Instant Love (4 page)

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” her mother had said to her. “You’re going to enroll in community college. I’ve checked already, you can still sign up through the end of the month. Take art classes or whatever you want, I really don’t care, Miss Sarah. Just get involved in something. Idle minds, miss. Idle minds. Also you’re going to stop smoking. And you’re going to cut your hair. Don’t dye it again. It looks atrocious. And you’re going to stop wearing those goddamn jeans. You can’t even take them with you. In fact, take them off right now.”

Sarah Lee stared up at her mother standing there, tidy and pressed and twitching in their kitchen. She didn’t know what her mother was going to do next. There had been a flurry of commands in recent weeks; her mother was in emergency mode. Sarah had been letting her run her mouth and waiting to see what stuck. It’s funny what sticks.

“This instant, Sarah,” she said.

Sarah stood, unbuttoned, unzipped, bent, one leg, then the other. She handed the jeans to her mother. There were holes in the knees. Sarah had drawn a picture of her boyfriend on the back pocket in magic marker. Her mother clenched the jeans, looked as if she were going to rip them in two. Sarah sat back in the chair in her underpants. The plastic cover of the chair felt clammy against her legs.

There was more after that. No contact of any kind with the boyfriend. College applications. And even though she doesn’t like church, she’s going to church from now on. Every weekend. Plus a job, any job. A new attitude. Get your act together. Pronto.

SARAH LEE SAT
at a wide wooden picnic table on the back porch of a stranger’s house, trying to figure out what to do next. Though the rain had stopped a few hours before, the wood was still damp, and she could feel her jeans soaking through, but she didn’t want to go inside. Outside was where her friend was, and it was good to stick with a friend at a stranger’s party; outside was where it smelled good, the flowers in the garden, plus the wood and the rain and the grass smelled rich and sweet together. But outside was also where it was quiet, and she didn’t like to meet people in silence—her stutter was more obvious then, and sometimes after that, people stopped listening to her completely. (Which is worse? To have never been acknowledged, or to be discarded? She could never decide.) She had compensated tonight by smoking some pot, which relaxed her, slightly stunned her nervousness.

Earlier her cousin had made her stew. She did this every Friday, invited Sarah upstairs for big bowls of her specialty, a spicy stew with thick chunks of beef and tomatoes, sometimes with sweet carrots and cabbage, whatever looked good at the market. Her cousin wanted to make sure she was getting enough iron. Iron was very important, said Nancy. She had a lot of opinions about what was important: fresh air, exercise, fruits, vegetables, and Democrats. Sarah listened to whatever she had to say, she didn’t mind. Sometimes Sarah would tell her about her art classes, or funny stories from her job at the bakery. None of Nancy’s work stories were funny—it was almost always about another person dying—so she kept them to a minimum. They dipped hunks of bread Sarah brought from work into the stew, clinked together their glasses of red wine (one a day, also important), they rubbed their bellies at the end of the meal and laughed. Sarah thought Nancy was an all-right lady. A little lonely, but all right.

And then, at the tiny mirror in the bathroom of her basement apartment, Sarah Lee had meticulously applied eyeliner, and admitted to herself that it might be time to get a new boyfriend. She didn’t know if her ex had tried to contact her, and she could finally admit she didn’t care. He was ruined now, soiled by the stain of getting caught, hustled in handcuffs, fingerprinted, fingers pointing, branded for life as a criminal. You can’t wash that off, no matter how hard you try.

So she headed to a party with her coworker Melanie, as a replacement friend for Melanie’s best friend, Jemma, who had homework to do. Melanie’s new boyfriend, Doug, had invited them. The two had met a week before at the park by the reservoir, during a break between classes. Doug was playing Ultimate Frisbee, and Melanie was making a bag out of hemp (she was always making something out of hemp) that she planned to sell in the parking lot of a Phish show in Portland the following weekend. Doug had thrown a Frisbee into her head, apologized for throwing a Frisbee into her head, told her he liked her dread-locks, and then they had totally fallen in love.

“He gives me hickeys on my tummy,” said Melanie, as they hovered behind the counter at the bakery, the sweet smell of fresh rhubarb pies swirling around them. “Look.” She had pulled up her T-shirt. They were plum-colored and surrounded her belly button, which had a silver bar through it. Sarah thought it looked like a tattoo. And if you were into that sort of thing, it was probably very pretty.

She was trying not to judge. No one judged in Seattle. It wasn’t cool to judge. People would think less of you if you did, Melanie had told her this. The whole idea wrapped around in Sarah Lee’s head and met itself again at the beginning, this judging of judging. She didn’t want to disagree, but hadn’t figured out how to agree.

Sarah Lee was just trying to sort out the Seattle bus system. That was for starters. The whole judging thing was way down on the list. Not that she had a list. Some people could think that way, in numbers or bullet points or alphabets, but not Sarah. She thought in circles.

IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN.
A car door slammed, and there was a shuffle of feet and then a knock at the front door, which echoed to the backyard through the quiet night air. Two voices, two more guys, Sarah thought. That makes fifteen men. Fifteen is either a lot, or not very many at all.

She dug her thumbnail into the moist wood of the table, traced the shape of a heart. There were three other people seated at the picnic table, all guys. Maybe I should say something, she thought. What do I say? I should have something to say.

Everyone else was inside except for Melanie and her boyfriend, who trampled through the grass, smelling the flowers in the dark. Sarah could hear Melanie laughing, a sweet tinkling laugh that usually made an appearance after she smoked pot.

There was a lot of pot at the party. The interior of the house reeked of it, from the front foyer with the beat-up welcome mat where two long-haired software engineers leaned casually, smoking a joint and catching a breeze through the screen door, to the kitchen with the tile scuffed with mud from the paws of the three dogs who lived in the house. The kitchen was where six employees of two competing software companies sat, at an old oak table, passing around a champion-sized bong. They would smoke several hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana that night. Six months later their companies would merge. One company would claim it bought the other. Some people would get promoted while others would remain stagnant. Feelings would be hurt. Two college roommates would stop speaking for a decade until their wives forced them to reconnect at another friend’s wedding, and then it was as if they had never parted ways.

Sarah turned to her tablemates and hefted herself upon them. She introduced herself. She got their names. She made eye contact. She pulled her hair out of her face and off her shoulders and pulled it up into a ponytail, and then swung it slightly.

This was a bad move, but she didn’t know it. Her hair looked much better down, but no one had ever told her that, even when she had asked. She had dated her boyfriend throughout high school, and he loved her no matter how her hair looked, which is how he always responded to the question. Her girlfriends had always said, “Who cares? You have a boyfriend, so it doesn’t even matter.”

And now here she was, single, and completely ignorant of the fact that when her hair was up her ears stuck out in an awkward way, and while the rest of her was perfectly lovely, with her moon-shaped face and long, wavy blond hair and pink-blushed cheeks, at that exact moment, with the moonlight breaking through the clouds and outlining the halo of the hair on top of her head and the shape of her ears, she looked like she could have been a circus freak, the Amazing Elephant Girl, one tent over from the Bearded Lady, only one dollar, step right up.

MELANIE DID
a cartwheel and slipped in the wet grass. She shrieked. Doug laughed and extended his hand to help her stand. She pulled him down next to her. He yelled. A light went on in a house down the block.

“We’re waking the whole neighborhood,” said Doug.

“Everyone will know we’re having fun,” said Melanie.

“Let them know,” said Doug.

“I am having fun!” yelled Melanie.

TWO OF THE
three men ignored Sarah. It wasn’t because of her ears—although that didn’t help—but because they were caught up in planning what they saw as a small revolution, even if it could only be viewed on a computer screen. That left Danny West, a sturdy, dark-haired guy in a baseball cap, who figured: Sure, why not give the girl a little chat? The stutter’s kind of sexy, actually. She’s the only one around anyway, except for that drunk chick talking to Doug, and I think they’re together. Danny had nothing better to do, anyway. He had already contributed his part to the revolution and cashed out early.

Danny West was twenty-four years old and a millionaire. Several times over, in fact, but who’s counting?

He could not stop counting.

He asked her if she liked it in Seattle, and she said, “It’s different than anywhere else I’ve lived. It makes me feel like I could be a better person,” and he liked that answer a lot. She was full of hope, it seemed. Everyone around him had hopes and dreams, and he had already sold his to a guy older than his father.

He didn’t know what to do with himself now.

“And what about you?” asked Sarah. “What do you do?”

“Nothing,” Danny said. “I’m a lazy sack of shit is what I am.”

The two men sitting next to them stopped talking, and one of them said, “Shut up, dude.” The guy laughed like he didn’t mean it, but he really fucking hated Danny West sometimes. Here the rest of the guys who went to school with West were working their tails off trying to come up with something genius that would change everything, make them rich, make them famous, and set them up for life in every way imaginable, and West had already done all that, made it look as easy as looking both ways and crossing a street. But then he’d just checked out, gone to Thailand and India and all the other places they could only dream of going if they could just get the time off, and then he came back sometimes and just hung around, showed up at parties and talked shit like that. He had simply ceased to be tolerable.

“Well, I used to do something,” said Danny. “I invented some software, I started a company, I sold it, and now I’m rich and won’t have to work again for a long time. So I mostly travel now. I just got back from a month in India.”

He took a sip from his plastic cup casually. It was a well-practiced sip. What do you say after that? You just sip instead.

SARAH
’
S EYES
widened, and she looked prettier. He was the kind of man who looked “good on paper” as her mother sometimes said. Sarah had always tossed that phrase around in her head when she heard it, let it travel like a curious bird. To be good on paper meant something entirely different to her. It meant a face that would be beautiful to draw, a face with character: deep lines on a forehead fresh from worry, a nose with a bump on it from a skateboarding accident, or ears, slivers like a partial moon or sturdy soup spoons like hers. Now here was someone who had something different, a brilliant story to tell, and a fantastic life to be led.

She took down her hair, played with her elastic. Now she was lovely, and excited by him. And she fell in love with him, or loved him a little bit just at that moment. It had never occurred to her that she might actually meet a rich man who could take care of her. She could suddenly see the future with him so clearly.

There were trips to be taken (India! She hadn’t even considered India. It was enough that she had made it to Seattle), and she wouldn’t have to work those weekend shifts for extra cash; he could help with little things probably.

She found his plain looks problematic, though (He was to become handsome only as an older man: his soft jaw would harden significantly with determination, and the wisdom he was already striving to achieve would eventually imbue his eyes with an irresistibility), and envisioned how a decent haircut and a little bit of stubble could change everything about him. They could move in together, and she could get out of that basement and into his apartment, which she was certain was spacious and lovely. (In fact, she was wrong. He was a simple man who hated to be wasteful. He lived in a small studio with big windows and a lofted bed, downtown near the water. There wasn’t really room for another person. It was a deliberate move.) Sarah Lee was smitten.