The Brunch From Hell

the tism was tisming 😀

Several hours before the brunch, I walked into a bookshelf. This was in the middle of the night, on my way to the bathroom, and I felt rather than heard the crack in my nose. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought Yep, that’s my bone splitting. I stumbled to the bathroom, where I curled up on the threadbare rug, crying. I called my ex, who was still awake at 4 a.m. He told me my nose probably wasn’t broken. I got it X-rayed the next morning. It was broken.

The great thing about breaking your nose is that you don’t need a cast, and you can do pretty much everything you would normally do—aside from, say, bobbing for apples. Since the brunch seemed unlikely to include this activity, I could still go.

A girl named Ariana, whom I’d met on Bumble BFF, was putting this brunch together. She’d invited me, along with four other girls I didn’t know, and said it would be the perfect opportunity to make new friends and build connections. I’d never met Ariana, but even over text she sounded like the sort of extrovert who might have adopted me in high school—or college, if I had let myself be adopted by anyone in college, if I hadn’t just slunk through the corridors and exited campus as quickly as possible after my classes.

Ariana’s house was down by the water in a trendy area of Manhattan. As I walked over there, my strides were long and confident—I was wearing my favorite faux leather zippered jeans, booties with a slight heel, and a new jacket. I noticed the surreptitious glances of people on the street, and had to fight to keep a pleased smile from blossoming on my face. Even if my nose was still a bit swollen, I looked good. I looked good and felt good and was about to create my own social circle—or, even if I didn’t do that, I would at least make fleeting connections, would laugh and bond with other women and have fun. I would be creating something wholly separate from my ex. A bright new side to my life, untouched by any shadow he might try to throw over it.

When I arrived, there were three other people, including Ariana; two of the other girls had canceled that morning. When she opened the door and greeted me, Ariana gushed: “When you said you’d broken your nose, I thought, Oh for sure she’s gonna cancel now! But you didn’t! You said you would come—and you did! Love that. It takes guts not to cancel when you’ve broken your nose.”

Ariana’s smile was broad and her eyes crinkled with friendliness. But the two other girls, who were sitting down at the glass table near the entryway, did not have the same welcoming energy. From one glance at their expressions, I realized that my agreeability to come to a brunch to meet strangers despite having a freshly broken nose was a sign, not of gutsiness, but of desperation.

I didn’t want to look into their faces anymore, so I looked down at my feet, and realized that my fly was undone.

So that was why everyone had been staring at me on my way here. It wasn’t because I’d looked like hot stuff. No, it was because my fucking zipper had been wide open, its tiny metal tongue probably flapping in the breeze with each step.

It was, as they say, downhill from there.

I went to the bathroom and came out with my fly re-zipped, but after glancing in the mirror, I now had something else to worry about: above the neck, I looked like I’d just come from a Bikram yoga class. My cheeks were flushed and sweat was beading like oil on my forehead. It was only May, and still cool outside, but apparently walking a few blocks from the subway was enough to cause me to break out in an unflattering shade of puce. This had been happening to me more and more often lately as the weather warmed, and I could only interpret it as an ominous sign. What would I look like come July? Would my entire face not only turn vermillion but also begin to radiate its own warmth, like a portable heat lamp?

Ariana served us a platter of berries, as well as champagne and coffee. I took the coffee. This was a problem I’d never had until recently: I was having trouble drinking. Over the past few months, for no discernible reason, my alcohol tolerance had been sliding downhill dangerously fast. Even on hours-long dinner dates I would only be able to finish one drink. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I downed a flute of champagne on a nearly empty stomach. So I sipped my cappuccino, stress-ate raspberries, and watched the other girls giggle and hold their champagne flutes delicately, showing off their perfectly manicured nails.

It was me, Ariana, her best friend Nikki, and another girl named Jocelyn. I think Ariana and I would have gotten along pretty well if it had been just the two of us—although that was probably because she was the kind of girl who got along with everyone. Nikki, on the other hand, was the type of woman I’d spent most of my time at college avoiding: straight out of a sorority, with overfilled lips and way too much fake tan and bronzer. Jocelyn had shiny black hair, a long, slender, aristocratic face, and was engaged to a rich older man. She kept her heavy-looking engagement ring positioned so that everyone could see it.

We began talking, but it felt all wrong, and I knew it was because of me. I watched as the other three girls effortlessly built a rapport, bonding with each other over college experiences and work experiences and relationship experiences. I felt like an anthropologist observing the customs of an alien tribe, the same way I had done countless times in high school and college and summer camp. By now I was an expert at clocking each and every eye movement and hand gesture, at tracking how everyone leapt smoothly and deftly from subject to subject, at noting how everyone said the exact right things while leaving the right amount of things unsaid—I was an expert at observing all these things and, at the same time, never being able to replicate them in any way that came remotely close to looking natural.

Ariana and Jocelyn were both in relationships, so I attempted to bond with Nikki over our shared singleness. Our fatigue of dating apps, perhaps; our cringe-worthy experiences on Hinge. But Nikki, as it turned out, had never had anything but great experiences on Hinge. She had never seen a single annoying profile. Never had a date turn uncomfortable or frightening. Whatever was going on with me was, clearly, only happening to me.

We talked about other things, but I forgot what I said as soon as it passed my lips. I was focusing too much on making the right amount of eye contact with everyone and also not looking too much at Ariana or Jocelyn or Nikki but at breaking up the eye contact evenly and also not drinking my coffee too fast or I’d get jittery because my caffeine tolerance seemed to be going downhill too, but also not saying anything stupid (but also not trying to seem too smart) and also not interrupting anyone, and in order to do this I had to time the conversation perfectly and anticipate a break in the flow of it, but I always did this wrong and whenever I managed to slide a pertinent sentence or two into the conversation I always felt like I’d achieved something, but then the next second the glow would leave me, and I’d imagine how flushed and sweaty I must look by now and how pathetic my victory really was.

And Nikki. Whenever I said anything, Nikki would glance sideways—either at one of the other girls, or just into nothingness, as though there were an invisible camera there. She’d raise her eyebrows and widen her eyes for a moment, and her lips would pull the slightest bit into a smile. But not a genuine smile: a tight, freaked-out smile.

It is the expression you make when someone has said something simultaneously very odd and very entertaining. It is the expression you make when you’re thinking, Oh shit, am I going to laugh about this bitch later.

At one point we were talking about our jobs, and since I was the only one there who still, a year after Covid hit, had not managed to get a new job, I decided to mention my books instead. “I’ve written, um, eight or nine novels by now,” I said. I didn’t mention that I had written all but two of them in the last three years—this felt too much like bragging. “I’ve got one ready to go out on submission soon.” At their blank looks, I added, “Going on submission means your agent is sending it out to publishers. And then they decide if they want to publish you.” I stuffed a strawberry in my mouth so I would have an excuse to stop talking.

“Nine novels!” Ariana exclaimed. “That’s amazing! Wow, isn’t that amazing?”

The two other girls nodded. “That’s, like, incredible.”

“Great job!” Nikki said in a tone that was a little too encouraging. The way she spoke to me reminded me of how the popular girls talked to me when we were in middle school—like I was challenged in some way, a slow and pathetic pet.

I chewed as fast as I could, desperate to say something that wouldn’t make it seem like I was trying to brag. “But none of them are published,” I added, as soon as I had swallowed. “Except for this one that might be, in the future.” And then, because they still didn’t seem to understand that this was not an accomplishment, I said, “Hey, I didn’t say they were good novels.” I laughed a bit, but maybe it came out too roughly. Or maybe my tone was too harsh, or maybe there was a rash of bitterness in my expression I hadn’t been able to smooth away. Because when I said this last part, Nikki’s eyebrows shot up higher than they ever had before, and when she glanced sideways at Ariana, her mouth actually dropped open into a gleeful grin.

Ariana laughed along with me, but hesitantly, as though she weren’t sure she should. On the other side of the table, Jocelyn snickered and tipped back her glass of champagne, as though the party had only really gotten started now.

I could only sit there, forcing a rictus smile onto my face. At least, my lips felt like they were raised in some imitation of happiness. The awkwardness increased as each second of my silence ticked by, but I knew there was nothing I could say without making the situation worse. Still clinging onto that grotesque parody of a smile, I finally looked down at my cappuccino, my whole body stiff with confusion and humiliation and shame.

I’d continue, but I think the rest of that brunch, which has gone down in my personal history as The Brunch From Hell, can be summed up with a phrase my old friend used to describe our eighth-grade flute class performance: “We started off on the wrong foot, it got worse around the middle, and the less said about the end, the better.”