Free Emma's Table by Philip Galanes Page B

distracted for that.
    All I need is a little white sailor’s cap, she thought, wincing as she studied her kitchen, which suddenly looked ridiculously nautical to her.
    She grew nearly panicked over the color scheme.
    Emma liked to get out in front of criticism, to nail herself hard before anyone else could.
    She’d only had the apartment for six months; she bought it when she finished her house arrest. Ready for a change, she supposed, but it turned out that Emma didn’t know much about changing course or reversing direction. What she knew was empire-building and muscling through—digging out Grand Canyons with ordinary kitchen spoons. So she shuffled her real estate instead, selling the sprawling place in Cold Spring Harbor. No more grounds or outbuildings for the tarnished queen of interior design, no more chicken coops either. She came to New York City and bought this place instead—a swank twelve-room affair on the corner of Park and Seventy-first, all crisp casement windows and burnished oak paneling.
    The blue was definitely a mistake.
    Emma looked all around her, as if her immaculate kitchen were filled with toxic waste. She hated errors. She always had, of course—who didn’t?—but lately she’d come to fear them too, as if an inferior paint job, or the wrong kitchen tile, would betray some terrible lack inside her. Back in the old days, before her legal woes, Emma had been much better at pushing straight past her worries. She’d choose a tile and move along; she had faith in herself. But she was at sixes and sevens lately, almost herself again, but not—like an egg with a shadowy crack running down its shell, just a little more prone to danger and rough handling of every stripe, from the frontal attacks in the media to the rolling eyes of total strangers. She seemed to have lost her knack for muscling through.
    She’d tried it that way, she supposed.
    She saw where it led. In her case, to federal prison and an avalanche of nasty press, a warehouse full of canceled contracts and a near-perfect catalog of every tag-sale line she’d ever cut, a virtual roll call of every cherubic assistant she’d ever reduced to tears.
    Emma wanted to find a different way—she needed to, really—but she hadn’t the vaguest idea where to look.
    She walked to her fancy Miele oven—a prototype model that wasn’t even in production yet, its slippery blue enamel like a fresh coat of paint. She pushed a small silver button that illuminated the inside and peered in at her pork loin, roasting plump on a silvery wire rack, an enamel pan positioned beneath it to catch the fatty drippings.
    Emma felt prickly heat at the nape of her neck.
    â€œOld habits,” she grumbled, turning quickly from the oven.
    She massaged the back of her neck and felt the tingling dissipate like a pat of butter in a warm sauté pan—all wavy edges at first, then spreading out wide.
    I’m just being ridiculous now, she thought, knitting her lips together and turning back to her Sunday roast. These oven lights had been around forever, for twenty-five years at least, and turning them on didn’t disturb the meat at all. Still, Emma had been down this road often enough to know that rational thinking didn’t scratch the surface of the way she really felt.
    â€œLeave the meat alone, Emmy.” That’s what her mother always said, back in those far-flung days before oven lights, scolding her daughter for opening that heavy door once too often. “Let it cook already, will you?”
    But somehow Emma could never leave a roasting pan alone, or a cake pan either, for that matter. Something in her needed to open the oven door wide, to supervise her handiwork in the light of day—on a minute-by-minute basis sometimes.
    It wasn’t so complicated really: nothing she cooked ever came out the same way twice, no matter how scrupulous she was about repeating the