“Of course, Mrs. Pierce. I’ll be here.” Leon, Jake’s driver, patted the Daily News on the passenger seat beside him.
“Please. Don’t wait for me.” She checked her watch. “Just be back at around one.”
Sympathy tinged Leon’s smile. “I don’t think so. Mr. Pierce would go wild if I just left you here.”
“It’s not like you’re dropping me off to wander in the desert for forty years.” She knew Leon would win, but she still tried to gain her freedom. “I’ve been coming here since I was twenty. I know my way around.”
Again, Leon smiled. “Right,” he said.
Right. Stated in the correct tone, right meant “I hear you, and I am now going to ignore you in the most polite way possible.”
She gave up and opened the door. At least Leon had recently given up that fight. Ever since Ira Henriquez, Mira House’s newly hired director, had noticed Phoebe alight from the car via the chauffeur’s politely offered hand, she had refused Leon’s help. Ira hadn’t said anything, but his eyes had widened at the sight of the limo, and his hello held a laugh. Not that Ira would ever be unkind. He didn’t seem built for anything but menschiness. Every woman at Mira House fell half in love with Ira’s mix of honorable and humorous soon after he took the reins.
Phoebe arrived for Cooking for English at least an hour early so that she could set up the kitchen. She often felt less the teacher than the one learning. Not only were some of the clients older than Phoebe, their offered wisdom went in all directions. She rarely said this aloud, not wanting to sound like a liberal cliché, but for God’s sake, they’d been through far more than she’d ever experience. How could they not be as much teachers as students?
Her teaching assistant, Eva, tall, slender, her dark skin always complemented by lipstick the color of bittersweet, offered only small details, but her parents escaped from Rwanda in 1963, when Eva was only eight years old, during a wave of violence against the Tutsi. They were barred from returning, but Eva had made trips to bring out her family left behind. That alone meant her survival skills surpassed Phoebe’s by light years. She and Eva were slowly building a tentative friendship; that Eva held Phoebe’s former title and job—program assistant—added another layer of connection between them.
Staff and students took turns picking recipes. Today happened to be Phoebe’s week. After a complicated cooking month that included spicy doro wat chicken stew from Ethiopia, peanut rolls from Cameroon, and banh xeo, a sort of Vietnamese pancake, she wanted to lighten up the class with cupcakes. Most of them envisioned her life as a confection anyway: light, sweet, and fluffy, a giddy existence—which in comparison with their lives was more than true. Strawberry shortcake cupcakes seemed the perfect choice.
Flour, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients lined the chrome counter. In the fridge, heavy cream chilled. Baskets of the freshest, largest berries available in Greenwich sat on the cooling board. Eva put out equipment as they readied for the students.
The door squeaked open.
“I’m first, yes?” Adina was always first. Phoebe suspected that she came so early and eagerly to escape her five children.
“First, and a most welcome sight.” Eva’s English—she also spoke French and Kinyarwanda, sounded musically clipped. “Help me put out the mixing bowls, please.”
By the time they had laid out bowls in a line, accommodating seven students plus Phoebe and Eva, the others had arrived.
Linh hesitated in the doorway. She struggled with her husband’s rages, which were followed by his fear of arrest. He prostrated himself before Linh, weeping at his shame at the position and his fear of being arrested, as he begged for her forgiveness, having heard of how the American police could interfere with anything they wished—even the relations between a husband and wife. Linh dreamed of college. She pretended that Cooking for English ran twice as long, giving herself time to study in the library.
“Here,” Zoya, the oldest woman in the class, said when she saw Linh. “Come in, come in. Beat the eggs. Build up those skinny arms.”
Zoya fancied herself third in command after Eva and Phoebe. She barged in each week as though docking in a grand harbor. Russia left her with a hatred of authority, a dismissal of Communism, and fear of starving.
Linh, sylphlike to Zoya’s bulk, grinned with her lips pressed together, hiding her missing tooth. Phoebe tossed in bed some nights, fixated on how to have her father repair Linh’s smile without insulting her or playing favorites. Other nights, she stayed awake wondering why she wasn’t fixing every one of her Cooking for English students. “Give me the money, instead of the synagogue’s building fund,” she should tell Jake, but she knew his answer. Jake’s generosity expected payment, usually in the form of investing the organization’s funds. Without his explicitly demanding this tit for tat, somehow it always evolved once the connection was made.
Linh nodded and took the whisk Zoya held out. Phoebe allowed only basic kitchen implements. She wanted the women to be able to duplicate these recipes at home—though baking cupcakes seemed an odd skill to offer no matter how much English they learned along the way.
“I wanted to beat eggs.” Adina, who faced off with Zoya for the role of Queen of the Stove on a regular basis, crossed her arms over the apron covering her plain brown kurta. “Linh can measure flour.”
“The eggs,” Eva said. “You want to beat the eggs.”
“You can prepare pans,” Zoya said, as though the jobs were hers to extend. Zoya would do well anywhere from prison to the Pentagon. “Or you can whip the cream if you need the work hard.”
“Hard work, not work hard,” Eva corrected.
“I don’t care,” Linh said. “She can do it. Anyplace is a good job.”
Phoebe began to correct Linh’s grammar, but Zoya got her advice in first.
“Don’t let them push you.” Zoya pointed both forefingers at Linh. “Fear is your entire problem. Everyone becomes your boss.”
“Nobody is bossing anyone.” Eva put up her hands and stepped into the cupcake war.
“We’re a team,” Phoebe added.
“Ha. America is all about sharing, right?” Zoya laughed. “Like everyone is kindergarten children.”
“No. Like we in Cooking for English are all in a place where we respect and help each other,” Eva said. “And the proper way to say it is: It’s like everyone is a kindergarten child.”
Zoya and Adina rolled their eyes as the rest of them divided the tasks written on the board.
“Acting like brats never helps.” Eva’s soft voice managed to dominate the room anytime she spoke. Despite being breathtaking enough to model, all Eva desired was educating herself, earning as much as possible, and then someday perhaps returning to Rwanda when peace prevailed.