The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (45 page)

My only choice, I decide, is to return to the message I began composing the day the
Post
article came out, and so the Saturday after the fire I flip open my laptop, and I write:

Your article about Blake Fischer and The Dupont Circle Supper Club [“Dupont Commissioner Goes Down in Flames,” Nov. 16] portrays Mr. Fischer as a willing participant in the supper club’s underground activities. This is not the case. As the sole proprietor of The Dupont Circle Supper Club, I ran the operation in Mr. Fischer’s house without his knowledge, on weekends when he was visiting the home district for his employer, Congressman Jay Holmes (D-FL). Every aspect of the supper club, from its conception to its implementation, was my doing, and mine alone. Mr. Fischer knew nothing about it until I set his kitchen on fire last weekend.

Though I realize this will have little impact on the public’s perception, I feel it necessary to mention that Blake Fischer is one of the most upstanding, inspiring people I’ve ever met. He cares passionately about making his neighborhood and community a better place and lives his life with guts and integrity. He is also very kind. It would be a disservice to the Dupont Circle neighborhood and the city at large to punish him for my own misguided actions. He deserves better.

Sincerely,

Hannah Sugarman

I skim the letter two times, and then, satisfied with my mea culpa, I click
SEND
and forward the message to the
Washington Post
.

Tuesday morning, the
Post
prints my letter. I sign onto my e-mail, hoping for a response or acknowledgment from Blake, but to my dismay, he hasn’t written. Neither has anyone else.

What surprises is how much I want Blake to write—how much I want to know how he is doing and where he is living and whether he thinks he could ever forgive me for what I’ve done. But I haven’t seen or heard from him in more than a week, and I’m beginning to think I may never hear from him again, except in some sort of legal eviction notice.

I do, however, hear from Rachel, who calls Tuesday morning as soon as she sees the
Post
. “I saw your letter,” she says. “Why didn’t you mention me?”

“I didn’t see the point in ruining both of our lives. Blake was my landlord, not yours. This one is on me.”

“But that’s a lot to lay on yourself.”

“Maybe, but you actually have something to lose—you’re applying to Johns Hopkins, you have a boyfriend, you have a job. I, on the other hand …”

Rachel sighs into the phone. “Well, thanks. I just hope you’ll be okay.”

“I’ll be fine,” I say.

“Any interest in meeting up for a cup of coffee before I take off for Thanksgiving?”

I glance down at my T-shirt and raggedy Adidas pants and wonder if, with a little makeup and styling, I can manage some sort of quasi-athletic, postcollegiate student look. I decide I do not have the energy to try.

“Nah. Thanks, though. Are you leaving today?”

“Yep,” she says. “What about you? Are you going to your parents’?”

I let out a protracted sigh. “Not sure. They’re still trying to get out of my aunt’s thing in upstate New York. They’re supposed to let me know tonight whether I should buy a ticket for Philly or Buffalo.”

“Thanksgiving is, like, two days away. Aren’t you nervous there won’t be any tickets left?”

“Right now, that’s the least of my worries.” I wander into the kitchen and pour some Puffins into a bowl and drizzle them with a little milk. I don’t want to talk or think about my parents right now. “How are things at the office, by the way?”

“Less fun without you. But not all that different. Mark is still crazy. His new research assistant is totally confused and overwhelmed. Millie is still the same pain in the ass. The usual.”

I freeze with my spoon in my mouth at the mention of Millie’s name. “Has Millie mentioned the party at all?”

“Ugh, don’t get me started,” Rachel says. “Ever since that article appeared in the
Post
, she has been
freaking out
. So has Adam, apparently.”

In a sad commentary on my current mental state, hearing this news makes me unexpectedly happy. I picture Adam’s and Millie’s faces when the fire alarm went off and they spotted the flames erupting from the stove—how panicked they looked, the way the two of them slinked out of the house without trying to help, content to let me and the kitchen burn to a crisp. Millie sees everything as a competition, but if Adam is as spineless as his actions that evening imply, dating Adam is one competition I’m happy to let her win.

“What else is new? How is Jackson?”

“Dreamy as ever,” she says. I can feel her blushing through the phone. “We both sent in our Hopkins applications, so fingers crossed.” She pauses. “Any word from Blake?”

I shovel a spoonful of cereal into my mouth. “Nope. Nada.”

“Not even an eviction notice?”

“No. Thank god.” My phone beeps, and I pull it away from my ear:
MOM CELL.
I groan. “My parents are calling on the other line. I’ve been avoiding their calls all week. I should take this.”

“Do they know about the supper club?”

I let out a hoot. “Are you kidding? They’d both go into cardiac arrest. After shitting themselves. I haven’t even told them I left NIRD. Like I’d tell them I nearly burned down my landlord’s house while I was running an underground supper club.”

“O-okay,” she says, in a tone that suggests my behavior is totally insane—which, I will concede, it most definitely is. “Well, you better get that call. Talk to you soon.”

I hang up with Rachel and answer my mom’s call, deeply dreading this conversation. “Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

“Hannah? Where
are
you?”

I clear my throat. I should tell them the truth. I will tell them the truth. Just not now. I’ll tell them … at Thanksgiving. Which, admittedly, is only two days from now. But I feel strongly that those two days will make all the difference. Why? I couldn’t say. Probably because I’m a big, fat coward.

“I’m … at work,” I say. “Where are you?” There is silence at the other end of the phone. “Mom?”

“You’re at work? Where?”

I swallow hard. “IRD. Why?”

“Well that’s funny. Because right now your father and I are at IRD, sitting in Mark’s office. And from what he tells us, you don’t work here anymore.”

And just when I thought my life couldn’t be any more of a mess, Murphy’s Law rears its ugly head and shows me, yet again, there are an infinite number of ways for the universe to fuck my life, and it appears nature is hell-bent on exploring each and every one of them.

In some cruel twist of fate, my parents decided it would be a fun surprise to visit me in Washington and bring Thanksgiving to me, since they so desperately wanted to get out of Aunt Elena’s ridiculous dinner. I cannot imagine why they thought this would be a good idea, but I’m guessing it has something to do with their complete lack of understanding when it comes to me and what I might consider a “fun surprise.” Admittedly, if I’d sucked it up and discussed my unemployment with them weeks ago, I wouldn’t be in this position. Hindsight, twenty-twenty, blah blah blah.

My parents ask me to meet them at the Tabard Inn in Dupont Circle, a request I cannot decline because, well, they’re my parents and they drove all the way to DC and I am a big, fat, lying liar. I throw on a gray wool sweater and a pair of black pants and hustle down Eighteenth Street toward N Street. I scurry up the front steps to the Tabard Inn, a small, independent hotel sandwiched between a series of row houses on a narrow, tree-lined street. A tall man in a suit holds open the glass-pane door to the inn, and I inch my way through the lobby. The hotel’s restaurant is tucked in the back of the hotel, and that is where my parents plan on meeting me.

I scan the restaurant for my parents, but they haven’t arrived, so I park myself next to the broad stone fireplace in the lobby. The fireplace roars with orange and yellow flames, and I secretly wish they would leap from their stone confines and consume me, so that my parents will not find me here. I clench my fists, jamming my fingernails into the squishy pocket of flesh along the bottom of my palms, squeezing tighter and tighter with the hope that I won’t feel anything because this is all a dream. My parents aren’t actually in Washington. This is not really happening.

But my palms sting and itch, and with each breath I fill my lungs with the smells of burning wood and baking bread. And when none of the patrons around me morphs into a goblin of the night, I know for certain this is all very real indeed.

My breath shortens, and I suddenly feel as if the walls of this room are closing in on me and there is no air in the entire building. What am I supposed to tell my parents? That I quit my job? That I told the head of HR to shove my statement up her ass? That I’ve spent the past few months hosting an underground supper club out of my landlord’s kitchen and almost burned down his house two weekends ago? Yes, I’m sure all of that will go over well. Forging my own path in the face of their disapproval has never been my strong suit, and instead of feeling strong and sure of myself, I now feel weaker than ever.

My parents walk into the lobby and spot me standing by the fireplace, their faces painted with confusion and worry. As my mom draws close, she reaches out and folds her arms around me, pressing my face into her chunky wool cardigan as her fluffy bob tickles my forehead.

“Oh, Hannah,” she says. And then, “What the
hell
is going on?”

And so it begins.

“Maybe we should sit down before we talk about this,” I say.

“Yes,” my dad says, raising his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “That sounds like a good idea.”

We settle into our table, and right away a few former colleagues recognize my parents and stop by our table to say hello. The Professors Sugarman offer artificially light and cheery responses, as if nothing—nothing at all!—could possibly be wrong. The last thing they want is for other people to witness their daughter’s complete meltdown.

Once we’re on our own, my parents speak in monosyllables as they decide what to order, feigning deep interest in the contents of the Tabard Inn menu, as if they are reading through a classified State Department document or the president’s personal diary. My mom pulls at one of her wavy auburn locks, nervously tucking and untucking it from behind her ear as she presses her lips together, an act that accentuates the small wrinkles around her mouth, which run from her lips like small tributaries.

“The trout looks nice,” my dad says.

“Mmm,” my mom replies, nodding. The trout, the chicken. We are all pretending to be engrossed in something other than what’s actually on our mind: the very unpleasant conversation that lies ahead.

I look out onto the cobblestone courtyard through the window behind our table. No one eats in the courtyard this time of year, but in the summer Adam and I would sit out there for brunch and stuff ourselves with homemade doughnuts and French toast. On a cool day like today, we would burrow into the restaurant’s cozy interior, with its roaring fireplace and black-and-white checkered floor. Today I’d like to burrow my way right into the wall until I disappear.

The waitress takes our order, and as soon as she leaves, my dad picks up where we left off.

“Okay,
what
is going on?”

I grab a piece of focaccia from the breadbasket and stuff it in my mouth. “Where should I begin?”

He scrunches his shoulders by his ears. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe the part where you quit your job three weeks ago and decided not to tell us?”

“Okay. I didn’t want to work there anymore. So I quit. End of story.”

My dad raises an eyebrow. “Hannah …”

“What?”

“You’ve ignored our calls and e-mails for the past three weeks. Obviously there’s more to it than that.”

I reach for another piece of bread. “You think?”

“Listen, you were getting antsy. Your mother and I knew that. But we thought you were planning to stick it out until you went to grad school.”

“I’m not going to grad school, so sticking it out wasn’t really an option.”

“I thought you signed up for the GREs?”

“I did. I canceled.”

My mom clucks her tongue. “Hannah, we’ve discussed this dozens of times. If you expect people to take you seriously, eventually you have to go back to school and get an advanced degree.”

“No, that’s what I have to do for
you
to take me seriously.”

My father sighs and shakes his head. “That’s not true.”

“Uh, yes it is. You and mom would rather I make myself miserable pursuing a career like yours than do something I actually enjoy.”

“That’s not
true
,” he repeats. “Listen, what you have to understand is that no job is fun all the time. Look at your mother and I—we have to do all sorts of things we don’t want to do. Grading exams, reading shoddy research papers. But we take the bad with the good. That’s the real world.”

“Frankly,” my mom says, “I don’t understand why your generation thinks work should be a never-ending party—constant fun, fun, fun.”

I huff. “Uh, maybe because your generation raised us to be this way.”