Aimee Bender - The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

That same unknown factory, again. Loud and clear, in the food. A machine-tinge I could not identify. Alongside a little-girl voice wanting to go back, to go back to a time with less information. Go back, said the little girl. Blank, said the factory. I steeled myself and sat at the table with a spoonful of pure sauce and tried to move as slowly as I could through all the layers of information, to the point where I thought I was practically feeling the farmer reach his hand down to pick the tomatoes, in Italy; I was nearly hearing church bells ringing through villages in San Marzano, but the tastes of the too sweet nostalgia and stone-cold factory kept returning in a metallic whir, and none of it matched any factory I’d known in my reservoir of factory tastes, which seemed only to indicate that it must’ve come from the cook.

It was like seeing that photo and not recognizing my own face. It was like lifting my brother’s pants and seeing the legs of the chair.

I did not like tasting that, no.

So it wasn’t as loud as a neon sign, maybe, telling me I wasn’t ready for George, but close.

While Eliza went through school, just as I’d imagined, with keg parties, and virginity losses, and tearful midnight talks with her roommate, and waning updates as the months and years passed, I spent my days working at the office, filing and making copies for other people, and every lunch I scanned the streets and consulted the stacks of those yellow phone-book pages to try out something new.

I started in our neighborhood, buying a pastrami burrito at Oki Dog and a deluxe gardenburger at Astro Burger and matzoh-ball soup at Greenblatt’s and some greasy egg rolls at the Formosa. In part funny, and rigid, and sleepy, and angry. People. Then I made concentric circles outward, reaching first to Canter’s and Pink’s, then rippling farther, tofu at Yabu and mole at Alegria and sugok at Marouch; the sweet-corn salad at Casbah in Silver Lake and Rae’s charbroiled burgers on Pico and the garlicky hummus at Carousel in Glendale. I ate an enormous range of food, and mood. Many favorites showed up-families who had traveled far and whose dishes were steeped with the trials of passageways. An Iranian café near Ohio and Westwood had such a rich grief in the lamb shank that I could eat it all without doing any of my tricks-side of the mouth, ingredient tracking, fast-chew and swallow. Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held. I asked the waiter if I could thank the chef, and he led me to the back, where a very ordinary-looking woman with gray hair in a practical layered cut tossed translucent onions in a fry pan and shook my hand. Her face was steady, faintly sweaty from the warmth of the kitchen.

Glad you liked it, she said, as she added a pinch of saffron to the pan. Old family recipe, she said.

No trembling in her voice, no tears streaking down her face.

I bowed my head a little. I wasn’t sure what else to say. Thanks again, I said.

One of the dim-sum restaurants on Hill Street in Chinatown knew its rage in a real way, and I ate bao after bao and left that one tanked up and energized. An Ethiopian place on Fairfax near Olympic made me laugh, like the chef had a private joke with the food, one that had something to do with trains, and baldness. I didn’t even get the joke, but the waitress kept refilling my water and asking if I was okay.

I’m fine, I told her, holding my spongy injera bread packed with red lentils. It’s so funny!

She rolled her eyes, and brought me the check early.

My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French café, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen door, but I didn’t care about any of it.

There, I ordered chicken Dijon, or beef Bourguignon, or a simple green salad, or a pâté sandwich, and when it came to the table, I melted into whatever arrived. I lavished in a forkful of spinach gratin on the side, at how delighted the chef had clearly been over the balance of spinach and cheese, like she was conducting a meeting of spinach and cheese, like a matchmaker who knew they would shortly fall in love. Sure, there were small distractions and preoccupations in it all, but I could find the food in there, the food was the center, and the person making the food was so connected with the food that I could really, for once, enjoy it. I ate as slowly as I could. The air around me filled with purpose. This was the flora of George’s road, and a swinging kitchen door meant nothing. I went over at least once a week, sometimes more, and my time in general was marked by silent sad dinners with my parents and then lunchtime or dinnertime visits to the café as a kind of gateway into the world. It was somehow fitting, that the place had come to my attention first on the night that Joseph left, me sitting across from George, soon to re-set the room with him, wearing my father’s suit jacket over my shoulders, shivering, trying to understand what I’d seen. The waiters recognized me on Fridays, when I came in at six. On Sundays, when I went over for lunch, while they served half-glasses of wine for tasting customers lounging at the back counter beneath the gilded chandelier.

I bought very few new clothes, and no new technology, and I paid no rent, and so I spent most of the money I made on meals. I allowed myself the extravagance of leaving a restaurant if I could not bear what I found on my plate, and instead did my father’s trick by asking for a to-go box and putting all the food inside it, with a plastic knife and fork, and handing it outside to someone homeless who did not have the luxury of my problem.

One afternoon, after a particularly amazing roast chicken, I paid my bill and circled around the outside of La Lyonnaise, finding my way to the kitchen door of the restaurant, a back entrance that opened up into a section of alley that housed a brown Dumpster and a pigeon family. I had the day off from filing. My mother had recently become co-president of the co-op studio, and was busy moving the massive piles of tools into a new loft building off Beverly, close to downtown. Dad at work. He’d gotten so into his jogging that he’d joined a group called Nightrunners that ran exclusively after dark to avoid excess car exhaust. He trained every night at home.

At the back of the restaurant I didn’t want to knock on the door; I just felt like standing closer to it, but after ten minutes or so, a small older woman with short dyed blackish hair opened up, holding a white plastic bag of garbage. She stepped out and picked her way carefully on the asphalt in her thin pink satiny slippers. Threw the bag in the Dumpster. Her face looked a little etched and weary, but her eyes were fresh. She stopped when she saw me.

Hello, she said. Delivery?

No, I said. Sorry. I’m just a happy customer.

Ah, she said, pointing. The front is that way.

I nodded. Yes, yes, I said. I know.

She stepped her way back through the alley and returned to the door of the kitchen. Pigeons burbled behind me. She too looked like a regular lady, living in the world-didn’t seem particularly with it or excitable or stellar. But that chicken, bathed in thyme and butter-I hadn’t ever tasted a chicken that had such a savory warmth to it, a taste I could only suitably identify as the taste of chicken. Somehow, in her hands, food felt recognized. Spinach became spinach-with a good farm’s care, salt, the heat and her attention, it seemed to relax into its leafy, broad self. Garlic seized upon its lively nature. Tomatoes tasted as substantive as beef.