by Kelly Harms
“I do.”
“As a student?” This can’t be right. “You’re the gardener there, right?” I ask, to be one hundred percent clear on what he’s telling me.
“Um, no. Landscaping is my summer job, to save up money for the school year.”
I pull away and blink at him several times. Somehow in just seconds, I’ve gone to sitting nose to nose with J.J. to pressing my back against the passenger-side door. At the same time I’ve changed from being his girlfriend to being the trashy girl he’s wasting the summer with. The divide now between us feels epic. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. I feel enormously betrayed, and also foolish for feeling that way.
“I didn’t tell you at first because I didn’t want you to think I was some idiot frat guy or something,” he says. “And then I didn’t tell you later because you seemed … touchy about class issues.” I suck in air. “Plus, you weren’t being terribly forthcoming with me, so I thought maybe … you wouldn’t care.”
I sneer. “Why would I care?” But I care very much.
J.J. shrugs. I squeeze my eyes shut tight.
“When are you going back?” I ask him. “To Dartmouth?” I add unnecessarily, just to try the word out again and see if it seems more normal this time. It doesn’t.
“In two weeks,” he says.
I burst into tears.
Yes, I’ve been crying all night. But now I am doing the scary, mucus-based, exorcist cry. My face is immediately sopping wet, and the tears come so hard they are dripping off the edge of my chin into my lap. I start gasping for air through my mouth, because my nose is instantly jam-packed with viscous snot. It won’t be long before it starts running down my face too. My shoulders shake.
“You lied to me,” I moan pathetically. The thought of him going in two weeks is too much.
J.J. opens his hands to me, like I’m a wild animal. “I never actually lied. I mean, I lied by omission, but you…” he shrugs helplessly. “You weren’t exactly being straight with me either.”
“It’s different,” I sob, though I know that doesn’t make any sense. “I knew I was lying,” I add, getting stupider as I go.
J.J. smiles a little sad smile. “I honestly thought you would figure it out, sooner or later,” he says. “Or ask. I mean, I’m twenty-two. Didn’t you wonder what I was planning to do with the rest of my life?”
I cough and choke on my own tears, wondering why I didn’t think about that. Probably because I never thought about that question in relation to myself, and I assumed J.J. was just like me. “Mow Janey’s lawn?” I say, idiotically.
J.J. shakes his head at me but he’s smiling. “I’m sorry, Nean.” He snakes his right arm around me and scootches me closer so he can hold on to me. “I should have explained sooner.” He puts a hand in my hair and combs through it gently with his fingers while I cry. I know I should push him away and keep my dignity, but that simply isn’t happening. I’m staying here, where I’m safe, until the very last second.
I think of all the stupid things I’ve said to him, of how quickly I assumed he was from the exact same world as me, despite the little clues that told me otherwise. His house—a little split-level way inland with a one-car garage, but still well taken care of, and with both mother and father inside, and married to boot. The way he seemed so comfortable at the fancy lobster restaurant. The books he is always toting around in a back pocket or on the passenger seat of this truck. Not thrillers and mysteries, but skinny green-covered classics. The sort of thing you might be assigned as summer reading.
My head hurts. He must think I’m a complete idiot. How do I stack up against the sort of girls who go to an elite Ivy League college, I wonder? I bet they don’t steal tampons from the bathrooms of fine-dining establishments. They probably don’t even have periods. Too messy.
With the memory of that dinner, my embarrassment becomes so intense it distracts me from my grief. My crying becomes snuffles and then stops. J.J. stops stroking my hair and pulls out a hanky from his back pocket and holds on to it as I blow. I take a big breath in through my newly clear nose and let my shoulders fall back down to their normal position and in general just unwind a little bit. “I’m okay,” I say, my voice a little raspy. “Sorry I lost my shit.”
“Understandable,” says J.J., rubbing a last tear off my cheek. “Listen, Nean, I was thinking. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Hanover is not even four hours away. We can see each other whenever. Or…” I watch him as his eyes dart around the cab of his truck. “Maybe you’d want to try out life in New Hampshire? I mean, it’s a college town, so there are lots of entry-level jobs you could try, if you wanted to. You could live with me, just for the first semester, and see how you liked it…”
I think about living in his apartment, working as a bartender or drugstore clerk while he carves open cadavers or solves physics or whatever it is fancy senior-year college students do, and shake my head. “No,” I say. “No. It’s not like that,” I tell him, surprised by the flash of disappointment I catch on his face, and then skeptical of it. “I think it’s better if we just enjoy these two weeks”—I look up at him and lock eyes as I say this—“and then say good-bye.”
J.J. looks right back into my eyes. He doesn’t break eye contact, but stares at me, like he’s trying to see through to the back of my skull. Then he shakes his head and looks down, and I feel the incredible loss of his gaze. After a long time in silence, he shrugs. I shrug back, just so he can know for once how impenetrable such a little gesture can be.
“I agree to nothing,” he says, though we both know this isn’t something we both have to agree on. “I’m not saying I will let you go.”
I ignore him and take a deep breath and sigh loudly, exhausted by the repetitiveness of my life. First the house. Now J.J. Nothing that I think is mine ever stays that way. “Let’s go get Aunt Midge,” I say. “It’s time for us all to go home.”
JANEY
“[A] sit-down lunch, even when it’s light and simple, is an immensely civilized respite from the rigors of the day.”
—IRMA S. ROMBAUER, Joy of Cooking
The day after Aunt Midge’s jailbreak I meet up with Noah for our standing lunch date, this time for a picnic with sandwiches made on a fresh loaf of Nean’s bread. I had to help her make it this morning, so I feel not at all guilty about skimming some slices off the top. Actually, Aunt Midge and I both did. We came downstairs this morning and found her staring at the dough listlessly. The two of them, she and the dough, just one lump regarding another. For some reason, that girl has been acting weird ever since she got back with Aunt Midge and my car last night. Maybe I came down too hard on her. I tried to tell her it was no harm, no foul, but nothing I’ve said to her seems to sink in. She seems interested only in her loaves, kneading and kneading until I had to take them away from her to save the bread.
I’ve been so busy with preparations for our big dinner date that I hardly put any thought at all into the picnic menu, so I bring only fruit salad and cookies on the side, but Noah makes a fuss anyway. He tells me I make the best fruit salad he’s ever tasted, and eats about thirteen cookies. Then he leans back dramatically and clutches at his stomach like he’s expecting an alien to burst out of it.
“You’re amazing,” he tells me, and I flush with pride. “The things you do with dill…”
I smile. “Ever since I learned to cook I’ve been waiting for someone like you to cook for.”
“Ever since I learned to eat, I’ve been waiting for someone like you, period,” he says lightheartedly. Even with his singsong voice and silly face, the words make me melt.
This is my opening—my big chance to invite him over at last—but I balk. Yes, yes, I haven’t invited him over yet. I know if I don’t say something soon I’m going to have a repertoire of date-night food as long as my arm and no date to show for it, but the tiniest chance that he’ll say no and everything between us will just fall through my fingers like a broken egg yolk into a meringue keeps me quiet. In
stead I lean back on the picnic blanket next to him and look up at the cloudless sky.
The day is perfect. We’re north of Little Pond, where the Atlantic beats hard at the cliffs, with no capes or coves to tame its ferocity. The park Noah chose is set high on the rocks and the ocean seems so far below us—just a sound track of an ocean more than an actual body of water. To the other people in the park, it is clearly not the main attraction either. There are tire swings, and a wooden castle with a rickety bridge, and a lighthouse about five hundred feet down the coast that is surrounded by gray-haired women taking photos of balding men in the foreground, and then the reverse. The grass around us teems with people noises. I am utterly in public, and yet I feel absolutely fine.
I sigh deeply.
“Are you bored?” Noah asks, propping himself up on his forearms and looking down his nose so his chin multiplies several times on his chest.
“Not at all.” I think of what to tell him. “I’m people watching.”
He sits up the rest of the way and bends his knees in front of him. “There’s quite a crowd out today, isn’t there?” We both sit and listen to the sound of shrieking little pirates storming their fortress for a moment, and then Noah shoots out his hand suddenly and grabs one of my wrists like a doctor looking for a vein. “Let me see those arms.”
I stretch them out to him happily. “Nothing,” I say. “They’re not even itchy.” Then, indelicately, I lift up the arm that’s free and gesture to the armpits. “Not sweating, either.”
He smiles. “Well, that’s a little weird, considering it must be eighty-five degrees out here.”
I lower my arm, suddenly embarrassed. “I just mean … I think I’m cured.”
He loosens the hold on my wrist and moves his fingers around to my palm, tracing gentle lines absentmindedly. “I hope not.” He clears his throat. “I mean, I’m glad you’re not breaking out in hives every time someone walks too close to our picnic blanket…” he looks up at the bright blue sky as if there’s a teleprompter up there. “But I’m also glad you still have your quietness. Your bottomless capacity for listening. All the other things I love about you that came from you being so shy…”
I feel my throat close. This is it. I have to ask him now. The moment is slipping away.
“I have been working on a recipe for clafoutis,” I begin unsteadily. He looks at me puzzled. “It’s a cherry custard thing. You make it in a Dutch oven—the oven has to be screaming hot. Actually I’ve heard it’s good made in the fireplace. It’s hundreds of years old.”
His eyebrows arch inward. He has no idea what I’m talking about.
“It tastes better hot?” I attempt to move through the script as prepared by Aunt Midge, but all my confidence is eroding away.
His eyes search mine curiously and I stop myself. What am I doing? We are on this blanket, on this beautiful day, with the taste of lemon cookies still in our mouths. He is holding my hand, and I can’t feel anything else at all but the touch of his fingers.
I am an idiot.
I stop myself from telling him that traditionally the cherries in a clafoutis still have their pits, and, instead, I lean over to him and touch his face with my free hand and close my other hand around his and kiss him. We are frozen like this for a moment, my lips just touching his, and then he begins to kiss me back, and oh, wow. It is long and deep and makes me feel tight and hot all over. I do not want to stop doing this. Ever.
When we do stop, it is because a shadow is cast over us, and I break away to examine the cause. It is a little redheaded boy who is wearing the better part of a chocolate cupcake on the front of his shirt. He is standing about six inches from our faces, staring, mouth open, with completely unabashed fascination. When he realizes our make-out session is over, thanks to him, he beats it pronto, but the damage is done. I feel the telltale burn on my shoulders, and then the redness flushes up and down both arms and across my chest, and I know the hives are only minutes away.
My head tips back as I roll my eyes heavenward. “Well, at least you know I’m not cured,” I tell him on a laugh, because what else can I do but laugh and apply calamine lotion?
He laughs too and lays out flat on the picnic blanket with his arms behind his head, looking like he made all this, the perfect day and the hushed ocean and probably the cupcake on the front of that kid’s shirt too. Right now, if he told me he did, I think I would believe him. I lie down perpendicular and put my head on his stomach.
“Do you want to come over to my house for dinner tomorrow night?” I ask him. “I am making clafoutis.”
“At your house?” There is just a hint of hesitation there. Enough to make me worry.
“Yes. Well, or … I could cook at yours, too, if you’d rather. I could bring the clafoutis over. If you’d like.”
There’s a pregnant pause, and then Noah shakes his head at me, and for just a second I think I am about to hear a no. Instead he says, “I would love to come to dinner tomorrow night,” and his voice echoes through his stomach into my ears. “I love clafoutis. Did you know that the recipe is hundreds of years old?”
I laugh and he does too, and when he laughs, his stomach bounces up and down like a little trampoline for my head. My head bounces up and down, and my eyes close in the brightness of the sun, and the ocean keeps splashing so far below. It is right then that I realize that I am in love.
NEAN
“I’ve sometimes thought that if my mother had been a baker (she wasn’t), and if she had ever made me this cake (which she didn’t), it would have been my childhood favorite.”
—DORIE GREENSPAN, Baking: From My Home to Yours, on her Devil’s Food White-Out Cake
In the days that follow, I tell Janey nothing at all, resolved to enjoy every last second with J.J. and then forget he ever existed. Besides, she is obsessed with the last-minute preparations for her date with Noah. But she must notice me stewing, because the eve of her big dinner, she invents a wild-goose chase to keep me busy while J.J. is off doing the sort of things college students do two weeks before a new semester. Buying condoms and Trapper Keepers, I guess.
It’s black truffles Janey wants, but after hours of shopping, I’m still empty-handed. I finally find them when I am inspired to swing by Damariscotta’s woo-wooey-est restaurant, a sustainable food place where the daily menu is written by hand on butcher paper on each table. I show up well before the dinner service, looking as respectable as I can, and bang on the window until they let me in. Then I ask them their source for black truffles.
The chef has a good laugh at this, but does eventually lead me back into her kitchen to give me the hookup from her own stash, after I explain that the presence of black truffles could make or break my only friend in town’s chances of getting some nooky. I pay almost a hundred bucks of Janey’s money for less than an ounce. I tell the chef that at that price, I should get to rub some on my gums gratis, and this cracks her up so much that she sits me down and feeds me for free, along with two waiters and her wine lady–slash–girlfriend.
The crew explains that this is their family dinner, where they taste the specials of the night so they can sell them to the diners. Then over the next hour and umpteen dishes, they regale me with stories of rude customers and knife injuries, and I momentarily forget the sadness that’s been clinging to my shirt hem like a spoiled child. The food, which is almost as good as Janey’s cooking, I must say, is served with a thick-crusted sourdough loaf that crackles when you slice it and melts when you chew it. When I ask them where they got their bread, the chef tells me about the bakery I’ve walked by admiringly so many times. It is Bread and Honey, the place with that amazing list of daily breads in the window, always changing and making my mouth water. It’s only two blocks away.
After I leave the restaurant, I walk to the bakery and peer into the windows. It’s almost five now, and the employees inside, two youngish women with hairnets, are putting the place to bed. There are hardly any loaves left behind the counter, but there’s a ca
ke, a round three layer that one of the women is boxing up. It’s so beautiful, that cake, that it nearly takes my breath away. The frosting on the sides has been coated with bright white coconut, and on top are the words “Happy Birthday Meredith” in curly orange cursive, studded with pink and red polka dots. Little yellow flowers are sprinkled around the words, their middles rounded and dark. Black-eyed Susans, I realize, the same as grow in the ditches of Iowa.
The cake makes me lonely, and then jealous. I would like to be Meredith tonight. I would like to come home and open the front door and hear the word “Surprise!” and then see J.J. and Janey and Aunt Midge and Noah and maybe even the people I just met from the restaurant, grinning expectantly, gesturing “ta-da” toward that lovely little cake on a table next to a stack of tiny waxed paper plates and plastic forks.
But my birthday is in January. J.J. will be long gone by then. Janey and Aunt Midge will have tired of me. There won’t be any surprise, or any cake. It’s not fair.
All at once, I think of walking in, telling them I’m here to pick up the birthday cake. I can pay for it with the extra truffle money Janey gave me. I’ll tell them that Meredith is my coworker over at the bead store in Boothbay Harbor, and that she has no idea there’s going to be a party—that we told her that we had to stay late in the store and do inventory so she wouldn’t suspect. They probably took the order over the phone. They’ll never be the wiser.
Until the real friend of Meredith shows up wondering what happened to her cake. God, what is wrong with me? Stealing birthday cakes? I shake my head in disgust and turn to leave when the door of the bakery pops open with a jingle.
“Hey,” says the woman, the dirty-blond one I saw sweeping a moment ago. “Do you need anything? We’re getting ready to close but we can still find you a loaf of something if you’re desperate…”
“Um,” I stall, feeling guilty just for thinking what I was thinking. “I was wondering, um…” I can’t think of a thing to say that doesn’t involve stealing a cake.