Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  “Poor Angelo,” I’d replied. “I hope you get to eat out sometimes. I can’t bear to think of you sitting in front of a bowl of rice every night.”

  He hadn’t liked the note of pity in my voice.

  “Well, you know, Cara, when I go out, there are more important things on my mind.”

  I’d been vaguely relieved to learn that the trait that had made it impossible for me to stay married hadn’t vanished with the advent of a new and better wife.

  “I hope,” I’d lied, “you are not making Annunciata suffer too much.”

  “No, no, Cara,” Angelo had said. “She does not suffer at all. She takes no notice of . . . She is beyond all this. She is a saint.”

  Finally, a definition of sainthood for the twentieth century.

  “Mmm,” I’d said. “Farsumagru.” It had a certain appeal, if only because it was one of the five or ten unhealthiest dishes in the world and I was already sick of the health questions. Nobody ever put food in her mouth anymore without estimating the number of years it would take from her life. “I’ll tell you what, Angelo. If I do it, I’ll send you a tape.”

  Sheldon’s response to farsumagru was, “Oi vei, Cholesterol City,” but Bob thought controversy about cholesterol was better than no controversy at all.

  “Unless Sicilians are horrendously poor, their wedding feasts are extraordinary in both the quantity and variety of food. The dish of dishes at many such feasts, which I’ll do with you today, is farsumagru, a rolled steak stuffed with ground pork, spicy sausage, eggs, prosciutto, and a couple of kinds of cheese. farsumagru is intended to reinforce the laws against divorce. If everyone in the family gets married once, you’ll only eat it ten or twenty times, which will be enough cholesterol for a lifetime.” I displayed the meat, pounded it to the proper thickness and into something resembling a rectangle, sliced the hard-boiled eggs, and prepared the stuffing.

  I’d stored up a couple of jokes about forbidden foods. If worst came to worst, I’d be serious: “Well, you know, the trick is to balance your diet and save dishes like this for special occasions.” But the question, when it came, wasn’t a question and had nothing to do with diets or cholesterol. It was screeched at me by a tiny woman with pitch-black hair, tiny black eyes, and a chin so pointy it could have been a finger. As I began to spread the first layer of stuffing on the meat, she waved her hand frantically in the air. I signaled the cameraman to focus on her. An assistant hastened over with the microphone. When he reached her, she leaped to her feet and hoisted up a black-bordered poster that’d been rolled up in her bag. On it was a blown-up photo of a cow with its newborn calf, the calf pleading: MOMMY, SAVE ME FROM THE MURDERERS!

  “You’re a murderer!” she screeched at me. “Killing babies! Telling the others to do it!”

  “Oh, well,” I said after a long moment, my voice, I am told, smacking of resignation, “Hitler was a vegetarian, you know.”

  Because it caused such hilarity, because someone did a piece about the show for the Times, because of the letters and phone calls we received (I was recognized on the street for the first time since we’d begun), because it was the beginning of our real success, I’ve been asked hundreds of times when I’d actually learned that Hitler was a vegetarian, whether the question had been planted, and so on. But I’d learned it years earlier from my father. In high school I’d asked a history teacher if I could fulfill an essay requirement by writing on the mass murderer as vegetarian. He’d assumed I was being a wiseass, but I wasn’t. (I ran into that teacher at some point after the Hitler program. He claimed always to have regretted not encouraging me to write that paper. Whether you believe him is related to how much you know about the way some people behave before and after you’re a little famous.)

  As the audience laughed and the man with the mike moved away from her, the little, screechy lady stalked off the stage and out of the auditorium. When the laughter had subsided, someone else, without waiting for the microphone, called out, “How about Mussolini?” Before answering, I held up my spatula, demonstrated how I was spreading the stuffing mixture on the flattened-out steak, leaving some room around the edges.

  “My memory is that Mussolini had tendencies in that direction,” I finally said, tasting the prosciutto I was about to layer on the stuffing, rolling my eyes in pleasure. “But he was a pol, you know. The opposite of a real fanatic. They hardly believe anything, it’s not that they get some fixed idea and can’t shake it. I don’t think he ever went all the way. He was from a little town in the Romagna, the family wasn’t rich, and they must’ve eaten more fish than meat. On the other hand, they used a lot of lard . . . and some sausage. . . . Anyway, the man changed his mind radically about Jews and birth control, or at least changed what he said about them, so we can’t assume he felt the same way about meat all his life.”

  I’d added the slices of hard-boiled egg and Provolone. Now I held up my basting needle, showed the camera and studio audience how I threaded it, rolled the filled steak and sewed it up. But not everyone was ready to let fascist-vegetarians go, and, as I worked, I nodded at someone who asked if I was saying that all vegetarians were nuts.

  I cut up the onions to sauté in the pot where I would brown the meat, explaining what I was doing and how, then repeated, “Nuts? Gee, I don’t think so, but there’s something . . . I mean, some of my best friends are meat eaters. Come to think of it, all of my best friends are meat eaters.” I poured some oil into the pot, threw in the onions, explained that they shouldn’t get brown or they’d burn when I put in the meat. “Even the phrase ‘meat eater’ is peculiar, because it makes it sound as though you don’t eat anything else. Like lions and tigers. And the fact is, most meat eaters who’re people eat mostly other things. I don’t eat meat a lot of the time, sometimes a week or two’ll go by and I don’t have any, but I know how I’d react if someone told me I could never again have osso buco. Or a BLT Down. Does that make me a Meat Eater, capital M, capital E? If it does . . . well, ad aspira cum came, as they say in . . . They must say it someplace.”

  We were overwhelmed by (mostly) admiring calls and letters from viewers, requests for interviews by various newspaper and magazine people who’d been uninterested in my existence, piles of unsolicited cookbooks from publishers who hadn’t previously noted or cared that I referred to books on the show, calls from people I hadn’t heard from in months or years, and, most important, by potential sponsors and a couple of networks that had been certain there was no interest in one more cooking show, surely not one without a celebrity chef. There was a change, sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, in the way everyone connected to the show treated me, from technicians who’d been pleasant but became friendly, to executives for whom I’d become a valuable commodity to be taken to fancy lunches, instead of just another trick they might be able to turn. There was a change, I should say, in everyone except Sheldon.

  I’d assumed he would relax a little, be happy with what he had wrought. But he became more rather than less anxious about the show’s future, harassed me more than ever about the specifics. Now he had a level, the level of “the Hitler show,” that we had to maintain if we were going to “get a network.” The viewers we’d hooked onto our line with such difficulty would run away if they were bored in the first two seconds of my next show. Suddenly the qualities Sheldon had perceived in me from the first were qualities he had to make sure I retained. The next show, I quote him precisely, should be “the same, only different.” He’d love it if I could find a way to bring up Hitler. I reminded him that surprise spun my wheels and many other people’s. He said I should “break it down” and repeat only some of the elements. (He needn’t have worried; for weeks someone always found a way to bring up Hitler.) He was concerned that I might say something to drive away new viewers. He was terrified that I would refer to network conversations in front of Bob. He insisted I put off a discussion of the differences in men’s and women’s food tastes because “We have to be careful about getting the lunatics mad w
hile they’re hooking into you.”

  I laughed. “That’s pretty funny, considering I needed to get mad at a piece of bread to—”

  “This is different.” He waved it away, spilling his coffee in the process.

  “So who’s going to get mad at the men-women stuff? Feminists?”

  He nodded. “They go crazy if you tell ’em you have a dick.”

  (This was before the Bobbitt case had made it clear that there were a large number of women with reasonable I.Q.s who actually thought it was all right to cut off an abusive husband’s penis. I treated it as I treated most of Sheldon’s inanities.)

  “I promise not to,” I said. “On the other hand, I could have some fun with tails. I have a wonderful Chinese recipe for oxtail from Craig Claiborne. Kangaroo tail’s supposed to be good. Can’t say I’ve ever eaten it. And I read someplace, there’s this deer, I think it’s called black deer, the Chinese cook something with its tail that’s supposed to cure impotence.”

  He was not amused, although Bob Kupferman was. He and I had liked each other even before Hitler—B.H., as I had begun to call it. A little, skinny guy who’d once looked into the distance when Sheldon got too ridiculous to be answered, Bob now met my eyes at such times instead.

  “We could call it Tails,” I said, “that’s T-A-I-L-S, from the Kitchen.”

  “What else you got? Anything from history?”

  I stared at him.

  “History?”

  He nodded. “History. No current events. If you date the show, we won’t be able to sell it for reruns.”

  I asked my father if there were any more good food-history stories.

  “Hmm,” he said. “The only thing that comes to mind is Harding’s daughter. He was quite a philanderer, you know, and his daughter said it was good he hadn’t been born a woman because he’d have been pregnant all the time. Come to think of it, that’s not about food, is it.”

  Of course, they weren’t so easy to separate in the brain, a fact I might be able to have fun with sometime.

  “It would require some research,” my father said, “but George Washington refused a salary as President. He just wanted his expenses covered. They say it came to much more than a salary would’ve. A lot of that has to have been about food and wine.”

  Nobody sympathized with my Sheldon difficulties. Leon said Sheldon was right, I was being too Jewish, turning triumph into tragedy. A couple of nurses at the hospital had been talking about the show and he’d been proud to claim me as his girlfriend. He said he knew I was too busy to ask about the progress of his divorce, but, whether I cared or not, it was final. I said that I cared about everything connected to him. But my brain wasn’t ready to absorb the fact that the divorce had anything to do with me. It was about him and his children.

  Ovvy, at eight, couldn’t stand to be kissed, but he was delighted that I no longer had afternoon classes and he could drop by any day with a friend to have milk and cookies before they went upstairs to Nintendo. He was less aware than the girls of my new fame; none of his friends knew about “Pot Luck.” When we watched it together on TV, it was like seeing a home movie. Someone in Annie’s social-studies class mentioned the show when they were talking about the Second World War and Hitler. Annie volunteered a tape, explaining that I was a family friend. The class viewed the tape the next day and talked at length about Hitler. Annie said the teacher had told them that while my joke had seemed funny to a lot of people, there was nothing funny about Hitler. Annie wanted to know what I thought about this.

  I nodded, glanced at Leon, who was looking at the ceiling. “I think she’s absolutely right,” I assured Annie.

  She had remained pleasant since the summer, and Leon repeatedly assured me our problems were a thing of the past. But it was clear to me that if her behavior was almost as friendly as it had once been, I’d forfeited real affection. Leon was convinced that she’d just come out of herself, was making friends at school, needed me less, but Ovvy needed me less, too, and loved me no less. The difference was clear to me, if not to Leon.

  Rennie was almost fourteen and trying to become a more typical teenager than she’d ever be. Her standard response to almost any question was either “Fine. Really fine. Awesome” or, alternatively, “He [or She or It] sucks,” an expression that irritated her father, puzzled her brother until he heard the kids in school using it, and made Annie smile because she knew how Leon felt about it. Rennie sort of imitated Annie’s attitude toward me; I couldn’t tell what was really there, but suspected that her sister’s coolness made her less hostile to me than she’d once been.

  And then there was Olivia. My daughter had never confessed to seeing the show, but civility had become her baseline with me, and once in a while she relayed a question from Pablo’s mother. Mrs. Cruz worked from seven A.M. until three o’clock as a cashier in a neighborhood luncheonette and apparently rushed through any shopping she had to do in order to be home for “Pot Luck.” Olivia was thoroughly absorbed in her own life, which was fine, except that the two parts of her life in which she was absorbed were Pablo and Harvard. Harvard and Pablo. The intensity about Harvard had increased since her weekend up there, when she’d come home talking about how wonderful it was, how the students looked great, how much nicer than New York Boston was. She had phoned Sally, the girl she’d met in Rome but hadn’t, to the best of my knowledge, spoken to since. I couldn’t tell if she was remaining in contact, but she spoke of Sally as though the girl were a close friend, Harvard as though she were expecting a call from the admissions office that week.

  “When you think about Harvard,” I said one evening, “I mean, maybe it’s too far away to worry about, but do you figure you won’t be seeing Pablo anymore?”

  “Why would I figure that?” she asked, more puzzled than hostile.

  “Well, because it’s hard to imagine, I mean, I know it’s a long time away, but . . . Aside from your age, you have very different interests. You’re talking about maybe going on to law school. You really love school. Pablo may be very intelligent, but he’s not an academic.” I’d never heard the two of them talk about anything but which movie they wanted to see, music they wanted to hear, restaurant they wanted to try. “I don’t think the two of you’re going to have many interests in common, once the first, you know . . . as you grow older.”

  She looked up. “You don’t know anything about Pablo’s interests. Or mine.”

  I was going to have to be even more careful. No use trying to tell my daughter that her father and I had probably had more in common than she and Pablo did, and it still wasn’t enough to carry us through a real life. From what I’d seen, Livvy was not only an academic of sorts, but a much bigger snob than I’d ever been. As a matter of fact, once or twice when she’d complained about some course and Pablo had asked what the problem was, she’d just said, “Ohhhh, you wouldn’t understand,” and gone to phone a friend about it.

  “All I know is that whatever your interests are now, you need to have a chance to develop them. Or let them change. You’re a bright, young girl, and maybe you should be seeing some boys, not a man, however lovely he is, certainly not a man who’s a lineman for the phone company.”

  “He’s not a lineman,” she said with a superior little smile. “He works with the Secret Service. They check out hacker fraud.”

  “Hacker fraud?”

  I was mortified that I’d never asked Pablo about his work, had to remind myself of how seldom we’d sat around and talked. The reminder didn’t quite pull me through.

  “Computer nuts.” She stood, yawned. “You might want to ask him sometime. Meanwhile, I really have to do my homework.”

  I talked to Leon, who was convinced that it was my old Anything-But-Relax syndrome. Here my daughter was, finally growing up, acting human, making responsible choices, and I was, what? Worried! But it was, of course, her refusing to acknowledge that choice would be involved that worried me. I talked to my sister, who responded with a nasty comment about Livvy’s
delusions of grandeur. I told her it wasn’t a delusion for a young girl with a ninety-five average to think she might get into Harvard, but it was clear that I couldn’t talk to her about Livvy. Actually, the number of subjects we could discuss had diminished radically, since the success of “Pot Luck.” My brother, Gus, was bringing his family in for Thanksgiving, as he hadn’t in years, and my father said that on the phone Gus had talked about little but how they all loved the show. Beatrice’s reaction to Gus’s call was a snotty line about how it was good someone in the family had gotten on television or we’d never have seen Gus again. Apparently a couple of her friends who’d not seen the Hitler show had asked if she had a tape, and this had aroused her sibling bitchery. (The first time someone asked my mother for a tape, she’d asked what was broken.)

  “Hello, everybody. The Italians have the phrase cucina casalinga. Casalinga homemade, and cucina, of course, means cuisine. For a long time the phrase simply meant mother-daughter cuisine. More recently it has come to mean peasant cooking. Maybe there’s a natural association—peasants are less likely than others to leave their hometown, more likely to pass on ways of doing things, including cooking. But passing on methods and recipes can also be a way of allowing the past to contribute to the future, so that if you move from one province of Italy, say, to another, or even from Italy to a new country, you don’t lose your old life but incorporate it into your new one.”

  On the blackboard I’d listed some recipes that changed from province to province, beginning with a soup (minestrone, made with pumpkin in Naples, etc.), going on to lasagna (which Neapolitans made with tiny fried loin of pork patties), and ending with a chocolate-truffle recipe that had nothing to do with Italy, but would allow me to do a chocolate riff when my imaginary peasant daughter moved to France. Everyone loved a chocolate riff.

  “Why only mother-daughter?” a woman asked. “My son loves to cook.”