Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [80]
“No way,” I tell her. Apart from the fact that I cannot bear the thought of wasting my excellent culinary education hawking chocolate chip cookies or Rocky Road fudge from my home, one of the many problems with Ruth’s plan is logistics. Where am I to do this catering and cooking? There are probably zoning laws or Board of Health constraints that prohibit cooking for wide distribution in one’s home. Even if there aren’t, my father’s kitchen is too small and antiquated. When I tell this to Ruth, she just shrugs.
“Don’t worry about that. The assignment is where you see yourself in five years. First think about where you want to end up, and then you can figure out how to get there. So, what do you think about getting bangs?”
“What? How is getting bangs going to help me get where I’m going?”
“Not you. Me. I’m thinking about changing my hair, something soft swept across the forehead. Look at this,” Ruth says, pulling her hair severely back from her forehead and furrowing her brow. “Wrinkles. I read in More magazine that getting bangs is the poor girl’s facelift. Cheaper than Botox, for sure.”
I consider Ruth’s face. She has curly, shoulder-length hair, dark and peppered with wisps of gray. It’s soft and pretty. When I tell her so, she rolls her eyes. “You’re no help,” she says, bending to retrieve Carlos’s pacifier, which has rolled under the table.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “Maybe I’m not the best person to ask. I’ve had the same hairstyle since the seventh grade.”
“That’s because you have perfect hair. Long and thick and straight. I hate you.” Ruth laughs. “But seriously, how am I going to get Gym-Dad to notice me looking like this?” she asks, pulling her hair in tight fists away from her face and groaning.
“You’re fine,” I repeat, “You’ve got great eyes, an intelligent face, and you probably don’t have any stretch marks. I’d trade good hair for no stretch marks,” I say, picking up a piece of hazelnut biscotti and dunking it in my latte.
Ruth considers this a minute and smiles. “Yeah? Well, maybe.”
“All I know is that whoever this guy is, he can’t possibly be worth all this fuss,” I tell her, surprised that she’s clearly given him so much thought.
“That’s because you haven’t seen him yet. He’s adorable, boyish, you know? The kind of guy you look at and know exactly what he looked like in the third grade. But he’s graying at the temples, which is good because that means he’s in the right ballpark agewise. Why is it that gray hair is sexy on men and on us it just looks old?”
“So where was this phantom Gym-Dad yesterday? For all you know, he’s married and his wife was there yesterday. Maybe she just couldn’t make it last week.”
“No. For starters, the kid wasn’t there. I’d have recognized him, a cute little redheaded boy a little older than Carlos. Besides, the buzz in the gym last week was that he’s a widower.” Ruth says this breathlessly, as if she’s just found out the Dow had risen three hundred points, leaving me to ponder the particular brand of buzz that widowerhood engenders among the Gymboree set.
“Hello, we’re supposed to be planning my life, remember?” I tell her, waving my Life Notebook in her face.
“Okay, okay. I’m on it,” Ruth says, picking up the Food section of the Post-Gazette. “Hey, what about teaching a cooking class? Look,” she says. “There are all kinds of cooking classes being offered. Low-Fat Indian Favorites, Guiltless Gourmet Party Stoppers, Ground Beef 101.” Ruth looks at me over her newspaper and raises one eyebrow. When I shake my head, she goes back to her newspaper.
On the back page of the Food section is a restaurant review. Just looking at one, even for a restaurant I don’t have anything to do with, is enough to give me a stomachache. The restaurant is being reviewed by the Nibbler, the anonymous Pittsburgh restaurant reviewer