Fry Me a Liver (2 page)

So what decided me, you may ask. It wasn't the work family or the breakup with Grant Daniels or the fact that I really had nowhere else to go. Oh no. It was something I didn't see coming.

The decision took about five seconds and it came during my first visit to a shul since Uncle Murray died. I'm not religious, but I took a drive to Memphis after what I called the Chinese matter—my most recent brush with murderers—to clear my head. I passed a temple and went in. A temple is like a McDonald's: wherever you are in the world, inside they are pretty much the same. The same services, the same trappings, the same books, the same familiar Hebrew writing and text, the same rabbinical wisdom that springs from the same five millennia of culture and teaching. I realized that “home” is portable, transferable. What I missed in New York City were familiar trappings, what I grew up with; the stuff that mattered, which I should've learned from
The Wizard of Oz
, is inside. When she left, Gwen Katz was in danger of being defined by the hustle of Wall Street, the jazz of the night life, the sanctuary of a tiny apartment crammed with personal
tchokes.
It was time I defined myself. I couldn't do that in a metropolis where every street held memories, the ghosts of thirty-plus years of previous incarnations of Gwen. I had to stop being the divorcée who was running from Phil Silver and embarrassed by her life in a corrupted profession. And now, it was also time to start over.

That's why I stayed. That's why I redid the house.

That's why I wanted to explain about work family, about how and why it matters. For now, at least, men can come and go. But not my staff. And certainly not in the way that was about to challenge us all.

The deli was very crowded today. I was expecting that and had come in earlier than usual, surprising Newt, Luke, and the other setter-uppers. Business was generally excellent and growing. Even in the winter, when the temperatures were in the forties, Nashvillians had to eat and we did a bang-up trade in both soup types: chicken and matzo ball. We also had split pea with ham for the unrepentant gentiles. Downtown was constantly alive with tourists and students, natives and transplants, familiar faces and new ones—many of whom are surprised to find a Jewish deli in this so-southern city. It didn't hurt that just awhile back we had won the Best Midrange Restaurant of the Year.

That recognition, awarded by the aforementioned Mr. Reid of the
Nashville National
and a local association of business and civic leaders, is what triggered a situation none of us could have envisioned.

Democratic Mayor Louis Benedict Dunn was an occasional customer, coming in an average of once a month with two or three aides, typically for a late working lunch. It wasn't just that he liked our mushroom and potato knishes, which he did, but it served him well to be seen at local eateries, especially one that had nabbed local kudos. It showed that he respected the judgment of the very influential communications mogul and the other local luminaries who voted for us.

But, today, this being an election year—and it being the heart of the election season—Mr. Dunn's rival, businesswoman Tootsie Pearl, was going to be at the deli
avec
media. She had come by three times in the last month, once to eat and twice to shake hands. Dunn was a green advocate and a popular civil rights attorney who had done a lot of pro bono work for minorities. Ms. Pearl, a Republican, was the founder of Tootsie's Toppers, a hat shop that became an Internet sensation after football players' wives were seen wearing their hats at a televised Tennessee Titans game. She was all for healthy living, but only when the city could afford it. Right now, hybrid car tax breaks and the banning of plastic grocery store and takeout bags were not on her to-do list as they were on Dunn's. She was about fixing the local economy and attracting jobs to Nashville.

There was also a third party candidate, Moss “Com” Post of the Edenist Party. He was an organic farmer and an unabashed Luddite who believed in a complete return to nature. He was not Facebooking, Twittering, or anything else electronic. He was campaigning on horseback and handing out bags of homegrown chives. They weren't bad. He also had a core of Republican followers, since he was a strong gun rights advocate.

A month before the election, polls showed that Dunn was expected to lose by a
sakh
, as they say in Yiddish—a lot. Unlike the blue staters, people here were less concerned about social issues than they were about the local economy, which was pretty crummy. Moreover, Post—whose family went back two hundred years—was expected to siphon off traditional Democratic votes.

This would be a good time to point out that I am not terribly political. When I was growing up, my family was always all over supporting Israel and I gave money to plant trees whenever I was guilted into it. Back then, things were simple. Just like before Clinton's impeachment, for me, things were simple: what a John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Eleanor Roosevelt did behind closed doors stayed there. The press didn't talk about it. Now, there was too much information and too much parsing of every word spoken by a politician. It was all too big to get my head around. I always voted, usually for candidates who lost, and typically for Libertarians. It's not just pushy men I want out of my face; I would be happy if every wanna-be authority figure got lost. That included the government. Defend our shores, police the streets, and let us take care of everything else. That was the entirety of my political philosophy, though I'm not militant about it. Why get all worked up over something I can't control and have such a supernaturally small say in?

Anyway, Tootsie showed up at eight a.m., shortly after we opened, in order to hit the coffee-and-bagel-to-go crowd. It was a bigger deal than it had been a couple of weeks before. She was not only the favorite, she had Candy Sommerton of WSMV Channel 4 News in tow. The forty-year-old politician had grown into a genuine crowd-pleaser. Five-foot-ten, leggy, bosomy, with a big smile, big eyes, big red hair, and adorable little freckles, she was divorced from a truck driver and had once lived in a trailer park. It was a great American success story with a photogenic heroine.

Candy Sommerton was some of those things too, but she was also a major pain in my
tuchas
. I couldn't blame her for trying to get stories. Truly. The local TV market was now a national Internet market and a viral video could make a newscaster famous. But some of the stories Candy chased had to do with me and crimes in which I happened to be a victim or an innocent bystander. Candy did not understand or care to understand the word “privacy.” She just showed up and expected cooperation. Intellectually, I didn't blame her. Personally, I wanted to give her a
potch
with a skillet.

One member of my waitstaff, A.J., was not only unimpressed, she was put out. Customers were in the aisles, standing precariously on chairs and taking pictures, most of them in the way of her getting her job done. Oddly, Raylene, my other morning waitperson—a term I found clumsy, however politically correct it was—was energized. Just goes to show how one person's stress is another person's fuel.

“This is all so exciting,” said the southern-born gal as she waited by the heat lamps for a side of hash browns.

“Yeah, like trying to tune a guitar in the middle of a set,” Luke offered. He smiled. “Hey, cool idea. A tuna guitar. A guitar shaped like a fish.”

“Brilliant,” A.J. said as she breezed by. “And you, I just don't get,” she said to Raylene.

“Why not? This makes me feel like I'm at the center of the world!”

“Yeah, surrounded by molten lava,” I said.

She looked at me quizzically. “Honey, this is big! This is American democracy at work. Don't you feel a thrill in your blood?”

“I feel it,” Luke said as he stacked clean coffee cups. “Like, I'm plugged into the Foundational Fathers.”

Raylene rolled her eyes but didn't bother to correct him.

“What I feel is the overkill,” I said. I nodded toward Candy. “This is media carpet bombing at work.”

“You're funny,” Raylene said. “This li'l pork roast is filling seats, filling the till, getting us publicity—and you're, what do you say? Kuhvetching?”

“Kvetching,” I corrected.

“That's what I said,” Raylene protested.

“You didn't, but that's not important. It's like Wall Street. I've always preferred slow, steady growth to a steroid injection. That's why I never really fit in up there.”

“‘Up there,'” Luke said. “Don't let Thom hear you. Only heaven's ‘up there.'”

I happened to look over.
I heard!
Thom mouthed from the cash register.

Raylene grabbed her plate and said over her shoulder. “You're a 'fraidy cat, lady. I think I would have
killed
with all those traders and hustlers. I always liked hunting squirrel with my brothers. Never shot less than any of them. Never.”

“A squirrel is a very different kind of rodent,” I pointed out.

Raylene smirked as she left.

I marveled, again, that I had anything in common with this cobbled-together family of mine. Then again, it got me thinking. For me, as a young girl, the biggest challenge was getting home from school on the subway without having my
tuchas
fondled, or pretending not to notice when I was sitting across from a flasher. In the days before cell phone cameras, that was a daily occurrence. And it reached across all socioeconomic lines, from the homeless to clergy. I wondered, briefly, what my life would have been like if I had been able to carry an air rifle and plug the pervs the way Raylene shot squirrels.

Tootsie stood out front for about twenty minutes, shaking hands, signing campaign posters, and posing for pictures as people walked in. There were a lot of new faces, a lot of flashing lights that obscured some of those faces, and a lot of enthusiasm. There were a few kvetchers too, mostly about the doorway and aisle being blocked; Thom cleared a path like Moses parting the sea. Protestors were kept behind a nearby barricade by police, and there were only four or five of those. Most of them were opposed to Tootsie's support of allowing the display of the Confederate flag in public places.

Inside, Tootsie circulated among the diners. I had given my permission to do this as long as Candy and her camera operator didn't try to follow through the closely packed tables; with backpacks and purses hanging on chairs, it was tough enough for the waitstaff to get through. One slow circuit later, Tootsie made her way toward my office. I had been standing there most of the time, arms folded, watching, to make sure that things didn't get out of hand with the candidate or the TV duo.

The office was located midway along a corridor that ran from the back of the counter to the kitchen. It was situated right behind the restroom, which spoke to pretty lame design work; it was like a prewar New York apartment where every burble from the radiator or the toilet—and not necessarily your own—made its noisy way through pipes over your head. I can only imagine that when this place opened, my uncle didn't spend very much time in his cubbyhole. I not only heard water moving through the ceiling, but people humming, talking on cell phones, clearing their throats, and—well, everything else one would expect to hear coming from a lavatory.

The kitchen was active. Newt was at the grill and fryer; he seemed a little grumpier than usual, but he was young and that was to be expected. Luke had just done his midmorning restroom cleanup and was bussing. A.J. and Raylene took care of their own oatmeal and cereal orders. I usually pitched in during lunch, when I prepared the sides like cole slaw and potato salad. For breakfast, all I did was throw
shmear
on a bagel and act as shortstop when the waitstaff got backed up.

There were people out there I didn't know. There was hubbub that annoyed the regulars. I felt like I should go out and schmooze them, but I'd only be in the way and that would make things worse. I hustled over to Thom, told her to give the regulars ten percent off. She gave me the thumbs up. She'd seen their agitation too.

Then I went back to observe. But not for long.

After about twenty minutes of additional glaring, I was called to lend a hand. The morning was different in one other way. As Tootsie circulated, there was a knock at the back door. That was where we got our deliveries. The door opened onto a fenced-in asphalt area with the Dumpster and a narrow alley from the street. We typically got our bread, veggies, and fish well before opening; our butcher was behind because of two days of vegan protests at his shop, billed rather awkwardly as “Forty-Ate No Meat Hours.” I was glad to see Sandy ‘Fat
Fresser
' (Yiddish for a big eater.) Potts, the zaftig daughter of Alex Storm, the owner. We had a run on chopped liver that morning, which was one of our biggest sellers. It was delicious, yes—more on that later—but people responded to the Yiddish saying that Uncle Murray had put in English next to the chopped liver platter listing on the menu, as he did with most of the entrées:
Gehakteh leber iz besser vi gehakteh truris
:
Chopped liver is better than miserable troubles.
As I invariably explained to all our first-time customers, chicken soup got all the credit, but it was really the iron-rich liver that did all the heavy lifting.

The young woman was a powerfully built gal, five-foot-seven with arms like Popeye, only she looked like she lived on a diet of bacon, not spinach. She had the three big plastic-lined boxes on a dolly which she rolled in.

“How you doing?” I asked as she arrived like a blast of sunshine.

“Me? I'm personally not so bad, Gwen.”

That was an odd answer. I thought for a second, then bit. “How's your daughter?” Bonnie was her eight-year-old by her live-in boyfriend, Fred, an aspiring artist. I bought one of his oil paintings,
Pickles and Cream Cheese
, for fifty bucks and hung it in the lavatory. Not because I didn't like it, I lied to his face, but where the public could see it and hopefully commission a work. That was a year ago. “Is Bonnie still a little overachiever at school?”

“Ordinarily, yeah. But my little lamb's in a kinda bad way right now.”

“Why? What's wrong?”

“She's with her dad instead of doin' her numbers and letters like she likes. Poor thing busted her leg last week playing soccer in gym.”

“Ow. Serious?”

“Compound fracture. Required surgery.”

“
Gevalt!
”

“Yes ma'am. Fred's bringing her home from the hospital today.” She added wryly, “Lucky for us he's unemployed so he can take the time.”

“Is an artist ever truly employed?” I asked.

“He is when he's a house painter. He was pretty disappointed when they put her leg in a brace instead of a cast since he wanted to paint a warren of bunnies on it.”

I gave her hand a little squeeze. That was a topic for a longer talk and a few drinks. I'd only met Fred once, at a reception for Nashville Women in Business. He reminded me unfavorably of my dad, who didn't mind being “kept” by my uncle.

I had her put two of the boxes in our big walk-in refrigerator and the other on a wooden pallet next to the stainless steel worktable in the back. That kept the tub from sitting directly on the floor, something the health department frowned on. I cut one box open with a knife.

I gave Newt about three pounds of raw chicken liver for broiling, not sautéing. That was how you removed the blood to make it kosher. Then I grabbed the mayo, onions, and ajar of my special additive: diced dill pickles. Uncle Murray noted in his recipe book—which was so thick no rubber band could hold it together, it took one of those old book-straps—that the juice made all the difference. As I started to wield my Ginsu knife, A.J. came back to make a chopped liver platter from what was left in our dwindling stock. She took it from the walk-in, right inside the door on the right.

“I always thought I would like the spotlight,” she said as she plunked it on the table and began tearing lettuce leaves from the head we kept in a stainless steel bucket of ice.

“What do you mean?”

“As a girl in a woodsman's shack, you have your ‘over the rainbow' moments when you imagine being somewhere else,” she said. “I thought I'd like to be on TV. We only got three channels in Kingsport, but I loved reruns of Dinah Shore.” She shook her head. “She was so sweet, always smiling, always singing. But y'know—I never imagined what it'd be like having to live with lights in your face
all
the time, like this. Not just at the studio but when you went out to dinner or to get the newspaper or anything.”

“Man, I'd squeeze out a live bird's guts for that,” Luke said as he arrived with bins of dishes and silverware. “And the money. All that crying over being
famous
!”

“Quality of life matters too,” I said.

“
Quality
is being rich and successful,” he said.

We ignored him.

“So the loss of privacy would not be so inviting?” I asked A.J. as I
chop-chop-chopped
the onions.

“Privacy, shmivacy,” she sneered. “I'm talking about the actual spotlight, Gwen. The light itself. That lamp turns my lines into shadows like the erosion at the creek near my house. I saw myself on someone's cell phone yesterday. My crow's feet look like tiger claws.”

“Dinah Shore looked okay, as I recall.”

“She had makeup artists on staff, Gwen! Her skin must've looked like a tractor road in real life.”

“I see,” I said as I
dice-dice-diced
the pickles. “The good news is, think of how amazed people who see your photo will be when they see you in the flesh. They'll be struck speechless at how good you look.”

“Good? What they'll
think
is that I got work done on my face, honey!” she said. “That would be awful. I hope I'm not steppin' on any Botox here, but I think a woman should be herself from waist to forehead and all stops in between, all those worrying, childbearing, age-wearing lines and sags. Far as I'm concerned, I earned those battle scars, and I don't want anybody thinking I had it easy.”

“All fair points,” I said. I wasn't one for surgery, either, though I wasn't quite at the age where I thought it might actually be necessary. I hoped I stayed true to that conviction.

“Hey, you can start wearing bikinis,” Luke said as he engineered a controlled crash of a bin overflowing with coffee cups, saucers, and spoons on the stainless steel ledge adjoining the industrial-size sink behind us. Every time he did that, things clattered without ever breaking. The young man could be annoying but he was a pro.

“I'll wear them if you will,” A.J. replied.

“That doesn't even make sense,” he said, with a little more edge in his voice than usual. Something was troubling him. Probably money, from the way he was harping on it.

“Fine,” A.J. said. “Then you can wear Speedos.”

“Boss, give me the word and consider it done,” Luke said. He began washing some of the flatware by hand. We would need it before the morning rush was through.

“Luke, did you remember to replace the towel in the bathroom hand dryer?” I asked, happily changing the subject.

“Of course,” he replied.

“And I say again, we need to get a hand blower. That old cloth thing is totally tragic,” Newt shouted from the grill.

“Blowers don't work!” Luke shot back.

“They work,” A.J. said. “You're just impatient, like most of your generation.”

“That's not it! They don't dry and they leave me with cracked skin that hurts when I play my riffs.”

A.J. didn't answer him. Apparently, one front during morning combat was enough.

“And I wasn't the one who brought up bikinis, Luke,” she said to the busboy. The lady was never one to leave an argument unresolved, which meant her winning by force of argument or simply running out the clock. “Men are always happy to promenade with their manly assets on display. But, hey,
you
try lookin' good in some of the stuff we have to wear.”

“You can look good if you work at it,” Newt joined in. He stepped into our peripheral vision and flexed an arm as much for his own pleasure as to make a point. “Free weights and two hundred curls every morning.”

“What do you do to build your mind?” she asked.

“Argue with people who think they know everything,” he replied.

“That's enough,” I said. He wasn't naturally this belligerent. Best to end it now.

Newt flexed his arm again and winked as he went back to the grill to flip some turkey bacon.

Gevalt
. Though I had to admit, Newt was a hunky guy and I did briefly wonder if a Chippendale approach one night a week—one
late
night a week—would do any kind of business. I could call it
Borsht Beltless.
It could draw not just the ladies but the gay men, a demographic that didn't really have a restaurant hangout—just the usual bar or two. It was something I would have to ask our clients, not my staff.

“Look, this all started because I was just commenting about the cameras,” A.J. said as she trimmed the platter with pickle slices.

“No, it started because you can't accept the fact that I would love it,” Luke told her. “Lights and fame. Attention. Money.”

“Rats, any idiot with a gun can get that,” A.J. said. “It doesn't take any kind of talent whatsoever to get famous.”

“I want the spotlight, but only for my music,” Luke said solemnly. “And for Dani. She looks so hot on YouTube.”

“Hey, chief—you want him to wash the coffee cups or go to Styrofoam for the sit-downs?” Newt asked.

“Wash,” I said, happy to be back on the matter at hand. “And don't call me chief.”

“Yes, boss.”

Except for Newt's extra little edge, this kind of banter was the norm. It made work go faster for the crew; it made me meshuga because it was an endless cycle of thrust and parry with no one ever really winning. To wit:

“Yeah, Luke, the washing might give you Newt's manly biceps and make you more of a rock star,” A.J. muttered with just a soupçon of sarcasm.

“You had to start again,” I muttered.

“Does a possum eat garbage?” She winked.

“You want to watch, A.J.?” Luke flirted.

“Only if I can laugh,” A.J. retorted.

I shot her an exasperated look and Luke made a smug little face as he continued at the double sinks behind us. They were located right beside the basement stairs, which were beside the back door. On the other side of the door was the walk-in cooler where Sandy was just finishing up with the delivery: wrapped slabs of tongue, corned beef, and pastrami, all waiting to be seasoned à la Murray's recipe book. She put the meat beside plastic tubs of cole slaw on the bottom shelf which we had prepared the night before. The butcher's daughter swung around the refrigerator and out the back door to put the dolly back in the van. I noticed a man in a ragged sports jacket was outside at the Dumpster, his back to me. I wasn't surprised to see him and I didn't mind. Unlike New York, where the problem of the homeless seemed overwhelming, there was something I could do about it here. I left Styrofoam containers of food out back. Anything that wasn't going to last another day went to feed those who needed it, stacked in a big steel-mesh shelf that hung from the fence. A.J. had described it as a bird feeder for the poor, and while that had a demeaning sound, that's pretty much what it was. As long as there wasn't a breadline each day, I would continue to do what I could.

It would be another half hour before I could start grating the fresh livers into a bowl. I scooped up the last slices of what we had left, cut it into a Tupperware container, and mixed in some of my ingredients. A.J. plopped it on her platter.

“I'm so glad I don't have a son,” A.J. said.

“What, a college girl is easier?”

“By a mile,” she said. “I've
been
where my daughter is. I know where she's going. I know what's in her brainpan. So, yeah. I don't know if I could deal with Newt's kind of testosterone. It's like those guys at the counter.”

A.J. nodded in that direction. I looked under the heat lamps at a row of intense young faces.

“Who are they?”

“The local political bloggers,” A.J. said as she used an ice cream scoop to fill a second plate with chopped liver.

“Ah. I thought I didn't recognize them,” I said.

“They're all playing for alpha dog status,” she said. “They're like the other bloggers who come in after morning rush, when you're in the office. They like to have stuff up by lunchtime for their readers, they tell me. They tippy-type away at the counter between sniping at each other and shooting what looks like spitballs.”

“Look what I miss when I order potatoes.”

“Oh yeah,” A.J. said. “They actually fight on the counter for elbow room, like babies. Jab, poke, jab. Thank God we don't have those kinds of wing nuts here except for an hour or so every day.”

“No, thank God I have you to deal with them,” I pointed out.

A.J. gave one of her short “damn right” nods. She was the one who happened to mention that as the number of laptop and tablet users grew, we needed to establish a no-refill policy at the counter. Otherwise, people would have stayed there like it was Starbucks. Dani was the only one who didn't mind; she was happy to have fewer tips and less work. That gave her more time to hang with Luke in the kitchen. Young love. I never had it like that. The time between graduating high school and getting my MBA was a wall of study, like scholars bent over the Torah. I dated, but that was more a biological function than a social one. I emerged from the process a fully rounded grown-up. When I finally looked around at men, I settled for someone I liked well enough and figured everyone else would approve of. Looked good on a spreadsheet, like everything in my life, before it suddenly didn't.