One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  “You think I could forget?” I say as I pick out the strips of pimento from his serving, and we both dig into the warm food. One order is enough for a family of four, and there’s crusty bread and pats of butter.

  “I’ve read all your schoolwork, all the stories you wrote,” I tell him. “They were really good.”

  “I know,” he says. (Modesty was never his strong suit. The boys in his class used to fight to see who would sit next to him in the lunchroom. When his mother asked him why he said, “Because I’m famous.”)

  “I don’t know which story I like best,” I say. “It’s a tough choice. Maybe ‘How to Walk My Dog.’ I like when you say, ‘Find a tree.’ ”

  “You don’t have to pick,” he says. “You can like them all.”

  He’s looking at me earnestly, and I have the wish that this moment would last forever, just me and Max and our chicken and rice.

  I spoon out a second helping of chicken and rice and butter a piece of bread for him.

  “I like what you wrote about money,” I say. “ ‘Children should be paid to go to school, like thirty dollars,’ ” I read. “ ‘Why don’t they get paid?’ ”

  But Max has lost interest. He’s finished his chicken and rice and is on his way to the kitchen freezer and is soon back with a carton of Häagen-Dazs ice cream and two bowls and spoons. That’s my cue to get the sprinkles—not chocolate, the rainbow sprinkles are the ones he likes, hot pink, green, blue, white, yellow, orange, and red. He sprays them over his mountain of vanilla ice cream, so thick the spoon is dense with them as he fills it up. I pick some sprinkles off his lip, and we sit looking at each other and eating ice cream together.

  Our spoons are scraping the bottoms of the bowls. Lunch will soon be over and he’ll have to leave. I feel a wave of anguish wash over me. Our time is coming to an end. “You know that La Caridad may soon be gone, don’t you?” I say. “It’s going to be bulldozed to the ground. A high-rise will be going up where it is now.”

  “I know,” he says. “But I’ll never forget it. Will you?”

  “Never,” I say.

  Max takes the bowls into the kitchen, and when he comes back I hold him tightly, my lips pressed against his cheek, hearing the soft sound of his breath and feeling his bones against my chest as he slips away.

  “I love you, Bama,” he says.

  “Oh, Max, I love you, too,” I say.

  I walk him out to the elevator. The door opens, and he’s gone.

  Standing in the empty hallway I have a sudden recollection of Emily Gibbs in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, learning how painful it is after death to go back among the living. Just as unbearable, I think, for the living to have one last chance to be with the dead.

  Phyllis Raphael is the author of the memoir Off the King’s Road: Lost and Found in London. Winner of a PEN Award for short fiction, her stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, the Village Voice, Vogue, Boulevard, Creative Nonfiction magazine, and the Norton anthology The Seasons of Women. She has taught creative writing at the New School, at New York University, and in the undergraduate creative writing program at Columbia University.

  — 18 —

  “. . . she had become a global culinary superstar. The Beyoncé of Bolognese. The Adele of Antipasti. The Rihanna of Risotto.”

  STEPHANIE PIERSON (STUDENT, FRIEND) AND MARCELLA HAZAN

  I know this will come as a surprise to her husband, Victor, and their son, Giuliano, but from the time I was about twenty-six until my early thirties, Marcella Hazan wasn’t just one of the most influential women in my life; she was like a mother to me.

  The job was open since my own mother basically abdicated early on. (“What changed the most for you once you had children?” someone asked her. “I could no longer afford designer shoes,” my mother replied, without even a touch of irony.)

  Marcella was rarely described as maternal. If anything, quite the opposite. Just Google “someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly,” and Marcella’s name will probably pop up.

  And yet the “Author Who Changed the Way Americans Cook Italian Food” (from her New York Times obit) changed the world for me. I do not think I thanked Marcella for all she gave me when she was alive. And by the time I would have told her, she had become a global culinary superstar. The Beyoncé of Bolognese. The Adele of Antipasti. The Rihanna of Risotto.

  I first imprinted myself on Marcella when I signed up to take cooking classes in her New York City apartment in the early seventies. I was neither famous nor forthcoming. Many students in the class were both. Just how unfamous and reserved was I? When Marcella announced to us that she would be teaching a cooking course in Bologna, I remember telling her, “Count me in. I’m coming.” She looked at me and said, “You?”

  “You?”?! Ouch. I went to Bologna, where we got to know and really like each other. It could have been my zeal at the stove under her watchful eye, or it could have been the warmth of many glasses of grappa after a dinner one night on a class trip to Parma. Because Marcella could be cranky, critical, short. (A student stirring a stockpot in our class in Bologna: “Marcella, how do you know when this will be ready?” Marcella: “When it is done.”) But after my trip to Bologna, she was never anything but kind to me.

  In short, my mother fed me. Marcella nourished me.

  She gave me my first taste of fried zucchini blossoms, Jerusalem artichokes, cranberry beans, the best bollito misto in Bologna. I would say you can’t top that, but actually I can: Marcella introduced me to Julia Child and blood orange juice on the very same day. She taught me magic tricks: stick two lemons in the cavity of a chicken—don’t add liquid, don’t baste, don’t do a thing—and you will get the sweetest, juiciest, most sublime chicken you have ever tasted. She taught me simplicity: to make her rich, thick tomato sauce, all you do is put canned tomatoes (the best canned tomatoes) in a saucepan with a halved onion and butter and simmer for forty-five minutes.

  She taught me patience: peeling fresh chestnuts. (Enough said.) She taught me exactitude: rolling pasta. She taught me the proper disdain for what isn’t honest and authentic. Re: commercially grated parmesan cheese: “It is of no interest whatever to Italian cooking” (from this page of The Classic Italian Cookbook).

  From Marcella, I learned how to chop, how to turn out evenly sized crespelle (well, to even know that crespelle existed! A wonder! Right up there with grappa!), the difference between tortelloni and tortellini. She beamed when I cleaned the squid perfectly. Praised me when my risotto simmered away happily, not too dry, not too wet; not too low a heat, not too high. The day I learned to caramelize? Marcella gave me a hug.

  Now, almost fifty years later, my Marcella cookbooks are dog-eared, ragged, ravaged by small red stains from cabbage, dried traces of grease from frying an eggplant, the soft imprint of a grain of Arborio, the tiniest crumb of I-don’t-know-what on the recipe for Spaghetti with Tuna Sauce.

  THE INVITATION.

  “Dear Marcella, come to lunch from the Great Beyond, if you can manage it, so I can thank you properly. I hope you’re free.”

  “Dearest Stevie. It has been forever. Yes! And could I ask you to bring me something?”

  OUR LUNCH.

  Well, I couldn’t possibly cook for Marcella. (I actually did, just once. A dinner party at my New York apartment. Afterward, Marcella told me how much she disliked my opera stage manager husband and how much better she had liked my journalist ex-boyfriend. Unprompted. Duly noted. I made a James Beard roast, one I had cooked to perfection a million or so times before, but somehow, that night, it took more than three hours to be done. We ate around 11:30 p.m. How do you say “disaster” in Italian?

  “Dear Marcella. Let’s go to Marta. It’s on East Twenty-Ninth Street, right off Park. We’ll have fun. We can reminisce. I will never forget when our class picture was on the front page of the biggest newspaper in Bologna. I think the Italians were floored—where were our nonnas? Why did we have to pay to learn to cook?! Do you re
member that?”

  “Dearest Stevie. Of course. And I will never forget the first moment you walked into the big kitchen in Bologna. You were so shocked to see that Maria, our beloved New York cooking assistant, was there to be our pasta-making expert. You ran to her, hugged her, and burst into tears.”

  Back then, I was soft. Marcella was al dente.

  A table for two at 1:00 p.m. Marta, Twenty-Ninth Street right off Park Avenue. Italian but not the kind of American Italian that Marcella hated. Fresh ingredients. Nothing complicated. Presentations that weren’t meant to be Instagrammable. Everyone was Danny Meyer–friendly. The food was Danny Meyer–satisfying.

  The place was full. I was waiting by the entrance. An ooh and aah of foodie acknowledgment when Marcella walked in. We hugged. Self-assured, as sleekly blond as ever, with that disarming, slightly crooked smile that I loved. Marcella was wearing a pale blue cashmere turtleneck with a black pencil skirt. A double strand of pearls lit up her face. She gracefully sat down on the banquette across from me, taking in everything, seeing what was on every plate, in every glass, not missing a thing. The waiter handed us menus.

  A glass of Frascati for me. A Jack Daniel’s for Marcella. And we ordered appetizers. To share. Crisp zucchini fries. Tomato risotto croquettes with mozzarella. Grilled baby artichokes. Wood-fired mushrooms.

  “How lovely to be here,” Marcella said. “And with you! And I am starving! But why now? I haven’t seen you in so many years.”

  “Well,” I said, “I wanted to thank you. I didn’t get a chance earlier.”

  We toasted.

  “For everything. By teaching me to cook your food, you changed my life. I came to life. I grew up at your table. Everything was foreign, and then nothing was. Food became everything it should be. Love. Discovery. Confidence. Contentment. Empowerment. Passion. Joy. Giving. And you gave it all to me.”

  “That is a lot,” said Marcella. “I had no idea.

  “And, Stevie, I hope you brought what I asked for. My New York Times obituary.”

  “I did,” I said, and took it out of my handbag.

  “Maybe it’s vanity,” Marcella said, “or curiosity. But I want to hear what it said about me. And by the way,” she added, “this food is delicious!”

  “Not as good as yours,” I ventured.

  “Oh, not at all!” Marcella agreed. “But maybe we should try the chicken meatballs with ricotta. . . .”

  Of course. After we ordered that, I told her that Kim Severson had written the obit. Kim, who I had interviewed once for an article. A gifted writer who was as down to earth as Marcella.

  “A good choice,” Marcella said. “Read it to me.”

  “The headline,” I said, “is ‘Marcella Hazan, Author Who Changed the Way Americans Cook Italian Food, Dies at 89.’ Frankly, it’s a rave. A total rave. Lidia Bastianich called you ‘the first mother of Italian cooking in America.’ ”

  “Not in the world?” Marcella asked. “Just America?”

  “Oh, Marcella! America is a big country!” I laughed, scanning the page. “Kim went on to say that you ‘embraced simplicity, precision and balance’ in your cooking. And she said that you ‘abhorred the overuse of garlic in much of what passed for Italian food in the United States, and would not suffer fools afraid of salt or the effort it took to find quality ingredients.’ ”

  Marcella asked, “Did she say that I hated when people put lemon peel in their espresso? That Italian coffee should never be reheated? That I wrote in one of my cookbooks that in most parts of this country it is easier to find a unicorn than a really good piece of veal? And in another, I said, ‘If an olive oil brand has become familiar to you through advertising, stay away from it.’ ”

  “No,” I replied. “But Victor . . .”

  “Aah, how much I miss Victor,” Marcella said. “The love of my life.”

  “In the obit,” I said, “Victor is quoted as saying, ‘A lot of people had encounters with her because she knew in her mind, in her heart, exactly how things were supposed to be. That is what made her cooking great. Marcella wasn’t easy, but she was true. She made no compromises with herself with her work or with her people.’ ”

  “What is that expression?’ Marcella asked me. “ ‘She took no prisoners’?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “You took no prisoners.” And I added, “People loved you for that. For your honesty and integrity. And, Marcella, there weren’t just obits. There were so many tributes and celebrations. The day after you left us, the Times asked cooks what their favorite Marcella dishes were. You cannot believe how many people responded.”

  “Really,” said Marcella, with a smile on her face. “And the dishes?”

  “Oh, everything,” I said. “From osso buco to your pesto to your tomato sauce to lasagna to your Bolognese sauce to Roast Chicken with Lemons. And, Marcella, they got you. Who you were. Your candor. Your caring. Your dry wit. The way you could totally demolish something but with good intentions and a good heart . . .”

  “Uh-oh,” said Marcella, “that sounds intriguing. What do you mean?”

  “Well,” I said. “Here’s what a woman in Indiana wrote to the Times.” I read it out loud. “She said, ‘Marcella Hazan has been my hero since I started cooking seriously in my twenties. Many of her recipes remind me of my Italian grandmother’s dishes, which were never written down. I own six of Marcella’s books and have prepared about one thousand of her recipes over the years. I agree about her Bolognese and Roast Chicken with Lemons, which I make regularly. Two of my current favorites are the Friulli-Style Vegetable Soup and Broccoli Potato Soup from her Marcella Cucina book, which is among her best.”

  She went on to say, “One last thing, I had the good fortune to meet Marcella twice. The first time, we sat together at a food and wine event where she was being ignored as everyone buzzed around the trendy chefs. She picked up a crab leg, took one bite, looked at me, and said, ‘There’s nothing good to eat here.’ ”

  Marcella leaned back and roared with laughter. “ ‘There’s nothing good to eat here!’ I remember that! Let’s take no prisoners! Let’s eat!”

  She smiled. By that time Marcella was eating the pizza with everything fabulous: sopresatta, guanciale, pork sausage, mozzarella, Grana Padano. I was enjoying the pizza with very little—the Margherita. After that, an arugula salad. We ate slowly. And happily.

  “Oh, Marcella,” I said, “I feel like you should know this. Growing up, our dining table was a battlefield. My mother would leave in tears after an argument with my father. When we were very young, my brother, Sam, and I were often sent away to eat in the kitchen since Sam was too antsy to sit still in the dining room. When we were older, well, it didn’t get better. Every night we had soup. One night we were eating cream of tomato soup. ‘None for me,’ I said. Silence. My father looked up and said: ‘You like tomatoes, don’t you?’ Yes, I replied. ‘You like cream, don’t you?’ Yes, I said. ‘Well then,’ said my father, banging his spoon down in a cold fury, ‘you like cream of tomato soup, goddamn it!’ And he made me eat the soup.”

  “Another glass of Frascati,” Marcella told the waiter as soon as she could catch his eye. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You didn’t deserve that. How awful.”

  “Oh, Marcella, I know I didn’t. But I’m fine now. The happiness and beauty of your food healed me.”

  Marcella took my hand and held it.

  “Dearest Stevie,” Marcella said. “A splendid lunch. I loved every bite and every word written about me. Maybe by now it is easier to find a good piece of veal than a unicorn. So I would edit that out of the next printing—maybe you could see to that?”

  I nodded.

  She went on. “But I can’t see you again. You know that. Just know you have made me very happy. And I am so proud of you. They could have served the pizzas a little hotter.”

  Oh, Marcella! A declaration of love. After all these years.

  “Dessert?” I asked her.

  “I’m full,” Marcella said.<
br />
  “Me too,” I told her, taking her hand in mine. “Me too.”

  And then she stood up, and left so quickly I didn’t have time to give her a kiss or a hug or cry. (I’m still soft.)

  I watched as she rushed out of the restaurant and hailed a cab and disappeared.

  And then the waiter said, “Just so you know, she’s taken care of everything.” How did he know?

  Stephanie Pierson is a New York advertising copywriter and journalist. She has written lifestyle, design, and food articles for the New Times, New York magazine, Atlantic Monthly, the Huffington Post, and Food52. After she fell in love with Marcella Hazan’s cooking, she found herself inexplicably smitten with brisket. She wrote the definitive (it’s the only) book about brisket: The Brisket Book: A Love Story with Recipes, published by Andrews McMeel. She knows that everybody has the best brisket recipe ever. And that you have the best brisket recipe ever!

  — 19 —

  “And honestly, did I really want to see my mother, dead by her own choice since 2003, over a Cobb salad or an omelet? No, I did not.”

  MARGARET HEILBRUN (DAUGHTER) AND CAROLYN HEILBRUN AND HER PSEUDONYM, AMANDA CROSS

  My mother, Carolyn Heilbrun, always liked to sleep well into the mornings and never met anyone for lunch. I didn’t even consider suggesting that she and I have lunch together, so well were my mother’s absolute ways of living familiar to me.

  True, she was now dead. Would she, in death, prove more amenable to lunch? It seemed to me unlikely. And, honestly, did I really want to see my mother, dead by her own choice since 2003, over a Cobb salad or an omelet? No I did not.

  Over hard liquor was how we used to meet each other in her latter days. At a bar near my parents’ Upper West Side apartment. I used to work nearby, and she and I would meet just after 5:00 p.m., when no one else was in this particular dive. She’d order a gin martini with olives, and I’d get a whiskey sour, a kind of drinking that neither of us indulged in at home.