Starting From Square Two
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“Are you guys responsible for the goodies?” Todd asked. “Like the notepads and rubber pill toys and clipboards doctors get with the names of drugs on them?”
Gert laughed. She usually just got blank stares when she told people what she did. At least Todd was creative. “Our company doesn’t make them, but it does research to see if they’re a good way to increase product name recognition,” she said. “We might get twelve people in a room and bring out a tray full of those toys, then take them out of the room and see which ones they remembered.”
“Wow.” Todd closed his eyes. “I remember…that you’re wearing a red shirt and you have long hair, and dimples.”
Gert smiled shyly.
The waitress set down a bowl of calamari, along with a huge, soft stuffed red pepper. Gert was hungry. She hadn’t eaten Italian food in a while.
They made up their plates, and they ended up talking so rapidly that Gert only ate half her meal. She barely even tasted it. She hadn’t expected to enjoy Todd’s company so much. He told her that if the train broke down anywhere along the route, whether it was pouring rain or sloppy snow or in the middle of a dangerous city at 3:00 a.m., it was his job to jump out with a flashlight and walk the length of the train to find out where the problem was. “Some of those trains are a mile long,” Todd said. “And you don’t want to get out and walk the length of a train in a desolate area at 3:00 a.m.”
“I wouldn’t try it,” Gert said.
She told him about the worst part of her job, dealing with her often-cranky boss, Missy, and about the odd cast of characters at her old job. They had been so brain-dead that after a certain point, she’d stopped smiling for fear they’d complain about not getting the joke.
“So how did you end up in your line of work, anyway?” Gert asked Todd.
“Well,” he said, wiping his mouth, “it was strange. It wasn’t a job that would have occurred to me at all.”
“So what happened?”
He hooked some linguine around his fork. “I majored in history in college,” he said, “and I wasn’t that great a student in school, but history was the one thing I was interested in. I love finding out how things came to be. There are so many stories. I knew I wouldn’t have lots of jobs lined up after graduation with that major, though. For a while I led tours in a museum part-time. Then I was reading the help-wanted ads in the paper one Sunday morning, and I saw this boxed ad at the bottom of the page for an information session for a train company, and something kind of clicked. Working for the railroad is kind of a cliché, but I’d never actually thought you could do it.”
“It seems like a job people had a hundred years ago,” Gert said.
“Exactly!” Todd said. “That’s what I thought. But that’s what interested me. There’s such beauty in trains. Cars and planes and buses change every year, but if you look at a passing freight train, with its string of yellow and orange and brown boxcars, it looks the same as it did fifty years ago. And trains travel through the most historical points in the country, too. They’re like moving museums of America. But when I first saw the ad, I didn’t know if I should go to the info session. It didn’t seem like a job that people who went to college did. I tried to talk myself out of it.”
“Yeah….”
“But I realized something: I had majored in history because I loved it. And now I could look into a job I might love, too. My heart told me to go.”
“And you went,” Gert said.
“And I went. The recruiters actually try to talk you out of it. They tell you about the crazy scheduling, the long hours, the drug testing, and the hard work. But everything they said to scare us off was something that made me want to do the job more.”
“That’s great,” Gert said. “A lot of people don’t follow their heart.”
“Especially about work.”
He asked Gert where she’d grown up. She said she was from L.A., and that her parents were still there. She said she’d come east for college. She didn’t say she’d stayed and married a Bostonian, though. She told Todd that her younger brother was still in L.A., and that he’d done nothing for two years after high school and was now waiting tables. She told him about her best friend from childhood, Nancy, who lived there with a husband and two kids. She said she usually talked to her about once a week, and the same with her parents.
Todd told her that the friend she had met at the bar, Brian, was someone he’d known since elementary school. He said he only had a few close friends, but once he got along with someone, they were friends for life.
Gert realized by the time they’d finished dessert that she had gone for more than an hour without thinking of Marc. It was the first time in a year and a half that that had happened. Even when she was sleeping. She’d had a dream two days earlier, in fact, in which she was sure he was right next to her. She could even smell him. Then she awoke. She wanted to crawl back into the dream. She wanted so desperately to fall back to sleep.
When Todd asked whether she still wanted to see a movie, she was glad, because she’d been wavering on it. What she really wanted to do was find out more things about him—not sit in a theater with her mouth shut. But she wasn’t going to say that, because then he might suggest going back to his place, and that would ruin everything.
“Well,” she said, “it is pretty late.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Todd said. “I hate to be a wet blanket, but I have to go to work at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow. Could we do it another time, though?”
He wasn’t trying to get her back to his apartment! And he wanted to see her again. She hadn’t botched the date. What luck!
“Sure,” she said. “That sounds good.”
“Do you want to take a walk before we head home?”
It was bitter cold outside. He took her hand for a second, without thinking, and then let go when they got near the waterfront. “What’s out there?” he asked.
“Water,” Gert said.
He laughed. “I knew you were smart,” he said. “It looks like an island.”
“Long Island?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a bench facing the water, and they sat down. She wondered if he was going to ask The Question. At what point did guys ask women about their ex-boyfriends and past relationships? It didn’t happen on a first date, right? She wasn’t sure.
The women in her support group had talked about this: If you met someone new, at what point did you tell him that your husband had died? For the older women, it wasn’t much of an issue, because their suitors generally figured they were either divorced or widowed and asked about it. But with younger women, it wasn’t expected at all. And Gert had found that when you told someone such news, particularly young people, they often had no idea what to say. Sometimes they just stared at her, stunned. It was almost as if they were waiting for her to comfort them.
But Todd didn’t ask about Gert’s former boyfriends. He asked about her friends, her college, her dreams. He told her that he figured that someday he’d have kids, travel and see the world—not by train—and be a good person so that he’d be satisfied when he got old and looked back on his life. He said what was most important to him was to be with the people he cared about and make them happy.
He was simple, Gert thought. Much simpler than Marc.
But he was the kind of guy, she thought, that someone could fall in love with.
Gert found out Todd was younger than she was—twenty-six. Hallie had a “Rule of Twenty-Seven.” If a guy was still single after twenty-seven, she said, there must be something wrong with him. If he was decent, it was unlikely that he’d even get that far. So once a woman surpassed the age of twenty-seven, she would always be dating guys younger than her.
Todd was Gert’s brother’s age, which she found a little strange. It was like dating one of her brother’s meatheaded friends. But Todd wasn’t anything like her brother. Gert loved her brother, but he could definitely be a meathead sometimes.
They made plans to see a movie the weekend after next. Then Todd gave Gert a quick kiss on the cheek.
She could still smell his cologne and feel the brush of his stubble afterward. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed that.
Chapter
3
“You can’t start dating the first person you meet,” Hallie said.
They were at a dingy coffee shop on the Upper West Side, near Hallie’s apartment.
“Did Brian say anything about me?” Erika asked Gert. “I don’t want to date him…I just want to know why he didn’t like me.”
“I’ll ask the Saturday after next,” Gert said, feeling suddenly tired of Erika. She elected to forget the “big hair” comment.
“But you were supposed to come to a party with us on that Saturday!” Hallie said. “You can’t go out with him that day. Can’t you see Todd on Sunday?”
“He’s working on Sunday,” Gert said. “He’s working for a week straight after that.”
“Now she knows his schedule,” Erika said.
“They’ll have to have their wedding when he’s not on call,” Hallie said.
“They won’t be able to have alcohol at the reception,” Erika said, “because Todd can’t drink.”
“Then I’m not coming,” Hallie said. “How can a single girl get through a friend’s wedding without alcohol?”
“Will you guys stop!” Gert said. “We’re not getting married.”
“You act like it.”
“You know, all the two of you do is complain,” Gert said. “It almost seems like you’re upset that I spent an evening with someone nice.”
There was silence.
“You know we just want you to be happy,” Hallie said.
“Yeah,” Erika said. “We know what guys are like. We don’t want you to get hurt.”
Gert didn’t want that either. But sometimes it hurt to get up in the morning. Whatever was coming couldn’t be much worse.
Every other Christmas, Gert and Marc had stayed with Marc’s parents in their huge warm house in Massachusetts, where all four brothers had grown up. Gert loved that house. It held oodles of guestrooms, a fireplace and long slurpy couches you could fall asleep in. It was in an upscale waterfront hamlet just north of Boston with gaslights on the main streets and shanties near the water. During holidays, relatives practically oozed from the walls: Cousins, nieces and nephews, all asking Gert when she was going to have a baby. She had always said, “Soon.”
Nowadays, she sometimes felt like she had a gaping hole inside of her, ready to be filled with something living. She used to look at Marc and think that she couldn’t wait to see what kind of person would come from them.
This past year, on both Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Healys hadn’t invited her to the house. She and Marc had routinely stayed on the East Coast for one holiday and then gone to her parents’ in L.A. for the other. But now, she hadn’t heard from Marc’s parents in almost five months. She still had their last name. She had been officially part of the family. Yet, suddenly, because of one day, half of her support network was gone.
Going home to L.A. for both holidays had been especially hard. Gert’s brother and his girlfriend were there. Gert was alone. After bluffing her way through dinner, she’d gone up to her childhood bedroom, lay on her mattress surrounded by purple walls and cried.
She remembered the times that Marc had stayed with her there on holidays, how they had both crammed onto her single bed in the room with the stuffed animals and purple walls, and how funny that was. He used to scrounge through her closet to find old diaries and report cards and use them to tease her. “‘Gert’s penmanship has improved slightly, but she needs help following directions,’” Marc read one time in an authoritative voice, linking it to the way she’d botched a bisque recipe the previous weekend. “Oh, look,” he said. “A poem: ‘I Love My Fish.’ Aw, how cute—you drew fins on the ‘O’ in love, to make it look like a fish! No wonder you flunked handwriting.” But as much as he teased, he was unrelenting in wanting to see every single thing in her closet. Gert sometimes felt as though she had actually kept all those things to show someone someday, if she was lucky enough to find someone who cared enough about her to want to know what she’d been like as a kid. And he had. He’d gone through everything, asking incessant questions. Marc was driven in everything he did.
Once, at Marc’s house, Gert had gone through his things, too. It was only fair. He had packed most of them away in the basement before heading off to college. She was delighted to find that he had listed the contents of each box very carefully. He was super-organized and super-particular. All his baseball cards were in order, all his die-cast cars were in order. She teased him constantly as she burrowed through the boxes. He’d even alphabetized his comic books.
She also found photos of him growing up. There was one of him at his high school graduation in wire-rimmed glasses, looking younger but just as serious. His short brown hair was neatly cut, and he was wearing a suit and tie. Very neat, very particular, very handsome.
Marc’s particularities had extended into adulthood. There was a certain steakhouse near their college in Pennsylvania that he had loved. So a couple of times a year, he would wake up in their New York apartment on a sunny Saturday and randomly decide it was time for a “steak break.” He’d drive the two of them three hours back there for dinner. After relaxing and enjoying their meal, they’d drive the three hours home. Marc was such an adventurer, Gert thought. And he took such good care of her, too. But she also knew how to support him when he needed it. She filled in all his blanks.
Another thing about Marc was that he was big on looking after his friends. He consistently went out of his way to help them move, to study, to work on projects. A year after graduation, his best friend, the baby-faced Craig, was in Illinois at graduate school teaching economics to freshmen. Marc and Gert took a road trip out there. Marc forced Craig to bring them to one of his classrooms to give them a mock lesson, so they could see exactly how Craig taught his students. Marc delighted in other people’s fancies. But at the end of the day, when he needed someone to rest his head against, it was Gert. Heading back in the car, she would look over at him, his Red Sox baseball cap hovering over his tired eyes, and she’d squeeze his right shoulder.
Now she would never go to the steakhouse in Pennsylvania. She’d never get to reach over and squeeze his shoulder while he was driving. And she had no reason to head up to Boston to visit the warm house with the fireplace and the huge slurpy couches.
“It’s like you don’t just lose him,” said Brenda, the nurse, at the support group that weekend. “You lose his whole family. You see them at services and memorials right after, but if you didn’t have a baby with him, your in-laws stop needing to see you. It ends up being an exchange of cards on holidays. It’s like, for years they cared about you, but it was only because you were part of him.”
“We never had kids,” Gert said. “I always think that if we’d had kids, I’d still hear from them all the time. They’d be inviting me up there or coming down to visit. Now they act like we were never even related in the first place.”
Arden looked angry. “We have this society that makes you feel like it’s okay to defer everything,” she said. “I have a friend who’d been living with her boyfriend for almost six years. They lost him in the Pentagon, and the two of them hadn’t even gotten engaged yet. Six years. Now the relationship counts for nothing in anyone’s eyes. She feels like she doesn’t even have a right to the memories.”
Gert thought again of Chase, who’d lost her fiancé in the towers. Chase hadn’t been there in six weeks now. Gert wanted to ask Brenda if she had her contact number, so she could make sure Chase was okay. But she knew she probably wouldn’t ask.
“You put things off, and poof, you wish you hadn’t waited so long,” Michele said. “But I have friends who got married and had their kids young, and they always tell me they think they gave up their youth too soon. You never know what’s going to happen. You just have to do what you feel is right and not sit around having regrets.”
Stephanie, who was a personal trainer, said, “What about my biological clock? I’m thirty-five, and I still can’t imagine when I’ll be psychologically ready to date again. If I start two years from now, and I meet someone, it will probably be at least a year or two before we get married. By then I’ll be thirty-eight. Too old to have kids. For the rest of my life.”
“Honey, you can have kids these days till you’re fifty,” Brenda said.
“No, you can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“That’s a medical falsehood perpetuated by the media.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is. It’s…”
Gert wasn’t in the mood for this debate. Her gaze moved to the wall of the community center where the meetings were held. There were finger paintings all over it from the daycare program that was in the building. One of the paintings said in round, childish letters, “TODD.” Gert smiled, thinking Todd was actually a little innocent and childlike.
She thought of telling the women in the group about going out with him. But she was feeling guilty about it. The women always talked about how they couldn’t imagine dating someone again. What right did she have to have dinner with a man—and what right did she have to actually enjoy it?
“Having a baby alone just isn’t something I’m going to do,” Arden said.
Everyone else got quiet.
Gert found the silence uncomfortable.
“Well, let’s move on,” Brenda said. “What else happened this week?”
Gert saw no volunteers among the ten women there. She started reluctantly. “I had dinner with someone,” she said. “On Saturday.”
The other women leaned closer. “A man?” Brenda asked. Gert nodded. “Your first date since…?”
“Yes,” Gert said. “But it wasn’t really a date. Just a friendly dinner. I met him when I was out with friends, and he asked me to dinner, and I figured I might as well try, just to see what it was like.”
“And how was it?”
She shrugged. “His name’s Todd. He seemed nice….”
“But he’s not your husband,” Brenda said.
“No,” Gert said, shaking her head. “No one could be. And he’s very different from Marc. But in a way, I was glad. If he was anything like him I’d have felt like I was cheating.”
“Don’t ever feel like that,” Brenda said. “Don’t any of you feel like that.”
“There’s at least room in our hearts for new friends,” Michele said.
“Are you going to see him again?” Leslie asked.
“I think so,” Gert said. “It’s strange, but I feel like I want to learn more about him. But just last week we were all saying how we couldn’t possibly imagine dating again. What right do I have to go out with anyone when it’s only been a year and a half?”
They all got quiet.
“I have a confession,” Michele said. “I know I said I couldn’t date for years. But sometimes, when I’m in bed at night, I miss being held.”
“I do, too,” Leslie said.
“It’s odd,” Brenda said. “I think the better your relationship was with your husband, the more you probably will need to find that closeness again. It’s just that the idea of being with a stranger repulses us. What we really want is to be with our husbands. But it’s impossible. Right now, a fantasy seems better than a real person.”
“When are you going to see him again?” Arden asked.
“Next weekend,” Gert said.
“Those friends you mention,” Brenda said, “make sure you don’t let their notions of dating and five-nights-a-week partying push you. If you need four months to get to know this guy, to get to the point when you so much as want to kiss him, you take four months. Gert has to do what’s right for Gert.”
Gert smiled. Brenda often lapsed into social worker–speak.
“Are those girls younger than you?” Michele asked. “When you talk about them, they seem like it.”
“No,” Gert said. “But sometimes, I feel about five years older than them.”
“It’s not that you’re five years older,” Arden said. “It’s that they’re emotionally five years younger than you. If you’re between twenty-five and thirty-five and you’ve never been married, you get to subtract five years from your age. So your friends are twenty-three or twenty-four. And if you have children before you’re thirty-five, you add five years to your age.”
“What if you’re a widow?” Brenda asked.
“You add a hundred,” someone said, and all the women laughed.
At work, someone had left a card on Gert’s desk. It was a congratulations card for a guy who worked on a different floor. Gert was supposed to put ten dollars in it for a wedding gift.
Gert hated these cards. Hallie had told her once that in China, it was the opposite. In China, if something great happened to you, you took everyone else in the office out to dinner; they didn’t take you. That made sense—after all, you were the lucky one. You were the one who was getting married or promoted.
Marrying the person you loved was not a struggle. The struggle was being able to keep going after you’d lost yours, or not finding one at all. The people who needed cards were those who weren’t engaged, those who weren’t about to have a baby—those who were miserable, single, alone.
“Congratulations,” Gert wrote unenthusiastically in the card, and stuck in her ten dollars.
She got up, sauntered down the hall and pitched the card onto the desk of Leon, the long-haired fiftyish nihilist proof-reader. “No backs!” Gert said, and raced back down the hall.
“Awww, I hate these!” she heard him say.
As she ran, she looked at the tops of buildings: The GE building, the Paine Webber building, some brown towers she didn’t know the name of.
At work, the people were mostly older. She had always been glad that she’d been married and hadn’t counted on work as a social outlet. No one in her office went out after hours. The only person there whom she really had thought of as a friend was her boss, but even that had changed over the last few months. Missy was in her mid-forties and still dressed sexily, always in skirts and off-black panty hose. She had an evil sense of humor. But for the past few months, she’d had mood swings that could have registered on the Richter scale. Gert thought it had to do with relationship issues. The rumor was that Missy was having an affair with the chiseled young guy on the ninth floor who worked in the mailroom. There were elevators near the back of the building that could be stopped between floors without setting off alarms.
What else could she say about Missy? Missy had been saying for years that she was going to get separated from her husband, Dennis, but she never had. Gert had met Dennis at the office Christmas party. He was a sad sack. He hated dancing, so he always stood near the buffet table watching Missy dance up a storm with every guy in the company. Gert wondered why Dennis didn’t try a little harder to keep up with Missy, looks-wise. Not that he should have had to. But he could have at least tried.
After fobbing off the congratulations card, Gert sat back down and stared at her in-box. The accounts that her boss handled involved baldness remedies, skin creams and hemorrhoid preparations. Not really Gert’s preferences, but she had, from time to time, thought up some pretty funny campaigns for all of them. Watching British comedies with Marc often got her thinking creatively. Someday, Gert could take over those accounts if Missy moved to others. Or she could move to other accounts if she had a portfolio of creative work. But Missy was there to stay, and Gert had put off starting creative work for a long time. There were only so many things you could do at once. She’d been fulfilled enough in the past and had never really expected to get most of her satisfaction nine-to-five, anyway. She went out with Marc’s co-workers, took road trips to see friends, celebrated milestones with both of their families—siblings’ graduations, new babies—cooked together, bought a condo. She had felt feminine doing these things, even. Now she felt like she had to be the man and woman in dealing with every daily chore and struggle.