The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs Read online

  I slather my bagel with cream cheese while I wait for my computer to boot up, but as I take a bite, my computer lets out a long, deep drone like a dying lawn mower. The droning gets louder, building in intensity, and then abruptly stops. The computer screen flickers and turns black.

  I press the POWER button and nothing happens. I press it again and again, pressing it quickly, then holding it down for ten seconds at a time. Nothing happens. I press every key on my keyboard. Again, nothing. My stomach seizes, contorting violently from the potent mixture of coffee and anxiety.

  I don’t know much about computers, but I know this does not bode well.

  Poppy seeds fly everywhere as I drop the bagel on my desk and run to find Rachel. I scan her desk for a Starbucks Venti Latte, the telltale sign she is somewhere in the office. The latte isn’t there, and neither is she. Crap.

  I scurry back to my desk and along the way encounter Millie typing furiously at her computer. I slow my pace. Was she there the whole time? And, more to the point, do I ask her for help? The thought nauseates me. But so does the thought of losing Mark’s paper. I take a deep breath and sidle up to Millie’s desk.

  “Yes?” she says, her eyes fixed on her computer screen.

  “My computer won’t start.”

  “So call IT,” she says, banging away on her keyboard.

  “Sean doesn’t get in until nine-thirty …” I pause. “I was wondering if you might be able to help.”

  Millie stops typing and looks up at me. I realize how ridiculous my request sounds. Millie probably knows even less about computers than I do. And, as far as I know, she does not possess magical powers that will somehow restore my computer’s functionality.

  “Help you?”

  “I figured … maybe this has happened to you before. Maybe you’d know what to do.” I force a smile.

  Millie clicks her mouse and looks back at her computer screen, smirking. “That’s never happened to me. And besides, I don’t see what I could do.”

  I clench my jaw. “Millie, for once in your life, could you do something to help someone else?”

  “What, like join the Peace Corps? Oh, wait. I already did that.”

  Oh my god, I’m going to kill her. “Never mind,” I say. “I’m sure you couldn’t fix it anyway.”

  Millie snaps her head around. A challenge. “Or maybe I could,” she says. “Let’s have a look, shall we?” She lifts herself from her desk. “By the way, you have poppy seeds in your teeth.”

  The two of us walk over to my desk, and Millie presses the POWER button.

  “I already tried that,” I say. “For some reason it won’t turn on, no matter what I do.”

  Undeterred, she presses a few more buttons on the computer tower and keyboard, grimacing as she observes the mess of papers and poppy seeds on my desk. Nothing happens.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with this thing,” she says. “You’ll have to call Sean and have him fix it.” I let out a frustrated sigh. “What, is there something you need on there right away?”

  “Mark’s paper,” I say as I bury my head in my hands. “The one for Susan.”

  “You backed it up somewhere, right?” I stare at her blankly. “Right? You must have saved the paper on a flash drive or the server or something. You wouldn’t forget to back up all your work.”

  “Well, actually …” I trail off.

  Millie’s eyes widen. “How could you not back up your work? Haven’t you seen the Sex and the City where Carrie forgets to back up her computer? That was, like, a decade ago!” Her voice echoes down the hallway.

  “Shhh,” I say, motioning with my hand to keep her voice down. “Yes, I’ve seen that episode. I’ll … I’ll figure something out. We still have a week.”

  “Yeah, but Susan wants that paper now. Yesterday, actually. How am I supposed to do my job if you won’t do yours?” Millie sighs and stomps off, her mop of curls bouncing off her shoulders.

  Fantastic.

  I press the POWER button on my computer one last time. Nothing. I look at the clock: 9:29. I pick up the phone and dial Sean’s extension, hoping he has arrived. He has not. Why am I surprised? Sean never shows up on time and consistently lacks a sense of urgency. Part of me thinks he enjoys the control. We’re all at the mercy of the IT guy.

  I leave Sean a frantic voice mail and run upstairs to scout the ninth and tenth floors, hoping to find someone—anyone—who can help me. But the only people I encounter are the ones even more technologically incompetent than I am.

  I run back downstairs. “Please, please, please,” I mutter to myself. “Please let Sean be there.”

  But, of course, he is not. Why is this happening? Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe the universe is telling me I never should have taken this job to begin with, and this is my punishment for doing so. Or maybe it’s a sign that this supper club is a terrible idea, and I should cancel the whole thing. What was I thinking, trying to juggle my work with an underground supper club? I’m not Rachel. I can’t shift seamlessly between two demanding ventures. I let out a whimper and collapse into my chair.

  “What seems to be the problem?” I whip my head around. It’s Mark. And, once again, he isn’t wearing any socks or shoes.

  “My computer—it died. Or at least I can’t turn it on.”

  “Did you call Sean?”

  “Yes,” I say. “He’s not in yet.”

  “Hmm. Let me take a quick look.”

  At the moment, I’m willing to believe almost anything if it means my computer will start working again. The existence of unicorns or vampires, for example. But believing Mark possesses the competence to fix my computer? That’s a bridge too far. He can’t even create his own PowerPoint slides.

  “Oh, Mark, you don’t have to …” He starts banging at my computer tower and keyboard, his arms flailing as he randomly pushes buttons. He looks as if he has cerebral palsy. If anything, he is making things worse.

  “Hmm,” he says, “I’m not sure what the—”

  “Maybe we should wait for Sean,” I say. He kicks my computer tower with his bare foot. Oh, god. Someone make him stop.

  As Mark kicks my computer, I see Sean at the end of the hall-way, meandering slowly toward my desk in his blue-and-white paisley shirt and dark-wash jeans.

  “Sean!” I run to meet him halfway down the hall. “Oh, thank god. I have major computer problems. I need your help.”

  “Dude, what is Mark doing over there?” I look up to see Mark lifting my computer screen over his head, like Moses at Mount Sinai.

  “Who the hell knows. Please … help me.”

  Sean walks to my desk and pushes Mark out of the way. Like Mark, Millie, and I, he presses the POWER button and nothing happens. Does he think we haven’t tried that? Do we look like idiots? I look up at Mark, who is wringing his hands and has broken into a sweat. Okay, never mind. The POWER button is fair game.

  Sean tries a few more combinations of buttons, but nothing works. He scrunches up his face and sighs.

  “There’s a problem with your hard drive,” he says. “I’ll need to send out for a replacement.”

  “A replacement?” I ask in horror. “But … what about all the stuff I saved on there?”

  “You mean you didn’t back it up?” Mark and Sean ask in unison. Apparently I am the big asshole who, in the twenty-first century, forgets to back up her work.

  “I backed up … most stuff. But not everything.” Mark doesn’t need to know the truth. Not yet. I still have time to fix this.

  “There are ways to retrieve the data, but it could take a while,” Sean says.

  “A while as in …?” Please say a few days. Please say a few days.

  “A couple of weeks, at least,” Sean says. “In the meantime, I can hook you up with a spare computer so you can get online and stuff.”

  “Good, because I’m going to need that paper by noon,” Mark says, turning to face me. “Oh, and I also need you to type up a summary of the latest IMF reports on Greece, L
atvia, and Spain before you leave as well. I’d like that by five, please.”

  That gives me two hours to rewrite a fifteen-page paper on currency markets, and then five hours to read and summarize three IMF reports. No way. No way I can make that happen. And now, it has become abundantly clear, there is also no way I can leave early to start working on the supper club. Which means all of my carefully constructed plans are about to fall apart.

  CHAPTER

  twelve

  I grab my keys and rush over to Rachel’s desk. Her eyes widen as she spots me charging down the hall.

  “Whoa, slow down, lady,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “What’s going on?”

  I slam my keys on her desk. “Can you sneak out early today?”

  “I guess? I don’t know. Why?”

  “My computer died. I have five hours to write up some report on Greece, Latvia, and Spain and rewrite Mark’s currency paper.”

  “But didn’t you—”

  “No, I didn’t back up my work. And yes, I saw that Sex and the City.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was going to leave early to start braising the brisket and pulling stuff together for tomorrow, but there’s no way I can do that now. I need your help.”

  Rachel snaps to attention. “You need me to cook?”

  Rachel doesn’t cook. Well, that’s not fair. She cooks, but most of her recipes involve the microwave and Duncan Hines. I keep encouraging her to branch out, but she suffers from a profound lack of confidence in the kitchen—surprising, since she possesses an abundance of confidence in every other area of her life. I blame her mother, Barbara, whose kitchen philosophy resembles that of my mother and Sandy Prescott.

  “Rach, you can do this. All you need to do is start some of the prep work. The recipes are sitting on my counter.”

  Rachel bites her lip. “Okay … If you think I’m up to it …”

  “I have total confidence in you. I’ll send you an e-mail explaining what I need you to do, and I’ll get home as soon as I can to help. Cool?”

  She hesitates. “Yeah, okay. I can probably get out of here by three.” She takes my keys and shoves them in her bag. “Good luck,” she says.

  “You, too.”

  I hurry back to my desk and find Sean plugging a spare computer into my power strip. “All set,” he says. He digs into his pocket and pulls out a blue-and-white flash drive. “And, uh, take this. You know, to back up any new documents you start on this computer.” He knows my shame.

  I turn on the computer and download Mark’s sketchy outline of his paper. I stare at the page.

  “Oh, what am I doing?” I groan as I massage my temples. The question is all-encompassing: hosting a supper club, not backing up my work, working at NIRD in the first place. What am I doing?

  I never should have taken this job, although when I accepted the position, it was this job or nothing. When I started at Cornell, my sneaky plan was to transfer into the Hotel School and focus on a career in the food industry, but my parents caught wind of this idea during my freshman year and nearly shit themselves. So, after several heated phone calls and threats to cut off my tuition payments, I let go of the Hotel School idea and ended up majoring in American studies, a discipline that prepared me for nothing in particular in the real world. Thus, after spending four years at Cornell, I was both highly educated and unemployed. In my parents’ warped view, unemployment was preferable to a career in the restaurant industry.

  And yet, in an ironic twist, entering the restaurant industry is exactly what I did. After graduation, I moved back into my parents’ home in the Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown and waited tables at a nearby restaurant called Cedarwood to make some cash while I looked for a job. No one prepared me for how grueling waitressing would be—the dull, persistent pain that would extend from my spine and wrap itself around my midsection, the nonstop disrespect from customers—but after a few weeks, I got into a groove and, to my surprise, started to enjoy it. That’s not to say I wanted to waitress for the rest of my life. Far from it. But the chef started sharing cooking secrets with me, and I soaked up everything he would teach me, and before long I wasn’t just waiting tables—I was helping in the kitchen, too, chopping onions, slicing carrots, and making vinaigrettes.

  One evening, the sous chef slipped a piece of paper in my pocket, and as he headed back to his station, he winked. “You’ve got talent, kid,” he said. “Check that place out.”

  The paper listed the contact information for a local cooking class, which met three days a week and wasn’t too expensive. I signed up without telling my parents. Waiting tables was exhausting on its own, but juggling my job with a bunch of secret cooking classes sapped all of my energy. Many a night ended with me falling asleep on top of my comforter, fully clothed. And yet, although most of my memories from that period blur together, what I remember most is how happy I was. The kitchen environment felt right. I fit in there.

  My parents, however, were having none of it. After watching me work at Cedarwood for a year, they sensed a diminished intensity in my search for a “real job.” One night they confronted me. They sat me down on their living room couch and told me, point-blank: “College-educated girls don’t wait tables.” I pointed out that apparently they do because I was. Needless to say, that comment did not go over well.

  After much yelling and many tears, my parents shamed me into seeing things their way—that I was wasting my time, my intellectual potential. And I have to hand it to my parents: they’re good salesmen. I started to believe them; I started to doubt my own happiness. After all, I’d spent years studying until my eyes ached so that I could get A’s and the occasional B+. I’d worked hard, I’d learned, I’d achieved. Surely I hadn’t done all that to land a job a high school dropout could do.

  My mother mentioned she had a favor to call in with a former colleague named Mark Henderson at the Institute for Research and Discourse. These are the kinds of favors my parents call in. Some parents know important business people or Hollywood producers or congressmen. But no, my parents have connections in places of no use to the general populous. They know people in academic departments and at think tanks. So that’s where I ended up.

  And now, here I sit, with a few hours to work magic in a subject area where my lack of insight is outpaced only by my lack of interest. The only way I could forestall my imminent failure is if, by some miracle, I managed to remember the intricacies of the structure and prose I assembled over the past five days. This, I believe, is on par with asking me to speak Hindi, or fly. But, much to my surprise, as I flip through the notes Mark sent me on his paper, all the details start rushing back to me. Global asset price bubbles. The carry trade. The euro. The yen. I can do this. I can finish this by noon. And the report on Greece, Latvia, and Spain by five. This won’t be as difficult as I thought. I’ll skip lunch and work straight through, and no one will be the wiser.

  Apparently the whole “skipping lunch” idea was wishful thinking. I know other people do it, like Simon Wellington in NIRD’s foreign policy department. He has trained his body to eat once a day, which explains his high productivity and toxic halitosis. But I can’t concentrate when my stomach starts gurgling. As soon as I type the words “credit crunch,” all I can think is “mmm, crunch.” And then I want a bag of potato chips and a plate of nachos.

  What I’m saying is, the idea of working straight through doesn’t go exactly as planned. I finish the currency paper by noon, so on that front I’m right on schedule. But when I print out the IMF country reports on Greece, Latvia, and Spain, I discover I have more than two hundred pages of text to (a) read, (b) understand, and (c) summarize in a way that is useful to Mark. For some people, five hours would be more than enough time to do that. I am not one of those people.

  Fueled by NIRD coffee and jelly beans, I race through the reports. Well, maybe not race. Claw. I claw my way through the reports. But by five I at least have some notion of their substance. By six I have a rough outline of
a summary for Mark, and by six-forty-five I finish. An hour and forty-five minutes later than my deadline, but it’s a freaking miracle nonetheless.

  Mark hasn’t left yet, so I march into his office and drop the report on his desk with a loud thud. “The IMF summary,” I say.

  He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and flips through the pile. “Remind me—what is this?”

  “The summary of the IMF reports. On Greece, Latvia, and Spain.”

  He frowns. “Oh. Right. I’ll take a look Monday morning.”

  Are you kidding me? “I thought you needed it before you left today.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yes. You said that.”

  “Hmm. Interesting.” He rubs his chin. “Well, I appreciate your hard work, Hannah. Have a nice weekend. We can discuss the report Monday afternoon.”

  “Monday afternoon? What about … Monday morning?”

  “Unfortunately, my youngest daughter is visiting me this weekend. Have I told you she’s finishing her PhD in American history at Yale? Anyway, I want to spend as much time with her as possible this weekend, so I won’t have time to read your work until Monday morning. But thank you again for getting it all together. Good effort, as always.”

  He adjusts his glasses and returns to reading an article in The Economist, oblivious to the fact that I am now foaming at the mouth.

  I grab my bag and stomp to the elevator, seething as I descend the eight floors to the lobby. I hate this place. Un-freaking-believable.

  I stalk through the lobby and stop abruptly when I reach the door. It’s raining—and not a minor drizzle. A torrential downpour. Sheets of rain beat against the glass doors, the long metal handles rattling with each gust of wind. I reach into my bag for my umbrella and discover I left it at home. Fantastic.

  “Take this, honey,” says the security guard behind the desk. She hands me a copy of today’s Washington Post.