Adventures of a Salsa Goddess (16 page)

He wiped the sweat off his brow with a quick backstroke of his hand. A mass of blond curly hair escaped over the tops of his ears and out the back of the Brewers baseball cap that he wore backward. I took note of his black tank top and red swimming trunks not to mention his thick muscular thighs covered with blond hair.

“Easy for you to say,” I wanted to tell him. I half expected that if I dared turn around again, I’d see my teammates stringing a noose over the lifeguard stand.

We started playing again. As the ball magically avoided me for the next ten minutes or so, I had begun to relax, although I was still too nervous to actually be having fun. It was then that my eye caught the ball coming right at me again.

“Okay, I can do this,” I told myself. “I can, I can, I can!” I forced myself to keep my eye on the ball, only to misjudge its trajectory. In an attempt to dive for it, I slid face-first across the sand, my mouth open in stunned disbelief until I finally stopped moving, with my arms straight out o
ver my head, hands still clasped together white-knuckled in a death grip. It occurred to me that if I lay there long enough, they might think I’d died. I quietly spit out as much sand as I could, making a little puddle of saliva under my chin. Then the pain hit. My forearms and knees felt like they were on fire.

I felt a pair of strong arms lift me up from behind to a standing position. I was a picture of stunning beauty—completely coated in sand, my left knee bleeding, the right a red roadmap of scrapes, and both forearms scraped raw. And to top it off, a long string of sandy drool dangled from my chin. I turned around to see that it was Mr. Cute Guy from across the net who’d rescued me. The only way this could get worse was if one of my boobs had popped out of my suit. I looked down. Mercifully, they were both still intact.

With the little dignity I had left, I gave my teammates a little wave and scuttled away like a crab. I limped over to the sidelines, bent over to grab my gym bag, and slung it over my shoulder.

“But your volleyball career was off to such a promising start,” said Mr. Cute Guy, running up to my side as he slipped an arm around my back and helped me to my car.

“Hey, Joe, are you coming back?” yelled a guy on his team.

“No,” said Joe. “See you next week.”

I fumbled for my keys inside my gym bag. Joe took them, opened the passenger door, and helped ease me into a sitting position.

“I’ve got a first-aid kit in my car,” he said. “I’ll be right
back.” While he sprinted off to the north, I found a bottle of water inside the bag and rinsed the sand from my mouth, pouring the rest over my body. Joe returned a minute later with a medium-sized brown paper bag.

“I’m always banging myself up. I keep a little disinfectant and a lifetime supply of Band-Aids in here,” he said, rummaging through the bag. “Here we go.” He pulled out a bottle of iodine and a few bandages.

“Now this is going to sting,” he said smoothly, staring at my knees.

“Ow.” I flinched and looked down at the Band-Aid on my left knee. “Snoopy?”

“I’m all for equal opportunity in the world of cartoon characters. How about SpongeBob for your right arm and Scooby Doo for your left?” he asked, holding up a bandage in each hand.

After he’d finished playing doctor, I’d expected him to leave, but he lingered as I slipped on a pair of jean shorts and a T-shirt over my swimsuit, and fifteen minutes later, he and I sat across from each other in a booth at an old-fashioned ice cream parlor called Cream City. Joe devoured a hot fudge sundae loaded with pecans while I licked my single scoop of Death by Chocolate from a sugar cone.

We talked about what brought us to a sand volleyball court on Lake Michigan and our jobs.

“I became an engineer because my father was one and his father was too,” he said, shoveling a big spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. “But if I won the lottery, I’d quit and never look back.”

It turned out that Joe got paid to work as a chemical engineer for a food company, tackling such problems as figuring out the exact formula needed for the latest M&M color. But Joe’s job was more of a hobby than a profession since he devoted the rest of his life to all things sports and music. He was also on a men’s volleyball team and played rugby on Sunday mornings and softball two nights a week. On weekends, he played guitar in a garage band at weddings and the occasional opener for has-been bands at church festivals.

Was he filling up his life because he didn’t have a woman in it or because he didn’t want one? These thoughts bounced around in my head until he asked for my phone number when he dropped me off and gave me a peck on the lips.

“Hey, Sam, don’t forget,” he said. “Next Thursday is my birthday.”

He’d only mentioned his birthday four times, as though it were a national holiday. But I hoped that he wanted me to save the night so I could help him celebrate.

“I’ll call you,” he said with a wave and then drove off.

When I got home and checked my voice mail, I found messages from Elizabeth and the man with the voice from the newspaper personal ad, Dr. Mark, whom I called back despite the embarrassing message I’d left for him. I reached Mark on the first ring, actually half a ring, as though he’d pounced on the telephone the moment it had sounded.

At first Mark seemed normal enough. He told me he liked piano jazz bars, that his favorite authors were Salman Rushdie and Hunter Thompson, and that his favorite hobby was taking exotic action vacations, something an orthopedic surgeon probably had no problems budgeting for. His next trip was planned for Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

“Did you know that scientists are predicting that the snow on Kili is going to be gone in just fifteen years?” he said, and with barely a breath added, “So Sam, how would you describe your build?”

“My build?” I asked, taken aback by his bizarre segue to what was probably the deal breaker for him—no fat chicks. “What do you mean?”

“Your ad says that you’re 135 pounds, but, well, you know how that goes,” he said chuckling.

“No, why don’t you tell me how that goes?” I said, not chuckling.

“Well women tend to ignore the actual numbers on the scale, if they weigh themselves at all,” he said as if giving a lecture. “Women fudge ten, fifteen, even fifty pounds in my experience.” Right, and men suck in their guts, add three to six inches to their height, and do the comb-over on their bald spots. But I guess when you have the nerve to claim that you look like Mel Gibson, it’s easy to imagine that you have a license to grill women about their vital statistics. I was tempted to tell him that I only had another one hundred pounds to lose to reach my goal weight of 135, to see how quickly he came up with a sudden orthopedic emergency to get off the phone.

“I’m 135 pounds give or take a pound or two fluctuation, if that’s all right with you,” I said.

“Great! Would you like to go to dinner Monday night?”

“I think I’ve got something going on Monday night,” I hedged.

“How about Tuesday or Wednesday?”

Warning. Warning. This guy has way too much time on his hands.

“I left my calendar in my car,” I told him. “Let me check my schedule and give you a call back.”

He didn’t seem happy about it but he agreed. As soon as I hung up, I called Elizabeth.

“He’s an orthopedic surgeon who looks like Mel Gibson. He goes on exotic vacations, has a voice like God, and you’re wavering about whether to call him back? Do I have the situation summarized correctly?” asked Elizabeth, as if she were addressing a courtroom.

I mumbled a “hmm,” knowing it was pointless to argue with her when she was on a lawyer roll.

“On the other hand, if everything about him is true,” she continued, “why in the world does a guy like that need to call a personal ad? He must have some fatal flaw.”

“Exactly. I’m not calling him back.”

“Aren’t you at least curious to see Mel in person?”

“No,” I lied. “But it would be fun to show up on a date with him wearing a fat suit.”

“Sam, you’re too picky,” she said.

I groaned inwardly. Too picky, indeed! How could one be
too
anything when it came to the most important decision in life? Think of how hellish it was to live with a bad roommate much less a person that would require thousands of dollars and half your worldly possessions to get away from permanently.

“If you were in L.A.,” Elizabeth continued, “he’d probably be asking you if you’d had a boob job and the name of the surgeon who’d done it. What’s the worst that happens? He buys you dinner and you waste one evening.”

“Because it’s not just a wasted evening, Elizabeth,” I protested. “Blind dates are torture! It’s like coyote ugly plus coyote brain dead. Not only do you want to gnaw off your arm to get away because the guy is so repulsive, but you also want to rip your brain out to take away the mind-numbing conversation that always comes with that package. ‘So how many brothers and sisters do you have?’ ‘What are your hobbies?’ ‘What’s your favorite color?’ I can’t go through another one of these evenings, Elizabeth! I can’t do it!” I said, my heart beating wildly in my chest.

“Okay, okay, so don’t! There’s just one problem,” she said calmly. “Isn’t this your job for the summer?”

“Why did I agree to do this?” I sighed, plopping down on my sofa.

“Think of this summer as a challenge, as the most exciting time of your life,” she said, in her infuriating way of sounding like a TV commercial urging wayward teenagers to sign up for technical
college or to join the armed forces.

“You’ll be fine. Just don’t let anyone, especially Elaine Daniels or your mother, push you into anything that isn’t right,” she added.

“No need to worry about that,” I said. No one tells me what to do. I’m my own woman. “So what’s going on with you and the judge?”

She and Doug were going away that weekend to the Hamptons to his beach house. His divorce was going to be final by Labor Day and she was getting less concerned about being the transition woman. Things were going very well for Elizabeth. And maybe, if I played my cards right, things would turn out for Robert and me as well? And as for Javier, well, all I could do was try to resist him as best as I could. Step number one should be to cancel any future private lessons. Well, one more wouldn’t hurt. Would it?

* * *

We’d met at an Indian restaurant, the kind that mysteriously stays in business despite the fact that five waiters in black suits stand idle most nights to wait on three customers. Indian classical sitar and flute music softly whined in the background.

“So how many brothers and sisters do you have?” asked Dr. Mark, a minute into our date. I stared longingly at one of the waiters leaning against the wall in the elegant dining room, doing nothing. Maybe if I looked pathetic enough, he’d take pity on me and slit my jugular on his next trip to the kitchen, which by the looks of things might not be until next month.

Mark looked about as much like Mel Gibson as I looked like a broom handle. Actually, Mark looked like a broom handle. No wonder the man was obsessed with fat; he didn’t have an ounce of it. I’d seen healthier looking famine victims on CNN. So naturally, I ordered the most fattening dish on the menu. Mark winced and exhaled audibly as the wai
ter took my order: rich cheese balls in tomato cream sauce, two orders of garlic naan, and a Kingfisher beer. He ordered plain chicken tikka, no bread, no rice, and mineral water.

“Do you have any knee or ankle problems?” was question number two. Mark, the orthopedic surgeon, then bent under the table to examine my extremities. Apparently he was searching for scars, deformities, or a lack of vitamin D that had led to
a rare case of childhood rickets.

“I feel like a horse,” I told him when his cue-ball-sized head had popped back up. “Would you like to look at my teeth while you’re at it?”

“Do you have teeth problems as well?” he asked me.

“Well, this is very embarrassing, Mark. But I feel I can confide in you as a doctor. I have a recurring case of trench mouth. I
brush my teeth once a month. I don’t understand what the problem is.” This is what I’d wanted to say. Instead, I smiled politely and lapsed into unconsciousness as Mark continued jabbering on about his favorite subject, himself.

How is it that men like Mark, egomaniacs who weigh less
than one of my thighs, are considered prizes, while single women like me are practically objects of pity? Even worse, men seem to upgrade to better and younger women as they get older, but as women age, we get stuck with the bottom-of-the-barrel leftovers.

The next day at the grocery store, a sudden image of emaciated Dr. Mark popped into my brain. I’ve never had to worry about my weight, one of the few genetic blessings I had inherited from my mother, but suddenly I had an urge to load my cart full of the most fattening items I could find: ice cream, avocados, crackers, peanut butter, macadamia nuts, Oreos, cream cheese, and bagels. While I was waiting in line, I glanced at the candy bars, thinking about adding some to my cart, when I glimpsed a copy of the
National Enquirer
. My mouth fell open. I ripped one off the stand.

On the cover was a full-page grainy black and white photograph of an enormously fat woman with her face obscured by pixels. She had her arms around the pencil thin neck of a bubble
-headed alien, a quarter of her size. A flying saucer hovered several feet off the ground in the background, in case anyone had mistakenly confused the alien with a really ugly human being.