Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,8

now, but I didn’t think he was done with me. Indeed, when the chauffeur stopped the car and I began to climb out, Si lifted a hand to stop me. “I have the greatest respect for Gourmet.” He gave me a soulful look. “I am determined to make it the finest magazine in its category. I feel certain that you are the one to do it. Please give this your utmost consideration.”

I WATCHED THE LIMO PULL away from the Times, waiting until it was out of sight. Then I pulled my coat around me and headed down the street. I think better when I’m moving.

Despite everything I’d said to Si, I had to admit that it was tempting. I thought back fifteen years, to when the Los Angeles Times asked me to be their restaurant critic. I had resisted then too, unwilling to leave the familiar comfort of Berkeley.

“You must go!” Mary Frances Fisher said when I told her of their offer. I’d become friends with America’s most famous food writer while profiling her for Ms. magazine; we’d bonded over our mutual dislike of honey. Since then I’d gone to lunch at her Sonoma home every few months, thrilled by her attention. “You can’t keep doing the same thing your entire life,” she told me as she ladled out a bowl of split-pea soup liberally laced with sherry. “It’s time you moved on, stopped playing it safe, took a chance. Working at a newspaper will give you some perspective. It’s good for a writer to know that the words she’s so carefully crafting today will be wrapping someone’s fish bones tomorrow.”

My Berkeley friends, however, had other ideas: To them this job meant selling out, and the people who shared my communal household were openly appalled. Even Alice Waters asked incredulously, “Are you really going to go work for corporate America?”

“Of course not,” I said. What had I been thinking? I was a thirty-six-year-old freelance writer, getting by without a proper job or a weekly paycheck. Why would I give that up to go into an office and take orders? It wasn’t me.

“I’m not sure you know who you really are, dear,” Marion Cunningham said gently. I’d met the stunningly beautiful older woman at a party for James Beard (Marion was his West Coast assistant and had recently revised The Fannie Farmer Cookbook), and we’d instantly recognized that there was a bond between us. The next day I told her about the paralyzing panic attacks that kept me off bridges and freeways, and she confessed that agonizing agoraphobia had kept her prisoner in her house for years. She was forty-five before she overcame her phobias, but she’d sailed on into a bright and famous future; her Breakfast Book had been a huge bestseller. “You’re making a mistake,” she insisted. “Los Angeles”—like all older Angelenos, she pronounced the word with a hard “g”—“isn’t a safe little sanctuary like Berkeley, but it’s a real city and I know you will be happy there. Don’t”—she leaned in to emphasize the point—“do what I did. Don’t let your fears keep you from moving forward. It’s such a sad waste.”

Then Cecilia Chiang, who introduced sophisticated Chinese food to an American audience when she opened the Mandarin Restaurant, added her voice to the chorus. Cecilia is a force; even now, at ninety-eight, her energy remains undimmed, but back then she was a whirlwind with very decided opinions. In my early years as a food writer, she took me under her wing and became my Chinese tiger mother. “Of course you will take this job,” she said in her elegant Shanghainese accent. “It is very prestigious. Don’t even think of saying no.”

These three formidable women could not have been more different, and the fact that they were speaking with one voice had a profound influence on me. The combined force of their opinions was too much to resist. I took the job.

I’d never regretted it, but Condé Nast was not the Los Angeles Times. In its heyday the newspaper was known as “the velvet coffin,” a workplace so relaxed that reporters sometimes spent an entire year on a single story. Condé Nast, on the other hand, was a notorious pressure cooker filled with the most aggressive people in the business. Was I ready for that?

It was a cold day, and I huddled into my coat, listening to the voices in my head. Happy to lose myself in the anonymity of New York, I walked for a