The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

by Dana Bate

  Once we’re on our own, my parents speak in monosyllables as they decide what to order, feigning deep interest in the contents of the Tabard Inn menu, as if they are reading through a classified State Department document or the president’s personal diary. My mom pulls at one of her wavy auburn locks, nervously tucking and untucking it from behind her ear as she presses her lips together, an act that accentuates the small wrinkles around her mouth, which run from her lips like small tributaries.

  “The trout looks nice,” my dad says.

  “Mmm,” my mom replies, nodding. The trout, the chicken. We are all pretending to be engrossed in something other than what’s actually on our mind: the very unpleasant conversation that lies ahead.

  I look out onto the cobblestone courtyard through the window behind our table. No one eats in the courtyard this time of year, but in the summer Adam and I would sit out there for brunch and stuff ourselves with homemade doughnuts and French toast. On a cool day like today, we would burrow into the restaurant’s cozy interior, with its roaring fireplace and black-and-white checkered floor. Today I’d like to burrow my way right into the wall until I disappear.

  The waitress takes our order, and as soon as she leaves, my dad picks up where we left off.

  “Okay, what is going on?”

  I grab a piece of focaccia from the breadbasket and stuff it in my mouth. “Where should I begin?”

  He scrunches his shoulders by his ears. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe the part where you quit your job three weeks ago and decided not to tell us?”

  “Okay. I didn’t want to work there anymore. So I quit. End of story.”

  My dad raises an eyebrow. “Hannah …”

  “What?”

  “You’ve ignored our calls and e-mails for the past three weeks. Obviously there’s more to it than that.”

  I reach for another piece of bread. “You think?”

  “Listen, you were getting antsy. Your mother and I knew that. But we thought you were planning to stick it out until you went to grad school.”

  “I’m not going to grad school, so sticking it out wasn’t really an option.”

  “I thought you signed up for the GREs?”

  “I did. I canceled.”

  My mom clucks her tongue. “Hannah, we’ve discussed this dozens of times. If you expect people to take you seriously, eventually you have to go back to school and get an advanced degree.”

  “No, that’s what I have to do for you to take me seriously.”

  My father sighs and shakes his head. “That’s not true.”

  “Uh, yes it is. You and mom would rather I make myself miserable pursuing a career like yours than do something I actually enjoy.”

  “That’s not true,” he repeats. “Listen, what you have to understand is that no job is fun all the time. Look at your mother and I—we have to do all sorts of things we don’t want to do. Grading exams, reading shoddy research papers. But we take the bad with the good. That’s the real world.”

  “Frankly,” my mom says, “I don’t understand why your generation thinks work should be a never-ending party—constant fun, fun, fun.”

  I huff. “Uh, maybe because your generation raised us to be this way.”

  My mom widens her eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “My childhood was scheduled by the minute—tennis lessons, SAT practice, theater rehearsals, bassoon lessons. I was programmed to expect fun.”

  My mom smirks. “Since when is SAT practice fun?”

  “It isn’t. But the point is, every minute I was on to something new. If I got bored with something, that was fine because an hour later I was onto something else. I never had to deal with perpetual boredom. I never had to worry about making my own way in the world.”

  My dad rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “And this is your excuse for quitting a perfectly good job? Because your mother and I were too generous when you were a child?”

  “No—that’s not what I’m saying.”

  Gah, talk about derailing the conversation. This is not where I was headed.

  “I appreciate all the opportunities you gave me,” I say. “I know how lucky I am. Really I do. But it’s taken me a while to figure out I was in the wrong line of work, and now that I have, I see my job at IRD was a bad fit. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “But how can something be a bad fit when you were obviously so good at it?” my dad asks. “Some of the papers you coauthored with Mark knocked our socks off. That doesn’t happen when a job is a bad fit.”

  “Competence doesn’t necessarily equate with happiness,” I say, grabbing a triangular cracker from the breadbasket. “I was good at singing, too, but you don’t see me running off to be a pop star.”

  My dad snorts. “Of course not, because that would be ridiculous.”

  “To you!” I say, pointing at him accusingly with the tip of my cracker. “It’s not ridiculous to anyone who is passionate about music or singing. The reason I didn’t pursue becoming a singer—or a writer or a painter—isn’t because I thought those careers were silly. It’s because I figured out pretty early that those careers would never fulfill me.”

  “It doesn’t sound as if anything will ‘fulfill’ you,” my mom says under her breath as she grabs for her water glass.

  “Hey—that’s not fair.”

  “Well, honestly Hannah, every time we talk about this, you seem to have an unrealistic notion of the sort of satisfaction you’re supposed to derive from a job. It’s called work for a reason. It isn’t supposed to feel like a vacation every day.”

  “I don’t expect work to feel like a vacation. But I also don’t expect it to feel like a prison sentence.”

  “Okay,” my dad says, sighing loudly. “Then what are you planning to do, now that you’ve quit?”

  I take a deep breath and steady my voice. “I’m applying to culinary school.”

  “Oh, here we go again with the cooking thing,” my mom says, rolling her eyes. “You’re going to be a glorified waitress again?” She says it like I’ve decided to become a stripper or a call girl.

  “No. Not a waitress. A caterer. A cook.”

  “And have any culinary programs accepted you yet?” my dad asks.

  “Not really.”

  He clears his throat. “Not really?”

  “Not yet,” I say. I still haven’t heard from L’Academie. I have no idea where I stand.

  My mom grabs aggressively for her glass. “So what you’re telling us is that you quit a perfectly good job for a pipe dream. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, I wouldn’t put it that way …”

  She shakes her head. “This is ridiculous, Hannah. Let us talk to Mark. I’m sure we can get your job back at IRD. Or at least let us make some calls to some of our colleagues in town to see what other opportunities are out there.”

  “No!” I shout. The people seated around us turn and stare. “No,” I repeat, lowering my voice. “I don’t want my job back. Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve said?”

  “We have,” she says, “and I realize this all sounds very exciting to you. But you’re only twenty-six. Your father and I have years of experience on you, and though it’s difficult for you to appreciate this, we aren’t suggesting you go to grad school or work at a think tank because we want to make you miserable. We’re suggesting these options because we know how many doors they could open up for you. We’ve been around the block. We’ve seen lots of friends pursue wacky dreams, only to end up failing. Remember Uncle Sol’s music store? And Jim Gillibrand’s solar start-up? Both of them failed. It happens all the time. Your cooking adventure could blow up in your face.”

  “And if it does, I’ll come up with an alternate plan. I’ll work at Starbucks if I have to. But I refuse to go back to IRD or any place like it.”

  My mom throws her hands in the air. “I give up. You’re not making any sense at all. Alan, would you talk to her?”

  In the wake of my mother’s fit, the waitress returns to
deliver our entrées. The three of us shift in our seats as the waitress places the plates in front of us, my parents affecting a cheery disposition for her benefit, as if the waitress has any interest in our conversation or its tone. All she wants is a nice tip.

  “Alan,” my mom hisses as soon as the waitress leaves. “Talk to her.”

  My dad swallows a bite of his trout and takes a deep breath. “Hannah, the way you’re talking—it’s foolish to sabotage your entire career over one bad experience.”

  “Unbelievable,” I say, stabbing my mushroom tart with my fork. “It’s like we’re talking in circles. It isn’t foolish to sabotage a career I never wanted in the first place and definitely don’t want now. You guys always talk about my ‘career goals,’ but the problem is, those have always been your career goals you’ve projected onto me. And I went along for the ride for a while, but if I’m being honest, they were never the goals I wanted for myself.”

  “That’s because you never knew what you wanted,” my mom says. “We were trying to give you structure. To give you focus.”

  “Of course I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. How is someone who is sixteen, seventeen, twenty-one, supposed to know for certain what she wants to do with the rest of her life?”

  My dad sighs. “You don’t know. You pick something, and you work hard at it.”

  “Well I did pick something, and I worked hard at it, and I wasn’t happy. I kept trying to explain that to you—to tell you how miserable I was—but every time I did, you either ignored me or convinced me I was being a spoiled brat.”

  “That’s not fair,” my mom says.

  “It’s not? Every time I tell you how much I love cooking and baking and all of those things, you give me a ten-minute lecture on how those are hobbies and how you didn’t work hard all these years—how you didn’t break down all these ‘barriers’—so that I could end up back in a kitchen. Come on, Mom, how many times have you given me that speech?”

  “But, what I meant …”

  “What you meant was cooking isn’t an acceptable career for your daughter.”

  My mother looks down at her plate and sighs. She hasn’t touched her meal. “A lot of that is in your head, Hannah.”

  “Really? Because I don’t think it is.”

  “I know I haven’t always been supportive of your interest in food,” she says, “but all this disapproval you’re talking about—a lot of that is what you heard, not what I said.”

  “Oh, please! Let’s hit the rewind button and go back three minutes ago when you nearly crapped yourself at the suggestion I might go to culinary school. And what about your offer to get my job back for me? That’s not exactly an endorsement of my choices, Mom.”

  She grabs her water glass and takes a long sip before laying the glass back on the table. “I was only trying to help,” she says. “I want the best for you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  I close my eyes and let out a long sigh. “Listen. What I’m trying to say—what I’ve been trying to say for a long time—is I understand all the sacrifices you made for me. The bassoon lessons, the SAT tutors, the fencing practice—I know all of those things cost money. I’m sure that’s why you never bought a bigger house and why you kept that rusty Volvo for all those years. You wanted to give me every opportunity, and I’m grateful for that. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to want the same things in life you want for me. I’ve tried for a long time to be the next Professor Sugarman, and it isn’t me. It never has been.”

  My parents catch each other’s gaze at this last comment and, as if I have removed a critical block from a wobbly Jenga tower, their resolve begins to crumble.

  My dad scratches his scruffy beard. “Well, if you were so miserable and felt passionate about pursuing another career, why didn’t you just do it?”

  “Because …”

  But I can’t finish the sentence. Why hadn’t I just done it? Because then I couldn’t use my parents as an excuse anymore. I couldn’t sit around and blame them for my misery and talk about what I’d rather be doing; I’d actually have to go out and do it, which would mean opening myself up to uncertainty and insecurity and failure. And if I failed at the one thing I’d always wanted to do, well, how would I explain that to them? To myself?

  “Because,” I say, “I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  My dad sighs and shakes his head. “Oh, Hannah. We’ve never been disappointed in you.”

  “Really? Because it feels that way sometimes.”

  My mom rubs her temples. “Maybe I am a little disappointed. But not in you. In your interests, I guess. You have to appreciate how hard I worked to get where I am. I didn’t have any of the opportunities you had—and not because my parents didn’t provide them for me. I was a woman living in a different time. I had to fight my way in. And for me to watch everything being handed to you and then have you turn it all down—when you have such potential—well, I suppose I’m having a lot of trouble with that.”

  I look at my mom, whose hazel eyes glisten as she plays with the stem of her water glass. “I have so much respect for you and your career, Mom. You’re amazing—I’ve always thought you were amazing. And sometimes I wish I could be just like you. But I’m not just like you. I’m me. And I want to be a cook.”

  My parents look at each other across the table, their faces pale and riddled with wrinkles and laugh lines, and a part of me wants to jump back in and qualify everything I said so that I don’t lose my parents as my psychological safety net, the one easy excuse for why I’m stuck in the wrong career. But I don’t. Because even if their pressure pushed me down the wrong road, on some level I know my own fear and self-doubt kept me chugging along that path.

  “Well,” my mother says, after a prolonged silence, “I have to be honest. I do not like this. I do not like the idea of you throwing away all these years of hard work for some fantasy.”

  “Judy,” my father says.

  “Let me finish, Alan. But even though I think you are probably making a huge mistake, I’m not going to stand in your way. Because if I do, lord knows you’ll hold it against me forever. You’re right. You’re an adult now, and you can make these decisions for yourself. But that also means you shouldn’t expect your father and me to bail you out when this whole plan implodes. You’re on your own.”

  “That’s fine,” I say.

  But in that moment, my mother’s words tighten around me like a noose. I’m on my own. No bailout money, no backup job waiting in the wings, no magic wand to fix my problems. Life outside the bubble isn’t going to be easy—which, I suppose, is something I always knew and is why I’ve waited years to have this conversation. It’s a lot easier to complain about feeling trapped than to do something about it.

  “I thought this lunch might end with you disowning me or something,” I say.

  “That’s ridiculous, Hannah,” my mom says. “You’re our daughter. We love you. We will always love you.” She reaches out and clasps her hand around mine. “Even when you make foolish decisions.”

  “Judy,” my dad says again, this time more forcefully.

  She shrugs. “I’m just saying.”

  It is the most I can expect from my mother. Giving me her blessing does not change the fact that she hates this decision and probably always will. But I suspect a part of her recognizes there is nothing she can do about it, that I am an adult and no longer subject to her directives, and so this new career path is as much a change for my professional life as it is for the nature of our relationship. She isn’t so much giving in as she is letting go.

  We finish eating and pay the bill, and my parents walk with me toward my apartment. As we walk down N Street toward Eighteenth, my mom reaches down and grabs my hand. I look up at her, and she smiles. It’s a forced smile, tense around the eyes, but for now it’s enough. She’s trying.

  “So tell me more about culinary school,” she says. “When did you apply? How did this come about?”

  “It’s kind of a lon
g story …”

  “We’re professors on sabbatical,” she says, squeezing my hand. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

  I study my parents, whose expressions I would hitherto have called anxious or critical, and maybe they do feel that way, just a little. But for what feels like the first time in years, I also see interest—genuine interest—in their eyes, as they try to figure out what sort of bizarre trail I’m blazing, far away from their well-trodden path. And if they’re ready to listen to how all of this began, I’m ready to tell them.

  I grab my dad’s arm with my free hand and pull both my parents into a coffee shop on Connecticut Avenue. “Let me start at the beginning,” I say. “See, I have this landlord …”

  CHAPTER

  forty-four

  I miss Blake. There, I said it.

  I’ve tried not to miss him. I’ve tried not to think about him. But I can’t help it. An eerie silence has filled the house in his absence, haunting this basement apartment for what has now been two full weeks. No matter how hard I try to think about something or someone else, as soon as one of the pipes starts clanging in the wall I assume Blake is home, but then I realize he isn’t, and there I am thinking about him again.

  When he first left town, I was, on some level, relieved. At least I’d be able to stay in this apartment a little longer while I searched for a new place—a search that has, to this point, been entirely fruitless. And hearing him thumping around upstairs or seeing his face would only remind me what a terrible person I was. Who needs to be reminded of that? I lied to him. I took advantage of his generosity. I ruined his political prospects. I made so many mistakes—all of them foolish, none of them excusable—and having Blake around would only throw those mistakes back in my face.

  But the longer Blake has stayed away, the more I’ve yearned for his companionship—a development I most certainly did not anticipate but is nonetheless true. I miss his corny jokes and his cherubic smile and his optimistic realism. I miss his little adventures and his pep talks and his knack for knowing just the right thing to say—as opposed to Adam and Jacob, who knew exactly what to say to get into my pants. Deep down, neither of them really gave a crap. But Blake is different. He actually seems to care about who I am and what I want and how I can get the most out of life. And that’s why I want him to come home and why I hate not knowing when or if he will.