Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (3 page)

•   •   •

IT WAS ALMOST ONE O'CLOCK,
and as Al waited for his next appointment, his stomach growled slightly.

Al had met his client Lillian one afternoon some eight years before, just as she was getting ready to open her restaurant. He had been walking to the bank to make a deposit. It was October, raining, and the umbrella over his head made him feel invisible to a world he glimpsed only in quick, private bursts. He had passed the Craftsman house that stood between the movie theater and the bank like some kind of unkempt cousin at a family gathering. It had been remodeled into a bar once, years before, the dream of a software entrepreneur who could have used Al's financial advice, for the business had opened and closed within the space of a year, and for almost a decade the place had been empty, the roof collecting moss while the cherry trees in the front yard bolted and twisted into an unruly sculpture.

But there had been activity over the past few months; the front yard had been pruned and planted, the shingles stained a quiet brown and the porch boards painted a warm and elegant red. As Al walked by that October day, a scent of something he could almost remember floated out toward the street and caught under the dome of his umbrella. Cinnamon? Vanilla? Without thinking, he put his hand on the top of the wrought-iron gate and pushed it open, his feet finding their way down a stone path to the open side door of the kitchen.

The woman inside was young and slim, with dark hair pulled into a quick ponytail. She was alone in the kitchen, which was clean and bright and professional, in contrast to the cozy exterior of the building. She stood at the big stainless-steel sink, wielding a spray nozzle at a mixing bowl. The kitchen was warm from the heat of an industrial-sized oven, the fragrances stronger now, coloring the air.

“Hello?” Al said tentatively.

The woman turned around.

“The smell . . .” Al continued.

“Ah,” she said, smiling. “Cookies. I'm celebrating. This is my restaurant. Well, it will be when we finally open next week. I'm Lillian.”

She walked across the kitchen, wiping her wet hands on her white apron.

“I'm Al,” he said, shaking her hand. “I have an office up the street.”

“You're the accountant,” she said. She saw the question on his face. “I'll be needing one. A friend told me I could trust you.”

She paused, smelling the air.

“Cookies are done,” she said. “Would you like one?”

•   •   •

LILLIAN'S RESTAURANT
had become a success, helped along in part by Al's financial guidance, and over the years Lillian had become a friend as well as a client. It was Al who, seeing the success of her dinner creations, had suggested that Lillian start teaching cooking classes, and encouraged her to open for lunch, the latter a suggestion he unrepentantly acknowledged as selfish. Al had started eating at Lillian's several times a week at noon, discreetly tossing out the nondescript slices of ham on buttered white bread that Louise gave him to take to work, and ordering a marinated eggplant sandwich with a generous slathering of aioli sauce, or a blackened-salmon salad, the surface of the fish crunching, spicy and hot, between his teeth.

When it was time to go over the restaurant accounts at Al's office, Lillian generally selected a time slot just before or after lunch on Mondays, when the restaurant was closed, and Al knew by now to anticipate food along with Lillian's accounts. She called them his Blue Plate Specials, and Al had decided there was nothing better than the combination of spices and textures and numbers, even if it occasionally left grease on the pages. It took him back to when the smells of Mrs. Cohen's cooking used to linger on his math homework and evenings meant family, even if it wasn't his own. And just as he had never told his mother about what Mrs. Cohen's dinners meant to him as a child, he never told Louise about his new lunchtime routines.

Not that there was anything, in the traditional sense, for Louise to be jealous of—Lillian had always treated Al as a delightful surrogate uncle, a vision Al had accepted with a certain, if not unmixed, relief. Al told himself that he was protecting Louise's feelings—she was so proud of her own cooking—but the reality was, he knew that whatever these lunches added to his side of the equation could only be subtracted from hers.

And yet he needed them—the food, the conversation, the feeling of communion they brought into his day. They were like perfume slipped behind the ear of a beautiful woman, or wine with dinner—nothing you had to have to live, and yet nothing felt more like life than the experience of them.

So when a child-woman dressed in a big gray sweatshirt and worn jeans came dashing into his office ten minutes late for Lillian's appointment, a large manila envelope in her otherwise empty hands, he could only be disappointed.

“I'm Chloe,” she said. “Lillian's sous-chef. She asked me to bring these—she's sick today.”

She saw his downcast expression. “Oh, damn it,” she said. “I forgot the food in my car. I'll be right back.”

There was the sound of tennis shoes pounding down the stairs that led to the street, a door slamming. And then a tide pool of fragrance coming up the stairs—butter and bay leaves, thyme and cod and onions.

“Here we go.” Chloe entered the office, breathing hard, a bag in her arms. “Don't worry; it's good. I just finished off what Lillian started.”

She looked around the office expectantly. “Where should I put it?”

“On the desk, please. Thank you.”

Chloe unpacked a round metal container and poured the soup into a large white bowl, which she set on Al's desk next to a white linen napkin and a big, round spoon. She stepped back and observed the place setting, considering.

“Oh, hell,” she said. “The bread.” And she was gone again.

Al waited a moment, and then picked up the spoon and carefully tasted the soup. It smelled good, but he wanted his first reaction to be unobserved.

The taste flowed across his tongue, a mix of sea and sky, warm cream and softened onions. Al found himself remembering an afternoon, not long after he and his mother had moved to Los Angeles. They had been on their way to look at an apartment when his mother suddenly turned the car away from the freeway on-ramp and took them instead to the beach. They had sat on the sand, looking out over an enormous expanse of water, unlike anything Al had ever seen. He tried to count the waves but finally had to give up. He asked his mother if they ever stopped, maybe at night, and she said no, and he thought—that's what infinity sounds like.

“Do you like it?” Chloe asked anxiously as she entered, bread in hand.

“Yes,” he said. “Very much. Here, sit down. You should have some.”

They ate in silence. After a while she looked up from the bowl and glanced around Al's desk.

“What's this?” she said, reaching over and picking up the big book of rituals that was resting on top of a short stack of file folders. “Doesn't look like a tax book.”

“Just something I've been reading,” he said quickly. He took it from her and started to walk over to the bookshelf.

“Wait,” Chloe said.

Al looked at her for a moment. She sat in the chair, swallowed up by her sweatshirt. She reminded him of a 4, Al thought. Not the kind where all the lines meet up with each other, clean and straight, but the kind where there was a break at the top, a space where life poured in, for better or worse. What ritual might help her navigate the floodtides of her life?

“Why do you have that book?” she asked.

And Al sat down, and leaned across the desk, the book open in his hands.

C
hloe stood at her front door, looking out at the dark. It was New Year's Eve, almost eleven, and the neighborhood was far from silent. She could hear a party down the block to the right, probably the Morgans, famous in the neighborhood for their raucous, extended-family celebrations. Chloe could hear their voices now when she listened, make out the sound of children staying up long past their bedtimes, the prolonged hiss and sharp pop of the illegal fireworks the relatives bought at the Suquamish reservation on the way into town.

Her own New Year's Eve had been quiet thus far, just she and Isabelle sitting in front of the fire, which Isabelle's age-spotted hands tended with an assurance Chloe could not yet master, mostly because Isabelle refused to give up the task, sitting by the fireplace as if reading the smoke that rose up into the chimney. Almost a year now Chloe had been living in this house—housemate, not guest, she would remind Isabelle. Housemate, not protector, Isabelle would say, looking pointedly at Chloe. True, and not true, on both counts.

Chloe had first met Isabelle in Lillian's cooking class. At that point, Chloe was a nineteen-year-old busser at Lillian's restaurant, the cooking class a first, instinctive step toward a dream of becoming a chef. It was Isabelle who had taken Chloe in when she had left her boyfriend and the thought of returning to her parents' house had quite literally given her hives. Chloe had arrived on Isabelle's doorstep at ten at night, and the older woman had given her homemade chamomile tea, insistent that it would cure the red blotches covering Chloe's arms. Two hours later, the litany of Jake's transgressions diffused into the air, Chloe had looked down at spotless skin. Isabelle set Chloe up in the guest room where she had stayed until they both realized that the arrangement was better than temporary, better, in many ways, than family.

Isabelle loved the dark, Chloe thought as she looked out the front door. When Chloe had first moved in, she would come home from Lillian's restaurant late at night and check on Isabelle, only to discover the house empty. She would finally find Isabelle in the backyard in her yellow men's pajamas and a kitchen apron, gardening by the light of a headlamp, a fairy circle of spades and cutting shears and weeding forks surrounding her. Isabelle said gardening at night was more fun, and better for the plants. You could feel them, she would say: you could tell with your fingers which ones should go, which ones needed to stay. Besides, it made for a better surprise in the morning. Chloe had to admit she was often astonished, looking out the kitchen window as she held her morning cup of coffee, to see a patch of daisies meticulously free of weeds, a row of beans gracefully winding their way up long, white strings.

But recently, Chloe had sometimes found Isabelle gardening out in the dark with no headlamp, no apron, and the surprises in the morning were more often exactly that. Last week, Chloe had come home from work and heard rustling in the yard next door. There had been raccoons recently, and Chloe looked over the three-foot-high fence to check, and spotted Isabelle digging with her spade in the middle of the neighbors' hydrangeas.

It was funny, and not in a humorous way, Chloe thought now, how the qualities you admired most in someone could become your biggest obstacle when things started going off-kilter. When Chloe had first met Isabelle, it was her independence that drew Chloe to her—the way Isabelle kept moving forward even when her memory sometimes slipped her sideways. But nowadays, Isabelle's independence was transmuting into waywardness and Chloe sometimes wondered how long it would be before family would have to be family again.

Still, even on her good days—and probably especially on her bad—Isabelle wouldn't have thought twice about walking out the door at night with a suitcase in her hand. Wouldn't have worried about what might be in the dark, wouldn't have cared what the Morgans might think, or been embarrassed by the fact that the red suitcase was empty, the journey simply metaphorical. A leap in the dark, Isabelle would have said. You don't have to know where you'll land.

The house was quiet, Isabelle safely asleep. Chloe stepped outside and closed the door, locking it firmly behind her.

•   •   •

IT WAS AL WHO
had started the whole thing with the suitcase. That day Chloe had gone to his office, bearing the soup Lillian asked her to bring, she had encountered a man some fifteen years older than her father, with short-cropped dark hair and an awkward pair of glasses that would have told Chloe he was an accountant even if the sign over the door hadn't already declared it. But he had a friendly face and he seemed as befuddled at seeing her as she was at being there—so when he pulled an extra spoon out of his desk drawer, running into the little bathroom to wash it and then handing it to her with a flourish, saying really, she had to share the soup, it was so wonderful—she sat down, without thinking, across the desk from him. It was while they were eating that she spotted the book of rituals.

Al had tried to hide the book at first, but that only made Chloe more curious and he finally tried to explain.

“Rituals are like making time into family,” he said. He checked to see if she was following. She wasn't.

“I mean,” he continued, and then shook his head, frustrated. “You know, never mind. I'm not very good at this. I'm better with numbers.” He reached for the folder next to him.

Chloe watched him, fascinated. Her father always knew what he thought; it was reassuring in a way to see someone, a real grown-up, looking confused.

“No,” she said. “Keep going.”

“Well . . .” he began, and then he leaned forward, his voice gathering in intensity. “Normally, time just flows along, and you might not pay any more attention to it than you would strangers on the street. A ritual makes you stop and notice. It says, look, you're growing up, or older, or into something. It turns that moment into something you carry with you forever, when otherwise it could have just drifted away.”

“Okay,” Chloe said.

“And rituals can change you, too,” he added. “Make things happen.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know; what do you want to have happen?”

Chloe pondered. She hadn't thought about things like that much recently. For the first time in her life, it felt like she was rounding the corner on happy. She was cooking in Lillian's restaurant, no longer bussing tables. She was living with Isabelle, which many would have said was a strange situation for a twenty-year-old girl, and yet the intricacies of life with Isabelle were satisfying in a way she didn't know how to explain. She knew only that Isabelle, with her startling directness, her own lonely places, and even her occasional waywardness, answered a need in her.

And yet. Back when she was bussing tables, Chloe would sometimes see a customer sitting alone in the restaurant, across from an empty place setting. And then the front door would open and someone would enter, and the customer's face would simply illuminate in recognition.

I want someone to look at me like that, Chloe thought.

And then almost immediately, faster even than surprise, she could hear what her father would say about a statement like that, coming from her.

•   •   •

CHLOE'S MOTHER AND FATHER
had been teenagers when she was born, no more ready for parenthood than they had been prepared for sex. Chloe's formative years were built upon a framework of cautionary tales in which her own existence was held up as a prime example of the consequences of reckless actions. Chloe's mother, in an act of penance, or perhaps merely in a search for domestic normalcy, had attempted to emulate the June-and-Ward social conventions she had seen on reruns as a young girl, but the ideal had a tendency to wander in disconcerting directions without the frame of a television set to hold it together. It was a bit, Chloe thought later, like being raised by a nun who kept slipping out back for a cigarette break.

Chloe's father had one standard of measurement for a daughter, and Chloe had fallen below the bar early on. She had been fourteen, her body green and unfurling like a fiddlehead fern—arms reaching toward warmth, legs suddenly yearning to wrap around the slim hips of boys who had previously only been playmates.

She had been lying on the couch with one of them, a boy whose name she couldn't even remember now. The house was empty—she had made sure of that at least—her mother and father at work. She and the boy were swimming in the luxury of skin against skin, their eyes open and amazed. But then, of course, as if in a scene she had watched multiple times in movies, she heard her father's footsteps coming down the hall. The boy sat up and yanked down his T-shirt while she grabbed at the buttons of her blouse—but her fingers, which had been so deliciously skillful only moments before, fumbled. In desperation, she had pulled her shirt across her chest, her situation ridiculously obvious even in the dim and wavering light of the television. Her father came in, walked across the room, bent over, and kissed her on the forehead.

He doesn't see, she thought. It's going to be all right. Relief flooded through her. She didn't deserve this kind of mercy, but she would take it.

“Thank you, Chloe,” she heard his voice say evenly from above her. “Now I know—wherever I am—you are doing what I knew you were; I don't even have to worry about it. You are exactly what I thought of you.” And he turned and walked out of the darkened room.

After that, it didn't really matter what she did.

•   •   •

“SO,
what do you want to have happen?” Al repeated.

“I don't know.” Chloe shook her head. It was strange to have someone Al's age asking her questions as if the answers mattered. He was listening, and his face looked kind.

“Do you have children?” Chloe asked suddenly.

Al shook his head.

“Dumb question,” she said, seeing his face.

“You still haven't answered mine.”

Right—like she was going to tell anybody that.

“Too much thinking,” she declared, reaching for the book. She closed her eyes and let it fall open on the desk between them.

“I'm not sure that's how you do it,” Al said.

Chloe brought down the tip of her finger onto the page.

“That one,” she said.

Which is how she ended up on New Year's Eve, with an empty suitcase in her hand, walking around the block to invite adventure into her life.

•   •   •

NOT THAT ANYTHING ADVENTUROUS
had happened yet; there was just the sound of her footsteps traveling down Isabelle's front path, the whisper of the old red Samsonite suitcase brushing against her jeans.

“Okay, then,” she said to herself. “Once around the block. Here we go.”

At the front gate she turned left, away from the Morgans'. The first two houses she passed were dark. The Greenlys were old, likely already in bed; the young couple in the house next to them were just as certainly out on the town. Chloe had watched them move in last fall, wedding presents still in their Crate & Barrel boxes. They had closed the door behind them, presumably to have nonstop post-wedding sex; now the only time she saw them was as they were going to or coming home from work in their matching Audis.

Three doors down lived the Bernhardt family—a full hand of gin rummy if ever there was one, every member seeming to belong to the rest. On her nights off from work, Chloe had often walked around the neighborhood in the evening on the off chance that she might see them through the window, sitting around the dinner table, tossing jokes and stories back and forth like footballs thrown across a backyard. It stunned her every time, the effortlessness of it, as if the habits of a loving family life were something encoded into their DNA.

The family dinners of Chloe's childhood had been different, the main focus being the studied consumption of all four food groups. By the time she was five, Chloe had learned the skill of silence—until she reached adolescence and dinnertime conversations became considerably louder. With Jake, dinners often had been at the grill where Jake was a cook and Chloe had worked for a time as a busser—burgers and fries eaten at the bar after the late shift, when the four food groups tended to morph into vodka, tequila, bourbon, and beer. More rarely, they ate at Jake's apartment, which, even after she had lived there for four months, Chloe never managed to refer to as hers, or theirs.

Mealtime with Isabelle had been a revelation for Chloe. Isabelle had declared early on that she'd had enough conventional dinners in her life. She and Chloe had eaten in every room of the house; they even dined in the middle of the vegetable garden one August evening, Isabelle declaring that they could find everything they needed to eat in their own backyard, proving it by pulling up carrots and snapping off sweet peas and tomatoes, then rinsing them off with the hose. With Isabelle you never quite knew what was going to happen. It felt good to be shaken up like that, although it didn't stop Chloe from taking walks in the evenings.