by Ruth Reichl
“Lemon meringue,” I said.
“It’s gorgeous!” she breathed. “Can you teach me to make it? Rick loves lemon meringue pie.”
I looked at her dubiously. “Maybe we should start with something easier,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. I realized, to my horror, that I had just agreed to give her cooking lessons.
“Can you believe it?” I asked Mr. Izzy T on my next visit. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t worry, doll, you can do it,” he said. “But I tell you what. Why don’t you go over to Ludlow Street and ask the fishman for a recipe? Every girl should know how to make gefilte fish. You should see the fancy ladies who come there on Friday!”
It was true: on Friday mornings the street in front of the dingy basement fish store was filled with limousines.
“Go in,” urged Mr. Izzy T. “You could learn something.”
That Friday I followed a sleek mink coat through the door. And almost gagged: it was gruesome. The fish markets I knew were pristine places with clean white tiles and pretty piles of lemons. This was an airless hole where the fishmen wore aprons encrusted with blood. They looked like butchers to me—whoever thought that fish could bleed so much? The men stood there, chopping the heads off fish as the women in fur haggled horribly, as if it would be dishonorable to pay a penny more than necessary. It was positively medieval.
I stood there for a while, just watching. When it was my turn I asked for a couple pounds of fish mix. The man scratched his stubbly chin, weighed the mixture out on a rusty hanging scale, wrapped it in white paper, and handed it over. “What do I do with it?” I asked.
He turned to one of the fur coats. “Hey, Essie,” he said, “this madel wants a recipe. Can you help her?”
Essie was a short plump woman with bright orange hair and high color. She nudged me with her elbow and said, “A little gefilte fish never hurt a relationship.” And then she actually winked. “I’m going to Streit’s matzos,” she said. “Come in my car and I’ll give you the recipe. You got a pencil?”
I had a pencil. The chauffeur opened the door. “Such a neighborhood,” said Essie as the car snuffled east. She pointed out Mr. Izzy T’s store. “A great artist,” she said. “You need a quilt, you can’t do better. But so slow! To get a quilt for my daughter’s birthday I had to yell so much I almost had a heart attack. And so opinionated! I wanted a blue quilt for my Rachel; it’s a good Yiddische color. He says it should be green. The arguments!” She sighed happily at the memory.
“Now,” she said, “the recipe. Remember, the fish is just a start, you need the matzo too.” She finished dictating just as the Cadillac pulled up in front of the factory.
The small, hot building was filled with men wearing long black coats and yarmulkes as they pulled the flat squares off the conveyor belt. “Two pounds,” said Essie, pulling off her gloves. “And see that they’re warm. I didn’t schlep down here to buy stale!” She stuck her chin in my direction and said, “Her too. She wants fifty cents worth.” And then she reached out her hand and touched my matzos, just to make sure I wasn’t being cheated.
I made the gefilte fish the second time the Superstar came for dinner; I thought it would impress her. She thought it was icky. So did Doug and Pat. To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of gefilte fish myself.
“So, maybe you try Italian?” suggested Mr. Izzy T the next time that I saw him. “There’s that Italian butcher over on Mott Street. His meat isn’t kosher, but it won’t kill you. Maybe he could give you something to teach your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my friend,” I insisted. “I don’t even like her.”
He just shrugged.
After the gefilte fish debacle I was not prepared to take Mr. Izzy T’s advice on neighborhood purveyors. Still, one day as I passed I looked in the door. The shop was clean and bright and the butcher was dressed in a spotless apron. The meat case was filled with great coils of herb-flecked sausages and the lamb chops were gussied up in those little frilled panties. It was irresistible.
“Sit down, sit down,” said the butcher. “Joseph Bergamini. What could I do for you?”
“I need some lamb shoulder,” I said. He carefully selected a piece of meat and held it up.
“This do?” he asked.
I nodded.
“How much?”
“Two pounds,” I said. “And could you cube it?”
“Stew?” he asked.
I nodded.
“You don’t need no shoulder for stew,” he scoffed. He replaced the meat in the case and took out some lamb necks. He weighed them out, wrote down the price on a piece of paper, and began meticulously separating the meat from the bones.
“Much cheaper this way,” he said.
“But it’s so much work,” I protested.
“Whaddya think I’m here for?” he asked. And then he began expounding his political theories. “Did you know,” he said, pointing the thin boning knife at me, “that if every manufacturer installed a fifteen-dollar device in their plants the air would be clean? We could do away with pollution. They’re killing us for fifteen dollars! The cheap bastards!”
On subsequent visits he worked his way through his theories and the meat case, offering me suggestions for fixing the world and making cheap meals. “You ever try cooking veal breast?” he asked. I hadn’t. “Got a pencil?”
I made the veal breast the night the Superstar came for her first lesson. While it cooked, filling the loft with the good smell of herbs, onions, and garlic, she and I got down to work.
It wasn’t easy.
“You wouldn’t believe it!” I railed to Mr. Izzy T. “She wanted to know what the bubbles were when the water began to boil.”
He laughed gently and I went on. “She stood there watching for so long that her makeup started melting off! By the time I had taught her how to cook pasta, drain it in a colander, and make a simple sauce of tomatoes, basil, and onion, her curls had gone straight and mascara was running down her cheeks.”
“Look, doll,” he said, “if you can teach that girl to cook you should write a book.”
“Yeah,” I said sarcastically.
“Really,” he said. “Think about it.”
Rick liked the spaghetti. The next week we tackled brownies.
“Melt these two squares of chocolate over boiling water,” I instructed, handing the double boiler to the Superstar. She looked baffled.
“Put water in the bottom pot and the chocolate in the top,” I said irritably. “Put the top pot inside the bottom one and put it on the heat.”
I should have known better; she, of course, put the water and the chocolate in the same pot. We tried again.
“See,” I said, bringing the water to boil in the bottom and melting the chocolate on top of it, “it keeps the chocolate from scorching.”
“From what?”
“From burning and smelling very, very bad.” I took the melted chocolate off the fire.
“Now we’re going to cream the butter.”
“I didn’t know you could make cream out of butter,” she said.
I sighed. “It’s just a word that means you stir until it’s soft.”
“Why do they call it cream then?”
“It’s got to be an act,” said Doug. “Part of her Superstar persona. Or else somebody told her men like dumb women.”
I had never measured ingredients for pastry before, but I did so now, meticulously noting down how much flour, butter, Crisco, and ice water I was using. It didn’t help; the first crust the Superstar made was so tough that she wailed, “I can’t feed this to Rick.” I suddenly remembered that Doug’s grandmother had given me an old recipe she said was foolproof. I threw the leaden one into the garbage and got out a clean bowl.
“Put four cups of flour, one tablespoon of sugar, and two teaspoons of salt into that bowl,” I said to the Superstar. She worked slowly, tongue between her teeth, leveling off each ingredient with a knife.
“Now
stir them with a fork,” I commanded. She did, laboriously.
I handed her the Crisco and another measuring cup. “Measure three quarters of a cup of that white stuff.”
“Ooh,” she said, “it’s disgusting.” I showed her, again, how to cut the shortening into the flour with a pastry cutter until it was the size of peas.
I handed her another measuring cup and told her to fill it with a half cup of water. “Now add 1 tablespoon of white vinegar,” I said, handing her the bottle, “and an egg.” She broke the egg in. “Stir them together and add them to the flour and shortening mixture. Now stir it all together with the fork.”
“Look!” she cried, “it’s all coming together.”
“That’s what it’s supposed to do,” I said, tearing up waxed paper and laying it on the counter. “Divide it into five balls and wrap each one in this.”
So far, so good. I put them in the refrigerator to rest for half an hour as she droned on about Rick and what a wonderful lover he was.
Foolproof indeed. The Superstar thumped on the pastry as she rolled it out but the crust was flaky and fine.
“Next week,” I promised, “lemon meringue pie.”
“Next week,” she promised, “I’ll try to get Andy to come look at Pat’s costumes.”
None of us were optimistic but we scrubbed the loft. Pat worked around the clock trying to finish a group of costumes while I worried about what to feed The Great Man. Mr. Bergamini suggested suckling pig.
“You can’t go wrong with a suckling pig,” he said, stuffing an apple into his own mouth to demonstrate.
“Too expensive,” I said. “Besides, what if he’s vegetarian?”
“Ah,” he said disgustedly, “you don’t want to go giving him a bunch of salad.”
In the end I chose a complicated pasta wrapped up in pastry that took two days to make. I was still rolling the minuscule meat balls that went into the dish when the doorbell rang. We all ran hopefully to the window but the Superstar was hugging the building and we couldn’t see if anyone was with her.
We listened to the footsteps on the stairs. “It only sounds like one person,” I said.
“Maybe Andy walks softly,” said Pat. The door burst open. The Superstar breezed blithely in, threw off her silver satin coat, and removed the first of twenty-five bangle bracelets. “Ready for lemon meringue,” she trilled happily. She was alone.
“Isn’t Andy coming?” I asked.
“Oh no,” she said blithely, “he’s out of town. Where do I begin?”
Pat clumped to her end of the loft. From sixty feet away I could hear her grinding her teeth. The Superstar did not notice the heaviness in the air; she was very intent on separating the eggs.
The lessons went surprisingly well.
For all of us.
“So tell me,” said Mr. Izzy T the next day, “how did the boyfriend like the pie?” He put a kettle of water on the hot plate for tea. He spooned cherry preserves into two tall glasses, poured in the tea, and handed me a glass. Then he sat down among the bolts of cloth and watched me expectantly.
“The pie was perfect,” I said. “But it didn’t quite work out the way she wanted.”
He nodded encouragingly.
“I think she thought she would hand it to him and he would ask her to marry him.”
“But he didn’t,” said Mr. Izzy T, as if he already knew the ending.
“When she went to his loft and rang the bell he looked out, saw her and told her to come back later. She told him she had something for him, so he lowered a basket on a rope. She put it in, he pulled it up, leaned out, said the pie was beautiful but she still couldn’t come up. He had a visitor.”
“What goes around comes around,” said Mr. Izzy T with the proper degree of indignation. “She didn’t keep her end of the bargain.”
And then, with the diffidence of a child, he reached under the counter. He extracted a puffy red velvet square tied with string and offered it to me.
“Here doll,” he said, “I do.”
BERKELEY
Life in New York would have been good. If not for Mom.
“I know it’s not my business,” she kept saying, “but I think you might want to reconsider living with Pat.” At first I thought she was concerned about how our unconventional living arrangement looked to her friends, and I could understand that. It was bad enough that we were living on the Bowery, but a newly married couple sharing a loft with another woman was worse. What would people think?
Later I realized it wasn’t the arrangement that troubled her; she was merely jealous. She would have liked to live with us herself. My brother and his wife were living abroad, but I was in New York and she wanted my total attention.
And so she insinuated herself into our lives. She called constantly. Her voice followed me everywhere: when I was working, when I was on vacation, when I was at home. It was the opposite of my adolescence. She insisted on spending birthdays and holidays with us, and if we went away without her she had a tantrum. Even when it was her idea.
The Christmas of 1972 she actually suggested that we visit Milton in Italy. “The airfares are so low,” she said, “it would be a crime not to take advantage of them.” But once our plans were set she took to her bed, wailing that she was being abandoned. “What use is there in having a family,” she raged, “if all they ever do is leave?” Dad came to the loft and begged us not to go. I felt suffocated.
Literally. I began to panic on the subway. When the trains came whooshing into the station I clutched the columns to keep from throwing myself onto the tracks. I was relieved when the doors were safely closed, but only momentarily; then I began to be afraid I would start screaming and be unable to stop. I couldn’t stand bridges or tunnels and I started having headaches so severe I couldn’t leave the house. It was unbearable.
“It’s your mother,” said Pat, “she’s making you crazy.”
Doug agreed. “We have to get out of New York,” he said. “We have to go as far away as we can.”
“Move quickly,” said Pat. “I don’t like the idea, but you really have to go. Before it’s too late.”
I knew they were right. I turned to Doug and said, “You’re going to have to tell my father.”
“I know,” he replied.
Dad looked unutterably sad. He sighed deeply and took a breath. Finally he said, “You’re right. But I can’t tell you how lonely it’s going to be when you’re gone.”
I imagined what his life was going to be like without us; Mom was going to be furious and she would take it out on him. “Was she always like this?” I asked.
Dad studied his shoes. “You know,” he said, “I really can’t remember. She couldn’t have been, could she?”
We packed everything we owned into the van: Doug’s tools, my quilt, and a thousand dollars. We were headed to California and I sang all the way West.
It was early spring when we got to Berkeley, and when I stepped out of the van I was surrounded by the scent of night-blooming jasmine. I had never smelled it before and the aroma was so powerful that I reeled. Even now, after all these years, the scent of jasmine reminds me of how free I felt.
We set up our tent in a friend’s yard and started looking for a place to live. We didn’t try very hard; Nick was part of the rolling coast-to-coast party of the early seventies and staying at his house was fun. People started showing up around nine and often stayed all night, drinking, debating art, and talking politics. Some mornings when I came into the house to watch the Watergate hearings at 6:00 A.M. I’d find Nick and his girlfriend Martha still drinking cheap wine, eating cheese, and talking to a motley crew of guests.
Usually they’d go right from wine to coffee. I’d make toast and we’d all pile into the living room to watch the grainy gray television Doug had bought at the flea market for three dollars. The images on the screen were so vague we could barely make out Gordon Liddy and John Dean, shadows who were trying to steal the government.
When did we start
talking about getting a house together? Whose idea was it? I don’t remember. But we had only been in Berkeley a little while before we decided to pool our resources.
We soon found that nobody would rent to a group—that’s what they called us—so we decided to become homeowners. We marched into Mason-McDuffie Realtors, such poor prospects that the nice old man who took care of us shuddered visibly. I could see myself reflected in his big round glasses, a Gypsy with abundant black curls tossed over my shoulders and a multicolored skirt that swept the ground. Nick, standing next to me, had a beard so full he looked like the prophet Isaiah. Martha was pale, with long blonde hair and a moon-shaped face; in the striped clothes she had constructed from natural materials she looked about twelve. Even clean-cut Doug now wore his hair below his shoulders and had a metal stud between his front teeth where a cap was missing.
The old man sat us down and asked us to fill out papers. We were outraged. What business was it of his, we wanted to know, how much money we had? We rolled our eyes and sighed and complained about bureaucracy. He explained, gently, that he needed to know about our finances before he could help us buy a house.
We put down the usual lies. I said I was an author; I was actually writing term papers for a living, sometimes three or four in a day. It was challenging and paid very well if you promised good marks. Doug said that he was a carpenter; he had put up signs all over town offering his services. Martha listed herself as a student. This was more wishful thinking. She had dropped out of school to live with Nick and occasionally talked about going back. Nick was the only one with a real job and even that did not look very impressive on paper: he built electronic instruments for avant-garde musicians.
The old man sighed and took us to see a few houses. The first was a fine old place with a view of the Bay from the window seat at the turn of the stairs. I loved it but Nick objected to the neighborhood. “I will not,” he said, “live on a fancy-ass street where people have maids and drive Mercedes. I’d be embarrassed to give people my address.”
