The following is an excerpt from the book The Kindness of Strangers: A Novel
by Katrina Kittle
Published by William Morrow; February 2006; $24.95US/$32.95CAN; 0-06-056474-1

Chapter One

Sarah

Whenever Sarah thought back to that morning twelve years ago, she remembered the chick.

She cracked open an egg, but instead of a yolk, a bloody chick embryo fell into the bowl. She stared at its alien eyes and gaping mouth, and the hair rose on her arms and neck. The maimed chick felt important somehow, a sign of how bleak and bad things had become. Sarah sensed that this was an omen, but she couldn’t imagine for what or how to prepare herself.

The chick — in addition to giving Sarah second thoughts about buying free-range eggs at the local farmers’ market — made her remember the robin’s nest she’d found the day before in the apple tree. There had been four eggs, pale and delicate, like the sugar-dough decorations on the wedding cakes she was known for.

Sarah looked at the chick in the bowl and wanted to make sure the robin eggs were all right. She knew that this need was irrational — her sons were expecting breakfast, it was typical springtime in Ohio with the rain running in sheets down the window, and the robin certainly didn’t require her assistance. Sarah knew she had more pressing things to focus on — she had to cater Thai red seafood curry for twelve today, she needed to start production on a wedding cake, and she was supposed to be developing recipes for a “salads as whole meals” spread for Food & Wine, whose deadline was rapidly approaching. Sarah mentally inventoried these obligations, but she slipped out the back door anyway. She jogged across the sodden ground and stepped onto the bench under the tree. At the sight of Sarah’s gigantic head, the mother robin shrieked and fluttered to a higher branch. Sarah peered down at the nest, dry and cozy even in this downpour, and the eggs that, to her relief, still sat there like jewels. Four perfect eggs. Nothing but promise and potential ahead of them.

She’d once felt that way about her own family.

The eggs and that contorted chick reminded Sarah of the sappy assignment she’d been given in her grief support group two years ago, back when Roy, her husband, died. The counselor had told her to find three things each morning for which she felt grateful. The counselor told her not to count her two children — they were givens.

The robin screeched at her in urgent, one-note cries, and Sarah tried to think of something that inspired gratitude. Weariness and regret weighed her down, but she stubbornly shoved them away. She could do it, damn it; she could come up with three blessings. She scanned the yard, appraising it, as if it were a property she’d never seen. She looked at the old sandbox the boys used to play in and at her garden, its recently tilled earth as dark as Black Forest cake. One of these days, if the rain ever stopped, she would plant.

The mother robin hopped to a lower branch and continued the staccato warnings. Sarah felt bad prolonging the bird’s worry, so she stepped down from the bench. As she did, she reached for a branch, for balance, and in a flash the robin dove at her. Sarah jerked her hand away, but not before she felt the stab of beak and the surge of adrenaline at the attack. The robin flew one more swipe at Sarah before settling defiantly back onto her nest. Sarah examined the wound. A drop of blood welled on the back of her hand but washed away in the rain. More blood rose from the tiny puncture when she clenched her fist. The entire hand throbbed, and the slight pain felt almost good. This was pain from outside, not from within. And not only did her hand ache, but she shivered, aware of how wet and cold she was, skin tight with goose bumps, nipples erect. She felt something. She was alive.

There. That was a blessing. She looked up at the tree, wanting to thank the bird for this sensation. This apple tree belonged to her younger son, Danny, who was eleven. Roy and Sarah had planted trees for both sons, in the ancient tradition that the branches from the trees would later be used for the chuppahs at their weddings. Danny used to be as sweet and cheerful as the tree’s early-April bloom, but a crab apple tree might have suited him better lately. He’d changed. They’d all changed. And Sarah didn’t know how to stop it, how to go back to the family they’d been before.

Sarah walked across the yard, through the rain, to Nate’s dogwood tree and touched the trunk. This tree was planted nearly seventeen years ago. Now it stood taller than Nate.

Thank God, Nate’s suspension from school was over — that would be the second blessing of the day. He’d already been suspended twice this year for truancy; once more and he’d be expelled. Actually, this was the second for which he’d been caught. She knew he’d skipped more than that, because she’d seen him in the middle of a school day. Once, visiting Roy’s grave at Temple Israel cemetery, she’d been outraged to see someone sitting on Roy’s stone, smoking, but when she recognized Nate, she’d slunk away before he saw her. She’d never told him she’d seen him there, never scolded him for cutting class. And from the cigarette butts that accumulated at the grave, she knew he went frequently. She never mentioned the butts, for fear he’d cover his tracks, and she took comfort in knowing some small thing about his life. Plus, her approval of the visits might make him stop. Everything she said to Nate these days seemed only to insult and anger him. That’s why she was making his favorite burritos this morning. She hoped they could be a peace offering.

Copyright © 2005 Katrina Kittle

Author
Katrina Kittle is the author of Traveling Light and Two Truths and a Lie. She helped found the All Children’s Theatre in Washington Township, Ohio, and teaches theater and English to middle schoolers at the Miami Valley School in Dayton, where she lives. Chapters from this novel earned her an Ohio Arts Council grant.

For more information, please visit www.katrinakittle.com.

The following is an excerpt from the book Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We’re Still Single
by Jillian Straus
Published by Hyperion; February 2006; $21.95US/$29.95CAN; 1-4013-0132-0
Copyright © 2006 Jillian Straus

The First Date Interview

Those singles who can’t stand ambiguity from the very beginning develop a more direct dating approach. Meet, for instance, Steven Kaplan — as several of my girlfriends did. I was on yet another blind date — my third in the last two weeks. Here we go again, I thought, as I walked out my front door, and waved to the night doorman, Stan. Stan was my friend, and he had watched me return home forlorn from every date in the last month, except for one night when he happened to catch the end of a good-night kiss — albeit from a man who never called me again.

Like most of my friends, I had a careful semiotic clothing code that I had worked out for different kinds of dates. Tonight I was in full date battle mode: wearing my new fitted red V-neck sweater — the effort was to be attractive but not too slutty — paired with Diesel jeans, to give a “casual” impression. I had avoided my usual uniform of black cigarette pants, black top, and Gucci bag (on sale, but no one needed to know), because I did not want to convey that I was too high-maintenance. Hey, I am being honest here.

I was on my way to meet a friend-of-a-friend named Steven Kaplan. I didn’t know much about him, except that he was supposedly a good-looking, thirty-six-year-old Jewish oncologist — with a full head of hair. In my mother’s mind, of course, he was already fully qualified, sight unseen, to be my husband; in mine, he sounded like he could go any number of ways, but it was at least worth meeting him for dinner on a Tuesday night in the West Village.

I arrived at a cozy, unpretentious restaurant, Gradisca, and looked for someone fitting his description: “I’ll be wearing a green sweater and I have salt-and-pepper hair,” he’d told me during our short phone conversation. The first person I saw was a man wearing a green shirt — with the largest nose I had ever seen. As I walked toward this man with trepidation, trying to stay focused on the beauty of the soul, someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Hi, I’m Steven,” this man said.

I breathed a sigh of relief. He fit the description, and was actually better looking than I had anticipated: 6′2″, with thick, wavy salt-and-pepper hair and, thankfully, an entirely ordinary nose. We sat down right away. The restaurant was buzzing with beautiful people. We were seated at a quiet table in the corner, away from all the activity.

I was impressed by Steven’s sophistication: he perused the wine list and selected a full-bodied red wine; it was delicious, and we lingered over the bottle for about twenty minutes before ordering dinner. By then, I had a nice buzz, and I was beginning to feel chemistry between us. Steven looked particularly handsome with the shadow of the candle flame flickering on his face, turning his eyes into deep reflective pools. Hmm, I thought . . . He asked the usual first-date icebreaker questions: “Where are you from?” “What do you do in your free time?”

Who in New York has free time, anyway? I thought vaguely, as I admired his deep voice and silky lips. I was wondering what it would be like to kiss him.

Before we’d had a chance to order, however, the scene shifted from Last Tango in Paris to Nine to Five. My date had started to put me through a job interview:

“Do you want to stay in the city for the next couple of years?”

“Why did your last relationship end?”

“How many kids do you want?”

I was floored. I was thinking what it would be like to make out with him, and he wanted to figure out where we were sending our kids to school! When the waitress came and rescued me from his relentless battery of suitability questions, I was thrilled. The romantic mood had been extinguished the moment he seemed to scan my resume for the position of Mrs. Kaplan.

He sensed my unease, politely walked me home, and gave me an obligatory kiss on the cheek.

I wasn’t the only one of my circle, as it turned out, who’d had a date that ended up as a job interview. A few days later, I was having drinks with some girlfriends, and we were comparing our recent dates. I told them about Steven Kaplan. “He was really attractive and sophisticated, but he grilled me about my long-term life plan ten minutes into the date,” I complained. Rory, thirty-four, a blunt casting agent with baby-blue saucer eyes, explained my baffling evening to me in her own terms. Her clinical analysis of the different stages in which people approach courtship helped me to understand why so few of these dates we were all going on seemed romantic in the slightest: “He’s just trying to figure out what phase you are in. There is ‘Phase One’ and there is ‘Phase Two’ for people in the dating process,” she said. “Phase One involves buying some nice clothes and looking after yourself — for instance, taking care of your apartment, your job — and having lots of sex. I did that until I was about thirty, and I loved it.”

Rory continued, “Then there is Phase Two: This is when you want to put your money into building something for your future, you want to make your place a home in preparation for a partner and eventually a family, and most of all you want to share the life you’ve built with someone. For a woman in Phase Two, it can be challenging: you can try to put a Phase-One guy in a Phase-Two situation, but it rarely works,” she explained. Of course, the same applied to women, she said. That was clearly part of the disconnect between Dr. Kaplan and myself. But Rory felt she was now too often on the Phase-Two side of the equation, waiting for a Phase-One man to commit, and she was tired of it. I knew all too well what she was talking about, since I had spent much of my dating years chasing non-committal men.

But the interrogation on the first date is not particularly romantic. Besides, this tendency of young people to be either partying wildly or on a manic Google-like search for “the one and only” complicates the hope of simply falling in love; if we did not assign ourselves these rigid life categories, we would perhaps be more open to being persuaded to move, by the connection with another person, from Phase One to Phase Two — or even better, to simply want to be close to someone and intimate for its own sake, rather than for the fulfillment of an external timetable. But as long as we continue to approach our search for love this way, perhaps we’d be better off if we wore visible distinguishing signs: “NC” for non-committal or “R,” for ready.

I never saw or spoke to Steven Kaplan after that. I heard he got engaged to someone six months later. I was not surprised. The first date interview was an obvious, but unsubtle, way to weed out those who were not in the same place in their lives. Many of the people I heard from talked about the tormenting challenge of trying to find someone with whom you “connect” — that central word again — who is “ready” for the same things you are. On the whole, more women than men whom I interviewed had this complaint, but there were plenty of men who were pining after women who were “not ready.” The “readiness factor” was usually a sense of one’s own place in one’s life, rather than a reaction to the pull of the relationship itself. Steven Kaplan was ready, and he wasn’t going to waste any time trying to figure out whether I really was — or, for that matter, whom I really was.

On more than a dozen occasions, I had lent an ear to tortured friends who had waited and waited for a commitment, constantly hoping for clues, signs that their potential mate was coming around. I told the Steven Kaplan story to one of my ex-boyfriends, a semi-reformed non-committer who had broken my heart over ten years earlier. Years after the breakup, he had said, “Jillian, it wouldn’t have mattered if you were Cindy Crawford — I just wasn’t ready.” Here we were now, friends, and he explained my date with the doctor this way: Most guys don’t necessarily end up with the woman they love the most. “It’s like a game of musical chairs; you sit down in one chair, then you sit in another, and when the music stops, whatever chair you are sitting in is the chair you end up in.” It was the most unromantic thing I had ever heard and I thought I would never be able to buy that line of thinking. While this approach provided a shortcut to finding a mate in an ambiguous dating culture, I doubted that in the long run it resulted in many happy, permanent matches.

Gen-Xers are accustomed to figure-it-out-as-you-go-along dating and seem to resist any early pressure in a relationship, no matter what phase of dating they might be in. The Gen-X approach gives men and women the ability to get in and out of their relationships as easily as they change their jobs or apartments. The lack of formal romantic cues give this generation freedom, but with that freedom often comes a price: the inability to decisively commit.

Excerpted from Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We’re Still Single by Jillian Straus. Published by Hyperion. Copyright © 2006 Jillian Straus. All rights reserved. Available wherever books are sold.

Author
Jillian Straus spent eight years producing programs for The Oprah Winfrey Show, where she interviewed hundreds of men and women about their lives and their relationships. Prior to that, she worked for ABC News. She received a B.A. and an M.A. at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Straus is currently a fellow of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, training young women in communications. She lives in New York City.

For more information, please visit www.unhookedgeneration.com.