The Way Life Should Be (6 page)

Without opening my eyes I feel around for the telephone. “Hello?”

“I saw the news,” my father says. “I think you’d better come home.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be there in an hour to pick you up.”

The thought of going back to New Jersey with my father fills me with dread. What I’d like to do is hide in my apartment for the next month or so, but apparently that isn’t an option.

My father hands me the newspapers when I get in the car. The cover of the
Daily News
is “FIRE-EATER’S FURY.” The
New York Post
says “FIERY GRUDGE MATCH!” The front page of the
New York Times
Metro section declares “Museum Fiasco: Fire-Eater’s Revenge Damages the Huntsworth.”

The
Times
article ends, “Because the museum neglected to take out supplemental fire insurance for the event, officials say, the final cost of damage to the Huntsworth could run into the mid six figures. This does not include the incalculable cost of losing a piece of art as important as Zoë Devereux’s ‘The Pantomime Artist,’ which appears to have been severely damaged and possibly ruined.”

For the next twenty-four hours,
I talk to no one but my family. When I turn on my cell phone, I find thirty-one messages—mostly once urgent invitations from news organizations large and small to tell my side.

My brother, Paul, calls to commiserate. In his way. “Jesus, what a mess,” he says. “Isn’t fire insurance Event Planning 101?” Paul, who is six years older, has never had much to do with me. I was twelve when he went off to Rutgers and double-majored
in economics and political science, determined not to spend his life, like our father, toiling at a tedious job and bringing home a modest paycheck. Later Paul went to business school, and now he works as a consultant, putting in hundred-hour workweeks and raking in lots of cash. He married an associate at a rival firm who promptly got pregnant, quit her job, and started house hunting in White Plains. Kim stays home with their two kids while Paul commutes by train to Manhattan, arriving back home after dark.

“If you need advice or anything, give me a call,” Paul says. “But if my secretary answers, don’t leave your name. I don’t want anybody to know I’m related to you. Hah—kidding.”

On Monday I call the office, and Mary Quince tells me to stay home. Take a few vacation days, she says.

My father and stepmother leave for work. I climb back into bed.

What was once my bedroom has been converted into my stepmother’s dressing room with a pull-out sofa. When I try to sleep, my skull thrums; the ache behind my eye sockets is relieved only by finger pressure. I curl under the covers on the foldout, massaging the sides of my head, every rib of the couch mechanism poking against my spine. One of my stepmother’s three cats is draped, beanbaglike, across my legs.

I am allergic to cats.

There’s no question in my mind that as soon as I summon the courage to slink back into work, I’m going to be out of work. I’ll be surprised if my stuff isn’t already packed when I arrive. I have managed to screw up the single most important event of my career, effectively ruining my chances of ever working in the field again. My reputation as the planner responsible for the biggest debacle in Huntsworth history will precede me wherever I go.

As I lie under the covers in a state of near catatonia, a re
covered memory bubbles to the surface of my brain, a casual exchange in the hallway with Mary Quince several weeks ago as I was leaving the office for the day:

“Angela. You’re hiring a fire-eater, right?”

“Yes. In fact, I just checked his references.”

“We need supplemental insurance for his act, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, and went merrily on my way, stopping on the way home at Vicky Slut (Lindsay’s affectionate name for Victoria’s Secret) in anticipation of another MaineCatch encounter in the near future. I bought something silky and pink.

What was I thinking?

If I am honest with myself—and as the hours progress, drugged up on Benadryl to avoid a full-blown allergy attack from the cats, sleeping in my stepmother’s dressing room, watching daytime TV in the den she recently redecorated with Thomas Kinkade reproduction prints, I am driven close enough to despair that honesty is unavoidable—I have to admit that I probably wasn’t thinking at all. Despite the fact that “fire insurance”’ was on several of my many lists, as soon as I was out the door that day, Mary Quince’s words melted in the air and I never thought of the insurance again. My brain was distracted by sailboats and sea air. In my blissed-out state, it seemed inconceivable that anything could go wrong anywhere.

CHAPTER 6

My grandmother shuffles around silently, trying not to disturb me,
except when she joins me in the den to watch TV. Joy Behar, I learn, is Nonna’s favorite host on
The View.
Kelly really knows how to put Regis in his place, and Ellen, well, you’d never know she was a lesbian if she hadn’t felt the need to announce it to everybody.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Nonna tells me, and when I say, “Unfortunately, it was,” she sighs, “Who doesn’t make a mistake?”

Tuesday is gloomy and rainy, the kind of day when Nonna likes to make food my stepmother disapproves of, slow-cooked soups and stews and bread from scratch. I watch her assemble ingredients for a loaf, flour and yeast and an egg, as I sit at the table drinking coffee. “Nobody makes bread anymore, Annalisa,” Sharon clucks, bustling through as she’s leaving for work. “It’s pennies at the A and P.” Nonna shakes her head and pushes her daughter-in-law out of the kitchen. “I don’t tell you how to do your job, don’t tell me how to do mine. I’m busy. Now shoo.” When Sharon is gone, she mutters, “
Quella donna è un’idiota.
”

I feel sorry for Nonna, living here with my dad and Sharon, whom he met through a lunchtime dating service—Sharon, who is constantly patting her stomach and saying, “None for me, thanks, I’m watching my weight.” Who hates to cook, hates
everything about the kitchen. Who calls homemade cavatelli “carbs” and won’t touch it. Sharon wishes that she and my dad lived alone. She is jealous of his time and wants him to herself. She is cold and stiff around Nonna, always acting as if she’s in the way.

Sharon loathes having Nonna in her clean kitchen, filling it with the simmering reek of strange food. Unrecognizable things in the refrigerator—pieces of chicken she’d never cook with; wet, lumpy cheeses. She hates the work this kind of cooking generates, splatters of marinara on the stove top, endless dishes in the sink. Foreign smells, pungent and pervasive, wafting through even her bedroom. Nonna openly disapproves of the low-fat convenience foods Sharon prizes, disapproves, too, of her poor cooking skills. The two of them have been engaged in a long-running, passive-aggressive battle ever since Sharon moved in.

I sit in my pajamas chopping tomatoes and
cucuzzielli
, baby zucchini, and I feel as if I’m in high school again, home sick, hanging with Nonna while she makes dinner.

“Die,” Nonna says. Her voice is hoarse.

“What?” I ask, startled.

She makes a chopping motion with her hand, first one way and then the other. “Dice.” She lifts her apron to her mouth and coughs into it. “
Scusilo
,” excuse me, she says.

“Oh. All right. Are you okay, Nonna?”

“Fine,” she says, flapping her hand. “Just a cold. I get one every fall.”

“You do? I can’t remember your being sick.”

“Kids don’t notice such things.”

“I’m hardly a kid, Nonna.”

“Really?” she says, arching an eyebrow. “Then what are you doing in your pajamas in my kitchen, in the middle of a weekday?”

“Good point.”

“You know,” she says, “when I was your age, your
father
was a teenager.”

Nonna’s hands are ropy with veins but stronger than mine. Her thumbs are like mallets. When I stand beside her at the stove, I inhale her Jean Naté scent, notice the yeasty rise of her bosom beneath the red gingham apron, her glasses fogging as she checks the sauce. Like a magic trick, her eyes disappear behind frosted glass.

There is red sauce on the stove, bubbling like a lava pit; dough rising under damp tea towels on the Formica countertop; onions and garlic minced on a worn cutting board. The radio (a sleek white Bose that hovers on the counter like a miniature spaceship, a Christmas gift from my stepmother, who complained after giving it that Nonna didn’t seem to know or care how expensive it was) hums low, Top 40 hits that Nonna sometimes, incongruously, hums along to. She mouths offhand snatches—“I got you, girl” or “You’re as cold as ice”—words that, in her Italian accent, sound like sentences from a phrase book. She is in constant, sharklike motion, chopping, stirring, rinsing vegetables in the sink. Shaping veal meatballs in her hands, holding her fingers away from the meat as if she doesn’t want to get them dirty, palms only. Wiping the counter once, twice, again. And with each turn she makes she is teaching.
Here is how you cut a potato, slicing it just so and slipping it into a pot of cold water to stop it from turning brown. You carve a tomato perpendicular to the stem. Sprinkle sea salt over cut eggplant in a sieve to drain the bitterness out.

Chicken stock, marinara, the
soffritto
—these are the essential elements of Nonna’s cooking. Each requires long, slow preparation, but once done, the rest of the work is relatively easy. Flavor, she says, builds up from the bottom. Nonna is a good cook
because she has patience and because she can sense proportion. She has an uncanny ability to pinpoint what is missing—a pinch of sugar in the marinara, another bay leaf in the stock.

When Sharon comes home from work, she peers at the dinner in the white casserole dish and frowns. “Too much olive oil, Annalisa. I thought I told you.”

“Not so much.” Nonna smiles and shrugs. “One tablespoon. Two at the most.”

“I got you cooking spray, remember? You said you’d try it.”

“I tried it. Terrible. Nothing but chemicals.” Nonna makes a face.

“You know, olive oil is actually good for you, Sharon,” I interject.

“Well, we don’t need the calories. Any of us,” she says, clearly irritated that I’m taking my grandmother’s side.

“Calories, pah,” Nonna says.

“I just want to live a long and healthy life. I want Louis to live a long time, too.”

“I lived a long and healthy life already, and I never ate cooking spray. You want skinny, not healthy,” Nonna says.

“I want both,” Sharon says.

Nonna turns back to the sink and starts noisily washing dishes. “Tell your father we’re having
fave e cicoria
.” Fava beans and chicory. “His favorite. Unless that woman has forced him to change his mind.”

Sharon snorts. “That woman, Annalisa, is still standing right here.”

“I know she is.
Purtroppo ha uno cervello come uno cetriolo
.”

Unfortunately, her brain is as fleshy and watery as a cucumber.

Sharon doesn’t speak Italian, but Nonna’s message isn’t hard to figure out.

Later that night,
when Nonna and my father and stepmother have gone to bed, I wander into the kitchen and plug in my laptop. Dial up. It takes forever. But there, in my inbox, is exactly what I am hoping to find.

No message from you

What’s going on, I wonder?

Run off with a dwarf?

I click “Reply,” then think for a moment, staring at the empty screen. Then I write
Lost my job. Weighing my options.

I log off and go to bed, the rest of my life hanging in the balance.

It’s Wednesday, midmorning.
My cell phone is ringing somewhere in the house. I spring from the couch and scramble around trying to find it, like a dog on the scent, cocking my head and listening. The ring tone is the theme song from
The Partridge Family,
which I downloaded from the Internet as a cultural in-joke, and it’s really annoying. Now it’s repeating the entire song.
“Hello, world, hear the song that we’re singin’
—
C’mon, get happy! A whole lot of lovin’ is what we’ll be bringin’
—
We’ll make you happy!”

Yes, it’s upstairs. I bound up two steps at a time, swinging on the railing around the corner, and skid into Sharon’s dressing room. There I fall on my knees, tossing clothes and shoes into the air before glimpsing the silver phone on the narrow arm of the sofa. The little window reveals a now-familiar 207 number.

“Hey,” Rich says when I pick up. “That sucks about your job. Are you okay?”

I appreciate that he asks how I am before going after the gory details. “That’s nice,” I say. “I’m all right.”

“You had that big party.”

“Yeah. It didn’t go so well.”

“Really?” I was afraid he might have read about it, but evidently he hasn’t. Or he’s being polite.

“There was a fire-eater. A centerpiece went up in flames. Not good.”

“Oh, man,” he says. “And it was your thing, and they think you’re responsible.”

I feel tears well up in my eyes. His empathetic summation casts me rather nicely as victim, and I wallow for a moment in the feeling of having been egregiously wronged.

“That New York grind, man,” he says. “It can wear you down.”

So right! I think fiercely. He is
so right
!

“I think you need a vacation.”

“What do you pro”—I start to say “propose,” but my brain catches up to my mouth halfway through—“suggest?” It’s a coquettish question, one I might ordinarily have considered beneath me, but nothing is beneath me now.

He sighs into the phone and doesn’t answer right away. “Maybe you could, ahh—take a little trip up here,” he says finally.

My heart pit-pats. Did I hear that right? Did he just invite me up there? He did, didn’t he? “Do you think that would be—smart?” I ask.

He laughs. “Nobody ever died trying something new.”