Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Leon continued to follow me from room to room. If I asked what was going on, because the girls were around and I was self-conscious, he was disconcerted. He hadn’t thought about it, he’d just done it. The girls grew uneasy. On Saturday morning, when they usually hung around until he or we were ready for the beach, they went with friends and remained out with them. Their father was in no hurry to get to the beach, unless I was. If he had been grateful for my attentions to his children, had come to like me, to enjoy me and my assorted hospitalities, and had, finally, grown deeply attached to me, the blonde he’d bumped into on the steps had caused Leon to fall over that peculiar line. He was, as they say, madly in love.

  On Sunday morning, when I’d separated the eggs for pancakes and was beating the whites in the big, tin-lined copper bowl that had been my first post-contract purchase, he came into the kitchen, kissed the back of my neck, and asked what I was doing. I told him.

  “Can I try it?” he asked.

  I turned around, laughing, but he was serious. I handed him the whisk, showed him how to hold the bowl, and guided his hand as he began to beat.

  “Whew,” he said, when a minute or more had gone by and I was occupied elsewhere. “It hurts.”

  I smiled, came back to his side. “You’re not used to it.”

  “Why am I doing this?” he asked.

  “You’re beating air into the eggs,” I said. “They’re getting stiff, see?” He turned to see if I’d intended a double entendre—in those weeks almost everything had some sexual meaning attached to it—but I ignored him. “It’s what you do to make the meringue on a lemon meringue pie. You whip air into it and you bake and it hardens that way.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  It was more extraordinary than anything he’d learned in medical school.

  “Except they won’t be sweet unless we put in some sugar.”

  His eyes gleamed. “Let’s do it!”

  He was having an enormous amount of fun as we beat the yolks in their little bowl, combined them with the flour mixture, added the whites and finally the cut-up peaches. It’s one of cooking’s pleasures that understanding how it works doesn’t rob it of its magical quality, and he was unbelievably excited when I showed him how to use the spatula to lift the part of the pancake that was trying to stick to the pan, thrilled when I said that yes, we could serve it directly from the pan, an act he’d seen me perform many times.

  The kids came into the kitchen, stopped at the sight of their father with a spatula in his hand.

  “Look what we’re making for you!” he announced proudly. “Are these the most beautiful pancakes you ever saw?”

  First, they all gaped. It was a joke. It had to be. They couldn’t believe it. Then my adorable Ovvy angrily informed me that I wasn’t supposed to be teaching his father how to cook and he wasn’t hungry, anyway. Rennie said Ovvy was an idiot and anyone who wanted to cook could, that was what the women’s movement was about. Annie said it was the fluffiest pancake she’d ever seen, far fluffier than any I’d made with them, and at breakfast she said that it tasted the best, too. I asked Ovvy to come sit on my lap, “the way you did when you were little.” He’d gotten too old to let himself do that, but he did consent to move his chair close to mine, and I whispered to him that I didn’t think his father was really interested in cooking, it was just this one little thing that had grabbed him. But when Leon suggested that the kids walk to the beach without waiting for us, and we’d drive over when we’d loaded the dishwasher (a machine I hadn’t known he understood to exist), Ovvy joined the girls without protest. They all wanted to get away. There was an intensity in the very air of the house that they needed to escape. That was when I understood that finally my feelings were well met.

  Leon said he loved me.

  I told him that if I’d only known, I’d have bleached my hair earlier.

  He didn’t know what I was talking about.

  I asked if he realized that if the show wasn’t a success, it would cost me a fortune to keep my hair blonde and curly.

  I wanted him to say he’d love me with my old, wavy brown hair, but he told me not to worry about it, he would pay for the beauty parlor.

  That night, as I prepared for bed, I had to force myself to insert my diaphragm. I hated it as I never had. If Leon hadn’t given me his speech about being finished having children, I think I might have managed to forget it. As it was, I lay in the much-denigrated supine position that had always been my absolute favorite, the only one that was no work and all play, except the play wasn’t quite as wonderful as usual, because I couldn’t get Olivia out of my mind, even as Leon sucked my nipples, played with me, then came into me like a sixteen-year-old hitting a home run. Olivia, asking me whether I didn’t have anything in the world to think about besides her getting pregnant.

  Maybe she was right. At least partly. Maybe I should concentrate on my own temptations instead of worrying so much about hers. In any event, she knew what was necessary, as did Pablo. They would have to take care of themselves.

  They came out with Leon for a couple of weekends. She was gaining so much weight that if I hadn’t seen how much she was eating, if I hadn’t made my own connection, I’d have worried that she was already pregnant.

  I was grateful for Pablo’s presence. He was a sweetly reasonable man who served as a sort of interpreter between me and my daughter, essential because since I’d come upon him in the apartment, she assumed a malevolent curiosity that turned the simplest question about, say, whether they’d join us for dinner, into an attempt to pry. Pablo explained to her patiently.

  “No, sweetheart,” he would say. “That’s not what your mom asked. She just wants to know if she should make supper for us before she goes out.”

  Livvy, certain that the motive she’d imputed to me was correct but unwilling to relinquish her victim’s role, would subside.

  Late Saturday night of that first weekend they were with us, as we returned from a party, we passed their room and heard the sounds of lovemaking.

  “They do know all the possibilities,” Leon said, when we’d reached our own bedroom. Until now, he’d been inclined to think I worried too much. They were clearly sane, clearly . . .

  I shrugged. “I’ve done what I can. He seems responsible. She always acts as though she’s safe because she was raised half a mile from the Vatican.”

  “Does she think every pregnant teenager is the daughter of liberal West Side Jews? She should spend a little time at the clinic. See how many of them are nice little Catholic girls.”

  “I think that’s a very good idea,” I said. “I hope you’ll invite her to do it.”

  He became contrite, as he wouldn’t have before.

  “I will talk to her. If you want me to.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Leon. When I do it, she acts as though I’m trying to take away some kind of prize. She knows what’s involved.”

  If Leon remained at the center of my existence, even he was displaced from my thoughts in the days between our return to the city and the first “Pot Luck.” I would tape on Thursdays at five; the show would air at seven. Ovvy would be responsible for our home tape, whether or not Leon was there. We agreed, giggling, that during the first airing, we’d not only all be there, but we would send out for pizza.

  The weekend before the show began, I had a call from Mrs. Sakai. I hadn’t heard her daughter’s name all summer and I was pleasantly surprised. She said they’d been in Japan and now were driving to Boston to visit their “American relations.” While they were there, Mayumi wanted to just take a look at Harvard. They would stay in a hotel in the city and would like Olivia to join them. I said that would be lovely, thanked her. When I asked Livvy why she hadn’t mentioned the trip, she said I got nervous whenever she mentioned Harvard. When I tried to explain that it wasn’t Harvard that made me nervous, but that in her sophomore high-school year she had already decided there was only one school in the world where she could be happy, she ignored me.
As though what I’d said had nothing to do with anything we’d been talking about or that had happened before.

  The first few shows went well, but not well enough. There was no press coverage of what was just one more food show on a lesser cable channel, so nobody became interested who hadn’t just happened to turn it on.

  “Hi, I’m Caroline Ferrante and this is Pot Luck. The expression ‘taking pot luck,’ as you probably know, means turning stuff you find in the cupboard or the refrigerator into a meal. Here, the pot will be my brain, full of odds and ends about food that I hope will interest you. Some of the food I’ll just talk about, some I’ll cook. Sometimes I might dance because the producer keeps telling me television’s a visual medium and I’ll bore you if I stand still and talk. Sometimes I might just complain about the producer, report our arguments—with funny gestures that’ll make them visual. His trouble is, he’s not really interested in food.

  “People’s brains are like magnets; what they’re attracted to is more likely to stick. From the time when I was very young, anything about food stuck to my brain. As an adult, well, sort of an adult, I went to Italy and cooked in restaurants there for years before returning to the States. I should mention that one reason I could do this was that women were accepted as chefs in Italian restaurants when the cooking establishment here was still acting as though females were structurally unequipped to prepare food away from home.

  “When I came back to the States, I brought hundreds of recipes from Italy. Then I found myself playing with ingredients I’d never seen there, like ginger and wonderful Oriental vegetables that hadn’t been in many stores here when I left. Incidentally, the way I keep ginger is, I buy a root, peel and grate it, then make little bundles in plastic wrap and freeze them so they’re there when I want them. They defrost in about thirty seconds in the microwave, and don’t take much longer on the counter. Ginger and reheating coffee are the only things I really love the microwave for. Whatever its virtues, a microwave isn’t lovable. It provides heat without warmth.

  “Today I’m going to play with something very lovable, an Italian dessert called tiramisu I learned to make when I was growing up. I recently put a little ginger juice in a tiramisu when, I didn’t have any of the liqueurs people customarily use, but most Italians would probably consider that beyond the pale.”

  “Who’d you learn from?” a woman in the stage audience asked.

  “A wonderful lady named Anna Cherubini. She was our housekeeper. The keeper of our home and our kitchen. My mother worked.”

  “It’s easy to like cooking if you don’t have to do it!” the woman said.

  I shrugged. “Sure. But some people—Anna was one—love it even if they do. Anyway, how come nobody ever says that about sex?”

  The audience laughed. In the wings, Sheldon nodded violently, clapped silently, I should Do More of Same. Sheldon never laughed if I said something funny, he just wanted more of same. He never believed it wouldn’t be as funny the second time.

  “As you can see, I’ve listed different ingredients for tiramisu. Tourists have a good one at a restaurant in Venice, and they order it in Rome, expecting the same dessert. But a Roman’s idea of tiramisu is quite different from a Venetian’s. Which is not a Florentine’s. There’s a wonderful dictionary-encyclopedia-cookbook called Gastronomy of Italy, in which the author, Anna Del Conte, tells us that the cake was created by a chef near Treviso in the late sixties and is most often made with ladyfingers or sponge cake, soaked in rum or brandy, then layered with mascarpone, a sweet, creamy, soft cheese. As you can see, I’m beginning to put together a version based on Ms. Del Conte’s comments. But as I do this, I want you to look at the other recipe on the blackboard, for something called Mascarpone Cheese Cake. This comes from a book called The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, whose author, Edda Servi Machlin, says the cake is a classic of Italian-Jewish cuisine. The ingredients, the basic concept, if you will, of this cake is clearly very close to that of the cake that was ostensibly born in the late sixties. This happens over and over again.”

  I’d been prepared to be pressed on the matter of who was stealing what from whom, and had ready a few lines about simultaneous invention, and Isn’t It Surprising That This Sort of Thing Doesn’t Happen All the Time—It Probably Does! But the next question came from a huge woman in a pink dress, who asked, in a little girl’s voice, “What about salmonella?”

  “I wanted to mention that,” I lied. “When the Machlin book was published, we weren’t worried about raw eggs the way we are now. You might want to try various solutions. The first is to find a chicken farm near you where you’re sure the eggs aren’t carrying salmonella. Or a small store where you trust the people, and they know the farm. Or you might want to experiment with some of those new fake eggs. As far as I could discover, they’re all homogenized. My own preference would be to play with eggless versions if I couldn’t find eggs I knew were all right. But, you know, if there’s one thing I’d like to do here, beside getting rich and famous, it’s to make people stop treating food as though it were atomic waste. Honestly, there aren’t that many things you can die from in the kitchen. And when there’s something really unhealthy, often there are substitutes.”

  On the stage, another hand went up. It belonged to a chubby blonde who had been playing with her hair until I called on her.

  “Why did you come back from Italy?” she asked in a tiny, timid voice.

  I hesitated, smiled in what I hoped was a friendly fashion. “Let’s just say it had nothing to do with the food, and this show is about food.”

  “Are you interested in health food?” someone else asked.

  “You mean, health with a capital H? Somehow, when you call it that, it’s not too interesting. But if you read, say, Elizabeth David’s wonderful book about Provence, there are moments when you think you’re reading about Southern Italy. They’re both healthy cuisines, they both use olive oil, not butter, one of the main points anyone’s going to make about eating right, and of course it’s easy to eat healthily when you live in a warm place where fruit and vegetables have a long growing season. Anyway, there are a million health-food cookbooks for anyone who wants them, but I hardly ever have bean sprouts on the brain. Which isn’t to say that I won’t be happy to hear about what’s on yours. Especially if you happen to be curious about any of the subjects that interest me. I’m interested in food customs, in what you eat on holidays, religious or national. I’m fascinated by forbidden foods, beginning with Adam’s apple.” (Sheldon had warned me that I was not to bring up cannibalism, under any circumstances.) “And in the matter of how we can maintain any sense of continuity in a country where the politicians are so stupid they think you can just change the dates of holidays because the date of a date doesn’t matter. So, let me hear from you. In the meantime, let’s see what’s going on with our first tiramisu.”

  Sheldon said I had to stop giving authors’ names—as though the second it took to say Del Conte or Machlin slowed up the show beyond repair. He wanted more about food and sex, but the closest I could come was with a program on wine. I quoted Horace—“No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers”—and pointed out, at Bob’s insistence, that the alcohol in wine evaporates when you heat it, and only the lovely flavors remain. (There were still protests from a number of Muslims, all at the same address, who said I was encouraging the use of liquor.) I quoted an explanation I’d read for the Jewish history of moderate drinking: Around 500 B.C. the Babylonians had brought the Hebrews to their country as slaves. The Babylonian enemy was the Persians, who knew the former loved the darkness, and drank too much when they had parties. The Persians attacked and destroyed the Babylonian empire very late on a party night. They also freed the Jews, who might then have learned a lesson in the value of not drinking too much. A couple of the letter writers objected to my “holding up” as an example any group except the Muslims, who lived well and ate wonderful food without touching pork or liquor.


  “What’s with you and the Jews?” Sheldon wanted to know. “I want you to leave the Jews off the goddamned show for a while.” When I asked how I could do that when I was a Jew, he said he only meant the “Jewish stuff.” The Jews didn’t know how to cook, anyway. He kept pressing for an arranged disaster. When I pointed out that he was the one who’d called me a natural, he said there was natural enough for cable, and then there was natural enough for network.

  I was startled. I’d only been on cable for a few weeks. He’d never referred to network before. I said I didn’t understand. He said he was trying to get network people to pay attention, then made some slighting remark about Bob Kupferman and his penny-ante cable programs.

  I asked if Bob knew that.

  Sheldon shrugged. “If he’s got a brain in his head, he knows it.”

  It appeared that nobody with a sense of humor ever wrote a letter or asked a question. By the fourth week, Bob was beginning to consider Sheldon’s very strong opinion that we needed to “arrange” the questions. But they agreed to give me one shot at picking questioners who didn’t look reasonable. Who might give me a hard time. Which might be entertaining. That was the week I did A Sicilian Wedding Feast.

  I’d decided it was prudent to keep in touch with Angelo, in spite of my vow.

  “I tell you, Cara mia,” he’d said recently, when I told him I was cooking on television, “I didn’t appreciate you enough. How I long for your farsumagru!”