That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  “It’s so nice to meet you,” Daisy said.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too.” Diana sat down, rolling her eyes. “I spent the last six hours with a guy who called me sweetie, and I’m not sure if it was because he’d forgotten my name, or because he’d never known it in the first place. I’ve been looking forward to this all day!”

  Daisy smiled and sat, congratulating herself on her guesswork. Diana Starling was tall, like she’d imagined, with a poised, confident manner. She wore a black business suit, crisply tailored, with a cream-colored silk top with an artful bow tied at the neck, the kind of shirt Daisy would have never been able to pull off (her bosom made button-downs impossible, and the bow looked complicated). Significant diamonds flashed at Diana’s ears. There were no rings on her fingers, but she was wearing perfume, something dark and emphatic, with notes of musk and tobacco. Diana’s dark hair hung in loose waves against her shoulders. She had a broad forehead, two faint lines between her eyebrows and more at the corners of her eyes, high cheekbones, and a square chin. Daisy saw the eyelash extensions she’d imagined, blush and bronzer and lipstick that left a dark-red bow on her water glass’s rim. It was more makeup than a typical Bryn Mawr mom might have worn for drinks, but it suited the other Diana. Daisy guessed that she was about fifty, but a well-maintained fifty, a groomed and fit and hydrated fifty. She looked healthy and attractive, and didn’t seem like she was trying desperately to look young. Daisy imagined private Pilates classes and a lap pool; regular blowouts, facials and waxings and a personal shopper to find those suits and silk blouses. When the other Diana traveled, it was probably first-class, and when she stayed in a hotel, it was probably five stars. It made Daisy insignificant and ordinary, with a handful of wholly unremarkable achievements: she’d married a man, produced a single child, and started a very small business, and how hard was any of that?

  A waiter approached and bent over them solicitously. “Ladies, welcome to the King Cole.” He handed them both menus, refilled Diana’s water glass and gave Daisy one of her own, and set a silver dish of warmed, spiced cashews, and another one of chicharróns, in front of them.

  “Mmm,” said Diana, biting into a nut. “Delicious.”

  “Nuts are always better when you heat them up,” said Daisy. “I tell that to all my clients. Five minutes in the toaster oven and they’re a hundred times more impressive.” She realized that she was showing off a bit. It felt good, though, to have someone look at her like she was the expert, like she had wisdom to impart. Normally, she only experienced that kind of regard from a distance when she was with Hal, watching as people pumped him for legal advice or asked if he knew any secrets for getting into Dartmouth.

  “I want to hear everything. But first…” Diana opened the menu. “I’m getting a Bloody Mary. They say they invented them here, you know.”

  “Sounds perfect,” said Daisy. She had planned on ordering her usual glass of white wine, but a Bloody Mary sounded like exactly the thing.

  “And is it okay if we get some snacks?” Diana made a funny, self-deprecating face again, and Daisy felt gladdened to know that Diana was an eater. “I had one of those working lunches, where they bring in platters of pastrami and corned beef sandwiches for the guys, and there’s always that one salad in a plastic clamshell, and it’s always the saddest salad in the world. And I have to eat it, because I’m a girl.”

  “Can’t you eat the corned beef?” asked Daisy.

  “The one time I attempted a sandwich at a business meeting, I ended up with mustard all over my blouse. A Shout wipe can only do so much.”

  That made Daisy feel a little bit better, even though she suspected that Diana was probably lying, or that if the event she’d described had happened, it had occurred only once, years ago, and Diana had related the anecdote for the sole purpose of putting Daisy at ease. Daisy felt grateful for the effort, even though she couldn’t imagine this elegant, composed, confident woman with mustard on her blouse or dog crap on her shoes or walking into a PTA meeting with the back of her skirt tucked into her tights, which had happened to Daisy just three weeks ago.

  They agreed to share the cheese plate and the calamari. When the drinks arrived, Diana lifted her tall glass of horseradish-flecked tomato juice and vodka. “To Dianas,” she said.

  “To new friends.” Daisy clinked Diana’s glass with her own, and gave her drink a stir with the celery stalk, before taking a sip, relishing the heat of the spices, the slower burn of the booze. “It’s such a weird coincidence. And honestly, nobody’s called me Diana in years. My husband renamed me.”

  The other woman tilted her head. And you let him? Daisy imagined her thinking, but what she said was, “Daisy’s a lovely name.”

  Daisy thought her name was sweet more than lovely, and she wasn’t sure how the notion of a man renaming an adult woman was resonating with her new friend. “So what are you doing for work, right now?” she asked Diana. “I know you’re a consultant, but…”

  “I know, I know,” Diana said, with a good-natured shake of her head. “A word that means nothing. In my case, businesses—mostly pharmaceutical firms these days—bring me in to spend a few months looking around, to find the deadwood and the soft spots. And then do the cutting.” She shrugged, smoothing a glossy lock of hair. “I’m the angel of death, more or less. I bring the axe down, and I leave while the blood’s still on the floor.”

  “That must be hard,” Daisy ventured. She could picture it: this assured, competent woman inviting underlings into her office, saying, Close the door and have a seat, then telling them that they were no longer needed. “Do people ever—you know—react badly?”

  Diana’s lips turned up slightly. “Some of them cry. Some of them call me names. I’ve had a trash can thrown at me.”

  “You must be good at talking people through it.”

  Diana shrugged. “Actually, I’ve just got good reflexes.” She mimed ducking out of the way of a projectile, making Daisy laugh.

  The waiter arrived and set down the plates with a flourish, arranging them just so, handing around cheese knives and small plates. Diana spread warm goat cheese on a round of baguette, gold cuff flashing in the candlelight, and took a bite with evident enjoyment. Daisy got another whiff of Diana’s perfume, and could see that her eyes were hazel. They seemed to glow, cat-like, in the candlelight. Or maybe that was just the effects of the Bloody Mary, which, somehow, was already half-empty.

  “Yum,” Diana said after her first bite of bread and cheese. Daisy nibbled a calamari ring, watching Diana eat. She wondered if, in another life, she herself could have been a businesswoman, in black suits, causing waiters to scurry and hustle to make her happy, and not the kind of woman who’d gotten married before she turned twenty-one, who’d dropped out of college and had spent her life cooking and keeping other people happy. With a sigh, she thought, Probably not.

  “I want to hear more about what you do,” Diana said. “How’d you get to be a chef?”

  “Oh, I’m not a chef. I haven’t had professional training. I’m just your basic home cook.” A home cook with pretensions, as she’d once overheard Hal describe her, and when she’d told him how that made her feel, how diminished and belittled she’d felt, he’d looked puzzled before he’d said, You’re right, Daze. I should have said ambitions, and not pretensions. She’d accepted his apology, but felt like the incident had given her a window into Hal’s mind. She’d seen his true feelings, and they were not flattering.

  “I always loved cooking. And my mom didn’t.” Daisy felt a pang, remembering her mother’s gardens. “She liked growing food, but she really didn’t like to cook it. And I have two brothers who are twelve and thirteen years older than I am. I think that, after feeding two teenage boys, my mom would’ve been happy if she’d never had to see the inside of the kitchen again. And then my father died when I was fourteen.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry,” Diana murmured.

  “Yeah. It knocked my mom for a loop. She wasn’t really
interested in cooking.” Or in anything, for a while, Daisy thought. One of her dad’s former business partners, one of the men who’d bought out her father’s shares in the video rental stores, had helped her mother find a job, doing the books for a car dealership. Her poor mom, who’d once worn a diamond tennis bracelet and designer gowns, reduced to working nine to five, under harsh fluorescent lights, dealing with their former neighbors who’d come to get their BMWs and Jaguars serviced.

  Daisy made herself look cheerful. “I used to bake with my dad, and my grandma. So it wasn’t a big step to take over the meals, too.” Her mother would give her grocery money at the beginning of the week, and Daisy would shop after school, stopping at the Key Food that was on her way home. At night, Judy would sit on the couch, drained from her day at work, and Daisy would bustle around behind her, walking the circuit from the refrigerator to the counter to the stove, trying to cook something—anything—that would coax her mother to the table. Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she’d roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she’d spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She’d stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father’s absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths.

  “After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do…”

  She tried to explain it—how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same steps that her mother’s mother’s mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven’s heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

  “Do you like to cook?” she asked Diana, who looked rueful as she shook her head. “Too much travel, and too many business dinners. I can make tuna-noodle casserole and heat frozen dinners. That’s about it. What about your husband and your daughter?” Diana asked. “Do they like to cook? Or do they even bother when they’ve got a pro in the house?”

  Flattered, Daisy said, “Hal can do the basics. Beatrice isn’t really interested in learning.” She felt her smile fade as she considered Beatrice’s and Hal’s indifference to her life’s work. Her husband would eat pretty much anything, with the same degree of enthusiasm. “Tastes great, dear,” he would tell her, whether she’d served him salmon en papillote or beef Wellington, with mushroom duxelle and puff pastry made from scratch, or a hoagie she’d picked up at Wawa. Meanwhile, Beatrice’s favorite food these days was cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. And even the most perfect, most lovingly prepared cucumber sandwich was still, at the end of the day, cucumbers, butter, and bread. Worse, she suspected that Beatrice thought that cooking, cleaning, homemaking, all of what used to be called the domestic arts, were women’s work. A yoke that Daisy wore, of her own choosing, boundaries past which she did not stray; all of it part of a world that Beatrice and her generation had evolved beyond.

  Diana seemed to sense her discomfort, and deftly changed the subject. “How did you start giving lessons?”

  “Ah,” said Daisy. She’d expected the question. Most of her clients would ask—hey, how’d you get into doing this?—so by now she had a story as polished as a silver serving piece. “My sophomore year of college, I had three roommates. We had this tiny little shoebox of an apartment. One night, I made chicken marsala for dinner. Chicken, rice, a green salad with vinaigrette. Basic stuff.”

  “It doesn’t sound basic to me!” Diana said, and Daisy felt herself flush with pleasure. “How do you do it?”

  “Well, you start with chicken breasts. And you have to pound them thin.” She remembered how they didn’t have a mallet, and how they’d wrapped a can of soup in tinfoil and used that instead, taking turns, thumping the cutlets to the beat of ABBA. Pretend it’s your ex! Louisa had said.

  “Then you dredge the cutlets in flour, sauté them in butter, and deglaze the pan—that just means you put in some broth or some wine, and scrape up the browned bits. And then you add mushrooms, a little cream, whatever herbs you like. There’s really not much to it.”

  Diana shook her head, and Daisy repeated that it was easy, that anyone could do it. But she could still picture her roommates, hovering around the pan wide-eyed as Daisy touched a match to the liquor and sent flames jumping out of the pan; how they’d watched the sauce come together like it was a miracle. How it felt to have their attention and approval, when usually she felt herself overlooked, the least pretty of the roommates, the one boys’ eyes skipped past. This is better than anything I’ve had in a restaurant, Louisa had said, and Marisol had said, Daisy, you’re a genius!

  “And vinaigrette? How do you make that happen?”

  “Oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and a whisk. It emulsifies.”

  Diana raised her hands. “Taking your word for it.” From her expression, Daisy could tell that the word “emulsify” meant as much to Diana as the word “consultant” meant to her.

  “It means the two liquids combine to become something different.” In her mind, she was back in the apartment’s tiny galley kitchen, remembering they’d sung along with “Waterloo,” and done rock, paper, scissors to determine who’d have to find her fake ID and make a trip to the liquor store. That year, cooking had gone from being a lonely, solo activity to being communal, loud and a little slapdash in the crowded kitchen, and a lot more fun. Each girl would pour herself a glass of wine while they cooked. Marisol had taught them her grandmother’s recipes for pernil, and arroz con pollo, and Louisa had made her mother’s rosti, and Gretchen had mostly watched and washed the dishes because her parents had both worked, and most of their food had come from cans and boxes. It had felt so good, Daisy remembered, having people who appreciated what she made, after years of watching her mother pick at her cooking, indifferent and unappreciative, pushing whatever Daisy had prepared into her mouth like it was Soylent Green and not a gourmet meal.

  “So, fast-forward a few weeks, and Gretchen’s in a panic, because her boyfriend’s bringing his parents down to meet her, and he wants her to make, quote, ‘that chicken thing’ for all of them.” Daisy could still remember the terror on her roommate’s face as she’d racewalked through the library to find Daisy. He gave me a hundred bucks to buy groceries, she’d whispered as other students had glared and tried to shush them, and he swears he told me that his parents were coming to town, only I don’t remember him saying anything about it, and I can’t tell him I was lying, please, Diana, you have to help me. I’ll do anything!

  “I took Gretchen to the grocery store and we bought everything we needed. Then we went home, and I showed her how to do it.”

  “She didn’t want you to cook it yourself?” Diana asked. “You know, Cyrano the dinner?”

  “Oh, she absolutely wanted that.” Daisy remembered how Gretchen had begged. But Daisy hadn’t wavered.

  “I told her, ‘Give a man a fish, he eats for one meal; teach a man to fish, and he’ll never go hungry.’ I made her do the whole thing.” Daisy could still see it: Destiny’s Child on the stereo, Gretchen, with her hair in hot rollers,
scooping textbooks and magazines and discarded sweatshirts off the floor; Marisol following after her with the vacuum cleaner.

  “Gretchen paid me to give her mother a lesson for Mother’s Day, and her mom referred me to some of her friends, so I did it that way for a while. Word of mouth. And then one of my brother’s friends hired me to help his dad.” She could still remember Danny’s voice on the phone, asking if she remembered him mentioning Hal Shoemaker, an Emlen classmate, the stroke of the men’s eight. “I gave him your number. I hope it’s okay.” Hal had called, not ten minutes later. Daisy remembered how he’d sounded, his voice clipped and terse. My mother died six months ago and I think my dad’s going to starve or get scurvy.

  “And I married him. The guy who’d hired me, not his father,” she explained.

  “So, like, right out of college?” Diana looked startled.

  “It was actually in the middle of my senior year,” Daisy said, feeling the familiar twinge of embarrassment she got when confessing that her only diploma was from high school.

  “Wow. You must have been a child bride.”

  Daisy swallowed hard, again hearing echoes of her friend. Hannah had teased her, calling her kiddo sometimes, or teen mom. “I was almost twenty-one. That’s actually kind of average for lots of the country, but, yeah, it’s young for around here.”

  Diana was looking at her with an expression that Daisy couldn’t decipher. “You must have been sure of him.”

  “I guess I was.” Daisy sipped the watery dregs of her drink. “Although sometimes I think that all I was sure about was marrying someone, and Hal was just the first one who asked.” The words were out of her mouth before she’d thought about them, and, as soon as she heard them, she felt her cheeks get hot. This wasn’t something she’d ever said out loud. Not even to Hannah. “God, that sounds horrible. I mean, I wouldn’t have married just anyone.”