Out to Lunch

by Stacey Ballis

  I finally calm down, apologize to Brian for my outburst, and head to the staff bathroom to put myself back together. My face is red, my eyes are puffy. I have that horrible hitch in my throat that makes me feel like I could start crying again at any time.

  “He’s sorry.”

  Fuck you.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Fuck you twice.

  “It isn’t the end of the world. It’s all cleaned up. Accidents happen.”

  Wayne is an accident. Your biggest.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Then you don’t know me at all. Go away. Go haunt Wayne if you are so keen to make someone feel better about this. I have no desire to talk to you.

  Before the Voix can lecture me about how hateful and awful I was to her precious Wayne, there is a knock at the door.

  “Jenna? Lemme in,” Andrea whispers.

  I lean forward and unlock the door.

  “You okay?” she asks. I shrug, because if I try to speak, I’m gonna lose it all over again.

  “It’s all fixed out there. And except for the fifteen people downstairs when it happened, who are all being supercool about it, it didn’t even really register to the people upstairs. Everyone up there just thinks someone dropped a tray of glasses or something, no worse than what we have all heard dozens of times in a restaurant. Thank god for Lois and Eloise going overboard as usual; they couldn’t stop playing with the recipes all week, so we still have plenty of food. And the chefs seem very pleased.” She gets this all out in a rush, eager to make me feel better, to make it right, to be the fixer.

  I nod. “Good.” It’s all I can get out.

  “You know, if you want to . . .”

  “Go home? Yeah. I’m going to go home.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jenna, but it’ll all be fine.”

  “I know. Thank you for taking care of it. Tell everyone . . .” What can I tell anyone other than I need to run away? That I won’t be able to muster a fake smile, to pretend to be having a good time. That I am fresh out of positive thinking and false bravado. “Tell them thank you. Tell them something I ate for lunch hit me funny or something plausible, and apologize to the chefs for me for not saying good-bye.”

  Andrea hugs me, and I walk past her. Brian is waiting for me, a look of grave concern on his face.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t . . .” I touch his arm, and head for the door, desperate for the cool night air, for home. But he follows me out and stops me at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Come with me,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, Bri, I’m just not . . .”

  “I know. But come with me anyway.”

  I don’t have the energy to argue, so I follow him to his car. And to his credit, he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t offer any platitudes, he just shoots straight down Milwaukee to Armitage, and then turns left and parks.

  I look up and laugh.

  “Margie’s?” We are parked in front of the legendary old ice cream parlor, the place my parents used to end most of their dates, since my mom has eaten a bowl of ice cream nearly every day of her adult life.

  “I find that even if hot fudge doesn’t make everything better, it doesn’t hurt,” he says, smiling at me.

  We get out of the car and go inside, sitting down in a saddle-colored worn booth. Brian orders us both Grandpa’s Turtle Sundaes, a classic with vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, caramel sauce, whipped cream and nuts, topped with a house-made turtle candy instead of a cherry. Sigh. So much for getting out of the elastic waistband pants anytime soon.

  But the thing is, it works. Decadent, insane, over the top, but so freaking delicious. Cold ice cream, fluffy whipped cream, the mingling richness of fudge and caramel, perfectly tempered with the salt and crunch of toasted pecans and peanuts. A weirdly perfect food. I make it about halfway into my enormous bowl, totally focused on making each bite balanced, careful to not drip anything gooey down my bosom, before I drop the spoon.

  “Tilt,” I say. “I’m tapping out.”

  “Nah,” Brian says. “You’re just taking a break. A couple sips of water, a few minutes, and it will call you again. I always think I’m going to stop at half, but I never do.”

  “Thanks for bringing me here.”

  “No worries. I know when someone needs a sundae.” He grins.

  “I need something,” I agree.

  “Like a Waynectomy?” he says wickedly.

  “GOD. He just makes me INSANE. And I don’t really understand why.”

  “Because he is an idiot?” Brian says.

  “I dunno. I try to think about it, if you or Benji or Andrea had accidentally dumped over the buffet, my main concern would have been to make you feel better about it, to make it no big deal. But Wayne does it and my blood pressure shoots up and I start dreaming of large-caliber weaponry.”

  “Why do you think?” Brian says, biting into his turtle candy, long strings of caramel pulling out of the chocolate shell.

  “I wish I knew.” I take another spoonful of my sundae; apparently Brian is right about getting a second wind. “I guess I’ll have to talk to my shrink about it. In the meantime, I don’t want to talk about or think about Half-Brain for the rest of the night.”

  “Not a problem. I have some ideas that don’t involve Wayne in the least.”

  I think about this for a moment. “Um, you do realize that stuffing a girl full of a sundae the size of Montana is not smart as a foreplay move. I’m not going to be feeling acrobatic for at least ten hours after this.”

  “Dirty mind, you have such a dirty mind. I wasn’t talking about ravaging you. I was thinking maybe a snuggle movie at your house. Something stupid funny. Maybe from the ’80s. Something Brat Packy.” He knows about my secret stash of ’80s filmography.

  I laugh. “You’re on.”

  “And Jenna?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for inviting me tonight. Before the Waynado, it was a really lovely event and I liked your store. Maybe one of these days I can really meet your crew.”

  “I’d like that. And I know they would.”

  “Excellent. It’s a date. In the meantime, let me tell you about the partner at my firm who got so drunk at the holiday party last night that he mistook an office for the bathroom. Not HIS office, mind you . . .”

  And before I know it, I’m actually smiling and scraping the bottom of my bowl.

  12

  I find it interesting that you are so painfully aware of how much harder you are on Wayne than you are on the other people in your life. How much slower to forgive or give the benefit of the doubt. What do you think that is about for you?” Nancy says.

  I think about this. “I can feel it when it’s happening, I can feel myself go immediately to anger and annoyance, but the whole time I’m thinking that I’m such a horrible person because I know if someone I loved did the exact same thing, I would brush it off.”

  “So you are not just hard on him, you are hard on yourself for being hard on him.”

  “I’m my own Doublemint Twins of psychosis.”

  “You aren’t psychotic, you are human. But I wonder where it comes from. Originally. When is the first time you remember being annoyed with Wayne?”

  I think back. “The first time I met him. He and Aimee had been dating for a few weeks, and Aimee brought him to a dinner party I was having. He showed up with a bag from McDonald’s, announced that he heard I was a great cook, but there was just a lot he didn’t eat, so he brought his own.”

  “Not a great first impression.”

  “To say the least. And then all night he kept just jumping into the conversation with weird non sequiturs and asking strangely personal questions. Mostly it didn’t matter. It was Andrea and her current boyfriend, my friend Alana with a date, and another couple I can’t remember right now . . . and I had a guy there, a friend of a friend I had a crush on, a wine consultant, and Wayne was sitting next to him. By the end of the night, Wayne was fixing him up with some woman he worked
with.”

  “So not only did he come to your home with his own food, snubbing the thing that is most important to you, but he, um . . .” Nancy reaches for the right words.

  “Twat-blocked me.”

  She laughs. “Not the phrase I would have used, but the sentiment is correct.”

  “It felt like every time we were together the first few times, he was just, so weird or did or said something so wrong. He asked Andrea’s mother if she made good Mexican food; not the best thing to ask a Dominican. He asked Lois’s husband if he had been recruited for the Hitler Youth back in Germany, which was ridiculous not just because he would have been about three years old at the time, but also because both his and Lois’s family were part of an underground movement that hid Jews. At his first Christmas weekend at the Brands’, not only did he do a McDonald’s run for lunch and dinner for three days straight, he kept challenging the kids to games and then BEATING THEM. I mean, you know, winning, not like, beating . . . oh, and he knocked over their Christmas tree. Twice. By the time the weekend was over, all the kids were pouting and the tree was down to lights and tinsel and a couple of plastic ornaments. Eventually he figured out how to fit in better with them, the extended Brand family is very easygoing and forgiving, but it just irked me to no end. And I like to think of myself as tolerant, open, but it felt like every conversation I ever had with Wayne was just a nonstarter. In the early days he would ask me horrible questions about my lack of a dating life, and then when I met Jack they didn’t connect at all either . . .”

  “So you never found the right opening to really get to know him. I mean, if the person after Aimee who was most important to you wasn’t a Wayne fan, then it goes to reason that while you were together it wouldn’t be terribly easy to reverse your opinion.”

  I think about this for a minute, wondering if Jack’s anti-Wayne stance helped build this wall I’m trying to dismantle. “I guess that was probably part of it. Jack was the kind of guy you could take into any situation and he would figure out how to fit in. Wayne, not so much. So they didn’t really ever bond.”

  “You know what we therapists say about people who fit in in every situation?”

  “What?”

  “They have no inherent genuine personality. They aren’t themselves, they are only who they think the current audience expects them to be. Flawed though some of Wayne’s actions may seem to you, at the end of the day he sounds like someone who isn’t afraid to just be himself, all day, every day. That takes a fairly strong sense of self, to not go against your natural instincts, to not try to make yourself into something you aren’t in order to be better liked or more homogenous.”

  “I never thought about it that way.”

  “Most people don’t. But if you look at some of the truly great minds and artists of our history, they are often people who didn’t necessarily fit, who were outside the norm. Some of them had actual disorders, many of the great minds are now presumed to have some level of Asperger’s or low-level autistic tendencies, but a lot of them were just left of center.”

  “Are you saying that Wayne is a secret genius? Do I have a Jobs or Spielberg or something on my hands?”

  “Of course not. I’m just saying that fitting in, or caring about fitting in, isn’t necessarily in and of itself the world’s most desirable trait.”

  “So I should try and think about Wayne’s ‘outside the boxness’ as a good thing.”

  “I think anything you can find to appreciate about Wayne, you should. Maybe for next time you could come with a list of eight to ten things you like about Wayne, and we can explore more. In the meantime, maybe it is time to think about the beginning of your relationship with him and acknowledge that there might have been some very minor things that sat wrong with you that were the genesis of this enormous negativity you have about him.”

  “You’re probably right. I was sort of quick to ignore the reality of him in the beginning. Aimee and I were so busy with work, and I wrote him off as a total nonpriority. By the time I realized that Aimee was really serious about him, I just was too far down a path of dislike to turn myself around. And then they up and got married and that was that.”

  “People talk about inheriting family when you get married, but friends are just as important, sometimes more so. After all, even if you are close to family, you spend far more time with your friends.”

  “Exactly. Suddenly this guy that just didn’t fit anywhere was involved in almost every aspect of my social life.”

  “And how was Aimee with you and Jack?”

  “I thought she liked him, but now I think she didn’t.”

  “What makes you think that now?”

  I haven’t mentioned the Voix to Nancy, since I have no desire to be institutionalized. “Some things that Andrea and others have said recently.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  “Okay, actually. I sort of thought that maybe people thought that I had missed my chance when we broke up, let a good one get away. It weirdly feels nice to know that actually they didn’t like him for me, so it makes me feel like I dodged a bullet.”

  Nancy looks at her watch. “We’re almost out of time. How are you handling the current situation with Wayne?”

  “You mean post-Waynepocalypse? I’m dealing best as I can. He is stopping by tonight with Noah. I’m having a small Chanukah party to introduce Brian to my friends since he didn’t really get to meet them last week. Thank god Wayne and Noah are going out to dinner, but coming over just for dessert. He called and apologized a zillion times, asked me to please charge his account for the damage at the party and all the dry cleaning costs, sent me a cookie bouquet . . .”

  “And have you forgiven him?”

  “Mostly. I think out of self-preservation I need to just let it go. I know intellectually that he never means to do anything to hurt me or make me angry, it is totally unintentional, and I just have to get to a place where that is enough to keep my emotions in check.”

  “Good. I’ll look forward to hearing how this goes next time I see you.”

  “Okay.”

  I head out of the office and out to my car. Everything at home is in good shape, I’m picking up rotisserie chickens from Feed, I have homemade latkes with applesauce and sour cream already prepped, chilled steamed asparagus dressed in a lemon caper dressing, Andrea is bringing roasted root veggies, and Benji is bringing predinner nibbles. Eloise is bringing cookies, I’m sure. Lois can’t make it, it is one of her grandkids’ birthdays, but she usually makes excuses for evening events anyway. I think she just likes to be home and without the tumult of people thirty to fifty years her junior. Brian is bringing wine, and I’m interested to see how the gang takes to him.

  I get home and Volnay limps over to greet me. I wonder if there is snow coming; her arthritis seems to be really acting up, so I slip her a pain pill in a spoonful of peanut butter.

  The bell rings.

  “Hello beautiful. Happy Chanukah!” Brian comes in carrying a bag with six bottles of wine, which he immediately goes to drop in the kitchen. He leans over and gives Volnay a rawhide chew toy in the shape of a dreidel. “Couldn’t resist.” He grins. He’s very early; ostensibly to help set up, but it becomes quickly clear that he is of a mind to sneak in a little romp before the party. Not that I’m complaining. It doesn’t always have to be flowers and romance; sometimes a girl just needs a skirt-up quickie on the island in the kitchen library. I wait till Brian goes to put himself back together in the powder room to wipe the island down with a bleach-based spray.

  “You might be a ho, but you are still a stickler for food safety.”

  True enough.

  Brian is still in the bathroom when the team arrives en masse, having come straight from the Library. After hugs and kisses and coat dumping, everyone comes to the kitchen. I have a lovely formal dining room, but for tonight, we are setting up the food on the kitchen island and eating at the large farm table in the kitchen.

  “This is a ha
ppy sight,” Brian says, appearing from the back hallway and surveying the scene in the kitchen. There is a quick round of introductions, and then Brian works on getting everyone a glass of wine while Benji puts out some elaborate snacks.

  “So,” he explains. “Take the piece of bread, dip it in the olive oil and then in the spice and nut mix, and then smear some of the spicy carrot dip on top.”

  The appetizer is complicated to assemble, but absolutely delicious. The bread, a hearty baguette from La Boulangerie, is a chewy, crusty foil for the buttery oil, savory crunchy nut mixture, and sweet and spicy carrot puree. An explosion of flavor and texture. He also has some creamy local chèvre, and marinated olives.

  “So, Brian, are you very busy at this time of year?” Eloise asks, licking a rogue bit of carrot off one elegant finger.

  “Not too terrible,” Brian answers, gratefully accepting the appetizer I have assembled for him. “A lot of my clients are in vacation and holiday mode, so hopefully things will stay relatively slow until after the New Year.”

  “That must be nice,” Andrea says. “Will you be doing any travel to see family for the holidays?”

  “I’m off the hook this year. My folks are on a Christmas cruise, and my brother and his family are in Disney with their kids for the holidays. I’m actually heading out on Christmas Day for a skiing trip. I have some friends who have a house in Snowmass.”

  “Ooooo. Fun!” Benji says, making Brian another bite, and handing it over. “Is Jenna going?”

  “BENJI!” I say, slapping at him.

  Brian grins. “Funny you should mention that . . .” Brian reaches into his sportcoat pocket and hands me an envelope. “Happy Chanukah . . . I hope.”

  Inside, a homemade coupon. Oy.

  “Good for one trip to Snowmass, preferably on Christmas Day,” Brian says.

  Eloise claps. Benji smacks Brian on the back. Andrea whispers, “Excellent.”

  “We’ll talk about it later, thank you.” I lean forward and kiss him, and everyone ooohs and aaahs.