The Hypothetical Girl (11 page)

Yes, she should have, it must have been very cute, but then she lived far away and had a job as an office assistant at a meatpacking company, God Bless America Meats, that gave her great benefits and where her boss gave her Friday afternoons off all summer. How often do you get that at a job? It almost made living in Horseheads, New York, worthwhile, although a Friday afternoon off there was hard to enjoy. She could drive one town over to Elmira and go to the movies, or drive over to Corning and visit the glass museum. But how many times could a person go to a glass museum, even if it is very, very good? It was a finite number. She was sure.

It had recently occurred to her that a woman who is an office assistant at a meatpacking plant in a town named Horseheads at age thirty-eight really can’t be picky at all. She was lucky Charlie even wrote her back. So the date was set; it would be cocktails and conversation. And that would be that. If they “clicked,” it could become more. If not, then nothing much would be lost but another evening of her life.

As the date grew nearer for Estelle and Charlie, the self-described Ugly Man, to meet, Estelle became more nervous. What would she do if he had been in one of those car accidents that rearrange your face so you look like a Picasso painting? What if he had a hunchback? What if he was covered in boils, or had acne pits so deep
that you could fit a fingertip inside them? She pondered how she would politely extricate herself from such a person, and what sort of person it would make her if she did—just fled like that.

“I am so excited to meet you,” wrote Charlie, two days before the evening of their date. Estelle felt a chill run down her spine. It wasn’t the good kind of chill, the excited and slightly nervous romantic sort, but the other sort, the kind you get when you know you are soon to have oral surgery and it could necessitate some sort of large metal instruments sawing away inside your mouth. “I am excited, too,” she wrote back.

She was becoming a liar. The Ugly Man was making her one.

One evening before the date, which was set for seven o’clock at the Black Bay Tavern in a neighboring town, Estelle saw she had a message on Loveforreals.com. It was from someone with the screen name “Handsomeguy345.”

What are the chances
, she thought,
that someone screen-named “Handsomeguy345” would e-mail you just as you are about to meet an ugly man?
It was a million to one, perhaps. It was like winning a lottery. That rare. But without the money, of course.

“Like your profile,” wrote the handsome man. “Wanna chat?”

“Hi there,” Estelle wrote back.

And the conversation proceeded from there:

Handsomeguy345
: I like your smile.

Lovegrrl15
: Thanks!

Handsomeguy345
: So whereabouts do you live?

Lovegrrl15
: Horseheads. Where do you live?

Handsomeguy345
: Corning.

Lovegrrl15
: Oh, I like that glass museum there.

Handsomeguy345
: Yeah, it’s real good. So what do you do in Horseheads?

Lovegrrl15
: I work at God Bless America Meats.

Handsomeguy345
: Oh wow, I like their meat. It’s real good.

Lovegrrl15
: I know, I get free steaks once a month. And I get Friday afternoons off in the summer.

Handsomeguy345
: How lucky.

Lovegrrl15
: I know.

Handsomeguy345
: We should get together one of those Fridays. Maybe go to the glass museum? They have a nice café.

Lovegrrl15
: I love that café!

Handsomeguy345
: Then it’s a date.

With that, Estelle found herself in the most awkward and peculiar position she imagined could possibly exist. A date with both an ugly and a handsome man, one day apart. Drinks with Ugly Man followed by lunch with Handsome Man at a glass museum, no less. “What are the chances?” she asked Margaret, her coworker, the bookkeeper at God Bless America Meats. Margaret had recommended she go on Loveforreals.com. She had
met Jake there and now they were engaged. She called him Jakey-poo and talked to him on the phone in baby talk. “Awww,” Estelle could hear her coo, “is Jakey-poo upset? Does Jakey-poo need a huggy wuggy?”

Estelle had heard people talk to their children like this and found it very annoying, but with a boyfriend it was even worse. She wondered if all the couples who met on Loveforreals.com developed annoying methods of address. You meet someone in print, how can you know what they sound like in audio?

“You can’t know,” her mother said. “Deal with it. You are pushing forty.”

“Technically,” Estelle said, “I am one year away from pushing forty.”

“What-ev-er!” her mother replied. It was something you would expect to hear from a teenager, not a sixty-something woman living in Poughkeepsie who belongs to the Red Hat Society. Estelle suspected she got the phrase from her niece, LaDonna, who was living with her mother while her sister, Sonia, was in rehab. Sonia had been a crackhead and now everyone was very happy she was just a pillhead, addicted to Darvon and Valium and such. “It is so much easier to get off of those,” her mother said.

But Estelle knew the truth, that Sonia was taking their mother’s Oxycontins, prescribed for severe osteoporosis that had caused her back to curve up like a question mark. She would crush them up in the bathroom
and snort the resulting powder. She was also taking their mother’s fentanyl patches and sucking on them, under her tongue like a lozenge. These were not good things, not at all, but she hid her sister’s secret practices the way you might hide a vibrator in a drawer, even liking that her sister had found a source of relief, and meanwhile let their mother pick on her, the good daughter. The one who held down a job, had recently acquired a mortgage, and had never given birth to a child because she felt it was unethical without the means to create a college fund immediately for said child. You couldn’t go reproducing in the world just because you had a job that provided the occasional free steak. She let her mother rip her to shreds, whenever possible. It was like a favor to Sonia. And she owed her one.

It had to do with something that had happened long, long ago, to her sister, and the role Estelle had played in it. The event was so distant and truly dark it almost seemed like a movie she had once seen, or a dream. But it was real and she knew it and it was like a stone in her heart, a hard cold spot there that never let her feel completely happy.

She recalled the geology classes she had taken in high school and how they had a hardness scratch test you could perform on rocks, to find out what sort of minerals the different rocks held inside them. The MOH Hardness Scale would tell you if rocks were made of more than one mineral. She recalled they had tested for
(1) fluorite, (2) gypsum, (3) calcite, (4) quartz. You could find out things about rocks by determining what other material could scratch them and what they could scratch. She thought if you scratched that rocky place in her heart with a penny, a paper clip, or even a diamond chip, you would never see a scratch. It was that hard. It probably contained molybdinum or uranium or something. Or maybe even an element that had never been discovered. Her heart contained a glob of Kryptonite, the stuff that made Superman vulnerable, that had been imported by a meteor from a faraway world where things were harder than any substance known to man. Her sister’s heart, on the other hand, was more like a fossil. Something that had once been an organic thing, but had died out. A species gone extinct. Her heart was a dodo bird, or a small dinosaur, that had once run very fast. Estelle had played a part in it, the killing of that fast, special heart.

When she was nine and Sonia was seven, they had gone to a camp where each girl had to care for and tend her own horse. Estelle’s was Frost, a tall white gelding. But Sonia had gotten Kit, and Kit was pregnant. Halfway through camp Kit foaled and was out of commission, so when the camp girls went on their daily trail ride, up over the rise and into the hills for the entire morning, Sonia had to stay behind with Gramps, the father of one of the counselors. One afternoon Sonia had told Estelle that the old man would touch her in her underpants and smelled bad, “like sour cheese.”

“I wanna go home,” she told her sister, a tear dripping off the end of her nose onto her lip, where it quivered for a moment, before it fell.

Estelle, painfully aware of the position both girls already had in the complicated popularity echelon of the camp, had seen this as a further risk to their reputation, her sister drawing additional negative attention to them. Making some sort of stink about wanting to go home would be bad for their positioning; it could even rub off on her, and she was just getting in with the cool crowd.

“We can’t go home, Mom will get mad at us,” she had told Sonia, ignoring her little sister’s tears. “And whatever you do, don’t tell anyone about this but me.”

The following day, as the long column of girls rode away upon their horses, Estelle looked back. It was just a glance, but long enough to see Sonia’s face, wild with fear, as the old man placed his hand on her shoulder and guided her away.

Since that day, it seemed to Estelle, Sonia had shifted inside, her rare heart had fossilized and she had departed from life. And her own heart had gotten that stone inside it. That chip of Kryptonite that hardened her, and made it possible for her to take any sort of critique their mother could dole out. She deserved it, after all.

The day of her first date, the one with Ugly Man Charlie, soon arrived. Estelle found herself going repeatedly
into the bathroom at God Bless America Meats, not to actually use the bathroom but to look at herself in the mirror. It was, in fact, a kind mirror; she rather liked the way she looked in it. There were mean and there were kind mirrors in the world, Estelle had discovered. The mirrors at the mall in Binghamton were quite cruel and made her look obese and hideous. The mirrors at the airport there, on the other hand, were quite sweet to her, much better than she deserved; whenever she was going on a trip she looked forward to the way she looked in them, kind of cute and youthful and travelly. But the waist-up mirror in God Bless America Meats was the kindest of all. She always looked stunning in it, like a real beauty. It made her days working there so much more pleasant knowing, at any moment, she could go into the bathroom and look that way. It would make it hard to ever leave the job, in fact, because leaving would mean leaving that image of herself, the really pretty girl one, a girl who seemed like a fine-looking and even good person in the world, behind.

She let the door slam behind her and stood there a moment, in the soft white light of an overhead bulb (overhead bulbs are much better than fluorescent ones!), looking at the girl in the mirror who was going to have a drink in three hours with the Ugly Man, Charlie. She was
such
a pretty girl there. But she knew, deep inside her heart, somewhere next to that hard cold spot, that she could also be an ugly girl herself, a girl who had left
her own sister behind. She would be ugly if she were just looking at herself at the Oakdale Mall rather than the bathroom mirror at the meat company. She could not afford to be choosy. She was lucky to have a date at all.

“So what are you wearing?” asked her mother, in a cell phone text.

“MOM! Stop!” she texted back.

“Okay, don’t tell me, but it better not be anything green or yellow, those are NOT your colors.”

Her mother had begun texting recently, something her niece, LaDonna, had introduced to her. And like a teenage girl, it seemed dear Mom could not get enough of it. She texted several times a day: Did you check oil? Did you find a good dentist yet in town? Would you like my dentist to give a reference?

“I am fine, Mom. I have a dentist. I do not need a reference. I had the oil changed.”

“Well don’t change the oil too often, it is a waste of money, they say you only need to every twenty-five thousand miles.”

“Okay, Mom, I may have had it changed a bit too soon.”

She would cop to mistakes often like that; it was something she did for her sister. A sort of recompense for that thing that had happened, long ago. She would let her mother go off on her for this or that small thing to save her sister the scrutiny that might reveal her
Oxycontin addiction and the thing about the patches, the way she sucked on them until she was fairly loopy with narcotic.

At 4:30, Estelle went into the bathroom one last time and looked at her reflection. There she was again, a pretty woman. She applied a little spray mist cologne. Something called Butterfly Mist she had picked up at Walmart. It reminded her of Coco by Chanel, which was far too expensive. She coiffed her hair a bit with a finger. Pulling a ringlet out into several.
I am pretty. I may even be too pretty to date this ugly man, but there are reasons why I should be with an ugly man, too
, she thought, just as the little ding went off on her phone. “I hope you aren’t considering canceling your date,” her mother texted. “You are running out of time, sweetie.”

She turned off her phone and walked out to her desk. There stood Margaret. “You sure are using the bathroom a lot today,” she said. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, yes,” Estelle said. “I’m just nervous about a date I have tonight.”

“Really? A date? With who?”

“Oh, I don’t really know,” she said. “I met him online.”

“Well, as you know, that is where I met Jake … and look at us now … We are practically married!”

“Yes,” Estelle said. “I know.”

The hour of the drink date arrived and Estelle settled into her car to drive to the meeting place, feeling a bit like a princess about to head to the ball. But it was sort
of an anti-ball, she thought, knowing that the prince was an ugly man. Oh well, she thought, her car was nice. She had recently washed it and hung up a pine-tree-shaped car deodorizer that smelled, enigmatically, like butterscotch. She popped in her favorite CD. It was the Clash,
London Calling
, and with its familiar lyrics singing to her, she drove at medium speed to the bar where they were set to meet.