Dress Rehearsal

by Jennifer O'Connell

  “Right.” Robin wasn’t convinced. “Screw him, and screw his happy little house hunting. Look, I’m not in the mood to go house hunting right now. That’s okay, right?”

  Paige nodded. “Sure.”

  We watched Robin storm off, muttering I’ll show him as she passed pedestrians who quickly stepped out of her way.

  “That was a close call,” I observed, as we started toward Paige’s car.

  “He’s lucky she didn’t go ballistic. Think she’ll be okay?”

  “She’ll be fine,” I told Paige. “What’s the worst thing she could do?”

  Paige unlocked the car and looked at me over the roof. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

  “So where is this place?”

  Paige glanced down at the listing in her hand while trying to keep her eyes on the road. “Around Cleveland Circle, off Strathmore.”

  We were driving along Beacon Street, just past Washington Square and the quaint neighborhoods of Brookline. As we got nearer our destination, the pedestrians passing us at stoplights seemed to get younger and scruffier.

  “Isn’t it mostly students around here? You’re going to buy a place for some Boston College seniors to pillage and plunder?”

  “No, it’s an old house that was converted into three apartments, a great buy around here. I’m just considering it right now.”

  The house was a dingy beige with white trim that had started to yellow where it wasn’t worn away completely. The paint on its weather beaten shingles bubbled up and curled over itself, peeling away from the house like skin after a severe sun burn. A large covered porch spanned the front of the Dutch Colonial style house, a wooden swing hanging limply from its roof. I followed Paige up the uneven front steps, stepping cautiously for fear of putting my foot right through the rotted planks.

  If the outside was a before picture from This Old House, the inside was an after picture from a police crime scene. Okay, so there wasn’t any blood, although there were rusty stains on the carpet as if someone had gone from room to room dripping spaghetti sauce, and instead of yellow tape warning DO NOT ENTER, some spiders had gone to town and spun an elaborate afghan connecting the ceiling lighting fixtures.

  Someone had laid down carpet in the seventies, an oxidized orange with flecks of brown and gold in its shaggy pile. I could just imagine the decades of grime embedded in the synthetic fibers, where the flow of the rooms was clearly discernable by following the paths that had worn the carpet bare, like dirt trails.

  “Do you think it’s haunted?” Paige asked, stepping over a creaky floor board.

  “The only thing scary about this house is the prospect of living here. You’d have to completely gut this place,” I observed, peeking inside the bathroom and quickly retreating.

  “Would not. Look here.” Paige was on her knees with a Swiss Army knife wedged under the carpet by the kitchen doorframe. “There are hardwood floors under the carpet.”

  “But you’d have to change everything about it.”

  Paige stood up and made notes on the small pad of paper she kept in her well-stocked purse. “I think you’re being a little harsh. It’s great.”

  If great meant in need of a bug bomb and a wrecking ball, then the house certainly fit the definition. “The ants in the kitchen seem to agree with you.”

  “Come on, you can get rid of ants, but you can’t get crown molding like that anymore, or a built-in China cabinet with that workmanship without spending a fortune.”

  “You’d have to pay me a fortune to live here.”

  “It’s just been empty for a while,” Paige replied, poking her head inside the soot-covered bricks of the fireplace and looking skyward. “Wow, this is a working fireplace.”

  “Probably the only thing in this place that’s working. I don’t know how you can see past all this,” I told her, signing my name in the dust on the kitchen counter. “I’d rather have a place built for me, with everything exactly the way I like it.”

  “It’s not about changing everything until it’s exactly the way I want it. It’s about appreciating the unique character of the home.”

  “You are a better woman that I, Paige Carmichael.” As I watched Paige scribbling with her Mont Blanc pen, I remembered what Robin said about Paige keeping her engagement ring. “Have you talked to Steve?”

  Paige shook her head and changed the subject. “Did you reschedule your date with Charlie?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t matter right now. I don’t want to talk about my date. I want to talk about your date.”

  Paige removed a tape measure from her purse and started assessing the width of the windows. “What date? I didn’t have a date.”

  “I know, and Robin and I were thinking that maybe you should go out with someone.”

  Paige let go of the tape and it retreated noisily into its neat coil as if it knew better than to stick around for this conversation. “Haven’t you two done enough for me recently?”

  “But I met this guy, a brother of one of my clients, and I thought that maybe you two would hit it off.”

  “Hit it off? I just broke off my engagement, Lauren.”

  “I know, and I’m not saying that you have to go on a date date. Robin and I thought that we could all go out together, as a group. I’d invite Charlie, and Robin would bring whoever she wants to torture for the evening.”

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” Paige avoided looking at me, and I wondered if her steadfast façade was finally cracking. She pulled the tape out from its hiding place and hooked one end against the windowsill.

  “Look, no pressure. We just thought you should get out for a night.”

  Paige stopped measuring and sighed. “Fine,” she agreed flatly. “Set it up.”

  “Great. I will.” And I’d also tell Vivian that I might have the happy beginning she was looking for after all.

  After our house hunting excursion, Paige dropped me off in front of my building. Instead of heading straight upstairs to my third floor apartment, I took a detour down the tiled hallway that led to the laundry room entrance, and descended into the basement.

  My building was like most of the older white brick residential structures built along Commonwealth Avenue where the T’s green line divided the street down the middle like the trolley in Mister Roger’s neighborhood. Unlike the neighborhoods closer to downtown, where luxury condos were springing up where smaller, tired buildings once stood, the area hadn’t been targeted for regentrification and cars still dodged across the signal-less T tracks like kids skirting capture in a game of tag.

  My area of the city was the neighborhood equivalent of that spot on the tarmac where airplanes went when they could no longer sit at the terminal, but they weren’t quite cleared for take-off. Located between the family neighborhoods of Newton and the trendy streets of downtown, it wasn’t populated with partying college kids, nor was it the quiet refuge of the elderly. Instead, most of the tenants were in-between, kind of like the neighborhood itself, a rest stop on the way into the city or out to the suburbs.

  In the basement of my building, two washing machines and two dryers stood against a wall under the long, exposed tubes of fluorescent lights. The basement was clean and brightly lit, but it was still a basement, with a cold cement floor and cinderblock walls painted an industrial battleship gray that formed a thick smooth coating along the cinderblock’s pebbled surface, almost like rubber. Paige wasn’t kidding about the taxidermy collection or the assortment of army boots – for some reason, either because he thought it provided some measure of decoration or because his wife wouldn’t let him keep them anywhere else, the building’s owner mounted his hunting trophies from the exposed wooden support beams running along the ceiling. The mildewed army boots were tied together and strung along the underside of the beams like Christmas lights.

  There were twelve storage rooms in the basement, one for each unit in the building. The storage rooms weren’t meant for valuables, and I was reminded of that b
y the handwritten sign that told tenants the building owner wasn’t responsible for lost or stolen articles. The walls between the stalls stopped short of the ceiling, to let in the light, and the remaining two feet was strung with chicken wire. But even with their plywood walls and makeshift plank doors, the stalls were dry and relatively safe - perfect for storing my boxes of out of season clothing and otherwise useless memorabilia.

  I worked the combination on the lock I kept on my stall, and scanned the floor – a four by six space neatly stacked with large Rubbermaid tubs containing my summer clothes, which I would swap out in April and replace with my winter wardrobe, and brown cardboard boxes labeled in thick black Magic Marker. The contents of my stall fell into two categories – things I didn’t have room for in my apartment, and things I’d never have a use for but couldn’t bear to throw away. I was looking for the latter.

  Next to my grass stained field hockey stick, I found a box labeled Senior Year and untucked the stiff flaps that were folded over one another to create a makeshift seal. There were textbooks and spiral bound notebooks, my yearbook, a yellowed campus newspaper, and even my date book where I kept all my assignments. I’d saved it all, although God knows why. I never expected to have a sudden need to review Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism.

  I picked up the metaphysics textbook, and an envelope tumbled out from between its pages. I recognized the handwriting and immediately knew what it contained.

  Freshman year my parents sent me a teddy bear in a care package – a brown Gund bear with a tag that told me his name was Chocolate Truffle (I don’t know why I assumed a bear named Chocolate Truffle would be a boy, but I did). I renamed the bear Oliver and kept him on my bed all throughout college. By senior year Oliver had seen better days, his fur was matted, I’d lost the burgundy velvet ribbon that came tied around his neck, and his suede nose was all but rubbed off. Still, I slept with Oliver on my bed every night, and so when Neil came back to my room after our second date, he met my bedmate.

  A few days later a letter arrived addressed to Oliver in care of Lauren Gallagher. Paige thought it was sweet. Robin thought Neil was trying too hard. And me? I was amazed that someone wanted so much to be a part of my life that he’d actually try to win me over by buddying up to my stuffed animal. It was weird looking back on it. Like I said, Neil’s romantic gestures were pretty standard. I’m sure if Neil remembered he’d be horrified, but at the time, I thought it was endearing.

  Neil wrote me a letter after we’d gone out a few times, and added a PS at the bottom saying that he hoped Oliver wouldn’t mind sharing me in the future. If I didn’t mind, I couldn’t see any reason why Oliver would feel put out, considering he’d had a near monopoly on my sleeping arrangements for almost four years. I was more than ready to move Oliver over onto my bookshelf to make some room for Neil.

  Neil was a catch. In my head I knew it. The women in my residence hall knew it. People who met him knew it. By the end of my senior year I saw Neil as someone who was reliable and familiar, which isn’t a bad thing when you’re about to graduate and embark on a life filled with unknowns. So why didn’t I move with him? Like Paige said, I’d had my reasons and they were very logical at the time. I had a job at an ad agency that I liked. A lease on a studio apartment. My friends. I told Neil I couldn’t leave and I told Paige and Robin I wouldn’t leave. I couched my reasons in terms they could understand, but never admitted the truth. I wanted to stay in Boston and see what I could do without Neil. I was just getting started, and moving to DC with Neil seemed to be a premature ending of my first year on my own. I deliberately didn’t move in with Paige and Robin when they got a two bedroom apartment in Brighton. I didn’t move in with Neil, even though he offered. Graduating from college was the beginning of life without training wheels, without the soft landing. I wasn’t ready to give that up so soon and trade it in for a bicycle built for two.

  I folded Neil’s letter to Oliver and placed it back in the envelope. I’d kept it for eleven years, why not a few more. Besides, it might come in handy sometime in the near future if I needed to jog Neil’s memory. I picked up the date book and thumbed through the pages, watching my senior year unfold week by week. Tucked between the pages of the week of November seventh, a piece of notebook paper with frayed edges was folded into thirds. The List.

  Robin, Paige and I had decided to write out our lists after a night of drinking, which explained why my handwriting was lopsided, each letter a little lower than the other until by the last word it seemed the sentence was sliding down a hill off the page. At the time it sounded like a good idea, an easy way to sift through the clutter, as Robin had put it. It was as if by merely identifying what we wanted in a man it would mean he could be delivered to order, that he actually existed.

  My list didn’t have a title on top, just lines numbered one through ten beside a few phases that at the time didn’t seem like asking so much. After all, I was probably seeing double at the time, so asking for just one perfect guy didn’t seem like such an outrageous request.

  “That sounds like Neil,” Robin had pointed out when I read my list aloud. “You can’t do that. It’s cheating.”

  “And why is number one blank?” Paige asked.

  “I don’t know what number one is yet,” I’d answered, pretending to be stumped. But what I didn’t tell them was that I’d left the line blank for another reason – mainly that I was afraid if I wrote something down on paper it would be obvious that Neil wasn’t the one for me.

  Now I scanned the page and quickly calculated that Neil easily met seven of my top ten must haves. That wasn’t bad.

  I kneeled on the floor of my storage locker and ticked off the criteria, wondering how Charlie stacked up against my list. Even though I’d only seen him in suits, Charlie seemed athletic. He found me funny, which meant he obviously had an excellent sense of humor. As far as I knew he didn’t smoke, he was an attorney so he was well-educated, and since he was at least four inches taller than me, I could definitely kiss him in heels without having to stoop down. So Charlie had five checks in the plus column. He was halfway there.

  It was too soon to know about the other five requirements.

  5. Nice to children

  4. Isn’t afraid to admit he liked When Harry Met Sally

  3. Gets along with his family

  2. Good in bed

  1. (To be determined)

  That was quite a list. The only thing missing was world peace and justice for all. I’d practically described Ghandi, although I wasn’t so sure about the good in bed part. I don’t know who I thought I was fooling. It wasn’t like other women were looking for chain-smoking, uneducated couch potatoes who abandoned their families and cursed at little kids.

  By the time I finished going through the list, my knees were numb from kneeling on the frigid cement floor and I just wanted to go upstairs and get warm. I stuffed the list in my jacket pocket, grabbed my yearbook, and closed up the box. Maybe it was time to revisit my list. And maybe Charlie and Neil could help me figure out what the first line should have been.

  Chapter 17

  I was now officially represented by Robin’s literary agent and on the verge of publishing greatness, or at least that was what Vivian kept leading me to believe. She’d been eager to get a contract signed and pulled out all the stops with some very serious wooing – in the twelve hours after Vivian first walked into the boutique I received two voice mails, a call from her assistant, a gourmet cheese basket and a bouquet of flowers, which I should have kept to myself but in a moment of poor judgement decided to share with Maria and my staff.

  “What’s that?” Maria asked, when I walked into the kitchen carrying a flower arrangement so large I could barely see over the tops of the purple, lavender and fuscia anemones.

  “Aren’t they gorgeous?” I placed the fishbowl-sized glass vase on the butcher block bench and stood back to admire my unexpected delivery. I didn’t even bother hiding the grin that seemed plastered to my fac
e. “I think I have an admirer.”

  Maria turned up her nose at me. “Oh, please. So, who’re they from?”

  “I don’t know. It could be Charlie, you know. We did have a wonderful dinner.” I leaned down over a perfectly formed blue curiosa rose, its petals just opening from a tightly wound bud, and inhaled. “Then again, who knows?” I didn’t say his name, but Maria narrowed her eyes at me and I knew she got my hint. Maybe it was Neil who sent the special delivery.

  “Considering this is the first time anyone has sent you flowers, I hardly think you should be parading around like you’ve been crowned Miss America. Why don’t you just read the card so we can get this over with?”

  “Is that jealousy I hear in your voice, Maria?” I teased, because I was feeling like Miss America. The only thing missing was Bert Parks serenading me as I took my victory lap around the kitchen. “This isn’t some FTD teddy bear holding carnations. This bouquet cost a fortune.”

  I reached for the miniature envelope peeking out from behind a spray of green celosia and slipped out the handwritten card. I read the message silently to myself, and wished I’d just placed the flowers on the tasting table and kept my mouth shut.

  “So, which of the many men you think are pining away for you sent them?”

  I considered lying to save face, but with the card in my hand Maria could always confirm my story.

  “Well?” Maria asked again, losing patience.

  I was about to be publicly dethroned.

  “Your biggest fan, Vivian,” I read, and then held up the card to show her. “Wasn’t that thoughtful?”

  “Vivian? The publishing woman?” Maria laughed at me and then attempted to look serious. “You know, Lauren, you’re right. I’m jealous.”