Thirty-Seven
Clara moved to New York City weeks after Bridie left for college.
The sister of a friend needed a roommate in her small apartment on far West Ninety-Fourth Street.
Fiona’s place was tiny but efficiently organized and had a certain charm even though Clara could only fit a twin bed in the room off the kitchen that at one time, before this previously grander home had been cut up into smaller apartments, had housed the family maid and, apparently, generations of mice based on the abundance of steel wool stuffed into every crevice in and around the floorboards and radiators.
In addition to the kitchen and Clara’s closet-sized bedroom, there was a decent living room that faced Riverside Drive and got plenty of light through three nicely spaced windows.
Fiona’s bedroom was big enough for a queen-sized bed and the custom shelves she’d had built to house her photography equipment, but she paid a much larger portion of the rent, so Clara felt like she’d lucked into a deal.
The only job offered to her when she arrived in town was at an Irish pub on Second Avenue in Midtown.
She worked weekends, including the dreaded bottomless-mimosa Sunday brunch, which was its own circle of hell because when she wasn’t ferrying endless plates of eggs Benedict and French toast and traditional Irish breakfast, she had to sprint around the room double-fisted, a carafe of orange juice in one hand and a bottle of cheap champagne in the other.
By the end of brunch, everyone was too drunk to pay the check properly, much less tip.
One weekend she walked into the bathroom as one of two regulars had dropped their pants to show the other how her pubic hair had been shaved into the shape of a shamrock for Saint Patrick’s Day.
“Wow,” Clara said, stunned as the woman cheerfully displayed her pubis to the entire room.
“A surprise for the boyfriend,” the woman cackled.
And then, after lucking into her apartment, Clara lucked into a career.
“Can you cook?” Fiona said one morning. “My sister said you can cook.”
“I can cook,” Clara said, not very enthusiastically. Since landing in New York, she had not missed cooking one bit, did not miss feeding a household, but anything had to be better than roaming the floor of Molly Malloy’s covered in orange pulp and J. Roget Brut.
“Do you want to help on this shoot today? My food stylist’s assistant called in sick. You just need to do whatever Joy tells you to do and know your way around food. Pay’s not terrible.”
“I can do that,” Clara said.
A bit of bad luck for the sick assistant—a case of mono that wouldn’t quit—was spectacularly good luck for Clara because by the time the former assistant was ready to return, Joy only wanted to work with Clara.
Clara had a knack for food styling, and she liked it.
She enjoyed preparing food purely for how it might look on a plate with no regard for consumption.
She liked viewing a whiteboard rendering of a roast chicken and figuring out how to make it look like a thing someone would want to eat even though her efforts—an undercooked bird painted with a browning mixture of bitters and Kitchen Bouquet, a little food coloring and dishwashing liquid—would render the thing inedible.
She liked the slant, the trickery, and it appealed to her perfectionism.
After a couple of years learning all she could from Joy, she decided to do a certificate course at a small culinary joint in lower Manhattan.
“You don’t need to go to culinary school to be a food stylist,” Joy told her, “but your knife skills could use some work, and if you’re in this for the long haul you want to get better at recipe development.
It wouldn’t be a terrible idea to work in a restaurant kitchen for a bit. ”
Clara loved the culinary program so much she considered doing a full-fledged degree at CIA up the river, but it was prohibitively expensive, and she refused to take any of her mother’s money because it was Finn’s money.
Clara was still furious that Bridie had allowed Finn to pay her full tuition at Cornell.
She tried not to think too often about the day she’d visited Bridie on campus, only weeks after Nina and Sam had dropped her off.
Clara had wanted to take Bridie to college herself, but the parents won that round.
Sam and Nina were not exactly friendly, but they had reached a certain accommodation in coparenting that Clara resented.
Her high school graduation weekend had been an awkward nightmare, starting with the senior talent show the night before commencement, when Clara had chosen, against Mr. Goodman’s advice, to accompany herself on the guitar she was just learning how to play while singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” Only a few chords in, Clara lost her place and had to restart, and she could hear how shaky her normally steady voice sounded.
She soldiered on through the audience’s scattered coughs and uneasy silence and the sudden exit of Dune, who stood and stormed out through the swinging lobby doors as she reached the chorus.
By the following year, when Fern and Bridie graduated, the families were willing to sit in adjacent rows in the Eastman Theatre, calmly and, Clara thought, smugly. At least Dune hadn’t appeared for this graduation. He was staying in South Bend for the summer.
“Probably trying to avoid me,” Clara said to Bridie.
“I don’t think so,” Bridie said and then quickly corrected herself. “I mean, maybe!”
On the day Clara pulled up to Bridie’s dorm, she couldn’t help but imagine herself on campus, walking around in cutoff shorts and some boy’s oversized Oxford cloth shirt, waving from the second-floor window of an ivy-covered dormitory, welcoming friends back after the summer.
When Bridie showed her the old reading room off the library with its three-storied open walkways of books stretching up to the ceiling, the ornate grillwork on the railings and plush leather chairs and old-fashioned lamps that gave the entire space a warm glow, Clara felt physically ill.
She could see herself sitting in one of the chairs by the front doors, reading and looking out the window and feeling like the platonic ideal of a college student.
She’d regretted deferring Cornell immediately but hadn’t known how to reverse course, and she still—unfairly, she guessed—blamed Sam for not dragging her off to Ithaca.
In her more honest or haunted moments, the ones that came between two and four in the morning, Clara realized she’d staked a fraudulent claim on Bridie, and she could hear her mother’s admonition (curse?) as if her mother were in the room with her: Exaggerating the value of your presence again, Clara?
She wasn’t Bridie’s parent. She had become something closer to an unwelcome guardian, exhaustedly watching over her sister and father, who were slowly moving away from her. Well. She could move away, too.
After the culinary course, she worked in two different neighborhood Italian restaurants for a few years, both owned by the same family, both under the radar except for locals, which gave her the opportunity to do almost everything in the kitchens, including sidestepping grabby hands and avoiding alcohol-fueled rages by an assortment of chefs and ignoring the waitstaff doing lines of cocaine in the walk-ins. Stuck in the kitchen. Again.
Whenever possible, she’d fit in a shoot with Joy, but she didn’t know where she wanted to land in the food world.
She struggled with the tedium of styling for print.
After the hours of staging and corrections based on often contradictory feedback and the dozens and dozens of Polaroids and more adjustments, they’d photograph the “hero”—the version of the dish everyone agreed looked best. Then they’d wait for hours for the film to be developed.
When the contact sheets came in, if the photographer wasn’t pleased with the results, they’d reset and do it all over again, including waiting for the second round of photos and so on.
Sometimes she’d get home at four in the morning, sleep for two hours, and head to the restaurant for prep.
It was a grueling few years while she had one foot in two different food-based worlds.
Which one to choose? The adrenaline of the kitchen or the satisfaction of sleight of hand—the two rarely coexisted. She wavered.
Until an unassuming but sneakily assertive batch of blueberry muffins changed the trajectory of Clara’s career.
Clara didn’t even like blueberry muffins.
She’d eat one if there was nothing else quick and convenient around and she was ravenous, but she’d almost rather have anything else for breakfast. An egg fried in olive oil until the edges were brown and crisp on top of a slice of toasted sourdough.
Yogurt with strawberries and the granola she made herself.
Oatmeal with brown sugar and heavy cream and some ripe banana slices on top.
But this travel magazine wanted muffins for its June issue: The muffins should look elevated but also accessible.
The recipe had to be interesting but not intimidating.
The photo editor told her she wanted “homey but also a kind of downtown, kind of SoHo feel,” because Dean & DeLuca’s enormous space on the corner of Prince and Broadway would be prominently featured in the spread.
Clara wanted to impress because this magazine was new and had an interesting aesthetic and paid well.
She spent an entire weekend trying to capture the client’s contradictory wishes, making batches and batches of muffins until she got a look she hoped would work.
In the photo she would forever feature on the first page of her sample portfolio, the muffins appear freshly baked.
Instead of standard-issue cupcake liners, she’d used individual soufflé cups, which were pleated with a tiny rolled edge.
She’d doubled the blueberries, smashing some so they bled through the soufflé paper, soft and purple.
She topped the muffins with a craggy streusel and a tart lemon glaze, brightened with yellow food coloring.
On shoot day, she commandeered one of Dean & DeLuca’s large marble cheese boards, a white porcelain colander, a heavy silver butter knife, and a midnight-blue linen napkin.
She arranged the muffins in a studied sprawl, filled the colander with blueberries, scattered a few on the slab with errant crumbs, and angled the knife with a smear of butter directly in front of a sliced muffin.
She wrinkled the napkin with damp hands and tucked it beside the colander.
The art director balked at the messiness of the tableau and asked her to clean it up—no crumbs, smears, or wrinkles.
But the photographer, hired for his love of overhead close-ups, imperfect tableaus, and natural lighting whenever possible, took one look and said, “Who did this? It’s perfect. ”
“Nice,” Joy said to her when Clara recounted the day, feeling proud. “Philip Woolf is stingy with the compliments.”
He’d flirted with her a little that day, but she hadn’t seen him again until last night, and now here he was, presenting her with a cappuccino and a freshly laundered dress (in-unit laundry!) because she’d landed in a big puddle of J?germeister on the dance floor.
She was too mortified to ask about the end of the evening, but he volunteered that he’d intervened when she was about to leave with Mr. J?germeister—“I didn’t like his energy.
” She was grateful to him but angry with herself because some of her coworkers must have seen her go home with Philip, which broke a rule she had (okay, maybe more of a guideline) about not having sex with coworkers.
Now, Philip was asking her a question and she tried to focus.
“The television stuff?” he said. “Do you remember talking about it last night?”
She did not. “Vaguely?”
“It’s a new cable channel, called the Food Channel or something blindingly obvious like that.
Brand-new. Small and scrappy. Not a big audience.
I don’t see how it’s going to work, personally, but they’re desperate for people and asked for recommendations.
If you’re interested, I can put you in touch with my contact.
It’s a bit of a mess over there, but it might be fun. ”
“I’m interested.”
“What’s your number?”
She hesitated. Ordinarily, she’d pull her usual trick, scribble the phone number incorrectly, but she was curious about the television stuff. She gave him her number, grabbed her bag, and left.
In the years since Clara had been living in New York City, she’d dated more men than she cared to count, all of them for relatively brief periods.
A few of them still friends. Most of them left wondering what they’d done to warrant her sudden and often inexplicable disappearance in their lives.
To thirty-three-year-old Clara, it was simple.
Things were fun until they weren’t, and then you cut your losses.
What was the point of drawn-out conversations or trial breakups or couples therapy?
What was the point of talk, talk, talk? If you needed to examine your relationship with a paid professional, wasn’t that the clearest sign it was over?
It was to her. Could she have been a little more considerate when breaking up with people? She supposed.
The coffee at Philip’s apartment had revived her, but only briefly.
She felt worse and worse as the subway came closer to her stop and for one horrifying moment feared she might have to discreetly vomit into her purse.
But she took a few deep breaths and, as the train screeched into her station, felt steadier.
She climbed the stairs and had a moment of gratitude that she didn’t have to go into work today.
Maybe she’d take a nap and do laundry, which had reached an appalling condition.
She stopped at the corner bodega for a Diet Coke and a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich and when she checked her home answering machine she had two messages, one from a television producer saying he’d gotten her number from Philip and one from Bridie: “Hi, it’s just me.
Bridie.” Clara smiled at the machine. Always the same words.
Always the just me and always leaving her name, as if Clara wouldn’t recognize her voice.
“You are not going to believe who I sat next to last night at one of Mom’s fundraising things. Call me!”