Georgia's Kitchen (6 page)

“Hello?” She didn’t bother checking caller ID.

“Hey.” It was Glenn.

“Glenn. Where are you?” She was ready to forget everything: his coke, her doubts, their problems.

“I’m over at Ray’s. I think I’m gonna crash here tonight.” Ray was Glenn’s hedge-funder cousin who shared a multimillion-dollar, four-thousand-square-foot Tribeca loft with a tank of exotic fish. Georgia and Glenn had toured the space with him before he made his all-cash offer, and she was quite sure she had visibly salivated over the kitchen: six-burner Wolf range, twin Miele dishwashers, double wall ovens, marble countertops honed from a quarry in England. All this for a guy whose Sub-Zero would never hold more than a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a six-pack of Bud.

“Are you serious? You’re not coming home?”

“Yeah. I went back to the apartment while you were out and grabbed some stuff. I need a break, Georgia.”

For the second time that day, Georgia pointed her chin to the ceiling, willing herself not to shed even one tear. “Hold on. You mean, you’re not coming back?”

“Not right now.”

“Because of the coke?”

“It’s not just the coke, Georgia. I need some time.”

She swallowed. “Then take it.”

Georgia replaced the phone on the receiver. She looked into the kitchen, her eyes falling on the pricey Vita-Mix blender Glenn had given her as a makeup gift after their year break. That night they whipped up fresh-mango margaritas and strolled clumsily up Madison Avenue for gelato. It was a balmy spring evening, one of the first of the season, and they had just decided Glenn would move into her apartment. Or rather Glenn had decided and Georgia agreed.

She frowned. Was that how it was between them? He made the decisions and she went along with whatever he decided?

Sally rolled over on her back, nudging Georgia’s hand with her paw. “Time,” she said as she reached down to scratch her pooch’s belly. “He says he needs time.” For what, she didn’t know. As far as she could tell, he’d already decided. And maybe she had too.

G
inger Rogers and Fred Astaire danced across the screen while Georgia lay on the couch waiting for the delivery guy. As far as thirties musicals went, it didn’t get more glamorous than
Top Hat
. She and Grammy had watched it together a million times, a bowl of popcorn propped on the sofa between them, swooning over debonair Fred and gorgeous Ginger. That night, popcorn wouldn’t cut it. The doorbell rang and Georgia went to answer it, picking up a twenty from the dining-room table.

Ice cream in hand, she shuffled into the kitchen, swung open the oven door, and pulled out the second sheet of Toll House cookies, baked to back-of-the-package specifications. Sally had followed her in and now looked up expectantly.

“I’m afraid you’re out on this one, Sals. No chocolate allowed. You know the rules.” She pried off the top of the Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby and stuck in her spoon. “‘Heaven,’” she sang à la Fred Astaire as she took her first bite. “‘I’m in heaven.’” She’d tried convincing Glenn that “Cheek to Cheek” should be their wedding song, but he vetoed it as too cheesy. They still hadn’t agreed on a song for their first dance.

After scooping nearly all of the ice cream into a mixing bowl, she popped it into the microwave to get it sufficiently slushy. She stuck half a dozen cookies into a Ziploc, smashed a frying pan on top of the bag, then mashed the cookie bits into the ice cream, topping it off with a generous pour of U-bet chocolate syrup. For a classically trained chef, Georgia’s tastes, at least in crisis mode, tended to the plebeian.

The phone rang and she picked it up without checking caller ID, sure it’d be Glenn. “Hi.”

“Georgia. I’ve been leaving messages for a week. Didn’t you get them?” It was her mother, Dorothy. After years of twice-monthly phone calls, she’d taken to calling two, sometimes three times a week. Georgia blamed the ring on her finger for her mother’s ringing on the phone.

“Oh, hi. I’ve been really busy lately.” Georgia scooped up a bite of the magical Chubby Chippie concoction. “Sorry,” she said, her mouth full.

“What are you eating?”

“Chubby Hubby ice cream and chocolate chip cookies.”

“With the wedding just weeks away? Not to mention that our family has a history of diabetes.” Dorothy paused. “Although with my mother in the bakery business you’d never know we had issues with sugar.”

Georgia refused to take the bait, well aware that Dorothy’s relationship with Grammy had been less than perfect. Based on Georgia’s own relationship with Dorothy, she was pretty sure she knew why—and it had nothing to do with Grammy.

“Are you trying to get sick, Georgia?”

“Nope.” She took another bite. “Just fat.”

Dorothy sighed. Georgia’s rejection of her mother’s bone-jutting body ideal had been a point of contention between them
since Georgia turned three, which was the age, Dorothy believed, when baby fat was no longer adorable.

“Mom, please try to remember I’m a chef. It’s practically illegal for me to be skinny. And I’m not even fat.”

“I know, I know. Anyway, I’m calling to remind you about tomorrow and to check on the wedding planning. I haven’t heard an update lately.” For some inexplicable reason Georgia couldn’t figure out, Dorothy cared more about this one day in her daughter’s life than she had about her entire thirty-three years put together.

“We already have the space, the caterer, the florist, the band, the judge. There’s no more updating to do.”

“The invitations?”

“We’re going to see the proof next week.”

“Good. How’s Glenn?”

“Glenn is great.” It would never occur to Georgia to tell Dorothy the truth. “Remind me about what?”

“Tell him we’re looking forward to seeing him.”

“I will. Oh, it looks like we’re getting a three-fork review.”

“A what?”

“The restaurant. We’re getting a three-fork review.”

Dorothy was silent.

“Marco? Where I work? A really important reviewer came in last night, and she’s giving us a fantastic review.”

“That’s great, Georgia. I’m glad that cooking is finally working out for you, since it’s obviously what you like to do.”

“Oh, is it that obvious?”

Dorothy charged on, as seemingly oblivious of her daughter’s sarcastic tone as she was of everything else about her. “I was wondering if you thought I could wear a sort of rosy-red dress to the wedding. I know red is traditionally very Republican, but it’s
more magenta actually, a floor-length tunic with hand embroidery around the neck.”

“Sounds like Mrs. Roper from
Three’s Company
.” Considering Dorothy’s obsession with skinniness, you’d think she’d have at least a vague clue about fashion. Instead, she was stuck in the era of Earth shoes, muumuus, and rust-colored pantsuits.

“Mrs. Who? Is Glenn’s mom wearing something similar?”

“I doubt it, Mom. Wear whatever you’d like.”

“Great. Then I’ll see you tomorrow. The party’s at one.”

“Party?”

“You haven’t forgotten, I hope? Dad and I are driving down tomorrow and spending the night in Millbrook at Uncle Paul’s. I have the environmental summit in New York on Monday, remember? Paul invited us all to a lunch he’s having at the farm. All four of us. You said you were coming.”

Georgia put down the Chubby Chippie and tried to remember when Dorothy had mentioned the luncheon. Paul was her dad’s younger, only, and extremely successful brother. He owned a co-op on Sutton Place and a horse farm upstate and had recently gotten engaged—for the third time.

“Georgia, you said you and Glenn would come, and we’ve already told Paul to expect us all. It’s an easy train ride from Grand Central, and Dad will pick you up at the station in Dover Plains.”

Now Georgia remembered. She had accepted the invite in the hopes that a yes to Millbrook would get her off the hook with Dorothy for the duration of her city stay. As general counsel of a small environmental nonprofit, Dorothy had been attending the summit for years. It ran for three days, and with her mother a mere cab ride away, this was three days too many.

“Of course I didn’t forget,” said Georgia. “I’ll be there.”

“What about Glenn?”

“I mean we’ll be there.” Explaining Glenn’s absence would be easy, and she already knew what she’d say: working on an important case, couldn’t get away. Dorothy would be suitably impressed and wouldn’t ask more.

She hung up the phone and went back to the couch. The Chubby Chippie was almost gone; conversations with her mother had a funny way of driving her to eat. If Grammy hadn’t been around during her childhood, she’d be big as a house. And without Grammy’s intervention, she might not have become a chef.

At the tail end of Georgia’s college graduation dinner, a mediocre meal at the second-best restaurant in town, Grammy announced that she had something to say. Georgia closed her eyes, praying Grammy wasn’t about to reveal that she had some horrible, fatal disease. Instead, she said she’d set up a trust that would allow Georgia to go to any grad school she pleased, plus have a little something left over for a rainy day. The way Grammy saw it, Georgia would either get the money when Grammy was dead, her ashes sprinkled over Silver Lake, or while she was still kicking and could watch her enjoy it. A stunned Dorothy dropped her spoon into her lemon Pavlova, where it quickly sank into a cloud of meringue, while Hal launched into a fit of throat clearing.

She’d paid for Dorothy’s schooling, Grammy explained, so of course she’d do it for Georgia—after all, she was practically her daughter. Sniffling a little, Georgia told her family exactly what she wanted to do: go to culinary school and become a chef. Grammy was pleased, Georgia’s parents—having just lost any influence they’d hoped to exert over her choice of grad school or career—dead silent.

Top Hat
’s final credits started rolling, and Georgia headed into the bathroom for a shower. A day in the country sounded
grand; a day in the country with Dorothy and Hal, less so. But at least her uncle Paul was cool and could usually be relied on to pull some fairly impressive bottles from his wine cellar.

She sloughed off the dead skin on her arms, legs, and back with a sea sponge and grainy body wash that smelled like mint. After, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, her mouth fixed into a discerning
o
. Could everyone see those little hairs above her upper lip, or was it just the lighting? She searched the medicine cabinet for the facial mask Lo had given her, the one that erased pimples, though not, sadly, girlstaches. A pill canister rolled out from behind a tub of Glenn’s shaving foam and she picked it up from the sink. Affixed to the side was a yellow-and-black warning label: “Do not operate heavy machinery or drive a car after taking this medication. Do not drink alcohol with this medication.” She flipped the canister over in her hand. It was a well-known sleeping pill, prescribed to Glenn by his family doctor. Frowning, she shook the canister. A handful of pink pills rattled at the bottom, and she poured them into her palm. She paused for a second, then popped one in her mouth, swallowing it with a gulp of water from the sink. Just what the doctor ordered.

A loose-jowled woman behind the ticket counter looked down through the drugstore reading glasses perched on her nose and exhaled heavily. “Yes?”

“Dover Plains,” Georgia said. “Round-trip, please. Off-peak.”

She turned around while her ticket printed and stared up at the domed, blue-green ceiling sky dotted with constellations that loomed over Grand Central. The balcony restaurants on either end of the massive hall were empty, and travelers took their time climbing the double staircases that would deliver them to the city streets. A group of teenagers wearing huge backpacks
and knee-length shorts, despite the cool spring morning, met another, identically clad group at the clock in the center of the terminal. They exchanged hugs and grins, and a girl with two thick braids hanging down her chest pointed to the famous four-sided clock and said something that made them all laugh. Georgia paid for her ticket and headed down to the lower level to catch her train. The food court, a United Nations of culinary offerings, was bustling even on this sleepy Sunday morning, and she surveyed her options, settling on a very American coffee, banana muffin, and
New York
magazine.

Despite logging nine hours of sleep (that little pink pill kept its promise), she felt the same jittery way she did after a triple espresso on an empty stomach. She boarded the train and turned into the first empty row available, planting herself next to the window and placing her handbag on the seat next to her. The last time she’d seen her parents was in Wellesley, when she and Glenn had broken the news of their engagement over Vietnamese takeout. They spent the night at the split-level ranch where she’d grown up, she and Glenn in her old room (where, despite her parents’ unspoken blessing, they couldn’t bring themselves to have sex), and had left the next morning after bacon and blueberry pancakes. Her parents stood at the end of the driveway and waved good-bye, their breath turning to smoke in the frosty morning air. Georgia turned for one last glimpse of her childhood and caught them kissing. They were always kissing.