Marcy is the pastry sous chef at the Astor Place Hotel, working under the amazing Sophie Langer. She will be the head pastry chef at the new outpost bakery café, Sophie’s, that Sophie and the hotel are opening in Logan Square in a few months. It will be part of Little Astor, the small boutique bed-and-breakfast they are creating in a historic six-flat just off the square on Kedzie. So Marcy gets the whole married-to-your-job thing, and while she is four years younger than I am, she is middle-thirties enough to own the part of her that likes being a homebody for the rare hours she isn’t working.
Unlike me, she also has a healthy and active sex life, and has confessed that for every third or fourth wedding they cater at the hotel she ends up with a groomsman or single guest. Since my boy options at work include one elderly gay man, one happily married father of four, a sixteen-year-old, and a ten-year-old, I am both a homebody and a celibate one. Marcy disapproves, but accepts this about me and doesn’t nudge, unlike my mom and Claire, and Shelby. And Lawrence.
“I’ve been a little upset,” I say, weighing the box, which is labeled with the Astor Place logo and is surprisingly heavy for its size.
Marcy looks puzzled. “Crying upset?”
“Yeah.” I hate crying. In no small part because I am an ugly crier. Like, off-her-meds-Claire-Danes-in-Homeland-on-steroids ugly crier. My whole face gets red and splotchy, my eyes swell up like a pug with a thyroid condition, and my nose runs with thick trails of snot, and I end up spending the better part of six hours looking like I’ve been hit in the face with a bouquet of poison oak.
Marcy follows me into the kitchen, where I put the box on the island, and Simca, having finished her treat, comes over to Marcy for petting. “Oh, now you love me, do you?” Marcy says, hoisting my beastie into her arms, getting some delicate face-licking and ear-nibbling love, and perching them both on the love seat bench I have at the counter. Simca finishes her snuggling for the moment and leaves Marcy’s lap to curl into a pile of fur on the bench beside her, while I open a bottle of pinot gris. I toss Simca the cork, since she loves to chew them, and she catches it deftly in her mouth, then clasps it between her paws to get some purchase for good gnawing.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry in all the years I’ve known you,” Marcy says, reaching over to the bowl of giant green Cerignola olives I have put out and popping one whole in her mouth, looking like a chipmunk smuggling an acorn.
“I try to avoid it if possible.” I pour us two glasses. We clink and take a sip of the cool, crisp wine.
“I mean, you didn’t even cry that time you took the whole underside of your middle finger off with the mandoline and bled all over your mise en place,” Marcy says, matter-of-factly.
Ugh, that was an awful wound and a long recovery. I instinctively run my thumb over the slightly shiny underside of the middle finger on my right hand, devoid of all fingerprints and only barely creased at the knuckles. “Nope, and you can see why.” I gesture to my face.
“What happened?” she asks, taking a small piece of the Parmesan that I have broken into craggy shards on the small wooden board I’ve laid out, with a wedge of triple-crème Délice de Bourgogne Brie, some nuts and dried fruits, a homemade quince and plum membrillo paste, and some tiny little German wild boar sausages that I’ve been hoarding since my trip to Berlin last year.
I take a breath. “My favorite teacher from high school died.” I can feel the tears wanting to come back. I don’t cry often, but when I do, it’s like breaking the seal of something ponderous. The emotions stay right at the surface, threatening to bust through at the slightest provocation.
“Oh, honey, that sucks, I’m so sorry. Had you stayed close?”
I shake my head, knowing if I tell her about how shitty I was to let the relationship die on the vine for no good reason, I’ll lose it all over again.
Marcy seems to sense this and shifts tactics. “What made her your favorite?”
I tell her about freshman year, and how she made me feel good about being tall. About how it was her class where I met and bonded with the people who became my most important friends in high school. I tell her about Mrs. O’Connor also being the assistant track coach, where I was a presumptive Olympics-bound shot-putter until I blew out my knee junior year and ended my athletic career. I tell her about how Lynne and Teresa and I were so lucky and got her again for English senior year, and that she was the one who convinced me to go to college even without the athletics, to test the wide world instead of just going straight to culinary school, even though I suspected it was what I would want to do with my life. That she wrote the most amazing letters of recommendation for me with all my college applications, and then again when I applied to culinary school after graduation. I stop there. I can’t tell her about what happened after Dad died; it would be too much.
“Wow. Cool lady, sounds like. I’m so sorry for your loss. So did you talk to them? Your friends? Are they in town?” She plucks a sausage from the platter and peels the powdery white skin off before popping it in her mouth.
“I don’t know. We haven’t seen each other in . . .” I start to do the math. “Seventeen years?” God, that sounds like a long time. Too long to even be possible. But that is about right. Teresa’s wedding was New Year’s Eve 2000, and that was the last time we were all together. Lynne was on the West Coast full-time by then, and I was in France until my dad got sick in 2009.
“Damn.” Marcy spreads a piece of baguette with the gooey Brie and then adds a thin slice of the membrillo and chews it thoughtfully. “Think either one of them will be there? At the visitation?”
I haven’t even thought of that. “No idea, frankly. I presume Teresa is still in Chicago. I was at her wedding a zillion years ago, and I’d have to guess that by now she has a houseful of kids. Lynne was living in L.A. then, and seemed really happy, so I doubt she would have come back here. I don’t even know if either of them would know that Mrs. O’Connor has passed.”
“Someone must have let them know on Facebook.”
“Possibly. You know I’m not on it.”
Marcy shakes her head. “I know. I just still can’t really fathom why.”
“You forget I was abroad for nine years. Most of it in a town where we were lucky to get the landline phones to work consistently, let alone Internet. When all this social media hooey really hit huge, I was working my ass off in a flyspeck village in Burgundy.” My standard excuses. Why am I so skittish about social media? Because the one time I toyed with the idea of Facebook, the first thing I did was look up Bernard and saw a picture of him with three kids in his lap, all of them the spitting image of him, and my heart shattered into a zillion pieces and I had to call in sick to the Farbers, because I couldn’t stop crying for three days and in those days I ate three huge bags of Doritos and a box of Ho Hos and mashed potatoes and an entire gallon of ice cream washed down with a bottle of bourbon.