Recipe for Disaster (5 page)
“And Carl pulled something from the cellar that is older than us.”
“Damn them.” Carl, Caroline’s better half, is a pretty serious wine guy, and when he pulls something from the cellar, you better sit up and take notice.
“I know. They’re insidious. I’ll fetch you at five thirty.”
When Hedy says she will fetch me, what she means is that her driver will come fetch me. Hedy shouldn’t drive. As one of the top interior designers in the city, she spends more than half her life in the car, and all of her life on the phone. After six expensive fender benders and four talking-on-her-phone tickets (that she couldn’t flirt her way out of, of the ten times she was actually pulled over), she finally gave up and hired Walter, an elegant man of indeterminate age, who squires her around in a massive Lincoln Navigator. And it certainly helps on nights like this, when you have a friend with really good wine way out in the burbs. Saves us a fortune in taxis, and no one has to miss out on the vino to be the designated driver.
I finish the grout, making one final pass over the tiles with a huge damp sponge. Barely a cup of leftover grout in the bottom of the bucket, much to my satisfaction. Some people are math savants, or piano savants; I’m a bucket savant. I can eyeball the perfect amount of adhesive, grout, Spackle, cement, paint, drywall mud, mortar, anything that either comes in a bucket or gets mixed in a bucket; I’m usually right on the money. Grant can measure a precise amount of salt or herbs in his palm, from an eighth of a teaspoon to a full quarter cup, and yes, I have tested him. I’m that way with building materials.
My stomach growls, and I wash my hands and grab my phone. The local Al’s Beef delivers, and I’m feeling like I’ve earned it. By the time my “Big Al, sweet peppers, dipped” with a large fries, extra ketchup, extra napkins arrives, I’ve cleaned up the grouting supplies. Thank god for the exertion of work, otherwise, with my appetite, I’d be twice my size. I’m built like a German peasant, all muscular legs and broad shoulders, wide hips and big boobs. And while 180 is certainly not an insignificant weight for a girl who just barely hits five foot five, I’m solid, not squishy. My doctor tells me that she’d love me closer to 150 to 155 for my build, but I’m healthy as a horse, and my body does most of what I ask of it without too much trouble. I know that when I can’t do the labor anymore I will have to rethink my appetite, but for now, youngish and active, I pretty much eat what I want, and burn it off on the job.
Grant loves that I eat. He says it was the first thing he noticed about me. I try to take this as a compliment, ignoring that I might have preferred that he notice my sparkling hazel eyes, or my porcelain skin bespattered with fetching freckles, or my beautiful smile. But I’ll take it. I’m frankly glad he noticed me at all. My looks, perhaps one tiny notch above plain, and comfortably in the arena polite people call handsome or attractive or interesting but never beautiful, skipped two generations. I look exactly like my great-grandmother Anneliene.
Both my mom, Anneliese, and Grand-mère Annelyn were stunning beauties, with willow-lithe frames; blond, blue-eyed sirens with quiet voices, light tread, and delicate features. I was a squat little tank of a girl from the day I was born, with a voice like Cathy Moriarty after a bender, thick, wavy dark red hair with cowlicks that tended toward frizz, and a step like a baby elephant. I was enormously disappointing to both of them. My unnamed and unknown-to-me father was, according to Grand-mère, gone from my mother’s life and the city before they even knew I was on the way. There was always an implication that he had been in town for business temporarily, eventually finished the job, and likely gone back to a wife and kids, but that sense was never officially confirmed by either Grand-mère or my mother, and frankly, I couldn’t care less. My relationship with my mother is proof that blood doesn’t make someone family. Her difficult pregnancy and the first year of my life, which kept her tied to the house and off the dating market from the prime ages of twenty to twenty-two, were an offense I was never able to redeem. As soon as I was walking and taking solid food, she put all of her focus into finding a man to take her away from the tragic turn her life had taken.
For my entire childhood, Anneliese jumped from husband to boyfriend to husband, sometimes hers, sometimes other people’s, in parts distant from Chicago. Usually warmer climes and occasionally glamorously abroad, and when the husbands or lovers would leave her, or she them, when they would break her spell and go back to their lives or their wives, she would return home for a short time to Grand-mère’s care and my company. Long enough to sigh over the state of my hair and clothes, my choice of playmates or lack thereof, my powerful appetite, and the baby fat that never fully melted. Anywhere from six weeks to six months, never more, and she was off on her next romantic adventure, postcards and odd occasional gifts to follow.
I never thought Grand-mère was one for sentimentality, but when she died I found a box in her basement, all of the trinkets my mother had sent me over the years. The Russian nesting dolls and Turkish slippers, the embroidered dress from Greece and the pale pink beret from Paris. The tiny little cowboy boots from Brazil, and half a dozen dolls, each in some sort of traditional garb. The box is in my storage unit; I don’t really want the stuff, but somehow can’t bring myself to throw it away.
On one of her jaunts at home, when I was thirteen, she met Joe, who had been dispatched when Grand-mère’s usual handyman wasn’t available to fix the garage door. He was tall, blandly Midwestern handsome, unassuming. He was no match for my mother, who took to him, wooed him, won him, and within a month they were married. A part of me thinks that it was her way of trying to actually give me something that resembled a family life, her sacrifice for me. Or maybe she remembered Grand-mère’s unquenchable need for perfection from her when she was a teenager and wanted to protect me the smallest bit. I want to believe she did one thing for me besides the accident of my birth.
The three years they were together were almost normal. We lived in Joe’s tidy little house, my mother and I circled each other cautiously, like strangers do, but at least she wasn’t mean and dismissive like Grand-mère, just oddly distant. And she required a tremendous amount of rest. I think being beautiful must be exhausting. I spent most of my time hanging out with Joe in his garage workshop, watching him build furniture while she took long baths and longer naps, and indulged in a daily routine of personal care and improvement that took no fewer than four hours. She slept every day till nearly noon, in the bedroom she kept as cold as a tomb with heavy blackout curtains and a sleep mask for good measure. She would start her day with a long bath, and break her fast with hot water and lemon, a single piece of dry toast, maybe some yogurt. The afternoon was usually devoted to personal upkeep, which was the closest thing she ever had to a job. She gave herself manicures twice a week and pedicures once a week. Weekly facials and deep hair-conditioning treatments. An hour of stretching exercises and calisthenics every day without fail. I always thought it was strange that by the time she finished applying lotions and potions and perfect makeup, it was nearly time for her to meticulously begin reversing the process.
Joe was a contractor by trade, but a master cabinetmaker and furniture designer by nature, and his pieces were stunning, most of them in the Arts and Crafts or Prairie mode, simple functional designs in beautiful woods. He would let me meet him at job sites; I would work on homework in the trailer, and then follow him around and learn about his work. When it became clear that my mother couldn’t cook to save her life, or ours, and the constant restaurant meals were going to bankrupt him, he bought a copy of
Joy of Cooking
at a yard sale and, after a long day at work, would put together simple meals for us, or pick up takeout. This was mostly for the two of us; Anneliese, like Grand-mère, was entirely indifferent to food, and would pick at Joe’s meals, or skip them entirely in favor of a small salad dressed with lemon or cider vinegar and no oil or salt.
My mom disappeared one Sunday night shortly after my sixteenth birthday. We came home from a long day at his latest project, covered nearly head to toe with dust from my first experience with plaster and lath walls. We had a huge bag of Chinese food to celebrate my new skill, but when we opened the door, the house was dark and quiet and there was a short note on the kitchen counter for Joe that I wasn’t allowed to read.
Joe and I simply didn’t discuss it at all for three months. We just worked in the garage, and ate a lot of pizza. He brought home pieces of furniture he found in alleys or from job sites and taught me to strip off old paint and do beautiful lustrous stained finishes and limed waxes and the meticulous process known as French polishing. He taught me how to repair wobbly chair legs, to fix wonky drawers. We built a few pieces from scratch, including the Arts and Crafts–style library table I use as a desk to this day. It was strangely some of the best times of my childhood, just Joe and me, school something to get through so I could work with him, learn something new. No tiptoeing around the house or seeing the resignation in my mother’s face that I would never become what she wanted or needed. Had it not been for the sadness that lurked beneath the surface of Joe’s brave face, it would have been the happiest time of my life. I tried to keep his spirits up, to make silly jokes or ask lots of questions when we were working so that he could focus his energy on explaining things, on being a teacher instead of a left and bereft man.
But when the divorce papers arrived unceremoniously in the mail with a Nevada zip code, we had a heart-to-heart. Did I want to stay? I did. Did he want me to stay? He did. Was I allowed to stay? Nope. Mom’s custody request was clear; she reasserted her custodial rights, and I was to stay with Grand-mère till her return. Joe and I knew that there was no way to fight it, no money for lawyers, and even if there were, no law to back us up. Joe held my shoulders tightly and looked deep into my eyes, holding back his tears, and told me that once I was eighteen I could do as I chose, and he would always be there for me.
So Grand-mère took me back. I was resigned. I followed her rules, and tried to keep my hair neat and my clothes unspoiled and my manners as ladylike as I could stand. I worked like a dog to finish high school a year early, and spent as much time with Joe as I could on the weekends. Grand-mère reluctantly offered to send me to college, but only if I lived at home with her, since she thought of college as a hotbed of drinking, drugs, and sex, none of which were appropriate for a young lady of breeding. But she acknowledged that with my looks and manners, marriage prospects were going to be minimal, so some sort of vocation was in order. In her opinion, that should have been some sort of secretarial work or anything in an office where I might meet a man to support me. Joe also offered to send me to college, but could only afford it if I didn’t mind living with him, and promised to fix up his basement for me with a separate entrance so that I would have some privacy and independence for the drinking and drugs and sex he didn’t want to know about, but figured were unavoidable in college.
You can imagine which option I took. The day I turned eighteen I packed my few belongings and moved back to Joe’s little house, where he had created a refuge for me in half of his basement. A small bedroom, a bathroom, and a sitting room with a corner desk. He even took an old Hoosier cabinet and retrofitted it with a small dorm-sized fridge, a microwave, a single-burner hot plate, and a coffeemaker. It was like a mini kitchen, and one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. It’s still in my storage unit, waiting for a useful life someday in a future guest suite.
Joe and I lived easily together; separate enough for privacy, but still sharing meals and garage projects with regularity. I finished college in three years, having never really gotten into drugs or drinking, and limiting sex to a series of perfectly normal boring boyfriends and boyfriend facsimiles, acutely aware of how expensive my schooling was for Joe despite my work-study jobs, and not wanting to extend it just for the sake of parties and play. I got a scholarship for grad school and did a master’s in architecture in another three years, apprenticing with Joe on vacations and weekends. When I graduated we worked together side by side until he retired, and then I got the job with MacMurphy. Joe died of a heart attack a year later, when I was twenty-five, leaving me his sole heir. I lived in his house until I moved in with Grant, but when I look around this building, I know he approves of why I sold it and what it will become. He would have loved this place, and I hate that he isn’t here to see it, to work on it with me. And I suddenly know something else. He’d never approve of how long I’ve stayed at MacMurphy, of how I let them treat me. He’d have pushed me to go out on my own, just the way Grant is doing. I wish they had met. They have so many of the same tender qualities. The only two men in my life I’ve ever believed in, who believe in me. Of course, Joe would also have lectured me about how I’d have to tamp down some of my less flattering personality issues before taking that leap. “
There’s a difference between honest and asshole, Anneke
,” he said to me once after I’d casually informed one of our clients that their idea for creating a master suite in their dank basement with the low ceilings was simply stupid. “
Everything is in the delivery. It isn’t that you’re wrong, it’s that you give your opinions as if they are gospel, and in a tone that implies that someone else’s opinions are wrong, instead of just different from yours
.”
There is a part of me that knows that one of the major reasons I am hesitant to strike out independently is that knowledge, that I would have to be the face and voice of my own business, that when everything is on my shoulders, I would have to watch everything about how I behave. A large part of me wonders if I would even be capable, if I could carry it all and keep my cool. Joe taught me a lot, but gracefulness wasn’t in his wheelhouse, and I was pretty well broken in that arena by the time he even met me.
