Save Me the Plums

by Ruth Reichl

  For a full minute, Si did not respond. At last he said, “My friends in Los Angeles tell me that you are a wonderful editor.”

  “Editor? I’m a restaurant critic.”

  “But before you came to The New York Times you edited the food section of the Los Angeles Times. Have I got that right?”

  I nodded, amazed that he’d done such diligent research. In my experience, New York media people looked down on West Coast publications, and I honestly hadn’t expected him to know about that.

  “They say”—I thought again how stingy he was with words, how reluctantly he permitted them to leave his mouth—“that it was both excellent and original. My compliments. I want Gourmet to be the premier epicurean publication in the country, and I thought we should meet.”

  So Truman had tricked me? “I’m very proud of that food section,” I said hastily, “but newspapers are not like magazines.”

  Si waved an airily dismissive hand. “As I understand it, the Los Angeles Times has its own test kitchen and photo studio?”

  I thought about the small test kitchen with its two homey cooks; compared to the famously capacious Gourmet kitchens, with their many food professionals, the L.A. Times facility was a joke. As for the photo studio…In my mind’s eye I saw Gourmet’s perennial caption: “Photographed in Gourmet’s studios.” I imagined lights, cameras, action.

  “And,” he continued, “your section won many awards?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “But that still doesn’t mean I could run a magazine.”

  “Many people,” he said stubbornly, “manage the transition. You’ve made a fine name for yourself at The New York Times. We are prepared to provide you with all the resources you require, and I am convinced you would make a remarkable magazine.”

  “And I am convinced”—I can be stubborn too—“that you are making a huge mistake. Gourmet is an important publication, and you should hire someone who knows what she’s doing. That would not be me.”

  The oddest smile danced across his face, and I realized that he was, at last, enjoying himself. He was a negotiator who liked the action, and my recalcitrance made it that much more fun. This had become a contest, and he was not a man who liked to lose. His voice became a low seductive purr. “You really should consider it.”

  He sat back, quiet now, but I didn’t think he was done with me. Indeed, when the chauffeur stopped the car and I began to climb out, Si lifted a hand to stop me. “I have the greatest respect for Gourmet.” He gave me a soulful look. “I am determined to make it the finest magazine in its category. I feel certain that you are the one to do it. Please give this your utmost consideration.”

  I WATCHED THE LIMO PULL away from the Times, waiting until it was out of sight. Then I pulled my coat around me and headed down the street. I think better when I’m moving.

  Despite everything I’d said to Si, I had to admit that it was tempting. I thought back fifteen years, to when the Los Angeles Times asked me to be their restaurant critic. I had resisted then too, unwilling to leave the familiar comfort of Berkeley.

  “You must go!” Mary Frances Fisher said when I told her of their offer. I’d become friends with America’s most famous food writer while profiling her for Ms. magazine; we’d bonded over our mutual dislike of honey. Since then I’d gone to lunch at her Sonoma home every few months, thrilled by her attention. “You can’t keep doing the same thing your entire life,” she told me as she ladled out a bowl of split-pea soup liberally laced with sherry. “It’s time you moved on, stopped playing it safe, took a chance. Working at a newspaper will give you some perspective. It’s good for a writer to know that the words she’s so carefully crafting today will be wrapping someone’s fish bones tomorrow.”

  My Berkeley friends, however, had other ideas: To them this job meant selling out, and the people who shared my communal household were openly appalled. Even Alice Waters asked incredulously, “Are you really going to go work for corporate America?”

  “Of course not,” I said. What had I been thinking? I was a thirty-six-year-old freelance writer, getting by without a proper job or a weekly paycheck. Why would I give that up to go into an office and take orders? It wasn’t me.

  “I’m not sure you know who you really are, dear,” Marion Cunningham said gently. I’d met the stunningly beautiful older woman at a party for James Beard (Marion was his West Coast assistant and had recently revised The Fannie Farmer Cookbook), and we’d instantly recognized that there was a bond between us. The next day I told her about the paralyzing panic attacks that kept me off bridges and freeways, and she confessed that agonizing agoraphobia had kept her prisoner in her house for years. She was forty-five before she overcame her phobias, but she’d sailed on into a bright and famous future; her Breakfast Book had been a huge bestseller. “You’re making a mistake,” she insisted. “Los Angeles”—like all older Angelenos, she pronounced the word with a hard “g”—“isn’t a safe little sanctuary like Berkeley, but it’s a real city and I know you will be happy there. Don’t”—she leaned in to emphasize the point—“do what I did. Don’t let your fears keep you from moving forward. It’s such a sad waste.”

  Then Cecilia Chiang, who introduced sophisticated Chinese food to an American audience when she opened the Mandarin Restaurant, added her voice to the chorus. Cecilia is a force; even now, at ninety-eight, her energy remains undimmed, but back then she was a whirlwind with very decided opinions. In my early years as a food writer, she took me under her wing and became my Chinese tiger mother. “Of course you will take this job,” she said in her elegant Shanghainese accent. “It is very prestigious. Don’t even think of saying no.”

  These three formidable women could not have been more different, and the fact that they were speaking with one voice had a profound influence on me. The combined force of their opinions was too much to resist. I took the job.

  I’d never regretted it, but Condé Nast was not the Los Angeles Times. In its heyday the newspaper was known as “the velvet coffin,” a workplace so relaxed that reporters sometimes spent an entire year on a single story. Condé Nast, on the other hand, was a notorious pressure cooker filled with the most aggressive people in the business. Was I ready for that?

  It was a cold day, and I huddled into my coat, listening to the voices in my head. Happy to lose myself in the anonymity of New York, I walked for a long time, leaning into the wind, unaware that I had a destination, until the Washington Square arch rose up before me.

  I’d come home to Greenwich Village. To the large, solid building on the corner of 10th Street and Fifth Avenue that my parents had occupied for fifty years. They were both long gone, but I looked up at our old apartment on the eleventh floor, wondering what they would advise me to do.

  Long ago, on a winter day like this, I’d come home from school to find Mom watching workmen hoist a large dead birch tree up to the eleventh floor. “It didn’t fit in the elevator,” she explained, “but isn’t it wonderful? And such a bargain! I bought it on sale.” She began to enumerate the many ways this improbable object was going to improve our lives.

  Later, Dad and I came back down to this little patch of sidewalk to figure out how to deal with the huge object now occupying our living room. We always came outside to strategize over Mom’s more exotic purchases. We’d stood here for hours, in warmer weather, the day she announced she’d just bought a house in the country.

  “You’re going to love it!” she’d enthused. Mom was tall, with short iron-gray hair and a penchant for flamboyant clothes; I remember she was wearing a bright red shirtdress. “It’s right on the water. And I bought a boat to go with it.”

  “A boat?” Dad ran his hands through his hair over and over, until the thatch covering his bald spot was standing straight up.

  “A thirty-five-foot Chris-Craft cruiser we can park in front of our new house.” Dad and I stared at each other in shock and ter
ror; we knew from experience that there would be more. But all I could think to say was, “Mom, you don’t park a boat. You anchor it.”

  Mom ignored this as she shifted into the aggressive tone she used at her most manic. By then we’d learned to read Mom’s moods; after years on a psychiatrist’s couch she’d finally been diagnosed as bipolar, and we’d come to expect the extreme swings that moved through her like weather, altering every aspect of her being. The doctors had yet to discover the drugs that could help her; one day she’d be a whimpering blob of self-doubt, the next a dictatorial titan determined to rule the world.

  “Why shouldn’t we have a nice home? I’ve also invested in a painting. It’s a large abstract canvas—all blue and turquoise—that will look beautiful on the wall facing the water.”

  “Where did you buy this painting?” Dad’s voice was unnaturally low, as soothing as one you’d use on a dangerous animal. I recognized this tactic; he was beginning to collect the information he’d need to undo the damage. We could not afford a single one of these things on a book designer’s salary; together they were a financial disaster. Everything would have to go back.

  Mom proffered a benign smile. “I met the nicest man on the bus the other day. He has a gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, and he suggested I stop in. When I saw my painting it felt like fate; it’s just perfect for my house. Then, as I was leaving…” Mom stopped and for the first time faltered. Dad and I exchanged frightened glances; this was not a good sign. Something worse was coming.

  “As you were leaving…” he prompted in that quiet voice. His face had taken on a papery, ashen hue. I felt sick.

  “Well, it was Fifty-seventh Street, and there’s that furrier right next door. What harm can there be, I thought, in stopping in? You know I’ve always wanted a mink coat.”

  “Oh, no!” The words escaped before I could stop them. I quickly covered my mouth; arguing with Mom when she was like this was a very bad idea.

  She turned on me, furious, her voice rising in righteous indignation. “And why shouldn’t I have a mink coat?” She stood up, then slammed her chair into the table. It reverberated, on and on, like the rumble of a drum.

  “I wonder if there’s anything else?” Dad whispered.

  Haunted by the life she imagined for herself, Mom was constantly humiliated by the pedestrian reality of our existence. Dad worked hard but he never made much money, and our rent-controlled apartment was small. Mom liked to remind us that Bertrand Russell had once asked her to marry him, and although I thought she was exaggerating, she took me to meet him on his ninetieth birthday and it turned out to be true. The man she’d married instead—her first husband—had been wealthy, and although she’d married for love the second time, she tortured herself (and us) by making friends with fabulously rich people who owned giant apartments and vast country estates.

  Even as a child I knew there was something pathetic about the way she made us dress up for cocktails at the Rainbow Room, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, and the Top of the Sixes. We’d each order a single drink, stretching it out as long as possible. When we left, headed to dinner at the Automat, Mom would turn and stare longingly at the people in the dining room, wishing she were one of them.

  She knew when every ocean liner came to town, and she’d make me and my best friend, Jeanie, dress up in our fanciest clothes so we could head down to the docks. In those days anyone could buy tickets to tour the great liners, and we’d board the Île de France or the Queen Mary and wander slowly through the luxurious staterooms, pretending we were there to see friends off. Afterward we’d stand on the pier, waving and shouting “Bon voyage!” until we were hoarse and the ship was gone. The wistful look on Mom’s face was painful; she would have given anything to sail away.

  Now, looking up at the apartment, it all came back to me. I never knew what to expect when I came home from school, and I’d stand outside the apartment door, key in hand, afraid to put it into the lock. Afraid of what was waiting on the other side.

  I might open it to find the mom who was a ball of energy and sent me off on endless errands that needed to be done right this minute. Or the mom who’d wake me in the middle of the night, insisting that I clean the house. During these periods I’d hear her at midnight, still on the phone, planning parties, typing manuscripts, sending urgent letters to the far corners of the world. She’d spin ever-more-fantastic schemes. This could go on for months.

  In one of her more manic moments, Mom rearranged our apartment. “Why waste space on bedrooms?” she cried, rousting Dad and me from our beds so she could send them to the Goodwill. “If we sleep on pullout sofas we can use every room to entertain.” She threw parties, endless parties (in her manic moments she made friends with every stranger), so I never got enough sleep: Dessert was always served in my room.

  Manic Mom ate nothing—she was too keyed up for food—and she went on epic shopping sprees to buy new clothes, new furniture, new birch trees. Eventually she’d work herself into such a grandiose state that she’d pick fights with all her friends. And mine: Once, when Jeanie had the temerity to throw a tissue into the trash, Mom turned on her in fury. “Don’t you dare put anything into my clean wastepaper basket!” she shouted at my trembling friend.

  But inevitably the day would come when I’d arrive home from school to creepy quiet. Mom had gone to bed, where she would remain for months, reading the same book over and over (she was particularly fond of Vivien Leigh’s biography), eating sweets, unable to rise from the sofa bed, which was now never closed.

  When you have a bipolar parent, you never know what’s coming. Change is always lurking, waiting to pitchfork you into a new life. You can’t control it and you never know what form it will take. How I envied Jeanie, who could count on finding the same mother every time she came home. Like all children, I craved consistency; all I ever got was change.

  During one of Mom’s more manic episodes I asked Dad why he put up with it. Instead of replying, Dad went to his desk and returned carrying an old black-and-white photograph, curling at the edges, of a boy dressed in tails and a top hat. A huge medieval tapestry hung behind him; I could vaguely make out a unicorn. “Me,” he said, “at about your age.”

  “Why are you wearing a costume?”

  “It’s not a costume; those are the clothes I wore when my governess took me downstairs to say good night to my parents. I grew up with all the things your mother dreams of.”

  “Even a boat?” I couldn’t resist.

  “Oh, yes.” His smile was bitter. “My father was the commodore of the kaiser’s yacht club. But I learned when I was very young that things can’t make you happy. My parents’ Berlin house was cold, and I couldn’t wait to escape. All I ever wanted was to work with books, but the family didn’t think that grand enough. That’s why I came to America.”

  Dad loved books, loved them so much I’d sometimes enter a room to find him running his hands across the pages of the latest one he’d designed as if it were whispering secrets meant for him alone.

  “Oh, Rusie…” When Dad was serious, his German accent grew more pronounced. “I often think that if your mother had work she loved, work that challenged her, she wouldn’t want so much or do such crazy things. She’s just bored and frustrated. It’s so sad for her; she’s a smart woman who was born at the wrong time.”

  It is a sign of how oblivious—or perhaps hopeful—my father was that he refused to accept how sick Mom was. But Dad truly loved the woman he had married, and he never stopped believing that if he could only find the magic bullet she would be cured.

  He reached out and ran his fingers down my cheek, continuing the thought. “But I hope things will be different for you. The world is changing. What I want most for you is challenging work that makes you proud. It’s the key to happiness.”

  Remembering his words, I realized that although he’d put it differently, this was exactly what
Mary Frances, Marion, and Cecilia had told me the first time I’d been offered a new job. But now I heard a different message. What they were saying was that it wasn’t the job that frightened me: I was just terrified of change. I heard Mary Frances saying, very clearly, “It’s time you stopped playing it safe.”

  I’d come in search of an answer. And I’d found it. I took a final look up at the apartment where the last rays of winter sun were glinting off the windows. Then I turned and made my way uptown.

  “BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO TAKE the job,” my agent, Kathy Robbins, said, “there’s something you need to know about Gourmet.” She paused, as if trying to figure out how to put it. And then: “The magazine’s publisher is in the family.”

  “The family?”

  “Si’s family. Gina Sanders is married to Steven Newhouse, his nephew.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “What you’re saying is that if we ever had a fight, I’d lose.”

  “What I’m saying is, go meet her before you make a final decision. Because if you don’t get along, the job will be a nightmare.”

  Gina Sanders was only in her thirties, but on the phone she sounded oddly formal. When I asked how I’d know her, she replied, “I’m five foot three and I’ll be wearing business attire.”

  Who uses the word “attire” in ordinary conversation? But the description proved useful: There was only one person in the coffee shop not dressed in casual clothing, and as I headed for her table I noted that the small woman in the conservative gray suit had shiny brown hair, bright eyes, and a pointed chin. I almost laughed: This was not the frightening businesswoman I’d envisioned. Gina Sanders made me think of a character in a children’s book, a sleek little fox dressed in grown-up clothing.

  She eyed me with some alarm. I was rather proud of my outfit; I’d recently discovered a vintage coat from the fifties in a thrift shop, and I loved the way it hugged me tightly to the waist before erupting into a swirl of velvet skirt. Gina, however, was clearly not impressed. It did not help that the melting snow on this blustery January morning had leaked through my old leather boots, which were emitting embarrassing little squeaks with each step. She looked down as I sloshed toward her, then quickly adjusted her face and held out her hand, fingers pointed downward.