“You can touch her,” Nieves says, and smooths her shirt down. “Lately everyone does. I think she’s still sleeping right now, though. Or he.”
Felice moves her palm shyly over the rising curve, brings her face close and says, “Hello in there, baby.” There’s a flutter under her hand and she sits up and looks at Nieves, who is laughing. “She heard you,” Nieves says.
“For real? Did she?”
She shrugs. “Sure, I guess. Why not? They’ve got ears and stuff.”
Felice gazes solemnly at her stomach. “Can I hear her?”
“That I don’t know.” She pats her belly again. “Try if you want.”
Felice considers for a moment, then she turns on the bench and lies back, lowering her head to Nieves’s lap. Her ear presses against her stomach, and as she watches the dwindling streaks of clouds she waits. Gradually she makes out small sounds, a distant riverine gurgle. “Oh. Oh my God. Is that her?”
“It’s probably just that I haven’t had breakfast.”
Felice puts her hand on the top arc of belly and presses her ear in close and she’s almost certain now she hears a low, steady murmur. “Hi baby,” she says. “Here I am. It’s Felice.” She seems to hear tiny motes, a far-off pulse like the movements of fish. The clouds unravel over their heads and Felice shades her eyes with one hand. Beyond the sound of the traffic there’s a noise, a rip in the air. Unidentifiable and syncopated, it lifts, voices torn from the high branches. Felice watches as a flock of birds rises over their heads and curls into the white sky. She watches its progress and she holds herself silent and very still, waiting for what will come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For invaluable advice, assistance, and guidance, my deep gratitude to Nanci Lanza, Stephanie Pacheco, Jose Pacheco Silva, Yesenia Balseiro, Bertha Vazquez, Cristina Nosti, Adrienne and Frank Curson, Sara Fain, Ellen Kanner, Mitchell Kaplan, Daniel Kaplan, Barbara Goldman, and Sally Richardson. Special thanks to Alane Salierno Mason, Joy Harris, Sarah Twombly, Denise Scarfi, and Andrea Gollin, who were heroic and steadfast and made this book possible. And thanks most of all to Scott Eason, who read every draft, and thought about, talked about, and paced through this book right beside me.
BIRDS OF PARADISE BY Diana Abu-Jaber
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT A BAKER
By Diana Abu-Jaber
First published in Gilt Taste. Reprinted with permission.
In our family of mostly-women, baking was the feminine form. There was usually something magnificent under the heavy glass cover on the porcelain stand, some pastry displayed like a Tiffany’s necklace. We baked for the sugar, but for more than that: for the communal pleasure of working together, for baking’s equal parts chemistry and alchemy, for the physical beauty of the baked thing.
And yet, even after years of food writing, I’d not once addressed the private, ecstatic rites of baking. I’m not sure why that was, but I suspect I might have dismissed it — as if I’d decided baking wasn’t quite special enough. It had always seemed so familiar and intimate, even in some sense, private — which perhaps made it seem dull.
My grandmother, an early, furious, proto-feminist, held that “women’s work” was lesser stuff, far beneath her daughter and certainly not for her granddaughters. It was important to her, in fact, that we never learn the tasks that she was raised to do, like ironing, sweeping, or typing, that we never be, in any way, associated with such menial labor. Baking, with its quaint sentimental quality, had a special category, however: it was a form of guilty pleasure.
Not despised, but not to be taken seriously. Further, she had given me to understand that even in the professional world, men were cooks, like my father, and women were relegated to the pastry work — a backseat occupation with lower wages and less fanfare — in second place, always trailing the main course.
One day I began writing a novel set in Miami. The main character was a woman named Avis and the crux of this story, as I imagined it, was that her daughter had run away and that it had driven her slightly insane. I felt I understood Avis’s solitude and angst, her struggle to feel like a part of an unwelcoming community. But on reading the early draft, I could see that Avis lacked a sort of direction, intention. This listless character needed some vital spark — the sharp hook on which to hang a novel. I could make her a pastry chef, it occurred to me, but I recoiled from the idea almost immediately.
I was writing about the restaurant world for the Portland Oregonian in the late 90s and early 00s. Every week, restaurants
shimmered in and out of existence like fireflies. During this time, there was an intriguing bit of gossip involving a pastry chef.
Formerly head pastry chef at Alain Ducasse in New York, he’d been lured to Portland to elevate the desserts at one of the city’s best restaurants. His work was reputedly stunning, Babylonian: ziggurats of sugar and cream, temples, pyramids, erupting volcanoes and cooling streams. The paper had asked me to write a profile on him and his work, but when I went to the restaurant, he was already gone. Apparently, this mercurial genius, this Daedelus, had lasted all of six weeks before the head chef had shown him the door.
“It was merely time for a parting of the ways. An artistic difference,” Chef purred in his French accent. “He’s extremely talented and he’d learned all we could teach him.” But when I put down my notebook, Chef slapped the top of his head. “He’s like all pastry-chefs, totally fucking insane! He wants to take over the whole kitchen! He screams at all my line chefs and throws pans at the waiters! He will use only hand-churned butter! He buys maroon saffron threads from Kashmir — for one mousse! And he was ordering gold leaf from Austria to sprinkle over his puddings. Actual gold leaf. Do you know what that costs?”
Ah, but I loved the idea of such egregious behavior in the name of dessert. It seemed wonderful to me that someone would damn practicality, to demand baking be given its due, to assert the sweet could be just as vital as the savory.
The following day, I sought out this gold leaf baker. He’d already taken a job at an expensive “atmospheric” high rise restaurant where the kitchen staff seemed to scuttle around and stare at him from behind corners. All suave, feline charm, he came to my table dressed in his white jacket and baggy pants and tilted his head as if we were on a date. His pastries,
which a series of cowed wait staff ferried out, were architectural
marvels — paved slabs of chocolate and shards of nuts, cakes with doors and hinges: they were indeed glorious.
But was it all a little much? It struck me in the moment as almost egotistical, to spend this much time and effort on dessert, making something too beautiful to eat. I noticed tucked among the gorgeous pastries, a single ripe pomegranate: it was nestled in a bed of green grass made of spun sugar. I was struck by the ingenuity of setting off the pastries with a bit of fruit — a nod to the un-improvable beauty of nature. A spark of modesty that redeemed the chef in my mind. He plucked up the fruit; using a sharp little knife, he cut into it, revealing rows of glistening ruby seeds. I realized it hadn’t torn apart like a pomegranate would but broke into shards: its red sheath was actually a berry-tinted chocolate. While the interior seeds were actual pomegranate seeds, they’d been painstakingly embedded by hand into an inner membrane of white chocolate. I looked into the chef’s hooded black eyes and thought: Hello, Colonel Kurtz.