Life From Scratch (11 page)

Hearing my blog, my writing, described this way makes me blush. I bury my hand back in the cookie bag, trying to make myself busy searching the Milano crumbs.

“I didn’t know anyone was reading,” I say, again, for the forty-first time.

“That’s why you should have loaded this software on your blog ages ago. I
told
you that people were reading.”

“How many do you think there are in all?” I question, hitting refresh again.

“You’ll know in a few days. Let it run for a bit, and you’ll see a trend in how many visitors you get on average.”

“But how do I know which one is Gael? If any of them are Gael? There are too many from
New York
to know.”

“I thought of that too,” Arianna says, suddenly remembering the second part of her plan. “You need to create a fake site . . . well, not a fake site . . . a real site but one you’ll only use for bait. Load the Sitestalker stuff on it. Make the site something about ideas for future dinner parties. Then send a link to Gael making it sound as if you’re sending the url out to a bunch of people, but only send it to him. When he clicks over, you’ll be able to see his IP address.”

“You’re a genius,” I tell her. “A complete genius.”

“And all of my brilliance is wasted on hem lines,” she laments. “Anything to help a girl out as she dives back into the dating pool.”

“Do you think Gael’s reading my blog?” I ask, the other question that has been returning all night. I check my stats one last time then log off on her computer.

“There’s only one way to know,” Arianna tells me in her best secret agent voice. “Set up a sting.”

I know you're not supposed to say this, you're not even supposed to think it, and anyone in their right mind would whisper it into a pillow rather than broadcast it to the world via their blog, but here goes: I don't like Park Slope.

There.

I said it.

Now that those of my readers who are deeply offended by that admission are gone, clicked away to go write another ode to the neighborhood, I can finish the thought. I don't like the tempo of Park Slope.

It's like
Brooklyn
is pudding to
Manhattan
's ice cream.
Manhattan
has bite, it has substance. It holds in your mouth.
Brooklyn
? It sort of slides around on your tongue. There's a little flavor, and then it's gone. It doesn't even change with the temperature.
Brooklyn
is always
Brooklyn
, just like pudding is always pudding.

But
Manhattan
? It's an overly sparkle-lighted mess in the winter and it’s sweat stains under your arms in the summer and it's dodging the weirdoes in
Central Park
in autumn and spring. It's three scoops of Heath bar crunch one day and a pool of ice cream soup another and . . . well . . . I like it like that.

I am thinking about Park Slope because I have to go out there today to meet my sister. She and I will undoubtedly have the Manhattan/Brooklyn argument, so I like to warm up here, get my verbal boxing gloves on so to speak. Can you believe two people I'm related to live over the bridge? You would think that we'd get an equal portion of the common-sense gene, but unfortunately, that gene seems to have skipped my parent's first and last borns.

The largest reason why I hate Park Slope is that there is no place to get a good vegetarian egg roll in
Brooklyn
. Before you get all up in arms and start screaming something about your favorite Chinese restaurant over the bridge, notice I said "egg roll," not "spring roll." Not even Tofu on 7th—a vegetarian haven—has a vegetarian egg roll: the chunky golden jewel of the Chinese restaurant menu.

If I could, I would wear one around my neck like a lariat necklace, with shredded cabbage as the chain. Fatness and the dough are the main differences between an egg roll and a spring roll, but I only like the egg roll version of the appetizer. And egg rolls traditionally contain pork. While I've never kept kosher, I've also never been able to overcome my Hebrew school teacher's voice in my head that starts shrieking every time I go to take a bite of something that contains swine.

I would love to learn how to make my own egg rolls, since I rarely get to order one since I realized how much carryout actually costs. Does anyone know how to make one like the ones at Hunan Chow? An easy recipe that will not make me weep and shake like my angel food cake recipe?

Chapter Five

Snapping the Carrots

Over the next few days, I see just how popular my little blog is as each reader is logged by Sitestalker. I have readers from around the world—from
American Samoa
to a telecom call center in
India
. They stay for an average of five minutes on the blog, which doesn’t seem like a long time at all, but Arianna promises that is eons in blog years.

I feel like an average girl who was just told by someone that she’s popular. You know the rule of the average girl, right? Popular girls always know that they’re popular. They don’t need to ask, and they really don’t need you to tell them, but they’re always glad when you do because it just confirms what they already know.

But average girls can never believe it when they’re told that the cute boy likes them or that they’ve been nominated for homecoming queen or that their blog is being read by thousands of people each day. It seems a little surreal, as if they’re part of a joke and now they need to cringe and wait for the punchline. There are average girls who have been working successful jobs for years and are still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Movie stars who can’t believe their luck that they married their gorgeous, rock-star husband, and so they are still checking
People
magazine religiously to confirm that their entire life is not a dream.

I am an average girl.

So who are the three-thousand or so readers who stop by
Life From Scratch
each day, downloading recipes and checking out my photographs of onions caramelizing? How many of them are people I know; neighbors in the building, old friends from the library, potential boyfriends that hail from
Spain
?

It is a bit unnerving. I am well-aware that the entire point of a blog—the very fact that you put your journal online instead of tucking it between the box spring and mattress—is to get people to read it. But now, seeing them swing by the site, sometimes three times a day, makes me uncomfortable. What have I said that will bite me in the ass later? I don’t remember ever writing about anyone other than Arianna or Adam or family (well, except for a few hints about Gael because he is so incredibly delicious that he is the human equivalent to food), but what if I’ve upset someone along the way? And, on that end, what if Adam ever finds my site?

Sitestalker gives me a PhD in paranoia.

I follow Arianna’s plan and send out an email written to a fictional group of people announcing my latest site, a dinner party blog where I’ll be talking about all the dinner parties I’ll have in the future. I send the link to Gael without mentioning the fact that I’ll be seeing him that weekend, which I think is pretty damn clever since it’s supposed to be a group note.

And for once in my life, everything works out according to plan. He clicks over, I label his IP address, and then scrawl it on a post-it note hidden under my pocket dictionary on the table so I can look it up in the IP search bar every time I log onto Sitestalker.

But for the thirty-six hours preceding the date, Gael’s name doesn’t pop up on my main blog, and I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved. I chew my way through a baguette with the cheapest brie I could find at the market. It tastes like cheap brie. “Don’t you think this is a sign that he’s not really interested?” I ask Arianna as she flicks through the clothes in my makeshift closet, Beckett sleeping in a carrier on her chest.

“No, why?” Arianna asks absentmindedly, considering a little black dress with a deep neckline.

“Because he knows my blog exists; I mean, you brought it up at dinner. He knows the name of the site. If you were going on a date with someone you were really interested in, wouldn’t you read up on their thoughts by going on their blog before the date?”

“Yes, but I’m a girl,” Arianna says. “You’re attributing girlie behavior to a boy. Boys do not poke around blogs like that.”

“What about all of those tech blogs? The political blogs?”

“I didn’t say men didn’t read blogs. I’m just saying that they don’t cyber-stalk their potential love interests like women do pre-date.”

She picks out an outfit for me that falls between all worlds—it’s not hinting at sex and it’s not denying it either. It doesn’t scream responsible mother-type but it doesn’t dismiss the desire to nurture. It is not risky or exciting or too far out there or too common. It is between everything and therefore nothing at all.

And therefore, it is perfect for the second first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life.

Before I can go out
to dinner with Gael, I must endure a trip out to Park Slope in
Brooklyn
to have lunch with my sister, Sarah, and her family. Usually I’m able to talk Ethan into joining us, but he claims he has some photographs to take of cream pooling up on plastic table tops.

I love my sister to pieces, and I know that she always has my best interests at heart, but she also knows how to push my buttons even more than our mother and takes every opportunity to remind me of my foibles—purposefully or inadvertently.

Sarah is very successful at what she does. She is a surgeon—a brain surgeon at that. Which means that she is very smart, though the tradeoff is that she is also slightly socially awkward. She prefers her operating room to be silent instead of playing light music like the other doctors. She keeps her Park Slope apartment much in the same way she keeps her operating room, impeccably neat and organized and silent.

She managed to find a husband who is the exact replica of her except in male form and with a specialty of heart surgery. She even reproduced herself in Penelope, a solemn child who prefers steamed edamame to fried burgers, and whose most daring moment came when she announced she wanted to be Madeleine for Halloween instead of a doctor for the third year running.

My sister also has a rabid love of her neighborhood and an inability to find anything redeemable about anywhere else in the world. She would love to bring me over the bridge into her whole wheat pancake world and thinks that it is only a matter of time until I come around.

The topic du jour is how much more difficult it is to get Penelope into a good preschool in Park Slope than it is anywhere else in the city, state, or country.

“I thought I read that preschool enrollment was down,” I say as we walk down the street. We pass four or five perfect acceptable restaurants where we could park ourselves and get this meal in motion, but they study each menu carefully, debating all the past meals they’ve had at the establishment and sighing about how many choices there are in Park Slope. As if picking a restaurant is akin to
Sophie’s Choice
.

“Not at the g-o-o-d schools,” my sister says carefully, spelling the word “good” as if it’s on par with a curse word or sex position.