She Who Shops

by Joanne Skerrett

  She recited her “elevator pitch” to several more students and professors. She couldn’t wait to meet the other black girl, but she seemed so busy chatting up a storm with everybody else. She seemed to already know some of the people. Weslee could hear her laughter all the way across the room.

  She decided to go introduce herself to the lone black man in the room, who was off talking with an Indian guy she had already met. She racked her brain to remember his name. Too bad it was an Anglo name—that made it even harder to remember.

  “Hi guys,” she said, smiling at the two men.

  “Hello again,” the Indian guy said as she struggled to remember his name and not look at his nametag. She didn’t want to give herself away.

  “It’s Weslee, right?” he said, peering at her nametag.

  “Yes”—she smiled back at him and quickly looked at his tag—“Brian.”

  “We haven’t met,” she said to the black man. He looked to be either in his late thirties or early forties. He wasn’t terribly good-looking, but he was tall and carried himself very formally. He was the only man in the room wearing a tie. The other guys wore polo shirts and khakis.

  “No, we haven’t,” he said in a clipped, tight voice. “I’m Harrell Sanders.” He extended his hand.

  “Weslee Dunster,” she replied. She asked the requisite where are you from and why are you here, and somewhere in the conversation, Brian, the Indian guy, slipped away to hobnob elsewhere.

  Harrell was from upstate New York and worked at Prudential Securities in Boston. He was taking a couple of years off from work, he said. He told her that his wife was a kindergarten teacher and that they had two toddler-age children. Boring, boring, boring.

  “Hey, I’m Lana,” a high, perky voice said on her left. She turned, and there was the only other sister in the room, smiling at her.

  “Hey,” she said brightly. “I’m Weslee Dunster. I’ve been meaning to come over and introduce myself, but you seemed to be always talking to someone else.”

  Lana was a couple of inches shorter than Weslee, very pretty—in an unattainable, Vanessa Williams kind of way. That was a fierce little outfit she was wearing. Weslee was no fashion expert, but she recognized quality when she saw it, and she knew that this hadn’t come out of TJ Maxx.

  “Yes, girl, I’ve been getting my networking on,” Lana said in a strange accent that struck Weslee as a hybrid of New England, Valley Girl, and Ebonics. Lana flashed a perfect white smile at Harrell Sanders and guided Weslee by the elbow in the other direction.

  “Some of the people in here are so bullshit,” Lana said conspiratorially as she waved across the room to some guy who was smiling her way.

  “Have you met them before?” Weslee asked.

  “No, I’ve never seen any of them before,” Lana replied, her big grayish eyes casing the room.

  “Oh, it just seemed that you—” But before Weslee could finish, a pair of women came up to them.

  “Hey, you guys,” one of them said. Weslee had met her. Her name was Kwan; she was Japanese via Encino, California. The other woman was a local, white and attractive. They seemed to want to stick to Lana like glue.

  As they made plans to meet later, Weslee began to feel better, more excited, less intimidated. She could see herself hanging out with this Lana girl. In no time at all she had gone from almost being the wallflower to near-center of attention. Yes, it was going to be all right.

  “Where are you from?” Weslee asked Lana, trying to get to the bottom of her accent.

  “New York. Rye. And Martha’s Vineyard.”

  Weslee laughed. “Your accent is so different.”

  “Oh, it’s not really an accent. It’s just the way I talk. I’ve been practicing for years.” Lana smiled widely and then laughed wildly at the confused look on Weslee’s face.

  Weslee laughed, too. She thought she had gotten Lana’s joke. It didn’t matter. She thought she had made a friend. Sort of.

  So, this morning before class, Weslee had worried. She had wanted to look good. She remembered the way Lana had sized her up the night before. She hadn’t liked the appraising look in Lana’s eyes. But Weslee, a traditionalist, had nothing but khakis, skirts, lots of navy and black—nothing cute. She had settled on a khaki linen dress and red sandals. Lana had swished into class wearing a knee-length white skirt, camel-colored stiletto sandals, and a tiny black tank top. Weslee had marveled as the male members of the class gawked or quickly looked away from Lana, maybe ashamed of what they were thinking. She so wished she could put clothes together that way.

  Now Lana had her hand up. The professor beamed at her like one would at a precocious and adorable child.

  Her comment was a very obvious rip-off of what the professor had just said. Yet he gushed, “That is a very interesting point!”

  Someone groaned behind Weslee, but she didn’t look back. It was strange how she immediately felt defensive of her new friend.

  Lana’s beautiful condominium in the Charles River Park building was perfect for entertaining: lots of space, sparsely but tastefully furnished, with a real bar. Weslee was impressed.

  “How do you keep this thing stocked all the time?” she asked as she sipped ginger ale and Lana refilled a shot glass with something strong looking. Weslee had never been much of a drinker. Matter of fact, she never quite knew what to order when the wine list came or on the few occasions she had been out to bars with her co-workers back in Chicago. Ginger ale was her mainstay.

  “Oh, my dad owns this place. His assistant takes care of all that stuff,” Lana chirped.

  “Oh” was all Weslee could say as she mentally did the math. So in addition to a house in the New York suburbs, on the Vineyard, and in Manhattan, Lana’s father also owned this apartment. Must be nice, Weslee thought.

  “Lana, I just love this place!” a girl giggled as she sipped one of the apple martinis that the bartender—one of Lana’s friends, a handsome guy Weslee did not recognize—had been making over the past half hour.

  Lana basked in all the praise and attention. She was the perfect hostess, flirting with the guys and complimenting the women on their hair, their dress, anything that did the trick. She listened to the women talk about their boyfriends or lack of, gave advice, told funny stories, and charmed them. She flitted around the room in her tight little black dress that showed off her perfect little body, balanced on impossibly high heels. “Jimmy Choos,” she had told one of the girls who marveled at them.

  It had been this way for a while. Lana had anointed herself social director by scheduling dinners, drinks, or baseball game outings every other day or so. Weslee went along to all of them admiringly, half-enviously. From her point of view, it was either go along or stay home alone. Boston seemed so unfriendly. Besides school, she had yet to meet another soul. The nights that she chose not to attend one of Lana’s social outings, she studied or watched TV idly, distractedly, longing for Michael or just any form of companionship. It was a strange feeling, the loneliness. At least in Chicago she could have buried herself in work, staying late at the office writing reports weeks and weeks before they were due. Or she could have spent time with her parents or with Terry and her twin children, Weslee’s niece and nephew. But Weslee had no one in Boston. No one to call to say “Let’s go see a movie” or “Let’s grab dinner.” She was totally alone.

  But here, among her classmates and Lana’s friends, she felt as if she belonged somewhere—that she was not just a random person in a random city doing random things. At least she was part of a group. People knew her name, knew that she was the quiet introvert who had a quick wit once she loosened up and was the only “girl” in the class who could hang with the guys when it came to statistics. Yes, she was a part of them.

  Lana was becoming louder and more effusive and flirtier with the quiet Kenyan who she had said was her date—nothing serious, she had explained to Weslee—with each sip she took out of her seemingly bottomless glass.

  Weslee stood back in typica
l fashion and took it all in: the scene, the apartment. She loved the doors that led out to the terrace. She imagined that if she lived here she would sit out there at sunset and read every single night. She was about to make her way out there when she stopped herself.

  No, she wouldn’t play the wallflower tonight.

  She walked off to join the group of female class members who were gathered around Lana.

  She was telling them another story about her travels. Lana, it seemed, had been everywhere, from Cape Horn to Oslo. It made her even more interesting. The story of how she mistakenly brought a stash of pot into the United States from the Netherlands was eliciting howls of laughter.

  “ ‘Oh my God,’ I told the guy at the airport. ‘I didn’t know I still had that!’ ”

  Weslee laughed with the other women, all of them under Lana’s spell, Weslee the only one to notice it was being cast but falling under it anyway.

  She stayed behind after everyone had left, thinking Lana needed help cleaning up. She insisted on helping although Lana protested that the maid would come in the morning.

  “Weslee, where are you from again?” Lana asked after they had finished putting away glasses, half-empty bottles of champagne, strange-colored drinks, and such. “I mean where you’re really from. Not Chicago.”

  “I was born in Barbados, but my parents emigrated here when I was six.”

  “Oh, I knew it,” Lana exclaimed. “Your facial features are definitely West Indian. I love the Caribbean. I spent a month in Barbados right after I finished college. My father knows the prime minister well. They’re such great people.”

  Weslee was impressed, but that was short lived.

  “My mother used to have a Bajan maid in our house on the Vineyard. But she’s in medical school now. Can you believe that? She’s forty-five years old and studying to become a doctor. That’s what I love about Caribbean immigrants. They’re not afraid to work hard, and they’re not ashamed that they had to start from the bottom.”

  Weslee almost opened her mouth to protest what she detected as a veiled insult, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the insult was in that statement.

  “Anyway,” Lana continued, “we need to hang out more. I think we should team up on the statistics project.”

  Weslee nodded, although she had already agreed to team up with two other people. “Maybe you can join Koji and Haraam and me on our team,” she offered.

  Lana made a face. “You know, it’s really not a good idea to team up with people who are still struggling with English. When you do your oral presentations at the end of the term, they’re going to make you look really bad.”

  Weslee was shocked at Lana’s ignorance and petty snobbery. “Koji and Haraam are two of the smartest students in the class,” she said, laughing so as not to offend Lana.

  Lana shrugged. “You want a drink?”

  “Actually I think I’m going to head home,” Weslee said as the handsome Kenyan reappeared. She had thought he had left with the others.

  Lana shrugged again. “Hey, thanks for staying to help. I owe you.”

  During the cab ride home, Weslee decided that she had to do better at making new friends. While Lana certainly was an interesting and sometimes entertaining person, her shallowness and underlying meanness unnerved Weslee. Everyone seemed to like her so much, but Weslee was not sure it was a friendship that she should pursue.

  She thought back to her former best friend, Ann Marie. They had been neighbors, close since childhood, though they had gone to different schools. Ann Marie was never one for books, and she always did the barest minimum when it came to academics. Weslee, on the other hand, was always pushing or being pushed to excel or at least do better than most people in school, in sports, in Sunday school—it didn’t matter. Ann Marie coasted through life, bringing her troubles about boys, clothes, make-up, and bullying girls in public school to smart, dependable Weslee—who spent a miserable twelve years of primary and secondary education in Chicago’s best magnet schools.

  It was no surprise then that Ann Marie had married at twenty-three a professional football player. She now lived in a huge house in the Chicago suburbs with her four lovely children. She and Weslee had grown apart but managed to talk on the phone once a month or so. But as the years went by, they had less and less to say to each other, especially after the Michael breakup. It was as if that had dealt the final blow to their friendship, seemingly forever excluding Weslee from the happily married suburb-dwelling club.

  Weslee missed Ann Marie. She missed her teammates from college, too. She wished she was the kind of person who made the effort to hold on to her friends. They always just seemed to slip from her life like water through her fingers. A part of her blamed Michael. He had been her life the last five years; she had no room for anyone else. Now she regretted giving him so much of herself. She hated feeling like the new kid in school who has to jump hurdles to feel accepted, get invited to parties, feel like one of the crowd.

  I am too old for this, Weslee thought as the cab drew near her building.

  If only she had given Michael just a bit less of herself.

  Chapter 3

  Boston was preoccupied with a horrendous car crash that had killed four teenage boys in an instant. The families were on all the news channels and in the newspapers saying that they were good boys, loved sports, had girlfriends. No one had the guts to ask the question that burned in the city’s collective mind: Why, then, were these four good boys fleeing the police after a night of underage binge drinking at a party in one of the city’s toniest suburbs?

  Weslee missed having someone to discuss the news with. She and Michael would argue for hours about politics, sports, you name it. She held the more conservative opinion, while he was the left-wing radical—according to her, anyway. She now read the Globe while eating Raisin Bran at the kitchen counter as Bloomberg reporters barked loudly on the TV. It was a routine she had grown used to over the years—just not solo.

  An hour later she stepped out into the warm Saturday afternoon air, heading to the Charles River for her jog. The city was overrun with college students—undergrad girls wearing flip-flops and tank tops with their skirts low on their hips, young men with baggy cargo shorts and skateboard shoes. Youth was everywhere.

  The city’s geography was confusing. Nothing lined up or made sense. Her research and endless supply of maps were not a whole lot of help. Walking, therefore, was a time-consuming and sometimes precarious proposition. Hadn’t these people ever heard of a city grid? The streets sometimes stopped at a turn and started again at another angle. Printed directions never panned out. Weslee had grown used to getting lost every time she ventured out.

  Sometimes she felt as if she were in a foreign country when trying to absorb Boston’s culture. She was learning not to say hello or smile at people in elevators, people she bumped into on the subway, not even the operator on the Green Line trolley. No one in Boston ever said hello just to say hello. Matter of fact, if you did they eyed you suspiciously, edging away slowly and grabbing on to their purses or briefcases—their very lives, it seemed.

  Her apartment had ceased to be a mess of unpacked boxes and was beginning to look more like a home. Thanks to a Bed Bath & Beyond in the Fenway, she had robin’s egg-blue drapes. She had decorated the bathroom in the same color. Her living space was finally habitable. She didn’t dread coming home anymore after a day of classes to the dreary, messy, one-bedroom flat.

  She missed her Honda Accord desperately. She tried to walk as much as she could instead of taking the subway, but she knew that once winter rolled around that would have to change.

  She had already decided that the seventeen-mile running trail around the Charles River was her own private oasis in the crowded city. She managed to get all her thinking done while she ran the trail, even when it was crowded. The first time she ran the loop she decided she would start training for a fall marathon so she could qualify for the Boston Marathon the following April. Now she ran
five days a week.

  So things were going well, she decided this Saturday. She took long, slow, deliberate strides on the asphalt path, letting other joggers pass her. Business school was no breeze, but that was not a surprise. Most of the courses were as challenging as she had anticipated. She felt rejuvenated now: by the coursework, by the goal of qualifying for the marathon, by the need for sustainable human companionship. She wanted those things, and she decided she would get them even if it meant getting outside of herself a bit.

  She nodded at a white-haired man she had seen almost every day during her early morning runs. He made her smile because she could just see herself at seventy years old, shuffling along a running trail every day.

  “Great pacing,” he said as he waddled past. She yelled out a thank-you and smiled. OK, maybe the city is not entirely unfriendly.

  There were three messages on her voice mail when Weslee got back to her apartment: one from her mother, Clara, and two from Lana.

  Weslee couldn’t help but smile as she listened to the messages. Her mother wanted to know why she hadn’t called all week. Lana, assuming rightly that she had nothing to do this Saturday night, was inviting her to yet another party. “This one’s a little fancy, so you’ll need to wear something nice,” she said in her postscript message.

  Something nice, Weslee thought. She had packed two black dresses, a set of pearls she had bought years ago for job interviews, and one nice pair of suede Stuart Weitzman shoes that had made her feel guilty weeks and weeks after she had purchased them.

  Maybe it was best that she stay home, Weslee thought. She was beginning to tire of looking like the poor cousin at glamorous Lana’s side when they went to restaurants, bars, or parties. It wasn’t that Weslee was jealous; she was just uncomfortable with being in the spotlight. At first it had been different and a little fun, but now she was beginning to miss being in the background as she had happily been her whole life. In school she had been a good athlete but not great enough to get a lot of time on the court; she had had friends in high school, but she definitely did not run with the cool crowd. At work she had a couple of acquaintances who were all married; she never felt that she had much in common with the nightclub-crawling scenesters at the office who were around her age. She had thought them shallow and petty, and she felt that her solid relationship with Michael gave her an edge over them. She would feel a little superior when they would relate their horrible weekend-dating experiences to one another in the office on Mondays. She was so much better off, she had thought back then. After the breakup, it had become unbearable to stay there among them, single like them. She could almost feel them laughing at her, taunting and pitying her. Ms. “I’m Dating a Doctor and We’re Going to Get Married” was just like them now: alone, approaching thirty, with no prospects. They had the edge, she knew now, because they knew how to navigate their way out there.