Six
Nina’s favorite part of a dinner party was the next day, when she could involve her daughters in preparing a midday Sunday dinner.
When she was a girl, that’s how all the families ate on Sundays.
A big meal in the early afternoon and something light in the evening.
She couldn’t get Sam on board with that schedule as a permanent thing—he liked to go into the office for a few hours on Sunday afternoons—but he would do it when they had an abundance of food left over from entertaining the previous night.
He liked extending the evening and its charms for another day as much as she did.
Today, Sam didn’t wake up in his usual post-birthday jovial mood.
He was sharp with her all morning. Nina and the girls were used to calibrating around his various humors.
A good or a bad thing? Nina couldn’t decide.
Today he walked into the kitchen trailing a palpable cloud of disappointment.
“One more birthday meal, for Dad!” Bridie’s forced cheerfulness was a little heartbreaking to Nina. Couldn’t Sam get over himself? Even for the girls?
“Hey, Dad,” Clara said, giving him a kiss.
“We made fresh potatoes.” Clara had carefully sliced and layered raw potatoes in a bright red casserole dish, covering them with warmed milk and sage.
She’d browned the top perfectly. Nina watched Clara remove the dish from the oven and test the doneness of the dish with a fork.
She was wearing the shirt from last night and had her long, dark hair piled on top of her head.
She had an elegance to her movements that felt new to Nina.
“What do you think?” she said, handing a forkful of the steaming potatoes to her father.
“Careful, they’re hot.” Nina could hear the echo of the millions of times she’d handed a fork or spoonful of something to the girls using the exact same words.
Clara waited for Sam to taste, hand on hip, expectant.
“Sublime,” he said, cracking the first smile of the day.
Clara gave a quick nod and said, “They should sit for another ten minutes. Then we’re ready.”
“You’re so grown,” Nina said, unthinking. Clara hated being observed by her parents, but this time she smiled and said, “I guess.”
Where had this remarkable human standing in her kitchen, confident and poised, come from?
Where was the little girl who wouldn’t even cross the street without holding her mother’s hand?
Who needed a step stool to reach the counter and burst into tears if Nina wasn’t around to tuck her into bed at night?
Nina was flooded with pride and love and—she was ashamed to admit—envy. Clara had so much ahead of her.
“Want a taste?” Clara said to Bridie, proffering another forkful.
Nothing made Nina happier than kindness between her girls.
If Clara was seventeen going on thirty, Bridie was fifteen going on twelve.
Bridie who still slept with her stuffed horse, now on its third repair.
Bridie, who cried when she lost her first tooth because it meant she was growing up.
Because Clara was more independent and confident than Bridie, the air between them could be fraught, but Clara, no matter how she tried to toss it off, was a nurturer at heart.
“Oh my god, they’re so good!” Bridie said with a mouth full of potatoes. Nina and Clara smiled at each other in acknowledgment. Teammates.
AFTER LUNCH, NINA NERVOUSLY WATCHED the clock.
The girls had rushed back upstairs to do schoolwork, and Nina made a mental note to check on what they were really doing because their enthusiasm for homework on a Sunday was suspect.
Sam, who usually spent a few hours in the office on Sunday afternoons, was puttering around helping her clear plates and wrap food while enumerating his concerns about recent sales numbers or order numbers coming out of Japan, where smaller and faster copying machines were demolishing Xerox’s market share.
“The future of the company is sitting out in Palo Alto, but nobody wants to admit it.” She wasn’t absorbing the specifics because any minute Finn would amble across the street and put something in the mailbox meant for her eyes only, as he’d said on the phone earlier.
They’d exchanged books this way for years, so a book in the mailbox wasn’t suspicious, but she had to retrieve whatever else was in the box before Sam did.
She poured the rest of the wine they’d opened for lunch into her glass. A clean, crisp Chablis. “Not sharing?” Sam said.
“Oh, do you want some more? Aren’t you driving to work?”
He sighed. “I guess I am. Not really in the mood.”
She forced a smile. “Don’t go if you don’t want to go. Stay and relax.” She tried not to show her relief when he grabbed his coat. “Just an hour or two,” he said.
For years Nina had actively disliked Finn Finnegan and his anemic spouse, Honey.
When she and Sam moved to Cambridge Road, Honey was the self-appointed welcoming committee, offering opinions on everything from the color of the shutters on Nina’s house to the best local dry cleaner to which liquor store delivered quickly.
No matter how many times Nina mentioned that she’d been living in the neighborhood for years, Honey still showed up at her door more often than necessary to offer a phone number for a local sitter, a coupon, a heads-up on a new candidate for parish council or the school board.
Nosiness dressed up as consideration. Nina refused to engage in chitchat as a warm-up to gossip.
She didn’t like Honey, and she didn’t like Honey’s husband, Finn, who was the muscle behind Finnegan Grocer’s aggressive expansion over the past ten years, a strategy that meant the demise of so many small businesses, including some of Nina’s favorites.
Johannson’s bakery and their exquisite cinnamon buns, Goldblum’s deli, where she’d get pastrami and corned beef and bagels, Russo’s tiny Italian grocer that offered freshly made mozzarella and imported tomatoes and the best chicken parmigiana sandwiches in town.
Not to mention all the sundry mom-and-pop stores where the kids bought jump ropes and kites in the spring, beach balls in the summer, sleds in the winter, and penny candy all year round.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Nina said to him once at a holiday party. “These people work all their lives to build something. They can’t possibly compete with you. Doesn’t it—keep you up at night?”
To his credit, she could admit, he didn’t give a lighthearted answer.
He was quiet for a long minute and then said, “If I thought about it only in those terms, I guess it would keep me up. My job is to feed people all over this city, to offer convenience and quality at a fair price. For example, the store nearest to the Kodak plant should have sandwiches ready to go every day, morning to night, so the shift workers can buy their lunch whenever they need. And while they’re in the store, they can pick up light bulbs, a magazine, shampoo.
Not everyone has a lot of extra time on their hands.
I’m streamlining goods and services. Helping their dollar go farther. ”
“Okay,” she said. “I see the value in that approach, but I miss the small stores. I miss Caruso’s.”
“That’s a perfect example!” he said. “It took months of taking Vito Caruso out for coffee, for lunch, for an afternoon espresso down the street, to get him to trust me. To convince him to let us bring his cookies inside all Finnegan’s locations.
He was attached to the place, and I understood, but his kids didn’t want the business.
He was tired. After he sold, he and Connie were able to buy a place in Florida and retire down there and now everyone’s happy. ”
“Most of all you.”
“Me most of all. I have one of those half-moon cookies every afternoon.”
Nina sighed. “The cookies don’t taste the same, though.”
“We use the exact recipe Connie got from her aunt in Utica, where those cookies were born.”
She shrugged. “They’re missing something. Connie Caruso’s touch. A loving hand. Smaller batches, better quality control. I don’t know, but something’s missing.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but everything is fair in love and capitalism.”
Nina hated him again.
She hadn’t been looking for love when the trouble started; she’d been looking for lust. Barreling toward fifty, she felt she’d rounded a bend and could see through to the end of her life—a straight shot devoid of passion and desire and sex.
The most surprising part of their women’s group for her was hearing the truth of everyone else’s intimate life.
Hers was so pale in comparison. She’d been able to ignore the lack through the years because so much energy and intimacy and love had flown to and from her daughters.
She couldn’t blame that dumb book; she knew that was silly.
By the time Bess came in blazing with her gift last year, their women’s group was a lackluster thing minus any real discourse or conflict, which she imagined was the entire point of a women’s group.
But Bess had arrived not only with The Joy of Sex but with a list of questions for everyone: How would you describe your sex life?
(Is that where it started? When the first word that popped into Nina’s mind was nonexistent?) How many times a week?
(Did it start then? When Nina realized that people counted their sexual encounters not over the course of a month, a year, a decade, but a week?
A week?) What have you not done yet that you’re curious about? (Everything?)