“I just want to get through this summer,” I said, looking out my patio doors. It looked as though the storm was subsiding. I could now see a horizontal gray line that had to be Lake Michigan.
“Be positive!” Elizabeth urged me.
It had only taken me a few minutes after leaving Elaine’s office two weeks ago to decide that I would do this crazy assignment after all. It was certainly time for me to shuffle the deck of my life. I was bored not just with my job as a lifestyle editor, a position I’d held for the past four years, but with everything. Besides seeing Elizabeth a couple times a week and the occasional date, I had no social life in New York. I lived for my four weeks of vacation a year when I could travel with my pal Andre. I loved my younger sister, Susan, her husband, and of course my new niece, Matilda, but Susan and I had never really connected. My father, whom I’d been very close to, had been gone now for almost twenty-five years. And every time I saw my mother, a woman who could drive the Pope to take a hit off a crack pipe, I wasn’t myself for days afterward.
Of course it would be a dream come true to get “La Vie,” my own humor column, but what had actually convinced me to come to Milwaukee was very simple: I wanted to see if finding a man I could fall in love with and marry was even possible. I had nothing to lose and potentially everything to gain by doing this assignment. Elizabeth was right as usual, I needed to be positive and take this assignment seriously.
* * *
The next morning I walked out onto my balcony under a perfect cloudless sky and turned my face up to the sun. White sailboats dotted the sapphire blue water. I could see weeping willow trees bent over a pond in the distance and a few colorful kites hovered over a huge expanse of green. Rubbing my arms, which had broken out in goose bumps, I took in the spectacular view, which made me feel as though in the middle of the night I’d been whisked away to a commercial set for a feminine hygiene product.
After taking a quick shower, I slicked a comb through my hair and put on my favorite pink lipstick and a thin coat of mascara. I slipped on a red halter dress and a bright yellow sweater and was out the door in twenty minutes. Grabbing the Saturday paper I found on my welcome mat, I took the elevator down to the ground level and stepped outside to take my first sunny breath of Milwaukee. The smell of freshly cut grass hit me, reminding me of summer visits to my mother’s house in Scarsdale, New York.
In search of my morning caffeine fix, I walked by redbrick and brownstone mansions, twenty-story apartment buildings, the construction site of a new condo building going up, the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, and a small art museum. The sidewalks were filled with people walking dogs, jogging, and strolling hand in hand. Outside a retirement home I passed, old men and women sat on benches, chatting in a broken language full of harsh consonants, probably Yiddish or Polish.
A few minutes later I saw the sign The Java Junkie and knew I’d found the perfect spot. Anything that implied unhealthy excess when it came to coffee was my kind of place. I ordered a latte and a blueberry scone and took them outside to the only free black, wrought iron sidewalk table.
Two sets of dewy-eyed hand-holding couples with the we’ve-just-gotten-out-of-bed-after-a-night-and-morning-of-amazing-sex looks on their faces were sitting at tables on either side of me. Post-bonking hormones swirled through my airspace like unwanted secondhand smoke, and I felt my early-morning good spirits slowly sinking into emotional quicksand.
Not a good way to start the summer. I packed up my scone, grabbed my coffee cup, headed back to my new apartment, and spent the rest of the day trying to do as little as possible. I unpacked my carry-on suitcase, finished reading the paper, and went out to my balcony, where I must’ve dozed off, since the downstairs buzzer woke me at six.
I opened the door to a stunning woman with a pierced navel and a blue and gold shooting-star tattoo soaring over her belly button. Her wild auburn, strawberry, and cherry hair was gelled into crazy two-inch spikes, and big silver hoop earrings dangled from her ears.
“Can I help you?” I asked, thinking it might be the apartment manager or a neighbor wanting to share some of that famous Milwaukee gemutlichkeit.
“Sam, don’t you recognize me?” she said, throwing her arms around my neck and giving me a hug, which was followed by one of those awkward it’s-good-to-see-you-and-I-want-to-look-you-over-to-see-how-three-years-have-changed-you-but-don’t-want-to-be-impolite-and-stare moments. I couldn’t get over how different she looked.
“Lessie, wow, you look fantastic!” I said finally, not wanting to bring attention to her weight loss directly.
“You do too!” she assured me cheerfully. “You haven’t changed at all except, what happened to all your hair?”
I’d had shoulder-length straight blond hair my entire life up until three years ago when, in a post-ex-fiance-David-break-up-frenzy, I’d had my hair chopped off the very day that we were supposed to get married. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that he loved my long blond hair and had told me that several times a week for the entire three years we’d been together.
“I have the same question for you,” I said, looking at her short spiky locks, which seemed to change color as the sun hit them when she walked across my living room.
The first time I’d seen Lessie had been in the bathroom of our dorm during our freshman year at Brown University. I’d noticed her hair immediately. She’d had magnificent hair, the kind that was capable of launching a thousand ships—waist-length, thick as molasses, golden blond, and perfectly straight. Lessie had always been pretty, but I’d never seen her wear makeup and her weight had always been a problem. Every year she’d added another five to ten pounds, and by the time we’d graduated, she must have been close to two hundred. But Steve, her fiance, at six foot five and probably fifty pounds lighter, had loved her exactly as she was. After graduation, they moved to Milwaukee, Steve’s hometown, and were married six months later. Three years ago, just before David and I had broken up, Lessie had come to visit me in New York just after she’d filed for divorce and when she’d still looked like the Lessie I’d known in college. It was the last time I’d seen her, but we’d been in constant contact via e-mail and telephone since that visit.
Lessie, a high school art teacher, stood in the center of my living room and looked around, hands on her narrow hips. She wore a cropped white halter top, white Capri pants encircled by a hip-hugging silver chain-link belt, and white sling-back sandals. I glanced down at her hipbones jutting out through the thin material of her cotton pants.
“When I lost all my weight after my divorce, the biggest thrill of my life was discovering I actually have hipbones just like everyone else,” she said. “But I have to be careful, if I so much as think about ice cream, I gain five pounds.”
Men don’t know how easy they have it. If one of their buddies whom they hadn’t seen in a few years had lost a lot of weight, they’d either avoid the topic altogether (impossible among Venetians) or say something like, What the hell happened to your fat ass and beer gut? Women on the other hand must follow the unwritten rule of never calling attention to physical imperfections, former or present, because when we look into the mirror, we see every facial hair, trace of a wrinkle, and cellulite molecule beginning to form on our thighs. But bald, chinless men with guts that could qualify for their own zip codes look in the mirror and think “stud” before going out to try and pick up a woman half their age.
“Great apartment!” Lessie said, stepping out onto the balcony. “What a view!” She turned and flashed me a huge smile. “So, Sam, you were all mysterious on the phone about why you’re in Milwaukee. What’s up?” she asked me, her blue eyes expectant. “You’re on assignment, aren’t you?”
I handed Lessie a copy of the May 27 issue of Tres Chic with a silhouette of a woman’s head on the cover carrying the lead story: “Will Our Mystery Woman Defy the Statistics and Find Mr. Right?”
“Holy shit, are you the Mystery Woman?” she asked, gaping at me as though I’d jus
t announced the date for my sex change operation. “I heard something about this on the news yesterday.”
I shrugged. “I’ll tell you the whole story over dinner.”
* * *
“So this whole thing isn’t just a publicity stunt for Tres Chic?” Lessie asked me a half hour later. She stabbed a forkful of greens with her right hand while she grabbed a French fry off my plate with her left, swiped it through the ketchup, and popped it into her mouth. “You’re not going to get a quiet annulment a few months after everything dies down?”
“No scam. I’m here to find true love,” I said. I cut another slice of my filet mignon, taking full advantage of my healthy expense account. “And my wedding is already set for this New Year’s Eve at the Plaza.”
I had also finagled a three-week honeymoon to Europe from Elaine once I realized I had some leverage. Unless Elaine wanted to go with a freelance writer, and I knew that for this type of assignment she preferred to keep it in-house, I was the only choice, being the only woman over forty and never married presently working at Tres Chic.
“Wow, this is just like those reality TV shows, only I guess it’s reality magazine?”
It was real enough I suppose, although nothing before in my life had ever had such a bizarre, surreal quality to it. It was difficult to grasp the concept that it was now my “job” to find a husband, something I’d thought I wanted since I was a teenager, except that now I was no longer sure.
“You’ve picked a hell of a city to try and find a husband,” Lessie continued, shaking her head. “I know that’s why you were sent here, but...”
“Is it that bad?” I asked her.
“The first words that spring to mind when I think of Milwaukee’s dating scene are black, soulless wasteland of loneliness and despair,” she said in a voice, serious soft, like a mother explaining that the hamster isn’t sleeping, it’s dead.
My face must’ve collapsed at that point, since she immediately broke out into a huge grin. One of the things I’d always loved about Lessie was her wicked sense of humor, which was so disarming and unexpected coming from someone who’d grown up on a dairy farm in the middle of Minnesota. At least she used to look wholesome. Her sense of humor fit her new looks perfectly.
“The problem is that we have an epidemic of un-dating,” she said.
“Un-dating?”
“You know, men who don’t really ask you out. They suggest meeting them at a bar, maybe buy you one drink, and then expect you to jump into bed with them.”
“Yeah, we have that in New York too. I guess I was hoping the Midwest was a little more traditional,” I said.
“Or maybe they do ask you out, sort of, but then make the women do all the work,” she said.
Lessie recounted a story about meeting Kirk at a summer festival the year before. I exchanged my own un-dating experience, telling her about Brad, a wealthy entrepreneur whom I’d met weight lifting at my health club a couple years ago. Our first date had been great, but then he’d followed up with a lame e-mail wanting to know if we were going to have a second “meeting.” I made a mental note to write about un-dating in my journal later. I wanted to have ideas and columns ready for “La Vie” when I started in September.
“For the first two years after my divorce, I was looking for a real man who would treat me well. But over the past year, I’ve downsized my criteria. Now I’d be happy with a man whose picture isn’t hanging on the wall of the post office.”
“So the dating scene here is bad?”
“It’s not great, but I suppose it all depends on what you’re looking for,” she said. “Let me see if I have this straight. According to your boss, you’re supposed to find a college-educated, professional guy, attractive, but preferably movie-star handsome since it will make for a better cover shot, never married, or if divorced, no kids or skeletons in the closet, right?”
“Basically,” I said. She made it sound like I was in the market for a luxury sedan with all the standard equipment plus all the options.
“Good luck,” she said, as she played with her left hoop earring.
If gorgeous, smart, and sexy Lessie had been looking for three years without much luck, I’d be lucky to have one good date this summer.
“I’m going to be publicly humiliated. In September I’ll be revealed to the nation as the loser who couldn’t find a husband.”
“Your boss doesn’t seem to have a clue what it’s really like out here in the bowels of singlehood,” Lessie said.
She didn’t know Elaine Daniels. Of course Elaine didn’t have a clue, and if she did, she wouldn’t care.
“So what’s your plan of action?” Lessie asked.
“I thought I’d go through the white pages alphabetically,” I told her. “Hello, my name is Samantha. If there’s a single man in your household between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five, could I speak to him please?”
“Aren’t you limiting yourself a little with that age range?” asked Lessie.
“Okay, I’m supposed to do the video dating thing, Internet dating, personals ads, three-minute dating, singles volleyball, a singles’ cooking class, baseball games, stuff like that,” I said.
“Are you going to have time for any fun this summer?” she asked.
The waitress came by and Lessie ordered another glass of wine. A toddler in a high chair at a nearby table gurgled happily at his parents.
“Do you still want to have kids?” I asked her.
I knew that the kids issue had been the main reason Lessie had divorced Steve. After years of trying, Lessie hadn’t gotten pregnant so she’d gone through all of the tests, which she’d passed. Then, after begging Steve for years, he’d finally gotten tested. They’d found out he was sterile due to a case of mumps when he was fourteen. Lessie had wanted to use a sperm donor or adopt, but Steve wouldn’t even discuss it or go to marriage counseling.
“I’m not sure I want to have kids anymore. I think I’m getting too old,” Lessie said.
The waitress brought her glass of wine. We both passed on dessert.
“How about you, Sam, do you want kids?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t see myself as a single mother. Every time I go to the gynecologist’s office, I get that look from my doctor like ‘what are you waiting for?’ I want to tell her, I’m waiting for the whole package and in the usual order, the husband and then the kids.”
I used to think a lot about the children I would have. David and I had had it all planned out—two kids and then maybe adopt one. But then, everything fell apart because of a chicken wing.
Just three months before our wedding, David and I were having dinner when I’d made the fateful mistake of wondering out loud how many eggs I had left. I was only thirty-eight at the time, practically up to my eyeballs in eggs, but I thought I was getting too old to have a child. When I told David I wanted to get pregnant right after we got married, he inhaled a chicken wing and started choking. He grabbed his throat and turned beet red. I watched in horror while the waiter saved him with the Heimlich maneuver.
Having a chicken wing temporarily lodged in his throat turned out to be a life-transforming experience for David. First, he started talking about giving up his partnership and quitting Ernst & Young to travel to India and stay for a while at Swami something-or-other’s ashram in the Himalayas. If you knew David, you would understand that a declaration like that would be a little like Hugh Hefner announcing that he was giving up women, sex, and his publishing fortune to pursue a life of asceticism. Not only had David given a new definition to the word workaholic (he’d slept at his office two or three nights a week), I’d begged him since we’d first started going out to take some time off to travel with me. But David had always claimed that he couldn’t get away from work.
Next, he was no longer sure he wanted to have children and had suggested postponing the wedding. I’d thought he was just getting a normal attack of wedding jitters. But it wasn’t the usual case of cold feet. His had beco
me encased in glaciers that wouldn’t thaw until the next millennium. And a week after that, David had told me he didn’t love me anymore and wasn’t sure that he ever had, and then he’d broken off our engagement.
When the bill arrived I pulled out my Tres Chic American Express card and put it on top, waving Lessie off when she reached for her wallet.
“I think we should do something special to inaugurate your arrival in Milwaukee,” said Lessie with a devilish smile.
* * *
“You can open your eyes now, ma’am.”
I’d just suffered the ultimate in humiliation, being called ma’am in a tattoo parlor by a kid young enough to be my son.
Part man, mostly tattoo and metal, the tattoo artist had a face that could launch a nuclear attack. He had so many piercings, I couldn’t tell where his skin ended and the metal started. Eyebrows, nose, forehead, cheeks, lip, and chin were lined with dozens of tiny silver hoops, while his arms were swathed with snakes, dragons, and what looked like a mermaid being swallowed whole by a whale. A scorpion was tattooed on the front of his neck, and a U.S. flag dead center on the back.
I’ve had my share of zany moments, and I suppose this was one of them, although I hated to admit that I might actually be one of those women who refused to acknowledge the fact that they were—although technically only in the numerical sense of the word—middle-aged. You know this kind of woman. She still shops for clothes in the juniors section and gets Botox injections and face-lifts until her head hovers a few feet above her shoulders. She dates much younger men, pierces her navel, and lets someone she hasn’t seen in three years talk her into getting a ...
“Let me see your tattoo,” said Lessie, who’d stepped back into the room as soon as the needle had fallen silent.
The three of us looked intently at my stomach as if peering into a still, very deep pond. The delicate wings, the tiny bow, the quiver of arrows, the cherubic face ... What the hell had I been thinking?
Adventures of a Salsa Goddess Page 3