My mom cooked dinner every night after her ten-hour days in the insurance office where she worked. They weren’t elaborate meals, but they were homemade: spaghetti and sauce, tuna casserole, baked chicken. I complained about the menu, whining that I wished we could be like Kate, whose parents were always out in the evenings, and just pick up Chinese or a pizza. My mother never gave in. Instead, she’d toss one of her rotating Liz Claiborne blazers onto one of the kitchen chairs, roll up her sleeves while she walked to the refrigerator, and say, “Waverly, you know I have to cook. It clears the noise of the day from my head.”
It took the worst day of my life to understand what she meant. I was nineteen and midway through my sophomore year in college. My roommate, Nancy, and I were headed out to dinner, the door to our dorm room just slamming behind us, when our phone rang. She ran back into the room to get it, saying that it might be Christopher, her boyfriend, who was coming to visit from Massachusetts that weekend. I’d rolled my eyes. One of their marathon phone sessions had ended just a few minutes before, I was starving, and it was pizza night in the cafeteria—the one opportunity I had each week to eat something edible on campus.
But the call was for me. It was the Virginia State Police, calling to inform me that a drunk driver on the Beltway had hit my parents’ car. Both of them were in intensive care. My father died the next morning, three hours after I arrived at the hospital after driving all night—despite Kate’s and Nancy’s insistence that I shouldn’t be on the road by myself. My mother died the next day. When I said good-bye to my father, he squeezed my hand, acknowledging that he heard me, but my mother’s spinal injuries were so severe that I could tell from the moment I first saw her in the hospital bed that she had already left her body. I sat next to her, examining her for hours before she was taken off of her ventilator, noticing the chipped polish on her fingers, the broken blood vessels around her eyes, and tried to remember the last thing we’d talked about. Years later, I still can’t recall what it was.
I took a leave of absence for the rest of the semester and spent most of the next two months in my parents’ kitchen, cooking. Babci, my Polish maternal grandmother, moved in with me and did the dishes. Because my parents had both been only children like me, she was now my last living relative. Sometimes she rolled up her sleeves to cook with me. Other times she came into the kitchen and offered gentle suggestions (“that cheese will slice easier if you freeze it for a little while…toss those berries with some flour and they won’t clump together when you bake the muffins”). Before she walked out of the room, she’d kiss my cheek, her lips leaving a smudge of Max Factor red on my face.
Kate came home from Providence every weekend and sat at the kitchen table with me, talking if I felt like talking, reading aloud from the books and magazines that she brought when I didn’t, and eating the banquet of food that Babci would end up giving away or throwing out because there was enough, as they say, to feed an army. I must’ve been the only grieving person who’s ever given food to her neighbors instead of the other way around. I went through every yellowed, splattered recipe card in my mother’s file at least once, discovering along the way that the choreography of chopping and mixing and measuring was a kind of religious ritual, as practiced and soothing as prayer. The particularities of the way that I pinched a piecrust or seasoned a roasted chicken were because I’d learned them standing next to my mother, who’d learned from her mother, who’d learned from hers. I made my father’s famed gumbo in the middle of the night, then ate a bowl of it on the kitchen floor as the sun started to come up. I made my mother’s mushroom soup, my grandmother’s pot roast, the carrot cake that my mother made from an old New York Times recipe every year as a birthday gift to herself. It was the only way that I knew how to hold on to them.
Now it’s hard for me to fathom that I’d ever considered another career. Sometimes one of my former students will come into Maggie’s and I’ll get a pang of nostalgia for my old job—the hollow thump of the eraser against the blackboard, the moment each day when you’re standing in your empty classroom and can hear your students coming down the hall, roaring like an approaching wave—but cooking is what I was meant to do. It’s the one constant in my life, the thing I can always go back to, the place where there are no disasters that I can’t fix.
Every day, the hours roll out with an easy, dependable rhythm I’ve come to rely on. At ten to seven, three of my regulars, all retired engineers from the Naval Research Lab, huddle outside the front door waiting for me to unlock it. By eight, the bakery is humming with the commuters who don’t bother to look up from their phones as they order. At ten, it’s the young moms with strollers who’ve been up for hours and need a caffeine fix. Then the lunch crowd, then the teenagers when school gets out at three, and then, finally, the coffee break stragglers who wander inside in the late afternoon, dazed from staring at computer screens all day.
Unfortunately, the money is not as predictable as the clientele. Those of us who sell coffee out of cups that don’t feature a certain megachain’s logo are struggling, and as much as I understand that trips to the local bakery are the kind of thing that quickly gets cut when a family tightens its budget, I still want to throw something at the television every time I see a personal finance expert advising people to watch their “latte factors.” Catering jobs—bridal showers, corporate luncheons—have always supplied the little extra that kept me in the comfort zone after I paid my eight employees, bought my supplies, wrote the building’s landlord a check, and paid my utilities. Now those gigs are necessities that I rely on to make my numbers each month. Last year, in an effort to find some extra cash, I created a little market in one corner of the shop where I sell gifty-foody things like artisanal honey and tea tins and Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, but it turns out—shocker—that selling an eight-dollar jar of Stonewall Kitchen jelly a couple of times a week doesn’t exactly wear out my cash register (and, frankly, just gives me more crap to dust). Things haven’t been so bad that I’ve had to stop taking a salary, but I’m close. Very, very close.
I’ve started to brainstorm new business ideas: a dinner delivery service, a cookbook. But as they say, it takes money to make money—not to mention time. And with fifteen-hour days in the shop and no extra cash to devote to new projects, I don’t have either. I’m stuck. Screwed, really. My accountant is the only one who knows how fast I’m sinking. And, lucky for me, he reminds me on a nearly daily basis.
This morning, I need to make lemon-coconut cupcakes for a bridal shower. After knotting my hair back with one of the elastics I usually wear on my wrist and drying my hands on my favorite orange apron, I scoop sugar and butter into the mixer and switch the speed to high. I still can’t get over the dinner party last night. As hard as I try to forget it, my mind keeps sliding back to the scene Mike made at the table. Kate was right—what an asshole. How does Amy live with him? By the time she was putting on her coat to leave, I wanted to throttle her. Mike had continued to be less than charming—he’d snickered loudly when Kyle mentioned that he was taking Rebecca to an Ani DiFranco concert on Sunday, huffed when Kate answered Rebecca’s questions about the campaign—and Amy just sat silently beside him, grinning placidly like a heavily sedated 1960s housewife. I cannot understand why she just lets him get away with acting the way he does, and why she doesn’t make more of an effort to make him stop. Amy may be a sweetheart, but she’s not a shrinking-violet, damsel-in-distress kind of girl. When she lived across the hall from me, I heard their occasional fights. It was always just garden-variety stuff—he forgot to call when he said he would, or she made plans for the weekend without checking in—but she wasn’t shy about expressing herself when she was upset with him. Now it’s as if she’s blind to his behavior, like Mike’s one of those horrible geometric posters that they sell in crappy mall stores that can look like two different images depending on your perception, and she just can’t see the picture that the rest of us so clearly do.
Larry insists that Kyle and Rebe
cca aren’t insulted. “Seriously, Wave, I’m sure that Rebecca gets that all the time—she did not care,” he’d reassured me after everyone left. “And it’s not as if anyone else was shocked. It’s obvious that Mike’s a dick before he even opens his mouth.”
I crack an egg on the side of a mixing bowl and watch it disappear into the creamed sugar and butter. I wonder whether it would be too much to send Rebecca something as an apology. A dozen raspberry thumbprint cookies. Twin loaves of zucchini and banana bread. Maybe an old-fashioned chocolate cake? I didn’t believe Larry when he said that it wasn’t a big deal. Everyone had scurried home right after dessert, even Kate. That never happens at my house.
I walk across the kitchen to grab a spatula. Larry’s right about Mike—he’s a jerk—and I shouldn’t waste time fretting over him, but I just can’t blow it off. Larry insists that my need to understand things like this, to unfold them and figure out why, is something intrinsically female, like talking on the phone for sport. “Don’t worry about it, babe; forget it,” he’d said last night. “You take things too seriously.” If I keep brooding, he’ll tell me to go for a run or have a beer. He’s right, of course. I could benefit from learning how to let things go. But Mike is Amy’s husband and that somehow makes him family. He’ll be in her life forever, which means he’ll be in mine, too.
The whole thing is so strange. Mike has never been the most gregarious person in the room, but he’s been friendly and pleasant to be around, easy with a “How’s everything going?” and a “Nice to see you.” Back when he and Amy started dating, we all insisted that they were perfect for each other, and we meant it. They wanted the same things: family dinners at the kitchen table, a swing set in the backyard. She and Mike even look alike—both lithe and athletically built, both dark haired and freckled. Together, they resemble the kind of vanilla, All-American, scrubbed-up couple you see on a billboard for a cosmetic dentistry practice or a jewelry chain.
When he proposed, bending down on one knee after they’d gone for a run on the C&O Canal trail, I couldn’t have been more excited for them. Their wedding, a down-homey pig picking in Chapel Hill, was one of those rare matrimonial events where the wedding guests truly seemed to revel in the couple’s bright future, not just the free food and alcohol. I remember thinking, watching them skip down the aisle together after the ceremony, that their relationship was exactly what I wanted. I wholeheartedly approved. Since then, Mike and I have been around each other enough that I shouldn’t dread conversations with him because of the way we fumble to find something to say to each other. But we do. At one point last night when I was getting the tiramisu ready and he came into the kitchen to throw away his empty beer bottle, it was like I was talking to a stranger, but I’ve known Mike for ten years—and not just as my close friend’s boyfriend, but as my friend, too.
For example, there was one Sunday afternoon, years ago, when we were still living in the apartments. Mike and Amy were in the throes of their newfound romance. I was single and, frankly, feeling sorry for myself. I apparently hadn’t done a great job with the “I’m independent; I don’t need a boyfriend” speech I’d given Mike when he asked if I was dating someone because Mike—this very same Mike—set down the bowl of chili he was eating while we watched the Redskins game and declared that he was going to set me up with one of his fellow residents.
The following Friday, the four of us went on a double date. The guy—what was his name again? Rob? Bob?—was far from my type, and I knew I wasn’t his. I could tell as soon as I spied him from Amy’s bedroom window, where I watched him walk up the cracked cement pathway toward the front door of our apartment building. He looked like a Brooks Brothers ad—khakis, respectable brown loafers, the same light blue oxford shirt that nearly every man in Washington wears at least twice a week. Meanwhile, I had on this atrocious patterned skirt that I’d bought from a street vendor during a weekend in New York that I thought was cool and bohemian at the time but later realized was a kind of gaudy throwaway that looked like a loan from Mrs. Roper’s closet.
So the guy wasn’t for me. In fact, oddly, it was Mike who made an impression that night. He carried the dinner conversation in the most engaging way, making all of us feel at ease. I remember watching Amy as he spoke, noticing the way that she rested her hand on his forearm and squeezed it when he said something particularly funny or smart. When Mike started rattling off my accomplishments to try to impress Rob/Bob—“She was summa cum laude at Bowdoin!” “She finished the Marine Corps Marathon in three and a half hours!” “You haven’t eaten a brownie until you’ve had one of Waverly’s!”—I had been a little startled that he knew so much about me, and I remember being so flattered that I pined for him just the tiniest bit, and wished it was my hand on his arm instead of Amy’s.
I add shredded coconut to the mixing bowl and fold it into the batter. I wish I could figure out how to broach the subject with Amy in a gentle way, which should be easy, as close as we are. (“What are you going to say, Waverly? ‘Your husband’s an ass’? ‘No one can stand to be around him anymore’?” Kate says when we talk about it.) Save for the usual “he’s driving me crazy” kind of stuff that you bitch about with your girlfriends, Amy is as bright and cheerful as she’s ever been, but I just think it has to be a lie. How could she not be miserable, living with him? But then again, I think, pulling out the cupcake tins, maybe I shouldn’t judge. Lately I’m not exactly someone who can speak with confidence about the importance of being honest about your relationship. I mean, as much as it annoys me that Amy ignores her husband’s terrible behavior, I’m also a person who swiped a couple of twenties out of her boyfriend’s wallet this morning because I needed gas and didn’t want to put it on my credit card.
Six hours later, the morning rush over, my manager Randy and I are standing at the front counter when Kate swoops in, immaculate in a camel cape and navy pantsuit. Sometimes she looks like a caricature of herself, like a movie star playing the role of the political wife. I wipe the sweat from my hairline with the inside of my forearm and then reach for the silver coffee thermos in Kate’s hand. It’s been a steady Saturday morning despite the cold drizzle outside, which has brightened my mood a little bit.
“Where are you headed all dolled up on a Saturday morning?” I say. I know she mentioned a campaign event last night but I can’t remember what. These days, they all run together.
“Ooh-la-la,” Randy says. “Love the getup today, Kate.” Randy’s been my manager for a couple of years now. He’s in his early thirties and his look screams “Apple Store employee” to me—skinny corduroys, hipster sneakers, bedhead haircut, white headphone wire eternally hanging out of his back pants pocket. He won me over during our first (and only) interview when he told me that he’d started baking in high school as a way to cope with the merciless bullying he endured on a daily basis. It also helped that he brought the most amazing cheddar and apple pie I’d ever tasted to the interview. His palate’s a lot like mine; we’d both rather eat homey comfort food (chocolate cake, bacon anything) over intricately designed, architecturally assembled fancy food. When we’re coming up with recipes and get stuck, our jokey solution is to say, “Bacon it” or “Butter it.” In other words, add more of one or the other—or sometimes both. Most times, it actually works.
“I have a campaign contributors’ luncheon,” Kate whines. “Another Saturday, another speech.”
“At least you get a free meal out of it, right?” I fill the thermos while Randy opens the bakery case and reaches for a blueberry scone, Kate’s regular order.
She raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, great. If it wasn’t for you, I’d eat nothing but rubbery, hotel ballroom chicken.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “Speaking of which, thanks for last night.”
I send Randy back to the kitchen. “Ugh. What do you think?” I whisper after he’s left. “Was it a disaster?” I bite my lip, wincing and waiting for the punch, but Kate’s distracted, glaring at two older women who are edging closer to her as th
ey wonder loudly whether the spinach and bacon quiche in the bakery case looks better than the ham and Gruyère. She shudders like a horse shooing away a fly and shuffles closer to the counter.
Our future First Lady, a woman of the people, I think.
“So,” Kate says, turning back to me. “Last night. What the fuck was that all about?”
One of the women stops talking, looks up at Kate, and then makes a face at her friend.
“Kate, language,” I whisper. Once a teacher, always a teacher. “I’m really embarrassed,” I say. I pull out the rag that I keep in my apron pocket and start wiping at invisible spots on the counter. Randy jokes that I use it like a security blanket, which is probably true, and now my employees all call it my “wooby.” “Do you think I ought to do something for Rebecca?” I ask. “Larry doesn’t think it’s necessary, but it was bad, wasn’t it?”
“Well.” Kate shrugs. “It wasn’t the kind of party that would make me want to run back to your house again next Friday night.”
I stop wiping and sigh. “Thanks.”
Kate rolls her eyes. “Let me finish! It was no reflection on you. It was Mike.” She cracks a smile. “What a piece of shit that guy is. He’s always been a piece of shit.”
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