Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Page 4

  But quickly I realized that I would need money. I had entered a few of my neighbors’ houses by crawling in windows when I knew they wouldn’t be home or sometimes even just walking in the unlocked front door and for reasons unknown to even myself, made off with some of the strangest things, like wine that I didn’t even yet care for, and adult’s clothing that didn’t fit me. I had managed to lift a few silver objects—ashtrays, a birth cup, candlesticks—and had pawned them in town, but even so, I understood I needed a job. So with the hardly faint traces of all the parties we’d thrown still swirling around in my blood—the laughter of drunk adults still echoing in my ears and the lingering powerful aroma of roasted lamb smoke still clinging, practically, to my skin—I walked the mile or so along the train tracks into town to find work.

  What can a thirteen-year-old do in a heavily touristed town of a hundred bad restaurants? Cut bread. Haul bus tubs. Take out the garbage. Wash dishes.

  I did all of those things for a few weeks at The Canal House. I applied there because, I realized thirty years later on a walk through town with my own young children, it was the first restaurant you came to when you got into town along the route I walked. It was picturesque, perfectly located, a tourist trap with unintentional food, a piano player on the weekends, and outdoor seating romantically arranged right along the canal where the tourists could throw bread from their dinner baskets to the ducks below, and with geraniums growing in planter boxes hanging from the railing canal-side. With portions designed to signal value, the waitresses asked, when clearing your plates, “Did ya get enough to eat?!” It was a very, very busy restaurant.

  Johhny Francis, the owner, knew my father, but I didn’t know this. He was probably only forty years old or so when I walked in and asked for a job on a hot summer weekday. I thought I was talking to an old man, his years of restaurant life hung on him so. I was extra polite as I had been raised to be. Johnny wore glasses that got darker in sunlight. He sat down in the now-empty canal-side dining area and looked me over while puffing on long white cigarettes.

  “This’ll be a summer job? Part time? What position are you applying for?” he asked, rather gruffly, I felt.

  I totally panicked; I didn’t even know the names of the jobs in a restaurant. I’d never heard of busser, salad girl, runner. We ate in restaurants when I was a kid, but not like families do today; to dine was an exception and a special treat. We had to sit in our chairs the whole meal, say please and thank you at every exchange with the server, and eat everything on our plates with a fork and knife. We ate at the Lambertville House, the Colligan’s Stockton Inn, and rarely, Conti’s Cross Keys Inn in Doylestown, where they made Caesar salad tableside, with both egg and anchovy. As a reward for our good behavior, we were allowed a Shirley Temple, just one, and at Colligan’s we were allowed to throw pennies in the wishing well outside and, until we got too big, to sit on the owner’s especially giant St. Bernard dog named Brandy. At the Lambertville House, we were allowed to be excused from the table to go visit Fritz the bartender in the back of the restaurant and eat pretzel mix.

  I said to Johnny with a straight face, “I’m sixteen, and I was thinking of being a waitress.”

  I had just started “borrowing” cars from the repair and body shop up the road, which would be left in the lot with the keys in the ignition or under the floor mat in those days, waiting to be serviced. I would go up at night, now that I had no curfew and no chaperone, and first just sit in the cars. And then turn the engine on. And then finally, I crept the cars out of the parking lot and onto the road. I went everywhere that it used to take me hours to get to on my bicycle or on foot, and places I’d been to with my mother, keenly alert the entire time to the route and to being sure I could find my way back, which I’d never before had to actually attend to. For a few days there was a pale blue Volkswagen bug that I so thrilled to drive—it fit me so well—that I felt heartache when it was finally serviced and no longer in the parking lot. I returned it, my body wrecked from the exquisite exhilaration of having bathed in such unknown freedom and the nearly narcotic, depleting relief of not getting caught, having burned out the clutch and run out the gas. With the headlights off, I coasted the car right back into its spot at the gas station, put the key back under the floor mat, and walked home alone down the dark back road. Somehow, because I could do this, because I possessed some of the talents of an average sixteen year old, it felt effortless to claim it to Johnny Francis.

  In that thirteen-year-old way of understanding the world, I didn’t realize somehow that New Hope was a small town, and that if it was small enough for everybody to know almost everybody and that my dad was kind of a big fish in a small pond, then the very thing I was hoping for, that my last name would help me, could also work in the reverse. That Johnny Francis could easily pick up the phone or run into my dad at Smutzie’s lunch counter and say: “Gabrielle came looking for a job a few weeks ago, claiming to be sixteen.”

  Luckily, he didn’t. He sat with me and just talked for a while. “You’re Jimmy’s youngest?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s right,” I answered, a little spooked that he would know that.

  “I knew your great-aunt Helen Louise.” He smiled warmly. She had been kind of legendary in town, my father’s aunt. She drove a black antique Thunderbird, wore coral-frosted lipstick, played Burt Bacharach on the piano—rather well—and kept a vintage bric-a-brac shop in town that was considered quite stylish and elegant. We reminisced about her, and it was as subtle as the way his lenses lightened in the cool shade of that terrace that his face and demeanor softened during the talk. Then we went out onto the sidewalk in front of his restaurant, in the blazing sun, and surveyed the scene. He asked me, from behind his now-black lenses, what I saw.

  It was probably not later than eleven a.m. on a weekday. I didn’t know what to say. What was I supposed to notice? The tchotchke store across the street was just opening up: The Ember Glo’, filled with glass menagerie and incense and the kind of trinkets that end up at yard sales across the country. A few tourists straggled along the cobblestones, window-shopping.

  “Look at those people,” Johnny said. “Where are their shopping bags?” He dragged on his cigarette easily, blew out with a little fatigue, irritation, world-weariness. “It’s a tight season.”

  But by the end of our conversation, he let me come and try to be a busser on a Saturday lunch. I didn’t know to wear an ironed shirt. I didn’t know how to properly pour ice water. I didn’t know the right way to clear a plate. He had me off the picturesque, canal-side serving floor and back in the kitchen within an hour, and as soon as I saw the three-bin stainless steel pot sink, exactly like ours, I felt instantly at home and fell into peeling potatoes and scraping plates for the dishwasher like it was my own skin. And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start.

  It almost didn’t happen because, at that age, I didn’t understand that a schedule was a rule not a suggestion and so I didn’t show up one day, when we, the green-capped Mets, had a game against the yellow-hat Astros. Only three teams in the league had a girl player, and the Astros’ girl was a pitcher. I was our third baseman. It was not the first year that they let girls play Little League, but it was only the second, and I was acutely aware of the skepticism and also the shame for some of the parents when I tagged out a runner at third and drilled the ball to first for a double play. Joanie Carrozza, the black-eyed, thick pony-tailed Astros’ pitcher, easily struck out boys twice her size and of course plainly heard the taunts aimed at the batter who walked, fuming, to the bench. You got struck out by a giiiirrrrll? It was not possible for me to be absent from this game. Nor could I reveal to my employer, who was supposed to be taking me for a sixteen year old, why I couldn’t work the shift. Of course there was no job waiting for me at The Canal House when I went, audaciously, to pick up my pay.

  But I got another job, this time as a dishwasher at the Picnic Basket, and listed the Canal House, on my application, as Previous Experience.
When I saw two women making out in the kitchen—a chef and a line cook deeply tongue kissing up against the walk-in freezer door—my heart raced so fast and I felt such a prickling of adolescent embarrassment that in the middle of the shift I quickly changed out the garbage in my station, hauled the half-full bag out to the Dumpster behind the restaurant, and sprinted home along the train tracks. Afraid to be caught, I ditched my apron in the woods.

  On so many occasions, vestiges of my real chronological age and all its attendant ignorance and confusion tapped a disruptive finger against the smoke rings I was convincingly blowing on the exhale of a Marlboro and must have startled so many people who took me at my word even though they surely perceived, on some level, the cleavage between the girl and her doctored-up story. Simon had found mealtime surrogate family life in the homes of some of his friends whose mothers were the more-the-merrier types who good-naturedly added another plate to the table and fed their broods Pop Tarts and frozen French bread pizzas. There must have been some adults who might have liked to have put a strong warm hand on the back of my neck, to walk me gently off the field for a quiet talk, and then to walk me back into the game, with better focused purpose and direction. But I was meeting only the kind who were enthralled and titillated by me in a red tube top, who were lavishly entertained by the way I said “cunt,” “fuck,” “dick,” “ass,” “bitch,” and “shit” in a single conversation, and who gave me just the enormity of attention I was so seeking. “She’s eleven going on twenty-two,” my dad used to say, proudly, to a stranger when introducing me.

  During this summer I learned how to cook. I spent most of my time in our home in the kitchen, opening old jars of stuff my mother had left behind in the pantry. It was the only room in the large house that most resembled what it had looked like when my mother and family all lived in it together. How complicated it must be to separate out a vivid and fruitful marriage of twenty-five years. Half of the furniture, the photographs, the sheets, and the books had made their way to Vermont, and nothing had taken their places. When you split up, and you are struggling with the very meaning of everything said and promised in love itself, who is able to divvy up the contents of the pantry?

  Our mother had her own double-tiered, potbellied couscoussier, and she made tagines with preserved lemons and cardamom pods, pigeon pies with sultanas and pine nuts, painstakingly brushing each fragile layer of phyllo dough with melted butter using a special brush made of white duck feathers, which would neither leave loose bristles in the dough nor perforate it. She knew to serve mint tea and sliced oranges with onions and olives, if she was making a bisteeya, and never put a meal together in a careless, eclectic, or incoherent way. The meal was always organized correctly, traditionally, which I now appreciate, but as a kid, pigeon was not a treat, even if it was served with the traditional condiments.

  On certain nights, she gave us baths and then hair washes and then dessert, sort of. Side by side, however many could fit, we knelt at the edge of the tub after we had bathed, leaning over a drainful of suds, just as we had waited in that same huddle every Christmas morning at the top of the stairs before being allowed down to see the tree and attack the pile. Huddled there, we pressed washcloths to our clenched eyes until brown curlicues and stars formed from pressing too hard while she hosed water over our heads and shampooed us. When we were clean and dry, we stood in the kitchen while she stood before the pantry, its shelves laden with red boxes of raisins and cashews; crinkly yellow bags of sweet baker’s chocolate; metal tins of flour; sugar; green, yellow, and orange candied fruits; glass jars of oatmeal; dark bottles of olives, vinegars, and syrups; salt; strange cans of fish, beans, and crackers; tubs of peanut and almond butters. The boxes leaned against the stacked cans, and the stacked cans towered over the jars that sometimes lay on their sides.

  One at a time, she blindfolded us with a dish towel, spun us around a few revolutions, and then set us in front of the shelves. With blind outstretched hands, each of us in turn surveyed the shelves and from behind came the shouts, “Cold! Cold! Lukewarm! Okay, Warmer! Warm! Hot! Hot! You’re burning!” of the siblings, trying to guide each other to something good.

  Whatever we blindly landed on, that was our dessert. It was a game of roulette. You could have a can of cling peaches or escargots, equally. If you picked the wrong package—Trenton Oyster Crackers—tough shit. The older kids were better at this than me, obviously, rehearsing the layout of the pantry shelves ahead of time, peeking out from under the blindfold.

  Our sweets were mostly of the “natural” kind: a piece of fruit, yogurt mixed with jam, sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar, the occasional little square of good chocolate. And our school lunches were just plain embarrassing: leftover ratatouille, a wedge of Morbier cheese, a bruised pear. We were given one piece of Saran Wrap for the week, to be reused and brought home each day, washed and left to dry in the dish rack over the back of an upturned ladle or wooden spoon, ready to wrap our lunch in the next day. My mother turned soured milk into buttermilk with the help of a tablespoon of cider vinegar, and then it went in the blender with strawberries for our breakfast. Stale heels of bread became bread crumbs, made by grating on the toothy holes of a box grater and then kept in the freezer. Mold was cut away until the creamy tender edible part of whatever thing was revealed.

  Now without her, but left with the strange contents of her pantry, which my father had not cleaned out—the way a griever won’t empty the clothes closet of the deceased spouse? Or the way of a man who has not had to do any cleaning his whole married life?—I relied on what I had seen her do and improvised from there. I ate tinned white asparagus with capers and some of their juice and olive oil and parsley from the garden. I ate canned sardines and chewed through the spines and the silvery unpleasant skin until I finally realized how to skin and filet them gently with a paring knife, placing the meaty bodies on horribly stale Triscuit crackers with sliced shallots and mayonnaise. I washed lettuce from the garden in warm water so my hands wouldn’t get cold and watched it wilt but ate it anyway. I added Dijon mustard to milk and tried to make a pan sauce that curdled but I still ate it, poured over rubbery cold-and-raw-in-the-center chicken breasts which I had placed, still completely frozen, into the pan, reasoning that this would all just take a little longer to cook. When we ran out of Dijon mustard and olive oil, I used tomato paste in my salad dressing, and raspberry jam, and once even some chicken broth.

  As my mother had shown me, I picked the Japanese beetles off the bean plants in the garden and dropped them into a mason jar of gasoline and harvested the lettuce from outside of the core so that it would regrow and continue to yield. I climbed into raspberry bushes and picked the fruit, getting stained, stung, and ripped apart in the doing. Our abandoned garden produced all summer, in spite of my inexperience, and I ate whatever it offered. I learned to cook a lot of different vegetables the way my schoolmates learned to put together a PB and J.

  I finally got another job, where I managed to make my home for a few years working summers and after school and during holidays, at a restaurant on the main drag called, ironically, Mother’s. There I grew into a teenager and a beginning cook and even worked as a waitress and bartender for a stint when I dropped out of college. I started by helping in the retail bakery, cutting and rewrapping the two full cases of cakes for which the restaurant was rightfully well-known. They made everything from scratch in the bakery upstairs and produced gorgeous tall cakes that drew in thousands of customers who planned their meal around saving room for one of the twenty buttercream castles on display in the gleaming refrigerated case near where you waited for the maitre d’ to take you to your table. But I soon wanted to be back in the noisy, hissing kitchen, behind the two swinging doors with round ship windows—enter left, exit right—and so I washed dishes. Then I helped with salads on extremely busy or understaffed days, and I eventually even made it on to the hot line by the time I was fifteen. Mother’s had a popular dish called a seafood chimichanga, which
was a big pile of sauteed seafood—scallops, shrimp, and salmon, all mixed in with minced jalapenos, and then draped with a couple of slices of Monterey Jack cheese melted under the broiler. Instead of wrapping the seafood up in a tight package of flour tortilla and then deep frying it like a fast-food chimichanga, at Mother’s the cheesy filling was tipped right from the pan hot from the salamander into an edible bowl made of a deep fried flour tortilla that looked like a giant bloom or clam shell. The sauté guy then garnished the gluey seafood with an orange half-moon and a sprig of curly parsley and sent it out the swinging doors.

  I made stacks and stacks of those chimichanga bowls by dropping the flour tortilla into the deep fryer, where it would float and sizzle on the surface for a moment like a lily pad on a pond. Then, with a deep ten-ounce ladle, I pushed down in the center, and the tortilla came up around the bowl like the long dress and underskirts of a Victorian woman who had fallen, fully clothed, into a lake, her skirts billowing up around her heavy sinking body. We served, I am sure, two hundred chimichangas a day on weekends in this quaint town with its endless antique and art shows and mule barge rides along the canal, and I garnished every single one of them with its orange wedge and curly parsley sprig.

  On the walk home from town, after the mats were hosed down, and the stainless steel scoured with soapy green pads, then toweled off as Chef Joe and Chef Tom supervised, I held in my hand my paycheck from Mother’s—$74.11 after its inscrutable and unwelcome FICA and FED WT—and had precocious thoughts about who was in charge of me now, if I was earning my own money and everybody else was hiding in New York City or the hills of Vermont. No future graduate-level feminism seminar would ever come within a mile of the force of that first paycheck. The conviction was instant and forever: If I pay my own way, I go my own way.