Life From Scratch Page 4
“My angel food cake!” I exclaim, taking the bag out of his hands. He shrugs his shoulders and starts rummaging through my refrigerator for leftovers. No one in my family can cook.
These are the things you should probably know about my brother. He is thirty-two going on sixteen. He has the self-righteous indignation of a teenager coupled with the irresponsibility of a first-year, pot-saturated college student. And he is brilliant—smarter than my brain-surgeon sister and lawyer parents combined.
He is, as these types always are, redeemed by his quick, wide smile which divulges the sweetness and thoughtfulness with which he conducts our relationship. Take, for instance, the time he returned to my old apartment to pick up all of my books when I didn’t feel like facing Adam. He carried those boxes up and down three flights of stairs for seventeen consecutive trips. That is love; that is redemption.
For the time being, he is a photographer. I say, “for the time being,” because this career was preceded by stints as a carpenter, a first-month medical student, a dishwasher, doorman, and amusement-park mascot, and it will be followed by something equally unusual such as being someone’s butler. He’s smart, but he’s bored easily and doesn’t think it is remarkable that he can add seven-digit figures in his head instantaneously. I think he gives my mother more stress than I do. At least they can write me off as a talentless failure; with Ethan, they need to contend with wasted brilliance.
Just to be clear, when I say “photographer,” I mean that he is wholly unpaid and working on a coffeetable book featuring photos he’s taking at Starbucks and Mudtrucks in Manhattan. A coffeetable book about coffee spilled on tables. Which means that until it sells—which it probably won’t—he never has any money. Our parents cut him off a long time ago. He doesn’t ask me for cash because he knows I’m trying to eke out my savings to last for a year. Instead he bothers our sister for rent money and comes over to my apartment to raid my refrigerator.
Feeding Ethan is the closest thing I have to a stint in mothering.
“I have some salsa and chips. I made the salsa myself,” I tell him, taking the chips off the top of the refrigerator.
“Is it any good?” he asks, bringing the bowl towards his face to sniff at the tomatoes.
“No, Ethan, it’s terrible, so I saved it and offered it to you.”
“I had an idea today. Do you know what you need?” Ethan asks me. “You need to have a dinner party. You’ve never had a dinner party.”
“Adam and I had dinner parties,” I say defensively.
“You had other couples over and ordered in from somewhere. It’s not the same thing. Look at all the things you can make now. Eggs. You could make fried eggs for everyone. Or salsa. You need to socialize. You’re spending too much time communicating with people online. People you can’t see. People who may actually be a sixty-year-old man in Kansas pretending to be a thirty-something cook in Vermont.”
“I like my online friends,” I insist.
“I know you hate it when people tell you what you need to do, but seriously, you need to socialize and show off your newfound skill to people who have the ability to taste your creations. Everyone will drink a lot and we’ll wreck your apartment and give you tons of great ideas for things you can do with your life other than graphic design. Such as being a traffic cop. I saw a traffic cop today, and I was thinking about how you would be great at that.”
“Who would I invite? Sarah?”
“Um … no … not Sarah. Because that means she’ll bring Richard. The idea is to socialize, not let Richard put everyone to sleep. I swear, the only thing more boring than one surgeon is a married pair of surgeons.”
The reality is that beyond my siblings, I really have only one person I consider a good friend, and that’s Arianna. There are acquaintances here and there, but since I left Adam, and since I left work, most of the people we mutually knew or who I saw in the office have fallen away. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a guest list larger than “one.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll invite a few friends, and you could invite Arianna. We can call the dinner: “The Reinvention of Rachel Goldman Who Should Go Back To Calling Herself Rachel Katz But Is Still Using Her Ex-Husband’s Last Name.”
“I’m not ready to change my name.” He stares at my left hand, and I curl it under the table protectively. “I’m almost ready to take off my ring. Almost. I swear. Seriously, it’s too much change in one year.”
“You know my thoughts on that,” he says. He slides off his chair and seals the chip bag, returning the half-eaten salsa with chip crumbs back to the refrigerator.
“All right, Ethan. You can invite two people. Two. And they can’t bring more people. I don’t have room in the apartment.”
“I’ll invite two. And you invite Arianna.”
He wiggles his eyebrows as he says this, and disappears out my front door, just as unannounced as he came.
This post is brought to you by the word of the day: substitution. I'm not just talking about out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new. Bumping out the past-the-expiration-date marriage for some new produce. I am talking about making cooking work in Manhattan when you are at the mercy of the local bodega.
Okay, so I'm not exactly at the mercy of the local bodega if I would get my ass on the subway and trek down to Whole Foods or Fairway. But since I tend to stay close to home, I poked around on the Internet to see if there were things you could substitute if the local market was missing ingredients.
For instance, if, by chance, you needed a shallot and you went to two markets before giving up, you could use the white part of 6 or so scallions to equal one shallot. Gelatin can be used in place of agar-agar. Lime juice and a little lime zest can be used in a pinch in exchange for lemongrass. A tablespoon of raw ginger can be converted into a 1/8th tsp of powdered ginger. Plain yogurt can stand in place—cup for cup—for buttermilk or sour cream.
And then there are the things that cannot be substituted no matter how lazy you feel about getting on the subway. You can't exchange a green pepper for a red pepper. Turmeric can turn something yellow, but it won't have the taste of saffron. The correct bean may actually matter depending on the dish. I mean, can you imagine lima beans in chili?
I know that substitutions may not taste exactly the same as the original recipe. It may, for instance, take some time for the new flavor to grow on you. You may have to let go of some of your expectations. Wait . . . we were talking about food . . . right?
Chapter Three
Melting the Butter
I wake up and realize that it is time to ditch the ring. It hadn’t been the right time for over nine months, and I have made up every possible excuse to keep the absolutely perfectly symmetrical diamond-and-platinum combination on my finger. It was like a protective cloak. Removing it would make me be truly alone.
As long as it was firmly below my knuckle, the average person passing me on the street would think I was married; that someone would miss me if I didn’t come home that night. My brother thinks that I continue to wear it because I can’t bear the thought of owning such an exquisite diamond and not having everyone know it.
But I swear, I’ve never even liked diamonds. I’m a color girl. I like peridots and garnets and deep-blue sapphires. Clear gemstones aren’t my thing. But neither is appearing single.
And if I’m honest, the ring is the final tangible daily reminder I have to Adam. Sometimes I find myself looking down on it during the day, and I’ll suddenly remember, “I was married.” It really happened. It wasn’t just a dream. And as much as it leaves me gutted every time it catches my eye, and I think about him, it also privately makes me smile to think about what the ring used to mean.
But on the topic of honesty, nine months is also long enough to wear the final reminder of my marriage.
If I am taking off the ring, I am definitely going to get something sparkly and beautiful as its replacement. Which means heading to the Mecca of beautiful jewelry: Harry Winston.
Arianna insists that we make a day of it, get tea and scones at the Plaza and try on shoes at Manolo Blahnik. She wants to get us makeovers at M.A.C. and see the new line of purses at Prada. And just to appease me and get me to let her window shop at all of the clothing stores, she promises to swing by the Crate and Barrel so I can covet kitchen equipment that wouldn’t fit in my apartment anyway. In other words, spend the day pretending that we have scads of nonexistent money.
Which is not quite as nice as being rich, but is, at least, free.
By the time we get to Harry Winston, I’m exhausted from both dodging the real shoppers returning unwanted Christmas presents and upper class tourists alike. My face feels stiff from the powder Billé at M.A.C. (pronounced, of course, as Billy, though his name tag was accent aigued) promised made me look at least five years younger. I am finished with pretending to be rich for the day. It’s a nice world to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live on Madison Avenue. Still, we are at Harry Winston, the point of the entire trip to Midtown, so we move quietly amongst the cases, peeking at the glittering jewelry.
“This is me,” I whisper, pointing towards a cushion-cut ruby ring. The band and prongs are coated in tiny diamonds. “That’s the sort of thing I want to get.”
“How much do you think it costs?” Arianna whispers back, her blond hair swinging in front of her shoulder. She has dressed up for the occasion in some Stella McCartney pants that she got as a gift in exchange for some work she did on her collection. They’re wide-legged trousers that almost drag on the floor behind her ballet flats. Despite the fact that at least Arianna is dressed fashionably; the woman at the end of the counter, speaking to a customer, glances over at us and flashes a tight smile that says, I know you won’t be purchasing anything today so I’ll take my time putting thin ankle over thin ankle to get over to you, gawkers.
“Five figures. At least. I’m not going to get it,” I tell her, as if this were ever a possibility. “I’m just saying—that’s the type of ring I want to get.”
We move from case to case, and I pause in front of the engagement rings and wedding bands. I can’t help it; it’s like watching a car accident. There is a woman paused at the case, her sleek chestnut brown hair reflecting the store’s light. She smiles at me shyly.
“I think I want to try on this one,” she tells the man behind the case. I lean in to examine a pink diamond ring flanked on either side by perfectly cut clear diamonds. The man takes out her ring and slips it onto her perfectly manicured hands.
The woman makes me look down at my engagement ring for a final glance. I’m going to miss it—not the diamond or the metal, but how Adam put it on my hand, how it looked sitting next to the sink when I came out of the shower, how I noticed it and thought about Adam one million times each day. And how that will no longer be the case.
“Are you looking for something?” the man asks, politely splitting his attention between the dazzling woman and my frumpy self.
“A ring,” Arianna tells him as she flits past. She is in her element, surrounded by pretty things without any pressure to buy. Arianna is a serial looker.
“Are you getting married?” the man asks, glancing down at the case between us. “If you give me a moment, I can help you find what you’re looking for.”
The other shopper beams at me, a sister-in-arms, a fellow pre-wife. She gives me that look that expectant mothers exchange with one another, brides who bump into each other as they examine the same Vera Wang knock-offs at Filenes. We’re on this crazy ride together, and isn’t it better to finally be on this crazy ride than be one of those poor people still waiting outside the ride in line?
I mumble something about coming back after lunch and drag Arianna away from a case containing a Padparadscha sapphire-drop necklace. “I think I once saw that on Gwyneth Paltrow’s neck in People magazine,” she says as we spill out onto the street.
“Harry Winston sucks,” I tell her as I start leading us to the subway so we can go south to more realistic jewelry environs. “Soon-to-be-engaged people suck and people who are happy suck the most.”
“Agreed,” Arianna says simply. “Unless you get engaged one day. Or you’re me. We are the exception to the rule.”
“Of course,” I tell her.
We head straight to Me&Ro, simply because I’ve coveted their jewelry in the past. It seems like a good starting point and end point. It’s the type of store I’d always begged Adam to duck in just for a minute and peruse the cases on our way to somewhere else. He’d stand by the doorway, scarf in hand, letting me browse while he read messages on his blackberry. If Holly Golightly had her Tiffanys, I had my Me&Ro, the sort of store where peace reigned, yoga was probably performed in a back room, and workers greeted each other with an earnest “Namaste.”
And yet, I not only never had breakfast there (to be fair, since the store didn’t even open until 11 a.m., it didn’t really seem like a breakfast-y sort of spot), but Adam had never bought me a piece of their jewelry as a gift. A thank-you-for-being-my-wife sort of gift. Or a birthday gift. Or an I’m-sorry-that-I-missed-your-work-function-yet-again-because-I-was-working-really-late gift.
It wasn’t even about Me&Ro or jewelry at all, but the fact that we went from thinking-about-you moments to forgot-you-existed-at-all. When we first started dating, he noticed everything about me. He knew more about me than I even knew about me, remembering what I wore on certain dates or which book I read on which trip. But while I could still rattle off what he ordered at each restaurant, which tie he liked with which suit, the movie he wanted to see after glimpsing it on a coming attractions kiosk, he stopped noticing me. He stopped hearing what I was saying and filing it away for later use to show me that he thought about me even when I wasn’t around.
Maybe he needed me to spell it out for him, have Arianna drop the hint directly before an anniversary, but it felt like it didn’t count if you needed to tell the person outright. He should have been attuned to that sort of thing, looking out for dropped clues into what would make me happy, just as I was always trying to read his mind and do little things for him.
Instead, since he always had his nose buried close to his blackberry screen, I’m not sure he could have even named this store if someone put a gun to his head. I don’t know if he could have named my favorite cereal (Special K) or the book I had read at least 12 times (Jane Eyre) or the brand of lipstick I used (always Bobbi Brown). I knew every detail about him: his choice of after shave (Gillette, picked up at Duane Reade), his favorite piece of sushi (unagi), which turnstile he always used at the 6th and 23rd subway stop (the one all the way to the left).
Which only makes the store more enticing as the place to replace my wedding band. Toss out the old, bring in the new. Be good to myself. Arianna is a patient shopper, even when she’s paying a babysitter at home $15 per hour to entertain Beckett with fuzzy toys. She points out idea after idea in the case. A ring covered in Tibetan writing, one that looks like a skull with ruby eyes, a set of three, hammered, stackable rings.
“Have you ever considered online dating?” Arianna asks.
“Not exactly,” I say, not wanting to offend in case she’s thinking about searching for a husband herself online.
“I’ve actually been on a few dates through Datey.com, and they were all really good.”
“Then why aren’t you dating those men anymore?”
Arianna chooses to ignore this question and instead reads a tiny card propped up next to a bracelet. “You could try it. You can set up an account for free and wait for someone to contact you and go on one date before you write it off.”
My eye catches on a thick cuff ring, etched with flowers and leaves and tiny designs.
“This one is beautiful,” I breathe.
And just like that, Arianna hears the love in my voice and drops all other suggestions—jewelry or online dating—coming behind me to agree that it is not only love at first sight, but it is love within th
e first eight minutes of stepping into a store, and therefore, it is also fate that this ring and my hand be joined.
“You just know, you just know,” she murmurs, like a sorcerer testing out a potion.
A woman who could have been a dead-ringer for Sandra Bullock unlocks the case and pulls out the ring for me. I slip off my wedding ring, taking my time twisting it over my swollen knuckle. I’ve taken it on and off before, but there is something about this time that feels momentous, as if I’m about to set it on fire or toss it into the sea, rather than place it in my pocket.
“Do you know your size?” she asks politely.
“I don’t,” I admit, extending my ring finger so she can slip on the cuff.
“Rach,” Arianna admonishes, “you can’t wear it on that finger.”
“Why not?” I ask, completely taken aback by this thought. Wasn’t the entire point to this outing to get rid of the wedding band?
“Get rid of it, not replace it,” Arianna corrects. “You can’t wear another ring on that finger.”
I know why not. Because everyone who only does a quick glance will think I’m taken, and I’d never have a stranger propose a date when we bump into each other in the produce department at the food store. I would look married. And maybe that Why not? is my why. Why I am willing to finally take off my wedding band—because I am merely slipping on something else in its place. Having something there means I can keep the memories even if the original ring and the husband who gave it to me aren’t there anymore.
“Absolutely not,” Arianna tells me.
“Then where will I wear it?”
“Your middle finger. It will double as a big fuck you to Adam.” Arianna explains to the sales woman, “My friend got divorced this year.”