by Dana Bate
“What do you think? Coauthoring a book is quite a big deal. I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I’m honored, Mark. Absolutely. And on such a substantial topic.” I gesture wildly with my hands as I talk, hoping Mark will mistake my animation for genuine enthusiasm. “The Federal Reserve—wow.”
On the word wow, I throw my hands forward and lean back in my lopsided chair—a massive misjudgment that throws off my balance and sends me flying backward onto the floor. My head hits a pile of newspapers as my legs thrash above me in the air. I deeply regret my decision to wear a skirt today.
“Oh, dear,” Mark says as he rushes to my side of his desk. He approaches my chair and bends down to lift me up but jerks his head away when he realizes he is looking right at my crotch. He fumbles around like a blind person, feeling for my hands and in the process grazing my right breast, at which point he lets out a high-pitched yelp.
“What is going on in here?”
From my current location, I cannot see anything but the back of Mark’s head and the ceiling, but the voice sounds like Susan’s.
“Could someone please help me up?” I say as I flail on the floor.
Susan’s face appears above me, the whites of her eyes widening as she watches me squirm like an overturned beetle. She pushes Mark out of the way and extends her arm, and I grab on as she lifts me to my feet. I smooth my skirt and brush my hair off my face. Mark faces the wall, barefoot and unable to look at me.
“Thank you,” I say to Susan.
“You’re welcome,” she says, eyeing Mark and me suspiciously. Her expression reminds me of the one my mother had the time she caught Scott Kraut kissing me on my living room couch senior year of high school. Scott and I were going over lines for the school play, but my mom assumed we were up to the usual teenage mischief and gave me a look similar to the one Susan is giving now: arms crossed, lips pursed, an eyebrow raised. Which raises the question: does she think Mark and I were …? Oh, gross.
“I lost my balance,” I say, trying to explain. “My chair was resting on a pair of socks.”
“A pair of socks?” Susan raises one of her thin, black eyebrows and glances at Mark’s bare feet, then drags her eyes across Mark’s floor until she reaches the boxerlike article of clothing. “Is that appropriate?”
Great, now she thinks I was undressing him. I might throw up.
“Never mind,” I say. “Mark, thank you for the opportunity with the book. I look forward to working on it.”
I rush back to my desk, wondering how this day has already managed to surpass my most horrific expectation, and it’s only eight-thirty.
By lunchtime, I am still in a daze, as if I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole into an alternate reality. On one side, I was a research assistant moments away from being fired, and on the other I am a research assistant with even more responsibility and less free time, whose boss has seen her crotch.
I cannot face Mark or Susan or anyone else in the lunchroom and decide to buy a sandwich and eat at my desk. In my current state, I am not fit for human interaction.
When I am about halfway through my gyro, my cell phone rings. I lick the tzatziki off my fingers and grab my phone, when I see the caller in question is Jacob. We haven’t spoken since our rendezvous two days ago.
“How’s my favorite think tanker?” he says.
I blot a trickle of gyro juice off my chin. “I’ve been better.”
“Why, what’s up?”
“Long story. Office drama.”
“Ah. Fun times.” He snickers. “Don’t worry. Whatever it is, it’ll blow over in a day or two.”
Considering I’ve been tasked with researching the history of Federal Reserve intervention, I somehow doubt this is true. “Here’s hoping,” I say.
“So … I was wondering … what are you up to next weekend?”
“Over Columbus Day?”
“Is that next weekend?” He pauses. “Then, yeah. Over Columbus Day.”
Given the near nonexistence of my social life, I cannot understand why everyone wants to spend time with me over the one weekend where I have other obligations.
I sigh into the phone. “I’m busy that weekend. Supper club duties.”
“Ah, got it. That’s too bad.”
Too bad? Surely we can work out an alternate plan. I glance at my calendar in Outlook. “What about this weekend?”
“As in tomorrow?”
I squeeze my phone between my ear and shoulder and wipe the grease from my fingers. “Or Sunday.”
Jacob goes silent for a few seconds on the other end, and I suddenly fear I’ve shown my hand too quickly. We just saw each other two days ago. I probably seem needy and overly eager.
“Sorry, I’m out of town this weekend, and I’m busy most of next week,” he finally says. “What about the week after Columbus Day?”
I scan my calendar and see I have nothing going on that week, nor do we have a supper club planned for that weekend. “Sure. Works for me. What day?”
“Maybe Wednesday night? Let me see how my work schedule is shaping up that week. This immigration debate is screwing up everything. We might need to wait until the weekend.”
“Oh. Okay.” I’d rather not wait two weeks to see him again, but I will if I have to.
“Great. I’ll give you a call in the next week or two, and we’ll work out a plan. I already have something in mind.”
“Oh?”
He laughs. “When the time is right, I’ll let you know. Until then … good luck with the work drama.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Although I think I’ll need more than luck.”
I hang up with Jacob and spot Rachel gliding down the hallway toward my desk, her silky, brown hair tied into an off-center chignon. As soon as she gets within five feet of me, Millie jumps out from a side hallway and latches onto Rachel’s side.
“Hey, ladies,” Millie says, smoothing the front of her characteristically tight red button-down top, which is tucked into a pair of skintight black pants.
Rachel and I wave passively, trying not to engage her, hoping she will go away. She doesn’t take the hint. She never does.
“What’s up?” she asks, taking a seat on the far side of my desk. “Hannah, I heard you talking on the phone. New boyfriend?”
Rachel and I exchange a look: The Hemorrhoid.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say.
Millie rolls her eyes. “Whatever, it sounded to me like you were planning a hot date.”
“Not really.”
As I say this, I pretend to organize papers on my desk, as if to say, I could not be less interested in this conversation. Please go away.
“Well, if you’re looking for a fun restaurant, I highly recommend Central. Adam and I went last week and loved it.”
I stop shuffling papers when I hear Adam’s name. Rachel stiffens. “Oh?” I say, trying to sound casual. The gyro churns in my stomach.
“He got a big promotion at work, so we went out to celebrate. He totally deserved it. You know how driven he is.”
Of course I know. I dated the guy for more than a year. Why she thinks it’s appropriate to bring up Adam in this context, I do not know. I assume it has something to do with her status as the most annoying woman in all of Washington.
But, Millie’s irksome nature aside, hearing about Adam’s success stirs up a hot pot of emotions. On the one hand, I am genuinely happy for Adam. I know how hard he worked for this promotion, and I know it’s what he wanted. And though a small part of me wants his career to crash and burn in a spectacular fashion so that he will regret the way he broke up with me, the rational part of me knows that won’t happen. Adam doesn’t “do” regret. What I feel most of all, I suppose, is bitterness. Adam’s promotion is yet another story of a friend moving closer to his or her dream job, while I get sucked further into a job I increasingly cannot stand. As Gore Vidal once said, “Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies.”
“Good for him,” I say, try
ing my hardest to seem genuine. “Tell him I say congrats.”
Millie sighs loudly. “Like he doesn’t talk about you enough already … Anyway, I should get back to work. I have so much on my plate right now. Susan wants my help writing some book.”
I grunt. “Join the club.”
Millie narrows her eyes. “What?”
“Mark offered to add me as coauthor on his book if I help him with a few chapters.”
Millie jerks her head back. “Really? Wow. That’s … surprising. Good for Mark.”
Rachel raises an eyebrow. “I think you mean good for Hannah.”
“Sure, whatever,” she says, lifting herself off my desk. “Good luck with your work. My guess is you’ll need it.”
As she stalks away, I look up at Rachel and plead with my eyes, trying to communicate that if this is what it means to stay employed here, I want her to take my pen and stab me in the throat immediately.
But she doesn’t. And I’m still here. Still here, and stuck, stuck, stuck.
CHAPTER
twenty-five
There is only one way to bring myself out of a funk of this magnitude, and that is to cook my ass off. And, with a week to go until the next installment of The Dupont Circle Supper Club, that’s exactly what I do.
I spend the weekend sifting through my recipe files, trying to come up with a suitable theme for our next two dinners. If the food blogosphere is to be believed, The Dupont Circle Supper Club specializes in gourmet comfort food, and so whatever menu I come up with should align with our growing reputation, inadvertent though it may be. After jotting down nine potential themes, I settle on a winner: diner food.
Growing up outside of Philadelphia, I never wanted for diner food, whether it was from Bob’s Diner in Roxborough or the Trolley Car Diner in Mount Airy. The food wasn’t anything special—eggs and toast, meat loaf and gravy, the omnipresent glass case of pies—but I always found the food comforting and satisfying, served as it was in those old-fashioned, prefabricated stainless steel trolley cars. Whenever we would visit my mom’s parents in Cranbury, New Jersey, we’d stop at the Claremont Diner in East Windsor on the way home, and I’d order a fat, fluffy slice of coconut cream pie, which I’d nibble on the whole car ride back to Philly.
I’m not sure why I’ve always found diner food so comforting. Maybe it’s the abundance of grease or the utter lack of pretense. Diner food is basic, stick-to-your-ribs fare—carbs, eggs, and meat, all cooked up in plenty of hot fat—served up in an environment dripping with kitsch and nostalgia. Where else can you get scrambled eggs and toast all day long? Where else are a jug of syrup and a bottomless cup of coffee de rigueur? The point of diner cuisine isn’t to astound or impress; it’s to fill you up cheaply with basic, down-home food.
My menu, however, should astound and impress, which is why I’ve decided to take some of the diner foods I remember from my youth and put my own twist on them. So far, this is what I’ve come up with:
Sloe gin fizz cocktails/chocolate egg creams
Grilled cheese squares: grappa-soaked grapes and Taleggio/Asian pears and smoked Gouda
“Eggs, Bacon, and Toast”: crostini topped with wilted spinach, pancetta, poached egg, and chive pesto
Smoky meat loaf with slow-roasted onions and prune ketchup
Whipped celery root puree
Braised green beans with fire-roasted tomatoes
Mini root beer floats
Triple coconut cream pie
The menu is longer and slightly more involved than my previous supper clubs, but now that The Dupont Circle Supper Club has started turning a slight profit, I can afford to splurge on some extras here and there. Plus, due to the surge in our popularity, we’ve increased the price per head from forty-five to fifty-five dollars, giving me a little more wiggle room. These decisions hardly make me the Warren Buffett of supper clubs, but I’m beginning to grasp the business end of this operation in a way I hadn’t appreciated before.
My greater concern, however, is that due to the surge in demand, we increased the number of available seats each night. Now, instead of hosting twelve guests a night, we’re hosting twenty-four, catching the overflow in Blake’s living room with the folding table Rachel borrowed from NIRD. That amounts to forty-eight heads a weekend. I’m a little concerned as to how, exactly, this will work, but with three dinners under my belt, Rachel assures me I can handle it.
The Friday before the dinners, Rachel and I sneak out of work early and head to Whole Foods to pick up our last-minute ingredients, slipping out before Mark, Millie, or Susan spot us leaving the building. The local Whole Foods sits one block away from my old apartment, where Adam still lives and where the temperature is probably still five degrees too cold. I would worry that I might run into him, but given Millie’s big news about his promotion, I’m guessing he is either at work or in Millie’s pants.
Rachel grabs a shopping cart and pushes it into the Whole Foods produce section, leaning her weight into the handle as she steers around the displays of apples and pears.
“So … have you seen the paper today?” she asks.
“I scanned the digital version. Why?”
She reaches into her purse and pulls out a ripped-out page from the Letters to the Editor. “Here. Read this.”
I grab the paper from her hand and begin skimming the page as Rachel fills a plastic bag with green beans:
I was disappointed with Celia Green’s feature last week on The Dupont Circle Supper Club [“Shhh: Dinner Is Served,” Sept. 30], which glorified an operation that is, at best, irresponsible and, at worst, illegal. The Dupont Circle corridor already suffers from an overabundance of restaurant and food establishments, some of whom employ illegal workers and owe back taxes to the DC government. The last thing our neighborhood needs is yet another shifty restaurant operation. While the secret nature of The Dupont Circle Supper Club may sound exciting and fun to some, the complete lack of regulation and accountability creates a risk for patrons and for the neighborhood at large. I would encourage the carrot-cake-loving hostess of this supper club to do the responsible thing and terminate her operation immediately. She should play by the rules, just as I, as candidate for the Dupont Circle ANC, am encouraging all restaurants in the neighborhood to do. There is no point in having rules if some people don’t have to follow them.
Sincerely,
Blake Fischer, candidate for Dupont Circle ANC (Ward 2B07)
“Whaaaaaaat?” My voice fills the entirety of the Whole Foods produce section.
Rachel snatches the article from my hands. “Shhh. Don’t shout.”
“This is five thousand percent terrible, Rachel. Five thousand percent!”
Rachel grips the shopping cart by its handle and pushes it toward the baking aisle. “It isn’t that bad.” She casts a sideways glance. “Okay, yeah, it’s pretty bad. But this feels to me more like a ‘concerned citizen’ letter. He’s leaving the responsibility in your hands. Besides, ANC members have no legislative authority whatsoever. So even if he does get elected, he doesn’t have the power to shut us down.”
“Uh, he does as the owner of the house in which we operate.”
Rachel frowns. “True.”
“We can’t do this in his house anymore. We have to call it off.”
“Hannah, you’re overreacting. Blake is out of town for the entire weekend. Let’s get through this dinner and figure out the rest later. Okay?”
I sigh. “Okay. But you are taking some of the blame if we get caught.”
Rachel takes a deep breath, her eyes tense as she stares into the distance. “I’m sure everything will be fine. I wouldn’t worry.”
She pushes the cart speedily along the linoleum floor, and I race to catch up with her, now more anxious than ever because although Rachel says I shouldn’t worry, the tone in her voice says the opposite.
Saturday morning, we meet outside Blake’s front door and launch straight into our prep work in his kitchen. Rachel unloads a bunch of double sh
ot glasses onto the counter, which we’ll use for our mini root beer floats, and unpacks a few vintage diner napkin holders that are painted a pale robin’s egg blue.
“Where did you find these?” I ask, twirling one of the napkin holders in my hand.
“Etsy. Aren’t they great? I’m going to showcase them on my blog after the dinners are over.”
“How’s the blog going?”
She flashes a confident smile. “Great, actually. The Post listed me as one of the top ten local bloggers to watch.”
“Rach—that’s fantastic.”
“Thanks. Although I’ve been a bit of a slacker ever since I started helping you with the supper club. And there have been … other distractions.”
Rachel looks as if she is about to continue, but before she can say anything, my phone rings.
“Oh my god,” I say, staring down at my phone. My heart races. “It’s Blake.”
“Answer it,” Rachel says.
“I can’t answer it! I’m in his house.”
“He doesn’t know that. He can’t magically see you through the phone.”
“But what if he can tell by the sounds in the background?”
She furrows her brow. “Because the silence sounds different here than it would in your own apartment? You’re being crazy. Just answer it. If it’s important, he’ll just keep calling anyway.”
I pick up the phone and press it to my ear. “Hello …?”
“Hey, Hannah? It’s Blake.”
“Hi.” I’m in your house, I’m in your house, I’m in your house.
“You’re going to think I’m a little OCD,” he says, “but I’m in Tampa, and I can’t shake the feeling that I left the lights on in my kitchen. Would you mind running up to my house and checking for me?”
I gulp loudly. “You want me to go … into your house?”