"Ruth Reichl - Tender at the Bone V1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reichl Ruth)

The bartender draped half a dozen cherries around the rim of my Shirley Temple and I sipped it slowly, wishing Mrs. Peavey would go back to the bathroom. It had never occurred to me to ask if Mr. Peavey was still alive, or wonder how he had died. But I got no more information that evening.
Mrs. Peavey did not come back the next day. Or the next. For almost a week I came home from school every day, put my key into the lock, and wondered what I would find on the other side of the door. I'd stick my nose in first and sniff hopefully, wishing for the smell of cooking. Instead it was just my increasingly irritable mother with a long list of errands for me to do and lamb chops, again, for dinner,
On the third day I ran to Mrs. Peavey's closet to make sure her dresses were still there. I put my face against the sagging cotton shapes with their pale tiny flowers and inhaled the reassuring smell. Then I went into the bedroom, where my mother was polishing her short nails with blue-red polish, and asked if I could make dinner.
"You?" she asked, waving her hands in the air so her fingernails would dry. "What will you make?"
"Wiener schnitzel," I said boldly. "And green salad. And brownies for dessert,"
My mother looked amused. "Why not?" she said. I held my hand out for the money and she nodded toward her nails and told me to take what I needed from her wallet.
I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and walked up the street to the Daitch Supermarket on University Place. As I walked through the store I experienced a delicious moment of freedom. I felt very grown-up as I wandered the aisles. I strolled past the meat counter and found some pale, pearly scallops of veal, I bought bread
crumbs and a lemon; I was going to impress my father by making his favorite dish.

But walking home, the bag of groceries banging against my leg, I panicked. I had forgotten to ask the butcher to pound the meat, and I didn't know how to do it myself. And how was I going to make the bread crumbs stick? My mother would be no help. I needed Mrs. Peavey.

Amazingly, when I got home, she was there. The air in the apartment was heavy and it crackled as it swirled around my mother and Mrs. Peavey, but I had missed the storm. When I walked into the kitchen Mrs. Peavey lifted the bag of groceries out of my arms and said simply, "What are we going to make for dinner?"

"I'm going out," my mother called from the hall. Mrs. Peavey did not answer. My mother siammed the door.

"Wiener schnitzel," I said.

"Ah," said Mrs. Peavey, "the secret is getting the veal thin and the oil hot. The Viennese are really wonderful cooks." As she moved around the kitchen she hummed a German children's song about a horse and rider.

"Where were you?" I asked. "Why didn't you come back?"

Mrs. Peavey took the big iron skillet out of the cupboard and unwrapped the meat. "Get some waxed paper," she ordered. She tore off a large piece of the paper and laid it on the counter. She put the meat on it and placed another layer of paper on top. "Now watch," she commanded.

She lifted the skillet above her head and brought it crashing down on the meat. The sound reverberated throughout the small kitchen. She picked up the skillet and showed me how thin the meat was. "You have to do it a couple of times to get the meat really, really thin," she said. "That's all there is to it." She lifted the skillet again and brought it down on the paper; the meat had become even thinner.

When all the veal had been pounded, she got a platter and three
large soup dishes out of the cupboard. She filled one dish with flour, one with bread crumbs, and broke an egg into the third. Seasoning each dish with salt and pepper, she dredged the cutlets in the flour and then dipped each one in the beaten egg. She handed me the first cutlet and said, "You do the bread crumbs." I carefully rolled the sticky piece of meat in crumbs and laid it on the platter.
When all the meat had been breaded, Mrs. Peavey put the platter in the refrigerator. "It's much better if you let the meat rest before you cook it," she said, rinsing her hands and patting them on her apron. "Don't forget that. This is your father's favorite dish and somebody in the house should know how to make it properly. Here, I'll write the recipe down for you."
I didn't like the sound of that and I sat down in one of the rickety metal chairs and watched sadly as she wrote.
When she was done, Mrs. Peavey poured me a glass of cranberry juice, filled her silver goblet with ice and water, and sat down at the kitchen table. "I thought I'd have longer to explain," she said at last. "But it's not your mother's fault."
"Explain what?" I asked.
"Why I'm here," she said simply. "Why I'm leaving."
Something inside me had known that she had not come back for good. "Don't leave me," I wanted to say, but I couldn't. Ijust looked at her dumbly. "I can't be a maid," she said. "I just can't. It is time for me to make a change."
"What will you do?" I asked.
She took a deep breath and looked straight at me. "I am going to do what I should have done when Mr. Peavey died. I am going to be a cook."
She looked proud and noble as she said it. I believed that she could. "What about Mr. Holly?" I asked.
"He is not part of my plan," she said softly. "I will have to change other aspects of my life as well."
I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but I pictured Mr. Holly in the permanent midnight of Googie's. Then I pictured Mrs. Peavey in the big tiled kitchen in Baltimore. They did not go together.
"You mean you won't be going to Googie's anymore?" I asked. "I will not," she said. She hugged me. "I've joined an organization that will help me keep my resolution," She sat up straight, as if someone had just told her to pay attention to her posture. She folded her hands on the table.
"Now," she said, "there are three things I want to tell you before I leave. The first is not to let other people tell you how to live your life."
"You mean," I asked, "that you should not have pretended that the cook was doing the cooking?"
"Something like that," she replied. "The second is that you have to look out for yourself." I thought of her three sons in their big limousine.
"And the third?" I asked.
"Don't forget the extra pastry when you make beef Wellington." She reached out and hugged me. The she picked up her silver goblet and clinked it hard against my glass of juice. The sound was pure and lovely.

4 - Mars

Х In 1960 when you flew to France you stopped first in Gander, Newfoundland, and then in Shannon, Ireland. It was a long trip.
To an almost-thirteen-year-old it seemed even longer. We spent Christmas in France that year-the dollar was strong and my mother had found a bargain rate at the Ritz.
My two most vivid memories of the trip involve haute couture and haute cuisine. The clothing connection came through a woman named Ginette Spanier, directrice of Maison Balmain. Mom, in some moods, was the world's friendliest person; she talked to everyone. One night she sat next to Ginette in the Ritz bar and the next thing I knew we were being whisked off to the rue Franчois-Ier. "They're having a sale of the dresses the models wore down the runway," Mom whispered excitedly in the taxi. "They should fit you just perfectly."