Tender at the Bone

by Ruth Reichl

  Encouraged, Mom made a leap. “Since you’re going to Paris,” she said, “there’s no point in wasting the time on cooking. Why not go to the Sorbonne?”

  It was clearly time to change the subject. “Actually,” I said, “I have been thinking of getting a job. There’s a restaurant here in Berkeley I’d like to work in. It’s a really good restaurant, Mom. It’s called The Swallow.”

  There was a long silence and then my mother said in a very small voice, “Well, at least it will get you out of this house.”

  THE SWALLOW’S PORK

  AND TOMATILLO STEW

  ¼ cup vegetable oil

  8 large cloves garlic, peeled

  2 pounds lean pork, cut in cubes

  Salt

  Pepper

  1 bottle dark beer

  12 ounces orange juice

  1 pound tomatillos, quartered

  1 pound Roma tomatoes, peeled and chopped

  2 large onions, coarsely chopped

  1 bunch cilantro, chopped

  2 jalapeño peppers, chopped

  1 14-ounce can black beans

  Juice of 1 lime

  1 cup sour cream

  Heat oil in large casserole. Add garlic cloves. Add pork, in batches so as not to crowd, and brown on all sides. Remove pork as the pieces get brown and add salt and pepper.

  Meanwhile, put beer and orange juice in another pot. Add tomatillos and tomatoes, bring to a boil, lower heat, and cook about 20 minutes, or until tomatillos are soft. Set aside.

  When all pork is browned, pour off all but about a tablespoon of the oil in the pan. Add coarsely chopped onions and cook about 8 minutes, or until soft. Stir, scraping up bits of meat. Add chopped cilantro and pepper and salt to taste.

  Put pork back into pan. Add tomatillo mixture and chopped jalapeños. Bring to a boil, lower heat, cover partially and cook about 2 hours.

  Taste for seasoning. Add black beans and cook 10 minutes more.

  Stir lime juice into sour cream.

  Serve chili with rice, with sour cream—lime juice mixture on the side as a topping.

  Serves 6.

  At The Swallow every worker was a manager and every manager had an opinion. The restaurant was collectively owned and the group was incapable of agreeing on anything. And now they were arguing about me.

  “She sounds like a prima donna,” said a tall woman with short blonde hair. “Why would we ask her to join the collective?” She gave me a hostile look, smoothed her long denim skirt, and sat down again.

  “Look who’s talking,” said an intensely thin man, jumping out of his chair with such force his wild blond curls quivered madly. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and said with great passion, “You’re so rich you never even cash your paycheck.”

  “Well,” said Helen, “at least I don’t make sixteen gallons of Indonesian fishball soup that smells so disgusting we almost lose our lease!”

  Another woman leaped to her feet. Small and stocky, she spoke with a decided French accent. “You don’t make anything at all,” she said with a snort. “At least Peter tries. You just stand at the front counter playing the grande dame!”

  “Who mopped the floor last night?” Helen demanded, eyes blazing.

  “Look,” said a barrel-chested man with thick black hair. He was tall, with a smashed nose that made him look more like a boxer than a chef. “You guys want to fight about the Wednesday night shift, that’s groovy. But do it on your own time. I have to read my poetry at Cody’s in less than an hour.” He plunged back into his seat. The two women also sat down.

  Then a plump, pretty woman in a low-cut print dress pushed back her chair and pointed an accusing finger at me. She had reddish brown hair and wore a surprising amount of makeup. “Helen’s right,” she said. “We don’t need any more like her. Take yesterday.” She folded her hands prissily in front of her and made her voice high and affected. “Judith took three hours to make the quiche, because it simply had to be perfect. Antoinette was creating a roast beet and orange salad, and Bob suddenly decided to make a new pot of soup. Me and Linda couldn’t get any of them to help out during the lunch rush. Even worse, Rudy was working the cash register and you know he can’t add.” Chrissy burst into tears. “I’m so tired of all your PhDs and MDs and BSs. Can’t we please, please take some ordinary people into this collective?”

  “Look what you’ve done!” said Helen, walking around the table to hug Chrissy. She glared at me over her shoulder. “Oh, why don’t you go work at Chez Panisse?”

  After Helen’s little speech it didn’t look as if the membership would even offer me a trial period. The members were put off because I was from New York (too aggressive), and married (highly suspect in Berkeley). Having a master’s degree made it worse; there were plenty of nonpracticing doctors and lawyers in the group, but they were not considered the best workers.

  As Helen and Chrissy talked on about how much they didn’t want me I looked around the room and wondered how I had become the enemy. I wanted desperately to join this strange group. Suddenly I had an idea. “I’ll work for a month, and if you don’t want me in the collective you won’t have to pay me for my time,” I said. “You have nothing to lose.”

  “No way,” said Chrissy, “she must be rich. Who else would work for free? We don’t need any more rich people.”

  “I’m not rich,” I insisted. “I live very cheaply. Last year I got by on less than fifteen hundred dollars. There are eight people in my house and we grow most of our own food.”

  “You live in a commune?” said Chrissy. “That’s different.”

  “A commune?” said Michael. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I have to be at Cody’s in twenty minutes. Can we vote?”

  I loved working in the restaurant with a fierceness that surprised me. There was no hierarchy: everybody did everything, from cooking the food to mopping the floor, and there was no job I didn’t like, from lifting fifty-pound sacks of flour off the delivery truck to burning my hands on hot plates as I snatched them from the dishwasher. I loved the quiet of the clean kitchen early in the morning and the noisy intensity of the lunch rush. But what I liked best was the way working in the restaurant used every fiber of my being. When I was in the restaurant I felt grounded, fully there. While my muscles ached from the hard physical labor my mind strained to anticipate problems. When my shift was over I was often so tired I could not walk the six blocks home. The first day I had to call Doug and ask him to pick me up. “I hope I get in,” I said fervently as he drove me home.

  I began studying the other members, trying to figure out how to persuade them to vote for me. Chrissy and Linda were the easiest; they were the backbone of the restaurant, young working-class women who did their job and wanted you to do yours. They flirted with the college boys, giving them free slices of our rich quiche. They made them egg salad-and-walnut sandwiches so stuffed with filling the guys couldn’t get their mouths around them, and slipped them extra brownies. If it was a night shift they turned the radio up loud while they cleaned. All I had to do was offer to stay late so they could go dancing. “Cool,” they said, and started to be nice to me.

  Peter and Michael were easy too: they wanted help making soup. There was a lot of competition over the soup pot, and regular customers always asked who had made it before ordering. Michael’s soups were straightforward versions of the recipes we had on file, sturdy vegetable or navy bean, things he could do with a minimum of fuss. I gave him a little spice advice and his soups improved dramatically. He was touchingly pleased. Peter, on the other hand, could not resist attempting exotic concoctions. “I could have told you that Indonesian fishball was going to be a disaster,” I said. “From now on, let’s talk it through before you start.”

  The cooks, however, were clearly going to be a problem. Antoinette, who was French and talented, thought my cooking was far too pedestrian to improve the restaurant. She never considered cost, bringing bones from her own butcher to make stock for onion soup and insis
ting we bake all our own bread even though it cost more. She once used gallons of cream to make a shrimp bisque so extraordinary that for years afterward people would ask hopefully, “Shrimp bisque?”

  Judith, the professor’s wife, was not impressed with me either. She was The Swallow’s secret weapon, a woman who went to Europe every summer to take cooking lessons with famous chefs. She returned with dried mullet roe from Sardinia and saffron from Spain. The summer she spent in Italy she brought back real balsamic vinegar from Modena and The Swallow’s famous salads became even more famous. Toward the end of my trial month I walked into the kitchen just as Judith was tasting the pork and tomatillo chili. “You used canned beans!” she said, making a sour face. “What can you expect of someone who lives in a commune?”

  Bob, the other maestro, considered me insufficiently temperamental to be a great cook. He was extremely talented but he cooked only out of despair and disappointment; every time he broke up with his girlfriend he drowned his sorrows in the creation of a masterpiece. Fortunately the relationship was stormy, but even on a calm day he was capable of something as spectacular as the peanut-butter stuffed chilies he invented for a catering job. When I told him I thought they were fabulous he waved a dismissive hand and said, “You’re just trying to get me to vote for you.”

  They sent me out of the room while they voted. I waited ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty. How long could a simple vote take? After half an hour I couldn’t stand it anymore and I went back. Nobody even looked up: they were arguing over a recipe request from a magazine.

  “It’s an elitist publication!” shouted Michael. “We can’t send them a recipe.”

  “We should be flattered we’ve been asked,” Antoinette said.

  “It will be good publicity,” Judith agreed.

  Had I been accepted into the collective? Nobody said anything, so I just sat down.

  “Publicity is not the point,” said Peter. “Do we really want to support the mainstream press?”

  “Yes,” said Judith. “We could use more customers.”

  “Come on!” said Linda. “We can barely manage to run the restaurant now.”

  “Yeah,” Chrissy added ominously, “and who’s going to type it? It better not be someone on my shift!”

  “Did I get in?” I asked. “If I did, I’ll type it on my own time.”

  “Of course you got in,” said Antoinette impatiently. “But don’t bother with the recipe. I already sent it.”

  Michael and Peter groaned in unison.

  I was very proud to be a full-fledged member of The Swallow. I especially liked the Saturday morning shift; after a few months we were working together like a well-oiled machine. I loved the speed and the pressure, the feeling that we were operating at peak efficiency. Every week we tried to produce more food in less time, to make an extra pie or a special rice salad. We were twice as productive as most of the other shifts, and it was exhilarating. Tiring too: by noon, when it was time for my break, I barely had the energy to take a piece of quiche out to the garden.

  One Saturday I was sitting on the ground, sipping lemonade and leaning against a big bronze sculpture. My untouched plate of quiche was next to me.

  “Aren’t you going to eat that?” said a voice. An overweight middle-aged woman was standing over me, looking longingly at the white porcelain plate.

  “You have it,” I said, “I’m too tired to eat.” Her hand darted out, as if she was afraid I might change my mind. She put down the newspaper-stuffed straw basket she carried and arranged herself and her many skirts next to me. She took a bite.

  “You make the best quiche in The Swallow,” she said. She put her florid face a little too close to mine so I could see the lines around her bright blue eyes and the short gray hair peeking out of the printed scarf that covered it.

  “Thanks,” I replied, wishing she would move back a little.

  “I’m Rachel Rubenstein,” she said, edging a little closer, “I’m writing my thesis on film.”

  “Umm,” I replied as noncommitally as I could. I moved back, hoping that if I didn’t say anything she would go away. I had heard about Rachel, who seemed to spend all her time in the Film Archive next door, asking impossible questions of the directors who came for special screenings. She went to the arcane movies that didn’t seem to interest anyone else, ducking out between shows for coffee and sandwiches.

  “I never got to go to college,” she pressed on. “I had children too early. Don’t you make that mistake.”

  I shook my head, saying nothing.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Twenty-six,” I said. “Damn!” She had caught me.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I replied. And then she was telling me about the ungrateful son who never came to see her and her cats and why she liked the movies so much.

  After that she was my customer, the way the handsome boys belonged to Chrissy and Linda. It didn’t seem quite fair but I didn’t know how to make her go away.

  Rachel studied the collective. She did it openly, taking the table in the corner and watching her current victim the way a cat watches a mouse. Later she would tell me what she thought.

  “I know her type,” she said, pointing a broken fingernail at Helen. “People like her have no understanding of real pain. She’s been handed everything on a silver platter. Does her husband support her?”

  She called Chrissy and Linda “the workers,” and respected them even though they treated her with total contempt. They served her politely enough, but when she tried to engage them in conversation they refused to respond. I wished I had known how to be so rude.

  Michael was “that big brute.” She wouldn’t let him wait on her. “He calls himself a Marxist and a poet,” she said contemptuously, “but I went to listen to him read one day. Pure dreck.” She approved of Peter because he was kind and she liked his politics. She changed her mind abruptly when she saw him at the movies with a tall girl with long blonde hair. “I never would have figured him as a man who would fall for a shiksa goddess,” she said, sniffing.

  She had her problems with the people who ran the Archive too, especially after she told an avant-garde Yugoslavian director that he was a “no-talent Fascist” at a post-screening discussion. She was so agitated that we could hear her ranting through the closed doors of the movie theater.

  She was still shouting when Steve, the mild-mannered ticket-taker, ejected her. “You Fascist slob,” she screamed, shaking her fist as she emerged. I held my breath, hoping she would go past the restaurant and walk away. But no, she was coming in. I ran into the pastry room, hoping she hadn’t seen me.

  Even from back there I could hear her bullying voice. “I must have coffee right now!” she shouted. Then she demanded shortbread. “That’s too small,” she boomed, “give me a bigger piece.”

  I didn’t hear Peter’s reply, but it was obviously not satisfactory. There was a crash and an audible gasp from the collective crowd. And then Peter was shouting, “Out, out, out,” at the top of his voice.

  I couldn’t contain myself; I had to find out what was going on. I walked into the dining room and saw Rachel hurling shortbread cookies across the room. “Fascist slob, Fascist slob, Fascist slob,” she was repeating each time she threw another pale square of cookie into Peter’s face.

  “Do something,” Peter shouted when he saw me. I rushed over and put my arms around Rachel. She smelled electric, as if she were a toaster that was short-circuiting. When I touched her she put her arms at her sides and started to weep. “They made me do it,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Them,” she said. “The ones who put the plates in my head.”

  “Shh, shh,” I soothed. I led her outside to the garden and sat her down on a bench. “Shh, shh,” I kept saying, stroking her large, flabby arm, “it’s okay.”

  “You’ll know what it’s like someday,” she said, pressing her jowly cheeks against mine. “You’ll k
now what it’s like to have them put plates in your head and control everything you do.”

  “Shh, shh,” I said as soothingly as I could.

  “You’ll know it when your time comes,” she said again. I didn’t say anything, so she fixed her crazy blue eyes on me and hissed, “It will happen to you.”

  As I looked at her I felt suddenly frightened. I tried to look away, but her face was pressed against mine, teeth clenched. I was grateful when Antoinette came out in her purple apron and said, as if it were a normal day, “Ruth, could you come in? The movie’s letting out.”

  “I was just leaving,” said Rachel, gathering her skirts with dignity. “I couldn’t bear to see that pig of a Yugoslav again.” She stood up and looked significantly at me. “Think about what I told you,” she said, stomping off. I could feel her footsteps reverberating through the ground as I went back into the restaurant.

  The next night we called an emergency meeting about Rachel Rubenstein. We took our places around the big oak table and Antoinette handed out pieces of chocolate-pumpkin cake. “Taste it,” she urged. “We should be baking this every day.”

  “Antoinette!” said Linda, stamping her foot. “We’re not here to eat cake. We’re here to decide what to do about that crazy woman.”

  “Please,” said Antoinette, her French accent very strong. “It will not ’urt you to taste it. We could make an extra sixty dollars every day.”

  “It’s delicious,” said Judith.

  “Judith!” said Linda.

  Judith held up her hands. “Okay, okay, let’s talk about Rachel,” she agreed. “But we could use the money. We haven’t given ourselves a raise in almost a year.”

  “She should be banned,” said Chrissy flatly. “It’s simple. She scares away customers and the only one here who likes her is Ruth.”

  “I don’t like her,” I said, “I feel sorry for her. I wish I had never met her. But what are we going to do, post a sign that says KEEP OUT RACHEL RUBENSTEIN?”