A Girl Like You Page 13

  “That’s not it. I did push him.” Madd buried her face in Penny’s neck.

  “How?”

  “I asked if we were boyfriend/girlfriend or just hanging out.”

  Back in my junior high school days, it used to be called going steady. This usually meant holding hands in the hallway and kissing in the cafeteria in the lunch line, waiting for chicken and gravy on a bun. Also, walking to the school bus together for another kiss goodbye, followed by furtive phone calls before dinner. It was known by everyone which couples were boyfriend/girlfriend from day one.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything wrong with that, honey.”

  Maddy lifted her face, letting Penny lick her ear. “Mom, it was too early to define our relationship. I should have just let it grow organically.”

  I didn’t exactly agree, but it wouldn’t do any good to argue the point.

  “What can I do to help?”

  “You can tell me what a shit bag he was.”

  “Total shit. He’ll make a terrible school counselor.”

  “He will, right?” Maddy’s voice had a bit of hopefulness.

  “The worst.”

  “It shouldn’t be this hard, should it?”

  “Not for you, babe.” I tousled her hair.

  “Not for any of us,” she sighed.

  40

  After seven months of online dating, I no longer watched Netflix and had cut back on my Amazon shopping considerably. I’d get home from work, make spinach salad with warm chicken, take Pen-Pen for a little walk, settle on the couch, and start looking.

  But I wasn’t even close to figuring it out.

  My inbox wasn’t filling up with messages from men making the first move. Maybe they were waiting for me to take initiative? But as I quickly discovered, most guys ignored my messages entirely. It was like messaging into an abyss.

  Not for the first time, it occurred to me I might be doing it all wrong.

  I’d started out with the casual, hopefully unintimidating approach: “Hey, how’s it going tonight?”

  It seemed like such an easy question to answer, but after sending it out to a dozen or so guys, I hadn’t gotten a single response. I changed my tactic, reading their profiles and picking out little tidbits way down at the end to prove I’d studied everything they had to tell about themselves.

  “Hey! I like Cold Play too…what’s your fave song?” I asked MusicMan.

  No response.

  “Hey! I’m also a Halloween fanatic. What’s your favorite horror movie?” I asked PumpkinGuy.

  Come on, that was a simple question to answer and could have led to a lively conversation… if he’d replied.

  “Hey! I see you have an iguana…that’s an unusual pet…I feel ordinary just having a regular dog.”

  No response from iguana man? That was a downer. How many messages could he possibly get in a week from women interested in his reptile? Was it even a reptile?

  I decided it was the exclamation marks that made me appear overly eager and therefore verging on desperate. Take it down a notch, I told myself.

  “Hey. I also have two adult children and spend much of my spare time with them. Do you have sons or daughters?”

  Blech! That had to be the world’s most boring online dating message ever. I was putting myself to sleep.

  “Never ask questions that require one-word answers!” Madison scolded. “You’re supposed to sound flirty and energetic! And don’t say hanging out with your kids is your social life!”

  “It is my social life.”

  “I know, but never admit it, Mombo! Pretend you have an actual life!”

  Penny, who had been dozing at my feet, stirred and looked up at me, giving me her all-knowing dog stare, making me believe she had me figured out. Maybe she did know me better than I knew myself. I wished she could share her wisdom with me.

  Ian came into the room, opened the fridge, looked inside, and closed it again. “Dad’s in town,” he said, trying and failing to sound casual.

  I didn’t look up from my book.

  “You think he might like to stop by the house for a couple minutes?”

  I closed my book. “Ian, if you’re trying to make your parents be friendly, it’s not going to happen. He checked out of my life a long time ago, and I don’t care to revisit that.”

  “I’m going to meet him at Roger’s Rock for dinner. You wanta come, Madd?”

  Madison hesitated. In the years since he’d been gone, she had seen him only a couple of times. She’d told me Adam texted her almost every day, but she didn’t elaborate on whether she texted him back.

  “Maybe next time,” she said at last.

  “He said tell you you’re always invited,” Ian said.

  “Tell him thanks.”

  “Have fun,” I said.

  “OK, well, I’ll tell him you said hi, Mom.”

  “Ian!” I tried to use my authoritative mom voice, but he was already out the door.

  41

  “Worst date ever,” Maddy said as she loaded jeans into the washer.

  “Don’t stuff so much in there; nothing will come out clean,” I told her.

  Ignoring me, she piled in hoodies until the washing machine was filled to the brim.

  I sighed. She would never learn.

  “Come sit; I’ll make tea.”

  Madison settled at the kitchen table. “I need more than tea. This is a three-alarm call for chocolate.”

  “Oreos or ice cream? Oh, I’ve also got Kit Kat bars, those little snack size ones.”

  “Oreos,” she said miserably. “Oh hell, give me the ice cream too.”

  I made her a bowl and set out a plate of Oreos, ready to eat them right along with her.

  “He was on Bumble. We chatted for a day, then switched to texting, then we talked at night.”

  “Name?”

  “Bruce,” Maddy said, scooping up ice cream with half an Oreo. “We like the Cake song ‘Love You Madly.’”

  “Oh, I love that song,” I broke in.

  “Anyway,” Madd continued patiently. “We both like scary movies, pesto pizza, The Walking Dead, he also has a younger brother….”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “Yeah, it did, so we went to Nick’s.”

  “Good choice.” I twisted an Oreo in half and licked the center, remembering my first date at Nick’s Tavern with Michael when he had seemed charming and attentive and not a selfish vain stoner.

  “He was there first and was almost falling off the bar stool, he was so drunk.”

  “Maybe he was just nervous?”

  “Mom, he had five beers in an hour.”

  “OK, so that’s a lot of beer,” I conceded.

  “He kept talking without moving his lips, but when he finally smiled, he had teeth the color of corn kernels. OK, my teeth aren’t exactly dazzling, but Bruce looked like he hasn’t seen a dentist his entire adult life.”

  “You have excellent teeth!” I said, defending her pearly whites.

  “I was so stupid,” she groaned. “I broke the closed-lip smile rule.”

  “The what?”

  “If they keep their teeth hidden in their profile pics, it’s a good bet their teeth are a mess.”

  I made a mental note to add this tidbit to my online dating rule book.

  “Then he ordered food—some sloppy bacon cheeseburger—and I felt compelled to order something.”

  “What’d you have?” I was always curious about food.

  “Chopped salad,” she said. “But the server forgot what kind of dressing I wanted and when she came back to check, Bruce yelled ‘she said balsamic’ loud enough for everyone at the bar to hear. People in the parking lot probably heard.”

  “OK, that’s not good.”

  “Worst of all, it took forever to get his food because he ordered his burger well done. They brought it out charred and he sent it back to be cooked more. When it came out, it looked like black shoe leather.”

  “Yikes.�
� I stood up, took her bowl, and loaded it into the dishwasher.

  “There’s more! He had some burger stuck in his nasty teeth. He took the stirrer right out of my drink and used it as a toothpick.”

  “OK, now that’s just disgusting. Did you run?”

  “I didn’t want him paying for my salad, so I sat there until our bill came. He said he’d leave the tip if I paid the $58 bill, then he put $5 on the bar.”

  “He will never be able to show his face in there again,” I said.

  Madison put her head down on the kitchen table. Sensing despair, Penny came in and rubbed her back against Madd’s legs.

  “Why do we put ourselves through this?”

  “Online dating is only for the strong-willed,” I said, patting her head. “If we were weak, we’d have given up a long time ago.”

  Then we both laughed, because we were in the same boat. But the boats, both of ours, were still very much afloat.

  42

  As hard as it was to believe, my best friend Eddie was turning sixty. I’d known him all my adult life but knew the best days for us were still ahead.

  I called Eddie’s husband Donny, to say I wanted to throw a surprise party.

  “I don’t know, Jess,” Donny said. “Eddie doesn’t really like surprises.”

  “Of course he does! Remember when we said we were going to the beach, but we took him ziplining instead? And the time we got him those moose slippers?”

  “OK, maybe you’re right, but let’s keep it small.”

  “I know. He doesn’t like a big fuss made over him.”

  A week later, the guest list was up to twenty-five people, so many that I moved the event from my house to the party room at Nick’s Tavern.

  Amazon had so many “Over the Hill” gag gifts, I could hardly resist any of them.

  It took two trips to the car to lug in all the decorations the Friday night of the party.

  “Think you’ve gone a little over the top?” Madd asked, helping me blow up a life-sized inflatable walker for the elderly.

  “Not really—do you?” I asked, tying black ribbons on helium balloons that said “Old as Shit.”

  “Of course not, Mombo.”

  “This looks fantastic,” Donny said, coming into the room carrying a huge sheet cake with “Aged to Perfection,” written in blue icing.

  Ian was taping a poster up on the wall with photos showing Eddie from babyhood until his recent days, with a sign on top that said, “It Took 60 Years to Look This Good.”

  Over the next twenty minutes, the room filled with people ready to help Eddie celebrate. Despite the invitation requesting no gifts, everyone brought presents to put in the black cardboard mock coffin on the gift table. Someone brought a giant magnifying glass for him to read his birthday cards.

  One of Eddie’s neighbors brought an enormous cookie platter with messages piped in frosting that said “AARP,” “RIP Youth,” and “Old Geezer.”

  I went out to the parking lot to wait for Eddie, who was coming under the ruse of having a quiet dinner with Donny, me, and the kids.

  He pulled in right on the dot of 7:00.

  “You wore my favorite Poe leggings!” Eddie said. “Love those ravens.”

  “Happy birthday, honey.” I kissed his cheek.

  “Thanks, chicky. Where’re the kids? Donny said he’s running a little late.”

  “Inside getting a table,” I said, not looking at him because I was a terrible liar. “It’s crowded tonight; they’re seating us in the side room.”

  “Starving,” Eddie said, rubbing his hands together. “What’s the special tonight? I could go for some good winey chicken.”

  I opened the door to the party room and we stepped into complete darkness. Then someone flipped the light switch and the guests all hollered “Surprise!”

  It startled me as much as Eddie, and I had already known they were there.

  “I should have been more suspicious,” Eddie said, beaming nonetheless as he was swept into the crowd.

  We toasted Eddie with champagne, then commenced with specialty cocktails. We all hooted while watching Eddie open his gifts, including emergency underpants, Senior Moments memory mints, a set of wind-up dentures, and a Potty Putter golf game. Madd and Ian put together a gift basket with Ben-Gay, a bag of prunes, Preparation H, and denture cleaner.

  Eddie was a good sport all night long. He tried on the adult diapers, ate a prune, blew out the inferno of candles on his cake. By the end of the night, he looked a bit relieved as guests began to filter out and head home.

  “Had enough being the man of the evening?” Ian asked, opening the tin of wintergreen Memory Mints and popping one into his mouth.

  “It was great, but let’s not do it again for another sixty years.”

  The song “Sea of Love” came over the sound system.

  Donny held out his hand to Eddie, and they used the corner of the party room as a dance floor. Watching Donny and Eddie slow dancing made me believe there really was a match for everyone. And with the kids and friends like Eddie and Donny, it didn’t seem such an emergency to have that person show up on my doorstep ASAP. I wasn’t going to sit in my front porch rocking chair waiting. I was going to have a life.

  A good life.

  43

  “Hi, AriesGurl. I like your profile and also like beaches and bonfires,” a message came across on a Thursday from Woodsman.

  OK, so I’d never been on a beach at night with a fire. But I would love to.

  I quickly pulled up Woodsman’s profile. Thankfully, he had more than one photo. But he was, of course, an outdoor fanatic. His pics showed him rock climbing in summer, hiking in fall, and snow-shoeing in winter, all in a setting I didn’t recognize. Adirondacks, maybe?

  If I could walk on an incline on a treadmill, I could snow-shoe, I told myself proudly, even though his pics showed him traversing rather big hills. The shoes looked large and extremely stable, so the possibility of tipping over and face-planting in a snowbank seemed low.

  Nature aside, Wood—real name Macon—and I had a few things in common. We both had two grown kids, liked Mexican food, and liked to travel. As the icing on the cake, he lived right outside Meredia and was my true age.

  “Have you met nice men?” Macon messaged.

  “Not exactly,” I typed in, then deleted it. Try to sound upbeat, I told myself. “I just got on the site, so I haven’t had a lot of experience.”

  Great. Now I sounded like a clueless newbie.

  “There are crazy women out there. One woman I didn’t know from her pictures.”

  Ahhh. So, catfishing happened at every age. Scary.

  “Do you want to meet for a drink this weekend?” Macon messaged.

  Did I? You bet I did. I liked that he was direct; it seemed confident.

  We agreed to meet the next night, picking a pub about five minutes from my house and an equal distance from his.

  This time I refused to get all worked up. I’d survived Michael. What could possibly be worse than being dumped by an angry pothead?

  The pub was dim, but Macon was sitting at the bar close to the door and thankfully looked like his photos. He waved me over to him. I held out my hand to shake his, but when he didn’t return the gesture, I had to turn it into a half-assed wave back to him.

  “Hello!” I said, already sounding too giddy.

  “Hi, Jessica. I’s good to meet you.”

  Hold on. Had he said “I’s?” And why was it so hard to hear him? The bar was mostly empty.

  “You as well.”

  “Vould you like drink?” Macon asked.

  I realized it wasn’t that he was speaking quietly. It was his accent, so thick that he was almost impossible to understand.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Croatia.”

  “How long have you been in this country?” I asked, signaling the bartender wildly, because a glass of Pinot couldn’t arrive soon enough.

  “Tree months.”

 
“Well.” I began. “What do you do?”

  “Fix medical equipment.”

  “That sounds interesting,” I lied.

  For the next forty minutes, Macon told me in excruciatingly precise detail how to repair ultrasound machines, including how to troubleshoot problems, what tools to use, and how badly his lower back hurt afterwards.

  Between the language barrier and his techie talk, I understood almost none of what he was saying.

  “How old are your sons?” I asked, trying to steer things back to common ground.

  “They twenty-four and twenty-five. Not used to being around people. Don’t like go out. Stay inside.”

  “All day?”

  “Ya, day and night.”

  “That’s kind of sad. If they got out, they would get used to life here.”

  “Not veally,” Macon said. “They don’t go out muchly.”

  Macon pulled his buzzing cell phone out of his pocket.

  Without a single word to excuse himself, he carried on a loud conversation in Croatian, at times gesturing to me as if describing what I looked like. Twice, I heard him say my name.

  A full five minutes later, Macon finished his phone call. I polished off my wine and stood up, bumping our knees together in the process. Macon put out a hand to steady me and I tried not to recoil from his touch, managing to turn it into sort of a side step away from the barstool.

  As luck would have it, Macon’s car was right near mine. The short walk across the parking lot was agonizing.

  When we got to my car, Macon pointed at my zombie leggings.

  “I don’t understand the pants,” he said.

  “No, I don’t suppose you would.”

  “We do again?” Macon said, smiling.

  “We won’t do again,” I said. “But good luck. Enjoy America!”

  I’d tried to leave it on a high note but ended up sounding like Betsy Ross.

  “No matter,” Macon said, turning his back and walking away.

  My jaw fell open. No matter? I had just nothing to say to that. No response. Nada.

  But I gave myself credit for weeding out one more frog, and after all, it was a great story to share with Eddie and the kids.