Girls In White Dresses (9 page)

“Get back on the horse,” her sister, Molly, told her.

“You get back on the horse,” Isabella said to her.

“Nice,” her sister said. “Very mature.”

Her cousin suggested online dating. “That’s how I met Roy,” she said. Roy was a dentist with a beak for a nose, and he slurped his spit whenever he talked. “Wow,” Isabella said. “I’ll think about that.”

“I think I miss Ben,” she told Lauren one night.

“No, you don’t,” Lauren said.

“But sometimes, I really think I do.”

Lauren sighed. “Isabella, you miss the essence of a boy. That’s all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. It’s better that he’s gone. He was a pothead, remember?”

“What are you?”

“I’m a pot enthusiast,” Lauren explained.

“Right,” Isabella said.

Isabella had never lived alone before, not really, anyway. She’d gotten her own place years ago, but Ben was there almost every night, and then he moved in. Now that he was gone, it was just her and the dust balls.

Sometimes she talked out loud just to hear her voice. She missed having someone there to discuss what to eat for dinner. “I think I’ll make a tuna sandwich,” she would say to no one. “Or maybe a veggie burger,” she would tell the couch.

She started sleeping with the television on at night. It blared reruns and gave her strange dreams. One night she woke up to a
pop!
and the TV screen was black. She sat up in bed and looked around. The air smelled like electrical burning, so she unplugged the TV and tried to go back to sleep.

“I could’ve died,” Isabella said to Mary the next day. “It could have exploded and started a fire all over the place.”

“I think you would have woken up,” Mary said.

“Maybe.”

“I wonder what happened.”

“I killed the TV,” Isabella explained. “I was too needy.”

“You have to meet my friend Jackson,” her coworker told her. “He’s an accountant, he loves to go wine tasting, and he’s a ton of fun.”

“Okay,” Isabella said. “Yes, okay.”

Her coworker arranged it so that Isabella and Jackson would meet at a bar and then go to a Mets game. “You are going to have so much fun!” her coworker told her. Isabella smiled and felt sick inside. “Oh, one more thing, just so you aren’t surprised,” her coworker said. “Jackson is a little bit bigger than most guys.”

“Okay,” Isabella said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

It turned out that Jackson was, in fact, obese. And by the third inning, he was so drunk that Isabella couldn’t understand him. He yelled at the guy in front of him for standing up, he yelled at the beer man for being too slow, and he yelled at the hot dog guy for running out of relish.

“What about me says,
Set me up with an obese person
?” Isabella wailed to Mary and Lauren later that night. She had made it through the game and then gone to chug wine at Lauren’s apartment.

“Nothing,” Mary said firmly. “Nothing about you suggests that you should date an obese person.” Lauren nodded in agreement.

“Your coworker is obviously an idiot. Or an asshole,” Lauren said. “I’m not sure which, but she’s one of them.”

“You guys, I mean he was really fat. Seriously.” She took a Kleenex and blew her nose. “Great,” she said. “I’m the meanest person. I date fat people, and now I’m obviously going to hell.”

Isabella’s friend from high school came to visit. Kerry Mahoney was a chipper blonde who wanted everyone to be married. “I am totally setting you up with my cousin,” she said. “He’s cute and fun, and you guys totally have the same sense of humor. I’m going to give him your number, and maybe you guys can get together next week.”

“Yes,” said Isabella. “Can I see a picture of him? Okay, yes.”

Isabella walked into Mexican Radio and looked around for someone who matched the picture she had seen. A boy with brown hair was at the bar, sipping a giant frozen pink drink with mango floating on top. He looked at her and smiled and she smiled back. “Isabella?” he said in a singsong voice, tilting his head to the right.

“Hey-a,” she said. She meant to say hi, but it came out wrong. It was just that she was shocked that she was on a date with a gay man.

“First obese and then gay,” she said to Lauren later that night.

“At least it wasn’t both at once,” Lauren said.

“Are you ever afraid that you aren’t going to meet anyone?” Isabella asked Lauren one night. They were finishing their last drinks at the bar, and Isabella finally asked the question she’d been thinking for a while now. She didn’t want to say it out loud. She was embarrassed that she even thought it, and waited for Lauren to lecture her about being a strong woman. Instead, Lauren finished her drink, crushed an ice cube in her teeth, and said, “All the time.”

“I’m exhausted,” Lauren said. She was on two kickball teams, a softball team, and was an alternate for a beach volleyball league. “I have scabs all over my legs,” she said, pulling up her pants. “Look! Look at this!”

“I don’t think the summer of yes should be taken so literally,” Isabella said. “It’s not like you have to do everything people ask.”

“Yes, I do,” Lauren said. “That’s what I set out to do, and now I have to follow through. I just didn’t know that everyone was going to ask me to be on so many intramural teams. Am I that athletic?”

“Not really.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Isabella met a guy selling art at a street fair on the Upper East Side. “I’m just trying to make a living doing what I do,” he said. “I’m trying to perfect my craft.”

He was handsome, and so when he asked her to hang out, she said okay. “I will ignore his weirdness,” she told herself. “I will not be judgmental. This is the summer of yes.” She gave him her number and he called the next day.

“A friend of mine from art school is having a party in Greenpoint. You want to go? You can bring some of your girls if you want.”

“Yes,” Isabella said. She hung up and went to Lauren’s apartment to beg her to come with.

“Please?” she asked. “Please? For the sake of the summer of yes?”

“Fine,” Lauren said. “But if anyone there asks me to play on any teams, then I’m saying no.”

“Fair enough. Oh, and it’s also a costume party,” Isabella said quickly.

Lauren stared at her. “What kind of costume party?”

“Um, so Kirk kind of explained it as that—well, um, okay. So, what everyone is going to do is dress up as their spirit animal.”

“Isabella, are you serious?”

“Yeah. He kind of sprung it on me at the end.”

“He sounds like a freak,” Lauren said.

“Yeah, he might be.”

“I hate the summer of yes,” Lauren said.

“I don’t think I have a spirit animal,” Isabella said.

Lauren ended up making out with a guy at the party who was wearing a green sweatsuit and shamrock antlers. “What are you?” Lauren asked him when they walked in.

“I’m the spirit animal of St. Patrick’s Day,” he said.

“That’s really stupid,” she answered.

“That’s what I’m going for,” he said. Twenty minutes later, they were grinding on the dance floor and Lauren was wearing his shamrock antlers.

Kirk was dressed up as a deer. “I’m gentle inside,” he told Isabella. She wanted to hit him with a car.

“What are you?” he asked her.

“A bunny,” she said.

“That’s your spirit animal?”

“No, it’s just the costume I had.”

“Isabella, do you mind if I make an observation?”

“Go for it.”

“You strike me as a closed-off person.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“That’s too bad,” Isabella said. She watched Lauren and tried to gauge how much longer she would have to stay.

“Would you like to have dinner with me?” Kirk asked.

Isabella thought for a moment. “Absolutely not,” she said.

Isabella decided to quit her job at the mailing-list company. “I don’t even understand what I do,” she would say when people asked her to explain her job. “I organize lists, okay?”

The thing about this job was that Isabella was good at it. She had been promoted three times since she’d started. “I am now an account manager,” she told Mary. “I am an account manager of a mailing-list company.”

“It’s a good job,” Mary said. “Your salary is decent, the hours aren’t bad. It’s a good job.”

“I hate it.”

“Then you should quit. If you really hate it, you should quit. But you should do it now. You’ve been saying that you hate it for a long time, but the longer you wait, the harder it will be to leave.”

“I want to work at a publishing house,” Isabella said.

“Then you better get on it,” Mary said.

Isabella nodded. She hadn’t updated her résumé in five years. It took her a week to find the file, and when she did, she realized that she should just start over. “The last thing on my résumé is an internship at
Harper’s Bazaar,
” she said, looking at the piece of paper.

“You have to do it sometime,” Mary said. “Just get it over with.”

Isabella sent out e-mails to every single person she knew who might have a contact in publishing. She typed cover letters and perfected her résumé. She hounded the HR departments of every publishing house she could think of. She did not get one single interview.

“Why did I waste all this time?” Isabella moaned to Lauren one night. “Why didn’t I do this two years ago?”

Lauren didn’t say anything, and it didn’t matter. Isabella already knew the answer. She hadn’t noticed how much she hated her job when she was with Ben. He distracted her from the misery of list selling. And now, it just glared in her face.

“I will probably end up running the fucking company,” Isabella said. “I will probably be the best list compiler and maker in the whole world. And I’ll have Ben to thank for it.”

“That should be your acceptance speech,” Lauren said.

Mary called her, out of breath. “My brother’s friend Andrew works at Cave Publishing, and he said that they need a new assistant. I have the e-mail of the woman who’s doing the interviews, so e-mail her right now. Okay? Are you ready? I’ll read it to you now.”

“An assistant?” Isabella asked. At the list company, she had her own assistant.

“Isabella,” Mary said, with warning in her voice.

“What?”

“Just take the e-mail and send her your résumé. You have to start somewhere, okay?”

“Okay.”

Isabella sweated through the entire interview. Her upper lip had never been so wet, and she was sure she wouldn’t get the job. She assured the woman that she wouldn’t mind starting over as an assistant, that she wouldn’t mind a pay cut, and that she was eager to learn.

The woman took notes as Isabella talked. “I really want to make a change,” Isabella said. “I’m not challenged at my current job, and I’ve always wanted to get into publishing.” Isabella hoped she sounded desperate enough, but not pathetic.

She got the job and was offered a salary that was about half of what she was making. “So, I’ll eat macaroni and cheese a lot,” she said, trying to convince herself. Her parents told her they would help her out at the beginning. Isabella wished she could say, “No thanks, I’ll make it work!” but her new salary barely covered her rent, so she just said, “Thanks. Hopefully it won’t be too long.”

At her old job, people had treated Isabella like she was a savant. “So organized!” they would crow when they walked by her office. “So efficient!” they would cry when she doled out tasks. Now she sat in a cubicle that was covered in paper. “I don’t even know what to do with most of it,” Isabella admitted to Mary. “They keep handing me stuff, and I literally don’t know what to do with it.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Mary said. “Give yourself a break. It’s only been a few weeks.”

At night in her apartment, Isabella talked out loud more often. “I’m tired,” she said to the TV. “It’s exhausting having no idea what you’re doing all day,” she told the rug. “I think I’m just going to order Chinese,” she confessed to the coffee table, while lying on the couch.

“Maybe you should get a dog,” Lauren suggested. “Or a cat.”

“Lauren, if you ever tell me to get a cat again, we are not friends anymore. Okay?”

“Touchy, touchy,” Lauren said. Then she considered it and said, “That’s fair.”

“I met a guy,” Lauren told her. “He’s great.” Isabella immediately hoped that it wouldn’t work out, and then felt awful about that. Lauren was her friend, but she didn’t want to be the last single one standing.

“Come out with us tonight,” Lauren said. “He’s going to bring some friends. What do you say?”

“Yes,” Isabella said.

Isabella walked into the bar, and Lauren rushed up to her. “So, none of his friends could make it. Sorry! But I want you to meet him.” She grabbed Isabella’s hand and pulled her over to the table. “This is Brian,” she said, and Isabella was relieved. He looked like Bert from Sesame Street—no, he looked like Bert with pockmarked skin. Isabella smiled. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

Isabella sat and drank her vodka soda, while Lauren and Bert held each other in long hugs. “How’s the new job?” Lauren asked, with her face in Bert’s shoulder.

“Great,” Isabella said. “Everything I hoped.”

Isabella’s new boss was called Snowy. She had a skunk stripe in her hair and was frighteningly skinny. Sometimes when she walked down the hall, Isabella was sure her legs were going to pop right off, like a Barbie doll’s. Snowy was only ten years older than Isabella, and a star in the publishing world. When Isabella started, Snowy told her that she wanted to be a mentor, not a boss. “I want to help you learn, to help you become a star here.”

Snowy had two assistants, and Isabella was hired to be the second one. The first assistant was a twenty-two-year-old named Cate, with shiny brown hair and an amazing wardrobe. The day Isabella started, Cate took her to lunch at a fancy French place and used Snowy’s credit card. “I used to be the second assistant, but the first girl left because she said Snowy was impossible to work for,” Cate told her.

“Is she?” Isabella asked.

Cate shrugged. “I mean, yeah, she’s a nightmare. But don’t worry. Just do your job and try not to get upset when she yells.”

“Okay,” Isabella said. They went back upstairs and Cate showed Isabella how to do Snowy’s expenses.