by Dana Bate
My apartment sits on Swann Street between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets, in a semi-undefined neighborhood sandwiched between Logan and Dupont Circles. For years, Fourteenth Street was known, informally at least, as Washington’s “Red Light District,” more famous for drug trafficking and prostitution than for organic markets and independent art galleries. But over the past decade or so, the neighborhoods have gentrified, and now Fourteenth Street is one of Washington’s hottest areas, with a new restaurant or café seeming to open every week.
My street stretches from west to east and is filled from end to end with brightly colored town houses, all squashed together like crayons in a Crayola box, lying just beyond the red brick sidewalk. Unlike the towering, three-story row homes in Dupont Circle, the houses on my street are squat, two-story affairs with square, flat roofs and modest front stoops. Some of the homes lodge a single owner, but many, like mine, are broken up into separate apartments. I occupy the entire second floor, whereas the first floor houses a wiry, forty-something recluse named Simon.
When I arrive at my building, a butter-yellow house sandwiched between a maroon town house to the right and cobalt blue town house to the left, I find Simon shoveling the front walkway beyond our wrought-iron gate, humming what sounds like a slow dirge. Given the day I’ve had, I should probably join in with a funeral song of my own.
“Hi, Simon. Need any help?”
Simon looks up, his pale face blank as he stares at me with hollow eyes. “No. I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
He digs into the snow with his shovel and tosses a heap over his shoulder. “Yes.”
Simon was already living in the downstairs apartment of our town house when I moved into the second floor. We rarely see each other, given the private doorway to his apartment and the private, locked stairway leading to mine, so most of our interactions involve my saying hello and Simon’s grunting an unintelligible reply. He looks a little like a rodent, with his pointy nose, bleached-blond hair, and beady eyes, the whites of which are often tinged with pink. But in a previous life, I lived in an apartment in Georgetown next door to a bunch of rowdy college students, and I would take a quiet introvert over a frat boy any day.
I march up the front steps and check my mailbox, where I find a folded piece of yellow paper. When I open it, I find, in bold capitals, a message from our landlord, Al:
NEED DECEMBER RENT ASAP. YOU ARE LATE. AGAIN.
Perfect. As if this day weren’t already a kick in the ovaries.
I stick the note into my coat pocket and let myself through two sets of doors before trudging up the stairway that leads directly into my living room. As soon as I reach the top, I dump my coat and bag on the floor, kick off my boots, grab a handful of miniature gin bottles from the cupboard, and collapse onto my plush gray couch.
My feet propped on the armrest, I sip the gin straight from the toy-size bottles and reflect on all the ways in which this situation totally blows. I never even wanted to work on a morning news show. I wanted to be a food journalist, to write about the connections between food and culture, to interview chefs and bakers and food enthusiasts who would clue me in to new cooking techniques and food trends. That’s the stuff that turns me on, the stuff I could read about for days. One time in college, I was so engrossed in Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone as I rode the “L” into Chicago that I missed my stop and ended up back where I’d started in Evanston. I loved immersing myself in her writing—the way I could almost taste the food she described through the pages—and I wanted to explore food and cooking through writing the way she did.
The problem, of course, was that I couldn’t find a job like that after college, or at least not any job that paid anything. The only offers I got were “unpaid internships,” which I couldn’t afford to take without my parents’ help, and I knew my parents didn’t have the money to support me, so I didn’t even bother to ask. I did interview for one job at a small online startup, but it was located in Fort Lauderdale, which, after four years of long distance, was farther away than I wanted to live from Zach, who was set to start law school at Columbia in New York City. I often wonder what would have happened if I’d taken that job: if I’d be the food writer I’d dreamed of being, or if that dream just isn’t meant to be.
No other paid food-writing jobs came along, so I took the best journalism job I could get and figured with a little finessing, I could make the transition from general television journalist to paid food journalist. Naïve? Probably. But I thought I could make it work. Whenever I had the chance, I pitched Morning Show stories with a food angle—a piece on farm subsidies that would take us to Loudoun County, or a story about the cupcake craze hitting the nation’s capital. Sometimes I felt as if I were trying to jam together two puzzle pieces that belonged to two entirely different puzzles, but I did my best to make the job and me fit. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was close enough, at least until I found the food-writing job I’d always wanted. Which, of course, I never did.
And now I’m unemployed.
Not just unemployed—unemployed in the only industry for which I have any real qualifications, which, as it happens, is also an industry that is hemorrhaging positions by the day. The other major networks have either already laid off hundreds of staff members or are planning to do so in the coming weeks. Where am I going to go?
I gulp down the last of the gin from the mini bottles and nestle myself into the couch cushions, determined to come up with a plan to pull myself out of this funk. All I need to do is close my eyes for a few minutes while I figure things out. Or, at the very least, forget why my life is a bit of a mess.
Four hours later, I jump as my cell phone hums and buzzes on the coffee table. A four-hour nap? This has not happened since I had mono freshman year of college.
I grab the phone and see it’s Heidi Parker, one of my best friends from Northwestern who has been living in DC as long as I have.
“Hello . . . ?”
“Uh . . . hi,” Heidi says. “Did I . . . wake you?”
I clear my throat and stretch my mouth wide to wake up my lips. “Kind of. Not really.”
“Sleeping on the job? That’s not like you.”
“I’m at home. I got laid off today.”
Heidi goes silent. “Oh my God,” she eventually says. “Syd, I’m so sorry.”
“Not half as sorry as I am at the moment,” I say, breathing my stale, gin-laced breath into the phone.
“We need to get you out of that house. You need a drink.”
I laugh. “Already have a head start on the latter.”
“You’ve been drinking alone?” I don’t answer. “Okay, we’re calling in the troops,” she says. “Bar Pilar is running some sort of blizzard special on beers for happy hour. Meet me there in twenty minutes.”
“But I . . .”
“Ah, ah, ah—no objections. You’re coming. End of story.”
I contemplate interjecting with one more halfhearted protest, but I realize there is no point. Heidi will come to my apartment and physically drag me to the bar if necessary—probably by my hair, as she has done before—and in one day, there is only so much humiliation a girl can take.
Before I leave, I poke my head into the refrigerator to see if there is anything I can eat before I meet Heidi, since continuing to drink on an empty stomach will surely end in disaster. My choices consist of the following: a container of two-week-old Chinese leftovers, some bottles of mustard and ketchup, and several half-eaten containers of fruit preserves. I’m not sure what I expected to find. Ever since I landed a job on The Morning Show, work has consumed most of my waking hours, and I barely have time to do laundry, much less cook.
I haven’t cooked much since Zach and I broke up, anyway. Cooking was our thing. Even if it was just a bowl of spaghetti and box-mix brownies, we would try to make dinner together every weekend in high school. Zach’s mom, Alaine Pullman, is a famous Philadelphia caterer who regularly put on events for the mayor and other loc
al celebrities, so while she was out on Saturday nights preparing filet mignon and arugula salads for Philadelphia’s finest, Zach and I would raid her well-stocked pantry and whip up our own mini feasts. I developed an early fondness for candied walnuts and a definitive aversion to stinky cheese and learned there is, in fact, such a thing as too much cheesecake and that amount is equal to three slices. We made our own fun, even when that fun involved breaking a bottle of his mom’s truffle oil from Piedmont, an incident that was not without consequences.
Once we left for college, seeing each other became more difficult, with him in New Jersey and me in Illinois, and our dorm kitchens lacked the swanky equipment and ingredients of his parents’ kitchen. But we tried our best to make it work, even toward the end, when his heart wasn’t in it anymore. The last meal we cooked together, on the night everything went wrong, was spaghetti carbonara, and to this day the smell of crisping bacon makes my stomach turn.
I slam the refrigerator door shut and decide I’ll buy something at Bar Pilar, where the offerings will be more appealing than Chinese leftovers that smell like roadkill. I throw back one more airplane miniature of gin, pull on my coat and boots, and stumble woozily down the front steps, where once again I run into Simon, who is now beating our bushes with a meat mallet.
“Um . . . Simon?” I watch as he thrusts the tenderizer into the bushes again and again. “What are you doing?”
Simon whips his head in my direction, his vaguely rodent-like eyes glassy and pink. “Saving them.”
“Saving . . . whom?”
“The bushes,” he says. “This snow and ice will kill them. There’s too much of it.”
“Oh. Right. Do you need my help?”
He turns away from me and rattles the mallet around in one of the bushes. “No.”
I wait for him to add a “thank you” or a “thanks for the offer,” but he doesn’t. “Well . . . have a nice night,” I say.
And as I push past him onto Swann Street—me unemployed and soaked in gin, him beating at a bunch of shrubs with a meat mallet—I wonder which of us is the sadder case and how the contest ever got this close.
CHAPTER 5
The one-block walk to Bar Pilar requires the physical exertion of a two-mile hike, mostly because I am slightly buzzed from the gin and the sidewalks are covered with about four feet of snow. I have no idea how I’ll make it home after another drink or two.
The overhang above the bar’s entrance shoulders a good two feet of snow, the fluffy mounds bearing down with the weight of a small school bus. There’s so much white that from where I stand below the entrance I can barely make out the block stencil letters punched out of the bar’s copper nameplate. This is the kind of weather I loved as a kid. I remember missing two weeks of school in the seventh grade, when a major snow and ice storm pounded the East Coast. My mom and Libby baked chocolate chip cookies, while I looked on, peering over my copy of MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me. The three of us played cards and watched movies and curled up on our couch with steaming mugs of hot chocolate. It’s one of the last memories I have of the three of us hanging out like that.
When I walk inside, I find Heidi sitting along the wooden bar, chatting to the bartender as he fills up a glass from the beer tap, his back to a long wall of exposed brick. A song by the Doves purrs through the bar’s speakers, and as I tromp through the long, narrow bar in my snow boots, both Heidi and the bartender look up at me.
“There she is!” Heidi says, her blue eyes sparkling. She sips her beer and wipes a dab of frothy foam off her narrow freckled nose.
I look around for the many friends I assumed Heidi would bring with her, but the only people here besides the two of us are a thirty-something couple sitting at a table and a man in a puffy vest sitting at the far end of the bar.
“Where are the ‘troops’?” I ask.
Heidi smiles sheepishly and tucks a stray strand of her stick-straight blond hair behind her ear. “Everyone is snowed in. We’re an army of two tonight.”
The bartender slides a beer to the man at the end of the counter and scratches his beard as he nods in my direction. “What can I get you?”
I scan down the list of beer specials scrawled on the black chalkboard, but I’ve never been much of a beer connoisseur, and at this point, I really don’t care what I order as long as it contains alcohol. “Uh, the third one,” I say. “Thanks.”
Heidi helps me unwrap my scarf and stares at me worriedly. “Did you even look at yourself in the mirror before you left?”
“No, why?” I glance in the mirror behind the bar and notice a crease down my cheek, long and deep like the San Andreas Fault, and a mysterious streak of mucus in the corner of my eye. I look like an extra from The Walking Dead.
Heidi grabs my drink from the bartender and passes it to me. “To new beginnings.”
We clink glasses, and I gulp down half my beer.
“Whoa, slow down,” she says. “Happy hour lasts another two hours. We have time.”
I slide my glass back and forth on the counter and sigh. “I can’t believe I lost my job.”
“Who did they keep?”
I roll my eyes as I take another sip of beer. “Fucking Charles.”
“That’s it?”
“Melanie, too. Although she’s going to be some sort of quasi producer-slash-digital reporter, whereas Charles will produce his own spots. I almost feel bad for them, until I remember they will still be getting a paycheck.”
“You will, too, soon enough. And anyway, you never loved that job. Maybe now you can give the whole food journalism thing a try.”
I throw back the rest of my beer. “If it were that easy to find a job as a food writer, don’t you think I would have left The Morning Show a long time ago?”
Heidi rubs my back. “Fair enough. But you’ll get another job. Don’t worry.”
We both know she has no idea whether or not I’ll get another job, but I suppose these are the stock phrases you say when a friend loses one. You’ll be okay. You’ll land on your feet. You’ll find work soon. People say those phrases so often they almost lose meaning. Really, the only response that resonates at all is, That sucks.
On some level, I should trust Heidi knows what she’s talking about. She works at an education nonprofit, her third in the four and a half years since we graduated college. She knows all about budget cuts and empty coffers and organizational mismanagement. At one point, between her last job and her current one, she was working three different side jobs—restaurant hostess, dog walker, and farmers’ market cashier—just so that she could make the payments on her many student loans. Yet each time her company let her go, she managed to land on her feet, continuing to supplement her meager income with her weekend job at the farmers’ market. If she has made it work, then maybe I will too.
Heidi takes another swig of beer and sets her glass on the counter. “Gotta run to the ladies’. You’ll be okay?”
“I’m unemployed, not suicidal.”
“You’re a pain in the ass, is what you are,” she says. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
She scoots down the narrow hallway to the bathroom, and I redirect my gaze to the counter as I swirl my empty glass by the base. There is an inch or two of beer left in Heidi’s glass, and, not caring if it’s rude or wrong, I grab her glass and finish it.
“Looks like you need a refill.”
The man from the end of the bar is standing behind Heidi’s chair, his hands tucked into the pockets of his puffy black vest. His hair is the color of milk chocolate, wavy and thick with narrow sideburns, which frame his slender face. He looks vaguely familiar.
“I guess I do,” I say, looking into the bottoms of my glass and Heidi’s.
The man flags the bartender. “Hey, Eli, another for the lady and her friend,” he says. “Add it to my tab.”
I dismiss him with a wave of my hand as I let out a small burp under my breath. “Thanks, but I’ve got this. I can manage four bucks.”
“I’m sure you can. But I overheard you and your friend talking, and it sounds like you’ve had a rough day.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You were eavesdropping?”
His cheeks flush, and he rubs his narrow chin. “It was hard not to. Your voice—let’s just say it carries.”
“Oh, so now I’m a loud talker? Great. Thanks. That’s just what I needed to hear.” The bartender places the filled glasses in front of me. I clear my throat. “I’VE GOT THIS,” I shout. “BUT THANKS FOR THE OFFER.”
The man’s face turns even redder. “Suit yourself,” he says. “But don’t tell me chivalry is dead. I tried.”
“Badly,” I mumble into my beer.
“What’s that?”
“BADLY,” I shout. “FUNNY, IF I’M SUCH A LOUD TALKER, THEN WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M SAYING?”
“Sydney . . . ?” Heidi pokes her head out from behind the man in the vest. “Why are you shouting?”
“Gee, I don’t know. I guess I can’t help it. According to this a-hole, I’m a LOUD TALKER.”
Heidi smiles nervously. “How many of those gin bottles did you drink before you got here?”
“What do you care? I can do what I want. It’s a free country.”
Apparently in my buzzed and self-pitying state, I have resorted to the rhetorical sophistication of a six-year-old.
“Maybe another drink isn’t such a good idea,” Heidi says, eyeing the bartender and giving him a not-so-subtle sign to cut me off.
“Oh, yeah? And why’s that?”
Heidi shifts her gaze from the bartender to me to the guy in the vest and back to me again. “Because I think we need to get something in your stomach.”
