Three women, one completely uninterested in cooking, another mistress of her domain, the last commandingly skilled. Three women who understood food as the measure of her power. Three women who took a young girl in hand.
Mrs. Coogan danced barefoot from counter to stove, a martini glass in a corner and the living room stereo cranked up louder than what might have been deemed permissible in the other little row houses, my family’s included. Everything about her seemed lush—her thick-waisted body, her dark curls, her sweet high voice that always sounded on the verge of laughter. She was an outliner in our modest neighborhood, her house at the top of the hill filled with books and rumpled pillowed furniture, the beds covered with plumb feathered quilts that only needed to be shaken high in the air to neatly disguise disheveled sheets.
Mrs. Coogan laid a knife on the counter before me, her five-year-old helper in fixing a paella for a party that night. It was the only recipe she knew by heart, the one she could cook and expand to feed as many guests as would show up, especially with all the cocktails her husband mixed. She let me chop onions and green peppers, too, then moved the step-stool I stood on over to the stove to help her shred bits of cooked chicken into a bowl. At some point when more exacting cooks would have checked on the rice, the music revved up and she swung me off the stool and across the kitchen floor in an all-the-way-to-the ground and up-again hedonist twist.
“Patty, sweet puss,” she exclaimed, “go faster!”
Helen never told me her last name and I never asked. She was the head waitress in a pseudo-French restaurant in Center City for at least fifteen years, ever since her husband died and left her childless. She hated him for both. Her station was the lucrative bar section, eight tables usually occupied by insurance executives whose lunch leaned toward alcohol rather than the menu. Helen ruled in the fashion of a mother superior, reenforced with a severe black, knee covering uniform accented with a gold cross and accompanied by a clipped Irish brogue. I was 18, kicked out of my first college and in need of money to get the hell out of Philadelphia. My previous experience as a diner waitress failed to equip me for a station that encompassed a third of the main dining room. It didn’t help that my uniform consisted of a tight satin corset cinched by a starched white lace apron that did not cover the short velvet skirt belled out over layers of itchy tulle netting. When I covered for Helen on her days off at the bar, I was required to wear this get-up with heels and put up with pinches.
She was forthright about my shortcomings. For starters, she did not abide that it took two weeks for me to learn how to securely balance a heavy tray on my shoulder. The incident with serving a half a cabbage head covered in French dressing for a heart of palm salad appalled her. She knew I would quit right after I grew acceptable to her.
One day she took me aside and said, “the trouble with you is you don’t know how to make yourself valuable. The sooner you learn to communicate that, the sooner people will respect you and you’ll get what you want.”
A month later, lying in a narrow bed in a rundown apartment in Atlanta, Georgia, and wondering if I had just made the dumbest move ever, I wrote down what Helen said in my notebook. I ripped the page out and taped it on the wall above my typewriter.
Sena dressed all in white: a white kerchief tied over her white hair and another with a jaunty knot around her neck, a white tee-shirt, white pants, white clogs. Immaculate when she arrived in the kitchen, immaculate after cooking lunch in a family-run Italian restaurant in a small Ohio farming town. Sena was in her late sixties, maybe even her early seventies. She ate a whole onion every day to treat her arthritic knees. Still, she never stopped bustling from the moment she began cooking at seven in the morning until she plated the last lunch order after three P.M.
I was married for about two months and pretty sure I was failing at being a wife when I was hired to be the morning waitress. I loved my husband but hated marriage. I felt to my marrow that, having moved to where he worked as a reporter for the county newspaper, I would never fit into his happy life. The recession stripped the area of job openings. The novel I was writing fell apart. I spent long afternoon hours laboring through wedding-present cookbooks to prepare for the role of a content and social wife welcoming her husband and several of his male co-workers home to many drinks and a fine dinner. Being hired at the finest restaurant in town was the last vestige of hope I had for pulling together the pieces of a rattled life.
A side-blowing snowstorm slapped me into my first day at the restaurant. One of the owners was behind the bar pouring shots of whiskey into the coffee mugs of a row of farmers. Sena was alone in the kitchen, simultaneously whipping up their eggs and constructing the daily specials. She seemed to be mid-way through telling a story that I thought I better catch up to because no other instructions were being given. I tried my best while figuring other things to do such as filling ketchup and mustard bottles, checking on silverware, making carafes of coffee. The story sort of came to an end but others continued. About being Sicilian in a white community that would have preferred to have Blacks. About being tricked into marrying the son of a local mobster where armed men stood guard outside the church. About leaving her abusive, cheating husband and hitch-hiking across the country with her two adolescent girls who continued to think of the ordeal as an adventure. About working at a pizzeria in Seattle and eventually saving enough money to buy the business but not enough to afford an apartment: she built a little space for a bed under the counter. About coming back after all this time because the town was her home and one of her daughters was here taking care of her father, now sick with syphilis—not that Sena wished that on him.
It was a year spent listening to Sena’s stories and her teaching me how to poach eggs, arrange the grill by the way the orders would come in, prep the side station to expediate the day’s specials, and not to forget to add a sprinkle of chopped parsley to make the dish more attractive. Chill the metal mixing bowl when making dough. Give guests something to drink as soon as they sit down. Always smile through troubles. Always think you are happy and you may become happy. Get up and go, but remember where your heart remains.
Super duper loved reading this. Thank you.
Powerful piece, Pat.