He does not ask me to give up my dreams, whatever they turn out to be. And he doesn’t make me feel guilty for wanting to wander like a gypsy, either. Just lets me know that I am always in his heart.
“You want to get married, old woman?” he’d asked once, nuzzling my neck with the tip of his nose.
Lord, no. I’d be in the running with Zsa Zsa Gabor or Elizabeth Taylor as the most married woman in America.
“I love you,
old
man,” I told him, “but I’d rather live in sin if you don’t mind.”
My mother is rolling around in her grave. “Better to marry them and be miserable than live in sin and be happy” would have been her motto. I haven’t figured that one out yet. But I am way too old now for bridal white and orange blossoms and all of the magic tricks and illusions that go with them, not that I ever went that way. No time for that. Just need a warm body next to mine. And an open heart.
Jess had laughed. The sound of his laughter, the warmth of his breath on the back of my neck had made me smile. I felt sleepy.
“Thought that I’d better ask,” he’d told me, his voice softening, his words coming out slower. He yawned. “I knew you’d say no, but you’d raise hell with me if I didn’t at least
ask.
”
“You got that right,” I had told him, closing my eyes again.
At least, I’ve been asked.
“Just make this your home, Juanita,” he says, softly now. He takes my hand and places it on his heart, a warm place on his bare chest. “Make this your home . . .”
I see Jess’s face off and on in my dreams as I fight bulls in Chihuahua, make crepes in a Toronto bistro, or climb Mount McKinley . . . no, take that dream out, I am afraid of heights! Everywhere I go, no matter how far away it is, I see Jess’s face.
“Make this your home . . .” Juanita’s place.
I open my eyes. The rain has stopped but it’s still drippy outside, the dampness slinking off the leaves of the trees like green gravy that hasn’t thickened right. The eastern sky is a strange shade of yellow and orange, the western sky is the color of slate, a dark, angry gray with clouds of silver and black. Zigzags of lightning flicker in the distance. Peaches is playing Nina Simone now,
Sinnerman.
The clicks of the music are offbeat from the plops of rain that have started to hit the windshield. Peaches turns on the wipers again. I close my eyes.
Sometime, during my dream, Nina’s voice fades and the background music that comes from the truck’s engine is replaced by a loud, heavy roar. Not a groan or screech like an old car that gets stuck in first gear. And it gets loud, then it gets soft, and then it gets loud again. Over and over and over. But when the roar softens, I hear birds calling to each other and the clanging of a bell in the distance. And splashing. I am running in my bare feet through a meadow of water instead of wildflowers . . . splashing?
I woke up so fast that I jumped and almost hit my head on the visor. The truck has stopped; its engine idling. The cab was quiet and empty. No Peaches. I looked around the parklike setting and then I stared. I rubbed my eyes. I didn’t believe what I saw. Peaches waved her arms to get my attention.
“Hey, Miss America!” she screamed. “I hope you got a thong bikini with you!”
I stared.
She looked like hell with her pants legs rolled above her knees. Peaches has legs like tree trunks. There was a fairly strong wind and her hair was flying every which way. She looked like a kid in a Disney World commercial.
But that’s not what I was staring at.
I didn’t even bother to open the door; I leaned out of the window, just looking at this thing in front of me. It roared and it crashed against the rocks. It’s gray, no. It’s kind of bluish-gray, no, it’s green. I didn’t know what color it was but it was big and loud and it went on forever.
And I have only seen it in movies.
I ran to the water’s edge, kicked off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants, and stuck my foot in. And shrieked!
The water was cold!
“It is late fall, Juanita,” Peaches yelled. “Even if it is California!”
I have always wanted to see the ocean. I’d heard about it and read about it and I’d seen it on TV but nothing gets you ready for the real thing. It comes in and goes out and comes in again and the white-tipped waves and the foam look the same every time. But they aren’t the same.
I put my hand up to my forehead and looked out to the end of the world, looking farther than I did when I looked east across the Montana plains toward Illinois. And I wondered now if those ancient sailors weren’t right. The world is flat. The pelicans dove after fish and bobbed along the water like the apples we used to grab with our teeth from my grandmother’s tin tub. The gulls screeched. I stood there with my mouth open in amazement.
“And I thought
I
was country!” Peaches teased me. “You haven’t seen the ocean before?”
Why? Does it show?
“No, I haven’t.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and the salty air filled my lungs. The air smelled deep, rich, and old and I would not forget the smell as long as I live.
I wonder how the first woman felt, seeing this water for the first time. Did she stand here, with her mouth open and her eyes closed and smile as the heavy ocean breezes whipped around her face? Or did she just stare, eyes unblinking, wondering how far it went, what moved beneath the water, and if this rock that she stood on was the end of the world?
She was probably a lot more practical than I was. She probably thought about food, fishing, or building a boat.
I was just too awestruck for those kinds of thoughts.
I stood there until my toes went numb from the cold water. Just stood there in one place. I looked down at my feet and watched the water come in over my toes and then go back again. And each time I thought it might be the same water. But, of course, it wasn’t.
As we drove away, it occurred to me that’s what I want—for something, just one thing, to stay the same. But only good things. Could they please stay good, ’cause I’ve had enough ugliness in my life. I have moved away from that mess, and I want someone to tell me that the joy I’ve found will stay with me awhile. That I’ll be able to pull it over my head and wear it like an old soft sweatshirt whenever I need it, for as long as I need it.
You know all those cities I have wanted to visit? Buenos Aires, Beijing, New York, Hong Kong? I have learned something new about myself: I don’t like cities much anymore.
Peaches drove into Los Angeles from the north. Some miles out I saw an orange-brown cloud that floated over the skyscrapers like a shawl thrown over a woman’s shoulders. But this was not a delicate, soft length of cashmere that was made to keep the evening chill away. It was a rough wool blanket, scratchy and thick. In some places, the haze was murky and more brown than orange. And it wasn’t lightly perfumed. It was stinky.
We were traveling through the city on I-5 and, in both directions, the traffic was bumper-to-bumper, moving slower than a constipated snail. Car horns honked, middle fingers went up every place you looked, and I saw more fists raised in the air on that highway than I had in 1969 at a Black Panther rally.
“Must be some accident,” I commented. “They’d better get it cleared out soon. This is a mess.”
Peaches chuckled.
“There’s no accident; it’s like this all the time. In LA, everybody drives.
Everybody.
The freeway looks like this all day. You might get a clear highway at 3:00
AM,
which is when I usually come through here.”
“Oh,” was all I could think of to say. I was used to cities but not ones this spread out. Even Cleveland was not
this
big or this busy. I had seen traffic, but not like this. You couldn’t pull over, you couldn’t pull off. You were stuck.
But when we finally got off, somewhere in the central part of the city, I think, I saw things that I was familiar with. It didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t want to be familiar with them anymore: the hustle and bustle and noise of buses, diesel fuel blowing from their exhausts and music that I didn’t want to hear blasting from cars as they bounced down the avenue. The souped-up Firebirds had speakers bigger than their engines. All you heard—and felt—was the bass thumping. The yelling, the cursing, the boarded-up buildings, and piece-a-cars sitting at stoplights. We drove down one street and I thought that I’d passed into the
Twilight Zone
of lives lived. I saw myself walking down the avenue, carrying a bag of groceries or standing back from the curb, waiting for a bus. It was as if someone had said “Welcome back, Juanita.” Young boys stood around and didn’t seem to be doing anything except trying to look as if
they
were the alpha
and
the omega, while they tried to keep their pants from falling down around their ankles. Do they know that they walk funny? And there was always someone looking out for the uniformed men and their flashing lights. I had to blink to keep from seeing Rashawn on those corners, digging a huge roll of Fort Knox–backed paper out of his pocket, explaining his position in a low, soft but menacing tenor. Hundreds of miles away and in cities in between, there were street corners and alleys and vacant lots just like the ones I left behind. That didn’t make me feel good.
There were people everywhere, walking fast and wearing sunglasses. Lots of sun, lots of noise. And not much grass and no pine trees and no lakes or rivers, and we were too far into the city to see the ocean anymore. Later, I remembered seeing the mountains at dusk as they struggled to show me their beauty through the murky haze. I saw the “HOLLYWOOD” sign, too, from a distance. I hadn’t been there but a few hours and I’d already decided that I had seen enough.
But I was wrong.
Chapter Two
“I
f you’re going to LA,” Jess had told me before I left, “then you’re going to Yancey’s.”
I’d been packing, it was nearly 1:00
AM,
and the last thing I wanted to do was argue with this man. I was having a hard enough time trying to close this stupid suitcase. I pushed the lid down. Damn. It wouldn’t close again. Of course, it might have been because of the two bra straps that were sticking out on the sides.
“
Not
going,” I told him. “I don’t have any after-five clothes. Not unless Wal-Mart sells them.”
“Move.”
Jess maneuvered me out of the way, opened the lid of my suitcase, and stared.
“No wonder the damn thing won’t close.” He picked up the sweater that I had squished on top, then glared at me. I shrugged my shoulders. “You can’t pack a suitcase for shit, you know that?” He pulled out my other clothes.
“Hey!” I moved to stop Jess. He bumped me out of the way.
“There’s a right way and there’s a wrong way,” he bellowed back. “You . . .” he shook his head in disgust. “
You
should have been in the military.”
Every time I don’t do something the way Jess does it, he sneers at me and says that I should have been in the army.
“Jess Gardiner, it is 1:00
AM
, I am not going to talk about whether or not I would have survived the army and you are
not
going to repack my suitcase. Close the damn thing for me, and let’s go to bed.”
Jess ignored me and continued packing my clothes with everything buttoned, sleeves smoothed and folded with sharp right angles. By the time he finished arranging my stuff in that tired little suitcase, I had enough room for the dog if I’d wanted to take him. We did not, however, stop arguing.
“I’ll call Yancey. You and Peaches can have dinner at his restaurant while you’re there. That way, you’ll see a four-star restaurant, Beverly Hills-style.”
Yancey was an army buddy of Jess’s whose bistro was world-famous. He was always showing up on TV or in celebrity magazines and Jess even said that he’d been talking to the Food Network about doing a television show but the producers were afraid to use him because he cursed too much.
“Jess, I don’t have any Beverly Hills clothing,” I told him.
“If you’d listen to me, woman, you’d hear that you don’t have to dress up. Yancey tells me those Hollywood types wear everything under the sun. Just throw on a pair of pants and a blouse and you’ll be fine.”
Just like a man. Never ask him what you should wear when you are going somewhere. He’ll always tell you the same thing. “Just throw on” this or that.
But my reluctance to visit Yancey’s was rooted in more than being self-conscious about clothing. My experience eating out was pretty limited. Oh, I’d managed the diner, all right. Fast-food places and greasy spoons in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming were fine and comfortable. But fancy bistro uppity places? Just the thought made my legs shaky.
“What if I use the wrong fork?” I asked.
Jess smiled, snapped the suitcase shut, and set it in the corner.
“Juanita, you think those Hollywood folks grew up knowing a salad fork from a fish fork? Most of them prob’bly never saw a demitasse cup until they hit it big. Don’t be intimidated. You’re as much a high-class lady as they are.”
This is a man who looks at me through rose-colored bifocals, no doubt about it.
There’s a fish fork?
“OK, OK, I’ll go,” I agreed, just to get him to stop picking at me. “But what kind of food does he serve? Real food, or will I have to stop at McDonald’s afterward?”
At that comment, Jess looked sheepish.
“Oh. Uh. Well, yeah, you might want to do that. Yancey’s a great chef but he does belong to the ‘less is more if it’s beautifully arranged on the plate’ school.”
Just as long as he didn’t use shitty, I mean, shitake mushrooms,
I thought.
Yancey’s is tucked away on a side street just off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It is a place that is 180 degrees different from Jess’s diner. It has a wine cellar, a huge glass-paneled bar, and a place where folks can smoke cigars, men
and
women. You have to call a month ahead to get a table because it is a place to be seen and to see (or something like that). But, thanks to Jess, Peaches and I didn’t need a reservation and we got the best table in the place.
Yancey Carl is a West Virginia boy who served with SSG Jess A. Gardiner’s unit in 1966. He was pulled onto a chopper by that stone-faced sergeant after he took shots in the leg and abdomen. There isn’t anything Yancey wouldn’t do for Jess.
“Almost fell off my stool when I got the phone call,” Yancey told us. He seated us himself, served our drinks, and now sat at the table shooting the breeze despite the frantic waving of a familiar-looking woman across the aisle who was trying to get his attention. Peaches’s eyes were huge. And she was . . . pointing.
“Juanita, isn’t that . . . ?”
I swatted her hand down. Sometimes, Peaches is not cool at all. It was what’s-her-name from one of those TV shows that I don’t watch.
“How is the old sergeant?” Yancey asked.
“Still growls a little,” I told him.
Peaches looked doubtful.
“No, he growls
a lot,
” she corrected me. Now Peaches was trying to sneak a peek at whoever-that-woman-was without looking like she was trying to sneak a peek. That didn’t work either. Peaches is a lot of things, but subtle isn’t one of them.
Yancey enjoyed hearing that.
“Yeah, he usta growl at me, too. I sure miss him. Have to get out your way someday.” He looked around at the busy restaurant now filling up with patrons. “When things settle down. If they ever do.” He pointed out some items on the menu and made a few recommendations. “Pick what you want; it’s on the house. If it weren’t for the sergeant, I wouldn’t be here to cook up these fancy smantzy dishes. My momma says I’ve come a long way from sausage gravy and watercress greens. Oh! Save some room for dessert. Wendy Stern is my pastry chef and she’s A-plus.”
The wine was good. (Peaches says it was “great” but she knows a lot more wine than I do. My experience is limited to Boone’s Farm.) And the food was good, too. What there was of it.
Jess was right. Yancey cooks from the less-is-more-just-add-a-sprig-of-parsley-or-rosemary school. There was a nice, round, thin (≴thin” was the most important word here) slice (only one) of rare (extremely rare, so rare that it was scary) roast beef resting in a pool of
au jus
(I know about “oh juices” now), along with finely chopped scallions (I call ’em “green onions”), and a nice, large,
very
green piece of parsley. Think Emerald City green. A teaspoon of garlic mashed potatoes (What is the point of just a teaspoon of mashed potatoes? That’s hardly worth the effort!). Oh, and two beautifully cut (and very thin) strips of carrot.
I looked at my plate. Peaches looked at hers as if it was a plate of gold, said, “Hmmm . . . maybe I should have ordered two . . . ,” and dug in, using both hands. I looked back at my plate.
From over my shoulder, I heard Yancey say, “Is something wrong, Juanita?”
I am not an herbivore. I do eat meat. I just don’t want to eat it while it’s still breathing. That tiny little slice of roast beef was so rare that its blood pressure was higher than mine. I could barely look at it.
“Um, Yancey, could I get . . . I like to have my prime rib . . . medium, if that’s OK.” I knew those were killer words to a chef, and I wasn’t even a paying customer, but what could I say?
Yancey chuckled and whisked the plate away.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, a huge grin splitting his face. “You’re in good company. My momma only comes here once a year. Says she can’t stand the food I serve and the crowd of fakes that I serve it to. ‘Puttin’ on airs’ she says.
And
she makes me serve her roast beef medium, too.”
I finished my dinner and gave my compliments to the chef. And then Yancey brought out the dessert tray.
You never know when lightning will strike, when a flash of inspiration will appear and push you in a new direction. Destiny crossed my path in the form of the dessert tray.
There was a pudding that looked as if it had been whipped up with clouds. A three-layer lemon cake with soft ivory-colored icing that had sparkles in it. The apple tart was big enough for four people to eat or six if you counted the gigantic scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream on the side, and then a chocolate dessert with a white chocolate pyramid on top. It was called “Chocolate Death on the Nile.” They were so beautiful. Each one was like something that you could see in an art museum. They had been sculpted, designed, and measured. They had been crafted. I looked at that little pyramid every which way. Peaches was through.
“Juanita, the man has other tables to wait on. Are you going to order that cake or pray over it?”
I couldn’t answer her. I had turned myself into a pretzel so that I could look at the underside of the pyramid. I ordered two desserts. Not even to eat them. I just wanted them on my plate so that I could study them up close and touch them. It was hard to believe that they were food.
OK, I did have a few bites.
As I shoveled in a forkful of the lemon cake, I asked Yancey to tell his pastry chef that she was a genius.
“Yeah, she is. But you’re welcome to tell her yourself.”
Wendy Stern had a wide, toothy grin and tired brown eyes set in a friendly face. Her short dark-brown hair was cut like a pixie’s. She blushed when I told her how much I enjoyed her desserts—looking at them
and
eating them.
“I almost feel bad getting paid to do something that I enjoy so much,” she said in a quiet voice that was hard to hear over the banging of pots and pans and the yelling in the kitchen.
“Almost,” she chuckled. I could hear the flat ranch lands of Texas in her voice.
“How did you make this?” I asked as she put the finishing touches on another sculpted dessert that looked as if it had come from an architect’s drawing board.
She shrugged her shoulders as she gently placed a plump raspberry on top of a swirled dome of whipped cream that looked as if it was really made of white marble.
“It isn’t that hard, really,” she said as she drizzled thin lines of chocolate syrup around the plate in a design that looked like a tasty spider’s web. “You could do it. You draw it out, get it down on paper. Then you calculate. You have to measure everything, make a formula. That’s the most serious part of what I do, the measuring. Especially since I can’t eat what I make.”
“Why not?” I asked, remembering the taste and richness of the last should-be-illegal dessert. I tried to lick my fingers without looking too much like a pig.
“I’m diabetic,” she said simply. “Sugar and I get along fine but only from a distance. I have to be careful.” She gestured toward one of the other chefs who was working at the opposite end of the kitchen. “Larry helps me with the tasting when I’m not sure or when I’m experimenting.”
I stayed by Wendy’s side for another hour. Peaches left me to run the truck through some diagnostics (something about a rotor, or maybe it was a radiator) and to fill up the gas tank. I could have stayed in Yancey’s kitchen a week, just watching.
Wendy and her creations had me feeling like a kid in Toys Us. I listened to her talk about the cakes and the crusts for pies and tarts and flans and brulées and white chocolate and dark chocolate, berries, nuts, and sprinkles and extracts of this, and drops of that. There were influences from here and shades of there and sometimes Wendy sounded like Mr. Dinos in my painting class at the community college. And when she’d finished, she had a work of art rising from a plain white dessert plate.
I knew how to cook and I knew how to bake. I could pinch a pie crust around the edges and ice a cake pretty good. But Wendy’s desserts were millions of miles from the ones that I made. I never gave my stuff much thought, just whipped ’em up and threw ’em in whatever pan or plate they needed. Turned the oven on to 350 degrees and wiped my hands. There weren’t any complaints. There weren’t even any crumbs left when I made a sweet potato pie or a yellow cake with chocolate icing, especially if Mountain was around.
But watching Wendy got me to thinking about cooking in a different way. New words sneaked into my vocabulary like “artistry” and “technique” that didn’t come from the last novel I had read. And one more new word: credentials. Could I sculpt a confection onto a plain white plate? Could I craft a pyramid out of chocolate or make custard lighter than clouds and decorate it with a dollop of cream that looked like a marble statue? Could I learn to do that?
Wendy had several framed pieces of paper on the wall of the crowded little corner of a back room that served as her office. These pieces of paper were diplomas and certificates from cooking schools and competitions. She had a row of medallions hanging from red, white, and blue ribbons. She’d baked quiches in Santa Fe and whipped up puddings in a hotel in British Columbia. She had stirred soup in Taipei and baked chocolate confections in Edinburgh. She seemed to have been everywhere and had credentials coming out of her ears.
The question that I wanted to ask got caught in my throat. I had a high school diploma and knew how to use measuring cups and turn on the oven to the right temperature. I knew salt from sugar, cayenne from cumin. I could match the right pot or pan to the recipe. I could stir up fudge in a pan. In other words, my list of “culinary” skills could be added up on five fingers. But I couldn’t do puff pastry. I hadn’t baked bread or created a soufflé. And I would never think of sculpting whipped cream or cutting out pieces of paper-thin chocolate the way that Wendy did.
I was just a cook. But could I be a . . . chef? I hadn’t realized it but I said this aloud.
Wendy laughed.
“Why not?” she said. Without breaking a sweat, she formed a two-inch-high Babylonian tower of whipped cream on top of strawberry shortcake. I sighed. It was the most beautiful food I’d ever seen. “Sign up for a program. It’s as much talent as it is training. You can’t have one without the other.”