You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  “Have a seat,” Evan said. He set a cup of coffee before me. Traces of cream still spun in its center.

  “Pretty good memory,” I said. Evan sipped his coffee and looked at me.

  I wasn’t sure what I had thought he might do, welcome me with smiles like an old friend, or tell me to get off his property. Maybe my intentions would have showed, if I had a better idea of what they were. The crisp was just an excuse. It wasn’t even Evan’s favorite; he preferred something more elegant: a sunburst of sliced peaches in barely sweet almond custard, baked inside a tart, crème fraiche rather than whipped cream. It was Kate who’d loved the generous chaos of crisps and cobblers, who was charmed by old American dessert names like buckles and slumps. Before me on my coffee table the crisp had steamed away, smelling gorgeous, and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to eat it. I decided I’d make the next one perfect and make this one a good excuse to see Evan and get it over with. I wasn’t going to dart around town like a squirrel, afraid of seeing him any time I went somewhere pleasant. And I certainly wasn’t going to stop going to the market.

  Evan just kept watching me, his expression unreadable.

  “I don’t have a good reason to see you,” I admitted. “I just thought I might . . .” I stopped. “I saw Lisa the other day.”

  He nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I heard. You seem to be making the rounds, apparently.”

  I stared at him. My face felt numb. You imagine these moments, but most people don’t just lay it down for you like this. If I’d been less stunned I might have respected him for cutting to the chase.

  Evan sat back and regarded me. His expression wasn’t very neutral anymore, just hard and still. I was about to cave in and apologize—for a second I felt the onset of a tremble in my lips—but his face stopped me. Instead of saying anything I just looked back at him and waited.

  I had never heard one thing from him after Kate died. Not one letter, or a questioning phone call asking for me instead of sending a message through my mother, or any of the things I would have done. He had never asked me what happened. I kept telling people the same thing, that I had woken up too late, that I’d gotten up to silence but had just missed the noise that roused me, maybe the last sound she’d made, and found her. It was what she had told me to say. But if Evan had asked I would have told him. When he didn’t call, I assumed he’d believed the same thing everyone else did, that I’d simply found her too late. Looking at him now it was clear to me he knew what had happened.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “I seem to have to make my rounds. Since no one will call me.” I took a sip from my coffee mug and set it down. “But then, I’m used to jumping into your shoes for you anyway. You should pay me for this, too.”

  Evan took off his glasses and wiped them with the hem of his sweater. Deep red welts were on either side of his nose.

  “That was snide of me,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’m not,” I said. “I meant it.” My doubt had vanished—I had done exactly what she’d asked me to because none of them had done it for her, and now I had to go begging for contact, handing out desserts just to get someone to talk to me about it.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “You seem to think I went skipping off, when in fact she made me go. I wanted to work things out.”

  “Yeah, she could tell. We could all tell how much you cared while you were out on dates.”

  “You were there a lot,” he conceded, “but not every second. And you don’t know everything. Don’t talk to me as if you do.”

  I smiled at him. “Fuck you, Evan. I know a lot more than I ever asked to.”

  He shook his head and got up from the table. “No offense, Bec,” he said, then shook his head and gave a mirthless laugh. His back was to me as he poured coffee. “You were wonderful to Kate. But she was my wife. You were the employee. A good friend to her too, but I don’t have to answer to you.”

  He turned around, but he didn’t come back to the table. He crossed his arms and regarded me from the counter. “And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “I would not have let her do what she did. That’s what I know. I would never have let that happen, not the way you did.”

  I thought of Kate’s face, her mouth stretched wide for air, her eyes bulging with the strain. Of course he wouldn’t have done what I did. I had barely been able to do it. Evan would have taken one look at her and called the ambulance. There were times I still saw myself lifting her hand, the skin cold and dry, placing the button on the floor away from my foot, away from any impulsive or accidental contact. I remembered it as the slowest moment of my life, the most silent and determined. I knew there had been noise, her attempts at breathing, my voice, but in my memory the room was always hushed and empty as Kate and I looked at each other.

  I sat there and cupped my hands around the coffee cup. I felt pure rage at her then, at her willingness to bring me into this and leave me with it. I was as furious with her as I used to be with Evan on her behalf, when I had hated him for being outside the body of illness, just for having the luxury of his options, that ability to walk away.

  “I know you wouldn’t have,” I said. “So did she. Why else was I there?”

  twenty-four

  LE CHAMPIGNON LOOKED ALMOST modest in the daytime. Sunlight streamed into the windows at the front of the dining room. The chairs were haphazardly shoved into a corner, and the tables were bare except for blank cloths. I was sitting at the empty bar, waiting.

  The woman who came out of the kitchen, Anna, was shorter than I was, broad and sturdy in her whites. She didn’t have on a chef’s hat as I had expected. She wore a baseball cap with a Muskie on it. We shook hands, hers rough and damp, though she’d wiped it on the towel that hung off her belt. She smelled of onion. From the kitchen floated a rich, meaty fragrance. Anna saw me sniff and gave me a brief smile, saying, “Beef bones. For demi-glace.”

  As I followed her into the kitchen she glanced over her shoulder at me. There were rubber pads on the floor, an open screen door at the back, steel tables everywhere. Pans of beef joints, browned dark, were balanced on every surface. “Make a lot of demi-glace?” she asked me.

  “Just lots of stock,” I said. Thank god I’d read enough of Kate’s Julia Child books to know what I was talking about. In the hopes of showcasing this, I added nonchalantly, “I never needed to cook it down that far.”

  She nodded. “I think we spend about half our time making stock,” she said. “It’s the backbone. You bring knives?”

  I shook my head. It hadn’t even occurred to me. I thought they’d have them.

  “Cooks bring their own knives and they watch them like hawks,” she said. “You don’t want them getting dull or dropped or whatever. You’ll need to get a couple good basics and a knife case.”

  I flushed. I had told her over the phone that I had some professional cooking experience. It was not quite a bald-faced lie, since I had indeed learned to cook while on the clock, but it was clear she was going to grasp the extent of my ignorance pretty quickly. Apparently cooks brought their own knives. Who knew?

  She led me to a long table near the door. There was a pile of shallots in a wooden crate sitting on it. Anna laid a hand on them and said, “These need to be peeled and trimmed. Come to me when you finish that.”

  IN THE TWO WEEKS since I’d seen Evan, I cooked every day. It had been months since I’d cooked regularly. I missed making the caregivers nightly meals, missed the rhythms of buying my ingredients, setting them out, and transforming them into something. I even missed the parts I’d enjoyed without wanting to admit it: I liked disjointing a chicken, seeing the construction of the animal and knowing how I’d change it. I began to cook again for the pleasure of seeing how new dishes would turn out, whether making my own sourdough starter was worth it, if squash ravioli were better with prosciutto and sage or just brown butter and parmesan.

  My kitchen was ill-equipped to do any of this. I ended up dragging ov
er the coffee table, balanced on some books for height, to get extra counter space.

  Not everything turned out perfectly—I had to limber up. Jill and I gamely chewed a few bites of a lamb ragu, conversation dwindling, until I admitted it tasted like dirty wool and we went out for pizza. But others were flawless. Mark and I each ate huge platefuls of squash ravioli, unable to stop. We’d made more than we needed, yet at the first touch of the handmade pasta slick in our mouths with sage-scented butter, velvety squash on our tongues, there couldn’t possibly be enough of them. “I feel insane,” Mark had said, helping himself to another spoonful. “I think I’m going to have a big buttery aneurysm and it’s going to be fantastic.”

  The day after that I had begun to look at classifieds in the restaurant section. There were quite a few diners hiring, and though I liked the fantasy of simple honest food, homemade pie, and freshly ground burgers, I knew that wasn’t likely. I could make burritos to order in several locations. But the good restaurants never ran ads.

  I was feeling very uncompromising. There was no point in going into the restaurant business if it was only to thaw a preformed burger and pour out a carton of soup into a vat. I could remain an amateur if that was all I wanted. Still a little high on the success of the handmade pasta for the ravioli, I decided to think it over while making my first batch of croissants. I thought I had it right, kneaded the butter into the dough as quickly as I could, and cut and rolled them, waiting as the smell of pastry filled the apartment. They looked stellar until I tore one open, only to find they were leaden, oozing butter.

  I took a bite, chewed thoughtfully, and tossed the rest. I was never going to get anywhere like this. I might stumble into a good dish 75 percent of the time, but it wasn’t the same as studying. This was too random. I needed a plan, a directed, educational plan. Somewhere in Oconomowoc my mother was probably grinning but didn’t know why.

  People did these free apprenticeships, unpaid time in good restaurants, just for the experience. Though I was fairly certain I didn’t qualify even for slave labor, still it seemed worth a try. I’d bluffed my way into jobs I didn’t want, so I ought to be able to argue for one I did.

  Finally, bolstered by the sight of brown pastry in my trash can, I called Le Champignon. I wasn’t sure how the titles worked, so I asked for the person in charge of the kitchen. This turned out to be someone named Anna, who was distinctly unimpressed by my skills as I described them.

  “I’d like to apprentice, for free, for a week or two,” I said. My voice sounded tentative, so I sat up straighter, which seemed to help. I was sitting cross-legged on my fizzy carpet. “I have experience,” I went on. “I was a cook for a year, a private cook. The thing is, my training was a little . . . haphazard. You know, it went according to the client’s taste.”

  Anna treated me to a skeptical silence, during which I blushed though I was alone.

  “Oh yeah, the article,” she said. “For a while after it ran we had retired executives calling every day. I love the people who think restaurant work will be a pleasant retirement hobby.”

  I laughed with her, a hearty, skeptical laugh. Amateurs. “But you’ve done a little professional cooking, huh,” she said finally. “Just privately though.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. Then I continued, with a silent apology in case Kate was rolling her eyes at me, “I worked for a pretty demanding client though. She had very particular taste, but it was also pretty eclectic.” Silence hummed over the line for a moment. In the background I heard someone hollering about a ten-top. “But I’d do this for free. I’m skilled enough to be useful, and I’m cheap labor for you. The cheapest, actually. If I get in your way you kick me out again.”

  “Very true,” she said, “I will. Whatever. Come in tomorrow at ten.”

  After the first thirty shallots or so, I got into a rhythm, peeling and tossing them into a big metal bowl I’d found near the dishwasher. There seemed to be more shallots than they could possibly use in a day or probably a week, and I wondered if she was just trying to get me so bored I’d give up on the first day. When I had peeled them all I started on trimming. I was trying to remember to keep my fingers curled back and protected, but that was always my worst habit, one pinky sticking out as if it were begging to be sliced away. If that habit had driven Kate crazy, then for these people it would mark me as an even bigger amateur than I was.

  Around me people kept squeezing by with trays of roasted walnuts and little salted crackers, beef joints and root vegetables that had been roasted and caramelized. After a while I stopped jumping in surprise when someone bellowed, “Behind!” and shoved past me. I just pressed into the table till my hip bones bruised and let them pass.

  “Behind with sharp!” someone said, and a guy in a stained apron went by with a long knife gleaming in his hand. Earlier I had almost collided with someone when I misunderstood “Behind with hot!” and turned to see what it meant. It turned out to be a pan still sizzling with fat, clamped in a pair of tongs and carried by one of the cooks to the dish sink.

  I got the occasional cold breeze from the open door, but the rest of the kitchen was sweltering. People dressed in jeans and ragged jackets stormed in the back doors carrying boxes of meat and vegetables. They asked me where to set them and before I could answer that I didn’t know they put them on the nearest table, so that was what I started telling them.

  No one seemed very surprised to find a stranger peeling shallots in a corner. They either ignored me completely or wiped what I hoped was beef blood off their hands and offered one to me to shake. I couldn’t remember anyone’s name.

  When I finished the shallots I found Anna in the walk-in cooler with a clipboard and a marker. Without looking at me she nudged a box of carrots my way with her toe. “Peel them,” she said. I hefted the box and went back to my corner.

  The whole place was much louder than I had imagined. I think I had pictured neat rows of people dicing and sautéing quietly. Instead there was a great deal of swearing and exclamation about the state of the truffle oil. “Don’t leave the fucking truffle oil on the table, people!” Anna yelled, holding up the offending bottle. “The next time I see it out here it goes in the walk-in right next to your severed head.”

  Around two o’clock she walked past me and set a piece of foil bearing a small chunk of blue-veined cheese next to the carrot box and said, “Eat that.”

  I was smart enough to keep peeling carrots while I ate the cheese. It was fantastic. Salty, pungent, a combination of something creamy and melting and little delicate grains along the blue threads. I wished I had a pear or some port to have with it. Or Sauternes. Kate would have known which was better.

  One of the guys who had introduced himself came back and set a metal pan of water on the table. He cocked his head at me, so I went over and peered in. In the steaming water was a white ceramic dish, filled with something that looked like layers of mousse, a creamy beige color.

  “Foie gras?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “We’ll put a taster out for the servers after staff meal,” he said. “Fight your way in and get a smear. And I do mean fight. Fucking servers are like vultures.”

  By now my legs were sore and my feet throbbed. I’d been leaning over a table so long my back was aching all around my hips, and I wore the soreness like a sash tied around my waist. Under my cap my hair was damp and hot. It felt as though someone had stretched me on a rack.

  “Dinner,” said Anna. The foie gras guy turned and practically sprinted. Anna glanced my way and said, “You staying for staff meal?”

  “If it’s okay,” I said.

  “Fine by me,” she said, “but then you have to get out so you don’t get in the way of dinner service. Come back tomorrow at six A.M. You can help with the baking.”

  THE STAFF MEAL WAS chicken in a smoky red sauce. There was also a huge pan of rice, a metal bowl of greens and a squirt bottle of vinaigrette, a loaf of bread and a couple squares of butter. I got in line and took a white plate from a
pile and served myself a little too much of everything. I was starving.

  I sat down near one end, giving a mute smile to the people on either side. It was like being at a very awkward dinner party, but at least by now I’d had experience with real embarrassment. This was easier than the first time I’d tried to get Kate out of bed.

  “You visiting?” a woman asked. I had a mouthful of chicken and as I chewed and swallowed she took another bite of bread, watching me the whole time. She was one of the servers, who all looked too dressy to be at a plaid tablecloth at four thirty in the afternoon, gnawing chicken legs. They wore shirts and ties or crisp blouses and skirts, hair swept up and eyes lined.

  “Yeah,” I said finally, swallowing. “I think Anna’s letting me see if a professional kitchen will wear me down or kill me outright.”

  She grinned and took a sip from a can of Diet Coke. “Where’d you work before?”

  “I worked for a couple, just cooking for them privately. And their friends, for parties. It was like being a caterer, sort of.”

  The other people near us were listening in. The foie gras guy looked surprised. “Does Madison have people rich enough to hire private chefs?” A few servers chuckled. “No, I’m serious, does it? Because I’ll wear a uniform and a toque, I don’t care.”

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” I told him. “She was disabled and couldn’t cook, and she had very good taste. So I learned a lot from her.”

  “This must be different,” the woman said.

  “It’s more chaotic. And I’m a lot more tired than I thought I would be. And I don’t have a clue what anyone is doing. But I’m told I get to try the food.”

  The foie gras guy laughed. “We have to keep you around somehow. No restaurant lets go of free labor if they can help it.” He took another bite of his chicken and said conversationally, “I saw you cutting the tips off those shallots. Remind me to give you a lesson later. Your knife skills fucking suck.”