Life From Scratch

by Melissa Ford

  “I’m doing intrauterine inseminations,” she told me. “With donor sperm.”

  “Why would you do that?” I asked dumbly.

  “To get pregnant,” she said impatiently, sitting down gingerly on a bench in the clinic lobby, as if she was scared the sperm would swim out of her body on the taxi ride back to her apartment.

  “I mean, why are you trying to get pregnant?” I tried again.

  “To have a baby, idiot. Listen, we’re in our thirties. Your fertility doesn’t exist forever. I want to be a parent. If I can do it this way, great. If I have to go about it another way, fine. The only thing I cannot accept is never having a child at all.”

  Which, like women synchronizing their periods, made me start thinking of the world in terms of babies and fertility too. I spent the next two years helping Arianna conceive and carry a child, while becoming increasingly bitter towards Adam, who was not filling me with his very inexpensive, readily available seed. There I was, watching my friend shell out tens of thousands of dollars to become a mother while I technically could become a mother for free, but didn’t know if I’d even make a good one.

  After two miscarriages, three fresh IVF transfers, four frozen IVF transfers, several months of daily Lovenox injections, a premature delivery, and a NICU stay, Arianna had Beckett, so named after the author of the most famous Godot of all times. Beckett may have been her own personal Godot, but the delay in his arrival only meant that she had built up more love for him than any one person could possibly need in their lifetime.

  We jump off the train at the 79th Street station, dodging the Upper West Side nannies returning their charges from play dates and students coming home from school with oversized packs strapped to their backs like studious camels. 79th Street feels, if possible, ten degrees cooler than the packed sidewalks in Midtown. Of course, Zales has been decorated for Christmas with the requisite boughs of holly hanging over the enormous sign announcing the store’s Christmas sale and window displays of heart-shaped sparkling jewelry. Arianna rolls her eyes and Beckett gurgles and slaps the fabric of the baby carrier.

  We forgo bagels at H&H, and instead push our way into the throng of shoppers clogging the narrow aisles of Zabar’s. We travel up here usually once a month so Arianna can get the pickles she likes and stock up on their cream cheese spreads and coffee beans. We hit the dairy aisle first, dropping containers of Greek yogurt and crème fraiche into our basket.

  “Zabar’s makes me hungry,” Arianna announces as we pass the smoked fish counter. I cannot think of anything more unappetizing than fish that has been pulverized into a spread.

  “Seriously? Smoked fish? What are you, a seventy-year-old man? I understand if you said that back at the cheese counter. Did you see the fresh pasta that was on sale? Tri-color capelletti?”

  “Their smoked sable is incredible. Not that I need to spend twenty bucks on smoked fish at the moment, but if they were giving out free samples, I’d stand in line for hours.”

  “Beckett would love that,” I comment.

  I duck past a woman reading the label on a jar of lemon curd and make my way toward the baking supplies. We stand in front of the empty space in the baking section, where cake flour would normally be stocked next to the enormous jars of active yeast and the Dutch-milled cocoa.

  “Do you think the world is trying to tell me something?” I ask, shifting around bags of cornmeal and gluten-free rice flour.

  “What do you mean?” Arianna asked, adding vanilla to her own basket.

  “When everything is going wrong—when your husband is choosing the office over you, and you’re somewhat newly divorced, and you only have a few more months left in your savings account before you need to go back to designing pamphlets, and every store is not stocking cake flour even though you already went out to New Jersey to retrieve the stupid angel food cake pan you were given for your wedding—do you think that is the universe telling you what you should expect after you die? Is this forewarning that I am heading to hell?”

  “Oh, sweetie, of course you’re going to hell. That’s where all self-pitying drama queens go.” Only Arianna can get away with teasing me while I’m down. She holds up a bag of whole wheat flour, and I shake my head.

  “I can’t use that to make my angel food cake. It has to be cake flour.”

  “So drop the idea of the cake, and you’ll make it some other time.”

  “What other time?” I admonish. “I’ve had the pan for months now, and I still haven’t used it. It’s mocking me. It’s whispering to me every night that while I may have gotten quite good at flipping over fried eggs, I will never master the art of baking.”

  Cake flour—not fancy cream cheese spreads—was the whole point of this trek to the Upper West Side.

  A few weeks into learning how to cook, I took the train out to New Jersey with two empty, rolling suitcases, and I went down into my parent’s basement to retrieve all of my unused wedding gifts—gifts to celebrate my now-defunct marriage.

  When Adam and I were engaged, I registered for cookware like all good brides in New York, even though I didn’t know how to use a roasting pan or colander. I mean, how do you admit that fact to friends and family who are so keen to buy new brides cookware? It’s practically written in the Wedding Bible: Thou shall buy brides either cookware or lingerie for their shower.

  So I unwrapped box after box of beautiful William Sonoma silver pots and pans and Le Creuset enamel and silicone spatula bouquets and properly ooohed and aaahed about each gift, all the while knowing that they probably would never be used. I would have loved to have thrown Martha Stewart-inspired dinner parties with linens matching the centerpieces, but emptying a pre-cooked chicken purchased in Chelsea Market into a roasting pan seems like cheating. And though Martha went to jail for some type of stock debacle, I could not see her being down with that type of cheating and sullying her good housekeeping name.

  I considered just admitting that the entire idea of learning my way around the kitchen filled me with exhaustion and ask instead for other gifts—maybe lifetime memberships to various city museums or a subscription to the American Ballet Theatre. But my non-cooking mother encouraged me to register for the cookware because people loved to buy it, imagining the couple hunkering down to some warm soup in the middle of their first winter together. She also helped me repack it in boxes after the guests departed and labeled the outside of each William Sonoma box with a black sharpie. My mother is, if nothing else, practical.

  She took all the boxes back to her New Jersey basement under the guise that we shouldn’t use up precious New York storage space on wedding items. I think my mother was a tad fearful that I might ignore all the beliefs she drilled in my head as a teenager if I had access to those gorgeous pots and pans in my kitchen.

  According to my mother, suggesting that women cook dinner rather than order in from a local restaurant is the first step in returning all of the liberties women have obtained in the last fifty years. I might as well declare myself Amish and go sew my own clothing and can green beans from my garden. “You don’t knit your own sweaters, Rachel,” my mother was fond of saying. “So why do you want to cook your own meals? Let Diane Von Furstenberg make your tops and let Hunan Chow make your dinner. You have more important things to do than housework, and it’s just food.”

  Except that, unlike her, in the few months leading up to the trek out to New Jersey to pick up my kitchenware, I really didn’t have more important things to do.

  It’s not like Adam and I literally never ate a meal at home. We had cereal for breakfast, and I was fantastic at boiling up ramen noodles. But once I crossed the threshold of three or more ingredients, once the directions weren’t written on the outside of a package, I sort of tossed the idea of preparing the meal back on the figurative shelf.

  Through most of our marriage, I didn’t think Adam cared. He liked my mother’s spirit and complimented her when she ordered Thanksgiving dinner from his favorite caterer. And he certainly wasn�
��t doing any cooking since he rarely got home before 11 p.m. But it was a throwaway thought he spat out during one of our final conversations while we waited for our lawyers to divvy up our possessions that gave me pause.

  “You’ve never been supportive,” he said.

  I couldn’t think of a way I could have been more supportive of his work at the office unless I’d offered to deliver his subpoenas. So that left showing support of him at home, which conjured up images of wifely duties I should have been performing instead of watching television. Of meals unprepared and shirts un-ironed and all of the things my mother had drilled into my head not to do for a man.

  It’s not as if his own socialite mother ever slowed down from her busy schedule to toss a few steaks onto the grill for Adam’s family so I’m not sure where the domestic desires stemmed—certainly not from childhood. But learning to cook became a way to recreate myself—something I had never done before. I’d defy my mother’s brainwashing and Adam’s unspoken accusations about not being homey enough with one, single act.

  So New Jersey was where my cookware rested until several months following my divorce, when I went to collect it so I could scramble my own damn eggs.

  After we had coffee and bagels, my mother asked why I had brought two deflated suitcases with me. There was a fearful tone to her voice, as if she was bracing herself for me to request moving back into my childhood bedroom.

  “I’m just going to take back some of my old wedding gifts to New York. The stuff in the basement,” I said.

  On second thought, moving back into my bedroom seemed more sane. My mother had been holding her breath for several weeks as I talked about redefining myself with a new career. I think she secretly hoped that I would announce that it was law school for me after all.

  “Are you talking about the cookware?” my mother questioned. “Your father and I were talking about donating that stuff. Give it to a family who needs it.”

  “I need it,” I told her.

  “I really don’t understand why you’re bothering with that.” She couldn’t even bring herself to call it cooking. She left dishes in the sink where my father would get to them later. It was one of the tradeoffs between his love of the earth as an environmental lawyer and her insistence on rejecting any tasks deemed “housework” as an escapee from the 1950s and overworked immigration lawyer. If they weren’t going to choke the landfills with paper plates and plastic forks, Dad was going to have to take care of the dishes. My mother did not touch dish soap.

  “I’m bothering with it because I can’t afford to eat out every night anymore,” I explained as I started following her towards her office.

  I wanted to add something snide like, “I’m not a big fancy lawyer like you,” except I knew that would only take us into a discussion on how I could be a big fancy lawyer like her if I only applied myself. In her world, 35-years-old was not too old to return to the classroom and get a new degree.

  I went into the basement by myself and filled my bags with salad spinners and frying pans and tiny saucier pots. I left behind the tagine, knowing that certain cookware was out of my element. At last minute, I threw a tube pan into the mix—an angel food cake pan that came with a recipe card called The Anniversary Cake, to be eaten on the first anniversary. I crumpled up the card and tucked the bakeware into my bag.

  The Cuisinart and the standing mixer were too bulky and heavy to fit in the bags. But I wanted them. I stomped back upstairs, dragging one of my suitcases behind me. I found my father in the kitchen at the sink, scrubbing a dish before he turned the water back on.

  “Any chance you could drive me back into the city?” I wheezed. I motioned to the suitcase. “I have a lot of stuff I want to bring back.”

  “Oh, cupcake, I’m working on a brief right now.”

  “It’s Saturday,” I pointed out. “You’re washing dishes.”

  “After this, I mean. I’m working on a brief this afternoon and then your mother and I are going out with the Perlmans.”

  Just as I didn’t know how to say it to Adam, I didn’t know how to remind my father that I am just as important as a brief. That I’m part of that environment he protects—a living, breathing human. Instead I accepted his apologetic shoulder shrug and walked through the house to find my mother. She was sitting in front of the computer, reading the New York Times both on the screen and in paper form simultaneously.

  “You have to go online to see the comments,” she explained.

  “Why not read it all online?” I asked.

  “I can’t stand the computer. I need to hold my newspaper. Smell the news.”

  “You would think Dad would have convinced you to cancel your subscription by now,” I said. “Chopping down trees. Bad for the environment.”

  “I recycle,” she insisted. “Are you heading out, pumpkin?”

  “Actually, I was going to ask you to drive me into the city. I have so much stuff to take back and I can’t really fit it all into the bags. It’s really heavy.”

  “I can’t, honey. After I finish the Times, I’m getting back to work.”

  “And then you have the Perlmans,” I finished for her.

  “Right, the Perlmans,” she agreed, relieved that I wasn’t pushing the issue.

  “Can I borrow your car?” I finally pleaded. “I’ll drive into the city and then drive back and take the train back in.”

  “I don’t see why not,” my mother told me. “As long as you’re back before we leave for the Perlmans.” She beamed at me as if she was so proud of my self-sufficiency. One needed to be self-sufficient when surrounded by those who treasured paper over people.

  That was months ago, but I hadn’t been brave enough to attempt angel food cake until recently. And, of course, once I decided to try making it, cake flour disappeared off of every shelf in New York City. This was not the first store I had traveled to in search of baking ingredients.

  I lean against the wall and take out my phone, opening Twitter so I can complain about Zabar’s lack of flour choices.

  “I think it is merely a strange coincidence, this city-wide disappearance of cake flour,” Arianna admits, nuzzling the top of Beckett’s head. He twists around to try to grab the ends of her honey-colored hair.

  “Blech!” he exclaims in Beckettese.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I tell him, hitting send.

  We walk back out into the damp, cold afternoon, which is slowly bleeding into evening. I can see my breath in the air, and Arianna fusses with Beckett’s hat, tying the strings underneath his chin again. He swings his little legs against her stomach as he hangs from his carrier. They’re always together. A unit.

  Even though he was created with sperm that came from an anonymous donor, it seems as if all of Beckett’s features come straight from Arianna. Her narrow, blue eyes; her stick-straight blond hair that looks like it benefited from some obscure Japanese straightening treatment; and her thin, straight nose have all shown up in miniature on Beckett. They share the same smile down to matching dimples on their left cheek.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I nominated you for a blogging award,” she says as we walk down the subway steps, trying hard not to knock our bulging shopping bags into the other riders.

  Arianna knows how much the blog has grown on me, how much pride I take in the relationships I’ve built through the site or the comments I get on my posts. I turn my head slightly so she can’t see my huge, slightly-embarrassed grin.

  “Er . . . what sort of a blogging award?”

  “I don’t know. It’s called ‘the Bloscars.’ I saw a post about it on one of the fashion blogs I read. I nominated you in the food category.”

  “Well, there’s no way I can win,” I tell her. “I mean, my blog is about frying eggs, not making soufflés. Probably one of those big-name bloggers will win. Pioneer Woman Cooks or Smitten Kitchen. People who can really cook and have a million readers.”

  “You have a million readers,” Arianna insists.

  “I ha
ve like twenty readers. Maybe thirty.”

  “How do you know?” Arianna says.

  “Comments! I get twenty to thirty comments on a post.”

  “Maybe you have more people reading and not commenting. Haven’t you ever read a blog and not commented?”

  Er . . . like The Dating Diva? But that was because I thought I had nothing to say. Or I thought I had a lot to say and had no clue how to say it. I hadn’t found my voice again; but now that I have, I expect that everyone who reads me probably comments at least once.

  “Anyway, Rachel, you have loyal readers. They love that you share all the stuff about your divorce. And love life,” she hurriedly adds.

  “One date with Rob Zuckerman does not constitute a love life,” I sigh, stepping onto the subway platform, bypassing a woman mumbling to herself.

  “Give it time,” Arianna promises.

  That night, I Google the Bloscars and immediately see hundreds of thousands of hits including the main site. I scroll through the categories and see Arianna’s nomination for my site, under Food Bloggers. Seeing my blog name makes my heart start pounding, and I cover my mouth to hide my smile even though I’m alone in the apartment.

  There is a small box next to her nomination that you can check in order to show your agreement with the nomination—the point, of course, is to help the award-givers separate the wheat from the chaff. Blogs that receive more nominations probably deserve a second look. After I click it, it informs me that I am the sixteenth person to nominate the site. There is no additional information on who the other fifteen are or where they came from.

  I am about to shoot off an email to Arianna when someone knocks on the door. I instantly know it is my brother, Ethan. He is the only person I know who would rather hang around outside waiting for someone to give him access inside rather than use the buzzer. It all goes back to his love of shocking me.

  I open the door, and God bless the asshole, he has arrived with a bag of cake flour. “You bitched about it on Twitter that you couldn’t find any. I brought this one over from Brooklyn.” I hug him, crushing the flour against his shirt.