Until the Real Thing Comes Along (3 page)

About half of us live here in Crystal Cove year-round, and we practically congratulate each other when we pass on winter-deserted streets. The rest pull in for Memorial Day, leave after Labor Day. Their pretty houses sit empty the rest of the time, alarm console lights glowing day and night, although most theft around here has to do with skateboards.

The Berkenheimers live in a suburb north of Boston and their apparent vocation is driving here a few times a month and looking at every low-cost piece of property on the market, many of which they have already seen. Once Muriel, the wife, asked to see one of the most expensive mansions. Artie, her husband, started yelling at her.

“It’s just for
fun
, Artie,” she said. “Which you have forgotten how to have. About forty years ago, you forgot.”

“About forty years ago I had something to have fun with,” he said.

She took off her gigantic black sunglasses, turned around and stared at him sitting in the backseat of my car, sweating a little. He always has to sit in the back because if Muriel sits there, she gets nauseated. “Excuse me,” she said. “Have you had a good look in the mirror lately? You want to know from forty years ago?”

“
Did
you want to see the place on Deer Run?” I asked my windshield.

“She’s crazy,” Artie said, waving his hand. “Mrs. Nutty Fruitcake.”

“I’ll show it to you,” I said.

“Well, of course we can’t afford it,” Muriel said, her voice low. She pulled a handkerchief out of her purse, dabbed at her nose with it, stuffed it back in her purse. I saw a banana in there, dangerously ripe, and half a bagel, entombed in plastic wrap.

“I know you can’t afford it,” I said. “I don’t mind. It’ll be fun.”

“We should maybe wash first,” Artie said.

There was a moment of silence. Then Muriel said, “Oy, you hear this? ‘
We
,’ he says. Like I’ve got a problem. Have I got a problem? I don’t have a problem.”

This is the way it goes with them. But they always treat me to lunch in a nice place because they feel so terrible about never buying anything. And their grandchildren are adorable and sometimes they’ll bring one along. And then while they argue loudly in other people’s kitchens, I take the little boy or girl outside to play. Sometimes there’s a swing set. Sometimes we look for things on the beach. Sometimes we find something good—blue beach glass in a perfect oval shape, a shell with all the pinks of an A+ sunset, a crab scuttling away to safety.

It’s not a terrible job. I mean, the Berkenheimers and I got to look at a beautiful house for a good forty minutes that day. The kitchen was roughly the size of a basketball court. There was a third-floor game room with a mahogany bar and a huge pool table, the requisite stained-glass lamp hanging low over the center. Artie and I took a few shots while Muriel inspected the bathrooms. She came up to the game room clutching her chest. “Solid marble,” she whispered. “Pink! I swear to God.” The closets were cedar; there were beautiful parquet floors; the swimming pool
had a nice view of the ocean. You could be in the water looking at the water. We had a good time. We had a lot to talk about over lunch. And when I got back to the office, there was a message for me. A family of four, moving here for sure, needed a place within the next two or three weeks. “Even you can get a sale out of this,” my boss Michael told me. Nicely—he really likes me. He’s married.

But I didn’t make that sale. Angela Ramsey did, she was working on the day they finally found a house, while I sat at home with the flu.

But the point is, there’s always hope, you never know.

As in, the egg comes down the fallopian tube. The sperm leaps out with a box of candy. They get along. They really get along. Nine months later, I really am nursing a baby in the rocker—and soundlessly crying with relief. I tent the baby’s head with her receiving blanket so the tears won’t fall on her. And what color is her hair? Mine, exactly.

It hurts like a knife blade, this longing. If anyone knew how often I think about having a baby, I’d die of embarrassment. Which would take care of the problem, at least. But my plan is to not have it come to that. My plan is to get going right now in a very scientific and purposeful way that will lead to marriage and pregnancy. A husband and a child. The specifics of the plan I’m not too clear about. Only the intention.

O
n Saturday, I go to the library and look at the shelf that has books on relationships. There aren’t many, but there’s one called
Mr. Right? Right!
that seems promising. The jacket says this is a realistic approach to forming a relationship that is virtually guaranteed to lead to marriage. The author, a nonthreateningly attractive blonde woman, sits in a chair in what appears to be her office. There are many books on the shelf behind her, but you can’t read any of the titles. I wish you could. I want to trust this woman. If I liked her books, we’d be off to a good start. I stare into her eyes: blue, friendly. Her jewelry is a simple gold wedding ring and a watch with a brown leather band. Pearl studs. She is wearing a white, long-sleeved blouse, open at the throat, blue jeans, and red cowgirl boots. At the end of her bio, it says she lives in New York City with her husband and infant daughter. Infant daughter, huh? I slam the book shut, go to the desk to check it out. Mary Ann, the fortyish librarian, leafs through it before she hands it back to me. “Let me know if it’s any good,” she says. I notice for the first time her ringless left hand. “All right,” I say. We nod at each other.

We’ll talk more later. I’ll take her out for a cup of coffee. I’ll say, “God, Mary Ann, are you miserable and desperate, too? I didn’t know that! I’m so glad!” It’s too busy to talk now; there are crooked lines of kids with crooked stacks of books pressed hard against their chests. You can tell the real book lovers; they stare silently ahead, reading the books in their minds already.

When I get home, I see Sophia, the neighbor who lives above my basement apartment, sitting out on the steps waiting for me. She has some mail in her lap, and I know why. She barely reads English, and what she does read she takes quite literally. Therefore junk mail gets her very excited. It’s up to me to set her straight over and over again; she never believes her husband when he tells her it’s all bullshit. Today is going to be exceptionally difficult—I see that the Publishers Clearinghouse envelope has arrived.

“I can be already winned,” she tells me, before I’ve even reached her. She holds up the envelope. “Here is numbers.”

I follow her into her apartment, sit at her kitchen table, sigh.

“This one is for true,” she says over her shoulder, as she hangs up our coats.

“Sophia—”

“No! Some one body does win this!”

I stare into her pretty brown eyes. She must be at least seventy, but she still has a beautiful face. “That’s right,” I tell her. “Some
one
person does win this.”

“So?”

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll help you. Did you pick out what car you want for the bonus prize?”

“There is car, too?”

“Yes.” I find the insert, show her.

Her eyes tear. “I never forget you help me.”

“Listen, Sophia, I just have to tell you, your chances are so, so slim. You understand? You do not have a good chance to win.”

“I pick red one,” she says. “Convergeable.”

“Fine. Good. What else have you got there?”

She holds up another one of the letters. “Here, I can buy plate of kittens from famous artist.” She shows me the color photo of the painted plate, blurrily displayed on a wooden holder. She shrugs, then muses in a high, soft, singsong voice, “I don’t know, what you can do with some thing like this.” She stares at the plate a little longer, then turns to me to ask, “Have you know of this artist?”

I shake my head.

She looks at the plate again, then puts the letter back in the envelope. “Okay. No thanks, I do tell them.”

“You don’t have to tell them. You can just throw it away. They only send it if you ask them to.”

“Oh. Yes. I forget.”

Next she shows me a white envelope with excited red print on the front. “This, I don’t know what is it.”

“It’s for car insurance.”

“I don’t have car.”

“I know. So just throw it away.”

She puts the letter in her housecoat pocket. “When convergeable comes, I look on it again.”

“Let’s finish your entry, Sophia. I have to go make dinner. Ethan’s coming over.”

Sophia widens her eyes, clenches her fist, thumps at her chest
with it. “
Beau
tiful,” she says. “He is more than all what I seen in movie.”

I feel an illegitimate surge of pride. “Do you really think so?”

She nods, adjusts the wide strap of her brassiere. “Give me some picture of him to dream on.”

“I don’t think I have any.” Huh. I don’t think I do.

“I take one his sock, then.” She smiles, and the gold from her front tooth glints. “Is joke,” she says seriously.

“I know.”

Sophia never wears socks. She wears only orangeish-colored nylon stockings that she twists into knots below her knees. And then she wears Nikes with them, double-tied. She wears housecoats except on Sundays, when she wears severe dark suits and low heels and earrings that dangle just the tiniest bit.

Actually, I do have a pair of Ethan’s socks. A gorgeous brown paisley weave. Once when I stepped in an icy puddle on the way to his house, he gave me a pair of his socks to change into. On days when the blues suck the life out of me and I never change from my bathrobe, I wear his socks to add a little class to the outfit.

“You always make so much!” Ethan says.

“You can take home leftovers,” I tell him.

He sighs unhappily, eyeballing the huge pan of eggplant parmigiana that’s sitting on the table between us, approximately one-twentieth of it gone.

My phone rings. I answer it, hoping it is some interesting man who has just realized how much he cares about me. Then I can turn to Ethan and say, “Just leave, since you’re so ungrateful. Take your eggplant and get out of here. I’m busy.”

“Yes, hello, Patty?” I hear.

“Yes?” Yay. Testosterone.

“This is Mark.”

“… Who?”

“Mark? Hansen?”

Silence.

“Uh …” he says. “Is Ethan there?”

There is not much that can deflate you more than your own phone ringing in your own house where you are the only one living there and then it’s for someone else.

“Yes, one second,” I say. I hand Ethan the phone, start clearing the table. I’ll just be the maid. I’ll just tidy up.

Ethan pulls the phone cord taut, talks in a low voice with his back to me.

I make loud kissing sounds, and the feel of my lips on my lips reminds me that it’s been so long since I’ve been kissed by anyone but my family members. Ethan turns around to narrow his eyes at me and I shrug, fill the sink with soapy water.

He gets kissed all the time, Ethan. I’m sure of it. And he’s such a good kisser. I remember. I love a good kisser. I love when your chest tightens and a whole rush of warmth moves down in you until you feel it in … Well. Here I am, rubbing a Brillo pad with a little too much energy over a fork that was clean long ago.

Ethan hangs up. Then he comes over and puts his arms around me from behind. We are the perfect image of a happily married couple, me wearing an apron and washing up the pretty plates, him pulling me close, his chin on my shoulder, his voice in my ear. Why does he have to be gay? It’s just hostile.

“That was really for you,” he says.

“What was?”

“The phone call.”

I turn around, confused. “What do you mean? He asked for you!”

Ethan picks a plate out of the dish rack, starts drying it. “It was a guy I work with who wants to date you.”

“What
?”

“I told him about you. And I was supposed to tell you about him tonight. And then he was going to call, to make a date with you. He was asking if I’d told you yet. He’s kind of eager.”

“Well, forget it. You know how I feel about blind dates. I’m through with them. I’m never doing one again.”
Eager
.

“You should do this one.”

“It never works.”

“Just do this one, and I promise I’ll never ask you again.”

“What’s he like?” I say tiredly. And then while we finish the dishes, I listen to the usual careful superlatives.

I know one woman who still likes blind dates. I can’t believe that she does, but she does. I am so sick of the drill: getting excited while you shave your legs in your new and too-expensive bubble bath, thinking no, but really, this one
could
be the one! You put on your makeup with extra care, you think about the cute stuff he said on the phone, you select your underwear with a certain mind-set. Not the first date, you’re thinking, never on the first date, but hey, you never know, you might want to offer a sexy preview. You pace in your living room in your (new) heels before he arrives, see his car pull up, feel your hands start to sweat, hear the bell, open the door, smile brightly, and want the date to be
over immediately. Because I don’t care what people say, you can tell in three seconds if it’s going to be good and I have yet to have a blind date where I opened the door and thought, Oh, wow, this is going to be good. No. What I always think is, Oh, God.

“Fine,” I tell Ethan. “I’ll go out with him.”

We make our way to the sofa to see what’s on TV and the phone rings again. I go over and pick it up. A man says, “Hi. This is Mark. Again.”

“Yeah, okay, let’s do it,” I say.

“Pardon?”

“Let’s go out.”

“Oh! Okay. Tomorrow night? Dinner? I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty?”

“That’s fine,” I say. At least I’ll get a free meal. Assuming he pays.

I hang up the phone, sit down next to Ethan on the sofa, and burst into tears.

“Jesus,” Ethan says. “What did he
say
?”

“I’m so
sick
of this,” I blubber. “I just want to be done. I want to be married. I want a
ba
by.”

“I know.” He puts his arm around me.

“Why can’t you love me?” I ask. “You love me, why can’t you
love
me?”