Life From Scratch (34 page)

“Rachel!” I hear Adam call from behind.

I turn around, and Adam is jogging towards me, just like in a movie. He is slightly out of breath, as if he has leapt down the stairs two at a time, and he leans on the railing by the subway stairs to catch his breath. A man playing saxophone nearby starts wailing louder on his sax, nodding at us and half-smiling at the same time. I toss some change from my coat pocket into his case and wait for Adam to speak.

“There is no one,” he tells me.

“What about Laura?”

“I’m not dating Laura anymore. It was a brief thing.”

“You just said in the apartment that you’re still dating her.”

“Laura is dating some teacher at work now. Her brother set them up after I broke up with her. Rach, I’m not dating Laura.”

“You broke up with her? When?”

He bit his lower lip. “Right before I saw you at her party. When I found out you two knew each other. She was dating the teacher by the time we saw each other at her apartment. ”

“Why did you say . . .”

“I thought you were still dating that Spanish guy you brought to the party.”

“Gael? I broke up with him. But . . . at the party . . . I heard you tell someone that you were relieved to be divorced.”

“I never said that,” Adam insists. “I’m relieved to be out of the law firm. I was never relieved to be out of our marriage.”

Adam squints at me, somewhat distracted by the saxophone and the people pushing past out of the subway. We both stand there awkwardly, as if we’ve run out of shocking truths.

“I thought about you a few weeks ago,” he admits. “Before I saw you at the party. I was teaching a poetry unit to the kids, and the anthology we were using had that Longfellow poem in it. Remember that ring I got you from
London
with the inscription in it?”

“Bizarro wedding band,” I say.

“Right. I decided to read it with the kids. And one of the kids asked the etymology of the word ‘strange.’ So we looked it up online. I don’t remember the whole thing—maybe it’s from Old French—but part of the definition of strange is ‘Someone who has stopped visiting.’ And I thought,
That’s what I became to Rachel
.”

My husband the stranger
, I once called him when he walked in the apartment. Isn’t this the way it always works—that the answers are with you the entire time, sometimes even entwined around your finger, and you just don’t see them until it’s too late.

“I never told you what I was thinking because, as I said, I never felt you wanted me to be a teacher. I always wondered if you married me for the money—my family’s money or the salary I could pull in as a lawyer,” he continues. “I would have shared all of that before this point if I had thought that you would hear it and . . .do something with it.”

He waits again. I’m not sure if I like his new habit of circumspection, pausing after every two sentences. But we can work on that now that Laura has fizzled out like static on a television.

Adam says, “I want a chance to talk again. With no promises, Rach. Just a chance to think all of this out.”

“We may still reach the same conclusions,” I warn tearfully, but smiling.

“We just need to have the conversation that we never had last year, and see where it takes us.”

It will really suck
, I want to joke,
if we discover that we could have worked through all the misunderstandings without needing to divide all of our property and pay two divorce attorneys
. But perhaps we could have never ended up here, leaning close to each other on the railing of the subway stairs, if we hadn’t gone through the divorce and rebirth. He wouldn’t have shown me who he really wants to be. I certainly would have never found my passion for cooking, or my confidence in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have found my voice as a writer or connected with an audience through the blog. I don’t think we could have ever moved forward until I found something for myself, a small passion. Like the filling inside a pie. Without the apple slices and cinnamon, a pie is only an empty shell.

And that’s what I was when I used to sit home by myself, thinking that he didn’t care.

“Can I take you out for dinner tomorrow night?” he asks.

“No,” I say firmly. Then, quickly, to dispel the disappointment flickering in his eyes, I explain, “Let me make you dinner.”

He smiles. “At your apartment? Tomorrow night?”

I write the address on a small slip of paper from my purse. We stare at each other for a long time, not saying anything, and then he gives me a small kiss on the cheek.

I hear him whisper another apology under the wail of the saxophone.

I whisper one back.

My mother has agreed to let me cook the Passover seder meal this year. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but since she has protested this the last few times I raised the idea, it feels like a small victory. She still tells me that she doesn’t see the point in me cooking when the caterer can produce a perfectly lovely meal. But it means something to me.

I can finally call myself a cook. A home chef. I’ve graduated from the basic cooking books and borrowed a new slew of ethnic cookbooks from the library. And before you twist your underpants in a tizzy, it doesn't mean it’s the end of the blog. Oh no, dear readers, you're stuck with me. I will always find new recipes to write about, new lessons to learn, new neuroses to unload. My hope is that I can keep this level of honesty in everything I'm touching—

this blog, my food.

I declare this the start of my Honest Food Movement.

Honesty + food = if not something good, then at least something without regrets.

In honor of landing the Passover meal, tonight I’m making a meal combining everything I learned this year—from roasting to basting to baking (gasp!) to sauces. I have tried to incorporate every type of knife cut and ingredients from all four food groups. It wasn't difficult. The choices were clear. Second-nature. I only hope it tastes as good as it looks.

But in the tradition of the great cliffhanger, a critique of the meal will need to wait until the next post, because I just heard the buzzer I've been waiting for from the building’s front door.

Chapter Thirteen

Pinching the Salt

Unlike the first time I cooked for Gael, I am not nervous when I hear the buzzer announcing Adam’s arrival. I feel shy; I feel anxious to hear his thoughts on the meal; I feel a fluttering sensation at the base of my throat, somewhere close to where it meets my stomach. I am anything but hungry. But I’m also at peace. Having the strength to pull myself off of our sofa and walk out of our apartment without the promise of a next meeting has filled me with confidence. I will get through the next phase, this night, whatever “this” happens to be.

While I was cooking, I checked Sitestalker for old time’s sake. And there, most likely for the first time, was Gael Paez. He stayed on only for a few minutes, and I have no deep feelings about his visit. It was like
Alice
catching a glimpse of the Mad Hatter while she does her toiletry shopping at Target. She has moved on from Wonderland; her experience there helped her find a new way to be happy in the real world. It’s nice to see the Hatter over there by electronics, but she doesn’t need to follow him through the store, understand why he’s there, or search for greater meaning.

Goodbye Mad Hatter. Goodbye March Hare, and Red Queen.

Before Adam arrives, Arianna and my brother call from her apartment. Ethan promises me that Adam has always been his favorite brother-in-law, despite all the times he cursed him this year. Even though they are an odd couple, I can already tell there is something about Arianna and Ethan that works, a comfortable give-and-take where they finish each other’s sentences and move with a fluidity that cannot be learned or faked. He ducks off the phone call to take care of Beckett, and Arianna whispers a final “Good luck,” and tells me to call her the second Adam leaves.

I have made Adam the meal that, for me, embodies home. My grandmother used to make it the first night we came to visit, and it always made me feel as if she had been thinking about me the entire time she was waiting for me. Making this meal makes me feel like I can honestly say that I really know how to cook for someone I love.

To roast the chicken, first I peeled the onions. I juiced a lemon and placed the rind inside the bird’s cavity. I melted butter and rubbed it lovingly into the skin, my Hebrew school teacher’s voice be damned. I prepared the thyme, de-stemming the leaves. I snapped the carrots, rondelled the celery, cubed the potatoes, and chopped the parsnips. I splashed wine into the roasting pan, added crushed garlic cloves before trussing the chicken’s leg together with cooking twine. I sprinkled pepper and pinched the salt.

And after all of that is done, I hear the buzzer.

Smiling, I open the door and welcome Adam in.