Dating Without Novocaine (2 page)

T
uesday evening found me knee-deep in bridesmaids' dresses, my Bernina sewing machine humming smoothly up and down seams and around armholes. I'm a seamstress, and have my own pick-up-and-deliver alterations and custom sewing business, Hannah's Custom Sewing. I'd left off my last name, O'Dowd, as it had less than desirable connotations for one whose work was mainly with clothing.

Six months ago I had been living in Eugene, working in an alterations shop. My degree in history was going as unused as Cassie's coursework in sociology, but I didn't care. I'd realized that the only part of history that I really liked was examining the clothes in old paintings. The French Revolution was more interesting to me for its effect on fashion than for its effect on the French aristocracy, although the two were inextricably intertwined. Any history paper where I'd had the choice of topic had focused, in some manner or another, on clothing.

When my off-and-on boyfriend of two years had at last been permanently switched off, I'd taken a page
from the Book of Cassie and decided to move up to Portland. I was tired of Eugene with its determined tofu-eating and tie-dye, and tired, as well, of working for someone else. The alterations shop had been turning away business, there was so much of it, and I felt certain I'd be able to find ample work for myself up in Portland, where people actually bothered to wear clothes that fit. To make my services special, I would pick up and deliver clothes and other sewing work to people's homes and businesses. That would also save me from worrying that someone would slip and fall on my front steps and decide to sue me.

It's a good thing I like to drive. I've put nearly ten thousand miles on my Neon since I've been in Portland.

The first few months I barely managed to scrape by, and used up all my savings staying ahead of car payments, gas, insurance, and that nagging little lump of credit card debt that festered like a nasty pimple, never completely going away. These last two months, though, I had hit some sort of critical sewing mass, and I had a steady stream of clients, some of whom had already become regulars. I made more money than I had at the alterations shop, but on my own I didn't have health insurance or paid sick days. I was debating which to buy first—the health insurance or a hemmer.

My sewing room is upstairs in the small 1920's stucco house that Cassie and I share. In exchange for taking up two rooms to her one, every four or five weeks I make her a new dance costume or something for her room, like a new comforter cover or floor pillows. This month was going to be curtains, made out of some filmy Middle Eastern material she'd bought at a belly dancing fes
tival. I think I'll put bells on the bottom, just for the fun of it. When the wind moves the curtains, they'll make soft tinkling sounds. Cassie will like that.

I glanced at the clock and grimaced: 7:00 p.m. I was due at San Juan's Mexican Restaurant in half an hour. Cassie, Louise, Scott and I were all meeting for dinner, to celebrate Louise finally getting off nights and onto days at the crisis line. She'd been working there for two years, and the screwy sleeping schedule and proscribed social life had driven her to the brink of clinical depression. And she should know, being a counselor and dealing with the mentally ill all night.

I slipped the jacket I was working on onto a hanger and hung it up along with the others, giving the lineup a critical look. The bride, genuinely concerned that her bridesmaids be able to wear their clothes again, and having the good taste to abhor butt bows, taffeta and sleeveless dresses that exposed flabby upper arms, had chosen to garb her friends in Jackie O-style skirt suits in a neutral blue.

It was a nice idea, but all lined up together I feared the bridesmaids might look like 1960's flight attendants. All they needed was a pair of wings pinned to their lapels and pillbox hats, and the guests would be expecting them to throw peanut packets instead of flower petals as they walked down the aisle.

I shrugged. It wasn't my problem. I'd learned long ago to let clients decide for themselves what they wanted. There was too wide a range of tastes out there for me to try to advise anyone, based on my own limited preferences.

My pants were creased from sitting, blue threads and
fabric fuzz stuck to them like paint on a Jackson Pollock. I stripped the pants off and pulled on a short tailored skirt of gray faille. I had sixteen skirts of the exact same cut, made from fabric remnants from various jobs. On top I wore a short-sleeved light blue cashmere crew-neck, found for twenty-four dollars at Nordstrom Rack. I'd repaired the hole in the armpit that had relegated the treasure to the bargain pile. It brought out the blue in my blue-gray eyes, and was my favorite piece of clothing.

I put in small crystal studs and gave my chin-length bob a quick brushing. The color was presently a soft honey-blond, darker than the over-highlighted tresses I'd worn in Eugene. When the boyfriend had gone, so had my long hair. I'd sat myself down at the salon and told the stylist to give me hair that would attract professional men with marriage on their minds, instead of the usual unemployed gorillas who came on to me. I've never understood why it is that the men with the least to offer are the ones the most willing to make a pass at a woman.

My new hair hadn't given me any success with the eligible men yet, but at least the shiftless ones had left me alone. Louise said it was the new, determined look in my eyes that scared the losers away, not the hair. I hoped that wasn't the explanation for the lack of professional men, as well.

Scott and Louise were waiting in the foyer of the restaurant when I arrived, sitting on a bench eating chips. The peasant-bloused staff gave out baskets of them when the wait for a table was over ten minutes, which was one reason the place was a favorite of ours.

“Hannah!” Louise said, scooting over to make space for me on the bench. “Where's Cassie?”

“I don't know. She'll be here. Hi, Scott.”

“Hi,” he said, smiling his usual friendly smile. He and Louise had been boyfriend and girlfriend senior year in high school, and he'd been Louise's “first” in both love and sex. The relationship hadn't lasted over a year into college—Scott had gone to Cornell, Louise to Oregon—but they'd remained friends, and Scott had become friends with Cassie and me, as well, when each of us in turn had moved up to Portland.

It was silently understood that Louise, while willing to share Scott as a friend, would not look kindly upon either Cassie or me taking him on as anything more. I couldn't blame her—the thought of my first love sleeping with either Cassie or Louise set my teeth on edge.

With that past relationship serving as a symbolic sword on the bed between us, I'd found that I was more comfortable with Scott than with men who were available. He was tall and reasonably good-looking, with dark hair and a slightly boyish face with a dimple in his chin. I occasionally helped him shop for clothes, and when the weather was nice we'd sometimes go for a hike together.

“Hey, Scott, I've got a new one for you,” I said, leaning forward to see him around Louise.

He groaned. “Your jokes are never new. I've heard them all a hundred times.”

“This one's a limerick.”

“Please, no.”

“I want to hear it,” Louise said, brown eyes sparkling
in her freckled face. She enjoyed teasing Scott about his profession nearly as much as I did.

“Okay, here goes.

Louise laughed, but Scott put his hands over his face and shook his head. “That one's older than George Washington's dentures,” he complained. “I have to listen to this type of lame humor all day at work. Why do you have to inflict it on me after hours?”

“Because dentists deserve punishment. They're evil people.”

Louise put her hand on my knee and gave me her mock therapist look. “I'm sensing a deep childhood trauma, Hannah. You're safe here. You can talk about it.”

“The memories, I only see flashes of them, a man in a white coat, the whine of a drill—no! No!”

Louise turned to Scott. “She's repressed the memories. We'll have to try hypnosis. This woman has been deeply scarred. Your presence obviously brings up painful feelings for her.”

Scott was about to respond when Cassie swept in, bringing a wave of patchouli and sandalwood with her that temporarily overwhelmed the chili pepper odors of the restaurant. “Sorry I'm late! Practice ran later than expected.” Cassie belonged to a semi-professional belly
dance troupe, and her first public performance was coming up in a few weeks.

Louise waved her hand in a gesture to say it didn't matter. “Our table isn't ready yet anyway.”

The teenage hostess called Louise's name just then, and we followed her swaying, tiered gathers of orange skirt with pink bric-a-brac into the dining area, Scott and me falling behind Cassie and Louise.

“Did I tell you about the Japanese exchange student I saw last week, the one who hadn't been to a dentist in over ten years?” Scott asked. “One of his molars had cracked, and the nerve was exposed. I had to—”

“Stop it! Stop it!” I cried, putting my hands over my ears. Hearing about dental disasters was even worse to me than listening to stories about someone getting their eye poked out. This, however, was Scott's usual revenge for my dentist jokes: his most revolting cases recounted in excruciating detail for my torture. I don't think he knew how very real my fear of dentists was, under all the joking.

And it wasn't that anything truly horrible had ever happened while I was under the gas and drill: no wrong tooth accidentally removed, no hygienist slipping with her little metal scraper and gouging my gums, no near-choking experience with those tooth trays of drool-producing fluoride I got as a kid.

It was instead a lifetime's worth of anxious dread, of the taste of topical anaesthetic before the needleful of novocaine went in, of spitting out small chunks of tooth after the drilling was finished and the filling put in.

I hated going to the dentist, I hated dentists on general principle, and since I had no insurance I was enjoying
the relatively guilt-free thought that I couldn't afford to go to one for quite a long while.

We gave our orders and settled down to a fresh basket of chips, two types of salsa and kidney-straining quantities of diet soda. Except, that is, for Scott, who rode his bike about forty miles every other day and didn't have to worry about the dimensions of his derriere. He eschewed diet soda for a Dos Equis.

“I can't believe I'm going to have a normal life,” Louise said, her straw making loud suction sounds at the bottom of her ice-filled glass. Scott flagged down a passing busboy, who took away Louise's empty glass for replacement. “My life will no longer revolve around sleep! I can go out in the evenings, I can see the sun on weekends. I've already taken the blankets down off my windows.”

“You're like a plant, ready to grow,” Cassie said. “You've been in the dark too long, getting yellow.”

“Exactly!” Louise said. She held out her pale, freckled forearm for us all to see. “This is not the color of a healthy human being.”

“Now you won't have an excuse not to start dating,” I said.

Louise made a duck face with her lips, her eyes narrowing. “I'm sure I could think of one.”

“How long has it been since you broke up with that guy who worked at Intel?” I asked.

“I wouldn't call it ‘breaking up.' We only went out a few times. That doesn't constitute a relationship.”

“But how long ago was it?” I persisted.

“Three months, give or take, and I'm in no hurry to repeat the experience. I just don't do well with technical
men—I think it's a basic personality conflict. They're all Sensing-Thinking types, and I'm an Intuitive-Feeler, like Cass. But of course the only available guys work in computers. Why is that?”

“It's a major industry in the region,” Scott said, “so of course there are lots of guys around who work in computers.” We all gave him dirty looks. Sometimes he failed to catch the true substance of a discussion.

“No, I think it's because they're the only ones left who are single,” Louise said. “And there's a reason for that, in terms of their emotional development—or lack thereof. They're all geeks, who've put all their efforts to learning about things instead of people.”

“Geeks have their advantages,” I said. “They usually have good jobs, and they treat you well, they're so glad to have you.”

“Have you ever dated one?” Scott asked.

“Well, no.”

“I didn't think so. They don't seem to be your type,” he said.

“What
is
my type?”

“I don't know. Someone edgier.” He widened his eyes. “Dangerous.”

I snickered. “Yeah, right. The muscle-bound sort, with long hair and tattoos. Motorcyclists who ride without helmets. Bad boys, the type who group together to rent a house in northeast Portland and wouldn't know a lawn mower if it ran over their foot. Probably don't vote, either. That's the type for me!”

“Hannah, dear,” Louise said, “I don't know a single woman who finds a man who avoids yardwork attractive.”

“And long hair is only nice in fantasies,” I said. “In real life, it's the sign of a guy who has to sell his motorcycle to find money for this month's rent.”

“I like guys with long hair,” Cassie said. “They don't have to be losers—I know several emotionally aware ones in my yoga class, one of whom teaches English at Portland State. I think long hair's sexy.”

I looked at Scott, trying to imagine him with long hair, the heavy mass of it pulled back in a ponytail while he walked around his office in blue-green scrubs. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant picture, but it was pretty funny.