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reflection in a glass by joanne seiff Last summer when I met Jocko LaPuzza, I was already in trouble. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. I’d been laid off from my job, I was confused, I was wandering around wondering what to do with my life. You see, when you spend your life going from one tony suburban school to another — grammar, high school, fancy college — you never expected to be laid off from your upscale, big money office job. At least, I didn’t. But when my fancy dancy city company cut me, I was totally lost. I couldn’t tell my family. I couldn’t tell my friends. That’s what I thought the morning after I was laid off. You’d expect me to have a hangover, at least, but I was totally sober the previous night. I just stared at my hands, and decided it was time for me to go away for a while and downsize.
I remember I looked around my apartment, and it wasn’t hard to say goodbye. My roommate had been thinking about asking her boyfriend to move in, so it would be no big deal to leave. I left her a note on the breakfast table. We’d work out something. Instead of driving to work, I drove to my parents’ vacation place on the lake. It was only a few hours away from the city, and I was wandering around in the weak spring sunshine by 11.
Lake George had this boardwalk kind of thing, and I strolled along it. Most shops weren’t open yet, but I didn’t notice. Mostly I was staring at my reflection in the window. Was I still there? I wondered.
That’s when I saw Jocko. He was dressed in chef’s whites, the white jacket that said “Jocko” in italics, and the droopy checked pants and plastic clogs of a professional. He watched me staring in the window, and pointed to a sign in that window. At first I thought he was pointing at my breasts. God, now there was something wrong with my breasts, too? I looked down at myself at first, but he knocked on the glass, and I saw he was pointing to the sign. “Sous-chef wanted. Inquire within.”
He was already unlocking the door to the restaurant by the time I found my bearings. I wasn’t about to work in a restaurant; I could hear what my parents would say — ‘that Ivy League education wasted on cooking?’ I knew that’s what they’d say since I’d asked to go to cooking school — The Culinary Institute or the Cornell Hotel School — when I was in high school. No, they said, and I ended up spending four years in emptiness instead, classes that my mind leapt over while my hands were flipping crêpes and chopping onions in my sleep. I cooked only at home. I wasn’t a restaurant chef, or even a sous-chef. I knew that.
“So.” His words cut the air like a fine quiet dice. “You coming in or what?” His accent was Queens, and he looked the part. Jocko was Italian all over. He wasn’t tall, about 5’8” or so, I guess, but you could see the strength of his muscles through his clothes. He had a five o’clock shadow at noon. It was the hair that blew me away. Black ringlets, like you’d see on a girl, but pulled back into a huge ponytail. The guy wore a cap on his head, but his hair glistened in the light. I was staring, but it was as if this was normal for him. He pulled me into the dining room by the arm.
“Yeah, it’s the hair. That’s what they all say. So, tell me about your cooking experience.”
“I, I, do human resources management for… I did,” I stuttered. And then it came out. All the years of cooking by myself, the huge collection of cookbooks, the catering I did in high school, the perfect crêpe recipe I’d worked out from those dreams. I told him what I knew. It was a blur. It ended, “but I don’t have any of that on a résumé or anything.”
“No problem.” Jocko smiled. “We don’t do those here. Go into the kitchen and cook me lunch. I got some ordering to do. Then we’ll talk about whether you’re hired.”
It took me an hour to make a simple lunch in an industrial kitchen. I’d never seen his kitchen before, but the organization was astounding. I took most of my ingredients off his cold line, the cold cuts, baby spinach, arugula, radicchio, banana peppers, grape tomatoes, sweet onions and capicola. I created one of those warm salads, oozing with vinegar, oil, good quality sausage and greens that causes your taste buds to stand up and notice. I found a good light red wine in his beverage cooler, and poured a glass. I made garlic bread and olive tapas. I put it all on a tray and brought it out in style, with a complete table setting on the tray.
Jocko was on the phone, yelling at a supplier. “Vinnie, if I told you goddamn once, I said it a thousand times…” The thousand sounded like “tow-sand” to me, and I stood in a daze for a moment, the tray before him. He looked up. “I gotta go, Vinnie. You straighten that shit out or I won’t work with you again.” He slammed down the receiver and looked at the tray.
“Good presentation.” He picked up a fork, tasted the salad. He washed it down with some wine. “You’re hired,” he said. “Now where’s your fuckin’ fork, lady?” That was our first meal together, me and Jocko. He didn’t even know my name.
***
Two months later, it was hot as hell in the kitchen. It was August and ten o’clock at night on a Saturday. The customers were just about on dessert. I was wrung out to dry. It’d been hot and I’d been sweating all day long. I’d been sweating all summer. At first I was embarrassed when he leaned into me, showing me how to chop the vegetables just as he’d asked for, or when he taught me to use the meat slicer. Now I was used to his intimacy, his constant presence. He was an in-your-face perfectionist, and his oversight wasn’t meant to be sexy. It was forceful — he wanted it right, and right now. I’d worked that out. The kitchen was small and hot.
I leaned around him to put away a pot and a knife. The front of house manager stuck her head in. “We’re closed up, Jocko. They’re having their coffee. Shut her down.”
She went out the swinging door, all sleeveless sundress, boobs and make up and perfumey smell. I drooped inside. A couple of weeks after I started at Jocko’s, I cut off all my long hair, so now it was just a pixie cap of brown hair around my head. It was cooler, it was more practical, but I wasn’t all swinging skirts like the manager.
I caught Jocko looking at me as I hung up another pot behind his head.
“What?” I said.
“I saw that. Don’t ever think you’re less than she is, you know that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I stepped away from Jocko in the tight space. He caught my wrist and pulled me back over to his station. His brown eyes were serious.
“You ain’t less than her. You’re more. You look better and can do a lot more.” He grabbed me then, and kissed me once, with such intent that I suddenly realized that maybe that intimacy before, when he was teaching me, was intentional. We were hot and I tasted salt on his lip. He clutched me to him in the steam of the kitchen, and I felt the curls of hair on his chest through the cloth. His heart thumped loud against my cheek.
“God, Donny, I’ve been wanting to do that a long time.” My name was Donna, but he’d called me something else the first week. I was Donny to him. I remembered that moment in my mind. It was so damned hot.
We cleaned the kitchen fast that night. The rest of the season was a feast. We tried to outdo each other in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on the beach. We were always ready to dive naked off the dock near my parents’ cottage in the middle of the night last summer.
When the restaurant closed in the fall, Jocko made sure I’d earned enough to get me through the winter. He never said anything about spending the winter with me, and I didn’t expect it from him. I knew by now that he was not about to become the marrying kind, at least not with me. His family in Queens called him all the time, asking when he’d be home, when he’d marry a nice Italian girl, when he’d settle down like the rest of them.
In the winter, he worked in the family’s restaurant in the city. Even though I was named Donna, I knew that with a last name like Gemmings I wasn’t an authentic enough Italian for them. So I’d had an Italian grandparent, so what? It was so long ago, I was just a Heinz 57 American. Jocko, or rather, Giacomo LaPuzza, was the real thing.
I stayed up there at Lake George in the winter. When the snow drifted up against the sides of the cottage, it wasn’t all that toasty. I kept the woodstove going all the time, and I read a lot. Before Jocko left I thought I might be pregnant, but I didn’t say anything. What could I say? Jocko, stay up here and play house with me? Help me deny reality just a little bit longer?
I was almost 6 months along when I saw the “For Rent” sign on the boardwalk, in Jocko’s restaurant. I thought maybe Jocko owned the building. I wrote down the phone number on the back of an envelope. I stood there, braced against the cold, and saw my reflection again, different this time, in the restaurant’s window.
When I called the phone number, I found out Jocko never owned the restaurant. He’d just leased the space for a couple of seasons. I also found out that the rent was surprisingly cheap. I took it.
I opened for the season early and took only a couple weeks off to give birth. Giacomo (Jocko) LaPuzza Gemmings was born in April. My mom came up to help. I changed things at Jocko’s. I included highchairs, and put that warm spinach and sausage salad on the menu. As Jocko would say, I want so the man would recognize the place, you know, if he came by.
There are a lot of LaPuzzas in the New York City phone book, but I’m not going to call every one. Instead, I’m going to keep filling the air with good smells for my baby. I open the restaurant Wednesdays through Sundays, just for dinner. I make a good meal or two. I nurse the baby. I barely manage to keep up. Yesterday I put a sign up in the window: “Sous-Chef wanted. Inquire within.” I figure you can never tell who might walk through the door. In the meantime, it’s okay to look at your reflection in the glass.
 About the Author: Joanne Seiff
Joanne Seiff is a writer and knitwear designer. This story first appeared in Dragonfire at www.dfire.org. Her book, Fiber Gathering, will be published by Potter Craft, a division of Random House, in Spring 2009. To see Joanne’s writing and designs, check out her website, http://www.joanneseiff.com . Joanne does her best work while her colleagues, bird dogs Harry and Sally, sleep on the office couch. Read about more of Joanne’s adventures with her absent minded professor husband on her blog: http://www.joanneseiff.blogspot.com.
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