Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  She had a point. It’s not one I considered valid, but it’s a point I couldn’t argue with her. Nevertheless, give Rebecca enough time and she’ll argue both sides in her own head. The pro–Red Hook side of the debate will win if I can wait out the other side’s acquiescence.

  I took her to the end of the pier and we looked out at the Statue of Liberty, never so close before, never seen from this angle. She was almost facing us. I kissed my wife there. “I love you,” she blurted the second our lips parted.

  And I walked her around those small streets that exist outside of the triangle, tributaries that jut off until they are stopped by the amorphous shape of the shoreline. I showed her a restaurant that specializes in key lime pie and is so popular and so renowned that it can exist in Red Hook selling mostly key lime pie.

  We sat across from one another at Hope & Anchor, her sipping a white wine, me a beer. She glanced around the restaurant, and everyone looked like they too were from affluent Connecticut. Everyone digging into their artisanal sandwiches looked like they grew up in a town that puts tinsel on the train station railings starting in the middle of November. Children of university professors and bank vice presidents. Sons of gynecologists and daughters of orthodontists.

  She sipped her wine furtively. I told her she resembled a sparrow drinking from a birdbath, but I knew how nervous all of this made her, so I reached across the table and grasped her hand.

  “Red Hook is far from all of our friends,” she posited. “No easy way for us to get to them or vice versa.”

  “You’ll have to rely on me for entertainment,” I replied. This doesn’t placate, so I continued, “The friends who are friends will come and see us. I can’t base our life decisions on how easy it is to get drinks with Alice and Peg and Carly.”

  “You just named three of my friends.”

  “Or Sam, or Aaron, or Tanya. I’ll see them when I see them. I want us to have our own place.”

  She paused for another skim of a sip, asked me, “Where is it?”

  “We passed it. It’s an open-plan loft, second floor of a two-unit building. We can build up the kitchen for you, put in a few ovens, and put up partitions to make rooms. It’s in our price range, with a little room left over.”

  “Room for three?” she asked me. The debate had been settled; now came the terms for surrender.

  I smiled and repeated it back to her, assuredly. Meant it too. “Room for three.”

  *

  • • •

  The move into Red Hook was a process, a step-by-step march into our own space. The landlord gave us free rein to, as he put it, “put a few nails in the walls,” meaning he had our security deposit and couldn’t be bothered to care how we renovated an open–floor plan loft space. The first thing I did was divide the giant room into two halves, essentially creating an efficiency with a kitchen next door. A few beams, a few tubs of joint compound, and up pops a bedroom. Split that in two and there’s room for three. Slap a couch and dining room table on the other side of the wall and line the whole thing with bookshelves and even Rebecca didn’t mind spending the night with me on an air mattress, though the alternative was staying alone with my parents, so I take only some of the credit.

  The lion’s share of the work happened in the kitchen. My father called in a few favors and a team of Hebrew-speaking electricians showed up to argue with one another, knock some holes into the walls and ceiling, and curse in heavily accented English about the construction of our building. But they also gave us a second line for a second oven.

  “She could keep both ovens going all day, run a mixer, and blow-dry her hair without tripping a circuit,” Dov bragged to me, smoking his unfiltered Israeli army cigarettes in my apartment.

  Why the second line? For that, go back twelve years, give or take. Rebecca’s family studiously avoids one another, four drops of vinegar in a pool of oil. Her father lives at his office, penetrating the psyches and occasionally the labia of his patients. Her mother throws herself into community service, chairing town committees like a petty tyrant. Her sister, Jolie, drives through the gateway drugs and vanishes for weeks at a time. Rebecca, very much alone at home, takes up baking. Discovers she has a talent for it. Discovers she has a marketable talent for it and pays for her own car with the proceeds from running a perpetual bake sale out of the house. Becky’s Bites was born, continued through college, and brought south to Brooklyn.

  Rebecca started by baking the cookies herself, selling them in gift boxes. A few enterprising coffee shops put in orders and Becky filled them, providing five-dollar desserts to people already sipping four-dollar lattes. Then the restaurants came calling, but with caveats. It made no sense for Rebecca to bake two dozen cookies for them three times a week. Depending on when she filled the order, the cookies could be stale by the time they hit the plate, and customers kept sending them back to the kitchen in the hopes the chef could warm them up, like mom used to make them, which was because they were Toll House.

  So Rebecca toyed with ingredients, with storage, and perfected the cookie log—an almost fanatically cylindrical mass of dough, notches run through with a serrated knife in precise eighteen-millimeter increments, wrapped first in wax paper, then plastic wrap, then tin foil. Baking instructions taped to the package. Now, she makes a delivery once a week to her restaurants, and they can cut and bake as needed.

  *

  • • •

  A year after we moved to Red Hook, and Rebecca hasn’t called the police once. She waits out further “improvements” to our neighborhood with a dogged determination. The day a Starbucks opens she will stand triumphant in its doorway and personally remind everyone that bathrooms are for customers only.

  She finds me on the roof of my studio, prolonging a ten-minute smoke break from alternating between stretching canvas and restoring a set of antique chairs. I proffer the cigarette to her but she declines, a sour twist to her mouth. “Too nervous even to smoke?”

  “I need you to drive me,” she replies. For a moment, I consider mounting an argument—it’s certainly not convenient, but that’s my sharpest dull weapon. There’s no one else in the shop today, and the sign-out board for the truck is empty for the next thirty-six hours. By the time I pull up in front of the apartment she’s waiting for me on the curb, logs of cookie dough cradled in her arms.

  “Which did you bring?” I ask.

  “Maple walnut, lemon thyme, white chocolate blueberry, rum raisin,” she replies, wide-eyed. “Should I have gone with something else? I don’t have anything with chocolate.”

  “I thought you said white chocolate blueberry.”

  “That’s white chocolate. It’s not real chocolate.”

  I give her question due consideration. “Maple walnut is your best cookie.”

  “That’s your opinion.”

  “Yes, but I eat a fuck-ton of cookies, so my opinion counts for something. Maple walnut is the best, lemon thyme is a good example of a more savory cookie, so she’ll be able to envision it paired with different things. White chocolate blueberry is just yummy, and it’s denser than your other cookies, so that’s another weapon in your arsenal. Rum raisin tastes like fellating a homeless man, so that one was a mistake.”

  She laughs, “I’m serious, Michael.”

  “I am too. Rum raisin cookies wouldn’t even make the menu at Dachau. But the other three she’ll love.”

  She is the immaculately poised Dawn de la Puente, owner of four restaurants in Brooklyn. All farm-to-table, at the vanguard of the locavore movement. Half of her vegetables come from rooftops scattered throughout the boroughs, the sources for every ingredient listed on the menu. Rebecca and I ate at Riziki, her flagship in Bed-Stuy, and while I couldn’t discern the difference between lettuce that came from California and lettuce that came from three floors up, Rebecca savored and swooned.

  “How do you know she’s not lying?” I asked. “How do you know this chicken isn’t from some factory farm in Kentucky?”

  “I
can tell,” Rebecca replied sagely.

  “How’s that?”

  “When you eat factory farmed animals, you taste the sadness in the meat.” She meant it too. Every word.

  Dawn will quiz her on where she sources her ingredients, and Rebecca has the expensive fanaticism about getting her supplies locally. All of the basics—the flour, the eggs, the butter—all come from New York State, close enough in horseshoes, hand grenades, and the militant wings of the locavorian army. She has to go farther afield for the sugar—the cane fields of Westchester have gone by the wayside—but she did spend over a month finding the right independently owned and operated sugar plantation in Florida, so she gets her sweets from there. The rum she uses isn’t from a local distiller, the raisins aren’t from local grapes. I couldn’t begin to tell you where half the nuts come from. This weighs on Rebecca’s mind; I can tell from how she narrates the signs she sees on our drive to meet Dawn, her chatter an old standby from her stable of tells.

  “‘Bud Lime. The night starts here,’” she mutters.

  “It’s going to go fine,” I reassure.

  “I know that.” Then, “‘Have you been injured in an automobile accident?’”

  I grab a beer and watch bowling on television at a bar down the street from Riziki. On a weekday, at two in the afternoon, I’m both the youngest by twenty years and the whitest by three shades. So I sip my beer and avoid conversation until my wife is done baking and taste-testing cookies with an enterprising restaurateur. Part of going to any other neighborhood now involves absorbing the reasons why our neighborhood is better and feeling smugly superior. Bed-Stuy is a little more worn around the edges, no Fairway as a supermarket, no river view, and it smells vaguely like wet metal. Growing up, my father told us around the dinner table that “Bedford-Stuyvesant has a slogan. It’s Bed-Stuy: Do or Die. Can you imagine living in a place like that?”

  And my mother, bless her heart, couldn’t understand why the community would allow such a seemingly negative phrase as its welcome mat. “Why not Bed-Stuy: Have Some Pie?” she offered. I like Red Hook better, and scanning the bar, I can’t see anyone who wouldn’t gladly swap neighborhoods with me, if not lives.

  Rebecca texts me an hour later and I meet her outside of Riziki in the truck. Dawn comes out and waves to me, though we haven’t met. If she’s not proceeding directly to a gala, I cannot fathom how anyone can look that put together on a weekday. Dawn hugs Rebecca. That’s a good sign, that and how Rebecca’s hands are now empty.

  “She’s in for eight dozen a week.” She radiates light.

  “Is she going to serve them in all of her places?”

  “Starting just here.”

  “Is that … good?” I don’t want to pop her balloon, but I’d think someone with four restaurants would want more than (quick math) ninety-six cookies a week. My parents have helped with start-up costs for both of our businesses, and mine has steadily grown to where I write them a check every month rather than the other way around. If Rebecca is going to do the same, and God help me I don’t want to have the conversation wherein I ask Rebecca to start doing the same, she can’t sell cookies to the restaurants of Brooklyn like running a bake sale out of our nonexistent front yard.

  “It’s eight dozen per flavor,” she clarifies. “She wants eight dozen maple walnut, eight dozen lemon thyme, even eight dozen rum raisin.”

  “Fool.”

  “And she put in an order for the caramel pine nut and the Mexican chocolate sight unseen. Or flavor untasted.”

  “So eight times twelve times six.”

  “Five seventy-six.”

  “A week.”

  “Every week.”

  “Every week?”

  “From here until Armageddon.”

  We celebrate by having sex in our new apartment, napping, and then getting dinner at Hope & Anchor. The staff there has started to know us by sight, not yet by name. Red Hook feels tonight like the edge of the globe whereupon we dance, gleeful to be in such proximity to oblivion. When Rebecca and I curl around each other in bed later that night, exhausted and joyous, mapping out our future like we’re plotting a heist, she runs a finger through my paltry chest hair and whispers in my ear.

  “Today went so well.”

  “That it did.”

  “It went so well, Michael.”

  “You make amazing cookies.”

  “Soooooooooo well.” Then she starts crying. I turn my head toward her and the faucet has spun open, she’s shaking against me, crying and heaving and laughing, cackling at the top of her lungs. Like a mad witch. Like someone triumphant over death. “I’m pregnant,” she bellows, a huge admission made through wracked sobs and maniacal giggles. “I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant! I’m pregnant!”

  My first instinct is to crack a joke, and thank God I force that down, because she’s going to remember how I reacted to this moment for the rest of our lives. Rebecca possesses within her limitless patience, boundless kindness, unending generosity. She can also recite past fights verbatim. Every slight goes into a cabinet, reliably forgiven but never forgotten.

  We’re going to have a baby. It hits me the way it’s supposed to, nothing to force or contort. My face lights up, I cry right along with her, I laugh as loudly as she does. We laugh and cry, so loud that our neighbors could reasonably call the police. Then I drag her, naked, into the empty guest room and we laugh and cry some more, pointing at where the crib can go and the changing table and the glider. A baby a baby a baby, we repeat, sleep-dumb and slack-jawed, wild and in love and unhinged.

  Somewhere in this mirth I pause to consider that we don’t use condoms because Rebecca is on the pill, and thus totally in control of her own, and by proxy our, fertility. And it occurs to me that, unlike condoms, the failure rate on the pill is so minuscule as to be totally disregarded. And I search the recesses of my mind for a memory of having ever had a conversation with Rebecca about her going off the pill.

  And draw a complete blank.

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  10:10 AM

  We stand so as to not ruin our suits. It’s our last vestige of pride, this miserly held belief that a suit we’ve sweat through is still fixable, that the dry cleaners and their magic chemicals can polish it like new, but by sitting, by lowering ourselves to the filthy rubber floor and the stains of a million footprints, we will absorb a residual grime that will never come out.

  Everyone else sits down, men crisscross, women in skirts with legs tucked demurely underneath themselves, crooked to the side. When the air-conditioning went out, more than a few people started shouting, but they hushed almost immediately. A ranting lunatic wants to be alone on his or her soapbox. That so many people were shouting the same thing, in tone if not exact phrase (“Like caged animals!”), took the oxygen out of the fire.

  The ranters gave way to the sneering derision of the pack, a slower burning fire, more heat than light. The sarcastic comments, the veiled threats, the promises of retribution. These went on for a bit, while clothing got stripped off and bags were set down. Our eyes adjusted to the dark on the train; we could make out shapes by this point, follow a withering comment to the outline of a head.

  Once the pack got it out of their system the lieutenants emerged. Not leaders, but not followers, these were the people who started getting others to sit down if they wanted, to clearing space where space could be cleared, to calming kids.

  The rest of us, myself included, stay silent. We wait for some action to be requested before we take action on our own. Some of us are, understandably, ambivalent. It’s not our place to … do what, hijack the train and take us to the next station? We are, ultimately, powerless, and so the best thing to do is to not make matters worse, and to plug our ears to people who have made their point multiple times and were now at risk of being punched.

  “You touch my ass again I’m going to break your fucking hand,” a woman’s voice rings out ten feet to my left.

 
; “I’m not touching your ass,” a male voice shoots back.

  “That’s the third fucking time, pervert.”

  “Listen, bitch, just because you have a huge ass—”

  “Both of you!” a voice barks over to my right. It’s all voices at this point, no one can tell how big her ass is, how close his hands are, or whose voice just rang out, but it resonated deep. A weight-lifting voice. A black voice. The voice of the possible pervert, on the other hand, is a cask-beer-appreciating voice. A white voice. “Miss,” the black voice instructs, “see if you can’t move to another part of the train. If that guy touches you again, I’ll deal with him.”

  “Can fight my own fucking fights,” she grumbles, but there follow the sounds of her heels and muffled excuse me’s on the way across the aisle.

  The loudspeaker crackles, and there’s a collective shushing, though no one speaks. A voice tries to sound strident, but it quivers as it descends from the ceiling. Attention passengers, there is an emergency situation and we are unable to proceed. We have no further information at this time. We ask that you remain calm. In the next few minutes, the conductor is going to come through with an officer of the New York City Police Department. Please do your best to make way for them; they will be opening the emergency doors in between the cars while we await further instructions. And quiet muttering behind the conductor, something unintelligible to us. Okay. I’ve been instructed to tell you that no one is in any danger, and that we have no further information at this time, but to repeat, no one is in any danger. We’ll come through now. Please clear a path.

  “They fucking did it again,” a voice says. He means terrorists. We all know he means terrorists. He means that somewhere on the surface something has exploded or collapsed or there are particles floating through the air making people fatally ill. Maybe all three. And it could be the heat, or the fear, but no one disagrees, posits an alternate theory. No one even bothers to check a phone. The sitting rise and, in a practiced gesture of anticipating the first responders, they push themselves to the sides of the car, creating a path down the middle.