I’m not much of a cook. Not any kind of cook, actually. But food is David’s love language, and he inherited that gene from his mother. He courted me over meals at his favorite restaurants, telling me his personal history through the dishes we ate—the lucky ramen from a spot on St. Marks he ordered the night before every one of his NYU finals, the seafood tower at Jeffrey’s Grocery where his dad took him when he passed the bar exam, the pancakes at Sarabeth’s where he brings his mom every Mother’s Day. When I had a cold, he insisted on getting June’s recipe for chicken soup, the kind with homemade broth from a chicken carcass. According to him, the soup had mystical medicinal properties. To my astonishment, it really did work.
What I brought to his mother’s house on Thanksgiving felt like a test, and I wanted to ace it. I’m not meeting anyone new, but being here for a holiday feels more important, more official than my previous visits.
I spent the past week maniacally researching Yelp reviews of every bakery in the city to secure the best pie money could buy before settling on Pies ’n Thighs in Williamsburg. I took the J train over the bridge at eight this morning to collect the pie I ordered, not wanting to risk it growing stale overnight.
“You can put it over there, sweetie.” June points to a square of countertop where two other pies rest on a cooling rack. There’s a third in a domed Tupperware from one of David’s sisters-in-law. If this was a test, I already feel like a failure as I set my pie with the others, all homemade.
“Can I help with anything?” I ask.
“I’ve got it. Why don’t you go see what the girls are doing?”
* * *
? ? ?
?“Do you realize how hard it is to get into the right preschool?” Jen, David’s sister-in-law, is asking Zoe, his other sister-in-law, when I walk into the living room. “You should be putting yourself on the waitlists now.”
Zoe’s face crumples. She’s on her third IVF cycle in as many years. She confided in me about this over drinks—a glass of wine for me, a sparkling water for her—at a cozy wine bar in Fort Greene, around the corner from the apartment she shares with David’s middle brother, Nate. They moved into a two-bedroom a few years ago with hopes of needing the extra room for a baby, but so far, the only new addition is a Peloton bike.
“I didn’t realize there was a right and wrong kind of circle time,” I say to take the heat off Zoe. We’ve only hung out alone a few times, but I like her, and Jen is a bully.
“Oh my god, not putting Sophie on the waitlist at Saint Ann’s the minute I got pregnant is my biggest regret in life. It’s why we had to leave New York,” she admits. “We were too late to get her into any of our top schools.” I suppress an eye roll that this—her child’s rejection from a $48k-per-year preschool—is the moment that cleaved her world in two. It’s not that I wish her pain, exactly, and more that I wish her the perspective to see what an ass she sounds like in this moment. But however hard this blow lands for me, I’m sure it lands twice as hard for Zoe and her empty uterus.
Feeling like I’ve overstayed my welcome in the motherhood conversation, I try my luck in the den, where David is having a drawn-out debate with his oldest brother Adam about whether Bitcoin is a good investment while they half watch the Giants game.
* * *
? ? ?
?After two hours shuffling back and forth between the women in the living room and the men in the den, trying to picture how I might fit into this family, I feel wrung out. Even though everyone’s been nice to me—in June’s case, exhaustively so—I can’t get myself to relax. And the effort is starting to take a toll. Frazzled and on edge, I wander upstairs to David’s childhood bedroom to sneak a minute to myself.
I take a lap around the room running my fingers over the soccer trophies on the dresser and the framed photograph of David at his high school graduation bracketed by both brothers. I flip open a dog-eared copy of a Hardy Boys mystery from the bookshelf. On one of our early dates, David told me he almost became a detective, because of this book series.
“Why didn’t you, then?” I asked.
“Because Adam wanted to be a lawyer, and most of all I wanted to be just like him.”
“You’re kind of like a detective,” I told him. “Being a lawyer still means solving cases.”
“That’s generous,” he replied, “I think I missed the installment about the rogue trademark infringer. Between the two of us, you’re the one pursuing their dreams. And I think that’s incredibly sexy.”
Now, being in this room filled with relics of David’s earlier selves stirs an illogical jealousy in me that I never witnessed these past versions of him. The elementary school soccer star, the high school honor society president, even the NYC club rat. The latter, a brief phase memorialized in a photo of him with gelled hair and a shiny shirt beside a crew of college friends tacked to the bulletin board above his desk.
I swiped right on David’s Bumble profile because of the combination of his singular dimple and the quote in his profile: You be the DJ, I’ll be the driver. I didn’t realize it was a John Mayer lyric until our fifth date, but by then I liked him too much to care about his questionable taste in music. And true to his profile’s promise: he was happy to let me be the DJ.
I always pictured myself dating a musician, someone as passionate about music as I am. Not a frontman, but maybe a drummer or a bassist. Someone who wasn’t in it for the girls or the glory, but the craft. David couldn’t be further from that. Last week I heard him singing the Stanley Steamer jingle in the shower and he once asked me for a six-letter word to answer the crossword clue: Former boybander heralding a “Sign of the Times.”
“He’s Boy Scout cute,” Priya remarked when she caught him sneaking out of my bedroom the morning after our second date. And she was right. He’s the kind of boy next door handsome that has old ladies chatting him up in the grocery checkout line. I didn’t think that would do it for me; I pictured myself with someone tattooed and broody. But, somehow, just about everything about David does it for me.
A knock on the doorframe startles me and I clutch the paperback I was leafing through to my chest. When I turn around, David’s leaning against the wall with a small smile on his lips. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say back, feeling shy having been caught prowling around his bedroom.
“What are you doing up here?” he asks. “I looked all over the house for you.”
“Just being a creep,” I admit.
“Well, if we’re admitting creepy things, is it weird that I like seeing you in here? I didn’t exactly have any girls up here in high school. There’s a real wish fulfillment to this.” He looks me up and down.
I flush at his assessment. If his parents weren’t downstairs, I’d think about pulling him down on the bed, but instead I settle for crossing the room and giving him a chaste kiss. Nothing we’d be embarrassed about if his parents walked in.
“Should we go back downstairs before we’re missed?” I ask.
“No, let’s stay a minute. I could use a breather, too. I know they can be a lot. It means so much to me that you’re here today.”