Page 2 of Below the Shadow of the City

Despite being stuck in a painfully long line behind senior citizens and frazzled nannies wrangling Upper West Side toddlers, I manage to slip back into the office bathroom at 12:24 and stuff my wrecked tights in the minuscule metal trash can. The stall is absurdly narrow, like the architects purposely wanted to prevent anything but efficiency. After body slamming the walls a few times I manage to make it out and fake a saunter into the conference room at 12:29. I’m superficially perfectly coordinated and scheduled while I’m mentally barely hanging on by a thread. It’s an art form.

I linger until the plates are cleared and scavenge for remnants of pricey lunches I can claim for myself. There’s a packaged salad with a mystery dressing, and half a sandwich that will likely turn too soggy to eat if it sits any longer. Once I check the coast is clear before the cleaners come in, I swipe my treasure and hurry back to my desk.

As the hours creep towards the late afternoon, I’m merely killing time before my day and week are over. I type up notes from a meeting, refresh my calendar, doodle a bit on the notepad on my desk. After completing every mundane task I’d been putting off for the week, I take a breather and check my personal email. Usually it’s sales promotions from brands I can’t afford or the occasional recruiter telling me what a great fit I’d be for an entry level job that’s definitely underpaid. But there’s a new message in my inbox that looks strange. And oddly, promising?

Hi Sigrid,

I’m Billie Gustafson, one of the editors at Gingham Books. I’m not sure if you know of us, but we’re one of New York’s oldest publishers of lifestyle and cookbooks. We’re in the process of putting together a collaboration between various New York-based baking Instagrammers (currently untitled). One of the members of our Public Relations team had been a fan of your account, and I wanted to reach out and invite you to provide a submission.

We ask that you submit eight self-produced recipes, and we will select up to six of them. If this is something you’re interested in, please let me know by October 1st. We’d require all recipes to be submitted by December 1st. I understand this is a tight timeline, but you are welcome to reuse recipes you’ve previously posted on your account, so long as they haven’t been published elsewhere.

If this is something of interest to you, I’ll have our legal team send over our contract for you to review and sign. I look forward to hearing from you!

All the best,

Billie Gustafson (She/Her)

Senior Editor, Home & Lifestyle

Gingham Books

I hunch over and reread the message over and over again. My face gets progressively closer and closer to the screen as I track each word. I verify five, maybe six times, that Billie Gustafson is real. Google pulls up photos of a sweet looking Black woman in her forties with a pixie cut and almost two decades of publishing experience. She’s definitely real. And the opportunity is very real, and despite my baking account having been dormant for months, I must have done something right.

My last post on the account Billie used as a way to find me, a clementine tart with Italian meringue, sits dormant in a time capsule from January. Four days before Perrie and I split. Each time I get a notification from someone liking or commenting on an old post it dredges up the dull ache of what I used to be.

That’s not to say I haven’t tried.

I’ve stood at the farmers market and stared at perfectly ripe strawberries and imagined them transformed into a compote with basil. I’d fantasized about making a panna cotta or ice cream from scratch to top with a hypothetical herbaceous and sweet sauce. I’ve gotten so incredibly close to making something, but a black tornado swirls around my heart and rips up the delicate scaffolding I set up.

Using my mixer and oven after months of ignoring them feels akin to climbing Mount Everest in sandals. But this would change everything. I might actually make real money doing what I love. I could feel like I’ve done something with my nearly thirty years of life. For the first time in a very, very long time, I think I feel excitement. There’s little time before anxiety and imposter syndrome crash over me in dark churning waves.

I need backup, encouragement, maybe a slap in the face. A flash of black hair sways across the room and I perk my head up like a meerkat. I need my best friend. ASAP.

“Margo!” I whisper-yell to not disturb the people with jobs of importance who sit around me. A few developers shift in their seats and glance up at me. They all already harbor a thinly veiled resentment for Margo and I and our constant chatting, thankfully most of them don headphones. Most of them started to once they’d realized how chatty I was. “Sorry,” I utter uncomfortably. Margo spins on her heel, her hair fluttering behind her, and crosses the office to me. I’m struggling to explain what the opportunity is, so with a shaky finger I just point at my computer monitor. She narrows her deep brown eyes at me and then turns to the screen to flash them back and forth over the text, a few times, exactly like I did.

“Sigrid,” she starts, sincerity gripping her normally sarcastic tone. “That’s unreal. That’s like, the biggest opportunity you could imagine.”

“I know, I’m terrified.”

“You need to say yes, as your best friend I implore you to say yes.” She’s buzzing with as much excitement as I am.

“I haven’t baked since…” I trail off. I shouldn’t be so haunted, and we both know it.

Margo looks at me with pity in her eyes. “You need to find a reason to again. That old Kitchenaid of yours used to be an extension of your body. Say yes, you owe that much to yourself.” And like some tattooed fairy godmother, she gives me a wink and continues back to her desk.

This opportunity would be the perfect reason to get back into the only hobby I’ve ever stuck with. I’d floated from knitting, to guitar, to watercolors, but nothing ever stuck. I’d get bored, quickly. But then I was asked to bring a dessert to a Friendsgiving, and all the pies had been covered. Desperate, I begged my mom for her chocolate chip cookie recipe.

I had no clue what I was doing. I had thought I’d burned the butter I was melting until I realized I’d perfectly browned it. And when the store was out of chocolate chips, I bought a few chocolate bars and chopped them into rough pieces. I’d seen enough Ina Garten to know to sprinkle some flaky salt on top and the end result was cookies that were allegedly the best my friends had ever tasted. After that, I was hooked. A year later, after using my coworkers as willing subjects I’d started my Instagram. A year after that I had ten thousand followers, a number that had steadily grown until I abandoned the account altogether.

Margo’s right, my Kitchenaid mixer really used to be an extension of myself. Logistically, it’s possible. There’s a little over a month to commit, and two months after that to develop eight recipes. Difficult, for sure, but not impossible. It’s just that committing to something like this is…a lot. Committing to anything these days feels like I’m ripping myself open and wandering around entirely vulnerable for the world to destroy. Ignoring the itchy feeling I’m getting from stress hives, I close the email. I fill the rest of my day with every menial task I can conjure to keep my mind off of the looming opportunity.

Five o’clock hits and the rhythms begin again. Ralph steps out of his office, and gives a canned quip about having a great weekend. “But not too great.”

He laughs at his own joke as if I haven’t heard it hundreds of times before. Oh to be so amused by such things. I’ve already called a car to pick him up out front. It’ll arrive precisely as he steps out the front door. He has a penthouse and trophy wife in SoHo to return to, after all.

A few moments later, ready for this day and week to be over, I follow suit. The mist of the morning has cleared and the day has dried out enough to not be dense with humidity. I consider such things a microscopic win. Couples are arm in arm zigzagging on the sidewalk heading out to their dates. Lost tourists are attempting to find their way to Times Square. And I’m ready to leave midtown and not return until Monday at 8:40.

CHAPTER 2