The Caterer's Call

I'm fifty-eight years old and I never thought I'd be catering a movie set, that's for sure. I'm Nana, by the way, and I run a small catering business out of my kitchen and a rented commercial space over on Delmore Street. Mostly I do funerals, retirement parties, the occasional wedding where the budget ran out before the flowers. So when a production assistant named Mandy called me in March and asked if I could feed a crew of forty people for six weeks, I laughed right into the phone.

"You're serious?" I said.

"Dead serious," she said. "The last caterer quit. Something about the director yelling at her. We pay weekly, cash flow is fine, it's just a weird job."

Well, weekly pay is weekly pay. My savings took a hit when my furnace died in February, and I'd been picking up whatever came my way since. So I said yes before I could think about it too hard.

The soundstage sits out in the industrial district, past a tire warehouse and a place that makes signs. From the outside it's just a big gray metal box. Inside, they'd built a whole living room from some year in the forties, with wallpaper and a fireplace that doesn't work and a staircase that leads nowhere. The first day I walked in with my steam trays, a man in a period suit walked past me talking about his taxes, and a woman with a radio headset nearly ran me down yelling about a light. I stood there with my cooler cart and thought, well, this is chaos, but it's paid chaos.

I set up in a catering tent behind the stage, next to a row of portable toilets and a stack of road cases. It's cramped. There's one fold-out table and two coolers and a warming unit that trips the breaker if I run the coffee pot at the same time. But I've cooked in worse. I once did a fish fry in a church basement with one outlet and a window unit dripping on me.

Here's how the days go. Breakfast at six-thirty for the early crew. Lunch at noon, and that's the big one, everyone comes through at once like seagulls. Then a snack around four, because apparently actors can't go four hours without food, and I don't blame them, it's long days. By the second week I knew most everyone's order. The sound guy wants no onions. The director, a nervous man named Paul, drinks his weight in coffee. Mandy eats standing up, one eye on her walkie, and always says thank you twice.

And then there's Beryl.

Beryl is the lead actress. Thirty-six years old, been in a handful of things you might have seen if you watch the right streaming service, and the whole movie more or less rests on her. The first time she came through my lunch line she was in full costume, some forties dress with a high collar, and she looked at my soup pot like it had spoken to her.

"What's in here?" she asked. "It smells incredible."

"Ham and white bean," I said. "Made the stock last night."

She got a bowl and took a bite and closed her eyes for a second, right there in the middle of the line, holding everyone up. Mandy was behind her doing the patient dance.

"Okay," Beryl said, opening her eyes. "Who are you?"

"Nana. I'm the caterer."

"Nana. Like the grandmother."

"Like the grandmother," I said. "My nieces started it and it stuck."

"Well, Nana," she said, "this soup has a secret ingredient and I need to know what it is."

"There's no secret. It's a ham hock and patience."

She squinted at me like I was lying, which I wasn't, and walked off with her bowl. I thought that was that.

It wasn't that. She came back the next day, and the day after that. Every lunch, there she is, still in costume or half out of it, cardigan over the forties dress, hair pinned up, asking what I've got. And every day some new tease. One day it was the secret ingredient again. Another day she asked if I'd cater her imaginary wedding, which apparently has no groom and a very specific menu. Another day she told me the crew was betting on what I'd make Thursday, and that she'd put money on stuffed peppers, and she was right, and she collected, and she told me I owed her a cut.

"From your winnings?" I said. "I fed you the peppers."

"Fine, I'll pay you in compliments. These peppers are the best thing that's happened to me this week."

"It's Thursday morning, honey."

"Exactly my point."

I'll admit I started looking forward to it. Not in any serious way, at first. I'm fifty-eight, I've had a couple of relationships, nothing that stuck, one man in my forties who lasted eight months and a few brief ones in my thirties that lasted less. Nobody since I turned fifty, honestly, and I'd made my peace with that, or told myself I had. You get to a certain age and you figure the interesting part is over and the cooking part is what's left. I like the cooking part. It's a good part.

But Beryl would come through the line and stay to talk while I restocked the tray, and she talks like someone who actually wants an answer, not like a person making noise. She asked about my business. She asked how long I'd been cooking, and I said since I was twenty-two, starting in my aunt's diner, which is more than thirty years now if my math is right, and she did the math faster than me and said "thirty-six years," and I said "don't tell me that, I'll feel old," and she said, "You're not old, you're established. There's a difference." I don't know why that landed the way it did, but it did.

* * *

Week three, it rained, which doesn't matter to a soundstage except that everybody's mood goes sideways and lunch runs long. I'd made chicken and dumplings because the weather report said rain and I plan my soups like some people plan their outfits. Beryl came through at noon sharp, first in line for once, no makeup retouch holding her up.

"Dumplings," she said, like I'd read her mind. "Nana, are you psychic or just perfect?"

"Just tired," I said, and ladled her a bowl.

She didn't leave. There's a little folding stool behind the tent that I use when my feet complain, and she sat down on it with her bowl like she owned the thing, and we just talked. About nothing much. Her knee hurt from a take they'd done eleven times. My sciatica was acting up from standing on concrete. She told me a story about the last film she did, how the craft services table had nothing but granola bars and one sad bunch of bananas for two months, and she said the whole cast had lost their minds by the end, and I told her that explained half the crew's faces on my first day here.

"You cook like somebody loves somebody," she said, out of nowhere, halfway through the bowl.

"That's a strange thing to say about dumplings."

"It's a strange thing to say about anything, that's what makes it a good thing to say."

Mandy poked her head in around then, clipboard in hand, and said, "Beryl, they need you on set in five."

"Tell them I'm conducting important quality control," Beryl said.

"They need you now!"

She stood up, sighed, handed me the empty bowl instead of putting it in the bin like everyone else, which I noticed, and said, "Save me a dumpling situation for the four o'clock snack, would you? If it's gone I'll know who to blame."

"There's never any left by four, sweetheart. That's the whole point of cooking for forty people."

"Then hide some. Chef's privilege. I know you have a secret stash, nobody's that generous."

I did have a secret stash, as it happened, a container of the dumplings I'd set aside for my own dinner. I told her no such thing. She looked at me like she knew anyway, and went back to work, and I stood there in my tent with an empty bowl and a funny feeling I hadn't had in a good while.

* * *

The next week there was a lull. Paul was arguing with somebody about a lighting rig, and the whole set went quiet the way it does, forty people suddenly pretending to be busy. Word came down through Mandy that lunch would run early and long, so I set the trays out at eleven and had an hour to kill.

Beryl came through with her plate and didn't go sit with the rest of the cast like she usually did. She stood there holding her fork and said, "Sit with me."

"Sit with you?"

"There's a chair. It's even a decent chair. Come on, I hate eating with the camera people, they talk about lenses."

So I untied my apron, which felt strange in the middle of the day, and went and sat with her at the fold-out table while she ate the pork and apples I'd made. It was the first time I'd sat down at my own service in a month. My feet were grateful and the rest of me didn't know what to do.

"This is good," she said, pointing at her plate with the fork. "What's in it besides pork?"

"Cider, apples, a little thyme, brown sugar. My mother made it with cheaper cuts and cooked it longer. I've got better equipment but I still cook it long."

"You cook everything long. I've noticed that. Everything you make tastes like it had time."

"Well. The trick is mostly that. Time and salt." I was fiddling with a napkin. I don't know why I was so nervous. She's thirty-six, I'm fifty-eight, we were eating pork at a folding table in an industrial district. Nothing about it called for nerves.

But then she said, "Can I ask you a personal question, or is that against catering rules?"

"There's no rules. I make them up as I go."

"Do you have somebody? At home, I mean. Waiting for you."

"No," I said. "Nobody since I turned fifty. There was a man for a while in my forties, eight months, and a woman before that, less than that. Neither one stuck. I stopped expecting things to stick around my age."

She chewed a piece of apple and looked at her plate. "I've been single two years," she said. "I came out when I was twenty-two, dated a couple of actresses, one director, and it all fizzled out politely. Two years is a long time to be politely fizzling."

"It is."

"And you? What does Nana do on a Sunday?"

"I do my books. I go to the farmers market on Saturday. I watch cooking shows and yell at them." She laughed at that, a real laugh, not the set laugh she uses on Paul. "I call my nieces. They're the ones who named me Nana, you know. Started when they were little and it stuck, and then the business stuck with it, and now I'm Nana on invoices."

"I like it," she said. "It suits you. Warm and a little bossy."

"I am not bossy."

"You told the gaffer his hand wasn't clean enough to touch the serving spoon. That was bossy and it was correct."

Then she did a thing I keep coming back to. She reached over and put her hand on my wrist, just rested it there, light, while she said, "I mean it about the food. Nobody's cooked for me like this since my grandmother died, and I didn't even like my grandmother." Her hand was warm and her thumb moved once, barely, against the inside of my wrist, and I forgot every recipe I know.

"Green room," came Mandy's voice from the tent flap, not even poking her head in, just the voice, one eye on her walkie like always. "Beryl, green room, five minutes, they're setting the two-shot."

Beryl took her hand back and stood up, and I think something happened in her face, some shift, but it was quick and I might be inventing it after the fact. "Duty calls," she said. "Thanks for sitting with me, Nana."

"Anytime, sweetheart."

She went, and I sat there another minute with my thumb on my own wrist where hers had been, which is a foolish thing to do at your age and I did it anyway, and then I got up and restocked the tray because the line would start soon and that's what I was there for.

* * *

The coffee thing happened two days later, Thursday, the long day, the day they