Life From Scratch Read online

  “That is so sad,” the woman says in a completely unconvincing voice.

  “It is sad,” Arianna corrects in a more believable tone. “And she is finally getting rid of her wedding ring. So don’t you think she should wear the cuff on her middle finger? Rings on a middle finger are bad-ass.”

  “I’m not really that bad-ass,” I remind her.

  “This will make you bad-ass. Please, Rach. Not the ring finger.”

  There is a plea in her voice, one that reminds me that she has been the listener on the other end of the phone all the times that I’ve called her crying in the middle of the night. She has lugged over Beckett and brought cookies and camped out on my floor.

  She has given me for years what Adam couldn’t even muster giving me for minutes at a time—her attention, her ear, her sympathy. She advises me not out of cruelty, but because she will be the one on the other end of the line when I call her a few days from now, crying because the new ring still reminds me of the old ring. I extend my middle finger towards the woman and hope that because it is not pointing upward, it is not offensive.

  Sandra Bullock’s stunt-double measures my finger with a ring of sample sizes and finally picks out the proper copy of the paisley-printed cuff to slip onto my hand. I stare at the exquisite cuff, just slightly right of the puffy line left behind by my old ring. And I choke on my words, telling her how much I love it. That I’m going to wear it home.

  I should sell my wedding ring but I can’t bear to do it. So I tuck my wedding ring into the back of my underwear drawer. I’m aware that the back of a drawer isn’t the best place for a diamond ring valued at several thousand dollars, but it seems safer—both fiscally and emotionally—than lumping it in with the other pieces of jewelry that I keep in my night table. I won’t have to ever see it again unless I run out of good underwear and need to scoop a few pairs of period-flecked panties from the back of the drawer.

  I sit down at the computer, reading first through a few emails. My brother has secured two friends to come to my place for dinner and asks if I’ve broached the topic yet with Arianna. Comments have come in on a recent post on my blog about the best way to de-skin butternut squash—I didn’t know this back when I mentioned that I needed to prep the squash for a soup, but apparently there is a long-standing peel-first-or-roast-first debate. An online friend has sent a recipe-exchange chain-letter email.

  I minimize my email and open another tab and take a deep breath. I Google Arianna’s suggested online dating site, and the screen is immediately filled with a carousel of happy couple photographs. Everyone has perfect teeth and perfect skin and perfect happiness contained in a rotating 4x6 image. The newly-formed couples are playing tennis, horseback riding, and enjoying dinner in front of a fireplace. Quotes from happy customers run down the right side of the screen:

  Thank you, Datey.com, for helping me find Dave. He’s one in a million, and so are you.

  Datey.com made dating easy. And now my fiancé and I are getting married in Vail!

  I write my own premature “thank you” inside my head:

  Datey.com, thanks for giving me something to do with my Saturday nights beyond crying over my ex-husband and eating raw cookie dough.

  I try to conjure up a good attitude and click on a button labeled “Getting Started.” I create an account and jot down my password on a sticky note, and then I start going through the pages and pages of questions aimed at helping me find that Special Someone.

  Name? This is easy. I am Rachel Goldman. I pause for a moment. Maybe I should write Rachel Katz even though I haven’t changed my name back yet? Maybe I should change my name back before I fill this out? I shake my head; I can probably change my profile later, just as I updated my wedding ring this afternoon. I delete and restore my married surname several more times before moving on.

  Birthday? February 17, 1974.

  Location? New York City.

  Religious Affiliation? Jewish. Emphasis on the “ish.”

  Status? It takes me a moment to understand the question, and it isn’t until my cursor hovers over the drop-down menu that I understand. Never married. Separated. Divorced. Looking for friendship. Looking for a relationship. Don’t know.

  Don’t know? How could you not know what your past relationship history held? Had you been married or not? What were the possible other options? That you might be separated today, maybe to be divorced by the time someone reads your profile? And who the hell comes to a dating site looking for friends?

  I start to make my way through the various questions. What do I like to do? I like to cook, write, read . . . but these acts seem a bit too tame, too boring. No one is going to jump on a profile that essentially states that I like to live my life in solitude, like a Walt Whitman poem. I look around the apartment for inspiration.

  It is easier to say what I don’t like to do: sit on the sofa by myself deep into the evening. Write love notes to my husband that go unanswered. Endure mediation followed by divorce. Yes, that’s a sucky way to spend an afternoon. I’m actually not so much into dating, either, and would love to skip straight to the established relationship, if that is possible.

  I decide to come back to the question later, and charge ahead. I can feel myself losing steam with this project; my eyes wander longingly down to the tab that holds my email account—the gateway to my blog and cooking project and people who think I’m funny. My blog is easy. Dating sites are hard.

  What kind of food do I like? Finally, questions that call forth my years of carry-out knowledge. I do like Indian food, and I do like standard American fare, and I do like French, very much so. I like sushi, and I like Chinese, and I like coffee, especially if it is served with cinnamon buns that have just come out of the oven so that the icing oozes down the sides. My cursor hovers over the next selection. Japanese. But I just answered ‘Yes, please,’ to sushi. Do they mean tempura? Teriyaki? Everything except raw fish?

  I glance down the list. Dumplings have been separated from Chinese food. Falafel has parted from the Middle East. I decide to come back to the food questions.

  I skip ahead and see screen after screen filled with questions, most of them unanswerable, at least not in a way that tells the reader anything about me. How you can capture the way my nose scrunches when I hear something I don’t like? That was something Adam always said was his favorite face I made. How can I explain via a check box the sound my jaw makes as it clicks when I stretch it before bed?

  Other unphraseable facts: The shape of my hands, the way I sleep on my side, how I am more likely to take the last brownie than offer it to you, how deeply I love, because that seems like the most important point of all for a potential suitor to know: how deeply I love.

  I close the screen without completing the form, bypass email and head to the safety of the kitchen, where the curve of an apple is the curve of an apple is the curve of an apple. And no one is going to ask me if I like apples. If I like fruit.

  I take a deep breath and preheat the oven, reading through the instructions several times, wondering if I’m starting the steak too early, if it will really taste as good as the cookbook promises if I serve it room temperature over the salad. I preheat some oil in a pan and salt the steak, having deep regrets at attempting meat. I should have stuck with just making the tomato sauce. The vinaigrette would have been a Martha Stewart-y enough touch to the meal.

  I decide to make a really easy pasta dish for the dinner party—keep it simple. I buy bread from the faux French bakery down the street and dessert from Magnolia’s, the West Village shop that kicked off the whole cupcake craze. I don’t need to make the whole meal, I decide. It counts as “homemade” if you make the main dish. Plus, I decorate the vanilla cupcakes with chopped up strawberries for color. I’ll throw together a salad with great butter leaf lettuce I found at Whole Foods and the extra tomato I bought earlier in the week. I’ll make my own vinaigrette. And then stupidly, at last moment, I throw some steaks into my basket at the store, and now I am bac
k home and staring down the meat with dread. The cookbook is talking about searing and finishing. About making my own garlic butter.

  I drop the steaks into the pan and then step back, promising the cookbook author that I will not touch the steaks, will not fuss with them and touch them and move them around until the timer goes off marking three minutes. I watch the color crawl up the side of the meat, the top still freshly pink, the bottom half a caramelized brown. When the buzzer goes off, I smear on the garlic butter I mashed together while I waited, flip the steak, and send the whole pan to the oven. Done. Door closed. I breathe a huge sigh and pour myself a glass of water. My hands are shaking from steak anxiety.

  As the steaks finish in the oven, I start on my tomato sauce, a bit more confident now that the hardest piece of the meal is out of the way. I chop my garlic, lovingly bringing the knife over it like I’ve seen the Food Network chefs do on television, taking special care not to slice open my fingers, because I’m not a Food Network chef. I mix it with a small amount of water in a cup to mellow the bite of the garlic once it hits the oil. As the garlic browns, I open a can of crushed tomatoes to get ready. I hum to myself, picturing my mother rolling her eyes at the way I am spending my afternoon.

  The buzzer goes off again, and I pause for a moment, grabbing some newly-purchased oven mitts. The steak comes sizzling out of the oven, and I let it rest for a few minutes on a plate. It looks gorgeous, and I have an urge to cut it immediately despite directions to the contrary in the cookbook.

  I proudly slice open the first steak and am greeted by the red fleshiness of undercooked meat. I panic, fanning back to the steak salad page in the cookbook. Can I put it back in the oven? Serve it semi-raw? Dump it and cry over the wasted money?

  The chef gives no directions for this possibility, as if it could never happen if the original instructions are followed precisely. I wonder if my steak is too thick; if I skipped a step. With a deep breath, I drop the steaks back in the butter-laden pan and return them to the oven, biting my lip over this decision as if it holds the same importance as choosing which college to attend or which person to marry. Did I make the right choice?

  When the meat comes back out of the oven a few minutes later, the center is a creamy pink, like the photographs. I almost cry, so incredibly proud of the steaks—my babies—and how they have browned in their own juices. I set them aside again, this time with real confidence. I am like a kitchen ninja from an Alton Brown skit, striking out on my own to stave off meat catastrophes.

  I throw a pot of water on to boil. The crushed tomatoes in the sauce crackle and splash out, staining the stove top with blotches of juice. I turn down the heat, sprinkle in a bit of sugar for sweetness, some salt for bite, and leave it to putter away while I start on the rest of the salad.

  I turn on some music and dance through the apartment, tucking dirty clothes under my blanket and snapping down my air-drying bras from the shower curtain bar. I touch-up my lipstick, give the vinaigrette another shake, and combine the pasta sauce with the drained noodles back in the original pot. I toss in some chopped kalamata olives, some arugula leaves for color. I rummage in the cabinets for something to serve it in.

  The memories always comes out of nowhere, when I least want to be thinking about Adam. I’m about to throw my first dinner party, for Christ’s sake, but suddenly, I am reminded of the day he bought me the serving dish I’m holding in a small town in Upstate New York.

  We had been on vacation, a small weekend getaway to Bolton Landing on Lake George. We spent the day wandering through antique shops and drinking coffee by the water. Right before we got back in the rental car to return to the city, we stopped in a home goods store to pick up a gift for my sister’s birthday.

  Nestled between two teapots was a cheery, orange, oblong dish with stripes around the top edge. We often played a game while we were dating where he had to guess whether or not I liked a certain ring or dress as we window shopped. This game strangely stopped soon after the wedding, even though I was obviously dying to play it during all of those excursions to Me&Ro. But in this store, back when he seemed to care what I thought as if he was exploring every nook and crevice of my being, he raised his eyebrows at me and pointed at the dish, “Like?”

  “Like,” I agreed.

  While the cashier was ringing up the vase we were buying for my sister, he pointed towards the serving piece and asked her to box it for us. “Adam,” I hissed, trying not to let the woman hear me. “We can’t afford that right now.”

  “I don’t really think you can wait on happiness,” Adam said, which was such an Adam thing to say at the time. “And when are we going to get back here?”

  He had a point, and I had a dish. It was one of the things I debated leaving behind in the divorce because it made me remember that day, but it was my favorite serving piece. Remembering Adam and that day by the lake is a little bit like my longing for children when I see Beckett—this strange mixture of grief and peace and happiness all at the same time.

  The truth is that a long time ago, I was more like Adam now, and he was more like I am now, and somewhere along the way, our personalities crossed and transferred like a Freaky Friday experiment. Back in graduate school, where we met, I was the one who worked well into the night. He was the sort of person who loved the minutiae of academics but dreaded applying that to the real world. He liked to argue, liked to read cases and dissect them in the same way he loved his literature books and talking about composition.

  One night, he even asked me if I thought he’d be better off being a teacher. But we were too heavily in debt from law school, and he agreed—he’d find a job at a New York firm, work the requisite amount of hours so we could pay off the student loans and then have money left over for travel, the suburban house and 2.4 kids. He brought home stories from the office about other lawyers who stayed well into the night while we happily snuggled and ate carry-out dimsum on the sofa.

  At first, he was the one who suggested that we grab matinee tickets to the off-Broadway shows or check out the latest exhibit at the Met or walk around the funky, bohemian Busker festival as if we had nothing better to do with our afternoon.

  And then slowly, slowly, the wardrobe changed, and the jeans and t-shirts were replaced by suits. And then slowly, slowly, his tastes changed until he was telling me that he enjoyed the dinners out with other lawyers rather than finding them tedious. And then slowly, ever so slowly, he started stretching out his day until he was working more than he was not working.

  At the same time, I was losing my drive and desire to become the best little graphic artist in the world. I was reading house-decorating magazines and talking about which neighborhoods had the best schools and could he please come home before nine o’clock so we could have some time together before bed?

  And slowly, slowly, my heels and skirts changed to cords and sweatshirts. And slowly, slowly, I started to find things about Adam that annoyed me, like the way he discussed how much he missed the Hamptons with his mother or the way he flossed his teeth in the bedroom or the way he left his damp towel on top of our bedspread. And then slowly, ever so slowly, I started wearing out the sofa cushion directly across from the clock which I watched as if it held the answer to when Adam would be returning home.

  These are the things I should not be thinking about five minutes before a dinner party.

  I throw the noodles in my serving bowl and place the salad into a tacky dish I picked up in Bar Harbor, Maine, in the shape of a lobster. I work the serving dish a little too hard, lining up the strips of steak to look like the claws, and then change my mind and toss the whole thing together.

  At eight o’clock, the table is set and the food is all cooked and no one is here. I sit down to check my email. I wade through a few comments from my latest blog post—an internal debate on whether or not I should attempt baking projects now that I am the owner of a bag of cake flour. The unanimous vote is “Yes,” though no one can agree if I should begin with the angel food ca
ke or something easier.

  There is an email from a PR person wondering if I’d write about her client’s product on my blog, which is ten kinds of weird, and I don’t even know how these PR people find me. A few notes from mailing lists, an email from an online friend, and a recipe contest announcement from the site, Epicurious. And then, tucked between a note from Arianna telling me she secured babysitting for tonight and an advertisement from an online bookstore is a note from the Bloscars.

  It is obviously a cut-and-pasted message to all nominees, but it congratulates me on being a finalist for the 2009 Bloscars and passes along a series of important dates (the opening and closing of voting being two of them) and a Bloscars icon in case I want it for my blog.

  I am fumbling frantically to add it to my sidebar when the buzzer rings.

  I buzz the person into the building by hitting the button on my wall and then go back to trying to figure out my blogging software. The icon is a plain grey box, but I am strangely proud to have made it to the finalist round. I finally get it uploaded and admire it for several moments on my site before a knock comes on the door.

  “I’m a finalist,” I crow, throwing the door open.

  But instead of finding Ethan or Arianna on the other side, I am facing a tall, droopy-eyed man with carefully tousled hair holding a wine bottle.

  So, naturally, I scream.

  Which causes my next-door neighbor to instantly throw open her door as if she were waiting for this exact moment to happen and hiss at me because she has a baby sleeping. I apologize to her and to the man while my brain catches up with my body, and I realize this must be one of the two men my brother said he would bring along. Silly me, I expected them to come with him, as in at the same time, so that I didn’t have to entertain a stranger in my apartment, alone. But unless you specify these things with Ethan, it’s always a guess as to how things will play out.

  “I apologize,” the man said in a thick accent of European origin. I guess Spain. Or maybe France. Or Portugal. “Ethan told me to come here tonight? To a dinner party?”