The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (5 page)

“Household emergency,” I say, only partly lying.

“Is everything okay?” she asks, moving in close. I nod, ignoring her mock concern. Millie and Adam dated in high school, when he was a senior and she was a sophomore at Georgetown Day School, and they are now “best friends,” the sort of warm-and-fuzzy friendship that makes my stomach churn. As far as I can tell, Millie harbors hope the two of them will reunite in a scene straight out of
When Harry Met Sally
. I foresee something more along the lines of
Fatal Attraction
.

Millie deserves a little credit, I guess. She introduced me to Adam. We met at one of her parties, and much to her surprise, Adam and I hit it off. Even then—when I was at my fittest—my petite, curvy frame couldn’t hold a candle to Millie’s five-foot-seven-inch frame of pure marathon-runner muscle. She never thought Adam would show interest in someone as clumsy and out of shape as me. I would be lying if I said I took no pleasure in proving her wrong.

Millie draws closer, lowering her voice to a whisper as she widens her eyes. “I heard about last night.
Yikes
.”

I can’t see my watch through the stack of cakes, but I know it’s no later than nine-thirty. I cannot fathom how she already knows about last night’s dinner. I’m sure it has something to do with the nature of her friendship with Adam, where they talk every day and tell each other everything. Which, of course, pleases me to no end.

“That’s not why I’m late,” I say, glazing over her reference to last night’s events. “My … dad called from London.”

“Oh, right, they’re in England. London School of Economics, right?” I nod. She stares at the foil tower nestled in my arms, eyeing it suspiciously. “What’s that?”

“Coffee cake and leftover carrot cake.”

“Two cakes? Are you trying to make us all obese?”

“Yes, Millie. That’s why I bake for the office. To make you all obese.”

Millie raises an eyebrow. “I don’t see why you couldn’t bring in something healthy every once in a while.”

Adam once told me that when Millie was thirteen, her mom sent her to fat camp, and from what I can tell, she has lived in mortal fear of eggs and butter ever since. I am about to remind Millie that the carrot cake does contain vegetables, and therefore possesses a modicum of nutrition one could rationalize into health-fulness, but before I can speak I hear a voice calling my name at the end of the hallway.

“Hannah? Hannah, where are you?”

Mark Henderson. My boss. Crap.

“Gotta run.” I dash past Millie and dump my cakes in the kitchen before scurrying to my desk.

“Where have you been?” Mark asks, knitting together his apricot-colored eyebrows, which jut a full inch beyond the rim of his round, tortoiseshell glasses. He speaks, as always, with the faintest hint of an English accent, a mystery to all of us, seeing as Mark was born and raised in Indiana. From what I can tell, the accent is an affectation, much like his extensive collection of bow ties and handkerchiefs. Mark used to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, where for a whopping fourteen years he was in charge of setting interest rates and overseeing the U.S. banking system. These days, he churns out papers and op-eds on fiscal and monetary policy and occasionally makes the rounds on the cable news networks. As a prolific DC commentator, he is sort of the economic equivalent of Terry Bradshaw or John McEnroe, albeit without the charisma and with a much larger collection of tweed.

“Sorry,” I say. “Family emergency.”

He crosses his arms and sighs. He’s heard it all before. “Well now that you’re finally here, I need you to get going on the preparations for the conference.”

“The conference?” This is the first I’ve heard of any conference.

“Yes, the conference. On the economic recovery? And financial risk? In December?”

Again, this is the first I’ve heard of any of this. “Right,” I say. “The … conference.”

“I need you to get the ball rolling—contacting the speakers, reserving a room, coordinating with marketing. You know the drill.”

I pull out a pen and paper, awaiting further instructions on what speakers I am supposed to get in touch with and when, exactly, he wants to hold this conference, but when I look up, Mark has disappeared into his office. This might be more concerning if it didn’t happen at least three times a day.

Hoping to find guidance in the form of an e-mail or announcement, I log on to my computer and scrub my in-box where I find … nothing. I search through the piles of papers on my desk, mostly old research papers and printouts from Mark, but again I cannot find a single mention of the December conference. I give up.

I let out a loud groan and look up to see Rachel gliding toward my desk from her perch in the health policy department, carrying a sliver of my coffee cake. She slides up to my desk for one of our daily heart-to-hearts, looking characteristically chic in a sleeveless cream blouse and chocolate pencil skirt, the kind of outfit I could never wear because I actually have hips. Rachel, on the other hand, is built like a willowy nymph. Everything about her is lean and trim, from her narrow face and delicate nose to her boyish hips and long, sleek brown hair. If she were a few inches taller, I bet she could have been a model. I would say she’s the Jackie O. to my Marilyn, but I’m pretty sure Marilyn Monroe never wore fleece.

“Awesome coffee cake,” she says in her faint Chicago accent, the
a
in
ah-some
drawn out like a song. She licks the crumbs off her slender fingers. “Melts in your mouth. What’s in the streusel? Cinnamon?”

I nod. “And a little cocoa powder.”

“Nice. So how was dinner last night?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.”

She comes around to my side of the desk and sits on the edge. “Care to give me the CliffsNotes version?

“Let’s see. Should I begin with the part where I picked a fight with Adam’s mother, or the part where I told his parents Adam and I are living together?”

“They didn’t know?”

“No. As you can imagine, the news went over really well.”

“I’m sure.” Rachel scrunches up her lips and studies the tip of her brown, snakeskin shoe, admiring its pointy toe. “Hey—in the end, you did everyone a big favor. It’s Adam’s fault for not telling them months ago.”

Rachel Cohen has never been one for mincing words, particularly when it comes to Adam. Her candor is one of the things I love about her. A graduate of George Washington University, she started at NIRD a few months before I did, and one of the first things she said to me, as I reached for a chicken salad sandwich in the NIRD lunchroom, was, “I wouldn’t do that unless you have a bottle of Pepto in your desk.” I didn’t have many friends in Washington before I met Rachel, but with her by my side, I never had to worry about eating alone at lunch or enduring an afternoon of gastrointestinal distress.

Over the past three years, in what is as much a surprise to me as anyone else, she has become, in addition to my best friend at work, my best friend in all of DC. Had we met at a different stage of life, I’m not sure that would be true. My college friends and I were kindred spirits, homebodies who preferred sweatpants to high fashion, a night watching old movies to a night on the town. But those friends are spread across the country, in Boston and Seattle and New York, and now Rachel is the one who knows the intimate details of my daily life—Rachel, the woman everyone notices when she walks into a room, who can make sweatpants look like high fashion, in a way I never could. In addition to writing about domestic health care policy for her boss at NIRD, she runs a wildly successful fashion and design blog called Milk Glass—further proof she is beauty and brains personified. None of my other friends are like her, and yet some days I feel closer to her than I do to them, for the simple reason that she’s here and they’re not.

“Don’t worry,” Rachel says. “The Prescotts will get over it.”

“I hope so.”

“You hope what?” Millie’s voice pierces through the low hum of the fluorescent lights and computers peppering the eighth floor. She stalks up to my desk and inserts herself into the discussion, as is her wont.

“Nothing,” I say.

Millie lets out a frustrated sigh. “Whatever. Why haven’t you hoes responded to my birthday Evite? The party is this weekend.”

“I’m still trying to move a few things around,” Rachel says.

Millie places a hand on her hip and turns to face me. “You’ll be there, Hannah. I know you don’t have plans.”

I choose to assume she has already spoken to Adam about this, rather than interpret her remark as a commentary on my lack of a social life. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I say.

“Good,” Millie says. “And keep your weekend open. I’m trying to put together a brunch on Sunday followed by an afternoon at the movies.”

Millie stalks back to her desk, and Rachel sighs, twirling one of her long, chestnut locks around her finger. “A weekend of Millie,” she says. “Good luck with that.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I have a date.”

“Shocker,” I say. Rachel always has a date. How she manages to find so many datable men in DC is a mystery to me.

“I don’t want to traumatize this guy by introducing him to Millie on our first date.”

“True, but come on. You can’t send me out there alone.”

“You’ll have Adam,” she says. This provides surprisingly little consolation. “I’m sure it’ll be fun.”

But as she says the words, she can’t help but snicker, because although Millie’s party may be many things—loud, smelly, unbearable—the one thing it won’t be, for me at least, is fun.

I look forward to Millie’s party as much as I look forward to a Pap smear or a tooth extraction. Which is to say, not at all.

But before I know it, Saturday is already here, and my anxiety gives way to resigned acceptance. Adam and I are going to this party together, and that’s the end of it. Adam and I haven’t talked about the party—we haven’t talked about much of anything all week—but I know that as painful as tonight may be, it is also an opportunity for me to remind Adam why he fell in love with me in the first place—how he used to love my quirks and how they don’t always spell disaster. There was a moment two nights ago, after I made a crack about Mark’s mammoth eyebrows and how it is only a matter of time before I grab a pair of scissors and trim them myself, when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a smirk cross Adam’s lips. In that moment, I knew there was still hope for us. I can still make him laugh. I can still make him smile. All I need to do is sail through this party with grace and dignity, and then I can finally stop having anxiety dreams about being single, lonely, and homeless.

As I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, tugging at my unruly hair, Adam shouts from the living room, filling the apartment with the sound of his voice. “Jesus, Hannah, you’re going to make us late—again!”

“Coming!”

What I leave out is the “will be”—as in she
will be
coming round the mountain when she comes. And I
will be
coming out of the bathroom … as soon as I throw my hair into a ponytail and give my eyelashes one more coat of mascara. And try on another color of lipstick. Before checking my ass in the mirror. Twice.

“One sec!” I tear into the bedroom and shove my wallet, phone, and keys inside my purse, grab a bottle of Vouvray for Millie, and hurry into the living room. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”

A few months ago, Adam would have said something about my new white maxidress or given me a kiss or at least done something to validate the effort I put into pulling myself together. That’s part of what I fell in love with, I think—how good he made me feel about myself. I was curves, brains, and snark all in one, a loveable mishmash of Christina Hendricks and Maureen Dowd and Kathy Griffin. Or at least that’s what he led me to believe. He always found something to compliment: my eyes, a paper I’d written, the softness of the skin along my doughy belly. The night we met at Millie’s party, he told me I had an infectious laugh. It was one of the first things he said to me. I turned to goo and made a terrible joke about infections and swine flu—with, as I recall, some bizarre reference to Batman and the Joker—but Adam chuckled anyway, saying he’d be happy to catch anything I’d give him. And, for the first time, I didn’t worry I’d made a total fool of myself in front of an attractive member of the opposite sex. He put me at ease. He always knew the right thing to say.

But tonight he says nothing. He hasn’t commented on anything I’ve said or done for the past week, ever since our argument last Sunday. I bet I could go out wearing nothing but a bra and pajama bottoms, and he wouldn’t even notice.

We walk side by side from our apartment in Logan Circle to Millie’s place in Kalorama, a hilly neighborhood just north of Dupont Circle, peppered with grand Victorian and Art Deco buildings, elegant prewar condos, and tree-lined streets. Millie frequently reminds us that the neighborhood has been home to everyone from Woodrow Wilson to Betty Friedan and, in more recent history, people like Ted Kennedy and Christopher Hitchens. So, by Millie’s way of thinking, she fits right in. That I dislike this woman should come as a surprise to no one.

As Adam and I make our way up Eighteenth Street in the thick, sticky heat, charged silence swirls around us like electricity. Our shoulders are only three inches apart, but we might as well be walking on opposite sides of the street.