The Cookbook Collector

have Mom’s letter here somewhere….”

Their mother, Gillian, had passed away when Emily was ten and Jess was only five. Fighting breast cancer, suffering from long treatments, alternately hoping and despairing as the disease recurred, Gillian had cast about for ways to look after her daughters when she was gone. She’d then learned that some patients wrote letters to their children for their birthdays. Jess and Emily each had a set of sealed envelopes.

Jess pulled her letter from a stack of notebooks on the floor. “It’s short.” The letters got shorter and shorter. Reading them was hard, like watching their mother run out of air.

“Dear Jessie,” Emily read aloud as she smoothed the creased paper, “I am trying to imagine you as a young lady, when all I see is a five-year-old girl waving her little legs in the air—that’s the sign that you’re tired. I imagine you with your hair untangled. Your sister tried to brush your hair this morning and you wouldn’t let her. I wish you would.” Emily paused a moment, sat up straighter on the bed and continued. “Surely by now you are embarking on a profession. If you have not yet embarked, please do!

“Ahem,” said Emily.

“I have embarked!” Jess protested. “A doctoral program is embarking.”

“She means working.”

“Philosophy is work. And I also have a job.” By this, Jess meant her part-time job at Yorick’s, the rare-book store on Channing where she did her reading in the afternoons.

“I don’t mean a job—” Emily read, and then stopped short. “She knew what you were going to say.”

Jess giggled, because Emily treated the letters like such oracles.

“I don’t mean a job. I am talking about a career, and a vocation. George Eliot wrote ‘that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life’—but that was more than one hundred years ago. I’m hoping that you and your sister will set your sights a little higher.” A little higher, Emily thought, as she placed the letter on the bed, and yet Gillian had been a mother, no more, no less. Would she have done more if she had lived? Much more? Or just a little? Jess was sorting through her mail on the floor. “You aren’t even listening,” Emily accused her.

“Yes, I am. Things are not so ill with you and me.”

“You never take these letters seriously.”

“I do! Of course I do. I’ve read them all—lots of times.”

Emily was shocked. “All of them? Up to the end?”

“Yeah, I read them all at once when I was twelve.”

“You did not!” Emily had always looked forward to her birthday letters and missed them now. Gillian had only written them up to age twenty-five. “That’s just wrong.”

“Why? She never said you have to wait for your birthday every year.”

“But that was the intent!”

Jess considered this. “Maybe. I just opened all of mine at once. Then I got into Dad’s computer and opened the WordPerfect files.”

“Why would you do something like that?” The idea was foreign to Emily. Not only dishonorable, but self- defeating, like peeking to see how a book ends. “Didn’t you feel bad?”

“No. Yours were better than mine, anyway.”

“You read mine?”

“They were more interesting,” Jess confessed cheerfully.

“Jess.”

“Well, you were older, so she knew you better.”

“I’m sorry,” said Emily.

“Sorry that you’re older?” Jess hit her sister with a pillow. “Why are you so sad tonight?”

“I’m not sad,” Emily retorted, but she was; she was. Birthdays saddened her. She missed their mother, and she did miss Jonathan, although she wouldn’t talk about it. He had his own start-up on the East Coast and they didn’t see each other enough. Of course Jess knew that. She knew what Emily kept hidden, and so their time together was difficult, and also sweet.

Jess found what she was looking for on the floor, a photo of Lily and Maya in red and green plaid nightgowns. “Look at this.”

Emily examined the picture. “Have you noticed how Heidi likes Christmas colors?” she asked Jess. “It’s like she celebrates Christmas all year round.”

“Mmm.” Jess loved her sister most when she was catty. Emily was so disciplined, as a rule. Jess waited for those occasions when Emily said an unkind word. There was nothing cozier than talking about their father and his house in Canaan, Mass.—the house where they had not grown up. Nothing sweeter than wondering how Heidi got their father to go running—about which they felt the same way—pleased and also secretly a little angry, because he had never felt the need to exercise before. They discussed the cuteness of their half sisters, aged three and one; they never forgot to speak of this, but they reverted quickly to Heidi and how she didn’t cook. On the one hand, they were supposed to fly east for Thanksgiving, and on the other hand, they would be eating at a restaurant.

“It’s the worst of both worlds,” said Emily. “Guilt without home cooking.”

“I think I’d be afraid of Heidi in the kitchen,” said Jess, and Emily could not stop laughing. It was as if all their talk before, about the IPO and the birthday letters and the suit had been a prelude to this—the real conversation about their father and the family, all new people: Heidi and the little girls. Jacinta, the live-out nanny, who kept house and took care of dinner, but unfortunately took off weekends. Elmo, the new goldfish, who had arrived without the children’s knowledge after the first Elmo went belly-up. Richard was new too, someone who changed diapers.

They talked until almost midnight. Then Emily said she should be going, but the rain fell outside and thrummed the streets, and it was so warm in Jess’s room that she stayed a little longer, and longer still, until she began to forget about driving back across the Bay to Mountain View. The rain poured down, and she and Jess kept whispering until sleepily, half-dreaming, they began to talk about the old days, the vanished time when their mother was alive. Emily remembered better than Jess, but when Jess was with Emily, she remembered too. Their mother had white hands, long tapered fingers, and when she kneaded dough, her wedding ring clinked against the bowl. She was always singing softly as she played the piano with her white hands. She accompanied Emily’s dance recitals and she could play anything, but Chopin was the one that Gillian loved. She played Chopin every night, and when she turned the pages, she wasn’t really looking at the music. She knew the saddest Waltzes by heart. The saddest were the ones that she knew best, and she would play at bedtime, so falling asleep was like drifting off in autumn forests filled with golden leaves.

2

Yorick’s Used and Rare Books had a small storefront on Channing but a deep interior shaded by tall bookcases crammed with history, poetry, theology, antiquated anthologies. There was no open wall space to hang the framed prints for sale, so Hogarth’s scenes of lust, pride, and debauchery leaned rakishly against piles of novels, folk tales, and literary theory. In the back room these piles were so tall and dusty that they took on a geological air, rising like stalagmites. Jess often felt her workplace was a secret mine or quarry where she could pry crystals from crevices and sweep precious jewels straight off the floor.

As she tended crowded shelves, she opened one volume and then another, turning pages on the history of gardens, perusing Edna St. Vincent Millay: We were very tired, we were very merry, / We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry … dipping into Gibbon: The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay … and old translations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: They walked the whole day over meadows, fields, and stony places. And when it rained, the little sister said, “Heaven and our hearts are weeping together….”?

During her first days at Yorick’s, the bell had startled Jess when a customer arrived, and she’d been