Paint Me True (2 page)

“Look,” he said, “you sure you don’t just want to have some steak and that can be that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “All right.”

“H
e did what?” Hattie still stood, her light jacket half off and half on.

The ice cream parlor was empty except for us. Most people weren’t crazy enough to eat ice cream on a chill night like this. It had begun to rain, not heavily, but enough to make the air that gusted in the door smell sweet.

“Look, that’s not the worse part,” I said.

“You got dumped by
Len,
and that’s not the worst part? What did you do? Propose to him?”

“No, I-”

“Did you beg him to take you back?”

“No. Um-”

“Did you run into the restaurant with your eye makeup all smudged from crying?”

“
No
-”

“Did you-”

“Stop. Let me talk, okay? It’s not anything that happened tonight. The worst part is...”

Hattie tugged her jacket the rest of the way off, sat down across from me, and leaned in as if drawn by a magnet.

The words were stuck in my throat. I couldn’t look my friend in the eye.

“Do you have cancer?”

“No.”

“Pre-cancerous-”

“No.”

“Did another relative die?”

“No.”

“Is your dad getting divorced and your step mom about to throw you out of her old house?”

I shook my head.

“She going to charge you rent?”

“No.”

“Your last painting got rejected?”

“No.”

“The Church is going to ex-communicate you for your subversive art?”

“No.”

“You’re pregnant with Len’s baby?”

“No.”

“You’re pregnant with someone else’s baby?”

“No.”

“You registered as a Democrat?”

“No-”

“You’ve decided you’re a lesbian?”

“No, just-”

“You voted for Obama?”

“Stop!”

“Look, I love you, but if you join the liberals, our friendship is over.”

“I did not join ‘the liberals’.” I made air quotes. “So spare me the lecture about Obama being the antichrist.”

“An antichrist, not
the
antichrist. The scriptures say-”

“I’m thirty.” There. I’d said it. “And nine months.” Three months away from the dreaded age of thirty-one, when I would be too old to go to church in the singles ward. My records would be sent to a regular old family ward full of married couples and children.

Hattie sat back, then grinned as if she’d won a bet. “I knew it!”

“You did?”

“Well, I knew there was some reason you were dating my loser cousin.”

Yes, that was another detail. Hattie and Len’s mothers were sisters. She had his same pale blue eyes, though there the aesthetic similarity ended. While he was rail thin and all angles, Hattie was all contours. Full cheeks, a graceful curve to the neck, hands with short fingers that always rested closed, little fists even when she was relaxed. Her hair was light brown and cascaded down her back in gleaming waves.

I raked my hair back from my face with my nails and then stared miserably down at my hands.

“It’s not too late,” said Hattie.

“I’m not gonna find my soulmate in three months, and please-” I held up one hand “-don’t tell me some story from the pioneer days about an ancestor of yours who met someone and got married in five days or something.”

Hattie smirked at me. That was something else she and Len had in common, the ability to laugh without making a sound. A dimpled cheek and twinkling eyes said it all. “You can still date even when you’re out of the Church’s young single adult program. It’s allowed, you know? And so what if you can’t come to the singles ward? You’ll be that exotic girl the guys don’t see every Sunday. You can totally make this work for you.”

“Hey,” said the guy behind the counter. “Your sundaes are ready.”

Hattie made a pushing gesture to keep me in my seat and went to get them. Once she’d returned, she slid mine and a spoon across the table and said, “Your age isn’t why you’re single. It’s the fact that you settled. You have to stop doing that.”

The truth was the last thing I needed to hear at the moment. I wanted more sympathy first. My first spoonful of ice cream was the perfect grace note to a symphony of good eating that night. Sweet strawberries and the non-low fat ice cream.

“Seriously,” said Hattie, “you’re gorgeous. I bet you’ve been proposed to at least three times.”

I swallowed. “Five. But I lived in Utah before. People propose on the first date there.”

“How many non-first date proposals, then?”

“Well, five.” I hadn’t counted the time Ryan had proposed on April Fool’s day, or Andrew’s proposal at the airport when I arrived home from a trip. I’d assumed that one was a joke too, since he was dating my friend, but he never did speak to me again after I cracked up laughing, pranced around with the ring on my finger, and then pretended to punch him in the face with my left hand.

“So see? You’re in demand. You need to remember that.”

“You’re one to talk,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You agreed to go out with Mike when his friend asked you out on his behalf, and then had to go convince him to follow through. Talk about undervaluing yourself. You shouldn’t date a guy who isn’t clearly interested in you.”

“Mike was interested. He likes me.”

“Not interested enough to ask you out himself.” I knew I was being cruel. Hattie had been infatuated with Mike for years and had leapt at the chance to date him. Still, truth was truth. “Listen, you don’t date a guy who doesn’t ask you out himself, and who can take no for an answer. You want a guy who adores you. Who thinks you’re the most amazing person ever.”

“So, what, a guy who keeps asking you out even when you say no?”

“Yes. He needs to show commitment. I used to require that guys ask me out at least three times before I’d consider saying yes.”

“Fine,” said Hattie. She reached into her purse and pulled out a little notebook and pen. “Rule One, guy has to ask you out three times and still act interested. Len wouldn’t have passed that test.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m writing you a list of things you need to remember for next time.”

“I don’t need a list.”

“You were dating
Len
. What’s Rule Two, then?”

“I don’t do rules.”

“Guidelines, then. Suggested practices.”

I shook my head and focused on my ice cream.

“He has to be in your same political party,” said Hattie.

“No,” I snapped. “Maybe for you they do, but not everyone’s even into politics.”

“Then name another Rule. What’s something else my cousin did wrong?”

I ignored that prompt and instead thought about her and Mike. “Remember how Mike forgot your birthday?”

“He didn’t forget-”

“He did. And when someone reminded him, he got you a gift certificate to McDonald’s?”

“It was a gag gift.”

“I don’t see how that’s even funny. You need a guy who can give good gifts, who stops to think about it, who really wants to make you happy. I mean, even if he can’t think of something creative, he can at least buy you flowers.”

“He gave me flowers.”

“He gave you a half wilted bouquet from the grocery store. I’m talking real flowers, from a florist. The kind that can run fifty bucks or more.”

“Well, I’m not into flowers.”

“Yeah, but at least by spending real money, he shows he cares. Would you get a bouquet like he got you for a friend in the hospital? I don’t think so.”

“Okay, Rule Two, has to give good gifts, e.g. fifty bucks worth of flowers or more. What’s the next Rule?”

“No, I’m not helping you draft rules. I’m just saying-”

“Did Len ever get you flowers?”

“No. But we weren’t dating over my birthday-”

“Valentine’s Day, what did he do?”

“He sent me an e-card.”

“Ah-
ha
, so you do need to follow some Rules.”

“It’s not about rules, it’s about standards.”

“Which is what I said before. What’s the next Rule?”

I scraped my spoon around the edge of my sundae to get all the drips of melting ice cream.

“Hmmm?” prompted Hattie.

I wasn’t going to play this game.

“I think politics really is important,” she said. “I mean, the Church leaders are clear, this is the End of Days and as the world refuses to repent, we find ourselves in enemy territory.”

I glanced around. Hattie didn’t have much grasp of nuance when it came to politics or taking spiritual guidance from church leaders. I always worried that her comments would provoke a fight when she aired them in public like this, but the parlor was still empty, and the guy behind the counter was busy tooling around with the milkshake blender.

“Seriously,” she went on, “I dated this one guy whose sister was gay-”

“Your brother’s gay.”

“And look what happened to him and my whole family!” Her voice rose to a crescendo.

This wasn’t a discussion I wanted to have again. Her brother and the rest of her family had left the Church and I didn’t want to hear Hattie’s theory that liberals had conspired with Satan to make this happen. “Okay, fine, Rule Three... um... howabout the first date Mike took you on? Took you to a movie he wanted to see with a bunch of his friends. He basically just let you tag along.”

“I like action movies.”

“You so don’t. Besides, even if you did, tagging along with his friends? You need to only date guys who put thought into dates. I mean, he should figure out the perfect date for the two of you. Like I had one guy take me on a ‘hot chocolate date’ once-”

“How is that a good date?”

“We didn’t really know each other and he...” I quickly amended what I was going to say. The guy had pointed out that the rest of society did coffee dates, where people who didn’t know each other well met in a casual setting to drink coffee. The date could be as short as the time it took to finish the coffee, or could go longer if they really hit it off. Since we Latter-day Saints didn’t drink coffee, he proposed a hot chocolate date instead, and it had worked well. I didn’t want to get Hattie started on her anti-coffee rant, though. “Okay, so it made sense for us. It turned out to be a really casual, low stress date, and afterward I wasn’t interested in going out again, but he picked up on that while we drank our hot chocolate and it was just perfect. I wouldn’t have known how I felt without it, and if he’d taken me somewhere more expensive, then he’d probably have been way more disappointed.”

“So a guy should do a cheap, no strings attached date?”

“No, the guy should really think about the first date. Put some real planning into it. I mean, I knew a guy at BYU who did the same first date, same second date, same third date – no matter who he was dating. It became a joke. We’d be like, ‘Oh, you made it to the frisbee golf date? Wow, you were serious about him. I only made it to the bowling date.’ He put no thought into it. Planning a date should be like planning a-a diplomatic event. Guys need to engineer a date that shows they get you and where you’re at. They need to ask you out at least three days in advance and demonstrate that they are willing to do what you want and they need to put work into the whole thing, not just the planning, but the execution too. I mean, a date’s like a job interview, and they need to act accordingly. It’s their proposal to get you to spend more time with them, so they better make it a good one.”

“I don’t know how to write that as a Rule.”

“Well, don’t bother writing it down-”

“Rule Three, treat first date like a job interview and work very hard to impress. No generic dates, and no doing whatever it is he wants to do. It has to be about you. ‘Kay, how’s that?” Her pen scrawled the words across the page.

“Whatever. Sure.”

She tore off the notebook page and pushed it across the table to me.

“What? Why?” I said.

“Because you need to remember. You made the Rules. You have to follow them.”

“I was trying to help
you
.”

“You know the scripture about the mote and the beam. Thank you for noticing the mote in my eye, but you’ve gotta take the beam out of your own.” She pushed the paper at me.

I snatched it off the table and stuck it in my pocket.

She grinned at me as if she’d won this whole exchange.

While I’d been trying to be helpful, not start a game of one-upsmanship. It was time to finish my ice cream and go home.