What's Your Number

by Karyn Bosnak

  “They’re Muppets,” he snaps, correcting me.

  “Whatever,” I say dismissively.

  “No, not whatever,” Wade shoots back. “The two are totally different.”

  “No, they’re not. Regardless of whether you stick your right or left hand in them, they’re stuffed animals on sticks.” Wade begins blinking rapidly. By the look on his face, you would’ve thought I just told him there is no Santa Claus. “I mean, put yourself in my position. You’re an old boyfriend, an adult, and you have puppets hanging from your wall.”

  “Muppets!” he screams.

  “Whatever!”

  Wade rolls his eyes. “I should’ve expected this,” he says pissily, slapping his knees. “I should’ve expected this from you, the girl who got drunk and heckled my family.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Oh, you heard me, missy,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “Did you think I forgot about that? Well, I didn’t.” As Wade shakes his head and looks away, I realize it’s time for me get on my launching pad and fly away.

  “Wade, thanks for the picnic today,” I say politely. “But I think I’m gonna go.”

  “Yeah, good idea.” He stands up.

  As I turn Eva’s bag around on my lap and get ready to put it on my shoulder, she spots the old man Muppet sitting on the couch and, without so much as a warning growl, lunges out of her bag. Suddenly it’s like she’s possessed. After jumping on top of the Muppet, Eva takes it in her mouth and begins thrashing it from side to side, yanking out its yarn hair in the process. When Wade turns around and sees what happening, a look of panic comes over his face.

  “Noooooooo!” he screams.

  Reaching for the Muppet, Wade tries to pull it away from Eva but isn’t able to do so—her teeth are clamped firmly around its head. “Stop her!” he screams, as chaos erupts. “Stop her now!”

  Reaching down, I try to pry Eva’s mouth open but can’t. Wade’s panic is fueling her—she’s out to kill. “Wade, let go of the puppet!” I tell him. “If you let go, she might too!”

  “No!” he screams. “Make her stop!”

  “I can’t! You’re freaking her out! You’re making it worse!”

  “No, I’m not! Make her stop!”

  Wade suddenly picks up the Muppet causing Eva to dangle in the air. Seeing my puppy staring danger in the eye, I do what any good mother would do—I begin to kick the shit out of Wade’s shins.

  “Put her down, you animal!” I scream. “Put her down now!”

  “No!”

  As Wade begins to shake the Muppet up and down, Eva bounces in every direction. But she doesn’t care—she’s fearless. The Muppet must die, that’s all there is to it.

  “Stop kicking me!” Wade yells, suddenly feeling the sting in his shins.

  “I’ll stop when you put her down! I mean, what’s wrong with you? You’re gonna yank her teeth out! Let go of that stupid puppet!”

  “Muppppetttt!”

  “Whateverrrrrrrrrrrrrr!”

  That’s it. I’ve had it. With everything I have, I give Wade one final kick—a karate kick. As my foot meets his hip, I hold on to Eva for dear life as he loses his grip on the Muppet and flies across the room. When he hits the wall, Eva drops the Muppet and then looks over at him. Staring at Wade, she chews the few pieces of yarn hair she managed to pull out. When she swallows them, a look of satisfaction comes over her face. I swear to God, if she could burp, she would.

  “You’re such a psycho!” I say, turning back to Wade. “She’s just a puppy, for God’s sake!”

  “You’re calling me a psycho?”

  “Yes! You’re a twenty-nine-year-old man who plays with puppets!”

  “Mupp—”

  “STOP!!!!” Don’t you dare correct me again, you freak!”

  Wade takes a breath, stands up and walks toward the door. “I think you should go now Delilah,” he says, opening it. His nostrils are flaring.

  “Gladly,” I say, putting Eva in her bag. She’s still smacking her lips.

  After I walk out the front door, I turn around to say good-bye to Wade, but he’s already gone back into the apartment. Through the screen I see him kneeling on the floor, gathering up chunks of Muppet hair. Sensing that I haven’t yet left, he turns around.

  “What is it?” he asks rudely. “What do you want?”

  I was going to apologize for Eva’s behavior, but by the look on his face, I can tell it won’t do any good.

  “Ah . . . forget it,” I say as I turn around and walk to my car.

  “So what are you gonna do now?” Michelle asks, a little later that evening. I called her on my way home and told her what happened.

  “I don’t know. I was tired earlier, but like with Rod, the anger from what happened has given me energy, so I think I’m gonna start driving to New Orleans to see Abogado. It’s only five hundred miles away or so. If I leave now, I should be able to get there around midnight.”

  “That’s a bad idea,” Michelle says, after hesitating a bit. Assuming what she means by “bad idea” is me driving at night, I tell her not to worry.

  “Sorry, that’s not what I mean,” she says. “I think going to New Orleans in general is a bad idea. He doesn’t want to see you.”

  The “he” she’s referring to is #16, Diego Soto, also known as Abogado. I met him while on vacation with her in Barcelona. She hooked up with one of his friends and still keeps in touch with him, and because of it, she thinks she’s little Miss Know-It-All.

  “You don’t know that,” I say.

  “I don’t know it know it, but based on the way you two left things, I have a pretty good idea.”

  “Oh gimme a break. It happened two years ago. I’m sure he’s over it by now.”

  Michelle doesn’t respond.

  “How about this,” I offer, “Colin e-mailed me the addresses of four more guys. How about I go see them first, and go to New Orleans only if they don’t work out.”

  “Even then, I still think it’s a mistake.”

  “Well, I disagree.”

  “Fine, whatever,” Michelle says. She sounds aggravated. “Do what you want—just leave me out of it.”

  “Will do.”

  After hanging up, I stare into space for a bit. Michelle’s crazy to think Abogado still cares about what happened. There’s no way he could. But just in case, I’ll put off seeing him. I don’t have a very good feeling about things working out with any of the next four, but who knows—maybe I’ll be surprised.

  After packing my belongings and checking out of the hotel, I get in my car and head toward the highway. Since both Eva and I have had a stressful evening, I think soothing music is just what we need, so I tune my iPod to lovely tunes of John Denver. He brought us into Tennessee; he might as well take us out. Since we’re heading to the Sunshine State, I tune to one of my favorite songs and begin to sing along. “Sunshine on my shoulders, makes me happy . . .”

  $3,526, 37 days, 14 guys left.

  * * *

  1 After talking two people into buying a set of Dollywood salt and pepper shakers, I realized that, owing to a lack of sleep, I was unfit to mingle with the public and quickly left.

  2 I always wonder if people who live in subdivisions like this have a hard time finding the right house after a late night out. I mean, it can’t be easy.

  Chapter six

  #5 Tim the Townie

  One half of the “Thompson

  Twins” (Not the ’80s band); rumored

  to have a big one. Didn’t.

  #6 Ian Kesselman

  Weirdly obsessed with his mom.

  #9 Tom the Townie

  Other half of the “Thompson Twins”;

  rumored to have a big one. Did.

  #12 Delaware Pepper

  Yes, it’s his real name. Smelled like macaroni.

  four of a kind

  sunday, april 17

  A week later, as I pull onto the highway in Kansas and head to New Orleans, I wonder how I’m going to br
eak it to Michelle that I’m going to see Abogado. Suffice it to say, my reunions with Ian, Delaware, and the Thompson Twins didn’t go very well. As with Wade, I should have known better than to even think that one of these guys might be the one. People can change, yes, but really strange people usually don’t.

  The first disastrous reunion occurred when I visited #6, Ian Kesselman. I dated Ian ten years ago, when I was a sophomore in college. After graduating from high school, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with my life. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to go away to school. Away being the key word. My mom wasn’t keen on me leaving the East Coast but allowed me to apply to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, because she went to college there. Of all the schools that accepted me, Miami was the farthest away, so that’s where I went and that’s where I met Ian.

  The best way to describe Ian is to say that if central casting came knocking on my door looking for a stereotypical neurotic guy, I’d send them to Ian Kesselman’s house. He thought he was Woody Allen—he walked like him, talked like him, and thought like him. He copied him in every way except one. Rather than being attracted to younger girls, Ian was attracted to older women, mom-aged women, women in their fifties.

  A lot of women in their fifties are attractive, so this really didn’t bother me at first. However after a while, a couple of things happened that creeped me out. For one, although he denied it after the fact, Ian hit on my mom when she came to visit for parents’ weekend. Of course, she thought it was the coolest thing ever, that a college kid would hit on her, but when I told her that Ian hit on her because he liked older women not because he thought she looked young, she didn’t think it was so great.

  “What does he think I am, like fifty or something?” she asked in a huff, acting all offended.

  “You are fifty, Mom,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, but I don’t look it.”

  “I agree, but apparently Ian thinks you do.”

  A week after I said this, she ran out and got her first face-lift.

  The second thing that turned me off about Ian had to do with the fact that he talked dirty to me while we were having sex. I was only nineteen years old at the time, and at that point in my life verbalizing naughty thoughts was something that happened only in Sharon Stone movies, not my dorm room. However, while it might have caught me off guard, the dirty talk alone wasn’t what put me off. What did was that one time while I was having sex with Ian at his apartment, while he was saying something like “Yeah, Mama, you know you want it!”, I caught Ian looking at a picture of his mom on the nightstand. The first time it happened I thought it was a fluke. I thought maybe he was looking at something off in the distance and that the picture just happened to be in the way. But when it happened a second time, and then a third, I realized it was no fluke. That was it—three strikes, Ian was out.

  Of all the places for Ian to live today, it of course had to be Florida—the cottonhead capital of the country. (And I mean that in the kindest way.) Right then I should’ve figured out that Ian hadn’t changed. But I didn’t, no, not me, not dense Delilah. Singing “I saw the sign!” along with Ace of Base the whole way there to get myself back in the mood, I drove my cheap-ass, crappy little car to Tallahassee, staked him out, and learned that he was an aerobics instructor. Sure, the name of the gym he worked at was Fit 50, but the possibility of it being a fitness center for people over fifty years old never crossed my mind. No, I went shopping and bought myself a hot little leotard that was totally retro and totally cool. When I put it on, I looked just like Jane Fonda did in all those workout videos she made in the eighties—fierce. The very next day I trotted my twenty-nine-year-old tushy into Fit 50, only to find out that I’m twenty-one years too early to be allowed past the front desk.

  Any moron would’ve left at this point, knowing the kind of guy Ian was and all. But I didn’t, no, not me, not dense Delilah. No matter how many times I sang about “seeing the signs” on the way down to Florida, I let them all go right over my head when I got there. I never put two and two together, never assumed that Ian worked at Fit 50 because he was . . . let’s say . . . dating the owner or anything. (Which yes, he is.) I thought it was a coincidence and threatened age discrimination, demanding to be allowed inside. My threats worked—they let me in.

  When I walked into Ian’s advanced aerobics class and looked around at my competition, I giggled thinking, I’ll blow all these ladies right out of the water. Thinking being the key word there. Long story short, I passed out halfway through the class. When I did, as if that wasn’t bad enough, some old man slipped me the tongue while giving me mouth-to-mouth. Yeah . . . ewww.

  After leaving Florida, Eva and I moved on to #12, Delaware Pepper, who today lives in Houston, Texas. Although Delaware and I went to high school together, I didn’t meet him until a year after we graduated from college, in 1998. I was answering phones at a design house in Manhattan at the time and was sitting outside on my lunch break one day, listening to the Ally McBeal soundtrack while trying not to eat and hiking up my skirt, when he walked over to me and said hello. He said it was good to see me, asked how I was doing, asked how my mom and Daisy were doing, and I had absolutely no idea who he was. For twenty minutes, while we chatted, I sat there, searching my soul, wondering, Who is this guy? The look on my face must have been one of confusion, because the next thing I knew, Delaware was like, “You don’t know who I am, do you?” I shook my head and told him no—I was so embarrassed. “Delaware Pepper,” he said, trying to jar my memory. “We went to high school together.”

  Even though I still didn’t have a clue, I faked a moment of realization and exclaimed, “Oh, Delaware, I’m so sorry! It’s so nice to see you!”

  Feeling bad about not remembering him, I invited Delaware to meet me and some friends for drinks that evening. When he arrived and joined the conversation, he started going on and on about how he graduated from Harvard and was hoping to go to MIT to get his master’s degree. He was such a dork—a bore, actually—but for some reason I found myself oddly attracted to him. I think the reason had to do with the fact that he was a challenge. On the surface, Delaware was dull and strange, but underneath he was mysterious. I kept thinking if I could break through the shell and unearth his true potential, then I’d be better than all those people who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Later that evening I invited him over and the two of us ended up having sex—not very good sex. Because he was so inexperienced, Delaware had to stop every ten seconds to maintain stamina.

  Anyway, that night was the only time we slept together. I ended up breaking things off with him a few days later because he smelled like macaroni. Seriously. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it because it’s so stupid, but this is what happened. A few days after our night of passion, Delaware stopped by my apartment right after I made a big pot of macaroni and cheese. It was the good kind, the kind with the powdered cheese packet, and I wanted to dig in. I didn’t want company.

  When Delaware walked through the front door, he immediately wanted action but I wanted . . . my macaroni and cheese. He started kissing me, and the whole time I kept thinking, My macaroni and cheese is getting cold . . . it’s not going to be creamy . . . it’s going to get curdy. When I couldn’t wait any longer, I pried myself away from him and told him that I had to eat because I was hypoglycemic. I gave him a bowl to make him feel less rejected. It was only polite. When we finished eating, Delaware started kissing me again and I got really grossed out. Not only did the macaroni make his mouth warm and sticky, but it made him smell like cheese too. Just like that, it was over.

  I’ve always wondered what happened to Delaware, and when I read that he was living in Houston, wondered what on Earth he was doing there. After waiting outside his house for three days and not seeing him, I began to think I might never find out, but then I read through the notes Colin gave me more thoroughly and found his work phone number, so I called it. When I did, I quickly realized Delaware wasn’t doing anything in Hou
ston—or on Earth, for that matter. When his voicemail picked up, instead of getting the typical “Hi, I’m not available to take your call” message, I got something a little more . . . out there.

  “Hi, this is Dr. Pepper.” (Yes, Dr. Pepper, that’s been his name ever since he got his PhD from MIT) “I’m unavailable to take your call right now since I’m on the Space Shuttle Discovery servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. By the way . . . Hi, Mom!”

  Yes, the Space Shuttle Discovery, the Hubble Space Telescope. Delaware Pepper, the guy I so foolishly broke up with because he smelled like macaroni, now works for NASA. Yes, in Houston we had a problem, and it was me, kicking myself for being an idiot, seven years ago.

  But Eva and I didn’t give up, no. We got back in the car and drove all the way to a small rinky-dink town in the middle of Kansas to visit #5 and #9, the Thompson Twins. Obviously, these aren’t the same Thompson Twins who sang the “Hold Me Now” song that was so popular in the eighties, but twin brothers whose last name just happens to be Thompson. I’m not proud of it, but yes, I hooked up with brothers. I didn’t do it at the same time or anything. (I’m not that low-budget.) I hooked up with the second one almost two years after I had hooked up with the first, and in my defense, the only reason I did was because I thought he was the first. These guys were identical, they really were.

  Well, almost.

  I met Tim and Tom Thompson in college. They lived in Oxford, Ohio, but didn’t go to Miami University. They were locals—local yokels—who grew up there. Seeing as though they were friendly guys, everyone on campus thought they were students, which they were, just not at Miami University.1 They were cute in a skater boy kind of way, and tall and skinny with good, floppy, Hugh Grant–style hair.

  The first twin I was with was Tim. We dated on and off for a few months at the beginning of my sophomore year in the fall of 1994. I don’t remember why we broke up, but when we did, I remember that some girl asked me if the rumor was true, if Tim’s penis was as large as everyone said it was. I had never heard such a thing, and unfortunately (for me) told her that there was no truth to it—Tim’s penis was average.