Luscious Lemon

by Heather Swain

  When I started this place, I put together the best crew I’d ever met. Franny and I hadn’t cooked together since we’d dragged ourselves across Europe, a trip that left our friendship in shambles. Despite our falling-out, I never lost track of her. When it came time to open Lemon, I enticed her away from a busy bar in SoHo. She wasn’t hard to convince. Ernesto walked out of a giant Italian joint in the Bronx and brought his cousin Manuel, fresh off the plane from some tiny Ecuadorian hill town, to do our prep and clean up. Makiko came with me from a pan-Asian monstrosity dedicated to fusing the worst of all cuisines. I stole Melanie, the hostess, from a bar down the street where I used to drink after my shifts at the last bistro where I worked. And I pinched Kirsten and Lyla from my favorite pseudo-diner on the Lower East Side.

  I cajoled, bribed, and promised all of them anything they wanted to come work with me. Swore to them that we would be chummy. Comrades in our quest for dazzling the chow hounds and foodies, the Emeril LaGasse watchers and Nigella Lawson wannabes who come in every night and comment on the temperature of the wine and whether the chicken is organic or not. I claimed that I would be a different kind of chef, never making empty vile threats with a shining cleaver poised above my head nor running a revolving door of support staff through the kitchen.

  Of course, over the past year, I’ve broken every one of those promises. Repeatedly. I’ve hired, fired, and lost twenty-three waitstaff, bartenders, and line cooks, often due to my own stupidity and shortsightedness. I’ve consistently overruled Franny and Ernesto, even though they usually have better judgment than I do. Scared Makiko witless with my temper tantrums and threatened Melanie more times than I care to admit. But in the end, they’ve stuck by me through all of my transgressions, trespasses, fits and starts, firings, yellings, and bad-mouthing. I’m grateful to them for their loyalty. I admire them for their brazenness to stay. Of course, I’ll never tell them that. They’d think I’d been slurping absinthe from a sippy cup.

  An order comes across the printer for three radish and butter sandwich appetizers. I quickly slice a warm baguette and slather the soft insides with butter, then shove my hand into an empty radish container on the prep line.

  “Manuel!” I holler toward the back. “Where the fuck are the radishes?”

  By the time I’ve said it, he’s abandoned his sink full of giant pots and scrambled over boxes of passion fruit and mangoes and bags of basmati rice and disappeared into the walk-in.

  The printer grinds away more tickets. I rip them off and call the orders. “Baby greens, beet and endive, two roasted pepper goats. Mushroom tart, sausage sampler, lamb shank, trout, and rare filet. Another radish. Is there a freaking radish lovers’ convention in town tonight or what? Manuel!”

  “Si. Got it!” he calls from the back.

  While I wait for him to slice the radishes, I lean against the counter and close my eyes. My feet ache, my back hurts, my head is pounding. I have an oil slick on my forehead. I’m getting a zit on my chin the size of a cantaloupe. And I’m running on about two-and-a-half hours of sleep. This has been my state for over twelve months, and there’s no end in sight. How could this all be worth it? I ask myself every night.

  Then the peppery fragrance of the freshly chopped radishes hits my nose, and I am back at my grandmother’s kitchen table in Carroll Gardens. On warm spring Saturdays we munched tissue-thin slices of red radishes stacked on crusty buttered baguettes with a pinch of kosher salt and squeeze of fresh lemon. My grandmother grew the radishes behind her house in a small garden next to my mother’s pear tree. They were always the first vegetables of spring, when the dirt was warm and moist from all the rain. The baguettes came from Monteleone’s Bakery on Court Street, the place where my grandfather worked for thirty-five years delivering bread all around Brooklyn. Those sandwiches are the reason I started this restaurant.

  After ten years of whoring myself to other chefs in five different countries; of slinging hash, burning my arms, crying into soups; of swatting the greasy hands of horny fry cooks away from my ass while holding cookie sheets against my chest like armor; of enduring insults, propositions, come-ons, and blackmail in fifteen different languages across two continents, I swore if I ever had my chance…Chance, schmance. What was I waiting on? Some long-lost uncle to keel over and leave me a million bucks? When the shoe store went out of business on the bottom floor of this building, I was there, Johnny at the rat hole, as Eddie’s father would say. I signed the lease. Put down the money from my parents’ insurance policy, left festering in a low-yield savings account. Agreed to let Eddie invest some of his inherited loot. And took a loan—the number so big that it made me dizzy. That’s how I opened Lemon, the place where I can cook what I want with the people I love.

  “The sweetbreads!” Franny yells.

  Ernesto’s across the kitchen, getting more trout from the reach-in. But I’m right there, so I rip the pan off the heat and scoot the delicacies onto a waiting plate, perfectly garnished by Franny with lardons and curly endive. I hand the plate off to Kirsten, who scurries in and out of the kitchen like a nervous cat. Franny, Ernesto, and I grin slyly at one another.

  It’s a miracle that we pull it off every night. We’ve purposefully bucked the traditional structure of the restaurant kitchen. No garde-manger, no saucier, no rigid system of who does what. At this restaurant there are no coke-addled ex-cons who’ve made a life going from kitchen to kitchen like pirates jumping ships. No egomaniacal misfits who only find solace in the hot exclusivity of a cooking staff. We flattened out the hierarchy and got rid of the regimen. The result is a kind of controlled chaos, but none of us would have it any other way. Lemon is a success, no doubt, because of the weird symbiosis among Franny, Ernesto, and me.

  I look around the kitchen again. Manuel has already built the radish sandwiches. The orders are all on the grill, and the salads are up. There’s nothing moldering under the heat lamps in the window. Everything seems momentarily in control, so I pull the bandanna off my head and run my fingers through my matted sweaty hair. “I’m going out front!” I yell as I swing open the kitchen doors.

  I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on in the dining room. I realized early on that a restaurant is only partly about making food. I’m in the business of satisfying all the senses: sight, sound, smell, and touch as much as taste. Everything has to be perfect, or nothing will be. So every night, I have to make sure the tables are set correctly, the flowers are right, the music is at the ideal volume. I have to see how people look as they bite into their entrees. Are they smiling? Drinking? Laughing? Are the waitresses keeping everyone happy? I know my checking-up makes the staff crazy, but I don’t care. Maybe after another year I’ll trust things are running smoothly without my constant vigilant oversight, but not yet.

  The clatter of pans and sizzle of oil from the kitchen recede as I step into the dining room. I let out a long breath. I love this space. I spent months and months scouring flea markets all over the eastern seaboard for every last detail until I nearly drove Eddie batty, but I knew exactly what I wanted.

  Diners laugh, talk, and stuff their gobs at beat-up wooden tables surrounded by funny old mismatched chairs from other people’s kitchens. Giant gold gilt mirrors and stained-glass windows discarded from churches, estate sales, old inns, and defunct restaurants line the lime green walls. Overhead, chandeliers from Atlantic Avenue antique shops are turned down low. Some are simple, with small crystals dangling like diamond earrings. Others are ostentatious, with gaudy cut-glass-crusted appendages that remind me of little girls’ unicorn collections. Tin flowerpots, lace doilies, candelabras, and old picture frames decorate every flat surface. It’s a mishmash, a gallimaufry, a jumbled-bumbled mess. It’s the personification of me, and that’s just the way I like it.

  On the edge of the bar, I reorient a green glass vase that once belonged to Little Great-Aunt Poppy. The flowers release the heady fragrance of lilies into the air. Peonies the size of baby heads droop prettily from the vase. Giant
spires of hollyhocks stand up tall and proud above a mist of Queen Anne’s lace. My florist, Xiao, gets it right every night.

  Then I notice Lyla and Kirsten idling by the drinks station while Mona, the bartender, holds up a bottle of Grey Goose vodka in one hand and a Mr. Boston gin in the other.

  “Wait,” says Mona as she ponders the liquor. She looks like a white-trash trailer-park Gidget in her tube top and Union ’76 truck-stop hat. “Which one does a sidecar use?”

  This is what I get for hiring a twenty-something diva wannabe for a bartender. I groan and start for the bar, ready to toss Mona out by the nostrils. The girl cannot get it together. Can barely remember what goes in a gin and tonic, let alone a sidecar.

  I’ve regretted hiring her from the first day that she sweet-talked her way into the job, telling me how much she needed the work if she was going to stay in New York and keep her band together. I’ve always been a sucker for the strugglers with a dream. Plus, I was in deep shit, having just fired my last bartender, who turned into a lush and a thief after three months on the job.

  Every time I swear I’m canning Mona’s ass, Eddie points out that she’s gorgeous and that cute girl bartenders win points with the weekend steak eaters. But enough is enough. She’s backing up the whole damn dining room. I stomp across the room, taking in a deep breath, ready to let Mona have it, but I’m stopped in my tracks when Eddie saunters in the front door.

  Time bends and slows when Eddie comes into a room. Something in his Deep South manners, his leisurely assured walk, his drowsy lingering grin, drags the fabric of the cosmos back to an era of long hellos and longer good-byes. It’s not as if he thinks he owns the place. More like he’s certain that you’re glad to have him around. I’m sure that’s why his import business does as well as it does, given what a lazy ass he is at heart.

  Melanie, the hostess, normally wound up and ready to pop, visibly relaxes when Eddie comes in. Her shoulders ease. Her motions become as languid as Blanche DuBois’s. She greets him with a kiss to each cheek as if everyone has been transported to the Left Bank. She chats with him, tosses her head back to laugh at his silly wisecracks. The people waiting for her attention don’t resent Eddie’s intrusion. He offers them a little shrug and an apologetic smile. They stand back to listen in to his conversation as if they are each his new best friend. Melanie pats an empty barstool behind her, but he shakes his head and points toward the back of the house. He wants to see me.

  Eddie ambles along with his hands in his pockets and a lopsided grin on his face. He wears his usual southern-schoolboy-gone-bad uniform, wrinkled khaki pants with a white T-shirt under the same untucked, unbuttoned blue oxford cloth shirt that was balled up on the roof a few hours ago. He has the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, showing off the curly blond hair across his forearms as if he’s been out chopping wood instead of yukking it up with the best chefs in the city over samples of first-press oils.

  I forget about Mona and the botched sidecar. Forget about whether the sweetbreads are too rubbery and whether the walk-in will go on the blink tonight. I watch Eddie shake his hair out of his eyes, then survey the place. He nods at every table packed with happy eaters, reveling in their ravioli, bingeing on beef cheeks au jus, loving life that offers them fresh lima beans in a sweet-pea cream. Watching Eddie evaporates all my fury.

  He spots me and breaks into a huge smile. Walks toward me with open arms, drawling the words, “Darling! I hear your roof is on fire!”

  “Jesus, Eddie,” I say. “You’re so freakin’ cheesy.”

  “Drunken goat,” he says.

  Then, just as I’m ready to step into his hug and bask in his sweet olive smell, I hear Mona say, “Does vermouth make a martini dry?”

  Now I’ve got no time for Eddie’s sweet-talking, good-oldboy slap-and-tickle. I close in on him and grab him by the collar, dragging him with me to the back, pleading with him. “You’ve got to tend the bar before I kill Mona. She doesn’t know the difference between a mojito and her skinny white ass!”

  “No worries, Lemon, darling,” he says, but promptly plops himself down on a barstool and asks for a glass of his special stash of ’97 Altesino Brunello red.

  “Eddie!” I whine.

  “It’s all under control,” he assures me. “Mona and I will not let you down.” He winks at her, and she winks back as she uncorks the wine. Eddie tells her how to mix the drinks, and I go back to scanning the dining room, making sure everything else is perfect.

  Once Lyla and Kirsten have hurried off with their cocktails, Eddie turns to me and says, “Oh, by the way, my mother says to tell you congratulations. She’s been showing off the Gourmet article to her gardening club today.”

  “That’s nice,” I say absently as I try to decode the facial expressions of every eater. Chefs are fundamentally insecure people, always trying to bowl everyone over with the food they create. I’m no different. If I could, I would run up to each table and ask, Do you like it? Is it the best thing you’ve ever eaten? Which, of course, is really a way of asking, Do you like me?

  “Speaking of my mother,” Eddie adds inelegantly. I try to ignore him, but he says, “She and my father want to come up for a visit.”

  It’s not that I don’t like Eddie’s parents. They’re perfectly fine people, but the few times I’ve been around them, I’ve gotten the distinct feeling that I’m not the girl they’d imagined for Eddie. Before I can protest, make excuses, forcefully refuse, Melanie grabs me by the elbow.

  “Critic at table four,” she whispers fiercely.

  I glance over at the unassuming couple Mel is nodding toward. “I don’t recognize either one,” I tell her.

  “I’m pretty sure she’s the new critic from the Post. I called Bryan at Bistro Jeanine and described her. He says that’s the one. See, she’s writing notes under the table.”

  “Christ,” I mutter. “Like they fool us. What’d they order?”

  “To start, the fennel apple salad for her. Seared sea scallops for him. Then the lamb and the trout.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I tell Melanie with some new kind of crazy megalomaniacal self-confidence. Usually I’d flip out if there were a critic in the house. I’d dash into the kitchen to personally inspect, taste, and plate every item going out to a critic’s table. But right now I’m so beguiled by my own success that nothing can touch me. “Anything else?”

  Mel frowns at me uncertainly, but I’m feeling so good tonight that I stick with my pronouncement that everything will be fine. “Well,” she says. “We’re booked until ten-thirty tonight and Sunday brunch is full for the next four weeks. Must’ve been that Gourmet article.”

  I shrug. “Who knows?” But I think, Who cares? I deserve every ounce of this attention. If the critic from the Post doesn’t agree, then too bad for her.

  The front door opens, and a laughing group of six walks in. Melanie immediately strides across the room, her arms outstretched as if she’s greeting her dearest old friends. They smile. Look eager. Ready for our food. Eddie has turned around to chat with Mona, who leans across the bar to flirt shamelessly with him. I let it go, for now. I don’t have time to play the jealous girlfriend. I’ve got to get back to the kitchen to wow these new diners with some culinary delight.

  As I throw open the kitchen doors, I find Franny and Ernesto locked in a kiss over the grill. Makiko looks at me and shakes her head with feigned disgust. “Like a Tokyo love hotel in here,” she says.

  “You filthy sluts!” I yell. “Get back to work before I can your lazy, good-for-nothing asses!”

  Franny gives me the finger, and Ernesto says, “Jealous?”

  “Hardly,” I say as I tie my bandanna on my head and scoot back behind the prep line. “You two deserve one another.” Although I say it like an insult, I mean it in the nicest possible way, and they know it. The printer cranks out a never-ending ribbon of new orders. I take a deep breath, but before I start the call I grin, deeply satisfied with my good life.

  Zygote

&n
bsp; In the past two weeks, you have divided and divided again until you resemble a mulberry. This cluster of cells holds everything that will be you. You have traveled through the channels of your mother’s swampy womb, laid your roots, and burrowed in for the duration of your stay. You mother has tucked you beneath a protective lining, to keep you safe and snug inside her.

  Despite her first protective act, she remains an unwitting accomplice to your existence. She goes about her daily life (on her feet twelve hours a day, slugging back margaritas at two A.M., sleeping only a few hours, then waking to terrifying fears of failure) as if silently daring you with her debaucherous behavior to live. And you do, you live, you tenacious blastocyst. Sending out your signals that she ignores. Your subtle signs of life. Her swollen breasts like water balloons left on the tap too long. A vague queasiness she associates with stress. That off-kilter sway when standing still, as if in a tipping boat. You bide your time, patient and enduring, going about your business of becoming an embryo.

  Chapter

  Three

  W hat’d you bring?” Grandma asks without looking up from the cabbage rolls she’s making on the wooden table. The same table with scratches on the legs and a yellow-checked oilcloth cover that’s been in the center of this kitchen since I was a kid. The smell of onions and garlic, simmering tomatoes, and pork fill the room. My stomach rolls over, and my underarms prickle in the heat.

  “You bake a pie?” Aunt Adele asks as she takes the pan from my hands.

  My four aunts bustle in the tiny kitchen, stirring pots, cutting vegetables, and getting in each other’s way. The older they get, the more alike they look. Each one has the same olive skin and thick jet-black hair with a few strands of gray chopped into different variations of a bob. It was Grandfather Calabria’s hair.

  My grandmother, mother, and I were the only three towheaded northern Italians in the midst of the all those dark brooding Calabrisians on my mother’s side and the back-slapping, joke-telling Manellis from Modena on my father’s side. I’m the only one among my dozens of cousins who burns in the sun, gets freckles across my nose, and can’t eat more than one hot pepper without sticking my head under the faucet. I’ve always been the quiet one. The left-out one. The different one. The orphan.