Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single

by Heather McElhatton

  I shrug.

  “Good. Women that don’t like dogs are bitches. Did I tell you I’m a lawyer? Criminal defense. I have this case right now, a guy who was taking pictures of Chinese kids, boys mostly. Like twelve-year-olds. He was giving them money and clothes, like he was their dad. Being all nice. None of those kids have shit. Some don’t even have winter coats, so here’s this guy who has a camera and he says he just wants to take some snaps. Asks them to take off their shirts or whatever. The kids get all hysterical and get the guy in trouble. Kids are unreliable witnesses, though, but try to tell a jury that.”

  “Well, I hope you get him,” I say. “I hope you lock him up for life.”

  BigKev007 makes a face. “The guy is my client. Why does everyone think I’m trying to prosecute him?”

  I drain my wine and wonder if I have any Vicodin in the car. Then, in what will be our most tender moment, he leans over the table and says, “Pedophiles have a story, too, Jill.” He shakes his head sadly. “They have a story, too.”

  I have no idea what to say. I never met a pedophile defender before. I think if I was a pedophile-defending lawyer and on a first date, this is one little piece of information I would not share.

  He tells me what I would consider intimate and illegal-to-tell-strangers information about his various court cases. He goes on for some time and I’m just zoned out, staring at his fat, ugly, pudgy face. The more I look at it, the more it looks like knuckles. He doesn’t ask me a single question about myself. He tells me he’s been sober for thirteen years, but now he can drink a little. Then he says, almost proudly, like he’s passed on the family business, that his teenage daughter is an alcoholic, too. “She’s in rehab right now,” he says. “I guess the apple doesn’t fall, stagger, or collapse far from the tree, huh!”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” he says. I hate it when people say this. I know it isn’t my fault, I’m just trying to be nice. Hasn’t he ever heard of manners? “Was she in rehab for Christmas?” I ask. “Did she have to spend the holidays in a hospital?”

  “No,” BigKev007 says, “she was out of rehab by then, but I don’t know where she was on Christmas.”

  I tilt my head because I think I misheard him. “You don’t?”

  “I went to Jamaica with this real piece-of-work redhead who turned out to be a complete bitch. I had to fly in another one because she was just crazy.”

  The blond waitress comes back and asks if we want another drink.

  “No,” he says while staring at her stomach, “just the check.”

  “I’m sorry,” I ask him. “You had to fly in another…”

  “Girl,” he says. “I had to fly in another girl.”

  “But…was the first one still there?”

  “Yeah, but she got her own room. I had a pretty good time. I did yoga on the beach. You do yoga? I just started.”

  “So wait,” I say. “Your daughter was just out of rehab and you left her alone on Christmas to go to Jamaica with a woman who you ditched for another woman? And then you did yoga?”

  He looks at me blankly. “I dunno,” he says. “My daughter went to her mother’s house, I think, but that’s another sob story.”

  There’s a moment of silence as I stare at my drink coaster.

  “Can I ask you something?” he says.

  The waitress sets a little green plastic tray with the bill between us.

  “Sure.” This idiot better at least pick up the tab.

  BigKev007 leans in and lowers his voice, like he’s about to admit he was in fact peeing in his pants when we first met, or some other slightly embarrassing admission.

  “I was just curious,” he says. “Have you ever thought about losing a little weight?”

  White light. Shock. Disbelief. I am stunned silent. He’s still talking, but I can’t focus in on what he’s saying. Something about a cruise he knows about and a friend who went on it and lost all this weight. “Because you have a really pretty face,” I hear him say. And then something about carbohydrates and how living in the Midwest distorts one’s concept of portions. He finally adjusts his glasses and looks at the bill. “Normally I’d get this,” he says, tossing it over to me, “but let’s go Dutch, okay?”

  Speechless, I nod while thinking, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight, Lose a little weight.

  I come out of my daze and get out a five-dollar bill.

  “We need a little more for tip,” he says.

  I fish out another dollar.

  I drive home carefully on the icy streets. I stand at the sink with my coat still on as I gulp down an entire glass of tap water. I call Christopher, but he’s not picking up. It’s moments like these when I’m not sure if I should tell my friends what horrible thing just happened to me, or if I should just keep it to myself. If I tell Christopher, I’ll get to vent and he’ll tell me how beautiful I am and what a jackass BigKev is and that I shouldn’t let anyone make me feel bad about myself. He’ll pack aphorisms and platitudes around my bruised heart like ice chips until I fee
l better and we agree no one can know the mystery of the universe or fully understand the beauty of the broken world, and so on…which frankly sounds exhausting because, let’s face it, we’ve recited this particular script a lot.

  On the other hand, if I bury the events of this evening deep, I can pretend it never happened. I can rewind the tape, cut the scene out, and burn it. I can reassign the event to something I saw on TV. Something that happened to somebody else. A story I could even relate to others like, “This one time this one girl went on an online date with some bastard and you won’t believe what he said to her.” Then I can hear all the I don’t believe it!s and what an asshole!s without the humiliating story being attributed to me, already the keeper of so many humiliating stories.

  I decide to bury it.

  I pour myself a big glass of wine and go to the living room, where I sit cross-legged in front of my small white wooden dollhouse that has green shutters and loads of perfect tiny furniture. I’ve had it since I was little and I’ve always messed around with it when I’m stressed out. Miniature things soothe me. So does wreaking havoc on the small Tinkertoy family that lives inside. Right now the scenario is rather spicy. While the kids are asleep in their tiny respective rooms and the little wife is in the kitchen standing mutely at the refrigerator, the little husband is lying down stiffly on the living room couch with a big, nude splayed-leg Barbie on top of him.

  I sip my wine and move the family around, giving them new emergencies to handle. A plastic dinosaur peering in through an upstairs window, a miniature space alien walking through the front door with his laser gun drawn, a Christmas ornament Bambi grazing on the small AstroTurf lawn outside the window. It’s a form of art therapy.

  I finally get bored and retrieve my sacrosanct bottle of Lunesta. Thirty little blue pills in a prescription bottle to be used only in the case of emergency, because they cost about twenty dollars each. The bottle sternly advises that you take only one pill and you don’t drink alcohol, because this intensifies the effect. If only they hadn’t told me.

  I get in my comfy blue flannel nightgown, the one I wear when there’s absolutely no chance of a man being around, and I pop two Lunestas and drink wine while sitting in bed and staring out the deep blue window at the flurry of snow driving past, asking myself:

  How the hell did I end up stuck here?

  I eventually pass out on my pillow and the day dissolves under my eyelids. I slip into a comalike sleep sponsored by the lovely chemists at Lunesta, and it’s all over. No emergency here. It’s like the whole night never happened.

  At work the next morning I sit in the parking lot and try to pull myself together before I go inside, while the painful echo of BigKev saying lose a little weight is playing on a continuous loop in my head. I have this piercing dehydration/humiliation headache and I look like I’ve been in a small fistfight. I used an antipuff serum and calming facial wash, along with three different kinds of cover-up, but what I really need is some spackle and a trowel.

  I can’t stop thinking about David. I know he was a bastard, but besides that, he was perfect for me. Tall, creative, musical. He loved bad bars and strong drinks, but he wasn’t anywhere close to being an alcoholic. He was funny. He had such a perfect sense of humor. The only problem with David was he didn’t feel the same way about me. He said he did, but he was constantly standing me up and treating me like shit, but if I’m going to be honest, there was something about that that seemed right.

  David was very forceful. Sex with him was like being bumped with a shopping cart. Then he was done and snoring next to you.

  I linger in my car and re-do my makeup, hoping maybe Brad Keller might show up again. This time I could be charming and funny instead of paranoid and enraged. Maybe he likes angry, complaining women. Some men do, especially if their mothers were that way. Maybe Brad has had his share of women who are people pleasers and sycophants; maybe he’s still single because he hasn’t found that sassy firecracker he’s been looking for. I wait in my car as long as I possibly can, my windows fogging over with my breath until I’m late for the plus-size prom dress shoot.

  I get up to my cubicle and wrestle off my hundred-pound Eddie Bauer parka. The thing is double-insulated, double-quilted, and double-stuffed, and will keep you warm in an ice storm, but it makes me look huge and it’s freaking heavy. When I wear it I feel like I’m giving a seventh-grader a piggyback ride. “Good God!” I say, dumping it onto the floor. “Why the hell do we live in Minnesota?”

  “I don’t know.” Ted shrugs. “Nice people and lots of parking.”

  “More like nice apathy and lots of depression.”

  “Ooh,” he says, “those would make good mascots. We could take two Minnesota loons and name them Depression Loon and Apathy Loon. Depression Loon would ask Apathy Loon to peck him to death but Apathy Loon wouldn’t care.” He looks at his watch. “Aren’t you late for the shoot?”

  I’m even later than I thought. I try to pull everything together and Ted hands me his copy of the shot list when I can’t find mine. I snap it up and scamper down the hall. God. I have to remember to never say “scamper” again.

  By the time I get to the studio—a boxy, hot room located conveniently in the Keller’s basement by the boilers—they’ve already set up the lights for the set, which is a series of large white pillars and a wooden gazebo with a barbecue grill in the background. Very midwestern belle epoque Southern plantation hot dish. My eyes adjust slowly, and I make my way over to the coffee table, which I’m hoping will also have aspirin or perhaps prescription-strength pain killers.

  I hear someone shout, “The list? Is it here now?” and I hurry toward the brilliantly lit set, where Alan, the catalogue director says, “Oh, thank you. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble to keep us all waiting.”

  Then Brad blooms into view.

  “Mr. Keller here is watching the shoot today,” Alan snaps. “He’s the new boss. We do anything he says, got it? Ed Keller’s direct orders. Straight from the top. The people who have been here for years are not the boss now, the new guy, who just got here, he’s the boss.”

  “Okay,” I say and Brad raises an eyebrow at me.

  I smile.

  “You’re going to double-check the shot list, Jen,” Alan says. “Since the photo department got bitched at last time, someone from marketing is going to keep track this time. That way if there are any problems, you can all just bitch at yourselves.”

  I smile and nod, as though he’s just paid me a great compliment.

  “Sit here,” Alan says and kicks an overturned bucket next to the camera. He expects me to sit on a bucket. Lovely. How elegant. I want to slap him right across the face but instead I sit down. Alan storms off to the dressing rooms where he starts shouting at someone else and I try to look pretty, perky, and nonchalant as Brad talks to our new photographer, who’s actually a nice guy.

  Our staff photographers in the past have tended to be dickheads. We had one who looked like a fiddle-with-the-girls gym teacher, and another who used dental floss on set in between takes. Flick! Flick! Flick! The last staff photographer looked like a little boiled midget, a Napoleon-size red-faced guy who was always screaming. He actually dropped dead during last year’s Easter shoot. He was yelling at the kids on set, who were all perched on top of Styrofoam Easter eggs and having trouble keeping their balance when all of a sudden he stopped shouting and dropped to the floor. Total renal failure. All the little kids freaked out and started screaming and a boy wearing a powder-blue tuxedo actually peed in his pants.

  Alan leads the plus-size models out along with Nell, the chubby wardrobe assistant. God, she’s really gotten chunky. She’s got a very sweet, perky personality, and she’s always good for a smile or a quick joke, but then again she has to be. She’s chubby. David once said I was chubby, “in a lovable way,” and I cried for two days.

  Sitting there, frozen in a pert expression, I smell something strange. Wait. I smell my armpits. How is this possible? How could I ha
ve forgotten deodorant? I managed to put a top coat of clear gloss on my toenails, but I forgot deodorant? I look around like maybe people are already talking about it and keep my arms firmly clamped to my sides. I text-message Christopher and tell him we have an odor emergency. I can do this. I can accept disgusting body odors are for some reason a natural part of the human condition. I just won’t raise my arms. Ever.

  The models get in position and Nell shuffles over to me. She squats down and I tighten my arms to my sides. Why does she have to sit so close? “I tried to put her in the Beverly Hills blue dress,” she sighs, “but it was too big for her. The plus-size girls get smaller every year.”

  “Thanks,” I say and cross Blue Beverly off the shot list without moving my arms.

  “Sometimes I wonder if the dressmakers are secretly trying to make fun of these girls,” Nell says. “I mean, why would you name a plus-size prom dress the Clara? That’s just mean. That just makes me think of Clarabell the Clown, or Clarence the Cow.”

  “Yep,” I say, wishing she’d pick up on my lack of eye contact or comment and go away.

  “And the Queenie?” she snorts. “I mean, come on. Queen-size! Someone somewhere is laughing their ass off.”

  “I bet they are,” I say. Brad walks past us and I hope Nell doesn’t notice me stiffen.

  “I heard Brad Keller took one of the cosmetics girls out on a date,” she whispers.

  “What?”

  “No, thank you!” she says. “That family is crazy. I would never go out with him.”

  Well it’s not like you’re going to have to worry about that, I think, and then by the look on her face, I realize I said it out loud.

  She sniffs and leaves. Crap. Now I have another mortal enemy. It’s so easy to collect them when you work with so many women.

  I study the models as the camera sets up. It’s true, these girls look like maybe they’re size ten. The brunette looks like an eight. I sag. That would mean—no, wait, I try to push the thought out but it comes charging back. I am bigger than a plus-size model. I was hanging onto size ten this summer, hanging on for dear life, but this fall I lost my grip and tumbled into a size twelve. And here I was considering the possibility of going on a date with Brad Keller?