The High Season

  “Really?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No! Mike told me about the job, but—”

  “I told you that Jem was offered a job in her kitchen.”

  “You never told me!”

  “I thought I did. I mean, it just happened about a week ago.”

  Penny looked stricken. “I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t you see? That woman is taking over everything. She knows you two are our best friends! She’s going after you, too!”

  “She’s not taking over,” Elena said. “Penny got the job on her own. She didn’t use Adeline.”

  “But Adeline knew! She set the whole thing up. Don’t you see that?”

  “We don’t know that,” Penny said. “Mike just said he heard about the new place, and I know David, the owner, so I just called him. And anyway, what difference does it make?”

  “It makes every difference!” Ruthie felt the whiskey eat through her stomach lining, and she put down the empty cup. “You’re in the friend loop now! Won’t it be great next summer? Mike and Adeline will have a favorite table—of course it will be the best one—and you’ll be sending out amuse-bouche and free glasses of champagne and chef’s little tasting appetizer things! Except all vegany because she doesn’t eat dairy!”

  “Now you’ve gone too far. I don’t cook for vegans!”

  “This isn’t a betrayal, sweetie,” Elena said. “It’s a job. And we need it.”

  Ruthie had always admired Elena’s beautiful serene gaze. It had always soothed her. Now it infuriated her. She stood up, the chair clattering. “Why doesn’t anybody listen to me anymore? Do I have a voice? Can you actually see me? Am I a ghost?”

  “Let’s cut to the chase. Do you want me to turn this job down?” Penny asked. Her voice was quiet.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You are saying it.” Penny slammed her fist on the table and sent the cups rattling. “So just say it!”

  Elena put her hand over her mug. She looked from Penny’s white face to Ruthie, standing now and trembling, hanging on to the kitchen chair.

  Penny pushed back her chair. “Say you want me to give up a fantastic opportunity so that you won’t have to feel uncomfortable if your ex-husband and his girlfriend happen to stroll into my restaurant on a random Tuesday evening and I cook them food. Because that is what you are saying and I am hearing you say it.”

  “Why would I say it? It would mean that you’d have to actually listen to me instead of talking about yourself all the time.”

  “And you’d have to be not such a fucking victim!”

  Ruthie strode to the door. Elena took two steps after her but stopped.

  “When did you become such an asshole?” Penny shouted.

  “Today!” Ruthie yelled. “Okay? Tell everyone. Ruthie is now an asshole! All she had to do was tell the truth!”

  “Ruthie!” Elena spoke with the sternness of a schoolmarm. “You can’t blame Penny.”

  “I am going to blame everyone in the world,” Ruthie said, opening the door.

  30

  PENNY WAS HARD on people, she told herself. Penny held grudges. When she let you in, you felt lifted, because she didn’t bestow her friendship easily, only her acquaintance. Maybe that was why when she let you in, she had to tell you everything in her life (which was admittedly entertaining), but often it didn’t leave much room for anybody else. Ruthie was not the kind of person to elbow herself into getting attention, even from her best friend. Now they had bumped into the thing that maybe had wrecked them for good. They had shared their meanest thought about the other.

  When had love become a thing that choked her instead of enfolding her?

  Maybe all relationships, friendship, partner, parent and child, were held together by the things you did not say as much as the things you did. The unsaid was the keystone in the arch. Once you kicked it free, you had nothing that held you up.

  Without Penny, she was a boat unmoored. A woman without a best friend.

  She left the playhouse for the lawn. She needed plenty of pacing room. Earbuds in, she dialed her father’s number in Tampa. He would be surprised to hear from her. They had a regularly scheduled phone call on the first of the month, as if she were a bill on automatic payment.

  “Ruthie! We just spoke! Anything wrong?”

  “No, I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “Great! It’s just that we’re going out to dinner. New place in Hyde Park. Berte already put on her earrings, that means two minutes and we’re out the door. That woman is a clock,” he said fondly. “How’s my little girl?”

  “Fine.”

  “And my beautiful granddaughter?”

  “She’s good. She’s been working hard at the farm stand. She likes it.”

  “Good. Never too soon to be responsible. Hang on.” She heard him speak to Berte. “Go ahead out, cool down the car for us, darling.” Of course his darling should cool down the car; Ruthie had been to Tampa in July, it was hellfire. Of course Berte was anxious to make their reservation, of course he would call her darling, of course the easy affection of their marriage would cut her to the heart every time. She pictured Berte in a tropical-print full skirt, red lipstick, dangling pretty sea-glass earrings, swishing out into the warm night to cool down the Buick.

  Conversation with her father was always bumpy. On the mornings of their scheduled calls she drew up a mental list of items to talk about. She could sense his impatience now. His cocktail was waiting.

  “How’s that museum of yours?”

  She hesitated. That was what she was calling for, to tell him what had happened, to ask for a loan, to ask for something for the first time in her life since she’d left for college. She had already planned it out, how she would structure the payments to pay him back, the amount she would ask for, the amount she would offer to Mike to buy him out. Her father, she was sure, had the money.

  “One of these days we’ll get up there to see it. Such a long drive, though.”

  “You could fly.”

  “Right. Berte is going to take that course, you know the one where they cure you of phobias? They use meditation now.”

  “Great idea.”

  Usually a variant of this sparkling dialogue continued for ten excruciating minutes, until they were allowed to hang up. There was so little in common between them. Love, of course. Love was a given, but if she wanted a place in his heart she had to get in line. That was just the way it was. She didn’t need to go to therapy about it. She got it. He was a man who had been overtaken by an overwhelming force. True love. Berte had given him all the warmth he’d been missing, and she was all he needed and wanted.

  Her father had always been called “such a sad sack” by her mother. He had been a creature of routine, and that didn’t include smiling. By the time Ruthie woke up in the mornings he was gone, heading out to buy fish for his shop in Bayside, Queens. When he got home he walked to the cabinet, took a slug of Scotch, and went immediately to the shower to wash off the smell. Sometimes on weekends when Ruthie got in the car she could see blood on the floor. She never asked her father to drive her and her friends to the movies, for fear the car would smell like bluefish.

  When she was nine he started leaving on Wednesday evenings to take lessons in Portuguese, so he could communicate with the fishermen, he said. He’d listen to tapes in the car. Um dois três, they would chant together. Domingo, Segunda-feira, Terça-feira. He fell in love with Brazil and spoke of its beaches and jungles to Ruthie as if it were a place in a book, something enchanted. He nagged her mother to make moqueca on Fridays instead of broiled swordfish. Finally he himself tied on an apron and made feijoada, pronouncing it correctly with a flourish. Her mother worried about a nervous breakdown and was on the phone with her friend Marie for hours, but Ruthie liked this new perky version of her dad. Unt
il the day he moved out to live with Berte, a Brazilian widow. Apparently his fishermen didn’t speak Portuguese after all. Berte had come into the fish store every Friday. They’d fallen in love over the fluke.

  In less than a year they’d moved to Tampa. Ruthie was not allowed to speak his name in the house. She used to whisper Lou Lou Lou with her mouth smashed in her pillow. His calls were sporadic. A card on her birthday, urging her to visit. “Your father is louco,” her mother said, proud of her pun. She waited for Lou to realize his mistake, to come back and reclaim the fish store and his family, but he sent pictures of himself tarpon fishing instead.

  All through her adolescence, Ruthie’s yearly visits were painful, her Julys excruciating, when she arrived for four weeks. Berte had three teenage daughters, girls from a fairy tale, each more beautiful than the next. They all ran in and out of the sunny house with the terrazzo floor, dressed in tennis whites or bikinis, grabbing fruit from enormous colorful bowls. Lou now dressed in baggy short-sleeved shirts and shorts that showed his tanned knees, sandals that revealed his toes, the toes Ruthie had never seen, and a variety of caps that covered his bald spot. He had gone into real estate at the right time in the market. He laughed and smiled, he kissed Berte every morning, he owned a juicer. Full of citrus and mangoes, Ruthie would arrive back on the plane in a state of fruit-drugged anguish. Her mother would meet her at the baggage claim at LaGuardia and ask through tight lips (what an effort that must have been, to seem disinterested) how the trip was. Ruthie knew, even at twelve, even at thirteen, that a one-word answer was required.

  Fine.

  Because saying This has saved him would not go over well. Even at ten and twelve and fifteen she had known this, that her father was one of the charmed people in the world whom love had transformed. Angela was wrecked by love. Maybe she’d gotten over Lou, but she never got over being left.

  Angela sold the fish store and got cheated in a collusion between lawyer and buyer so devious it still had the power to visit Ruthie at 3 A.M. and send her blood pumping in anguish for her mother, so lost and alone she put her trust in two men who saw a way to make an easy buck. Angela took the money and they moved to a smaller apartment in another neighborhood. She took a bookkeeping course (she never got cheated again) and got a job for a furrier in Astoria. They moved again. Then again, to someplace smaller. It was a time of rent hikes, and they moved every year for much of Ruthie’s childhood. She went to three different high schools.

  Angela developed fears. She couldn’t make a left turn in the car, she had to make a series of rights before getting to the destination. She couldn’t go to movies because they were too loud. She couldn’t buy fish, she couldn’t travel, she couldn’t attend Ruthie’s school events because people expected to talk to you.

  Then she began to go to church again. This is what Catholics did with heartbreak, threw themselves into rosaries and jealously guarded their special friendship with Father Peter or Father Anthony.

  Ruthie drew. Ruthie did the grocery shopping. Ruthie painted. Ruthie got an after-school job. Ruthie made collages of fish out of parchment paper. Ruthie hung with the art kids and got into Cooper Union, a day she still remembered as one in which elation finally filled up every empty space. Tuition was free and she was about to take the E train to a new life. On high school graduation Angela gave her a check for ten thousand dollars. The amount of sacrifice it must have taken for her mother to save that much almost broke Ruthie enough to decide to give up her future and stay home (for that minute, anyway), but all they did was hug. “Don’t embarrass me,” Angela whispered in her ear.

  In the middle of college her mother got sick. Angela’s friends from church rose to help, bringing meals, rides to chemo and doctor visits. Lou called but did not come. Angela’s sister, Nancy, arrived from California and slept on the couch for a week. Ruthie dropped out for a semester. Her mother bore it all with no complaints except for the food. A constant stream of casseroles showed up at their door. Ruthie, after all these years, still couldn’t look at baked ziti without pain.

  They didn’t say much, in those last months. There were appointments and hospital stays and sudden fevers, but there were quiet days of sitting, Ruthie reading aloud or both of them staring at the TV. Everything was painful for her mother to watch except black-and-white movies and baseball. It was a good season for the Yankees. On one of those unbearably long afternoons they had been watching the ball fly across the green field and Ruthie had said, “I’ll get us some lunch,” and her mother had said, “Not yet,” and taken her hand. They had watched an inning holding hands, Angela’s dry and all bone. To be in the middle of that much terror and find that much love was a surprise that could shatter a heart.

  “So what is it, kiddo? Berte just honked. Maybe we can talk tomorrow? Hang on, no, Vanessa is showing up with the grandkids at eight A.M. sharp. We’re all heading to Disney World.”

  Ruthie swallowed. “Let’s just talk next month,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  * * *

  —

  ACROSS THE BAY were dinner parties under shady trees, where the food was never fried and the wines were exquisite, where the women were slender and fresh as stalks of green grass and the men, bare feet in thousand-dollar driving shoes, wore watches worth as much as a house.

  She’d always been a scrupulous rule follower of a person. She had always told the waiter if he left something off the bill. She had never cut in a line or gone through a red light, even at one in the morning. Have a headache? Ruthie has aspirin in her purse. A sweating glass? Ruthie will run for the coaster. Heartbreak? Ruthie will bring the wine and the tissues.

  Now she was a door off its hinges, and she was ready for the gust of wind that would blow her free. She wanted the bang. The crash. Then a whole lot of open air rushing in.

  Would it be a crime, exactly, to take a watch thrown away into a junk pile?

  She could walk in the door of her own house and write a check to Mike and the house would be hers. With no rent, only taxes and upkeep, maybe she could cobble together a freelance life, make it through the years before Jem left for college.

  Didn’t she need it? Didn’t she deserve it? Didn’t Jem?

  A sudden, lucid thought: She was thinking like a criminal. Because wasn’t justification the second step, after desire?

  31

  LOGISTICS.

  How does one broker an expensive watch? The best option would be privately, through some sort of watch dealer to the extravagantly rich. She would need an introduction. When she ran through a list of all the wealthiest people she knew, they were hardly the people she could ask—Mindy, Helen, Carole.

  She was still mulling the question when she drove to the farm stand the next day to pick up Jem. Joe Bloom cruised the aisles.

  She could ask Joe. Discreetly. If he didn’t run at the sight of her. She collided with the fact that living in a small town had enormous disadvantages if you turned into the kind of person who humiliated herself at parties.

  She owed him an apology. A graceful one. If she could somehow be the kind of person who could deliver a short apology, a crisp, heartfelt sentiment. She must not overexplain, she must not dribble, she must not abase herself.

  She spied on him as he examined the eggplants and peppers. Maybe it was a sign of something beyond caponata; she knew he liked Italian food. Surrounded by local tomatoes, he would be in a tolerant mood.

  She caught up as he stood palming two small cantaloupes. She came from behind, hoping to catch him by surprise; she needed the advantage. “You need either a handbasket or a brassiere.”

  “A handbasket,” he said. “Isn’t that what you go to hell in?”

  She lifted one out of his hands and sniffed it, then the other. “These aren’t ripe.”

  “Actually, I was looking for cherries. I got waylaid by a cantaloupe.”

  “You can’t trust a mel
on.”

  “A most untrustworthy fruit.”

  “Those aren’t local, either. Local is usually to the right.”

  Joe looked over. “Zucchini, cherries, and lavender.”

  “In California, they’d put it on a pizza.”

  “But we’re New Yorkers, so we stick with mozzarella.”

  They were lobbing the ball back and forth, but there was no glee in it, only a desperate need to be genial. “Speaking of hell…um, the other night. All that. I didn’t mean to be a rude bitch. Or yell at nice people. Which would include you. I’m sorry. I…”

  “I get it. You just found out about your ex and Adeline. Totally normal behavior.”

  “I chopped down a tree.”

  He shrugged. “You did a little landscaping.”

  “Here’s the thing.” Hands clasped, shoulders up around her ears. “I’m not usually a maniac. I don’t really get angry. I just get sort of circular. Thinking, oh God, this is probably my fault for not doing whatever, and then, I don’t know, I talk myself out of anger because it rarely gets the right results, does it? So it just sort of dissipates instead of getting expelled. I mean, not expelled in a school way, in a purgative way.” She was dribbling. “Anyway, I’m sorry for making fun of you with the gorgeous Sancerre thing.”

  “You used to get angry,” Joe said, and she remembered again dumping wine on his lap. “Look, I think everybody understood. Adeline felt terrible.”

  “Yes, I’m sure her suffering is worse than mine. Dinner party disruptions can be so tiresome.”

  “She’s used to getting her way, but that’s not entirely her fault,” Joe said in a gentle way that almost—but not quite—felt like a rebuke. “The world works for people like Adeline. They all get their way all the time. I would imagine it’s difficult not to get used to that. Anyway, the point is, you don’t owe anyone an apology. Just show me the cherries.”

  He ambled behind her as she snapped open a paper bag and began to pick through the cherries. Because she was still apologetic, she examined each one.