Until the Real Thing Comes Along (6 page)

But it was always dolls I liked playing with the best. I treated them with great respect: washed their little dresses in a dishpan out on the front porch, hung them out to dry, then ironed and folded them and put them away in their Whitman’s candy-box bureaus. I never cut their hair into fright wigs like all my other
friends did with their dolls. I heard about one girl who dumped catsup all over her life-sized doll, then put her in the bushes and waited for someone to come along and start screaming. That news depressed me. If I’d known where the horrible event occurred, I would have gone over to rescue the doll immediately, would have tenderly bathed her and then dressed her in the finest outfit I owned, my First Communion ensemble. That sparkly white dress and veil lived in a plastic bag in my closet for years, making my other clothes feel guilty.

It’s true that I had a particular passion for Betsy-Wetsy; but I loved all my dolls, the baby dolls especially, with their sweetly needy faces and uncomplaining dispositions. Not that I didn’t understand what the real deal was with babies—my younger siblings showed me what red-faced squalling and leaky diapers were all about. But I wanted this. On one inspired occasion I put scrambled eggs in my dolls’ diapers. Then I carefully pinned the diapers back on, went away to attend to some task, and later came back into the room to wave the air before my nose and say, “Oh, my goodness!
What
have we got in-a
britches
?” which is, of course, exactly what my mother said.

I imagined the baby dolls’ sweet smiles replaced by mouths open and trembling in baby rage; and at those times I swaddled the dolls in receiving blankets and paced and patted and sighed wearily and worried mightily and felt satisfied to the core.

I played dolls until I was fourteen, and only stopped then because I was too afraid someone would catch me, and I would be embarrassed for the rest of my life. I would play dolls now if anyone would play seriously with me. Once, when Ethan and I were
dating, I showed him my doll collection and we played a bit. He was very good at it. But we were both a little drunk; it didn’t count.

I also loved playing house. I thought domesticity was a many-splendored thing; I didn’t know what could possibly be more satisfying than looking in the Sears catalogue for a new club chair while pineapple-upside-down cake baked in the oven. I liked all the trappings of the modern home: the steam iron, the copper-bottomed pots and pans, the scientifically engineered cleaning products, the pull-out vegetable bin of the frost-free refrigerator. I liked TV trays and paper doilies and the stately Mixmaster.

I learned to make chocolate-chip cookies by the time I was seven and it gave me a real sense of power. “Please,
please
!” my little brother and sisters would clamor when I removed the cookies from the baking trays to store them in the cookie jar. “No sweets until after dinner,” I would say, prim-mouthed, and then, finally, “Oh all right, but just
one
.” My mother’s white ruffled apron hung low on me, swayed languidly over my official Brownie oxfords. I was a model of cheerful righteousness and authority. I thought all you needed was a husband, a house, children, and a decent oven, and you could be happy. I still think that. It’s just that now I’m afraid to admit it.

I finish with my carrots, and look up to see my mother staring at me, smiling.

“What?” I say. I still hate it when she catches me daydreaming.

“Nothing. You’re all right.”

“I know,” I say. And then, standing, “Well, okay. I think I’m going to go.”

“You don’t want to stay for dinner?”

“No, I don’t like salmon.”

“Is that right?”

“You know that, Mom.”

She turns in her chair, yells, “Robert?”

Nothing.

“
ROB
ert?”

A moment. Then, “WHAT?”

“PATTY’S
LEAV
ING!”

“Ma,” I say. “Stop yelling! I can go into the den and tell him myself. Jesus. It’s like boot camp around here.”

She smacks me on the butt. “Don’t swear.”

“I just said ‘Jesus.’ It’s not like I said—”

“Don’t start. Honestly. You’re just like your father.”

Who has appeared, again with newspaper in hand. “You’re leaving?”

“Yeah. I’ll see you later.” I cross the room to kiss him. He smells like a cigar. In anyone else, I would hate this.

“You don’t like salmon?” he asks.

“She doesn’t like salmon,” my mother says.

“Why not?”

“Dad.”

“Why
not
?”

“Jesus,” I sigh.

“
Pa
tty,” my mother says. And then, to my father, “She just doesn’t
like
it, Robert.”

“What?”

“Salmon!”

“Well, I know that, Marilyn. She just said that. So. What should we do tonight?” My father is finished with me.

“I don’t know.” My mother wipes her hands on her apron, starts filling the kitchen sink with dish soap and water. She looks over at him. “Go to a movie?”

“Why don’t we go to a movie?”

“All right, Robert.”

“Good.” He looks at me over his glasses. “Come on, Scout. I’ll walk you out to the car.”

He calls me this, sometimes, “Scout.” I don’t know why. I am also Poker Chip and Bean Blossom. And on occasion, Fruit Toots. I always want these nicknames. I never want anyone else to know them, though.

When I open the car door and sit down, my father leans in and kisses my forehead. “I’m a little worried about your mother,” he says.

I feel the dull sock of alarm to my stomach. “Why?”

“She’s … I don’t know, kind of depressed. I think it’s the menopause got her again.”

“It doesn’t get you twice, Dad.”

“Well, she’s acting just like she did then.”

“Huh.” I can’t think of anything to say. I hadn’t noticed. Plus I don’t want to worry about my mother. I’m too consumed with myself.

“Don’t worry about her,” my father says, as though he were reading my mind.

“Just … call if you need me,” I say.

“I’ll call you if I need you.”

“All right, Dad.”

“How would that be?”

“That would be fine.”

Everything has to be his idea. It’s always been that way. But you can’t help but like him anyway. You can’t help but love him.

I watch him standing in the driveway, holding his paper, as I pull away. I raise my hand until I see him do it too. Then I head back to my pretend home while my father goes into his real one.

O
n Saturday afternoon, Mark comes over to install the VCR someone at work gave me. Sally Gunderson sells a house a week, it seems like. She’s rolling in dough, and she’s always buying something new and giving away the old one. I have a bread maker from her that she got rid of because it didn’t have a timer. Also a quilt whose colors she decided she wasn’t crazy about. I hope the sale she’s working on now goes through; maybe she’ll give me her house.

Mark is very good at this, as most men are. He has the VCR up and running in almost no time, and we put in the movie we rented. It’s
Moonstruck
, a compromise, because I wanted Bette Davis and he wanted Sly Stallone. Ethan will always watch Bette Davis.

Cher is kissing Nicolas Cage when Mark takes my hand. So gently. If I were watching him in a movie, I’d think, what a great guy. And he is a great guy. For anyone but me. I don’t know why his hand wrapped around mine makes me feel like someone is holding me down. I am finding it hard to breathe. I am thinking, What can I do that will make me need to get up?

And now he is turning my face toward him and kissing me and I feel that as soon as he stops I’ll start screaming. I don’t, of course. I say, “Would you like some pretzels?”

Later, after a long walk, we are out for ice-cream sundaes. I liked the walk. That part, I liked.

“I can’t believe you don’t like chocolate ice cream,” Mark says.

“I know,” I say. “It annoys everyone. They seem to take it personally. But I only like vanilla.”

“Try this, though,” he says, holding a spoonful of his sundae toward me.

“I don’t want it,” I say. “Thanks.”

“Just
try
,” he says.

“It’s no
use!”

“Pardon?”

“I don’t like chocolate ice cream.” I take a big bite of my sundae, then point to it with my spoon, saying, “This is good.
This
is what I like.”

“Okay.” He looks away, flushes slightly. I don’t know why people get so upset that I don’t like chocolate ice cream. This has been going on since I was a child, when I also detested hot dogs. “You don’t
like
them????” kids would say at parties, at picnics, waving their wieners in front of my face. “
These
, you don’t
like
????”

“
No
!” I would say, “I don’t
like
them!” Then I would eat the bun with catsup and mustard and relish on it, saying it was fine. And it was.

By the time we’ve finished our sundaes, Mark still hasn’t
looked at me. I suppose I’ve really pissed him off. I excuse myself and go to the ladies’ room. When I come out of the stall to wash my hands, I look up into the mirror. There, at the side of my mouth and extending up toward my nose, I see a smear of caramel. I look quickly around the washroom, grateful that it’s empty. Then I wash the smear off. It takes a little scrubbing.

When I rejoin Mark, he smiles and says, “Ah. You fixed it.”

“Yeah,” I say. But what’s in my head is: I don’t think so.

“It’s not working,” I tell Ethan on the phone. “But he’s wonderful.”

“Patty,” Ethan sighs. “Think about what you just said.”

“I know. I know! But he’s not for me, that’s all.”

“You just have to give things a little time.”

“I have!”

“Three weeks?”

“Three weeks of intensive dating.”

“Three weeks of playing around. Try a real date. Dress up like a big girl. Have some sex. Both of you need to relax!”

“What do you mean? What does he say about me? What?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, please.”

“Nothing but good things, which I’m not going to tell you because you’re a nasty person who doesn’t deserve to hear them.”

“I’m not nasty!”

Silence.

“Ethan, just because you failed as a matchmaker—”

“I didn’t fail.”

“See? This is why you should never get fixed up by friends. If you don’t like who they pick out, they get all pissed off.”

“You really don’t like him?”

“Well … no. I do
like
him.”

“So give it some time, Patty!”

“Fine,” I say, and lie back on the sofa, look up at the ceiling. Flat. No color there, really.

The next Saturday evening, I’m getting ready to go out to dinner with Mark. This time it’s to a real restaurant, some fancy place in Boston near the Common, to celebrate our one-month “anniversary.” He won’t tell me where. I have to say I love these kinds of corny surprises. I always wanted to bite into a dinner roll and find my engagement ring. This actually happened to a friend of mine. She and her boyfriend were eating one of those box dinners from Kentucky Fried Chicken and she bit into her roll and—voilà! “What if I had eaten it?” she asked him, and he said he hadn’t thought of that. Good thing she hadn’t. She brushed the crumbs off the ring, and put it on her finger. A few years later, they were divorced. Both of them had decided they were gay. True story. They now live with same-sex partners. But they’ve remained very good friends. True story.

I bought a new dress this afternoon at Theresa’s, a long red one with a slit up the side. Then I went over to Elaine’s to borrow her red Wonder Bra. “You actually wear this?” I asked, watching the stuffed cups rotate lazily as the thing dangled from my hand.

“Never for very long, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh. Well, is it … clean?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Is it?” I asked and she said,
“Yes
, it’s clean!” And then she told me to try it on and I had to admit that it did have a certain … allure. “Wow,” I said quietly, staring into the dresser mirror at myself.

“See?” Elaine said. “Doesn’t it even turn
you
on?” She was lying on her bed with a fat novel, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt under a plaid flannel shirt. She had a little cold, the satisfying kind where your voice is affected so people feel sorry for you but you secretly feel fine. She was going to stay in tonight, order a double cheese pizza and read until ten o’clock, when
All About Eve
came on. I envied her.

“I don’t want to go,” I said, sitting on the bed beside her. I saw my breasts jiggle like Jell-O in their Wonder Bra serving cups. It was a little sickening.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, you’re just nervous. You always get nervous when you have to dress up.”

“True. But it’s more than that.”

“Well, yeah. Tonight’s the night, right?”

I look at her. I’m tired, I realize. I need a little nap. Fifteen, sixteen hours or so.

“Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Patty. You came over here all excited. What just happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you please find something else to say?”

“Well, I
don’t
know, Elaine! I just … something’s missing, okay? It’s just not right. I had a lot of hope this time. I tried. But it’s just not
right
.”

“Listen to me. Don’t blow this. He is the best thing you’ve had happen in a long time. Ever, in fact. And he’s crazy about you!”

“Yeah.” I really want to say “I don’t know.”

“He’s got everything you could want. He’s good-looking, he’s smart, he’s got a good job, he has a HUGE feminine side.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. He’s sensitive. Intuitive. Imaginative. He actually listens, too, right?”

I sigh. It’s true. I should never have told Elaine all the good things Mark does. I never dreamed she’d use them against me this way. There is nothing bad I can find to say about Mark. And yet.

Oh, who can account for these things? I had a friend who was wild about a guy I simply could not understand her attraction to. Once, over a drink, I asked her what she saw in him. She said it was his smell. “His cologne?” I asked, and she said no, the smell you weren’t aware of smelling. Chemistry, I guess she meant. It’s a powerful thing. A guy can be a real asshole, but if he’s got the right pheromones, we hand over our hearts. Similarly, a guy can do everything right, and if it isn’t there, well, by God, it just isn’t there. And the more you try to force it, the worse it gets. It never, never works to try to talk yourself into someone. What happens is not that you gradually start to fall in love with him. What happens is that you see him take the cap off his fountain pen and think, What a jerk. You lie in your bathtub getting ready for yet another date with him, and as you’re washing under your arms
you stare into space and say quietly, “Fuck you, I hate this.” Then you let the water drain out of the tub and then you put your makeup on so he’ll think you’re pretty.