Mafia Chic. Erica Orloff
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Nit-twit, as Di would call me. So much for witty repartee.
“What’s your schedule like?”
“Thursdays are good. I usually work Friday night. My sous chef does Thursday night. I do lunch Thursday instead.”
“What about Sunday? I’m off on Sundays.”
I crinkled up my face in a wince he couldn’t see. Sunday was sacrosanct—family dinner in Brooklyn. “Sundays are no good.”
“Thursday then. Next Thursday okay?”
“Sure.”
“I’m a little nervous taking a chef out for dinner. You probably have high standards.”
“No. I was born in a family of professional eaters. But honestly, I’m not that fussy. I like to enjoy someone else’s cooking for a change.”
“How about if we meet at a little Japanese place called Yama’s at Fifty-fifth and Seventh?
“I’ve heard of it.” Heard of it? I’d heard it was one of the priciest new restaurants in the city—and the sushi chef was a temperamental master. I knew I’d love to scope out their menu. Japanese was a style of cooking I’d longed to experiment with. My mother mocked my Manhattan eating adventures. “Raw fish,” she’d once said. “What’s next? Cold monkey meat?”
“I’ll make reservations for eight-thirty. Okay? Does that sound all right?”
“Okay. See you then.”
“I’m really looking forward to it.”
“Me, too.”
I hung up the phone by pressing down on the reset button. Then I immediately speed-dialed Lady Di on her cell, which she wore attached to her hip at all times, with a tiny little earpiece set in her ear. Di also carried a Palm Pilot and had her laptop at home perpetually plugged in. Besides dressing to the nines, she was wired to the nines.
“Diana Kent here,” she answered.
“It’s Teddi.”
“Hello there, flatmate,” she said, never getting used to calling me her roommate or roomie.
“He called.”
“Who?”
“Who…him!”
“That Robert fellow?”
“Yes, that Robert fellow.”
“How fantastic, Teddi! Are you going to see him?”
“Next Thursday.”
“Smashing.”
“I need your help, though.”
“What?” she asked. “Want to borrow my little black dress? Oh…what about the Roberto Cavalli one?”
“Too wild.”
“My Donna Karan. The black wraparound one?”
“No. That’s not why I called. Well…now that you mention it, that dress might be good. But no…I need you to distract my ‘bodyguards.’”
“Right-o. No problem.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little ridiculous that I’m a woman in my mid-twenties and I’m still being baby-sat?”
“Yes. But one of your baby-sitters is your cousin Tony. And I find him positively delicious. So, for purely selfish reasons, I rather find it amusing.”
“You’re impossible.”
“But that’s what makes me so irresistible.”
“Look, just help me duck out unnoticed.”
“You can count on me. I always feel all James Bond when we do this, you know.”
“I feel a little Godfatherish when we do it. But either way, next Thursday keep them busy. I’d like to get in a first date without them looking over my shoulder. And the black dress would be nice, too.”
“It’s yours.”
“We have six days to plan.”
“And plan we shall. Must run now.”
“Ciao.” I put the phone down. I had stopped going to church years ago, but if I was still a church-goer, I would have said four novenas and five Hail Marys that my date with Robert Wharton went off without a hitch.
Chapter 3
Calling what my family does on Sundays “dinner” is like saying the pope is just another priest with a fancier hat.
Lady Di and I arrived at Sunday dinner to the usual chaos of the Marcello clan with a couple of Gallos thrown in for good measure. In the kitchen my mother was making an immense pot of gravy. Not only was the pot big enough for one of my little cousins to use as a fort when not filled with gravy, but Ma couldn’t even move it from one burner to the next without the help of my cousin Tony.
My aunt Marie, aunt Gina, aunt Connie and assorted other aunts, and wives and fiancées of my male cousins were all crowded into the kitchen as well, supervising my mother. This routine goes on until my mother has had it with the lot of them and chases them all out with a wooden spoon. For every infraction I committed as a child, the wooden spoon was threatened. Not that she ever actually spanked me with it. She just chased my brother and me throughout the house, screaming in Italian.
The women all clustered around the stove. “Add more oregano, Rose.”
“It needs a pinch of…something. Hold on…maybe some more garlic.”
“Can’t have too much garlic.”
For my mother, the red stuff she slaves over is a religion. She has been known to actually break out in a cold sweat at the sight of a jar of Ragú. That’s sacrilege of the highest order.
Lady Di and I always gather in the kitchen because it’s what we do, feminism aside. The men watch football during the season, and with most of them heavy gamblers and bookies, it’s either a joyous occasion or the cause of a lot of screaming. Either way, the language flying through the room would make Sister Mary Catherine of my old grammar school roll over in her grave.
Lady Di is considered an oddity, being as she comes from way across the Atlantic, and she had never even eaten true gravy before meeting my family, nor had she ever teased her hair, or even discovered the wonders of Aqua Net hairspray—the aerosol-can variety. I’m not even sure if the Aqua Net company still makes it, thanks to the ozone layer’s problems. However, my mother and her sisters have enough stockpiled to take them into the next decade.
“Diana, honey, can you stand a little advice?” My aunt Gina cornered us in the kitchen. Diana had no time to answer before Gina, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, was pinching her. I don’t mean like a little pinch on the cheek, either. I mean she was pinching her upper arm for all it was worth—Lady Di showed me a bruise later. “You could stand a little meat on these bones.”
“Well…I—”
“Honey…men don’t like bags of bones. You wonder why you’re not married? This is why.” She stated this with such certainty, oblivious to Di’s beauty.
“Actually, Aunt Gina—” I felt the need to defend my pinched roomie “—Diana has a lot of boyfriends, and she’s been proposed to three different times. She’s not married because she doesn’t want to be married.”
“Bullshit.” Aunt Gina pinched her again. “Look at this. You see this, Andrea?” She motioned to one of my other aunts. “You see this? Both of them. Really, Theresa Marie, you, too. You think you’re all fancy living off in that city, but when your uncle Rocky proposed to me, I was the babe of Brooklyn.”
I stared at Aunt Gina and glimpsed, beneath the pile of