November 6 - You're eating breakfast

She was brushing her teeth when he dropped the bomb.

“Did I tell you that my parents are coming into town tomorrow?” Just like that, casually while he adjusted his tie and adored his reflection in the mirror.

Phoebe spit out a mouthful of toothpaste. “They’re what?” she asked around the foamy mint on her tongue, so it sounded more like this: “Thah-wah?”

“Coming to town.” Rafael patted her butt proprietarily as he walked past her and out of the bathroom, and Phoebe gaped another moment before lowering her head to the tap and swishing water around to rinse out her mouth.

“Rafael,” she whined. “What do you mean they’re coming?” She followed him into the bedroom. He was now lacing up black patent leather shoes, standing and smoothing an imaginary crease from his pants. He admired his reflection one more time, this time in the full-length mirror next to their king size bed.

He laughed at her. “I mean they’re coming to visit. Don’t you think they’d like to see our new place?”

Phoebe shuddered.

She and Rafael had married six months ago, but she had only ever met her in-laws twice before the wedding; they only dated four weeks prior to the wedding, after all, but as Phoebe liked to gush to girlfriends over coffee, after four weeks they knew. Phoebe wasn’t oblivious to their reality; he was wealthy and provided her with security (they had met at the club where she tended bar, one night when he was out after work with similar, corporate types, showing off and buying bottles of four-hundred-and-fifty dollar vodka), and she in turn provided him with a pretty woman on his arm to take to cocktail parties and trot out for the company holiday ball. Phoebe was okay with this. Rafael didn’t expect her to be the kind of wife who kept house (she had already hired a maid) or cooked (they ordered takeout or ate at neighborhood hot spots) or produced children (she adamantly did not want to ruin her figure that way, and he seemed to harbor no paternal aspirations). What she did mind was the way his parents had instantly looked down their identical, slim, patrician noses when they first met her, weighing every ounce of her flesh (yes that included the silicone) and probably gleaning what she had eaten for breakfast that morning, and lunch and dinner the day before (which, truth be told, was more often than not cocktails mixed in with some party nuts and a Caesar salad, if the day on which they met was like most days in her life). Under those stares, Phoebe could hear every thought that flashed behind their WASP-y blue eyes of not good enough and raised on the wrong side of the tracks and money grubber and bad genes. A wife, to the Martin family, was a hostess, a helpmate, not someone who went to get her nails done at a salon and spent the biggest portion of her day shopping at Barneys.

Phoebe loathed the idea of them showing up tonight. Well she wrung her fists into her silk bathrobe, Rafael’s head poked back around the door from the hallway.

“Gosh, and honey?” he said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had something home cooked ready to go for breakfast in the morning? My parents are big fans of the sit down breakfast, and I thought maybe they’d like to eat here instead of out like we normally do.” He winked like this was a grand idea.

Phoebe hurled a shoe at his retreating back as he took the stairs down, two at a time.

Breakfast? Her idea of making breakfast was opening the plastic bag inside a box of cereal and eating it dry by the handful; she couldn’t even be bothered with bowls and milk. She thought of dialing Rosalinda, but then remembered that the maid was out of town for her son’s wedding that week. She thought of calling a caterer, but she could just imagine Lydia Martin’s sneer at being offered someone else’s food while her daughter-in-law and (she hoped) the progenitor of her future grandchildren did no more than hand over a few crisp twenties. Panicked, Phoebe ran to the back room – it was meant to be a nursery, so the realtor had told them with barely concealed nudge nudge for their marriage bed, but Phoebe had plans to turn it into a walk-around closet and dressing space. For the moment, however, it was still nothing more than barren white walls and slick wood floors, and heaps of boxes that held the wedding gifts from Rafael’s family, waiting their turn to be unpackaged. His relatives had been horrified to learn that the couple had eloped to Vegas instead of planning a proper ceremony. Phoebe was just as happy to be wearing a short, nearly sheer blue dress with Elvis as attendant, and afterwards to drink themselves silly until five in the morning. She was pretty sure Lydia wouldn’t have approved.

Upon word of the nuptials, every long lost uncle and second cousin and niece of a niece of a sister had sent what they deemed proper wedding gifts, as though the trappings of a good 1950s housewife would take away the shame surrounding the couple. Phoebe promptly deposited all the boxes in the back room and forgot about them. Her kitchen drawers were filled with Chinese takeout menus, not pots and pans.

“I know they’re here somewhere,” she muttered, ripping open cardboard flaps and sending Styrofoam snowing down on the polished wood floor. It took four more boxes before she unearthed the cookbooks that Great Aunt Phyllis (really a childhood friend of Lydia’s, but forever referred to as great aunt) had sent.

“Baking for the Young Wife.” Phoebe rolled her eyes. She thumbed past the breads and the meats and the vegetables and the pictures of a blonde woman beaming proudly like Vanna White as she swept an arm across a table laden with her efforts. Phoebe snorted. She came to breakfasts.

Overnight Caramel French Toast.

It sounded complicated enough to impress Lydia, but looked simple enough to execute. The picture was actually rather mouthwateringly tantalizing. Phoebe scanned the ingredient list.

The first step was to figure out where the nearest grocery store was. If she shopped, it was at the deli on the corner for canned specialty olives, aged cheeses and biscuits, or at the liquor store for wine. She had never bought: light brown sugar, corn syrup, cooking spray, all purpose flour, vanilla extract, sugar, ground cinnamon.

“Excuse me?” she asked a man walking a dog. “Is there a grocery store nearby?” He looked at her oddly and then nodded impatiently, instructing her to walk one more block east. She thanked him.

“Excuse me,” she said to an indifferent looking woman in an apron at Gristedes. “Can you show me to the baking aisle?” The woman eyed her up and down lazily.

“Un huh,” she said, gesturing half-heartedly for Phoebe to follow. Ten minutes later she was swiping her credit card and clipping proudly back down the sidewalk with two plastic sacks in her hands. The doorman eyed her warily when he admitted her to the building.

“Baking, ma’am?” he asked wryly. His sardonic grin made the plastic sacks seem less glamorous.

“Don’t get to used to it,” she snapped, and swished to the elevator.

It took her hours, but Phoebe was meticulous about it. She even tied on an apron – another gift dug up from the cardboard boxes in the back room – to emulate the woman in the picture. Applying some jazz music to her speakers, she did this:

Combine one cup of packed brown sugar (packing was a foreign term, so she measured it out in her cosmetics bag, the smallest sack she had for packing), half a cup of corn syrup (dreadful, sticky stuff) and a quarter cup of butter. For this last, she used Benecol. That’s what Rafael needed for his high cholesterol. The recipe said to cook it over medium heat for five minutes, but her burner must have been on high, because within two, big thick bubbles were forming. With a yelp, she snatched the pan form the stove, then realized she’d forgotten to spray the baking dish to pour it into with cooking spray. Holding the skillet aloft in one arm, she awkwardly pressed the nozzle with her second hand, then poured with an exhalation of relief.

She arranged ten slices of French bread (she used the white wonder bread slices currently in the fridge) in a single layer atop this syrup (that was the cookbooks words. Not a sauce; a syrup).

Milk, flour, vanilla extract, salt, and eggs (these last already in the fridge because Rafael would come home with a carton of free-range from the specialty deli, to hard-boil for late night snacks when he was crunching numbers at one in the morning)were placed in a bowl. The recipe said to use a whisk. She wasn’t sure what this was, so used a knife to stir it all around vigorously, then poured the liquid over the bread slices. Now it was meant to refrigerate overnight. In the morning, she had only to slip it in the oven and bake for an hour.

“Phoebe,” she heard Rafael call, as she shut the refrigerator door and wiped a thin sheen of sweat from her forehead. “Phoebe, where are you?”

“The kitchen!” she replied happily. There was a confused silence, footsteps, then three bodies entering the kitchen, Rafael followed by Lydia and George, twin pillars of white-haired disapproval behind him.

“You’re cooking?” Lydia asked archly before even saying hello. “Darling, you’ll hurt yourself.” Phoebe removed her apron with a flush.

The night was precisely as painful as she feared. They went out to dinner, and Lydia kept leaning in to whisper maliciously, “Darling, that napkin should be in your lap,” or “Oh dear. Don’t just bite into your bread! Break it into chunks.” Phoebe was ready to spit food at her by the time the waiter removed the soup bowls. Somehow, the only thing that stopped her was the idea of that French toast waiting in the fridge, biding its time before she could show Lydia what a good wife she could be, what standards she could live up to.

With an almost conspiratorial glee, a secret only she knew, Phoebe set her alarm for six in the morning. Lydia and George woke early, and she wanted the French Toast to be piping hot from its hour in the oven when they materialized from the guest room in cashmere robes and fluffy slippers.

“What are you doing?” Rafael asked in sleepy concern when she threw back the coverlet and shrugged into a robe at the early hour. He knew her habit was to sleep until noon. In fact, Phoebe couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the sun rise. It was still dark outside the broad window of the master bedroom.

She placed a finger to his lips. “Shh,” she admonished. “Just you wait.”

Preheating the oven was an alien concept; it sounded time consuming. She figured if she skipped that step and simply cooked the French Toast at a hundred degrees hotter, it would still come out fine. Slipping the pan into the four-hundred-fifty degree oven, she set the timer n the microwave for an hour.

“You’re up?”

Phoebe gave a yelp and turned to find an already dressed and scrubbed Lydia staring at her. Had she really thought her mother-in-law would emerge in a bathrobe? Phoebe felt tousled and unkempt in comparison.

“I was making… breakfast,” she concluded lamely. Lydia sniffed and sat at the window bay, the sun just now peeking in through the window panes.

“Tea?”

“Oh, um, I haven’t made any. In fact, I’m not sure we have any. I think…” The pitch of her voice was rising in alarm when, thank God, Rafael appeared around the corner, already showered himself! She looked at him accusingly but the stare glanced off of him.

“I’m doing a Starbucks run, Mom,” he said, kissing Lydia’s forehead. “One chai tea for you coming right up.” Lydia pursed her lips and looked archly at Phoebe.

“Jesus,” she swore, stomping back to the master bedroom. She took a long shower.

She was blow drying her hair when she caught the whiff of burning. Assuming it was an idle strand caught in the nozzle, she continued her drying and brushing when she heard a shriek. Quickly, Phoebe shut off the hair dryer and tilted her head to listen. The burning scent was thicker, acridly crowding into her nostrils. There was another yelp, then a:

“Phoebe!”

“Oh shit.”

She dashed to the kitchen, where thick smoke crowded around the marble countertop, the Whirlpool refrigerator, the custom-made cabinets. Coughing, Phoebe rushed to her stove and waved one hand frantically in front of her eyes as she turned off the stove with the other.

“Pot holders, pot holders!” she cried, looking around furiously, completely forgetting where she had left them. Of course there was Lydia, standing with one hand on her hips and offering the damned pot holders casually with the other. Her smirk clearly said, I told you so. Phoebe snatched the pot holders from her and extracted the burnt French Toast.

Burnt indeed. Blackened. Phoebe stared down at the charred mass of her creation with dismay.

“Well,” she heard Rafael laugh. She looked up at him pleadingly, waiting for him to rescue her from Lydia’s words, George’s scoff, the mocking that hung thicker than the smoke in the air. “Well, it looks like we’ll be going out for breakfast after all.” George gave a soft chuckle and Lydia was already moving towards her mink coat.

“No!” Phoebe’s shout froze them all where they stood. “Enough is enough. I’ve had it with you all thinking I’m not good enough and we’re going to stay right here because I’ve prepared this French Toast and I spent all afternoon yesterday getting ready this moment and now that it’s out of the oven you’re going to EAT IT.”

There was a stunned silence. She pointed imperiously at the kitchen table.

Rafael was the first to move. He grabbed one of the four plates she had left stacked on the countertop and walked to her side. “Right,” he said firmly. “Mom, Dad?” Lydia and George lined up behind him with twin expressions of horror. Smirking, Phoebe dished out one burnt toast slice onto each plate, then primly handed each party a knife and a fork. There was an awkward shuffling of feet, the screech of chairs being pulled back along the tiled floor, the awkward crunch as the knives forced their way into the black bread.

Rafael placed a bite into his mouth. His eyes betrayed him for a moment, going first wide with shock, then tight with effort, and then he swallowed. “Phoebe!” he crowed. “It’s delicious. A budding home chef we have here. Mom, Dad? You see how hard Phoebe has worked to make you happy?” Phoebe could have kissed him.

Lydia swallowed like it was a live bug going down. George still seemed to be chuckling around his bite. “I’d say she made a valiant effort,” her father-in-law said, slicing into his piece a second time, and eyeing her with a new note in his eye. Could it be… respect? Waving away the errant tendrils of smoke that still clung to the air, he took a second bite. He looked over at her and winked.