“If this works out, you know, for both us,” she said, “it could really work. I mean, even after the baby is born. My mother’s not the kind of woman who’ll show up and make chicken soup and lasagna to last until the baby’s in training pants.”
“Okay,” I said. “But neither am I.”
“Neither are you what?”
“The type of chef who’ll come over and cook for your freezer.”
“Uh-huh,” Valerie said, turning and looking out her loft window at the white iron arches of the building across the street. “Persnickety, aren’t you?” she said, smiling.
“Are you always this combative?” I replied.
We shook hands and made it official.
• • •
Cooking for Valerie and Jamie succeeded in getting my mind off Dan a bit. I stopped drawing pictures on his face in our college yearbook and I finally removed the pile of cut-up photographs that had become a mountain of sorts with the aid of hot wax from the candles surrounding it. I found other things to talk about with my friends. I still had the dreams at night, but then I imagined those would continue for a while, or at least I hoped, because it was only in my dreams that I was sad instead of purely furious. Usually I dreamed I was on a crowded street and I would see Dan’s father or little sister across the street, waiting for a bus or cab. I would try to greet them, to get their attention, to get to them, because I wanted to say I missed them and I wanted them to tell me they were sorry for Dan’s bad behavior, and that they missed me, too, really missed me. But of course the cab or bus always zipped away with them just about to turn their heads in my direction, and I was left there, alone and anonymous once again.
When we got to East Hampton that Friday, I set about organizing and preparing the weekend’s food. Valerie pulled on some spandex and clipped on her utility belt—so named by me because it held both her Walkman and her cell phone—and she went walking on the beach. It was cool and foggy that day. From the kitchen window I could see only about a hundred yards into the water. Waves lapped the beach so that the surface of the water barely swayed, all at the edges.
I chopped rosemary and thyme for a roast chicken I was going to cook and then slice for sandwiches. I peeled and boiled some beets for a puree to go with the swordfish I would grill that night. And I made banana bread because Valerie loved it and she ate it with cream cheese—more calcium.
Sometimes I wished I was making a ginger-banana soufflé in a restaurant kitchen instead of sour cream banana bread in an old electric oven in East Hampton. But then, baking always soothed me—in college, my roommate would know that Dan and I had fought by the two batches of cookies she’d come home to after studying in the library all evening. Anyway, I had only been a soufflé chef for three or four years. For fourteen years prior to that, I cooked what would have been the biggest hit at Syracuse church bake sales, i.e., things involving chocolate chips, caramel cubes, sweetened condensed milk, butter, and coconut in a nine-by-thirteen-inch pan at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Of course when I got to feeling as if I were losing my skills, it was always my option to whip up a little batch of petit fours or a perfect foie gras for Valerie and Jamie. They loved eating things that they had to pronounce with an accent. Yet what I found most satisfying about cooking for them was my victory in the calcium battle with “no-dairy” Valerie. The second day of our contract, I made her a banana-strawberry yogurt shake for breakfast and she requested them every day thereafter. Nothing was ever said about the fact that I used milk and nonfrozen yogurt in the concoction—she loved it so I continued to make it.
“It’s all you,” Valerie said to me that morning while drinking a shake before we left for East Hampton. I was doing dishes. “It’s your cooking that’s keeping me so healthy.”
“I’d love to think that, Val,” I replied. “But some people just get lucky and have really easy pregnancies.” She’d had virtually no troubles and she was six months gone. Her feet swelled during the day and every now and then she’d get a zit the size of China. But there was no nausea, no out-of-control cravings, no sleeplessness, even. I was thankful for this—maybe as thankful as she was.
“Well, all I know is that my pregnancy would be a lot harder without you.”
“Thanks,” I said, a little shocked at the compliment. She was rarely direct—usually it was some backhanded compliment that old, grumpy men excelled at, like, “Are you sure I’m getting my money’s worth?” Or, my personal favorite, “You went to that big school for this?”
To these jabs, I easily replied, “Terminate this contract any time you like, Valerie. I’ll take my Cuisinart and Calphalon elsewhere.” It became a routine, calling one another’s bluff time and time again.
Thus, to her huge and unusual compliment that morning, I had only been able to reply, “Do you want chicken or lamb for lunch?”
The baby kicked then, and Valerie pretty much shrieked with excitement. She grabbed my dishwater-wet hands and pressed it against her belly. I felt a little bit of aftershock as if the baby were pulling the covers back up around its shoulders after it had rolled onto its tummy.
“Do you think Jamie will make a good father?” she asked.
I immediately wondered if she’d snuck a couple of beers when I wasn’t looking. I was shocked. I also didn’t know Jamie that well. So I stuttered for a moment, fought against the smart-ass response.
“He’ll be fantastic,” I said finally. “So will you.”
“Good,” she said. “I really hope so.”
The fact was, neither one of them would be parents to whom I would relate. I grew up the daughter of a writer and a professor in Syracuse. My mother worked, sure; she taught classes and wrote books and articles. But she was also home with me and my brother full-time. She cooked meatloaf and mashed potatoes and she hand-pitted cherries and made a pie crust from scratch while supporting Roe v. Wade. This is to say that she was far from being a stereotypical housewife, yet she stayed home with me and my brother. She was a mother first.
“Mother first” did not seem to be what Valerie had in mind. I knew because she had already talked about it, a lot. That her baby would have a nanny from the get-go. That it would eat sushi by age five and would spend more money on tuition by the time it was eight than I’d spent in four years at a ridiculously expensive private college. The kid would probably be in summer camp for eight weeks a summer and boarding school for seven months a year. I wasn’t willing to say that any of these things were bad per se because they were completely out of my realm of experience.
• • •
Dusk in East Hampton. Valerie was still walking the beach and I was holding a big swordfish steak when the phone rang.
“Rache,” Jamie said. “What’s up?”
“Marinating,” I said.
“Sounds good.” Jamie was hollering a little bit; he sounded far away, or like he was about to go out of range.
“Where are you?”
“Far. Maybe another hour and a half.”
“Traffic?”
“Does it rain in a rain forest?”
“Right,” I said. “Although, not really.”
“Val there?” he asked.
“She’s on the beach. Walking,” I said, dropping the swordfish into the big pyrex pan where a lime-honey-sesame marinade was waiting.
“Thanks, I’ll get her there,” he said.
Five minutes later, Valerie trucked into view. She was doing her “speed walk” arm swing that her trainer had taught her, but just with one arm. Her other hand held the phone. One side of her Walkman headphones were pushed back so that the phone could get to her ear. I imagined Jamie getting a whiff of Salt-n-Pepa and Courtney Love as Val talked to him and continued her workout.
As she turned up the beach and approached the deck, I could see that she was upset. Her finely plucked dark eyebrows were squinched together and her lips were moving fast and tight. Just as she was about to step up onto the deck and come inside, she stopped. She glanced up
at the house all lit up, and then she turned and sat down on the sand right in front. Because of her belly size, she had to squat until she almost reached the ground, and then she sort of fell back onto the sand.
I popped a beer and continued to think about Dan—would he and the lawyer he fell for make it? I wondered, as I did often those days, what had been wrong about us, or wrong about me. I had never let him tell me anything but that he was in love with this other woman—I figured that if he wanted to dump me, he could live with never getting to explain himself. He could live with my hating him, with not getting my understanding or my forgiveness. It was, I figured, the least he could do.
But he had called that morning, catching me on the way out the door as I was headed to Valerie’s.
“What can I do for you?” I said. “I’m running off to work.”
Dan was caught a little off guard. “Oh—sorry. Yeah, your brother told me about your gig with the casting agent. Sounds great. Could be just the connection you need to hit the big time.”
“Could be I don’t need any connection,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Okay,” Dan said. “Sorry to have caught you at a bad time.”
I kept going: “My brother had no right telling you about my life.”
Dan paused, then said, “I’ll call some other time.”
I didn’t respond, but trilled my fingers on my kitchen counter. I wished I had long nails so that they would click and he would hear them.
Dan still didn’t hang up. He said, “You’re being pretty harsh, you know?”
“And I’m supposed to be how?”
“Whatever,” Dan said. “I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up.
I suppose I was satisfied, and I really did feel good for a split second. But then I was sobbing and I didn’t so much feel triumphant and satisfied as utterly alone. I wailed facedown on my bed. I cried well past the point when your stomach and throat ache, when it feels like you’ve been throwing up.
Then I got up, showered again, and got to Valerie’s an hour late. I told her there was a water main break in Times Square, that I had to walk up to 55th Street and take the N to the 4 train at 53rd and Lex. She believed this. “Start taking cabs,” she said. “I’ll pay your fare—the subway is disgusting. You can get pinkeye or molested down there. Worst of all—it’s unreliable. It can screw up your whole day.”
Standing in East Hampton twelve hours later, I decided I must be on the road to recovery after such a big breakdown. It was a turning point. Maybe Valerie had been right—maybe I should start keeping my eyes peeled at the agency.
When she finally came in from the beach, it was dark out. The banana bread was cooling on the counter and the swordfish was marinating in the fridge.
“I’ve lost him,” Val said, setting the cell phone down on the table and unbuckling her Walkman belt, which sat below her belly like the waistbands on large men.
I looked at the clock on the microwave. They must’ve been on the phone for nearly an hour and a half. “He should be here pretty soon, shouldn’t he? Another hour at most?”
“No, I’ve really lost him. He’s on his way back to the city.”
The phone rang again.
“You answer it,” she said.
I froze for a moment until Valerie lifted the phone from its receiver and put it up to my ear.
“Hello?” I said as she held it there.
“Rache. It’s me. Tell Val, that—” He paused. “Tell her—”
“Uh-huh?” I said, having no other choice. I looked into Valerie’s anxious and insistent face and I took over holding the phone to my ear. She stepped back and then turned to pour herself a glass of water. She drank it with one hand on her hip, still facing away from me.
“Tell her that she’s beautiful and that we’ll be great parents and that I didn’t mean what I said about hating cartoons, fairs, circuses, zoos, Barney, playgrounds, and anything else ‘kid related.’ Just tell her that, okay?” Then he hung up.
“Umm,” I said, more awkward than I could believe, looking at Valerie’s swayed back. “He said to tell you that you’re beautiful and that he didn’t mean what he said about zoos, circuses, Barney, Sesame Street, and jungle gyms.”
Val slowly set her glass down on the counter and turned to face me. “He said he hated everything with the word ‘kid’ in it and he wondered if we were doing the right thing,” Valerie said. She started walking out of the kitchen. “He’s gone. He’s history.”
I didn’t bother putting my two cents in, that it seemed like a perfectly normal fear to be having, despite the horrendous manner he was choosing to express it. I wasn’t their counselor, after all. I was just their cook. I opened a second beer and shucked a couple ears of corn.
Valerie showered for a long time. When she reemerged from the bathroom, I was sitting on the couch reading Entertainment Weekly, wondering if Dan had called looking for forgiveness and for us to try and be friends or some old bullshit; or whether he had dumped the lawyer and wanted me back. (Hah! I thought.) Val got a glass of juice from the fridge and joined me on the couch. She seemed surprisingly calm, given her husband’s choice words and the tantrum they produced not so long ago. Her dark hair was wet and pulled back in a rubber band. She had on her maternity jeans and an old sweater that had holes in the elbows.
“You know, there are lots of different ways to raise children,” she said, dropping the magazine to her lap. “People get all proprietary about it. Knowing the right way. I’m going to do a great job bringing up this kid.” She took a long drink of juice and I sat listening, reassuring myself that my jaw had not dropped. She spoke quietly, as if it was a real voice from somewhere below her bottom rib that was speaking, for the first time in a very long while. What had coaxed this Valerie out of hiding?
“For instance, I know you’re horrified when I talk about nannies and preschool tuitions. When the simple matter is, you didn’t grow up that way. So you don’t know that it can work.”
I nodded. I liked the beginning of what she said—she almost seemed real—but I didn’t like that she was now using me as a comparison.
Valerie continued: “And I bet the first French you ever spoke was in high school, am I right?”
I nodded.
“My baby is going to be bilingual from the time it’s three because we’re going to have a French-speaking Nanny. What do you think?” Valerie did her best to seem unaware of having semi-insulted me.
“Great,” I said. “Sounds great.” I looked back at the clock on the oven. 8:41 P.M. I chuckled to myself at how unsubtle she’d been in saying that her kid would be a lot smarter and more sophisticated than me. “Yeah,” I almost added. “And she or he will be a lot more fucked up than me, too, from having a psycho power-monger mother.” I couldn’t say this, much as I would’ve liked to, but I had to say something. So I blurted, “My French is pretty good, by the way.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. But starting young is the best thing, really.” Valerie reached for my beer with a smug little grin on her face. “I need a little taste,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have a whole one with you, and skip having wine with my husband, who may or may not show up.”
“Mais, bien sûr” I cooed.
She leaned back and put her feet up on the glass coffee table. A wind came in off the water through the screen door and blew a piece of that day’s Times onto the floor. Wind was coming from the south. Fog would blow away or burn off by morning, hopefully. I wondered what Valerie was like before she was successful, if she was ever consistently nice and relaxed and normal before she spent her days with all the freak actors and anorexic models and the agents who drove them. If I became Namebrand Superchef, what would I be like?
“Jamie will come around. But he’ll have to do it on his own,” she said with her eyes closed. “When we should probably be doing it together. I have his questions, too, you know? We’re going to be parents together. We should be able to work this out together.” She opened her eyes as she thought of
something else. “Do we, by any chance, have any Cheetos? I have a mean craving for Cheetos.”
“How lowbrow of you,” I said as I stood up. I went and retrieved an unopened bag from my backpack. Cheetos were my weakness, too, but I didn’t tell her that. Valerie looked so gleeful that I half-expected her to clap her hands together and say, “Oh boy,” as I tossed the unopened bag to her. Instead she caught the bag, grinned broadly, and said, “Excellent.”
“Now, what about you, Miss Rachel,” Valerie said. “You’re always so mysterious about your love life. Is there anyone?”
I took a long swallow of beer and formed the words in my head before I said them. “My fiancé broke off our engagement several months ago, right before I started to cook for you.”
“God, Rachel,” she said. “That’s really awful. I am so, so sorry.”
“Well, I don’t particularly like to talk about it.” I laughed nervously because it suddenly felt good to talk about it, to let Valerie know what I thought about while whisking eggs or cream or peeling vegetables for her. Maybe I also wanted to let her know that she didn’t have a monopoly on the trials and tribulations of the world around her.
Valerie crunched a handful of Cheetos. Then she said, “But you’ve got to talk about it. It’s the only way to make sense of it.”
“I thought we were set, you know?” I said before I could stop myself. “I thought I knew my life. Our life.”
“Everyone thinks that once or twice. Everyone has to go through something like this. You’ll make it,” Valerie said, stretching her arms over her head. “Of course, for the moment, I’m sure it sucks and I’m sorry.” This last bit was said mid-stretch, to the ceiling.
I got up and went to the screen door, thinking that I didn’t need Valerie to tell me that my problems were average piss, rite-of-passage sort of problems. I coughed to hold onto the composure I was finally losing. I kept staring out the screen door, into the darkness. For one brief moment I thought, “Maybe she’s right. In her own pathetic little way, maybe she’s right.” That’s when I spotted Jamie. Standing to the side of the deck, just out of the light spilling from the kitchen. He was watching her—I could tell by the way he was staring in through the window. He didn’t see me.