Eleven #5
“I do not know this,” Irine said. “I’m not much of a cook, though. My mother usually makes the food but tonight she has a pain in her wrists, she cannot cook, I don’t remember the word—”
“Arthritis?”
“Arthritis,” Irine agreed. “So I told her just to go to bed. I was going to have an egg,” she said. “But if you are cooking—”
“Just sit!” Amy said. “Relax, I’ve got this.”
Although it had been a while since she’d cooked for someone else—really, since Ferry had gone to college—for years she’d produced a stream of Spanish tortillas, ratatouille, shakshouka, Caesar salad, pecan-banana bread.
She remembered how much she liked doing it, how much pleasure it gave her to feed people.
So much of the labor she did at home was reflexive, adopted without consideration, but the cooking had always been a choice, and a delight.
Why had she stopped? (Because there was nobody around, she supposed, to appreciate it.)
“So tell me about this primavera,” Irine said. “Would you like some wine?”
“I’d love some,” Amy said. While Irine got them glasses and a bottle, Amy found salt, oil, a large stockpot. “It’s sort of like a vegetable pasta. Some people add cream, some people use just oil and butter.”
“Do you need these things?” Irine said. “You can see what we have in the refrigerator. But I should warn you I have no idea. My mother does the shopping.”
Irine’s fridge was about two-thirds as large as an American refrigerator, and it was filled with ingredients Amy had to guess at—was this butter in this tub or some kind of lard?
Was this yogurt or heavy cream? Two plastic containers of sushi, an old orange.
Amy dug out bunches of tarragon and parsley, a zucchini, a plastic-wrapped blob of some kind of soft cheese.
On the counter there were shallots, garlic.
She felt the muscles in her hands start to twitch with anticipation. “You’ve got great stuff.”
Irine waved her glass of wine in the air. “It is all a surprise to me.”
Soon the room smelled, if not exactly like a restaurant, at least something like a kitchen, the garlic and shallot exorcising the smell of dogs and old cigarette smoke. Maia wandered in, looking surprised and pleased. “What’s going on? It smells so good!”
“Amy is cooking dinner,” Irine said. “Come, help me with these peas.”
“What do we do with peas?”
“We shell them, like this,” Irine said. “I used to do this all the time as a child.”
The zucchini went into the sauté pan, then the shelled peas; the fresh fettucine was dropped into the briskly boiling salted water, and Amy stirred the soft cheese into the vegetables so that it melted into a creamy sauce.
She sprinkled the herbs and the feta on top of the pasta, while behind her, Maia set the table with lace napkins and pretty flowered dishes.
She wished she had a loaf of sourdough or a nice leaf salad to add, but still, the pasta looked appetizing, and both Maia and Irine seemed delighted.
“Bon appetit!” Irine said, refilling their wine glasses. “Gaamot!”
“Wow!” Maia said. “I’ve never seen anything like this!”
The fettucine had turned out exactly as she’d hoped, slightly al dente; the freshness of the vegetables offset the richness of the cheese and the brightness of the herbs.
“Oh my god this is so good I am dying ,” Maia said, stuffing her face with noodles. “Where did you learn to cook like this?”
“Oh, when I got to New York I thought I was going to be a model, but that was harder than I thought it would be, so I ended up cooking in restaurants. Which was also hard—”
“Wait, you weren’t a model?”
“Oh god,” Amy said. “Not really. I mean for like five minutes.”
“Mom, you said she was an American model!”
“She was!” Irine said. “She’s just being modest.”
Amy laughed. “Guys, the highlight of my modeling career was a photoshoot for a tire catalog. I was done by the time I was twenty, and then I really needed something else to do, because there was no way I was going back to Minnesota.”
“Where’s Minnesota?”
“In the middle of the country, yes?” Maia said.
“Way up north,” Amy said. “Next to Canada.”
“So why didn’t you get more work as a model? Why didn’t you keep trying?”
“You know, in the end, once I started working in restaurants, I just—I started having more fun. I felt much more at home behind a stove than I did in front of the camera. I liked the people I met, I liked the fact that I could do it. That it turned out I was actually good at creating recipes, or figuring out what people liked to eat.”
“Is this what you made?” Irine said. “Pasta primavera?”
“Sometimes,” Amy said. “But I cooked all kinds of dishes, a lot of brunch stuff, eggs benedict, French toast. I’ve always enjoyed it.”
“Does your husband cook too?”
“Judd?” Amy put down her fork. “He did, for a little while, but that was never his main interest. He likes the front-of-the-house stuff more, meeting and greeting people, that sort of thing. He works with the chef to design the menu, though. He takes that part very seriously.”
“Was it hard for you to cook at the restaurant and raise your son at the same time?” Maia asked.
“Not really,” Amy said. “I started working less as he got older. We had a nanny for him when he was young, but by the time he was in kindergarten I wasn’t taking any more shifts at the restaurant so I could be there, you know, when he got out of school.”
“You could afford to do that?” Irine asked.
Amy dabbed at her lips. “Well—I mean, the restaurant was my husband’s. Did I mention that? So it’s like, any money I earned there was money we would have had anyway. Because whatever I didn’t earn just went back into the restaurant’s profits.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Amy decided to just barrel through her half-assed explanation, hoping to stave off more direct questioning.
“Well, my husband’s parents are heavy investors in the restaurant, so it’s really more like a family business.
So we worry less about one individual income and more—and Ferry’s biological mother has always been, kind of, I don’t know, ill.
So it’s always been important for me to be there for him. ”
“Deda, it’s like how bebia has always been there for me.”
“Of course,” Irine said. “Although your grandmother worked too, you remember? My mother,” she said, turning to Amy, “was an operator at the phone company for many years. During the Soviet era, especially, everyone had a job.”
“Everyone in America works too!” Amy said. “We love to work! It’s like our thing!” She laughed, but nobody else joined in. “And I’ve always volunteered at the shelter on top of that. And I teach writing classes when they’re available. So that’s always kept me busy.” She took a long sip of wine.
“Was it easy to work with your husband?” Irine asked. “When you were at the restaurant?”
“Judd?” She thought about what she witnessed during her time at Le Coin: his occasional icy silences or rage at a late supplier, the way he’d turn around on a dime to charm a sexy new waitress or hostess or a well-heeled couple at the bar.
It was one of the reasons it had been easy, in the end, to step aside from the stove; working with Judd wasn’t a great way to keep their marriage happy.
“My husband is, I don’t know. Kind of complicated. ”
“Ah,” Irine said. She finally smiled. “I understand.”
“I mean, sometimes he’s wonderful—”
“But you wouldn’t have come all this way if he was wonderful all the time,” Irine said.
“Deda, stop that.”
“I came here to find a dog,” Amy said.
Irine looked at her serenely. Amy took another long-ish sip of her wine.
“Okay, well then, I have a different question,” Maia said. “I read that in America, only fifty percent of the population that is allowed to vote actually votes. Is that really true?”
Politics again! “Unfortunately, it is,” Amy said. “I think a little bit more in presidential elections, but not, like—not a ton more. Not everyone by any stretch. People take their rights for granted, so they stop using them.”
“Some people say that democracy makes you lazy,” Irine said. “That nothing ever gets done, and that the people in democracies stop thinking that their votes matter, and everyone runs around in circles but nobody solves any real problems—”
“Deda,” Maia said. “Stop.”
“I’m not saying that’s what I think of democracy,” Irine said. “Only what some people say.”
She had made them dinner. She had been a pleasant houseguest. Why did she feel like she was on the defensive? “Look, democracy isn’t perfect, and yes, some things take a very long time, but at least we have a say in our government, right?”
“Which is why you get people like Donald Trump?”
“I guess so—”
“But isn’t that not who most people vote for?” Irine said. “Isn’t it because of, what do you call it? The thing where the person who gets the most votes in the United States doesn’t always win?”
“The electoral college,” Amy said. “Yes, it’s a confusing system, but I don’t think it’s a sign that democracies don’t—”
“But generally speaking,” Irine said, “democracy doesn’t even really mean that most of the people get what they want.”
“No, no—sometimes it does. Usually it does.”
“And it does make some people very rich, correct?” Irine said.
“Sometimes,” Amy said, “it does.”
Maia forked some more pasta on everyone’s plate. “What I think is that any country that could accept so many people from around the world and have them basically get along and also come up with food like this sounds like a great place. Amy, tell me again how you made this pasta?”
She was grateful to Maia for moving the conversation along, and recounted, step by step, mincing the herbs and sautéing the vegetables and folding in the cheese sauce, and then they moved the subject on to other kinds of American food—fried chicken, which they both loved, and meatloaf, which they agreed sounded disgusting—and after a while the pasta bowl was empty and two wine bottles had been tapped.
Maia offered to do the dishes, which was good, because Amy was too tipsy to really move.
So she and Irine shared postprandial cigarettes in the warm afterglow of a delicious meal, and Amy tried not to think about what Irine really thought of her or where she came from and what she valued and only that she had cooked them something good, that she had done well.