I watched Maria check the oven one more time to make sure it was off, and then, out of habit, flip off the light switch before exiting through the swinging door and leaving me in the dark.
“Goodnight, Maria.”
Chapter 2
“What are you doing tomorrow tonight?” Robin demanded, not even acknowledging my pleasant greeting.
“Hello to you, too.” I balanced the cordless phone against my shoulder and continued folding laundry. “Steve and Paige are coming for their tasting at five and we were thinking of going out for a drink afterward.”
“Shit, I forgot,” Robin heaved an aggravated sigh, as she did every time someone mentioned anything to do with marriage, men or monogamy - which meant there’s always a gust of air blowing from Robin’s direction. “How’s she doing?”
“Paige is hanging in there. She still hasn’t convinced Steve that it’s absolutely necessary to be transported from the church to the reception in a horse-drawn carriage, but she’s still working on it.”
“Well, come over afterward, I want to talk to you about something.”
“Not another seminar.” Robin was constantly testing out new seminar ideas on me and Paige, but since Paige was in the middle of planning her wedding and couldn’t be relied upon to provide objective feedback on programs designed for disgruntled women, I’d become Robin’s sole sounding board. Apparently I more closely resembled Robin’s target audience.
“Let’s just say it involves getting screwed,” she said, purposely leaving me on the hook.
“Sounds intriguing, any hints?”
“As a professional speaker and seminar aficionado, I know better than to give away the punch line.” Robin paused for effect, which, despite the fact that I knew it was coming, worked. “You’ll find out when you get here.”
I placed folded stacks of t-shirts and underwear and jeans into the laundry basket and hoped that Robin’s need to talk had nothing to do with Mark. After two years of post-divorce retaliation, there wasn’t much left she could do to make Mark rue the day he met Robin Cross. Then again, she was very creative.
“So, what’s for dinner tonight, chef girl? Perhaps a little herb crusted leg of lamb? A simple salmon and asparagus en croute?” Robin struggled to affect a convincing French accent.
“Let’s see.” I made my way past a sad excuse for a dining room table and into the kitchen, where the remains of my dinner still sat on the Formica counter. “I prepared a mélange of flaky albacore in white sauce, sprinkled with freshly grated aged cheddar and nestled on a bed of toasted organic nine grain loaf.”
“A tuna melt on whole wheat?”
“Bingo.”
“Just because you’re cooking for one doesn’t mean you have to eat like a ten year old,” Robin scolded. “You know, for someone who makes a living because she supposedly knows her way around the kitchen, you’re certainly a big disappointment to those of us who know you.”
I removed the cooled griddle from the burner and set it in the sink with this morning’s cereal bowl. “You know what they say – the cobbler’s kids and all. Besides, my living is made outside the kitchen, where it’s all about presentation.”
“Speaking of which, I’ve gotta run. I’m writing a new workbook for the SCALPEL program, and there’s a publisher interested in taking a look at it. An editor’s taking me to dinner.”
“Brave soul.”
“Smart soul. SCALPEL’s booked through June. Tell Paige and Steve I said hi. And don’t let them pick anything with nuts. You know how I feel about nuts.”
Mostly that she liked to bust them.
Robin’s company, Women In Action, was originally a small organization that coordinated classes for bored housewives and single women – pottery classes and candle-making, macramé and flower arranging. When Robin joined the company right out of college as an event coordinator, she immediately saw the possibilities. Instead of offering night classes on how to create memory quilts, Robin had bigger plans. She bought the company from the owner and set about recreating the firm, and today Women In Action developed seminars and workshops based on the phases in a woman’s life - from adolescent angst to incontinence, Robin liked to say
The themes of Robin’s seminars seemed to follow along with the events going on in her life. When she first purchased the company she created programs for working women, seminars with names like Sleeping Your Way to the Top: Using Your Dreams to Achieve Professional Success and Is That Spinach in Your Teeth?: What NOT to Say During the Interview Process. When she married Mark, she started focusing on couple issues with The More the Merrier: Group Sex for Married Couples and I’m Not Your Mom So Pick Up Your Own Dirty Underwear: Setting Boundaries that Make Marriage Work. Unfortunately, Robin’s been more successful telling other people how to live their lives than figuring out her own. Since the divorce, she’s struck it big teaching women how to get over lost love, even as she struggles to take her own advice. Love Stinks: Getting Over It and Moving On was so successful it led to the entire Relationship Circumcision series, which included Men: Can’t Live with Them – And Why Would You Want To?, Sexual Healing: Nothing a little KY Jelly and Batteries Can’t Cure, and finally the complete SCALPEL method of relationship recovery. In her program SCALPEL: Cutting Out the Man Who Ripped Out Your Heart, Robin takes women through the seven steps necessary to move on after splitting up - Screaming, Crying, Anger, Loneliness, Payback, Elevation and Letting Go. Robin’s still kind of stuck in the payback phase herself, but she claims to be working on it.
The seven-week series begins with Robin standing on a darkened stage wielding a scalpel, the instrument’s slender blade illuminated by a spotlight reflecting shards of light into the audience. Once the drama of the scene sinks in, the audience quiets down and turns their full attention to the stage. In a voice that is at once thunderous yet controlled, Robin announces that men are as useless as foreskin. Those are her exact words, men are as useless as foreskin. The women go crazy, clapping and whooping, pumping their fists in the air. With that line alone, her audience believes that the seminar was worth the $750 admission fee. Clever gal, that Robin.
In a way, we’re kind of at two opposite ends of the spectrum. I was there to see women get caught up in the fairy tale, and Robin was there when Prince Charming rides off into the sunset with the chamber maid.
Robin thought I was in danger of becoming a wedding junkie, which was akin to becoming a serial killer, in her opinion. But after watching the transformative power a compressed piece of carbon can wield on otherwise sane women, I was the opposite of a wedding junkie. I’d seen successful, competent professional women get blinded by yards of raw silk and glittery tiaras, and how rational women could come unglued at the thought of sacrificing just one creamy white Pascili rose even as her wedding budget was nearing that of a third world country’s gross national product. It turned out even Paige wasn’t immune to the hysteria, which is why every conversation we’d had lately seemed to revolve around such thought-provoking topics as big band versus swing and Calphelon versus All-Clad.
In fact, if Dante was around today, he’d add a tenth circle of hell – other people’s wedding plans. But in my line of work, I didn’t just have to grin and bear it – I grinned and baked it.
Even though Robin insisted I was destined for disappointment, that being around giddy brides everyday would leave me hopelessly buying into the myth of marital bliss, I knew she was wrong. If anything, watching couples go through the process of planning a wedding has made me even more convinced that I shouldn’t settle for anything less than Mister Absolutely Right. And I definitely wasn’t desperate to get married like other women who hit the big three-oh and felt their biological clocks turn into time bombs – even if I did have my wedding cake picked out (raspberry-filled almond cake with chocolate ganache), knew where I wanted to live with my husband (the Back Bay with a view of the Charles River), and my habit of ripping out pages from the Pottery Barn catalog and saving them in a folder marked “S
omeday” drove Maria crazy. And Maria wasn’t the only one.
Robin and Paige couldn’t understand why my apartment was still decorated in early-career Ikea even though Lauren’s Luscious Licks was booming. They couldn’t believe I hadn’t traded up, that I still relied on my old standbys – the particle board dressers, queen-sized futon and rice paper lamps. But there was no denying that my apartment was homey, and I always had fresh or still-not dead flowers on the dining room table that doubled as a TV tray when you folded down the two leaves. So what if my kitchen coordination consisted of matching the white laminate cabinets with the six ribbed glasses I got for free when I purchased one hundred dollars worth of groceries at Star Market.
No matter what Paige and Robin said about my apartment, its three rooms still reminded me of the day I swallowed hard and signed the lease on the Newbury Street store. I took a huge financial risk by signing that lease, and then compounded my leap of faith by moving into a one bedroom on Comm Ave a week later. But either because I was terribly naïve or just desperately hopeful, I believed in the boutique. I knew I could make it a success, and signing the lease meant that failing wasn’t an option.
My kitchen was a drastic contrast to Paige’s granite countertops and Robin’s Sub-Zero fridge. My refrigerator wasn’t even full-sized no less a five foot wide behemoth with enough freezer space to keep Walt Disney in a deep freeze until science developed a cure for old age. I didn’t have a dishwasher, either, which is why the dishes tended to pile up in my sink until I was forced to either wash them or drink straight from the carton of milk. Paige and Robin were fully aware of my dirty little secret, which is why they always declined my offer of any beverage in an unopened container.
But if I didn’t care, why should they?
Well, actually, I did know why Paige was so concerned. She was hell-bent on finding me that Back Bay condo and cashing a very hefty commission check when I signed on the dotted line. But, I’d always thought that when it came time to buy real estate and invest in adult furniture, adult meaning pieces that came pre-assembled and didn’t require hex nuts and wood glue, I would share the decision with someone else. Why invest in French country if my future significant other preferred mission style? It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be making the decision with someone else whose tastes I’d have to take into consideration, someone whose color preferences I’d have to reconcile with my own. Buying a place was a huge decision, a commitment that I just wasn’t ready to make when the man of my dreams might want to live in Cambridge.
Even if my decision to wait patiently caused me to be on the receiving end of Robin’s feminist manifestos and Paige’s daily e-mails about declining mortgage interest rates, I was fine with it. Besides, I’d had my chance to marry Neil. If I was really a wedding junkie, I would have accepted his offer and right now, instead of running Lauren’s Luscious Licks, I’d be in Washington, DC popping out little Neil juniors and enjoying all the perfectly pleasant perks that surely accompanied the title of Mrs. Neil Morrow.
Instead, two weeks after Neil moved, I found myself without a boyfriend, without a job, and without any money to buy a gift for Paige’s birthday. I could barely afford a cab ride to the party, no less a present, so I picked up a Martha Stewart cookbook for two bucks at a used bookstore in Cambridge, and went to work. Before that afternoon, the closest I’d ever come to baking was the time Paige, Robin and I attempted to make hash cookies – hash brownies requiring too much effort, as the Dunkin Hines mix actually necessitated the measuring of water and cracking of an egg. But cookies, that we could handle. All they required was slicing open a roll of Tollhouse cookie dough and placing the dollops of dough on the toaster oven’s miniature cookie sheet. Even without the hallucinogenic effects of hash, the chocolate almond torte I’d made for Paige was a hit, and soon I had people asking me to make desserts for parties and, eventually, after I’d taken classes to learn the proper technique, weddings.
Eight years later, Lauren’s Luscious Licks was the toast of the town, Neil was long gone, and I was getting ready to make Paige another cake.
I ran some water over the dishes and griddle and headed back into the living room where my clothesline fresh laundry, and hopefully a juicy Lifetime movie, awaited me.
Lifetime TV – what an ingenious idea. How could a woman possibly feel bad about her own life after watching two hours of women who are cheated on, betrayed, struck with amnesia, jailed, mutilated or held captive by stalkers. Besides, it’s given life back to a whole generation of sit com actresses who were spiraling into entertainment oblivion. I’ve gotten sucked into so many movies starring Meredith Baxter Birney as a psycho husband killer or adulterous sex addict, I had a hard time picturing her as sweet Mrs. Keaton anymore.
As I folded my bath towels, I thought about Robin out at some expensive restaurant getting wined and dined by an editor while I devoted an evening to ensuring that my socks were matched and my underwear was folded into quarters. Funny thing is, I knew that Robin would give it up in a heartbeat – the articles that quoted her as an “expert,” the requests to appear on TV, and the all expense paid dinners with publishers who were trying to woo her – and all it would take is one phone call from Mark saying he wanted her back.
If I’d offered Robin the option of a thinking it over party five years ago, there was no way she would have taken it. Even though they lived together for four years, no one, not even me or Paige, assumed that marriage was on the horizon for Mark and Robin. As a couple, Robin and Mark prided themselves on their respective independence, they were the consummate contemporary couple comprised of two separate but equal participants. Their relationship was an exercise in self-preservation, with two tubes of the same toothpaste and a conscientious decision to avoid having a designated side of the bed – too conventional and routine, even though Robin preferred sleeping next to the alarm clock and Mark liked having easy access to the phone. No, we never asked Robin and Mark when they’d get married, but we did ask if. And when we asked, Robin held her breath.
Despite herself, Robin had become one of those women she hated – a woman who needed more, a woman whose neediness was breeding discontent and something completely foreign to Robin - insecurity. The longer Robin and Mark lived together without the mention of a ring, not mentioned because Robin believed that no self-respecting woman should have to bring it up, the more she needed it. When they walked to the grocery store together on Saturday mornings she found herself stealing glances in the jewelry store windows, the expansive plate glass mercilessly reflecting what she herself had started to see – fear. When Mark finally proposed, three years from the day they met and one week short of the date Robin gave in her ultimatum, she was finally convinced that she’d gotten what she’d wanted.
Of course, the best laid plans are usually the ones that come back to bite you in the ass. When Mark left Robin he proclaimed that he didn’t want to be married anymore, implying that it was the institution that he found distasteful, not the person he’d chosen to enter into the institution with. But Robin knew what he meant. He meant he didn’t want to be married to her.
Unlike Mark, I didn’t have a problem with the institution of marriage; I had a problem planning a life with Neil.
“I have an offer you can’t refuse,” Neil had told me over a candle lit dinner at L'Espalier. “Move to DC with me.”
“He said what?” Paige had cried when I told her about the apres ski dinner. “An offer you can’t refuse?”
“What is he, a used car salesman?” Robin started waving her hands in the air like the guy from the Fast Freddy’s commercial. “Come on in today, folks, we’re wheeling and dealing, we’ve got a man with an offer you just can’t refuse!”
“That is the lamest proposal I’ve ever heard,” Paige chimed in.
“It wasn’t exactly a proposal,” I’d told them. “It was more like –“
Robin cut me off before I could answer. “A sign you should seriously wonder why you’re dating this man?�
�
No, it wasn’t a proposal, but I realized, just by looking at the expectation in his eyes, that Neil’s offer was a prelude to marriage and a lifetime together. And after three years of dating, three relatively pleasant, stress-free years where we bumped along without any significant disagreements but without any electrifying fireworks either, it seemed like the obvious thing to do.
“I’ll think about it,” I answered, but even then I knew that the only thinking I was going to be doing was the kind that resulted in an ironclad excuse that wouldn’t make me look like the bad guy.
But would things have turned out differently if Neil had given me the opportunity to say yes to a thinking it over party? Maybe with more time I could have learned to live with the little things that started to make me question whether we belonged together. It was as if the more real the prospect of us spending our lives together became, the higher I turned up the microscope on his habits and ways of doing things and revealed imperfections that, once uncovered, I couldn’t overlook. Like how he’d laugh a little too hard at his own jokes, as if hoping his listeners would follow along. Or when he’d tell me he could care less and I wanted to scream at him “you couldn’t care less, the expression is you couldn’t care less.”
Okay, minor things, I know. In retrospect, maybe I was blowing things out of proportion in the end. It was an expression lots of people got wrong. But it became like a humming noise in the background of our relationship, and the harder I tried to ignore it, the louder it grew. It wasn’t that Neil was Mister Wrong. He just wasn’t Mister Right.
You get what you settle for, Maria once told me. I think at the time she was referring to the low cocoa butter content in a shipment of chocolate we received, but it applied just as well to relationships. We didn’t hesitate to send the shipment back and order from another supplier. And if I wasn’t willing to settle for anything less than perfect when it came to ingredients for our cakes, I sure as hell wasn’t going to settle for anything less when it came to my personal life. After all, everyone knew that the best things come to those who wait.
Dress Rehearsal Page 2
