But apparently I’ve gotten another thing wrong about him.
“Oh yeah,” he says, clearly enjoying upending my expectations. “I was totally the gawky little kid with that kind of pudding-bowl haircut who would sit on the counter and lick the spoon while my nan was baking for me. I was a super-picky eater, but I loved cookie dough and cupcakes and really any baked good. And it’s what my nan did with all her free time, so I got used to watching her and then eventually she taught me too.”
“Huh,” I say, trying to imagine it. Trying to picture brash Eli as a small child nestled in with a middle-aged Esther, chocolate frosting getting scooped out of a bowl. The edges of young Eli are fuzzy but there.Yet there’s one part Icannotpicture. “It’s so strange to me, thinking about Esther as maternal,” I say, almost to myself. “She was always so stern. Mathematics professor has always made sense to me, but doting grandma baker is blowing my mind.”
His expression softens as I talk about her. Even with her being described as stern, he seems to love the memory.
“She was definitely no nonsense,” he remembers. “And she wasn’t exactly maternal; you’re right about that. But we sort of fit together. It waseasyfor me to be with Nan. We understood each other, and we didn’t require a lot of energy from one another. We liked a lot of the same stuff, and we had the same sort of logical way of approaching things. So she brought that into baking, too, and it really worked for my style as well.”
I can’t help but think it’s like the opposite of my family. Eli and Esther were hexagonal pegs in a world of round and square holes, but they went together. Whereas my brother and I are those normal rounds and squares, but my parents are pterodactyl shaped, completely off the board of anything you can imagine. I wonder if my parents ever wished they had kids who saw the world the way they did. What a comfort it must be to be a unique entity who happens to be related to a similar unique entity.
“Okay, now it’s your turn,” he says, breaking my thoughts.
“None of those were particularly embarrassing,” I point out. “More like fun facts.”
He smirks. “Okay then. Your turn for some fun facts.”
I feel sort of boring, because I don’t have an instant answer to that query. There’s nothing about me that I would say automatically stands out. I trynotto stand out. The only person who seems to make me go off the deep end of normal behavior is Eli.
But that’s not something I want to admit.
He doesn’t let it go, though. “How about—what if I asked your landscaper friend? What would she say?”
“Dane?” I think. There’s a million things Dane would love to embarrass me with. “She also mocks my baking, even though she’s probably the largest consumer of its spoils,” I say with a smile. “She does like to knock the way I read, though,” I admit.
“How can someone mock the way you read?”
“I always read the end first,” I admit.
At that he stands up, incredulous. Dramatic. Typical. “You can’t be serious!”
“Just like the last couple of pages.” I cross my arms across my chest, armor against his disbelief.
“The wholepointis to wonder how it ends. That’s a crime. That should be officially entered as a criminal act. You can’tread the endingbefore you even start!”
He’s pacing a little, and now I’m sort of enjoying how much this boring fact about myself has flummoxed him.
“It’s comforting!” I explain with a shrug. “You can get into the story and the details without all the anxiety of not knowing what’s ahead.”
“That’s life, Nora. No one gets to know what’s ahead.” He crouches down until he’s in front of me, and I’m once again rattled by his nearness. “That’s thefunof it.”
Chapter 14
Apparently, starting with embarrassments can open up an entire world of conversation.
As a therapist I get handed people’s deepest secrets all the time. But the mundane fragments of life can often be the most illuminating.
Up on a roof with nothing to do and nowhere to go, we allow our conversation to wind around, plucking small pieces from each other’s tapestry. It’s a way to pass the time, but in doing so we’re weaving something new—and the more we talk, the further away I can push that earlier sensation of being physically on guard around Eli.
Instead, sitting dutifully distant, we hand over small irrelevant intimacies, like how when he’s alone, he’ll order a particular cider called Strongbow that he loved as a teenager, but he would now get ruthlessly mocked by any fellow Brit, who would see it as a ridiculous watered-down drink. Or how his mother made him take ballet class as a kid and how he stuck with it until he was eight. How he broke his left arm as a teenager and had to wear his watch on his right wrist, but then he got used to it, so now it’s the only way he can wear a watch.
And I tell him how I got George because of the trip after my breakup, and he howls with laughter that my big takeaway was deciding I wanted an old cranky dog. Or how as a kid I never realized it was weird that my brother would eat all the cream from inside the Oreos before handing them to me. Or the fact that I still know a song—that names every country in the world—from a random cartoon VHS I hadas a kid, and it’s the song I sing to myself whenever I get nervous. He makes me do a demonstration, and I love how much the absurdity of it delights him.
“Do you get nervous a lot?” he asks, once he’s made me sing this ridiculous song three separate times. “I would think at this point you’d be unshakable, having to listen to so much of people’s lives. It’s like, most people are told to imagine everyone in their underwear, but you sort of get the verbal version of that from your patients every single day.”
I consider it. “It’s not the same when it’s about you, though.”
He nods but still seems skeptical. “I just think you get to know people so much more than most of the other people in their lives.”
