Life From Scratch (4 page)
“Diamonds,” Arianna agrees.
“Or sitting on your Stainmaster carpet and opening Christmas morning gifts with your husband.
Or buying a new car with your husband.
This whole first-Christmas-after-the-divorce thing is making me very depressed.
Television commercials are like downers.”
“Imagine how single, Christian people feel,” she says, motioning to herself.
“But you have Beckett,” I point out.
“You’re not really alone in the true sense of the word.
Like I am,” I add dramatically, throwing open the front door of her building and streaming back onto the sidewalk to join the sea of shoppers making a pilgrimage to the subway stop.
“Seriously, you cannot borrow my feeling-sorry-for-myself holiday.
You can have Valentine’s Day,” Arianna offers.
Beckett squeals in agreement and points at the traffic lights.
“Let’s just walk the four blocks to 7
th
,” I tell her as I wind my scarf around my neck again, the flakes of snow still cautiously testing out the air.
Adam and I meant to have children. At least, we discussed having children before we were married, and it was a base understanding between us. When the time felt right, we would ditch the birth control and have two kids and live happily ever after. But the problem was that the time was never right.
For instance, it turns out to have a child, one has to have sex.
It really makes me cringe to admit this, but Adam and I only had sex a handful of times during the final year of our marriage. Maybe five. First and foremost, he came home so late every night that he practically turned into a stranger; and I couldn’t roll around in bed with him as if nothing were wrong.
The other thing is that I started over-thinking whether or not we’d make good parents. I had grown up with parents who were barely around, and it sort of sucked to be their child. My parents never attended dance performances or piano recitals, and they would have missed my high school graduation due to a business trip if I hadn’t gotten my favorite teacher to persuade them otherwise. My parents loved me intensely, but I wouldn’t have called them
great
parents, and I seemed doomed to repeat their mistakes, since I had no other example to follow.
Plus, Adam and I hit a point where I didn’t want to have children with
him
. I didn’t want to become what would essentially be a single parent, though it was hard to admit that to my friend, Arianna, who
is
a single parent by choice. But even she’ll tell you that if she could have found the right partner, she wouldn’t have gone about parenting alone. Still, she has always had a much stronger calling towards parenthood and, as my mother puts it, “grabs life by its balls.”
The woman who grabs life by its balls pushes her way down the subway stairs and jiggles herself gracefully through the turnstile, carefully lifting Beckett’s legs so they clear the bar.
We wait for the train next to a large group of high school students all dragging suitcases behind them.
Arianna shocked the hell out of me three years ago when she asked if I could bring her home from a doctor’s appointment, and I ended up meeting her at a fertility clinic. “What is this?” I asked, as if I was living off-the-grid in the wilderness and had never heard of in vitro fertilization.
“I’m doing intrauterine inseminations,” she told me. “With donor sperm.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked dumbly.
“To get pregnant,” she said impatiently, sitting down gingerly on a bench in the clinic lobby, as if she was scared the sperm would swim out of her body on the taxi ride back to her apartment.
“I mean, why are you trying to get pregnant?” I tried again.
“To have a baby, idiot. Listen, we’re in our thirties. Your fertility doesn’t exist forever. I want to be a parent. If I can do it this way, great. If I have to go about it another way, fine. The only thing I cannot accept is never having a child at all.”
Which, like women synchronizing their periods, made me start thinking of the world in terms of babies and fertility too. I spent the next two years helping Arianna conceive and carry a child, while becoming increasingly bitter towards Adam, who was not filling me with his very inexpensive, readily available seed. There I was, watching my friend shell out tens of thousands of dollars to become a mother while I technically could become a mother for free, but didn’t know if I’d even make a good one.
After two miscarriages, three fresh IVF transfers, four frozen IVF transfers, several months of daily Lovenox injections, a premature delivery, and a NICU stay, Arianna had Beckett, so named after the author of the most famous Godot of all times. Beckett may have been her own personal Godot, but the delay in his arrival only meant that she had built up more love for him than any one person could possibly need in their lifetime.
We jump off the train at the
79
th
Street
station, dodging the
Upper West Side
nannies returning their charges from play dates and students coming home from school with oversized packs strapped to their backs like studious camels.
79
th
Street
feels, if possible, ten degrees cooler than the packed sidewalks in Midtown.
Of course, Zales has been decorated for Christmas with the requisite boughs of holly hanging over the enormous sign announcing the store’s Christmas sale and window displays of heart-shaped sparkling jewelry.
Arianna rolls her eyes and Beckett gurgles and slaps the fabric of the baby carrier.
We forgo bagels at H&H, and instead push our way into the throng of shoppers clogging the narrow aisles of Zabar’s.
We travel up here usually once a month so Arianna can get the pickles she likes and stock up on their cream cheese spreads and coffee beans.
We hit the dairy aisle first, dropping containers of Greek yogurt and crème fraiche into our basket.
“Zabar’s makes me hungry,” Arianna announces as we pass the smoked fish counter.
I cannot think of anything more unappetizing than fish that has been pulverized into a spread.
“Seriously? Smoked fish?
What are you, a seventy-year-old man?
I understand if you said that back at the cheese counter.
Did you see the fresh pasta that was on sale?
Tri-color capelletti?”
“Their smoked sable is incredible.
Not that I need to spend twenty bucks on smoked fish at the moment, but if they were giving out free samples, I’d stand in line for hours.”
“Beckett would love that,” I comment.
I duck past a woman reading the label on a jar of lemon curd and make my way toward the baking supplies.
We stand in front of the empty space in the baking section, where cake flour would normally be stocked next to the enormous jars of active yeast and the Dutch-milled cocoa.
“Do you think the world is trying to tell me something?” I ask, shifting around bags of cornmeal and gluten-free rice flour.
“What do you mean?” Arianna asked, adding vanilla to her own basket.
“When everything is going wrong—when your husband is choosing the office over you, and you’re somewhat newly divorced, and you only have a few more months left in your savings account before you need to go back to designing pamphlets, and every store is not stocking cake flour even though you already went out to New Jersey to retrieve the stupid angel food cake pan you were given for your wedding—do you think that is the universe telling you what you should expect after you die? Is this forewarning that I am heading to hell?”
“Oh, sweetie, of course you’re going to hell.
That’s where all self-pitying drama queens go.”
Only Arianna can get away with teasing me while I’m down.
She holds up a bag of whole wheat flour, and I shake my head.
“I can’t use that to make my angel food cake.
It has to be cake flour.”
“So drop the idea of the cake, and you’ll make it some other time.”
“What other time?” I admonish.
“I’ve had the pan for months now, and I still haven’t used it.
It’s mocking me.
It’s whispering to me every night that while I may have gotten quite good at flipping over fried eggs, I will never master the art of baking.”
Cake flour—not fancy cream cheese spreads—was the
whole point
of this trek to the
Upper West Side
.
A few weeks into learning
how to cook, I took the train out to New Jersey with two empty, rolling suitcases, and I went down into my parent’s basement to retrieve all of my unused wedding gifts—gifts to celebrate my now-defunct marriage.
When Adam and I were engaged, I registered for cookware like all good brides in
New York
, even though I didn’t know how to use a roasting pan or colander. I mean, how do you admit that fact to friends and family who are so keen to buy new brides cookware? It’s practically written in the Wedding Bible: Thou shall buy brides either cookware or lingerie for their shower.
So I unwrapped box after box of beautiful William Sonoma silver pots and pans and Le Creuset enamel and silicone spatula bouquets and properly ooohed and aaahed about each gift, all the while knowing that they probably would never be used. I would have loved to have thrown Martha Stewart-inspired dinner parties with linens matching the centerpieces, but emptying a pre-cooked chicken purchased in Chelsea Market into a roasting pan seems like cheating. And though Martha went to jail for some type of stock debacle, I could not see her being down with that type of cheating and sullying her good housekeeping name.
I considered just admitting that the entire idea of learning my way around the kitchen filled me with exhaustion and ask instead for other gifts—maybe lifetime memberships to various city museums or a subscription to the American Ballet Theatre. But my non-cooking mother encouraged me to register for the cookware because people loved to buy it, imagining the couple hunkering down to some warm soup in the middle of their first winter together. She also helped me repack it in boxes after the guests departed and labeled the outside of each William Sonoma box with a black sharpie. My mother is, if nothing else, practical.
She took all the boxes back to her
New Jersey
basement under the guise that we shouldn’t use up precious
New York
storage space on wedding items.
I think my mother was a tad fearful that I might ignore all the beliefs she drilled in my head as a teenager if I had access to those gorgeous pots and pans in my kitchen.
According to my mother,
suggesting that women cook dinner rather than order in from a local restaurant is the first step in returning all of the liberties women have obtained in the last fifty years. I might as well declare myself Amish and go sew my own clothing and can green beans from my garden. “You don’t knit your own sweaters, Rachel,” my mother was fond of saying. “So why do you want to cook your own meals? Let Diane Von Furstenberg make your tops and let Hunan Chow make your dinner. You have more important things to do than housework, and it’s just food.”
Except that, unlike her, in the few months leading up to the trek out to
New Jersey
to pick up my kitchenware, I really didn’t have more important things to do.
It’s not like Adam and I literally
never
ate a meal at home. We had cereal for breakfast, and I was fantastic at boiling up ramen noodles. But once I crossed the threshold of three or more ingredients, once the directions weren’t written on the outside of a package, I sort of tossed the idea of preparing the meal back on the figurative shelf.
Through most of our marriage, I didn’t think Adam cared. He liked my mother’s spirit and complimented her when she ordered Thanksgiving dinner from his favorite caterer. And
he
certainly wasn’t doing any cooking since he rarely got home before
But it was a throwaway thought he spat out during one of our final conversations while we waited for our lawyers to divvy up our possessions that gave me pause.
“You’ve never been supportive,” he said.
I couldn’t think of a way I could have been
more
supportive of his work at the office unless I’d offered to deliver his subpoenas.
So that left showing support of him at home, which conjured up images of wifely duties I should have been performing instead of watching television.
Of meals unprepared and shirts un-ironed and all of the things my mother had drilled into my head
not
to do for a man.