Girls In White Dresses (10 page)

That night, when Mary asked Isabella how work was, she said, “Today, I got career advice from a twenty-two-year-old.”

“It’ll get better,” Mary said.

“God, I hope so.”

About three times a day, Snowy dropped a pile of little scrap papers and Post-its on Isabella’s desk. They had handwritten notes on them, most of which made no sense. “Here,” Snowy would say as she gave them to her, “file these.” Isabella, unsure of what to do with the notes, typed them up and kept the originals in a file folder, in case Snowy ever asked for them. One time, Isabella found a Kleenex in the pile of papers. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked Cate.

Cate just wrinkled her nose and said, “Gross.”

One morning, Snowy dropped a manuscript on Isabella’s desk. “Why don’t you read this and get back to me?” Isabella held it with both hands on the subway home, afraid that she was going to lose it. She stayed up most of the night, reading it and writing out notes. Everything she wrote sounded stupid.
The main character is too one-dimensional
, she wrote. Then she crossed it out.
The main character does not have enough depth
, she wrote instead. “At one point in my life, I was smart,” she thought.

In the morning, Isabella’s head and eyes hurt. When she went into Snowy’s office to drop off the manuscript, she thought she was going to wet herself. She felt homesick for the list company, just for a second, and then handed her notes to Snowy. When Snowy handed them back to her later, Isabella could see that she’d crossed out almost every note Isabella had written.
No
, she’d written in mean red pen.
Not clear enough
.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” she told Isabella. Isabella went to the handicapped bathroom and cried for ten minutes. Then she got up, splashed her face with water, and went back to her desk. Cate smiled at her sadly.

Cave Publishing was closed the last week of August, and Isabella decided to go home. Her mom had suggested it, and Isabella almost wept with relief when she did. She was tired of getting Snowy coffee. She was tired of having Snowy tell her that she was doing her job wrong. She was tired of the name Snowy.

“That would be great, Mom,” Isabella said. She was looking forward to having someone cook for her. She could stay in sweatpants all day if she wanted.

“Oh, that will be fun!” her mom said. “Plus, you can help out with Connor. I’m sure he’ll love to see you.”

Isabella’s nephew Connor was spending most of the summer at her parents’ house. He had been asked to leave camp after he screamed at a counselor for changing the schedule. Apparently, the Guppies were supposed to have free swim after crafts, and the unassuming teenager had tried to mix it up and take them to archery instead. Connor flipped out and charged the counselor, head-butting him and screaming, “You idiot asshole!” The head of the camp thought that Connor showed signs of “unusual aggression,” and that it would be better if he didn’t come back to camp. With no backup child-care plan for Connor, Joseph had asked his parents for help.

“I didn’t know you could get kicked out of camp,” Isabella said to her mother.

“I didn’t know either,” her mom said. “But it would be great if you were here to spend some time with him. He’s a little difficult these days.”

Every morning at eight-thirty, Isabella’s brother dropped Connor off. Joseph was balding at a rapid rate. He looked old and tired to Isabella. He was probably upset, but he appeared formal and detached; that’s how he always was. “Good morning, Isabella,” he would say. Then he would bend down to talk to Connor, who scowled and remained silent.

Connor had been tested for every behavioral abnormality under the sun and had been diagnosed with some frightening acronyms. Now they were working with a therapist to “overcome his challenges.” He was odd. Isabella couldn’t deny that. But she’d always had a fondness for Connor. He was her oldest nephew and always told her she was his favorite aunt. He always chose to sit next to her. He was sensitive. (Plus, his mother had run off with a man she’d met on the Internet, leaving Connor and his sister with their dad. You had to cut the kid some slack.)

Last Thanksgiving, Connor made up a game. He would draw a box, then draw three objects. “Okay,” he’d say. “You’re locked in a room with a gun, a bomb, and a phone. What do you do?” No one else but Isabella would play the game.

“What would you do, Auntie Iz?” Connor asked.

“I would use the phone to call outside,” Isabella said. “I would warn them to get away, then I would blow a hole in the wall with the bomb and have the gun just in case anyone dangerous was out there.”

Connor looked pleased with her answer, and said quickly, “Okay, good one.” He nodded his head four times. Then he started drawing another room with three new objects.

All week, Isabella tried to keep Connor occupied. She took him swimming, she took him to play tennis. They went to see a movie, and went to check out books at the library. But on the last day Isabella was there, they ran out of things to do. They sat in the playroom, staring at each other.

“Do you want to play a game, Auntie Iz?” Connor asked. Isabella didn’t, but she said yes.

“Okay, so here’s the game. It’s called Deaf or Blind. So first, you tell me if you would rather be deaf or blind.”

“Blind,” Isabella said. Connor looked annoyed. He was holding earplugs he’d found in her dad’s room.

“You should choose deaf,” he said. “It’s better.”

“But I want to make sure I can still hear music. I’m going to choose blind.”

Connor shook his head like he couldn’t believe she was making this choice. “Okay,” he said, “hold on.” He went over to the dress-up chest and rummaged around for a while, until he found a bandanna that had once been part of a cowboy costume.

“You know,” he said, “it’s a lot scarier to be blind.” Isabella nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ve never picked blind before. It seems scary.”

“I think I’ll be okay,” Isabella said.

“Are you scared?” he asked.

“Just a little bit, but not too much.” Connor looked at her with admiration.

He stood behind her and wrapped the bandanna around her eyes and then tightened it. Isabella saw the blackness, and then, as he pulled it tighter, bursts of light started to explode. “You can’t see, right? Auntie Iz, you can’t see anything, right?” Isabella shook her head no.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to go in another room and you have to count to a hundred and then come find me. You can call my name three times. Wait, no, only two times. If you call my name three times, then you lose points, okay? And I’ll answer you so that you can try to hear where I am.”

“Got it,” Isabella said.

“Okay. This is hard, though, Auntie Iz. You have to listen with your insides. You can listen in a way that you didn’t before. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Connor walked out of the room and then Isabella heard him stop. “But Auntie Iz? If you get scared or fall down, you can take it off, okay? That’s okay.” Isabella nodded. She felt Connor touch her eyes softly. “You really can’t see, right? Okay, here we go.”

Isabella heard him run out of the room and shout, “Okay, go!” She was counting to one hundred in her head, and then she heard him say, “Auntie Iz, you have to count out loud!” So she started over. “One, two, three, four,” she said, and then she heard him scream, “Slower!” so she slowed down.

She heard a door slam downstairs and then voices. Her mother was talking to Connor. Isabella could tell that he was frustrated that she was interrupting the game. Then she heard her brother’s voice. They were talking to Connor like he was younger than he really was, and Isabella felt bad for him. She hadn’t noticed how their voices changed when they talked to him. She heard them ask him about where she was.

“No,” she heard him say. “No, you can’t get Auntie Iz now. She can’t come in here yet. She’s blind,” and Isabella was struck by how he said that last word. He said it like he was proud of her for choosing the blindness, like he was amazed that she would choose not to see.

She could hear Connor’s voice start to rise. His pitch got higher and his volume louder as he said, “No, you said three-thirty and it’s only three o’clock. I’m not ready. I’m not finished.” Isabella knew that he was shaking his head as he said this, tightening his arms and shaking them back and forth with quick, little movements. She had seen him work his way into a fit a number of times in the past week, but now she just listened.

“I’m not done, I’m not ready!” he said. “Izzy is still blind, and I didn’t know you were coming yet. I’m not done! I’m not done!”

Isabella listened to him as he shrieked so high and loud that she knew the neighbors could hear. “This isn’t how it was supposed to go!” he yelled. She listened to her mother and brother try to quiet him down, try to plead with him to settle himself. But he didn’t. Connor screamed with all of his might. He fought against it with everything he had. All he wanted was to know what to expect. His world didn’t look like he’d thought it would, and she understood. How could he keep calm if he couldn’t see? Isabella lay on the floor of the playroom upstairs and listened. She heard the screams and she knew exactly how he felt. He was right—she could hear it on her insides.

T
he bartender at McHale’s was sleazy in an attractive way. This annoyed Lauren. She couldn’t make sense of it. She was disgusted with Preston, yet still happy whenever he threw a lime at her from behind the bar. “He’s gross,” she tried to explain to her friends. “He has dirty blond hair that he slicks back behind his ears with little curls at the end. It always looks greasy. His eyes are a filmy blue, like he’s thinking pervy things. And he has this big scar on his chin that I just always want to touch.”

“So he’s dirty sexy,” her friend Shannon said.

“Yes!” Lauren said. “But why?”

“Dirty sexy can’t really be explained,” Shannon said. “It’s kind of like ugly sexy. Only you feel worse about it because you think you should be above the sleaze.”

Lauren felt better for the explanation, but it still unsettled her to be around him. “I will not sleep with him,” she told herself. Two weeks after she started working there, she stayed with Preston to have a drink after work and found herself having sex with him in the walk-in fridge. One second she was drinking a vodka soda, and the next thing she knew there was a bin of lettuce shaking above her head. She couldn’t serve a salad for weeks without feeling trashy.

“So much for that,” she said to Shannon. Shannon just shrugged.

Lauren was sure that Preston was not the right guy for her. But still, she found herself in his bed. She lay behind him and sucked his blond curls when he was sleeping. She knew it couldn’t end well.

Lauren was almost out of money when she decided to be a waitress. She had been looking for PR jobs in New York for a month and hadn’t even gotten an interview. So she started applying at bars in SoHo and gastropubs in the West Village. (She figured if she was going to be a waitress, she would like to do it in a place where she might see famous people.) But none of those places wanted her. It turned out that being a waitress in New York was more competitive than being in PR. Aspiring models and actresses flooded every restaurant, elbowing one another with bony arms to win the right to serve food. Lauren didn’t have a chance.

A friend suggested that she apply at McHale’s, an old-fashioned restaurant in Midtown with a wood-paneled dining room and a meatloaf special on Wednesdays. McHale’s was the kind of place that made people nostalgic for a time when businessmen drank at lunch and people ate pot roast on Sundays. It had a bar with red leather stools and a mean vodka gimlet. They offered Lauren a job the day she walked in and she took it.

And just like that, Lauren was a waitress. It was only temporary, of course. It was just an in-between job, something to make money while she was looking for her next move. She could tell that it made the customers happy when she told them this. They were more comfortable once they knew that Lauren had plans. She was just too pretty, too charming to simply be a waitress.

Lauren figured she would work at the restaurant for three months, maybe six months max. But a year went by and she was still there. She stopped sending résumés out to PR firms. She couldn’t even remember what she thought she had wanted to be.

At the very least, Preston was a distraction from the detour her career had taken. He wasn’t a big talker, and Lauren found herself filling up the silence when they were together. That was how she came to tell him the story of the ham.

In her high school biology class, Lauren dissected a pig. Each pair of students got their very own formaldehyde-soaked piglet to cut up. As they sliced and dismembered the little porkers, the teacher told them different facts about the pig’s stomachs and reproductive organs. He walked over to Lauren’s pig and pointed to the rump. “This is where ham comes from,” he told her. Lauren looked up. “Ham comes from pigs?” she asked. “Doesn’t ham come from a ham?” Everyone laughed. As soon as the question was out of her mouth, she knew it wasn’t right. A ham wasn’t an animal, of course. She was only confused for a second or two. But the thing was, she knew what the ham would look like if there was such a thing. She could picture it perfectly, as though she had actually seen it before.

She told Preston this story when they were lying in bed together. She didn’t know why she told him. Lauren hated the story, hated explaining how she’d thought a ham was an oval-shaped hunk of an animal that slurped across the ground. “You know,” she said, “I thought it would be a ham.” As she said this, she moved her hands in an oval motion. “A
ham,
” she emphasized, as though this would explain it.

Preston laughed so hard that he cried. “Did you think it had just that one bone?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I didn’t think about it.” He held his stomach and rocked back and forth. “Ow,” he said, wrapping his arms around himself. “Ow, it hurts! I can’t stop!”

A week after that, he woke up and said, “I don’t think this is going to work.” She was still in his bed in a T-shirt and underwear and didn’t know what to say. Immediately she felt sorry for the ham—it had been a mistake to tell him about it. That much she knew.