On a Thursday evening in June of 2017, I took myself to the Figaro Bistrot in Los Feliz. The restaurant is French themed, so the servers are mean like my family. It sits a few doors down from the Los Feliz 3 Cinemas—a revolving door of weird haircuts, exposed navels, and delicate tattoos. There’s a lazy feel to the Figaro; they don’t need to try too hard because they have the best real estate in Los Feliz. You have the movie crowd, happy hour crowd, theater crowd, and spiritual, crystal crowd all buzzing around the same intersection.
I sat outside, at a table by the door between two groups engrossed in their phones, though for different reasons. The table to my right sat two women who looked to be in their thirties, having a fight with a third woman, Kate, by text. “See, see?” The woman in the black shirt flipped her phone toward the woman in the white shirt, who didn’t look up from her own phone.
“This is the problem. I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry, Kate, but this is what you do, you push people away…’ God, I’m gonna flip a bitch over this.” Black Shirt began typing into her phone, while White Shirt typed in hers. I shifted my focus to the table on my left.
“It’s too late to do ’shrooms tonight, let’s do it on Sunday,” a curly-haired man told the group. Apparently 7:41 p.m. is too late to do ’shrooms, and here I thought it was your forties.
“Can’t you just text Carmen?” a redhead with a British accent asked.
“No, Carmen’s boyfriend just died,” the curly haired man responded.
“I heard it was ex-boyfriend,” added a very hot woman, who I would come to overhear is an actress, but “not from anything you would’ve seen.”
“I’ll just invite her to do ’shrooms with us and then we can go to Wi Spa,” British Accent said.
The server, Jennifer, came to my table with my martini and left before I could order any food. It turns out that my favorite part about eating by myself is that I am invisible. Sitting at Figaro reminded me of my high school years, the aimless days spent under the radar. I missed the time before cell phones, when life was rife with opportunities to quietly observe the world and connect to the minutiae of the day.
The girls to my right switched phones and copy-edited each other’s texts to Kate while the table on my left was group-drafting a ’shroom request text to Carmen. I was the only one not on my phone.
“Anything to eat?” Jennifer asked. She had eleven pens in her pocket, long auburn hair pinned back with a brown hair clip, coral lips, and drawn-on eyebrows. Would I have noticed the way her nose slightly crinkled when she smiled if I was with a friend, passing phones back and forth? I wonder if I would’ve noticed anyone: Black Shirt and how she fiddled with her gold engagement ring while trying to compose the perfect text. White Shirt and the way her camo slippers perfectly matched her camo pants. Curly-Haired Man’s incessant yammering about his new terrier mix, Birdie. “I started giving her probiotic yogurt because it’s good for her little tummy,” he told the table as Birdie chewed on a gum wrapper under his feet. The way Hot Woman’s pink lace bra peeked out from her beige cut-off tank top. I ordered a beet salad with goat cheese and was rewarded for my choice with a smile from Jennifer.
“I don’t want to do ’shrooms,” Hot Woman said. “I want ice cream and then I’ll go for a run. Get my night high that way.” She put a cigarette in her mouth and began to dig in her purse for a lighter. A busboy appeared out of nowhere to tell her she couldn’t smoke there. She looked at him dumbfounded, as if he had asked her to eat her cigarette.
The women on my right settled on two separate “we should meet” messages to Kate. It took them an hour and fifteen minutes to compose those texts. I wondered what it felt like to have the kind of privilege to spend an afternoon composing a text to a prickly friend. I mean, ditch the friend and write a movie, ladies. Black Shirt and White Shirt decided to treat themselves to burgers from a restaurant down the street. Jennifer with the auburn hair and eleven pens brought me my salad, then turned to The Shirts.
“Anything else for you ladies?” she asked.
“We’re good. Just the check,” Black Shirt told Jennifer. She pulled up an order menu on her phone and began listing burger toppings to White Shirt: “You want avo, mayo, tomato…”
“Yeah.”
“… and mushrooms?”
“… and pickles.”
“It comes with pickles. Do you want mushrooms?”
“Yeah, mushrooms.”
Meanwhile, the table on my right decided that Monday would be the day they would do mushrooms, because “there’s nothing else to do on Mondays.” Which is true in Los Angeles.
For a second there, it felt like we were all at the same table, sharing a meal and casual conversation about mushrooms—in a way, we all were, at least for a moment. But eventually the women on my right went to pick up their burgers. They were replaced by an older couple who wore their glasses on the tips of their noses and loudly read the day’s emails to each other. The table on my left disbanded shortly after deciding on Mushroom Monday, hovering at the corner for more cigarettes and conversation. I took comfort in my second stiff martini. At the end of my meal, I waited another twenty minutes for Jennifer to bring the check. The evening dinner crowd gathered at the entrance as the sun was setting. A busboy brought me my bill. I paid, said thank you to no one in particular, and gathered my things. Once safely across the street, I watched as Jennifer bussed the table for two young girls with flawless skin and short skirts.
Eating alone sharpened my wolf fangs and taught me the power of peacefulness. It heightened my sense of focus and connection to the people around me. The fear of loneliness is a strong one that grows each year, fueled by our constant need to be digitally connected, but just like it’s important to fan the flames of friendship, I’ve learned that it’s important to do things alone. It gives you a chance to fill your head with your own thoughts and strengthens a sense of security within yourself. I guess that’s why 95 percent of people in Los Angeles meditate. Which I would totally try if you were allowed to eat while doing it.
25
COOK A FIVE-COURSE MEAL
My dad used to call my mom Soup Queen. Not the most ideal ranking within the kingdom, but it’s true, my mother was a royal goddess when it came to soups. Borscht, solyanka, mushroom, cabbage, various forms of gazpacho—Olga could make all of them from memory.
Soup, I know, is not glamorous, but somehow my mom made it so. Her pearl-painted nails would disappear into a bowl of shredded vegetables, only to reappear moments later clutching a cluster of perfectly cut potatoes. She’d sprinkle the potatoes into her broth and I’d watch as they disappeared into the depths of the pot. The house was constantly filled with the sweet, woody smell of beets boiling in salted water.
Borscht was the specialty of her specialties; the beets drew you in with their unassuming vegginess, the meats gave off the familiar warmth of stew, the spicy mustard kicked you in the face, and the sour cream licked your wounds. Served hot in my house, it always tasted like Russia to me. Before my baby palate could appreciate a soup with such multifaceted flavors, I marveled at the color. God, the color. I used to soak my lips in the broth, hoping that they’d turn ruby red, if only for a moment. (Oftentimes, I ended up with a beet-colored goatee instead.) All of those ingredients join together to make a flavor so perfectly balanced that I could taste my mother’s elusive love in every bowl.
“When you grow up, I’ll teach you all my recipes,” my mom would tell me, stirring her pot as if it were a cauldron, “so that you can make husband happy.” It always came down to my nonexistent husband and how to keep him happy. I heard about him every time I walked by the kitchen. “Marina, you have to learn how to cook,” Olga would yell after me while peeling potatoes, “or no one is going to marry you!”
In my mother’s mind, a woman’s purpose is to keep her husband happy and her children alive. That way, her boys can go off to earn enough money to support the family, and her girls can birth bouncy grandchildren to brighten up the
tragedy that is life. My mom broke off little pieces of herself and sprinkled them into her children, her husband, and her soups—like a proper Russian woman.
I am the black sheep in my family when it comes to cooking; my sister, brother, and dad are all excellent cooks. My guess is that gene skipped me. It’s a goddamned miracle I made it this far into my life, because I have absolutely zero interest in cooking. Up until meeting Sam, I survived on different combinations of canned food with hot sauce, oatmeal, and whole wheat tortillas. Rest in peace, my Single Gal’s Diet.
It is insane how quickly a fast ’n’ loose woman will get domesticated when she’s in love. I started doing novel things, like washing bed sheets, hanging towels, shaving my toes. I even took a slight interest in cooking because Sam likes to cook. I learned that cooking is an easy way to show someone that you love them, and an easier way to fish for compliments. If you put the food you’ve made in front of someone, they are obligated to tell you that they like it so that you continue to put food in front of them. It’s Pavlovian, or something.
I wanted to use the kind of warmth and love that my mom used in her cooking, but that would require a proper lesson from her. In the years since her children left the house, my mom has been cooking less and less. A while ago, she stopped cooking entirely. Well, that’s not completely true. Olga still cooks gourmet meals, but only for her dogs. At first, my brother, dad, or I would inevitably eat the food sitting in the fridge. “What is this? Beef?” I’d ask between big heaping bites. “No!” my mom would shout, snatching the container from my hands, “That’s Sherry’s chicken liver! Spit it out. She needs it for her poops.”
The soundtrack of my parents’ house has become my dad wandering from room to room complaining that he’s hungry. “You have two hands, you know where the fridge is,” my mom yells back. The Soup Queen abdicated her throne and it created a weird shift in my family dynamic. It feels like she lost interest in us, retired from being our mom, and turned all of her attention to her dogs’ fecal rhythms. Have you ever been genuinely jealous of a Yorkie?
After my little brother graduated from high school, my mom stopped traveling, and eventually, stopped leaving the house altogether. “What is out there that I can’t see in here?” she asked us, pointing to the computer.
“My apartment, for one,” I told her.
“Oh, I can see that over the FaceTime.”
On the bright side, having an agoraphobic mother is useful in the sense that she’ll never pop in on me or judge my blind-to-dust ratio. But I still feel a little abandoned on Adult Island. I swam out here, and instead of gentle guidance, I’ve been left to fend for myself.
When it came time to attempt to cook a five-course meal on my own, it only made sense to try my hand at my mother’s borscht. Convinced it’d be really poetic to have the recipe written in my mom’s beautiful handwriting, I emailed to see if she could write it down and send me a scan. When she writes, you see a historically perfected form of strokes and ink distribution, each letter more striking than the last. It’s art. I used to tell kids in school that she was a calligrapher because I wanted her to be more than just a housewife.
A dog-related notecard my brother found in my parents’ home.
My dad called me back the afternoon I sent the request. His voice was strained from frustration. “Your mother doesn’t want to do it.”
I could hear Olga in the background, in her signature high-pitched tone, “It’ll be faster to send her online link.”
“Would it work if I wrote it for you?” my dad asked, trying to make things right. Unlike my mom, who was very present for our upbringing, my dad was always working long hours. Their roles have since reversed, with my dad being eager to please and my mom wanting all of us to leave her alone.
After years of my mom insisting that I let her teach me how to cook, she’d tapped out. My heart sank. When it comes to confronting my mom, I become oddly apathetic. She is this delicate orb I don’t want to touch for fear of breaking it. Cracks are already forming in the glass, so instead I hold her lightly, never breathing, always hoping that she will stay intact, fearing what might happen the day she breaks.
“It’s not a problem!” I squealed. “I’ll work something out, no problem at all!”
An hour later, I received a borscht recipe beautifully written in my mother’s handwriting. Clearly, there was a discussion I wasn’t privy to. Surely it wasn’t pleasant or civil, but something went down in my parents’ house to convince my ever-so-stubborn mother to meticulously write out the recipe that she’d promised to teach me years earlier.
Borscht for Lazy People
Boil the broth.
Add a small piece of meat, or ¼ chicken, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 2–3 bay leaves, 6–8 black peppercorns into a pot of water.
When broth is ready, separate meat from the bones, cut into small pieces, and put into the strained broth.
Shred: 3 potatoes, 1 carrot, ¼ head of cabbage, 1 beet.
Put vegetables into the broth and bring to a boil, reduce the heat, add 2–3 tablespoons of lemon juice, tomato paste, and sugar.
Add salt to taste and cook over low heat for 15–20 minutes.
Brew for 20–30 minutes. Pour into bowls, add sour cream, garlic, and herbs to taste.
When the recipe arrived in my inbox, I knew that was the end of my culinary education. There will be no sunlit mornings, my mother and me in matching aprons, delicately rolling out dough for pierogies, discussing ideal husband candidates. My mom will never come to my own kitchen and share a glass of wine as we make her famous cauliflower and broccoli soup, or pass down any more recipes unless I wrench them out of her tired, perfectly manicured hands.
I did cook a five-course meal,1 eventually, using recipes that I found on the very same “online” she had originally suggested. It took me four hours, and I only messed up two of the dishes. At the end of the meal, I didn’t attract a husband. Instead, Sam washed the dishes, and we curled up on the couch to watch a movie. The next day, he made breakfast for us, like he always does because he likes to cook, and I can now 100 percent confirm that I do not.
Maybe in that sense, I’m not an anomaly in my family. Maybe I am more like my mother than is initially apparent. My mom just pretended for years that she liked to cook because she loved her kids. She gave away little pieces of herself until they were all gone. Then her kids moved out and left her to fend for herself on Adult Island. On my mom’s first day alone, she walked to the end of the driveway, cigarette in hand, took a deep breath, and decided she didn’t want to fend for herself. So she walked back to her home, once filled with children, and decided to fill it with dogs instead.
Because at least dogs, as my mom always says, “will never leave you.”
26
FIND A JOB I LOVE
On March 4, 2015, after almost a year and a half of unemployment, I started my first job after going viral for quitting my last one. A real live “industry” job. That’s what people in Hollywood call it when you work in entertainment: “the industry.” It sounds shiny, like you should only say it while wearing sunglasses.
I was so excited to work in an office with real people again that I left my apartment extra early, getting to Hollywood Center Studios at five a.m.—two hours before the work day started. The salmon-colored slabs of building caught the rising sun, making me feel like anything was possible—in a way that no other workspace ever had. I got to Stage 2, where I’d be working for the next two years, and rubbed my hands across a small bronze plaque that read: THE LUCY STAGE: ORIGINAL HOME OF “I LOVE LUCY” 1951–1953.
During my sixteen months of unemployment, I had begun to understand why housewives sleep with their gardeners and/or drown their children. When you spend too much time cooped up at home, your idea of reality starts to shift; your head begins to imagine alternate lives, and your body wonders if you should pursue them—like becoming a Nutella-jar artist.
I was constantly dizzy from all the contradictory feelings churnin
g through my unemployed soul. Similar to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, I experienced five stages of emotion while looking for my dream job.
Unlike the Kübler-Ross model, which at least boasts the concreteness of death, this model can’t promise you anything except the unwavering pressure of pursuing a job you love.
A few months ago, a guy I used to work with in Taiwan messaged me. He wrote of his struggles committing to a full-time creative career and how he was hoping to have a conversation that was “less airy-fairy ‘follow your dreams’ stuff and more about, you know, how to ensure you stick stubbornly to the path you’ve marked out for yourself.” My job, at the time, was taking notes and getting coffee for writers, yet he thought I’d cracked some secret code to career happiness.
It wasn’t until I started receiving messages like this one1 that it became clear to me that maybe, simply by pursuing my passions, I’d figured something out. Yes, my first job in the industry was thankless, poorly paid, and didn’t include any writing, but I was working beneath real comedy writers (my office was literally under theirs), with real comedians, and others who knew how to get paid for making people laugh.
If I hadn’t spent so much time on shadow-careers, I probably would’ve had a seat at that table. Unfortunately, it took a series of sidesteps, steps back, box steps, the movie Step Up 2: The Streets, and sixteen terrifying months of unemployment before I was in the correct field. It’d be greedy not to share the steps that got me here.
Step 1: Figure out where to direct your laser.
It’s very easy to say, “My dream job is writing.” Or cooking. Or colonoscopy captain to the stars! But there are thousands of mini-subcategories within each industry. Specificity is key to success. If you are able to verbalize exactly what you want, “A comedy writing job for a late-night unscripted television show,” then you’ll be surprised how many opportunities, even if they’re peripheral, begin to present themselves.
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