by JD Hawkins
“Funny.” I ignore the pinpricks of jealousy that I know I can’t possibly be feeling right now. The guy was basically a walking Ken doll. What woman really wants that? “I guess, yeah, good teeth. Had that going for him. He was a big guy,” I say at the camera.
“Oh yeah. He looked kinda like Prince Eric.”
“Prince Eric?”
“From Disney? The Little Mermaid?” Margo says, like I’m supposed to know that.
I relax. “Like a cartoon character, got it.”
“I mean, if The Little Mermaid was real—which I kind of think it might be.”
“Right. Especially now that you’ve met your prince,” I say, unable to avoid a little edge in my voice. Did I sound too sarcastic there?
“Um, that’s kind of where the similarities ended actually.” Margo bursts into laughter.
I grin at her, a rush of relief washing over me, check the cameras, and take a long sip of coffee.
“Go on.”
“He was….like…I’m trying to figure out how to explain…” Margo says, slowly, her eyes searching the ceiling for clues. “Well first off, he was very good at mini-golf—I can say that for sure. Pro status.”
“And that’s exactly what ladies like in a man,” I say, a joke for the cameras, a petty sense of one-upmanship inside.
“Oh god…” Margo laughs again. “Is it obvious I’m struggling to say something nice about him? You go. Tell me what you thought of Kate when you first met her?”
“Kate was…” I say, leaning back my seat. “She was beautiful, dressed really well, really warm and positive. Day job, modeling underwear for a catalog we’re all familiar with, though I won’t say the name. Does charity work in her spare time. Not a bad package, all told.”
“Yeah. Sounds like the total package,” Margo says, and I study her face for a moment, wondering if I detect a note of envy in her tone, or if I’m hoping for it. I get nothing. Margo’s expression is warm, open, and without a trace of jealousy that I can see.
“I…guess,” I say, for once struggling for words.
Mia leans away from her camera and asks, “So about that laugh, Margo. How did you feel when you first heard it? Because I noticed in the footage that you kind of froze in place and started looking around with like, an alarmed expression. You want to comment on that?”
Someone hits the playback button on one of the other cameras, and suddenly the silence of the room is pierced by the shrill recorded laughter of Kate the underwear model.
“Oh god!” Margo says. “I thought that sound was an exotic bird at first. That’s why I kept looking around, I thought it was like a jungle parrot on the golf course or something!”
Kate’s laughter plays again, and Margo tries to hold back a giggle, but pretty soon we’re both laughing. It goes a long way toward breaking the tension in the room, and when we get back to the post-date chatting, our good rapport feels less forced, more natural.
“So where’d you two end up after the date?” Margo finally asks me, wrapping things up.
“We had a drink,” I say, watching Margo for a reaction, wondering if she’s as curious about what Kate and I did after we turned in our clubs as I am about her and Brian. She just nods and takes a big swallow of her coffee, casual as anything.
“I figured. Owen is a player.” Margo directs her comment at the camera with a stoic smile that I can’t read. “Just in case you all hadn’t figured that out by now.”
I laugh as if I find that funny, though I’m really just buying time to decide on my move here. I can’t tell the truth—that I let Kate down gently after the drink ‘cause the thought of Margo going home with another guy had me in a funk. But I don’t want to lie either. I guess I can pretend I was more into Kate, mention that we talked about seeing each other again (though for me it was more out of politeness than genuine interest), give the fans something juicy to dream about, and try to cut off whatever’s still going on between me and Margo.
“Kate was nice. So we’ll see,” I say. It’s a cop-out, for the audience, for me, for Kate, and for Margo, but I know not to jump when I’m on a tightrope.
“Mm-hmm,” she hums.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m just trying to figure out if you’re a real gentleman, or just really good at letting women down gently.”
I laugh and say, “Can I be both?”
Margo gives the camera a look.
“How about you? Did anything happen after the date with Brian?”
Margo smiles at the question and takes a deep breath, and suddenly I don’t care about the camera picking anything up—I just want to know.
“No, thank god,” she says. Relief floods through me. “But he definitely…tried to make it happen.”
“What did he do? Put a move on you?” I ask, sounding way more like a dad after prom night than a curious friend.
“Several moves. At once! Ugh,” Margo says, hiding her face in her hands. “I can’t really talk about it ‘cause I don’t even want to remember it. I think he just wanted more screen time or something.”
I look at the camera, noticing Tom’s smile peeking out from the side. “Just give us the highlights, Margo,” he says. “The footage we have is hilarious. We need your comments.”
“Gather ‘round, children,” I say. “It’s story time.”
Margo drops her hands from her face, sighs, then looks aside as she pushes on.
“So it happened after the date, when we got back to the parking lot—and just to clarify, the date was awful. Besides the pro golf thing, he was impossible to have fun with. I was firing questions at him like I was investigating him! I know the details of his job, where he’s lived, what he likes, what he doesn’t like—I could write the guy’s biography, I swear.” Margo pauses to ride the laughter from me and the crew. “But I don’t think he even remembered my name, to be honest with you. Especially ‘cause he started calling me ‘babe’ toward the end of the date. Like he thought all his holes in one were some kind of foreplay for me!”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t like being called babe? I call girls ‘babe’ sometimes. Is that sexist?”
“No, I don’t mind it,” Margo says, musing on it a little. “I get that it’s a term of endearment. So it’s fine, but only as long as I’m sure you also know my real name.”
“I don’t think he did,” Tom cuts in with a laugh. “But he sure knew the name of the camera I was using.”
“So anyway,” she continues, after taking a draw of coffee, “the date finishes, the crew is starting to pack up the equipment, and we’re out in the parking lot—just me and Brian. And he—” Margo leans close to me and wraps an arm around my shoulders, pulling me close to her side, “puts his arm around me like this, real close and tight. Then he goes,” Margo lowers her voice in mockery of masculine tones, “‘Don’t worry babe, I’ll call the Uber. You ready to close the deal? Fair warning though, my cleaning staff hasn’t been by yet this week.’”
“‘Close the deal’?” I repeat. “He actually said that?” Margo nods, a miserable expression on her face. “Well. My heart’s fluttering,” I say, leaning my head on her shoulder. A joke, but the way she so easily gets close to me, the feeling of that soft skin on mine again, the way she smells faintly of jasmine—all of that is real, and the last thing I feel like doing right now is laughing.
She takes her arm off me, once again glancing between me and the camera, as if it’s just another friend at the table now, a natural.
“I tell him I’m going back with the crew, and he just looks at me like I’m a kid and says, ‘Don’t be shy. I actually think you’re really hot.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, what the fuck? You were awful on this date and you think I’m going home with you now? Are you delusional?’ And he says…what did he say…it was so gross I forgot it…oh yeah! Something like, ‘I know you probably read playing hard to get is what guys like, but trust me, I don’t like it.’”
/> “Charmer,” I say.
“I know, right?” Margo says. “I had the exact same reaction, I was just staring at him like,” Margo looks, open-mouthed and incredulous at the camera, “I couldn’t even think of anything to say, but I guess I should have said something, because all of a sudden he…you know when something really bad is gonna happen, and you’re hoping so much it’s not happening that you almost see it in slow-motion?”
“Sure. I’ve dropped my phone in the toilet before.”
Margo laughs before returning to the horror of her story. “I just remember literally thinking ‘is his face moving closer to mine?’ ‘Is he pouting his lips?’ ‘Is he actually trying to kiss me right now?’” She moves her open palm towards her face to indicate the motion.
“Please tell me that’s when you kneed him in the balls.”
“I didn’t knee him in the balls. But I was so stunned, right, that I moved away way too late. So he’s already bent over, like inches away, mouth already open…and that’s when I step back, like I suddenly woke up, and he’s still standing there, bent down, kissing air.”
I laugh as I say, “That’s amazing,” bringing my hand up for a high-five that Margo meets me with almost instantly.
“I think that was one of my top three worst ever dates. And that’s a pretty competitive category.”
“We should mention that we didn’t pick these dates ourselves,” I say.
“No, although I would love to see this guy’s profile. No way would a guy like that not have a profile with red flags all over it.”
Margo sighs at the camera, then looks at me for a few seconds, a smile on her face that I can’t quite read. It’s not the first time we’ve shared stories of bad dates, and it’s always cathartic, but something here, now, is different. I know it’s not the cameras, it’s something between us.
“To be honest,” I say, mischievously, “you don’t really pick dates that well when you do it yourself anyway.”
Margo sucks air through her teeth. “Low blow, Owen!”
I shrug apologetically. “Just saying. Maybe you need someone to show you what you need, rather than what you want.”
“And you think you know what I need?” There’s a flicker of a frown on Margo’s face, something real beneath the good humored chat for the cameras. Something she wouldn’t hide so quickly if we weren’t being filmed. “Are you thinking what I hope you’re not thinking?” she says.
“I don’t know—tell me and find out.”
“That you want to choose my next date for me.”
I pretend to be surprised. “Oh! That’s a great idea! I mean, if you really insist.”
“Fine.” Margo laughs and adds, “Only if I get to pick yours, too.”
“Ok,” I say, offering my hand and pulling up my sleeve, “deal.”
“No deliberately bad dates, no prank ones, or anything like that—please! I just wanna meet a nice, normal guy.”
“No bad set-ups, I promise,” I say. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Margo’s face softens, a rare sight, her eyes going rounder, glistening a little. “I wouldn’t do that to you either,” she says, in a tone too sweet, too intimate, for a studio filled with cameras. The kind of tone women usually use only across a pillow.
I look at the camera and wink.
“Did you just wink at the camera?” Margo laughs, punching me gently in the arm. “You’d better not even thinking about screwing me, Owen!”
I almost tell her right there, in front of the cameras, that it’s all I can think about right now.
10
Margo
My sister’s standing at my apartment door when I open it. She’s holding two jumbo-sized bags of potato chips in one hand, a bottle of champagne in the other, and her hair color is now a grayish-lavender platinum blonde rather than the strawberry blonde it was when I saw her two days ago.
“Classic movie night!” she squeals, throwing her arms around me.
When we were little girls, Louise and I loved old movies. We built our own imaginary world—I guess most sisters do—and the classics provided the backdrops, characters, and storylines that informed it. It wasn’t that we were trying to escape anything, because to be honest, our childhood was pretty great, but real life couldn’t compare to cinema.
What made it even more of a bonding experience was that while our friends were watching the emergence of reality shows and gross-out comedies, Louise and I were stuck with a crappy black and white fourteen-inch TV in the attic room we shared that couldn’t get reception. It was effectively useless except that it could play VHS tapes, so we raided our parents’ video collections, neighborhood yard sales, and charity thrift shops when we visited the city for any and every faded old video tape that caught our eye.
So our imaginations were fueled by actors and actresses in dreamily monotone, grainy images. Classic American cars rolling down surprisingly empty streets, conversations from phone booths, and ever-elegant clothes. Audrey Hepburn being three kinds of beautiful at once, Mae West sassing men before she devoured them. Meryl Streep making you forget she’s Meryl Streep and Olympia Dukakis making you forget she’s old enough to be your grandma.
I mostly grew out of it when I got involved with band and the school paper, sometime during high school—but Louise always clung to those visions of glamour. I think that’s what made her want to become an actress. And ever since we watched The Seven Year Itch where Marilyn Monroe dips chips into champagne, Louise wanted to try it. Eventually we did, as teenagers fooling around at a wedding party while the adults were all dancing drunkenly.
I can’t tell if Louise actually liked it, but somehow it became a tradition for us, as soon as we were hold enough to legally drink—to cheer ourselves up when times were tough with chips in champagne.
“Any news on your audition?” I ask, as she manages to squeeze the life out of me despite holding the food and drink.
She pulls away and steps inside as I close the door, striding toward the living room.
“Worse,” she says, “no news. I’d even take bad news right now, just to put me out of my misery.”
I walk into the living room where she’s already popped open one of the bags of chips and stretched herself out on my comfy, overstuffed loveseat.
“What happened to ‘trying not to think about it’?” I tease.
I go to the kitchen and grab some glasses while Louise chomps through the chips in her mouth enough to speak.
“Do you know how hard it is not to think about something?” Louise says, wiping her hands on her jeans and grabbing the champagne to open it. “You try to ignore something and it just turns into this giant, looming shadowy monster in your mind, waiting behind every other thought. Slipping just in and out of view like some killer in the trees.”
The champagne pops and Louise squeals slightly, then notices the hard look on my face. “What? Did I scare you?” she asks.
“No. That’s just a pretty good way of describing it. And yeah,” I say, holding up the glasses for her to pour, “I do know how hard it is trying not to think about something.”
Louise peers at me over a champagne glass she’s preparing to dunk a chip into.
“The Owen thing? Did you think about what I said? Might be worth a try…”
“Never mind,” I say, waving her comment away as I settle myself beside her on the loveseat and grab a chip. “What’s up with the audition stress? It’s only been two days.”
Louise shrugs as she falls back and sighs, almost spilling her champagne.
“Two days since I told you—five since the audition.”
“Hey, you’ve told me yourself that these things take time. That the casting people send the videos to producers, then those people take their time going through them, and then if they like someone they still have to convince everyone else—five days is nothing.”
Louise raises an eyebrow, skeptical. “I probably said that during the ‘optimism’ phase of post-audition stress.”<
br />
I laugh around a mouthful of ‘crazy’ chips. “What stage are you at now?”
“Ah!” Louise straightens up as if reciting a lesson. “It goes ‘optimism,’ ‘confused self-analysis,’ and then ‘deeply critical self-analysis,’ ‘utter nihilism,’ and then ‘trying not to think about it.’ Unless I’m interrupted by a call-back, of course.”
I look at Louise, only half-smiling as I try to gauge how much of that is humor and how much is genuinely the case. “Is there a stage after that?”
Louise beams at me and sips champagne through a grin. “This one. The ‘crazy’ chips stage.”
I laugh gently, clink my glass against hers, and drink.
“Ok, I’m done,” Louise says. “Tell me what’s going on with Mr. Big O.”
“Ugh…” I groan, as Louise stretches out, putting her legs on my lap. “I don’t even know where to start…”
“Well it’ll probably end with the fact that you obviously like him, so start anywhere you like,” Louise chides gently.
I shoot her a sarcastic glare, then sigh it away as I start talking.
“So at work they paired us up for this, like, dating show—”
Louise leans forward, eyes popping. “Like the Dating Game? They made you go on a date with each other?”
“No, not exactly. We’re supposed to date other people, and they film it, and then we get together afterwards to kind of go over what happened and make jokes about it.”
“Like those old reality dating shows?”
“Kinda. Yeah.”
She smirks. “And the problem is that you actually want to be dating Owen…”
“No,” I say, rolling my eyes. “That’s not the problem.”
“Well then what’s wrong? It sounds fun.”
“It is…but…”
I stare forward so long searching for the words that Louise sits up, grabs the bottle, and fills my glass to the brim, even though I’ve barely drunk any.
“Look,” she says, “if you can’t admit you like him—even a little bit—to me, then obviously you won’t be able to admit it to yourself. What’s your hang up?”