Chapter 4
It wasn’t much but Emily had thought it would count for something: two years’ experience cooking at IHOP on weekends and during summers, fingers gummy from maple syrup, watching pancake batter bubble with holes as it cooked on the griddle.
Years later, at a beach on Ile de Ré, she and Jack went clamming.
The tide withdrew, exposing muddy sand. They squelched over it, wicker baskets in hand, searching for bubbles that signaled life below, and dug down for clams the size of peach pits.
In high school, at seventeen, gooey bubbles meant it was time to flip the pancakes.
In Cambridge, when she was twenty-one years old and it was her senior year of college, IHOP meant nothing and the clams hadn’t happened yet.
Restaurant managers in Cambridge and across the river in Boston told her over the phone that they had all the waitstaff they needed. Others didn’t return her call.
Florencia, who concentrated in English and was reading Ulysses in bed, glanced through the open door between their rooms as Emily hung up.
“Did you know that potatoes aren’t native to Ireland?
” Florencia said. “They came from South America. My professor, though, says the potato in Leopold Bloom’s pocket is a symbol of Ireland.
My friend, that potato is not a potato. It’s in Bloom’s pocket when he’s lusting after Gerty MacDowell.
Let me tell you what that potato means: stately, plump, postcolonialist dick . ”
“It’s impossible to get a job off campus.”
Florencia didn’t ask why she needed one or point out that Emily already had a work-study job at Widener Library.
Florencia set Ulysses aside. “I always wondered who was smarter but now I know it’s not you.
Don’t call them. Show them.” They went to the computer lab in the dorm’s basement and looked up high-end restaurants.
Emily took the T across the river and walked through Boston’s snowy Common. She entered Sirocco in Beacon Hill, where the restaurant’s manager, a woman with a tight bun, looked at Emily and said, “You are not a cook.”
“I can do prep.”
“You are not back of the house. You are front of the house.” The manager told Emily to stand behind the bar, which glowed with topaz vessels and turquoise gin.
A pear-shaped bottle held a pear that slept like a fetus in clear brandy.
Florencia had been right: the manager said, “You look amazing. Can you start on Friday?” The manager didn’t ask whether Emily knew how to make cocktails (she didn’t), only if she was a quick study (she was).
She learned the arctic burn of a cocktail shaker filled with ice and how to foam egg whites. One night, she peeled the rind of an orange so that its ribbon wrapped around one large ice cube in a glass of bourbon and placed it in front of a man who introduced himself as Jack.
“So he’s hot,” Florencia said.
They were supposed to be studying. Emily had a copy of Herodotus open on the café table and Florencia had been snickering her way through Pepys’s diary, periodically interrupting Emily’s reading to report on the diarist’s affair with the woman who combed lice from his hair, yet how the sexiest thing ever for him seemed to be when he boarded a merchant ship and saw bags of rubies and other riches.
“?‘Pepper scattered through every chink, you trod upon it,’?” Florencia had read out loud.
“?‘In cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees.’ Treasure was his kink. He’s practically coming all over the page.
Don’t get me started on when he buries gold in his backyard and can’t find it later. Hilarious!”
The skinny, blond-bearded waiter looked offended when Emily asked for hot water to refill her teapot. Emily didn’t blame him. She knew what it was like to work for tips. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t ordered more. Florencia ordered falafel.
Café Algiers was packed with students preparing for finals.
Emily and Florencia had arrived early to claim a table upstairs and had been there for hours.
A snowfall that had begun when they arrived had stopped.
Outside, snow lay in thin scarves draped over the tilted gravestones from the sixteen hundreds.
Emily drank her watery mint tea. Her father had refused to pay for college.
He had two more children, Emily’s younger half sisters from his second marriage.
She understood, didn’t she, that he had already divided marital assets with her mother in the divorce, and if Cheryl had spent everything, well, that wasn’t his fault, was it?
The waiter stuffed his order pad into his apron and went to the next table, his narrow shoulders slouched, his body like a doodle drawn in the margins of a notebook. “I dare him,” Florencia had said, not especially quietly, “to tell us to leave.”
Concentration broken, Emily had closed her book and told her about Jack. Yes, he was hot: face noble, jaw wide, mouth nicely cut. His red hair was short enough to qualify as professional yet long enough to ignite into a fiery mess when he ran a hand through it.
“Redheads experience pain differently.” Florencia was full of random facts—or pseudofacts that she announced with such casual surety that their truth took second order to her confidence. “They have a higher tolerance for pain. It’s all about their melanocortin 1 receptor gene. Is he freckled?”
“No, tanned.” His oxford blue shirt had been unbuttoned at the neck. He had smiled at her when she handed him the square-cut glass, his teeth very white against his skin.
“Tanned, in this weather? Tanning-bed tanned? Orange undertone, pale around the eyes from goggles? You white Americans are always doing weird shit to your skin.”
“No, he looks good.”
Florencia slapped the table. A girl at the nearest table, textbook open, gave them a dirty look.
“Then he’s rich . Caribbean vacation, probably.
” After Thanksgiving break, a select group of students had returned to campus with deep tans.
Florencia had pointed them out over dinner in their dining hall: “St. Barts, Abu Dhabi, hmm, Punta del Este, I bet.” Florencia was rich, too, born in Buenos Aires to landowning scions.
Emily told Florencia about the hundred-dollar bills. Twice now, Jack had come to Sirocco’s bar, ordered an old-fashioned, and left a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill as a tip. “Do you think it means something?”
“Duh.”
“What should I do about it?”
The waiter returned, bearing two plates of falafel and hummus dusted with za’atar. Emily said, “But I didn’t—”
“I did,” Florencia said. “I’m buying. Emily, stop. It’s not even me, okay, it’s my parents. They’re buying and they won’t notice and if they did, they would be glad. As for what to do with Jack, easy: pocket the money. You are under no obligation to him. Has he asked you out?”
Emily shook her head. “You think he’s trying to buy sex.”
“Only a teenager thinks two hundred bucks will buy him sex.”
“So he’s just being nice.”
“I didn’t say that. What do you think of him?”
Emily considered the question as she ate the falafel. She tried not to think about the warm gift of this meal. Kindness always made her eyes sting. She remembered Gen’s marigold seeds sliding inside their packet, their soft, costly rattle.
Was Jack nice? She couldn’t tell. He was friendly, not pushy.
He didn’t linger at the bar or try to pull her attention away from other customers.
He had come to Sirocco two Fridays in a row.
In town for work, he had said. He was older, Emily guessed, by about five years.
His eyes were gray, the color of an empty mirror.
He sometimes rubbed his bright stubble when he checked his BlackBerry.
He had offered his name, and when she gave him hers, he shook her hand, clasp quick and firm, palm cool from holding his drink.
“If you like him,” Florencia said, “it would cost him way more than two hundred.”
“I’m not interested in that.” By senior year, Emily had learned that there was a market for girls like her, on campus or off, in various ways.
She knew other students on financial aid.
A barrel-bodied guy down the hall worked on a fishing boat every summer in Alaska, making tens of thousands of dollars that he buried beneath the sand where he pitched his tent when he came to shore.
He sold his sperm regularly and told her that she could get big money for her eggs; people paid extra for Harvard genes.
She dismissed the idea, just as she ignored rumors about girls who were sugar babies (“Not the same as prostitution!”), not because she thought it was wrong but because she wanted to get by on her own, and if someone were to say, But this is your own, your own eggs, your body, she would feel a lonely, condensed anger, like a stone pendant knocking against her chest with each swing of the chain, and remember her mother’s tired expression when she learned where Emily was applying for college, and how that expression had hurt.
Much later, when Emily had children of her own, she would think that maybe her mother’s face hadn’t shown skepticism about Emily’s chances, only the resignation of someone being left behind.
But as a teenager, and for many years after, Emily was sure that her mother believed that she wasn’t good enough for Harvard.
Gen’s reaction had been very different. When Emily had told Gen her top choice for college, Gen nodded knowingly, her breath rising white over the track field as she said, “I’ll miss you when you go. ”
Emily wasn’t willing to trade her body. In loving Gen, Emily had already given away too large a part of herself before she understood its worth, and was too young to know that she wasn’t alone, and that people did this in all kinds of ways.
Emily was also just old enough to dread another self-betrayal, and not old enough to know its inevitability.
Florencia said, “I’m not trying to sell you. Just acknowledging basic facts about pretty blondes in a capitalist society. Did you know that in late-seventeenth-century Italy you could buy interactive, lift-the-dress drawings of courtesans?”
“I’m going to study now.”
“Maybe this Jack will be your one true love.”
Emily opened her book.
“Make you forget your broken heart.”
“I’m reading,” Emily said.
“Make you forget all about Dillon.”
“I never cared about Dillon,” Emily said, which was true.
Florencia sighed.
“He didn’t break my heart,” Emily said. “Gen did.”
“I know. I’m just pretending that he was the one to do it, because he kind of sucks, so it’d be easy to say, Emily, he’s trash, forget him. But you actually forgot Dillon the moment you met him.”
“ You made me go out with him.”
“I have terrible taste in men. Never listen to me where they’re concerned.” Yet weeks later, when Emily introduced her to Jack and Florencia pronounced him perfection, Emily believed her, because Emily agreed, and it was what she wanted to hear.