Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (18 page)

Why do I care what she thinks all of the sudden? Yesterday, I hated Nate Sugarman. Now I’m thinking about impressing his mom. A lot happens in a day in the Hamptons.

“So, speaking of dinner…” Nate begins.

“Yes, of course,” I say, “I should let you get ready. I’m sure you have plans. And I’m sure my grandmother is wondering where I’ve been all day.” I go to give him a peck on the lips and make my hasty exit, but he grabs me around my waist and I fall into him.

“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” he whispers into my ear. “How about you go home and change and I pick you up in half an hour?”

I’m powerless to say anything but yes. It wasn’t really a question, anyway.

Twenty-five

My grandmother can see it on my face the moment I walk in the door.

“You’re gone, aren’t you?” she says.

My bathing suit and cover-up have dried, but now they’re itchy from the chlorine. I stand there like a little girl, squirming around while my grandmother chastises me.

“Now you don’t like Nate Sugarman?” I ask.

“I like Nate Sugarman just fine,” she says. “More than fine. But he’s besides the point. This is about you. Don’t fall too hard for just one.”

“What if I don’t want to date anyone else right now?” I’m trying hard not to think about sex. I’m sure that if I’m thinking about sex, my grandmother will be able to see that on my face, too. But how can you date someone else when you’re sleeping with one person? As I wait for my grandmother’s response, I think about whether or not she has this same issue. Does she sleep with each person she dates? As I think about this, I realize I can no longer look my grandmother in the eye.

“You should be meeting all different types of men. Dating all different types of men. You can’t really do that if you’re smitten with just one.”

“I’m not smitten,” I say, trying not to smile.

“Oh please.”

*   *   *

When I hear the doorbell ring twenty minutes later, I fly down the stairs to meet Nate. My grandmother beats me to the punch and I hear Nate say to her: “Mrs. Morganfelder, may I take your granddaughter out to dinner this evening?”

I stifle a giggle. I think it’s completely adorable, but I have a feeling that my grandmother may not agree.

Half an hour later, we’re on Route 27, in Nate’s windowless, doorless Jeep. I have no idea where we’re going. I lean back and take a deep breath. I enjoy the view and try to enjoy the not knowing. When Nate sees my wet hair flopping around in the wind, he leans over and opens the glove compartment. He takes out a baseball cap.

“Thanks,” I say as we head further east on Route 27.

We pull off the road, into a driveway that looks like every other driveway on Route 27. I have no idea where we are.

The Jeep glides down the driveway and stops outside a little bungalow with Chinese lanterns strung from every tree in sight. I don’t know quite what to expect, but when Nate grabs my hand I realize I don’t really care where we are going.

We walk into the bungalow, which is completely empty, except for a small bar without any bar stools. “Where are we?” I ask. Nate smiles, leading me out the back door, and I see what we came all this way for. There are a dozen or so tables right there in the sand. Tiki torches light up the perimeter, and more Chinese lanterns twinkle above. The sun has just about set, and it casts an orange-pink glow on the beach.

“Nate, this is—”

“I know,” he says, and puts his hand on the small of my back.

“How did you know what I was going to say?” I ask, smiling. The wind picks up and I catch the scent of his aftershave: lemon, mint, and verbena.

“What were you going to say?” he asks, and leans down toward me.

His lips gently touch mine, and I forget all about what I was going to say. A waiter recognizes Nate, and nods his head at a table where the sand meets the water.

I look around at the crowd, and it’s so much more laid back than most of the other places in the Hamptons. This is not the type of place you go to if you want to see and be seen. This is the kind of place you go to if you just want to
be
.

“Do you bring all your dates here?” I ask, leaning toward him. It dawns on me that I have no idea how to flirt. I met my husband in law school, where sharing your notes with someone and joining their study group was as flirtatious as you could get. Then I met Jaime at a downtown club where he was performing. He saw me in the crowd, and the next thing I knew, we were together. The point is, I’m not especially good at getting what I want. I’m better at letting things just happen to me.

“I think my line here is: ‘Only the special ones, baby,’” Nate says, and I laugh. I realize that I’ve laughed more today than I have so far this whole summer. In a long time, actually.

We order our dinner—mussels and fries, the house salad, and grilled lobsters—and we kiss shamelessly.

Nate and I talk about our work, I tell him about my firm’s gentle brush off, and we move on to talking about our families. The mussels arrive just as Nate is trying to defend my mother’s lifestyle, calling it remarkable. I dip a French fry into the pot of mussels to soak up the sauce, and try to change the subject.

Just then, the waves get a bit stronger and creep up toward our table.

“Should we move?” I ask Nate. He shrugs his shoulders and tells me that it’s part of the ambience. I take my shoes off.

For the rest of the evening, the water tickles my toes, and Nate leans over and kisses me whenever he feels like it. The music gets louder and our conversations get more intense. I try to memorize every moment of the night: the sound of the water, the music flowing through the speakers, the taste of Nate’s kisses, the way he brushes my hair off my face when the wind moves it around, the way Nate’s lips curl when he smiles at me.

That night, I fall asleep thinking of him.

Twenty-six

“No, darling,” my grandmother tells me, “these photographs are not gems. If you want to see gems, I can show you my jewelry collection.”

She eyes her ruby cocktail ring and uses her thumb to roll it around her finger. I show her the photograph I was admiring.

“These old photos
are
gems,” I insist. “But, if you’re offering, I’d like to take a peek at your jewelry collection, too.”

My grandmother laughs and looks at the photograph of the two of us. I’ve seen this picture before. It’s one of my mother’s favorites. For a photographer, she didn’t have much of a talent for displaying photographs when I was younger, but one of the things she always carried around with her was a small sleeve that held a few of her favorite pictures: the shot that won her the Pulitzer—a photograph of three Nicaraguan contra rebels smoking, guns strapped to their backs, none of whom look older than sixteen; a picture of her with her parents, when she was eleven years old; and this photograph of my grandmother and me, taken when I was three.

“This picture is so old that your clothes are actually back in style again,” I tell my grandmother.

“Nothing about me was ever out of style,” she says, and gives me a tiny smile.

“I want to do something with these pictures,” I say. “You can’t just leave them all to die in this trunk.”

“They are not dying in this trunk,” she says. “They’re just fine the way they are.”

“There are so many loose ones,” I say, picking one up off the bottom of the trunk to show her. “They’re getting ruined. Let me put them into albums or something.”

“The way you’re giving yourself projects to do makes me think you are not adjusting to the life of leisure the way I’d hoped you would.”

“I’m not giving myself a project,” I say, laughing. “I just don’t want you treating these photographs like garbage. They are treasures. We should be treating them as family heirlooms, not discarding them like unimportant trinkets.”

I look up to find my grandmother regarding me. I can tell by the way she’s batting her eyes that she’s about to lay one on me. I look back at her and wait.

“So,” she says, slowly smiling. “Speaking of things that were discarded … I guess you didn’t hate Nate Sugarman
that
much.”

“No, I hated him.”

“It seemed to me that you didn’t really hate him,” she says, eyes narrowing. “If you really didn’t care for someone, that person would be inconsequential to you. But you
hated
Nate. With a real passion. And he’s really not that objectionable, if you ask me. So, that can only mean that what you really hated was yourself for having feelings for him.”

“Wow, Grandma,” I say. “You’re wise, just like Yoda.”

My grandmother doesn’t seem to get the reference. “So, what should we call this one?”

“Nate,” I say, “we can just call him Nate.”

“How about ‘the one who tried to have me arrested’?” she says, throwing her arms out dramatically.

“That doesn’t really have much of a ring to it,” I say, and turn my attention back to the photographs. “Besides, he was the one who got me out of that whole mess.”

“The one who got you out of jail,” she says.

“I wasn’t actually ever in jail,” I say. “A police detective visited my apartment.”

“How about ‘the one who lived next door to us’?”

“You know what? How about we just call him Nate?”

My grandmother raises one eyebrow and looks at me. Her eyes are violet.

“Well, you’re right,” she says. “He doesn’t need a nickname. After all, who knows what will happen between the two of you. I never gave a clever little nickname to your grandfather. And Nate
is
the sort of man you should marry.”

“With our family’s track record, do you really think either of us should be getting married again?” I ask with a laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“The curse,” I say back in a stage whisper.

“I beg your pardon?” My grandmother does not find this line of reasoning funny. Could this mean that she has designs on marrying Rhett Butler? I really hope not. Although, if I’m correct about there being a family curse, that would be one good way to get rid of him.

“It seems to me that anyone we marry ends up dead,” I explain sotto voce. I’m still smiling, but my grandmother is not. In fact, she seems deeply annoyed.

“You weren’t married to the musician,” she says.

“Yeah, and he didn’t die.”

“Close enough,” she says, and examines her nails.

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?” she asks. “That you think there’s some silly family curse? Is that why you’re so afraid to be happy?”

“I’m not afraid to be happy,” I say, and feel my eyes well up with tears. What an awful thing to say to someone. I’m about to say as much to my grandmother when she interrupts me.

“Let’s get back to the photographs, shall we?” she asks.

Probably to cheer me up, she begins with a funny one—my grandfather dressed up for Halloween. My mother is young, very young, and she’s some sort of princess. My grandfather is playing the part of the evil witch. As I look closer, I realize that my mother is supposed to be Snow White and my grandfather is supposed to be the wench who gives her the poisonous apple. Did my mother hate convention even back then?

Every photograph my grandmother picks up comes with a story attached. I sit, riveted, as she shares each one, complete with descriptions on where each person ended up—the next-door neighbor who died in a plane crash, the school classmate who became famous, the happily married couple whose relationship ended in an acrimonious divorce. I guess when you look at photos twenty and thirty years later, you often know where the story ends. As for me, I’m still trying to figure out my own story.

“So,” my grandmother says, “your mother’s going to be coming back out to stay with us.” She smiles at me with a pained expression and I’m not sure why she’s trying so hard to pretend that everything is normal.

“Why?” I don’t even try to hide how I really feel about it. And why should I? I’m having a wonderful summer out here, and my mother will only ruin it. I already know she’ll just hate Nate—he’s way too normal for her. She’ll think he’s terribly bourgeois. She won’t let me enjoy this. And what I need right now is not to overthink this—whatever
this
is. Maybe if I’m happy for just a moment, if I can just take this snapshot of happiness and try to freeze it, I can figure out the rest of my life. I know that happiness doesn’t stick around long, but what’s wrong with trying to stretch it out just a bit?

“Enough—I don’t want to hear you talking like this,” she says, and gets up from the desk strewn with photos.

“Talking like what?” I ask. “The way I always talk?”

“Hannah, I don’t know how to tell you this,” my grandmother says. She stops at the door, and leans her body against the doorjamb, as if holding the weight of the house on her shoulders.

“Tell me what?” I ask.

She covers her face with her hands and takes a deep breath. I put my hand to her shoulder and her hands fall to her sides. She grabs both of my hands in hers and squeezes them.

“Hannah, your mother is sick.”

Twenty-seven

When I was ten years old, I caught pneumonia on a trip to London. I don’t remember many details about the trip, other than the fact that I was sick. I couldn’t tell you what we were doing in London, for one thing, and I don’t remember what hotel we stayed at, or what time of year it was, even. What I do remember is this: my mother being by my side, taking care of me.

I was put on a strict course of antibiotics and told to stay in bed and drink lots of liquids. It being London, my mother had room service bring up a huge assortment of teas that we spent most of my recovery time sampling. We stayed in bed all day together, watching television and talking. And laughing. There was a lot of laughing.

She would put strawberry jam on my toast for me, and force me to drink three cans of ginger ale each day. I would act put-upon and pretend that I didn’t want to drink the ginger ale, but the truth was, I loved the attention.

Attention from my mother wasn’t exactly something that was lacking in my life, but this sort of attention, what I imagined the care of a real mother was like … that was something I ached for. I pretended that the hotel room was my bedroom in our very big house, and my mother stayed with me in my room while I was sick so I didn’t have to be alone. I told myself that she prepared with her own two hands everything that room service brought up, that she even boiled the water for the tea herself. And of course, I imagined that she didn’t work. That our every day was like this. That she wasn’t just home with me because I was sick; she was home with me because that was what she did
every
day.