Greg had certainly heard this soliloquy on squid before. “Uh-huh,” the sous chef said.
The calamari the cook was preparing for his son, Daniel, was the forever kind. Tony Angel slowly stewed it with canned tomatoes and tomato paste-and with garlic, basil, red pepper flakes, and black olives. The cook added the pine nuts and chopped parsley only at the end, and he served the squid over penne, with more chopped parsley on the side. (Never with Parmesan-not on calamari.) He would give Daniel just a small arugula salad after the pasta dish, maybe with a little goat cheese; he had a local Vermont chèvre that was pretty good.
But right now the pepperoni pizzas were ready, and the cook pulled them from the oven of his Stanley woodstove. (“She bu de,” he whispered to the old Irish stove, and Greg once more glanced in his direction.)
“You’re crying again-you know that, don’t you?” Celeste said to Tony. “You want to talk about it?”
“It must be the onions,” the cook told her.
“Bullshit, Tony,” she said. “Are those my two pepperonis for the old broads out there?” Without waiting for an answer, Celeste said: “They better be my pizzas. Those old girls are looking hungry enough to eat Danny for a first course.”
“They’re all yours,” Tony Angel told Celeste. He’d already put the penne in the pot of boiling water, and he took one out with a slotted spoon and tasted it while he watched every step of Celeste’s dramatic exit from the kitchen. Loretta was looking at him as if she were trying to decipher a code. “What?” the cook said to her.
“Mystery man,” Loretta said. “Danny’s a mystery man, too-isn’t he?”
“You’re as dramatic as your mother,” the cook told her, smiling.
“Is the calamari ready, or are you telling it your life story?” Loretta asked him.
Out in the dining room, Dot exclaimed: “My, that’s a thin-lookin’ crust!”
“It’s thin, all right,” May said approvingly.
“Our cook makes great pizzas,” Celeste told them. “His crusts are always thin.”
“What’s he put in the dough?” Dot asked the waitress.
“Yeah, what’s his secret ingredient?” May asked Celeste.
“I don’t know if he has one,” Celeste said. “I’ll ask him.” The two old broads were digging in-they ignored her. “I hope you ladies are hungry,” Celeste added, as she turned to go back to the kitchen. Dot and May just kept eating; this was no time to talk.
Danny watched the women eat with growing wonder. Where had he seen people eat like that? he was thinking. Surely not at Exeter, where table manners didn’t matter but the food was awful. At Exeter, you picked over your food with the greatest suspicion-and you talked nonstop, if only to distract yourself from what you were eating.
The old women had been talking and whispering (and cackling) together (like a couple of crows); now there wasn’t a word between them, and no eye contact, either. They rested their forearms on the table and bent over their plates, heads down. Their shoulders were hunched, as if to ward off an attack from behind, and Danny imagined that if he were closer to them, he might hear them emit an unconscious moan or growl-a sound so innately associated with eating that the women were unaware of it and had long ceased to hear it themselves.
No one in the North End had ever eaten that way, the writer was remembering. Food was a celebration at Vicino di Napoli, an event that inspired conversation; people were engaged with one another when they ate. At Mao’s, too, you didn’t just talk over a meal-you shouted. And you shared your food-whereas these two old broads appeared to be protecting their pizzas from each other. They wolfed their dinners down like dogs. Danny knew they wouldn’t leave a scrap.
“The Red Sox just aren’t reliable,” Greg was saying, but the cook was concentrating on the surprise squid dish for his son; he’d missed what had happened in the game on the radio.
“Daniel likes a little extra parsley,” he was saying to Loretta, just as Celeste came back into the kitchen.
“The two old broads want to know if there’s a secret ingredient in your pizza dough, Tony,” Celeste said to the cook.
“You bet there is-it’s honey,” Tony Angel told her.
“I would never have guessed that,” Celeste said. “That’s some secret, all right.”
Out in the dining room, it suddenly came to the writer Danny Angel where he’d seen people eat as if they were animals, the way these two old women were eating their pizzas. The woodsmen and the sawmill workers had eaten like that-not only in the cookhouse in Twisted River, but also in those makeshift wanigans, where he and his father had once fed the loggers during a river drive. Those men ate without talking; sometimes even Ketchum hadn’t spoken a word. But these tough-looking broads couldn’t have been loggers, Danny was thinking, when Loretta interrupted his thoughts.
“Surprise!” the waitress said, as she put the squid dish in front of him.
“I was hoping it was going to be the calamari,” Danny told her.
“Ha!” Loretta said. “I’ll tell your dad.”
May had finished her pepperoni pizza first, and anyone seeing the way she eyed the last piece on Dot’s plate might have had reason to warn Dot that she should never entirely trust her old friend. “I guess I liked mine a little better than you’re likin’ yours,” May said.
“I’m likin’ mine just fine,” Dot answered with her mouth full, her thumb and index finger quickly gripping the crust of that precious last slice.
May looked away. “That writer is finally eatin’ somethin’, and it looks pretty appetizin’,” she observed. Dot just grunted, finishing her pizza.
“Would you say it’s almost as good as Cookie’s?” May asked.
“Nope,” Dot said, wiping her mouth. “Nobody’s pizza is as good as Cookie’s.”
“I said almost, Dot.”
“Close, maybe,” Dot told her.
“I hope you ladies left room for dessert,” Celeste said. “It looks like those pizzas hit the spot.”
“What’s the secret ingredient?” May asked the waitress.
“You’ll never guess,” Celeste said.
“I’ll bet it’s honey,” Dot said; both she and May cackled, but they stopped cackling when they saw how the waitress was staring at them. (It didn’t happen often that Celeste was speechless.)
“Wait a minute,” May said. “It is honey, isn’t it?”
“That’s what the cook said-he puts honey in his dough,” Celeste told them.
“Yeah, and the next thing you’re gonna tell us is that the cook limps,” Dot said. That really cracked up the two old broads; Dot and May couldn’t stop cackling over that one, not that they missed the message in Celeste’s amazed expression. (The waitress might as well have told them outright. Yes, indeed, the cook limped. He limped up a storm!)
But Danny had overheard snippets of their conversation before the ladies’ cackling got out of control. He’d heard Celeste say something about his dad putting honey in the pizza dough, and one of the old broads had joked about the cook’s limp. Danny was sensitive about his father’s limp; he’d heard enough jokes on that subject to last a lifetime, most of them from those West Dummer dolts at that piss-poor Paris Manufacturing Company School. And why did Celeste look so stricken suddenly? the writer was wondering.
“Weren’t you ladies interested in the pie and the cobbler?” the waitress asked them.
“Wait a minute,” May said again. “Are you sayin’ your cook’s got a limp?”
“He limps a little,” Celeste hesitated to say, but in effect she’d already said it.