by Darcey Bell
Charlotte wants to hear what Ruth says next. But Daisy gives her mother a warning look. Stay out. This is her conversation. For just an instant, Charlotte feels almost breathless with shock.
Eli gestures at the couch and says, “Please. Everybody sit down.”
In the kitchen, Charlotte slips the pasta into the boiling water. She sees Daisy streak past on the way to her room. Charlotte’s relieved when no one comes in, offering to help.
Finally Eli looks in and says, “What do you need? Give me something to do. I’m begging.”
“She seems nice,” Charlotte says.
“You always think that. At first.” He kisses her forehead, damp with steam.
“Well, isn’t she? Nice?”
“So far so good,” he says. “No special broccoli, nothing stolen so far, no suicide threats, no . . . But the jury’s still out. Let’s say the jury has learned its lesson.” Charlotte loves the faint traces of accent in Eli’s speech, the way he says yury for jury.
Charlotte says, “I need everybody to sit down. Call Daisy.”
By the time Charlotte brings in the platter of steaming pasta, everyone’s at the table. They all applaud, even Daisy. Charlotte’s mood improves. Her daughter glows in the candlelight. Daisy has parents who love her, good food, a comfortable home. A happier childhood than Charlotte’s was. Isn’t that what everyone wants for their kids?
Charlotte dishes out the pasta. Steam fogs her glasses, and Daisy gently removes them from her mother’s face, wipes the lenses with a napkin, and tenderly replaces them.
“Thank you,” Charlotte says, resenting how the sweetness of the moment is partly spoiled by her awareness of Ruth watching her and Daisy. It almost makes it seem as if they’re performing for this outsider.
“You’re welcome,” says Daisy.
Eating keeps them quiet until Ruth says, “Charlotte, it’s a miracle you can do this. Work all day, run a hugely successful business, and come home and cook something delicious. I mean . . . Rocco told me a little, plus I Googled Buddenbrooks and Gladiola. I love how you said that you named the company after the flower and the novel you’d always overlooked until you understood how amazing they are. I’m so happy when something makes me wake up and smell the coffee. Of course I’d heard about you. Everybody has, if they live in New York and go to parties. Which I used to, all the time. Though not so much anymore.”
Charlotte feels she’s supposed to ask why Ruth doesn’t go to so many parties anymore, but the moment passes.
Ruth says, “Gosh, I hope you don’t think I’m your internet stalker.”
“Not at all,” Charlotte says. Charlotte looks up people, but sometimes she feels uneasy—violated—if people say they’ve looked her up, and at other times she’s insulted if they clearly haven’t. “And I don’t know about ‘hugely successful.’ Everybody’s working overtime and struggling.”
Ruth says, “This pasta is fantastic.”
“Thanks. It’s really an everyday meal. Anyhow, I didn’t work today. I make time for family. We don’t have a nanny. I try to get out of work in time to pick Daisy up from after-school.” Why is Charlotte trying to prove what a hands-on mom she is?
“Rocco tells me that Daisy’s in public school.”
“Yes, it’s—”
“Admirable,” says Ruth.
Charlotte’s promised herself not to become one of those parents who ramble on about where their kids go to school and why. She likes Daisy’s school; so does Daisy. It’s nearby, the kids live in the neighborhood, the principal and teachers seem kind and smart and committed. She adores the after-school teachers, who always come up with interesting projects. Charlotte loves the women in charge. They’re all memory prodigies who learn your name—and which child is yours—after meeting you only once.
She’s lost the thread of what Ruth’s saying.
“I wish this was my everyday meal. Though when I went to culinary school—”
“Culinary school?” Charlotte says.
“Those three Tuscan grandmas? Remember? They had quite a moment and then . . . Eli, Rocco tells me you made some genius business decisions.”
“What I said was that my brother-in-law never has to work another day in his life. Go to sleep.com. Justthefood.com. Happytrails.com. That’s mi hermano.”
Rocco’s fond of Eli, but around his girlfriends, he’s critical, even dismissive, as if he fears they might prefer the handsome brother-in-law with the wife, the daughter, the money, the beautiful loft.
“That’s awesome,” says Ruth. “So are you like . . . retired?”
Why has she Googled Charlotte and not Eli? Unless she’s pretending ignorance, the party trick some women learn to make men talk about themselves. Or maybe she’s just being polite. There is always that chance.
Eli says, “The fact is . . . now I can do what I want . . .”
“Which is . . . ?”
“Set design. I’m working on a production of Macbeth.”
“I love Macbeth. I played Lady Macbeth in high school. ‘Out, out, damned spot. All the perfumes in Arabia . . .’” Ruth stares in mock horror at her hands as if they’re covered with blood, then giggles. “I was good at it. I wanted to be an actress until my drama teacher told me that people would always be telling me to lose weight and fix my nose. And that was a total buzzkill.”
Eli says, “Maybe Lady Macbeth ruined it for you. The bad-luck part, as you probably know. The role that ends a career.”
“Maybe. Well . . . When does your play open? Where?”
“You’ve probably never heard of—”
“Try me,” says Ruth.
“New Lights.”
“That’s amazing. I’ve been there a million times.”
Charlotte thinks: Has she really?
“I love that you can bring cocktails from the lobby into the theater.”
Maybe she has. Or maybe she did Google Eli.
“So how’s it going?”
“Not great,” Eli says. “The director is a maniac. He wants the witches to fly through the air on harnesses, even though the theater isn’t insured. No one can talk him out of it—”
“Can I be excused?” Daisy has heard this before. “Look! I finished all my pasta.”
“Good girl!” says Ruth. Charlotte shoots her a look that she hopes isn’t as resentful as she feels. Who is this stranger to praise her daughter?
“Sure, sweetheart,” Charlotte says. “I’ll call you for dessert.”
“See you later, alligator,” Ruth says.
“In a while, crocodile,” says Daisy.
Eli and Charlotte look at each other. What did their daughter just say? If Daisy has so readily accepted Ruth, maybe she senses something positive. Sometimes Charlotte thinks that her daughter is better at reading people than she is. And maybe it’s not a bad thing that Daisy has taken to someone outside the family.
Suddenly they hear noises coming up through the floor: shouting, screaming. It’s impossible to make out the words, but a slamming door makes everyone jump.
“You crazy bitch!” a man yells.
Eli puts his hands over Daisy’s ears.
“Yikes,” says Ruth. “Unhappy couple?”
“The neighbors,” says Charlotte. “Mother and son. Ariane and Drew.”
“Did you say Drew? I used to have a boyfriend named Drew. A total loser, trust me. Definitely one of my worst mistakes.”
There’s a silence.
“Well, then! Does anyone want seconds?” Charlotte says. “I think we need more Parmesan.” Everyone still has pasta on their plates; there’s plenty of cheese in the grater. But she needs to escape to the kitchen and take a breath.
When she returns to the table, Eli and Rocco are deep in conversation. Ruth looks at Charlotte. Talk to me. Please.
“How did you and Rocco meet?”
Charlotte can tell she’s said the wrong thing. Is she supposed to know or not know? Did they meet on Tinder or some edgy dating/hookup app?
&nbs
p; “Rocco didn’t tell you?”
Now Charlotte gets it. Ruth is upset that Rocco didn’t rush to tell them the thrilling story of his new romance.
“We’ve hardly seen him,” lies Charlotte. Rocco stays with them every Friday and Saturday night when he sleeps over in the city and isn’t staying with a girlfriend. He hadn’t mentioned Ruth until he called to say he was bringing her to dinner.
“We met at the Greenmarket. I was buying kale.”
“Tell them how much kale.” Despite himself, Rocco’s been drawn into the conversation.
“Ten pounds,” Ruth says.
“That’s a lot of kale,” Charlotte says. “Big party? Restaurant work? What do you do, exactly?”
“I’m a survivalist,” Ruth says. “I mean, a survivalist consultant. I help rich people freeze-dry healthy organic foods to stock their panic rooms and bomb shelters.”
“Seriously?” So this one is crazy too. It’s always something they didn’t expect and couldn’t have predicted.
“Ruth’s messing with you.” Rocco smiles. There’s something about her he likes. Her joke hints at a sense of humor. Sort of.
She says, “I work for a start-up.”
Of course you do, Charlotte thinks.
“Every Friday one of the staff cooks lunch for the others, and the day I met Rocco was my turn. I thought I’d make them that amazing kale salad they do at Kanji. The kale is fried tempura-style, then mixed with raisins and walnuts. This young chef worked with David Chang, whom I sort of know. Have you guys eaten there? We should all go sometime. Early. For Daisy.”
“Sure,” says Rocco. “Sometime.”
“You should find out about supplying them, Rocco,” says Ruth. “That would be a whole new market for the farm, organic Chinese greens and whatever.”
“Good idea. I’ll look into it.” Rocco has no such intention.
“So what does your start-up do?” Eli asks.
“God’s work,” Ruth says.
Her messing with them is becoming a little much. Unless this time she means it.
“Relief work in Sudan, free schools in Haiti. We finance the saintly stuff by selling rich people junk they don’t need. One of our most profitable ventures has been a website called Experience Hunters International. We have contacts in cities all over the world willing to adopt, for up to five days, a business traveler or a tourist. Not for sex, though we don’t judge. We do track customer reviews.
“The point is to experience life in a different country. Our carefully vetted contacts’ friends are your friends, their hangout spots are your hangout spots. Our algorithms match you with a person who you would be friends with, if you lived there. It’s been very successful, as you can imagine.”
“Charlotte and Eli probably can,” says Rocco. “I can’t imagine, myself.”
“STEP is what the start-up is called,” says Ruth. “Solutions to Everyday Problems. We plow the dirty money from Experience Hunters back into our public-minded programs.” So that’s what Rocco likes about her. She has a social conscience and (unlike Charlotte) is apologetic about working for the rich.
“That’s great,” Charlotte says. Pieces are falling into place. When they were in high school upstate, Rocco led a student-faculty strike to raise the lunch ladies’ salaries and to get them name tags and make the students stop calling them “lunch ladies,” which they hated.
“How was the kale salad?” Charlotte says.
“Awesome,” says Ruth. “The guys loved it. So . . . Charlotte and Eli, how did you two meet?”
Eli says, “I walked into Charlotte’s flower shop to buy a Valentine’s Day bouquet.”
“For someone else,” says Charlotte. They’ve told this story so often they could do it in their sleep.
“And as she was putting it together, I realized I was buying the flowers for the wrong person.”
“Eli paid for it. Then he handed me the bouquet and asked me to have dinner with him. And here we are, twelve years later.”
Ruth says, “Wow. Can I ask you something else?”
“Of course.” Charlotte braces herself.
“Are you Italian? Rocco’s an Italian name, but he claims he isn’t.”
“We’re not Italian. Rocco’s telling you the truth.” It’s up to Rocco to tell her that his real name is Rochester. Their mother knew whole paragraphs from Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights by heart. Charlotte assumes Mom’s forgotten all that. Living in Mexico, she mostly speaks Spanish now.
Ruth says, “Have you done Ancestry.com? I did it for my grandparents and me. We’re ninety percent Scandinavian. With a dab of Central Asian. A drop of Genghis Khan. I know this sounds strange, but it felt empowering to be related to one of history’s greatest mass murderers.”
Another silence follows that.
“Just kidding,” Ruth says. “Really.”
“How’s business, Charlotte? Flowers for the One Percent.” Rocco has never hidden his feelings about the fact that most of Charlotte’s clients are rich, or trying to raise money from the rich.
“Blooming,” Charlotte says, as she always does. It drives Rocco crazy.
Ruth says, “What’s your favorite flower, Charlotte?”
Charlotte pretends to think about this as if she hasn’t been asked before. “I’d say foxglove. They look like outer space aliens. You have to see them in the wild.”
One summer, before Daisy was born, Eli drove Charlotte upstate to an enclave built for Victorian billionaires: massive summer mansions with turrets and verandas. A path led through the forest where huge stands of gorgeous foxglove bloomed. They never returned there. Sometimes Charlotte thinks she dreamed it. Foxglove Brigadoon.
“I love foxglove,” says Ruth. “How could something that gorgeous be . . . natural? But aren’t they . . . poisonous? Loaded with digitalis? Didn’t Van Gogh or somebody like that take giant doses of digitalis and that’s why he painted like that?”
Rocco bristles. “Lots of people take drugs, and there was only one Van Gogh. There was no ‘somebody like that.’”
“Whatever,” says Ruth. “Excuse me. One more question, Charlotte, and I’m done, I promise. How come you have no flowers in your house?”
“I have enough flowers in my work life.”
Eli says, “Daisy has asthma.”
“That must be hard,” Ruth says.
“You can’t imagine,” says Charlotte.
It’s the truest thing she’s said all evening. No one who doesn’t have an asthmatic child can know. Not even Eli, though that’s not strictly true. The two of them handle it, but not always well. Watching Daisy struggle to breathe, they sometimes snap at each other. It’s just fear, they know that, so they forgive each other. But it’s not ideal. And Charlotte can’t rid herself of the idea that it’s her fault—though she knows that’s not possible.
A voice says, “Can we eat Ruth’s sticky buns yet?” They hadn’t noticed Daisy return. How much has she overheard? They try not to talk about her asthma. Daisy has covered her ears and run out of the room when the subject’s come up.
“That must be tough,” Ruth says to Daisy.
Charlotte is holding her breath.
“It’s not so bad,” Daisy says. “The hard part is when I lose my inhaler and my mom gets mad at me. Sometimes—”
“Not mad,” Charlotte says, louder than she means to. “I get scared, is all.”
Ruth says, “If that’s the hard part . . . there’s got to be some practical solution. Let me think about it, okay?”
Why is she asking Daisy?
“The sticky buns?” Daisy says. “Can we have more now?”
“Give us five minutes, honey,” says Charlotte. “We’re getting to it.”
“That’s what you said last time,” Daisy says.
“I know,” says Charlotte, though she’s pretty sure she hadn’t.
Eli says, “Eye roll alert. Five going on fifteen.”
“I’m six,” Daisy says.
“Not for a while,
” Charlotte says.
“Happy birthday in advance, Daisy,” says Ruth. “What are you doing for your birthday?”
“It’s not for a while,” Charlotte repeats.
Daisy looks like she’s about to cry, which is definitely not what Charlotte wants.
“Okay, come on, Daisy,” says Charlotte. “You can help bring in the dessert.”
She’d prepared a bowl of clementines and shelled walnuts. But next to the sticky buns, the fruit and nuts seem overly health-conscious, no fun. Daisy arranges the buns on a platter. She gently slides the pastries around to get the arrangement right. Watching her, Charlotte feels happier than she has all evening. Now if only she could keep Daisy from eating more sweets.
When Daisy carries in the platter, Ruth beams as if she’s being brought a birthday cake topped with lit candles. She looks around, delighted, slightly embarrassed, as if she’s waiting for them to sing.
“This is awesome,” she says. “Being able to share my grandma’s baking. I can’t wait to tell her.”
Don’t, Charlotte thinks. Don’t tell your grandmother yet. Don’t tell her anything about us. If she’s hoping you’ll find someone to love, maybe even marry, you’ll only disappoint her.
Ruth says, “The most amazing thing about my grandparents is they’re still madly in love after fifty years.” Her already flushed face brightens as she describes how her grandparents spend their evenings snuggling on the couch.
Charlotte senses that Ruth has said this before, maybe even to Rocco. But shining through the performance is her love for her grandparents, a good sign. She’s able to love, a gift that people don’t recognize as a gift, as something you have or don’t. Maybe Ruth can love Rocco. Maybe she already does.
Charlotte yawns. “Oops. Excuse me.”
“Don’t apologize,” says Ruth. “We should let you put Daisy to bed. And you guys should get some rest.”
Is she saying they look like they need some rest? Why is Charlotte so defensive?
“Can we eat the rest of the sticky buns after you leave?” Daisy asks.
“Save them for breakfast,” says Ruth. “Heat them at 350 degrees for exactly five minutes. Can you do that?”
“Mom, can we do that?”
“We can.” Charlotte thinks: There is no way that’s going to happen, even if she has to eat all the rest herself. Which, at the moment, doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. The truth is, there’s nothing like sugar and butter . . .