“She’s on Planet Mom.” Steffi laughs.
“Yup. Still.” Callie sighs. “All these years later and she still lives on Planet Mom. Or Planet Honor, as Dad calls it. She still loves her Chinese medicine and natural supplements. She’d drive him nuts. It’s never going to happen.”
“Does he still hate her as much as ever?”
“Put it like this: when he talks about her, he still refers to her as ‘your mother,’ with a sneer in his voice.”
“God, you’d think that two marriages and one longtime relationship later he’d get over it.” Steffi shakes her head.
“I know. I think he still loves her.”
“And if by love you mean hates her passionately—absolutely.”
“I’m still amazed they didn’t screw us up more.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m the younger one and, according to Dad, I’m a total mess.”
“He doesn’t think you’re a total mess. He just thinks you’re completely irresponsible and still a child.”
“Thanks for the support.”
“I didn’t say that’s what I think,” Callie protests. “That’s what Dad thinks.”
“So what do you think?”
There’s a pause. “Pretty much the same,” Callie says, and they both burst out laughing.
“So maybe Reece and I will treat Dad to a stay in a hotel in New York for his birthday, then,” Callie continues. “You’re right about the apartment. Dad would think Rob was a disaster and it would put him in a permanent bad mood. Let me talk to Reece and see if he could get some time off work so we could all go out and do stuff together.”
“Time off work? Your husband?”
“I know, I know, but a girl can dream.”
“I’ve got to go,” Steffi says. “Love you, Callie.”
“Love you too, baby.”
They put down their respective phones, each with a smile on her face.
Callie sits at her desk in her home office and grabs a pad and pencil. There is so much to do every day that the only way she can breathe is to make lists and systematically tick off each item as she gets it done.
1. Walk Elizabeth. Elizabeth is their devoted black lab, who is now the size of two black labs because, despite Jack’s pleading for a puppy and swearing that he would walk her every single day, no one walks Elizabeth anymore, and flinging a tennis ball from a plastic orange ball flinger in the garden twice a day doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference. The vet now says Elizabeth has reached critical size and must be walked at least twice a day in the dog park, where she can jump and play with other dogs.
2. Register Jack for baseball; and sign Eliza up for drama classes, in a bid to channel the drama into something constructive, rather than the weeping and wailing when, say, Callie cancels a sleepover as a consequence for Eliza’s backtalk.
3. Return the phone calls from all the sleepaway camps that have been leaving forced-cheerful messages on the answering machine for weeks. Oh how she wishes she’d never asked them for information in the first place. She had no idea quite how much they would want her . . .
4. Grocery shop. There is nothing in the fridge except drawers full of wilting vegetables, which is what happens when you try to be clever by buying tons of food in the desperate hope that you won’t have to hit the grocery store again for at least another week, and your husband doesn’t get back until nine p.m. every night and has usually grabbed a pizza on his way home.
5. Cook. Callie is hosting Book Club tonight, and has completely forgotten about it until this very second. She can’t just serve ready-bought food. No. She can’t. The girls would never let her hear the end of it. She’ll make Steffi’s tomato tarts with puff pastry—easy and impressive. That’ll keep the girls quiet.
6. Aaaargh. Run to the liquor store and get bottles of wine, and then to the gourmet food market for snacks. Having Book Club at her house tonight is also a problem because whoever hosts it has to introduce the book and give her opinion and some constructive thoughts as an opener, and Callie hasn’t had time even to open the book. She does like the cover though, although she’s not sure that’s enough.
7. Get to the gym. She’s been feeling extraordinarily tired lately, and she’s convinced it’s because she’s let her exercise routine slide. There’s no question that when she’s working out every day she is filled with an energy she doesn’t otherwise have.
8. Check for paper plates in the pantry. An email had gone out last week asking for volunteers to bring things in for Eliza’s class performance of their Colonial Williamsburg project, and by the time Callie had gotten around to responding, all the good stuff—cupcakes, biscuits, lemonade—was gone, and the only thing still left on the list was paper plates. She’s pretty sure they’ve run out because no one’s used them since the summer and she doesn’t recall seeing any, so she will have to remember to add them to the shopping list.
9. Organize Eliza’s birthday party. It may not be until next year, but Eliza’s planning it already, and Callie figures it’s better to get it organized this far in advance. She has decided she wants a karaoke party, having heard about someone’s big sister’s bat mitzvah extravaganza in New York City at an actual karaoke club, but given there are no karaoke bars in Bedford, Callie is having to use her imagination. Eliza has point-blank refused to have a party at home, and so Callie has found a Japanese restaurant with a private tatami room, available on the night of Eliza’s birthday, and she has the number of Kevin the Karaoke King, who will apparently turn up with the machine, the video and the books. At what point, Callie wonders, did her daughter discover sushi and karaoke? What happened to mac ’n’ cheese and disco dance parties in her bedroom?
10. Register Jack for football and basketball. She had meant to do this weeks ago, but couldn’t face all the additional driving. No one ever told her that motherhood meant you would spend three-quarters of your day as a chauffeur. She made a decision not to overschedule the children, and now feels guilty because every boy in Jack’s class is doing football, basketball, tae kwon do, baseball clinic and music. She draws the line at music because she just doesn’t have the energy.
11. Copyedit the ad that’s going in the local paper next week, and call back the journalist who’s writing an editorial feature on her—an amazing coup that is likely to bring in a lot of new business—plus call back the three people who have called this week to make an appointment for photography consultations.
Photography has always been something that Callie has loved. As a little girl, she would grab her mother’s camera and snap away at people. It was clear, even then, that she had an eye.
Without any sort of training, she instinctively knew how to frame a shot, and one fine art degree plus several photographic courses later, she had learned about shutter speeds, apertures, lighting, developing.
For a while, after Eliza was born, she devoted herself to being a full-time mother. They were living in the city at the time, on the Upper East Side, having left the apartment in Chelsea, and she would push Eliza in a buggy back and forth to Central Park, weaving through the nannies in a desperate attempt to find another mother, to find a friend.
They moved to Bedford for more space, and Callie jumped straight into playgroups and preschool volunteering, figuring that was what you were supposed to do when you were a full-time mother, that this was now her job, and one she would take seriously.
But she could never put down the camera. It was always in her bag, and she captured every change in Eliza and Jack’s life. When the kids were in school, or on playdates, or there were other children around, she captured them too, and people quickly started to ask her for shots, then offered to pay her for formal shoots.
The thing was, Callie didn’t like formal shoots. She didn’t like anything posed, preferring to get to know her subjects, even if only a little, and to hover in the background and snap discreetly. She liked catching the true essence of a child, and, as time went by, of their families too.
Soon the wealthiest people in Bedford had huge, grainy, black and white Callie Perry prints of their families hanging on either side of the imposing stone fireplace in the drawing room.
“Who did those?” guests would inquire enviously. “They’re stunning.”
And Callie’s business took off.
It is, she often thinks, the perfect job. She is at home for the kids whenever they are home, and yet has something that is wholly hers. She loves the excitement of downloading the pictures onto her computer, of scrolling through to pick the perfect shots, and of changing the shadows, the saturation, the exposure to make each one even more perfect than it already is.
There was always something so meditative for her about exposing photographs the old-fashioned way, in a darkroom. About holding the sheet of paper between the tweezers and moving it gently through the chemicals, watching the image slowly appear, holding your breath with anticipation and excitement because you were never sure how it was going to come out.
And yet, although it isn’t the same, she is surprised at how much she loves Photoshop, how much she loves the extent to which you can change a picture, improve it, correct mistakes with just the click of a mouse.
If only it were this easy with husbands. She picks up the phone to call Reece, but remembers suddenly that he is traveling, and she puts it down with a sigh. She thinks back to when they first met; his job was smaller then, and, although he was already traveling, when he wasn’t away on business he would come home early from the office, would have dinner with her. But then the opportunity to shoot the car ads in South Africa came up and it was a huge career jump, far too good to turn down, bringing with it more travel, and later nights.
Tomato Tarts with Puff Pastry
Ingredients
1 package puff pastry
2 red onions, finely sliced
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
4-6 tomatoes, finely sliced
Package feta cheese
Basil leaves, finely sliced
Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Roll out the puff pastry and cut out circles, roughly the size of saucers. Score each circle (lightly track it with a knife) around 1 inch in from the edge.
Sauté the onions in the oil until soft and caramelized (should take around 30 minutes on low heat). Add a generous splash of vinegar and the sugar after about 15 minutes.
Heap the onions in the middle of each circle, with the tomatoes in a circle on top.
Place in the oven for 15 minutes.
Crumble the cheese onto the tarts, drizzle with oil and sprinkle with basil leaves and serve.
Chapter Three
On nights like these, when Steffi has been working all day, and the restaurant has been packed, and she’s barely had a chance to take a break, the last thing she wants to do is skid down the slippery stairs to a dank basement nightclub to watch Rob play a gig, but sometimes a girlfriend has to do what a girlfriend has to do.
Ordinarily she’d go out with the rest of the gang from the restaurant. Maybe to one of the neighboring bars, or to someone else’s restaurant where they’d close for the night and there’d be just staff and their friends sitting around, blowing off steam, wandering outside for the odd toke on a joint.
Or back to the apartment she now shared with Rob. Moving in with him was less an indication of the seriousness of their relationship and more that it was cheap and convenient; neither of them was under any illusion that this would be a leg up to the next level of their relationship.
But when Rob’s band has a gig she knows she has to go for support, because he expects it, and also, frankly, to make sure the young girls who follow the band around from club to club know that Rob is very definitely not available.
She checks her watch. Ten-fifteen. They were supposed to go on at nine, but experience tells her they’ll stall until ten-thirty, to give the audience time to build up a frenzy of anticipation. Steffi locks up the restaurant, inhaling sharply at the biting cold, then clutches her down jacket tighter and prays there is a cab nearby.
Usually she’d walk, but October in New York City can be vicious, and this is one of those nights when the wind chill takes the temperature down to a level that makes it clear that although winter is not yet here officially, it is definitely on its way. No one is outside unless they have to be. On the Upper East Side, the soignée women who are usually insulated in fur throughout the winter are already covering their faces with fleece balaclavas and giant ear muffs, trying not to expose an inch of flesh during their walk from their limousine to the waiting doorman.
Leaning back against the seat as the cab jerks and lurches through every pothole on the Lower East Side, Steffi closes her eyes with a small smile and thinks about how lucky she is.
She may be sweaty, and tired, and dirty, and she may be off to watch a band she secretly doesn’t think is all that good, but the one thing she’s certain of is that she loves her life.
Her twenties were wild—all the partying, the craziness, the constant whirlwind of not knowing what was next—but there was always a feeling that she hadn’t found her place in the world, didn’t know who she was supposed to be; she never felt settled back then.
Perhaps you are not supposed to, in your twenties, but Steffi always suspected that something would shift for her when she turned thirty. Callie, her older sister, had hated turning thirty all those years ago. She had phoned Steffi in tears, sobbing that she had no boyfriend, not a hope of marriage, nor of children, and thirty was the beginning of the end.
Nine years younger, Steffi had no idea what to say. Although she wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that Callie met Reece just a few weeks later, and by the time she was thirty-one Callie was married, and a couple of years after that she had Eliza, her beloved baby daughter.
Steffi celebrated her thirtieth birthday on the ski slopes of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, giggling with her then-boyfriend, Bob, as they got drunk at the top of Corbet’s Couloir, and somehow managed to make their way down.
Bob looked like a snow bum, which he was, but he also owned hundreds of acres of land in South America, where he grew roses for export to America, earning vast amounts of money in the process, hence his ability to stay in Jackson Hole for weeks at a time.
He looked and talked like a Californian surfer dude, and had adopted yoga and veganism several years earlier. Shortly after they met he urged Steffi to try vegan food, horrified at her penchant for meat, and spare ribs in particular. She wasn’t convinced, but agreed she would do it for a couple of weeks, just to see what it was like.
She loved it. Instantly. She loved feeling clean and light. She used to say it felt as if her body didn’t have to try in order to digest, and the benefits were huge. She honestly didn’t think it would be something she would stick to, but after the two weeks she knew that her meat-eating days were over.
Always a keen cook, she started cooking foods with which she had only had a passing acquaintance before turning vegan: tofu, tempeh, quinoa, wheat berry. She would sit for hours and devise menus, making sure they had the right balance of leafy greens, protein, omega-3s.
Her skin looked great, her body—always tending to the chubby side—seemed to find its natural weight without her even trying, and she became passionate about vegan cooking.
Bob looked at her one night after finishing a spinach and chickpea curry.
“You’re really good at this,” he said. “You ought to do it for a living.”
Steffi laughed. “You mean, give up my wonderful job as receptionist extraordinaire?”
“You’re only doing that because you haven’t found your path,” Bob said. “That’s just killing time. And yes, I do mean give that up. If you follow your passion you’ll be happy, and I can see that this is it.”
“What? Food?”
“Yes, but you’re talented. You’re always creating these amazing dishes, and I know you’re not just following recipes
. Half the time you’re not using a recipe, you’re just making it up. I’ve seen you scribbling notes when you get an idea. You should be a chef.”
It was one of those lightbulb moments, Steffi realized afterward. As soon as he said the words, she knew that it was exactly what she wanted to do, indeed, what she had been destined to do.
She came back from Jackson Hole and Bob paid for her to enroll in a course at the Culinary Institute of America. It was the greatest thing he ever did for her, and in many ways more than made up for the fact that he left her for a nineteen-year-old Brazilian beauty shortly thereafter.
And now she works at Joni’s, a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant tucked between a laundromat and a pawn shop on Twelfth Street. It isn’t exactly salubrious, but their reputation is such that it has become a destination, and every night there is a long line of people patiently waiting with bottles of wine in hand.
Even Walter, Steffi’s dad, liked it, grudgingly admitting that perhaps he had been wrong about his daughter’s “latest crazy decision” to become a chef.
She couldn’t really blame him; after all, he had been witness to every incarnation throughout her twenties, rolling his eyes each time and asking her when she was going to get a proper job.
“You don’t understand,” she’d say. “It isn’t about pensions and security anymore. No one wants that, Dad. And even if they did, companies aren’t offering it. Life isn’t the way it used to be.”
“Well some things haven’t changed,” her dad would say. “I notice you still come to me every time you need money.”