Spooning (19 page)

T
hat night, I found myself in our kitchen preparing to cook the hell out of my cookies for the f'ing Cookie Swap. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but it took my mind off of a certain someone. They say cooking can be great therapy. There's something about mashing, cracking, beating, and balling. It's choco-thera-chippy. But I had to release all my tension through the wrists because our kitchen posed a bit of a challenge.
It was basically a five foot wall comprised of a sink, what we called the Barbie stove, and some cupboards. For years when I was a kid, I had begged my mother for one of those EASY- BAKE Oven things. I wanted to whip up mini chocolate cakes (even though they tasted like rubber most of the time) and frost it with the pouch of white sugar. I dreamt of mixing and baking, basting, and broiling … okay, so my eight-year-old aspirations were not that sophisticated, nor were they ever fulfilled. My mother would not acquiesce. She was adamant about the fact that a toy oven would attract bugs. So she stomped all over my youthful dreams of cooking, and I fully blame her for my lack of skill in the kitchen today. Heck, I could have been the host of
Sunshine & Sensibility
, not the Diva. (I decided I'd throw this little zinger out to Mom on the phone tonight—payback for her snide comments about my homemade Christmas gifts.) But now, I had the Cooking Club to give me that all-important second chance at developing skills in the domestic department. It's never too late!

I spun in a pathetic twirl as my new favorite song blared through the stereo for the umpteenth time:

Crouching down, I faced our miniature Barbie stove head on; so like that EASY-BAKE Oven I'd once dreamt about. This cookie project was going to take me hours. I'd already had to run out once to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy new cookie sheets; the hand-me-downs from my babysitter were too wide for the Barbie oven. Plus, I could only bake one sheet at a
time. With flour in the air and in my hair, I mixed the brown gooey batter and even managed to separate the yolk from the white goopy part of the egg. I've never really been a fan of eggs, yet they appear in every recipe known to man.

My egg thoughts sent a new jolt of sorrow to my heart. I had dreamt about Mr. J. P. Morgan making me eggs once. My daydream went something like this: we would wake up after a late night out, me groggy and barely human, and he sweet and sexy, whipping breakfast up in the kitchen. My mother used to warn me, “Don't sleep with anyone before you marry them!” since I was such a bear in the morning. But Mr. J. P. Morgan wouldn't mind. He would wake up really early and begin to cook. Then he'd appear with a tray of scrambled eggs that he had dutifully concocted with a fork and a smidge of milk and pepper. He'd sneak in a spoonful of butter, not worrying about my cuddly hips. I'd smile sweetly with my eyes half opened and the eggs would soon be forgotten in lieu of a helping of morning sex.

The reality, however, was nowhere close, despite my poetic and imaginative scene setting. One morning, I
had
awoken to the smell of eggs—a smell, I confess, that I didn't even really like. Truth be told, I don't even like the taste of eggs (I just thought they'd look so pretty and sunny on a breakfast tray). Mr. J. P. Morgan's nose had twitched in his sleep and two nanoseconds later, he had left our love nest, jumping out of bed and leaving the covers thrown back and my nakedness exposed to the apartment. He had returned about twelve minutes later (about the time it takes to get the sports scores off the news broadcast), shoveling his roommate's leftover runny eggs into his mouth. I'd tried to smile sweetly with my eyes half open when he offered me a bite, but due to my squinted eyes,
my mouth half missed the fork, and runny eggs dripped onto my boob. Tantalizing, right? I tried not breathing through my nose. I'd learned early in life that if you cut off the olfactory glands, your taste buds go numb. When he'd gone into the bathroom to shower for work, I hurriedly spooned the rest of the eggs into the pot of ivy his mother had hung above one of his windows. Interestingly, that plant had begun to die just about the time our relationship peaked. Coincidence? I think not.

Now at last, my first cookie tray was in the oven. Since our stove did not have any modern gadgets such as a timer, I had to rely on my watch: nine to eleven minutes. I settled on ten minutes and vowed to check the cookies at 4:17 P.M. Just as I was sitting down at the table with an issue of
Us Weekly
, my door buzzer sounded. The pathetic whine meant that someone was a-visiting. Since NYC is not a drop-by kind of town, I figured it was Syd, she always forgot her keys. I buzzed her up, cracked the apartment door, and returned to the kitchen to stare at my cookies through the yellowed oven window.

“You never stared so intently at me,” laughed a familiar voice.

Holy shit! Mr. J. P. Morgan. I quickly tried to brush the hair from my eyes and felt the cookie dough from my fingers sticking to the too-long roots of my blondish hair. My heart pounded.

“I'm cooking,” I sputtered. Duh!

“So I see. Congrats. Is this a newfound skill?”

There was no need to defend my nonexistent cooking skills. And forget being impressive. Now, with flour on my face, dough in my hair, and stained (from God knows what) sweatpants on my holiday-enhanced thighs, I had no chance of making him pine. Instead, I had to become the cold bitch.
The non-codependent, confident, self-assured woman of the new millennium. She-man, activate! I thrust out my hip and struck my best cool bitch stare with the wooden spoon jutting out from my side.

With a cool tone, I again announced, “I'm cooking.”

“You already said that,” he laughed. Laughing is not the correct response to the cool bitch stance. Damn!

“I happen to be doing extremely important charity work on behalf of all the single girls in NYC.” Always stress being single as a positive. “What do you want?”

“Besides your effervescent holiday cheer, I need my extra apartment keys back.” What a mother-f'ing jackass! He had come by to pick up his spare keys. How pathetic. How un-holiday like, especially since I'd only come by the keys while I was waiting for him at his apartment that night he'd never showed. What kind of person had the gall to drop by unannounced after an incident like that? Had he no shame? Then again, could it just be a reason to see me? (Have to salvage a glimmer of hope.) Whatever his motivation, I wasn't going to let myself turn into pathetic, lonely ex-girlfriend. Be strong Charlie, be strong.

I stomped to my bedroom and fished the keys, which were lying next to my sexy panties, out of my top drawer. How fitting! Lucky for him, I wasn't fishing the keys out of the toilet, where they'd almost ended up a couple of nights ago after a night out with the ladies. I sashayed back to the kitchen to a view of Mr. J. P. Morgan's incredible ass. He was bent over staring at my tasty little morsels in progress.

“Here!” The whole thing suddenly felt so juvenile. I wasn't even sure why I cared. He had disappointed me countless times. Even now, when there were a hundred different ways for
the scene playing out here in my kitchen to go, I knew he would behave in the most thoughtless way possible.

The night before, when I'd been drowning my sorrows over a cup of Swiss Miss, Tara had actually forced me to check The List. Over the past few months, we had come up with the “Top Ten Romantic Interludes in NYC” (aka, The List) that we all were determined to experience with a man and/or have a man do for us; it had been tacked up on our refrigerator next to the Chinese takeout menu:

• 10. Watch the Macy's Day Parade together from the street with a cup of hot cocoa.
  

• 9. Enjoy the symphony in the park with a picnic basket and wine.
  

• 8. Have a portrait painted by a street artist at our lover's request.
  

• 7. Give a blow job while on the subway.
  

• 6. Watch our man, dressed in a suit, walk through the park toward us.
  

• 5. Enjoy a pizza and beer picnic at a city playground.
  

• 4. Take a tram ride to Rosie Island (aka, Roosevelt Island).
  

• 3. Have sex on a city rooftop.
  

• 2. Be presented with flowers bought off a street corner.
  

• 1. Circle Central Park in the winter by way of a carriage ride.
  

Number 7 had of course been Tara's suggestion. The rest of us doubted that we'd get a chance to check that one off The List due to the crowded-at-all-hours subway trains, but Tara was determined. “It's ‘risky business' all right,” she'd quip. The race, or should I say the dare, was on.

So far, Mr. J. P. Morgan and I had hooked-up on the roof of my building, but hadn't had sex outside of that one night in bed, so I couldn't officially scratch off number 3. Basically, he was a failure on the romantic front. It was December for God's sake, and number 1 was so obvious!

“Thanks,” he said as I handed him his keys. “My sister will need them when she comes to visit this week.” He had a sister?

I remained hopeful as he stood in the door. But he made no attempt to toss me a cute, flirty remark, or to invite me to his company cocktail party, which I knew he was dreading, and which I also knew was coming up this Saturday. Nope, it was over. And I needed him out. I walked to the door, opened it, and pointed down the long hallway with my floury finger.

“Bye!” I said with authority. He gave me his cocky smile (God help me!), shrugged his shoulders (so helpless, hmmm), shuffled out (so sad, ohhh, don't go!), and then chuckled (so cocky, ahhh!). Good God, would I never learn? I slammed the door and breathed in deeply.

Smoke.

Shit, the cookies were burning! It was 4:27 P.M. Damn you, Mr. J. P. Morgan! It was going to be a horrible, no good, very shitty Christmas.

S
ince Mr. J. P. Morgan had sabotaged my first batch of cookies, I had to start over and take another stab at the great cookie bake-off. I would stay true to our Cooking Club rule of “never, ever buy, just try, try, try.” My cookie choice, the Sledge Cookie, had been in honor of my sixth-grade teacher, who'd introduced me to the recipe. She had taught us her infamous cookie recipe in order to cement fraction skills. I had failed
both the cookies and math in general. This time, however, I could and would make her proud.

In my haste to mix a new batch of dough I knocked over a bottle of red food coloring. Not that Sledge Cookies require coloring, but in my disorganized, post-ex-boyfriend encounter state, I had pulled each and every baking item out of our cabinets. I figured that I might be inspired to add a creative twist or two to the recipe. Cooking truly is an art. If you wanted to be a real powerhouse in the kitchen, you needed to utilize that right side of the brain that was responsible for artsy-crafty things. But due to time constraints, I ended up sticking with the recipe line by line. However, when reaching for the brown sugar, I had knocked over the tiny red bottle, spilling its contents all over the counter, cabinet doors, stovetop, and floor.

Who knew that food coloring could dye items in different shades? A small drop of red will cast a pinkish hue, like that preppy shade that goes so well with green (note the once- white kitchen counter). Add about three drops, and you attain that rainbow red we all colored in grade school (see streaked cabinet doors). Add about five drops and you create that deep maroon found in velvet drapes in an old Newport mansions (observe said stovetop). Add a whole bottle, and well … blood. Think murder, decapitation, stabbing … a whole bottle of food coloring makes for quite a dark, shall we say rich redblackish color. Yep, and that was our floor. I grabbed a paper towel and started mopping at the red dye. Ten minutes later I had the situation under control—except that the red dye had wreaked havoc on my nails! Food coloring is water-based according to the box, but it does not come off of skin that easily, nor does it wipe clean from cuticles or come out of nail
beds. It had spread like some infectious disease. No amount of rubbing made it disappear.