Maple Syrup and Misunderstandings

My name is Mack, I am sixty-two years old, and I have never once backed down from a contest in my whole life. That is both my best quality and my worst one, depending on who you ask. My doctor says my blood pressure. My late wife used to say it with a laugh and a shake of her head. And my old classmate Peg Danner, who is sixty-one now and still the most stubborn woman I have ever met, would say it is the only thing about me worth talking about.

So let me back up a little and explain how a retired banker ends up standing in his own kitchen, covered in flour, with a sixty-one-year-old retired chef laughing at him from the floor. You will want the full picture before you judge me, and I promise you will judge me.

Peg and I met thirty years ago in a finance seminar, of all places. Neither of us belonged there, really. She was a chef who had inherited money and wanted to understand it, and I was a banker who had inherited a love of arguing and wanted somewhere to aim it. From the first morning we sat near each other, we went at it. She would question the instructor's numbers, I would correct her questions, she would correct my corrections, and by the third day the instructor had quietly moved our seats to opposite corners of the room. We kept finding each other at the coffee station anyway. The whole shape of us, back then. Two people who could not let the other one have the last word.

We never dated. I want that understood, because what happened last weekend took thirty years to arrive and it would cheapen it to pretend there was something earlier. There was not. There was only the rivalry, and Christmas cards with insults in the margins, and one memorable afternoon at a reunion where she beat me at trivia so badly I still bring it up in therapy, jokingly, mostly.

But here is how the weekend came about. Last month she sent me a card, because she sends actual paper cards like a person from another century, and in the margin she wrote that she had retired from the restaurant that spring and that her hands were getting soft from lack of use. And I read that, and my first thought, my honest first thought, was not sympathy. It was challenge. Because if her hands were getting soft, that meant she was slowing down, and if she was slowing down, then I could finally, finally beat her at something. I had lost to her at food trivia exactly once, at that reunion, and I have thought about it every month since, over a question about béchamel. You can laugh. I laugh about it myself now.

So I called her and invited her up to Pinecrest Keep for a weekend. Pinecrest Keep is my hunting lodge, or it was a hunting lodge once, and now it is a rustic retreat in the woods with a big timbered kitchen I spent too much money renovating and a fireplace lounge where I do most of my reading. I told her on the phone that I wanted a rematch on the trivia, and that I would cook us dinner myself, and that I had a very good bottle of scotch waiting. That is what I said. I said it casually. I remember being pleased with how casual I sounded.

And then she arrived on a Friday afternoon with two coolers, a knife roll, and a stand mixer in a canvas bag, and I understood immediately that somewhere in that phone call, two people had two completely different conversations.

"You said cooking showdown," she announced from my driveway, before she even said hello, hauling a cooler out of her car with the confidence of a woman who has carried heavier things for meaner people. "I cleared my whole weekend. I brought my own knives. I brought saffron, Mack. Do you know what saffron costs these days?"

I did not say cooking showdown. I know I did not say cooking showdown, because I had rehearsed that phone call, and I rehearsed it precisely so I would not oversell it and scare her off. What I said was dinner, and trivia, and a scotch. But she heard what she heard, and I will admit the words cooking and weekend probably both occurred in my vicinity, and a woman who spent forty years in professional kitchens hears cooking and weekend and packs the saffron.

So we stood in my kitchen and argued about it, good-naturedly, the way we have always argued, loudly and with a great deal of pointing. She said I baited her. I said she assumed. She said bankers are slippery by trade. I said chefs hear what they want to hear. And the funny thing, the thing I keep turning over in my head even now, is that neither of us was actually angry. We were both grinning like idiots by the third exchange, standing on opposite sides of my big kitchen island, and it felt like being thirty-two years old again in that seminar room, except now my knees hurt and she had laugh lines she did not have back then, and I noticed those laugh lines in a way I did not expect to notice anything.

So we needed to settle it. That is how these things go with us. Somebody has to win. And since the original dispute was about what I had actually said on the phone, and since neither of us records our phone calls like reasonable adults, we were at an impasse. And Peg, being Peg, proposed a solution before I could.

"Fine. Then we settle it the honest way. Dessert contest. Right now. One dessert each, judged by the other, loser washes dishes all weekend."

Now, I want you to understand my position. I am a decent home cook. I roast a good chicken. My bread is respectable. But Peg Danner ran a restaurant kitchen for forty years, and dessert is her specific, documented, award-winning territory. Agreeing to a dessert contest against her was like agreeing to a math contest against a calculator. And I agreed anyway, because I have never once backed down from a contest, as established, and also because she looked so pleased with herself in my kitchen that I wanted very badly to knock her down a peg, pun fully intended, and I figured even losing would at least be entertaining.

So she claimed my counter and began unpacking like a small invasion, and I went to the pantry to get the maple syrup, because I had already decided on a maple tart, which I will defend as an ambitious choice even given what happened next. The syrup was on the top shelf. I reached for it, and my elbow caught a stack of canned tomatoes I had no business stacking that high, and the whole business came down like small red artillery. Cans everywhere. One rolled under the stove, where I still have not retrieved it.

And Peg, who came rushing over to help, stepped in the olive oil that had also been on that shelf, do not ask, and her feet went out from under her, and she landed, directly and completely, in the enormous bowl of flour I had set on the floor while clearing counter space.

For a moment there was total silence. Then she looked up at me from the middle of the flour, wearing a fine white dusting from her hair to her knees, and said, with tremendous dignity, that the contest was off until I stopped laughing. And I was not laughing yet, you understand. I was holding it. I was holding it with everything I had.

And then I lost.

I laughed until I had to put a hand on the counter. Then I laughed until I had to put both hands on the counter, and then I made the mistake of looking at her again, this dignified sixty-one-year-old woman sitting in the wreckage of my pantry like the world's most flour-dusted ghost, and I went off all over again.

"It is not funny," she said, which of course made it funnier. "Mack. Mack, stop. There is olive oil in my hair. I can feel it in my hair."

"You look," I managed, "like a doughnut."

"A doughnut."

"A powdered doughnut. A very expensive powdered doughnut, because I know for a fact that is your good blouse."

She narrowed her eyes at me, and I knew that look. I have known that look for thirty years. That is the look she got in the seminar right before she dismantled my entire position on municipal bonds in front of twenty-two strangers, and I should have recognized the danger I was in. Instead I did the gentlemanly thing.