by Dana Bate
With the newspaper over my head and my bag pressed against my body, I bolt out the door and start running up Eighteenth Street. The rain saturates the newspaper, which quickly dissolves into a mound of pulp. My flats fill with water and refuse to stay on my feet, and by the time I reach Massachusetts Avenue, I am holding them in my hand. Drenched, cold, and barefoot. Could this day get any worse?
In fact, it could. Rachel is in my kitchen right now, attempting to cook something more complicated than a Lean Cuisine. There’s a high probability she has overcooked something, and a slightly lower probability she has set something on fire.
I walk into my apartment and find Rachel wiping off my kitchen counter, her hair soaked in sweat, and her slender face bright red. She jumps when she sees me enter the apartment.
“Don’t be mad,” she says.
“Mad about what?” I ask. “What did you do?”
I move gingerly toward the kitchen in my bare feet, but I stop abruptly as something sharp and pointy pierces my toe. I shriek in pain.
“Shit!” Rachel cries. “I didn’t realize you were barefoot!”
She rushes over and helps me limp over to my air mattress. I lift up my foot and pull out a tooth-size shard of glass. “What the hell is this?”
Rachel clears her throat. “You know how you’re supposed to brown the brisket before braising it?”
“Uh-huh …”
“Well … I didn’t realize you weren’t supposed to put glass on the stove top …”
“You used a glass dish on the stove? Are you crazy?”
“But it was Pyrex—the glass is supposed to be tempered.”
“That doesn’t mean you can put it directly on an open flame!”
“Well I know that now.” She sighs. “Anyway, the glass kind of … exploded. It burst into a billion pieces. Glass shards flew everywhere. I started crying. And the thing is … I had all the food laying out, so there were bits of glass in the dates, in the horse-radish sauce, and, of course, in the brisket.”
“The brisket? Tell me you’re joking. That brisket cost more than fifty bucks.”
Rachel bites her lip and wrinkles her brow. “Sorry.”
I run my fingers through my hair. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
“Listen, I’m really sorry, but we need to throw out all the food I made or touched. There’s glass in all of it, which is pretty much a lawsuit waiting to happen. We need to buy new stuff and start over.”
“But I special ordered that brisket, and the Dupont market is only open on Sundays.”
“Doesn’t Open Meadows sell at the Arlington market tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah, but the cooked brisket needs to rest overnight. It’s always better the second day. That’s, like, the number one rule of brisket making.”
“Brisket making has rules?”
I narrow my eyes. “Are you seriously questioning me right now? After you just detonated a brisket bomb in my apartment?”
“Sorry.” She smoothes the sheets on my air mattress and shrugs. “Well, there’s always Whole Foods.”
I sigh and cradle my head in my hands. “Great. Another hundred some dollars down the drain.”
I try to come up with a silver lining for this situation, but I can’t find one, and that’s because a silver lining does not exist. The only lesson I can glean from this incident, other than never letting Rachel alone in the kitchen again, is that whenever I think I’ve hit rock bottom, I should wait a few minutes, because something will almost always happen to send me plummeting to a new low point. I can only hope tomorrow’s dinner will be the exception, and not the rule.
CHAPTER
thirteen
As predicted, the situation deteriorates from moderate complication to total catastrophe. The next morning I awake with a start to the shrill beeping of my alarm clock and, in an unfortunate turn, the distinct smell of mildew.
I fumble for the off switch on my alarm and roll over, fixing my eyes on the ceiling. My body feels heavy and stiff, as if, in my sleep, someone replaced my bones with thick lead pipes. The act of rising from my mattress poses a far greater challenge than I expected, and so instead of moving, I continue to stare at the ceiling, willing myself to get out of bed. This is what happens when you spend seven hours shopping and cooking with a friend who is now afraid to boil water.
I rub the sleep out of my eyes and take a deep, calming breath, when—once again—a rotten smell fills my nostrils, a sour mix of moldy leaves and raw clay. What is that?
I push myself up from my mattress and scan the room. That’s when I see it: a shallow pool of muddy water creeping in from the front and back doors to my apartment.
Rainwater. From last night’s storm. Shit.
My mind races. How did this happen? When did this happen? I retrace my steps, from the time we started cooking to the moment I collapsed into bed at 3:12 A.M. I don’t remember seeing any water last night. After the drama following the Pyrex explosion, I would have noticed a small lake in my apartment.
I pick up my phone and dial Rachel. “Rach—we have a major problem.”
“Hey,” Rachel yawns into the phone. “What time is it?”
“Eight,” I say.
“Could I call you back in like an hour? I can’t function on five hours’ sleep.”
“Too bad. I need your help. My apartment flooded.”
“What?”
“From the storm. There’s water leaking in from the front and back doors. My apartment smells funky and moldy, and there’s water everywhere.”
“Uh-oh.”
“This is a total disaster. I can’t ask people to pay forty-five bucks to sit in a flooded apartment.”
“But we’ve already cooked, like, half the dinner.”
“I know.” I run my fingers through my knotted hair. “We’ll have to move the location.”
“Not to my place,” she says. “Lizzie is studying for some big law school exam. I promised she could have the apartment to herself tonight.”
“Crap.”
I have no idea what to do. I can’t cancel, that much I know. I’ve already spent more on this dinner than I should have. Thanks to Rachel’s glass explosion, I needed to spend another $100 on replacement groceries and another $50 on cleaning supplies and a new baking dish for the tzimmes. If I have a prayer of making this month’s rent, I need to recoup at least some of my costs.
“This was a dumb idea,” she says. “I pushed you into this. It’s my fault.”
“No it’s not,” I say, although I do blame her, just a little. But I’m not going to let this fall apart like everything else in my life. I’ve looked forward to this supper club for almost two weeks.
And then, through a fog of sleeplessness and desperation, an idea comes to me.
“You know what we could do …?” I say.
“Donate the food to a soup kitchen? Because I know some people at Miriam’s Kitchen and could hook that up.”
“That’s not what I was thinking,” I say. “But thank you for making me feel like a really bad person.”
“Sorry.”
“What I was thinking is, my landlord is away for the congressional recess, and I have the keys to his apartment. We could use his dining room and kitchen. We’ve already cooked a chunk of the meal anyway, and as long as we leave everything the way we found it, he’ll never know.”
Rachel is silent. I gather she is uncomfortable with this idea.
“Well?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Isn’t that … illegal? Trespassing or something?”
“He gave me a set of keys. He told me I could let a repairman upstairs. As far as he knows, maybe I needed to let someone in because of the flooding.”
“I guess.”
“And why are you suddenly worried about the legality of all this anyway? This whole enterprise is basically an unlicensed restaurant. And you stole two tables. And twelve chairs.”
“First of all, supper clubs aren’t illegal, per se. It’s
kind of a gray area. And I borrowed that furniture, thank you very much.”
“Whatever—you’re missing the point. Are you in or not?”
She hesitates. “Yeah, okay. I’m in. What do you need me to do?”
“Get over here as soon as you can,” I say. “And bring as many rags as you can find.”
Rachel arrives twenty minutes later with a huge tote slung over her shoulder and a heap of rags in her arms.
“Whoa,” she says as she examines the apartment. “You weren’t kidding about the smell.”
“Here—give me some of those rags. We can pile them at the front and back doors to sop up as much water as possible. I’ll deal with the rest of the cleanup tomorrow.”
We line the floor with old towels and T-shirts and haul all the ingredients and food from my refrigerator to Blake’s kitchen. Rachel stares at the ingredients lining Blake’s kitchen island.
“Maybe you should start cooking while I decorate the dining room,” she says, tugging at the tote on her shoulder.
“Sure, whatever.” After last night’s debacle, I’m happy to keep her away from food and flames.
We spend the next eight hours pulling everything together in a rushed frenzy. I try to focus on the positives, rather than the negatives, of which there are many (that Rachel shattered one of my dishes into all of the food last night, for example, and that we are now hosting a dinner in my landlord’s house). So, the positives: our menu is solid. Rachel’s Pyrex snafu notwithstanding, every component of tonight’s meal has turned out even better than expected. Last night I baked the Jewish apple cakes, and each one came out moist and fragrant and dense, bursting with apples I caramelized with Calvados and a touch of rosemary and then folded into a vanilla-and-cinnamon-scented cake. We braised the brisket in a tomato sauce so rich and garlicky I can still smell it on my fingers, and the honey ice cream came out silky smooth and tastes like a spoonful of creamy honey, with crunchy chunks of honeycomb toffee.
Another positive: Blake’s kitchen is a magical, glorious place. I would kill for a kitchen like this, and even though I know that, technically speaking, I shouldn’t be cooking in here, our dinner will be ten times better for using this space.
As Rachel bangs around the dining room, I plow through my morning prep work. I proof the yeast for the challah and toss all the ingredients into Blake’s KitchenAid mixer because, well, the mixer is there, and it seems silly not to use it. While the dough hook slaps the rich, tacky dough against the sides of the metal bowl, I toss the chopped onions into a frying pan on Blake’s six-burner range, filling the house with the fragrant smell of sautéing onions. I toss in the celery and carrots and eventually dump the mixture into a bowl along with the ground beef, rice, and seasonings. Later, Rachel will help me roll the filling into previously frozen cabbage leaves, which we’ll then braise in a pot of sweet-and-sour tomato sauce—assuming, of course, Rachel doesn’t have a total meltdown at the prospect of helping in the kitchen.
When the challah dough is smooth and glossy, I set it aside to proof and move on to the tzimmes, cutting the parsnips into coins and the sweet potatoes into paper-thin medallions. Rachel calls to me from the dining room as I finish slicing the parsnips and chopping up the dried pears, and I wipe my hands on my apron, a red-and-white-striped smock I bought at Anthropologie a few years ago. Adam used to joke that it makes me look like a 1950s housewife. I was never sure whether he meant that as a compliment or an insult.
I walk through the doorway and find Rachel arranging votive candles in the middle of Blake’s dining room table, tucking the candles among sprays of dried leaves, clusters of pomegranates, and antique honey jars. A large chalkboard leans against the far wall, the menu scrawled on the board in Rachel’s bubbly handwriting.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I say. “When did you buy all this?”
“Over the past few weeks. I picked up decorations when I was out buying groceries and stuff.”
She says this as if it’s nothing, as if putting together a table setting worthy of Martha Stewart Living is akin to breathing, or blinking. I guess this is what it means to have style: to make beauty and class seem effortless, despite how much effort is actually involved.
Rachel scatters a few more candles around the table and stands back to snap a few photos of the table setting with her Canon Rebel. “We’re actually going to pull this off,” she says as she shifts one of the honey jars slightly to the right.
I scan the table, with its honeypots and tiny votives and sprays of autumn leaves, and for the first time today, I think she might be right.
But what if she isn’t right? And, really, isn’t it more realistic that she wouldn’t be? I have no business doing what I am about to do: charging people forty-five dollars to eat a meal prepared by me, an enthusiastic home cook, in a house that isn’t my own. I am an imposter—a wannabe—and I am beginning to doubt whether I can do this.
Which is why, thirty minutes before the guests arrive, I start to lose it.
My hands shake as I slice the apples and potatoes, the razorsharp edge of the knife fluttering wildly above the cutting board, dipping and diving perilously close to my fingertips as I try to prepare the savory tart. All of my limbs take on a life of their own, thrashing and flailing in the air, spilling olive oil all over the counter and knocking an entire jar of peppercorns on the floor. My elbow jabs its boney tip into Rachel’s ribs on two separate occasions, and my feet have forgotten how to work together and keep getting in the way. I am a total mess.
But I can’t help it. I feel like one of those jerks who starts a blog, claiming authority on a topic without any credentials whatsoever—the gym teacher who decides he has an opinion on financial regulation everyone needs to read. What makes him think he’s an expert? The fact that he cares? Well, swap out the blog for a whisk and a ladle, and I’m doing the same thing: acting as if my interest in cooking qualifies me to run a restaurant out of my home. Correction: my landlord’s home. Who am I kidding?
But before I can voice any of my misgivings to Rachel—before I can tell her how utterly unprepared I feel, how we’ve bitten off way more than we can chew—a loud “Dong-ding” echoes through the house. I look at my watch. Eight o’clock on the dot.
“Ready to do this thing?” Rachel says, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
I nod and smile because, ready or not, here they come.
CHAPTER
fourteen
To my infinite delight and surprise, the night doesn’t begin as a total disaster. As soon as people arrive, they pile into the candlelit living room and start talking and drinking and playing the name game. The volume of their chitchat rises and falls like crashing waves, with a constant low-level buzz maintained by the jazz music humming through Blake’s speakers. The yeasty smell of freshly baked challah wafts through the house as the guests nibble on my last-minute menu addition of chopped liver canapés with date puree and pomegranate seeds, with the group standing as far away from Blake’s leather furniture as I can manage.
The group is a typical Washington mix: a lawyer, a journalist, some nonprofit workers, a teacher, some Hill staffers and lobbyists, all in their twenties and thirties. Some are Republicans, some are Democrats, and some are Independents, which means the dinner table could either be fertile ground for lively conversation or a Grade A disaster.
Once everyone settles in, I gently tap the side of a wineglass with a pair of steel tongs to get everyone’s attention. “Before Rachel and I get back in the kitchen,” I say, “we should probably introduce ourselves.”
I bumble my way through an introduction, making a mockery of the English language in the process, but somewhere in the middle of my spiel I notice a man at the back of the room staring at me, his ice blue eyes fixed steadily on mine. A light dusting of stubble covers his angular jawline, and his mesmerizing jewellike eyes peer from beneath a mess of dark, tousled hair. He wears an Old 97’s T-shirt and dark-wash jeans, and when I hold his gaze, his lips curl into an impis
h smile as he subtly winks and raises his cocktail glass. My face grows hot, and I look away, but when I look back he is still boring into me with his stare, giving me no choice but to freeze midsentence.
“… and so we hope all of you have a great time tonight,” Rachel says, jumping in. “Please make yourself at home and enjoy your drinks.”
As soon as she finishes, Rachel yanks me by the arm and pulls me into the kitchen. “What was that about?”
“What?”
Rachel raises an eyebrow, but I ignore her and begin to fumble through Blake’s kitchen drawers.
“Have you seen the thermometer? How is the tart coming along? Where is the horseradish sauce?”
Rachel slides up behind me and grabs my shoulders. “Relax.”
But how can I relax? I’m up to my elbows in brisket juices and horseradish sauce, and there is a seriously good-looking guy standing in my living room. Sorry, Blake’s living room. Blake’s. But if I am trying to calm my frazzled nerves, that guy’s presence isn’t helping.
I turn on the heat below the pot of stuffed cabbage, and within a few minutes, my anxiety melts away, and food becomes my primary focus. Getting each course to the table in order and on time requires a disciplined system, one that allows no room for distraction and panic. I organize my mise en place, and once I get my bearings, Rachel and I fall into a rhythm, like two workers on an assembly line. I slice the cooled challah; she arranges the slices in a basket and buses the basket to the table. I pull the tart out of the oven; she plates it. Back and forth, back and forth.
Just as I pull the brisket from the oven, the meat supple and richly seasoned in a bubbling scarlet tomato sauce, Rachel shuffles into the kitchen from the dining room, carrying an empty platter and a stack of twelve plates—Blake’s plates, which we decided to use because they were much nicer than the ones Rachel “borrowed” from the NIRD dining room.
“Apparently people loved the tart,” she says.
I nod solemnly, acting as if I am too preoccupied with cooking to bask in the glory of a compliment, but really, I’m basking. Nothing thrills me more than hearing people enjoyed my food, and tonight the positive feedback kicks my adrenaline rush into high gear, which is exactly what I need to see this dinner through until the end.
