The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (4 page)

“Well
. . . thank
you, Harold. We’ll see. But . . . sweetheart? What are you doing here?”

He smiled, sheepish. “I don’t know. I left work early. I thought maybe I’d take you out to dinner.”

“You did? Well, I’d love to, but it’s . . .” She looked at her watch. “It’s only four.”
Four!
Her stomach tensed; she
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could feel the prickle of perspiration starting under her arms.

“I thought you could knock off early, too. I thought we’d take a walk down Michigan Avenue while it was still light, and maybe then we could head over to Gene and Georgetti’s—get there early, get a good table.”

“Well . . . I would
love
to do that, but I have some work to do first. Maybe you could go do some things and I could meet you on Michigan, right by the Wrigley Building, right in front.”

He sat down in one of the chairs along the wall. “Just go ahead and finish up. I’ll read the paper—I never got around to it this morning.”

She should never have gotten that subscription for the office. It was two minutes after. “Harold? Would you mind running a couple of errands for me?”

He shrugged. “Sure. What do you need?”

What did she need. “. . . Paper!”

“Paper for what? What kind of paper?”

“Oh . . . every kind. Copier. Fax.”

“You just
got
fax paper. Last week when we were at Of-ficeMax, you—”

“Listen, Harold,” she said, “this is my office. I am the boss. And if I say I need fax paper, I need fax paper. Now will you get it for me or not?”

She snuck a look at her watch.

“I’ll get it,” he said, sighing. “I’ll come back for you at five.”

She watched Harold leave, then checked her e-mail to see if Jon had left a message saying he wasn’t coming.

When she looked up again, another man was coming in the door. And it was Jon. It was. He was fifty-nine, and not nineteen, but it was he.

26

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Her heart moved up into her throat and blossomed. She spoke around it. “Mr. Vacquer?”

He took off his elegant black coat, shook it. “Hey there.

Sorry I’m late.” He wasn’t in such good shape. A paunch, the three-months-pregnant look.

He came over to her desk, shook her hand. “How do you do?”

Did he not
recognize
her? Well, of course not. He needed some context.

“So!” Agnes said. “How about we talk a bit and then—”

“Before we do that, I wonder if I could see some pictures.”

“Of . . .”

“The women. The blondes.”

“Oh!” He would not be interested in the two blond women Agnes had on file. “Well, we don’t show anything to anyone until we’ve had an interview.” Her heart spoke quietly within her:
Jon. Jon. Don’t you know me?
Bette Midler sang mournfully in her brain,
Don’t you remember you
told me you loved me, baby?
Agnes smiled. “If the interview goes well, you fill out an application.”

“Oh. I see. Well, all right then, fire away.”

She pushed her hair back from her face, that old gesture, did he remember? “Why don’t you start by telling me where you’re from.”

“Oklahoma.”

“Uh-huh.” She leaned forward. “I used to live in Oklahoma.”

“Did you. Well, I lived there until ten years ago, then I moved here to Chicago.”

Ten years he’d been here! She took in a deep breath.

“Jon?”

“Yes?”

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She stared into his still-beautiful eyes for a long moment.

He shifted in his chair and said, “You know, I . . .” He stood up. “May I be honest with you? This doesn’t exactly look like the kind of place I had in mind. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to offend you, it’s just—”

“It’s quite all right,” she said.
What?
What was it? The wallpaper? The carpet? The furniture? Oh.
Her.

“I just always know right away if something will work or not,” he said, “and this . . . I think I need a larger agency. But I’m glad we were able to . . . I’m glad we didn’t waste each other’s time.”

“Yes.” She stood, looked at the clock. There was time to call Lorraine and tell her never mind, tell her everything.

There was time to take her things back to the stores before they closed.

“Thanks anyway,” Jon said.

“You bet.” He was almost out the door when she called his name again. He turned, politely impatient.

“Could you hold on for just a minute?”

He waited while she got her wallet. She took out her half of the dollar bill and crossed the room to hand it to him. He looked at it, then at her. “What’s this?” he asked.

And she said, “Nothing.”

He half smiled, and left.

Agnes sat down at her desk and rearranged the pictures of her wildly imperfect family, her son, her daughter. And Harold. “Hallelujah,” she whispered. She got the clothes she’d worn to work out of the filing cabinet and went into the bathroom to change back into them. She left the jewelry on.

She’d get a martini—Bombay Sapphire gin, extra dry, three blue-cheese-stuffed olives. She’d get a huge steak, 28

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d French fries, sautéed mushrooms, and creamed spinach. A nice Cabernet. She’d get a rich chocolate dessert, complete with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. She weighed 176 pounds and her socks didn’t match, and she was going out with the man who really loved her. “Harold,” she might say. “I believe in heaven. Did I ever tell you?”

the party

There were a bunch of us who had drawn together into a corner of the dining room. It was a big party, and none of us had met before. But a tiny core of women of a certain age had attracted more women until there were enough of us that we needed to be democratic about talking—each of us needed to be careful not to take up too much airtime.

We were talking about kissing, and we spoke rapidly and excitedly and laughed loudly. This was T-shirt and jeans laughter, not cocktail dress laughter—it came from the belly, not the chest. It was size fourteen and not size two. When one of us made moves toward some wilting hors d’oeuvre, the rest would stall, so that nothing good said was missed by anyone.

We seemed to like best telling about our first times.

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d There was a glamorous blonde wearing huge diamond stud earrings who said she first kissed at age eleven, while playing spin the bottle on a hot Texas night. The rule was that, after the spin, the chosen couple would go into the kitchen, stand by the washing machine in the corner, and kiss. No tongues. The blonde modified the rule to include no lips, only cheeks. But a certain Paul Drummond was too fast for her that night, and he smacked a kiss right on her mouth. She said she’d intended to get angry but instead backed up in pleasant shock into the washer hard enough to make a noise that roused the supposedly supervising parent from sleep. The kissing stopped; the party broke up; and the blonde went home, where she stayed awake much of the night reenacting the scene in her mind, and telling herself that the sin was venial, venial, venial.

A woman named Vicky said she spent years practice-kissing with her best friend, Mary Jo. “We would put a pillow between our faces, kneel down on my bed, rub each other’s backs, and kiss that pillow to
death.
” We all laughed some more, because we’d all kissed pillows, it seemed.

One woman wearing a seductively cut black dress that now seemed beside the point ventured bravely that she and her best friend, Sherry, had dispensed with the pillow and gone at it lip to lip. You could tell from the ripple effect of lowered eyes that she wasn’t the only one. I thought of fourth grade and my friend Mary, whom I asked to be the wife so I could be the husband. I liked to be the husband—you got to say when about everything. While Mary dusted, I went to work. When I came home, we kissed hello for what became long enough that we decided we’d better start playing outside.

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31

There was a serious, shy-looking woman named Jane, who hadn’t said much of anything, and who, when she laughed, had actually put her hand up over her mouth.

“Oh, honey,” I wanted to say to her, when I saw her do that. “Sweetheart, come here and let’s give you some tools.” She wore a dress with buttons that went high up on her neck, and each one was closed. I was pretty surprised to hear her say, “Oh well, kissing was one thing, but do you remember the first time you touched a dick?”

Now we were all into high gear. We were beside ourselves in our eagerness to share our experiences. We drew closer.

A roving rent-a-waiter dressed in tight black pants, a blindingly white shirt, and a black bow tie offered us little bundles of something from his tray. All of us, to a woman, took one. The waiter seemed very pleased. I waited for him to move on, then greedily spoke first: “I was forced.

This guy called Telephone Pole Taylor, for the very reason you might suspect, pulled my hand down and held it there until I had touched it for five seconds. We counted together. I almost threw up. I was a serious virgin, and I damn near passed out at the thought that that kind of thing would someday . . . But after I got over the size, I became kind of intrigued by the texture.”

Vicky’s eyes widened. “Yes! Like damp velvet, right?”

Jane, standing next to me, sighed quietly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Men’s bodies are just not
pretty.
That makes it difficult. I think women’s bodies are, though, and I’m not, you know . . .” We knew. She took a sip from her drink, leaned her head against the wall, frowned in a contemplative sort of way. “It turned out that penises weren’t so bad, really, although it did take me a long time to get 32

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d used to that rising and falling routine. I mean, it was grotesque the first time I saw an erection. It was like a monster movie.”

The gorgeous blonde spoke up. “I
liked
it! I thought it was so
magical.
” But then, as though protecting Jane, she added hastily, “But not beautiful of course.” We drank to that.

“It’s the balls that get me,” Vicky said. “They’re like kiwi fruit gone bad.” We burst out laughing again. I think we felt that we were becoming dangerous, careening in our conversation, and we liked it. We were ready to reveal anything about ourselves. Almost imperceptibly, the circle tightened again.

“I think it’s all a matter of cultural conditioning,” I said and was met with a friendly collective groan. “No, I mean it. If we’d been taught to go after a penis by a mother who winked at us when she talked about it, and if all the boys at those drive-in movies had covered their privates with both hands and moaned little protests into our ears, we’d have been
wild
to touch them. Instead, we pulled their hands down from our tits and up from their crotches.”

Jane put her empty glass on the floor. “I think men and women are just hopelessly different. It’s a wonder we get along at all. Sometimes the smallest things can bring out the biggest things. I had a horrible fight with my husband last night, and you know what started it?” We were all listening hard, and we didn’t notice the approach of Jane’s husband from across the room. But Jane did. She stopped talking and stared at him: in her eyes, it was as though a shade had been pulled.

He stood at the edge of our circle, a little wary. “What’s going on over
here
?”

There was a beat; no one answered. And then Jane said,
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“Oh, you know. Just girl talk.” I think we were all miffed by her response, but no one challenged it.

Her husband looked at his watch. “It’s time to go.”

Jane didn’t budge. “I’d like to stay for a while.”

“Oh?” He put his hands in his pockets. “All right.

That’s fine.” He didn’t move. Another beat. Silence all around. Then two of us simultaneously moved toward the food table. Someone else walked off toward the bathroom.

Vicky waved to a man across the room and started over to him. Our group fell apart in a sad, slow-motion sort of way, as when petals leave a blossom past its prime. And then I heard Jane say, “I guess it is late.”

I listened to her say good-bye to the people around her.

I was dragging a piece of pita bread through the leftover hummus tracks at the bottom of a pottery bowl. I was hoping the potter had used no lead. I was wondering what my children were doing.

I thought about what I had to do the next day as I finished my drink. Then I looked around for my husband. He was in the living room discussing the Middle East conflict with a short, mildly overweight, balding man. I imagined the man in the front seat of a car at a drive-in, thirty years ago. I gave him hair, but otherwise I didn’t change him much.

I sat in a chair close by and heard my husband say em-phatically that Israel fought only defensive wars. I fiddled with the hem of my skirt and wondered what it was Jane and her husband had fought about. Several possibilities occurred to me. I heard the short man ask my husband what he did for a living. Sports would be next. I turned my head away from them and permitted myself a yawn.