Dating Without Novocaine

“People are like fabrics: some are silk,

some are flannel. You have to be careful

which ones you try to sew together.”

—Hannah O’Dowd

To Anna, of course

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Anna Dudey and Scott Bodyfelt, who provided invaluable information on their professions.

To my extraordinary agent, Linda Kruger.

To my friends, whose experiences were rich sources of inspiration.

And to all the poor saps who’ve gone out with me, not knowing any better.

Contents

One: Sequins and Gossamer

Two: Orange Tiers with Bric-a-brac Trim

Three: Gypsy Scarf

Four: Black Leather

Five: Mourning Clothes

Six: Silk vs. Spandex

Seven: Green Plaid

Eight: Rubber Boots

Nine: Synthetic Fur

Ten: Tighty Whities

Eleven: Walking Shoes

Twelve: Embroidered Linen

Thirteen: Polyester Brocade with Garters

Fourteen: White Satin

Fifteen: Nasty Sweater

Sixteen: Blue Uniform

Seventeen: Pink Panties

Eighteen: Tapestry with Fringe

Nineteen: Shoulder Pads and Falsies

Twenty: Latex

Twenty-One: Wet Terry Cloth

Twenty-Two: Blue Medallion Print

Twenty-Three: Old Denim

Twenty-Four: Green Piqué

Twenty-Five: Percale Sheets

Twenty-Six: Running Tights

Twenty-Seven: Pale Gold Accessories

Twenty-Eight: White Silk for Another Day

One

Sequins and Gossamer

Portland, Oregon

“A noint your sacred body parts,” Sapphire said, passing ’round a small blue-and-white Chinese bowl. “I made this rose water with the petals of flowers from my own garden, plucked under the full moon to call forth the power of the Goddess.”

I slanted a look at Cassie, seated cross-legged next to me on a cushion on the wooden dance floor. She was wearing a short top that ended just below her breasts in a row of dangling, shimmering silver disks, her slightly poochy belly bare above the heavy belt of coins around her hips. She narrowed her tilted elf-green eyes at me in warning.

The bowl came to me, the rose water a dark burgundy that smelled safe enough when I gave it a cautious sniff. I dunked my fingers in the water and dabbed the stuff on my throat and wrists like perfume, and passed the bowl on to Cassie.

With reverence, Cassie anointed her breasts and her crotch, then bowed over the bowl and shut her eyes before passing it to the next novice belly dancer.

“I never knew you had sacred boobs,” I whispered to Cassie as Sapphire invited the class members to share their experiences of the past week. “I would have paid them proper respect, if I had. Shouldn’t you be wearing a more expensive bra, if you’re carrying around holy orbs?”

“Hush!” Cassie scolded.

A long-haired woman with hurt-looking eyes started talking about the telepathic conversation she had had with her dog.

“You’re going to have stains right over your nipples.”

“Hannah, be quiet. You won’t experience the Goddess if you don’t open yourself to Her.”

That didn’t sound a particularly awful threat at the moment. The belly dance/goddess worship class of ten women was sitting in a circle around a small terra-cotta sculpture of figures linking arms around a lit votive candle. I’d seen the same piece in Robert Redford’s Sundance catalog.

The psychic-dog woman finished, and a middle-aged woman with about fifty extra pounds showing between skirt and halter top started to weep. “My fiancé had to go to court this week. My neighbor says he flashed her, that he stood in our front yard and exposed himself to her. But he wasn’t naked, and he didn’t do it on purpose! He was wearing panties and gartered hose. He went out to get the paper, that was all.”

Sapphire made soothing noises, while the other women murmured and cooed.

“If she’s in touch with the Goddess, why is she dating a pervert?” I asked Cassie.

“Hannah!”

I shrugged. It seemed a reasonable question.

“It’s time for the affirmation,” Sapphire said, and everyone put their palms together in front of their chests, fingers pointing upward. Cassie hadn’t told me there’d be an affirmation. I put my palms together and tried not to feel like I was praying.

“The Goddess has blessed us with wisdom and compassion,” the women said in unison, touching their prayerful hands to forehead and heart. “She has taught us to nourish—” here the hands parted and everyone cupped her breasts “—and to create.” The hands came back together and inverted, pressing down into bespangled crotches. Pervert-boyfriend woman parted her thighs to get her hands down in there.

I lifted my hands away. I didn’t want to create with my loins, not while I was still single. Good God, that’s what being on the pill for the past eleven years was all about. Didn’t the Goddess know how to create with the mind or the heart? Or the hands? How about the hands? Leave the womb alone, for God’s sake, at least until I got a husband.

And that, of course, was the whole point of my being here and subjecting myself to Cassie’s belly dancing class of Goddess worshipers.

“If you get in touch with the Divine Feminine within you, men will sense it,” she’d told me. “You’ll loosen up the energies in your chakras, get them flowing. Men won’t be able to take their eyes off your lower belly, the center of your sexual power, and they’ll be swarming all over you.”

Sounded good. I was twenty-nine, and it had been six months since I’d had sex. Something had to be done.

I didn’t know if warming up my chakras was going to help things, but floating in the back of my mind was a vision of myself in a gauzy costume, strings of tiny bells wrapped around my hips, the faint shadow of my pudenda visible through the fabric, nothing but heavy jeweled chains concealing my breasts. Some strange, thumping, wailing music would be playing in the background as I put on a private, belly-undulating show for Mr. Right, working him into a froth of reproductive urges.

Whatever Sapphire wanted to say about belly dancing being about getting in touch with the Goddess and discovering one’s inner self, I’d seen my Desmond Morris on The Learning Channel. I knew that, anthropologically speaking, this hip rocking was about showing a man I was young and healthy enough to bear his children.

That was fine by me.

Once the nonsense about the Goddess was finished and we started dancing, I started to enjoy myself. Sapphire demonstrated Snake Arms, Egyptian Walk, Lotus Hands and an unnatural, rolling wave of belly muscles that for some reason came to me with ease. There was nothing attractive about it, but I knew it would come in useful at parties when others were showing off their ability to move ears or wrap ankles behind their heads. “Sure, you can touch your eyebrows with your tongue,” I’d say, “but can you do this?” And then I’d pull up my shirt and give them an eyeful of rippling belly.

We stood in three staggered rows, facing a wall of mirrors and copying Sapphire’s moves. My movements looked stiff compared to those of the others, my limbs about as loose and flowing as a senator’s. I’ve always been one of those dancers who loses the beat and has no natural sense of rhythm. Maybe my sex chakra really was blocked.

We repeated the mantra at the end of the class, Sapphire gave us a homework assignment of watching for circularity in our daily lives, and then Cassie and I were out the door and headed to the car. Sapphire’s house and dance studio were a few miles east of Portland, where suburbs give over to pockets of country, and we could hear a concert of frogs croaking in the spring night air.

“So what’s with that blue rhinestone Sapphire had glued between her eyebrows?” I asked Cassie as we were driving home.

“I knew I shouldn’t have brought you. You’re going to make cracks about this for the next week and a half, aren’t you?”

She knew me well. “And how about those little dots and diamonds beside her eyes? Suppose she used organic eyeliner to draw them? I mean, what are they supposed to signify? They make her look like a playing card.”

“You don’t have to come again.”

“I don’t think my chakra got any looser.”

“It’s not the only thing about you that’s blocked,” Cassie said, and turned on the radio so she wouldn’t have to listen to me yak.

The dance lesson hadn’t been a complete waste of time. Watching pervert-boyfriend woman move with sensuous grace, I’d imagined her fat-folded belly transformed from a disfiguring burden into some sort of symbolic representation of Mother Earth, ample and giving. Despite the woman’s lousy taste in men, the flowing way she moved showed she was in tune with herself in a way I decidedly was not.

I didn’t want to admit that to Cassie, though—it went against the firm stand I had taken against New Age flakiness and vegetarianism. I also didn’t want to tell her that while looking at myself in the mirror amid those other women, I’d realized I was neither as fat nor as tall as I’d thought I was. I was altogether smaller than in my own mind, and I didn’t know if that said something good or bad about the inner me.

It occurred to me that I had been unfairly obnoxious about the class in my quest to not admit to kind of liking it. “Sorry, Cass,” I said above the noise of the radio. I had been making fun of her religion, after all. “Want to stop at Safeway and pick up some Ben & Jerry’s? I’ll treat.”

“Cherry Garcia?”

“And Chunky Monkey.”

“Kewl.”

That was the great thing about Cassie. She never held on to her pique, and any difficulty could be smoothed over and forgotten with a bit of ice cream. A girl could do worse in a housemate, and the Goddess knew I had.

I’d known Cassie since my first year of college, down in Eugene at the University of Oregon. Three years older than me, she’d already been at the school off and on for four years when we met. She’d joked she was on the five-year plan, then a year later, on the six. She finally abandoned all pretense of finishing her degree in sociology and turned her talents to her boyfriend’s scented-candle business. She’d spend her Saturdays sitting in a stall at Eugene’s open air market, candles arrayed around her, a book on how to awaken your intuition in her hand. To the right had been a booth selling incense, to the left one selling little pewter sculptures of dragons and wizards holding crystals.

When the boyfriend started dipping his wick in wax pots other than her own, Cassie moved up to Portland and went to work at Shannon’s Pub as a bartender. She’d been working there ever since. Sometimes she sent away for brochures for career training programs, but they sat on the coffee table gathering dust and crumbs, until finally three or four months down the line, during one of our rare cleaning binges, I’d hold them up in question, she’d shrug, and they’d get tossed into the recycling bin.

She swung her hips to a wild and foreign drum, did Cassie, and I couldn’t decide if I admired her for it, or wished she’d grow up and join the same concrete world as the rest of us.

Well, most of the rest of us. Sapphire and the woman who held psychic tête-à-têtes with her dog obviously lived in another realm entirely.

Later that night, as we sat on the futon eating ice cream and watching TV, a question slipped out that by all rights should have stayed tucked behind my lips. Maybe it was something about the dance class that had stirred it up. I don’t know.

“Are you happy, Cass?” I asked, as on TV a woman with an ultra-white smile held up a tube of toothpaste.

Her slanted, lovely eyes glanced at me, the light from the television reflecting off them in the half dark of the living room. “Happy? What do you mean? Right now, at this moment?” She held her spoon motionless above her container of Cherry Garcia.

“Happy with your life, with how it’s going. Is this where you expected you would be, when you became an adult?” I thought it came out sounding judgmental, as if I had decided already that she was not showing the proper drive and ambition of any self-respecting American. But the question wasn’t truly directed at her, and she sensed it.

“Aren’t you happy?” she asked me, and if there was a Goddess, she seemed to be looking at me with infinite compassion from Cassie’s eyes.

I felt tears start in my own, taking me by surprise, and I tightened my lips against the sudden quivering there.

“Oh, sweetie,” Cassie said as the X-Files theme started whistling in the background. “It’ll be all right. You expect too much of yourself, is all.”

“But…” I blubbered, a vast blackness of want seeping up from the dark depths, the ice cream in my hand a cold and empty comfort. “But there’s so much I—”

“So much you thought you’d have by now? Husband, children, SUV, golden retriever? A house in the west hills?”

“A Volvo, not an SUV—”

“Hannah, you’re so predictable,” Cassie said, and somehow her gently sardonic tone was comforting. “Everyone thinks they’re supposed to want those things, but I don’t think you really do.”

“Yes I do. Especially the husband.”

“If you were ready, you’d have one. Maybe right now you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.”

I looked down at my Chunky Monkey. “You think so?”

“It’s your sewing business that matters to you. That’s why you moved up to Portland to begin with. Concentrate on that, and let the universe handle the rest in its own time.”

I wished I had her faith that all would come right in the end. It seemed to come so easily to her, so naturally. I never saw Cassie worry about anything. “Can’t I have a little of the rest right now? Like a boyfriend?” I asked.

“He’ll come when you’re ready.” She smiled. “In the meantime, there’s David Duchovny.”

I looked at the screen, where Mulder and Scully were arguing in a repeat episode, and sniffed back the remainder of my weepy self-pity. “I don’t want him.”

“Why not? I’d do him.”

“He never smiles,” I said.

“You don’t want a guy to be grinning while he’s got your legs over his shoulders. Talk about creepy.” She shuddered, and I gave a small laugh, glad of the change of topic and of mood.

“Can’t be much worse than how they usually look.” I squeezed my eyes shut and groaned as though I was in pain, straining out the words, “I’m coming, I’m coming! I’m almost there… Can I come? Can I come now?”

“They ask you that?”

“One of my ex-boyfriends used to.”

“Did you let him?” Cassie asked.

“Depends how long he’d been going at it. Past a certain point, I just wanted him to get it over with. I started thinking about urinary tract infections.”

Cassie winced, and I knew both our minds had gone to the unopened jug of cranberry juice in the cupboard, kept there in case of emergency.

“Maybe it’s for the best that your sex chakra is blocked up,” Cassie said.

“Maybe you’re right.”

Two

Orange Tiers with Bric-a-brac Trim

T uesday evening found me knee-deep in bridesmaids’ dresses, my Bernina sewing machine humming smoothly up and down seams and around armholes. I’m a seamstress, and have my own pick-up-and-deliver alterations and custom sewing business, Hannah’s Custom Sewing. I’d left off my last name, O’Dowd, as it had less than desirable connotations for one whose work was mainly with clothing.

Six months ago I had been living in Eugene, working in an alterations shop. My degree in history was going as unused as Cassie’s coursework in sociology, but I didn’t care. I’d realized that the only part of history that I really liked was examining the clothes in old paintings. The French Revolution was more interesting to me for its effect on fashion than for its effect on the French aristocracy, although the two were inextricably intertwined. Any history paper where I’d had the choice of topic had focused, in some manner or another, on clothing.

When my off-and-on boyfriend of two years had at last been permanently switched off, I’d taken a page from the Book of Cassie and decided to move up to Portland. I was tired of Eugene with its determined tofu-eating and tie-dye, and tired, as well, of working for someone else. The alterations shop had been turning away business, there was so much of it, and I felt certain I’d be able to find ample work for myself up in Portland, where people actually bothered to wear clothes that fit. To make my services special, I would pick up and deliver clothes and other sewing work to people’s homes and businesses. That would also save me from worrying that someone would slip and fall on my front steps and decide to sue me.

It’s a good thing I like to drive. I’ve put nearly ten thousand miles on my Neon since I’ve been in Portland.

The first few months I barely managed to scrape by, and used up all my savings staying ahead of car payments, gas, insurance, and that nagging little lump of credit card debt that festered like a nasty pimple, never completely going away. These last two months, though, I had hit some sort of critical sewing mass, and I had a steady stream of clients, some of whom had already become regulars. I made more money than I had at the alterations shop, but on my own I didn’t have health insurance or paid sick days. I was debating which to buy first—the health insurance or a hemmer.

My sewing room is upstairs in the small 1920’s stucco house that Cassie and I share. In exchange for taking up two rooms to her one, every four or five weeks I make her a new dance costume or something for her room, like a new comforter cover or floor pillows. This month was going to be curtains, made out of some filmy Middle Eastern material she’d bought at a belly dancing festival. I think I’ll put bells on the bottom, just for the fun of it. When the wind moves the curtains, they’ll make soft tinkling sounds. Cassie will like that.

I glanced at the clock and grimaced: 7:00 p.m. I was due at San Juan’s Mexican Restaurant in half an hour. Cassie, Louise, Scott and I were all meeting for dinner, to celebrate Louise finally getting off nights and onto days at the crisis line. She’d been working there for two years, and the screwy sleeping schedule and proscribed social life had driven her to the brink of clinical depression. And she should know, being a counselor and dealing with the mentally ill all night.

I slipped the jacket I was working on onto a hanger and hung it up along with the others, giving the lineup a critical look. The bride, genuinely concerned that her bridesmaids be able to wear their clothes again, and having the good taste to abhor butt bows, taffeta and sleeveless dresses that exposed flabby upper arms, had chosen to garb her friends in Jackie O-style skirt suits in a neutral blue.

It was a nice idea, but all lined up together I feared the bridesmaids might look like 1960’s flight attendants. All they needed was a pair of wings pinned to their lapels and pillbox hats, and the guests would be expecting them to throw peanut packets instead of flower petals as they walked down the aisle.

I shrugged. It wasn’t my problem. I’d learned long ago to let clients decide for themselves what they wanted. There was too wide a range of tastes out there for me to try to advise anyone, based on my own limited preferences.

My pants were creased from sitting, blue threads and fabric fuzz stuck to them like paint on a Jackson Pollock. I stripped the pants off and pulled on a short tailored skirt of gray faille. I had sixteen skirts of the exact same cut, made from fabric remnants from various jobs. On top I wore a short-sleeved light blue cashmere crew-neck, found for twenty-four dollars at Nordstrom Rack. I’d repaired the hole in the armpit that had relegated the treasure to the bargain pile. It brought out the blue in my blue-gray eyes, and was my favorite piece of clothing.

I put in small crystal studs and gave my chin-length bob a quick brushing. The color was presently a soft honey-blond, darker than the over-highlighted tresses I’d worn in Eugene. When the boyfriend had gone, so had my long hair. I’d sat myself down at the salon and told the stylist to give me hair that would attract professional men with marriage on their minds, instead of the usual unemployed gorillas who came on to me. I’ve never understood why it is that the men with the least to offer are the ones the most willing to make a pass at a woman.

My new hair hadn’t given me any success with the eligible men yet, but at least the shiftless ones had left me alone. Louise said it was the new, determined look in my eyes that scared the losers away, not the hair. I hoped that wasn’t the explanation for the lack of professional men, as well.

Scott and Louise were waiting in the foyer of the restaurant when I arrived, sitting on a bench eating chips. The peasant-bloused staff gave out baskets of them when the wait for a table was over ten minutes, which was one reason the place was a favorite of ours.

“Hannah!” Louise said, scooting over to make space for me on the bench. “Where’s Cassie?”

“I don’t know. She’ll be here. Hi, Scott.”

“Hi,” he said, smiling his usual friendly smile. He and Louise had been boyfriend and girlfriend senior year in high school, and he’d been Louise’s “first” in both love and sex. The relationship hadn’t lasted over a year into college—Scott had gone to Cornell, Louise to Oregon—but they’d remained friends, and Scott had become friends with Cassie and me, as well, when each of us in turn had moved up to Portland.

It was silently understood that Louise, while willing to share Scott as a friend, would not look kindly upon either Cassie or me taking him on as anything more. I couldn’t blame her—the thought of my first love sleeping with either Cassie or Louise set my teeth on edge.

With that past relationship serving as a symbolic sword on the bed between us, I’d found that I was more comfortable with Scott than with men who were available. He was tall and reasonably good-looking, with dark hair and a slightly boyish face with a dimple in his chin. I occasionally helped him shop for clothes, and when the weather was nice we’d sometimes go for a hike together.

“Hey, Scott, I’ve got a new one for you,” I said, leaning forward to see him around Louise.

He groaned. “Your jokes are never new. I’ve heard them all a hundred times.”

“This one’s a limerick.”

“Please, no.”

“I want to hear it,” Louise said, brown eyes sparkling in her freckled face. She enjoyed teasing Scott about his profession nearly as much as I did.

“Okay, here goes.

‘There was a young dentist Malone

Who had a charming girl patient alone

But in his depravity

He filled the wrong cavity

My, how his practice has grown!’”

Louise laughed, but Scott put his hands over his face and shook his head. “That one’s older than George Washington’s dentures,” he complained. “I have to listen to this type of lame humor all day at work. Why do you have to inflict it on me after hours?”

“Because dentists deserve punishment. They’re evil people.”

Louise put her hand on my knee and gave me her mock therapist look. “I’m sensing a deep childhood trauma, Hannah. You’re safe here. You can talk about it.”

“The memories, I only see flashes of them, a man in a white coat, the whine of a drill—no! No!”

Louise turned to Scott. “She’s repressed the memories. We’ll have to try hypnosis. This woman has been deeply scarred. Your presence obviously brings up painful feelings for her.”