The School of Essential Ingredients (11 page)

Tom

Tom stood outside the restaurant kitchen. The windows were lit; he could see the other students inside, mingling with the easy familiarity of neighbors at a block party. On the counter, cans of tomatoes, a canister of flour, a paper-wrapped package, sat ready for the night’s lesson. It was like coming home after a long day away, opening a door to the certainty that someone was there, had always been there. He turned to go.

“Hi, Tom.” Lillian opened the kitchen door. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face, her eyes calm, watching him. She smiled.

“Come in,” she said. “You’ll get cold out there.”

Something about Lillian’s voice touched everyone who heard it; it left you feeling protected, forgiven for things you hadn’t even figured out you had done. When Lillian told you to enter a room, you did, if only to be near her voice.

“I thought it felt like a pasta night,” Lillian remarked as Tom came into the kitchen. “Let’s see if you agree with me.”

The students found their usual places in the rows of chairs facing the wooden counter. “It’s chilly out there,” Lillian addressed the class. “I hope you all are warming up.” Her eyes ran over the rows of students, checking facial expressions, a jittery knee.

Tom followed her gaze. Claire was putting away her wallet; she had been showing photographs to Isabelle and a smile lingered on her face. Chloe had moved to the back row; her face was distracted, without the openness that had been there at the end of the Thanksgiving class. Tom noticed that Ian had finally secured a seat next to Antonia, although it appeared that he was still having a hard time figuring out what to say to her. Carl sat next to his wife, as always. She was resting her hand on his arm, the tip of her index finger just touching his wrist bone. Tom looked back to the front of the class.

“You know,” Lillian began, “something always happens to me when the weather changes in the fall. Everything seems to be moving so quickly toward the cold. So this evening, I thought we would work with one of the most essential ingredients of all—time.

“Not the herb,” she said, smiling at the look of confusion on Isabelle’s face. “Minutes, hours. If you stop to think about it, every meal you eat, you eat time—the weeks it takes to ripen a tomato, the years to grow a fig tree. And every meal you cook is time out of your day—but you all know that.

“Now, usually a class about time is really about efficiency—how to do twice as much in half the time. But we are going to do exactly the opposite tonight. We are going to cultivate inefficiency, squander our best resource as if our supply was infinite. We are going to make a meal that flies in the face of the fact that every day is getting shorter for the next three months—pasta with red sauce.

“Now, to truly have this experience, you would need to begin in the morning, so the sauce could cook all day. Unfortunately, we don’t quite have that amount of time, but you’ll be able to learn the lesson anyway.”

She picked up a head of garlic in her hand, as if weighing it, and then looked out across the class.

“Tom,” she said, “why don’t you come help me?” and she gently tossed the garlic. It landed in the bowl created by his palms, its outer layers crackling like a secret, the weight both heavier and lighter than he had anticipated. He didn’t want this, not tonight when the world seemed both too cold and too warm. But the garlic lay in his hands, waiting. He gripped it, hard, then stood and walked a bit uncertainly around the counter to Lillian’s side, his cupped hands coming up to his face in a gesture so automatic that he was surprised when the smell of the garlic slipped into his nose.

Charlie had loved garlic; she had told Tom that if he loved her, he’d better love the way her fingers smelled after a day in the kitchen, the scent soaked deep into her skin like wine into a tablecloth. She refused the aid of all kitchen gadgets, crushing the fat, firm cloves under her strong thumb, pulling off the papery outer sheets and digging her nail into the base of the clove to remove the hardened end. She would have chopped with her fingers, too, if she could have, burrowing into the smell of it. When she was done, she would trace lines with her fingertips between her breasts, along the base of her skull and up behind her ears.

“Trails for you to follow,” she would say to Tom with a wink.

One evening at a restaurant, the wife of one of Tom’s law firm clients had commented despairingly on the amount of garlic on her bruschetta.

“Andy will never sleep with me tonight,” she had remarked with an embarrassed laugh. “Darling, did you bring mints with you?”

While the couple was engaged in checking pockets and purses, Charlie had met Tom’s eyes across the table. Slowly, she ran her index finger over the thick, aromatic oil that had seeped into the toasted circles of bread on her plate. Then her hand disappeared under the table.

The garlic LAY on the chopping board, cut into small, precise pieces. Lillian took the knife from Tom and pushed the pile into a small mound on the side of the board. Tom was surprised to see a pile of freshly cut onions next to it, their smell sharper, lightning instead of thunder.

“I thought I’d keep you company,” Lillian commented. Grasping a half-gallon bottle of olive oil from under the counter, she hefted it up and poured a spiraling circle of thick, green-gold liquid into the large skillet on the stove. She turned the burner on with a small whoosh of air.

“Sometimes,” she remarked, “the best meal requires you to forget that time exists. But then there’s olive oil—olives start to change flavor within hours of when they are picked. After all those months of growing. That’s why the best oil comes from the first press, and the very best is made close to its own trees.”

Tom had met Charlie eight years before, when they were both working the summer shift at a restaurant on Cape Cod. Not that it was really a restaurant, or that he was really a cook, or that Charlie should have ever been a waitress, given her general attitude toward submissiveness. Considering Charlie’s skills in the kitchen, it should have all been the other way around. But that was the way things worked at Lonny’s.

Tom’s first day he had been on the breakfast shift, turning over bacon with a long-handled spatula and trying to work up the courage to flip the frying egg that would soon no longer be over-easy. A woman with golden skin and sun-blond hair, an appearance rendered only slightly less stunning by the irony of her red-and-white-striped waitress outfit, walked up to him and grasped the handle of the frying pan. With one quick jerk forward and back she sent the egg up and over.

“Wish I could do that to table number seven,” she remarked dryly, and headed back out of the kitchen.

She had found him again on his break. She handed him a frying pan, complete with a half-cooked egg.

“I’m Charlie,” she said. “Flip this ten times for me.” After his third failed attempt, she had grinned, taken the pan and shown him again, and he had fallen in love with the faint line of muscle that ran down her arm.

Tom quickly learned that Charlie couldn’t keep her hands off food. She could mince an entire onion, left unprotected on the counter, before the prep cook could come back out of the walk-in refrigerator. The cooks were always yelling at her for sticking her fingers in the sauces. She would placate them flirtatiously, giving a seductive pause before hip-checking the swinging doors into the dining room. She often came by Tom’s station on her next pass through.

“Add a little nutmeg to the white sauce,” she would comment in a voice too low for anyone else to hear.

She called it guerrilla cooking. Tom knew that when he wasn’t there she simply added the ingredients herself, but he liked that when he was there, she told him. He thought about her at night, wondering what she would do to a pancake, a pizza, the small surprises she would add to the lives of the people who sat at her tables.

She would eat anything. The nights they worked the closing shift, dancing on the trash in the bin until there was enough room to add the last boxes and cans, they would finish and look about them at the scrubbed-down kitchen. Then they would grab the pans, the oils, the food Charlie had stashed at the back of the walk-in, and start cooking for real. Salsa packed with onions and cilantro, fresh white fish with garlic and soy and tangerine juice. Many of the ingredients she brought herself—the patrons of the restaurant would no more recognize tofu than their own backsides, she was fond of saying. That Tom had never seen tofu before either didn’t concern Charlie.

“You’re different,” she would say. “Have a bite, and learn.”

They would eat in the kitchen, shunning the dining room with its paper napkins and plastic-coated red-and-white-checked tablecloths. While they ate, she would recite the old English poetry she refused to study anymore. Tom would tell her about the law courses he was taking, and she would listen, playing with the intricacies of the cases the way she would ingredients in a dish.

“What if . . . ?” she was always asking, and Tom would realize that her ideas, if applied to the legal system, would be as elegant and disturbing as fish roe and seaweed in a hamburger joint.

The first time he had kissed her—it had taken six weeks—was over hamburgers, two inches thick, juices running. He had leaned over and licked the grease off her arm without thinking. As he brought his face up to hers, he wondered how it was that the distance between arm and mouth could take such a sweet infinity to travel.

The oil covered the bottom of the pan, smooth and thick, the smallest of bubbles rising toward the surface.

“Now, we’re going to take one of these,” Lillian said to the class, holding up a flat square shape, covered in foil. “Does anyone know what it is?”

“Dadi,”
Antonia said in a delighted tone.

“They are more interesting than salt,” Lillian said, “a little like a bouillon cube, but this type is a bit different.” She opened the foil-wrapped package and placed the square, golden-brown shape in Tom’s hand.

It was soft, almost greasy, unlike the hard bouillon cubes that had flavored the soups of Tom’s childhood; this one crushed easily, leaving oil clinging to the ridges of his fingertips as he dropped the bits into the pan. Lillian stirred with a wooden spoon and the oil changed in texture, like liquid sand.

“Time for the onions,” Lillian directed. Tom picked up the slippery pieces and dropped them in carefully. The smell rose toward his face; he started to pull back, then leaned in and breathed—bread and vineyards, warm in the sun.

Lillian put the wooden spoon in his hand and motioned toward the pan. He watched the moving pieces as they started to turn from white to clear, their hard shapes melting. Tom stirred, waiting for direction from Lillian as the onions began to drink in the liquid around them, almost disappearing into the color of the oil. Lillian leaned forward and added the garlic, but still she said nothing. Finally, as the garlic softened, but before the edges began to curl, Tom reached forward and took the pan off the burner.

“Perfect,” she said quietly. The class let out a small collective sigh.

“Now we’ll add the meat. You can try different varieties,” she said, facing out toward the class, “depending on your mood. We’ll use sausage this time.” Waves of fennel and pepper, the smell of sizzling red meat, mingled with the air.

“Breathe in,” Lillian said. “The air is different now. If you want a dish that is lighter, you can make this sauce with eggplant instead of meat. Or a summer version, with just olive oil and garlic and fresh tomatoes and fresh basil, cooked for a moment or two. But sometimes, especially in fall and winter, it’s nice to have a little more intensity.”

Before Tom kissed Charlie, he had felt as if she was in his every thought. Afterward, he knew differently. It was almost mortifying how the thought of making love to Charlie took over his most mundane meditations. He started taking a toothbrush to work, although he knew full well that she had no particular passion for the taste of plaque-reducing mint.

“Good God, man, have you given up law for dentistry?” she had asked.

But he couldn’t help it. His lips, having touched Charlie’s arm and mouth, wanted to wander, and where lips couldn’t go, the mind would. Fried eggs, forgotten in the skillet, solidified into doorknobs, while Tom threw fries on the grill, lobbed steaks into the deep-fat fryer.

“Charlie, for Christ’s sake,” the dishwasher had yelled across the kitchen in exasperation, “would you give him a break before this whole place goes up in flames?”

Charlie walked back to Tom’s station. She looked at the mess on the grill.

“Dinner, my house. Tonight,” she said, then crossed the kitchen to the back door and punched out her time card. The prep cooks howled.

Charlie lived in a blue and orange cottage two houses away from the ocean. The paint had given up most of its color to the wind and sun years before; daisies and gladiolas grew with haphazard abundance, scattering petals across the gravel pathway that led to the house. When Tom arrived the front door was open, and he could see the inside of the cottage was tiny, with a futon that did daytime duty as the living room couch, and a kitchen large enough for a single slim cook.

Charlie stood at the stove, the wooden spoon in her hand. He could smell wine in the air, butter, and garlic.

“I just knew you’d be on time,” she said. The skin below her ear was warm against his lips. She smiled, and nodded toward the counter, where he saw a blue bowl overflowing with chopped melon and a set of brilliant white plates. “You can take those out to the patio.”

Tom ducked his head as he went out the back door and found himself under a trellis heavy with green vines and deep purple blossoms, the evening sunlight filtering down through the leaves. Beneath his feet was a patio made from old bricks that moved with his weight, clinking softly as he walked to the green metal table and placed the bowl and plates next to a basket of bread. He stood straight again, his head almost touching the leaves, and breathed in the pepper-sweet smell of wisteria. Everything suddenly seemed twice as quiet as he thought it ever could be.