The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (14 page)

“My computer died. I have five hours to write up some report on Greece, Latvia, and Spain and rewrite Mark’s currency paper.”

“But didn’t you—”

“No, I didn’t back up my work. And yes, I saw that
Sex and the City
.”

“Oh.”

“I was going to leave early to start braising the brisket and pulling stuff together for tomorrow, but there’s no way I can do that now. I need your help.”

Rachel snaps to attention. “You need me to cook?”

Rachel doesn’t cook. Well, that’s not fair. She cooks, but most of her recipes involve the microwave and Duncan Hines. I keep encouraging her to branch out, but she suffers from a profound lack of confidence in the kitchen—surprising, since she possesses an abundance of confidence in every other area of her life. I blame her mother, Barbara, whose kitchen philosophy resembles that of my mother and Sandy Prescott.

“Rach, you can do this. All you need to do is start some of the prep work. The recipes are sitting on my counter.”

Rachel bites her lip. “Okay … If you think I’m up to it …”

“I have total confidence in you. I’ll send you an e-mail explaining what I need you to do, and I’ll get home as soon as I can to help. Cool?”

She hesitates. “Yeah, okay. I can probably get out of here by three.” She takes my keys and shoves them in her bag. “Good luck,” she says.

“You, too.”

I hurry back to my desk and find Sean plugging a spare computer into my power strip. “All set,” he says. He digs into his pocket and pulls out a blue-and-white flash drive. “And, uh, take this. You know, to back up any new documents you start on this computer.” He knows my shame.

I turn on the computer and download Mark’s sketchy outline of his paper. I stare at the page.

“Oh, what am I doing?” I groan as I massage my temples. The question is all-encompassing: hosting a supper club, not backing up my work, working at NIRD in the first place. What am I doing?

I never should have taken this job, although when I accepted the position, it was this job or nothing. When I started at Cornell, my sneaky plan was to transfer into the Hotel School and focus on a career in the food industry, but my parents caught wind of this idea during my freshman year and nearly shit themselves. So, after several heated phone calls and threats to cut off my tuition payments, I let go of the Hotel School idea and ended up majoring in American studies, a discipline that prepared me for nothing in particular in the real world. Thus, after spending four years at Cornell, I was both highly educated and unemployed. In my parents’ warped view, unemployment was preferable to a career in the restaurant industry.

And yet, in an ironic twist, entering the restaurant industry is exactly what I did. After graduation, I moved back into my parents’ home in the Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown and waited tables at a nearby restaurant called Cedarwood to make some cash while I looked for a job. No one prepared me for how grueling waitressing would be—the dull, persistent pain that would extend from my spine and wrap itself around my midsection, the nonstop disrespect from customers—but after a few weeks, I got into a groove and, to my surprise, started to enjoy it. That’s not to say I wanted to waitress for the rest of my life. Far from it. But the chef started sharing cooking secrets with me, and I soaked up everything he would teach me, and before long I wasn’t just waiting tables—I was helping in the kitchen, too, chopping onions, slicing carrots, and making vinaigrettes.

One evening, the sous chef slipped a piece of paper in my pocket, and as he headed back to his station, he winked. “You’ve got talent, kid,” he said. “Check that place out.”

The paper listed the contact information for a local cooking class, which met three days a week and wasn’t too expensive. I signed up without telling my parents. Waiting tables was exhausting on its own, but juggling my job with a bunch of secret cooking classes sapped all of my energy. Many a night ended with me falling asleep on top of my comforter, fully clothed. And yet, although most of my memories from that period blur together, what I remember most is how happy I was. The kitchen environment felt right. I fit in there.

My parents, however, were having none of it. After watching me work at Cedarwood for a year, they sensed a diminished intensity in my search for a “real job.” One night they confronted me. They sat me down on their living room couch and told me, point-blank: “College-educated girls don’t wait tables.” I pointed out that apparently they
do
because I
was
. Needless to say, that comment did not go over well.

After much yelling and many tears, my parents shamed me into seeing things their way—that I was wasting my time, my intellectual potential. And I have to hand it to my parents: they’re good salesmen. I started to believe them; I started to doubt my own happiness. After all, I’d spent years studying until my eyes ached so that I could get A’s and the occasional B+. I’d worked hard, I’d learned, I’d achieved. Surely I hadn’t done all that to land a job a high school dropout could do.

My mother mentioned she had a favor to call in with a former colleague named Mark Henderson at the Institute for Research and Discourse. These are the kinds of favors my parents call in. Some parents know important business people or Hollywood producers or congressmen. But no, my parents have connections in places of no use to the general populous. They know people in academic departments and at think tanks. So that’s where I ended up.

And now, here I sit, with a few hours to work magic in a subject area where my lack of insight is outpaced only by my lack of interest. The only way I could forestall my imminent failure is if, by some miracle, I managed to remember the intricacies of the structure and prose I assembled over the past five days. This, I believe, is on par with asking me to speak Hindi, or fly. But, much to my surprise, as I flip through the notes Mark sent me on his paper, all the details start rushing back to me. Global asset price bubbles. The carry trade. The euro. The yen. I can do this. I can finish this by noon. And the report on Greece, Latvia, and Spain by five. This won’t be as difficult as I thought. I’ll skip lunch and work straight through, and no one will be the wiser.

Apparently the whole “skipping lunch” idea was wishful thinking. I know other people do it, like Simon Wellington in NIRD’s foreign policy department. He has trained his body to eat once a day, which explains his high productivity and toxic halitosis. But I can’t concentrate when my stomach starts gurgling. As soon as I type the words “credit crunch,” all I can think is “mmm, crunch.” And then I want a bag of potato chips and a plate of nachos.

What I’m saying is, the idea of working straight through doesn’t go exactly as planned. I finish the currency paper by noon, so on that front I’m right on schedule. But when I print out the IMF country reports on Greece, Latvia, and Spain, I discover I have more than two hundred pages of text to (a) read, (b) understand, and (c) summarize in a way that is useful to Mark. For some people, five hours would be more than enough time to do that. I am not one of those people.

Fueled by NIRD coffee and jelly beans, I race through the reports. Well, maybe not race. Claw. I claw my way through the reports. But by five I at least have some notion of their substance. By six I have a rough outline of a summary for Mark, and by six-forty-five I finish. An hour and forty-five minutes later than my deadline, but it’s a freaking miracle nonetheless.

Mark hasn’t left yet, so I march into his office and drop the report on his desk with a loud thud. “The IMF summary,” I say.

He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and flips through the pile. “Remind me—what is this?”

“The summary of the IMF reports. On Greece, Latvia, and Spain.”

He frowns. “Oh. Right. I’ll take a look Monday morning.”

Are you kidding me? “I thought you needed it before you left today.”

“Did I say that?”

“Yes. You said that.”

“Hmm. Interesting.” He rubs his chin. “Well, I appreciate your hard work, Hannah. Have a nice weekend. We can discuss the report Monday afternoon.”

“Monday afternoon? What about … Monday morning?”

“Unfortunately, my youngest daughter is visiting me this weekend. Have I told you she’s finishing her PhD in American history at Yale? Anyway, I want to spend as much time with her as possible this weekend, so I won’t have time to read your work until Monday morning. But thank you again for getting it all together. Good effort, as always.”

He adjusts his glasses and returns to reading an article in
The Economist
, oblivious to the fact that I am now foaming at the mouth.

I grab my bag and stomp to the elevator, seething as I descend the eight floors to the lobby. I hate this place. Un-freaking-believable.

I stalk through the lobby and stop abruptly when I reach the door. It’s raining—and not a minor drizzle. A torrential downpour. Sheets of rain beat against the glass doors, the long metal handles rattling with each gust of wind. I reach into my bag for my umbrella and discover I left it at home. Fantastic.

“Take this, honey,” says the security guard behind the desk. She hands me a copy of today’s
Washington Post
.

With the newspaper over my head and my bag pressed against my body, I bolt out the door and start running up Eighteenth Street. The rain saturates the newspaper, which quickly dissolves into a mound of pulp. My flats fill with water and refuse to stay on my feet, and by the time I reach Massachusetts Avenue, I am holding them in my hand. Drenched, cold, and barefoot. Could this day get any worse?

In fact, it could. Rachel is in my kitchen right now, attempting to cook something more complicated than a Lean Cuisine. There’s a high probability she has overcooked something, and a slightly lower probability she has set something on fire.

I walk into my apartment and find Rachel wiping off my kitchen counter, her hair soaked in sweat, and her slender face bright red. She jumps when she sees me enter the apartment.

“Don’t be mad,” she says.

“Mad about what?” I ask. “What did you do?”

I move gingerly toward the kitchen in my bare feet, but I stop abruptly as something sharp and pointy pierces my toe. I shriek in pain.

“Shit!” Rachel cries. “I didn’t realize you were barefoot!”

She rushes over and helps me limp over to my air mattress. I lift up my foot and pull out a tooth-size shard of glass. “What the hell is this?”

Rachel clears her throat. “You know how you’re supposed to brown the brisket before braising it?”

“Uh-huh …”

“Well … I didn’t realize you weren’t supposed to put glass on the stove top …”

“You used a glass dish on the stove? Are you
crazy
?”

“But it was Pyrex—the glass is supposed to be tempered.”

“That doesn’t mean you can put it directly on an open flame!”

“Well I know that
now
.” She sighs. “Anyway, the glass kind of … exploded. It burst into a billion pieces. Glass shards flew everywhere. I started crying. And the thing is … I had all the food laying out, so there were bits of glass in the dates, in the horse-radish sauce, and, of course, in the brisket.”

“The brisket? Tell me you’re joking. That brisket cost more than fifty bucks.”

Rachel bites her lip and wrinkles her brow. “Sorry.”

I run my fingers through my hair. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”

“Listen, I’m really sorry, but we need to throw out all the food I made or touched. There’s glass in all of it, which is pretty much a lawsuit waiting to happen. We need to buy new stuff and start over.”

“But I special ordered that brisket, and the Dupont market is only open on Sundays.”

“Doesn’t Open Meadows sell at the Arlington market tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah, but the cooked brisket needs to rest overnight. It’s always better the second day. That’s, like, the number one rule of brisket making.”

“Brisket making has rules?”

I narrow my eyes. “Are you seriously questioning me right now? After you just detonated a brisket bomb in my apartment?”

“Sorry.” She smoothes the sheets on my air mattress and shrugs. “Well, there’s always Whole Foods.”

I sigh and cradle my head in my hands. “Great. Another hundred some dollars down the drain.”

I try to come up with a silver lining for this situation, but I can’t find one, and that’s because a silver lining does not exist. The only lesson I can glean from this incident, other than never letting Rachel alone in the kitchen again, is that whenever I think I’ve hit rock bottom, I should wait a few minutes, because something will almost always happen to send me plummeting to a new low point. I can only hope tomorrow’s dinner will be the exception, and not the rule.

As predicted, the situation deteriorates from moderate complication to total catastrophe. The next morning I awake with a start to the shrill beeping of my alarm clock and, in an unfortunate turn, the distinct smell of mildew.

I fumble for the off switch on my alarm and roll over, fixing my eyes on the ceiling. My body feels heavy and stiff, as if, in my sleep, someone replaced my bones with thick lead pipes. The act of rising from my mattress poses a far greater challenge than I expected, and so instead of moving, I continue to stare at the ceiling, willing myself to get out of bed. This is what happens when you spend seven hours shopping and cooking with a friend who is now afraid to boil water.