The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

by Dana Bate

  Then I see the towering stack of two-inch-thick fudge brownies sitting behind the glass pastry case, and I’m a goner. I’ll wait in this line as long as it takes. And I do.

  When I get back to the office, it’s already three-fifteen—fifteen minutes until Mark appears on CNBC. I return to my desk, licking the fudgy crumbs off my fingers, and find the red light on my phone flashing furiously. My voice mail.

  As I pick up my phone to listen to my messages, I notice I also have five missed calls and two voice mails on my cell phone, which I left on my desk while I popped down to Firehook.

  “You have three new messages,” the automated voice on my office phone tells me. Five voice mails on two different phones? Weird.

  The first message on my office voice mail is from Mark. “Hannah, I am in the car reading through this folder you left for me, and none of this is what I asked for. Salted caramel popcorn? Lasagna?? Where is the information I asked for? Please call me back right away.”

  Uh-oh.

  As I press on to the next message, I spot a manila folder on my desk. I open it. The Treasury report. The Wall Street Journal. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It’s all right here. I gave him the wrong folder. The one with my recipes. The one that has nothing whatsoever to do with the work I’m being paid to do.

  The second message is also from Mark. His tone is sharper this time. “Hannah, it’s Mark again. I also left you a message on your cell phone, but for some inexplicable reason you still have not called me back. I’m at the studio now. I need the language in that report. Call me immediately!”

  Message three. Also Mark. “Hannah! Where the hell are you? I’m live in twenty minutes! This is unacceptable! CALL ME IMMEDIATELY!”

  I call my cell phone voice mail. More of the same. In one message I swear I can hear steam pumping out his ears. The gist: Hannah, you fuckup, where the fuck are you and why the fuck am I looking at a recipe for pistachio cake?

  I’m screwed.

  I look at my watch: 3:23. I still have seven minutes until Mark is live on the air. I pick up the phone and call Mark. Straight to voice mail. Shit.

  I rummage through the papers on my desk until I find the number for the CNBC producer I talked to earlier. Joanne Gerber. I call. Straight to voice mail for her, too. Crap! Crap, crap, crap!

  I scroll through my in-box and find our e-mail exchange from earlier. Mark doesn’t have a BlackBerry, but a producer for CNBC would. Maybe she could even print these documents for him. Or tell him to call me.

  I shoot off a quick e-mail:

  Joanne—could you print these documents out for Mark Henderson? Had a problem with our printer.

  And then I wait. And wait. And wait. Until it is 3:29, and I realize there’s no point in waiting anymore.

  I am officially 1,000 percent screwed.

  CHAPTER

  twenty-two

  Just as the clock is about to strike three-thirty, I run up the emergency staircase to the tenth floor, taking two steps at a time and wheezing like a ninety-year-old invalid by the time I reach the top. Dorothy, NIRD’s receptionist, has a small television on her desk that carries cable. I have to watch the interview. I have to see what happens.

  “Dorothy!” I pant, barely able to catch my breath. “I need … to watch … Mark … on … C … NBC.”

  My fitness is an embarrassment to mobile people everywhere.

  “Sweetie, calm down,” Dorothy says, apparently troubled by my profuse sweating and wheezing. “You wanna watch Mark on TV?”

  “Yes.” I exhale loudly. “Please.”

  She flips through the channels with her small remote until she lands on CNBC, where I see Mark sitting in front of a shot of the Capitol. Wisps of his brownish orange hair jut from either side of his head, and his wild eyebrows sit in a position of consternation on his forehead. His glasses are crooked.

  The monitor moves to a four-way split screen. In one box sits another analyst in front of a set of bookcases, whose graphic informs me he works for a group called Economics Anomalous. In another box, a gray-haired male reporter paces on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. And in the third box, a brunette named Erica Eckels—who looks as if she could moonlight at Hooters—sits behind an anchor desk. Her hot-pink top scoops dangerously close to her nipples, displaying breasts that are pushed together like two large grapefruits. She leans seductively over the news desk.

  “Why can’t the administration grow a pair and call China a currency manipulator?” she says. “Are you actually telling me you think China isn’t manipulating its currency?”

  “Now wait a second,” Mark says, visibly flustered. “What I said was we’re in a difficult position right now where we need China to buy our debt. And calling the Chinese currency manipulators might make the administration seem pushy.”

  “I’m sorry, what did you just call the administration?” She looks wide-eyed at the camera.

  “Pushy,” Mark says. “The administration might seem pushy.”

  “Oh, okay, for a second there I thought you said something else.” She smirks. “But doesn’t the administration risk seeming like a bunch of pushovers? That’s the sense I got in reading the report.”

  “Well, certainly the language in the report isn’t … as … strong as perhaps it could have been …” Mark trails off.

  Crap. The report. The report that is sitting on my desk. The report that Mark hasn’t read because I handed him a pile of recipes instead.

  “Let me jump in here for a second, Erica,” says the reporter on the floor of the stock exchange. “Mark, how would you say the report compares with past reports? How is this report different from anything the administration has said before? Is there anything new here?”

  “It … depends what you mean by different …”

  I can tell Mark is bumbling his way through this. I wonder if other people can tell, too.

  “Are we even talking about the same report?” asks the Economics Anomalous analyst. “The language in this report is much harsher than past years. Much more frank.”

  “And you disagree, Mark?” Erica asks, her lips pursed in a shiny pout.

  Mark blinks wildly as he stares into the camera. “Well, no, not entirely.” He pauses. “But the bigger issue here is what impact all of this will have on the value of the dollar.”

  “Interesting,” Erica says, leaning even farther over the desk, her breasts nearly toppling out of her shirt. “Explain.”

  This is Mark’s way of fudging it—shifting the conversation to a topic he can control, one that relates to the subject at hand but doesn’t require his intimate knowledge of a report he hasn’t read. A report I failed to give him.

  He and the three other talking heads jockey back and forth on the dollar, exchanging barbs and talking over one another so loudly it sounds like a bar brawl. I am impressed with how skillfully Mark is able to navigate his way through the interview. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. He spent fourteen years on the Fed’s Board of Governors and writes about all of this for a living.

  After a few more minutes of verbal sparring, the interview draws to a close. Erica Eckels tosses her hair over her shoulder. “So, Mark, final word.”

  Mark bumbles his way through a statement about China and the dollar, a statement I do not fully understand and that, apparently, his host doesn’t either.

  “I don’t know, it’s like all four of us read a different report today,” Erica says. “But anyway, thanks for being with us. That’s Mark Henderson, of the Institute for Research and Discourse, and Eric Stall, of Economics Anomalous.”

  The camera cuts away from the other boxes and focuses in on Erica, who moves on to another story. The interview is over.

  Which means I have about twenty minutes until Mark rips me to pieces.

  I hear Mark hurrying down the hall before I see him, the wheels on his briefcase screeching in an agitated fury as he moves toward his office. Toward my desk. Toward me.

  When I finally see him app
roaching my desk, the menacing look on his face sends a sharp pang to my gut. He looks like a man capable of eating puppies or killing babies. I have never seen him like this. Not even when the Federal Reserve bailed out AIG.

  As soon as he reaches my desk, he throws the folder on my desk with a loud thwack!

  “What in god’s name is all this?” he shouts. “Was this some sort of joke?”

  “Mark, I’m so sorry.”

  “Where were you when I tried to call? Where were you for thirty minutes?” His face swells until it resembles a big, fat tomato.

  “I must have been … in line at Firehook …”

  “For half an hour?” he roars. “Hannah, this is unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable.”

  “I’m so, so sorry. I promise it will never happen again.”

  “No, you’re right, it won’t,” he says. “I don’t have time today, but tomorrow we need to have a long talk in my office. We need to talk about your future in this organization.”

  My future? “Uh … okay. I’d be happy to talk.”

  “I’m sure you would,” he says. “You always are. In the meantime, can I count on you to finish tweaking my PowerPoint slides? Can’t I at least count on you for something?”

  “Of course,” I say, my voice thin and raspy.

  Mark storms into his office and slams the door, a sound that echoes down the corridors of the entire eighth floor.

  Great. Now Mark is going to fire me.

  CHAPTER

  twenty-three

  I return home after a day of record-breaking crappiness at the office to a refrigerator whose interior mocks me. Nothing but half an onion and a nearly empty carton of milk. Excellent.

  Over a dinner of Honey Bunches of Oats, I make a list of the pros and Cons of getting fired:

  PROS: Don’t have to work at NIRD anymore (no Mark, no Millie, no Susan); can focus on supper club; can (possibly) move closer to goal of running my own catering company

  CONS: Won’t be able to pay rent; won’t be able to pay bills; might not be able to find new job or start company; will have to tell future employers I was fired; will have to tell my parents I was fired; parents will go postal

  I’m no mathematician, but it strikes me that, at this point, the cons significantly outweigh the pros.

  My phone rings, and—speak of the devil—it’s my parents. But this time it’s a domestic number. I do the math and realize they flew back last night. I’ve been so caught up in my own drama I forgot they were coming home.

  “Welcome home,” I say, trying to shake myself out of my funk. “How does it feel to be back in the Motherland?”

  My mom lets out a labored sigh. “Your father and I are beyond jet-lagged. You’d think we’d get better at this after all these years, but we seem to get worse and worse. Old age, I suppose.”

  “You’re not old,” I say. “You’re not even sixty.”

  “We’re not as nimble as we used to be, that’s for sure.” She covers the receiver with her hand and mumbles something to my dad about not putting her black cardigan in the dryer because oh my god, how many times does she have to tell him?

  “Anyway,” she says, talking to me again, “how are things in the nation’s capital? How are things at work?”

  “Um … well …” I pause. Might as well temper expectations while I still can. “Not that great, actually.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t want to get you all worked up, and I know this probably isn’t the best time to talk about this, but my job …” I trail off. I can’t tell them about my imminent firing. Not yet. “I don’t think this job is a good fit for me.”

  “How do you mean?” she asks, trying to sound gentle and motherly but sounding typically tense and serious and concerned. I imagine her anxiously tugging at her fluffy auburn bob, twirling a frizzled strand around her index finger.

  “I’ve worked at IRD for three years, and I still don’t fit in. I’m not sure I’m cut out for think tank work. I feel as if I’m constantly faking it.”

  “Listen. On some level a job is a job. And in this economy, you should be thanking your lucky stars you have a job at all.”

  “I know. I am thankful. But I also feel so … stuck. Like I’m trapped in a job that has nothing to do with anything I care about and isn’t leading anywhere either.”

  “Oh, Hannah.” She sighs. I hear her cover the phone with her hand and whisper to my father: “She’s having another one of her breakdowns …”

  “Tell her to go for a walk,” I hear my father say.

  “She needs more than a walk …”

  “I can hear you, Mom,” I say. “I can hear both of you.”

  “Let’s not talk about this now, okay?” she says, redirecting her voice back into the phone. “We just got back from three months in England, and I haven’t talked to my baby in a while. I don’t want to fight. Let’s talk about this when we see you next weekend.”

  I fumble with my phone. “Next weekend?”

  “Your father and I were thinking of making a trip down to DC. We haven’t seen you in so long, and we figured you’d have Monday off.”

  Visiting next weekend? No. No! This is a terrible idea. Next weekend is Columbus Day weekend—the weekend in which Rachel and I will hold two more installments of the supper club.

  “I … don’t think next weekend is going to work.”

  Her voice tenses up. “Oh?”

  “We … some friends and I rented a cabin up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’ll be out of town.”

  “Can’t you drop out?”

  “I don’t think so. We made the plans a while ago.” I fiddle with the tip of my ponytail. “Let me look into it, and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Please do. In the meantime, maybe I can talk to Mark about carving out a better role for you at work.”

  “No! Mom, please—don’t call Mark. I’ll handle it. It’s fine.”

  “Okay, if you say so,” she says, using the singsong voice she assumes when she doesn’t believe me. “Anyway, if you want to advance and move on, you should send out those grad school and fellowship applications ASAP. I know your father talked to you about enrolling in a GRE course. Have you signed up for one yet?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think you should?”

  “Not really?”

  “Well I think it would be a very good idea.”

  And this, more or less, is how the rest of our conversation goes. Ten more minutes of planning my future, or rather, my future according to my parents. I hang up feeling more confused and conflicted than ever. They have always been this way—trying to fit me, the square peg, into a very round, very narrow hole—and because I’ve spent most of my life trusting their instincts more than my own, I’ve tried to jam myself into that hole, too.

  My choice in musical instrument is a perfect example. In middle school, I wanted nothing more than to play the flute. It was shiny, it was pretty, and it sounded like a tweeting bird, and, by god, I wanted to play it. But, according to my mother, flute-playing girls were a dime a dozen. Playing the flute would not get me into Harvard. So what did I end up playing? The fucking bassoon. And did the bassoon end up getting me into Harvard? No. Why? Because I didn’t give a crap about that instrument because deep down it was never what I wanted to play.

  That isn’t to say my parents somehow ruined my life. Thanks to them, my life so far has been categorically easy, my every step mapped out, from Little League to Cornell. I learned French and Hebrew, traveled around the globe, landed a job at one of the top think tanks in the country. I learned to write a good research paper and successfully answer an essay question.

  What I didn’t learn, however, is how to forge my own path. And now I have to wonder: am I really ready to throw myself into the great unknown? Am I ready to struggle? Am I ready to fail?

  No. I don’t think I am. Not yet, at least. I don’t want to get a PhD, but I also can’t bring myself to close that door entirely. Not until I explore
all of my options. I flip open my laptop and stare at the screen, which is open to The Dupont Circle Supper Club Web site. Then I type “GRE Registration” into Google, click on the link, and sign up for the November 7 exam.

  Sometime later in the evening, I awake with my face pressed against my keyboard to the sound of someone banging at my door.

  I snap upright and smooth my hair into place, running my fingers along my cheeks, which bear the imprint of my computer keys. With every passing day, I take the art of looking terrible to new and unexplored heights.

  “Coming!” I shout, dusting the flakes of Honey Bunches of Oats off my T-shirt.

  I pull open the door, in all likelihood resembling an alien shar-pei, and find Blake standing in my entryway with his hands tucked into his jean pockets.

  “Hi …,” he says, eyeing the right side of my face. “Sorry—I was coming down to check on the dehumidifier. Did I … wake you?”

  “No. Yeah. Kind of.” I touch the side of my face. “I fell asleep on my computer. Sorry.”

  Blake swats away the gnats and mosquitoes, both of which I’m convinced are breeding in my entryway. “I can come back later, if that would be better.”

  “No, no—now is fine. Come on in.”

  I let Blake inside, and he inspects the dehumidifier and the overall state of my apartment, giving particular attention to the areas surrounding the front and back doors. I pretend not to notice his facial expressions when he observes the disgraceful trifecta of my air mattress, beanbag chair, and pile of rumpled clothes.

  “Looks like you’re back in business,” he says. “And I finally—officially—fixed the drainage problem, so the apartment shouldn’t flood again.”

  “Cool.”

  Blake tucks his hands back into his jean pockets and leans back on his heels. “So … what did you end up doing with all those groceries? I noticed my freezer was disappointingly empty when I got back from Tampa.”

  Thank god.

  “I … braised some of the pork belly. Sautéed the broccoli rabe. Nothing special.”