Ten Girls to Watch (26 page)

Finally, I dramatically pushed in my chair, picked up my bag, and said to Elliot, “All right, I’m all yours.”

“Really?” he replied in a hopeful, flirty voice.

Eleven-year-old Dawn reared to life, and instead of flirting back, I ignored this comment.

“So are you parked near home?” I asked.

“You think I’m making you schlep all the way to Brooklyn?” he said. “How meager your expectations, my dear. I’m parked in the garage out back.”

I gave him a wide-eyed look, and he nudged me with his shoulder. He took my bag and we rode the elevator up, silently smiling.

Then, just as we approached the lobby doors, Ralph rounded the corner. When he saw us, his friendly face took on an expression I’d never seen before—a smirk. A hot shot of humiliation flashed in my brain. Did
Charm
send all its marginal employees to work in the archives? Had Ralph seen Elliot do this precise walk with other girls before?

“My man!” Elliot said, putting his hand out to shake Ralph’s.

Ralph returned the greeting. His eyes grazed right over me, as if walking with Elliot made me simply an accessory.

“Have a good weekend, Ralph,” I said, trying to reclaim my place.

He mumbled something back. It might have been “You too,” but I couldn’t really tell.

In the elevator, Elliot leaned over and kissed my cheek. Despite Ralph, I felt the blurry buzz I’d felt on the Brooklyn Bridge creeping back into me.

When we arrived at his sensible blue Honda, he drop-kicked the front bumper and said, “Check this dent. I bargained seven hundred dollars off the price thanks to this baby.”

Robert swore by BMWs. The contrast was enough to make me want to pull Elliot into the Honda, make out with him like crazy, then tell him all my bargain-hunting secrets: Honey Bunches of Oats are always cheapest at the drugstore; never buy anything online without searching for a coupon first; appetizers are large enough to serve as entrées at almost every single restaurant . . . When he opened the door, I acted on at least one part of my plan (sharing all my bargain-hunting secrets would have taken far too long). It was well after five o’clock when we pulled out of the garage.

We eked through traffic for a full hour before we escaped the city, but when we finally hit the Saw Mill Parkway, we started cruising. Until we hit the lights. How were there so many of them? Stopped alongside a construction site, Elliot said, “Have I ever told you about my lists? One of my best ones is my list of port-o-potty companies. Dr. John over there,” he said, motioning to a green port-o-potty, “I’ve never seen him before.”

“I keep lists too!” I said, thrilled to be able to come back with something I thought he’d find funny. “I’ve got a great misheard-expressions one: skimp milk, windshield factor. But I think my best one is my food spoof celebrity names: Tuna Turner, Catherine Feta Jones . . .”

“Oh, we’re coming back to those, but first we’ve got to deal with Honey Bucket, Call-A-Head, Mr. John . . . Dr. John there is upping the game. He may be heralding a whole new age of honorific porta-johns.”

We moved from one list to another as we finally broke free of the lights. Bond movie titles: Midnight Never Fades, Dawn Never Forgets (my personal favorite). Names I would consider should I ever become a romance novelist: Brooks Reverie, Constance Waters. Animal group names: pod of whales, pride of lions, murder of crows, clutch of doves. Bad company names: Krazy Kuts (Crazy and Cuts have the same first letter to begin with—why the switch? And does anyone actually
want
a krazy kut?), Bake My Day (confrontational muffins? No thank you).

This segued to bad ideas we’d executed on ourselves. We were passing through Waterbury, Connecticut, when I told him the story of the summer in college I decided to save money and eat nothing but Easy Mac. It was great, until July when I started looking pale and had three nosebleeds in a week. A lesson for the ages: Easy Mac is not a robust source of Vitamin C. It’s a strange day when University Health Services doesn’t even test to see whether you’re pregnant; they just tell you you have scurvy, and it turns out they’re right.

Elliot reported that he’d permed his own hair in high school.

“I give you scurvy and you come back with a perm? Weak,” I said.

“I could get all serious and talk about bad marital decision making, but I don’t think you want to go there.”

I suddenly felt guilty that I hadn’t read his book yet. Guilty and petty. I should have read it. I would have had I not been passive-aggressively reacting to him being “out of town.”

I waited a second too long to reply, and he said, “Did I just do a Debbie Downer feline AIDS thing?”

“No, no, not at all,” I said. “Or yes, sort of. I haven’t read your book yet. I’m so sorry.”

“Phew. Don’t apologize. I’m totally relieved. That’s the problem with memoir. You write it, and then it’s all out there.”

This was the flip side of Helen’s “write the truth” advice. “I can only imagine,” I said. “I’m scared enough when I write fiction. It’s not like my mom
isn’t
going to know the stories are about her. But at least we can all pretend.”

“So true, Kelly Burns. So true.”

“How did your ex-wife take it when the book came out?” I said, feeling a little daring at the direct mention of the ex-wife.

“I don’t know, actually. Susan and I haven’t talked since the day we signed the papers.”

All I could think of to offer was another feeble “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “It’s for the best.”

“How long were the two of you together?” I asked.

“We started dating when we were sixteen, and we got married when we were twenty-one and then divorced when we were twenty-six. So ten years or five years, depending on how you count.”

He said it all so easily, without ever looking away from the road. Like he was listing the classes he was taking or his favorite songs. And then he said, “There’s part of me that still loves her. And part of me knows we could have made it work. But I guess the way I think about it is a little like binding your feet. You can wrap them all snug and maybe they feel fine for a while, but then your feet get bigger, and it’s terrible. You can push through the pain and learn to do everything you need to do on your tiny feet. And maybe that’s a prize-worthy choice. But Susan and I decided we couldn’t do it.”

Everyone seemed to have shoe metaphors lately, and they were all trying so hard to get out of their shoes, their relationships, their careers. I just wanted some of those shoes in the first place. I could struggle with outgrowing them later.

I said it must have been hard. He said it was. And though I didn’t say it aloud, I wondered whether he and Susan had really decided together, or whether
he
had decided. Maybe in her mind she’d been lovingly holding him tight until one day he cut her off and threw her away. I mean, Robert and I always
both
knew we weren’t working, but somehow it always felt as if he was the one saying it out loud and doing something about it.

“Are you in touch with all your exes?” Elliot asked, feigning nonchalance. Or at least it seemed like feigning to me, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he had dated so many women that discussion of exes was nothing to him.

Once again, I was suddenly aware of our age gap. Clarifying that I only had one ex was like shoving my inordinate youth into a beaming spotlight.
Look at me, I’m practically an adolescent
, then jazz hands. In college, I’d never ached to be older, but now, my age was like a disability. When I said “twenty-three,” people’s voices turned creamy and condescending. “You’re so young!” they clucked. Which essentially meant, “You’re too young to do anything real, but it’s cute that you think otherwise.” One of the reasons I thought my Ten Girls calls often went so well was that my age wasn’t immediately apparent over the phone.

“We’re in touch off and on” was the response I finally settled on, hoping it had an easygoing and experienced ring.

Elliot waited for me to go on, and when I didn’t he tried to take up the conversational slack. “
Charm
asked me to do a column where I called all my exes and asked them what they thought I should have learned from our relationship. I declined.”

I laughed, and then attempted to change the subject. “So tell me about the friends you’re visiting in Boston this weekend,” I said. “Anybody special?”

“Say ‘special’ again,” he said.

“What, do I say it weird?”

“Yes, say it again,” he said.

“Special.”

“God, you say it exactly like my mother. Where the ‘sh’ in the middle gets all the emphasis. I love it.”

So I reminded him of his mother. I didn’t mind since it sounded like he liked his mom. I also noted he’d conveniently avoided answering my question.

“Back off, fellow western-stater,” I said.

He held up his hand. “Do you hear that?” he asked.

I listened. “No,” I said. And then a moment later, “Yes.” We both listened to the small rhythmic pinging, which quickly became both less rhythmic and less small. “That knocking?” I said, using what was now the only appropriate word.

“I’m going to pull off at the next exit,” he said. But then, moments later, the knocking disappeared, just like that. The car sounded totally fine.

“Maybe it was just something kicked up by the tires that was banging around,” I said. We exchanged doubtful glances but drove on anyway. For the next hour, half listening to each other, half listening to the car, everything was fine. I’d told Helen I’d be arriving by eleven at the very latest. I was still very much hoping this would be the case. And then, just as we cruised past the last Hartford exit, the pinging kicked in again with a fervor that made it clear the previous rat-a-tat-tat had been nothing but an overture. This was the real symphony.

The next exit was for Mashapaug, Connecticut.

“Do you ever feel like you’re in a story?” he said. “Pulling off in a town called Mashapaug . . . You know nothing good is coming your way in Mashapaug.”

“We’ve gotten ourselves into a real Mashapaug here,” I said. “Ha-ha.” Then I switched to my radio drama voice: “Dawn peered into the gloom. Was it possible? Could it be? A Mashapaug approaching through the mist?”

“I was thinking more like the high school football team is called the Mashapaug Marauders, and they haven’t won a game in fifty years,” he said. “But the Monster of Mashapaug is pretty good too.”

The car pinged and knocked and pinged and knocked, like an audience that starts clapping slowly and then breaks into wild applause. “Just keep your eyes peeled for a garage,” Elliot said. I kept figuring that around the next turn the frontage road we were following would reveal a splash of lights, and then fast-food joints, a gas station, and a town would appear. But no. When the din of pings was just too much, Elliot pulled the car to the soft shoulder of the road and killed the engine.

He turned to me in the dark. “You don’t happen to moonlight as an automotive expert when you’re not on lawn duty, do you?”

“Sadly, no,” I said.

“I’m just going to let the car cool down for a minute and then turn it back on and see what happens.”

I tried to keep calm. This wasn’t going to interfere with my plans to see Helen. Everything would be fine. We waited ten minutes, and the grand result was that when he turned the key the car didn’t make a sound. At all. It was fully and completely dead. I checked my cell phone—9:03 p.m. I wondered whether I should call Helen. But I didn’t want to yet. There was still time. Maybe this was going to be a quick fix.

One AAA call and thirty minutes later, Elliot and I were smooshed into the cab of a tow truck from the nearest real town, Sturbridge. Reggie, the driver, informed us that none of the garages in town would be open till Saturday morning, but Wilson’s Automotive would take great care of us as soon as Mr. Wilson himself got in at eight the next morning.

I finally called Helen.

“Dawn! Hello! How’s the drive?”

I told her the bad news.

“Oh, no! I can come get you,” she said, and she sounded eager, like she meant it, but she also sounded tired, like I should say no.

I assured her she didn’t need to do a three-hour round-trip drive to pick me up. The car would be fixed in the morning, and I’d be there bright and early.

“I can send a car,” she said. The longer we talked, the more I could hear the weariness in her voice.

I felt terrible. Not like I was just inconveniencing her. Not like I was just going to miss out on some fun times for me. Like she really wanted to see me. That worry I’d had a few weeks earlier, when she’d taken so long to reply to my e-mail, crept back in.

“Helen, is everything okay?” I said.

“Of course! I’m just sad to miss you.” I didn’t quite believe her. She sounded too cheery all of a sudden.

“The car should be fixed in the morning. I’ll call you first thing with an update. I should still be there in time for the reading.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “If it’s not this weekend, we’ll find another one.”

“I’ll call you in the morning. Sleep tight and see you soon,” I said.

As we said our good-byes I turned back to Elliot. I felt terrible. I was supposed to be with Helen tonight. But I was surprised to find, once I was off the phone, that I also kind of didn’t feel terrible. This little breakdown extended the time I got to spend in Elliot’s company threefold, fourfold, who knew. Plus, me, Elliot, a hotel room in Sturbridge? Far worse things had happened. Though as we piled into the tow truck cab and the reality of the night descended on me, I turned clammy. I wasn’t really sure we were at the sharing-a-hotel-room stage. Was this going to be a one-room, one-bed situation? A forthright and well-adjusted woman would simply have stated her preferences. That’s what Robyn Jackson or Helen Hensley would have done. But I froze.

If I jumped in and said two rooms, I’d be a total prude. And if I said two beds, would he think I was full of myself, assuming he was planning to put the moves on me? And maybe one bed was just fine. One bed did not equal sex. Sure, the Mashapaug Marauders would probably go for a touchdown, but certainly I could intercept their passes. Or maybe this was going to be their big winning season? No, no, it wasn’t. After all, it had taken Robert’s team a year to get into the end zone. One little drive to Boston and I was supposed to bench my defensive team? No siree.