CELESTE

Celeste was a friend of my mother’s—a social-worker colleague at Herrick Hospital. My first impression of her when I met her at a party she threw was of coldness. But then my mother told me a story Celeste had confided in her about her troubled first marriage to an army officer, describing a night she’d cried of happiness after lovemaking—it had been so long—only to learn years later that he’d thought she’d been crying with disappointment. Forever after that, I felt an empathy for her.

She’d divorced and married again—ill-advisedly, one of her therapy clients—a younger man who she eventually found out was cheating on her because, as he would complain, she was so perfect she made him feel inadequate.

She was a diabetic—slender, chic—kept a spotless house, drove a Mercedes—and had beautiful collection of lingerie I discovered in the dryer when I went to live with her. (Later, I would find out from my mother, she was having an affair with the boyfriend of a nurse friend of theirs at the hospital, which may have accounted for the lingerie.) She’d bought a Victorian house to renovate in in a poor section of Oakland, the realtor convincing her that the area was on its way to becoming an upscale neighborhood. She offered me a bedroom for free—a dilapidated room whose walls had been stripped—with the proviso that I would pay a modest rent once it was renovated.

My second night there, the battery was stolen out of my car and I was obliged to chain the hood of my car shut from then on—and not long after that, the house was robbed, one of the missing things, my beautiful embroidered Indian bedspread that I’d stowed in a storage room because it didn’t go with Celeste’s Victorian furniture. It was then she had an alarm system installed.

Mornings I used to wake up at dawn and drive to nearby Lake Merritt to walk —partway—around it, the water reflecting the still pinkish sky, a variety of large birds lined up wing to wing on a rope of buoys—mostly gulls and pelicans—that curved out of from the shore.

It was during this period that I began to cook in earnest, though I didn’t like Celeste’s stove, which had a smooth surface that I found a bit creepy. John had bought me The New York Times Cookbook for my birthday, and I bought myself San Francisco A La Carte. I found I loved making things like ratatouille that involved cutting up lots of vegetables because it gave me the feeling of being connected to the earth. I would make myself pots of leek and other soups that I divided up in plastic containers and took to work, where I heated them up for lunch in a pot on a hotplate.

And knowing how important it was to Celeste to maintain a spotless house, I made a concerted effort live up to her exacting standards—except in my own room, which was often a mess.