The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (9 page)

“I’m anxious to rent this place out,” Blake says. “We’re still in the August recess, and I have to head back to my congressman’s district next week. The sooner I can secure a tenant, the better.”

“You work on the Hill?”

He nods. “Communications director.”

“For …?”

“Congressman Holmes,” he says. I stare at him blankly. “Florida’s eleventh district? Big on immigration?”

“I’m not really up to speed on the immigration debate. Sorry. Is he up for reelection or something?”

“Congressmen are
always
up for reelection.” He smiles. “But no, this is an off year. He isn’t on the ballot again until next year. But given the political climate, we’re holding a bunch of town halls on immigration reform, so I’m going to be in Tampa for most of the time between now and Labor Day. If you want the apartment, I’ll give you first dibs, but you have to let me know in the next twelve hours. After that, it’ll be available to anyone at the open house.”

I jump up from the couch and extend my hand toward Blake. “No need to wait. I’ll take it.” I grab Blake’s hand and, taking a cue from Martin Prescott, shake it firmly.

He smirks. “Okay then, Ms....”

“Sugarman.”

“Sugarman. Sweet.” He chuckles, apparently amused by his own joke, which tells me everything I need to know about this guy’s sense of humor. He lets go of my hand and gives me a sailor’s salute. “Welcome aboard,” he says. “How soon can you move in?”

“I’d like to board ASAP, if that’s okay.” Why we are speaking like sailors I do not know, but I am now participating in Blake’s awkward nautical metaphor. I sound like an idiot.

“If you can get me the paperwork by this afternoon, I can run a credit check and work on getting you in by Saturday. Cool?”

“Cool.”

He shakes my hand a final time and smiles. “Well … anchors aweigh,” he says with a wink.

Shiver me fucking timbers. What have I gotten myself into?

After two weeks of blissful peace and calm in my new apartment, I awake the Tuesday morning after Labor Day to what sounds like an earthquake rumbling over my head.

I sit straight up, my eyes cast at the ceiling.
Thump. Thump. Thump, thump, thump
!

What the …?

Thump
!

Either my landlord is back from the congressional recess, or an elephant is stomping through his living room. As someone hoping for a prolonged period of undisturbed sleep, I am kind of hoping for the latter. Also, it would be pretty cool to see a live elephant in the middle of our nation’s capital.

I collapse back onto my pillow as the thumping increases in its intensity, all of it seemingly concentrated directly above my head.

“
Shut uuuuuup
,” I groan into my pillow. But Blake (or maybe the elephant?) does not shut up, and so I let out a resigned grunt and roll out of bed—or, rather, out of AeroBed, since I no longer own a bed and cannot afford a new one. At this point, the only “furniture” in my entire apartment is this air mattress and an oversize beanbag. I’ve been scouring Craigslist and Freecycle for a dresser, but I don’t have one yet, so for now my clothes sit in the closet, in boxes, or in small piles around the periphery of the room. I’ve tried to make the place look like less of a crack den, but my progress has been minimal.

Moving out of Adam’s apartment was generally traumatic and terrible, or at least as traumatic and terrible as disentangling your life from someone else’s is bound to be. I couldn’t afford movers, and since I wasn’t bringing any furniture with me, I didn’t really need them. But I don’t own a car, so moving day involved me carrying box after box the five blocks from my old apartment to my new one, alone. Adam offered to help, saying it would give us “closure,” but I basically told him to get lost. The only closure I want at this point is the closure of a door in his face—his
and
his sometime roommate Millie’s.

The one upside to being kicked out of an apartment where I owned very little is that I brought with me only the stuff I care about: clothes, toiletries, books, and kitchen gear. I may not have a dresser, but my kitchen drawers are lined with measuring cups and mixing bowls, citrus zesters and Kugelhopf pans. Any other random crap I collected—the kind of stuff that gets shoved in a junk drawer and forgotten about—is Adam’s problem, not mine. I hope he enjoys his drawer of nonfunctional pens.

As I rub the sleep from my eyes, the
Knight Rider
theme song blares from beneath a pile of pants. My cell phone. I jump up and rummage through the stack of denim, wearing nothing but an old Cornell T-shirt with a large coffee stain down the front. For the first time, I appreciate my apartment’s few windows.

I glance at the screen on my cell phone and see a very long series of numbers. An international call. My parents.

“Hello?” I say, my voice scratchy with sleep.

“Hi, sweetie, it’s Mom. I got your e-mail. How are you?”

I sent my parents an e-mail a few days ago telling them Adam and I split up and sending them my new address. I didn’t want to bother them all the way in England over something as silly as a breakup, but I figured they’d want to know I moved. I also secretly hoped they’d send money. They didn’t.

“I’m okay. Settling into my new place and everything.”

“What happened? I thought things with you and Adam were going well.”

“Obviously not.” My tone is snarkier than I intended, but I’m tired of telling and retelling this story. The breakup has been hard enough without having to relive it twenty times. My mom never cared for Adam anyway. She was convinced he would always promote his own career at the expense of mine—that his intense ambition would inevitably stifle my own. I’m not in the mood to listen to her gloat.

“I’m so sorry, sweetie. I know how you must feel. But you are beautiful and brilliant, and anyone who can’t see that must be an idiot.”

“I’m the idiot. Or at least the one who can’t keep her mouth shut.”

“Listen—any man who is looking for a submissive wallflower is living in the wrong era!” I pull the phone from my ear to keep from going deaf. “Do you think I became a prominent and tenured professor by not speaking my mind? You are a strong woman with something to say. Some man isn’t going to muzzle you—I don’t care who he is!”

If she knew my “something to say” was not about economic theory or civil rights, but about leg of lamb and beef satay, she might change her mind. My mother has always regarded my interest in food as a trivial hobby, an unfortunate pastime I picked up from her mother-in-law. If she’s said it once, she’s said it a hundred times: “My friends and I didn’t break down all these barriers so that you could end up back in a kitchen!” So, needless to say, cooking isn’t something over which we bond.

“I appreciate that, Mom. I’m doing okay. Don’t worry.”

“Well, just so you know, your father and I talked last night, and he’s going to wire a couple hundred dollars into your checking account to see you through the move.”

“Oh, Mom, you don’t have to do that …” My halfhearted protest doesn’t convince even me. I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars I don’t have on an air mattress and new bedding.

“It’s only two hundred dollars,” she says. “We insist. Anyway, how’s work going?”

Ugh, work. Let’s see. Between my intensive apartment search and looking for free furniture, I am massively behind schedule. I’ve barely done a thing about Mark’s December conference. I’ve also run into Millie almost every day since Adam and I broke up, where I’ve been forced to engage in stilted, awkward conversations that make it clear Millie still hasn’t forgiven me and possibly never will. So that’s been a treat.

“It’s been … a little exhausting lately.”

“I could put in a call to Mark. You know we have a good professional rapport.”

“No, Mom. Things are fine. Just busy.” The last thing I want is my mother running to Mark on my behalf, especially when the most intensive work I’ve done recently has involved monitoring Adam’s Facebook relationship status (for the record, he is still “single”).

“Well, before I let you go, I’ve been meaning to tell you about a wonderful fellowship opportunity I came across. Princeton is offering an economics fellowship perfect for someone your age.”

“Princeton?”

“Yes, sweetie, Princeton. I think you should apply. I know Mark would write you a good reference, and I have some connections there as well. I’ll send you the link.”

“You can send it, but I’m not making any promises,” I say.

“What do you mean by that?”

“That I’m not really fellowship material.”

“Of course you are. Why would you say that? Of course you’re fellowship material. They’d be lucky to have someone like you.”

“Assuming I’d want to apply to a fellowship like that. Which I don’t.”

“You haven’t even seen the description of the fellowship! Just read it over. Then decide.”

I have no interest whatsoever in applying for an economics fellowship, but this is how we work, my mother and I: she suggests an activity I should pursue, I push back, and she takes my resistance as further evidence I am too naïve and inexperienced to know what is in my best interest. The pattern persists, I suppose, because up to this point, I’ve done most of the things my parents wanted me to do—everything from bassoon lessons to SAT prep to a job at a Washington think tank. The main reason I pursued those activities was because I knew I
could
do them, and doing so would be an easy way to win my parents’ approval. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been chasing their approval my whole life.

That’s part of the reason I’ve stayed at NIRD so long. I don’t love the work, but I’m smart enough to do a better-than-average job, and working at NIRD is my way of holding my parents’ attention, of making the Professors Sugarman proud of their only child. The first time Mark listed me as a coauthor on one of his policy outlooks, my parents both wrote me enthusiastic and commendatory e-mails. Two Ivy League professors! Impressed! By me! For the first time, I felt as if I might be something other than a disappointment to them. But lately, I’m finding it harder and harder to pretend my job fulfills me when it doesn’t even come close. Signing up for an economics fellowship would take me further down a path I no longer have an interest in exploring.

My mom outlines the benefits of various fellowship programs but is interrupted by a knock at my front door. “Coming!” I shout, covering the phone with my hand. “Hey, Mom? I have to run. And anyway, this call is probably costing you a fortune. But thanks for checking on me. I love you.”

“I love you too, honey. We’ll be home in a few weeks. Oh, and let’s talk soon about Thanksgiving. Your father and I can’t decide what to do.”

“Thanksgiving is more than two months away.”

“I know, but your aunt Elena wants to reenact the first Thanks giving in upstate New York, and we’re trying to get out of it. It sounds like a total nightmare. I am
not
wearing a bonnet.” She sighs. “Anyway, take care of yourself, okay? And please read up on that fellowship.”

I hang up and rush to make myself presentable. As it stands, I have not brushed my teeth and am not wearing any pants.

“Just a sec!”

I quickly throw on a pair of sweatpants, gargle some Scope, and splash some water on my face. It’s no use. I look like a bag lady.

I hustle to the front door and open it to a gust of Blake’s woodsy aftershave.

“Good morning,” he says with a smile. He adjusts his blue-and-white-striped tie and fiddles with the buttons on his gray suit jacket. He looks nice—professional. I might even say dapper, if it weren’t for the blood-soaked hunk of tissue hanging off his jawline.

“You’re back,” I say, trying to mask the disappointment in my voice. I really enjoyed those two weeks of quiet. I was also really rooting for that elephant. “I thought you’d be tanner after two weeks in Tampa.”

“With this skin? Are you kidding? If I didn’t wear SPF forty-five, I’d be red as a strawberry.” He rubs his jaw, and as he plucks off the piece of bloody tissue, his cheeks flush. “Or possibly as red as I am right now. Yikes.”

He tucks the piece of tissue into his pocket and shakes his head. “Anyway,” he says, “sorry to bother you so early, but I have a quick favor to ask.”

“What’s up?”

He holds out a set of three keys on a bright yellow plastic key chain. “Would you mind holding on to an extra set of keys for me?”

“If you want me to … sure.”

“Awesome. The immigration debate is going to get crazy this fall, so I’ll be traveling to the home district a bunch. I’d feel better knowing there was someone around to keep an eye on the place. ‘Manning the ship,’ if you will.” He smiles awkwardly as he makes air quotation marks.

More nautical references. Who is this guy, Jack fucking Sparrow?

“So … what, you want me to water your plants or something?”

He shakes his head. “No, no, nothing like that. Just, you know, if something were to happen to the house while I’m away—a pipe explodes or something—I want you to be able to let the repairman in to fix it.” He smiles. “And if you want to clean my oven, by all means …”

I smile awkwardly.