Apron Anxiety (11 page)

We decide I’ll join a gym for some sense of community and because exercise has always been my best release. And I’ll follow up on a few potential new friends that have been recommended to me by trustworthy people from New York and Los Angeles. We contemplate befriending our perky neighbors, but with their freshly trimmed bangs and cutesy toddlers, I doubt they’ll give me the spark I need. And lastly, we agree that I’ll visit him more often at the restaurant. He wants me to feel like it’s as much mine as it is his. “Every hour I put in there is for our future,” he says, not for the first time. As far as my writing career, or lack of, he reminds me that I’ve worked hard my whole life, and not to be so tough on myself; a little break isn’t so horrible. He wipes both of our sniffles away (because whenever I
cry, he cries, too) and we watch an episode of
Sons of Anarchy
, all curled up.

The next day, I join the local gym. In New York, I was going to a spin lover’s candy shop called Soul Cycle, where bikes have the sweat of Brooke Shields, Renée Zellweger, and Kelly Ripa. It’s the Rolls-Royce of workouts, way out of my league, but I got to go for free because I wrote a big story about them. I would always leave class feeling fit, refreshed, and unstoppable, not to mention two pounds lighter. Returning to spinning, even at a not-so-glam gym, would be the perfect solution.

Despite my newfound optimism, I fight back tears throughout my first class. The music has no beat (a mix of Shania Twain and show tunes!) and nothing, not even the flabby naked, unwaxed women in the locker room, feel vaguely familiar or okay. Determined to make it work, I offer to teach the damn class myself. I present my credentials to the seventy-something manager and his rusty whistle, explaining that I’ve had the world’s best spin instructors in New York and Los Angeles, that the super-cool DJ Sam Ronson has made me an original workout mix, and that I could maybe even get the editor in chief of
Allure
magazine, Linda Wells, another spinning devotee, to vouch for my riding style, if that’s what it takes.

Nobody cares. Condé Nast name-dropping has no place on Capitol Hill. Coach says I’m not experienced enough and coldly dismisses me like I’m some Jehovah’s Witness ringing the doorbell at dinnertime. I walk away feeling undignified. No soul. No cycle.

“You would die if you saw me right now,” I say on the phone with my sister, driving away with one hand on the steering wheel, one to my ear, talking illegally. “I’m wearing crotch-padded spandex, with like, a big lump in my throat, because I
just got dissed by an old man who looks like John McCain in warm-up pants.”

“What the hell?” She laughs, muffling her voice at work. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Fine. Ya gotta laugh, right?” I say, hanging up quickly because there’s a cop about to pull me over.

I go on a Ferris wheel of “friend dates.” The women are either profoundly conservative or profoundly crazy. One covers her ears every time I say a swear word; the next one tells me, like it’s nothing, how she (perhaps the whitest girl in America) wears a big, black dildo on her married CEO boyfriend, cordially inviting me to join in.
Check, please
. They’re all either painfully boring or on the bad side of weird, and I feel ridiculous having these first-day-of-college-like conversations when, in the real world, I have the most amazing and hilarious friends ever, whether they’re ER nurses in Western Massachusetts or man-eaters in Lower Manhattan. Our neighbors also keep trying to chitchat, introducing me to their depressingly adorable kids, and asking if Ryan Reynolds is as dreamy in real life (duh …), but I have convinced myself that they’re just too ordinary to ever understand me.

“Still no friends?” Shelley says with an evil smirk from Los Angeles, where she’s now representing celebrities and seeing Leonardo DiCaprio’s life coach.

“Shellz, the last girl I was ‘set up with’ said she was thinking about leaving her husband … which I thought sounded promising … but it was because they couldn’t agree on health-care reform!”

“Yikes. Come to L.A. It’s Oscars season.”

In the next few weeks, I try to visit Chef more often at the restaurant. His partners and I don’t quite mesh—it seems we’re in constant competition for his attention. They think I’m
a prima donna, coasting in with my big shades and flowery sundresses. If only they knew that I once worked eighty-hour weeks, too, also all stressed out and exasperated by my job. But no one in D.C. knows that girl. “Just another day at the beach,” they say to me. Or, “Must be tough being you.” I try not to be oversensitive, but their ridicule is not very pleasant.

Even more belittling, I don’t have any friends to bring along when I go there, so I end up eating alone, pretending to catch up on e-mails, trying not to look too pathetic. I once tried to help at the cash register, but I screwed it all up, then hid in the car until closing. Chef thought it was cute, but I felt like an idiot.

One afternoon, I show up at the restaurant wearing a tight white pencil skirt and carrying my black leather portfolio. I tell Chef I have five minutes to kill before a big meeting with
Capitol File
magazine. I make sure his partners overhear this. Of course, I am lying. I have nowhere to be. I never have anywhere to be. All my plans are fake. He kisses me all over, wishes me good luck, and then I leave the restaurant to go to a bar by myself.

Belga Café is the only spot in town I hate a little less than the others, so that’s where I go for my faux power lunches and imaginary creative consultations. Really, I’m drinking huge beers for breakfast, reading a four-dollar
New York Post
, and trying to connect with whomever is the least creepy person also hiding from life like me. I’m not proud of lying to Chef, but I’m sick of looking like such a loser. And anyway, part of me thinks that he knows I’m fibbing but is too sweet to say anything.

Another time, I surprise Chef at work for a quick hello and to borrow his computer because our Internet isn’t working. He’s happy to see me, puts everything on hold, and gets me situated with a salad and Diet Coke downstairs in his office. I am not snooping, but his e-mail happens to be open, and
staring me in the face is an X-rated fan letter from a
Playboy
playmate, and a few flirtatious e-mails from prominent women around Washington. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. I knew he had admirers (after all, I was once one of them), but I naturally assumed they were obese or incarcerated. Chef hadn’t responded to any of these hussies, as far as I could tell, but I still yank him from the kitchen and start crying hysterically in front of all his customers and colleagues.

These days, it seems he spends as much time behind the grill as he does talking me off the ledge. Miraculously, he never loses his patience. The worst he’ll say is that my attitude is “unbecoming,” which for some reason always cracks me up and snaps me right out of my mood. Such a rigid word from such a rugged guy.

We do still get out of town now and then. We travel to Miami for the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, a promlike weekend for the country’s most famous foodie insiders. I am so excited that I buy us shopping bags of clothes, sunglasses, and swimsuits. (If nothing else, I’m definitely Chef’s stylist.) It’s an intense and intimidating crowd, with cliquey food writers and chefs that he’s only observed from afar. We share most of it with our eyes wide open, hand in hand.

At the end of the long weekend, it is announced that Chef has won a big cooking award and I scream at the top of my lungs!
My boyfriend ate the bear
. He makes a short speech, thanking the Boys, his partners, and publicists, but he doesn’t mention me. I try to let it roll off my shoulders, but not before mentioning it to him.

“Hey, you forgot to thank me!”

“It’s not always about you, Alyssa, jeez. Are you really doing this right now?”

He’s never been that sharp with me before, and I assure him that the issue is dropped.

Instead of sulking, I focus on celebrating. After all, I may not know how to patty a burger but I do know how to party. Not long after we arrive at the rooftop gathering in his honor, however, I find myself slouching next to Chef, uncomfortable in my own skin, as everyone bonds over blends of meat, Michelin stars, and the technicalities of deep-fried bubble gum. “That actually sounds yummy,” I say, trying to participate. “Ew, babe, really?” shuns Chef, making me feel gauche.

As the alcohol flows, a famously unfiltered female chef says in front of all the jerks who are already pushing me aside for a piece of my guy, “So you’re the
People
magazine reporter who stalked him!” Thank God I have a sense a humor, but it was really tested at that moment. I spend the rest of the night non-conversational, afraid to say the wrong thing, and freaked out by the whole environment, including Chef, who’s having a grand time.

A few weeks after the festival, one of Chef’s partners plants a seed that it’s unprofessional to bring one’s girlfriend everywhere. He shrugs it off, but in the days to come, there’s a shift imperceptible to anyone but me. Sometimes he still includes me … other times I feel forgotten about. Deep down, I think I let him down at the food festival because I couldn’t hold my own. That weekend turned me into a real drag. No one from my old life would believe it.

He’s traveling almost weekly now—from Anaheim to Amsterdam and everywhere in between. It’s mental motion sickness, especially with his disorganized ways—uncharged cell phone, expired driver’s license, missing house keys, disappearing wallet, unflossed teeth, and untied Vans. I try to see the
charm in it all, as I always have in the past (
who wants an uptight guy?
), but for the trips where I’m excluded, or worse, the ones he forgets to tell me about, my tolerance is diminishing. “I am not some 1950s housewife, whose only purpose is to find the fucking passport,” I say, dumping his entire dresser on the ground.

I use that same argument to explain why our fridge is always empty, save deli meat and beer, and why, on the counter, there’s only a sad butcher block with a few slices of bread, a box of stale granola, and two avocados encircled by fruit flies. Despite a full year of dating a chef, I remain sanctimoniously kitchen-phobic. He comes home exhausted and famished, and I, having done less than nothing all day, have no excuse for our sandwich-only fare. For my own meals during the day, I eat peanut butter on a spoon, cheese and crackers, green olives, rocky road ice cream, or whatever is around. Sometimes I just drink. I don’t tell my mom how disenchanted by D.C. I am, but when she says “Why don’t you give cooking or baking a shot, hon? It’s always been so therapeutic for me,” I know she’s picked up on my mounting sense of instability. I tell her she sounds crazy, while inhaling dozens of dried apricots for dinner.

I wish I could say that I refrain from my domestic duties out of some
real
sense of feminism or gender equality, and maybe subconsciously I do. But more likely, I’m just depressed. I can barely buy milk without a meltdown. Chef goes easy on me as far as my culinary inadequacies—he’s much more worried about my perpetual tears than my prep table. We do have a good laugh when I buy him cheeseburger-flavored Pringles, though, thinking it’s some heroic act. “Never buy cheeseburger-flavored anything for someone who makes cheeseburgers allll daaay looong!” he sings, wrestling me to the ground with one of his famous tickle attacks.

He rarely cooks for us at all anymore. There’s no time for
such luxuries. In opening a second restaurant, his hours get even worse. He comes home so physically drained that all he wants is a long kiss, a bag of chips, some juice, and for me not to be upset about anything. It kills me to see him so weak and bleary-eyed. The guy has more joie de vivre in his pinky finger than most people in their entire life span, and here he is struggling to stick a straw in a Capri Sun.

“What would you say if I gave you a list of five things I want my wife to cook for me one day?” he says in the middle of the night, over some soggy cereal.

“Um, was that a proposal?” I say, jokingly, deflecting the issue.

“One day, babe, one day.” He smiles, mischievously.

“Remember, rubies, not diamonds,” I remind him, reiterating my preference for my birthstone, rather than the typical rock.

“Okay, but you remember: roast chicken, not Cheerios!”

WE DON’T
have too many Sundays together after he starts working at his second place. And he comes home so late now, after closing the restaurant and getting through his paperwork at the office, that I can barely stay awake for snuggle and TV time.

Nor can he accompany me to
anything
at all. I visit New York about once a month, and unless it’s tied to a TV appearance, Chef doesn’t come along. So, I go to most family birthdays and friends’ weddings alone, leaving some worried that I’m robbing myself of a normal life. You can’t truly respect the grind of the restaurant business until you’ve lived with it. That said, it is rough. If I had my New York life, that would be another story. It would be so much fun finishing up our grueling days around the same ungodly hour, collapsing on top of each other with hot pizza and cold beer, too tired to talk, though not
too tired to sleep without sex. Now, I just stare out a window and wait all day.