Carrie Pilby (18 page)

I will drink some more and stick with Matt right now because, for one thing, I owe it to myself to be with someone like him whom I feel happy with. The fact that he's not married means this isn't really so bad—Shauna probably doesn't appreciate him at all, and probably thinks it's easy to get a boyfriend and that people like me who don't have one are losers, and for another thing, if he
does
deserve for her to find out, then I should hang around him long enough to carry this plan to its completion. Maybe I can tip her off anonymously.

When I finish my wine, a waiter sets a new glass on the table. Its clear meniscus seesaws, then settles. I see the dwindling twilight from outside reflect in it. Matt fills his fork with his penne, but some of it falls off. “I'm an incompetent pasta eater,” he says.

“It's okay,” I say. “I'll bet you're really good at other things.” He raises and lowers his eyebrows.

 

The two of us work through our meals silently. I like portobello mushrooms and I like mozzarella, but I don't think they complement each other, so I push them off the soggy sandwich and eat them separately. Matt looks as if he wants to question this, but he doesn't. He was too full to eat a second ago, but now he's packing it away. What an appetite.

As if he's reading my thoughts, he looks up and smiles, then resumes eating.

Maybe after he's spent enough time with me, he'll leave Shauna. But am I just as stupid as any woman who believes this? Is it a trap we all fall into? If he wanted to leave her, he would have done it a long time ago. He really has met lots of people, I'm sure. But they were people who wouldn't have accepted just being his hobby. That's the only reason I got him. The only reason I met him. It was under the condition that I'd never be first.

Forget it. I deserve fun. In the name of greater good, once again.

“Dessert?” Matt says, a mischievous grin on his face.

“You were full a little while ago,” I say. Half his entree is left.

“We could split.”

I look down the menu, then ask him, “Do you like tiramisu?”

He shrugs. “I've heard of it, but what is it?”

“It's like wet, rummy cake.”

“Wet is good.”

I guess he thinks he's being charming. We order it, and they bring it out, swimming in a white creme sauce dotted with flecks of chocolate. There are two long, thin spoons on the side. They get an A for appearance.

Matt takes his spoon, poises it above the soft beige square and slices off a spongy corner. “Hey,” he says. “This is good.”

“See?” Wow. I'm actually the one with more experience, for a change.

“I must say,” Matt says, “first vodka, now rum. I think you're corrupting me.”

“I'm usually the one to be corrupted,” I say. “I'm pretty innocent.”

“Are you, now?”

“Yes.”

I feel a little wobbly. But ebullient, too.

Matt finishes his side and bangs the end of his spoon once on the table. “We did a good job here,” he says. “That's teamwork.”

When the bill comes, Matt fumbles with his credit card. He says, “Want to see my high-school yearbook, with all the dumb quotes?”

As contrived as our whole meeting is, having come from the personal ads and all, he still has to think of an excuse to get me to come to his apartment. “Where's your yearbook?”

“Back at my place.”

“Don't you live with…”

“Shauna,” Matt says. “She's not coming home tonight. She's in Jersey because her sister's in a play.”

So that's it. The only reason Matt called me to meet him tonight was because he knew Shauna would be out of town; we got dessert because he can't get it when he's with Shauna; and last time, we ate Mexican because Shauna doesn't like it. I'm just her understudy.

 

Matt's apartment building is brick and old. In the hallway, the air smells musty but the green carpet is clean, and the people living on the first floor have a fuzzy mat decorated with holly along with the word
Joy
. Matt leads me up the stairs to the second floor.

The apartment is tasteful. The living room is black and white, with a coffee table, a full entertainment center (either a gift from someone's parents or a sign that people in their twenties make way too much money) and pictures of Matt and Shauna together all over the place. Them at their prom, looking earnest and young; them at high-school graduation in their caps; them sitting on the beach in winter in hooded sweatshirts.

I look at Shauna and think,
You know exactly who you will be with on holidays. You will get him on his birthday and wake up next to
him every morning and go to sleep next to him every night. You will dance with him on your 50th anniversary. When he becomes wealthy through his computer consulting company, you will beam at his side. You know all his secrets. You remember what he was like as a boy. You will have him your whole life, until you both die. Your whole life. That's a long time.
Should I begrudge them?

“My yearbook's in here,” Matt says, and I follow him into his room. There's a double bed with a crocheted bedspread, a large TV and piles of books. Matt sits on his bed and opens the yearbook in his lap. The bed sinks. I sit down next to him. “Keep in mind I'm from Jersey,” he says. He points to different girls' hair.

“This one looks like a wig,” I say.

“You think she's bad, look here,” he says, and turns the page. I laugh. Matt adds, “Look at her quote. ‘Don't worry, be happy.'”

I like the way his fingers move across the page, quickly yet deliberately.

“It's good that girl searched hard for something profound,” I say. Next he comes upon a girl who's blond on one side and dark on the other. “Now,
that's
interesting hair,” I say.

“That was our salutatorian,” Matt says.

“Come on.”

“I told you,” he says. “It's New Jersey.” He looks at me. “I really like
your
hair.”

“It's just hair,” I say.

“It's really natural,” he says. He takes a strand between his thumb and forefinger and winds it around them. “I like sleek hair.” Then he takes another. I lean closer. Pretty soon, we're engaged in a fair amount of face-mashing.

Eventually I look at one of the myriad pictures of Matt with the girl next door, this one poised precariously on top of his laser printer, and I sit up. “I should go,” I say.

“Come on,” he says, lying on his back. “The night is young.”

“Yeah, but I have to work tomorrow.”

“So do I. So what? We won't get many chances.”

“Just because you're on Shauna's schedule doesn't mean I am.”

He sits up. “I know it's not fair,” he says. “But you knew the rules going in. And you said you were in the same situation.”

“Well, I broke up with my boyfriend. Because I knew that if I'm capable of having feelings for someone else, then I'm not where I should be.”

Matt's quiet for a second. “You're young,” he says. “You'll learn when you get older that it's not so black-and-white.”

“Well, maybe it should be.”

“It'd be nice,” Matt says.

“That's bleak,” I say. “For you to give up on marriage.”

“I'm not giving up on anything. That's what this is all about.”

The thing is, I don't really want to leave. I want him to convince me to stay. I do like him, and I like exploring the idea of whether you can actually do something like this without hurting someone. Can it really be okay?

“You mad at me?” Matt asks. He reaches out and holds the ends of my fingers.

“I don't have a right to be,” I say. And it's true. I don't have a right to anything.

“Come here,” he says, and we manage to get back into it. The hints of stubble around his lips tickle me.

He moves his hands up my arms, to my shoulders, then holds my chin.

But I have to stop. I pull myself away before anything major happens. He says he'll call me next week.

Unfortunately, I leave wanting to see him again as soon as I can.

 

When I'm back on my block, I pass the Guarinos, the couple across the street. I recognize them from their kitchen window.

Nearly on impulse, I say, “Hi!” Both of them look bewil
dered, and Tom mumbles, “Hi.” When I'm up the street, I look back to see if I can catch them looking back at me to figure out who I am. They are. I laugh. They look befuddled, then annoyed that I caught them. I triumphantly keep walking. I said hi to my neighbors; that should signify progress. I guess at this point, if I don't force myself on people, I'll never meet anyone. In fact, I feel like every social thing I do is something I'm forcing. Hopefully someday, I'll find enough people I like and things to do that I won't have to force myself to meet anyone else. But maybe most people are already at that place, and that's why they don't meet
me:
because they found enough friends early on, and now they're comfortable.

It's true, isn't it? Isn't that why no one met me at the Harvard mixer? Because they got into their groups early and gave up? Isn't that why Matt is engaged to Shauna? Because he doesn't want to spend any more time looking for a potential wife? Isn't that why all of my neighbors keep to themselves rather than organizing a block party?

Maybe everyone ought to see Petrov. Everyone is socially lazy. It's not just me. And at least when I am, it's for a good reason: I don't want to deal with hypocrisy, lying and cheating all around. In fact, look at what Petrov's list has done for me so far. Because of it, I've kissed a guy who's engaged and become engaged in kissing a girl who's a girl. Should I stay alone and stop forcing myself out, or force myself out and give up my standards like everyone else?

Once inside my apartment, I take out my new journal and flop onto my bed. Maybe it will help if I sort out my moral dilemmas on paper.

“Acceptable behavior,” I write on one side of the page, and on the other, “Unacceptable.”

But is there a use? What if I just get an overwhelming urge next year, or five years from now, to do something in the sec
ond column? What's the point? Third-graders who learn in school that alcohol and smoking are unhealthy and dangerous will say that it's wrong to do them or pressure others to do them. But over a period of time, they become less and less averse. By high school, they're taking part in it without a second thought. When we're little, we don't think, “Someday, I'm going to grow up and cheat on my spouse.” We know it's a bad idea. Why do we know what's moral and wise when we're seven, but not when we're twenty-seven? We theoretically should be getting smarter, not dumber, as we age. But maybe we also get weaker.

But we're not, are we? I mean, we're definitely not physically weaker. So it must be something else at work. Maybe it really
is
Satan. Isn't it funny that that's the answer that makes the most sense?

My God. The religious nuts are right. Everything bad is caused by Satan.

That's silly, of course. There are plenty of things we can resist doing: murder, stealing. But those things are extreme enough that they don't become harder to resist as time goes on.

Well, I can always say this: I'm only human. Besides…

The devil made me do it.

Alcohol made me do it.

I couldn't help it.

It was my time of the month.

I was created to spread my seed.

I was brought up that way.

I'm Italian.

I'm Jewish.

I'm Catholic.

Temporary insanity.

I'm having a bad day.

My parents made me feel worthless.

I was under a lot of stress.

It's just one of those things.

I have ADD.

They do this all the time in Europe.

 

This should go to some music…

 

I'm only human.

The devil made me do it.

Alcohol made me do it.

I couldn't help it.

It was my time of the month.

I was created to spread my seed.

I was brought up that way.

I'm Italian.

I'm Jewish.

I'm Catholic.

Temporary insanity.

I'm having a bad day.

My parents made me feel worthless.

I was under a lot of stress.

It's just one of those things.

I have ADD.

They do this all the time in Europe.

Step right up, get your excuses here. Excuuuses. Get your excuuuses!

And they say
baseball
is the national pastime.

The evening after my date with Matt, I decide I'll try calling Michael, who answered my personal ad, one more time, even though he never returned the message I eventually left. I flop onto my bed with my phone and dial. This time, he picks up on the third ring. He's fashionably late like me. Something we have in common already.

“Is this Michael?” I ask.

“This is him,” he says.

Poor grammar skills. Strike one.

“This is Heather,” I say. “You called me…through the
Beacon.
”

“Right,” he says. “From the personals.”

Strike two. He admits it readily, rather than being hesitant about it, like any normal person should be.

“So,” he says, “what's up?”

That question's a little broad. “Considering you don't know
me,” I say, “I'll spare you the rundown of how Fluffy is doing since her operation.”

“Oh, wow,” he says. “You have a cat?”

“That's a joke.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Anyway, I guess these things are a little awkward. You said you've never answered an ad before?”

“Not too many of them,” he says. “You just seemed different.”

“Well, I did put an emphasis on smartness. That's different.”

He sounds like he's been lying down and is now getting up, because I hear things creak. “Well, I read a lot, so I figured,” he says.

“What do you read?”

“Well, I mean, I don't read all the time,” he says. “But sometimes I do.”

“Is there anyone in particular you like?”

“Well, I guess science fiction people.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Asimov?” he says.

“I've read
Foundation.
”

“You're kidding! That's awesome!”

“It was pretty good.”

“That's cool. Girls don't usually like science fiction.”

At least he didn't call me a “lady.”

As we talk, he slides in and out of my good graces. He seems fairly normal, but not very bright. I wonder if I'm supposed to be the person to hint that we meet. I guess so, since I placed the ad. But I'm not in the habit.

“Well,” I say. “We could talk more sometime.”

“Uh…yeah.”

“I guess we could meet somewhere.”

“Wanna meet for coffee?” he asks.

There it is again. Why does it always have to be coffee? Why is it that no one ever says, “Do you want to get carrot juice sometime?” Or, “I know this great peach nectar place.” Those things are a heck of a lot healthier than coffee, and better tasting. If I ever meet someone who asks me to meet up for some fruit juice, I'll marry him.

“Well,” I say. “There's a Barnes & Noble near my neighborhood. Since you like books.”

“Sounds good,” he says. “I'll be away next weekend, but how about the weekend after that?”

“Well, Saturday's fine, during the day,” I say. “Maybe for lunch. They have sandwiches there.”

“Sounds cool.”

The particular Barnes & Noble I have in mind is actually close to the police station, which is why I picked it. I think about the girl who met a grad student on the Internet in New York a few years ago, and she went to his apartment, and he allegedly bound and gagged her and held her against her will for hours. He was a smart, quiet guy, and look what happened. You just never know.

Now that I've hung up with Michael, my room is silent again. Very silent. I can barely even hear the hum inside my wall.

I guess it's back to normal for me.

I wonder why I never heard back from A-Adam. Maybe he chickened out. I pick up the phone and call the 900 number to see if there are any new responses to my ad, and the recording tells me that there's one. It's just a few seconds of silence, then a hang-up.

I think about how if I died in my apartment on the day after my appointment with Petrov, no one would notice for a week. My father might call and not get me, and try again, but it could take a few days for him to realize anything's really wrong. I'll bet
there are people in the world who couldn't go a few hours without someone noticing they're missing. And there are people who could die on Friday after work, and no one would notice until Monday. But for me, it could take an entire week. Perhaps that is a way to gauge how much you are loved in the world—how long it would take people to notice that you're missing. Right now, I would not fare well.

 

Soon, Thanksgiving Eve arrives. That afternoon, the streets start to get crowded. People have gotten off work early, I guess. I walk a few blocks to the local supermarket. I figure I'll nab a rotisserie chicken and have a makeshift Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. I expect the counter where the rotisserie chickens are to be empty, but there's a line that winds back through the frozen foods. I wonder why all these people are planning to eat supermarket-prepared chickens on Thanksgiving instead of the standard turkey. It seems almost sacrilegious. At least I have an excuse. Could it be that there really
are
other people alone?

When I look at them, I doubt it. They're largely well-dressed, impatient and sometimes beside a significant other. Maybe they just don't like turkey, or maybe they're eating the chicken tonight so that they don't have to cook. But who would eat chicken the night before a virtual turkeython?

All of them look anxious. I know that some are ready to shed their business clothes and their pinching high heels and hop into their cars to head out of town. I think about how when I was little, people used to bring their kids from the suburbs to the cities to visit their grandparents on holidays, and how now, people in their twenties and early thirties
live
in the cities, so they take their kids back to the suburbs, where they grew up, to see the kids' grandparents. I guess the trend will keep going back and forth until the suburbs are so citified and the cities are so suburbified that you won't recognize the difference.

I trot through the aisles, collecting cranberry sauce, ginger ale, wine (might as well go all-out), creamed corn, marshmallows, yams and a pouch of frozen buttered peas and carrots. I am not recreating the first Thanksgiving meal consumed by the Pilgrims (who, contrary to popular American belief, were English Separatists and not regular Puritans, a fact that's apropos of nothing except that it's irksome when they teach misinformation in schools), but I
am
recreating the first Thanksgiving my father and I celebrated together. We didn't celebrate it until I was about five because my father had never had it when he lived in England, and I never paid attention to it until we started doing projects related to it in America in kindergarten. That year, we traced our hands and turned them into turkeys; we wrote essays on giant green lined paper about all the things we were thankful for; we learned about the Pilgrims (we didn't learn that they were Separatists) and the Indians (who started being called Native Americans when I was in third grade) and about what they ate, which probably did not include poultry containing a pop-up thermometer. When, during kindergarten, I told my father that I wanted to celebrate, he called around and managed to come up with a hearty list of fixings that turned into a bountiful meal. Except for a few years during college, he has done so ever since.

On the way home, I pick up a few slices of pizza to prevent my mouth from watering thinking about tomorrow's cornucopia.

 

It's quiet when I wake up the next morning.

I hear a few car doors opening and closing. I hear someone yell, “Hiiii!” But the rumbles of the buses, and the horns of the taxis, are absent. I look outside, and the street is so empty that the faint frosty dusting that coats it on cold mornings has barely been disturbed.

I check the time. Eight-thirty. Too early to eat. Too early to do anything.

I don't know what I'll do this morning. I can't watch TV. The only programs that will be on are sports and the Macy's parade. The parade is a tradition I'm not fond of. It's hard to enjoy: “There's the Snoopy float. Look at it go. It took five men to inflate. It is five stories tall. The circumference of its snout is two pi feet. Its inner temperature is 280 Kelvin.” They ought to do parades sponsored by the most downscale of Main Street's urban clothiers, with floats like “Polly Esther” and “Rippy Longstocking.” They should run them through the snootiest suburbs in the country.

Such fantasies do not divert my attention from my boredom, or my aloneness. My stomach is empty. I can hear it rumble.

It's too early for my Thanksgiving meal. But I have a hankering for my juicy, succulent, spicy, warm cooked bird.

I decide I'll scrub my kitchen shelves, which I haven't done in a while. I stand up on a stool and rub them down, picking the stickiness off the ketchup and syrup bottles. But doing this only spurs more thoughts about food.

Then, I think,
I'm alone. Why not?

I don't have to wait for anyone else to eat.

The thought of eating dinner at nine in the morning might make some of us ill, but there's nothing at all unhealthy about it. It just shows what a psychological hold our culture has on us, the fact that something that is in no way wrong or unhealthy seems disgusting.

It's not like I'm going to do it every day.

I quickly pull the chicken out of the refrigerator, where it has oozed some nameless but not wholly off-putting gel, and I place it onto a broiler pan. I set merrily to opening the cans of corn and yams. I position plastic bowls and dishes on the table. I bring a portable radio into the kitchen and turn on my classical music
station. The DJ is talking in his soothing voice about Thanksgiving, and it makes me happy. He's alone, too. We're two of a kind.

For a second, I remember that Kara said something about all of us orphans getting together. I wonder what she's doing today. But I'm already set for the idea of eating alone. When I get into a settled mood, it takes a lot to edge me out of it. I do feel a small pang of guilt, but I feel a greater degree of happiness that I forgot to call Kara, because I'd really rather be by myself today. Maybe next year I'll get us orphans together.

I fire up the yams and marshmallows and get the water boiling for the stuffing. I fold my napkin and place it next to my plate. The seasoning for the stuffing smells delicious.

And this, my friends, is the beauty, the wonder, the joy—the reward for being alone! I don't have to sit in the living room inhaling four hours of turkey fumes waiting for someone to stick a charred mitt into the oven and pull out The Bird. I don't have to stare at the parade or some sports event pretending I'm not thinking about tender, juicy white meat. The Bird is mine! The Bird is all for me!

I can pick it apart all day. I can eat chicken for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This is my Bird.

 

The tinkling of the piano keys on the radio complements the clinking of my wineglass and cutlery as I eat and drink. I'm seated at the black wooden dining table that's from the apartment I grew up in—in fact, much of our old furniture is in my apartment. (The rest we sold or gave away.) I have a pink tablecloth on top, but for a second, I peel it back to look for nicks and scratches on the table, to revel in the fact that each of them was made during some Thanksgiving celebration or dinner party in my youth, which was pretty much the only time we used the dining room table. We had a small circular table in the kitchen
for eating that we've since tossed out. This was the fancy one. Each nick must have been made at a different age, at a different stage of life, in the same apartment with the same person. I run my index finger over them.

The chicken tastes wonderful—tender and tasty, much better than I could have cooked. My father has said that my mother was a good cook, and it's quite possible that I might have inherited this talent, but I haven't made many attempts to find out. Even if talents are innate, they require
some
inspiration. I don't need to cook shrimp cacciatore with fennel for just myself. I don't even know what fennel is.

I plow through the corn, cranberries, stuffing and potatoes. When I'm finished, and when the dishes are done, I flop down on my living room couch like a satisfied pooch. On some occasions, there's nothing better than an empty head and a full stomach.

 

At noon, my father calls.

He wishes me a happy Thanksgiving. He asks again whether he should call some friends in the city so I can go visit them. I decline.

He asks what I'm going to eat.

“Uh, I think I'm going to have this rotisserie chicken I bought,” I say, “and some corn and cranberry sauce, and probably potatoes and stuffing.”

“Sounds like you've picked up on our tradition,” he says. “I wish I was there.”

I know he's not just saying that. But I also wonder sometimes if he stays away because it's just easier for him.

“Maybe you can get them to have Thanksgiving in Luxembourg,” I say.

“Sounds like a battle I wouldn't choose,” he says, “but I am thankful today. I'm thankful I have you.”

 

When I hang up, it's completely quiet. More so than usual because there's no reason to expect the phone to ring again. Even telemarketers won't be calling today. Matt sure won't. I'm sure he's sitting around a lively table right now, not thinking of me.

All I've got right now are books, a few DVDs and leftovers.

I read for a little while, then clean my bathtub and organize the top shelves of my closet where I found the polka records when I moved in.

I realize that I need to hear something. This level of silence is too high even for me. I can't go the rest of the day without hearing a sound.

So I stand up on a chair. I say, low, “Aaahhh.”

Then, I say louder, “Aaaaah.”

Then, I yell, “Aaaaaah!”

Nothing answers back.