Life From Scratch (20 page)

I once dated a guy who said all the unhappiness in the world is tied to expectations, and if we could live without expectations, we'd live in a state of perpetual bliss because we'd always be happy with what we have.

Except if I hadn't had the expectation of how the rice pudding would make me happy, I wouldn't have tried the recipe in the first place. Whatever. That guy smelled like patchouli and wanted to be a professional hackysack player. What the hell did he know?

Chapter Nine

Splashing the Wine

I wake up in the morning to the telephone ringing. It takes a moment for my mind to untangle itself, especially since I’m trying to beat the answering machine from picking up.
I had sex last night with Gael. Twice
. I finished the proposal. I think. The telephone is ringing.

My sister immediately launches into what she needs. That is one of Sarah’s best traits—she doesn’t waste your time asking questions or making small talk. She tells me that her nanny has an emergency eye doctor appointment, Penelope has no ballet class due to a gas leak at the studio, and could I please come out to
Brooklyn
and watch my niece while Sarah opens up a man’s head.

“You want me to cross the bridge?” I ask. “Today?”

“Could you? Could you be here soon? Ethan can’t.”

I start dressing before I hang up, debating whether I have enough time to swing by the post office on my way to the subway and mail the proposal. Erika finally wrote back an apology last night for not contacting me again sooner and promised to read it as soon as it arrives. The agency office is a few blocks away, but I thought it would be creepy to show up at Rooks
LTD
(
Rooks knows Books!
) holding a stack of papers, nervously telling the receptionist, “This is my proposal,” as if I’m handing in a high school essay assignment. I swing by my local post office instead on the way to the subway and choose a nondescript manila envelope from the wall, filling in the local address and paying several dollars to have it walked a few blocks away.

“It’s a book proposal,” I tell the postmaster as he rings up the sale.

“That’s great,” he tells me, not bothering to even try to sound convincing.

I take my receipt and fold it carefully into my pocket. I’m not a big scrapbooker, but perhaps I should start—keep the receipt from the very first time I mailed something to an agent, use the scrapbook as a storage space for reviews when they come out.

Dream big.

Outside it is still bitterly cold, and I treat myself to coffee. If I’m going to provide free babysitting for Penelope, I’m going to need fortifications.

Sarah is already gone by the time I arrive, and the nanny hurries away once she has established that Sarah will be back by two. Before she leaves, she passes me Sarah’s Dos and Don’ts list.

Do make sure that Penelope fits in some form of exercise. Acceptable forms of exercise include 20 minutes of play in the park, jumping jacks, or going to the indoor playzone if it is particularly icy outside as long as I follow up the playtime with what amounts to an alcohol sanitizer bath.

Don’t allow Penelope to eat any processed foods, especially those containing dyes. I wonder if the nanny has broken her glasses on purpose—anything to get a free afternoon away from jumping jacks and dye-free foods.

I find Penelope in her room, playing with the dollhouse Ethan, and I bought her for her last birthday. “Hello, Aunt Rachel,” she says.

“Hello,” I answer back, sliding down onto the floor. She looks at me in surprise. “Can I play too?”

She stares at me without blinking and finally hands me a doll. The mommy. I fluff out the mommy’s apron and make her walk around the living room.

“She should be in the kitchen,” Penelope solemnly tells me.

“Why? Can’t she relax on the sofa? Catch up on her television shows? Can’t a mommy watch some
Sesame Street
?”

This makes her laugh, but she shakes her head. She pushes my hand towards the kitchen, and I oblige. I put on my best Julia Child voice and pretend the mother is chopping up chicken parts for an udon noodle dish. “La la la, red meat is better, but in a pinch, you can add chicken to your udon noodles making a most delicious dish. Lovely lovely noodles.”

“Aunt Rachel, are you a chef?” Penelope asks.

“No. Yes. I am a cook.”

“Mommy says that you think you’re a chef, but you’re not.”

“Oh, does she,” I say smoothly. I love that Penelope is still at an age where she speaks in absolute truths. “That’s because Mommy is a little jealous that she doesn’t know how to make delicious food like me. What does she say I am?”

“She says you’re a writer.”

I tuck my face down towards my shirt so she can’t tell that I’m smiling. I move the doll around the kitchen like she has suddenly broken out into an ecstatic dance. “Yeah, I’m a writer too. I’m a writer who cooks.”

“Mommy doesn’t know how to cook.”

“None of the Katz women do. Grandma Katz—terrible cook. But I am breaking that fate. I am going to be a great chef. Even better than Julia Child.”

“Is she a kid?”

“Julia Child? Oh…child . . . kid. No. She was a famous chef.”

“Why don’t you have children?” Penelope asks. She looks up at me, honestly interested rather than judging. I push her bangs out of her eyes and stare at the perfect curve of her cheek, the dark thickness of her lashes. I purse my lips together, trying to come up with an acceptable answer, one that doesn’t make me want to raid their liquor cabinet so that the nanny comes home to find me drunk on gin.

“How do you know I don’t have children?” I finally ask, to buy myself time.

“Because I’ve never seen them,” Penelope admonishes.

“That’s because I keep them in my pocket.” I slip my hand in my jeans and wiggle it around a bit. Penelope laughs. “There is Molly; no wait . . . that’s Peter.”

“Let me see,” Penelope says.

“Absolutely not. If I take them out, they’re going to want to play with your dollhouse and mess it all up. They’ll move the toilet to the kitchen and the sofa into the bathtub. Hey, I’ve got an idea. Henny Penny, let’s go out.”

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“We are going to a paint-your-own-pottery place that I just saw on the walk from the subway. And we are going to make me a big udon noodle dish. And then I am going to have you over for the most fabulous noodles you’ve ever tasted that I’ve never ever made before.”

She is easy to convince, easy to distract and malleable. She puts on her shoes and unhooks her coat from the rack by the front door. She stands politely on the welcome mat while I raid the kitchen, pushing aside the boxes of flax seed crackers to find something edible and failing that, grab a few dollars from the semi-secret envelope in my sister’s desk to buy myself a bagel at the Dunkin’ Donuts.

At the pottery place, I have Penelope sit quietly at a table—she is definitely the master of quiet sitting—while I talk to the owner and pick out a rough white dish. It has a lot of potential, the wide, shallow slope of the bowl, the unusual crimping of the edge. I bring it back to the table, and Penelope chooses the worst colors imaginable. A murky green, a sterile grey, beige.

“This bowl is supposed to celebrate noodles,” I tell her. “You love noodles. Dark green doesn’t say noodles. It says ‘receptacle for overcooked beets.’ What about pink? What about this sparkly purple?”

“What about blue?” she says, pointing to some more palatable shades.

“What about sunshine?” I ask, pointing to a cheery yellow. She smiles and squishes her finger over the same square on the color chart. I pick up her hand and give it a kiss. “What about reds and oranges and colors that are happy?”

“How do you know if a color is happy?” Penelope asks.

“It just makes you feel happy,” I explain. “When you’re looking at it, you feel happy.”

“Dark green makes me happy. It’s my happy color,” Penelope agrees.

“Okay,” I say slowly, my artistic vision being ruined as I struggle to be the adult. “We’ll use tiny accents of dark green.”

The owner brings us the paint on a small ceramic dish, and we each tackle separate sides of the bowl, making swirls of color and dots and lines as we paint towards the middle. She tells me about how her nanny cries while she watches soap operas in the afternoon and how her best friend at the park once swallowed a goldfish. She tells me all the words she knows in Japanese and how her mother told her that she could wear lipstick to her Bat Mitzvah when she’s thirteen. And slowly, slowly, our heads come together as we both bend over the bowl, our brushes crossing, and my hair touches her, mixes together until you can’t tell where we begin and end.

I leave before my sister
returns home, after having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with Penelope and her nanny. I make a mental note to return to Park Slope the next week to pick up my dish and promise Penelope that I’ll take her with me to get it. The nanny lets her try on her new pair of cat-eye glasses, and Penelope waves at me from the door, her already round eyes even more enlarged behind the frames.

I pick up a few ingredients for a tofu sesame stir-fry and call Laura on my walk home. She doesn’t pick up on the ambivalence in my question about guests, the way I give her one too many outs and tells me that she’s “thrilled” that I’m bringing my “beau,” and she’s just “ecstatic” that I’ve finally “moved on.” She tells me that she can’t wait for me to meet her new boyfriend as well, a “brilliant” man who quotes Shakespeare to her and takes her “picnicking indoors.” I’m not even sure what that means, so I thank her and try to keep my voice breezy. I call back Gael and tell him to pick me up on Saturday at seven. It’s a date.

I make dinner and eat it on the sofa in front of the television, checking my email at the same time. I know it would be too soon to receive something from Erika, that the postmaster didn’t heave himself around the counter and walk the few blocks to her office to hand-deliver it that morning. I just wish that I had thought to ask her if I could email the proposal. My good ideas always come too late.

The buzzer startles me out of the zen state I have entered, watching Cat Cora do bizarre things to ostrich meat on
Iron Chef
. First, I hit the entry button and second, I realize that I have no clue who I’ve just let into the building. It could be my brother, finally bored with waiting for someone to exit the building so he can make a surprise entrance. Or it could be a rapist who is going to wait in the stairwell until
I
come down the steps in the morning, forgoing every other woman who lives in the building. Not that I have a self-important, pessimistic imagination.

Someone knocks at the door, and I peer out the tiny peephole. Gael’s face looms like a reflection in a carnival mirror. He is staring at a spot on my hallway ceiling.

I actually mouth the word “Shit,” to myself, as if I’m trapped inside a romantic comedy movie. This has never happened to me before, the unexpected guest who is not kin—fictive or otherwise. My apartment is a mess. I left this morning without time to wash the dishes that are piled up in the sink. My bed is unmade and covered with my clean laundry that still needs folding. I am eating ice cream straight from the carton in front of the television.

“Rachel?” he asks. He knows I’m inside. I mean, I’ve buzzed him in. Unless I can pretend that it wasn’t me. It was someone else. The rapist, for instance, from the earlier worry who is lying in wait in my apartment, kind enough to buzz someone into the building but not wanting the company while he waits for me to come home.

“Give me a second,” I yell out, throwing the lid on the ice cream and stuffing it back in the freezer. I scoop up the clothes and toss them in the laundry basket and dump the basket and its contents into the dry shower, snapping the curtain shut. I kick a pair of shoes under the bed and give the blanket a shake. There is no time to fix everything wrong with the sink.

I throw open the door, and we both stand there for a moment, not saying anything. I am trying to catch my breath from running around the apartment, not wanting him to see just how out-of-shape I am that I can get winded by a 30-second clean-up spree. He has a look on his face as if he doesn’t quite know how he has ended up standing inside my hallway.

He pulls out a cookbook from behind his back. It is a thick volume, part of the “Cuisines of” series. This is
Cuisines of Spain,
and it looks a little dog-eared and
paella
-splattered. “I was at a bookstore today. A second-time bookstore? And I found this in the cookbook section,” he admits. I step aside so he can enter my still-messy apartment.

“What were you doing in the cookbook section?” I ask.

“It was next door to the Spanish section,” he said. “I thought of you.”

His honesty is like swallowing a chunk of jalapeno. I busy myself by flipping through the table of contents. He hasn’t removed the sticker from the bookstore. He paid eight dollars for the gift.

Is it a gift?

“Do you want to sit down?” I ask. Even though it is quite clear from the way he surveys my bed to the way he stares at the remote control as if he is waiting for me to turn off the television that sitting is the position farthest from his mind.
Do you want to lie down? Do you want to recline? Do you want to loll about in my bed making small talk and then ravage me
?