Julia's Child (9781101559741) (33 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pinneo

BOOK: Julia's Child (9781101559741)
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I took a deep breath and tried to recover. “Yes. That helps, J. P. That really does. I, uh, I think three fifty is a number I can live with. But there's one more thing I need to ask you. And I should have asked this earlier.”
“Shoot.”
“How much travel do you see for us, going forward? How many nights per month away from home?” I tried not to look at Marta, who must be apoplectic by now. But it would matter—to both of us—and I should have realized when Smith called me on Thanksgiving Day that GPG looked at the workweek a little differently than I did.
“I dunno? Six?” Smith began to sound a little wary.
“I think a number like two is more realistic for me,” I said.
Silence. “We could meet in the middle, Julia. Four?”
Everything is negotiable. Everything. I was finally catching on. “Let's put down three, J. P. And I'll fly to the meeting in Monterey, but I can't be in D.C. on Friday. But I'll get you those papers before cocktail hour. Signed.”
He only hesitated for a moment. “Done. I look forward to signing them too.”
After we hung up, I put my head in my hands for a minute, to compose myself. When I looked up, Marta was gone.
I rose from my chair, my legs shaking as if I'd just run a marathon. I peered out our office door, but she was nowhere. I wanted to hug her and tell her everything would be all right. It had been a rough day, for both of us. No, not just a rough day. The last couple of months had really hurt. I just hoped she could find a way to forgive me.
I had the worst kind of adrenaline rush. The big moment was over, but I was jumpy with a bad case of fight-or-flight. I sat down in my desk chair and forced myself to think about dinner reservations. Where should Luke and I dine? Should I pick a celebratory setting—or just somewhere quiet enough for me to tell him every sorry detail of the last twenty-four hours?
I was scanning
Zagat
restaurant reviews when Marta walked back into the office fifteen minutes later. She had composed herself all the way up to a shy little smile that played across her lips. She held a gift bag in one hand. Tissue paper was sticking out from the top.
I held up one hand for a high five, and Marta came over and slapped it. I grabbed her and gave her a squeeze. “I'm so sorry,” I said again.
But Marta didn't want my pity. She pretended not to hear me. “Three fifty,” she said instead. “I can hardly believe it.”
“Me either! Actually, I don't know what to think. Maybe the higher price really did push them to the limit. Or maybe they're jumping around their office right now, laughing about how cheap they just bought our company.”
Marta dragged her chair around to the little space between our two desks. “I don't even care,” she told me. “I'm just so glad it's over.”
“Me too. And again—I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I freaked out at the end.”
She held up a hand. “Don't . . . It's okay. Here. I got you something.” She put the gift bag on my desk.
“Marta! You shouldn't have.” I reached into the bag and pulled out something small, wrapped in tissue. When I unwrapped it, I thought the same thing again. She shouldn't have. Because it was a BlackBerry—a beautiful pink one. And I was still wary about coltan and the cell phone industry.
“It's
refurbished
,” Marta said before I could argue. “This is a
recycled
phone. Instead of becoming landfill, you will give it a new life. No new . . . stuff was used to make it.”
“Really? You can do that?” I'd never heard of a refurbished phone. But of course, I'd never shopped for a phone, so how would I?
“Yes!” she said proudly. “Some trendsetter gave up this BlackBerry Pearl—last year's model—to get the one all the kiddies want now. The brand-new . . . Squeal or Burp or something. And here.” She handed me a small padded envelope. “You send your old phone in here, and they'll recycle the parts, okay? This is not a travesty.”
I picked up my poor old frozen phone, cradling it in my palm. “Marta,” I said. “I don't know if I can give this one up.”
“Julia—
why?
” Her exasperation was complete.
I grinned. “This phone is lucky, Marta! It just made us $65,000!”
Then we laughed so hard that tears rolled down our faces.
“You really had me going there,” she said, wiping her eyes carefully with a tissue, avoiding her mascara.
I held the old phone up to the bare office wall. “We'll frame it, I think. If we're going corporate, we're going to need decor.”
The Post
(Early Edition), Filed Friday, December 22
By Christine Flannigan
 
Queens Mom Trades in Food Stamps for Stock Certificates
Area single mother Marta Rodríguez used to do her grocery shopping while her son Carlos was at school. “I didn't want him to feel bad like I did. Handing over the food stamps in the checkout aisle was never easy for me.”
Always handy in the kitchen, Rodríguez jumped at the chance to attend federally financed job training at La Cucina in Brooklyn. “I thought that just maybe the certificate would help me get a job with decent hours, so I could drop my son at school and pick him up again.”
Something even more magical happened to Rodríguez. Working after class in the Cucina kitchen, she met Julia Bailey of Julia's Child. The company was a tiny start-up, but Bailey hired Rodríguez full time. “Starting a business is rough,” Rodríguez said. “We worked in the office during the daytime and cooked the food at Cucina by night.” Neighbors pitched in to watch Carlos in the evenings, when Rodríguez was needed in the kitchen. “But it's so exciting, starting a business! And it felt so good to be part of something big,” says Rodríguez. Working hard, she worked her way up to an ownership stake. “I cried when Julia told me about my own share,” Rodríguez notes. “And we weren't even chopping onions.”
Fortune smiled on the women entrepreneurs. They recently sold the company to food giant GPG for an undisclosed sum. Both women are staying on to manage the brand for the conglomerate.
“My life is still frantic,” says Rodríguez. “The big corporations have a lot more meetings. It's different. We used to just shout everything across the room to each other. Now sometimes Julia and I call each other from twenty feet away. But they do so much for us there. I don't have to shop at Staples for all our office supplies anymore. I have health insurance. And I can see the Empire State Building from my desk.”
Now that the company has corporate backing, Rodríguez is happy to report that new recipe development—a task she and Bailey both love—is back on the docket. Rodríguez shares a wonderful whole grain Julia's Child recipe with us below:
 
Peas on Earth Bulgur Wheat Risotto
“Bulgur wheat is a whole grain, so it's healthier than white rice,” Rodríguez reports. “There's a lot more protein and fiber. It also cooks up faster than a traditional risotto, and you don't have to stir constantly. So you keep more of the vitamins!”
 
Ingredients
1 medium onion, chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup coarse (No. 3) bulgur
2 cups chicken broth
1½ cups water
¼ pound sliced bacon, chopped
2 cups frozen peas
⅓
cup freshly grated Parmesan
salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
 
In a 2-quart heavy saucepan cook onion in oil over moderate heat, stirring, until softened.
Add bulgur, broth, and water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, until bulgur is tender and creamy like risotto (about 20 minutes). Stir occasionally.
While bulgur is simmering, cook bacon in a skillet over moderate heat, stirring, until crisp, then drain on paper towels.
Stir peas into bulgur, then stir in Parmesan, half of the bacon, and salt and pepper to taste.
Serve sprinkled with the remaining bacon.
Three Months Later
Chapter 31
T
he park bench was cool to the touch, but the sun warmed my face. It was one of those early spring days that promised New York wouldn't forever remain a howling wind tunnel. I parked myself in front of the sandbox.
It was early in the playground season, so I hadn't thought to bring along our unruly collection of sand toys. Now Wylie and another little boy were having a cold war standoff, both vying for the same bit of wood. Wylie had found it buried in the sand, this pointed shivlike stick that was apparently essential for digging.
In order to scoop sand from the hole he'd made, Wylie put down the coveted stick for just a split second. But that was all it took. The other toddler made his move.
“Miiiiiine!” screamed Wylie, diving after it.
The other boy, blond ringlets hanging into his eyes, dropped it immediately and crumpled onto the sand, sobbing. He was obviously a first child. First children are wimps. Second children know how to go for the throat.
More than once I had wished for a T-shirt I could wear to the park that read, “My
other
child is sweet and well mannered.”
But there were no recriminations forthcoming from the mother of the sobbing towhead. She was arguing loudly on her cell phone. “If the track light is stainless steel,” she protested, “why on earth would you order a white track? That won't match.” She scooped her sobbing child onto her lap, flashing Wylie and me a generic scowl. “And those pendant lights, my God! The Venetian glass has been done to death. Get them off the elevations.”
My irritation began to grow. Who was this stranger forcing me to listen to her ceiling decor woes on a fine spring day?
The little boy sobbed into his mother's lap. She patted him absently on the head, continuing her tirade. “And I don't want to hear the words ‘restocking fee' from you again. How do I know if I'll like them until they're actually hanging in the room?”
My blood pressure surged in sympathy with the person on the other end of the call. The playground always brought out my inner sociopath. We came here because Wylie liked it. But I preferred the open spaces of Central Park, with fewer people and less drama.
But, as they say, it takes a village. So I scanned the concrete around my bench, my gaze landing on another stick. Perhaps it would be just as useful in the sandbox. I picked it up and offered it to the fair-haired toddler, who was watching me. “Here you go, honey. Try this one.”
He slid off his mother's lap and came over for it, taking it carefully out of my hand, as if it might be some kind of trick. Then he retreated to the spot next to Wylie. The two of them dug side by side, occasionally flashing mistrustful glances at each other.
The other mom finally snapped her phone shut, the plastic clacking together with indignation. She regarded her child, and then her face filled with revulsion. “Eew! Georgie! Don't touch the stick! That's
dirty
.” She leapt up, rummaged through the diaper bag on the back of her stroller, and reemerged with a portable box of baby wipes. She extracted one and attacked her child's pale fingers with it. The stick I'd given him went flying from his grasp, and Wylie snatched it up without even breaking the rhythm of his digging.
Georgie began to whimper, while my uncharitable thoughts multiplied. That's it, lady. Teach your child that the natural world is icky. Did this woman understand that her food
grew
in the dirt?
I checked my watch. It was going on eleven thirty. I'd taken the morning off from work to hang out with Wylie. We'd made four-grain pancakes together, and I'd even let him spoon batter onto the griddle. We'd had a blast. In spite of my major cleanup afterward, I could still detect a tinge of maple scent from somewhere on my person.
But now it was time for Bonnie to meet us; I was due at work. Now that Marta had recovered from her lumpectomy last month, I was expected to travel again. Today I'd roll my little suitcase toward the office, in preparation for a dinner tonight in Pittsburgh with a grocery chain executive. And that wasn't as bad as it sounded. I'd been managing to keep the travel below a reasonable limit. And I'd figured out how to steal back the time during the workweek by taking the odd morning or afternoon off. The change in routine was an unexpected pleasure.
At GPG, I wasn't a courageous entrepreneur anymore. But I was certainly less stressed out. I didn't wake up in the night worrying about money. And now—just three months after the acquisition went through—muffets were stocked in six hundred grocery stores. GPG's marketing prowess had proven as impressive as they'd promised. Next year we were aiming for a breathtaking six thousand stores.
Sure, there were new tensions. Sometimes I had to claw back some essential but expensive product feature from the bottom-line-driven culture. But things in corporate land weren't as bad as I'd feared. Though I wouldn't say it out loud, I was actually relieved not to make every single decision anymore.
It was getting late. “Wylie? If we get that sand off of you, I'll let you call daddy with my phone.”
He looked up quickly. I think he'd forgotten I was even here. “Otay,” he said. He staggered toward me like a drunk at the beach, grains of sand pouring from the shoelace holes on his sneakers. I would have to practically shake him upside down to get it all off.
I pulled him onto my lap and turned down the cuffs of his jeans. I slapped at them to get the sand out.
“Call Daddy now?”
“Just a second, honey.” I strained to reach to the ends of his suddenly long legs, pulling off his sneakers and clapping them together. I'd forgotten how much sand the kids were capable of dragging into the apartment in nice weather. It was like living at the beach, but without the view.

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