“Here, come try this,” she said, leading me into the kitchen. The appliances there were of the mammoth stainless steel variety that one did not yet see in Dellacrosse except in the back rooms of feed stores and supermarkets. The cold gray metal of the stove and refrigerator I knew was supposed to be chic, but I preferred the old avocado green of home (not yet a song). On the gleaming stove was a skillet of a paler metal, like white gold. In it were some silvered leaves. She picked one out with her fingers and presented it. I placed it in my mouth, where it seemed to melt slightly and then not, hanging on with a woody toughness. The flavors were a mix of candy store and forest.
“What is it?” I asked, still chewing.
“Caramelized sage.” She looked at me hopefully.
“Awesome,” I said, and meant the word in its every meaning.
Sarah beamed. “There’s a direct path between earth and heaven, and that is caramel,” she said. “Add a few grains of hand-raked Norman sea salt — and voilà!”
So this is what Americans were busying themselves with in Normandy now that it had been liberated from the Nazis: hand-raking the sea salt. Soldiers’ tears shipped thousands of miles and sprinkled on a fried leaf. Look D-Day in the eye and tell it that!
“Delicious. Am I the first customer?”
“You are,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind?—”
“Oops — and I forgot about these.” She opened the oven and with a terry-cloth potholder took out a couple of picture books. “These are from the library. I baked them to get rid of the germs. I always do that with library books. I’m told you can microwave the germs out, but I don’t completely trust that.”
I looked at the titles: Lentil and Make Way for Ducklings.
“I love these books … these were my favorites growing up. When I opened my first restaurant in Boston I called it Make Way for Duckling.” Here she shrugged. “It was not a success,” she said ruefully.
“Perhaps you should have gone with Lentil,” I suggested.
She smiled. “Actually, I did. I tried that one next.”
“Oh,” I said, a little startled. “Well, how about Blueberries for Sal?”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
“Or, well, maybe just McCloskey’s.”
“That one I managed to avoid. But just barely.”
“Well, at least you steered clear of The Cat in the Hat.”
“Emmie is sleeping,” Sarah interrupted in a hushed way. “The nursery’s on the third floor — former attic, but you should be able to hear her when she cries. The acoustics are such that sound carries up and down the stairs as well as through the laundry chute. Unless the doorbell woke her, she’ll be up in an hour, I’m sure. She’s way too old for a morning nap, but last night was not so good, so I’m letting her sleep.” I tried not to take personally what I felt was the slight reprimand of “unless the doorbell woke her.” “Perhaps I should get one of those signs that say NIGHT WORKER, DAY SLEEPER,” she said, smiling. “Also, I’m going to give you a key. You should feel free just to come in. In fact?” And here she walked briskly across the room and opened a drawer full of junk — extension cords, pliers, batteries, appliance warranties — and fished out a key, which she handed me. “This will get you through the front door, darlin’,” she said in some sort of put-on voice, perhaps a line from a movie I’d never seen. That it was accompanied by a wink was intended to help me understand, though it didn’t.
She put on not her shearling coat, and not her peacoat, but some long wool jacket, with the fuzzy, tight black-and-white tweed of television static. She lassoed a cashmere scarf into a coil around her neck. “Off to the Mill!” she said. “I’m afraid it’s falling apart. Two platings and one small fire — just last night.” She smiled grimly. The spell cast by caramelized sage and its stairway to heaven was now gone.
“What’s a plating?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s like an ancient Scots-Irish temper tantrum. One of the cooks throws the other cook’s plate onto the floor. You know, my father was Jewish, so I’m half Jewish—”
“So am I!” I burst forth, as if we were random transplants from the farthest reaches of Sri Lanka. I’d never met anyone half Jewish before, and for some reason it excited me: a peculiar but benign hybrid is what I felt like, and it seemed fantastic to know of someone else freakishly, well, neutered in exactly this same way.
“Really,” she said, unimpressed. Perhaps she’d known a thousand half-Jews. “Maybe that’s why I took to you.” She smiled one of those flashed-on-flashed-off smiles. “But it’s my impression that Jews don’t act this way. Jews don’t plate. They’re above these particular things. And so they succeed.” She scratched her neck. “But my mother was a Christian and so I was raised a Christian. My whole life, as a result? I’ve been around losers. ‘Let the losers come unto me,’ said Jesus. And they came. The worst are Protestants who behave like Catholics and the best are Catholics who behave like Protestants.”
These words stunned me. “Actually, Jesus said, ‘Let the children come unto me,’ ” I said. I was surprised at my own feelings. I was surprised to hear myself say this. I had just a split second ago been so happy to be part Jewish. Whence the Christian pedantry? I was perhaps a little fresh from Christmas.
“Yes, well, whatever. The children didn’t come unto me.” She paused, collecting herself. There was a kind of jolly bristle in the air.
“Except the one upstairs,” I reminded her, and tried to give her a forced but hopeful smile.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said, adding, “I’ve left all the instructions on the counter. And you’ll need to be watchful with that baby gate upstairs. I don’t want her tumbling down. Or you tumbling up!” Then she paused. We stand there blank as walls. “Babygate! Now there’s a scandal. You’re so young, I’ll bet you don’t even know how the word gate came to mean disgrace.”
“Watergate,” I said, though I wasn’t positive.
“Well, that’s right! Though that was well before you were born.”
“A lot of interesting things were.”
“Yes. Well. Oh! Besides the plating we did have one good thing last night: a winter minestrone made with heirloom beans and your father’s fingerlings. A big hit.”
I smiled agreeably, but I couldn’t imagine those potatoes sitting in soup. As if she could read my mind, Sarah said, “We sliced them. Right at their bumpy little knuckles.”
It was a brutal thing, food.
“Everyone loved it. Oh, before I forget,” she added. “There’s ipecac in the cupboard next to the sink. I’m not even sure how you use it — it’s for situations where poison is swallowed. A woman down the street said, ‘You’re adopting?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, what do I need?’ And she said, ‘Ipecac.’ And I said, ‘That’s it?’ and she said, ‘That’s all I know.’ So now that’s all I know.” Here Sarah looked at me mischievously, her look a complicated room one might wander through, exploring for quite some time if there were any time. “If anything goes wrong, whatever the hell you do, don’t phone me. I’ve left a number for emergencies. It’s 911.” She smiled.
“I’ll dial the paramedics directly,” I said, smiling in return.
“Thatta girl. Sorry I have to rush. They are burning the herbal holiday centerpieces as I speak and smoking fish over them.” She hurried out the back door.