start preparing for the departure of the boyfriend, as well.
When I had my final reading for my thesis, she knew well, and I knew that she knew, that my own move back to New York was not far behind. “And the lovebird? Is she going, too?” she asked, referring to my Michigan girlfriend.
“So it appears,” I said. “She’s packing her boxes. But I’m going to have to teach her how to drive faster and to give people the finger or she’ll be eaten alive.”
Misty chuckled.
“Well, I guess I’m going to have to come visit.”
Once during that miserable school year with our mother in Vermont, my seventh grade class took a school trip to New York City and visited the famous sculptor Claes Oldenburg’s studio in Soho. When we entered, there was a large white horizontal plank in the center of the room. And he had put a peephole in the center—exactly like the fish-eye peephole in every New York City apartment door. When you bent over and peered through it, you saw the back of your own head where you would have expected to have seen your own feet. It was so disorienting that it actually took several moments for you to understand what you were seeing. Some people took a long time figuring out what they were looking at. It’s not as assured and graceful as you might think to recognize the back of your own head when you see it. Especially when it is not where you expect to find it.
I had been staring right at Misty across that prep table and didn’t even recognize her for what she would come to be. It took me a long time to figure out what this woman in a dirty T-shirt grilling chicken breasts was teaching me. Or to even admit that I had learned something from her. One does not fend entirely for herself starting at puberty, and then gladly and easily turn around and credit just anyone who happens to come along later in life with having helped out. These kinds of admissions are careful. Gradual. Delayed. To call Misty my mentor isn’t accurate. I suspect it makes us both kind of uncomfortable—the implied intimacy of it for her and the fealty of it for me—and yet, if you squint with one eye, and look through that peephole, that is what she, for a certain important period, became.
8
I WAS NOT LOOKING TO OPEN A RESTAURANT. THAT WAS NEVER ON MY mind.
I was just dashing out to park the car one spring morning, when I ran into my neighbor Eric, a guy I knew only peripherally from years of living on the same block. I didn’t even know his last name, but we often saw each other during that hectic morning ritual of alternate side parking that New Yorkers, or at least East Villagers, seem to barely accomplish in time to beat the meter maid. It’s a twice a week early morning ritual, Mondays and Thursdays or Tuesdays and Fridays, depending on which side of the street you’re on, in which everyone on the block with a car comes rushing out of their building to move their machines, still wearing their pajamas and with pillow creases still marking their faces. Eric was sitting on the stoop in front of a long-shuttered restaurant space mid-block, and as I zoomed by in my sweatpants and hastily slipped-on clogs, we waved. He said, “You still cooking?”
I was, technically. I had taken an interim chef job at one of those huge West Side Highway catering companies where I had formerly been a freelancer while they performed a thorough talent search to find their real next chef. I was just a three-month placeholder, during the dead season, which is why I felt fine taking the job. I reasoned that it was a moderate way for me to make some money while I continued to write and to resolve my last lingering uncertainties about my place in a kitchen.
“I am, sort of,” I said.
“Wanna take a look at this space?”
I was off that day, with big plans to sit on my couch procrastinating the writing of my novel-in-progress.
“Sure. I’ll take a look. Why not.”
There was a faded yellow typewritten letter in the window from the former tenant—a French guy who had run a bistro that thrived for a brief but bright couple of years—advising customers that the restaurant would just be closing for a two-week vacation and renovation. They looked forward to seeing you soon!