Life From Scratch

by Melissa Ford

  But for the thirty-six hours preceding the date, Gael’s name doesn’t pop up on my main blog, and I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved. I chew my way through a baguette with the cheapest brie I could find at the market. It tastes like cheap brie. “Don’t you think this is a sign that he’s not really interested?” I ask Arianna as she flicks through the clothes in my makeshift closet, Beckett sleeping in a carrier on her chest.

  “No, why?” Arianna asks absentmindedly, considering a little black dress with a deep neckline.

  “Because he knows my blog exists; I mean, you brought it up at dinner. He knows the name of the site. If you were going on a date with someone you were really interested in, wouldn’t you read up on their thoughts by going on their blog before the date?”

  “Yes, but I’m a girl,” Arianna says. “You’re attributing girlie behavior to a boy. Boys do not poke around blogs like that.”

  “What about all of those tech blogs? The political blogs?”

  “I didn’t say men didn’t read blogs. I’m just saying that they don’t cyber-stalk their potential love interests like women do pre-date.”

  She picks out an outfit for me that falls between all worlds—it’s not hinting at sex and it’s not denying it either. It doesn’t scream responsible mother-type but it doesn’t dismiss the desire to nurture. It is not risky or exciting or too far out there or too common. It is between everything and therefore nothing at all.

  And therefore, it is perfect for the second first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life.

  Before I can go out to dinner with Gael, I must endure a trip out to Park Slope in Brooklyn to have lunch with my sister, Sarah, and her family. Usually I’m able to talk Ethan into joining us, but he claims he has some photographs to take of cream pooling up on plastic table tops.

  I love my sister to pieces, and I know that she always has my best interests at heart, but she also knows how to push my buttons even more than our mother and takes every opportunity to remind me of my foibles—purposefully or inadvertently.

  Sarah is very successful at what she does. She is a surgeon—a brain surgeon at that. Which means that she is very smart, though the tradeoff is that she is also slightly socially awkward. She prefers her operating room to be silent instead of playing light music like the other doctors. She keeps her Park Slope apartment much in the same way she keeps her operating room, impeccably neat and organized and silent.

  She managed to find a husband who is the exact replica of her except in male form and with a specialty of heart surgery. She even reproduced herself in Penelope, a solemn child who prefers steamed edamame to fried burgers, and whose most daring moment came when she announced she wanted to be Madeleine for Halloween instead of a doctor for the third year running.

  My sister also has a rabid love of her neighborhood and an inability to find anything redeemable about anywhere else in the world. She would love to bring me over the bridge into her whole wheat pancake world and thinks that it is only a matter of time until I come around.

  The topic du jour is how much more difficult it is to get Penelope into a good preschool in Park Slope than it is anywhere else in the city, state, or country.

  “I thought I read that preschool enrollment was down,” I say as we walk down the street. We pass four or five perfect acceptable restaurants where we could park ourselves and get this meal in motion, but they study each menu carefully, debating all the past meals they’ve had at the establishment and sighing about how many choices there are in Park Slope. As if picking a restaurant is akin to Sophie’s Choice.

  “Not at the g-o-o-d schools,” my sister says carefully, spelling the word “good” as if it’s on par with a curse word or sex position.

  Sarah finally decides that a small panini place will be the perfect place to deliver her monthly “Do you know what you should do with your life?” speech. These speeches started a long time ago, back when we were in high school and I was busy reading teen magazines while my sister read science journals. “Do you know what you should do?” she always began, placing her hand gently over Johnny Depp’s face. “You should spend some time in the library figuring out what you want to study once you reach college.”

  In college she told me that I had to pick a better major, go out more, go out less, and apply for summer internships. She always knew best. She just didn’t know me.

  I order a roasted eggplant sandwich and study Penelope as she pretends to read the menu. She finally orders slowly and carefully, as if she’s unsure whether her tiny voice is translating into English for the server. “I’d like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread with potato chips on the side, carrot sticks, and a juice box.”

  “Hold the potato chips,” my brother-in-law tells the server. “Can you substitute a yogurt stick? Sweetie, you have to think about heart health.”

  Penelope looks down at the table, examining a small crack on the edge, and my heart breaks for her. It cannot be easy to live with two surgeons who live their lives like a test for a clinical cholesterol study. Penelope has never tried a potato chip in her life unless the nanny has been sneaking them to her on the side.

  Even I’m not that brave to overstep my sister’s iron grasp on her child’s triglycerides levels.

  “Do you know what you need to do?” my sister asks when our food arrives. She immediately removes the innards of her sandwich from the bread and discards the roll into the general bread basket. She proceeds to cut up her grilled chicken breast into tiny pieces with the precision of a surgeon, for lack of a better description.

  “Join a gym?” I guess. “Drink more water? Spend less time outside? Have a colonic?”

  “No, what you need,” my sister tells me, “is to return to a job. Having too much time at home without structure can lead to depression. Which can lead to all sorts of other health issues.”

  “But I’m not depressed,” I say defensively. My taciturn brother-in-law stares off into the middle distance. Penelope watches me as she methodically chews her sandwich. I can see that she’s counting with each bite. “I’m having a great time. I’m trying to find a job that I’ll feel passionately about, and I do have a structure to my day. I wake up, I check email, I cook, I write about it, I go out at night.”

  “Cooking and writing a blog is not structure,” my sister tells me.

  “I have three thousand readers,” I respond, grateful the Sitestalker software has clued me in. “Three thousand people who don’t agree with you. They think the blog is great and . . . I am actually nominated for an award this year. And beyond all of that, I’m dating again. I’m making baby steps.”

  She rolls her eyes at the term “baby steps,” and doesn’t congratulate me on my award or date.

  “Have you considered what you’re going to do when the money runs out?” Richard asks me. He questions not out of a true concern for my well-being, but out of a fear that I’m going to start bumming off them, like Ethan.

  “Honestly, if nothing magically drops into my lap in the next few months, I’m back to work as a graphic designer. I know that,” I reassure them. “I’ll go back to making pamphlets until I grow old and die at my desk surrounded by ‘I heart New York’ mouse pads and Pantone color charts.”

  “Is Aunt Rachel going to die?” Penelope asks, her voice saturated with fear.

  “Aunt Rachel,” Richard says, “is speaking in hyperbole.”

  I notice that Penelope does not need the term “hyperbole” explained but instead seems placated enough on the topic of my health to go back to her peanut butter and jelly.

  “Will that make you happy?” my sister asks.

  And how can I answer that? The idea of abandoning my blog makes me want to place my head on the table and cry. If I could somehow translate my three thousand readers into subscribers for articles strategically placed in magazines or newspapers that would pay me enough to continue living in Manhattan, I’d take the job in a heartbeat. The reality is that I’m happiest when I’m writi
ng.

  “I do like design work,” I answer because it’s easier than vomiting out everything that just happened in my brain. “Listen, I’d love to be a writer, and I’d love to parlay cooking into a job. I am really happy in the kitchen, and I can’t believe that I waited thirty-four years to learn how to make my own hummus. So, yeah, I’d love to write and cook, and if I could make that into a job, I would.”

  “Watch out,” Sarah says drolly. “You may even end up with a career.”

  She pronounces the word in such a way that she conjures up every fight I ever had with Adam over the hours he worked. She makes it sound like I consider career to be a venereal disease, but I don’t have the energy to set the record straight. And regardless, the whole thing is mixed up in my mind as is. It’s suddenly too confusing to consider why our marriage ended over his emotional isolation or how I feel about work or what causes a husband to spend more time in the office than at home. Or why, oh why, I couldn’t have found my writing voice while I was with Adam. I could have used all of his late nights working to blog.

  “Don’t you want to know about my date?” I ask, realizing that I am still trying to convince them that my life is good. Can’t she see my enormous internal smile, radiating happiness?

  Maybe they didn’t hear me because they launch into a long story about a fundraiser at the local synagogue, the numbing effects of religion on the masses, and preschool tuitions that cost more per year than my college. There is no graceful way to bring Gael up again, so I finish off the afternoon watching my niece sit, straight-back and crumb-free in her chair, like a little robot. An edamame-loving, never-scuffed-shoe, loveable robot.

  Lunch with my sister before the second first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life was not the best idea I’ve ever had. No one can punch down my self-esteem or make me question all the choices of the last few years quite like my family in Park Slope.

  I slip on a jangly Peruvian red-shell bracelet, match it to my matte red lipstick, and walk a tiny path between my bed and sofa to work off my anxiety.

  I am really nervous for my first second date.

  I sit down at my computer and try to center myself before the date by checking my stats. 2544 people disagree with my sister, I note. 2544 people think that I’m funny and sassy and make a damn fine stack of pancakes. Actually, it’s 2,546 people by the time I log out of the stats after taking a quick peek to see if Gael’s IP address has shown up in the log.

  It isn’t there.

  At eight o’clock I decide to go downstairs and meet him at the front door even though he has been to my apartment before. It seems presumptuous to ask someone to take the elevator up to your apartment when you are perfectly capable of meeting them downstairs.

  Unfortunately, I do not account for the possibility that someone has let him into the building, so he receives a second shriek from me when I turn around from locking my door and find him standing behind me. My neighbor must spend her whole life with her hand on the knob because she throws her door open again and barks out some words about babies sleeping in a voice reminiscent of the banshees screeching about your certain death.

  “I am so sorry, Diana,” I whisper loudly. “We’re actually leaving.”

  She makes a face, as if I’ve only said that to rub her face in the fact that I can go out and she has to stay home with her sleeping child. I fumble for a moment, trying to think of what to say, but at that moment, the elevator doors open again, and Gael beckons me inside as if we’re exiting for a clandestine affair.

  The doors close, and we start our descent. Gael discreetly looks me up and down while allowing his eyes to wander to the lit-up floor numbers between glancing at each body part. “You look very beautiful,” he tells me, not in a voice that suggests he wants to get into the pants he just appreciated visually, but simply as fact. I am beautiful.

  My face burns, and I mumble something gracious. The fact is that I’m not the kind of woman who gets whistled at on the street. I don’t have men following me down into the subway with their eyes glued to my ass. I don’t even have men give up their seats for me when I’m juggling five bags of groceries on my way home to cook. The last person to tell me that I looked beautiful was Adam, and that was years ago.

  It feels nice to have someone else concur that I look good, especially after so much thought was given to choosing an outfit between every possible statement. We step outside, and I shiver for a moment, the shock of the cold shooting down my spine into the three-inch heels Arianna convinced me to wear. Height, she informed me, is sexy. Especially next to a tall, Spanish man.

  “You go out in winter without a scarf?” he asks, pointing at my neck. “The cold doesn’t bother you?”

  “The cold bothers me a lot,” I say, uncrossing my arms to show him that I’m shaking. The scarves I own don’t go with the look I’m trying to convey. He puts his arm around me in a way that could be construed as brotherly but I choose to take as romantic. I lean into his partial hug, and we awkwardly stumble down the street together. We could use a little practice.

  “Have you lived here a long time?” Gael asks. “In Murray Hill?”

  “About nine months,” I say. “Almost ten months.”

  “It’s a great neighborhood,” he tells me. “It must be nice to be on the same side of the city as the museums. Easy to get to the Guggenheim from here.”

  I decide in that moment that I love him.

  Adam and I used to trek out to the Guggenheim early in our relationship, back when we made time for taking advantage of New York—the art museums and shows and myriad of restaurants. We even had a Picasso poster in our living room from an old 1999 exhibit.

  Adam let our dual Guggenheim membership lapse a few years later, claiming we didn’t have time to use it anyway. That loss probably contributed to my bad moods. There is nothing better for staving off seasonal affective disorder than the clean whiteness that falls across the museum when the winter sun comes in through the glass roof.

  “I love the ceiling,” I tell Gael.

  “Me too,” he agrees. “We’ll have to go sometime.”

  “There’s a Kandinsky exhibit right now,” I say, his hip awkwardly bumping into my side as we walk.

  “There’s also the Museum of Sex,” he mentions, grinning like a nine-year-old boy who has just found his father’s Playboys. “That’s even closer, right?”

  “It’s a happening neighborhood,” I say dryly.

  Luckily he has chosen a tiny Italian restaurant two blocks away. He holds open the door for me, and I cross under the small walkway of sparkle lights the owner has attached overhead. Normally when I’m here, it feels like any other Italian restaurant in the neighborhood. Tonight, it feels a little bit like we’ve entered a fairy’s cave.

  Do fairies live in caves?

  We’re seated by the door, and Gael looks with concern at the table. “I’m worried my date will be cold,” he admits to the waitress, as if this were one of the many things worrying him before the date. Possible floods, tornadoes, door drafts. She motions to a table towards the back of the restaurant, as if she doesn’t mind that she is giving up a table in her section and the tip money that accompanies that. Or perhaps she remembers me as being someone who sticks firmly to the fifteen-to-eighteen-percent range.

  “Let’s order wine,” Gael suggests. “We have to toast everything.”

  “Toast?” I ask, handing him the wine list which was placed inside my menu. He scans down the list.

  “The ideas I have for your future career as a traveling, juggling, cooking writer. We need to toast my grand ideas.”

  He picks a bottle of red and asks me if this is okay. I notice that the skin around his eyes crinkles when he smiles his lopsided smile. He picks at the small bowl of olives the waitress placed on our table in lieu of the usual bread basket.

  “I like this place because they have olives,” Gael admits. “That is very Spanish, serving olives instead of bread. A small bowl of marinated olives, right?”

&
nbsp; “What else is Spanish?” I ask. “Besides ham.”

  “Besides jamon?” he laughs. “Late dinners. No one goes out before eight or nine in Madrid.”

  “And then where do you go?” I question. I am still freezing, but I don’t want to cross my arms over my chest to keep warm because it pushes my boobs into a strange position. I try to increase my body heat by jiggling my leg under the table.

  “You get a small meal somewhere. And then you go to a club. Like a music club? A dance club. And then you’ll go to a bar for a drink. What did you do when you were in Barcelona?”

  I like that he remembers the small details. “Well, I was only seventeen. I was there on a school trip. So no bars.”

  “No bars at all?”

  “No bars. Not even any restaurants. I think we ate in the hotel most nights. It was a place that catered to large school groups. They made this awful vegetable soup every night we were there. It was this pureed vegetable mixture. We called it culo.”

  Gael almost chokes on his olive and starts laughing. “You say that very well. Are you sure you don’t know Spanish?”

  “Only the curse words,” I admit. “And gracias. And, strangely enough, cacahuete.”

  “Peanut?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know why, but I remember cacahuete.”

  “You know hola,” Gael prods. “And bueno.”

  “But those are words that everyone knows. That’s not knowing Spanish. I’d like to learn Spanish. It has always been on my to-do list.”

  “To-do list?” Gael questions.

  “Like a list of things you want to accomplish.”

  “Aaaah, a to-do list,” Gael repeats as if he’s trying to commit this phrase to memory.

  “I’m just impressed by how well you know English,” I tell him. “I’ve always been jealous of people who can speak more than one language. And you know so many. Three?”

  “Well, English, you have to learn in school. It was a requirement for graduation. And you learn it for a long time. Many years. But my mother speaks French; she is from France, so we spoke French in the house too. French and Spanish, depending on who was winning the fight.”