The Cookbook Collector

Part Six Risk August 2001

23

Emily sensed that Jess was keeping something from her. She could tell by the way her sister hid behind her hair.

“Is your cell still working?” Emily asked her.

“I think so.”

“Then why don’t you use it?”

“I do. Sometimes.” Her hair fell like a curtain over her face.

They were sitting in Emily’s white condo, in the living room, and they were sharing a vegan chocolate cake Jess had brought for Emily’s thirtieth birthday. The big celebration was going to be with Jonathan that weekend at Lake Tahoe, but Jess had come for the actual day, August 8, and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the collection of Gillian’s birthday letters, hers and Emily’s together, in her lap.

For your eleventh birthday … For your twelfth birthday … For your twentieth birthday … I would like to see you at twenty. I think that you’ll be tall, and I want to know if I am right.

“What you should do,” said Jess, “is print these out on archival stock and make a scrapbook. This isn’t good paper, and this ink”—she pointed to the dot matrix printing—“see, it’s already fading.”

I do miss knowing you at twenty, Emily. Sometimes I’m quite sad about it, and then at other times I think I should be grateful for knowing you as long as I have. I’m greedy, like everybody else. I want to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. It’s never enough, is it? It’s not enough to have children. We want to see birthdays, and weddings, and grandchildren as well. I’d like to see them all. Of course there are other children I might have had, or other lives I might have lived, but I don’t dwell on those. Why, then, should I mourn this one? Because this is the life I know, and you and your sister are the daughters I love. All the rest slips into the background—the realm of the unborn. That’s another way to look at death, isn’t it? Simply the part of life that’s unexpressed. The might- haves and could-have-beens …

“Jess,” said Emily, “what’s going on with you?”

Jess looked up, startled. “Nothing,” she lied.

“You seem …”

“What?”

“Evasive.”

“Who, me?”

“Why are you so quiet?”

“Because I’m reading,” said Jess.

“You never liked to read her letters before.”

Jess thought about this for a moment. “But they’re more interesting now.”

She was spending the night at Emily’s place, and long after her sister went to sleep, Jess stayed up reading and rereading her mother’s letters. What was it about them? What was it she had overlooked before? Their secrecy. The obliqueness of the language drew her in, where before it had confused and bored her. I might have been someone else, her mother wrote. I might have married someone else. I might have lived a different way, but I chose this life, and I chose you.

The might-haves and could-have-beens, undescribed and unexplained. How had Jess missed them? She had been curious enough at twelve to read Gillian’s letters all at once, devouring those messages to her older self, but she had always looked for information. Her mother was guarded about her illness, and her feelings, and her past, all the things that Jess wanted to find out, and after reading the letters one after another, Jess had turned away in disappointment. It was Gillian’s reserve that made the letters interesting now. Those sentences Jess had always read as generalities looked different. I might have lived a different way. What did Gillian mean? I might have married someone else. Who would that have been? Perhaps after weeks with the cookbooks, Jess was overly sensitive. After so many hours pondering the collector’s notes, she saw subtexts and secrets everywhere. Even so, she began to read her mother’s words as coded messages. Dear Emily, at sweet sixteen. Never been kissed? Wished you’d been kissed? Wonder if you might have been? I didn’t wonder about kissing when I was your age, although I would later. I didn’t like to think about the future when I had one, and now that my future is running out, I think about it all the time.

“Gillian!” Jess whispered in surprise. She stared at the picture her mother had enclosed, a color photo of a laughing freckled woman in a sundress and a floppy yellow hat. An outdoor picture, a lawn chair in the background, her mother holding out a piece of chocolate cake. And as she looked, it occurred to her that she had never seen an earlier image of her mother. There were no black-and-white photos in the albums in her father’s house. No baby pictures or childhood-recital photos. Hadn’t Gillian performed in piano recitals for her teacher? And didn’t anybody take pictures? There were none. There was only the story Richard told, which was that Gillian never got along with her parents in London. That they had been so angry when she’d married a non-Jew that they cut her off completely. Therefore, Jess and Emily had never met their Jewish grandparents, or anyone from that side of the family. Gillian’s parents never spoke to her again, and she never spoke of them—or wrote about them either. And yet she said in her letters to Emily, I know from my own experience that some memories are indelible. This comforts me, because, of course, I should like to be indelible for you.

But what were these indelible memories? Gillian didn’t say. They lived between the lines, and underneath the letters, in that realm of secrets Jess could not ferret out. And Jess wondered, poetically, whether there had been some great love in her mother’s life—some other man she might have married (for she could not imagine her own father as a figure of romance). And she wondered whether there had been a secret hurt, a sad end to all of Gillian’s might-have-beens. Perhaps her parents forbade her to become a concert pianist, and this was why Gillian played Chopin Waltzes, in requiem. Late at night, in her pajamas, Jess was open to every dramatic possibility, for she had never felt a kinship with her mother before. She had never thought of Gillian as yearning or secretive. Her mother had died young, but now Jess saw that her mother had been young, and that was a different matter altogether. Her letters were no longer prescriptive, but searching, far more powerful now that Jess had a secret of her own.

She lived in the Tree House as before, and did her chores—cooking, cleaning, leafleting, supplying the tree- sitters in the Grove. She attended Rabbi Helfgott’s mysticism classes with Mrs. Gibbs, and typed the minutes for Tree House meetings, where she was official scribe. She slept in Leon’s bed, but he was away in Humboldt County, climbing, demonstrating, organizing, and who knew what else. He did call and ask her when she would come, but he did not call often, nor did he return to get Jess, and the longer Leon stayed away, the easier it became to slip into the collector’s world.

On weekday afternoons, she sat with the cookbooks at George’s table, and she lost herself in recipes for marzipan, illustrations of assorted ices, lists of berries for plucking in each season. She read the cookbooks along with their collector, noting where he paused to draw or quote or simply copy some delicious detail. Take your Angelica when young and tender, which will be about the beginning of May…. She worked with Tom McClintock’s ghost, and where he sighed, she sighed, and where he seemed to smile— Syrup of Maiden-hair!!—she smiled. And she examined each line drawing of the woman he adored, a lady with wide-set eyes, long wavy hair, small feet, and pointed toes. Jess was beginning to dream about this woman; she felt she knew her; she thought she almost knew her name.

She glided through the house, and ate the plums George left. She cut melons in the kitchen, and ate the dripping slices, cold and sweet. Be careful with this knife, he wrote on one of her note cards. Carefully, she slid George’s steel knife into round cantaloupe and honeydew and galia melons. And if she