When in Doubt, Add Butter

by Beth Harbison

  “Oh!” I felt warmth flush into my face. “You know, I never even thought about that until someone pointed it out last week.”

  For the first time, her face softened into something approaching a smile, though it didn’t quite get there. “Are you serious?”

  “Totally.”

  She shook her head. “You’re a professional chef, and it’s never occurred to you that your name rhymes with Jenny Craig?”

  I tried to laugh. Here I’d been thinking maybe she was stupid, and for years I’d missed the most obvious pun possible.

  “Well,” she went on, “I hope you cook better than you rhyme.”

  “I think I do.”

  She looked me up and down, then gestured at the chair adjacent to the sofa. “Have a seat. Please.”

  I sat.

  “As I’m sure you’ve gathered, and as I’m even more sure you’ve been told, I’m not really into this idea of having someone come in and cook.”

  I hedged, trying to figure out what to say that wouldn’t be obviously patronizing. “I don’t really know—”

  “Yes, you do.”

  I nodded.

  “I like flavor,” she said. “Not rabbit food. I know that doesn’t go with the whole weight-loss thing, so I’d like to know what you think you can make that I’ll actually want to eat.”

  “I can make anything you want to eat.”

  “Fried chicken?”

  It was such a cliché, I doubted she even really liked it, but still I said, “Baked that’s better than fried.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I bet you wouldn’t know the difference, in a taste test.”

  She raised a brow. “I’ll take that bet.”

  No small statement for a gambler. “What else?”

  “Pizza.”

  “Easy. Child’s play. What else?”

  “Dessert.”

  “You like chocolate?”

  “Eh.” She held out her hand and tipped it side to side. “Ice cream. The real thing, not ice milk, not low-fat ice cream, not frozen yogurt, but full-fat, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.”

  I thought of a recipe I’d been making recently for strawberries with chocolate balsamic vinegar and cracked pepper, spilled over a small amount of dense premium vanilla ice cream. The whole thing had comparatively few calories but was satisfying because it had such a huge punch of flavor. “No problem,” I told her confidently.

  “Seriously?” She narrowed her eyes.

  “Absolutely.”

  “No tricks? You’re not going to try and slip no-fat frozen yogurt by me as the real thing?”

  “Never.”

  “Huh.” She considered for a moment.

  “It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” And at this point, that was the best I could say for my end of it. Lex was right: This woman was a pill. But not a real bitch. She was no Angela, for example. Still, it wasn’t hard to see that this could go badly.

  “I don’t think I’m going to like it, and usually if I think I’m not going to like something, I’m right—”

  Well, sure, if you decide you feel a certain way about something, you’re apt to go ahead and feel that way.

  “—but I’ll give it a shot,” she finished, surprising me.

  “I didn’t see that coming,” I said honestly. It was obvious that honesty was going to be the best policy with her.

  “It’s my job to keep a poker face,” she said, doing just that. I had no idea if she was being ironic or serious.

  “Okay, well, if you’re willing to try this, so am I. After all, it’s a pretty simple formula. Fewer calories in, a little more movement … It’s tried and true. I’m sure we can succeed together.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” she warned, and all trace of humor was gone. Her face was a wide, blank landscape, like the surface of the moon with no discernible life or energy to it. “I said I’ll give it a shot. But I really don’t think this is going to work.”

  Unfortunately, I didn’t think so, either. It was hard to sell someone something they were sure they didn’t want to buy.

  Chapter 9

  The Oleksei family lived in a house on Wyndham Place in Northwest D.C., in a neighborhood that could once have been populated by Cleavers, Petries, Stones, and Haskells. It was a Cape Cod that looked small from the outside, but somehow managed to have five fairly large levels, and five larger-than-life occupants, on the inside.

  But there was a weird tension in the house. Nothing I could put my finger on. Just something … indefinable … that made me vaguely uncomfortable every time I went in there. Not uncomfortable like I was in danger, just uncomfortable like there was some creepy essence in there.

  Like the ghost of a mean old woman, standing next to me, glaring.

  Therefore, I usually tried to do most of my prep work for the hot meal in advance, so I didn’t have to stand there with the various members of the family, tediously chopping, mixing, and so on while wishing they weren’t there. But with tonight’s eggplant with walnut sauce, there wasn’t a lot that could be done in advance.

  So when I showed up and Viktor—the eldest son—was having a screaming match with his wife, Cindy, all I could do was try to blend into the woodwork and be as invisible as possible.

  Fortunately, most of the people I worked for did find me invisible, so disappearing wasn’t usually too difficult, though it’s never really easy to be around two people who are all-out screaming at each other.

  “You did not have to speak to him!” Viktor threw his arms up. “There was no reason for you to speak to him!”

  I took the groceries out and set them on the counter.

  “He asked for directions!” Cindy returned, just as heatedly.

  Eggplant, garlic, coriander, pomegranate juice, walnuts …

  “He could have found his way!”

  I opened my knife case and took out a chef’s knife and reached for the cutting board behind the sink.

  “To the Leicesters’? Two doors down? I would have looked like a fool if I’d just shrugged and walked away.”

  Viktor slammed his hand down on the tabletop, making me jump, but not Cindy. Fortunately, I had a good grip on the knife, because it would have been just like me to drop it and chop off a toe.

  “It’s all about appearances with you!” Viktor shouted. “You don’t want to look like a fool, so you make your husband look like one instead! Very nice. Very, very nice.”

  Cindy had been bitchy to me on more than one occasion, but I have to say I was completely on her side with this one, even though I didn’t know all the details. Nevertheless, even if it was a carful of men she’d had one-night stands with, if they were simply asking which house belonged to the people they were visiting, it would have been nuts for her to ignore them or to pretend not to know.

  “Ask Jenna!” Cindy said.

  That was the other thing. In a year and counting, she still thought my name was Jenna. Maybe all of them did, but she was the only one who spoke completely unaccented English, so she was the only one I could really hear the mispronunciation with.

  They wrote the checks to the right name. That was the only thing that really mattered to me.

  “Okay, we’ll ask her.”

  All I could think was, Please don’t ask me, please don’t ask me, please don’t ask me.…

  Both of them approached the counter, and I—in an acting job worthy of either Gabor sister but no Streep—pretended I didn’t hear them and turned to rinse the eggplant in the sink.

  “Jenna!”

  I rolled my eyes to myself, then turned around. “Did you need something?”

  “Do you think a married woman should be fraternizing with other men?” Viktor asked.

  Oh, God. That was not the question. What a jerk. “Depends what you mean by fraternizing, I guess. I don’t know.” Play dumb. Play possum if necessary.

  “Giving directions to neighbors,” Cindy supplied.

  I sliced cleanly into the eggplant and set the slice asid
e on a plate. “There’s probably nothing wrong with giving directions,” I said carefully. “We all need help getting where we’re going sometimes.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her and gave her husband a smug smile. “See?”

  Viktor’s face darkened. “And if a woman does it with her, how do you say it, with her tits hanging out. Is it okay then?”

  Slice.

  “Oh my God, Viktor. You don’t talk to the damn maid that way!”

  Chef.

  Slice.

  “You are going to be really sorry about this,” he said to her in a low, fierce voice.

  “You don’t scare me.”

  Everything Dell and Penny made look good about marriage, Cindy and Viktor made look horrible.

  The doorbell rang, and I looked at the two of them glaring at each other, challenging each other in a strangely fierce game of chicken, to move.

  I needed no such challenge. “Why don’t I just get that?” I suggested, and neither of them made a move. I could have said, I think that’s Santa Claus over there giving John Lennon a back rub, and they wouldn’t have moved their eyes from each other.

  I went to the front door, wiping my hands on a dish towel and wondering if I should find a new Thursday night in addition to a new Friday night. Except I really liked making the Russian food. It made for an interesting change from the norm, and it seemed unlikely that there was someone else in the D.C. area looking for a weekly infusion of noodles, potatoes, and other starches all mixed together.

  I opened the door. A small, balding man in an ill-fitting suit was on the front step, and he jumped, apparently startled, when I opened the door. What did he think, that someone was just going to vaporize out there to usher him in?

  “Can I help you?” I asked, knowing immediately that I couldn’t. I didn’t normally get the door, and I suddenly realized that no matter who this guy was here to see, I wasn’t going to be sure how to direct him.

  Particularly given the scene that had just taken place in the kitchen over Cindy giving driving directions to a house twenty yards away.

  “I’m here to see”—he looked left and right, then lowered his voice—“Vlad.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Most people came to see Vlad. I, on the other hand, rarely laid eyes on him. What was I going to do now? Go to the secret room where he was always holed up and bang on the door, telling him he had a gentleman caller?

  Fortunately, Viktor showed up and pushed me out of the way. Well, pushed might be a little strong, but it was a bit more than a nudge. I bristled at his touch, but then remembered the ugly scene that had just taken place with Cindy and decided it was better not to cross him under any circumstances.

  “What do you want?” he asked the man, and I could swear his accent got stronger.

  “I—I’m here to see Vlad? Vlad Oleksei? I’m not sure if this is the right place. I was expecting an office, but I was told—”

  “You’re in the right place.” Viktor flashed me an impatient look that left no doubt that I was not supposed to be there.

  So I went back to the kitchen and salted the sliced eggplant while the man was shuffled into Vlad’s office. Or torture chamber. Or whatever it was.

  Borya and Serge came in then. Like rambunctious adolescents being called in for dinner when they would rather keep roughhousing. They were small and sturdy—Tweedledum and Tweedledee to Viktor’s taller, darker, arguably handsome looks. I mean, if Viktor weren’t such a dick to Cindy, I might have thought he was kind of hot.

  Clearly he thought he was hot.

  “Who was at the door?” Borya asked, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  Lovely.

  “I’m not sure.” I put a pan on the stove and heated the burner to medium, focusing hard on the task. “Someone to see your father.”

  I could swear they exchanged a look.

  What did that mean?

  I put a big slab of butter into the pan. The Olekseis didn’t give one tiny damn about health, which made them refreshing to cook for, and my motto was pretty much, When in doubt, add butter.

  Right now, I was definitely in doubt.

  I added more butter.

  “So what is it your father does?” I asked, as if it had been explained to me previously but I’d simply forgotten.

  This time they definitely exchanged a look.

  “We are in the cleaning business,” Serge said, and Borya nodded.

  He paused over cleaning business; I’m sure of it. I was tempted to point out that Vlad wasn’t dry-cleaning wedding dresses and ironing shirts for people in the back room when they came in, but I held my tongue. Instead, I started frying the eggplant and dissolving into the background, which was understood by everyone to be my role.

  “Is it the last one today?” Serge asked Borya.

  “Of course.” Borya gestured at me. I pretended not to notice but a chill went down my spine.

  I placed three eggplant slices in the hot pan and they sizzled.

  Serge said, “Oh, yes, yes.” As if I were somehow the key to him (whoever he was, presumably the guy who was seeing Vlad) being the last one (last what?). “What are you making?” he asked me.

  “Eggplant with a pomegranate walnut sauce.” It was nice to be able to answer at least something with certainty. I turned the eggplant over in the pan. The sauce was just a mixture of pomegranate juice, good red wine vinegar, garlic, red pepper flakes, and salt. Nothing else. It was hard for me to resist embellishing recipes that called for so little, but the complexity of the juice itself transformed what would otherwise be the world’s most basic support ingredients into a symphony of flavor.

  “It’s from my grandmother’s recipe collection?”

  “Yes.” My friend who was translating had run low on time this week, so I’d just told him to pick the shortest recipe in the book and give me that one. Some of the grandmother’s recipes were quite long and involved, and I was dying to try them, too. “So … this should be ready in about twenty minutes, give or take.” I took the eggplant slices out and put them on a paper towel, then put more in, saying, “When do you think your father will be available?”

  He glanced at the clock and said, with complete certainty, “Twenty-five minutes.”

  “That works perfectly, then.” I waited, hoping he’d elaborate, but he didn’t.

  Borya disappeared down the hall, toward the back room where Vlad took his meetings. After a moment, Serge joined him.

  I was glad to be alone.

  It was short-lived, though. Cindy came into the kitchen about five minutes later. “Sorry about before,” she said. “Viktor can be a real jerk sometimes. He’s all worried about this thing his father’s involved in, so he’s even worse than usual.”

  “Oh, that’s…” What? Okay? Uncomfortable? Your problem, not mine? I couldn’t think of a way to end the sentence, so I didn’t.

  She nodded. Apparently my silence was the most profound thing I could have come up with for her. “Have you ever been married?” she asked me.

  This personal question, particularly from someone who’d been calling me Jenna for almost a year, took me by surprise. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Why not?” She looked me over—her manicured, made-up, designer-clad self shining like a beacon next to the shrub that was me—and frowned, as if such a thing seemed impossible.

  “I guess I never found the right man.” I hated giving her the answer that would make sense to her for all the wrong reasons.

  She nodded. “It’s a jungle out there. Have you tried a lot of dating services and things?”

  The assumption that I not only had been to dating services but that I had also obviously burned through a lot of them was insulting. “None, actually.” I turned the eggplant slices over in the pan. “I don’t really have a lot of time for dating.”

  “Really? What do you spend your time doing?”

  I looked at the stove and then at her. “Working.”

  “At … this?” She smiled, b
ut it wasn’t charming. “I mean, is this your only job?”

  “Yes.” My voice was getting as crisp as the eggplant. “This is what I do. I have other clients to fill up the week and special events on the weekends at the country club.”

  “Oh.”

  I took the eggplant out of the pan. Suddenly it looked dark, gray, and depressing to me.

  The smell made me feel a little ill.

  “I love my job,” I added, though it was probably a bit too defensively.

  She sighed. “I need a lawyer.”

  “What?” My question had been automatic, but I immediately wished I could take it back.

  “A divorce lawyer. I need a good divorce lawyer.”

  “Well.” Why was she saying this to me?

  “Do you know one?”

  This was starting to make me nervous. I had no way of knowing for sure, of course, but my impression was that Viktor wasn’t privy to these thoughts she was having. Or, if he was, he wasn’t worried about them. But it didn’t make sense that a man worried about his wife divorcing him would be hammering her about something as petty as giving driving directions to another man. So if Cindy was thinking of divorcing Viktor but Viktor didn’t know it, I sure as shit didn’t want to get caught talking to her about it.

  “I’m sorry?” I hedged. I was bad at improvisation. Focus on work. Pour pomegranate juice into the pan to reduce it to a syrup. Chop the garlic. Add the salt and red pepper flakes.

  Toasted walnuts were the garnish.

  Perfect.

  “Could you recommend a divorce lawyer for me?” she pressed.

  Ugh. “Wow, I really—”

  “Divorce lawyer?” The question came with such ferocity that there could be no doubt who was asking, even before Viktor rounded the corner, red-faced and wide-eyed. “Do my ears deceive me, or did you just ask the maid for a divorce lawyer?”

  Chef.

  But really not the time to argue that.

  Cindy’s face paled. “It wasn’t for me,” she lied badly. “I was asking Jenna about her divorce because my friend Ramona is looking for someone.”

  Somehow his expression darkened. “I’ve never heard of this Ramona.”

  “She’s in my Yogilates class.”