The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,24
for a little while. Jeff and I need to go talk master bathroom, anyway. We’re going to have to take out the whole third bedroom just to get a decent master suite!” And with another laugh, she was gone.
“It’s a nice house,” Jeff said to Antonia, before he left.
“Yes,” she replied warmly. “It is.”
Antonia stood in the kitchen, trying in her mind to lay the outline of Susan’s vision over the kitchen that existed, but the straight lines kept bumping into the curve of the bay, sharp edges rumpled by the cushion on a window seat, the rounded back of an imaginary chair, warmed and softened by the fireplace that somehow, in every iteration, never seemed to give way to the image that Susan had presented.
In Antonia’s four years in America, in her four years of designing kitchens in eighty-year-old cottages and colonial mansions, contemporary condos and doll-size Tudors, this was the first fireplace she had seen in a kitchen, and she found herself circling it like a child with a dessert she knows is not for her. Antonia had grown up in a stone house, lived in by generations of families whose feet had worn dips into its limestone steps, where the smells of cooking had seeped into the walls like a marinade. It had taken her years to get used to the idea of houses made of wood, and she still found herself pacing the rooms of her rented bungalow when the wind was high and whistling. As she had watched how easily a wall could be taken down to open up a kitchen to a family or dining room, however, she had come to appreciate a certain invitation to creativity inherent in wooden structures; it offset a bit her feeling that nothing she worked on was likely to last.
But here was a fireplace. It reminded Antonia of her grandmother’s kitchen, with its stove at one end and a hearth at the other, the space in the middle long and wide enough to accommodate a wooden table for twelve and couches along the sides of the room. Her grandmother’s cooking area was small—a tiny sink, no dishwasher, a bit of a counter—but out of it came tortellini filled with meat and nutmeg and covered in butter and sage, soft pillows of gnocchi, roasted chickens that sent the smell of lemon and rosemary slipping through the back roads of the small town, bread that gave a visiting grandchild a reason to run to the kitchen on cold mornings and nestle next to the fireplace, a hunk of warm, newly baked breakfast in each hand. How many times had she sat by the fire as a little girl and listened to the sounds of the women at the other end of the kitchen, the rhythmic rap of their knives against the wooden cutting boards, the clatter of spoons in thick ceramic bowls, and always their voices, loving, arguing, exclaiming aloud in laughter or mock horror at some bit of village news. Over the course of the day, the heat from the fireplace would stretch across the kitchen toward the warmth of the stove until the room filled with the smells of wood smoke and meat that had simmered for hours. Even as a little girl, Antonia knew that when the two sides of the kitchen met, it was time for dinner.
Standing in Susan and Jeff’s kitchen, Antonia felt her stomach tighten with homesickness. She hadn’t realized how strong the feeling was, how much she longed for everything this fireplace, this well-worn wooden table meant to her—a life of language rolling off the tongue like a caress, of houses that nourished the heart as well as the eye.
“Is it going to work?” Susan asked, returning to the kitchen, her face lit with plans. “I mean, I know it’s small, but if we do it right, there will be room for both of us to cook, and…”
Jeff looked at Antonia ruefully. “Which means, I suppose, we’d have to learn?”
“Of course,” Susan exclaimed. “I got some great cookbooks at our wedding shower!”
Antonia smiled politely. “I’ll work up some sketches. Shall we meet here again, say in a week or so?”
“That would be fabulous.” Susan was opening cupboards, and turned with a laugh. “Really, this is just awful. I’m so glad you can see what we are looking for.”
“I DON’T KNOW how to do this,” Antonia told her boss in misery.