one day story

It was at the end of my summer internship that my aunt made a big deal of taking me to Jean George’s. It was the best restaurant in the city. And my aunt, a cold, divorced woman with whom I felt closely connected, had thought it should be part of my education in the city to go there at least once.
The place was beneath a salmon-colored awning off 59th street. There were swaths of fabric on all of the walls. The tables were lined on two raised platforms, and in the gap, waiters walked back and forth. A maitre-d’ smiled when my aunt said her name and led us to our table. While she looked over the menu, my aunt apologized. She asked if it would be too ridiculous if she ordered something vegetarian. “But you should get the duck.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t understand any of the words on the menu. And I knew my aunt well enough that when the waiter came, she’d order for me anyway. It was just after eight o’clock. Across from us sat a couple – the man bald, the wife shellacked with one strap of her gown off her shoulder. Everywhere else were also couples – save two suited men by the door who were eating as quickly as they talked, as though the forks on their plates were diagramming plays. By this time my aunt had put down the menu. “It’s about the most depressing thing in the world,” she said. “To order a chestnut tagliatelle at Jean George’s,” she said.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I know. I just wish I could make myself want it.”
I began to explain to her an article I had read in The Nation. Supposedly, our consumerist nation values those who abstain. Skinny vegan actresses; monks…
“Madame?”
My aunt and I looked up as the Maitre’d crossed before our table, as he sat just beside us a tall woman in a red skirt-suit. She was Asian, with closely-cropped black hair, and wore a line of red paint across her lips that perfectly matched the suit. The suit was padded in the shoulders, pulled in at the hips, and speckled with little gold buttons painted with diamond-encrusted anchors. Looking down beside me, I could see she wore nylons, without a run, and a pair of Laboutin heels. I recognized them for the red laquer beneath the heels from my mother’s Vogues, always on the lip of the bath. When the woman accepted the menu from the maitre’d, she reached for it with both hands, smiled when he gave it, and held it before her with manicured hands. On her left hand, only the middle finger showed a ring of grayish diamonds.
I wondered who she was waiting for but there was no other place set.
“The poor woman’s come alone,” my aunt said. And then the waiter came to take our orders. When she ordered just the bouillabaisse, the waiter nodded, as though sharing her grief. “Just the tagliatelle, madame?” I got the canard, pointing to it on the menu so that I did not have to say it. I had studied Spanish because it was more practical. And yet I never used it.

My aunt’s apartment was on 81st street and Riverside Drive, and though it was beautiful and glassy and gray I hated to live there because her maid, Berrise, was always accusing me of either stealing or having boys over. Really, I had never stolen anything – especially not quarters from the jar above the Tupperware (her most recent accusation). But I had invited boys over – namely, my boyfriend, who was a secret from my aunt and who was living for the summer on 86th street, on the trundle-bed of his father’s sister’s daughter. In the mornings, he flipped the bed up against the wall in the living room – so that between the hours of 9.45 and 10.00, it was as if his bed did not exist. Which meant he was always coming over to 81st.
The maid might have known. There were cameras in the elevators where we often kissed and one time she surprised us at two in the afternoon on a Sunday to find him sprawled out on the living-room couch, reading one of my aunt’s catalogues on Japanese Nikkei. But he had quickly defended himself then as “my friend.” And because we were nineteen, maybe, we thought that adults could not tell the difference.
I was nervous whenever he was over. “Pleeeaaaase don’t sit out in the living room,” I said, when I saw him out on the sofa like that a second time. I was in the kitchen stealing Perrier and had come out to find him there, sprawled, reading a Russian edition of some novel. He had only taken Russian 1 and dropped out after three months (he couldn’t wake at 8.30 often enough). He was just doing it for show.
“I’m not your doll,” he said. He was looking straight at me and smiling.
“I don’t tell dolls to do things,” I said. “I don’t even have any dolls. I’m the type of girl – no, woman – who has never had a doll.”
“I’m sure you’ve had a doll,” he said, patting the spot beside him on the sofa. And I went to him. As he scratched my back he read to me softly, as softly as he could, the sharp words of the Russian of a book whose name I never learned.
I felt it was safer to keep Beal quartered in my bedroom – a huge, two-room suite, the former bedroom of my cousin Lexy, which still sported pictures of her at her Princeton graduation alongside her collection of college books -- Chekhov, Aristotle, Euridyces – which I was sure were not relevant to her in her current position at J.P. Morgan. Beal would stand around making fun of the pictures. He had a funny nasal way of talking which I had gotten used to, but could not stand when he used to speak of my family. “Who smiles like this?” he said, pointing to a picture of Lexy out on the dock, with her regatta team. I was brushing my teeth and came out of the bathroom, foaming like a rabid dog around the toothbrush. “Like what,” I mumbled.
“We’re so happy to physically suffer,” he said, doing a voice full of pep. “For competition!”
“Oh please,” I said. I went back to the bathroom and spit out the toothpaste. As I spit out water, I thought of what I was going to say and came back out. “You’re so unwilling to admit anyone else has any kind of life. What would they say if they saw you and your friends, in your grimy plaid shirts, standing in front of—oh, I don’t know – an ironic monument to the world’s largest taco?”
“Princeton,” he said. “Princeton, Paula.”
“You would have gone to Princeton if you had gotten in.”
When he went back to San Francisco, I was sure I would be happier. No more hiding from Berrise – who had recently left a note asking if I wanted the sheets washed twice a week. And then there was my aunt, whose plaintive, lonely face in the mornings on the few days when she came back from the country made it hard to have a lover. She ate half a grape-fruit and a small cup of plain yogurt, then ran downstairs on the treadmills in the windowless basement. It was awful having Beal over, knowing that. And on the day before he left, I had promised a friend – a mutual friend – that we would see Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I assumed Beal would come along. When I got out of work at six o’clock I told him our plan. We were seeing it at the theater on fifty-ninth street – the big Loews – and he could meet Rachel and I out by the glass doors.
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“But it’s our last night,” I said. I was on my phone somewhere between work and seventh ave. The sandwich shop was empty.
“Exactly,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll meet you at eight-sixth. We’ll get dinner. Then we’ll go.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I promised Rachel.”
“Whatever,” he said.
“So you’ll meet me.”
“I’ll be at eight-sixth. Call me.”
When I got out at eighty-sixth he didn’t answer his phone. I left a message. I decided to walk down to eight-first. If he didn’t pick up before then, I would just make a cocktail at my aunt’s house. It would be good for Berrise to see me coming in alone, and she might still be there. By the time I was at 82nd he picked up.
“I was napping,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Let’s just meet.”
“Where?” he said, as if there was no place.
“The Indian place.”
When I got there the Indian place was crowded. I stood outside and looked for him. He was ten minutes late, and showed up in brown corduroy pants, a striped shirt. He looked exactly as he did in my mind, when I had most loved him. “Let’s just walk around,” he said. He was sullen. I could not get him to say anything. We walked down Riverside park, we sat on a stone wall. A woman walked a brown, rust-colored dog below us. She had no control of the leash, and Beal finally spoke. He told an anecdote I’d heard before about how Americans are so poor at training their dogs, how we both love animals too much and eat too many of them. It was one of those things that made him sound pretentious in the way I didn’t like, one of those things that would embarrass me at dinner with my friends on St. Marks. I’d grimace, wait for them to chime in about how much they loved bacon, how they weren’t saints.
“I’m still afraid of dogs,” I said, telling again the story of how I had been bit, how it had torn the flesh out through the skin of my leg, so that a trail of white fat thick as twine came out of the wound. It was a story I told to explain myself, how quiet I could become. It felt sometimes like the only story I had.
“You’re afraid of everything,” he said.
I started crying.
“You’re afraid of a maid. Of Rachel.”
Back in the apartment, no one was home. We watched RoboCop2, sitting in separate gray chairs, each a perfect cube with one section cut out. Between us sat glasses of Perrier which, by the end of the movie, had gone flat – unfinished. “Are you hungry?” I said, at the end of the movie. “We could go to the Indian place?” He wasn’t hungry.
“I should go,” he said. He got his things from the Princeton room. In the hall, I held him around the neck. I said, don’t go. I started crying and pretended to try and keep it down. Really, the act of keeping it down was the grief; and I wondered if I were to stop trying to restrain myself, would any tears come at all. “You knew this was going to happen all along,” he said. He was standing between a gaunt Giacommetti and a conceptual piece made entirely of re-tooled disco balls, both of which seemed to reflect back my own sadness. “Don’t go,” I said. I stayed in the empty apartment, and I listened through the door to him standing in the landing, waiting for the elevator, clearing his throat, shuffling through his briefcase. When the elevator dinged, I went back to the kitchen and watched him on the elevator monitor, descending, his throat a black splotch; his forehead a white square.

A few weeks later my internship was over. I took a weekend to visit my mother in Washington. My mother’s Nissan was in the line of cars outside of the Union Station. “I’ve been through hell and high water getting down here,” she said, leaning over to open the passenger door. “There’s an accident on the 495.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I could have taken the Metro I guess.”
“No you couldn’t have,” she said. “What mother doesn’t pick up her kids from the train?” She described to me in detail the accident; how it seemed like a few people had died, probably drunk kids—
“On a Sunday?” I said.
-- and that you could see the bodies being lifted out onto the stretchers. She thought, she said, that a lot of the hooplah was just the rubberneckers.
“Well, you were a rubbernecker,” I said.
At home she made me tea. While she was boiling the water, I went over to the computer and opened my g-mail to check it. She came out and looked at me for a minute, standing on the stairs above the office.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Do you have anything important you need to do on the computer right now?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Well,” she said. “I thought you might sit with me and drink the tea. And we could talk.”
“Okay,” I said. The moment was strange. I could tell she had planned this, and when I got to the steel table in the breakfast nook, I saw that she even had the brand of tea I liked that I had been pestering her to buy – some kind of avant-guarde ginger peach that my father hated the smell of, called “girly white trash tea,” and so would not allow in his home. She had almost finished the puzzle; there were a couple of blank rows. I couldn’t read any of the clues without showing that I obviously wasn’t paying attention to her.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.
“My brother’s been killed in a war.”
“No seriously,” she said. “Your father and I are separating,” she said. “It’s for the best. But he wants it. He’s the one who wants it.”
“Does Trent know?” Trent was my kid brother.
“No,” she said.
“God mom, I’m always the messanger. You guys never tell him anything. And it’s my job to explain everything, literally everything to him. Christ, I even had to pay part of his college tuition!”
“Well, I’ll tell him,” she said.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” I said. “I wish you would tell both of us stuff at the same time, so I don’t have to feel bad about keeping it a secret until you tell him.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll do that next time.”
“There is no next time,” I said. “There was last time when I said the same thing, and you never listen to anything I say. Dad listens and now he tells us stuff at the same time but you always tell me first.”
She just sat there. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told it differently. I wasn’t thinking about that. It’s hard enough as it is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just get really annoyed when you do that.”
“Fine,” she said.
“It’s fine,” I said. “So are you going to stay here?”
“Yes,” she said. “Your father is moving to a new job.”
“He got a new job?” I said. “I’m always the last to find out anything.”
“Yes, in Vermont. And I’ll stay here.”
We drank our tea and then I started finishing her crossword puzzle. She left me alone. I watched her extended cable on the upstairs TV – Star Jones’, Millionaire Matchmaker, America’s Next Top Model—toggling between the Style Network and E!, channels I could never watch with Beal. The next time I saw my mother she opened the door to the TV room.
“I thought we could go out to dinner,” she said.
“I’m kind of sick of going out to dinner,” I said. “To be honest.”
“Well I don’t feel like cooking,” she said.
“I’ll cook, I’m happy to cook.”
“I don’t have any groceries,” she said. “I thought we could leave in half an hour.”
“Half an hour!?” I said. “What time is it?”
“Six.”
“I’m used to eating at eight, eight-thirty.”
“Well I’m not Tante Ferrin,” she said.
“This is why I’m fat.”
“You’re not fat,” she said.
“Well, I’m always forced to eat when I’m not hungry.”
“Forced,” she said and laughed.
A half hour later my mother was parking for the Cheesecake factory. She knew just the right spot in the mall garage that was near the pink elevators that went up straight to the restaurant level. In the elevator with us was an obese couple, holding hands. The hostess said there was a wait unless we –
“We’ll sit at the bar,” my mother said.
We sat between two separate groups of men, getting after work drinks. The bartender winked at my mother. She ordered water and then hid behind the menu.
After moving from California, the Cheesecake Factory, sadly enough, was literally the only place in Washington that my mother or I thought had decent salads. We both had the same weird taste in food – so exactly the same that in those Greek diners on road trips with their twenty-five page menus, we’d order the same dishes. It was one of those genetic indicators that made me kind of depressed.
We split one of the enormous Chinese Chicken Salads. I ordered a four-dollar lemonade/iced-tea because I knew she was footing the bill. The bartender turned out to be one of those sad, crabby men who make you regret just being a customer, just wanting anything. When he turned away my mom said, “Phew.”
“So you knew it was coming,” she said.
“Kind of,” I said. “You left a lawyer’s bill in the Xerox machine.”
“I did,” my mother said. Then she laughed. “Oh, that was stupid.”
“And the soy milk in the fridge went bad. The last time I was here.”
“You should have told me,” she said.
“I did tell you.”
“Really?” she said.
“I told you and you got new soy milk, but what I’m saying is that’s how I knew.”
“Oh,” my mother said. My mother drank regular milk – she cared only for calcium. But my father drank soy milk for lower calories. I just like the taste of it in coffee better.
“You seem fine,” I said.
“I am,” she said. “I’m fine. Your aunt visited last weekend.”
“So that was where she was.”
“We met up with some of her friends in Georgetown. And some of my skating friends. And it was nice. I could see – when I was at the flea market with her – I could imagine it being okay, being single again.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Did you get anything?”
“What?” she said.
“At the flea market?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think either of us got anything. But Sandy bought a nice picture of a –“
Just then our salad came.

At home, at my mother’s house, I would call Beal. “It’s nice,” she said, “that you have someone to talk to.”
I didn’t say anything. I never told my mother about my boyfriends – and there had only been three of them so far. I didn’t know why. It seemed to me that if I told her about them, she would make them hers, would be too excited. Now that I was nineteen, it would be so much worse. She had been waiting for years to hear of one – and the first one I told her of would get railroaded. As my ex-boyfriend Jeremy would say, quoting Mr. T – I pitied the fool.
What I did not tell my mother and my aunt and my grandmother – all slim, sexless women in separate gray apartments – was enormous and went back to childhood. Who knows why children do the things they do. But when I think of what I did not tell my mother it starts as early as I can talk. I do not tell her that I want a Barbie for Christmas. And I want a Barbie for Christmas every year, I want it for my birthday every year, and I do not get it. Instead I ask for teddy bears. I don’t want them. But somehow I think that this is what a good child asks for. And I am sure that if I ask for a Barbie – what I somehow subconsciously understand to be commodity designed to perpetuate misogyny – that she will sneer, that my aunt will sneer, that my grandmother will sneer, and I will not be accepted by my own family. So there are pictures of me with teddy bears – which get bigger and bigger in scale until age eleven when, Barbie-less, I get one of those enormous FAO bears which, as a pre-teen, I end up using as a pillow on sleepovers. I don’t ask my mother if I can start shaving my legs. Instead, I just do it, confident that her blindness (she wears thick glasses) will mean she never notices. But she does, and she asks, and I say “whatever.” It’s a word she hates for me to use, but she feels uncomfortable “banning language in a household” because she read somewhere that it “gives the words power.”
Whatever whatever whatever. This is my mantra. My father is leaving her? Whatever.

I waited until I was on the train to call my father. It seemed somehow terrible to do it in my mother’s house. When I heard his voice, I started crying.
“Your mother lacks warmth,” he said, when he was explaining it. “Think of me – all alone for so long. I need things. I need other things.” I couldn’t forgive him of that, and so he kept going. “I just want to be alone,” he said. “Can you understand that? She had started nagging me to entertain her and I just couldn’t – couldn’t do it anymore.”
My father is good at getting people to like him. He befriends every cab driver he meets, he gives speeches as a living. Unfortunately, he is just as good with us. To be alone; She lacks warmth. I want those things too. I believe those things.
Later, on the train, in the dining car, I fell for an advertisement for a hot dog, like the kind you can get out on the baseball fields. The picture made it seem xxxx It came in a shrink-wrapped package with one packet only of relish that could not make its way down the length of the dog. Trying to spread it out along the dog, I was suddenly angry. My father had tried to sell me too. I was always being sold to.

Back in the city the streets were gray. I splurged my small intern’s salary on a cab, watched the streets speed by. In my aunt’s apartment lobby the bellhop nodded. Al Franken was in the elevator – this was his building too – and earlier in the summer that might have brought me joy, but now I felt depressed about it. There was nothing to look forward to. Even if you got to be Al Franken you would still have to wait for elevators.
On the ninth floor, no one was home. I scrounged together some ingredients – Quinoa, butter, an egg – and invented a kind of comfort food that reminded me of grits. No one in my family had ever made grits; I had learned this from Beal. And I ate it in front of the television watching Anderson Cooper; in case my aunt came in. Anderson Cooper was my penance.
On my bed was the note inviting me to Jean Georges the next day, and explaining that she would be in the country until then. Okay, I thought. I flopped onto the bed I had slept on so often with Beal and stared ahead at the Princeton photos. People were only happy in such small moments, in photographic time. I read Anna Karenina, in English, a copy of which I had found on Lexy’s college shelf, and fell asleep.
The next day I felt peppy and ready. I called my brother and got a picnic lunch together and ate in Central Park. I didn’t speak of it, and only watched his face to remember it the way it was before he knew. He would be upset, more upset than I had been. I didn’t want to be the one to tell him. We walked to see the Penguins in the zoo and my brother tried to feed one of them a piece of gum through the bars. It worked, the penguin came toward us; but when the penguin got to it, it didn’t want it. “I thought it would want winter freshness,” he said. “Since it’s a winter animal.” The zookeeper came by and looked down at the piece of gum, still in its foil wrapper. “The people these days,” the zookeeper said. He was an old, brittle man with long droopy ears.
“I know,” my brother said. “And they were too dumb to take off the wrapper.”
“What?” the zookeeper said.
“Nothing,” I said. “He doesn’t mean anything.”
Back at the apartment I went to the little gym in the basement then came up and had some plain yogurt and sat around reading FrFerriny’s New York Times because my aunt must have taken Sunday’s. At seven I changed into an evening dress and sat around lounging on the couch, reading the catalogue of Nikkei, waiting for my aunt to come in. At eight she was here. “I could only make reservations for nine,” she said. “Are you starved?”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
“That’s how you stay so thin!” she said, running through to the coat closet and then the kitchen, where I heard her messing about with the tea-kettle.
We walked to the restaurant.
“You heard,” she said. “Your mother and I talked this afternoon. She said you heard.”
“Yeah,” I said.
My aunt laughed – a sharp, brittle laugh. “It’s like you don’t even care.”
“I care,” I said.
“I know you do,” she said. “Anyway, it will all be fine.”
“I know that,” I said.
“I know you do. She just needs to realize that she can be happiest alone; when you realize that, you’re fine. And everyone wants to be with you.”
“But then it turns inside out; you’re not happy.”
“Well,” she said. “You’re happy enough.”

At Jean Georges, they brought us little amuse bouches. They were the first amuse bouche I’d ever eaten, and the first was a little glass of watermelon basil foam. It tasted insane. I licked the inside of the cup and then realized I probably should have used the little silver spoon.
Then a summer salad came. From The King and I, I remembered to use the fork on the outside first. Then came another amuse bouche—a wild, yellow mushroom that tasted like animal soaked in a kind of cucumber brine. The woman beside us got her first amuse bouche – the watermelon cup.
“It’s delicious,” said my aunt, looking over.
“I’ve heard,” the woman said.
“Oh?” my aunt said.
The woman didn’t say anything, but began to slowly dig at the foam with the spoon.
“Excuse me,” my aunt said. “It’s just that my niece and I were wondering – what brought you to Jean Georges tonight?”
“You mean, why am I alone?”
My aunt laughed. “You’ve seen straight through to the heart of it.”
“I would’ve thought the same thing,” the woman said. “I travel for a living. And in every city, I make a point to go to the best restaurant.”
“Oh?” my aunt said. “Travel?”
The woman said she worked for CNN Corporate. She was never anywhere for more than five days. The most interesting place she had been that year was Istanbul. “And a divine shellfish restaurant,” she said.
“How interesting!” my aunt said. “What a bold choice, to go to dinners without even reading material.”
“A book, you mean.”
“Yes,” said my aunt. “That’s what I always do.”
“I used to bring a book,” she said. “But it distracted me from the food.”
When the woman’s main course came – a rabbit, which still looked like one – my aunt began to say goodbye. She turned toward me. “Now that’s a woman,” she said. “Now that’s the woman I wanted to be when I was young.” She ate her soup.

My aunt had told me her life story over a series of brunches spread out over my adolescence. I was the only smart one in the family, and so she trusted it to me. She had graduated at the top of her class in Wellesley, she said, peeling an orange with a knife blade. But there were no jobs for her, for women. She wanted to work on Capitol Hill first and applied everywhere, finally called in by a woman representative who told her she wouldn’t hire her: it would only make her life too hard. Then, she got a job in the foreign service. They were the only bureau that would hire a woman; her knowledge of Russian (fluency) was simply too valuable. She was sent over with a group of twenty-five young people in a sort of peace mission. One of the young people was Leonard Slatkin, and he cut her hair once in front of a group of Russian journalists. “Lenny,” she said. “Lenny was divine.”
Then, somehow – and she never tells this part – she ended up getting contracted out to the C.I.A., which then got her into some kind of situation she didn’t want to be in and she quit and moved back to America. More foreign service work. NGOs. A marriage to a lawyer she met in the back of a car. Children. Once an older woman was over, a lawyer. My aunt got tipsy. “When I was young all I wanted,” she said. “Was to go to law school. I thought that was definitely what I would do with my life.” And later, when I was using the swimming pool of one of my aunt’s neighbors in Guilford, she said it again. The woman’s husband had been a kind of famous law professor, and my aunt stood by the picket fence while I dried off. “That’s what I always wanted to be,” she said. “But in those days, you couldn’t want that.”

I went to bed thinking of what I had wanted to be when I was young.
My college suitcases were packed in the corner, with my clothes for the next day laid out. I was full of the canard. Berrise had not changed the sheets since Beal left. I could still smell him there. Maybe I should change them myself; but part of me did not want to.
I was nineteen; what did I want. I wanted Beal to miss me. I cried. I wanted all of the things I pushed away. I felt awful for my mother. I hated my father. I hated myself for the teddy bear, smushed into a pillow. I hated myself for my inability to ask for anything.
I wiped my eyes and got up to get a drink of water. In the living room, I sat, looking out over the houses and then lay on the sofa. Here it did not smell of him. I could not sleep. I turned on the little lamp and looked through the book of Japanese Nikkei. The little vases and bowls had been turned and twisted to look like animal heads. It was an ancient art; turning something obvious into something you could not control.