Been There, Done That (13 page)

“Cute,” I said. “And cute names, too.”

Evelyn, an attractive, forty-ish woman with short, frosted hair, was smartly attired in brown slacks and a tan crewneck sweater, a clever combination that undoubtedly camouflaged the layers of dog dirt that accumulated during the course of a day. She slapped the German shepherd on the back in a way that looked overly aggressive but that the dog seemed to love. “Altoid is out back.”

“Altoid?” I patted Bitty’s head. She snapped at my face. I stumbled back in terror.

“Oh, sweet!” Evelyn chirped. “Bitty’s trying to give you a kiss. She’s always loved people. Altoid’s . . . different. He needs to work on his social skills,” she said. “He gets a teeny bit upset when he meets new people. He’s very loyal, though.”

“And an excellent watchdog,” Dr. Archer said, entering the front hall with a scotch in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other. He held out the wine. “This is for you.”

I took the glass. “Aren’t you going to check my ID?”

“Oh, I’d say you’re at least twenty-one.” He held up his glass in a toast, and we both drank.

“There has been a string of break-ins around here, and we consider ourselves lucky to have Altoid on our side,” Evelyn continued, deftly steering the conversation back to her dogs. Apparently, she and her husband heard Altoid barking wildly one night. “Altoid doesn’t bark without a reason. Altoid is not a barker.” They turned on the outside lights but didn’t see anyone and went back to bed. The next morning, they learned of a robbery a couple of streets away.

They led me into the living room. I was still holding out for an enormous stone fireplace, mahogany paneling and shelves crammed with books. The books were there, but an awful lot of them were about dogs. Also, they were held in mismatched bookcases, most of which were laminate. And not white or black laminate, either, but brown, faux-wood laminate. Unforgivable. I read some of the books’ titles, because, really, the written word matters so much more than the artificial trappings of a well-done house. Once again, I pretended to be interested in dogs. Evelyn offered to lend me some of her dog books, and I smiled without saying yes or no. I peered at the framed photographs arrayed among the books and was relieved to see that some were actually of people. “These your children?” I asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Archer replied.

“They’re Donald’s children,” Evelyn corrected, though not unhappily. “My children are all the four-legged kind.” She rubbed Cream Puff ’s head with devotion.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.” The room fell silent just as I finally thought of the things I really wanted to ask: How long did the first marriage last? How do you get along with the children? Are previously married men “damaged goods,” or are they better for having learned from their mistakes? After all, the older I got, the smaller my chances at first wifedom were becoming. I really did want to know what it would be like to be number two.

We didn’t talk about that, of course. We talked about the guide dogs Evelyn was currently training and those she kept as pets. Bitty, Cream Puff and Altoid were all reject Seeing Eye dogs. “Bitty is too exuberant, Altoid is too aggressive, and my baby Cream Puff, well . . .”

“He’s retarded,” Dr. Archer laughed, draining his scotch and going to the freestanding bar to pour himself another. I didn’t think people had bars in their living rooms anymore. I thought people worried that it would make them look like alcoholics.

“You know I don’t like it when you use that word,” Evelyn said.

Their eyes met and they glowed. Dr. Archer crossed the room with his full drink and plopped next to her on the couch. He rubbed her thigh and said, “Oh, my flower. You have such a sensitive soul.” For a moment, they were the only two people in the room. And I decided that second wifedom might not be so awful, after all.

Dinner was, astonishingly enough, takeout Chinese. And not fresh takeout, either. Evelyn retrieved the cartons from the fridge and stuck them in the microwave. “I’m so busy with the dogs, I just can’t be bothered to cook,” she said without a trace of apology.

“Who can, these days?” I said nonchalantly, my inner child sobbing at the loss of a home-cooked dinner. I burned my tongue on the hot and sour soup (she should have only nuked it for about a minute and a half rather than three, I deduced). After that, I couldn’t taste much, anyway.

Against my efforts, the dinner conversation revolved around my “research.” I blabbed about how technology was changing student life and how today’s students were more focused on future careers than in my day. It was a load of crap. From what I’d seen, college kids were still the idealistic screwups they had always been. They still drank too much and took off their clothes more often than they should. They had more toys than in my day—cell phones, televisions, computers, flashy cars—and their fashions were simultaneously uglier and more provocative. Above all, they took themselves too seriously and all too often forgot to seize the moment. Just as we had. Or I had, at any rate.

Unfortunately, Evelyn didn’t forget about the dog books, although, mercifully, she only forced one on me. On my way out the door, she pressed a volume into my hands:
Soul Mates: Choosing the Perfect Dog
. “I sense there’s something missing in your life,” she said with a gentle pat on my head.

sixteen

When I told Tim what I had learned about the singing group, he said, “You’re a genius!” I knew he meant it as a hyperbole, but I got all stupid and tingly nevertheless. I’d sent the details of my breakfast conversation with Jeremy and Amber over e-mail; with dorm walls this thin, I didn’t dare say much over the phone. Since I still didn’t have a laptop yet, I had to go to the computer center. The center was virtually empty, as all the parents who could afford to send their children to Mercer could afford to set them up with a whizzy laptop and color printer (which came in handy for advertising keggers). I coded the message in my best teen-speak:

 
I deleted the message right after sending it, of course, but worried nonetheless that it would somehow be traced back to me.

Tim called me right away. I was out, so Tiffany took a message: my Uncle Tim had called. I waited till she went to the bookstore and phoned him back. “Uncle Tim?”

“Think it’s clever?”

“Brilliant. Like anybody’s uncle really calls them at college.” I was whispering, worried that Katherine might hear me.

“Her,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“‘Like anybody’s uncle really calls
her
at college.’”

I ignored his correction. “Anyone more worldly than Tiffany—which is basically anyone—would assume there’s something tawdry going on,” I chastised him.

“Oh, right. They’d know you’re an undercover journalist, just because you happen to have an unusually attentive uncle.”

“
She’d
know I’m an undercover journalist,” I purred.

“Really?”

“Of course not,” I hissed. “But you’re not the only one who can correct grammar. More likely, she’d just assume that I’d been having an affair with my high school math teacher, and we were staying in touch.” I was sitting on the floor by now, slouched against my bed.

“Actually,” he chirped, “that kind of rumor might work in our favor. Make you appealing to the right kind of people, if you know what I mean.”

We went on like this for a little bit longer. Then he called me a genius for having sleuthed so well, and I melted. My e-mail had implied that I’d been digging relentlessly when I finally struck gold: no need for him to know that everything had fallen into my lap after asking a couple of vague questions.

I’d already figured out the obvious plan of attack and how to implement it. In other words, I knew what Tim was going to make me do, and even though I didn’t want to do it, I suggested it before he got the chance to present it as his idea.

“The auditions are next week,” I told him. “I think I’ll use ‘You’re Mean to Me’ as my audition song.” It had been easy enough to track down the singing group, which was, ironically, called the Wallflowers. There were audition posters all over campus.

“Good thinking. I don’t know that song, though.”

“It’s a torch song. Makes me think of our days together.” Why did I always have to ruin my moments of empowerment like this? “Just kidding—that’s just the first song that came to mind. Got any other ideas?”

“I leave it up to you. You’re the musical one.” When Tim and I were college freshmen—real college freshmen—I’d told him I was going to audition for one of Cornell’s prestigious a cappella groups. He shook his head in disapproval. “You’ve got to pick your priorities. If you focus your energies and work really, really hard, you’ve got the potential to be a great journalist. But let’s face it. You’re never going to be a great singer.” I skipped the audition, telling myself that I probably wouldn’t have made it, anyway. There were times—too many—when I wished I could re-embody my eighteen-year-old (twenty, twenty-four-year-old) self and shout back at Tim: Why must everything have a purpose? Why should I always be working toward a goal? Why can’t we ever do things just for the hell of it, just for fun?

And here I was, eighteen again. And all I wished was that Tim was eighteen with me, lying on my bed, fully clothed, stroking my hair and telling me how great life would be when we finally grew up.

“I think we should set a time to meet,” I whispered. “Away from here—at my office, maybe. Got any free time this week?” We agreed to meet at
Salad
’s office on Thursday afternoon.

 
 
When I was eighteen, I thought Tim was the most ambitious, focused person I had ever met. He was going to be a writer, he told me, that first day over coffee. A reporter. He seemed so much more mature than the other boys I had met at Cornell, who never seemed to think much beyond where their next beer was coming from.

When I asked him what dorm he lived in, he said, “I don’t,” and took a drink of his coffee. I waited. He set the cup down and told me he was a commuter student, a rarity at Cornell. He lived with his parents in Endicott, NY, an hour away.

“Why don’t you just live on campus?” I asked, stupidly.

He raised his eyebrows. “What does your father do?”

“He’s a banker.”

“Your mother?”

“She was a housewife till a couple of years ago, but she got bored and got a job as an office manager.”

He nodded. “My parents work at a grocery store. Dad’s the deli manager, Mom’s a checker.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But they’re two of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” he said, tipping up his chin. “Most of my friends’ fathers work at IBM. There’s a big plant in town. But they aren’t any smarter than my parents. My mother does the
New York Times
crossword puzzle in pen.”

I envisioned his parents as two professors in red grocery aprons, but when I met them at their tiny Cape-style house, about a month later, they surprised me. I stuck out my hand to greet his mother, as my mother had taught me, and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. McAllister.”

She ignored my hand and enfolded me in her bony arms. “I feel like I already know you, Kathy. Call me Barb. Everyone else does.”

Meanwhile, Tim’s father beamed at me. “You’re just as beautiful as Tim said you were.” I felt a flash of pure happiness. No boy had ever called me beautiful before. It didn’t even occur to me to wish Tim had said it to me instead of to his parents.

 
 
When Tiffany came in, I went out. She wasn’t so bad, really; her manic spurts, set to a Clay Aiken soundtrack, alternated with long silences during which she wrote letters on scented pink stationery or listened to defeatist music sung by wailing females. When I was lucky, she wore earphones. Perhaps she did this out of consideration for me, or maybe it was because, on one of my cranky hangover mornings, I’d remarked, “What is this—music to slit your writs by?”

Still, I’d been living alone three years, ever since Tim moved away. In my apartment on Beacon Hill, I left the bathroom door open, flipped on the television at two in the morning, strolled around with bleach cream under my nose. Partly, I needed to be alone to get away from the pressure of being found out. More fundamentally, however, I simply needed time by myself. As Sheila was fond of saying, I needed my space. Of course, her space tended toward the ten-thousand-square-foot range, while mine was more metaphoric.

“I’m heading to the bookstore,” I told Tiffany. Her wounded look told me that I should have gone with her, that she was analyzing our pseudo-friendship and sensing a rift. “I can’t believe I didn’t think to go with you,” I said, a bit too obviously. “I’m such an airhead—I mean, like, I need books, right?” I wondered whether anyone still said “airhead.” Surely “space cadet” was out by now. I should really avoid slang altogether. “What time were you thinking about dinner?” I asked as I picked up my faux leather backpack.