Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  “Beautiful dog,” he tells the owner, a middle-aged woman who looks like she’d like to get her dog through this walk and back up to her air-conditioned apartment.

  I love this side of Adam, the one that disappeared during the years that he was working in the law firm. That Adam never paused to pet a random dog. Honestly, he wouldn’t have even noticed the dog because he would have either been walking too quickly or had his eyes trained on his BlackBerry. Adam finally gets the hint that the owner would like to move along and drags himself off the ground, looking longingly at the puppy as we continue toward our class.

  “You are going to remember to wash really well before you start cooking, right?” I tease.

  “Between my fingers and with soap and everything,” Adam promises. “But, come on, that puppy was so damn cute. How could I not pet him?”

  “He was cute,” I agree. “Too bad he’ll grow up to be the size of our coffee table.”

  “True,” Adam muses. He stares at a hot dog vendor packing up his cart for the night. “Do you ever still think about the two of us having a baby?”

  Adam glances at me sideways, as if he doesn’t quite want to confront this topic head-on. It’s not the first time he has brought up children since we’ve been back together, but usually, it’s more of a passing comment rather than an outright question. Do I still want children?

  I slip my hand through his, despite the fact that it is covered in dog saliva and God knows what else from touching the pavement as he crouched down. That is love—holding a hand that you know has been to disgusting places and back. “Absolutely,” I tell him, deciding to go the Band-Aid ripping approach and spill out my intentions clearly in case they don’t mesh with his own. Better to know this now rather than later. “I know it’s getting late to have the three or four kids I imagined I’d have, but I’d like to have one. Do you feel the same way?”

  “I absolutely feel the same way,” Adam agrees. “I’m not against more than one, but I’d like to have at least one child. However we build our family.”

  “However?” I joke.

  “I was just thinking about Arianna and how fertility is never a given,” Adam admits, referring to the fact that my best friend needed years of fertility treatments in order to have her son. As we approach the cooking school, its familiar green awning a few storefronts away, Adam drops my hand in favor of lightly touching both shoulders. My heartbeat quickens as he looks into my eyes, and I glance down at a crack in the pavement: a tiny, discarded matchstick lying in the collected city grime like an open grave. “My biggest regret, Rach, is missing out on time with you. Of letting things get where they got and missing out on so much time with you. I can never get those years back.”

  “You’re going to make me cry before class,” I whisper.

  The truth is that I have the exact same regret, and it fills my chest with an enormous pressure, like a hand squeezing a water balloon, shoving the contents to bulge on either side while the center contracts. I don’t want to spill all over right now, moments before class. It is unfair that life doesn’t come with a rewind button; an undo button that can reset time after you make a terrible mistake. I am well aware without Adam’s thoughts that our stubbornness, our inability to communicate, may have cost me my chance at motherhood. I do a fine job tipping back my head and staring at the sky, only losing two tears—one from each eye—as I get myself under control. I have a meal to cook, dammit. A food blogger doesn’t fall apart seconds before she starts working on the dish that is going to be focus of her post.

  We enter the building and immediately head to the sinks, carefully scrubbing our hands with the meticulousness of surgeons. I glance up at the chalkboard in front of the demonstration kitchen and note that we’re using the indoor grills to prepare Asian-marinated salmon steaks that we’re going to fillet ourselves. I am not a fan of preparing whole fish, preferring to keep the meat masquerade going by having it come to me shrink-wrapped and incognito from its former self. There’s something about cutting into an animal that still has its eyes attached. Who knows what dead fish can see?

  Adam and I gather at the demonstration kitchen with the other couples. One other couple is in their mid-thirties. They’re two men hailing from Brooklyn who work in Manhattan close to the school. They come from their office jobs in stylish button-down shirts and expensive pants. They live in my sister’s neighborhood of Park Slope, and I once bumped into the cuter one—Jared—when he was out jogging with their dog.

  Two of the couples are slightly older, perhaps nearing their late forties. Both couples live in the neighborhood, in the same building, and they’ve known each other for years. They often chat about their respective children over the low wall between their two kitchens. From what I’ve been able to pick up from snatches of conversation, the stylish African-American woman married to the white man who looks like a stereotypical bad guy from a spy movie works for the United Nations, and the petite white woman married to the lanky Asian man types up his long-hand poems and answers his correspondence. Their husbands rarely speak, so while I can tell that one is a fairly successful poet who recently read his work at the White House, I can’t tell what the bad-guy-from-a-spy-movie does except sulk as he shells English peas.

  The last couple is much older than us, past our parents’ age. This class is just one of the many activities they’re doing with their retirement hours. They missed two of the classes because they were off scuba diving in Australia. The man, Xavier, does the majority of the work while his wife, Oona, kibitzes with whomever she can drag away from their kitchen. She may not chop her vegetables neatly or even answer her husband’s pleas for help when he’s endlessly stirring a sauce, but she always makes sure that our wine glasses are filled with each course. She is what I imagine the first person who used the phrase, “the life of the party” meant when they coined the term.

  Adam refers to our class as the Benetton Cooking Class (or BCC for short), a snarky reference to our diversity in age, sexuality, and race. It is odd how different we are from one another—brought together simply due to our love of food—and in comparison, Adam and I seem a little vanilla pudding in our exterior. On the other hand, I’d hazard a guess that no one else in the room is re-dating their ex-partner, a fact that I’d like to think sets us apart from all the other happy couples as unique.

  Or not so happy couples. Tonight, there is a strange tension between the UN worker and her bad-guy-spy husband. They stand stiffly, their arms identically crossed over their chests, not only not speaking to one another, but pretty much ignoring their neighbors too. The poem-typer-and-correspondence-answerer gives me a tense smile, as if she is trying to suppress her own good mood in the face of the other couple’s obvious shitstorm.

  Our teacher, a red-haired guy who looks much younger than his actual age of forty-two—a fact I found out after Googling him and piecing together his cooking resume from old restaurant reviews (as well as finding his wedding announcement to a Ms. Courtney Hill in an old New York Times)—clears his throat to indicate that he’s ready to begin. His hands are a constellation of old kitchen burns and knife scars, and he splays them across the counter as he speaks to us, almost as a warning of how we’ll end up if we’re not careful and go into a life of restaurant work.

  “It’s important to know how to fillet a whole fish. Not only will it make it possible for you to prepare what you catch next time you go fishing, but it will change the way you approach someplace like the New Fulton Fish Market.”

  “When are we heading up to Nova Scotia to troll for salmon?” I whisper to Adam.

  “Forget that. When have we ever gone out to the Bronx to buy fish?” Adam whispers back.

  “The fish we’re preparing today,” Alex the chef informs us, “are whole salmons. We’re going to keep the skin on, but debone the fillets. I’ve already descaled all of these.”

  He takes a fish out o
f the tub of ice chips and places it flat on his cutting board. The fish stares upward at him, as if daring him to make the first move. Alex makes a cut behind the gills, leaving the head intact. He then turns his knife, sliding it into the groove he just created next to the gills, and cuts evenly from the head to the tail. I look away, staring at his neat handwriting on the blackboard. Maybe I’ll ask Adam to do this part while I work on bringing together the marinade.

  “You should be able to feel your knife against the backbone,” Alex says in a gentle voice that belies the inherent violence that comes in taking apart another animal. “Though you’ll cut straight through those little pin bones. Cut the fillet completely off the bone, and then flip the fish over and do the same on the other side.”

  When the two fillets are free from the corpse, he discards the head and backbone into the small rubbish bin he keeps tucked under the counter. Now the salmon looks like something I could have picked up at Whole Foods. He trims off the rib bones and then picks up a tiny tweezer. “You’re going to place the fillet skin-side down on your cutting board. I use my fingertips to locate the little pin bones and then use these kitchen tweezers to pull them out. If you’re on the river or at the beach and you’ve forgotten this utensil, a pair of everyday pliers can work just fine. Just remember to clean them beforehand.”

  “When do we ever have a pair of pliers with us when we’re at the river?” I comment to Adam as we gather up the remaining ingredients we’ll need for the side dishes from the demonstration kitchen to bring back to our work space.

  “When are we ever at a river?” Adam murmurs back, passing over a few bulbs of garlic to find a perfect one in the pile. “We’re more likely to be tortured by my parents in the Hamptons. Though I assume that if you’re fishing, that’s one of those tools you might find in a tackle box.”

  “I’m trying to picture your mother fishing,” I snicker. Adam’s mother isn’t really the type to get her hands dirty. She’s not even the type to get her feet coated in sand, despite owning a beach house, unless the reason you’re on the sand is to sip cocktails out of expensive glasses while allowing your expensive sandals to dangle from one hand. And even then, it’s only worth doing if you have a fresh pedicure to show off.

  “Rachel, I don’t even think my mother has ever purchased uncooked salmon much less prepared a whole fish. That’s what the help is for.”

  I’ve learned by this point in our relationship that when Adam is making the punches, it is fine to laugh. He uses these comments almost as a way of defining us; of pointing out how different we are from his society-obsessed parents. Neither of us mind the finer things in life, but we’re also equally okay just squeaking by with our greatly reduced salaries in order to pursue our interests.

  It’s a different story when I do it—when I point out something ridiculous his father said or how his mother doesn’t “do rest stops.” (Instead, when they have to travel I-95, they have a series of towns they pull off in that have suitable rest rooms in private establishments.)

  At least that dichotomy existed back when we were first married, when he could joke, and I could not. During the later years of our marriage, I didn’t waste my energy trying to joke with Adam, and we haven’t seen them much since we got back together. I can count the number of times we’ve seen either set of parents on one hand, and I haven’t seen his sister, Lisbeth, at all. But we’re not exactly there yet in our relationship; where I can tease him openly about his parents. That is comfort that can only be built over time.

  But tonight, it’s Adam pointing out the fact that he has now spent more time in the kitchen than his mother, and I laugh while I mix together the olive oil, mustard, and soy sauce for the marinade. I finely mince the garlic, dragging my blade across the bits to form a paste for good measure and then add it to the bowl, giving the mixture a quick beating with the whisk. I can pretty much ignore everyone else at their respective stations when Adam and I find our rhythm between the counter and the sink. Adam gently tugging out the pin bones I refuse to touch while I prep our ingredients for the cellophane noodle salad we’ll tackle next.

  This is that connection I craved all those years ago when I waited for Adam to come home from the office every night. Both of us completely spent on anything but each other.

  Oona flits by, offering us a shot glass of root beer schnapps, a vintage white gold bracelet studded with blue stones visible with her sleeves rolled up. I accept the drink, pausing to tap the piece of jewelry before tossing back the schnapps.

  “This is really gorgeous, Oona,” I tell her, coughing from the alcohol.

  “Every girl should have a piece of jewelry that makes her feel like a princess,” Oona advises, executing a fancy dance step before moving on to the next kitchen.

  While our salmon marinates and our noodles boil, I eavesdrop on the tense conversation volleying back and forth over the low wall between the UN worker and the poem-typer-and-correspondence-answerer. From what I can gather, the poet couple’s child was accepted off the waiting list into an elite Manhattan private school that will ensure safe passage into his father’s alma mater. The UN worker’s child was denied entrance to the same exclusive private school, a fact that she not only takes personally, but apparently believes is the indirect fault of the academic space-hogging poetry couple, accusing them of doing something underhanded to grease their way off the waiting list and into the school for this coming fall. If they hadn’t been waiting for the same slot, UN worker’s child would have certainly landed his body in the school’s navy blue uniform.

  Adam murmurs to me that we’d leave the city if it ever came down to that; truck our bodies over to Westchester if we can’t stomach the attainable education options, and I nod, not just to confirm that we’re on the same page in terms of keeping up with the Joneses, but that I’d never snipe at a friend for taking what I thought of as our slot. That we’re both adult enough to hold our rage against the institution and not a life-long friend. Then again, being so far apart in age, Beckett will never be competing with our future child for a school slot, so it’s easy for me to stand on my moral high ground, judging the two other couples as they bicker over the wall between their kitchens.

  And, of course, as much as I agree to Westchester right now, I would be nauseated if we ever had to eat our words and trek down the Saw Mill River Parkway. Currently, I am clinging to Manhattan by my fingernails when it would make more sense to save some money and live in Brooklyn.

  All the groups finish around the same time, our salmon grilled and garnished, our cellophane noodle side dish brightly hiding slivers of red pepper, and our cucumber salad decorated with a sprinkle of sesame seeds. We bring our respective dishes to the group table that Alex the chef has set up with the non-descript white dishes of the cooking school. Oona busies herself with pouring wine—a chilled white that the cooking school buys in bulk.

  Even though we could mix ourselves together and eat the same meal, we usually divide up by couple, even more so tonight when such an odd tension separates the warring couples from the rest of us. Jared raises his eyebrows at us, as if to indicate they too are relieved that they currently don’t have a child to push through the Manhattan private school system.

  “No, thank you,” the UN worker icily tells Oona as she leans forward to fill her glass.

  “Such a pouty face tonight,” Oona exclaims, getting away with her bluntness either due to age or charm. “What terrible thing has happened to keep you from drinking wine?”

  “Our son,” she growls, “didn’t get into the school we wanted.”

  Oona clicks her tongue to tell everyone at the table that she finds this ridiculous. I’m assuming once you live through something like World War II, it gives you a perspective on things such as school admissions. Oona and Xavier told us during dinner on the first class that they met a few years after the war while still living in Europe—a Jewish Holocaust surviv
or without family and a Belgian Christian—an unlikely couple that somehow sweetly worked. They have four children and eleven grandchildren, a fact, Oona informed us, that was piss in the eye of the Nazis who tried to exterminate her. I am fairly certain that the last thing she stressed about in this lifetime was school admissions.

  “He’ll go to a different school,” Oona tells her, filling Jared’s glass and then setting the empty bottle on a side table. “Children are resilient, and he’ll make the best out of wherever he is. Or he won’t. Either way, life will take him where it takes him.”

  “This affects his whole life,” the man-who-looks-like-a-bad-guy barks. “How is he supposed to go to a good college like Harvard if he couldn’t even get into a middle school?”

  “Good college?” Xavier repeats, echoing his wife’s sentiments as he always does. “He’ll get in where he’s meant to go. No one can control these sorts of things simply by going to a certain middle school.”

  “I went to Dalton,” Mike, Jared’s boyfriend, tells us. “And I didn’t get into Harvard. It’s not a guarantee.”

  “But you did get in and attended Princeton, sweetie,” Jared reminds him.

  “What I’m saying is that these schools try to sell you on the idea that they’re a one-way ticket to the Ivy League. But the reality is that unless the college admissions officers have become puppets of the private school system, there’s no way they can make good on that statement,” Mike continues.

  “Well, it makes everything up until this point a complete waste,” the man-who-looks-like-a-bad-guy snarls. “An utter, complete waste. The private school, the sports lessons, the music lessons, the language lessons, the mini-debate club, the travel. All of it. A complete waste.”