It’s only 10 AM when she gets back to the apartment, but there’s music coming from the end of the hallway. It’s Martha and the Vandellas, which means Hadley’s in a particularly good mood, because Motown is her happy music (followed by reggaeton and anything by the Rolling Stones). She drops her keys with a clang in the glazed ceramic Astier de Villatte bowl that sits on their entryway table and sits down on the rattan bench to untie her shoes and peel off her socks.
“What smells so good?” she asks. The kitchen is in total and complete disarray, to put it mildly. Measuring cups and spoons are scattered over the island, dusted in a fine film of flour. Her footsteps make a delicate crunching sound: spilled sugar. Two pieces of grease-stained wax paper, the butter sticks freed from their grasp, are balled up next to a mixing bowl full of a thick batter. A wooden spoon and whisk lie next to the bowl; a few drips of batter are lazily making their way down from the rim.
“Also,” she adds, “I didn’t know you even knew how to turn on the oven.”
“Ha!” Hadley replies. “Funny, funny. I’m actually a semi-competent adult, if you haven’t noticed, and it turns out I can read a recipe. It’s Cricket’s coffee cake. I’m making it to bring to Ollie’s for brunch tomorrow because he said I can’t just buy flowers from the bodega and call that a contribution. Sometimes he’s irritatingly perceptive.”
The aforementioned recipe is written out in neat, circular cursive script on a piece of white paper, which has been creased and folded again and again. Hadley’s grandmother’s best friend, Bronwyn Ingram Alsford—incongruously enough known to all as Cricket, was famous for this cake: a delicate yet sturdy yellow cake with a fat ribbon of sandy cinnamon sugared streusel running through the center and a thick cap of streusel on top. They called it “double cake” or sometimes just “double” for short because it had double the quantity of streusel of a normal coffee cake.
Cricket was the matriarch of the sort of household that employed a full-time chef, at both her Boston and Nantucket residences, and would not ordinarily be found in the kitchen. But she had a few specialities: this coffee cake, crispy pimiento cheese croquettes (a party trick she picked up from her college roommate Celia who grew up in Savannah, Georgia), and a warm lobster pie with a parmesan-and-Ritz-cracker crust.
Cricket always wore a pair of dove gray South Sea pearl earrings the size of gumdrops that her husband had brought her back from a business trip to Hong Kong. She favored suede driving loafers, starched polo shirts, and a men’s Rolex watch worn on the inside of her wrist, and she was the person who had taught Hadley about the merits of a good steak dinner on Sunday nights (one-and-a-quarter-inch thick New York strip with creamed spinach, twice-baked potatoes, and a dry martini—a Manhattan being the only acceptable alternative).
The nickname Cricket had mystified her at first. “Her name is Bronwyn? That wasn’t weird enough?” And thus had begun her brief crash course on the world of East Coast WASPs, an education which continues to this day, as she’s always stumbling about tiny lessons, like how a faded, threadbare Barbour jacket indicates status but ripped jeans do not, cars can be luxury (Mercedes, Range Rovers, vintage Fiats are a yes) but not flashy (Cadillacs, Lexus, Audis are a no), and one can never have too many ducks around: stenciled, embossed, etched, or needlepointed.
In Hadley’s family’s close social circle alone, there was a Happy, a Cece, a Taffy, a Tug, a Zibby, and a woman who went by—and she still couldn’t say this one with a straight face—Pony.
(Pony had the misfortune to possess an unusually long, narrow face and thick chestnut hair, which any writer worth their salt would have no choice but to describe as a mane. The equine resemblance was unkind but also uncanny. Pony was married to John Sanford Montgomery III, a managing partner for merger arbitrage at Davidson Kemper. Pony and Sandy, as John was known, were absolutely insufferable people, if she’s being honest. Their single redeeming quality is their son, Oliver. Oliver had been living in Hong Kong for the past two years, working as a senior architect in an urban planning firm, but has just returned to the states to take a year-long position at Harvard Graduate School of Design as a visiting lecturer. At dinner last week, she’d asked him what he’d be teaching, and he pushed his hair back from his forehead and leaned in earnestly to explain. She sort of followed—something about economic impact analysis and inclusive green spaces—but the truth is that Oliver is intensely smart and intensely passionate, period. He could be working at Walmart, and somehow he’d make it sound interesting and find a way to change the world a little bit by doing it.
Ollie is kind and thoughtful and entirely unaware of how adorable he is. He is the polar opposite of his parents in nearly every way, but refuses to write them off. He isn’t rebelling against them by choosing to make his gentle, bleeding-heart way in the world so much as he is following his own internal compass. Pony sniffs whenever the question of his job is brought up—she would have preferred a financier or a doctor for a son—but even she can’t do anything but dote on Ollie.
Hadley says that even in high school Ollie was respectful and sweet. “There was this girl Marissa Owens—total mess, but a very hot mess—who tried to get Ollie to sleep with her upstairs at a party at Adam Becker’s house sophomore year and he said no because she’d been drinking a gin bucket and was completely hammered. What high school boy says no to that?”
Everyone has flaws, but she often thinks that Ollie is the kind of person who would make a very good boyfriend: He would really see you. He’d ask about your day and he’d notice that you liked avocado smashed on toast but not sliced in a sandwich and he’d turn the shower on hot as soon as you walked in the door from a run in the winter. He’d be curious about what music you like, and he’d reach over to touch the soft curve of your shoulder when you were sitting together having coffee, and he’d want to know whether you played soccer or volleyball when you were in seventh grade.
Ollie likes to know how things work. He reads, a lot, and seems to know a little about everything. Once they were drinking beers outside at the Cisco Brewers Seaport and a helicopter landed atop a nearby building, and their friend Adam commented that engine failure would be terrifying in a helicopter, to which Ollie casually responded with an explanation of how autorotation worked. Adam had said, “Dude, how do you know things like this always?” and Ollie replied that he sometimes watched taped MIT lectures at night to relax, and had just finished one on aircraft systems and navigation. “Sure,” Adam said jokingly. “Because that sounds fun.”
Knowing he’ll be nearby again makes her feel comforted, as if the world is tilting back onto its proper axis. Ollie is a touchstone for her: of joy, of adventure, of stability. She has always been equal parts in love and in like with him, the scales tipping towards romantic affection or brotherly fondness depending on the year.
Now he is squarely in the brotherly camp (and there he will remain—she doesn’t know this yet but Ollie will be a groomsman in her wedding, will take her oldest son on a trip to India to complete the Chadar Trek along the frozen Zanskar River when he turns sixteen, will be the person she lists as a second emergency contact on her medical forms).
Ollie also happens to have recently fallen in love with a girl named Bridget Mackey who was living in Hong Kong at the same time doing a two year rotation as an investment analyst at a boutique sustainable investment firm. Bridget is very smart: Previous to her finance career, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study climate change adaptation in rural Chile.
Over breakfast the other week (Ollie is addicted to the Fancy at Mike and Patty’s, a tiny hole-in-the-wall breakfast spot around the corner from the vet where Pony used to send Ackley, their drooling, floppy, family golden labrador), he told her about Bridget. “She’s great, really great,” he said, swiping at an errant smear of the housemade mayonnaise that was oozing out of the side of the fried egg sandwich that was piled with crispy bacon, avocado, red onion, and cheddar. “It occurred to me the other month that I like being with her just as much, if not more, than I like being alone. Which has never happened to me before.”
She nods, looking down at her plate as she attempts to gracefully take a bit of her Carolina Caviar (fried egg and pimiento cheese on a buttered English muffin). She’s listening as he continues talking, but her mind has paused to consider this idea. It’s striking to her, not just because it’s rather romantic, but because it’s precisely why she finds herself in so very, alarmingly deep at the moment. Ollie has met him once since returning home, and knows about the relationship in broad strokes, but she hasn’t yet confessed the extent to he already inhabits her life.
She’s someone who very much likes to be alone and the idea of a constant companion never held much appeal for her. She used to chafe at the expectations of previous boyfriends who wanted to go to the gym together, hang out and have breakfast in the morning, know each other’s coffee orders, and study side by side. Her independence is a treasured and essential thing: She needs space like she needs oxygen.
And yet…without realizing it, he has upended this inclination. Anything she considers glorious to do alone sounds like it would be better with him.
She’d rather run with him down a long, wide trail under a canopy of evergreens, the ground softly padded with pine needles, the river whispering from its eddying currents just behind the trees, than do it alone. Even her most private solo indulgences pale in comparison now to being with him—this alone is a revelation she would have sworn could never happen. But now, it’s true, instead of being alone to let the busyness of her day slowly quiet itself, she’d rather have her socked feet just resting against his, curled up on the couch with a pint of ice cream wrapped in the sleeve of her sweatshirt, a spoon in one hand. She would rather run stadium stairs with him, sweating and cursing, would rather grocery shop with him, would rather stand in the line at the post office or wait for an especially slow barista to make a latte when she’s running late or do the crossword or lie in the sun and eat handfuls of ice-cold cherries or dance around the bedroom to Run-DMC after a shower in just her underwear.
Always, always she would rather be with him. Realizing this undoes her—she is untied, unmoored, set loose. It is, in turns, terrifying and exhilarating.
Cricket’s Double Streusel Coffee Cake
For the streusel
2/3 cup (142 grams) packed brown sugar
1 1/3 cups (160 grams) all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons (113 grams) cold butter, in chunks
For the cake
2 1/2 cups (300 grams) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
12 tablespoons (170 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 eggs
1 1/4 cups (285 grams) Greek yogurt (or sour cream)
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9" x 13" pan.
To make the streusel: Whisk together the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt. Cut in the butter until sandy and crumbly. Set aside.
To make the cake: Whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt, and set aside.
In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Add the vanilla, then the eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl between each.
Add the flour mixture and the Greek yogurt, alternating between each. Mix just until the batter comes together.
Spread half of the batter into your prepared pan. Take 1/3 of the streusel mixture (or up to 1/2 of it if you want more filling) and sprinkle it evenly over the batter. Pour the remaining batter over the top, spread evenly, and top with the remaining streusel.
Bake for about 55 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean or with a few crumbs.