I look at Eddie, totally appalled, but he’s oblivious. Just nodding along with whatever the woman says. “Well,” I say and stand up. “I have to get going. All that food for the big party isn’t going to prep itself!”
“But I thought Franny and Ernesto—” Eddie says.
“Oh, they’ll be there,” I say. “But I can’t expect them to do everything without me. Not yet, anyway.” I trot out the room, wondering how I will make it through another three days of this.
Chapter
Fourteen
T here’s really nothing for me to do at the restaurant. Franny and Ernesto have everything under control, like I knew they would, especially since I’m paying them time-and-a-half. I use the extra hour to sit in my office and grapple with the books, trying to figure out why I struggle to pay bills every month.
Am I spending too much on the food? How can I skimp on that? That’s what makes us who we are. Maybe I have too many people on staff. But I already feel pared down to the bone. I couldn’t ask my staff to work any more than they already do. Maybe the rent’s too high. I could’ve looked for a less established neighborhood, but then I wouldn’t have as much business. Or maybe it’s the little things. All the extraneous stuff I never thought about, like insurance and electric bills and the constant replacement of broken dishes.
I wonder how other, successful, people balance the business side of things with the craft of being a chef. Obviously, I’ve got the chef part down. The food is great, people flock here for it, laud me with praise, but those are the least of my worries, and everything else about running this place remains a mystery to me. I probably should’ve managed a restaurant before I got into this. I’ve never been one to plan ahead much, though. I see a hoop I like, and I light my hair on fire and jump through. Eddie keeps suggesting that I hire a manager, which is a great idea, if I had enough money to pay someone else.
By the time Franny raps on the door to tell me that the guests are arriving, I’ve worked myself into a tizzy. Numbers swim in front of my eyes, and I have no better idea where we’re at financially than I did an hour ago. I’m relieved to shut down the computer and ignore the problems for another day.
I freshen up in the staff bathroom. Somehow, despite my aching head and tired eyes, I look good. My skin glows pink, my hair is shiny. I attribute it to the prenatal vitamins and a day of not standing over a hot stove. I pull on a loose yellow silk sundress that Eddie brought me from Italy last summer. It fits a little snug around my middle. I think of ’Scilla pinching my side. She touches me tonight, and I’ll stab her with a fish fork.
“Watch out now, Lemon.” Eddie’s father stands much too close to me as he points across the room to his wife, holding court in the midst of my aunts. “ ’Scilla can talk the balls off a brass monkey.” He spews a whiskey-scented whistle with every “s” until a fine mist of his alcohol-flecked spit dampens the side of my face and tickles the hollow of my right ear.
“And that one there, Penelope Jardin, in the hat?”
I follow his finger to a large-hipped woman wearing what appears to be a Harry & David fruit basket on her head. Some relation of Eddie’s who has a pied-à-terre overlooking the MoMA.
“She looks harmless enough, but she’s shrewd. Married to a real bastard.” He stops and looks at me, eyebrows raised. I grimace, having no idea what he wants from me. “My cousin Richard!” he nearly screams in my ear, then claps me on the back and sends me pitching forward.
“A real Johnny at the rat hole, if you know what I mean!” He rumbles a deep throaty laugh and catches me by the elbow. Hauls me back up to stand by his side, nearly spilling my third tonic and bitters down the front of my dress.
I need to escape this man. He takes up so much space! His gut nudges at my hip, his elbow niggles at my side. He’s a toucher, a squeezer, a slapper-of-backs. He massages my shoulders and chucks me on the chin, grabs my knees and elbows me until I feel like he’s antagonizing me into taking a swing. As if he’s saying, Let’s see what you’ve got, Yankee. I’m about ready to show him when Lyla skirts by with a tray full of champagne. I reach out for a glass, desperate for anything to take the edge off the night, but she smacks my hand away. “Not good for the baby,” she reminds me.
“I’d give my left tit for one of those,” I grumble to her.
She glances down at my chest and says, “Honey, with the size of those things, you could get a whole damn bottle.”
Buck delicately swipes a flute from the tray for himself. Despite his girth, he’s an elegant and graceful man in a perfectly tailored suit and buffed fingernails. Before I can protest and demand some booze, Lyla scuttles off to give away my champagne to all the ungrateful louts in my family who’ve never been to my restaurant before tonight, and I’m left standing prisoner to Eddie’s father, stone-cold sober.
Eddie catches my eye from across the room and grins at me. I plead with my eyes to be rescued. He tosses his head back and laughs as if amused by my creepy cousin James (the author of many graphic novels about a tribe of omnisexual chimp-women with double genitals), who corners Eddie to talk “olive oil” at every family event. I suspect James has lurid notions for Eddie’s oil. Serves Eddie right, being cornered by the weirdo.
’Scilla has entertained my aunts for the better part of the cocktail hour. Huge peals of laughter erupt from their circle. I’m sure she’s regaling them with stories from her glamorous girlhood filled with debutante balls and summers on the coast with MeeMaw. My aunts eat it up, as if they’re reading a Jackie Collins novel. I can’t imagine what stories my family is telling ’Scilla in exchange. Tales of pool-hall brawls, pregnant girls, and steamy summer nights at Coney Island?
I imagine my mother in this situation. Wisecracking and sly, back up against the bar, cigarette in hand. How much would I give to stand beside her and listen to her take a few pokes at these genteel southerners mingling with our sprawling Brooklyn clan? I wonder what she’d think of my life. This restaurant. Eddie. I think my father would’ve approved. He told me over and over again when I was a kid to do what makes me happy.
Am I happy? I look around at everyone who cares enough to be here tonight. My grandmother, looking gorgeous in her dark red pantsuit, holding court by the bar with a glass of Chianti. My uncles, sitting in the back, talking sports and politics and horse racing. Many of my cousins, who’ve driven from all over Brooklyn and Jersey, leaving their little urchins behind with babysitters in order to celebrate with us. As much as I complain about my family, I know these people love me and would go to great lengths to see me happy. So yes, despite all my grumbling and grousing, I am happy.
The tinkling bells above the front door draw my attention away from watching my family while nodding mindlessly at Bucky’s inane stories. I crane my neck to see who’s coming in and catch sight of Trina and Chuck. She’s huge, pushing her belly in front of herself like a shopping cart. Apparently, she’s fully embraced impending motherhood, giving up her usual biker-chick gear for an oversize Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt over lavender leggings. She’s even let her hair fade back to its natural dirty brown. Chuck, on the other hand, still looks like he recently escaped from prison.
All of my aunts rush to Trina’s side, leaving ’Scilla free to glide across the room toward us, white skirts rippling behind her like unfurling sails. She holds a full martini glass daintily between her middle finger and thumb but doesn’t spill a drop as she sidesteps the swaggering drunks I call my family, who are dead set on getting every last drop out of Mona at the bar.
I wilt under Eddie’s father’s five-hundredth poke to my ribs. “Here comes trouble,” he chortles in my ear. “ ’Scilla, darlin’,” he says, then swoops out his arm to catch his wife in a practiced embrace.
“Lemon, dear! This place is simply exquisite!” The woman makes grand, sweeping statements about everything in her path, as if her brain constantly churns out marketing copy. She lays her free hand across Bucky’s belly and pats him fondly. “I can’t get over it. It’s so quai
nt and eclectic! Don’t you think so, Bucky?”
“Just like our Lemon, here,” he says and wraps his arm around my shoulders, jostling me to the depths of his armpit and bending me forward so that I come face to face with Eddie’s mother across his giant gut. She scrunches up her nose as she pats my cheek, like I’m one of her insipid dogs.
As abruptly as he grabbed me, Eddie’s father lets me go and sticks out his hand to welcome his cousin Richard, married to the woman in the fruited hat. “Richard!” Bucky hollers as they warmly greet one another. “Have you met the mother-to-be yet?” They turn to me but I’m long gone. Latched onto the elbow of Franny as she scurries toward the kitchen.
“Kill me now, Franny,” I beg when we’re behind the swinging door. “Shove me in the oven and turn it up to broil. I can’t take it anymore.”
“Such violent language from the pregnant lady!” Franny pulls an oven mitt over her hand. “It’s like some fucked-up reality show gone wrong out there.” She opens the warming oven and pokes at the duck breasts with a fork. “The Clampetts meet the Sopranos.”
“I won’t make it through dinner. Maybe I could claim a sudden illness. Preeclampsia. Early labor.”
“Schade!” Franny spits in her best Jewish grandmother voice. “That you should talk that way of your unborn.” She plucks a fingerful of salt from a cellar on the counter and tosses it over my shoulder. “Now spit three times before you curse yourself.”
“Sorry, sorry. I repent,” I say.
“Serves you right. Knocked-up hussy.”
“You’re enjoying my pain, aren’t you?”
Franny bastes the duck breasts. “Oh, more than you can possibly imagine.” She cackles with delight. Ernesto joins in while he carefully dresses salad greens on old flowered dessert plates that I got at a flea market years ago.
“Just you two wait.” I shove yellow pear tomatoes from the salads into my mouth. “When your families are dancing the hora to some mariachi band, I’ll be laughing my ass off.”
Kirsten pushes through the doors. Her eyes are wide, and a nervous smile plays on her lips. “Lemon, one of your cousins asked me for my phone number. His name is James. What should I tell him?”
“Run, Kirsten!” I say. “Run for your life!”
“Lemon!” My aunt Joy comes in on the tails of Lyla. “There you are.” She bustles into the room, grabbing for my arms. “What are you doing in the kitchen? This is your party. You’re the hostess. We’re all about ready to sit down. Aren’t we, Franny?” She has her claws into my skin, pulling me back toward the dining room. I want to grab onto the lip of the counter and refuse to let go, hold on tight until my legs are straight out behind me, as if a giant wind is trying to carry me away.
“That’s right,” says Franny, pushing me toward the door. “We’re going to start the salads. Now get out there and host!”
I throw a tomato at her as Joy drags me out the door.
Eddie and I sit at the head of the front table, with Bucky and ’Scilla to our right and my grandmother to my left. Radiating out from us are my aunts and their families. Eddie’s poor second cousin in the fruit hat has been surrounded by my aunt Joy’s extended family, including my cousin Teddy’s two teenage boys, who fight over the bread basket and flick figs at one another.
“I understand that you’re quite the cook,” ’Scilla says to my grandmother over the salad. “Is that where Lemon learned her trade?”
My grandmother holds up a forkful of baby greens. “I don’t cook fancy like this.”
“Eddie has raved about your home-cooked Italian food. I’m surprised that Lemon doesn’t have more of that kind of thing on the menu,” says ’Scilla. Somehow she makes it sound like an insult that I don’t have Grandma Calabria’s Home-Cooked Pasta Sauce for sale at the front of the house.
“She learned to cook gourmet food in Europe,” my grandmother says with the slightest hint of pride. This is the first time I’ve heard her talk about my time abroad as something good. “Went from country to country, cooking for different chefs. Came home with recipes for things that I’d never heard of. That’s what makes Lemon such a special restaurant.”
“Now I’ve been wondering about something since the first time we met you,” booms Bucky. His voice echoes around the room and quiets the tables near us. “You named your restaurant after yourself, but how did you get the name Lemon?”
My Aunt Adele leans over from the next table and says, “She looked like a lemon when she was born.”
“She really did,” Aunt Joy adds from the other side. “All puckered up.” She scrunches her face in a very unflattering way.
“With blond fuzz sticking straight up all over her head,” Aunt Mary calls from across the room.
“We’d never seen a blond baby with so much hair,” Gladys yells from her table at the back.
“Dark-haired babies, sure. Remember my Vincent?” asks Adele. She points to her son, whose hairline starts right above his eyebrows, which meet like a hedge across his nose.
“He looked like a chimp,” says Grandma.
“Still does,” says Adele and slaps him playfully on the back of his furry skull.
“You know,” ’Scilla says, “I’m just realizing that I don’t even know your given name, Lemon. No one’s ever told me.”
“Ellie,” Grandma tells her.
“Short for Eleanor?” asks ’Scilla.
“Just Ellie,” Grandma says.
“That’s gorgeous!” says ’Scilla. “Why don’t you go by that, dear?”
“Ellie Manelli?” I ask. “Sounds like a joke.”
Grandma looks up from her salad. “What do you mean, a joke?”
“I sound like a defunct pop band.”
My aunts have all risen from their chairs to encircle my table.
“Your father gave you that name,” Adele scolds me.
“When she was born, we all called her Lemon,” Gladys explains. “But her mother said we had to think up a proper name.”
“So her dad wrapped her up in a blanket and danced around with her in his arms, singing,” Joy says.
I’ve heard this story many times before, but like anyone hearing the story of herself, I never tire of it. I put my fork down and listen to my aunt Mary sing my name, “Lemon Manelli, Lemon Manelli, Lemon Manelli.”
“But he got all confused,” says Adele.
Joy and Gladys lean across Bucky’s shoulders and sing, “Lemon Manelli, Lemon Manelli. Lemon-elli. Lemon-elli Manelli, Ellie Manelli.”
“Then he just stopped and lifted her up and shouted, ‘Ellie Manelli!’ ” Mary tells us. Everyone chuckles appreciatively.
“Was he drunk?” I ask, meaning it as a joke.
Grandma rubs a piece of bread around the bottom of her salad plate, sopping up all the olive oil. “Probably,” she says with a shrug. “Giovanni liked his booze.”
“What?” I say. “Are you telling me my father was actually drunk when I was born?”
“Men drank then,” says Grandma and looks to Bucky for confirmation. He grins and nods. “They weren’t allowed in the hospital, so they went down to the social clubs and got tight until they got the call that everything was okay. Then they’d stumble into the hospital, weepy-eyed and stinking, carrying crushed bouquets of carnations, blubbering about how they were the happiest men alive. That’s just how we did things then. Giovanni was no exception.”
I glance around at my aunts. “So my father decided to name me while he was drunk, and not one of you said anything?”
“Eh,” says Grandma with a shrug. “We thought it was cute.”
“Were you all drunk?” I ask.
“It’s possible,” Joy says, and everyone, including Eddie’s parents, cracks up.
“Where the hell was my mother in all this?” I whine.
“What’d you mean, where was she?” Grandma asks. “She was right there. She’d just had a baby, for Christ’s sake. Where do you think she was? Out dancing?”
“I don’t know at
this point. Apparently when I was born, every adult around me was rip-roaring wasted, so I suppose it’s possible that my mother was out dancing while you were all naming me.” No one reacts to my accusations. “Didn’t she protest?” I ask.
Grandma shakes her head and laughs. “Nah. Once Giovanni got her to laughing, she’d agree to anything.”
“That’s probably how she ended up with me in the first place,” I say.
My aunts all look at one another and mutter, “That’s probably true.”
“Could be.”
“That’s how it usually happened.”
“Well,” I say. “I’ll tell you one thing. This kid is getting a proper name.”
“And what about the baby’s last name?” ’Scilla asks. She leans forward eagerly. Now I see where this has all been leading.
Eddie perks up. “Kilby,” he says, as if it’s a given.
“Says who?” I ask. Everyone, including me, looks at Eddie and waits.
“I suppose we could hyphenate,” he offers.
“Manelli-Kilby?” ’Scilla says skeptically.
“What’s wrong with Manelli?” I say.
As Eddie opens his mouth to protest, a little squeal goes up from the table beside us. Trina stands with her hands pressed against her belly and her mouth open. “Oh, my gawd,” she says. “The baby is kicking!” She lifts up her Pooh shirt to reveal her enormous belly with its dark hairline down the middle. “Can you see that?” A little ball punches out from her gut. She gasps and laughs, and my aunts rush to her side to put their hands on the next Calabria addition.
I could be mad at Trina for yanking the spotlight away from me during my party, but truthfully, I’m glad the attention has shifted. This whole thing is exhausting me. I reach out and touch Eddie’s hand.
Luscious Lemon Page 14
