page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | all | buy A half-century of Gus. "You'll want to use the best sherry you can afford when making a vinaigrette," she had said on a recent show, before realizing the sherry was almost as old as she was. "I could be bottled up and put on the shelf," she'd said, laughing. But a nagging dread had snuck up on her, and she resented it. Forty-six, 47, 48, even 49–all those parties had been smashing. When she blew out her candles on last year's cake–a carrot ginger with cinnamon cream cheese icing–and her producer, Porter, had shouted out, "Next year's the big one!" she had laughed along with the crowd. And she felt fine about it. She really, really did. No, really. She did. She hadn't scheduled a session of Botox, hadn't begun wearing scarves to hide her neck. Fifty, she told herself, was no big deal. Until she woke up one morning and realized she hadn't done a thing to plan. She, who never missed a chance to have a party. And that's when she realized that she didn't want to do anything about celebrating, either. The problem, she reflected one morning while washing her tawny brown hair with color-enhancing shampoo, developed somewhere between working on the show schedule for the upcoming year and learning that the CookingChannel was slashing the budget and ordering fewer episodes than usual. "All the cable channels are losing market share," Porter had explained. "We just have to ride it out." He'd been in the TV business a long time, longer than Gus, and was enviably successful, a black man in the very white world of food TV. There were rumblings he was even going to be named head of programming. Gus's trust in Porter was absolute. Then the CookingChannel had hired a style consultant who informed Gus that "after a certain age" some ladies do well to add a few pounds to smooth out the face ("You're wonderfully slender but it wouldn't hurt to fill in the lines, you know," the stylist had said, not unkindly. "Good lighting can only work for so long.") Finally, she'd met Sabrina for dinner one night and admired the couple at the table across from them, a gorgeous black-haired young woman in a bubble-gum-pink dress accompanied by a frowning older woman, her butterscotch hair in a medium-length swingy bob and clad in an oatmeal linen pantsuit. She was startled to realize the wall across from her was mirrored and the grumpy-faced diner was herself. "Are you okay, Mom?" Sabrina had said, signaling the waiter for more water. "You look as though you're a little ill." Gus wasn't young anymore. At first she'd tucked this awareness away with her white shoes after Labor Day. But the truth refused to stay hidden, revealing itself when she spotted a wrinkle she'd never noticed or heard a crackle in her knees when she bent over to pull out a saucepan. Or when her longtime sous chef announced, in what seemed like out-of-the-blue fashion, that she was retiring. Which meant she'd reached retirement age. Alarming when you considered that it meant twelve long years had gone by since Gus had her first CookingChannel show, The Lunch Bunch, in 1994. That the young mom who'd twisted her shimmering butterscotch locks into a loose updo, tendrils escaping, had eschewed aprons, and whipped up easy, delicious dishes now, was a parent of girls with jobs and lives and kitchens of their own. Girls who had, sort of, become women. They weren't really grown-up. Not in the real sense. After all, she'd had two children by the time she was Sabrina's age–and that was in addition to a husband, and a year of adventure in the Peace Corps. Aimee and Sabrina, on the other hand, were far from self-sufficient. Aimee seemed never to have anyone serious in her life, and Sabrina changed boyfriends with the seasons. It was funny, really, how today's twelve-year-olds page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | all | buy