Girls in Trouble (30 page)

She stood on the steps. It was a clear, cool night, and the sky was sprigged with stars. She touched the bag, just for a second. And then she turned, and without looking back, she began the walk back home.

S
ara was walking home from work, layouts and catalogs tucked in her bag. It was still light and she was taking her time, traveling out of her way so she could go up to Central Park first before she started back downtown, needing a fix of greenery. As soon as she got into the park, she felt better. Bikes whizzed past her, and the soft smattering of sound hit her like light dappling a window. She breathed deep, trying to relax, to get herself in the right frame of mind before she had to go back to her apartment and work. All that morning Hal had been on her case, yelling at her because she hadn’t come up with a new name yet for the not-so-best-selling Grecian Swimdress, a homely, girdled bathing suit with a skirt draping to the knees. “You think a new name is going to make it sell better?” Sara asked. “Why can’t we just make a decent, pretty swimsuit to sell? This suit looks like we’re punishing these women for wanting to go to the beach.”

Hal gave her fish eyes. “You and your new campaign had better be in my office by Monday morning,” he warned.

She passed an old couple on a bench, holding hands, talking, and yearning clenched her stomach. She slowed her steps. What did you have to know to make something that miraculous last through your life? She glanced back at the couple. The man rested his head on the woman’s shoulder, and the woman sighed with pleasure, like a cat in the sun.

Sara kept walking. Better to think about swim dresses.

Sometimes ideas came to her right away, zinging into her mind, and other times, such as now, it was like pawing through sludge for a dark brown jewel you had lost. Everything she thought of sounded absolutely wrong. Mermaidens. Dives. She laughed at herself.

She should go home, should start her work for Madame, but she couldn’t tear herself away yet. She kept watching and then she was in front of the kids’ playground. She leaned on the fence. A little girl was playing with a balloon,
NO ADULT ALLOWED IN WITHOUT A CHILD
. She stepped back, retracting her hand from the gate. She sat down on a bench and suddenly, despite herself, she felt shaken. She told herself she was just tired, just overworked, and then she covered her face with her hands.

“Hey, are you okay?”

She looked up. A man was standing there, in jeans and sneakers.

“I’m fine—” she said.

“You don’t sound fine,” he said doubtfully. “Your voice is quavering.”

She stood up. The concern on his face made her embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said.

“Are vou sure?”

She nodded. Kids squealed from the playground. The balloon bobbed. “Yeah.” She slung her purse on her shoulder. “I’d better get going.”

“Okay if I walk you a little? Just to make sure you’re okay?”

She glanced up at him. “I don’t know you—”

“Well, I’m Scott. Scott Fields,” he said.

“Sara,” she said, and then she joined him.

While they walked, she sneaked glances at him. She liked his straight nose, and his long black hair, liked the way you couldn’t tell what color his eyes were because they kept changing in the light, from green to brown to hazel.

“So,” he said, looking at her suddenly, as if he were trying to read her. “Student?”

She shook her head. To her surprise, she heard Abby’s voice whispering in her ear: “Tell people you’re a writer and stop at that,” and for the first time, Sara felt shamed by her job. Well, Abby wasn’t here, and Scott
was, and Sara dug into her bag and pulled out one of her catalogs. A woman poised in white flowing trousers. “Wear the Pants,” the headline said. “Making Fashion into a Plus.”

They stopped walking and he looked at the catalog. “Madame!” he said.

“You know the catalog?” Sara said, surprised.

He leafed through the pages. “Sure do,” he said, “my mother’s bible.” And then he looked at her quizzically. “Wait,” he said, confused. “You’re a plus-sized model?”

“No, no, I write the copy!”

“You’re kidding!” he said, delighted. “Wait until I tell my mother! She’ll go nuts!”

“It’s fun,” she admitted. She glanced at his shirt. “The white stuff,” she laughed.

“Do my sneakers.”

“Set the pace with stepped-up styling that sneaks up on you.”

He laughed, glancing down at his shoes. “Did you always want to do that, to write?”

She shrugged. “I was the only little girl who wanted to be a shrink. Guess that was one of those dreams I gave up.”

“No, no, you didn’t,” he insisted. “I mean, in a way you still are a shrink. That catalog does more for my mother than a bottle of Valium. She looks forward to it. And I bet a lot of other women do, too.” He helped her put the catalog back in her bag.

Sara smiled. He was nice, this guy. She was starting to like him.

“Teacher?” she guessed, looking at him.

“Architect. I’m lucky because I’m a designer. Business is so bad now that half the architects I went to school with are driving cabs. I was the fool who held out for what I loved,” he said. He molded the air as he talked, as if he were shaping clay, and she couldn’t help but notice how large and graceful his hands were. “But you don’t go into architecture for the money.” He wanted to have his own firm, he told her, and eventually, he wanted to design his own house, build it from the bottom brick up. “Most of the architects I know like modern, so I guess I’m a throwback. I
like all those old features, the wraparound porches that keep you cooler summers, that let you get some feel of outside when it rains. It’s crazy to throw out the past just because it’s the past, don’t you think?”

They came to the subway. People were pouring down into it, jostling their way up onto the street. In ten minutes, she’d be home. “Well . . .” She fumbled for words.

“Would you have dinner with me?” Scott asked.

Her smile spread across her face. She tried to think about her schedule, to reach into her purse and dig out a pen or a scrap of paper. “Almost got a pen,” she said. He touched her hand, and then she felt a jolt of heat and looked up at him, startled.

“No. I mean right now,” he said. “Let’s have dinner now.”

They went to a Mexican place he knew in the West Village, a little hole in the wall that he said was his favorite place in the world. The restaurant had bright striped Mexican blankets on the walls and margaritas the size of soup bowls, and the two waitresses were young and cheerful and dressed in T-shirts and jeans.

Sara folded herself onto the tiny chair, her knees knocking against Scott’s, but she didn’t take them away because she felt that same jolt of heat again. She couldn’t concentrate on the menu and, in the end, ordered the same chicken tamales Scott did.

Scott was telling her about growing up an only child in a Santa Fe suburb. He told her how his mother used to scribble sayings from the Bible on the napkins she packed in his lunch box every day. “Almost every one of them was frightening. I remember finding ‘God has cast me into the mire,’ and she just loved ‘Fret not yourself because of the wicked.’ She used that one a couple of times. I always felt she was trying to tell me something but all she’d say was, ‘That’s between you and God.’ That was her way to get me to head for church and pray for answers.” He grinned. “It was my way to head for the local movie theater. To me, double features were very, very holv.”

Sara laughed. The waitress set down the tamales. “Very hot plates,” she warned.

Sara hadn’t eaten all day. She loved Mexican food, but the way this food was prepared tasted different from any Mexican food she had had before. Each dish was more fiery than the next, and her mouth began to feel raw, her stomach was in a tangle. She took a big, enthusiastic bite, and instantly her mouth felt in flames.

“These are my favorites,” Scott said and Sara nodded. “Wonderful,” she managed to get out, and she grabbed for her water and finished it in a gulp.

“Are you all right?” Scott said. He handed her his water. “Have more.”

She nodded and sipped, moving her tongue experimentally. She bet she had burned a layer of skin off the roof of her mouth.

“Okay now? Good. Now tell me about you.”

“About me?” She played with her fork. “What do you want to know?”

“Oh—everything.”

She took another long, slow sip of water. Her mouth cooled, her stomach settled a little, and she started to talk.

She told Scott about growing up in Boston, about her parents. She told him how her father was an accountant, and how he had once bought her a real cash register for her birthday to teach her math, stocking it with ten dollars’ worth of real money. “He thought it would teach me the value of money, and it sure did. I learned that ice cream cost a dollar, that three dollars could buy you more than enough chocolate to make yourself feel sick, and that you could empty a whole cash register in two weeks without even trying.”

Scott’s smile widened and he put one hand casually on the table, and all Sara could think was that she could move her hand an inch and she’d be touching his.

“I’ve been making you talk and your food’s getting cold,” Scott apologized. “You eat, and I’ll be right back.”

He left the table and she saw him head for the restrooms at the back of the restaurant. The restaurant was noisy with people. Sara’s plate was still filled with food and all of it was so fuel-injected with jalapenos that she thought she’d spontaneously combust if she took another bite. She didn’t want to hurt Scott’s feelings since he was so enthusiastic about this place. She tried to arrange the food on her plate so it looked as though she had
eaten more, pushing it to the side the way she did when she was a kid, but even so, her plate still looked loaded. Sneaking a glance around for Scott, she quickly spooned the food into her napkin, folding it over into a ball. Then she crossed her knife and fork on her plate and there, suddenly, was Scott. She put one hand to her stomach. “This was so delicious,” she said, and Scott smiled. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said, and then he caught the waitress’s attention, making a check mark in the air for the bill.

Outside was muggy, the air thick as a woolen coat. Scott walked her home, but he didn’t take her hand or touch her again, and the one time she touched his shoulder, he kept looking straight ahead. She wasn’t sure what had happened to make him suddenly seem to like her less, but the closer they got to her apartment, the quieter he got, which made Sara want to talk more. They passed the Chelsea Cinema and she told him she had seen three movies there last night. She looked up at the marquee. “Oh, new movies are up!” she said. She felt fake as painted pennies. “Have you seen the new DeNiro?” she persisted.

He looked up at the marquee and then at her. “I hear that’s great,” he said, “I love DeNiro,” but he didn’t ask her if she wanted to see it. Instead, he pointed to a building across the street. “I like Chelsea because it’s got these great old buildings,” he said. “Look at that stone work, that nice brick detailing. Who does work like that today?”

She didn’t know what to do at her door, whether to invite him up, or say good night, but she didn’t have to. He thrust out his hand and took hers. He smiled warmly. His palm was dry, his grip as steady as if he were shaking the postman’s hand. “Thanks for coming to dinner,” he said pleasantly, and then, before she could say anything, or scribble down her phone number for him, he turned and started walking the other way.

Her apartment was eerily quiet. No one was shouting or stomping or doing anything that would reverberate through her walls. Her answering machine blinked with messages. A woman at work named Jennifer. Kate. A man someone had given her name to, clearing his throat. “Would you like to come to dinner with me, say next Friday at eight?” he asked, pausing as if any moment she might pick up the phone and answer.

She sat down at the table and tried to work, but she kept thinking about Scott. She didn’t have to replay the good-night scene to know when a man wasn’t interested. He hadn’t even asked her last name. Forget it, she told herself. She glanced at the clock. There would be other men, other hearts that would make hers beat a little faster. Work, she told herself, think about Madame’s bathing suits.

The next morning, Sara was on her way to the greengrocer’s for supplies—pretzels and cheese and juice—planning to do nothing but hole up in her apartment and work.

Her block was busy with people, and most of them seemed stunned by the heat. A turtle walked along the edge of the sidewalk, urged on by two children. A man turned on his boom box and salsa blared, making Sara wince and cross the street.

Jesus, this street, she thought. What she’d give for a serene little country house, for cool breezes and blue lake water. “Sara!” someone called.

She turned, and there, standing in the doorway of Healthy Chelsea, a tall glass of something gold and frosty looking in his hand, smiling out at her in delight, was Scott.

“What are you doing here?” she said, hoping he’d say he was here because of her, but he just shrugged.

“Checking on a building, stopping for juice.” He held it up so she could see and then he looked closer at her and grinned, took his napkin and wiped at her nose.