Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “We can keep going,” she said.

  “The flight. The wine.”

  He hadn’t acted like this since the drought. That voice on the phone in New York. There was an attractive young architect in his office, one of those tall, leggy types with a brunette blunt cut. Veronica Leonard. Maybe they’d stayed late at the office, and he’d invited her home with him. It was The Seven-Year Itch. This was the danger of staying in the country alone with your kids for a week.

  Under the guise of snuggling with him, Rebecca sniffed his neck. There was something strange on him, musky, sweet. She’d never smelled it.

  He fell asleep quickly, and when she touched his back to see if he was faking, he didn’t stir. His cell phone was on the table by the bed. A picture of the kids at a birthday party in Prospect Park. She slid the bar at the bottom. “Enter Passcode.” He’d never had a passcode; she knew this because Abbie frequently played games on his phone. This was something new. She tried Abbie’s birthday, then Benny’s, then her own, then his. She tried an old code he’d had for an ATM card. She was insane with numbers, remembered them like an idiot savant.

  She didn’t know offhand the birthdays of his mother or father. As a last-ditch effort, she tried their own anniversary, 10/09 and even 10/08, because sometimes he thought it was October 8 and not 9.

  The phone disabled, and the screen came up to dial an emergency call. She went around the bed and set it down next to him quietly. She sneaked a peek at his face. It was relaxed and carefree, like a child’s.

  Karen

  A Tisket, A Tasket Supper Club takes place in our loft apartment in Brooklyn, which has 450 square feet of dining space with high ceilings, an open kitchen, and an oak bar. There will be three chef/servers at your disposal, as well as a professional (and highly innovative) mixologist. We offer a five-course meal at a fixed rate: tastings course, soup, entree, salad, and dessert. Wines are BYO—please see recommendations below.

  Cocktail hour will precede the meal, including three unique drink offerings. Capacity is 25 people. Our September 4th dinner is $50/person.

  Dinner begins at 8 P.M. and dessert is served at 10:30. Should you make a reservation, please include any dietary preferences. We look forward to seeing you.

  After the Park Slope Single Parents potluck, Susie had called Karen and invited her to a supper club. When Karen asked what that was, Susie said, “You pay money to eat at a stranger’s house. I went last month, and it was really cool.”

  The whole thing sounded very seventies, very swingery—Karen feared that when she showed up, she would find a bunch of twentysomethings blindfolded, naked, and eating escarole. But she was intrigued. She liked the idea that she could tell Matty she was going to a supper club, then explain to him what it was.

  He had arrived at ten that morning to take Darby out for the day, and he had agreed to babysit until Karen came home from the dinner. It had been awkward at first. She knew he was going to get the letter from Ashley Kessler in the mail soon and wondered how he would react. Ashley had instructed her not to discuss it with him. He had wired her the four grand, and she would be fine for the month, but she was anxious. What if she couldn’t afford Ashley’s fee? What if Matty cut her off completely and it took time to get the wires going again? She kept their conversation briefer than usual and dispatched Darby with a big kiss.

  Two hours before the party, while Matty was out with Darby at a new pizza restaurant in the South Slope, Susie called to say that Noah had come down with a stomach virus and she had to stay home with him. Matty had volunteered to babysit Darby in the apartment, and Karen had already picked out what she was going to wear, a brown-and-gold V-neck shift that she had gotten before Darby was born.

  She was hurt, more than she expected to be given that she barely knew Susie. Just as it seemed she might do something fun, another mother was thwarting her. She was about to call Matty to tell him to bring Darby back right away when she realized she could go by herself. It was in Williamsburg, a place she hadn’t been in at least five years. But she was curious. She wanted to try something new, with or without Susie.

  She decided to take a cab so she wouldn’t have to worry about parking. As the cab cruised down the Williamsburg streets, she was stunned by the transformation. In the nineties she had eaten at the restaurant Planet Thailand a couple of times. This was before Dressler, before Fatty ’Cue, before Williamsburg became a foodie heaven. Back then the hipsters were the minority, a novelty. Now they had taken over the neighborhood, hundreds of scantily clad young people in oversize eyewear, all the men with lumberjack beards, all the girls with bangs. A few thirtysomething mothers pushed strollers, but they were skinnier than Park Slope mothers, in stringy tops that showed their bra straps, and they wore pale makeup with eyeliner. In the Slope people dressed as if the neighborhood were their living room, but in Williamsburg everyone was on a runway.

  Her cabbie pulled into a parking lot between two industrial buildings. A motorboat was parked in one of the spots. Karen paid the cabbie and went through a metal door that had been propped open by a high-top sneaker. Inside, next to the mailboxes, someone had posted three pieces of paper that read, “Who took my bike?,” “You’d better give it back,” and “What is WRONG with you?”

  She could hear soft Latin music from behind one of the doors. She pushed it open and found herself underneath a set of wooden stairs. An attractive couple, a tall woman and a short man, were working at a Cuisinart on the kitchen island. Neither wore gloves. The woman, with movie-star cheekbones, wore a loose-fitting Guatemalan-style dress that was cinched with a safety pin to make it fit more snugly. Karen had never cinched anything with a safety pin in her life.

  Around the room, twentysomethings mingled. Girls wore 1940s vintage dresses, boys wore chambray button-downs and boat shoes. One girl was telling another, “He’s been spending all his time with his competitive-drinking league.” The loft was warm and had no air-conditioning. A few 1970s squash racquets hung on the walls like art.

  A cute, baby-faced guy who reminded her of Sean Astin shook Karen’s hand. “I’m Tommy,” he said. “I live here. Welcome. Is this your first supper club?”

  She nodded. “Are these things legal?”

  “It’s a gray area. We don’t have liquor licenses or Department of Health permits. Some people feel that supper clubs are unfair to restaurants because we don’t have to do any of the grunt work. I feel like we’re democratizing the dining experience by offering good food in a home for not a lot of money.”

  “What if the cops come?”

  He laughed. “They have better things to worry about than underground restaurants. And this apartment isn’t zoned for residential anyway.” So the dinner would just be the tip of the iceberg.

  A freestanding oak bar was at the opposite side of the room. Behind it stood a slender man with a red goatee. Karen thought about his beard hairs dropping into the drinks like garnish. “Have you gotten a cocktail?” Tommy said, angling his head to the bar. “Rodrigo is amazing.”

  The drinks list included the Hairy Eyeball (bitters, lime juice, bourbon), the Mexican (salsa-influenced, with a cherry-tomato garnish and tequila), and a Lady Gaga (Pernod, rum, seltzer). Karen ordered the Lady Gaga and nearly gagged, it was so strong. But after a few sips, she felt it go to her head.

  A skinny boy in a seersucker suit with floppy brown hair approached Tommy. Tommy introduced him as Seth. “So has the absinthe kicked in?” Seth asked, pointing to Karen’s drink.

  “Pardon?” Karen said.

  “There’s absinthe in there. He doesn’t tell people, but there is. You know, it’s supposed to give you hallucinations.” She spit what was in her mouth back into the cup. She knew it had been a mistake to come. “Hey, I’m just kidding,” Seth said.

  He was making fun of her. She didn’t like it. Seth put his hand on her arm and said, “It was just a joke. I’m sorry. So, have you been to any of these things before?”

  “No, have you?”

&nb
sp; “A few.” She told him about Susie bagging on her. It turned out Seth lived in Park Slope, too, in the same house he had grown up in, on Sixth Street. He said he lived with his mother and worked as a masseur. Tommy excused himself to welcome other guests, and Karen was left alone with this strange emaciated man, who seemed half gay.

  “Park Slope must have been so different when you grew up there,” Karen said.

  “Yeah, the main difference was that nobody said things like ‘It must have been so different then.’ ”

  “Where’d you go to school?”

  “Berkeley Carroll. My mother thought BC would get us into better colleges, which was deluded. You don’t need a college degree to give massages.” Though Karen had always felt massage was mostly snake oil, she was impressed that he was finding a way to make a living doing something he liked. This young generation had the hubris of picking careers for love, not practicality.

  “What’s it like living with your mother?” she asked.

  “We stay out of each other’s way. It’s not ideal, but how else could I live in the Slope and do what I do? My whole generation is living with their parents. My sister lives with our dad in Greenpoint. Do you have kids?”

  “A boy. He’s six.”

  “How come your husband didn’t come here with you?”

  “He’s with my son, but we’re actually getting divorced.” She had expected to feel awkward saying it, but she didn’t.

  “My parents divorced when I was six,” Seth said. “My mother still isn’t over it. She calls my father The Bastard. That’s what I thought his name was until I was like seven. Divorce totally messes up the children. My sister stopped wearing underwear and fucks Hasidic guys.”

  One of the chefs was passing around an amuse-bouche in tiny wooden boxes with tiny plastic forks. Karen and Seth took from the tray. “This is diver scallop ceviche,” she said, “with grilled kale, blueberries, and grilled jicama in yuzu dressing.”

  “What’s yuzu?” Karen asked.

  “A kind of citrus.”

  She speared the ceviche, nibbled at it. It was gone in three bites. Tangy, sweet, rich. The scallops were perfect, and she wondered how the chefs had mastered the consistency.

  A cowbell was ringing. Everyone began filing toward the tables—open seating. There were four tables, with eclectic chairs and place settings. Karen sat with Seth. Their other table-mates were a woman named Leah, a short-haired brunette, and her boyfriend, Ferris, who resembled a heavier James Franco. Leah said she worked for an online aggregator. Karen didn’t know what that was. Ferris worked at a Morton’s steak house. The first course (individual card-stock menus listed them) was a watercress and seedless watermelon salad with goat’s milk feta from Smithson Farm in Vermont, with shallots macerated in champagne vinegar and sugar. Karen was wary of the feta-watermelon combination, but the dish impressed her. There was something special about the cheese.

  “I was talking to Katrina before,” said Seth, “and she said these goats are only milked during a certain portion of their lactation. That’s how come the feta’s so creamy.”

  “It’s such a gorgeous salad,” Leah said. “I don’t know if I want to eat it or photograph it.”

  “Food theory is like color theory,” said Ferris. “You can’t understand food unless you can taste everything at once, see how it works together.” The watermelon was light and sweeter than any Karen had tasted. She felt her table-mates were kindred spirits. Like her, they didn’t see the point of eating good food if you didn’t discuss it with the people you were with.

  She imagined opening a supper club in her apartment. It was a crazy thought, but not completely. If these first few dishes were any indication, she wasn’t as good a cook as this glamorous couple, but she could learn. It could be fun and maybe even lucrative. She could put tables in an L-formation, one of them going into the den. She did a few calculations in her head. If she could fit twenty-five people, which seemed the maximum to eat comfortably, and charge each fifty dollars, that came out to twelve-fifty for the night. Minus expenses, of course. What was the profit margin? Fifty percent? Less? If she could net five hundred a supper and throw four a month . . . It wasn’t a job, but it was a cushion. It was a beginning.

  The next course was a sweet corn passato. Each bowl came with a star squeezed onto the top in chili oil, with shaved deep-fried ginger. She wasn’t a corn person but found herself converted. And the deep-fried ginger was genius, with the interplay between the bitter flavor and the frying.

  Over the next course, semi-boned Bandera quail stuffed with fennel, chanterelle, walnuts, sage, and apple, the conversation meandered to the burgeoning Bushwick restaurant scene, the new Times restaurant critic, the stripes trend in summer clothing and Williamsburg children versus Park Slope children. Leah said she was about to move to the Slope, and Karen told them that she lived there. “I heard there’s some crazy weed coming out of the Slope right now,” Ferris said.

  “Not Park Slope,” Karen said.

  “Oh yeah. It’s medical-quality marijuana. It’s called Park Dope.”

  “That’s hysterical,” Karen said. “Have you heard of this, Seth?”

  “I’ve tried it, yeah. Friend of mine got it. It made me a little paranoid, but I have a tendency toward that anyway. I’m more into Upper Weed Side.”

  “There is not a kind of pot called Upper Weed Side!” Karen cried.

  “No, there’s not,” he said with a smile.

  “So is the Slope as granola as everyone says it is?” Leah asked. “I heard it’s impossible to walk down the street because of all the strollers.”

  “There’s not as much stroller traffic as there used to be,” Karen said. “Someone’s been stealing them. Mine got stolen last week. On Seth’s block, as a matter of fact.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s kind of rock-star, to steal strollers,” Ferris said. “A comment on the dominant versus subjugated cultures.”

  “Dog people are way worse than stroller people,” Seth said.

  “Oh my God, I know!” Karen said. “When I’m in front of a café and a dog comes up to me and starts sniffing my food and the owner just smiles like it’s cute, it drives me crazy.”

  “I don’t mind kids or dogs,” Leah said. “I can’t stand people who register their cars in other states. On my block, there are literally a dozen cars from outside New York. I’m compulsively honest, and they’re ripping off the city.”

  They got into a debate about small slights. Karen tossed down more chardonnay, enjoying the back-and-forth. She had been nervous about coming here alone, but it had turned out she could hold her own with a table of twentysomethings, even though she had been out of the workforce for six years, didn’t tweet, and had a child.

  The next main course was braised pork belly with coriander, nutmeg, and thyme, drizzled with lavender-scented honey, in homemade tortillas. The pork belly was cut so thin—how did they do it? Karen had been wanting to get a good knife but hadn’t found the time to go to that chichi kitchen-supply store in Williamsburg.

  After dessert of saba-drizzled chèvre cheesecake with a Nilla-wafer crust and candied Meyer lemon slivers, a jazz band set up on the upper loft. Everyone drank wine and ordered more cocktails. Seth asked Karen to dance. While they swayed, he massaged her shoulders. She jumped from the contact and stopped dancing. “You have so much tension in your shoulders,” he said.

  “Really?” He seemed too gay to be hitting on her. Maybe he was just trying to help her. Not all men were like Matty, selfish and manipulative.

  “Yeah. You should come for an appointment.”

  Karen thought about what it would be like to lie on a table at the apartment of a strange man in his twenties, getting a massage. The only massages she ever had were at salons, for special occasions like anniversaries or before her wedding. She always requested a female practitioner.

  “I don’t have a lot of money right now.”

  “Then book h
alf an hour. It’s only forty bucks. You’re going to have serious back problems if you don’t do something about that tension.” He was probably right. It was strange to think someone could give you advice just to be kind.

  She got Seth’s number and said she would call. In the cab home, she rolled down the window and sniffed the late-summer air. The sky glowed. Did she have the courage to pull off a supper club even once? Was she a good enough cook? What if the other coop board members found out and got upset? It was one thing to do it in an illegal rental and another to do it in a strict, small coop building.

  The cabbie took Vanderbilt Avenue, and as they reached the roundabout near Grand Army Plaza, she started to give him directions. “I know how to go,” he said. “I have GPS.” She remembered the elaborate driving instructions her mother used to give on the phone when they had company coming to Midwood—all the landmarks and lights and the ways you’d know you’d gone too far. Her mom had taken pride in it, in her skill at communicating complicated information so people understood. The problem with the world was that no one needed directions anymore.

  Melora

  Melora flipped channels on the bedroom television. It had been a long day of rehearsal, and she was worried she was going to bomb as Gwen. All she wanted to do was forget about the day and sleep. As she changed channels from reality show to home improvement to reality show, she came across her movie Poses on IFC—the scene where Maya Deren meets Sasha for the first time. Melora and Stuart had already slept together by the time they shot the scene, and she could see the burgeoning infatuation in her eyes. She turned the channel. In general, she tried not to watch any of her own movies. It was like watching yourself have sex. You might learn a thing or two—but it could really fuck you up.

  Would she see Ray Hiss again? It had been almost a week since she had left her message, and he hadn’t called. She thought about calling Julian Schnabel to ask whether he knew Ray, but it seemed desperate and pathetic.

  She went out into the dining room. Orion and Suzette were eating dinner: macaroni with broccoli and a side of asparagus in oil and vinegar. It was the day after Labor Day.