Hi, hey, a note: Thank you for your thoughts on my last post! Haven’t decided for or against the newsletter yet, so for now, we’ll just carry on with some occasional fiction here, and who knows what else, and we’ll see where life takes us…
She feels deflated—and tired of talking—when she walks into the coffee shop on Wednesday morning. The argument last night with her mother sticks to her, and she can’t shake the off-kilter feeling. She and her mother never fight; in their household, it’s her dad whose hot temper sparks the arguments. She and her siblings were always arguing with him in a comfortable, this-is-how-we-love sort of way: One minute they were shouting and slamming doors, and then by dinner time everyone was completely fine. Fights with her dad pass like a quick thunderstorm, the tension dissolving into nothingness, the chaos necessary to clear the air—just like weather.
She and her mother don’t fight because they’re very good friends, not because they avoid confrontation. They aren’t like her friend Clare’s family, who are exceptionally WASPy and refuse—in what seems to be an essential part of their constitution—to acknowledge any of what Clare’s grandmother Tippy (short for Tipton, which says a lot about her) refers to as “unpleasantness”.
In high school, she and Clare skipped field hockey practice and took Clare’s older sister’s car without asking, driving five hours to UVA to go to a party at Clare’s cousin Tripp’s fraternity. Tripp had to call Clare’s mother at 3 AM after she drank too much rum punch and threw up four times—twice in the boxwood bushes out front and twice behind a decorative urn next to the fraternity’s pool table—and Clare’s father came immediately, still wearing his flannel pajamas, to pick them up. After a strict admonishment on the drive home, they never spoke about it again.
Or, more tellingly, there’s the story of how Clare’s aunt had left her husband of twenty years to marry their (much younger) female interior designer, and this bombshell of a scandal is also never discussed, with the exception of an occasional oblique side remark. (She once overheard Clare’s mother on the phone to someone saying, “I knew when she recommended those metal industrial end tables for Suzy Miller’s guest bedroom that something was off about her.”)
Her mother is her best friend—which she realizes sounds like an awful cliché, but is the truth. They’re interested in each other’s lives and in the same things: cooking, literature, tennis. They can happily spend full days in each other’s company: a morning swim, tea while doing the crossword, discussing whether to try Ina Garten’s roast chicken with caramelized fennel or a new recipe her mother clipped from Southern Living magazine for crab cakes with a green tomato slaw, then shopping at Citarella for groceries. They both like white wine and good cocktails; they like simple, classic clothes; they like old romantic comedies and Masterpiece Theater. Her mother is gentle and funny and wise: She’s a good listener and a champion of her children’s interests, whether debating the pros and cons of law school or patiently enduring yet another of her brother Whit’s start-up ideas (Whit is an endless fount of such schemes, none of which have come to fruition in his 35 years).
So their argument last night comes as a particular blow to her already delicate emotional state. The last time she can remember arguing this fiercely with her mother was during her junior year of college. She was studying abroad in Singapore and had planned a ten-day trip with three friends. In hindsight, she can see the hastily devised adventure through a parent’s eyes: a dangerous and ill-conceived plan to drive a rented Jeep across the Johor-Singapore Causeway, then up through Malaysia to Kuala Besut, where they’d pay 75 Malaysian ringit (about 11 dollars) for a 45 minute boat ride to the Perhentian Islands.
“No,” her mother practically shouted, her voice sounding tinny and small through the receiver of the phone in the Internet café where they talked every Sunday. “No you are not, I repeat, not doing that. Do you know anything about the safety in Malaysia? Have you researched visas? What happens if something goes wrong? How could we even reach you?” Her voice reaches a feverish pitch and starts to tremble, like she’s about to cry or already has.
Her father comes on the line, “Sweetheart, we’re glad you’re adventuring, but this just doesn’t sound safe. Could you find some sort of resort to fly to if you want a beach trip? Or does the university have a guided tour?”
Typical, she thinks. They want me to do something cautious and padded on all sides by a cheerful American buffer. She chafes at the idea of only seeing the world around her through a guided Western perspective; she’s acutely aware that she, herself, comes from exactly that place and she’s at the age where she wants so desperately to inhabit some other existence, to be less than safe, to be somewhere wild.
Now, years later, she looks back and cringes at the decision. Granted, it was the most incredible 10 days of her entire college experience—maybe even of her life up until that point. But from a distance she can see how reckless it was and how little they’d planned: the near misses, the attempted coercion from the border guards at the boat crossing, the afternoon when they ran out of gas on a deserted road near the Cameron Highlands.
Her mother hung up the phone and didn’t speak to her before she left, not calling at the appointed time next Sunday and not responding to her emails. She was cool and distant for the rest of the semester until they were reunited, her relief so palpable that any stress between them melted away.
She’s reminded of the entire episode again now—both times, her stomach was in knots and she couldn’t concentrate. The undercurrent of her mother’s anger was impossible to diffuse.
Her five-mile run this morning along the Charles didn’t clear her head. A hot shower didn’t either. A woman standing next to her at the crosswalk had to politely ask her to move, because she’d been standing at a walk signal for over a minute without even noticing she was blocking foot traffic.
But when she steps through the door of the coffee shop, letting the bell on the door jangle behind her, she sees him sitting at a table by the window. There’s a yellow lined notepad in front of him, and she can tell that it’s already covered in his spidery, angular script. A mug of coffee sits in front of him—she knows it will be black, with two raw sugars, and knowing this with certainty is a warm enough feeling to start to dissolve the bitter, acidic unhappiness that roils in her stomach.
“Hey,” he says. “I ordered a biscuit sandwich, but it seemed like a good idea to get an extra just in case.” He motions to the table where an oversized biscuit sits on a small white plate; she knows he’s teasing her because she is deeply, irrepressibly attached to these biscuits. She doesn’t even mind that she always ends up staining whatever she’s wearing (right now, a silky navy dress that buttons down the front and leaves her shoulders bare) with her buttery fingertips, because these biscuits are worth it. Each one is the size of her fist and pulls apart easily into thin, flaky layers, studded with gooey pockets of melted fresh mozzarella cheese. The first time they slept together, she had whispered “better than the biscuits” dreamily after, in such a haze that she forgot he could hear her, and he burst out laughing, which made the entire episode even better than had it been intense and serious all night.
Today, even the sound of his voice—steady and deep—makes her knees a little bit weak. She says hi and tries to keep her smile to a relatively normal wattage, but even through her turmoil she wants nothing more than to climb into his lap and bury her face in his neck. To feel his fingers against her back and lose herself in the immediate sensation of him, which is what happens whenever she’s around him.
She assumed this would fade: No one still wants to kiss their husband of thirty years on the mouth so badly it hurts, even if they’ve just seen them an hour ago, do they? Frankly, even boys she’s dated with whom she’d been the most deeply infatuated (Henry Barrett, for example, the blond British sophomore who sat in front of her in her freshman year Geology 231 seminar, whom she thought about with such an intense focus that she almost failed her midterm and her final, and who finally kissed her one night outside a Chi Phi party before dating her for six months) lost the initial luster pretty quickly. If you’re lucky, she knows, it’s replaced by a good, strong connection, and if you’re really lucky, a decent but subdued attraction that remains over decades.
So when she found herself liking him more with each passing month—their relationship eliciting the sort of sappy emotion that made the lyrics of every love song sound precisely and perfectly accurate to her life—she told herself that it was just a phase. (She was standing in a bookstore once, early on after they had met, and flipping through the poetry section. Oh, she thought to herself, all the words suddenly taking on new meaning, like she’d been reading in a language she didn’t speak and now it was all translated before her. So this is what everyone has been going on about. She sent him a photo of a page with a poem by Tim Seibles with the lines: “How do we not talk about it every day: the ways we were changed by the gift in someone’s touch—your body, suddenly a bright instrument played by an otherwise silent divinity” and a minute later he just wrote back, “Is this about us?!? Do they know us?”)
But that couldn’t last, she was sure of it. One of them would get a cold and be miserable—the other would come over to find the couch where they’d lie intertwined for hours covered in used tissues and half-drunk bottles of lemon-lime Gatorade. Or one of them would have a stressful week at work, their bad mood clouding over the shimmering lust that enveloped them, turning them into an ordinary couple. They’d snap at the other, leaving no time in the morning to get dressed together, letting her stand in just her underwear next to him in the bathroom mirror, watching him shave and thinking there could be no more interesting sight on the planet.
But then, he does get a cold. He is miserable and the couch is covered in used tissues. She brings him chicken vegetable soup from the diner in town and a chilled bottle of Prosecco, just in case. “Leave, please,” he protests. “I’ll get you sick and I’m not any fun.” He’s wearing oversized sweatpants and his hair is mussed. He looks awful and yet still more attractive than she can possibly bear. At 8 PM, he climbs into bed and can barely open his eyes to say goodnight. It’s the first time they don’t kiss before falling asleep. She lies next to him, listening to the rattle of his breath, trying to understand why more words for happiness or love don’t exist. Probably, she thinks, because no container is big enough to hold this feeling.
How can she explain to him what she’s just now realizing? That being in love with someone like this means every single thing about them thrills you? Even the parts you dislike, because those are parts of them and it means they exist—a living, breathing, solid being that makes you feel like the holiday display down Fifth Avenue: thousands upon thousands of strands of twinkly lights alight and glowing? Or the moment—which has happened exactly twice in her life—when all of the streetlights turn green ahead of you at the same time, the road stretching out clear and open for as far as you can see, a kind of clicking into place that is both rare and deeply satisfying?
Recipe note: A perfect replica of her favorite biscuits, these are exceptionally flaky and full of melted cheese. You can use other types of cheese but please do try them with fresh mozzarella! Be sure to tear it into pretty small bite-size pieces; you can add a bit more cheese if you like but don’t go too crazy or the dough will be too wet—keep the quantity under 1 cup.
Fresh Mozzarella Biscuits
Makes about 6 large biscuits or 9 medium biscuits
240g (2 cups) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
84g (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, cold
60g (1/2 cup) fresh mozzarella, torn into bite-size pieces
113g (1/2 cup) milk, cold
Preheat the oven to 450º F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
Cut the butter into the dry ingredients using a fork or pastry cutter until it's in mostly pea-sized chunks—some chunks can be slightly larger and some smaller, but don't overwork it.
Add the mozzarella and toss gently to coat the cheese with flour.
Add the milk, stirring the dough with a fork until it is somewhat evenly moistened, then knead it a few times in the bowl so it mostly comes together in a ball but don't overwork it at all. It should not be cohesive and there should be chunks of drier areas and some wetter areas.
Turn the dough out onto the parchment-lined sheet, and fold it over onto itself until there aren't any dry spots remaining. Don't think of this as kneading: You want to handle it gently and as you fold, the wet/dry areas will disappear. Fold about 10 times, then gently press the dough down to a rectangle about 2" high.
Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into 3" squares (or 2” if you want smaller biscuits) and separate them slightly on the baking sheet.
Gather together any scraps, gently pat them together and press them out, then cut again until you run out. Don’t waste the extra bits! I always just ball them up and bake them—as a bonus for the baker.
You can brush the tops with milk, cream, or melted butter if you want them to have a bit of sheen, but it’s not necessary.
Bake for about 12 to 15 minutes, or until golden brown. Let cool slightly, then eat!