Dating Without Novocaine (12 page)

“The thing I don't get about this Pete guy,” I said, “is how he could put so much effort into trying to get me into bed, then abandon the quest so quickly. I mean, I'd think I was worth a little more perseverance than that. Did he not like me at all? Was he just horny for an afternoon?”

“I thought you said the whole thing didn't bother you.”

“It doesn't,” I semi-lied. Pete didn't deserve to be made into a voodoo doll just yet. “I'm just trying to figure out the male mind.”

“Don't look at me. I don't do that type of thing.”

“Never?”

“The guy sounds like a jerk.”

“But he was so cute.”

Scott looked at me with raised brows.

“Maybe he just got busy,” I said. “Maybe his ADHD kicked in, and he got distracted.”

“And if he called, you'd go out with him again?” Scott asked in disbelief.

“Nooo…” I said.

“Hannah, you wouldn't, would you?”

“Maybe he had to go undercover and couldn't call.”

“You said he was a patrol officer.”

“Maybe he got shot.”

“You should be so lucky.” He made a noise of disgust. “I can't believe you'd go out with him again. He's already shown you what type of person he is.”

“I know,” I said. But I didn't know, and Scott knew it. “But maybe—”

“Maybe nothing,” Scott interrupted. “For God's sake, you say you're trying to find a man to marry, a man who will treat you well and be a good father to your children, and here you are talking about spending time with a jerk-off like that. Why? Because he's ‘cute'?”

“I didn't say I wanted to marry him,” I said. “What's the matter, I can't have a little fun? Maybe all I want is sex, maybe that's the only reason I want to see him again. Guys do that all the time, why can't I?”

“If it was just about sex we wouldn't be talking about it. You could walk down the street and find a dozen guys willing to go to bed with you. You could have gone ahead and slept with this Pete, if that was what it was about.”

“I thought about it.”

“You're not like that. You don't sleep around.”

“What is this, high school? The 1950's? No, I don't ‘sleep around,' but not because of some outdated moral code. If I wasn't afraid of getting my heart broken or picking up some nasty disease, you can bet I'd take home anyone I felt like.”

“Why don't you, then? Use protection. And if it's just one night, what risk is there of breaking your heart?” He sounded as upset as I felt. “If you're Miss Modern Values, why don't you act according to them?”

“Maybe I will,” I said, as defiant as a teenager.

“You won't,” he said, and in his voice was doubt, and the hope that I was lying.

“I don't know why it should matter to you, one way or another.”

There was silence between us for a long moment. He poked at his cold noodles with his fork, then met my eyes. “I don't want to see you hurt. All I want for you is the best.”

I had no answer for that. I almost said that it was for me to decide what
was
best, only I knew it would sound snotty. When someone is being noble and saying things for your best interest, it's too easy to come across like an ungrateful juvenile delinquent.

“Well, thanks,” I finally muttered.

“You're welcome,” he said, equally as gracious.

And we talked about other things.

M
ost of the next week went by in a confused blur of sewing, driving to appointments, playing on the Internet and reading the thrillers I'd picked up at the library.

Wonderful place, the library, where books and their accompanying escapism are free and ostensibly educational. If you eat to escape your moods, or shop, or have sex or drink, everyone says you have a problem. Read a book, and they think you're smart.

I had a nagging feeling of guilt and discomfort about the argument with Scott. We'd never argued quite like that before, never let our discussions get so personal, with feelings close to the surface.

The nagging feeling tinted my days gray, and I felt as though everything I said to my friends was wrong, felt that my interactions with customers were off, felt my sewing was not as good as it should have been, and the lack would be noted. And on top of the rest I felt puffy and bloated, my skin oily, new blemishes arising to give outward proof to the loser I was inside.

I knew the mood and accompanying loser-dom was temporary, I knew it was a matter of perception and that
in a week or so all would be a sunny bright yellow again. But for now things were shadowy and incomplete, disjointed and murky with failure.

So I sewed and drove, read and ate and slept, and stayed up through the night looking at awful personal ads on the Internet, all in an attempt to not dwell on that argument with Scott. I had temporarily removed my own ad, knowing I was in too bitchy a state to answer any letters.

I didn't even work on my wedding dress. If I sewed it, he really
might
come, and I just couldn't be bothered to put on the makeup that would require.

Now it was Thursday, and I had an appointment with a new client, a pageant mother. She'd said on the phone she wanted me to make an evening gown and two other costumes for her twelve-year-old daughter, for a competition next month.

How could I possibly pass that up? It was almost as good as making wrestling costumes. Or maybe it was even better: kiddie pageants were surely the stranger, more perverted of the two.

The apartment complex where Carin Hoag lived was in the same part of town as Pete's, and of about the same price level, from the looks of it. I always wondered what it would have been like to have grown up calling a series of apartments home, instead of the house in Roseburg, where my room had always been my room, as if no one else could ever have lived there, or ever would in the future.

I suppose I would have adjusted, but still, I was glad that there was a specific place I could call home.

I parked, found the right door and knocked. I could
hear the tone of female voices sniping at each other, and waited. And waited a little longer, as the sniping continued. Then finally the door opened and I was facing a hard-faced girl who looked to be somewhere around eighteen or twenty. She had a burning cigarette wedged between two fingers.

A cigarette. Oh Lord. It seemed the only people in Oregon who smoked anymore were older people who hung out in bars playing the video poker machines, and the sort of teenagers who looked in need of social services before they ended up on heroin and giving blow-jobs for twenty bucks a head.

Everyone else was too busy hiking and shopping for organic vegetables.

“Yeah?” the creature asked, in way of greeting. She had on low-slung jeans tight enough to crease her crotch, and a form-fitting orange T-shirt that she must have bought in the children's department, it was so small. She took a professional suck on the cigarette, and I saw sore knees in her future.

“Ms. Hoag?” I asked.

The girl rolled her eyes. “That's my
mom.
”

“I'm Hannah O'Dowd. The seamstress?” I asked, trying to ring a bell in that sour head.

An older woman came down the short hall behind the girl, her hair frosted and teased, and covered with a fine cobwebbing of spray. She had parenthetical grooves around her mouth, and her magenta lipstick was bleeding into the fissures of her upper lip, despite the dark brown retaining wall of lip liner.

“You're going to ruin your skin, Bethany!” the
woman said, and snatched the cigarette from the girl's fingers just as she was raising it again to her mouth.

This was Bethany? Twelve-year-old Bethany?

“You want me to get fat?” the girl snapped back. “All the models smoke. Ballet dancers smoke. I'm going to get fat.” She looked at me. “Bet you don't smoke.”

I weighed in my mind the likely five to seven hundred dollars this job would gross, versus so much as ten minutes in Bethany's company.

“Shut up,” the elder Hoag said. Bethany tossed her head and stomped off down the hall. “I'm sorry,” Ms. Hoag said. “She's angry because I won't let her go to a rave tomorrow night. Please come in.” She smiled in what she probably thought was a warm, inviting manner, but I felt as if I was being lured inside by a fairy-tale witch, the type who can't quite hide the fact that the oven is set to preheat.

The place smelled of sickly sweet floral air freshener and cigarette smoke, and was furnished with cheap oak tables and chairs, and a beige nubby-cloth couch above which hung a framed print that looked as if it had come straight off the furniture showroom floor. A fake plant sat on top of the entertainment center, which was filled with trophies and ribbons, as well as a TV and a shelf of videotapes.

On the other walls hung picture after picture of Bethany in costume, crowns on her poofed head, ribbons across her child's body. In the oldest photos she smiled with baby teeth in a face made up like a refugee from the eighties. I shuddered. Horror-flick monsters had nothing on the creepiness of a child beauty queen.

Ms. Hoag saw me looking at the photos and gave me a rundown on each one. By the time we got to the end of them, I'd realized that Ms. Hoag had to have spent tens of thousands of dollars on costumes, entry fees, coaches and travel expenses, and in return she'd gotten the crappy faux trophies on the shelves and occasional prize money that might cover a night in a hotel.

I tried to think of a nice way to ask what was going through my mind, which was, “Why the hell are you wasting your money on this?” Instead, I asked, “So, uh, what drew you and Bethany to pageants?”

“It's an investment.”

I raised my brows.

“At the higher levels, there's scholarship money up for grabs. I want Bethany to go to college, and this is how we're going to get the money.” She took out a cigarette of her own and lit it. “I don't know how we could ever afford it otherwise.”

The woman appeared oblivious that the funds for at least one college education had already been sucked down the drain of pageants. With idiot genes like that in her blood, I doubted Bethany would ever be seeing the doors of a hallowed institution, money or no.

The phone rang, and Bethany ran out of wherever she'd been sulking to get it, a rain of excited, squeaky chatter following. She carried the phone back into the depths of the apartment, yakking all the way.

Ms. Hoag took out one of the videotapes and shoved it into the VCR. “The gown I want made is on here,” she said, as the image came up and she fast-forwarded through a home video of a pageant. “Do you have a VCR?”

“Yes.”

“I'll give you the tapes to take home, with the costumes on them.”

“You want me to copy one?” I had thought she wanted something original.

“Last year's winner. Here she is.”

The tape stopped on a girl of unknown age, in an evening gown shimmering with beads and rhinestones, and the type of dangling, swaying excrescence on the shoulders that made me think of long-dead episodes of
Dynasty.
The girl looked strangely out of proportion, like a doll made to the wrong ratio of legs to body to head.

Her head with all its hair was nearly one-third of the girl's height, and looked as though it belonged on a twenty-year-old. Her body was as hip- and waist-less as an eight-year-old's, no matter what had to be falsies giving contour to her chest.

I began to feel sorry for Bethany. Then I decided it was better to feel sorry for myself, who would be spending hours making such a beastly costume.

I endured another half hour of videotape as Ms. Hoag found the other costumes she wanted, then she took me back to Bethany's room so I could take her measurements.

“I think Tyler's cuter than David,” Bethany was saying on the phone. “He bumped into me in the hall. I know he did it on purpose. He's so immature! But I think he likes me.” Then she saw us come in—Ms. Hoag still trailing cigarette smoke—whispered a goodbye, and shut off the phone.

“Muuu-ther!” Bethany said, rolling off the bed. “You know I don't let you smoke in my room.”

“Hannah has to take your measurements,” Ms. Hoag said. She purposefully took another drag on her cigarette, stared at her daughter, then left.

Bethany watched her go, then turned to me with a smirk. “I don't really smoke, you know. I just pretend, to piss her off. Maybe make her think about what she's doing to her own lungs and skin. Have you seen those wrinkles around her mouth?” Bethany asked, and gave a shudder. “God, this is all such a waste of time.” She lifted her arms slightly to the side and stood still, in the pose of one waiting to be measured.

“Why do you still do it, then?” I asked, wrapping the tape measure around her and writing down the numbers in my notebook.

“Gives her something to do. She has no life.”

Ah, an altruist. “You don't enjoy it at all?”

She shrugged. “It would be fun if I could choose my own outfits, or make up my own routines. Have you seen those tapes, have you seen the dumb-ass stuff they make us do? They should let us dance like on MTV.”

She had a point of a sort, only I thought it would be even more disturbing to see pre-pubescent girls gyrating their hips than going through those stiff marionette motions on the tape.

“Your father…?” I asked.

“I'm going to see him in August. He's in Montana. They have horses up there—I wish I could live with him.”

I finished with the measurements, but didn't want to stop talking to Bethany quite yet. She was kind of in
teresting. “Who's that Tyler guy you were talking about?”

She looked at me for a long moment, assessing. “You know, I was expecting you to be another of those middle-aged losers Mom hangs around with. You know the type, they all have Jesus sayings on their walls, and collect Beanie Babies, as if that was not so over. You're not like them, though.”

“Heaven forbid.”

“So can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What
is
it with guys?”

“Hey, I'm still trying to figure that one out myself.”

“I mean, why is it the only way they can show they like you, is by being mean to you?” she asked, hand on hip.

“They grow out of that. At least, most of them do.”

She didn't look satisfied with that answer. I sat on the edge of her bed, and tried to remember when I had been twelve years old. Had I known
anything
back then? No, and I doubted, for all her airs, that Bethany knew anything, either.

“Listen,” I said. “You want to know what I wish someone had told me about boys when I was twelve?”

“Sure.”

Of course she did. And whatever I said, I knew it wouldn't make a difference. As with most things, you had to learn it on your own.

“Okay. Most boys only start acting like adults when they reach their late twenties. If then. So, you've got at least fifteen years ahead of you during which to build your own life, without fussing over any idiot boys.”

“What, not date?” she asked in disbelief.

“No, you've got to date, to practice dealing with them. And it can be fun. I just mean, put yourself first. Don't put aside what you want to do for the sake of a boy.”

“Not even for love?”

“Why love a guy who doesn't want you to pursue your own goals and interests? What type of jerk is that?”

She shrugged, obviously not satisfied with my words of wisdom. “Any other advice?”

I smiled, and stood. “Just the usual, that you've heard before. There are always more fish in the sea. Keep your friends. They'll be there after the boy is gone. Wait until you're older to have sex, and then always use a condom. Wait to get married.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I meant what I said. The boys will come and go. You're the only one who will be with you your whole life, so treat yourself well. Treat yourself…with all the devotion you'd give a boy you were in love with.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Hey, I'm still learning this stuff. I'm just trying to give you the benefit of my suffering.”

“Huh.” She looked doubtful.

I looked at my watch, seeking an excuse to end this conversation before I gave myself away as a hypocrite. “Jeez, I gotta go,” I said.

I went and found Ms. Hoag, and collected the tapes. I promised to call her with an estimate on price and
time, and left. I had just gotten in my car when my cell phone rang.

“Hannah's Custom Sewing.”

“Hannah? Pete, here. You ready for that hike?”