The Way Life Should Be (7 page)

For a moment my analytical brain switches into gear. What a ridiculous thing to say. Of course people have died trying new things; they do it every day. Think of all those novices on Everest! Or driving cars, for that matter! But this is not the time or place for my analytical brain. It is not the time for thinking at all.

I flash through my options. I could go back to school or, god
forbid, stay in Nutley and try to find a job in New Jersey. I could start temping again, I suppose, though what seemed insouciant at twenty-three isn’t quite as attractive at thirty-three. What else can I do?

As I see it, there’s only one thing. Escape. Isn’t this what you call serendipity, when you meet the man of your dreams just as your life is falling apart? I have never done one truly impulsive thing in my life.
Follow your bliss. Listen to your heart.
All of those slogans that once seemed so sappy suddenly resonate.
Seize the day. Reach for the stars.
If I don’t grab this moment, it will pass by me like so many others.

When I look at it this way, I feel I’ve been handed an incredible opportunity, one that most people my age are too settled or focused or successful to take. It’s a risk, perhaps, but what is life if not a series of risks? It’s when you start avoiding risk that your life becomes calcified, codified, boring.

That is not what I want!

What I want is a good man who loves me, a sense of unfolding possibility, and that little cottage on the Maine coast with roses climbing artfully around the door frame. So maybe this was meant to be. Not, I mean, the thousands of dollars of damage to the museum—that was unfortunate. But the series of events that have led me to this moment.

One day, perhaps, this will be the pivotal moment in the story that Richard and I tell our grandchildren. And when we get to the part about the fire-eater, we’ll all laugh and laugh.

CHAPTER 7

By the time I actually hear the words “Mary Quince would like to
see you in her office,” I am already packing books and three-ring binders from my shelves into a box.

“Sure,” I tell Mary’s secretary as casually as if she’s invited me to lunch. “I’ll be right there.”

Mary’s face is even whiter than usual. “The fire insurance was an egregious mistake. And, unfortunately, grounds for dismissal.”

“I know,” I say.

“I hope you’ll find something that you really want to do. I don’t think event planning is it, do you?”

Over the next few days, I call my landlord and talk him into letting me sublet the apartment, find a sublettor on craigslist. com, crate up my stuff, and haul it to my dad’s garage. When I finally tell him and Sharon about MaineCatch—select details, anyway—they think I’m a little out of my mind, and more than a little desperate. “You met him
how
? You’re moving
where
?”

“I’m not moving there. I’m just”—I remember Rich’s wording—“taking a little trip.”

“Trip? You mean vacation?”

“Yeah.” The truth is, I have no idea how long I’m staying. I haven’t thought much about the particulars beyond arriving on
Rich’s doorstep, falling into his arms, and living happily ever after.

“You’re not thinking clearly,” Dad snaps, silhouetted in the door of the garage like a killer in a horror flick. “You met this guy on the Internet, for Christ’s sake. Who knows what kind of deviant—?”

Kneeling on the cement floor, I am writing “ANGELA RUSSO—BOOKS,” “ANGELA RUSSO—KITCHEN,” “ANGELA RUSSO—BEDDING” in permanent black marker on the front panels of a stack of boxes. “Don’t you trust my judgment?” I ask.

“It’s not you I don’t trust. It’s
him
.” My dad jabs the air for emphasis.

“He’s a nice guy. He runs a sailing school.”

“Never trust a sailor,” he says.

My dad is always issuing bombastic declarations like this. About Korean food: “They eat dogs over there.” About protesters: “If they don’t respect this country, they should leave and never come back.” When I was a teenager it made me light-headed with fury, but the years have mellowed me. “Some people say never trust an accountant,” I say.

“Very funny,” he says. “You’re making your grandmother sick with worry. The screwup at the museum. Getting fired. Now this.” He shakes his head.

“Nonna wants me to be happy.”

“Not exactly,” my dad says. “Your grandmother wants you happy—here. She doesn’t want you moving six states away. It’s like the whatshisname, Wizard of Oz, said. Everything you need is right here in your own backyard. And if you can’t find it here, sweetheart, maybe there’s something wrong with you.”

“Well, maybe there is,” I say. “Or maybe I just want to try something else. I’m a grown-up, Dad. I can do that.”

“I don’t know,” he says, frowning. “Frankly, this strikes me as pretty juvenile. What are you going to do up there?”

“I have a little money saved,” I say, smiling up at him. “I’m not going to starve; I’ll find something.”

“Pah. This is the time in your life to be settling down, not traipsing off in search of—I don’t know what.” He shrugs. “But I suppose it’s your life.”

“Yep. It’s my life.”

In the kitchen my grandmother puts her hand, as cold and bony as a chicken wing, over mine. She says, “Stone soup? I made it this morning.”

“Thanks, Nonna.”

She ladles up a bowl of
minestra,
a soup of winter vegetables. Since I was a child, she has called it stone soup, after the folktale about a village that was going hungry until a stranger, passing through, said he could make soup from a stone. He put a rock in a pot and covered it with water, then began calling for scraps of vegetables that the villagers had lying around—an old turnip, a rubbery carrot, wild herbs. Eventually the pot was full. The villagers thought it was a miracle. I did, too; Nonna would send me outside to choose a small stone, which she would wash carefully and place in the bottom of the Dutch oven before adding the rest of the ingredients.

“It’s cold in the north,” she says. “You’ll need stone soup up there.”

“Why don’t you come with me, Nonna?” I ask playfully. “We can make it together.”

She sets the bowl on the counter and leans closer. “Your father,” she says. “His nature is
conservatore.
He settled here, and can’t see any other way. To him, this is how life is. And the way it should be. You work hard, you make a decent living, that should be enough.”

I nod. I know this is true.

“But you are not your father. You are young—”

“Not that young.”

“Young enough. And you want something else. Something more, something less—doesn’t matter. Something different.” She is silent for a moment. “I was younger than you—much younger—when I left my family and my country.”

“I know. Did you regret it?”

“Naturalmente,”
she says. “But what could I do? Here I was. And you—what is the word?—adapt. You adapt. There are surprises. I learned from my neighbors to cook dishes from all over Italy, things I had never tried before. And there was an Italian-American cookbook someone gave me. Your father’s favorites are not from Basilicata at all—chicken marsala and potato-crusted sole and baked ziti, god forbid. And there are other things—the baker in Nutley is better than the baker in Matera, and so on.” She turns and cuts into a crunchy ciabatta, hands me a piece. “Taste.”

Most Italian immigrants from Basilicata, my father has told me, refused to have anything to do with foods from other regions, let alone countries. But Nonna was different. As a teenager in Matera, she worked with a maiden aunt who cooked for a priest sent to their parish from Rome. Even in times of hardship, when people in the village had little to eat, the priest ate what he liked—cheeses and sausages from other parts of the country, fresh vegetables. So Nonna learned to cook a variety of foods from different parts of Italy.

The bread is chewy and elastic, and as I bite into it the smell of yeast wafts up.

“You need to know how to make a good ciabatta. And my
minestra,
” she says. “Maybe that’s all you need.” Her face softens
into a smile, and she places the bowl in front of me. “So. You cook the onion and the garlic very slowly, in good olive oil. Not extra virgin—too bitter. Regular. Peppers next. Then tomatoes. The pasta you prepare al dente; it will cook more in the soup.”

In my stomach I feel a twist of regret. I don’t want to leave her. “Tell me the rest of the recipe,” I say, though of course I know it by heart.

When I tell
my brother Paul I’m going, he says, “Are you out of your mind? You’ll freeze your ass off up there! With nine million men in the tristate area, you’d think you could’ve found someone closer to home.”

Lindsay comes out
to Nutley Friday evening on the bus from the Port Authority. “Hate that bus,” she says when I pick her up at the local stop. She looks over at me, sitting in the driver’s seat of the silver Honda Civic my dad bought used for my eighteenth birthday, and says, “It’s like we’re back in high school. Heading to Willowbrook Mall to check out the sale at Benetton.”

“You wanna go?” I say. “It’s a Friday night. Like old times.”

She laughs. “Sure, why not. When in Jersey…”

We take Bloomfield Avenue to Verona and turn right on Pompton Avenue, one of several off-highway options, to the mall. When we get there we drift in and out of shops, lingering in our stodgy old favorites—the Limited, the Gap, Ann Taylor. The mall has had a glitzy makeover for a new generation, and we’re a little out of step. Hordes of teenage girls wearing low-slung Seven jeans and cropped, candy-colored tops roam the stores, chomping bubble gum and slicking on glittery lip gloss, collapsing against each other in giggles. After an hour or so of regressing to our teenage selves—“These cords are cute,” “This
would look so good on you!”—we are overcome with mall fatigue and stagger to California Pizza Kitchen to order our old standard, Thai chicken salad.

I am nervous. I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell Lindsay about Rich. About Maine. I’m hoping she’ll take it well.

The waiter places the salads in front of us, and we aren’t disappointed; they’re as big as our heads. “Awesome,” Lindsay says.

We each order a glass of house white “just because we can,” Lindsay tells the waiter, who doesn’t say it but is clearly thinking that carding us was the last thing on his mind.

I raise my glass and say, “To you, for coming to visit me in exile.”

“What are friends for?” she says. “Besides, this is fun. I love the mall.” She takes a sip of wine and makes a face. “Eugh.”

I take a sip, too. It’s both cloyingly sweet
and
too tart, a seemingly impossible combination.

“Order wine in a mall, what do you expect?” she says.

“And house wine, at that.”

As we pick at our salads, all slivered almonds and crispy chow mein noodles, Lindsay tells me about the latest with Mr. Hot. He’s staying over a lot these days. They’ve had sex in all three rooms of her apartment, as well as in Central Park one afternoon and in a stairwell at a restaurant late one night.

“Is it serious?” I ask.

“Seriously good,” she says.

Finally I say, “Okay. I have some news.”

I tell her about my evolving correspondence with MaineCatch. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” she says. My tongue is awkward around his name,
Richard,
sticking to the “ch” sound. Mentioning his name seems too intimate, somehow, exposing him to Lindsay’s obvious skepticism. When I tell her about our tryst in
Boston and the haikus and the roses and the invitation to Maine she purses her lips.

I can’t take her silence anymore. “For god’s sake, Lindsay, I thought you might be happy for me.”

She shifts in her seat, then utters some trite admonitions I’ve already heard from Sharon.
You need to be careful. This is moving so fast. I don’t want you to get hurt.

“But you made me do this,” I protest.

“I wanted you to be happy. If I’d known you’d find a guy in Alaska—”

“Maine is not Alaska.”

“Whatever. It’s Siberia, as far as I’m concerned.”

“That is so not true,” I say, knowing full well that as far as she’s concerned, it so is true. “And besides, we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. I’ve only met him once, and we didn’t exactly discuss the names of our future children. I’m just going up there to see.”

She sighs. “This taps into all of my deepest fears of being in our midthirties—”

“Early to midthirties,” I say.

“No,” she says so fiercely that I sit back in my chair. “We are not
early
anymore, Ange. And I’m afraid we’re just going to grab whatever comes along next because—because it’s time, and we think we should be with someone, anyone. Starting a family.”

“Not just anyone,” I say defensively.

She shrugs.

“You don’t really feel that way.”

“Yes and no,” she says.

“Come on. We are two intelligent, good-looking babes. I don’t care if I’m single until my boobs touch my knees. I’m not settling, and neither are you.”

“Why would you even start up with someone who’s so far away?” she says. “What is the point of that?”

I don’t have a good answer. “You know I’ve always had a thing for Maine,” I say lamely.

“You’ve never even been there.” She pushes her half-eaten salad away. “Your ‘thing’ is a fantasy. It’s a state of mind, which for some inexplicable reason you have attached to a particular place.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“There’s nothing
wrong
with it, as long as you realize that’s what it is—a fantasy that has nothing to do with real life. And now you’re hooking up with this guy from nowhere who just happens to fit into the slot of your preconceived dream.”

“Hold on.” I feel my cheeks getting warm. “Isn’t that what it’s all about? Isn’t that, in fact, the core of the human experience—that the person you end up with is right for you precisely because he fits your idea of what you want, he fills your gaps, fulfills your fantasies? Otherwise, what’s the point of love? I want to have an ideal, and I want to find someone who will fit it.”