Life From Scratch (2 page)

I collect my drink, and we follow the hostess to a seat near the window. The rain is coming down harder now, splattering the glass so it’s impossible to see anything more than taxi headlights and glowing storefront signs. I play with the corner of my menu cover. With Adam, we skipped talking until we had both had a chance to glance through the options, but Rob doesn’t even crack the cover before launching into a series of get-to-know-you questions, the sort I had been rehearsing answers to inside my mind all afternoon while I worked out my nervous energy by learning how to julienne carrots.

“So, Rachel,” he begins, “it was so loud at the bar the other night, I missed hearing if you were actually from
New York
.”

“I’m not,” I answer, “I’m from
New Jersey
. But I sort of knew that I wanted to end up here after graduate school.”

“Oh, where did you go to graduate school?”

“Yale,” I say, hoping that this doesn’t sound pretentious. “School of art for graphic design.”

“That’s sort of cool. So you’re like an artist?”

“Like an artist,” I repeat.

“I’m from here. My family still lives off
Riverside Drive
.”

I try not to let my scorching case of real estate envy flare up. Nine months in a one-room apartment will do that to you.

“So how did you end up in
New York
?”

This was the question I was sort of dreading. I mean, I could lie and make it about my parents—both incredibly successful and respected lawyers—living in northern New Jersey and say they wanted me to be close to home like my siblings. My sister, Sarah, is a brain surgeon, married and living in
Brooklyn
with her husband, Richard, and daughter, Penelope. My brother, who could be seen by outsiders as the black sheep of the family because he never holds down a job longer than a few months, has taken his multitude of talents over the bridge as well and lives close to Park Slope. But honestly, my first impulse would have been to move as far away as possible. It’s hard to be surrounded by that much greatness. It makes you allergic to failure. Sans epi-pen.

The reality is that I ended up in
New York
due to my ex-husband and his job. And maybe getting this fact out in the open is the best way to deal with the big “D.” I wish he was staring down at the sashimi menu rather than inquisitively studying my face and cleavage.

“My ex-husband. He got a job here so we moved here after
Connecticut
.”

“So you’ve been married before? Wow … divorce … how did that happen?”

I’m not really itching to share my whole marriage saga with the first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life, especially not the part where I talk about how he was so in love with his career that he essentially was having an affair with his blackberry.
 
My ex-husband, Adam, trying to make partner, spent more time at the office than he did at home, choosing contracts over contact; the job over me. Over time, it became clear that we had differing views on money, despite what he led me to believe before we walked down the aisle. I wanted to be comfortable. Adam, who came from a wealthy New York family, worked to not only keep up with the Joneses, but to pass them in owning all the good electronic toys and going on the most exclusive vacations.
 
You could say that we had a lack of shared goals.

 
I glance at the laminated picture of sushi standing upright on the table, teaching customers the visual difference between the toro and maguro tuna rolls.
 

“Oh, you know,” I shrug, “50% of the population gets it wrong the first time.”

“Huh … 50%. I didn’t realize the number was that high.”

“I think it’s over 50%, actually,” I say.
 
“But luckily seventh marriages go the distance about 90% of the time.”

“Those are good odds for the married-seven-times set.
 
I wonder how polygamy rolls into that statistic.
 
I mean, if your seventh marriage is at the same time as your other six,” he points out.

“I’m guessing you were never married before?” I ask.

“Nope, I love a good first date, but I’ve never met the right person.”

I plaster a smile back on my face and take a deep breath. I wonder if it’s time yet to take a break in the small talk and see what sort of maki constitutes hip in
Soho
. It has been so long since I’ve eaten in a restaurant. But Rob Zuckerman has more questions and apparently, a non-grumbling stomach.

“Where do you live in the city? Wait, you’re in the city, right?
 
Not over the bridge or anything,” he jokes.

“I’m in Murray Hill.”

“Do you have any roommates?” Rob asks.

“Actually, it’s a studio. It’s small, but it’s a great neighborhood, all things considered. I mean, I’m lucky I found it. And it’s close to my best friend so I can walk to her place. Where are you?”

“
Gramercy
Park
,” he tells me.

My old neighborhood, and still Adam’s neighborhood. My ex-husband bought me out of my share of our condo which was how I was able to take off this year from my old job designing pamphlets for the New York City Library. My intention was to find another job, but that hasn’t happened and savings are dwindling down, it seems more and more likely that I’ll return to making materials to accompany exhibits. I’m lucky I had the year to sit in my sweatpants and try out every self-help suggestion Oprah passed my way.

“That’s a great neighborhood,” I offer.

“I’m on the board at my co-op. It is crazy how many people want to move into our building. I feel like my life is one long series of making rejection phone calls. Seriously, there are people applying who have kids. And pets!”

I smile wanly again, wondering if I would make the cut in his building. Job-less, unmarried me. At least Adam was too busy with work to ever make a baby with me. And I have my allergy to cats going for me.

“So, Rachel, what do you want to get?” he asks, even though we still haven’t opened the menu.

I throw open the cover and quickly scan my choices. I am hungry for everything. I want to taste their teriyaki sauce and see how they’ve worked yuzu into a salad dressing and sample their tempura batter. I want to sit up at the sushi bar and chat with the chef about different fillets of raw fish. And I want to be on a date with a guy who wants to hear the chef’s answers too. Still, Rob Zuckerman is nice, and he’s obviously smart and successful, and he has a full head of brown hair (one cannot discount that full head of hair). So I close my menu and ask him to suggest a few things since he has obviously been here before.

“Why don’t we start with a bowl of edamame and an order of tatsuta-age chicken?”

“I made that this week,” I exclaim, excited that he’d pick that off the menu since I was eyeing it. “I’m learning how to cook and it’s actually really easy.
 
You just marinate the chicken and then coat it in potato starch before you fry it.”
 
I notice that Rob is staring at me as if I’ve just started reciting the recipe in Japanese. “I can’t believe I’ve ordered it all these years when I could make it at home.”

“So, you like to cook?” he asks, quickly recovering from my blinding enthusiasm.

“I love to cook. I just started a few months ago, but it’s amazing what you can pick up from cookbooks and few Food Network shows.”

“How do you find the time?” Rob asks, motioning to a waitress that we’re ready to order some appetizers. “I eat out most nights or order in. I think the only thing in my refrigerator right now is ketchup and a few bottles of water.”

I try not to judge since that was my life as well only a year ago. While I miss my dog-earred copy of Zagats and hunting out new restaurants, I am intensely proud of my variations on a stir-fry and the salsa I make from scratch.
 
I blame my lack of cooking knowledge on my mother who unhelpfully taught me that “real women don’t scramble eggs.”

Women, such as my mother, who bring in a comfortable six-figure salary with their husband might not need to scramble their own eggs, but cooking for myself became a necessity when I studied my credit card bills closely. My year-long vacation from life was going to be cut awfully short unless I quickly learned how to make my own marinara. There were only so many packages of ramen noodles a divorcee could eat.

Rob tells the waitress our appetizer order and I slip in a request for a green tea. We both watch her walk back towards the kitchen, and I pound my brain for a topic of conversation. I had come up with so many good ideas back in my apartment. I wish I could have written them on my hand.

“Actually, I don’t even know what you do. You’re an artist?” Rob asks.

“Not exactly,” I admit. If he didn’t run screaming from the admission that I was a divorcee, perhaps he’d be equally as gracious about the fact that I’m currently job-less. “I used to work as a graphic designer for the New York Public Library, and I’ll probably return to that job, but I was taking the year to find myself. That sounds very self-helpy.”

“It actually sounds sort of nice. Like an extended vacation,” Rob admits.

I nod my head, feeling a bit more confident. I write in my blog every night which sort of makes me a writer, right? Saying you’re a writer is a very New York thing to say—sort of like how anyone living in Los Angeles can get away with calling themselves an actress, and no one calls their bluff. So I tell Rob that I’m also a writer and sure enough, he just gives a small smile and says, “Have I read anything you’ve written?”

And I merely deliver the next line every wanna-be
New York
writer feeds their first date: “Probably not. It’s just freelance stuff.”

The fact is that I read blogs long before I wrote a blog, and honestly, say what you want to about social media, but if it weren’t for blogs, I’d probably still be trapped in my marriage. There’s something about finding someone and saying, “me too” to give you the fuel to make a similar change.

I first discovered blogs when I started Googling, “divorce laws in
New York City
” (always a bad sign when your Google searches include lawyer names and mediation advice.)

I started with the divorce blogs and then worked my way backwards through the sex blogs and Internet-dating blogs until I found a woman who called herself The Dating Diva on a relationship blog titled, “Before You Put on the Little Black Dress.”

She offered all sorts of dating advice, analyzing the photographs of first-date outfits that readers sent her and telling women how to know when a guy is lying to them. I never commented or sent in my own questions; I just sat in our apartment every night like a heartbroken voyeur, devouring the words of other women who felt equally unhappy in their relationships.

And then one night, she was answering a question about a boyfriend who never apologized at the end of an argument even though the girlfriend was always forthcoming in admitting to her own foibles.

The Dating Diva
wrote:

You can’t change someone else, cookie. You can only change yourself or the way it affects you. And if you can’t honestly change the way it affects you because you’re going with your natural reaction to his lack of contrition, you need to get yourself out of that relationship. You’re never going to be happy with who he is as a person, and shoving a square peg into a round hole has never had the good makings for stable furniture that will stand the test of time.

When I read her words and applied them to my life, I ended up sitting at the computer and sobbing, knowing bone-deep what I had to do.

I closed the Dating Diva’s blog and sat there for several hours until Adam got home, thinking about whether or not our relationship could be fixed. I couldn’t change his behavior and make him leave his office in order to spend more time with me, and I couldn’t get past my loneliness and anger. It was better for both of us, I decided, to go our separate ways than for me to spend the next twenty years seething through every empty evening and for him to resent me.

The cockroach incident came a week after reading the Dating Diva’s advice, which was the end of the end.

And soon after that, I started my own blog a few weeks after moving into my new apartment, a whim one night where I signed up for a free blogging account and started posting tales of all the things I was doing to try to fill my new life. I talked about trying to mooch free yoga classes from nearby gyms and self-help books I checked out of the library.

Learning how to cook finally gave me something to write about, because I had been itching to find a direction for my blog. I didn’t want to write solely about my divorce because frankly, I thought about it twenty-four hours a day and could use a little break from obsessing. I couldn’t write about my job because I no longer had one. I had stopped going to museums and shows because ironically, I could no longer afford them even if I had all the time in the world to attend them so a blog about
Manhattan
itself was out too.

The name of my blog was already
Life from Scratch
, and food became a natural extension.
It turned out that writing about food was the perfect jumping board to discussing the rest of my life too.
If nothing interesting was happening, I could talk about how I learned to roast potatoes (the trick: put the cubed potatoes in a bag; splash in the olive oil, salt, rosemary, and garlic powder; and then shake to coat each potato evenly.)
But I could also write about the night
my best friend Arianna gave birth to her baby, Beckett, or muse about the idea of coloring my hair, and it all fit into the cozy space I created for myself, governed by my own rules.