a crêpe. I watch his hands. The path of his eyes. Tossing, tasting, adjusting. This is when I breathe. This is when I learn.

  The first order comes in. My chest gets all warm and prickly. Sweat pools in my bra. I yank my ponytail up into a tight bun and fall off a cliff for seven hours.

  Felicia?

  I feel Chef’s voice in my hands.

  No, no, no, no, please, not now, I mumble to myself.

  I run over to the pass. It is 6:00 p.m. and the expeditor is already drenched in sweat.

  Servers in starched shirts and bow ties line the mirrored wall. The first rush hasn’t hit. They look around for something to talk about.

  Chef steps away from the pass, turning his back on the yelling expeditor.

  Chef, we’re waiting on the cod. Come on!

  Chef places food in front of my face, expecting my lips to part.

  Merde, someone bring me a cod!

  Chef’s warm fingers slide into my mouth. I close my eyes so I don’t have to watch everyone watching me.

  Everything is up! Wipe the plates!

  I yank my head away, giving Chef’s salty fingertips only a quick swipe from the inside of my upper lip, promising myself this is all he’ll ever get.

  The servers pick opal basil and lemon thyme from dozens of potted herbs that line the mirrored wall opposite the pass.

  Let’s go.

  Garnish on. Plates up.

  Table ten.

  They move toward the dining room.

  Rattlesnake coats my tongue.

  Felicia, finito la musica?

  Sí.

  The dishwashers scrub the floor around me as I put lids on all the quart containers, wrap up the yellowtail, check that there is enough salad dressing for the next day’s lunch. It’s 1:00 a.m. Service is over. I take advantage of the empty fish flat tops and start cooking
slices of eggplant for the vegetable terrine in a dozen sauté pans.

  I wander into the empty dining room holding a gold-rimmed china plate filled with found scraps: sliced venison, cold potato purée, overcooked chocolate soufflé.

  I return to the kitchen, add a little more oil to the pans, flip the eggplant, and head back out to a padded Baroque chair. I pour myself wine from a deserted bottle. I wonder what it would be like to have enough money to just leave your wine behind.

  I flip the eggplant again.

  I pick up my wine and walk into the clean air-conditioned customer bathroom. I look in the mirror—at the bags under my eyes, the zits on my chin, the sallowness of my skin—and quickly turn away.

  I head back to the kitchen for another hour. Creamy, sweet eggplant only comes with time.

  I crouch down, lift up the back of my chef shirt, and cool my lower back on a stainless steel low-boy. I smile up at my friend on the meat line.

  Do you have any lamb popsicles available?

  Oui, Felicia. For you, anything.

  Will you sharpen my knives?

  Nope.

  You suck.

  Will you bike to Brooklyn with me this weekend, Felicia?

  Oui.

  I watch him open his oven and poke all the different cuts of meat.

  How do you know when that one is done?

  The pigeon? When it’s firm like an excited woman’s breast.

  I need to quit.

  He nods.

  I run into Chef on the stairs.

  Chef, can we talk?

  I want to tell him that I wake up crying.

  Felicia, taste this wine.

  I want to tell him that I fall asleep crying.

  Chef, I’ve been thinking really hard about something.

  I want to tell him that I am mortified when he sends a fancy glass of wine over to me and only me in front of the whole kitchen.

  He wraps my hand around a glass of wine. Do you like this wine?

  I want to tell him that he shouldn’t have moved me to garde-manger. That I wasn’t ready. That I can’t handle the six-day workweeks, the fifteen-hour days on my feet. That I may never be able to handle it.

  I hand back the glass of wine. Chef, I have to leave. I am giving you my two-week notice.

  Please leave my kitchen tonight.

  He walks down the stairs. I walk up.

  I throw my cooking boots into the dumpster and bike home. Feeling light. Feeling lost.

  I take a shower, scrubbing my body until it burns, trying to remove the restaurant from my hair, my skin, under my nails.

  I wrap my naked body around a sleeping M.

  I get a job working lunch service at a Japanese restaurant. Most days, I bust out hundreds of desserts in under three hours. While the rushes are huge, the pressure is low. The VIPs haven’t come for my desserts; they want the sashimi salad and the gold-flecked kampachi and the miso-marinated black cod. I am happily tucked away in my pastry station piping cursive bittersweet chocolate Happy Birthdays and carving kiwis into flowers and scooping yuzu sorbet. It’s just a job. It pays well. I sleep well. I don’t take any of it home. I have stopped crying. I have time to think about the rest of my life.

  M and I separate the Tone Loc from the Madonna. The George Michael from the Mozart. The Cure from the Kate Bush.

  After seven years, I want to know who I am without a partner.

  We separate the KitchenAid from the amplifier. The Shakespeare from the David Foster Wallace.

  I want to kiss other people.

  We separate the Diet for a Small Planet from the Desserts for Dummies. The Luc Besson from the John Hughes. The bong from the tea strainer.

  I live alone for the first time in my life. My West Village apartment. My dirty toilet. My New York Times. My neighbor who beats on the ceiling when he’s drunk and irritated by my 3:00 a.m. vacuuming. My nasturtiums on the fire escape. My Con Ed bill. My Advil. My bed. My loneliness.

  I turn away from the flat top to grab a sheet pan filled with ramekins. The tip of the sushi chef’s blade slides through my pants, right above my left knee, in and out of my leg quickly, smoothly, cleanly.

  At first, I feel nothing.

  I’m so sorry, Sakura.

  Blood starts trickling down my calf and into my boot.

  No problem. I am fine.

  Then comes the pain.

  Just twenty minutes before, I spied on him while he sharpened this knife. I wanted a lesson. But I was too shy to ask.

  I turn the flame off from underneath the ginger crème brûlée custard and run into the customer bathroom. I tear my chef pants off above the knee. The restaurant manager hands me cash and puts me in a cab. I enter the emergency room and hear screams. I step over streaks of blood. There’s a group of cops who just watched a man get thrown through a glass table and they’re all hanging around to see if he survives. Four hours later, a doctor checks me out. No stitches necessary, he says as he tapes me up with crosshatched Band-Aids, just watch out for those chefs.

  Round one. A chef. He sticks his tongue down my throat while pressing my bare back up against the metal grating of a closed bodega. He has a girlfriend. He promises to call me the next day. I listen to “Lightning Crashes” by Live for forty-eight hours straight. He never calls. Round one, over.

  A date. A drink. A walk. He’s gay and he doesn’t know it. No more round two.

  He is my writing teacher. He takes me out to dinner after class. He feeds me pasta and red wine. He touches my inner knee, he twirls my hair, he holds my cheeks. He tells me stories about hanging out with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He has done this too many times.

  He’s a comedian. He invites me to meet his friends, go skiing, move in. All on the first date. Round four. Over.

  He wants to start a writing group. He is getting divorced. I can feel his loneliness through the phone. I don’t call him back. No more round five.

  He tells me he loves how I look reading Philip Roth on the reclining bicycle at the gym. That he is attracted to my long neck, to my serious face, to the fact that I wouldn’t give him my phone number the first time we met. I can’t believe how much he likes to talk about food. How much he likes to drink gin. How pillowy his lips feel. I decide to cook risotto for him. For a little while, there is no round seven.

  I am twenty-six years old, at Columbia University, sitting next to very confident eighteen-year-olds.

  I don’t know how to e-mail or take notes or write a paper. I only know how to do triple pirouettes and press dough into a tart shell. But I have decided to get another undergraduate degree.

  I read the dictionary before going to sleep, hoping the new words will stick in my brain. Paucity, pith, hegemony, trope, atavism, hyperbole, dogma, trifecta. I try out the words. In papers about James Joyce. In bad poetry about regret and lost love and femininity. In handwritten letters to M that I never send.

  I run into M outside the Christopher Street subway station. He is so excited because he is going to Los Angeles for a month to star in a sitcom pilot.

  As I watch his lips move, all I can think is how I miss waiting for the subway with my head on his shoulder. I miss the way he tucks his fists under his chin while he sleeps. I miss walking into a party with him.

  He asks about my world. My freelance cookbook editing. My writing.

  I miss his Kate Bush CD. I miss watching Thirtysomething reruns. I miss his hand on top of my head when I can’t sleep. I miss kissing his cheekbones. I miss how hard he makes me laugh.

  I tell him I want to be a yoga teacher. He looks confused. We are used to making these big career decisions together, not playing rapid-fire catch-up on a street corner.

  I miss making him dinner.

  We hug goodbye and then we kiss and we kiss and we kiss. It feels sneaky and new. And then he walks east and I walk west.

  M comes home from Los Angeles and invites me over for dinner. I walk into his East Village ground-floor apartment and smile. His world minus my world
looks like Greece. Everything is white: the curtains, the floors, the sheets, the plates, the towels.

  His upstairs neighbor starts to sob uncontrollably. He tells me she does this every evening. He starts spending one night a week at my place. And then several nights a week. And then it’s as if we never lived apart.

  My grandmother Elizabeth proposes to my grandfather two weeks after they meet. He is too polite to say no.

  Will you go on a honeymoon with me to Elba?

  M puts down his silverware and stares at me.

  Are you asking me to marry you?

  I look down at the food on my plate. I can’t eat. I have made our favorite dinner: lamb popsicles, crunchy hearts of romaine, avocado bowls. I have spent more money on the wine than we can afford and drunk most of the bottle on my own. He takes another bite, as if the meditative chewing allows him to sift this idea through his body.

  He stops eating and moves over to the sofa. I rest my forehead on the table and wonder what I have done. He has always said there is no reason to get married. That he loves me. That I love him. That living together again is enough. I lift my head.

  We can have a big dinner party. With all our friends and family.

  He is so still. He is so stunned. He goes to bed.

  He thinks about it for a few days.

  I now pronounce you wife and husband. Phyllis, you may kiss the groom.

  I rise up onto my barefoot tippy-toes and kiss him hard. With tongue.

  And then we eat twelve cakes.

  We spend the morning looking downtown. There are no cars. They come later: driving too fast, speeding uptown, filled with people in suits covered in ash.