Comfort Food Read online

  “I hate peas,” she said impulsively.

  The gray-haired driver seemed to take her declaration as the most naturalthing in the world.

  “I’m reluctant to eat asparagus myself but the wife loves ’em,” he said. “Too mushy, I find.”

  “Oh, no, you should just steam them quickly,” said Gus. “Put a little water in the bottom of a sauté pan, cover for just a few minutes, drain, then put it back on the flame and toss with a bit of lemon and pepper.”

  “You are the cook, then,” he said. “So what’s your name, then, if you’re so famous. I’m Joe.”

  She hesitated. “Augusta,” she said. Then, feeling a bit sneaky, she came clean. “I’m called Gus. I’ve always been a Gus.”

  “Gus! Now that’s a name for a big greasy mechanic, not a pretty lady.”

  “My cousin called me that, after the fat mouse in Cinderella,” said Gus, wondering why on earth she simply didn’t shut up. But it felt good to just talk. “You know, the cartoon? My mother didn’t like it but my father thought it was cute. I guess it stuck.”

  “You’re not fat now,” said the man appreciatively. “If you don’t mind my saying.”

  Gus blushed. She’d never done all that well with men after Christopher. Even innocuous little comments like the driver’s. Finding her way around the clever pickup lines had been impossible before she met Christopher, and after the accident, well, there just hadn’t been time. And it hadn’t been the right time. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d been in a bar when she was in college. She’d always thought she was terrible at flirting. Gus could whip up a chicken Francese in a heartbeat, could host a party for one hundred with a day of planning, but she could rarely keep up her end of a little playful exchange unless she had a week to think on it. (“Mind?” she’d later think of how she could have replied to the driver. “Compliments have no calories.” And then remember to toss her rich butterscotch-colored hair and laugh. Ha ha ha ha.)

  The closest she ever came to flirting was the occasional sweet comment from Porter, who was happily married. She sometimes suspected his wife encouraged him to tell Gus how nice she looked. The two of them had been good friends to her for years now.

  “I was chubby-cute, I like to think,” she continued. “I tried calling myself ‘Augusta’ in college but it felt as though I was trying on clothes a size too big.”

  Joe gave the accelerator a bit of gas, careful not to go too fast with the snow. “Don’t worry; we’ll get there in time. I know a few side streets that’ll speed things up.”

  “Do you like your job?” she asked suddenly.

  “I get tired of the driving, no question,” he said. “People think it’s easy, no brains, but there’s no job like that. We all have stress, you know. And my back gets sore from the sitting.”

  “You could get out and stretch after every run,” Gus said, as the man shook his head no, explaining how he was on the clock.

  “I see how it is with you, Augusta called Gus,” said Joe. “You’re the type who’s always giving out the advice, too.”

  “Yes, I am,” Gus admitted. She hesitated, then continued. “It’s like I can’t help it. I see something wrong and I have to zap it!”

  “I’m married to one like that. She always wants to talk talk talk. Right when I want to watch the TV.” The driver smoothly turned off the FDR drive at Ninety-seventh Street and stopped at a red light.

  “I hate it when other people make mistakes,” she said. “It really pains me. Maybe it’s like that for your wife.”

  “Well, surely you’ve made a mistake or two.”

  “Too many, I think,” said Gus. “It’s how I know what to do now.”

  They fell into a few moments of silence as the car made its way down Second Avenue. Gus saw the dry cleaning shop, the gym, the florist, as the car rolled down the street.

  “I used to live here,” she told the driver, who nodded. “Back when it was called Yorkville. My husband and I.”

  “Before you made it big, eh?”

  The realtors dubbed it Carnegie Hill when the real estate values went up in the late nineties. But back when she and Christopher were not that long out of school and just back from their year digging wells in Africa, they had rented a small studio in the building on Ninety-fifth and Madison. They were too far north then to be in any way fashionable. But it was beyond thrilling to share a home, to brighten a room by putting cheap glass vases in the window, filled with water that she’d dyed green, red, and blue. Their bed had been a pullout sofa, but it was far more comfortable than what they’d slept on overseas. Christopher had hoped to get into journalism in those days and wrote for anyone who would publish him, Gus proofing his articles and staying up with him late into the night to make coffee and offer feedback.But excitement and possibility didn’t pay the bills.

  Eventually, he went to work for his father, selling surgical instruments, and they moved up to Westchester to be closer to his sales territory. And closer to her family: she needed the help when Aimee and Sabrina arrived in fairly rapid succession. Gus hadn’t expected it would all be so hard.

  She looked down at the thin gold band she wore on the little finger of her right hand. It was her mother’s wedding ring and she’d had it resized a few years before, after her mother died. Her father had been gone by then, too. I’m officially an orphan, Gus thought, an orphan and a widow. A twofer.

  Outside her window she saw the Food Emporium, the Barnes & Noble, the Heidelberg restaurant, and the German bakery, the only remnants of a neighborhood that had once been Germantown. Yorkville, then German-town—every handful of blocks meant a different feel in the city, a different community, a different cuisine.

  “Everything changes,” she said.

  “That’s good, in its way,” he replied.

  “I used to like change,” Gus said, in a quick rush of words as though confessing.“But lately it’s made me nervous. I feel a bit stuck.” She hadn’t been in a church in years, had stopped going when she decided that God didn’t need yet another foul-weather friend, someone who only came pleading for help when things turned ugly. Besides, she mostly suspected God wasn’t around at all. It was easier that way. And now she was suddenly pouring her heart out to the good-natured driver of a Lincoln Town Car.

  “People must tell you the craziest things,” she added, feeling a bit embarrassed.

  “They do,” he replied with a grin. “They also do some crazy things in the back but the relationship between a driver and a passenger is one of completeconfidentiality. So I can’t go telling you about that stuff.” He chuckled, maneuvering the car westward toward Rockefeller Center.

  Gus glanced at the crowded midtown streets, watching the men and women rush to get to their destinations. That’s what had been fun about the city: the energy. The excitement in the air. Perhaps, she thought, what she needed was to recapture that energy. Maybe what she needed was to give her loved ones the ingredients to put together successful lives of their own so she could finally do some reinventing herself. She’d done it before, found her way to an entirely new life and career.

  “Almost there,” said Joe. “But now you’re frowning again.”

  “It’s a habit.”

  “Habits are made to be broke, I always say.”

  “Not the good ones,” she replied.

  “Gus, I wish you a very good day,” said Joe. They were pulling up to their destination. “But I must say, you seem like a worrywart.”

  “Of course,” she replied as she gathered up her things. “I have two daughters.”

  3

  Aimee Wearily checked her clock. She’d set her alarm a full fifty-five minutes earlier than usual, with a plan of going to the gym. Although she’d decided to start a new fitness plan last Thursday, she had, of course, waited until a Monday to get going. She glanced quickly toward the unadorned window—no shade, no curtains, not even a valance—before peeling out of the warmth of her amber-colored cotton sheets (Macy’s Janu
ary White Sale, 25% off plus an extra $10 savings with coupon) and realized she couldn’t even make out the shape of the high-rise across the street. All she could see was white. Hah! It was snowing. And, as everyone knows, it’s practically a commandment that a girl does not have to go to the gym in the snow. Sometimes, thought Aimee, there were wonderful benefits to living in New York in February.

  She pulled her fluffy duvet up and over her thick, short sandy hair stickingout every which way, and pretended the alarm had never gone off. But just as Aimee was drifting back to much-desired sleep, the loud banging from the hall brought her to wakefulness abruptly.

  Sabrina. It had to be Sabrina.

  Aimee padded out of her bedroom to see her black-haired younger sister scooping up illustrated sketches from atop the dining room table and tryingto stack them in a neat pile. As usual, Sabrina was impeccably dressed, this morning in a lilac suit with a fluted skirt, a sharp contrast to Aimee’s stretched-out and faded pajamas.

  “I thought you stayed over at Billy’s last night,” Aimee said, her face in a practiced neutral expression, as she leaned in her doorway. The best thing about sharing an apartment with a sister who was always playing house with her boyfriend-of-the-moment was that it was almost as though she had a place of her very own. Right now she could feel the tug of her bed, empty but warm, so warm, encouraging her by its very fluffiness to lie down again. Her pillow still had the dent from where her head had been.

  “I did. But I’ve got a meeting in a half hour and I had to come all this way downtown because I forgot my drawings!” Sabrina stopped moving for a millisecond and scowled. “Think you could help me here?”

  “Uh, no,” drawled Aimee. “I’m in economics, remember? More into averting global disaster, not so much the individual issues.”

  “Aimee! If I don’t get this job I’m not going to come up with my share of the rent.” Sabrina didn’t move, confident in the knowledge that money—or lack thereof—always spurred Aimee into action.

  “Do you want some tips about getting it together, little sis?”

  “No, I don’t need you to tell me how to live, Aimee. I need you to help me, right now, for half a minute, to find my design board.”

  “Right.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes. I left you a message last night telling you it had been abandoned on the living room sofa and that I was going to throw it away.”

  “What?! I haven’t had time to dial my voice mail,” screeched Sabrina. “I can’t believe you chucked my presentation!”

  Once, a long time ago, in the hazy time after their father had passed away and before their mother had a television program, Aimee became so enraged with Sabrina’s side of the room being messy that she stuffed her sister’s European history report down the garbage disposal and turned it on. Bye-bye, Queen Isabella of Spain. Some manner of punishment had resulted—a grounding, or a week without television. Nothing that made the destruction any less worth it, that was for sure.

  Aimee later wondered why it hadn’t occurred to Gus to penalize her where it would have counted. To mess up her tidy side or prevent her from eating her vegetables in alphabetical order. Something that would have had an impact.

  At any rate, the mulching of the paper was one of those instances that immediately became a core family story. The kind that lived on in frequent telling, getting bigger over time, establishing Aimee as the cool cucumber and Sabrina as ... what? The easily crushed tomato? Something that needed special care and attention. A peach.

  Yes, that was Sabrina. A peach.

  Now Aimee watched her sister with an air of detachment, but in her heart she was thoroughly enjoying herself. It doesn’t matter how old one becomes—there remains something splendidly fun about tormenting a sibling.A certain inexplicable rush of power. Enhanced, to be sure, when a parent is nearby, but satisfying all the same. “You should really take bettercare of your things,” drawled Aimee, walking back into her bedroom as Sabrina worked herself into a frenzy.

  “Oh, go save someone who wants it,” yelled Sabrina, following Aimee into her room to continue their fight.

  With a sigh of exasperation, Aimee pointed to her closet. Sabrina turned her head; there, against the open door, lay her black microfiber portfolio case. Aimee nodded. Quickly Sabrina picked up the case by the handles and walked out of the room, then made a concerted effort to slam the apartment door. Nearly impossible with a door that had a hydraulic cylinder but Aimee gave her mental points for effort.

  She waited until the door had closed, locked it, then headed to the bathroommirror.

  “You’re kinda rotten as a big sister, you know that?” Aimee told herself. Her reflection stuck out its tongue in reply.

  It had been a miracle to get a cab and Sabrina knew it. As soon as a few drops of rain or snow fell, New Yorkers rushed to hail the nearest yellow taxi and gloat through their car windows at the suckers still on the street. And that morning’s sprinkling of snow had resulted in a veritable cab desert. But Sabrina lucked out when a patron pulled up to her regular corner. A lot of New Yorkers work the corners, of course, sticking day to day with a location they believed, based mainly on gut instinct and experience, worked best to get a taxi. And if Sabrina had a religion, its main belief was to avoid publictransportation at all costs. (“I don’t believe in being underground,” she’d explained to Aimee about a thousand times.) On the mornings she woke up at the Tudor City apartment she shared with Aimee, she walked up three blocks and crossed the street to her lucky corner. If she found herself at Billy’s Upper East Side condo, then she went to Ninety-sixth and Second; the year before, when she’d been dating Troy, she would stroll over from his NoLita walk-up to flag at Mercer and Houston. That had been a good spot, near Troy’s place.

  Taking taxis was one of the reasons she shared an apartment with Aimee instead of getting a studio of her own: Sabrina needed the disposable income to make sure she had cab money. After all, in the first few years after college, when she was interning and working as an assistant, there had been barely enough money for her MetroCard. But there was no going back once she’d landed a few interior design gigs of her own and savored how good it could be to be driven around. Her not-so-secret goal was to eventually work her way to having her own car and driver. A lofty ambition, to be sure, but one well worth the hours she was putting in. Her boyfriend of four months, Billy, had been complaining about how much she worked, in fact. Sabrina could just imagine Aimee’s reaction.

  “You?” Aimee would say. “Someone thinks you’re working too much?” And she’d laugh in that superior way of hers.

  Had it always been like this? She had a memory, more a gut feeling than anything else, of happier days. And certainly her mother, Gus, insisted there had been a time when the two of them were as thick as thieves. Generally, though, Sabrina could only remember arguments and hair pulling and being ignored at school. Even though she’d had a large circle of friends, it bothered her then—and it bothered her now—that Aimee seemed to find it a burden to be around her when other people were present. The simplest thing could set her off on a tear, such as the time Aimee mulched her history paper in the garbage disposal. Queen Isabella of Spain down the drain. That’s what Aimee had said: Queen Isabella of Spain down the drain.

  Their mother hadn’t done anything about it, either. Just tried to smooth it over as she always did. Making things just so was very important to Gus. She expected a lot from her girls.

  Sabrina quickly unzipped her portfolio case, just to reassure herself that it was all there. That Aimee hadn’t actually thrown away her work or tried to put it in the blender or the oven. She felt around with her fingers, peeled back the cover a few inches. Everything was in its right place. With a few extra pens tucked into a pocket that had been empty the day before and— what was this? A granola bar and a small bag of Cheerios.

  From Aimee, of course.

  From Aimee.

  The Secret to delicious Scrambled eggs was to co
ok them in a saucepan with bubbling butter and stir them constantly with a wooden spoon. Keep the heat medium-low. Resist the temptation to turn up the gas and cook the damn thing in two seconds. Only patience would allow the eggs to come together soft and fluffy and very, very light, Aimee thought to herself as she made little figure eights through the liquidy mixture, careful not to spill on her work clothes. Her plate, with a small dollop of ketchup, stood ready next to the stove, a fork resting on a folded napkin. A slice of bread browned in the stainless toaster.

  “Stir, stir, stir,” she said aloud, repeating what her mother, Gus, had always said when she insisted Aimee help out with breakfast. "Stir ...”

  “... and you won’t be sorry,” cried out Gus cheerily.

  Aimee whirled around, nearly causing the saucepan to fall off the stove.

  “Mom?”

  Silence.

  Oh, funny how it can sneak up on you: the moment of madness. It was one thing to repeat little phrases but now she was actually hearing her mother’s voice outside her head. What’s the standard procedure for losing one’s mind, anyway? Do you call in sick? Check yourself into a hospital? Aimee waited a second before she continued to stir, reassured that it was just one of those moments when the background noises come together to sound like something familiar. A fluke.

  Then she heard it again. Gus, talking slowly and clearly. Oh, dear God, had Gus died in the night? Was she haunting Aimee? She’d seen that in a movie once, though the parent was trying to convey an important secret that would save the family from a curse.

  “Mom, if that’s you, say something else.”

  “I’d never dream of using ketchup on eggs!” came Gus’s voice in reply. And then a spurt of laughter. From the bedroom.