Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (4 page)

“Right,” I say, clarifying the point. “No men.”

“Yes,” she says, “of course. I went through exactly the same thing when I was your age.”

I’m about to say something that I’ve been wanting to say for quite a while, something that I’ve never quite had the heart to say to her, when she beats me to it.

“I don’t know why you like to play this little game where you pretend we’re so different,” she says, adjusting her hat so that her face is out of the sun. “You and I are turning out to be very much alike.”

Six

“So, are we shopping for husband number eight?”

My grandmother and I are at a restaurant called Roman’s, where the diet Cokes cost twelve dollars.

“I don’t shop for husbands,” my grandmother replies, not missing a beat. I can tell that she is not annoyed by my snarky comment. Rather, she is about to turn it into a teachable moment. “I shop for diamonds, pearls. I don’t shop for husbands. That would be tacky.”

My grandmother takes a slow sip of her water, eyes on me the whole time.

“Is that what
you
are doing this evening?” my grandmother asks, eyes narrowing. “Shopping for your next husband?”

“No,” I reply, “it is not.”

The waitress comes to our table and we place our orders—for me, chicken parmesan, for my grandmother, a mixed green salad topped with goat cheese and pecans.

“People don’t really
eat
here,” she explains once the waitress is out of earshot. “You don’t come to Roman’s for the food, you come for the view.”

I look out to see just what view my grandmother is referring to, but all that I see is a parking lot filled with a lot of very expensive cars. Surely a woman who uses four different eye creams has no interest in cars. I turn back to face my grandmother.

She laughs at me and says: “No darling, I mean
the view,
” and throws her arm out to show me the bar area. It is crawling with twenty- and thirty-something singles. A view indeed: rich boys, trustafarians living off daddy’s dime; girls looking to marry rich, desperate wannabes, aching to fit in with all the money; a few lonely looking divorcées.

“That one’s cute,” my grandmother says, pointing at a nondescript guy my age. He’s wearing seersucker pants.

“He’s not really my type,” I say, and take a sip of my diet Coke.

“And what exactly is your type?” my grandmother asks, lips pointing upward into a sly smirk.

“Well, I don’t really like the same type as you.”

“And what type is that?”

“Rich,” I say. “Well off. You know, established.”

“That’s just a lot of different ways to say that I’m a gold digger.”

“No,” I say, my eyes widening to prove my innocence. “I don’t mean that at all. I don’t think that. I just mean that my type wouldn’t be out here in the Hamptons.”

“If I recall correctly,” my grandmother says, “your type used to be someone who really went for things in life and got them. A big-time lawyer who wanted to change the world. The type of man who most certainly would be in the Hamptons.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“I only bring it up to point out the fact that your type now seems to be ‘loser.’ But it didn’t used to be.”

I feel myself losing my temper, something I almost never do in front of my grandmother, and I take a sip of my ice water and grind down the ice cube with my teeth.

As if on cue, the waitress brings our main courses.
I’m complaining about the spoiled brat man-children out here, but I just ordered a forty-two-dollar chicken parmesan.

My grandmother takes tiny bites of her salad, and as I watch her eat her salad gracefully, I’m reminded of her European heritage. As for me, there is just no graceful way to eat a huge slab of chicken parmesan. So I just dig in, letting the cheese drip everywhere, scooping up sauce with every bite.

“You’re not going to get anywhere with your attitude. You can’t look down your nose at everyone you meet. Men need to feel important, like they are successful.”

“Not every man you married actually was successful,” I say.

“Yes,” my grandmother concedes, “that’s right. But they all
thought
they were. Even the Prince truly believed that the people loved him for him, and not because of his father’s crown.”

My grandmother looks over my shoulder, to catch what my eye has just seen.

“Are you still scared of those kids?”

“What kids?” I ask, and whip my eyes back to my chicken parm.

“Those young men over there,” my grandmother says with a slight tilt of her head. “They look like the sort of people you went to school with.”

“I’m not scared of them.”

“Well, that’s good,” she says.

“I was never scared of them,” I tell my grandmother. She looks back at me and smiles, but it’s a smile that says she feels sorry for me, that she knows I’m lying to myself and to her, and that she doesn’t care. She understands.

I was very different from all of the other kids who attended Pearce, the private school on the Upper East Side where I was a student from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. My attendance was spotty, for one thing, but the trustees loved that my mother was this award-winning photojournalist, so the school always let it slide.

The differences weren’t something you could see. I always had the right clothing, the right haircuts to fit in—my grandmother saw to that. But it was the subtle things that made me stand out. Being the only one in class without a father to speak at Career Day. Having my grandmother be the one to serve as “class mom.”

I’d be at the dinner table with a classmate in her family’s Upper East Side brownstone and her mother would innocently ask, “So, where do you live, dear?” My one word answer always shut them up: downtown.

Downtown New York City is a very cool place to live now, probably more desirable than the Upper East Side even, but when I grew up, with the people I grew up with, no one dared live below Fifty-Seventh Street. In fact, most people wouldn’t even travel below Fifty-Seventh Street, what with the gang violence, porn theaters, and crack epidemic raging in the eighties. The New York City I grew up in was pre-Disney Times Square, before people really lived all over the city, before every neighborhood in town was completely gentrified.

So telling someone that I was from downtown usually put a stop to the conversation. And my playdates.

But it wasn’t that I was scared of those kids. In fact, some of them I liked quite a lot.

Every Christmas break, my grandmother would take me away to somewhere warm. Sometimes it would be the vacation home of one of her husbands, sometimes she’d be between husbands and would cherry-pick a fabulous resort with beach access and lots of families vacationing so that I’d have other kids to hang out with.

When I was in ninth grade, we went to the Four Seasons on the Big Island of Hawaii. I loved going to Hawaii, where I usually met kids from California, rather than New York, as most New Yorkers opted for the three-hour plane ride to the Caribbean as opposed to the eleven-hour trek to Hawaii. I found that in these two weeks of vacation, I could reinvent myself to be whoever I wanted to be. Also, it was my second year in a row on the Big Island, so I knew a bunch of the kids from the year before. We hadn’t kept in touch at all—in a pre–email/Facebook/Internet world, the only mode of communication was letter writing—but when we saw one another again down at the lagoon, it was as if no time had passed.

The second night of vacation, we all gathered in the lobby after dinner, which was our custom, and began talking about what sort of mischief we could create that night. The boy from Texas said that the valet would give him his parents’ rental car so we could drive into town and try to get into a bar. Just as a quorum was being reached, a new kid joined our group. Mitzy from New Jersey immediately began chatting him up and discovered he was from New York City.

“Hannah’s from the City,” she announced loudly, and then presented him to me, as if I were in charge.

“I go to Dalton,” he said, name-dropping his top-tier school. This was a game I could play.

“I go to Pearce,” I said back. He smiled and told the group that I was a “real smart cookie.” Everyone laughed at this since, of course, they already knew that.

From that moment, Logan and I became inseparable. The rest of the kids doted on us as if we were their king and queen, which I suppose we were. But we only had eyes for each other. Every day, we met for breakfast before heading out to the lagoon. We’d sit side by side in lounge chairs all morning, then break at twelve-thirty for lunch, which we’d eat with the whole group. Then we’d disappear for a bit, exploring the grounds of the resort together. Late afternoons were spent wrapped up together in a hammock, gazing up at the perfect Hawaiian sky and, of course, kissing. I couldn’t kiss him enough and the feeling seemed to be mutual.

Luckily for me, my grandmother was busy with husband number six, the former teen idol, so she allowed me to eat dinners with the group almost every night.

By the time Christmas Eve rolled around, Logan asked me to spend it with his family. They even invited my grandmother and her husband to come along, too.

Christmas Eve was magical. Which is saying a lot, coming from a Jewish girl. My grandmother later told me that I was beaming the whole night. Positively beaming. Everything just seemed so perfect. Logan’s parents were kind to me. They didn’t ask where in the city I lived, just went on and on to my grandmother about how smart I must be to attend Pearce. My grandmother never once mentioned that I only got in because of my mother. She simply smiled to accept the compliment.

There were even presents—a photo album from the gift shop from Logan’s parents and a delicate necklace with a pink shell dangling in the center from Logan. As he put the necklace around my neck, I remember thinking,
I will never take this necklace off. Ever.

That night we had sex under the banana tree by the lagoon. Me, for the first time ever. Him, for the third. I was utterly, completely in love.

I’d be lying if I said that a tiny little part of me wasn’t also thrilled at the prospect of going back to school with a real-life, bona fide boyfriend. Better still, a Dalton boy. One who went to the right school, wore the right clothes, lived in the right part of town. Maybe having Logan would make me feel less like a social pariah.

And I knew just when I’d show him off. Melissa Rowan, the richest girl at school, was having a New Year’s Eve party. She hadn’t really invited me, per se, but she was throwing flyers around the hallways before break, so how strict could the guest list be? News of the party had reached Dalton, and Logan and his friends were planning to attend. On the last night of vacation, we said our tearful good-byes and told each other that we’d meet at the party.

I literally had to bribe my best friend Libby to come with me. I had to agree to do her geometry homework for an entire month just to get her to walk in the front door.

It was a simple bargain: I knew I couldn’t go to the party by myself, and she knew that the second I met up with Logan, I’d be off making out with him for the rest of the night, leaving her completely alone at a party she didn’t want to attend in the first place.

We walked in and I tried to keep my head high, tried to act like the leader of the pack I was when I was in Hawaii. But the moment I walked into Melissa’s brownstone, I was transformed back into Hannah Goodman, class outcast. No one turned around when I entered the room like they’d done in Hawaii. No one even noticed at all. The huge smile I wore was greeted with blank stares. My tanned skin, which I thought made me glow, was becoming warm and itchy. I quickly downed a beer to get a bit of a buzz—I figured that if I felt giddy enough, I could fake my confidence.

By the time Logan and his friends walked in, Libby and I were firmly ensconced in a corner. I turned to see him—you could feel his presence as he walked into the room—and he looked even more handsome than he had in Hawaii. I fingered my shell necklace and walked over to him, but it was already too late. It was obvious. I may have been the coolest girl in Hawaii, but back here in Manhattan, I was a nobody. And no one in the New York City prep school scene wants to be with a nobody.

He walked by me and pretended he had no idea who I was. I would like to say that I was crushed, that my heart was broken, but the truth is, I had a feeling that this would happen all along.

Seven

It’s raining. I figure that my grandmother will take this as an opportunity to have her event planner come by and work on my welcome-to-the-Hamptons garden party, but she has something else in mind.

My grandmother wants to organize her photo collection. I didn’t even know she had a photo collection, but it seems she does. And a quite extensive one, at that.

In her bedroom there is an enormous trunk, the kind that people used for trips on cruise liners across the Atlantic. A traveling chest. The sort of thing that isn’t used anymore because it’s too large and bulky to travel with. When I saw it in her bedroom on my first day here, I’d assumed that it was part of the décor—it’s a Louis Vuitton with faded leather, beech-wood slats, and a “V” hand painted on the top. Then there are the labels: Greece, Cannes, Spain, the Bahamas. They read like a diary from her life.

“What is this?” I ask, running my fingers over the customs stickers.

“My photographs,” my grandmother answers, and inserts a key. The trunk squeaks open, and as I peer in, I can see that it’s filled with old photographs and albums.

“I never knew you had this,” I say, and my grandmother gives me a sly smile. She is very much an open book, so I’m surprised to have discovered something about her that I didn’t know before. Why would she store all of these old photographs in a trunk? Why is she traveling with them?

“Makes me look like an old lady,” my grandmother says, almost under her breath.

“No,” I say, “it doesn’t. You know, people who’ve lost their homes in fires say that the thing they most wish they’d run back for is their photos. Photographs are important.”