Jorg stiffened and his eyes drifted slowly across the room. “Ja…I could do that.”
Within a few minutes he had the machine going and was pushing potatoes through the top, eyes gleaming, laughing and carrying on like he had just struck water. Arlys stood on the sidelines, a carrot in one hand and a swivel peeler in the other, too shocked by the change to speak. In a voice about as joyful as I’d ever heard him, Jorg said, “We got six tubs of hash browns, you guys!” and whacked the walk-in door shut with his heel.
—
There was rarely a moment when I didn’t love that job, when I didn’t leave sweaty, with swirls of pancake batter splattered on my bare arms, totally content. Especially in late August after the tourists had left and my garden at home was finally ripening, all at once. Each day after coming home from work at four o’clock and pumping myself a full quart jar of bedrock-chilled water to drink, I filled the giant enamelware boiling water canner and the big water kettle, then brought them up the hill. My tomatoes were ripening rapid-fire and I was loving canning them, standing in front of my butcher block, leaning hard on one hip, blanching and peeling my heirloom romas. One year I grew San Marzanos, the next Amish Paste, but this year the best yet, Opalka. They grew huge and heavy. Eastern European tomatoes liked our climate. I concentrated on boiling them just enough—not too much, not too little—so that the thin outer epidermis of the tomato peeled off in one great whispery translucent sheet, leaving the smooth, basal tomato sublayer behind. Thus peeled, the tomatoes were comically slippery, almost impossible to hold, and were, I was sure of it, more flavorful than the carelessly blanched.
For weeks during the late-summer harvest, this was my routine. The needs of our place were beautifully predictable. But personally, down in my subconscious, my own needs were starting to fog up. I realized that my inner clock was ticking too slowly; real time was passing me by.
One day at the Schwarzwald I saw my dad’s order on the check wheel—chef salad, no eggs—and put his salad in the window, then padded out to the dining room with a cup of coffee and sat down at his table.
“So what are you doing now?” he asked me, making it sound official.
“I guess I’m having a cup of coffee with you. It’s slow. I can take a break.”
“No.” He leaned forward. “I mean, what are you doing with your life?”
This was the guy who, when pop-quizzed, never knew my college major, which hadn’t ever changed. (It was English.) He’d been coming in for lunch, eating the best chef salad I could make out of the scraps we had in the kitchen, and had never hinted that he expected something else from me. His complete lack of criticism was generally welcome—but his uncanny gift for suspending all judgment about his kids also sometimes left us without much guidance. At this moment, “What are you doing with your life?” was a question I was actually relieved to hear him ask. Out poured my idea, which I’d only just floated with Aaron a few nights before.
“I was kind of thinking of going to cooking school. In New York City. To become a chef.”
To my surprise, not only was my dad fully supportive, he was a cheerleader. “Then do it!” he said, raising a fist in the air. (“Do anything!” was probably more what he meant.)
It took me about three days to convince Aaron to move to New York. Ruralness was a part of his ethic, his story, his belief system. But his friends Rob and Sara and some others from Minneapolis were moving there to make art, and New York was doubtlessly the center of both the art world he needed and the cooking world I needed. The move seemed suddenly obvious.
I found a cooking school in the back of my latest Saveur magazine. It was in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, cost two-thirds less than the famous Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York, and would only take five months of my time. Aaron overcame his reticence by coming up with a plan: his brother, Matt, was a pilot who flew planes carrying checks regularly out of Washington, D.C., and whenever he wanted to get back home Aaron could simply take the train down to D.C. and hop the plane home with Matt. His exit strategy figured out, Aaron agreed: New York City it would be. Our plan was to live there six months of the year and then move back home to Two Inlets in the summers to garden. It would be like moving to Minneapolis for the winter, but just a little farther. Or so we thought.
I flew out, solo, three weeks ahead of our move to find us an apartment. I walked the streets in Brooklyn, idiotically carrying my backpack on my front as had been advised, looking for addresses of apartments I’d found on Craigslist. After seeing a bunch of completely unsuitable dives, I finally handed my money over to a guy who was subletting his one-room studio with a sleeping loft in the on-the-cusp-of-gentrifying neighborhood of Fort Greene. He cautioned me, as he slid my three months’ rent, a thick pile of bills, into his coat pocket, that the landlord didn’t allow sublets. If he saw us, we’d be thrown out on our asses. If I had only known then that he planned to take our monthly rent and not pay the landlord…It was to be a newcomer’s storybook welcome to the intoxicating bedlam that is New York City.
Back at the house in Two Inlets, we got ready to move. We packed up a few things—our clothes, our tools, our freshly harvested wild rice, my canned pickles and tomatoes and preserves—all of which fit into the back of a twelve-foot U-Haul truck, and planned to set out the next day for Brooklyn.
Now that we had a secondhand solar panel from Dave, and the car battery to power it from Bruce, we were inching our way toward modern living out at Hazelbrush. On our last night there, as we walked back from the outhouse, our new solar-powered electric life glared out of the windows. We felt a little embarrassed about it, as if we’d somehow made a devil’s bargain. With the new overhead fixture illuminating the room to the corners, my evening reading lost all of its shadow-weight and felt about sixty percent less compelling. Compared to our formerly oil-lamp-lit house whose blurred edges faded into the black night, whose dim orange windows promised secret historical-society contents, this new brightness shot from the windows up to the house’s roofline so that we could see it for what it really was: a sturdy wooden pole shed dwarfed by swaying trees, with two sharp windows cut for eyes. Before, it had felt so monumental, so towering. Now it looked small, like a house in one of those decorative Christmas villages.
Like it wasn’t even real.
17
POUNDS AND PENNIES