Dating Without Novocaine

by Lisa Cach

  “I had to drill through her tooth, and when I did, this spurt of pus—”

  “I’m going to throw up.”

  “And the smell—”

  “Stop it!”

  “I second that,” Cassie said. “That is beyond gross. Jeez, Scott, you’ve been sucking ether too long if you think that makes interesting conversation.”

  “We don’t use ether. That went out in the fifties.”

  “You get my point.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s safe, Hannah. The beast has been silenced.”

  I glared at Scott, then spun ninety degrees in my desk chair and stood, going to snatch the grocery bag out of Scott’s hands. “What’s in here?” I asked.

  “Greedy thing, aren’t you?”

  “You went to Zupan’s? We’ll have to get out the linen tablecloth.” Zupan’s was the aesthetically pleasing grocery store a few blocks down from our house. Cassie and I usually shopped at Safeway, assuming that any supermarket as attractive as Zupan’s must be beyond our means.

  “That’s me, Dr. Deep Pockets. I picked up some things to make this torture more endurable.”

  I dug through the bag. Purple grapes, store-made brownies, red wine and Tater Tots. I pulled out the bag of frozen potato product and held it up, making a questioning face.

  “Don’t you like Tater Tots?” Scott asked.

  “Don’t they remind you of school lunches from grade school?”

  “If you don’t want any, it’s more for me.”

  Cassie took the bag from my hand and carried it into the kitchen. I heard banging as she dug out our one cookie sheet.

  “Did you get the photos scanned?” I asked.

  “I e-mailed them to you,” he said, flopping down onto the lumpy futon with its stained blue-canvas cover. He looked perfectly at home. Our nasty beige shag carpeting never kept him from sitting on the floor, either, and it didn’t seem to bother him that half our glasses were jelly jars.

  I would say that was because he was a guy, but I’d seen his place, a condominium on a bluff overlooking NW Portland, and I knew better. His taste went toward black leather furniture and lots of stereo equipment, and he had recently purchased a mission-style cherrywood dining table.

  Of course, all his furniture was buried under dirty clothes, magazines, dishes, and the unnamed effluvia of male existence, but the finer things were there, underneath. He’d once explained that he had to be so clean all day at work, he couldn’t stand to extend the effort to his home.

  That was dentists for you. Bunch of weird-os.

  Louise showed up, her dark brown hair flying in wild curls around her head, tossed by the wind. The touch of pink in her cheeks made me realize anew how pretty she was, and my eyes went to Scott, wondering if he ever regretted that things had not worked out between them.

  He seemed more interested in snooping through our bookshelf. I wondered whether he’d mention the guide to tantric sex that Cassie had recently added.

  “Hannah, I think I got another client for you,” Louise said.

  “Oh?”

  “Derek, at work. He’s lost a bunch of weight and needs some suits altered. I gave him your card.”

  “Is he the one who just got divorced?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, and the corner of her mouth crooked in a smile.

  I raised my eyebrows. Scott stopped browsing the bookshelf, and Cassie appeared from the kitchen doorway, plate of Tater Tots in hand.

  “What?” Louise asked.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “What? About Derek?”

  “Don’t say you’re going for a guy who just got divorced,” Scott said.

  “I’m not! Who said I was? I’m not interested. He has two teenage kids, you know. He’s too old for me.” She smiled like a naughty child. “Looks pretty good since he lost that weight, though. Oh, I’m just kidding,” she said before any of us could say anything. “You think I’m stupid? I have a degree in this crap, I know what not to do.”

  Cassie put the plate of Tater Tots down on the coffee table. “You’re the one who told us that counselors were the most screwed up bunch of people on the face of the planet, and not worth dating.”

  “That’s true enough.”

  I went over to the computer and woke it from sleep mode as Louise shed her coat and Cassie poured her a jelly jar of red wine. Scott went to work on the Tater Tots, squirting ketchup in a big puddle, and Cassie sat lotus-style and straight-backed on the floor and picked up a brownie. No one had touched the grapes, perhaps because they were fresh and unprocessed and therefore good for one. I tore off a small bunch and took them with me back to the computer desk, a few feet from the coffee table, just so they wouldn’t look scorned.

  “I don’t have to write my own ad, do I?” Scott asked as I connected to the Internet. “You three should write it for me. You know what women want.”

  I peered at him over my shoulder. “The idea here is to find your one-in-a-million match, not to score as many babes as you can.”

  “That sucks. Maybe I’m not ready for my one-in-a-million.”

  “Yes you are,” Louise said. “You’ve been messing around long enough.”

  “No I haven’t. I just got the BMW six months ago. I need to cruise! I need to impress chicks with my wheels!”

  “What are you, sixteen?” I asked.

  “I need to put the top down and leer at women on the sidewalks. I need to have hot tub parties.”

  “You don’t have a hot tub,” I said.

  “And your car is not a convertible,” Louise said. “And this is Portland. Who has a convertible? It rains too much.”

  “Don’t spoil my fun.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder what germs might live in hot tub water?” I asked as I logged onto the personals site I had chosen for our group experiment. “You think of hot tubs at apartment complexes, and what scungy people might get in there nude, oozing fluids left and right. And then it just stays there, bubbling. Don’t bacteria multiply in the heat?”

  “Hannah, yuck,” Cassie said. “I was going to go to Carson Hot Springs next weekend, too.”

  “Half a cup of Clorox might help,” Scott said.

  Cassie grimaced. “That’s just what I want, to breathe in steaming bleach. That is not why one goes to natural springs.”

  “It’s probably hot enough you don’t really have to worry about anything,” he said, and popped a Tot into his mouth.

  “Okay, here we are,” I said. “Who wants to go first?”

  Louise came to stand behind me. “Let’s look at some of the ads before we begin.”

  “Men or women?”

  “Guys. I’ve got to see if there’s anyone even worth bothering about.”

  I clicked my way to the search page, and filled out the obvious criteria of age range and marital status. “We can search by words in the ads, too.”

  “‘Vegetarian,’” Cassie said.

  “No!” Louise and I said in unison. “No vegetarians,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re high-maintenance eaters,” I said.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Oh, Cass, you’re fine, you don’t make a fuss. But for dating—I don’t want some guy taking me to organic restaurants. And how could I bring a vegetarian home to Mom and Dad?”

  Scott paused in his Tater consumption. “They’ll only let you marry a carnivore?”

  “Omnivore. It would just be too embarrassing. Can you see it? ‘Sorry, Dad, Jeremy won’t be eating any barbecued spare ribs. Could you grill this soy burger for him?’ I’d never hear the end of it.”

  Cassie was still looking pouty. “I don’t see why you should be embarrassed for someone else’s eating habits. If he’s fine with it, you should be, too.”

  “I’m too immature to separate my identity from my date’s,” I said.

  “As if maturity had anything to do with it,” Louise said. “None of us can do that. I certainly can’t.”

  “That
’s a chick thing,” Scott said. “Guys don’t care what a girl eats, or what others might think of her taste in clothes, or anything like that.”

  “Bullshit,” Louise said.

  “Louise!” I said, rounding my lips in fake horror at her language.

  “We don’t!” Scott insisted.

  “What a load of crap,” Louise said. “You guys care, you just choose different criteria.”

  “We do not.”

  Louise nodded her head, bouncing it up and down like a street fighter getting ready to brawl, her jaw thrust forward. “You want your date to have big breasts and long hair. You want her to have a nice butt that other guys will stare at.”

  “Hey, that’s got nothing to do with image.”

  “Sure it does,” I said, catching Louise’s thought. “The better-looking your girlfriend, the more of a ‘man’ you appear. You could look like a dead possum yourself, but if you had a beautiful woman on your arm other guys would assume you were something special. Even other women would assume it. They’d think you were rich. Either that, or…”

  “Or what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Or what, Hannah?”

  “You know.” I cast a quick glance at his crotch.

  Louise affected a Texas drawl. “They’d think that was a mighty fine cut of swinging sirloin you had between them thar legs.”

  “Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that type of thing,” Cassie said, “being a vegetarian.”

  I spoke primly. “Some girls eat meat, some don’t.”

  Scott gaped at us. “And they say guys are bad. You three are worse than any group of men.”

  “Oh, we are not,” Louise said, swishing her hand dismissively.

  “My privates are not up for discussion.”

  “You were the one who insisted,” I said. “And why is it always referred to as a meat product? Sausage, salami, meat, sirloin, and having sex is ‘porking.’”

  “Because you women are the ones who spend all your time discussing it. In centuries past you were all in the kitchen. With the meat.”

  “Yep, that’s where we were. Toiling with the meat,” I said, and giggled, and saw Cassie and Louise bury their noses in their jelly jars. “But bread would have done as well. ‘My man’s got a fine loaf.’ I could see that. ‘I was up kneading it all night.’”

  “It wouldn’t rise,” Louise said. “I put it in a warm place, but nothing happened.”

  “Maybe my yeast wasn’t fresh,” I said.

  Cassie groaned. “Yeast. Oh, gross.”

  “I know, I’m terrible.”

  “You’re as bad as Scott,” Louise said.

  He spoke around the last of the Tater Tots. “Hey, I contributed nothing to this line of discussion.”

  “You’re guilty by association,” Louise said. “You two should write a horror novel together. You could sit for hours thinking up revolting images.”

  “Only if the monster was a dentist,” I said.

  “He could never fit his hairy paws into his patients’ mouths,” Scott said. “He could carry off an ornery seamstress, though.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, and turned back to the computer, suddenly feeling awkward and wanting to change the subject. “We’re never going to get anything done at this rate.”

  Sometimes I got the littlest bit flustered around Scott. I knew he wasn’t flirting with me, I knew that, yet when a cute guy makes a comment about carrying you off, you start wondering things you have no business wondering about your best friend’s ex-boyfriend.

  “Put in ‘cooking,’” Louise said.

  “Okay.” I hit Search, and a few seconds later a list of names came up, some with a small camera beside them to denote a photo. “Here we go.” I clicked on the first name with a picture as Scott and Cassie joined us at the computer.

  A blank square came up, then the picture started to fill in, top to bottom.

  “A tree, so far so good,” Scott said.

  The top of a head appeared, dark-haired, then a forehead. A face, long and narrow. Neck. Shoulders.

  “Wait a minute,” Scott said. “Is he in the tree?”

  Louise put her hand over her mouth, laughing, as his lower body formed, and we could see his feet bracing him in position in the Y of tree branches. “What the hell kind of message is that supposed to send?” Louise asked. “‘I am a squirrel’?”

  “It’s kind of cute,” Cassie said. “Makes him seem boyish and playful.”

  “Thirty-four, software engineer—of course—never married, no kids, blah, blah, blah,” I said, reading, then hitting the scroll bar to move past the bare stats to the paragraph Squirrel Boy had written about himself.

  “‘Handsome, fit, creative professional seeks an active, petite woman to share wild times and walks on the beach,’” I read, then groaned along with the rest. “Walks on the beach, why do they always talk about walks on the beach? Strolls in the moonlight, candlelit dinners, snuggling in front of the fire. Why can’t they show some originality?”

  “Don’t forget ‘rainy nights,’” Scott said.

  “Those are a step above. It takes a slightly finer aesthetic sense to appreciate rain.”

  “What does he mean by ‘petite’?” Louise asked. “Does he mean short, or skinny?”

  I scrolled back up to the stats. Squirrel Boy was five-eight, one hundred and thirty-five pounds. “I’m guessing both. I don’t know many guys who want their date to be bigger than they are.”

  “Skinny guys sometimes like plump women,” Scott said. “It’s no good having your bones rubbing against hers.”

  I frowned at him over my shoulder.

  “Don’t look at me like that. Most guys I know would rather have a girl with a little extra on her, than too little. You need something to hold on to.”

  Cassie nudged me from the other side. “I told you so. You can’t be a good belly dancer without any belly. It looks wrong. Women are supposed to be soft.”

  “Mmm.” I was not convinced. I wanted to be convinced, I would dearly love to believe those extra ten pounds were beautiful, but I would have to isolate myself from the rest of the U.S. to believe it.

  I had a disturbing inkling that even if ten pounds were to fall off overnight, I would still think ten more needed to go. And then there were the two acne scars on my cheek I’d want lasered off, and the chin tuck, and the electrolysis for those nasty hairs around my navel and—horror upon horrors—my nipples. There was no end to the improvements to be made.

  “This one’s boring,” Louise said. “Let’s look at someone else.”

  The next photo was of a buff-looking guy leaning against a polished pickup, the sun glaring off the fenders and his sunglasses. His jeans were tight enough that the bulge of his penis was visible.

  “Full of himself. Next,” Louise said, not even giving me time to scroll down to read what the guy had to say.

  A balding guy, going to fat, crouching down next to a Labrador. “Maybe,” Louise said.

  Scott made a noise of disbelief. “Him?”

  “It’s the dog,” Louise explained. “Makes him look caring.”

  “Remind me to get a pet. A cat would be good. They’re independent, not much trouble.”

  “Don’t get a cat,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Guys with cats are weird.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Why?”

  “They just are. They start talking about ‘kitty did this’ and ‘kitty did that’, and it’s just wrong. Besides, your apartment will smell like dirty litter, and that’s nothing to bring a girl home to.”

  “She’s right, there,” Louise agreed. “The way you keep house, you’re better off with… Huh, I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t eventually smell.”

  “We’re going to be here all day if you two keep looking through ads. Come on, let’s get going.”

  “Ooo, you’re such a man,” I said. “So task-oriented.”

  “That’s me.”


  Nevertheless, I could see his point, and over Cassie’s and Louise’s protests I clicked through to the ad-writing screen. “Who first?”

  “I’ll go,” Cassie said. “I’ve got to get ready for work in a bit.”

  I slid out of the desk chair and Cassie took my place. I went and sat at the other end of the futon from Scott, snatching another bunch of grapes on my way.

  “There’s a problem with your one-in-a-million mate theory, at least as it applies to Portland,” Louise said, sitting in our battered old rocking recliner, rescued from a neighbor’s yard sale.

  “What’s that?”

  “Proximity. There may be two million people in the greater Portland area, but that covers a lot of space. Studies have shown that we tend to get involved with, and marry, those who live closest. Take two dating couples, one who lives twenty miles apart, and the other who lives five miles apart, and the five-milers are more likely to wed.”

  “Where did you hear that?” I asked.

  “I’ve been reading up on it.”

  “Makes sense,” Scott said, working on the brownies now, one leg crossed over the other in that knees-wide position used only by men. “It’s a lot less bother to pick a girl up five minutes away, than half an hour.”

  “You’re so romantic,” I said. “Sounds like you’d walk through fire for your true love.”

  He shrugged, brownie in hand. “It’s the truth. Men are lazy slobs. You should know that by now.”

  “So the point is,” Louise said, “if it’s only the closest people we can fall for, then we aren’t really searching all of the greater Portland area, which means less of a pool.”

  I chewed my lip, considering. “No, I don’t think that’s a problem. The idea was not that there would be one million single guys our age who wanted to get married: it was that there were one million males. We’re already draining away most of the pool just by selecting for age and marital status. So we drain out a few more by location. No problem. Although I admit, it sounds like the pool is turning into one of those shallow mud baths the zebras wallow in during the dry season.”

  Cassie looked over her shoulder. “Welcome to the dating world.”

  The Serengeti image was strangely appropriate, and put a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm for the project. I’d briefly managed to see Portland as a vast uncharted sea of men, but now I was back to the mud wallow.