Expiration Dates: A Novel (8 page)

Honey, listen, I need you to bring me over a dozen doughnuts from that place on Third that makes them gluten-free. Amy is coming, and if I don't have a gluten-free substitute for everything on my table I won't hear the end of it.”

“Why a dozen?” I'm balancing in a towel, water running down my back and onto the tile floor.

She clears her throat through the phone. “Suppose they're good?”

“Call in the order, and I'll grab them on my way over.”

“OK, mummashanna. Wear something nice. You never know.”

“Mom, it's brunch at your house.”

“People have friends! And drive carefully. No rushing.”

She hangs up, and I flip my hair into a towel, drying off my body, moisturizing, and then folding into a giant terry-cloth robe.

I try not to look at myself too often naked. All the freckles
and scars and birthmarks expanding and contracting. I read in a magazine one time that every woman should spend five minutes a day staring at her naked body. I'd rather hurl myself off a balcony.

I run a brush through my hair and then add some product to it. It will still dry straight—it always does—but if I'm lucky, the right amount of air can give me a windswept look, like I've just been caught in some light convertible play.

There's a vintage floral dress I bought recently at Decades on Melrose hanging on the door of my closet. It's white, with tiny blue flowers and cap sleeves. I put it on, pulling a cream cable-knit cardigan over it and sliding into some brown loafers. I add minimal makeup and walk out the door.

The drive down Sunset is hit or miss with traffic on the weekends, but today I hit a glide, and I'm at my parents' doorstep in half an hour, which is practically a record.

When I was growing up we lived on the border of Brentwood and the Pacific Palisades on a tree-lined street. My parents now live much deeper, past the Palisades Village, a Mickey Mouse shopping mall that looks like it belongs in Stepford Wives, California—the sequel. There is an Erewhon, which is the best upscale grocery store in all of California. The strawberries are twelve dollars, but they're life-changing.

Their new home is modest. Three bedrooms, single level. It's an old house, built in the seventies, with stone steps leading up to the front door. My dad greets me when I get there.

“Chicken,” he says. “You're here.”

My father is a short and trim man, with a goatee and a full head of gray hair. He's been calling me “chicken” since I was a baby, when he says I came out looking like a fresh piece of poultry.

“Hey, Papa,” I say. I present the doughnuts, and he takes them out of my hands.

“Your mother,” he says, shaking his head. “Come on.”

He carries the box in one hand and puts an arm around me with the other.

“How was your morning?” he asks me. “You feeling good?”

“Yep. Hugo and I went to the farmers market and had breakfast.”

My father eyes me and drops his voice. “You already ate?”

“Don't worry,” I say. “I won't tell her. And there's plenty of appetite where that came from.”

We enter the kitchen to reveal my mother, apron on, brown curls in a clip, her zaftig figure in black pants and a blue sweater, bustling around the kitchen like she's hosting Thanksgiving.

“Oh, Daphne. Hi. Moshe, why are you holding them like that?”

She snatches the doughnut box from my father, where it has been tucked under his arm thoughtlessly, the insides, I'm sure, in crumbs.

She opens the box on the counter.

“Moshe,” she says. “They slid.”

“Call the authorities, Debra!” my father bellows. “They slid!”

My mother smiles. This is their thing. My mom sweats everything, and my father calls her out on it. It works, perhaps, most importantly, because she lets him.

“You look gorgeous,” my mother tells me. She puts her hands on the sides of my face. They're warm. They're always warm. “How is my love?”

“Good, Mom. Fine!”

She goes to the cabinet and gets a plate down and hands it to me, motioning to the doughnuts. I start lifting them out of their box and onto the plate.

The counter is cluttered with food. Bagels, a tray of lox, cut onions, tomatoes, capers, and cucumbers. There's a fruit plate, and a basket of pastries, some of which I can tell my mother baked.

She taught me how to fry an egg, set a table, chop a scallion. Our taste buds are different—my mother prefers the traditional food she grew up with, and I like a little more spice—but whatever I know how to make, I learned from her.

“You're hungry?” she asks.

I look at my father. He winks.

“Starving,” I say.

The front door opens, and Joan, my parents' neighbor, comes in carrying a bouquet of wild roses with a wet paper towel wrapped around its base.

“Deb, I burnt the hamantaschen and I—” She rounds the corner. She has on silk pants and a linen button-down, and her silver hair hangs in strings around her shoulders. “Oh, hi, honey.” She kisses me on the cheek. Joan always smells like vegetable soup, no matter the time of day or year. “How are you?”

“Keeping the bats at bay,” I tell her.

Joan frowns, and my mother takes the flowers.

“The roses are really going off,” Joan says. “You wouldn't believe it. I have yellow ones now, too. Lance told me they only bloom in the summer, but you get a sunny day around here and all of a sudden they're lining the wall.”

The roses she has brought us today are the lightest shade of pink, rimmed with bright neon at their edges. They're beautiful.

“I'll have to come get some,” my mother says. “Mine have suffered with the drought this year.”

I think about telling her they looked gorgeous outside: plump and bright and full—but the roses seem to be an unspoken point of contention between my mother and Joan. I leave it.

The doorbell rings. My father calls, “Coming!”

Once every other month, my mother throws a brunch for her friends at Kehillat Israel, the reconstructionist temple she and my father belong to in the Pacific Palisades. We've always been reform, but over the years my mother got more and more progressive, and now their temple has things like namaSHVITZ yoga, bead blessings, and curiously uniform feelings about Israel.

My father comes into the kitchen with Marty and Dox, and Irvin and the Other Debra. The Other Debra is not my mother's favorite person, but my father loves Irvin (as does she, as do I), so she tolerates her.

“Welcome, everyone!” my mother calls. “Onto the patio. Out of the kitchen!”

My mother air-kisses them all and shoos them out. Joan and I stay behind with her.

“Any men?” Joan asks me.

My mother makes a bristling noise but doesn't turn around from the stove, where she is now preparing a frittata with caramelized onions.

I consider it, then: “Kind of.”

At this she whips around.

“His name is Jake,” I say. “We've only been out twice.” What's the difference? The paper says what the paper says. I might as well give them something juicy to chew on while I'm here.

“What does he do?” my mother asks.

“He's a studio exec,” I say. “He's not very tall, I'm sorry, but he seems pretty sweet.”

Joan clasps her hands together. “Oh, to be young!” she says.

Joan's husband passed away three years ago from pancreatic cancer. My mother sat shiva the whole week with her and cooked for the month following. We loved Hal. He was warm and hearty—a big, burly man who wasn't shy about throwing his arms around her or anyone who walked through their door. They had two sons together, both of whom live in New York. There was an era in which Joan was hell-bent on getting me together with her eldest, David, but he always had a girlfriend—who five years ago became his wife. Joan still tells me that maybe someday they'll get divorced.

“What else?” my mother asks. “How did you meet?”

“Kendra set us up.” I look at Joan. “My friend from work.”

“Is he Jewish?”

It's a good question. His name is Jake Green, but it's hard to say. “I think so,” I tell her.

A timer goes off, and my mother takes some sizzling potatoes out of the oven. “Joannie, take the fruit out, will you?”

Joan grabs the platter and does as she's told. I hold a ceramic plate underneath the potato tray as my mother scoops them off.

“How is Hugo?” she asks.

It's true what he thinks, my mother does love him.

“He's good,” I say. “He stopped by today.”

“Doesn't he have a girlfriend?”

“No? Maybe. It's Hugo. I never really know.”

My mother smiles. “He is handsome.”

I consider Hugo's sweat-laden running clothes this morning. He does even make them look good. “He is,” I say. “The problem is that he knows it.”

Joan comes back into the kitchen. “What's next?”

My mother points to the doughnut tray. “Those are for Amy,” she says. “Where is Amy?”

Joan shrugs and brings out the bagels.

“It's not such a problem,” my mother says. “Your father knows I'm smart; it works.”

“Hugo knows
he's
handsome, not that I am, there's a difference.”

My mother comes up to me. I see the lines around her eyes, her hair that she's beginning to let go gray. “Mummashanna,” she says, taking my face in her hands once again. “It's not attractive to state the obvious.”

Irina is in New York the following week to oversee a press photo shoot, and I mostly work from home. But Tuesday I go to her house in Laurel Canyon to check the mail and water the plants and fax over a new version of a script with my notes—Irina is old-school. I ask Kendra if she wants to come with me. Kendra is now the head of development for a showrunner on the ABC lot, and is always at work in Burbank, but today she has a doctor's appointment on the west side in the morning, and we decide to meet at Irina's house.

Kendra pulls up in her navy-blue Jeep Cherokee, the Chicks blaring. She is tall—six feet on a bad day—and she's got a mass of curly black hair. She wears jeans almost exclusively, and most of her T-shirts are cropped—I used to think it was by necessity, but now I know it's by design. She's got great abs, so I get it.

I think about our first meeting. I didn't immediately think we would be friends. In fact, I assumed we wouldn't. We would
overlap for the time it took to train me, and then she would move on. I wanted her to stay just long enough to teach me all the logistics. I had no intention of reinventing the wheel with Irina. I just wanted to know what kind of oil the machine preferred and how to keep securing it.

The first day in Irina's office Kendra gave me a big hug. I come from an affectionate family, but it had been a while since I'd experienced that level of unselfconscious display from someone I wasn't related to or sleeping with.

“Welcome,” she said. “This job is a lot of fun.”

Later she'd tell me about the hard parts—Irina could be temperamental; the hours were sometimes very long; I'd deal with a lot of personalities and no one had any patience. But I always appreciated that she opened with joy. That's who Kendra is. Fun first.

Irina's house is situated on Lookout Mountain, right at the summit of Laurel Canyon. It's an old house, built in the fifties, with a sunken living room, lots of wood and little light, and a neutral palette. The back of the house has an addition, though, with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over Los Angeles. She has one of the most stunning views I've seen. There is a terraced lawn beyond the house, and a black stone pool in the yard. It's a sexy house, a house with character, one that screams Old Hollywood, although Irina would hate the world
old
. She's fifty-eight, but no one is allowed to say that number out loud or put it down in writing unless it's a health form.

“You don't know what it's like for women in this town,” she tells me often. “The parents on teen shows are in their thirties.”

I often remind her she's not an actress, and that producing is
a different skill set, and that standards of age when it comes to beauty are changing, but she always pushes back.

“No one wants to make a movie with someone they don't want to fuck.”

I un-alarm the house, and Kendra goes to get some water for the flowers—the orchids take one ice cube of spring water, and the fiddle-leaf fig trees get eight ounces of tap, every two weeks. This is the third fiddle leaf I've killed, and every time their leaves start to turn brown for frustratingly vague reasons I feel like a murderer.

Irina's cat, Moses, comes out from the bathroom and nuzzles up against Kendra's leg.

“Oh, hi, baby.” Kendra scoops him up and cuddles him into her. “Who is looking after you?”

“Penelope,” I say.

Penelope is Irina's on-again, off-again girlfriend, who was once her wife. “Great with cats, terrible with plants,” according to Irina.

“What cycle are we in with that?”

There was no car in the driveway, so I know she's not currently home.

“Off?” I venture. They usually seem happier when they're not together, and lately they've been pretty happy.

I check the mail—some junk, some household bills, a few screeners—and give Moses a healthy scoop of kibble, just in case.

There is a framed photo of patron saint Patti Smith over the mantel in the living room, and an area comprised entirely of sheepskin, fur throws, and pillows that Irina calls “the playpen” to the right of it. Den of iniquity meets cozy, basically. This house just constantly looks like it's trying to get into your pants.

I love it here. I remember the first time I walked in, I thought:
This is what a point of view looks like.

When Irina is in New York, she is usually scheduled socially up to the actual minute, so as long as I remember to make her dinner reservations at Babbo, she doesn't mind if we take a bit of a breather in her absence. She'll never call and ask what I'm doing just for the hell of it. If she's taken care of, and the business is humming, that's all that matters.

The last plant is a palm in Irina's closet, which is a room all its own. There are mirrored sliding doors on every wall, and in the center is an island, with a glass top, and drawers on the sides. It's a masterpiece, the crowning jewel of this home, and not just because of its size, which is enormous, but because of what's in it. Irina has archives from every decade—incredible seventies sequins, Laura Ashley sundresses from the eighties. There is custom Givenchy and the entire line of Prada's women's wear from the year 1992. She has at least fifty black blazers. It's heaven.

“I love it in here,” Kendra says. She leans against the counter. “You know she once told me I could borrow the tulle skirt for my cousin's wedding? It didn't fit, though.”

Irina has
the
tulle skirt—the very same one Sarah Jessica Parker a.k.a. Carrie Bradshaw wears in the opening credits of
Sex and the City
.

“Yes,” I tell Kendra. “You've only mentioned it to me fifty times.”

Kendra fingers an Hermès silk neck scarf that's hung with a dozen others on a little display on top of the island.

“I miss it sometimes,” she says.

“What?”

“Working here. How unexpected it always was.”

“Irina loves you,” I tell Kendra. “She'd probably let you live in this closet if you wanted to.”

Kendra smiles. “Yes,” she says. “But things change, you know? It's different now than it used to be.”

“With you two?”

Kendra shrugs. “It used to drive me crazy, how she'd call me on the weekends at all hours, but sometimes I miss the drama.”

“I feel like there's less drama, in general,” I say. The last time Irina got truly worked up it was about a legitimate scheduling conflict on a film shoot—not a celery juice. And it was at 11:00 a.m. on a Wednesday.

I water the palm and then clap my hands together. “I'm starving,” I say. “Let's eat.”

Half an hour later we're seated at Art's Deli on Ventura in the valley. We haven't been here in ages, at least a year. But during those weeks where Kendra was training me we came all the time. We'd go to work, and then at five or six or seven, whenever we'd finish, we'd drive over the hill and sit in a red booth and order—a Reuben for Kendra, and a BLT with coleslaw for me. They have giant soda glasses—sixty-four ounces—and we'd sit for at least two hours, debriefing on the day, picking at cold fries.

“Ah, memories,” Kendra says, sliding in. We're handed thick plastic menus, but we don't even look at them.

“Wait,” Kendra says, once the waitress—Gretchen—leaves.

Gretchen is probably in her mid-forties, with a wide but impatient smile. We recognize her, but she doesn't recognize us.

“I haven't even asked you about how it's going with Jake.”

Reflexively, I feel my face break into a smile.

“That good?”

“We've only been out twice,” I say. “There isn't a lot to tell.”

“Bullshit,” Kendra says. “You don't get this”—she loops her finger in the air around my face—“stupid.”

I have never told Kendra about the notes. Not because I think she'd think I was crazy—because she would—but because I never tell anyone. For forever, it was my private joke with the universe, my little behind-the-scenes snapshot. I didn't tell anyone because it felt like it would be breaking a promise. Like exposing this anomaly to air might oxidize it, and then I might never receive another note again. That the spell would be broken.

To date, Hugo is the only one who knows.

“It's true,” I say. “I have a good feeling about him. He's sweet, and really smart.” I pause. “Did you know his wife?”

Kendra shakes her head. “No. It was before I met him.”

I nod.

“He's been through a lot,” Kendra says. “But I think it's made him kinder. He has a maturity a lot of men don't. You can just sense it in him. He's a real grown-up.”

“I know what you mean,” I say.

“We should all do something soon,” Kendra says.

Kendra's husband is a man named Joel. They got married last year on the beach in Malibu. Sunset, twenty people, a lace doily for a veil and Bob Marley on the car sound system. Her sister officiated, and afterward we went to Geoffrey's on the ocean and drank cold beer and warm red wine, ate oysters, and listened to the waves crash up against the rocks below us. It was perfect, and so very Kendra.

The thing about Joel is that he's not the friendliest, or better:
the most outgoing. Maybe that's a little too harsh, and maybe the comparison to Kendra is just extreme. He's always been nice to me, but he's a software engineer and way more comfortable in rooms alone than in any larger conversation. He usually encourages girls' nights, and resists anything involving a dinner table outside their home. I respect their relationship because it always appears—at least from the outside—that they let each other be exactly who they are.

He loves to hike; you'll never find her on the trail. He's a true pescatarian, and Kendra lives off hamburgers. But they balance each other.

“Joel has met Jake before,” she says. “He liked him.”

I unstick my shirt from the leather booth. It gives off a suctioning sound.

“Do you ever miss being single?” I ask her.

Kendra thinks for a moment. “I honestly never thought I'd get married. I never really wanted to, the whole thing seemed kind of stale and obvious.” She shrugs. “And then I met Joel.”

“That's not an answer.”

Kendra smiles. “Oh, but it is.”

Our food arrives then. The bacon is crispy, the lettuce is wilted but fresh, and the tomatoes are sweet. There's nothing fussy about it, just the basics. I missed this place.

“So in other words, no.”

“In other words, eat your food,” Kendra says, taking a bite.