Girls In White Dresses (14 page)

H
is name was Harrison, but no one ever called him Harry. Isabella learned that right away.

Isabella was drunk. It was happy hour and her friends had ignored her requests to go somewhere that served food. She’d ended up sitting on a bar stool in her rumpled work clothes, plotting to stop for pizza on the way home, when Harrison approached her and introduced himself. And because she could think of nothing better to say, she asked, “Do people call you Harry?”

“No,” he answered. He looked as though she’d asked if people called him Bob or Walter.

“Oh,” she said. She shouldn’t have had the third dirty martini. She could hear her voice from somewhere deep inside her head. And from in there she sounded retarded.

Isabella was tired. It was already almost eight o’clock and it would be a lot of work to talk to someone new. She had to be at the office early the next day. She contemplated excusing herself, getting up, and leaving. She could be home in her pajamas with pizza in thirty minutes.

But then her plan seemed too hard to carry out and so she let herself sit there. And after a few minutes, she leaned forward on the stool in a wobbly way and kissed Harrison in a crowded bar.

And that was how Harrison and Isabella met.

Her friends called him handsome, but what he was, was pretty. He had high cheekbones, delicate features, and flawless coloring—porcelain skin and cheeks that flushed naturally when he was excited. His shirts were never wrinkled. Even untucked at the end of a day, with his tie pulled loose, he looked staged, like somebody had gotten him a wardrobe for “end of the workday.”

Around him, Isabella felt sweaty and bloated more often than not. She wanted to apologize when she got a pimple or had to blow her nose. She was fairly certain he never had boogers.

Harrison met new people gracefully, shook guys’ hands and grasped their arm with his left hand. He kissed girls on the cheeks and remembered names. He was always interested in conversation, tilting his head at whoever was talking, nodding and interjecting every so often, but not enough to be obnoxious.

“He’s the one!” Isabella’s friends said. “We can’t believe you found him!”

The ones with boyfriends and fiancés were relieved for Isabella. She was twenty-seven and they all agreed it was about time. The single ones were sort of happy and a little annoyed. They’d been at the bar that night too. Isabella was pretty, but not gorgeous. Where had they been when he’d come up to her? (But for the most part, they were happy, of course.)

Harrison knew how to date. He made plans to go to dinner at restaurants where they could drink margaritas and hear each other talk. He took her to movies and then to a diner for grilled cheese. He always paid. He called when he said he would, and held the door for her. The first night she stayed at his apartment, he woke up early and came back with two cups of coffee.

“I like him,” Isabella told her friends. She sounded miserable. “He’s really fun. It makes me feel sick.”

Isabella knew enough by now to know that this wasn’t a common occurrence. You didn’t just bump into a nice guy that you liked every day. She was positive that she was going to mess it up.

Harrison and Isabella had been dating for three weeks when he mentioned the ski trip. He brought it up casually one day, as though the thought had just occurred to him that very moment, asking, “Do you want to go skiing for New Year’s?”

Isabella was in a panic almost immediately. She had been up most nights wondering if they would exchange Christmas presents, imagining the horror of handing him a wrapped box and being greeted with an uncomfortable look. New Year’s hadn’t even entered her mind yet. She was trying to deal with one holiday at a time.

“Isabella?”

“What?”

“New Year’s? A bunch of my friends are renting a house in Vermont. It should be fun.”

“Fun” was a relative term, Isabella knew. Something that seemed fun when compared to doing nothing could really end up being a horrific mistake. And a weekend with strangers could be up there with a car crash.

“Do I know any of them?”

“Um … I’m not sure. You met Parker, right?”

Isabella shook her head.

“Oh, I thought you did. Well, look, they’re a fun group. It’s not that big of a deal. If you want to go, great. If not, don’t worry about it.”

“Do you even want me to go?”

“Yeah.”

“It just kind of sounded like maybe you didn’t really.”

“If I didn’t want you to go, I wouldn’t ask you.”

“Oh.”

“Stop being so weird,” he said, and poked her in the stomach. “It’s really not a big deal. Just let me know.”

“Okay.”

Isabella wondered what it would be like to be a boy. She knew that Harrison meant it when he said it wasn’t a big deal. He really wouldn’t care. He didn’t have to obsess over her response or if she would go or not. If she were a boy, she would be much more successful. She was sure of it. As it was now, she wasted days at work analyzing things that Harrison had said to her. When he told her it was interesting that she had a goldfish, she lost a week of productivity.

What did she know about dating, anyway? Nothing. She thought back to the sixth-grade sex-ed class they’d had at St. Anthony’s. The girls were put in a room with the school nurse and forced to read scenarios out of an old pamphlet. “Kate and Michael have been going steady for a month,” the book read. “Michael wants Kate to try heavy petting, but Kate doesn’t feel ready. What do you think she should do?”

The nurse cleared her throat, blushed, and addressed the girls. “So, does anyone have a thought on what Kate should do?” The room was silent. Finally someone asked, “What’s heavy petting?”

In the other room, the boys told them later, a priest had drawn a large dome on the blackboard. “Do you know what this is?” he asked them. He sounded angry and annoyed. He put a dot on top of it. “That’s a penis,” he said.

That was her education? How was she prepared for this? There was no scenario in that book about starting a new relationship with a Harrison. There were no tips on whether or not to go on a trip so early in a relationship. (Or if there were, they never got to them. Because once they found out what heavy petting was, they laughed for a week and a half.)

“You should go,” her friends all said. The fact that she hadn’t skied in years and didn’t really miss it wasn’t something they were concerned with. The drive up there would take almost five hours. What would they talk about? They had never been in a car alone that long. What if it was just silence? After sleepless nights and countless conversations, she agreed to go. Immediately after, she felt sick.

The ski house was built to sleep as many people as possible. Most rooms had two sets of bunk beds and stairs that led to another room with a futon. When they got there, it was already dark and she could hear laughing as they stood outside the door. It was so cold that Isabella could feel the inside of her nose freeze when she breathed. The night seemed darker after coming from the city, and it made Isabella shiver. More than anything at that moment, she wanted not to be there. What had she been thinking coming up here? She didn’t know these people.

Isabella let Harrison walk in front of her and she walked behind him, pretending to look for something in her purse. There were about a dozen people in the kitchen and living room, sitting around, drinking and laughing. There was a football game on the TV, which no one was watching.

Everyone smiled and there were shouts of “Hey” and “What’s up?” Isabella waited for Harrison to introduce her and then stood there while he pointed to everyone and said their names. She didn’t remember any of them.

Harrison grabbed her bag to take it upstairs and she followed him. They peeked in the rooms, looking for an empty one, but there were bags on all of the double beds. The only thing free was a set of bunk beds in the corner of one of the rooms.

“Looks like this is us,” Harrison said. “Do you want the top or the bottom?”

Isabella wasn’t sure. If she slept on the bottom, she would be eye level with the other couple staying in the room. If she took the top, she ran the risk of falling out of bed and paralyzing herself while waking the whole house up.

“Um, the bottom, I guess.”

“Okay.”

Harrison threw the bags on top of the beds and turned to her. “You ready for a drink?” he asked. She nodded and followed him downstairs silently.

That weekend, Isabella sat close to Harrison, holding his hand and resting her head against his shoulder, which she never did. When he left the room for more than two minutes she started to panic at the thought that she was stuck with these strangers. She acted like a different girl than she was. Harrison didn’t seem to notice.

The first night there, Isabella was cornered by one of Harrison’s friends from college. Her name was Jocelyn. She was drunk and a close talker.

“I don’t really know my dad,” she confided to Isabella. “He never really wanted a daughter and I’m not sure he ever loved me.”

She was leaning in so close that her giant boob was resting on Isabella’s arm and her breath was on Isabella’s cheek. Was this girl hitting on her? Isabella felt like crying. She kept trying to catch Harrison’s eye so that he could save her, but every time she did he gave her a look like,
I’m glad you’re fitting in
.

At the end of the night, Jocelyn held Isabella in a too-long embrace and muttered something about how glad she was to meet her. And then she said, “I love you.” Isabella was in a loony bin.

“Isn’t Jocelyn nice?” Harrison asked. They were standing side by side in the bathroom, brushing their teeth. The floor was freezing and it made Isabella’s feet cold right through her socks. She was drunk and had to close one eye so that the reflections of her and Harrison in the mirror would stop moving.

“She would be nice if she was in therapy,” Isabella said. She stumbled a little bit and leaned on the sink. Harrison caught her arm.

“So judgmental,” he said. He tried to make it sound like a joke, but she knew he was annoyed.

She spit out her toothpaste and rinsed off her toothbrush. “Do you realize that at the end of the night, she said, ‘I love you’ to me? That doesn’t strike you as a little strange?”

“She’s an emotional girl. You just need to get used to her.”

“Did you use to date her?”

Harrison laughed. “I wouldn’t call it dating. It was a long time ago.”

Harrison rubbed the back of her thermal shirt and she leaned her head against him. All she wanted was to be back in the city at one of their apartments, where they could sleep in the same bed.

“Good night,” Harrison said and swung up to the top bunk.

“Night,” Isabella whispered into her pillow.

Isabella didn’t really want to go skiing, but the alternative was staying in the house all day with the few people who weren’t going either. Jocelyn was one of them, so Isabella put on her long underwear and ski pants, her thermal shirt and her puffy jacket. She looked like a marshmallow.

Isabella had skied when she was younger, but lately had realized that she didn’t like it all that much. It was scary—absurd, actually—to climb onto a metal contraption that would take you up a mountain so that you could zip back down again.

It became very clear while talking about this trip that Harrison was an excellent skier. He mentioned winters in Vail and Beaver Creek, and spring skiing in Aspen. He knew the names of his favorite runs, and would say things like “The speed you can get on Pepe’s Face is crazy.” Isabella just nodded.

“You can go ski with your friends if you want,” Isabella offered. She was relieved when he declined.

“The whole point is for us to hang out,” he said, and pulled her hat down over her eyes like he was one of her older brothers.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m just not sure that I’ll be able to keep up with you. It’s been a while since I skied.”

“No problem,” he said. “We’ll start on some blues until you get the hang of it.”

By the second run, Isabella was pretty sure that she’d never get the hang of it. Harrison skied ahead of her, swooshing in the snow like a professional. Isabella made a snowplow and took wide turns down the mountain. Every time she felt like she was going too fast and about to lose control, she let her knees buckle and fell to the ground.

“Just trust yourself a little more,” Harrison advised her. “The fun part is when you start going really fast.”

“Fun until you crash,” she said.

How could she not have remembered how terrifying it was to ski? Even the chairlift scared her as it chugged high off the ground with nothing to keep them from falling out.

“Could you not swing your legs so much?” Isabella asked Harrison. She tried not to sound so panicked.

“Such a little worrywart,” he laughed.

The day seemed impossibly long. The snow was icy and Isabella’s gloves were wet from falling. She sat inside the lodge to warm up while Harrison went on a couple runs by himself. When Harrison came back in to get her, she tried not to look sad and followed him back out to the slopes.

Isabella kept waiting for it to come back to her, but her legs kept buckling and shaking. And when Harrison said, “One more run and then we should go in,” she was so happy that she almost cried.

They were the last ones back to the house and there was no more hot water. Isabella shivered in the lukewarm spray and told herself the weekend was almost over. Everyone was tired from skiing, and wore sweatpants and pajamas. Isabella came downstairs in jeans and a sweater and felt like an idiot.

They played old college drinking games, and Jocelyn claimed Isabella for her flip-cup team. Isabella was relieved. Skiing was not her thing, but flip cup she was good at. She didn’t even mind that Jocelyn hugged her every time they won. She figured that Jocelyn was trying to make it up to Isabella for sleeping with Harrison. It was sort of nice, in a weird, messed-up way.

Isabella got drunk and happy. These people weren’t all that bad. She dragged Harrison to the middle of the room and danced with him. She was fun! Harrison’s friends would know that now. She made everyone do tequila shots and tried to suggest body shots, but Harrison shut that idea down.