Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (15 page)

I peel off my long-sleeve T-shirt and walk toward the closet. Opening the double doors with a slight
whoosh,
I find just what you’d expect given the state of the bathroom: nightshirts, a robe, a spare bathing suit and also a pair of fuzzy slippers, all lined up neatly in a row.

I hear a gentle knock on the window. It’s so quiet out here that it was almost distracting to me the first night I was here. I’d gotten so accustomed to how loud New York City was that I’d nearly forgotten that some people actually need peace and quiet to go to sleep.

I hear another rap on the window and look out to see that small stones are being thrown at it.

Hunter. It can only be Hunter. The teacher who undoubtedly forced him to read
Romeo and Juliet
against his will would be proud.

I’m really not in the mood for Hunter right now. I think that, earlier in the day, I might have thought it was sweet of him to be visiting me at the guest house, but after dealing with my mother, I’m just not in the right state of mind. And I don’t want to end up saying something that I’ll regret—despite myself, I sort of like him hanging around me.

I throw on the bathrobe and walk over to the window. I have to duck to miss a stray pebble as it careens toward my head when I get the window open. I look down to tell Hunter that it’s really too late for him to be visiting me, but it’s not Hunter I see down by the pool.

It’s Nate.

“Is it too late?” he asks in a half-whisper, half-shout.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, pulling the edges of the bathrobe tightly around my body without even realizing it.

“I can come back if you want,” he says. “Do you want me to come back? It’s just that I saw you walking out here—I can see your pool from my bedroom—and I thought I’d stop by to say hi.”

“You stopped by to say hello at ten at night?”

“Yeah,” he says. “No good?”

I have no idea how to respond to this. Of course it’s no good, I don’t want to see him during the day, much less ten at night. I pull myself back in from the window and shut it. I walk back to the closet and put on a pair of slippers. I make my way back toward the bathroom and I hear someone calling my name. I walk over to the landing and Nate Sugarman is standing in the entranceway of the guest house.

“You’re in the house,” I say.

“When you ducked back from the window, I thought you were telling me to come in.”

I want to say “I wasn’t,” because that’s what I would normally say if someone who I didn’t particularly care for was standing in my house. But instead I try to think of what my grandmother would do in this situation. She would be a gracious hostess, regardless of the time of night. My grandmother thinks it is important always to be gracious. “Do you want something to drink?” I ask.

Nate agrees and we walk over to the kitchen. I recall from the two-hour tour of the property my grandmother gave me on my first day here that the guest house has a fully stocked bar. There are no thirsty people at the Mattress King’s estate. In addition to the oversized kitchen in the main house, the guest house has its own little kitchen complete with every appliance a chef could possibly want, along with fully stocked cupboards and cabinets, thanks to my grandmother.

I open the fridge and survey what we’ve got.

“There’s a bottle of sparkling rosé,” I offer. I wonder if Nate knows that sparkling rosé is big in the Hamptons. “But maybe you want something a little stronger?”

“Rosé’s fine,” Nate says. “I’ll grab the glasses.”

As he stands up to find the glasses and I open a drawer to find the napkins, we bump into each other and self-consciously apologize. After a brief dance where we get the glasses, open the bottle, and pour, Nate walks over to the couch to sit down. I suddenly feel uncomfortable with him, so I opt to stay at the kitchen counter. I perch myself on a bar stool and act as if it’s not at all strange that we’re the only ones here, yet sitting more than twenty feet away from each other.

“So,” he begins, “you went to your firm right after law school.”

“Yup,” I say. “Did you go immediately to the DA’s office?”

“That was pretty much the plan,” he says. “It’s the reason I went to law school.”

“Well, I guess when you don’t have to worry about money, you can do what you want,” I say, with the attendant superiority one feels when one’s mother constantly tells her, “
We
aren’t like those people.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nate asks, furrowing his brow, and then takes a big swig of his wine.

“Just that you obviously don’t have to work,” I say, “so it’s nice that you’re doing public interest work.”

“Nice?”

“Yes, nice,” I say, my eyes down in my rosé.

“Nice,” he mutters under his breath. And then louder: “You say this all as if it’s a bad thing.” Nate laughs under his breath and gets up from the couch. He downs the rest of his wine and puts the glass into the kitchen sink. “You say ‘nice’ like it’s a curse word. I thought I was being nice by coming over here, but you don’t seem to do nice, do you?”

“I do nice,” I say, my voice a bit smaller.

“You know,” he says, “I was happy to see you out here, to bump into you at that party the other day. Each summer, it’s the same people out here, the same crowd. It was refreshing to see you—find someone different. And I really like your grandmother a lot, my whole family does, so even though we weren’t friends in law school, I figured that if your grandmother is so cool, you must be pretty cool yourself. But you really seem to have some sort of a problem. I don’t know if it’s with me in particular, or just the world in general, but I think I should go.”

I sit frozen on my bar stool—I’m just so taken aback by how upfront he is. In my experience, the only people you can actually expect to be honest with you are the ones who are related to you. Everyone else is just pretending they’re something they’re not. But not Nate, apparently.

“I’ll see you around,” he says.

And with that, he turns on his heel and walks out.

Twenty-one

Vivien Leigh famously complained of Clark Gable’s bad breath over the course of filming
Gone With the Wind
. My grandmother does not seem to have any such objections to
her
Rhett Butler. They are sitting so close at today’s lunch that it’s almost indecent. I’m reconsidering whether or not I should have invited Hunter to this little luncheon, but as I steal a glance at my mother, sitting next to me, I remember why I asked him over: I wanted to have at least one person to talk to.

Today we’re dining out on the backyard patio, just off the kitchen. There’s a beautiful view of the pool from here, and Rhett insisted on sitting on the side of the table that looks in at the house, so that my grandmother, mother, and I could all have the better view. Hunter did Rhett one better by not only sitting on the far side of the table, next to him, but also by pulling my chair out for me as we went to sit down.

My grandmother’s chef has prepared a banquet for today’s lunch—two different salads, homemade guacamole, tuna tartar prepared three different ways, bruschetta, an entire roasted chicken, an antipasto platter overflowing with Italian meats and grilled vegetables, freshly baked rolls, and my grandmother’s favorite chicken salad from The Sweet Apple, a tiny luncheonette in town. Jean-Marie made her own sangria and steeped a pitcher of iced tea just for the occasion. I tried to help her bring all of the food outside, but was laughed out of the kitchen by her and the housekeeper.

“Your grandmother is only fifteen years old here,” Rhett says, reaching over the table to hand me an old photograph. I’m amazed that he’s kept this photo for so long—it’s so old the edges have yellowed and curled up, but when I look at the woman in the picture, there’s no mistaking that it’s my grandmother. Her hair is jet black and her eyes look almost clear in the grainy black-and-white. I look from the photo up at my grandmother, and see that not much has changed. Her eyes still sparkle, even when she’s not trying.

“And when did you two get married?” I ask. I’m trying to be gracious, but I’m finding it difficult. Earlier this morning, my grandmother asked me to make an effort to get to know Rhett. He clearly has been given the same missive, because he’s trying so hard with my mother and me that it’s bordering on painful.

“We ran away together about six months after this photo was taken,” he says, smiling at my grandmother conspiratorially. It’s as if they have an inside joke that no one else knows.

My mother and I smile back at him tightly. “Lemme see,” Hunter says, and reaches over the chicken salad to take the photo from me.

“You look like her, Hannah,” Hunter says, smiling, and I thank him. I know it’s a compliment because my grandmother was beautiful, especially in that picture. Hunter smiles at me and takes a bite of his roll.

“This is the picture I carried with me to America after the war,” Rhett says. “It’s how I found your grandmother.”

“I never knew that you two saw each other after the war,” my mother says, even though the comment wasn’t directed at her.

“There are plenty of things you don’t know about me, dear,” my grandmother answers. Then, looking at me, my grandmother says, “It’s important for a woman to hold on to some things just for herself.”

“By the time I found her,” Rhett continues, with a forlorn sigh, “she was already married to your grandfather.”

Hunter asks Rhett for a detailed analysis on how, exactly, he was able to find my grandmother, while my grandmother asks me to help her with something in the house.

We go upstairs to her bedroom to her trunk of photographs.

“Don’t tell anyone that I have this,” she says. “Especially your mother. Let’s just take out an album or two to show Adanet.”

Her fingers seem to know exactly where to go. She reaches into the trunk and pulls out the first album that she grabs. She opens it to a random page in the middle and nods her head.

“This is the one.” I glance over her shoulder and see that it is full of baby pictures of my mother. My grandmother looks like a movie star in each and every one of the shots, even the ones taken right after my mother was born. In each photograph, her hair is immaculate, her face made up, her waistline tiny. I sometimes forget that my grandmother is European until I see something like this. Of course, she wouldn’t let a little thing like childbirth ruin her figure or cause her to stop wearing fitted dresses and three-inch heels. I know that my grandmother has grabbed this album because she thinks she looked more beautiful when she was younger, but she’s just as beautiful now. I tell her so, and she kisses me on the cheek.

We walk back out to the lunch table and Hunter and Rhett are still chatting animatedly. My mother sits across from them looking a bit green in the face.

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“Fine,” she says, tearing a piece of a roll. “What took you so long?”

“I thought you might like to see this,” my grandmother says to Rhett, handing him the photo album.

“Wow,” Hunter says, looking on with Rhett. “Mrs. Morganfelder, is this you?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” she says.

I look at my mother and she still looks green—I see her take a sip of water, and then put the glass against her forehead.

“Would you like to take a look, Hannah?” Rhett asks me, and I tell him that I’ve already seen the album. I know I’m supposed to be making an effort with Rhett, but I don’t want to have to walk across the table and look at the photographs over his shoulder.

I’m not sure why I dislike Rhett so much. Is it because there’s something about him that I inherently don’t like? Am I annoyed that I came out to the Hamptons for the summer and my grandmother found a man before I did? Or is it because I think he’ll take up my grandmother’s time, time that could be better spent with me?

“Would you all please excuse me?” my mother says, and dashes from the table. I jump up and follow my mother—but she’s run so quickly into the house that she’s already in the bathroom by the time I get there. From the hallway I can hear her inside getting sick, and I go to the kitchen and get her a cold glass of water.

“I think the chicken salad’s been left out in the sun too long,” she says as she walks out of the bathroom. I hand her the glass of water, and steer her over to the living room couches so she can sit down.

“It tasted fine to me,” I say. “Maybe it was the tuna?”

“I didn’t have the tuna,” she says, and takes another sip of water. “You don’t look so good. Did you have the chicken salad?”

“I feel fine,” I say, just as I feel my stomach lurch. All of the sudden, my head feels heavy and a wave of nausea washes over me. I jump up and run to the other bathroom down the hall.

Minutes later, I emerge and Martine is waiting for me with a cold washcloth. I thank her and walk back to the couch. My mother is already splayed out on the couch with a cold washcloth on her head. I walk over to the other couch and lie down.

“We don’t have to go back out there now,” my mother says. “Right?”

Finally. Something we can agree on.

Twenty-two

Hunter pulls up to the driveway in an enormous red convertible.

“What are you doing?” I say as I walk out to the driveway. The gravel under my feet makes more noise than the car. As I approach the driver’s side window, I can smell Hunter’s cologne wafting through the warm summer air.

“Picking you up,” Hunter says matter-of-factly. “We’re going out on date.”

“You’re fourteen.”

“So?” Hunter says.

“I’m … not fourteen,” I say.

“Are you afraid you can’t keep up with me?” he asks.

“I’m afraid I’ll get arrested.”

“Okay, fine,” he says, throwing his hands in the air dramatically. “I give up. Then, it’s not a date. But I’m taking you to a bonfire on the beach.”

“I’m afraid
you’ll
get arrested.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because you’re fourteen,” I repeat. “You can’t drive.”

“My dad said it was okay,” he says. “Anyway, everyone drives in the Hamptons. I’ll wait inside while you grab a sweater. It gets cold on the beach at night.”