The Eggnog Chronicles

by Carly Alexander

  It wasn’t until those difficult months around my mother’s death—when I’d penetrated the wall of denial to glimpse the inevitable panicked end—that I realized she did care about me. Of course, my mother loved me. However she had spent a lifetime exercising restraint, trying not to appear vulnerable, not to meddle, not to direct my choices. And all along, secretly, I would have loved a little meddling. When you’re passably pretty and sure you know it all and growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, your survival relies on meddling from your mother.

  But Alice Conner defied convention. When Dad died she quickly sold his beloved country place upstate—the mud hut, she called it—and she renovated the two-bedroom co-op Ricki and I had grown up in. I was just out of college, toiling in a sterile contracts job for an insurance consultant because I needed rent money, and I made the trip uptown to Mom’s place thinking I might reclaim my old bedroom for awhile now that she was alone. Turned out I was “Way wrong” on that assumption. The room Ricki and I once shared had been turned into a den, our twin beds replaced by a sofa and entertainment center. And that wasn’t all. The chipped, patterned tile of the master bathroom had been replaced by clean white marble with pristine trim for the new Jacuzzi tub and double vanity. The worn carpets had been torn up, the wood floors buffed to a sheen, the walls painted in deep hues so unlike my mother. I remember walking through the newly decorated living room in shock, wondering at the transformation of the white walls into the gem-tones of a Victorian manor house in India with walls and drapes and rugs in ruby red, indigo blue, royal purple. Velvet curtains were swathed over the arches. Votive candles flickered in glimmering clusters of color, and two stained glass pieces hung on the sliding glass doors to the balcony. “Early bordello,” my uncle pronounced with a wiggle of his eyebrows, causing Alice to slap his shoulder and show him the books she’d used for research.

  “I love the gem-tones,” my mother said, running her fingers over the purple and red mosaic tiles of a heavy vase. “These colors make me happy.”

  But I couldn’t believe the outlandish cave of color. “Where did this come from?” I’d asked, thinking of my failed pitch to paint my room blue when I was thirteen. My parents had vetoed paint the color of a robin’s egg, and now I was walking through the facets of a medieval jewel. “All those years of white walls—”

  “That was your father,”Alice had said as she lifted a votive candle to light her cigarette. “His reaction to his mother’s tendency to cover everything with souvenir plaques and cozies and doilies. White is very pure, but eventually it fades to gray.”

  “Oh, don’t we all,” Uncle John remarked with a shrug, and I had laughed along, pretending to be jaded and grownup and independent, pretending that I didn’t care that my mother had painted me out of my old room, out of my old life. Twenty-one, and I had just lost my father, and yet my mother was pushing me through a rite of passage I didn’t feel ready for, but the renovations had taken place and there was no turning back. “We can’t live in the past,” Ricki told me when I called her at Brown to complain. “Dad is gone and Mom is moving on.”

  Gripping the phone, I had swallowed back tears, reluctant to let Ricki mother me. That was my role, my job. I had stepped in to do the mothering when I’d realized Alice wasn’t cut out for the task. I was the one who’d told my sister the nitty-gritty of sex, the truth about boys, the warnings about over-plucking eyebrows, blue eyeshadow and the girls who wore their popularity like a crown.

  Mothers and daughters, sisters, missing parents . . . relationships were a morass of struggle and complexity. Thinking back to Yoshiko’s situation, I wasn’t quite sure how to separate my subject from her mother’s projections and dreams.

  Sometimes you need to wade through the crap and you can’t find a decent pair of boots.

  5

  A therapist once told me I would not get along with men until I resolved the feelings of abandonment and anger that I felt toward my father. I responded that I didn’t feel abandoned, that my father couldn’t help it if he had a heart attack, and that I didn’t really care that Dad was off at digs for long periods during my childhood. Isn’t it okay to love someone and live without them in your life every day?

  My boyfriend Carter didn’t get the concept of healthy separation either. Over the past few days he’d been on the cell twice a day, wanting to come over, wanting to squeeze in a quicky, wanting, wanting, wanting. “What part about ‘Not feeling well’ do you not get?” I’d snapped at him. “Would you look at some hot porn and call me next week?”

  And I had abandonment issues?

  Well, maybe just a few. For starters, there was Philip. I vowed never to forgive my ex-husband for screwing around on me. I mean, cheating is one thing, but when you marry a person it’s supposed to mean something. Ricki thinks I fell into the relationship with Philip to make up for losing Dad. She tells me I was infatuated with Philip, in love with the notion of love and security, two tenants that were threatened when our father died. Sometimes my little sister is too wise for her own good. Of course, I always argue with her, and she gets upset and tells me to be honest. But Ricki doesn’t understand that it’s not that simple. Some of us are unable to look in our souls and see our motivations, the roots of our pain, the reasons for our personal failures. Sometimes those answers are buried so deep inside us, we begin to doubt their existence.

  But pain tests our strength and endurance, and thanks to Philip and Dad and any other guy who’d done me dirt, I was feeling pretty ballsy the next day as my heels clicked over the tile floor of the lobby. Despite equal opportunities and women’s rights, the offices of the Herald are still a bastion of testosterone-laden, Type-A reporters. Perhaps my lack of testosterone was what put me in the obit section of the paper, but I figured I had enough Type-A to drag myself out of the grave beat eventually. In the elevator I flung back my fake-fur-lined coat and glanced down at my black Manolo Blahniks. Power shoes. Few people have the nerve to argue with a girl wearing stiletto Manolos.

  As my heels power-clicked along the floor outside the elevator , I sensed through my headachy lethargy that something was up. Instead of the usual conversation clusters around the TV monitors or the coffee machine, editors huddled in their cubicles, glancing nervously over their shoulders. The doors at the end of the hall were closed. That meant private talks in the offices of the publisher and editor in chief, and in a newsroom, almost nothing is private.

  I swaggered down the hall in a perverse swell of excitement. I enjoyed the controversy of closed doors. It usually meant someone was in trouble or someone was leaving. Either way, it signaled that a position was opening up, leading to a mad scramble as every editor tried to use the opening to leap to a higher spot in the food chain. Closed doors had served me well in the past. Years ago as an intern, it meant a move to assistant editor and a few promotions to work on the Sunday Magazine, then Wine and Dining. Then, when Robert Feinberg moved from obits to health editor (a backwards leap, I know, but where does one go from the Death Squad?) I’d wedged one Manolo into Marty’s door and gotten a toehold on Robert’s former spot. Yup, closed doors were usually a good omen for me.

  Spotting Ed Horn over by the fish tank, I stopped in my tracks, my long coat lapping at my ankles. With his bow tie and polite demeanor, Ed Horn was a city desk writer who was rumored to have joined the Herald when the newsroom was a sea of clacking typewriters. With tenure like that you don’t worry about getting fired, and I trusted Ed since the day he saved my skin and stopped me from plotting the demise of my arch rival, Genevieve. “Don’t waste your time and energy,” he’d told me. “A bad reporter will sink himself. You don’t have to puncture the raft.” Probably good advice at the time, though the evil Genevieve was still afloat and drifting into my side of the pond.

  “Good morning, Piggy,” he said as he tapped fish flakes into the tank.

  In response, Piggy wriggled up to the water’s surface, her golden-skirted fins whispering around her.

  “Good
morning, Jane,” he said just as brightly, though he didn’t turn away from the tank.

  “Good morning and good grief,” I said, lowering my voice. “What’s up?”

  “It appears that Ms. Grodin is fed up with the feeding frenzy of being a food editor.”

  I cracked a grin. “She what? You mean she’s quitting?”

  “Moving out to Arizona, planning to do PR work for a spa out there. She says the air out there is so much cleaner. Makes the pounds melt away.”

  Amy Grodin was going to need a major dose of air to melt down her weight gain, but I bit my tongue before that sentiment slipped out. Ed didn’t deal well with catty, and I wasn’t good at handing it out in a tactful way. “So they’re looking for someone to review restaurants and critique the occasional recipe,” I said, visions of expense account dinners dancing in my head. I could just see that Gold American Express card sliding across the fine linens at The Gotham. Ordering up a storm at Le Cirque. Steaks at Smith & Wollensky’s. Star-gazing at Joe Allen’s. Sampling the exquisite marriage of Japanese and Peruvian cuisine at Nobu’s. “You know, I used to work in Wine and Dining. I think I want that job.”

  “And give up the Death Beat?” Perplexed, Ed adjusted a cord on the fish tank’s filter.

  It’s true, when I’d landed my current spot there’d been a frenzy of excitement, partly due to the readership of Herald obits, partly due to the personal challenge. But now that I could sum up a person’s life in three hundred words or less, ennui was setting in. I sighed. “Face it, Ed, most obit writers are journalism wannabes or dusty curmudgeons on their way to retirement.”

  “I beg to differ. Obit writing is a gift—a calling for natural storytellers. Like you, Jane. And at the Herald? You come from a position of power: a newspaper with world-famous obits.”

  “I’d rather be sampling the achievements of world-famous chefs. What’s the dirt on Amy’s gig?”

  “It’s a tricky position,” Ed went on. “The food critic needs to guard his or her identity carefully. It requires vast knowledge of international cuisine and food preparation. Then there’s the matter of sampling nearly everything on the menu.” He patted down his pockets. “I’m fishing for my Tums just thinking about it.”

  “Who’s in line?” I asked him.

  He tapped on the glass of the tank. “It’s a tad early to speculate, but Genevieve is speaking to Martin at the moment.”

  Genevieve! No, not her! No one was less deserving. The guy with the sandwich cart had a better handle on food than Genevieve Smythe. I had to move fast if I wanted to save face. Not that food editor was the perfect job for me, but at this point I needed to block the enemy. Defensive maneuvers. I needed a plan in place when Marty’s office door swung open.

  “Thanks, Ed,” I said, hitching my coat up around my waist. Then I sped down the aisle, zigzagging around the cluttered cubicles of the fashion editors to my modest little home, a cubicle with a few small reproductions of impressionist paintings tacked to the board alongside the grids of schedules that I tried to ignore. I slung my coat over the fake wall and saw the glaring red of an editor’s pencil mark shrieking from a piece of copy on my desk. What the hell? A rewrite? I almost never got a rewrite. Flopping into my chair, I picked up the piece—an old profile from the vault.

  The profile of Antoinette Lucas, network reporter and breast-cancer-research advocate, wasn’t edited at all, but the entire body of copy was circled in red with a note from Marty that said “See me.” Since it was my first “See me” since I’d started at the Herald, I was skeptical that Marty Baker was calling me in to laud my appropriately placed modifiers. Under that, my profile of the artist Zachary Khan was surrounded by a giant question mark. Not a typical editorial query.

  Suddenly, I sensed someone watching me. Lifting my head, I spotted Genevieve looking over my shoulder. I swatted at her with the papers in my hands.

  “Ouch!” She stepped back, the fluorescent lights catching the gold highlights in her pixie-cut yellow hair. Christmas bulb earrings dangled in her ears, and I felt sorely tempted to stick her finger in a socket and light them up. “Looks like Marty’s on the warpath,” she said.

  “Oh, really?” I turned the papers facedown on my desk. “He’s been questioning your work, too?”

  “Not me,” she beamed. “I just noticed those pieces in your in-box.”

  As in, you were snooping around in my stuff? I wanted to say it, but instead I squinted at her as if she were speaking in an ancient tongue. “Really?”

  “Anyway, he wants to see you. Better run.” She was so full of giddiness, I half expected bubbles to float out of her mouth.

  I leaned back and propped one high-heeled boot on the visitor’s chair. “I’ll take care of it,” I said casually. “And next time keep your mitts out of my in-box.”

  She gasped in mock indignation. “I had a reason—”

  “Sure, you did. Just like you have a reason to disappear. Okay? Okay.” I opened a folder and pretended to become absorbed in the notes there—mostly a scribbled Christmas list and an expired list of chores: Bank, Cleaners, Pedicure, Pick up film from two years ago at CVS. . . .

  At least the diversion sent Genevieve bouncing off to her cubicle, which fortunately was a safe distance away, behind a pillar and on the other side of a TV monitor.

  I snatched up the red-marked pages and froze. What next? Should I run into Marty’s office and face this head on, or take a moment to compose myself and come up with a reasonable strategy. A smart woman would take these rewrites and put a spin on the situation. Yes, this is proof that I’m not really cut out for writing obituaries, and at the moment I’d be so much better at describing eggs Benedict and fresh strawberries with hand-whipped cream. . . .

  “Jane?” Marty leaned over the wall of my cubicle. “Did Genevieve tell you? I mean, do you have a minute?”

  I plunked my Manolos off the chair and grabbed the copy. “Oh, sure,” I said, following him into his office and realizing I would have to wing it. Marty was one of the few editors with a swell, glass-walled office—the kind you see in movies; the kind of office from which the editor monitors his workers, pacing nervously and shouting into the phone. A great office, though Marty wasn’t like any of the stereotypical, adrenaline-charged editors. Low-key, quiet, and unassuming, Marty would have been ill-suited for his job if he weren’t so damned intuitive and smart. He could smell when a story was cooking and he had a strong sense of both the commercial and societal value of a piece.

  Marty asked how I was doing and thanked me for doing the interview on my sick day. As I sat across from him, fielding the pleasantries, I flicked around a loose cuticle under the arm of the chair, wondering if I should attack now for a promotion to food editor or wait to be invited.

  Once you hit thirty, you stop waiting around for invitations.

  “You know, I’m glad you asked me in,” I said, “because I want to talk to you about the food critic position.”

  He squinted at me, as if it weren’t registering. “Amy’s position? Oh. Would you really want that, Jane?”

  “Well . . . of course,” I said, a little flabbergasted. What, did he think I wanted to be known as the Angel of Death for the rest of my life? “Wouldn’t you? I mean, savory meals and wine lists beat death any day of the week.”

  Marty smiled—a quick, polite smile—then rubbed the top of his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Writing about food is such a bit of fluff, really. Has fine cuisine ever really had a major impact on anyone’s life . . . changed the world? I’d be hard-pressed to cite a meal that changed society as we know it.”

  “Don’t forget the Twinkie,” I said.

  “Ah, yes, the Twinkie defense. Point taken, but when you mull it over, Jane, the work you do is far more significant. I like to think that our obits pay homage to society by revealing the cycle of life; that we celebrate the human spirit, the trials and victories of the individual, the impact one person has on our global community.”

  I nod
ded, hoping that my eyes weren’t glossing over at the well-worn speech. “You’re absolutely right, Marty, but you have to admit, writing celebrity obits is not for everyone.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Though you’ve proven yourself to be exceptionally perceptive, a master at researching and delineating idiosyncracies.”

  “Thanks.” I guess that meant he’d forgotten my past transgressions. The time a soap opera actress had dumped pasta in my lap when she discovered that I was an obit writer (and thus not someone who could advance her career) and I tossed a meatball back at her. The time I told an octogenarian televangelist who whimpered about seeing the pearly gates to get over himself. The Death Beat hadn’t been a smooth run for me; I was ready for a change. “I have to admit,” I went on, “I think I’m burning out in this area. Time for a change, and when I heard that Amy was leaving, well . . .” I tossed up one hand, as if to fling home my point, but I could see that Marty wasn’t tracking. “I want to be the next restaurant critic for the Herald, Marty. I have experience working in the Wine and Dining section, and I’ve got a great track record here.” Depending on who you talk with.

  Marty leaned back in his chair and pressed a finger into his cheek as if my proposal had thrown him into a fit of consternation. “You want the food gig?” He stared off in the distance as if a vision were unfolding—one of those Marty things. As I waited for him to visit Mecca, I thought that Marty wasn’t bad looking. He had thoughtful green eyes and high cheekbones. A strong square jaw that was somehow softened by his shiny bald head. Rumor had it that Marty had lost his hair in college, and I believed it. He was one of those guys who probably played Yoda to the frat boys, doling out beers and sage advice, helping them cram for finals.