The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  “All the good ones,” Laura says. Dennis Anderson, who was an artist and a sculptor and a writer, and who asked her to move to Tahiti with him, which she did not do, which was idiotic. But he moved there and married a native, and he had a heart attack at fifty-one and died. Fifty-one! John Terrance died a terrible death from pancreatic cancer. The last time Laura saw him, he was being wheeled about outside on a friend’s farm, and he saw the pond where he and his friends used to swim, where Laura in fact had swum with him just after they had begun their relationship. He couldn’t talk anymore by then, but Laura saw the look of longing in his eyes. She tried to push him down to the water’s edge, but the wheelchair wouldn’t go through the mud, so she went down to the pond and filled her hands with water and carried it back up to him and spilled it out all over his legs, which by then had gotten so heartbreakingly thin. And Ted Sullivan, he was in a car wreck, and he was such a good guy, too. So funny. Once they were walking through a park together, through roses, and they were talking about how beautiful they were. Then Laura asked Ted about a movie, and he said, “Laura. The subject was roses.”

  “Well, maybe…your ex?” Trudy says. “Would he count as an old boyfriend?”

  “He wasn’t a good one.”

  “I have an idea,” Joyce says. “Think of someone you wish had been your boyfriend. Call him.”

  “Right,” Laura says. “‘Hello, I used to know you when I was a hot tamale. Now I’m an older woman with liver spots and forty extra pounds, and I wondered if you’d like to have lunch.’”

  “How about this?” Trudy says. “‘Hello, I used to know you back in yada yada yada, and I was just thinking about yada yada yada, and you know what, I just wondered if we could get together just to have lunch. It would be fun, wouldn’t it? Incidentally, I turned out to be a terrific person who makes one hell of a tart.’” She makes it sound so perky and possible.

  “You know,” Laura says, “we are becoming good friends, but we don’t really think all that much alike.”

  “Well, then take a chance on something else,” Joyce says. “Make your dare be different from ours.”

  “Why don’t I just do truth?” Laura says.

  “We tell the truth to one another all the time,” Trudy says. “Let’s do something different now. Joyce and I will call old boyfriends. You can do something else. You make a lunch date with someone else, okay? Are you in? All you have to do is be scared to ask.”

  “All right, I’m in,” Laura says. “I know someone I’d like to ask. If I can get up the nerve. He’s a homeless guy, lives under the bridge on Sumac.” The other women start to laugh, and Laura holds up her hand. “I’m serious. I’ve actually had this fantasy for months, that I’d bring a meal over there and share it with him. I just want to know why he’s there.”

  “Don’t give him your address,” Joyce says.

  Laura looks over the top of her glasses at her.

  “So we’ll debrief at dinner at my house next week,” Trudy says. “Six o’clock sharp.” She stands, stretches, then points at her friends. “No backsies,” she says.

  That night, as Laura washes up for bed, she decides that she will just make up something about her lunch date. The other women will never know the difference. She’ll make something up, say it really fast, and then they can move on to the real stories. Already, a false scenario is creating itself inside her head. The homeless man’s surprise at her offering lunch. His interesting anecdote about how he landed there, him a former platinum credit card carrier. Some highly placed executive thrust out suddenly because of…what? Sexual harassment? A criminal act involving a White Hen? She falls asleep imagining various misdeeds, all kinds of things that can take a life and rip it right up. Then she imagines the man as shoved out of a mental institution that no longer has room for him, for that is the more likely scenario. She imagines saying, “Hi, there. Listen, I know this may seem odd, but I brought you some lunch, and I wonder if I could just sit with you for a while and talk.” And him leaning over to say between clenched teeth, “The descent is upon us, Silverado!” then leaping up and flapping his arms and yelling, “Helllllllllp!” so loudly she gets arrested. Then she imagines the man saying nothing, just staring at her and breathing oddly. Then she sees him as a poetic genius too sensitive for the world, someone broken by its unyielding ways, who begins to weep when she touches his sleeve. And then she decides that whatever he is doesn’t matter; she’s not going to approach him or anyone else, either.

  In the morning, Laura looks out her office window (she works at home, for a spectacularly successful gardening service, doing their billing) and sees a construction worker on the roof of the house across the street. He is very handsome—tanned and muscular, absolutely delicious. Could it be that her time for sex, for sensuality, is not over after all? Could it be? Or is this some kind of psychic hangover, the result of too much talk about times gone by, too many memories brought once again into sharp focus but apt to fade by lunchtime?

  She watches the construction worker for a while, then moves away from the window, sits at her desk, and opens up her computer. Sips her coffee as she reads her e-mail. Remembers last week, when there was yet another spam filter failure and she had yet another message asking if her penis was big enough. Now she wonders who responds to those e-mails. Who keeps those penis people in business? Are men her age trying to make sure they can still…? And if they are, would it be any fun to try once again to…?

  Focus! she tells herself, in the same odd accent her yoga instructor has, and begins her dreary task of calculation—she likes to work on the weekend and take weekdays off. If this new longing has not gone away by five P.M., she’ll go out to Panera for an Asian sesame chicken salad for dinner. There she will make a list of old boyfriends who might still be alive and were not horrible. She will Google them, and if she finds them, she will call and propose a lunch, and if they agree to meet her, she will even fly to get there. Might be better to fly there, in fact. No. No, she won’t fly. It has to be driving distance, she’s not going to use up her miles on what might prove to be a complete disaster. Imagine if the plane crashed after what wasn’t even any fun. Her sons at her funeral, sorrowfully asking, “What was she doing in Kansas City?”

  Focus! Laura gets to work.

  All the way to Panera, Laura has told herself not to get the bread as a side, get the apple. But when she gets there, she goes right ahead and gets the bread. One good thing if she starts to have sex again is that it will be no trouble to get the apple. That’s how it goes: good sex equals appetite suppression. Plus your complexion improves, who knows why.

  Laura eats her salad and starts making a list of all the boyfriends she’s had, from college on. The redheaded guy who came from a really rich family who dumped her after two weeks, the business major who looked like Gregory Peck but was chronically depressed, the Italian guy who loved Apple Jacks cereal and was such a good dancer, the doctor who wanted her to convert to Judaism. And after that doctor, Brian’s and her marriage, which lasted for over twenty-five years, then abruptly ended.

  The first few months after the divorce, she was ecstatic to be free again. Then, gradually, she became aware of what her freedom really meant; and there was nothing to be ecstatic about—mostly she felt as though she were walking a tightrope all the time. She came to the discouraging realization that many of the demons present in her marriage had moved into her condo right along with her. She realizes now that her ex-husband is the old boyfriend she would most like to have lunch with. Would like, in fact, to be married to again. He has a girlfriend named Cassandra, she’s heard—five years after the divorce, he finally has a steady girlfriend, but a girlfriend is not a wife, even if she’s living with him. Laura has never seen Cassandra; Brian, deeply wounded by the split, wanted nothing to do with Laura after their day in court. They communicated over the phone or e-mail about their grown sons only when necessary, which turned out to be hardly ever.

  Laura offered to be the one to move o
ut of the house. She thought that, since the divorce was her idea, the least she could do was let Brian stay in the house they’d built together. But she misses that house. She drives past it now and then, and last time she parked her car a few houses down and went to look at the garden in the backyard that she put in the first year they lived there. There it was, still growing. Everything still alive. It shamed her in a way so elemental her knees actually buckled. She fled the yard with her head held falsely high, a tight smile on her face, and vowed never to go there again. But now she leaves her salad unfinished and walks quickly to her car, keys in hand.

  Even on a Saturday the neighborhood is quiet. No one on the street, as usual. It’s one of the things that bothered her about this neighborhood, actually, the way you hardly ever saw anyone out. She likes that aspect of condo life better, the way you can’t help but see people every day—in the elevator, in the laundry room, at the monthly meetings. If she and Brian got back together, they would move to a bigger condo together. They wouldn’t need this house anymore.

  So now what, she thinks. Here she is, she sped over here, and now she is just sitting in her car right in front of the house. She looks up to see if anyone is peering out the windows at her. No.

  She takes a quick look at herself in the rearview, then marches up to the front door. She will say she is sorry to come over unannounced, but she needs a word with Brian. She hopes it’s Brian who answers the door. And she hopes he will accommodate her request. She thinks he will. She’s sure of it, actually. Laura and Brian. The roots remain.

  She rings the doorbell and waits. Rings it again and waits some more. Inside, she hears the grandfather clock striking, the clock she and Brian saved so long for, she loves that clock. She rings the bell one more time, waits one more minute. Then she walks down the sidewalk toward her car, full of a kind of misplaced embarrassment. As she moves past the curbside mailbox, she sees that the flag is up, and she looks to see what’s inside. It’s pathetic, it’s wrong, but she just wants to see. There are bills being paid, Brian’s familiar script for the return address. The only other thing is a postcard being sent to some kind of catering company; Cassandra is taking advantage of a free consultation. Laura looks around, up and down the block. No one. She puts the postcard in her purse. Then she closes the mailbox and drives away, careful not to exceed the speed limit. Once she got pulled over on her own street. “But I live here,” she told the cop. He looked at her oddly, then issued her a ticket. She cursed him as he drove away.

  On the way home, she resolves to mail the postcard—she’ll drop it in the box outside her building. She’s horrified that she took it. What in the world is the matter with her. She wonders what she would have done if Brian had been home, or Cassandra, or both of them. She’d flown over there in some kind of trance, expecting that Brian would drop whatever he was doing and say yes to anything she suggested, including getting back together. What is the matter with her. She will mail the postcard, and then maybe she’ll try to find Jerry Menzel, who was her teacher for an acting class. She’d had a crush on him, but he never knew, because he had a girlfriend, and so she never approached him. That’s how she used to be. What is the matter with her.

  On Monday afternoon, Laura calls Cassandra. “Hello,” she says. “This is Regan Kennedy from—” She looks quickly at the postcard again. “Home Cook In, and I am calling about the postcard you sent for a consultation.”

  “You got it already?” Cassandra asks.

  Silence, and then Laura says quickly, “Yes, we did, and I’m happy to say we’ve had a very nice response to this offer, so you’ll need to pick a time quickly, now how does this afternoon work?”

  “Today?”

  “Well, we only have…this is a limited offer.”

  “I can’t do it today. But I could do tomorrow morning, say, ten o’clock?”

  “That’s fine,” Laura says. Something occurs to her, and she says, “Now, with whom will I be meeting?” Undoubtedly Brian will be at work, but better make sure. For what she has decided is that she wants to have lunch not with an ex but with that ex’s girlfriend.

  “Oh, it’ll be just me,” Cassandra says. “This is a surprise for my fiancé.”

  Once Laura put salt on a slug. This is what her stomach is doing now. But she manages, “Oh! What fun.”

  “Yes,” Cassandra says. “I’m excited.”

  Laura hangs up the phone and stares out her window. Fiancée is not wife, she tells herself. She eats nonfat cottage cheese for breakfast. It would be nice if she could lose forty pounds by tomorrow.

  She doesn’t bother with makeup today. She doesn’t want to look into her own eyes in the mirror. Nor does she answer the phone when Trudy calls, because if she does, she’ll tell Trudy what she’s doing, and Trudy will make her come to her senses, and she doesn’t want to come to her senses. She wants to meet Cassandra, who has a low and lovely voice. She could be on the radio, one of those late-night personalities. What she does do is nothing, Laura happens to know. Her younger son told her that Cassandra used to sell cars, but now she’s doing nothing. “That’s ridiculous,” Laura said, and her son said, “I know. She should work.” But what Laura found ridiculous was that Cassandra had sold cars. It made Laura mad, because it made her jealous, because she could never do that. She still doesn’t know what a spark plug is. She pictures it as a cartoon character with a high voice and a little hat.

  On Tuesday morning, Laura parks on the curb a few houses down from Brian’s, gets out of her car, then back in it. She drives right up to the house, parks in the driveway, and walks briskly up to the front door. She puts her finger to the bell and takes in a deep breath. Rings it.

  Almost right away, the door is opened by an unusually beautiful woman wearing a sleeveless black sweater and tan pants, gold hoop earrings. She is tall and slender, with shoulder-length black hair, green eyes, and a full mouth. She is barefoot, her toes painted a champagne color, and even her feet are pretty. Laura’s hand flies up to her mouth, and, helplessly, she begins to laugh. When Cassandra looks askance at her, Laura says, “I’m sorry. Sorry! I was just remembering a joke a friend told me about…Well, never mind.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Regan. Very nice to meet you.”

  Cassandra continues to stare closely at her but smiles back. “Cassandra. Thanks so much for coming.” She gestures toward the back of the house. “Shall we go into the kitchen?”

  “Surely,” Laura says. Surely! Like some old maid schoolteacher. All she needs is some ugly old satchel-type briefcase, the straps curled up from age. Bad enough the state of her purse. Her older son, who lives in L.A., has a girlfriend who showed her a purse she thought Laura should buy, and Laura told her don’t be ridiculous, who would spend that much for a purse? Well, the woman in front of her would. Laura would guess that she paid well over fifty dollars for her pedicure.

  Laura sits at the kitchen table and puts her purse on the floor. A lot has changed here—the walls are a different color, the table is round rather than square, a lighter wood. There are curtains at the kitchen window, and it’s all Laura can do not to say, “Hey! Brian and I hate curtains—how’d you talk him into that?” Instead, she folds her hands and says, “So. How can I help you?”

  Cassandra laughs. “I hope that’s what you’re here to tell me. All I know is that your company sends people into homes to cook. So…What do you cook?”

  “What do you want?” Laura asks. It feels a little mean, the way she’s said this, and she likes that. She likes being a little mean.

  But Cassandra is not in the least offended. She says, “Well, the first thing I should say is that I’m a terrible, terrible cook. Just never had any interest or talent. But I’d like my fiancé to have good, home-cooked dinners every night—his ex was a wonderful cook.”

  “Was she?” Laura asks.

  “Yes, apparently everything was homemade—bread, piecrusts, pasta.”

  “I suppose she had one of those pasta machines,” Laura says. She did no
t. She cut the noodles freestyle and laid them over the backs of the kitchen chairs to dry.

  “I guess so.”

  “Although she might have cut them by hand and let them air-dry,” Laura says. “Like when pasta is really homemade. I’ll bet she did that. I’d imagine she made her own pizza crust, too. And fancy birthday cakes?”

  “Oh, I’m sure. I mean, Brian told me she made corn bread from scratch to use in the dressing she made at Thanksgiving.”

  “Gotta love that,” Laura says sarcastically and rolls her eyes in what she hopes is a modern, working-woman way.

  “Well, actually I kind of admire it,” Cassandra says.

  “But I don’t want to do it. So I thought I’d hire you and have my cake and eat it, too. So to speak.”

  Laura leans forward. “I have to tell you right off that this would be a very expensive proposition. Having everything homemade that way.”

  “No problem,” Cassandra says.

  The bitch. “With the shopping, it would be a good five hundred or so a week,” Laura says, then wonders if that’s enough.

  “That’s fine.”

  Laura raises her eyebrows. “Your boyfriend must do very well, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “He does, but it’s not my fiancé—he’s my fiancé—who would be paying. I would.”

  There’s a neat trick for an unemployed woman, Laura thinks. But never mind, better let this go; a real person would not be asking these kinds of questions.

  “So let’s talk about some menu ideas,” Laura says, and Cassandra says, “Oh, good, let’s.” Laura looks sharply at her, but no, there’s nothing in her face that makes it seem as though her remark is anything but innocent and true.

  “Does your boyfriend like beef?” Brian loves beef.

  “Oh, God,” Cassandra says. “Yes!”

  Well, that’s nothing that you know that, Laura thinks. What about the macaroni necklace he made for his mother in Cub Scouts, I know you never saw that, you never even got to meet his mother. But she speaks impassively, professionally. “I make a fabulous beef Stroganoff. We do, I should say. That dish has done very well for us, everyone loves it.”