Love & Other Disasters(10)
Right. Sure.
Except Dahlia didn’t have a career.
She had worked as a copy editor at a small Baltimore paper for the last four years, and enjoyed it for the most part. She had always liked writing and editing, and the work was interesting sometimes. More and more of the paper was simply canned from larger news wires, but the local beats their reporters still got to cover felt important. She liked her coworkers, especially Josh, who covered their online marketing and social media, who made her laugh and had always treated her with respect.
But she’d become restless these last couple of years after so many days in the same cubicle, never moving on to something bigger, better, more challenging.
Dahlia had dreams, but vague, blurry ones, dreams that held no concrete value. Seeing the world. Doing something she was passionate about, something meaningful. She simply had no idea what that something was. She worried that if she made cooking her career dream, she’d lose the joy in it. And sometimes, this last year, it felt like that joy was all she had.
Dahlia didn’t want to own a restaurant, or even work in one, but cooking meant something to her now, something primal and important. When her mental health and her marriage started to break down two years ago, far before she fully understood either of those things was happening, it was cooking that calmed her. Made her feel productive and useful.
Cooking made her mind focus on something other than herself.
And then, as she started getting better at it, as she started cooking more not because she had to but because she wanted to, she started to stray away from strict recipes to rely on instinct and knowledge alone. And that? That made her feel creative and powerful—two adjectives she had forgotten to associate with herself. And then it wasn’t just a distraction. Cooking held the possibility of helping Dahlia Woodson find herself again.
She was still working on that part. Finding herself again.
Because other than being really good at chopping vegetables and making homemade pasta, other than knowing she wanted to get the hell out of Maryland suburbia, Dahlia understood who she was less and less with each passing year. Like she was growing up wrong.
But she couldn’t say any of that to the camera. She couldn’t talk about her student loans.
So Dahlia swallowed, tried to smile, and said the most generic thing she could think of.
“I only started cooking seriously a few years ago, so I’m really excited for all I can learn here.”
Maritza nodded. “Good.” Her head swiveled to another PA as she checked notes on her phone. “AJ, can you go get Khari next?”
Dahlia left the room, worried, with a mortifying rush of shame, that she might cry.
She had never wanted to be a generic person.
She walked to craft services and shoveled down ten grapes without tasting a single one.
Dahlia was acting differently today, and London didn’t like it.
Maybe they didn’t have the right to judge how Dahlia Woodson did or did not act, considering they had barely known her for twenty-four hours. But they had spent at least eight of those hours yesterday staring at the set of her shoulders, the angle of her neck as she leaned forward in concentration at her station, the way she unconsciously shuffled her weight from one foot to the other when she was anxious. The way her cheeks swelled when she smiled.
They knew the way her face looked when she laughed, how her eyes beamed out joy when she tasted something she loved.
She was wearing a cheerfully bright yellow tank top today. But the Dahlia Woodson on set now seemed diminished. Quiet.
Most likely, it had nothing to do with London, or their conversation last night. Even if London had spent more minutes than they cared to admit contemplating whether they actually had been a jerk yesterday. Or thinking about the look on her face when she talked about money, her debt, how they wished, somehow, that they could erase it.
Not that, again, it was any of their business.
Dahlia was probably just quieter today because her nerves were settling down, because she was getting focused. Like London should be doing.
They were wandering through the pantry, waiting for the Ingredient Innovation to finally start, while Janet pulled contestants aside for solo interviews and the judges shot cheesy B-roll for the show’s corporate sponsors. The Ingredient Innovation was the most creatively demanding segment of the show, and London was antsy about it. The judges presented an oddball or lesser-used ingredient, and the contestants had to produce a small plate—usually a side dish or a simple dessert—that featured the ingredient and didn’t taste like garbage. London had always been good at following recipes with precision, at improvising with ingredients they were familiar with, but the element of surprise stressed them out. They knew the Elimination Challenges were the big cooks that really counted, but the judges took into account the skill and creativity shown during the Ingredient Innovations, too, before they made their final decision at the end of each episode. London had to get their head in the game, if they wanted to keep landing on the right side of those final decisions.
And yet—as if the universe was determined to put Dahlia Woodson in the way of London’s focus—there she was, standing stock still in front of the card catalog of spices in the pantry, clutching a tiny notebook to her chest. London watched her for a moment, intently inspecting the card catalog, which had been painted seafoam green before being repurposed to spice storage. It was pretty cool. But there was a lot of cool stuff on this set.