The Venus Fix

Fourteen

Five hours later, my daughter was sitting at the island in the middle of the kitchen while I went through the refrigerator looking for something ready-made that I couldn’t ruin.

Having a late-night snack after Dulcie got home from the theater had replaced having dinner together. Now we talked over the day while she tried to come down after the performance.

“Hot chocolate or hot cider?” I asked.

“Hot chocolate. Definitely.”

I took out the milk and grabbed the powdered mix from the cabinet.

“Can’t we make it the real way?” She meant the way Nina taught her-melting quality chocolate and then adding enough milk to give it the right consistency.

She was already pulling out the double boiler. When I had remodeled the kitchen, I updated all the pots, pans and utensils. Everything was state-of-the-art. The appliances had stainless fronts, the floor and splashboard were white tiles with black diamond accents, and the countertops were granite. It was all very elegant. A chef’s dream. Except I wasn’t a chef. Far from it. In fact, I could barely manage to broil a chicken and hardly used a double boiler.

That’s the problem with being a Martha-wannabe but not having any intuitive homemaker skills. Sure, everything gleamed in my kitchen. You just stepped inside and imagined fresh pies cooling on a rack and homemade tomato sauce simmering on the stove. In reality, I ruined tuna fish out of a can with too much lemon juice, and overcooked frozen food.

Dulcie, on the other hand, was gifted in the kitchen, a talent she’d inherited from her paternal grandmother, and which her aunt Nina encouraged. Since the play had opened, I’d missed having her in the kitchen, egging me on, teasing me and saving dinner on more than one occasion.

“I don’t have any chocolate. You’ll have to settle for powdered chocolate,” I said, putting the tin on the counter. Dulcie took the milk out of the fridge and went over to the stove, where she poured it in a saucepan and turned on the burner.

“That’s my job,” I protested.

“You’ll burn it, Mom, you know you will.”

While she stirred, I sliced two apples and opened a package of Pepperidge Farm Milanos. Even though they were Dulcie’s favorite cookies, I wished I were one of those mothers who bake for their kids.

“So,” I said once we were back at the island with our steaming mugs, “how was your day?”

Ever since she was little, it’s been our tradition at dinner to talk about what had happened that day, but with caveats. For everything that had gone wrong or that you complained about, there had to be one thing that had gone right or that had made you happy. Always a balance.

Dulcie took another cookie and chewed it, thinking. “Well, I don’t like our new teacher. At all.” Major emphasis on the word “all.” My little drama queen.

“Why?”

“She wants us to read a book called War and Peace. Do you have any idea how big a book it is? I’ll be fourteen before I finish it.”

I laughed. “No, it won’t take that long. The hardest part is keeping track of all the Russian names, but you’re good with languages.”

She rolled her eyes.

“It’s been years since I read it. How about I get a copy and we read it at the same time? Then we can talk about it together.”

She sort of shrugged an okay, but clearly I was more interested in the mother-daughter reading concept than she was. “So what was good today?”

She gave me her slightly shy look from under partially lowered lids. It was an expression she’d fall back on when she didn’t want to brag but still was proud of herself. “Six curtain calls.”

“That’s wonderful.”

She broke into a smile. “Isn’t it?”

I smiled back.

“And you, Dr. Sin, how was your day?” she asked.

My daughter had never come right out and said she was embarrassed by what I do for a living, but she didn’t need to after the day, three years ago, when she introduced me to her friend’s mother as a heart doctor. The moniker Dr. Sin had been coined one night when we’d been arguing about her curfew and she’d accused me of not trusting her.

“Why are you so worried I’m going to fool around or something? You’re Dr. Sin. You’re supposed to understand about this stuff.”

She rarely called me Dr. Sin when anyone else was around, but she did it often enough at home for it to annoy me.

“Should we start with what was wrong today?” she asked me. “Or what was right?”

I drank some of my cocoa to buy myself some time. All I could think of was how badly the group-therapy session had gone that night and how worried I was that those kids were in more trouble than I could help them with. Since I couldn’t tell her that, I told her that nothing bad had happened and that the good thing had been going ice-skating with Nina at lunchtime.

“Yeah, well, I believe you that you had fun skating. But I don’t believe that nothing bad happened.” She stared at my face: my little gnome with electric blue eyes and dark curly hair and an impish smile playing on her baby-pink lips. “You’ve got the listening look, Mom.”

“The listening look” was another of Dulcie’s sayings. She claimed that sometimes, even though I was home and focused on what was going on with her, I got an expression on my face as if I was still hearing what my patients had said that day. “It’s like you can’t stop listening to them. Like if you do, it will be your fault if anything bad happens to them.”

I used to get up and check in the mirror when she told me she saw the look, but I couldn’t recognize it the way Dulcie could. She was always right, though, when she called it, and she was right that night.