Off the Menu Read online

  “This is very exciting,” Bennie says when I call her to share the latest on the RJ front. “You are getting your birthday wish, I can feel it.”

  “We’ll see. That was a tall-order wish.” Last year, when I turned thirty-nine, I looked at the universe and essentially had a heart-to-heart. I said I was grateful for the blessings in my life of good friends, and loving family, and a mostly great if insane job, and my health, and Dumpling, and a pretty good sex life. And I said that I did have faith that “the guy” was coming, and that I would not spend my life without a real partner. But, if the universe wasn’t too enormously busy, might it be possible for whoever he was to hurry up a bit, because I did not relish the idea of waking up on my fortieth birthday alone.

  “That was not a tall order. That was a perfectly reasonable wish. You are entitled to a real guy, and you are entitled to want him to show up in time to usher in a new decade. And who knows, this might be him!”

  “This might be a married guy looking to play around. Or one of the endless ‘love to e-mail doesn’t ever pull the trigger on a date’ guys that linger around dating sites. Or we’ll meet and I won’t be attracted to him. Or he won’t be attracted to me. Or we’ll both be attracted and then the sex will be bad …”

  “Stop.”

  “What.”

  Bennie sighs. “Just stop. Why is it so hard to believe that he might just be a great guy who seems to already sense that you are a great girl, and you will meet and be great together?”

  “When does that happen?” I laugh. My actual dating life over the years hasn’t been that much of an improvement on my online theoretical dating life, and the older I get, the less patient I get and the more jaded and cynical.

  Bennie chuckles. “Okay, you’re right. He is a fundamentalist Mormon who wants you for his seventh wife, and will expect you to breed at least eleven children and be in charge of hand washing all your sister wives’ sacred undergarments.”

  We both giggle. “Okay, okay. Maybe he will be totally normal and he and I will have a very pleasant first date and take it from there.” I say this, but deep down I’m thinking it is much likelier that I am headed for the sequel to Big Love, A Jewess in Juniper Creek.

  “Much better. Now, more important, is my room available the weekend after New Year’s?”

  Bennie always stays with me when she comes to town. “Your room is available whenever you would like to come inhabit it. Did Maria summon?”

  “Yep. She wants to totally redo the workout room now that she has dropped the strength training and treadmill in favor of pilates, yoga, and the elliptical. So we’re shifting from bad-ass gym chic to soothing and spalike.”

  “Wonderful! How long will you be here?”

  “Probably three or four days.”

  “Can I throw a party? Everyone who has met you wants to see you again, and everyone who hasn’t, wants to.”

  “Of course! Sounds wonderful. We’ll make plans as we get closer. Hold on. Driver, please take a left on Fourteenth Street. Yes. Just pull up here on the left. Alana … got to go, love you! Call you later!”

  Bennie always calls me from taxis between appointments, or late at night. Which is perfect for me, since the taxi calls are quick catch-ups, and the late nights can be really good chin wags. Dumpling rises from his fabulous little teak and leather bed that Bennie designed and built for him, stretches strangely long for such a small, squat dog, and comes over to hop up on the couch next to me. I rub him under the chin, or rather chins, one of his favorite things, and take a small treat from the bowl on the windowsill behind me.

  “Who’s my good boy?” Dumpling barks. I give him the treat, which he wolfs down and then he snuggles against me, making a strange guttural noise. In the months he spent at PAWS before I adopted him, he got very close to some of the cats, who apparently made a big impression on him. When he is very happy, he makes a noise that almost sounds like choking, his way of trying to purr.

  “Should we go visit Maria?” She has invited me over for brunch, says she has something she needs my help with, and she requested that I bring Dumpling with me to have a playdate with her two brindled French bulldogs, Abrazos y Besos—Hugs and Kisses. Maria’s signature sign-off at the end of her show. The three of them are BFF, and hilarious to watch when they visit. Just hearing Maria’s name makes Dumpling jump off the couch and spin in a circle. “Okay, okay, let’s go!”

  Dumpling goes over to the door and pulls off the leash I keep hung over the knob. He does prefer to walk himself. I grab my bag and keys and we head out.

  Maria greets us at the door and grabs me in her expansive embrace. “Mi amorrrrrr! I am so ’appy you arrrrrrre herrrrrre.”

  Dumpling tears into the living room like a (fruit) bat out of hell, where Abrazos and Besos tackle him from two sides like a couple of tiny linebackers. The three of them tangle into a pile of loving play, until Maria comes in and says firmly, “Perros. Silencio.” The three dogs immediately stop what they are doing, and sit in a straight line, Dumpling flanked by Maria’s dogs, all three of them with their heads tilted to the left waiting for further instruction. It never ceases to be hilarious to see them together, Dumpling’s head way too small for his body, and Maria’s dogs with their heads way too big for theirs. They look like seconds from the dog-head factory.

  “Gigi?” Maria calls, and in two seconds her personal assistant materializes in the entryway. “Can you please take these thrrrrrree ninos to the dog park for an hour so we can ’ave some peace?”

  “Of course. Hello, Alana, how are you?” Gigi has been with Maria for more than a decade, a quiet girl from downstate who landed an internship at the show while still a student at Columbia College, and turned out to be the perfect replacement for Maria’s first assistant, who got engaged, married, and pregnant with twins in quick succession, leaving Maria for a life of diapers and bottles. Gigi is amazing, and truly keeps Maria on schedule and organized. She leans down and asks the dogs very seriously, “Should we go to the park?” The three of them hear the word park and go nuts. “Well, then, troops, let’s go!” and the four of them head for the door. I love Gigi.

  “You arrrrre ’ongry, sí? Comer?” Maria reaches for my hand, and we head for the kitchen.

  Laid out on the rustic farm table that sits to the side of Maria’s enormous kitchen island is a lovely spread of fresh-looking salads. Wheat-berry salad, what looks like a Greek salad, asparagus, a platter of beautifully arranged fruit, and some cooked tuna steaks. “This looks amazing!” I’ve been mired in fall comfort foods for work, all braised and hearty, and it is very exciting to see such fresh and light fare for a change.

  “My Melanie, she is a mirrrrracle.”

  Melanie is a local chef who runs healthy gourmet take-out restaurants and a food delivery service, and it is her light and delicious food that has helped Maria lose weight and get healthier. They met when Maria did a segment on midlife career changes. Melanie used to be a lawyer before she left to go to culinary school, and then opened her first place in Lincoln Square. Since then she has opened three other locations, one near me in Logan Square, one in the Gold Coast and one in Hyde Park. I often stop by on my way home from work to pick something up if I am too tired or lazy to cook for myself. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, as they say, and no one eats more takeout than chefs. When Maria and I parted company, she went through an endless series of diets with prepackaged food. Nutrisystem, Seattle Sutton’s, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, The Zone … She tried it all. She’d lose ten pounds and gain six. She hated the food with a passion. Up and down, forward and backward, minimal successes and maximal annoyance.

  After the career-change show aired, she called Melanie, who worked with Maria’s doctors and nutritionist to come up with a food plan, and Mel began both delivering meals and occasionally catering Maria’s events, ensuring that Maria could continue to entertain without derailing her program. And for the first time, Maria began to have serious sustained success, because first and fore
most, the food is delicious. Appropriately portioned, restricted in all the ways Maria needs it to be restricted, but very, very tasty. And they have become good friends and colleagues with a common cause. Melanie and Maria have launched a program in five of the local charter elementary schools in some of the food desert neighborhoods, to support healthy options in the school cafeterias and nutrition education as part of the science curriculum. Maria is pushing the Chicago Public School system to adopt the program for all of the elementary schools in the city, which is a long and difficult process, but I don’t doubt that she will eventually succeed.

  “It all looks amazing.” We fill our plates with small portions of all the dishes, and sit at the other end of the table to eat.

  “’Ow is la familia?” Maria asks, picking up a spear of asparagus in her fingers and munching on the tip.

  “La familia y un poco loco en la cabeza, but very good. Mama wants to know if you are coming for Thanksgiving this year?”

  “Of courrrrse! And my doctorrrrr says I can have little bit of everrrrrything, but no seconds.” She says this both as a way of guaranteeing her own smart eating, since once she has told me what the doctor said she can’t cheat and pretend otherwise, and as a way of knowing that I will warn my mother about not pressing her to eat more food. My mother, who has stood in line for two hours for a loaf of bread and one orange, thinks that nothing is more satisfying than filling people to eight times human capacity with rich food. Hence the size of my ass.

  “Fantastic! Everyone will be very excited.” This is exuberantly true. Maria is just herself, all day every day. She doesn’t have a “television persona.” All that warmth and wit and nurturing spirit that make her fans so rabid is genuine. Which is why the more famous she gets, the more secluded she becomes. Because she is the kind of person who would never deny someone access or reject someone reaching out to her, being in public can be exhausting for her. I know that famous people choose that fame, and so does Maria—she is not one of those celebs who bemoans the fact that she can’t go out in public without being recognized. She is resigned to the fact that in order to do what she feels is her calling, she has to give up some of the things she used to love, like shopping and eating out. I’ve seen her spend more than six hours in a bookstore after a reading, signing copies of her memoir, taking pictures with everyone who asks, kissing babies and soothing the people who become so overwhelmed by her electric presence that they break down in tears. She would never dream of leaving unless every person there has what they came to get, regardless of how exhausting it is or how much time it takes.

  When she comes to Thanksgiving, which she has now done about eight or nine times in the years we have known each other, she makes special time with everyone. She admires my dad’s antique woodworking tools and reminds him how many compliments she gets on her custom closet, which Bennie designed and my dad built for her. She praises my mom’s cooking, telling her that it is no wonder I am such a good chef. She consistently refers people to Sasha’s law firm, Alexei’s accounting office, and Natalia’s chiropractic service. She actually wants to hear about all six of my nephews’ sporting events and science fairs and my two nieces’ recitals, math competitions, and spelling bees. She’s a mean hand at Wii bowling, which the kids love, and loves football, which wins points with the rest of us. She brings stacks of signed books from famous authors for my sister and sisters-in-law to take to their book clubs, and CDs and DVDs for the kids, and sports memorabilia for the guys. She is like Santa Claus and a fairy godmother and your favorite aunt all rolled into one.

  “Good. You let me know what I can bring. In the meantime, we ’ave a new prrrroject I need your ’elp with.”

  I finish my bite of tuna. “Of course, what is it and how can I be of assistance?”

  “You know the school prrrroject, it goes verrrry well, sí?”

  “Of course. You must be so proud. I think it is fantastic.”

  “Sí. Of courrrrse. Verrry ’appy. So good for the little ones. But the teenagerrrrs. We ’ave nothing for them.”

  I know this has bothered Maria for a while, the fact that all the programs are limited to younger kids, and not available in high schools. But the initial research indicated that teenagers would simply opt out of any cafeteria food that they didn’t want, especially since most of Chicago’s public high schools are open-campus for lunch and surrounded by fast-food joints. Home Ec hasn’t been taught in Chicago since the late 1960s, and the standard science curriculum just doesn’t have room in it to do more than touch briefly on nutrition. They try to sneak it into PE a bit, but never very successfully. And PE is tricky because any student participating in an active extracurricular like a sports team or marching band gets PE credit and doesn’t have to attend the class.

  “Well, if you can continue to get your program out there with the grammar school kids, they will eventually bring that knowledge with them into high school.”

  “Trrrrrue. We think this also. But we do still want to do something for high schools. So we think, what about an after-school program, like an internship or job? They learn cooking, with nutrition and food safety, and maybe the best ones get scholarships to culinary school?”

  I think about this for a moment. “It seems amazing. Not every kid is cut out for academic colleges, but there are many jobs to be had in the food-service industry, especially in a city like ours with so many hotels and restaurants and catering companies and even colleges and universities. And there aren’t that many scholarships available for culinary school.”

  “This is what we arrrrre thinking. We ’ave permission from Clemente High School to do a pilot prrrrogram, eight students, all seniors, one semesterrrr. Once a week cooking class after school, with a full week during spring break for intensive work. The Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago, Washburne, and Kendall colleges have all agreed to save two places in their fall class for students, so we can give six scholarships.”

  “Maria, that is fantastic. Do you want me to ask Le Cordon Bleu if they would save two places there as well?”

  “That would be wonderrrrful. That way we know that we can offer scholarships to all participants, if they qualify. And I want you to be on the advisorrrry committee.”

  I think about this for a moment. “How much of a commitment is that, time-wise?”

  “Does it matter? This is rrrrright up your alley. It won’t be too much.” This is not a question or a request. This is a mandate. And Maria has asked very little of me over the years, so there is no way I would ever deny her.

  “Of course I’m in. I’d be delighted.”

  “Good. I will send you the inforrrrmation for the meeting next week. Now. Enough business. ’Ow is your love life? Still with the Brrrruce?”

  I love that Maria calls him the Bruce. Like Robert the Bruce. “Yes, I am still with Bruce, such as it is. He is coming in next week for a couple of days while we are shooting.”

  “And anyone that is not the Brrrruce?”

  I hesitate. She and Bennie are close, but I know Bennie doesn’t share confidences. Then again, I didn’t say that my correspondence with RJ was a secret. I have to err on the side of honesty, because if Bennie did mention something and I hide it, Maria will be hurt.

  “I have someone else that I am e-mailing with, but it is very new and we haven’t even spoken on the phone yet, so I am not really thinking anything much there yet.”

  “But you like him?”

  I think about this. “I like the very little I know about him so far, and the way he expresses himself. We seem on the surface to have a reasonable amount in common. But until it is more than just a few words exchanged on the computer, I can’t really say if I like him or not.”

  “Good. You like him.” Another mandate.

  “I suppose I am hopeful in the liking him direction.”

  “Excellent, mi amorrrr, excellent. You know I never really like this thing with the Brrrruce. Sex is fine, but you need boyfrrrrriend. And good sex makes you laz
y.”

  “I know you think that. Bennie says the same thing. I prefer to think that good sex makes me smart and clearheaded to make decisions about who I date and why. If I am being taken care of in that way, I never will rush a new relationship or try to make someone the right someone just because I want sex. I can take the time to get to know someone, and trust them, and then decide if they are the right person for me to be with.” It is my standard response for the handful of people who know about my current arrangement. I try to ignore that it sounds a little bit like a justification.

  “Hmm.” Maria looks at me pointedly. “And exactly ’ow many men have you taken the time to get to know while you sleep with the Brrrruce?”

  Gulp. “Um, none really, but …”

  Maria puts up her hand, one finger pointing in the air. “No ‘but.’ You ’ave no buts to give. You arrrrre busy with work, spend all your time with friends and family at people’s ’ouses, you arrrrre cooking for Patrick at all hourrrrrs of the night, and you have sex with the Brrrruce. No dating. No new men. No going out to meet people or have blind dates. I am glad you meet this man online. Do not let the Brrrruce distrrrract you.”

  I laugh. She is right, of course, as always. “I promise, I won’t let Bruce distract me.”

  “Or Patrick.”

  “Patrick is not a distraction.”

  “He crosses lines.” Maria is as leery of Patrick as my dad, but for different reasons.

  “He is fine. He is the same as he ever was.”

  “Ay, this is what I am afrrrraid of!” Maria spears a grape tomato and piece of feta with purpose, and pops them in her mouth, wagging her fork at me.

  I suppose I should probably mention that I did actually once sleep with Patrick, much to my embarrassment, and it is essential to my whole existence that we both pretend he doesn’t remember it.