May had been brutally honest with me, and now I owed her the same honesty. Or maybe it was myself I owed it to.
“It’s also that I like being the smart daughter. I like it when Mom and Dad ask for my advice about stuff. I like feeling capable and successful. I like”—here my voice dropped—“feeling smarter than Alex.”
“Of course,” May said gently. “Who wouldn’t?”
“And that interview I told you about?” I said. “For some reason every time I think about it I get scared. I think about plunging back into that world, and working all the time, and suddenly . . .”
I had to gulp air; I couldn’t even finish the sentence.
I forced myself to continue. “This is the first time in my life I’ve ever taken a break, and now it’s like all these doubts and fears are flooding in. I’m doing stuff I never thought I’d do in a million years. I spent three hundred dollars on makeup yesterday, and I don’t wear makeup. Not ever. God, what’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you,” May said. She got up, refilled our teacups, and sat down again. “But can I tell you what I saw last night?”
I nodded.
“I saw a woman who was confident and smart and kind,” May said. “First you scared off my ex-husband. Then you invited me out for a glass of wine because you saw how shaken I was. How many other people would do something like that for a complete stranger? And the way you took control at the bar. You took a group of rowdy people, and you managed to get their attention and make them focus on your questions. You were . . . breathtaking.”
I sat there, basking in the glow of that word.
“But it wasn’t me,” I finally said. “That’s the thing. I don’t do stuff like that.”
May looked at me and smiled.
“Well, whoever she was, I kind of liked her,” she said gently.
I stared at her. I was so caught off guard I couldn’t respond. I hadn’t thought about whether the things I’d done were good or bad—well, other than the near-sex on the conference room table. I was pretty sure that fell into the bad-girl category. I’d only been focusing on the fact that all that stuff I’d been doing wasn’t me.
May’s phone rang.
“Oh, no,” she said to me, holding up a finger. “Hold that thought.”
“Blind Dates. Yes, we are accepting new clients. Thanks so much for calling,” she said. “Can I take down some quick information and phone you right back?”
May reached for a pen and pad of paper by the phone and scribbled down notes while she made sympathetic noises: “Um-hmm. Oh, dear, I’m so sorry to hear that. No, don’t worry about a thing. We’re going to take care of all that.”
I swiped my napkin over my face again, trying to scrub away the last bits of makeup. Would it be really awful if I ate the crumbs on the cookie plate? I wondered. What the hell? My dignity was long gone already.
“Sorry,” May said as she hung up. “But that just gave me an idea.”
I stopped licking my index finger and looked up at her.
“Jane Swenson, age thirty-eight, divorced two years ago,” she said, reading from her notes. “She’s ready to start dating again. Want to go interview her?”
“Me?” I said.
“Then, if you want, you can set her up with one of our other clients,” May said. “We can go through the files together and figure out who would be best for her. And if you like doing it, I’d love to offer you a job.”
I stared at her. “Are you serious?”
“I need some extra help,” May said. “Especially now that I’ve got these ads. I have a feeling I’m going to have a lot of new business coming in. And maybe it would help you, too. Maybe you could use a little bit of time to figure out what you really want to do. You can work with me for as long as you want, and if you decide to take that other job, then you can leave whenever you want, too. No pressure.”
Work here? With May?
I thought about Ms. Givens sitting in front of her state-of-the-art computer, then I looked at May. She had a smudge of chocolate on her right cheek. She conducted business from her kitchen counter instead of a Hong Kong office. She walked around her house barefoot and thought nothing of having a two-hour talk with me in the middle of a workday. Her life was the opposite of mine. How could I come work for her? How could I stumble off in such a strange, unexpected direction?
May must’ve sensed my hesitation.
“Think about it,” she urged me. “And if you decide not to, I hope we’ll still be friends.”
May had offered me a job without checking my references. She hadn’t even mentioned a salary. Did she have any idea what I’d earned in my last job? There wasn’t any way she’d be able to pay me anything approaching what I was used to making. This was all very nice and pleasant, sitting here in her kitchen and sipping honey-sweetened tea and talking, but it wasn’t real life. It wasn’t my life.
I was trying to figure out how to gently turn her down without hurting her feelings when my cell phone vibrated. I looked down and saw an unfamiliar local number.
“Go ahead,” May said. “I’ve been answering my phone since I met you.”
“Probably just a telemarketer,” I said. “I’ll get rid of them.”
It wasn’t a telemarketer.
My heart started beating a little faster when I heard Bradley’s voice.
“Hey,” I said.
“Just called the house and your mom gave me this number,” he said. “I was wondering if you wanted to go to that movie tonight.”
“Sure,” I said. God, why couldn’t I think of anything witty to say?
“Pick you up around eight?” he asked.
“Great!” I said. Wit and charm; Helen of Troy had nothing on me.
“Oops, just got paged by my editor,” Bradley said. “Gotta run. See you then.”
“Let me guess,” May said as I put my phone away. “That was the guy.”
“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling. “I’m seeing him tonight.”
“Good for you,” May said. “So he’s the one, huh?”
“I think he might be,” I said.
“I’ve got only one bit of advice for you,” May said. “Don’t worry about your sister so much. I think you’re pretty spectacular in your own right. And don’t forget to think about my offer. Tell you what: if you do the interview and find the client a match, I’ll pay you three hundred dollars. Look at it this way: It’ll cover the cost of your makeup and you can stop feeling guilty about it.”
“Sure,” I finally agreed, not wanting to hurt her feelings. “I’ll think about it.”
I spent the rest of the day working at a coffee shop before finally packing up my laptop around four so I could get ready for my night out with Bradley. I hadn’t been able to get much done. Memories of Bradley kept flashing through my mind while I sipped my latte and smiled dreamily into the distance. I probably looked like one of those saps from the General Foods International coffee commercials (“Screw the barking dog and screaming kids and exploding toilet, this is my moment”), but I couldn’t help it. I was seeing Bradley tonight, and he was all I could think about.
One memory in particular kept coming back to me. It was the summer before we both headed off to college—I to Princeton, Bradley to UConn—and he’d just bought a secondhand Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible with a hanging-by-a-thread fender and a muffler that didn’t muffle. He drove up to my house with the top down and the gas tank full on a sticky August night when we were eighteen and it seemed like anything was possible.
“Love the car!” I said, running out of my house before he had a chance to walk up the steps and ring the doorbell. I’d been watching for him from the living room window.
By now I had dozens of tricks to keep Bradley away from Alex. If she was home, I sometimes pretended I was getting something out of my parents’ car when he arrived, so I could intercept him outside before he ever set foot in the house. Other times I met him at the door with my co
at on and my purse in my hand, shouting a good-bye over my shoulder and telling Bradley I was worried we’d be late. That excuse didn’t always fly when we were heading out, say, to study at the library, but given my anal-retentive neuroses, no one questioned it too much.
Was I being paranoid? Maybe so. But the way Bradley stared at me when he thought I wasn’t looking—well, that was the way everyone else stared at Alex all the time. Maybe I should’ve trusted that Bradley’s feelings for me wouldn’t evaporate if he saw Alex walking through the house, her hair damp and heavy from the shower, her eyes electric against her summer tan. But by then I’d had enough. That was the year Alex won homecoming queen; the year she appeared on three local television commercials in a single night, causing our excited neighbors to bombard us with calls; the year she flew to New York to shoot a two-page spread for Seventeen magazine. (Is it wrong of me to bring up that a deranged art director dressed her as a shepherdess and made her pose with a flock of smelly, gassy sheep?)
It wasn’t as if Alex and Bradley never saw each other at school. But at least at school other people acted as buffers between them; Alex was always surrounded by a crowd. They’d shared a class or two, but they’d never spent any time alone, never exchanged words other than a brief hello as they passed in the halls. I wanted to keep it that way.
So I jumped into Bradley’s car, and we headed off just before sunset. We were so comfortable together that we barely spoke; we even reached out to change the radio station at the same moment when the song “Louie Louie” came on. We both laughed when our fingers met over the radio dial.
We circled our hometown for a while, stopping at a 7-Eleven and buying cherry Slurpees, before Bradley made his way over to our high school.
Somehow I’d known we’d end up here tonight.
I was aching for my real life to begin—college, then grad school, followed by a fantastic job and a big, strong, hunky 401(k) plan—but on that night, as I stared up at that old red-brick building with the sign in the lawn that said “Congratulations Graduates!” a lump formed in my throat. High school hadn’t been the best time of my life, but it hadn’t been all bad, either.
“Let’s go,” Bradley said. He jumped out of the car, hurried over to my side, and grabbed my hand.
“What are we doing?” I asked, letting my hand go limp and slip away from his.
How many times had I done things like that? Bradley never pushed, but he showed me in dozens of ways that he wanted more than friendship from me. He left his arm on the armrest between us at the movies so I could squeeze it during the scary parts. I never did. Whenever we hugged good night, he kept his face turned toward mine, and I knew he was hoping I’d kiss him. But I always pulled away. I adored Bradley, but he felt like a brother to me. If I kissed him, I’d probably burst out laughing, which wouldn’t do much for his ego or for our friendship. So I let things drift along, and Bradley, in his gentle way, never pressured me for more.
“See the flat part of the roof?” Bradley asked me, pointing up at our school.
I nodded.
“That’s where we’re going,” he said.
“Up there? Seriously?” I asked. “But won’t we get in trouble?”
“What are they going to do?” Bradley asked. “Suspend us?”
“There isn’t any way we’ll get up there without a ladder,” I said. (Actually, I also said something ridiculously geeky like “They could revoke our diplomas!” But it’s my memory. I’m allowed to edit it as I see fit.)
“You’re probably right,” Bradley said. “Can we just take a walk around school for old times’ sake?”
“Sure,” I said, and we headed around the corner, where I almost ran into a big, shiny ladder propped up against the wall.
“Imagine that,” Bradley said, gripping its sides and putting his foot on the first rung.
“Bradley!” I hissed, looking around. “Did you bring this by earlier?”
“Who, me?” he said, climbing up another few feet. “It seems sturdy enough. Sure you don’t want to join me?”
“You’re crazy,” I hissed, glancing around again even though the nearest neighbors were a few hundred yards away.
In the grand scheme of things, considering one of our classmates had gotten arrested for hot-wiring cars, one had almost overdosed on LSD in a school restroom, and several others had attended graduation in maternity gowns, it wasn’t the most flamboyant act of teenage rebellion ever. Still, up until that point, the only mayhem I’d caused was when I’d gotten a B-plus on a calculus exam. (And, truth be told, the only mayhem that existed was in my own mind. Even Mom had asked me if I wanted one of her Valiums that day.)
“Coming?” Bradley asked as he reached the top of the ladder and climbed onto the roof.
I put a foot on the lowest rung.
“I hate heights,” I whined.
“Just don’t look down,” Bradley urged me.
I put my other foot up on the next step.
“My shoes feel really slippery,” I said. “Maybe they’re damp from the grass.”
“You’re not going to slip,” Bradley said.
Another step.
“Did you buy this ladder just for tonight?” I asked.
“I stole it,” Bradley said.
My mouth dropped open.
“Kidding,” he said. “Come on, you’re almost there.”
“I fell out of a tree when I was six,” I said. “I got a concussion. Well, almost.”
“Almost fell out of the tree or almost got a concussion?” Bradley asked.
“Both,” I said.
“Two more little steps,” Bradley cajoled. “Keep your eyes on me.”
Then he was reaching out and pulling me into the safety of his thin arms.
“Thanks,” I said, stepping away from his embrace, pretending all he was doing was steadying me. I pretended not to see the hurt look flash across his face, either.
“Oh, Bradley,” I breathed a moment later, turning around in a circle. I’d never seen our school like this. Stretching out on one side was the giant green rectangle of our football field, flanked by rows and rows of empty bleachers. It seemed majestic, yet somehow sad. Adjacent to the school was the little garage where Mr. Carey held drivers’ ed classes. I spun around to look at a huge oak tree in a corner of the lawn. That had been my favorite place for curling up with a textbook and a brown bag lunch, away from the rowdy table in the middle of the lunchroom where Alex held court. Seeing it all this way made it look like an enormous, sprawling painting.
“Hungry?” Bradley asked, flapping open a red-checked tablecloth and laying it down on the roof. I turned around and saw the picnic basket he must’ve stashed up here earlier. It was filled with French bread and Brie, strawberries and dark chocolate bars. All of my favorite things.
“Bradley!” I squealed.
He popped open a bottle of sparkling cider and smiled. He’d even remembered to bring along two plastic glasses. He’d thought of everything.
We sat up there for hours, long after the sun had set and the crickets began to sing. I think we both knew it was the last time we’d be together before we left for college. I’d never felt closer to him. As I watched Bradley cut me another slice of Brie, I saw the white scar on his thumb from where he’d fallen off his bike when he was eleven. We joked about the obnoxious football player from our class who’d just gotten a vanity plate that said tghtend, and Bradley’s eyebrows tilted up in the middle when he laughed, like they always did. We even talked about his mom, who’d died the previous October after a long battle with breast cancer.
“I think about her every day,” Bradley said.
He turned his head slightly, but not before I’d seen the tears glistening in his eyes. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop.”
“Remember the time she gave you a half-birthday party?” I said. “She made you half a cake.”
“She sang ‘Happy half-birthday’ to me, too,” Bradley remembered, smiling.
“She wa
s such a good mom,” I said. We’d spent a lot of time at Bradley’s house over the years, and she’d always made me feel welcome. “I miss her, too.”
We were quiet for a while, staring out into the night, then Bradley put his arm around me and pulled me close. He’d planned this moment, I suddenly realized: the ladder, the picnic with my favorite foods, the rooftop at dusk. He was wooing me. This was Bradley’s equivalent of a Hail Mary throw into the end zone in the final minutes of a game; it was his final, bold stand before we went our separate ways to college.
I closed my eyes right before his lips landed on mine. They were soft and gentle, but I didn’t feel anything. No delicious tickling in my belly, no desire to wrap my arms around him and pull him closer. Nothing. I could’ve been kissing my pillow for all the passion I felt.
After a moment, I pulled away. It seemed kinder to stop this quickly.
“I’m sorry,” I said gently. I did love him. But not in the way he wanted.
“I can’t—” I began.
“It’s fine,” Bradley said curtly. His cheeks flushed, and he turned away from me.
Oh, Bradley, I thought, staring at his thin back. I ached to hug him, but I knew that would only make everything worse. After a few minutes of sitting together in the heavy silence, he stood up and offered me a hand. Even though I’d hurt him badly, he was still a gentleman.
“It’s getting late,” he said. It was barely nine-thirty.
When we left the rooftop of our school, something had inexorably shifted between us, and we both knew it. I was too chatty on the drive home, trying to gloss over what had happened. If we acted normally, maybe we could turn the kiss on the roof into nothing more than a friendly peck between old friends. We could forget it ever happened, and go back to the way we were.
But Bradley wouldn’t play along.
“See you later,” he said, still not looking at me, when he pulled up in front of my house. I could feel his pain; it was a physical force in the car between us, keeping us apart. Keeping me from reaching over and hugging him, like I usually did at the end of the night.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “Okay?”
“Sure,” he said.
The Opposite of Me Page 17