Cooking as Fast as I Can (20 page)

“It's my day off, Donna,” I said.

Early on, it was clear that we were both attracted to one another and rubbed each other the wrong way. In some ways I was the daughter she never had; in other ways she saw someone young and passionate about her life and career, which stimulated feelings of fear or resentment. For me, she was glamorous, worldly, and sexy in her mercurial way, and also an older sister or mother figure.

Our days in the kitchen could go from fun and companionable to insane within an hour. She'd hired me to replace her, but she'd worked with the same brigade for ten years. Once, I was teaching them some aspect of a new dish and it was clear they weren't really listening. I found Donna in the dining room folding napkins.

“John and Raoul weren't listening in there just now,” I said.

“They know what they're doing, I wouldn't worry about it.”

“We're going over the new risotto and they need to listen up.”

“Cat, they've been cooking risotto for me for ten years. They don't need a lecture from you.”

That night at dinner service, she stormed into the kitchen with a return, slamming the dish so hard on the counter the mound of undercooked risotto hopped off the plate and onto the floor. “If you hadn't been spending so much time out in the dining room, Cat, we wouldn't be having these issues! Now learn how to make some fucking risotto,
please
.”

A fishmonger in San Francisco would make the hundred-mile round-trip to Napa to bring his fish to everyone in the valley. He was well respected, also a friend. Donna was notorious for being seized with inspiration, summoning him on a day that was not his regularly scheduled day. He would make the extra trip and she'd carefully inspect each piece, oohing and ahhing,
This salmon is perfect, look at this color, really a nice orange, really fresh
. Then suddenly she would come upon a piece that she felt was inferior, and she would begin to rant.
Look at this terrible cut! Terrible, terrible cut!
And the dealer would raise his voice, defending his fish, and they would go at it, as if this was an ancient, open-air market in Naples, not an upscale fine-dining establishment in Napa. I would look back
and forth between Donna and the fishmonger and try to offer my opinion, which mattered not in the least. As they argued on past the point of amusement and ridiculousness, I would reflect on how Donna drove everyone mad, how her diva dramas were what made her both beloved and infamous.

While my relationship with Melissa had been all business, with her the captain and me the first mate of our tiny ship, with Donna it was complicated, operatic. She said I was a diamond in the rough. I could cook my ass off, but was still naive when it came to the finer things in life. Despite my culinary degree, internship in France, and experience at Old Chatham, I was still a plain-talking girl of modest means from Mississippi. It escaped me, for example, that driving Alma's hand-me-down Honda might give the impression that I wasn't making enough at Don Giovanni to afford a decent set of wheels. Donna, eager for the culinary crowd to see she was paying her new executive chef well, pulled some strings and helped me get a good deal on a leased Range Rover. She helped Hannah and me find the right sort of apartment, then furnished it. Later, after Hannah and I split, she helped me furnish and decorate my new apartment and get back on my feet. Donna could be extremely generous.

I was working the usual sixteen-hour days, changing the menu, hatching my olive oil scheme, and overseeing dinner service and the family meal. Everything was coming at me fast. I was the boss of the kitchen, I kept telling myself in some poorly lit corner of my mind. I saw that Donna was determined to groom me, and I tried to will myself to accept the occasional dysfunction that came along with that. I liked California, saw that this was a place where I could set down some roots, but nevertheless felt unmoored, perhaps the natural outcome of packing up my suitcase one too many times.

The only other person I knew in Napa aside from Hannah and my brigade was Donna, and when we would hang out after dinner service, I found myself confiding to her about my problems with Hannah, which seemed minor, but underscored larger issues. Hannah and I were mutually obsessed with Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia. We always had a pint in the freezer. I liked to stand in front of the fridge and pick out the cherries and fudge chunks. It drove Hannah mad. If she caught me at it, she would completely lose her shit, yelling that I was ruining perfectly good ice cream, and by the way not inexpensive ice cream, by doing that.

Donna worked days and her husband, Giovanni, worked nights. On one of my days off she invited me over for dinner. Afterward, she disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a pint of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia. She placed it on the table in front of me and said, “I don't care if you pick out the cherries and chunks. With me, you can do whatever you want.”

She liked to invite me over to dinner on our nights off. Giovanni would be working at the restaurant, and it would just be the two of us. I never saw her eat a lot, but she loved to cook for me. She would grill up a nice New York steak, sprinkle it with sea salt, then sit and watch me eat it. She liked to smoke a little pot at night, and favored small, perfectly rolled little joints, which she held between her fingers like a cigarette, very sexy. She sipped her red wine and smoked and I ate, and for a moment it would be just lovely. I bought into her fawning. I wanted Donna's approval, which she gave and took away on a daily basis.

After I'd been at Giovanni's for a year or so, my mom came to visit. She witnessed the phone calls at all hours. I would pull the receiver away from my ear and she could hear Donna
shouting on the other end. My mom is low-key, an experienced geriatric nurse who's spent most of her life coping with people who were off their nut. Not much fazed her. But upon hearing Donna rant she said, “Cathy, honey, I'm worried for you. I don't think this is good for you.”

I'd struggled with depression on and off throughout my life. I'd never been on the verge of doing myself in, but sometimes I thought my job at Bistro Don Giovanni would push me to consider hurling myself off the nearest bridge.

The intense work that happens in a restaurant creates a kind of family, a natural and open camaraderie. In that context, a server had told me about a therapist named Robin. The server called her a healer and I nodded and smiled and thought,
Yeah, California, whatever
. She said Robin had helped her get to the bottom of her dysfunctional behavior, some of which sprang from early abuse. We were sitting in a coffee shop. I was slouched in the chair opposite her and at the mention of abuse I sat up straight.

“I need that girl's number,” I said.

I called and left a message. It was my day off. I wasn't good on my day off. I never knew what to do with myself. Like most chefs, my happiest moments were spent managing to stay out of the weeds during a harrowing dinner service, when life is lived thirty seconds at a time. I paced around the living room, opened the refrigerator, stared inside, then closed it. Hannah was at work. She'd hostessed for a few weeks at Bistro Don Giovanni, but it didn't last, as she and Donna shared a mutual dislike. She quit and got a job as a waitress at Celadon, a popular place featuring global comfort food on Main Street. We were almost never home at the same time, the only thing that kept one of us from moving out.

The phone rang. The moment I heard her say, “Hi, Cathy,
this is Robin calling you back,” I started sobbing. Her voice was so gentle and reassuring. No one had said my name that way for a long time. I was Cat now. Donna hollered it. My brigade shouted it, usually with alarm when something in the kitchen had gone sideways. Hannah imbued it with equal parts anger and despair. “Cathy?” she said again. “Are you all right?”

“I need help,” I cried.

“Okay. Just take a breath and tell me what's going on.”

I told her about how this was the job I'd been waiting for, but the personal dynamics had become so complicated. How Donna had taken a personal interest in my welfare, but also undercut my authority in the kitchen with my brigade, guys she'd worked with for years. How she was there for me when I needed to talk about how to end my relationship with Hannah, then not an hour later made me feel like pond scum for oversearing a piece of trout. I was utterly confused, which did nothing to prevent my becoming infatuated with her. I'd managed to fall in something with her. Love? Probably not. But something.

“Come and see me as soon as you can,” she said. She had an appointment available that very night.

Here's what I thought about my life. I thought this is the ocean, and this is what it's like to swim. But I didn't realize I was caught in a riptide, swimming, swimming hard, pointlessly, on the verge of drowning. Robin swam out to rescue me. I started seeing her once a week.

I felt about an inch high when I sat down in the chair across from Robin. Together we examined my interactions with Donna, the way she doted on me, drawing me near, then putting me down. The way she claimed to believe in me, then sided with even the least-talented, least-reliable cook against
me. Robin helped me gain some distance, some perspective, which then made it easier for me to see exactly what Donna was doing as she was doing it. I mentioned my childhood abuse in passing, and Robin wanted to examine that noxious stew, but at that point in my life I couldn't conceive of taking the lid off that pot.

It had been over with Hannah for some time, but we were too attached to the comfort of our coupledom to act on it. Sitting around on the couch watching videos with a glass of white wine and a bowl of popcorn. Having someone to check in with during the day and spoon at night. There was nothing wrong with this, but there wasn't anything terribly right about it, either.

But to break up once and for all felt as if I was dishonoring the sacrifices she'd made for me, and for us. She'd been with me when I first met the Greek side of my family on Skopelos, during the summer we'd backpacked through Europe. She'd pulled up stakes and moved with me to Rhinebeck so I wouldn't have to go through the Culinary alone. Then cooled her heels while I lived a little more of my dream in France. I dragged her all the way out to California. She, and the memory of us, deserved better, I thought.

Still, with the help of Robin, we managed to break up, to disengage, and not give in to the temptation to get back together just because we could.

On the morning of Christmas Eve I was cleaning the walk-in and Donna was standing in the kitchen with her hands on her hips chewing me out. I can't remember exactly what she
was on about. It may have had something to do with the fish order. I've repressed this particular tirade. Though it was indistinguishable from all the others, something rose up in me. I quit on the spot. “I'm not doing this anymore,” I said.

“What do you mean? It's Christmas Eve. You can't leave on Christmas Eve,” she said.

“I'm not leaving, I'm quitting.”