by Evy Journey
Adam wasn’t Adonis, but he wasn’t bad looking and he was good in bed. With a college degree, a steady job, and raised in a close-knit middle-class family, I was sure he’d make a good husband and father. And he did something other guys I dated rarely did—he brought me flowers. A bouquet, now and then, and a single rose every time we saw each other. After several months of going out with him, he asked me to marry him.
I was actually dumbfounded when he “popped the question,” and for a few minutes, I stayed silent, a blank look on my face. Here was the destiny I had been waiting for—being offered to me with a bouquet of two dozen roses when I was barely twenty. And yet, from the moment he uttered the first word of his proposal, I knew I was going to say “No.”
I did love him, although one might say not enough. The prospect of rejecting him pained me. I would be hurting him, yes; but I was probably hurting myself more. Someone like him might never come my way again, in the forgotten world I lived in.
When, finally, “No” croaked out of my throat, I could tell he was more shocked than I was. He was one hundred per cent sure I’d say yes. He stared at me for a long time, saying nothing. Then, he got up and walked away, his hands bunched up in his pockets.
He didn’t try to persuade me of his love or change my mind about my answer. Maybe, he sensed that I’d stick to my “No” no matter what he did. Or, maybe, he thought there were many more girls like me out there, so why waste another minute on me. I haven’t seen him since.
Why—when I had the chance to have the future I envisioned for myself—did I not seize it? I had endured groping from many men to find that one person who could give me the life I thought I was owed. I really believed from the first time Adam asked me out that he would be that one.
That very night, after a mere hour or so later, regretting what might have been, I stayed up planning what I should do for the next few years, if not for the rest of my life. I told myself that God or Fate was giving me a signal when I said “No” to Adam. A chance to make something more of myself than just a better version of my mother.
That “No” was like an epiphany, but not with angels tooting their horns. Mine rose out of pain, out of a constant state of wanting what I imagined I could never have, what I thought a lot of other people took for granted.
At twenty, I had no burning ambition, not even a vague idea of where I wanted to be ten years from now. But it became crystal clear that I needed to change the path I had been expected to take. I needed to take control of my future. At the very least, I needed to make a living that not only paid more than cleaning hotel rooms, which was what my mother has done since I was little. I need some sense that I matter. That I am more than just a face and a body, good for making babies, keeping my family fat and happy, and cleaning noses and asses along with toilets, furniture, and floors.
I asked myself what I could do well and actually liked. The following week I enrolled in cooking classes at the community college. It wasn’t an earth-shaking step, but it would take me nearer to a certain kind of freedom. And towards something I never dreamed about.
4
The bouquet of red roses is not the last one Leon sends me. Every week after that, the same thin, smiling old guy comes bearing another bouquet of the same kind of roses on the same day and at the same time. A card comes with each bouquet, but most of the time, except for his signature and his phone number, Leon doesn’t scribble a greeting or a note on it. After the note accompanying the first roses, he wrote twice: “I’ll keep sending flowers until you agree to see me.”
I know when that particular note comes on the third week of roses that I should call to ask him to stop sending me the roses, but I don’t know exactly what and how to say it so that I sound convincing. Besides, I really don’t know what to say to a spoiled, filthy rich guy, educated at the best schools. Marcia tells me he has an MBA from some place called Haas Business School in Berkeley. And, yet, how hard can it be if Cristi can talk to him? I should ask her. It will only take a phone call. But will she be suspicious and resentful if she and Leon are still dating? Especially after the history she and I have with her former boyfriends.
That leaves Marcia.
Marcia doesn’t speak for a minute or two after I tell her about the roses. Then, she says, “You say he’s dating a friend of yours?”
“Yeah, Cristi. She was his date the night I served the ahi. Cristi and I grew up together. Our family homes are on the same block. We were best friends once, but we only see each other now when we happen to visit our parents at the same time.”
“So, you’re asking Leon to stop sending those flowers because of her. Would you go out with him if she wasn’t in the picture?”
Her question makes me pause. I’m no longer angry at Leon but I still resent the stalking. So I surprise myself when I say, “Well, it’s tempting. I’ve never gone out with a rich guy.”
I meant it to be a funny answer. I didn’t expect Marcia to take it seriously. But she does.
“Does it bother you if I tell you Leon is a skirt-chaser, a court-em, leave-em kind of guy? He loves the pursuit, and my guess is he’s never been in love. He’s probably getting tired of your friend already and looking for a new diversion.”
“Marcia, I was kidding.” Was I? “But how do you know all this?”
“I’ve worked in this restaurant long enough, and I hear things.”
I look at Marcia thoughtfully. “Did you ever go out with him?”
“I’m not his type. He’s four years younger than me.”
“But you’re young and attractive.”
“Yeah, 33, and ten pounds overweight. I’m still looking for that special person who’ll overlook my flaws because he loves my pastries. Anyway, here’s my advice: Keep the flowers coming and wait until he leaves your friend.”
“That sounds crass and devious.”
“Why? You want to know what it’s like going out with a filthy rich guy. Well, here’s your chance. Just remind yourself always what his intentions are and don’t get emotionally involved. Have fun and enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts.”
“It’s Cristi I’m actually thinking of.”
“Cristi is a big girl, although I hope for her sake she’s not expecting more out of Leon than he’s willing to, or can give.”
On the drive home from work that night, I mull over Marcia’s question: Would you go out with him if she wasn’t in the picture?
My answer was silly but it makes me wonder. Leon does intrigue me, or maybe, his money and its accompanying privileges do. It doesn’t hurt that he is, in fact, quite attractive.
I do nothing to stop the flowers from coming.
*****
Two months later, I go home for Thanksgiving, which I’ve not been able to do the past two years because of my restaurant duties. This year, though, I take the week off, since I’ve been assigned to the Christmas Eve dinner. I’m sure that, like me, Cristi is also spending this holiday with her family. We’ve both done so since we left home.
I call her on Wednesday. “Cristi, it’s me. Gina.”
“Oh, hi! You at home?”
“Yes. I got a holiday break. No cooking for a week. Yeaay!”
“Haven’t seen you around here for quite a while.”
“Haven’t got time for myself. That restaurant keeps me too busy for anything else. I’m sorry I couldn’t call you until now. Can I come see you, or you can come see me, catch up?”
I get silence for what seems like a couple of minutes. It’s probably not that long but I do wonder and feel uneasy about it.
Finally, Cristi says, “I think that’d be great. How about Thursday afternoon? Everybody will be watching football and no one will disturb us in my room.”
Cristi sounds eager to talk and I suspect it’s because she wants to brag about Leon.
On Thursday after the usual “great to see you” greetings that come with pretend busses on the cheeks, she takes my hand and leads m
e to the bedroom she shares with her younger sister.
She closes the door, saying, “So no one comes barging in on us. It’s the signal me and Joana use to say we want privacy. We can make ourselves comfortable on my bed.”
I follow her toward her bed where we both sit, cross-legged; me, leaning on the headboard, and she on the opposite end.
“Tell me how you got to cook at that restaurant. I thought by now you’d be married and pregnant with Adam’s kid. So I was shocked last time I talked to your mom. She said you were a cook at Country Kitchen. She didn’t seem too unhappy, though. I know it was her ambition to get you nicely settled and I’m sure she thought Adam was a great catch. We all did.”
“He did ask me. I’m still not sure why I turned him down. Maybe, I wanted to find my own place in the big, bad world. Me, on my own. Or maybe cooking is just in our blood, you know, through the French grandfather I never met.”
“Maybe that’s it. Really tragic, what that criminal did to him. But it looks like you’re following his footsteps now. Lucky you, cooking at Du Cœur.”
“Yeah, that’s another thing I’m still not quite sure about—why Laure picked me. I apprenticed there, at first. Came in with two guys who I believed were better than me. When I asked the sous chef, he just said, ‘consider yourself fortunate. Many pass by through these hallowed walls. Only a very small handful stay.’”
“I’ve always thought you were lucky.”
“There’s luck, for sure. But I couldn’t leave it at that. I really needed to know, maybe because I didn’t have any confidence in what I could do. So, a few days later, I bugged him some more. So then he says they could tell I’ve got this passion for creating dishes and that I work my butt off. But so do those two guys who were hired with me. So I think it’s because I’m a woman. Laure is known to champion female chefs. She’s doing all she can to get more of us cooking in restaurants like hers.”
“Like I said, you’re lucky. Lucky in love, lucky in work.” Cristi scowls at me, her smile fading. “I’ve always envied you. You seem to get things you want all the time and without much effort.”
“But I’m working my ass off now. The restaurant owns me, body and mind. I never get time for myself anymore. Lady Luck is with you now, Cristi. Marcia, the pastry chef at the restaurant tells me Leon is filthy rich. He looks really good, too.”
Cristi turns her face away from me. “You should have married Adam. That would have solved all our problems.”
I’m puzzled. I thought she’d welcome the chance to talk and brag about Leon. What can she mean by her remark? I ignore it. “Believe me, if you saw me working at the restaurant, you’d think me stupid, or bonkers, or I’m on hard labor like I’m being punished.”
“You chose where you are now. How could you reject Adam?” Cristi’s eyes are beginning to squint the way I’ve seen them when she’s on the verge of anger; like those times in the past when she accused me of attracting her boyfriends away from her. “You should have married him. And you shouldn’t have brought Leon up.”
Cristi doesn’t want to talk about Leon. Marcia must be right that he has grown tired of her. Is it for my own self-interest that I mentioned Leon?
Leon is getting to me. Or, at least, those flowers he sends that brighten my cheerless apartment. I know I must ask him to stop sending them because he’s still dating Cristi. Maybe I need a push. I thought seeing Cristi brag about Leon was that push.
Still, I have to ask myself: Am I hoping Marcia is right that Leon might be tired of Cristi by now?
I frown and bite my lip, feeling uneasy at my thoughts. I drag my butt towards Cristi and grasp her arm to force her to look at me. I can see hatred in her eyes and pangs of guilt hit me. For hoping Marcia is right. For having brought up Leon—it now seems so scheming of me. For whatever part I played in ruining Cristi’s love life. Can I atone for any of them?
“Cristi, is there something you want to tell me?” Maybe I’m hoping she’ll let her anger out by shouting and accusing me like she had done before.
But in a low soft voice, she says “I think you know.”
“No. How could I? I’ve had no time for anything else but work. Not much time for talking except at break. I’ve got no new friends, much less a boyfriend.” Am I actually trying to tell her she’s now the lucky one?
“No, you don’t need to go after them, friends or boyfriends. They always just come after you, like duck to water.” Cristi is squinting even harder. If she started out trying to be nice to me today, her anger has now taken over.
I let go of her arm and swing my legs off the bed. “I think I should go now.”
“Not before you hear me out.”
I swing my legs back up and move my butt back towards the headboard. I wish I could just run out of the room. “I’m here, Cristi, and all ears. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No? This isn’t the first time you’ve done this to me. By my own count, this is the third.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do. First, Paul. Then, Bart. Now it’s Leon.”
“But I didn’t do anything to take them away from you.”
“No, you didn’t. They only have to take one look at you and I’ve lost them.”
“I never encouraged them. Bart tried to win you back.”
“I couldn’t forgive him for leaving me for you. By then, I thought of him as a discard. I wouldn’t take a discard back.”
“I’m truly sorry, Cristi.”
“I’m sorry, too. But I’ll never forgive you for Leon. Things were going great between us until he saw you at the restaurant. We kept dating and I thought he maybe forgot about you. But looks like I was wrong.”
“I don’t know what he’s told you, but I never answered any of the notes he’s been sending me.”
“Notes? He’s sent you notes? He said he’s been sending you flowers.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes, ‘in the spirit of full disclosure,’ he says. But he lied about the notes.”
“The notes came with the flowers.”
“I should have guessed. He went after me the way he’s going after you. I didn’t know he’d been sending you flowers until just a week ago when he broke up with me. Said he couldn’t stop thinking about you and couldn’t keep seeing me anymore. Then, he told me about the flowers. But he never said anything about notes. I thought I was the only one he wrote notes to with the flowers he sent. He didn’t tell me everything.”
“Maybe he just didn’t want to tell you I’ve pretty much ignored them.”
“You said that about Paul and Bart, too. That you ignored whatever it was they did to get you to go out with them. Didn’t do much good.”
I say nothing but I can’t look at Cristi. I can feel her intense, angry gaze on me.
She gets up as she says, “What’s it about you, Gina? I’m pretty, too. So many people have said they prefer my looks to yours.”
I glance quickly at her. “You’re beautiful, and those people are right.”
“But I’m not beautiful like you.”
“Maybe men are just jerks, Cristi.”
“No, it isn’t that. Doesn’t help to think that. Hurts no matter what. Being dumped hurts an awful lot. And for someone who’s supposed to be your friend. …” She turns and walks away from the bed.
I want to run out of the room but I can’t. Not while Cristi is in the state she’s in. Not with the guilt I feel. In my more clear-thinking moments, I feel it’s unfair of her to blame me for her inconstant boyfriends and yet I also can’t help feeling responsible for her unhappiness. I don’t move from my perch on the bed.
She turns around to face me again. “All the pain I’ve suffered—all because of you.”
“I’m sorry, Cristi. I never meant to hurt you.”
I never saw it coming—what happens next. I see her rushing toward me. She raises her arm and before I can grasp what she’s up to, I fe
el a sharp point digging into my right shoulder. I scream, more out of shock, than out of pain.
But the pain comes, piercing, slicing through my shoulders, intensifying. Cristi raises her arm again. She has a pair of scissors in her hand. There’s blood on it and on her hand. My blood!
I scream louder, scrambling quickly away from her, and shielding my body with my arms. By the time I jump to the other side of the bed, the door flies open and her whole family runs into the room.
Several voices shout at the same time. “Oh, no, Cristi, what have you done?”
One of her brothers grabs her arm from behind and pries the scissors out of her hand.
Cristi’s parents run toward me and her mother shouts, “Ronny, call 911.”
I can feel warm liquid dripping down my bare arm. I stare at my shoulder and arm. So red; so much blood.
My legs are melting from underneath me, but an arm catches me and lays me gently on the bed. Someone’s face hovers over my own. I think it’s Cristi’s dad. He presses a piece of cloth on my shoulder and I gasp. He says, “Sorry to hurt you but I’m trying to stop the bleeding. Hang in there. An ambulance should be here in a couple of minutes.”
The pain in my shoulders is slowly easing into a throbbing numbness. I close my eyes, and voices around me fade away. Silence can be so comforting.
5
I open my eyes inside an ambulance. My shoulder feels numb but at least it’s not hurting anymore. I say to the paramedic sitting to my right, “Am I still bleeding?”
“No. You passed out from fear, shock. Just a few minutes. You lost some blood, but not as much as it looked. Don’t worry, they’ll patch you up good. We’re almost there.”
At the hospital, they put me on a gurney and wheel me directly to a room blazing with lights. People in shapeless blue garb, caps, and surgical masks fuss over me, sticking needles into my arm and wrapping monitors around it.
I close my eyes. I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’m supposed to be relaxing, waiting until my mother calls me to dinner. She says I need time away from pots and pans and refused my help in the kitchen. Can’t I rewind my life like a film, back to before I call Cristi?
