That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

“I want to hear more about what you do,” Diana said. “How’d you get to be a chef?”

“Oh, I’m not a chef. I haven’t had professional training. I’m just your basic home cook.” A home cook with pretensions, as she’d once overheard Hal describe her, and when she’d told him how that made her feel, how diminished and belittled she’d felt, he’d looked puzzled before he’d said, You’re right, Daze. I should have said ambitions, and not pretensions. She’d accepted his apology, but felt like the incident had given her a window into Hal’s mind. She’d seen his true feelings, and they were not flattering.

“I always loved cooking. And my mom didn’t.” Daisy felt a pang, remembering her mother’s gardens. “She liked growing food, but she really didn’t like to cook it. And I have two brothers who are twelve and thirteen years older than I am. I think that, after feeding two teenage boys, my mom would’ve been happy if she’d never had to see the inside of the kitchen again. And then my father died when I was fourteen.”

“Wow. I’m sorry,” Diana murmured.

“Yeah. It knocked my mom for a loop. She wasn’t really interested in cooking.” Or in anything, for a while, Daisy thought. One of her dad’s former business partners, one of the men who’d bought out her father’s shares in the video rental stores, had helped her mother find a job, doing the books for a car dealership. Her poor mom, who’d once worn a diamond tennis bracelet and designer gowns, reduced to working nine to five, under harsh fluorescent lights, dealing with their former neighbors who’d come to get their BMWs and Jaguars serviced.

Daisy made herself look cheerful. “I used to bake with my dad, and my grandma. So it wasn’t a big step to take over the meals, too.” Her mother would give her grocery money at the beginning of the week, and Daisy would shop after school, stopping at the Key Food that was on her way home. At night, Judy would sit on the couch, drained from her day at work, and Daisy would bustle around behind her, walking the circuit from the refrigerator to the counter to the stove, trying to cook something—anything—that would coax her mother to the table. Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she’d roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she’d spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She’d stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father’s absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths.

“After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do…”

She tried to explain it—how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same steps that her mother’s mother’s mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven’s heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

“Do you like to cook?” she asked Diana, who looked rueful as she shook her head. “Too much travel, and too many business dinners. I can make tuna-noodle casserole and heat frozen dinners. That’s about it. What about your husband and your daughter?” Diana asked. “Do they like to cook? Or do they even bother when they’ve got a pro in the house?”

Flattered, Daisy said, “Hal can do the basics. Beatrice isn’t really interested in learning.” She felt her smile fade as she considered Beatrice’s and Hal’s indifference to her life’s work. Her husband would eat pretty much anything, with the same degree of enthusiasm. “Tastes great, dear,” he would tell her, whether she’d served him salmon en papillote or beef Wellington, with mushroom duxelle and puff pastry made from scratch, or a hoagie she’d picked up at Wawa. Meanwhile, Beatrice’s favorite food these days was cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. And even the most perfect, most lovingly prepared cucumber sandwich was still, at the end of the day, cucumbers, butter, and bread. Worse, she suspected that Beatrice thought that cooking, cleaning, homemaking, all of what used to be called the domestic arts, were women’s work. A yoke that Daisy wore, of her own choosing, boundaries past which she did not stray; all of it part of a world that Beatrice and her generation had evolved beyond.

Diana seemed to sense her discomfort, and deftly changed the subject. “How did you start giving lessons?”

“Ah,” said Daisy. She’d expected the question. Most of her clients would ask—hey, how’d you get into doing this?—so by now she had a story as polished as a silver serving piece. “My sophomore year of college, I had three roommates. We had this tiny little shoebox of an apartment. One night, I made chicken marsala