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Bread and Butter - Softcover

Wildgen, Michelle

 
9780345805430: Bread and Butter
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345805437 ISBN 13: 9780345805430
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Britt and Leo have spent ten years establishing Winesap as the best restaurant in their small Pennsylvania town. They cater to their loyal customers, they don’t sleep with the staff, and business is good, even if their temperamental pastry chef is bored with making the same chocolate cake night after night.
 
But when their dilettante younger brother, Harry, opens his own restaurant, Britt and Leo find their lives thrown off-kilter. Important employees quit and reappear in Harry’s kitchen, their “classic” menu starts to seem overly safe, and romance threatens to bubble up in the most inconvenient of places. As the brothers struggle to find a new family dynamic, Bread and Butter proves to be a dazzling novel that’s as much about siblinghood as it is about the mysterious world behind the kitchen door. 
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michelle Wildgen is the executive editor of the literary quarterly Tin House. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Wildgen received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her fiction, personal essays, and food writing have appeared in The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Best New American Voices; Best Food Writing; Prairie Schooner; and elsewhere. Michelle is the author of the novels But Not for Long and You're Not You, and the editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. You're Not You has been optioned for film by Hilary Swank and Denise Di Novi.

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Bread and Butter

Prologue

Every few months, in the grips of their parents’ civic and vicarious ethnic pride, Leo, Britt, and Harry went on a forced excursion to the last Italian market in town. Most people in Linden would make a day of it and drive ninety minutes east into Philadelphia, to hit 9th Street or Reading Terminal, but Leo’s parents were diehards. As long as Moretti’s was open, they would insist it was the best.
Inside a butcher’s case, denuded rabbits curled pink and trusting in white bins, while the sheep’s heads appeared chagrined and surprised by the depth of their eyeballs, the narrow clamp of their own teeth. The display of calves’ brains and kidneys, livers and tripe, repulsed Britt, struck Leo as regrettable but unavoidable, and entranced Harry, who was six. He stood with his hands on the glass, chewed-looking mittens dangling from his sleeves.
Britt and Leo, who were twelve and thirteen, were supposed to be watching their brother but were primarily lurking several feet away near the bulk section, peering over patrons’ shoulders at the hooves and teeth.
Their father appeared beside them, holding a pink slice of prosciutto, which he did not offer. These Saturdays sometimes left their parents flushed and high-spirited in a slightly confrontational way.
“We’re not even Italian,” Britt pointed out.
“Since when are you purists?” their father asked. “Would you be happier if we were in a haggis store?”
“I was happy playing basketball,” Leo said wanly. But the store was an invigorating riot of noise and meaty fragrance, and he found it difficult not to join in the hollering and sampling as his parents did with such mortifying enthusiasm.
“It smells like death in here,” Britt said. “Death and spices.”
“That’s fennel seed,” their father said.
Eventually their parents completed their tasting and shopping and returned, each holding a large brown paper bag.
“Where’s Harry?” their mother asked. She craned her neck, peering through the crowd. Her red hair was coming out of its ponytail. “Boys? Where’d Harry go?”
“He was here,” said Britt, and he and his brother both looked down to where Harry had been. The last they had seen of him, Harry was storming off into the sea of bodies, miffed that Leo and Britt refused to emote over the case of organ meat. They had not followed.
“Well, look,” their father said. Their parents began working their way through the crowd.
The street was gray and quiet, cars rumbling past Leo on the pitted streets. What a terrible place for Harry to be wandering around, his vividness like a target. Why did their parents bring them here? Leo jogged up the block and around the corner, fruitlessly, before returning to the store, where he stood in the mass of people, sweating, his heart pounding, realizing that he had ruined his family.
And then the crowd shifted and Leo glimpsed them all: a cluster of ginger-colored heads back by the meat counter, his father’s darker head in its Eagles cap. Harry was holding something wrapped in white paper. His parents’ faces were a volatile blend of anger and relief.
As they left the store Leo glanced at Britt, who rolled his eyes in a way that conveyed complicity and gladness, the latter something Britt was clearly embarrassed to feel.
Harry refused to hold either parent’s hand and was clutching his white package. Leo took in the oblivious bounce of Harry’s shoulders, the round curve of his cheek, and the cowlick on one side of his forehead. He probably hadn’t even gotten scolded. Leo took one lengthy stride, long enough to catch the heel of Harry’s shoe, a punk-ass little gesture that almost made him feel better.
“Thanks for scaring everybody,” Britt said.
“I was talking to the meat guy,” Harry said. “He has all the good stuff.”
“It’s a lamb’s tongue, by the way,” said Britt, nodding at the white package. “He got a lamb’s tongue.”
“To eat?” Leo said to his parents. “You bought him a lamb’s tongue?”
Their mother set her bag down on the sidewalk, pulled a stocking cap out of her pocket, and tugged[LD2]  it down over Harry’s head. Then she straightened up and said, “We didn’t buy it for him.” Her eyelids lowered just slightly, slyly, because Harry hated to be laughed at, and she added, “He used his allowance.”


Part 1

Chapter 1

Leo had imagined a cavernous space filled with sunlight and flaking pillars, but as he explored his brother’s future restaurant, he feared he had overestimated Harry’s ambition.
Britt trailed behind them as Leo followed Harry into the long, narrow room. Harry’s shaggy red hair and his blue-and-green shirt were the only spots of color in the dusky room as he gestured, all lanky arms and skinny wrists, toward where he planned to put the bar, the tables, and the server station. Harry’s forearms and wrists bore short faded purplish scars from hot pans and oven edges and errant knife blades, just like the arms on the cooks in Leo’s restaurant.
Leo glanced behind him; Britt was not paying attention but was swiping at the screen of his phone and swearing under his breath about the linen service. Periodically Britt swatted his blazer, making Leo realize that he too was smeared with pale washes of dust at a knee, an elbow, and a shoulder, but he merely whacked perfunctorily at his clothes. This was why Britt ran the dining room while Leo ran the back of the house. Britt could sense a flaw from yards away—a spotty wineglass or a tablecloth scattered with pollen dropped from a centerpiece—and correct it almost without realizing he’d done so.
“What’s the name?” Leo asked. His restaurant was called Winesap, the name a nod to the apple variety that grew in their parents’ backyard.
“71 King. Same as the address,” Harry said. He pointed up at fat ducts grown minty with age. “That’s copper piping. And I think this wall is, like, three feet thick.” He demonstrated the wall’s soundness with a flick of his hand against the brick, a gesture that looked as if it hurt. But Harry shook it off and looked back over his shoulder. “You don’t like the name?”
Leo chewed the inside of his lip. “It doesn’t say a lot,” he said gently. “It might be hard for people to picture what they’ll get here just from the name.”
“I guess it doesn’t really fit,” Harry admitted, looking thoughtful. “Although what does Winesap convey, exactly?”
“Well, for a while, not much,” Leo admitted. “Heirloom apple varieties didn’t evoke much in an old mill town. But now that we have more Philadelphia transplants I think it says farmers’ markets and rarity and quality.”
“Plus it’s just a great word,” said Britt. “Maybe it lets people forget for a second that they even got priced out of the suburbs.”
“And anyway, now it evokes you, right? See, that’s the thing,” Harry said. “I’m hoping that soon this address will say something, something totally different from what it does now. I’m trying to get ahead of the curve. Or to set the curve. Call it what you will.” He looked behind Leo. “Britt. 71 King. What’s it say to you?”
Britt looked up from his phone. Whereas Harry’s long, lean face was softened by his red beard and Leo bore a coarser nose and darker, down-turned eyes, Britt’s...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345805437
ISBN 13 
9780345805430
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
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Verantwortliche Person
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