Authors: Alyssa Shelasky
My dad rides the F train with me to the bus stop at Penn Station. He says he’s heading in that direction anyway, but I know that’s not really the case. While I’ve downplayed the trip to everyone including myself, he wants to send me off on behalf of my family with love and support. He hands me an envelope as I rush off and warmly says, “Buy Chef a coffee on me.” My parents, who have the gift of seeing the good in everyone, accepted him for who he is long ago.
I wait until I’m on the bus before I open the envelope. Inside, I find a twenty-dollar bill and a little piece of paper with a quote in my mother’s messy handwriting that reads: “Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making
the best of it … Delicious ambiguity.” She
loves
this Gilda Radner quote. It helps me relax. Delicious ambiguity, indeed. I fold up the note and put it in my wallet.
When I get to D.C., I find out that Baxter’s birthday party has been cancelled. He’s come down with a bad cold and can’t be around people. Because I had reserved the whole day to spend with C Street, I still walk there from the bus stop. My other neighbors want to catch up, with or without the cake and clowns.
As my feet touch the Capitol Hill sidewalk, I feel overwhelmed being back. This city and the streets leading up to our old house take me through a journey of extreme emotions: our house-hunting and anticipation of moving in together, the isolation I felt during the early days, the deliverance of marching toward Eastern Market to make my first home-cooked meals, and the long walks looking for answers when our emotional warfare made it too hard to think straight. Washington is where I thought we’d have it all, but then decided it couldn’t be. Was I wrong about both?
When I turn the corner and see our pretty brownstone, a lump grows in my throat. I am transported back to the day I pulled up, almost three years ago, with butterflies in my stomach and joy in my eyes, barely turning off the car before Chef swooped me off my feet and carried me through the front door. I ran around the house, with my hands flung in the air and my legs practically off the ground, screaming like a maniac, “This is ours?! This is ours?!” The scene plays in my head like an old projected movie—gritty, old-fashioned, full of depth. So many happy memories rush to my mind as my chest pounds just thinking of Chef.
But then I see that new tenants have cleared out our garden, which makes me feel suddenly queasy. All the flourishing herbs
I once helplessly turned to when cooking scared me so much; the brotherhood of bold yellow and deep orange tomato plants, which we’d water early in the morning and late at night with such vigilance; and the red and green peppers, so crunchy and easy to care for. Here was a testimony to all of Chef’s hard work and industriousness and all of my daily devotion, just ripped up, washed away, and replaced with shitty dirt, dead leaves, and cigarette butts.
Our electric green bike is gone, and I remember that Chef told me someone stole it from our front lawn after I moved out. He was so sad that day. A Subaru hatchback with an Obama bobblehead on the dashboard has replaced our beautiful, bird-crapped, and busted-up Jeep that was cluttered with discarded sunglasses, broken flip-flops, emergency picnic blankets, and grocery bags of barbecue potato chips and semisweet chocolate chips. (The poor car even croaked a few weeks back.)
No matter how hard I look, the divine spark no longer exists on the corner of the nation’s capital, where two kids in love once shared all their dinners and all their thoughts, who slept in the same interwoven position every night and woke up to bad coffee and rushed kisses every morning. I’m frozen as I stare at the house. Our home was really all we had. As if the soul of the brownstone could read my lips, I quietly whisper, “I’m so sorry I left you.”
Why am I doing this to myself?
Before I get too overwrought with emotion, Maeve and Ronan see me from their big bay window. I can hear them from across the street: “Miss Alyssa is here! Miss Alyssa is here!” So I pull myself together and walk ahead. The moment Joe and Allison open the door, the kids are cheering, and then soon they’re crawling up and down me, clinging to my every limb. Allison apologizes, but I tell her it’s exactly what I need. First things first, they want to know what I’ve brought them. So I
pull out the “fabulous” necklace and put it on Maeve, who’s now four. “What does ‘fabulous’ mean?” she asks Allison. “It means ‘Miss Alyssa,’ ” she says, smiling at me. I’ve got one child on my shoulders and another in my arms, and I’d keep it like that forever if I could. They want to know, “Where’s Mister Chef? Where’s Mister Chef?” Joe, Allison, and I say together, “Working!” We all laugh.
I spend the day hopping from door to door to all my old neighbors, telling everyone about my latest interview adventures. They want every little detail—who’s nice, who’s normal, who’s anorexic, who’s an alcoholic, and who’s doing whom. Allison and Joe urge me to get on the Howard Stern show (our mutual guilty pleasure) and I tell them that his wife spins at Soul Cycle. Laura and Mike are vying for a C Street cooking show. And Kathe and Jody are of course convinced Oprah’s new TV network needs a little
Apron Anxiety
. They all read my blog and closely follow my hot dates and ups and downs, and sitting in their presence, I feel like no one could believe in me more.
At the end of the long day, I put three houses of young children to bed, and Allison drives me ten blocks away to Chef’s new place, which sits inside a big converted warehouse on H Street, the hipster section of Capitol Hill. He’s at a hockey game with huge investors—an event he couldn’t get out of and told me about weeks ago. Knowing I’d arrive before him, he’s hidden a key for me under the building’s doormat. I can tell that Allison thinks he’s being inhospitable—all the women on the block have witnessed us at our absolute worst and are instinctively protective of my feelings—but letting myself in the door doesn’t bother me. I’m not his to pamper; he’s not mine to judge.
Once inside the main entrance, I find the door to his loft is unlocked, naturally. My ex, the eternal free spirit. Slowly entering, I cannot believe my eyes. It’s the coolest apartment
I’ve ever seen, including Christopher Wagner’s. The ceilings are seventeen feet high, the kitchen is stupendous and elevated like a concert stage, the pipes are raw, the windows are endless, and half the walls are covered in chalkboards. The bathroom boasts a colossal claw-foot tub, along with a urinal and a bidet—and craziest of all, it has no door. A small part of me takes pleasure in knowing that the girls he brings home will have to publicly wipe themselves. Or worse.
I drop my bags and study his blackboards. Within the fifty-foot circumference of chicken scratch, graffiti art, and tic-tac-toe, the first thing I notice is the small contingency of girly drawings of hearts and lips, with names like “Kari” and “Cassidy” written in round, bubbly purple cursive. Ugh. I never liked girls with that kind of teenybopper penmanship.
Whatever
. I see other notes from his family and friends, gangster lyrics from old-school hip-hop songs, a scoreboard for upcoming Ultimate Fighting Championship matches, some inside jokes that I don’t understand, and a to-do list:
Pickles
Plan safari to South Africa
Toilet paper
Good Morning America
segment
Find wallet
Watch
Whale Wars
Laughing out loud, all I can think about is how damn adorable he can be. The strangeness of the situation is temporarily stunted by my everlasting crush on him, despite all that we’ve been through.
I love it.
Nothing changes.
However …
There is no room for me on that blackboard
.
I make myself a cup of tea to calm the nerves that have snuck up on me with that last revelation. Just as I have made my own friends, and pushed ahead on my own path, so has he. But his new life is literally spelled out here. It’s something I wasn’t prepared for, even in rainbow chalk. Enhancing the
in-your-face
experience, seeing our possessions from C Street inside these new, unfamiliar digs is rattling. Every dresser, bar stool, oil painting, and pillowcase once echoed of such hope. I had shopped and agonized over every little design detail that now girls who dot their “i’s” with hearts get to enjoy. I remind myself, over and over, that it’s just stuff.
The silence of the empty loft intertwined with all these awakenings makes me feel more vulnerable than I ever expected, so I take out my computer and play the National to calm down. I’d happily lose myself in the kitchen if he had anything in his fridge but cider beer (
since when does he drink that?
). I text Chef that I’m sort of freaking out. He texts back, “Take a bath, Lyssie. Be home soon.”
There are no soaps or suds, so I soak myself in scorching hot and clear bathwater, listening to my music, and reminding myself that I am grounded and poised, that I’m the special one, and that I’ve come too far to fall apart now. When he walks in the door at ten o’clock, exactly when he said he would, I am fresh out of the bath. My hair is wet and brushed and I’m wearing a pair of fuzzy, green sweatpants that we always used to fight for at night.
“You’re here! My love is here! My Lys is here!” he says lifting me up in his arms and spinning me around. He inhales the scent of my just-scrubbed-and-lotioned body, like it’s his secret field of lavender, the way he would every night back when
things were nice. He looks handsome as always, my guy. A little rounder in the stomach, a little harder in the eyes, but he’s gorgeous, as he always has been. If only we could freeze-frame this moment! Chef makes sure to tell me that he rented the loft knowing how much I’d love the bathtub. “Yeah, yeah,” I say. “Go erase those stupid girls’ names.”
It’s just before midnight, and we are both in need of food.
“How do you have
nothing
to eat?”
“Because you always took care of that for me.”
“I did?” I know I’m fishing, but it feels so good to hear.
We make our old trip to 7-Eleven, walking just a few blocks away, down the streetlamp-lit Maryland Avenue, holding hands, and I fill him in on the C Street gossip from the day. At the store, I grab a loaf of Wonder Bread, a stick of butter, and some sliced American cheese; he gathers a pint of coffee ice cream and a six-pack of Coke. “Voilà, the celebrity chef and the food writer,” I say, as he kisses my cheek at the checkout counter. He looks so happy. We both do. The Ethiopian cashier says it’s lovely to see us again.
We stay up till four o’clock, lying on the couch, talking, kissing, and watching our favorite TV shows. Just before I allow myself too much happiness, I bring up Boston. A small part of me thinks he might have recalibrated things so that he could, in fact, make the trip with me, but that didn’t happen. Before anything erupts, we wisely switch gears. We watch the first few episodes of the new season of
American Idol
, rewinding and playing back our favorite high points of the performances. We eat several rounds of grilled-cheese sandwiches, taking turns at the stove. He tells me for the hundredth time that the secret is to cook them longer, but over lower heat. “Oui, Chef,” I say. “But in the future, I prefer to work with Comté more than Kraft Singles, okay?”
Sometime around six o’clock in the morning, I fall asleep on his lap, and when I wake up around noon, we’re both in his bed. His alarm, his phone, and his e-mails are going off, and if he doesn’t get his ass to work for the lunch rush, I know that soon the doorbell will be ringing, too. I remember this. When he gets out of his under-a-minute shower, I blast that song “Jai Ho” from
Slumdog Millionaire
and make him dance until his towel falls off. We crack up laughing. With all the fighting, I had forgotten about our magnificent morning dance parties. The best memories had dissolved first.
He gets dressed against the clock, forgoing the toothbrush, and admits that he feels bad that he’ll be gone all day. He doesn’t have to explain himself. Not anymore. Before he bolts, he asks if he should make us a dinner reservation at one of D.C.’s new restaurants. I know he means well, and that he’s striving to be on his best behavior, but I also know that in all likelihood, he’ll get too busy to book us a table, or won’t make it out on time. I don’t want to be disappointed, or for him to feel like he’s failed us. That part of our story has played itself out.
“No, sweetie,” I say. “I’ll cook.”
When he leaves for work, I make a pot of coffee and dive right into his cookbooks. I remember touching them for the first time with such trepidation. Now, it’s like seeing old friends. I contemplate knocking his socks off. Maybe I’ll try a whole fish? A French onion soup? Some braised oxtail? My mother’s brisket? And for dessert, all modesty aside, I’m capable of anything! A three-layer fondant cake? Homemade cannolis? As I busily mix and match recipes, I crack the windows for some fresh air. A neighbor next door is practicing the violin and it sounds so pretty. Standing in my bra and underwear, I look outside and to the sky. It’s the end of May and already quite muggy out. It feels like a thunderstorm is buffering in the air. I stretch out on the
olive green rug (which once took me six weeks to find) and notice that the loft could use some calla lilies. And then I hear the sudden pitter-patter on the window ledge and realize exactly what I need to make: Rainy Day Rigatoni, from our Greece trip.
Bellissimo
. I know this recipe by heart, probably because it lives there.
As I prepare to fetch my ingredients, I decide to take the dish a little further, to show some new moves, with a fresh topping of sheepshead ricotta cheese that I’ll mix with olive oil and sprigs of mint. If I make enough, we can first put it on some toasted crostini, drizzled with the superb honey that we smuggled into the United States directly from a “bee lady” in Greece. (The bottle was too sticky to move to New York with me, so Chef has had full custody.) I decide against making my own pasta even though I’m up for the challenge—but why deal with the mess when we have the pasta man at Eastern Market? Tonight is about relaxation. Life, and dinner, must go easy on us.