Girls In White Dresses (12 page)

One drop hit her chest and stayed intact, a tiny puddle of rain wobbling on top of her skin. Others fell on her face, sliding off the grooves of her nose and mouth. Some hit her eyeballs, and she thought they ran right inside her head, through her eyes and all the way to her brain. She let them all fall on top of her, let them soak her one at a time.

She watched a cloud turn into a shape that she recognized. It was a ham—but not the ham she had seen in her head. No, this was an ugly ham, a deformed ham. She watched it float along the sky and she was repulsed. It had bumpy skin and big nostrils. It was so fat that it looked like it was going to burst. She stayed there and watched as it floated away and got eaten by the other clouds. And then she left.

Lauren didn’t go back to the park after that. She hadn’t wanted to. She wasn’t totally over Preston, but something in her shifted. Wanting him back was like wanting to cut off your arm or have your toes poked with needles. It didn’t make sense. Her friends never knew exactly what had happened, but they were just happy she was getting back to normal.

“Breakups are tough,” Isabella said. “But you got through it!”

“I’m glad you’re over him,” Shannon said. “Now you need to go find another asshole to fuck with your head.”

But none of them knew that it was the ham that had done it. How could something that Lauren made up in her own head turn so ugly? How could her creation get so out of hand? It was that ugly ham that made her move on.

Lauren was still standing at the man’s table. She couldn’t seem to make herself walk away.

“Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?” He smiled and sat back, like he was sure she would be flattered at this invitation.

“No,” she said. “I really wouldn’t.”

“I’m very successful,” he said. He slurred a little.

“Why are you here alone?” Lauren asked.

“I’m celebrating. I’m celebrating a big deal.”

“Alone?”

“I’m very successful,” he said, sounding impatient. “I told you that already.”

“Well, you’re not the type of guy I want to go to dinner with.”

“Oh no? Who is, then? That bartender over there?” He said the word “bartender” like he was saying “pimp” or “homeless person.”

“No,” Lauren said. “He’s not my type either.”

“Oh, well, look at you, Miss High and Mighty! Are you going to meet someone in the park?”

“You’re a jackass,” Lauren said.

“And you are a rude waitress,” the man said. “A rude waitress who just lost herself a tip.”

“Good,” Lauren said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Why don’t you just sit down for a minute?” the man asked. “I feel like we got off to a bad start.”

Lauren rested her hands on the back of the chair across from him. Her knees felt wiggly. “I’m okay,” she said.

“I didn’t ask if you were okay,” the man said. “I asked if you would like to sit down. I would buy you a drink if you did. I just closed a huge deal.”

“I know,” Lauren said. “You told me. Why do you keep telling me that?”

“It’s the kind of thing people like to know,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing you want to tell someone about yourself.”

Lauren straightened herself up and looked him in the eye. She smiled widely, showing him all of her teeth. “Thank you, then,” she said. “Thanks for sharing.” She walked away from the table. The man sat there holding his drink.

“Carly, I need you to finish up that table for me,” Lauren said. “I can’t wait on that guy anymore.”

Carly nodded. “Sure. Is he rich?”

“He might be,” Lauren said. “You should ask him.”

“Hey, Lauren,” Preston said. “This guy at the bar just ordered a grilled ham and cheese. You want to go tell him that he shouldn’t eat the precious ham animal?”

“You are a moron,” Lauren said. “You know that?”

“I’m just saying, there are a lot of hams getting slaughtered around here today,” Preston said and smiled.

Carly looked back and forth between them, like she was waiting for a fight to break out. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Lauren said.

At the other table, the little boy was standing on the seat of the booth wiggling his hips and singing, “Ooh, baby, baby. Ooh, baby!” His mother clapped and laughed until his knee knocked over the water, and then she told him to sit and motioned to Lauren that they needed help cleaning up.

This was not what Lauren went to college for. This was not where she was supposed to be. These were not the kind of people she was supposed to be around. She took a deep breath and whispered, “Cumulonimbus.” She closed her eyes and saw the Ham—the real Ham—basking in all of its glory. It looked nothing like the monster she’d seen at the park. This was a handsome Ham. It had whiskers that blew in the wind, and Lauren thought it was smiling at her. She opened her eyes, feeling better. “Did you say something?” Preston asked her, and she shook her head. She picked up a towel from the bar and went to go clean up her table. She had the Ham back. Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she would quit.

W
hen Mary was nine, she stole a prayer. It happened by accident, but it happened just the same. She was kneeling in front of the prayer candles at church, blowing softly out of her mouth, and watching the flames flicker. She made a little circle with her lips and held her hands folded in front of her mouth, as though she were praying. Mrs. Sugar watched her closely, giving her warning looks with her thick eyebrows, while she tried to pay attention to the rest of the class, which was still lined up to give confession. Mrs. Sugar had a nice-sounding name, but really she was a witch. Every time she looked over, Mary pressed her lips together.

Mary had gone to confession first, and had already said her two Hail Marys and her three Our Fathers. Now there was nothing left for her to do except kneel quietly and blow at the candles. She sent the flame to the left, to the right, and then straight back. It leaned and bounced but always came back to the center, standing straight and tall. And then, it happened. She breathed a little too hard, and the candle sputtered out.

Mrs. Sugar was by her side before she even realized what had happened. She leaned down and grabbed the top part of Mary’s arm, whispering because they were still in church, but whispering meanly. “Do you know what you did?” she said. “You stole someone’s prayer. Someone lit that very candle with a personal prayer, an intention. And now it’s gone. Vanished. And it’s all because of you.”

Mary cried and was sent to sit on the bench in the vestibule to wait. She sniffled as she sat, wondering what Mrs. Sugar was going to do to her. But while she was back there, James Lemon farted loudly, making the rest of the class laugh and scream, and Mrs. Sugar got distracted as she ran around trying to calm everyone down. For the rest of the day, Mary waited for her punishment, but it seemed Mrs. Sugar had forgotten all about the candle and the stolen prayer.

Mary, on the other hand, never forgot. Anytime she lit a candle, she felt guilty. She kept thinking that this feeling would go away, that eventually something bigger and more important would come and take the place of this memory. But it didn’t. For years, anytime that she went to church, she put a dollar in the box to light a candle. “For the one that I stole,” she would whisper, and then she would light it. She lit a candle in Rome her junior year, and another in Ireland. When she moved to New York, she lit one in St. Patrick’s, and that was her last one. She stopped partly because she was rarely in church anymore, but also because she figured that however big the prayer was that had been attached to that candle, she’d more than made up for it by now.

Mary was quitting. That’s all there was to it. She’d always said that as soon as she passed the bar, she was done. No more cigarettes. She’d never been a real smoker anyway. It was just something she did when she studied late at night. And when she drank. But that was all over now, she told herself. She was a lawyer now. A lawyer who didn’t smoke.

Mary was hired at Slater, a big law firm right in the middle of Times Square. Its real name was Slater, McKinsey, Brown, and Baggot, but no one ever got past the Slater. She was hired along with nine other brand-new eager lawyers, and all of them were taken out on a boat cruise, where they were served piña coladas and reminded that they were incredibly lucky, that this was the job of a lifetime, that they better live up to their promise, and that they must pass the bar.

She spent the summer studying for the bar, holed up in her apartment drinking Red Bull and eating bananas, because she’d heard that they were good for concentration. Her friends sometimes dropped in to check on her, and while she knew they were being nice, she wished they would just ignore her until it was over. “It’s not normal how long you can stay in one place,” Isabella told her one night. She’d stopped by and found Mary sitting at her desk, where she admitted she’d been since that morning. “I think you should at least get out of the apartment once a day. Maybe we should go for a walk?”

But Mary refused. She didn’t have time to leave her apartment. She went to the store once a week for supplies, jumped rope for exercise, and treated herself by leaning out her window and smoking out into the darkness. “Just until I finish the bar,” she would sometimes say out loud, and then stub out her cigarette with purpose and force, so that it bent in half, as if to say,
See, cigarette, I won’t need you for long
.

After she took the test, Mary thought she would feel relief. But all the weeks of studying had taken their toll and all Mary felt was strange. She could feel all the caffeine she’d drunk still throbbing through her system, and her hand seemed unfamiliar now that it was no longer holding a pencil all the time. Sometimes Mary was sure she could still feel the pencil in her hand, the way she imagined people with missing limbs would feel.

It was because of all of this that Mary decided that she would not throw away her half-finished pack of cigarettes right after the bar, as she had originally planned. She would finish this pack she had, and then she would quit when she started at the firm. No sense in making too many changes at once.

But when Mary started at Slater, she found she needed her cigarettes more than ever. All of the other new lawyers, who she’d imagined would be her friends, were competitive and nasty. Some of them were secretive about their desire to be the best. Others, like Barbara Linder, followed Mary around, asking her what she was working on, how many hours she had logged that week, and what the partners had said to her.

Slater had a tradition of announcing congratulations to the new lawyers who passed the bar over the loudspeaker, and then having a cocktail reception. For weeks, Mary wondered what it would be like if she didn’t hear her name, if she was the one person of the group to fail. Until she heard the results of her test, there was no way she could stop smoking. And then when she did find out that she’d passed, the relief was so immediate and overwhelming that she made a weird noise and got tears in her eyes. Also, she wet herself just a little bit and so she let herself have a cigarette. If you pee in your pants, she thought, you deserve at least that.

Mary was at the office until at least nine every night, and that was if she was lucky. She was exhausted and sad to go to sleep at night because she knew it would mean the whole thing would start all over again soon. Each morning, as she walked from the subway to her building, she thought, “If I get hit by a car today, I won’t have to go to work.” She didn’t want to get seriously hurt, of course. She just wanted a minor bump that would send her to the hospital for a week or two, where she could watch TV and eat Jell-O.

No one had told her it would feel like this. She’d gotten so much advice about her first year at a law firm, but no one had ever said, “You will be constantly afraid.” And that’s what she was. She was afraid that someone would come to her with work to do, and she was afraid that no one would come to her with work to do. She was scared that she was missing something in her research. She went over each assignment she was given, and then she was terrified that they would all think she was slow. Whenever someone said “case law” or “document review,” her first instinct was to hide underneath her desk.

Sometimes, just as she was finishing up one project, feeling like she’d accomplished one thing, someone would come to her office to give her a new task. She was sure she was failing.

At night, Mary would take breaks and leave her office to go to the roof for a cigarette. It was wrong, she knew, but she couldn’t help it. She only smoked at night. During the day, there were too many people around and she didn’t want them to think that she was actually a smoker. She looked forward all day to standing outside and lighting her cigarette. She loved those five minutes of quiet, standing and blowing smoke. She breathed in and out, and told herself that smoking, for her, was a little bit like meditation. It was keeping her sane.

There was a lot to worry about those first few months, but one of the biggest things was this: Mary was afraid that she was getting fat. Each night that she ate dinner at the office, she felt her ass getting bigger. When it came time to order, she would look through the menus in disbelief that she was staying for dinner again. Sometimes, in a fit, she would order lobster or two different entrées. “They want me to stay, they can pay for it,” she would think as she clicked in her order on her computer. Other times she’d order from the diner, cheeseburgers and fries, and a milkshake for good measure. After these giant meals, she would go up to the roof and smoke. Breathe in and out, she would repeat. Breathe in and out.

In the bathroom, she examined her butt, turning to the side and running her hands over it, trying to measure how much bigger it was than the day before. She’d seen her cousin Colleen gain fifty pounds during her first year at a law firm. Colleen went from normal to almost obese in a matter of months, and she grabbed the weight and held on to it. “It’s worse than having a baby,” she’d said last Thanksgiving. “It’s just part of the job,” she’d told Mary. And then she’d eaten two pieces of pecan pie.