by Sarah Title
She looked like she was going on a first date.
Despite her protestations, it is prudent to put one’s best foot forward on the first date. That wasn’t lying, or trickery, as she’d argued; it was a way to show your plumage to its best effect and see if the guy’s plumage suited yours.
This guy’s plumage suited, on paper.
He was close enough to her age that it didn’t really make a difference. He had a steady job that more than paid the rent. He was handsome, in a bland, inoffensive way. She said he looked like a young Paul Rudd, and the look in her eyes when she said it leads this writer to believe that that is a good thing.
When they first met, there was an immediate interest, enough to keep dinner conversation going through an evening at a classic Cole Valley spot. She didn’t order spaghetti. She didn’t balk when he ordered veal.
But something happened as the evening wore on. Not something terrible. He didn’t reveal himself to be a closet Republican (which, for this librarian, would have been a problem). He didn’t bemoan the amount of tax money spent on public transportation. He didn’t talk about how he didn’t have time to read for pleasure and it just didn’t interest him.
Despite all of this, he probably wouldn’t be getting a second date.
There was no spark, the librarian reported. On paper, he was great. IRL, he was just fine.
Spark, or lack thereof: it’s sunk a thousand relationships. But what if there never is a spark? What if you’re just not a spark-y person? Do you sit around waiting for your spark to come along, or do you settle for the great-on-paper, fine relationship?
And if she wasn’t part of this experiment, would our Undateable Librarian have settled for Mr. No Spark?
BERNIE TRIED HER HARDEST not to punch a hole through her monitor.
Settle for no spark. What year did Colin think this was? She’d bet he’d never asked himself if he should continue seeing someone with no mutual spark, just for the sake of being in a relationship.
Not that she had done that. Not that she would do that. She had never seen the point. Relationships were such a pain that she never understood why people went through them if there wasn’t something extraordinary there.
All of the delight she’d felt after last night’s date had long ago evaporated. But was her level of delight as pathetic as people who tried to force themselves into uninteresting relationships? Were her expectations really so low that she was thrilled because he was a decent conversationalist who did not have terrible breath?
Yes. It was true. She’d been out of the dating pool for so long because she thought there was nobody there for her, and she had started to think that everybody was a vile monster whose only goal was to subjugate his prey into housewifely submission.
Maybe that wasn’t fair to the men of San Francisco.
Or of the world, really.
Her last date, Parker, was a great guy. Not great for her, but great. Which made her think there were other great guys out there, and that one of them would be great for her.
Hence, the floaty feeling of delight.
Which Colin burst as soon as he published that story.
She should be glad. It was a reminder that while she was taking part in an interesting personal experiment, Colin was using it for his professional gain, which meant driving more people to Glaze.com, which meant asking interesting-ish open-ended questions like he was Carrie Bradshaw in 2003. They each had something they wanted from the experience. If she got the great love of her life out of it, that was just the icing on the cake. The cake was her participation in a series of activities meant to prove that the Disapproving Librarian and all of her cynical sisters were not actually undateable.
She pulled her hair up off of her neck and fastened the clip in place. It was almost lunchtime, and she’d gone all morning without putting it up, which was a new record for her. She had come to terms with the fact that keeping her hair down was not an admission that the patriarchy was right and she needed to spend more time on her appearance.
She was trying.
She wanted to tell Colin that.
After she punched him in the face.
This was not healthy. She should walk off some of her anger, preferably with Starr. Or maybe she’d just go see if Maddie had any cookies.
“There’s our girl!” Al said when he opened the door, although Bernie could barely hear him over Starr’s ecstatic barking. It was nice to be wanted, Bernie decided. Even if it was mostly from a ten-pound fluff monster whose second love was rawhide. “Come in, come in,” Al said, ushering her around Starr, which was silly since Bernie just bent down to pick her up. “I’m running out to the store. Do you need anything?”
“I can go for you,” she offered, considering whether or not she’d be able to sneak Starr into Safeway. It hadn’t worked last time. Too many tempting smells.
Al waved her offer away. “You and Maddie have your girl talk. I’ll be back before you know it.”
Bernie found Maddie seated at their tiny kitchen table, her face tight.
“Bernie!” She brightened a little. “Is he gone?”
“Al? Yeah, he said he’d be right back.”
“Good. That man is wearing on my last nerve.”
“What? Why? What happened?” Bernie sat down across the table from her, Starr in her lap, and reached for Maddie’s hand.
“Oh, nothing. It’s just this tiny apartment, and I can’t get up and go anywhere without him. He gets so worried.”
Bernie winced. “I’m sure it’s just because he cares.”
“I know he does. I just . . . well, you don’t need to hear about this old lady’s problems.”
“Maddie, stop that. Anyway, we can go somewhere if you want. I was just coming to take Starr for a walk. We’ll leave him a note.”
“Aren’t you going out with your nice young man tonight?”
“Uh . . .” Bernie had explained that Colin was not her nice young man, but she hadn’t quite gotten around to the whole dating-thirty-different-guys-for-a-story thing. It wasn’t that she thought Al and Maddie would judge her. Al was always telling her she should sign up for “that Kindling on the computer,” which Maddie later explained meant Tinder. Which, yikes.
Al and Maddie were like her grandparents. She loved them, and she knew she had their support, but talking about her love life just felt like too much. Even though, a few months ago, she’d walked in on them in flagrante delicto, so it wasn’t like they didn’t appreciate the finer points of romance.
Anyway, Bernie’d worked the whole thing out with their dog. She didn’t need to bore Maddie with the gory details.
“Actually, I’m going out later this afternoon. But we have time to go grab a coffee. . . .”
“That’s sweet, dear, but these old bones don’t do anything quickly anymore. Anyway, Al’s gone out, and by the time he gets back I’ll be in love with him again.”
Well, that sounded terrible.
“It’s not terrible, you know. I can see that look on your face.”
“No look,” Bernie protested, even as she felt her facial muscles relax out of her patented look of unconscious disapproval. She focused her attention on Starr, who was focusing her attention on the plate of toast in front of Maddie.
“You’re young and you have so many choices,” Maddie explained, breaking off a piece of crust and feeding it to Starr. “It wasn’t like that in my day. If you didn’t get married, you were a suspicious old spinster.”
Not so different from today, Bernie thought.
“I was against marriage, too, you know. I wanted to be an engineer.”
Bernie felt her eyes go all wide with surprise. “Maddie, I had no idea.”
“My parents didn’t have the money to send me to college, and there were no scholarships for girls back then. I could have become a math teacher, I suppose. But the idea of spending all day with those monstrous little children . . .” Maddie shuddered. “And then I met Al and it didn’t matter.”
> “So you gave it all up for him?” Bernie arched an eyebrow at Starr, as if to say, See? This is what women have been dealing with. Starr continued to chew on her toast.
“I wouldn’t say that. I just didn’t have the fight in me it would have required to break into the field. It was easier to do what was expected of me.”
“Maddie, this is depressing.”
“No, it’s not meant to be. I made my choice, and I’ve been happy. I’ve spent sixty-three years with the love of my life, and the worst that happens is that he gets on my nerves sometimes. Yes, I didn’t get to build rocketships, but Al and I have created a life together, a happy life. We take care of each other.”
“And you never wanted to go back to school?”
“Oh, sure. I did, once. In the early eighties I enrolled in City College. I didn’t last a semester.”
“What happened?” Bernie asked, imagining Al missing coming home to dinner and a clean house.
“Do you know how much I hate school?” Maddie asked.
“But you wanted to be an engineer.”
“During my first class, I realized that everyone in the school was younger than me, and most of my classmates were men. Boys, really. And I realized if I got this degree and got a job, I’d just be answering to boys my whole life, and I can’t imagine anything worse than that.”
“So you gave it all up so you could answer to your husband?”
Maddie let out a quick laugh, bright and sharp. “Is that what you think? No, no. I was a housewife, but I did not answer to Al. The home is my domain. If anything, he answers to me.”
“True.”
“But the truth is, nobody answers to anyone. We’re a team. We take care of each other, and we love each other’s dreams.”
“That’s sweet, I think.”
“Yes, I know you’re too modern for anything silly like love. But you watch out for that nice young man. I think he’s the one who could capture your heart.”
Bernie snorted.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dear Maria,
I met my boyfriend at a wrestling match. I went there as a joke with a group of girlfriends, and I couldn’t believe I’d met such a handsome, normal-looking guy. We’ve been going out for a few months now, and it’s been great, except for one thing. He is really serious about how much he loves wrestling. Which would be fine, except that he thinks I’m super into it, too. I kept it up when we were first dating because I was interested in him, and I wanted him to be interested in me. But now we have a standing date at a wings place with pay-per-view, and he got us tickets to an arena match for our six-month anniversary.
Help!
Big Elbow to the Heart in South Beach
Dear Big Elbow,
I can see you’ve met your match, ha ha ha. You have two choices: you can fess up, and find something else you have in common, or you can keep on pretending. It depends on how badly you want to keep this man. It sounds like he’s a little obsessed, and by a little obsessed, I mean that it sounds like you are dating a man-child. Your entire relationship is based on this lie. My readers know that I am not against a little white lie if it keeps the peace, but this lie is really pinning you to the ropes. Your choice is either to be happy and alone, or to live a lie with your man. If you choose the latter, keep in mind that wrestling is fake, and maybe he’s into that sort of thing. Don’t ruin the illusion for him unless you plan to break up with him.
I still can’t figure out how to work in a full nelson joke, and for that, readers, I am very sorry.
Kisses,
Maria
COLIN WHISTLED AT HER and it took everything in her power not to smack him in his pretty face.
She couldn’t believe Makeda had convinced her to wear leggings in public.
Bernie didn’t even wear leggings in private.
Well, she wore them, sometimes. Under dresses, if her tights were all in the laundry.
Not with just a thin shirt that had a large hole cutout in the back (showing off her new sports bra, because apparently her old sports bras were only good for the incinerator). Athleisure, it was called. “We’ve reached peak ridiculousness,” Bernie had told Makeda.
“I can’t believe you’re complaining about a fashion movement that allows you to wear sweatpants in public,” she’d flung back.
But Bernie wasn’t wearing sweatpants. She was wearing tight leggings. And, yes, the shirt with the cutout back was long enough to cover her butt, and, yes, she was pleasantly surprised at how good her legs looked in the leggings, but still.
“You look hot.”
She blushed. Blushed! God, she was turning into the kind of woman who wore leggings and blushed at male attention. What would Marcie say? What would Starr say?
Starr would probably say that she was responsible for Bernie’s legs, on account of all that walking, and probably Bernie should give her some extra treats for that.
“I’d give a lot of money to know what just went through your head,” Colin said.
“What do you mean? Nothing.”
“Your face didn’t say nothing. Your face said anger, then embarrassment, then more anger, then it got kind of soft at the end there.”
“I was thinking about a dog.”
“A real dog? Not a metaphorical dog referring to men in general or me specifically for whistling at you?”
“No, I was thinking of an actual dog. One that I actually like.”
“Sick burn, Bernie.”
But Colin didn’t look offended at all. He had a crooked smile on his face that made her smile back.
Good God, were they flirting?
A cold wind blew off the bay, straight through the hole in her shirt.
Once again, fashion was making her a damsel in distress. Were backless shirts the new high heels? Probably not, but she reached for the sweatshirt she’d brought, despite Makeda’s protestations that it ruined the lines of her outfit. It was cold out here at the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge.
“I can’t believe I’m walking across the Golden Gate Bridge. I feel like such a tourist.”
“A tourist wouldn’t have brought a sweatshirt,” Colin pointed out, which was true. Lots of people came to San Francisco in the summer expecting summer temperatures. Ha ha ha, said the microclimates and the cooling breezes off the bodies of water that surrounded their little peninsula.
“At least it’s a nice day,” she conceded. She’d driven across the Golden Gate Bridge when it was so shrouded in fog that she couldn’t see the car in front of her. Today was bright and clear and, miraculously, sunny. She was wearing an updated version of sweatpants, and had learned about a fashion trend that would enable her to acceptably wear this version of sweatpants in public without being shamed by her new clothing conscience. It was a great time to be a woman!
“Do you want to know about your date?”
“Don’t spoil my good mood,” she told Colin, tilting her head up to soak in the sun.
“He’s not a software guy,” he said. “So that’s good, right?”
“Variety! Pia must really like me.”
“He’s a personal trainer.”
“Oy,” she mumbled.
“His name’s Chad—”
“Chad the personal trainer? That sounds ominous.”
“He’s the head trainer at a gym in the Mission, and he coaches baseball with the Boys and Girls Club after school.”
“That’s nice.”
“He said he wanted the chance to do an unusual date, and to show you a little about what his passion is.”
“His passion is frequenting tourist attractions in high-end sweatpants?”
“No, he’s a runner.”
It took a moment for Bernie to understand what Colin had said. She was so dazzled by the sun and the athleisure....
“Did you say ‘runner’?”
“Yeah.”
“So we’re running?”
“He promised to take it slow.”
“I don’t run!�
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“More of a jog, with lots of walking. He’s a well-respected running coach.”
“I’m wearing athleisure! Running isn’t leisure!”
“You walk all the time, right? This is just . . . a little faster.”
“We couldn’t just have casual sex?”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“What, I have casual sex!” Sometimes.
Rarely.
But she wasn’t against the idea.
It was certainly preferable to running across the Golden Gate Bridge. On a date.
“There’ll be a car at the other end to take you into Sausalito for a drink.”
“And where will you be?”
“I’ll meet you guys at the restaurant.”
“What if he tries to throw me off the bridge?”
“He’s not going to throw you off the bridge.”
“What if I trip and fall over the railing?”
Colin turned to look at the bridge, probably seeing the very high railings that it would be virtually impossible to accidentally fall over. “Um . . . I hope you can swim?”
“Glad to know you’ve got my back.”
Colin gave her a sarcastic bow.
“Melissa?”
She turned from the top of Colin’s head to see a man, about her height, with gelled hair and the hugest biceps she’d ever seen.
“Hi,” she said. “Chad?” She was almost afraid to shake his hand. He looked really strong.
Chad surprised her by leaning in to kiss her cheek. “I’m so pumped we’re doing this. You ever run across the bridge before?”
“Nope. I haven’t even walked across.”
“Sweet. We’ll take it nice and slow. Less than two miles, no problem. You pumped?”
Two miles? “Um, yes. Pumped.” Bernie fought off flashbacks to high school gym class. She must have survived the mile run because she was here, wasn’t she? But it hadn’t been pleasant. This would be twice that.