Once More with Feeling

by Cynthia Baxter

  As always, the first image that came to mind was that of a life of solitude. The one with the cookies in the pantry and the big, empty bed, all to herself. For a few moments she stepped into the cottage she’d created in her mind, thinking about how she’d decorate the walls with sponge-paint borders in the bathroom and a space-age mural in Evan’s room. In her dream house, even the little piles of clutter were gone. Not only those made of junk mail and PTA memos, either; more important, her mind would be clear. The emotional turmoil would have been swept away.

  Yet there was another image pushing its way through. Laura’s attempts at keeping it at bay were in vain. Finally she simply let it come. In this fantasy, she was once again the star ... but there was a costar, as well. A man. A wonderful man, the 1990s version of Prince Charming. He was smart, of course. Accomplished in his career as well, an important factor not only because he was satisfied with the way his life had turned out, but also because he had no reason to be jealous of the pleasure she found in her work. He also had a great sense of humor, a mellow outlook on life, and, while she was designing her dream man, a great set of buns....

  Damn! she thought, angry with herself. Have I learned nothing? Have all those years of mushy movies and breath-mint commercials really had such an impact on me? Could I even entertain the idea of pairing up with a man again?

  No, she decided firmly. Not yet. I still want my freedom. I’m not ready to give up this wonderful gift of having no one to think about besides my son and myself.

  All of a sudden, having no idea what she wanted out of life didn’t feel threatening at all. As a matter of fact, it was actually a relief. The roller coaster was in a state of free fall, heading downward in response to gravity’s pull ... and the sensation was exhilarating. She’d embarked on a real adventure. For a change, Laura realized, instead of gripping the sides so tightly that her knuckles turned white, she willingly threw her arms up into the air, anxious to experience simply letting go and seeing where the ride was going to take her.

  * * * *

  Standing beneath a dim porch light that flickered uncertainly, Laura pulled off one of the purple suede gloves that had been her Christmas present from Claire and stuck her hand into her coat pocket. She compared the address handwritten on a crumpled piece of paper with the number displayed on the front door.

  This was the place, all right, a row house in Queens. Checking her watch, she saw the time was right as well.

  In fact, she thought, taking a deep breath and boldly ringing the doorbell, the only thing missing was the conviction that she was really ready for this.

  Corning to an orientation meeting for Parents on Their Own had taken every bit of nerve Laura possessed. Following up on the newspaper’s suggestion that she call Dave for information had been hard enough. She knew perfectly well that, unlike her weekly support group, designed to be therapeutic, Parents on Their Own was a social organization. Still, there’d been no commitment involved in dialing the number listed in the paper. She owed Dave nothing besides listening politely as he rambled on about all the events the group’s members were invited to participate in.

  She learned that, for single parents and their kids, the organization hosted ski weekends, day trips to amusement parks, and visits to local ice-skating rinks, video arcades, and restaurants. For single parents on their own, footloose and fancy-free while the kids were weekending with the ex, there were dances, rap groups, and Trivial Pursuit nights, which, Dave informed her with pride, had been known to get pretty raunchy on occasion.

  It sounded like fun. Good, clean, innocent fun. Of course, with all those singles together under one roof, hordes of people representing gallons of hormones with no outlet, there was a good chance there’d be a lot more going on than pleasant chitchat about which of the new PG-13 videos were worth renting.

  Relax, Laura chided herself. You’re not here on a manhunt. You’re simply following through on a resolution made under the influence of Southern Comfort and cherry Diet Coke.

  Her sincere intention in joining this organization was to make new friends—women friends. What she needed was a coterie of divorced and separated women who were up for a Friday-night movie or a raucous Saturday night at Chippendale’s, stuffing grocery money into the B.V.D.s of men so young they really should be home in bed, fast asleep. And Parents on Their Own seemed like the ideal place to start.

  Laura was tempted to ring the bell again when she felt the vibrations of something large moving on the other side of the front door. Sure enough, when it opened, standing there was a woman who easily hit the two-hundred mark on the scale.

  “You must be Laura. Come in, come in! You’ll freeze standin’ out there!”

  Darlene Colletti was either a Brooklyn native or auditioning for the sequel to My Cousin Vinny. Her billboard-size frame was draped in a variety of garments, all of them in startlingly bold colors. Her jewelry was also oversized: earrings as big as postcards, an impressive row of bangle bracelets, rings flashier than the pope’s.

  It’s not too late to turn back, Laura told herself. But it was. Her hostess for the evening was ushering her inside, holding out her arms to take Laura’s coat.

  “You’re here for the POTO new members’ Greeting Meeting, right?”

  Clearly a different language was spoken here. It took her a few seconds to change gears. “Right. Parents on Their Own—uh, POTO. That’s me.”

  Darlene led her into the living room. The way she grabbed her by the wrist made Laura feel she was being dragged off to the principal’s office.

  She glanced around the room, trying to get a feel for what she’d gotten herself into. What struck her first was that too much large, dark furniture had been stuffed into too small a place. Huge, overstuffed couches and chairs, covered in brocade fabric with shiny gold threads running through, were pushed into corners and lined up against walls. Wedged between them were ornate tables with marble tops and molded wooden legs, swirled and twisted and ending in shapes dial resembled the paws of various animals. Decorating the walls were crucifixes, fifteen or twenty at least, Laura estimated. They covered even the doorframes and major appliances, she noticed as she peeked at the refrigerator magnets in the kitchen.

  Well, she’d come to meet and greet, not to redecorate, she reminded herself. Twenty or so people had gathered in the living room. A few of them milled about, but most sat up stiffly, in chairs or on the couch, looking as if they were in the waiting room at a proctologist’s office.

  They were all wearing name tags with the bright green POTO logo printed across the top. A man with JOE on his sweater sat with his legs spread wide, a big bowl of pretzels balanced in his lap. An older woman sat in one corner, smiling and nodding as she knitted away happily. She was dressed in a hand-knit sweater, a hand-knit scarf, and hand-knit socks. None of the garments hung quite straight. Her name, her tag proclaimed, was Natalie. Another woman, Elsa, wearing a dark, tailored suit, looked very much the banker with her silk scarf fashioned into a natty bow tie and her sensible black pumps. Vince was a male version of Elsa. The two of them sat side by side on the couch like a pair of salt and pepper shakers.

  “Come in! Come in! Don’t be shy.” Darlene gave Laura a push. “This is the first time for everybody. It’s as if we were all virgins again. But like anything else, it’s only hard the first time.”

  The man with the Joe name tag snickered. “If you’re lucky, it’s hard every time.”

  Suddenly Laura jumped as someone slapped her on the chest.

  “There you go.” Elsa was grinning at her. “You’re Laura, right?”

  Peering down, Laura saw that now she, too, wore a name tag.

  She was relieved when Darlene glanced at her watch and commanded the last stragglers to take a seat. The setup reminded her of a game of spin the bottle. It took her back, all those nervous males and females sitting in a circle in someone else’s living room, waiting for the evening to get started and hoping desperately they wouldn’t make complete fools of the
mselves.

  Panic rose inside her. What am I doing here? she thought. I have nothing in common with these people.

  But she did. And the name tag that Elsa had so unceremoniously stuck onto her chest was proof.

  Laura headed for the last vacant seat, a big upholstered chair that nearly swallowed her up. Its soft bottom placed her about ten inches below the people on either side of her, who were sitting on hard folding chairs.

  “Comfy?” the man on her right asked, grinning down at her.

  “Uh, I guess so.” She studied him more carefully, her interest piqued now that he’d gone out of his way to speak to her. His broad smile was a welcome sight, his friendliness a relief. There was something engaging about him. Open. He wasn’t what she’d call handsome, exactly, although his dark, piercing eyes and thick head of dark hair peppered with gray were appealing. It was more that he had a lot of character in his face, she decided.

  He stuck out his hand. “I’m Richie. I’m a dodo.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “D-O-T-O? Dads on Their Own?”

  “Ah.” Laura nodded knowingly. “Then I guess that makes me a moto.”

  Before he had a chance to respond, Darlene plopped down on the piano bench at one end of the room.

  ‘Take a seat, evvybody,” she insisted in her loud, gravelly voice. “First of all, welcome.” Earnestly she looked around the circle. “And Happy New Yeah. How many of yiz made new yeah’s resolutions?”

  Amid some tittering, half a dozen hands were raised shyly into the air.

  “Now, I’m gonna be nice t’night. I’m not gonna cawl on you and make you tell us what they were. I’m just gonna aks if any of yiz made a resolution to get out and meet some new people. Anybody?”

  Four of the raised hands remained in the air. As Darlene’s eyes traveled around the room Laura burrowed more deeply into her chair.

  “That’s a very worthwhile resolution. Much better than losin’ ten pounds. But it’s not easy, getting back into the social scene after a divorce. In fact, it’s very, very hard.”

  “At least you hope it’s hard!” Joe, the man with the lapful of pretzels, guffawed. Laura wondered how many more times he intended to milk that one tonight. She also wondered what he was hiding underneath that bowl.

  “But you’re all off to a good start. Parents on Their Own is a great place to make new friends. And you’re all first-timers here, so there’s no reason to feel self-conscious or anything.”

  “Hey, we don’t have to take off our clothes, do we?” Joe called out.

  Darlene let out a noise that was more a snort than a laugh, and waved her hands in the air dismissively.

  “Then I got nothin’ to feel self-conscious about.” Joe chortled.

  Laura wondered if he’d like to go out for a couple of brewskis with Tom and Arnie from the Wednesday night support group sometime.

  “Anyways,” Darlene went on, “what we’re gonna do, as a way of evvybody getting to know evvybody else, is play a little game.”

  A groan rose up from the crowd.

  “No, no, this is a good game. You’re gonna like this one.”

  “How ‘bout strip poker?” suggested Joe.

  Richie leaned over so that his face was next to Laura’s, no easy feat since he seemed to be well over six feet tall. “I wish somebody’d show that guy the door,” he whispered.

  “We’re gonna play a game I call the secret game,” Darlene went on. “The way it works is we go around the circle, one at a time, and evvybody tells a secret about themselves. Something other people wouldn’t necessarily find out unless you told ‘em.”

  Whatever happened to name, rank, and serial number? Laura wondered. Desperately she racked her brain, trying to come up with something revealing enough to be interesting, yet tasteful enough to expose to a roomful of complete strangers.

  “Natalie, you wanna start?”

  Dutifully Natalie put down her yarn. “My secret is that I love to knit.” Conspiratorially she added, “That’s something only my closest friends know about me.”

  Laura nodded politely, feeling like Alice on the other side of the looking glass, when Richie caught her eye and grimaced. She responded with a shy smile.

  “Okay, thank you, Natalie.” Darlene reached over and patted her hand. “Now we all know you a little better. Who’s next? Elsa?”

  Elsa tugged at the hem of her skirt, already covering so much of her legs she could have been a member of a religious order. “Well ... my secret is that even though I’m pretty successful in my job, a loan officer at a bank—

  Laura patted herself on the back for having such an astute eye.

  “—what I would really like to be is an exotic dancer.”

  “I expect some of the men here tonight are gonna want to find out more about that,” Darlene said, without a blink. “Vince? Looks like you’re next.”

  Vince looked as if he were about to run from the room. “This isn’t really a secret,” he said, his face turning red, “but it’s something most people don’t know about me. I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been in recovery for two years now, and it’s been a real struggle....”

  Joe was up next. “Most people think I’m a pretty easy-goin’ guy,” he said. “But they don’t realize I got a few—I guess they’re what ya’d call compulsions. Like I can’t leave the bedroom unless all my underwear is lined up in the drawer exactly straight. I check the front door ten or twelve times every night to make sure I really locked it. And I can’t date women with the letter R in their names.”

  I wonder if Phil Donahue’s thought about another go-round with Men Who Lead Secret Lives, Laura thought, struggling to maintain a pleasant, nonjudgmental expression.

  “I guess I’ll take my turn next.” Darlene clasped her hands to her abundant chest and raised her eyes upward, as if imploring some higher power to supply her with a secret worth sharing. Finally she looked around the room. “My secret is that I’m very shy.”

  A reverent silence fell over the room. Or perhaps it was simply incredulity. At any rate, it didn’t last very long. It was Richie’s turn, and he jumped right in. Laura was so busy trying to slow down her racing heart as she realized she was next, she barely listened to his confession about his passion for skeet shooting.

  And then all eyes were upon her. Laura attempted to sit up straighter, struggling unsuccessfully to reach something resembling adult height. “I, uh, guess my secret is that I’m actually enjoying being a single parent. I don’t feel lonely on Saturday nights, and I don’t feel pressured to find myself a new mate. For years I worried about what it would be like, being on my own again, only this time with a child to take care of. But now that I’m doing it, it’s okay.”

  She was exhausted after her little spurt of honesty. Fortunately, the group had already moved on. Someone named Pete was talking about his passion for buying lottery tickets.

  When the group broke up for refreshments, Laura felt someone tap her on the arm.

  Once again, Richie was smiling down at her. Only this time they were both standing. She’d been correct in her estimate of his height. He towered above her a good eight or nine inches.

  “That was very interesting, what you said before,” Richie began, “about enjoying being single again. I’ve been finding the same thing.”

  The way he looked at her was disconcerting. He stared with such intensity she felt like a specimen pinned against a tray.

  “I’m particularly enjoying getting out and meeting women again, after being married for twenty-two years,” he told her, taking a small step forward.

  “Really?” Automatically Laura moved back, as if the two of them were doing a dance. As she did she was struck with the alarming realization that this man—nice enough, if a little rough around the edges—was hitting on her.

  Oh, my God! she thought. He can’t do that! I’m not here for social purposes. I mean, I am, but I’m looking for friends, not men. Well, men friends would be okay, but I’m not looking for men
that way....

  “Listen, I know this is kind of sudden, but would you like to go out sometime?”

  “Excuse me?” Of course, she’d heard him. This man was asking her out on a date.

  “Thanks, but I don’t think I’m ready to start dating.”

  “No? How long’s it been? Since you got separated, I mean.”

  “Only a few months.”

  ‘Tell you what. I’ll give you my number, in case you change your mind.” Already he was scribbling across me back of a paper napkin printed with EAT, DRINK, AND BE SORRY.

  “I hope I hear from you,” he said earnestly. He took hold of her hand and pressed the napkin into her palm, hanging on a little longer than necessary. Laura, trying her hardest to act nonchalant, could feel her cheeks turning as red as if she’d just been asked out on her very first date.

  Then again, in a way, she had.

  Chapter Twelve

  Although Laura tried to suppress her excitement over having had a real live man ask her out for the first time in almost seventeen years, her step was a little more lilting than usual as she sailed past The Limited, past Sbarro, past the Disney Store, toward Macy’s. She couldn’t help marveling over the fact that even though she’d been around the block enough times to have earned frequent-flyer points, someone actually wanted to take her out on a date. It was precisely what her sagging ego needed.

  Valentine’s Day was only a few days away, and she’d come to the mall determined to buy something special. After all, this year she was the only one likely to give herself a treat when February fourteenth rolled around.

  Predictably, the mall was decked out in hearts: red ones, pink ones, lacy ones, comical ones, none of which resembled the human version that had inspired their creation. She had to admit that the holiday itself was similarly contrived, rooted more in the greeting-card and boxed-candy industries than in the deeply felt emotions of those lucky enough to be in love. Even so, Laura had always found the holiday a welcome break from the doldrums of what was easily the dreariest month of the year.