Life From Scratch (7 page)
Which only makes the store more enticing as the place to replace my wedding band. Toss out the old, bring in the new. Be good to myself.
Arianna is a patient shopper, even when she’s paying a babysitter at home $15 per hour to entertain Beckett with fuzzy toys. She points out idea after idea in the case. A ring covered in Tibetan writing, one that looks like a skull with ruby eyes, a set of three, hammered, stackable rings.
“Have you ever considered online dating?” Arianna asks.
“Not exactly,” I say, not wanting to offend in case she’s thinking about searching for a husband herself online.
“I’ve actually been on a few dates through Datey.com, and they were all really good.”
“Then why aren’t you dating those men anymore?”
Arianna chooses to ignore this question and instead reads a tiny card propped up next to a bracelet. “You could try it. You can set up an account for free and wait for someone to contact you and go on one date before you write it off.”
My eye catches on a thick cuff ring, etched with flowers and leaves and tiny designs.
“This one is beautiful,” I breathe.
And just like that, Arianna hears the love in my voice and drops all other suggestions—jewelry or online dating—coming behind me to agree that it is not only love at first sight, but it is love within the first eight minutes of stepping into a store, and therefore, it is also fate that this ring and my hand be joined.
“You just know, you just know,” she murmurs, like a sorcerer testing out a potion.
A woman who could have been a dead-ringer for Sandra Bullock unlocks the case and pulls out the ring for me. I slip off my wedding ring, taking my time twisting it over my swollen knuckle. I’ve taken it on and off before, but there is something about this time that feels momentous, as if I’m about to set it on fire or toss it into the sea, rather than place it in my pocket.
“Do you know your size?” she asks politely.
“I don’t,” I admit, extending my ring finger so she can slip on the cuff.
“Rach,” Arianna admonishes, “you can’t wear it on that finger.”
“Why not?” I ask, completely taken aback by this thought. Wasn’t the entire point to this outing to get rid of the wedding band?
“Get rid of it, not replace it,” Arianna corrects. “You can’t wear another ring on
that
finger.”
I know why not. Because everyone who only does a quick glance will think I’m taken, and I’d never have a stranger propose a date when we bump into each other in the produce department at the food store. I would look married. And maybe that
Why not
? is my
why
. Why I am willing to finally take off my wedding band—because I am merely slipping on something else in its place. Having something there means I can keep the memories even if the original ring and the husband who gave it to me aren’t there anymore.
“Absolutely not,” Arianna tells me.
“Then where will I wear it?”
“Your middle finger. It will double as a big fuck you to Adam.” Arianna explains to the sales woman, “My friend got divorced this year.”
“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
?
Location
?
New York City
.
Religious Affiliation
? Jew
ish
. 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 back 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.