Julia's Child (9781101559741)

by Pinneo, Sarah

  Lately, I did my cooking in a far less charming room. The next night found me surrounded by the linoleum and stainless surfaces of our production facility, La Cucina. I unwrapped blocks of cheese, while Marta washed organic apples in the giant steel sink.

  Marta shut off the water and looked around. “She’s not here, is she?”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t seen her.” Things were decidedly more peaceful when the Cucina’s ironfisted matriarch was not on the premises.

  The scuttlebutt around the kitchen was that the government paid “Auntie” Maria to teach employable skills to welfare mothers who were losing their benefits. With one hand, Uncle Sam had slashed aid to poor mothers. With the other, he paid Zia Maria to educate them.

  Zia, ever enterprising, had then hit on the idea of renting out the kitchens at night and on weekends to earn even more money. To fill these off-hours slots, she turned to another vulnerable population—hopeful entrepreneurs. There were now ten struggling businesses like mine renting time during the graveyard shift at the Cucina.

  Zia’s frugality was legendary. To force one enterprise to support the other, she required her welfare mothers to work several shifts a month for the entrepreneurs, at less than minimum wage.

  And that’s how I’d met Marta. By the time I arrived on the scene, she was nearly a graduate of Zia’s program. She could peel ten cloves of garlic in ten seconds flat and mince onions without shedding a tear. More important, Marta knew how Zia’s kitchen worked—which burners on the overused stove lit evenly and how to run the clanking flash freezer.

  Marta’s many talents announced themselves to me immediately. I could see that she was her own gum-cracking variety of superwoman, able to leap tall egos in a single bound. As soon as I was able, I hired her—full time. We were a tiny company, so Marta’s job was to be my gal Friday. I paid her a salary of forty thousand dollars, which was a hell of a lot less than she was worth but more than I could afford.

  Marta was not without her quirks. She was full of old wives’ tales. She thought cold water from the tap would come to a boil faster than warm water, in spite of the obvious physical impossibility. She also thought that too much stirring drove the vitamins out of food. But I hadn’t hired her for her scientific insight. I was after her skills with both kitchenware and diplomacy.

  Into Zia’s industrial food processor I fed great hunks of organic cheddar. The machine was deafening but quickly produced five pounds of cheesy smithereens.

  “Did you get a nap?” I asked Marta.

  “No. I got coffee instead. You?”

  I smiled. “Same. Who’s sitting with Carlos?” On our production Thursdays, Marta bribed a rotating collection of little old-lady neighbors to spend half the night on her living room sofa, keeping an eye on her son.

  “Señora Díaz tonight. Carlos likes her well enough. She lets him pick all the TV shows.”

  “Groovy.”

  I dropped the cheese into a mixing bowl the size of a Roman tub and looked around for a paddle. I didn’t mind our late nights in the kitchen. Making the actual food was for me the part that made all the bureaucratic nonsense bearable. Still, there was no time to waste when your workday ended in the wee hours.

  “I made the flyers,” Marta announced. She wiped her hands dry on her apron and then pulled a colorful page from a Kinko’s envelope. “Julia’s Child Sold Here!” There was a pretty photo of our packaging. But I also saw a small inset photograph of me cuddling Wylie against the leafy backdrop of the playground.

  I blinked. “My picture? Where’d you get that?”

  “Luke,” she said breezily. “The colors work—don’t you think?” She admired her work. “Green words, green trees, green product. Green mommy. Save the world. Get it?” She pulled on a hairnet.

  “Subtle,” I said. I wasn’t sure about having my picture pasted up in store windows, but I had to admit that it was a punchy document.

  Marta cracked her gum at me. “Where’s your flyer, then?”

  “It looks great, Marta. It’s perfect. Do you think any of the stores will object to putting our signs in their windows?”

  “I don’t plan to ask permission,” Marta answered, pulling on her latex gloves. “I’m going to tell them you’re sending a hundred new customers their way.”

  From across the room, we heard a shriek. “Ay! You no can put in there! You stink up my churros with your stinky pickles!” Lila, of Lila’s Churros, was hollering at Bob, of Bob’s Old-Fashioned Garlicky Dills.

  More than three hundred years into its history, the Brooklyn melting pot was still going strong. Most of the entrepreneurs who used the Cucina made ethnic specialty foods, selling the flavors of home to their countrymen. Aside from Lila and Bob, we’d worked alongside producers of Brazilian empanadas, Polish pierogi, and Indian chutneys.

  Marta and I were the only ones cooking for the toddler nation. We always got along well with the others. But tonight’s skirmish was repeated often enough—a familiar UN standoff over refrigerator space.

  Lila looked in our direction for support. “You see he do this? Put garlic pickles in with churros?”

  “I’ll move ’em!” Bob roared. “Just quit yer hollerin’.” He poked around in a neighboring refrigerator, rearranging things.

  “But I have to make all over again! Churros taste like garlic now!” Lila looked ready to weep.

  I trotted to their end of the kitchen. “Let me taste one, Lila. I’ll bet they weren’t in there together long enough to cause a problem.” She handed me one of the delicate cinnamon-flavored donuts, and it melted in my mouth. “Fine,” I told her. “Not a whiff.”

  “I’d better taste it to be sure,” Marta said from the other end of the room.

  I broke off a piece of my churro and walked back toward Marta. “Lila,” I said. “Watch this.” I tossed the piece toward Marta, who caught it in her mouth like a trained seal, all without breaking her rhythm with the apple peeler.

  Lila’s eyebrows went up in surprise. She forgot her anger and smiled.

  “¡Muy bien! Delicioso,” Marta declared. “Toss me another bite,” she demanded. I turned my back to her and tossed it over my head. I heard Lila gasp with surprise when Marta caught it. It was just one of my assistant’s strange skills. Once, I’d nearly choked to death on a grape while trying to imitate her.

  “Nice light touch with the cinnamon,” Marta complimented the chef.

  “Gracias,” said Lila happily.

  “See, I ain’t such a bad guy,” hollered Bob from his corner of the kitchen. We ignored him.

  “So all this cheese is for muffets?” Marta asked me, getting back to business.

  “Double batch,” I explained. “Ms. Aranjo mentioned them specifically in my introduction at Park Slope Parenting. Her son loves them.”

  “Let’s hope he’s hungry,” Marta grumbled.

  “Ha. After these, we’re going to make the Carrot and Black Bean Muffets, and if there’s time, we’ll do a batch of Gentle Lentil.”

  The muffet—a savory baked good made from unexpectedly healthy things—was our most popular and innovative product. No child could resist a baked good, even one containing protein or vegetables.

  We made hundreds of muffets. While Marta stirred batches of batter, I filled the muffet tins, placed them into the commercial oven, removed them after exactly eighteen minutes, and then started all over again. After four hours, my motions began to feel robotic. The muffets cooled on racks. When the first ten batches were cool, Marta cranked up the flash freezer and began zapping them into frozen little muffetsicles. I stood at the other end, mechanically placing them with gloved hands into our packaging, until the packaging and the product began to blur together.

  “That’s the last of them,” Marta finally said.

  If there had been a chair in the kitchen, I would have collapsed into it, but Zia Maria allowed no chairs in the kitchen as she was generally opposed to rest and comfort. So instead I leaned heavily against the stainless steel count
ertop. I took a moment to eat a broken muffet. “I’ll get the coolers,” I announced, heading sleepily toward my car. Outdoors the air was refreshingly chilly, a genuine fall evening. Perking up, I dragged the coolers out of the hatchback while droning cars rushed past on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which ran practically overhead.

  Back inside, Marta and I packed the frozen muffets among ice packs. Each shiny package, clean and perfect, was the result of our labor. Even with heavy eyelids, I admired their beauty. I had never once, in my years as an accountant, felt this way about my work. Holding the packages in my hands, it barely made a difference whether or not Julia’s Child would turn a profit. Moms would buy these very packets, tear them open, and hand the contents to their children. What could be more important than that?

  With a satisfied sigh, I zipped everything up. I grabbed the handles of the rolling coolers and took a few steps toward the door. “You could make the delivery if you’d rather.” I made my usual offer to Marta. It was a quicker job than the cleanup. But she never took me up on it.

  She waved a hand at me. “You go. I’m fine finishing up here.”

  I winked at her. “I’ll give Mr. Pastucci a kiss for you.”

  Marta made a face. She and I didn’t agree about Mr. Pastucci, or the Sons of Sicily Social Club. I found them to be harmless relics of Brooklyn’s storied past, while Marta said she found old Mr. Pastucci and his establishment creepy.

  “I don’t know what they’re up to at these social clubs, but it isn’t good,” she’d said, the first time we visited the space. “Old men, sitting around together in the dark.”

  It was only a three-minute drive with my cargo over to his low-slung Court Street storefront. Mr. Pastucci’s was the last of the Italian men’s clubs that used to line the street, or so I was told. That was back when the Italians ruled Brooklyn, before four-dollar lattes and pricy bistros came to the neighborhood. As far as I could tell, the Sons of Sicily Social Club was nothing more than a dim box of a room with a little old bar, a smattering of folding chairs, and a pool table. I pulled my Subaru into the dark alleyway between the club and a dry cleaner. The back door was in reach, but as per my arrangement with the proprietor, I went around to the front door, a scraped-up metal model with a peephole. I banged the knocker against the door four times, as Mr. Pastucci requested. And then I waited.

  After a few moments, the old man opened the door a couple of inches. Behind him I could see the dim lighting and wisps of smoke from the members’ cigars. Piano music played softly on tinny speakers.

  I smiled at him. “Open . . . saddle soap?” I asked. We always did a bit of a shtick from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon before he let me in the back door with my goods. “Open sarsaparilla?”

  Mr. Pastucci’s glance floated over my head, as he checked the spaces behind me, like a movie mobster. Then he nodded.

  If any of his paranoia was genuine, I assumed it was because he operated the little place without a liquor license. I pulled my coolers containing “da merchandise,” as Mr. Pastucci called it, into his small back room. There was nothing there save for a utility sink, a mop bucket, and two enormous chest freezers that I rented for a hundred dollars a month.

  Zia Maria’s rates were usurious by comparison. And the location was perfect, since we produced the food in Brooklyn and our only retailers were in Brooklyn.

  It took me just a few minutes to fit all the muffets into the two freezers while Mr. Pastucci watched.

  “How’s business?” he asked.

  “Okay,” I answered as cheerfully as I could at so late an hour. “I met some potential customers in Park Slope yesterday, and it went really well. So I made a lot of product tonight. Sales might pick up this week. Speaking of which . . .” I closed the top of the freezer and reached for my purse. I fished out two fifties, still crisp from the ATM machine, and handed them to him.

  He smiled. For another month, I was helping him keep the light on over the pool table and beer in the cooler.

  “Any of the stores give you trouble?” he asked. I bit back a smile. He sounded like the Godfather checking up on his famiglia.

  “Only the stores I’m not in are trouble,” I said with a smile. “That makes approximately eighty thousand grocery stores around the country that give me trouble!”

  “But Brooklyn has been good to you,” he said, his voice low and gravely. Mr. Pastucci loved Brooklyn. I wondered if he’d ever been anyplace else.

  “Of course!” I said quickly. “Brooklyn is my savior. I wish Julia’s Child was stocked at Entrefina in the Heights, but really I can’t complain.” It was time for me to leave. “Take care of yourself, Mr. Pastucci.” Then, happy to have the night finally reach its exhausting conclusion, I gave him a quick peck on the cheek and went for the door.

  “Good night, sweetie,” he said.

  Chapter 4

  “Get this. The new toothpaste I bought you has a childproof top.”

  “Groovy,” Luke answered. He hit the car’s turn signal and steered us toward the exit off the interstate.

  “I also bought you a different shampoo,” I told Luke. “This one is organic and not tested on animals.”

  “I’m fine with that,” Luke said. “Just as long as you don’t make me smell like a woman.”

  “I promise if anyone at work asks to borrow your perfume, you can switch back to your old one.”

  “But seriously—just don’t switch the toilet paper,” he warned. “First of all, I don’t like the idea of recycled toilet paper.”

  “They don’t mean recycled from toilet paper.”

  He just shook his head. “Even so. I try to be ‘green’ too, Julia. I’ll plant some extra trees in Vermont if you want. But I’m not using sandpaper in the bathroom.”

  I shifted in my seat. It was such a puzzle. Why were men, who by all accounts were less frequent users of toilet paper, so much more opinionated about it? Could their skin really be that much more sensitive?

  We’d been in the car too long, all four of us. But the Green Mountains were finally coming into view, and I felt my spirits lift. Very shortly we’d be there. “Back on the farm,” I said. “Back on the farm.”

  “Who is?”

  “Me! I’ve always wanted to say that. Now that I have a farm, I can say it whenever I want to.”

  Luke smiled. “Okay, honey. But you don’t exactly have a farm. You have a very nice barn, a pretty meadow, and a patch of dirt, where you hope that two college dropouts will figure out how to grow some better vegetables.”

  He had a point. Our neighbor’s grown children had produced for me a crop of organic eggplant and zucchini that wasn’t exactly worthy of photography, let alone praise. But it had only been their first try.

  “I still think the great vegetable venture might work out.” I hoped it would. Otherwise the project would become yet another entry in the list of things that cost me more money than they made. But we’d come to Vermont to relax, and so I would try not to worry about it. “Don’t rain on my parade.”

  “I couldn’t, even if I wanted to,” he said. “Look at that sky! Not a cloud in sight.”

  Dutifully, I lifted my eyes to the impossibly blue sky, where it met the rounded peaks of the Green Mountains. We’d been coming here together, to our little house, since before the boys were born. Luke and I were in perfect agreement that Vermont was the most beautiful place on earth. And my farming project amused him, even if he didn’t really understand why I wanted to try producing some of the ingredients for Julia’s Child.

  A shriek from the backseat broke through my reverie.

  “Where Elmo go?” Wylie was showing the strain of three hours strapped into his car seat. At the moment he was watching a video.

  “I’m sure he’ll be right back, honey,” I sighed. At home we had a strict no-TV policy for the boys. I hated the zombie faces they wore while staring at the screen. But in the car, I’d made an uneasy truce with Elmo. For the last third of the trip, when I’d run out of stories and songs a
nd snacks, I always put in some Sesame Street videos to keep the kids entertained.

  Videos in the car were something that belonged on my list of Things I Thought I’d Never Do.

  I wanted my boys to have the experience of coming to the country—not just a suburban stand-in, but the real thing. Vermont was the genuine article. I was thrilled to share with them the hilly terrain, the unspoiled farmland, and the only state capital in the union without a McDonald’s.

  But it was more than three hours from New York.

  So Wylie had taken to Elmo like an addict. As many times as I’d thought I might kill myself if I ever heard the Elmo theme again, I needed the little red menace with the squeaky voice more than I dared admit.

  “Where Elmo go?” he yelled again.

  “Mama, the screen really is black,” Jasper explained.

  I craned my neck uncomfortably to retrieve the DVD player from where it hung between the seats. The battery was dead. And the car charger we had for it wasn’t very reliable.

  “Sorry buddy,” I said to Wylie. “Elmo is taking a break.”

  “Where him go?”

  “Him is . . .” I shook my head to clear it. “Is anybody hungry? How about a muffet? I have Apple and Cheddar.” I swiveled uncomfortably around again just in time to see Jasper shaking his head violently. “Jasper! A simple ‘no thank you,’ will do.”

  “No thank you.”

  Lately, Jasper won’t eat muffets. If I put them in his lunchbox, they come home untouched. I understand that the poor kid is probably just sick of them. All the same, I was trying not to let it bother me. If I couldn’t even please my own child, it didn’t bode well for me as a businessperson.

  “Where Elmo?”

  “Oh, Wylie. Let’s sing a song, okay?” With Elmo on break, I was back on duty. “How about the ABCs?” I suggested. “You start.”