Chapter 57
Frida Rodriguez ... En Route
December 22, 1993
Paris, France
Dear Kate,
Congratulations! You did it! You let Serious Old Sven in! I don’t want to say I told you so, but the Fairest of Kates in All the Land – boy oh boy did I tell you so! I’m over the moon for me. Ha! New York is SO much closer to Paris than Seattle.
Now about this Kirby situation. Even if I decided to throw caution to the wind, it’s not like I can make any smooth moves right now anyway because he went to Vietnam for Christmas. And before he left it was business as usual except for the $100 bottle of Champagne he bought – yes you read that right! – when glamorous Lauren Dunne got back to me. She thinks I have the potential for an article about how war displaces a sense of identity, but I need to decide on my anchoring incident. The night the library burned? That first night of the Ramona Club? My goal is to get as close as I can and then Lauren will help me. Isn’t that what editors are for?
Speaking of the Ramona Club. We’re growing. Lejla brought two more refugee students, and I felt bad because I kept borrowing a hot plate from my neighbor Faith, so I invited her to join us. Her parents fled the Nigerian-Biafran war in the late 1960s, and she grew up in Montreal. She’s apprenticing with a sculptor named Niki de Saint Phalle who makes art to raise awareness about AIDS. Is there anyone in Paris who isn’t très intéressant? Apple Cheeks from the Yugoslavian embassy is part of our group now, too. Faith is a proud Beezus. Apple Cheeks is a closet Ramona.
A week or so ago everyone asked me to make a Mexican dish. My first thought was – obviously – chiles rellenos. It was an ordeal in and of itself to get the ingredients. Kirby had to track down an agriculturalist out by Versailles who has been experimenting with peppers in greenhouses, and even then I had to substitute. I got the idea that rather than prepare it by myself, we’d all make it together. Two hot plates weren’t going to cut it, so I asked Lisette if we could use the bistro kitchen when she’s closed. There were ten of us. It was like that old Life magazine photo of people crammed into a VW Bug. I usually hate people in my way when I’m cooking but this was a blast. We had a contest to see who could separate eggs without leaving the slightest drop of yolk. Merjema won. Her aunt has a bakery and sometimes Merjema helped her make ora?nice, which is a kind of cookie made with egg whites, walnuts, and sugar. She told us when she was six, she lost a tooth in the ora?nice batter. She was too scared to tell her aunt, and the next day a woman came in and plunked the tooth on the counter. From then on customers would say, “I’ll take an order of ora?nice please, hold the tooth.”
How do you like my responsible use of commas above? I might be a New Yorker writer soon. I take that seriously ! .
You know how judgy I was growing up because Mom wrote about food when she could have been writing about More Important Things. Cooking in Lisette’s kitchen with the Ramonas – it struck me in a new way, what Mom does. Wipe that look of satisfaction off your face! How come I could never see how she uses food to tell people’s stories – and by telling their stories explore their cultures – and by exploring their cultures explain their lives in a way everyone can understand because everyone eats. Everyone eats! I thought that’s the reason it wasn’t a Big Deal but Mom understands that’s the reason it IS a Big Deal! No gloating, Fair Kate!
Did I ever tell you how she got on a freighter all by herself when she was our age and traveled to Asia to write about food – she still calls it the Orient, and I keep telling her she can’t say that anymore. She’s been to India six times and Thailand four for work. She’s been to every state in Mexico – and written about all of them so people in L.A. can know about those places and even experience them because she includes recipes. If a flavor can take me home, why can’t a flavor take me someplace I’ve never been? Why can’t it take me inside someone’s life where I can see how much we have in common – how we all just want to be nourished – even if it feels like we’re polar opposites on the surface?
I wrote her a letter, Fair Kate. I told her I’m sorry for being so disrespectful about what she does. If you get to thank me for pushing you to let Sven in, I get to thank you for standing your ground with MFK so I could see Mom in a different light.
Flavorfully yours,
Frida