Camptown Ladies (18 page)

Lisa and I said in unison: “You let her go alone?”

When we at last found Erica, she was surrounded by a group of five butchy women trying to get her to play pool. Erica was politely declining, but the women were insisting, begging her over and over, “All you have to do is grab a stick. Come on, just grab a stick—”

“Kind of ironic,” I said to Lisa, and she snickered.

Lisa said, “I’ll distract the big one by talking shit about her pool skills, while you grab Erica and run for it.”

“What could possibly go wrong?” I said.

Lisa moved in like a shark, targeting the largest of the girls, just like you would in a jail yard. She put her arm around the big girl, who made Lisa appear petite, not an easy thing to do. The larger woman bristled at being touched, and straightened up as she turned
to face Lisa. I assume that Lisa also noticed that the top of her head was even with the woman’s chin. The other girls turned to watch Lisa and the big girl. The big girl was speaking and had easily pulled away from Lisa’s buddy grip, but then the big girl made the mistake of putting her finger too close to Lisa’s face. (Lisa hated that; I had done that
once.
) I saw the opportunity and lunged for Erica’s hand, yanking her out of the pool table area like a rag doll.

I didn’t have to turn around to know what happened next. In seconds, the big girl would have to choose either to back down and play nice, or be on her knees to avoid the near breaking of a finger. Been there, played that, and lost.

The big woman yelled after Erica and I, “Hey, fuck youse!”

I could hear Lisa say back, “Youse must be from Rhode Island!” as I pushed Erica along ahead of me.

Erica said, “I thought they just wanted me to play pool.”

I looked back to see the big girl had made the wise choice, since she was still standing as Lisa walked away, and her friends were all making various versions of a
What the fuck
face. As I pulled Erica across the room, they were finishing up the last contestant and I realized I had forgotten about the bidding, so the announcement over the mic surprised me.

“The woman who got the largest bid for dinner
plus
a kiss goodnight is Marie Santora!”

I heard Lisa shout from somewhere in the room, “Yes!” like she just coached her team to the Super Bowl.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“Congratulations,” Erica said. She scanned the room at the clientele, “Aren’t you curious who it might be?”

“Curious, no.”

Erica said, “Maybe it’s that woman over there, she’s pretty and she sure is staring.”

“At you,” I said.

Lisa and Vince joined us, and I noticed Lisa was a little out of breath. Lisa said, “I heard the announcement. I hope it’s some big diesel dyke!” and Vince made a valiant effort not to laugh at my expense.

The announcer said, “Sorry girls, the bidder wants to remain anonymous, and with the amount of money she donated, we have to respect her wishes. Would Marie Santora come up to the front please?”

I reluctantly walked up and was handed a piece of paper with a restaurant name and time noted on it. I looked into the crowd and a large woman wearing a Celtics jersey winked at me and pointed to two of her friends. “I can’t do this,” I said to the woman at the mic, and I tried to hand the paper back to her.

“If you don’t go through with it, we’ll have to give the money back, and it was quite the donation.”

“I’d be happy to replace it,” I said.

“It was three thousand dollars.”

“What?”

“Someone wants that date real bad,” she said.

I could have paid. I had the money. But three thousand dollars? Not exactly a small amount of money and I had planned to donate over triple that to a breast cancer foundation. I took the slip of paper from the woman and walked back to Vince, Erica, and Lisa. “I have to go,” I said.

“Of course you have to go,” Lisa said, smirking at me. “It’s for a great cause.”

I said, “No, I have to go because somebody paid three thousand dollars!”

Erica gasped and said, “Holy shit, lesbians are crazy! Straight girls complain when they have to buy their own drinks!”

Fifteen

Why Throwing Poop Is Sometimes The Best Choice

I refused to tell Vince and Lisa where my charity date was so they couldn’t show up to enjoy the show. I’d been through that experience before when our family had traveled to Jamaica and my siblings figured out where my first date with Lorn was after we met at the resort. As uncomfortable as meeting a stranger for dinner would be, it would be nothing compared to having the whole family along for a ride.

Fanizzi’s restaurant was where I was to meet my date, and although I had not eaten there, the Elizabeths had told me it had some of the best food around. It was in the east end of town (so I told Lisa I was heading toward the west end) and I wore my “Just in case we eat at a fancy restaurant dress.” I knew the choice of outfit would make Lisa’s teasing so much worse, but I was grateful Vince was doing some evening fishing with Dad and Erica had stayed in town to shop, so I had to deal with teasing from only one of them.

Lisa laughed when she saw me. “You’re going dressed like that? Your date will probably show up in Nikes and a fanny pack!”

The truth was, I was thinking that very thought as I entered the restaurant, looking to see if anyone appeared to be waiting for someone, but everyone was seated in pairs. Pairs of men far outnumbered the women and a quick survey showed that I was not the only woman in a dress, as there was an attractive woman in a blue dress sitting at the bar. When a man returned to the seat next to her, I cursed to myself. Of course I couldn’t be that lucky.

A moment later, a woman approached me as I waited for the host. She was a short, plump woman in her mid-to-late 50s, smiling up at me with a pleasing face. “Are you waiting for your date?”

“Yes,” I said, relieved that she seemed awfully friendly, though Lisa was right, she was wearing Nikes. She seemed non-aggressive and perfect since I was nowhere near ready to be on a real date.

“I’m Marie,” I said, not intending to sound as relieved as I did. The woman was quite a bit older than me and looked like she could be one of my mother’s younger friends. This is good, I thought, I would know how to talk to this lady.

“I’m Brenda, nice to meet you. I saw you at The Vixen last night.”

“Right, well, shall we sit?”

Brenda laughed said, “Well, you can join us if you wish, but I think your date will be disappointed.”

“So you’re not—”

Brenda said, “No, no, honey, I just recognized you from last night. I’ve been with the love of my life for over twenty years.” She flashed a warming smile. Of course she has, I thought. “My partner would love to meet you, too, since she was with me at the Vixen. She always says I could talk to a wall and I’m always picking up strays.”

“I am feeling very much like a stray at the moment,” I said, laughing with her.

“Well, I would invite you over, but I don’t think you should keep your date waiting. Hell, I know I wouldn’t! You two have a great evening,” she said, and I turned to follow her gaze to see the lady in the blue dress standing right behind me. I was startled at how the lady took my breath away.

I was more startled that the lady was Erica.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“I have a date,” she said.

“You have a date. Let me guess. You’re here with my brother to goof on me?” I said, scanning the room behind her.

“Hey, I paid good money to be here,” she said seriously.

I finally got it. Oh no. No, no, no. My brother loves this woman.

“Why did you do this?” I asked.

“It was for a good cause,” she said. “I would have donated anyway, business is good, so why not give back? It’s a good tax break, and I may have saved your ass from some biker chick.”

I laughed at her. Then, more serious, I said, “That’s a long list of reasons, right there.”

The host brought us to our table, which was in the center of the window with the best view of the ocean. “Our best table was reserved for you by the Vixen.”

Erica smirked at me. “Money can buy some things, right?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I almost paid three thousand dollars to get out of this date.”

“Glad you didn’t?” she said. Erica’s playfulness was foreign to me, but it also seemed weirdly familiar. Then I remembered that I had witnessed Erica flirt with my brother, and it looked . . . oddly . . . a little . . . like . . . this.

My face must have betrayed me, because she asked me what was wrong.

“Forgive me for being blunt, but you’re still not a—you’re still straight, right?”

“Right.”

I laughed. “Thank God. Or this would’ve been one awkward dinner!”

“Agreed. So, is this place any good?” she asked, and picked up her menu and started reading.

“I hear it’s great,” I said. What an idiot I was to think she was flirting with me. Clearly, being alone for the last few months had taken its toll and I was damaged and in need of some attention, some small victory with a woman well out of my league.

Oddly, this made me remember something I had read about rescue dogs. After too many bad experiences of not finding the living, rescue dogs need encouraging. So once in a while, one of the handlers hide. The dogs find a live body and regain their hope, and then carry on looking for victims. Otherwise, they’d stop; apparently, even rescue dogs can’t cope with too many lost causes. Lorn was my latest lost cause, and for a second I wondered if Erica had been my fake taste of victory, staged not by rescuers but by a lesbian bar, and unknowingly, my sister, who had no idea it was Erica I’d be meeting. Too funny.

We both relaxed and ordered our drinks and dinner and our
conversation turned to family, as it usually did, though she carefully avoided talking about Vince. “Has Lisa ever been in a long relationship?” she asked.

“Lisa acts like a womanizer, but don’t let her kid you. She is the fussiest person I know when it comes to women.”

“Really?”

“Really. Once she broke up with a woman because of a bad cold,” I said.

“Do tell,” Erica said, sipping on her red wine, holding the glass up. “This is amazing.”

“Glad you like it. Blackstone merlot. Anyway, Lisa went to bed that night, and when the poor woman woke up, she had a snot rag stuck to her left tit.”

Erica started laughing, and I felt like I always did when this happened, lucky.

“So there she was, in the bed, naked, except for this snotty Kleenex, which had cemented itself to her boob, poor thing. She carried on a whole conversation with Lisa about how she was feeling much better, and the whole time, the Kleenex chunk was stuck to her. The worst part is, when Lisa tells the story, she says, if it had just stuck to the smaller tit, she might have stayed with her.”

Erica had to spit her sip of wine back into her glass to laugh without choking.

I laughed at her. “Nice . . . very pretty,” I said, but I wanted to see her laugh like that again, so I kept going. I had a million Lisa stories, I could go all night.

“Another time, Lisa broke up with a girl on a first date, while they were sharing their first drink. It was at a Chinese restaurant, the drink was a scorpion bowl.”

“Why?” Erica said, still chuckling from the last story.

“In her defense, Lisa discovered the girl was dumb as a rock.”

Erica said, “During the first drink?”

I told Erica how Lisa described the girl stabbing herself in the eye three times on the extra-long straw. “Lisa said it was just one too many times, but what had really sealed the deal was when the girl whipped out a nail clipper at the table and clipped her straw to
a normal size to stop stabbing herself and Lisa dumped her on the spot. She said she couldn’t stop staring at the end of the straw, cut curved like a tiny toenail, and the way the girl had to lean way over it now since it was so short. Dumped her before the dumplings.”

Erica was laughing again, and the sound of it, along with the wine, was making me feel content for the first time in months. There was no place I longed to be, and no breakup conversation with Lorn replaying in my head.