“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

Dating Without Novocaine
Lisa Cach

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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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.”

Scott was about to respond when Cassie swept in, bringing a wave of patchouli and sandalwood with her that temporarily overwhelmed the chili pepper odors of the restaurant. “Sorry I’m late! Practice ran later than expected.” Cassie belonged to a semi-professional belly dance troupe, and her first public performance was coming up in a few weeks.

Louise waved her hand in a gesture to say it didn’t matter. “Our table isn’t ready yet anyway.”

The teenage hostess called Louise’s name just then, and we followed her swaying, tiered gathers of orange skirt with pink bric-a-brac into the dining area, Scott and me falling behind Cassie and Louise.

“Did I tell you about the Japanese exchange student I saw last week, the one who hadn’t been to a dentist in over ten years?” Scott asked. “One of his molars had cracked, and the nerve was exposed. I had to—”

“Stop it! Stop it!” I cried, putting my hands over my ears. Hearing about dental disasters was even worse to me than listening to stories about someone getting their eye poked out. This, however, was Scott’s usual revenge for my dentist jokes: his most revolting cases recounted in excruciating detail for my torture. I don’t think he knew how very real my fear of dentists was, under all the joking.

And it wasn’t that anything truly horrible had ever happened while I was under the gas and drill: no wrong tooth accidentally removed, no hygienist slipping with her little metal scraper and gouging my gums, no near-choking experience with those tooth trays of drool-producing fluoride I got as a kid.

It was instead a lifetime’s worth of anxious dread, of the taste of topical anaesthetic before the needleful of novocaine went in, of spitting out small chunks of tooth after the drilling was finished and the filling put in.

I hated going to the dentist, I hated dentists on general principle, and since I had no insurance I was enjoying the relatively guilt-free thought that I couldn’t afford to go to one for quite a long while.

We gave our orders and settled down to a fresh basket of chips, two types of salsa and kidney-straining quantities of diet soda. Except, that is, for Scott, who rode his bike about forty miles every other day and didn’t have to worry about the dimensions of his derriere. He eschewed diet soda for a Dos Equis.

“I can’t believe I’m going to have a normal life,” Louise said, her straw making loud suction sounds at the bottom of her ice-filled glass. Scott flagged down a passing busboy, who took away Louise’s empty glass for replacement. “My life will no longer revolve around sleep! I can go out in the evenings, I can see the sun on weekends. I’ve already taken the blankets down off my windows.”

“You’re like a plant, ready to grow,” Cassie said. “You’ve been in the dark too long, getting yellow.”

“Exactly!” Louise said. She held out her pale, freckled forearm for us all to see. “This is not the color of a healthy human being.”

“Now you won’t have an excuse not to start dating,” I said.

Louise made a duck face with her lips, her eyes narrowing. “I’m sure I could think of one.”

“How long has it been since you broke up with that guy who worked at Intel?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘breaking up.’ We only went out a few times. That doesn’t constitute a relationship.”

“But how long ago was it?” I persisted.

“Three months, give or take, and I’m in no hurry to repeat the experience. I just don’t do well with technical men—I think it’s a basic personality conflict. They’re all Sensing-Thinking types, and I’m an Intuitive-Feeler, like Cass. But of course the only available guys work in computers. Why is that?”

“It’s a major industry in the region,” Scott said, “so of course there are lots of guys around who work in computers.” We all gave him dirty looks. Sometimes he failed to catch the true substance of a discussion.

“No, I think it’s because they’re the only ones left who are single,” Louise said. “And there’s a reason for that, in terms of their emotional development—or lack thereof. They’re all geeks, who’ve put all their efforts to learning about things instead of people.”

“Geeks have their advantages,” I said. “They usually have good jobs, and they treat you well, they’re so glad to have you.”

“Have you ever dated one?” Scott asked.

“Well, no.”

“I didn’t think so. They don’t seem to be your type,” he said.

“What is my type?”

“I don’t know. Someone edgier.” He widened his eyes. “Dangerous.”

I snickered. “Yeah, right. The muscle-bound sort, with long hair and tattoos. Motorcyclists who ride without helmets. Bad boys, the type who group together to rent a house in northeast Portland and wouldn’t know a lawn mower if it ran over their foot. Probably don’t vote, either. That’s the type for me!”

“Hannah, dear,” Louise said, “I don’t know a single woman who finds a man who avoids yardwork attractive.”

“And long hair is only nice in fantasies,” I said. “In real life, it’s the sign of a guy who has to sell his motorcycle to find money for this month’s rent.”

“I like guys with long hair,” Cassie said. “They don’t have to be losers—I know several emotionally aware ones in my yoga class, one of whom teaches English at Portland State. I think long hair’s sexy.”

I looked at Scott, trying to imagine him with long hair, the heavy mass of it pulled back in a ponytail while he walked around his office in blue-green scrubs. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant picture, but it was pretty funny.

He caught me looking at him, and saw the smirk on my face. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

Our food came, platters of fajita fillings sizzling and steaming in dramatic fashion. For a few minutes all thoughts were turned to tortillas and sour cream, as we filled and rolled. With my first bite I felt fajita juice drip out the bottom and run over my hand.

“I don’t know why I should be the only one pestered to start dating,” Louise said after we’d all downed the first crucial mouthfuls. “Not a one of you is doing so yourself. You’re projecting onto me.”

“I’m trying to date,” I said. “God knows I’m trying. I just can’t seem to find anyone suitable.”

“Her sex chakra is blocked up,” Cassie said.

“What?” Scott asked, his pristine, undripping fajita halted halfway to his mouth.

“My sex chakra,” I said, and leaning back pointed to the area just below my navel. “Cass was trying to help me free my sexual energy by taking me to a belly dance class.”

“Men can sense when the Divine Feminine has been awakened in a woman,” Cassie said.

“They can?” Scott asked.

“Maybe that’s what I need to do,” Louise said, to no one in particular.

“If you’re not seeing anyone,” Cassie said to Scott, “your own sex chakra might have a blockage.”

“I’m not going to try belly dancing,” he said.

“I don’t know the proper moves for men, anyway,” Cassie said. “The energies are different. Drinking a lot of fluids is supposed to help, though, for both men and women. It flushes you out.”

Apparently water was not only good for conventional constipation, but emotional, as well. I refrained from making note of it out loud, considering we were eating. I saw Scott’s lips twitch. Our eyes met briefly, and I knew he was thinking the same thing.

“Where are we supposed to meet people these days, anyway?” Louise asked. “I don’t want to go to a bar, much less date someone who hangs out in one looking for women. Going through parents or friends is supposed to be what all the ‘experts’ advise, but my parents don’t know anyone of the right age—I’ve asked. All they can come up with is someone’s twenty-five-year-old, ultra-Christian son. And you all are no help. If you did find a single guy, you’d go for him yourselves.”

“I wouldn’t,” Scott said.

“You were supposed to find me a nice dentist. Where is he?” Louise asked.

“They’re all married,” he said. “And besides, they’re not your type. You need someone who’d be willing to talk all night about Jungian dream analysis, not some guy who’d rather be out boating on the river, cruising by Sauvie’s Island to spy on the nude sunbathers.”

“Is that what dentists do on their days off?” I asked.

“Only when they’re not polishing their Porsches or hanging out at The Sharper Image.”

We were quiet for a moment, each of us stewing over the perpetual adolescence of men, while Scott wrapped up another fajita.

“This really can’t be as hopeless as it all seems,” I finally said. “Even if there is only one man in a million who would be right for each of us, there’s what, two million people in the greater Portland area? So one million men, which means one guy who would be perfect. For each of us. And one woman for you, Scott. They’re out there—we just have to find them.”

“You can’t force these things,” Cassie said. “The universe—”

“I don’t want to wait for the universe to take care of it. I’m going to be thirty years old on September sixth—that’s four months away. I want to be engaged by then,” I said, resolved on the issue, all my angst of the other night suddenly crystallizing on this one point. It was as if making a declaration would take away all the uncertainty, all the worry about what my future would be. Nothing had changed, but it gave me a sense of control, however spurious. “I don’t want to turn thirty and still not know who I’m going to marry.”

“Hannah,” Louise said in a concerned, counselor tone, “getting married just because you think you’re the age that you should is setting yourself up for disaster.”

“Well, I’m not going to just grab some poor fool off the street. If I was willing to marry anyone there wouldn’t be a problem. No, I’m going to find Mr. Right—the one-in-a-million Mr. Right who is within a twenty-mile radius of us as we speak. Then it won’t be a mistake at all.”

“Why the big concern about turning thirty?” Scott asked.

We all looked at him. Again, his maleness was showing.

“I mean, I had a big bash when I turned thirty. It was great—you know, you were there. Yeah, I felt a little old, but I certainly wasn’t worried about getting married.”

“Tick, tick, tick,” I said.

He looked blank.

“The biological clock,” I said. “It’s ticking. You can have kids until the Viagra gives out, but we’ve got deadlines to meet.”

“Women are having children well into their forties—”

“I don’t think any of us wants to be eligible for social security when our kids graduate from high school,” I said. “I don’t want to worry that my husband is going to die of a heart attack while playing basketball with my son. I don’t want people to assume I’m my daughter’s grandmother. I’ve got an independent career, I make my own hours and my own money, now I want a husband and to start a family. It’s time, whether the universe thinks so or not, and I’m going to do something about it.”

“Jeez, Hannah, you sound like you’re about to start a military campaign,” Scott said.

“That’s no way to find love,” Cassie said.

“She’s right,” Louise said. “I don’t know about the universe knowing when the time is right, but guys can sense it when you’re desperate, and they run. Right, Scott?”

“You might as well have a trio of redneck brothers standing behind you with shotguns.”

“I’m not desperate,” I said. “I’m organizing. The universe helps those who help themselves. I can’t expect the guy to just turn up on my doorstep one day, can I? Don’t you all want to find your soul mates?”

A silence descended around the table, a pocket of quiet amid the voices and dish-clattering of the restaurant.

“Well, yeah, I want to find him,” Louise finally said. “But how?”

“That’s what I’m going to figure out.”

Three
Gypsy Scarf

“Y ou keeping busy?” Robert asked, handing me the armload of pants and jackets that needed hemming. Robert was a salesclerk at Butler & Sons, an expensive sportswear shop where I got a lot of alterations work. He was six years older than me, tall and slightly overweight, with a fresh face that lit up whenever I came in. I suspected he had a crush on me, but I couldn’t quite come to grips with the idea of dating a guy in his mid-thirties who still worked retail. Ambition and confidence were attractive, and Robert had neither.

Or maybe he didn’t have a crush, and was just happy to see someone fairly near his own age. The clothes Butler & Sons sold looked as if they were meant for golfers and the country club set, or whatever passed for the country club set in Portland. The customers who came in for the taupe pants and boxy argyle sweaters were not likely to be young single women.

“Pretty busy,” I said, taking the clothes. “I’ve got three appointments lined up for this afternoon.”

“Have you had a chance to eat?” he asked.

I avoided his eyes. Any mention of food was a danger sign. It seemed to go back to some primitive time when Man bring Woman meat, good, eat, eat. Which was fine, if Woman want Man, Man kill many mammoth, make good fire. Not fine, if Man kill one old pigeon and have wet wood. I wanted a good provider.

“Joanne usually feeds me,” I said, which was pretty much the truth. She was my next appointment, and she usually did have muffins or coffee cake she encouraged me to eat. It wasn’t a meal in the traditional sense, but I’d been counting on it as lunch.

“Oh.” His face fell, and then he struggled to put the cheer back into his expression. “Maybe next week we can grab something to eat together. The food court has some pretty good stuff.”

I smiled, rather painfully. “We’ll see.”

It was as good as I could do, for a response. It was neither dashing nor encouraging his hopes, although dashing was what I knew I should do. “You have to be cruel to be kind,” and all that, which I think is almost harder on the dasher than on the dashee. But I got a lot of business at this store, and didn’t want to create bad feelings with an employee.

Maybe he’d get the hint when I was too busy next week, and the week after, and then we could both pretend he had never expressed anything but friendly interest.

Butler & Sons was in the lower level of Pioneer Place Two, the new addition to the upscale shopping center in the heart of downtown Portland. Pioneer Place Two was connected to its older twin by a sky bridge and an underground tunnel, and it was along this tunnel that I walked with my armload of sportswear, following the streamlike undulations of decorative blue glass under my feet. The stores on either side were mostly the same chains found in every other city: the Body Shop, Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, Banana Republic, Eddie Bauer. I much preferred to go to Saks to steal my ideas for clothes to make. Somehow everything looked just a little more beautiful there.

The tunnel came out in the lower level of the original Pioneer Place, in the atrium center where switchbacks of escalators rose up four floors to a skylight roof. Thirty-foot bamboo grew in enormous pots, and smooth oak benches curved around a fountain that bubbled from several spouts, the sound rebounding off the bare floors and the glass walls of the surrounding shops. For some inexplicable reason someone had thrown a bright red toothbrush into the fountain, to lie at the bottom amid the pennies and dimes.

I spotted a rack of Willamette Week, and lay the clothes over the back of a bench as I took a copy and sat to peruse the back pages. It’s a weekly paper, the main alternative to the more run-of-the-mill Oregonian. No one I knew actually read the articles: all we wanted was the entertainment section and the personal ads. What I wanted today was found in the last few pages: ads for singles’ activity clubs.

“Women Call Free! Meet Quality Singles Like Yourself!” This, written above a heart with a photo of a blond woman seductively talking into a phone.

What women are willing to call those numbers? And what men do they find on the line? It was hard to not think of the “slimers” Louise talked about, who called the crisis line: men who would call up and pretend to need counseling, but there was always a telltale hitch in their voices that said they were jacking off. Apparently all they needed was a woman’s voice to get them to blow weenie phlegm into their hankies.

“Summer Fun! Rafting! Hiking! All Singles!” another of the ads read, over a black-and-white photo of young, handsome people screaming in delight as they shot the rapids, water splashing up around their rubber raft, their paddles raised, their life jackets turning them into uniform human cubes of athletic enthusiasm.

This sounded much more like what I was looking for, but I had a feeling there was going to be a hefty membership fee. If I couldn’t afford health insurance, I couldn’t afford to fork over hundreds to go rafting with other desperate singles.

No, not “desperate,” I reminded myself. Organized.

But still, there was something I didn’t like about the idea of paying a membership fee. It seemed so…forced. I wanted to be organized, but I also wanted to preserve a bit of the illusion that I would meet Mr. One-in-a-Million by fortuitous chance.

I flipped back through the pages toward the Culture section, stopping briefly in the personals at Men Looking For Women, but then deciding to save that entertainment for later.

The Culture section had everything from music clubs to art gallery listings, and went on for pages and pages. I browsed through it and found a college production of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”, performed on the Reed College lawn; a jazz group scheduled for a night at Pioneer Courthouse Square; and myriad events that made me feel like I was getting old. They sounded so loud. And smoky. Ugh.

I bought an Oregonian for its Friday pull-out A&E section, and found a hike along a trail in the Columbia Gorge, organized by Portland Community College, to observe spring wildflowers and wildlife. Five dollars, bring your own lunch and water to the specified meeting point.

They all held possibilities for meeting a man, although you can’t talk during a play. I might be able to drag Louise or Cassie along with me to the jazz night at Pioneer Courthouse Square, but I didn’t really like jazz. But guys seemed to, so maybe. The hike—maybe, although my hunch was that guys would prefer to think of themselves as the type of outdoorsmen who didn’t need a guide.

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice to find someone who enjoyed nature for reasons other than shooting deer and drinking beer by the fire?

I’d always liked those naturalists on television, the men who talked with calm, knowledgeable assurance, and had the patience to wait for hours behind a bit of shrubbery for the chance of seeing an otter or black bear. Any guy who would go on a guided nature walk in the gorge had to be a nice guy.

Some instinct had me glance up from the paper, and there was Robert, not fifteen feet away, headed for the second tunnel that led to the food court. He turned his head and saw me, and I felt my cheeks heat. I smiled weakly at him, feeling like a dog caught eating the cat’s food, and he gave me an uncertain little wave and then kept going.

Damn. He probably thought I’d been lying about the appointments, to avoid eating with him. I folded up the Willamette Week and the A&E section, and picked up the clothes, feeling like a clod. I shouldn’t have dawdled here, when I knew there was the danger of his coming by and seeing me. Stupid, stupid.

Why did emotions have to create so many delicate webs of pain, so easy to blunder through? And how many would be destroyed, both my own and others, by the time I’d found my Mr. Right?

Maybe there was a reason love and war were so often mentioned together. In both cases, the casualties were legion.

“This is you, the Page of Wands,” Cassie said, pointing to the tarot card in the center of the layout. We were sitting on the floor of Louise’s eighth-floor apartment, later that same day. Louise had invited us over to dinner, and Scott would be coming by in time for dessert. The apartment was filled with the scent of baking lasagne, likely made with five or six exotic cheeses and half a dozen vegetables I’d never heard of. Louise liked to try recipes from trendy cookbooks.

Louise was already looking more healthy now that she was working days: the shadows were gone from beneath her eyes, and her skin had a touch of color beneath her darkening freckles.

Louise’s apartment is in a new-ish building in the heart of downtown, the rent partially subsidized by her well-off parents, who slept better at night knowing that their daughter was in a safe place, with security cameras in the halls and a man at the desk in the lobby. Counselors at crisis lines did not make much money, and Louise would be living somewhere like I did if not for her parents. I envied her modern bathroom and the balcony with a view, but I liked where I lived with Cassie and wasn’t sure I’d trade.

“Why the Page of Wands?” I asked Cassie.

“Pages are for young women with lots of creative energy. They tend to be action-oriented.”

“Okay.” I shuffled the deck, the oversize cards awkward in my hands, and then Cassie laid them out in what she called the “gypsy spread.” My question for the cards was what my love life would be like in the next four months.

“These cards on either side of you represent aspects of yourself,” she said. “Seven of Swords—you have plans, but don’t know how to put them into effect, or whether they will succeed or fail. The Emperor—you are taking action in the real world.”

“That fits well enough.”

Cassie looked up at me with a grin, henna-red hair loose and slightly tangled, that and her elflike eyes making her look very much the part of the fortune-teller. Louise sat to one side, arms crossed over her chest, observing with a half smile on her lips. She claimed to not believe in spirits or supernatural forces, and said that the only useful thing about tarot cards was that they served as a good projective test for people’s psyches. You saw in the pictures what your personality allowed you to see, and nothing more.

Me, I chose to believe the cards only when they told me what I wanted to hear.

Cassie went through the aspects of the past that had brought me to the present situation, and then the “forces beyond my control.” Among them was a card with an angel standing with one foot on the ground, one in the water.

“Temperance,” Cassie said. “Sometimes this means that your angel is near, helping to guide you.”

“She is?”

Cassie shrugged. “You would know better than I. The interpretation of the cards is more for you to figure out than me.”

“Do you believe in guardian angels?” I asked, curious. I didn’t, but why then did I always get teary-eyed when I watched Touched by an Angel on Sunday nights? That I liked that show was one of my most closely guarded secrets.

“Sometimes I can feel my grandmother watching over me,” Cassie said.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. She talks to me in my dreams, too.”

“Huh.” I didn’t know quite what to say to that. I turned to the psychological expert. “What do you think, Louise?”

She shrugged. “If it is comforting and does no harm, there’s no reason a person cannot believe what they wish.”

“I thought counselors referred to that type of thinking as delusional,” I said.

“In psychology, we say that no personality trait or behavior is a problem unless it causes problems for the client.”

I chewed that over for a minute. “I guess that makes sense.”

“Then again, some people are just plain nuts.”

“That’s very helpful, Ms. Counselor.” I turned my attention back to the cards.

“These here represent the natural course of future events,” Cassie said. “There is friendship and merriment, and learning to feel your emotions. Next are scattered energies, struggles. And here, the final card, the Ace of Swords. Change. Major change.”

The Ace of Swords was a picture of a fist holding up a silvery-blue blade, with a crown and greenery circling the tip. “What type of change?”

“Could be good or bad. It’s a card of new force, new energy, new direction. It’s something dramatic, either positive or negative, and could be either love or hatred.”

“But which is it?”

Cassie just looked at me, letting me flail about, looking for my own interpretation.

“Well, what are these other cards, then?” I asked impatiently, pointing to the three in the upper left-hand corner of the layout.

“Those represent other possible futures.” She described the first two, then stopped at the third and gave me a meaningful look. “The Magician. He brings messages from the realms of the gods, often in the form of synchronicity. Watch for coincidences in your life, for there will be valuable information hidden therein.”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” I said. “None of it sounds like a possible future.” I was still feeling disgruntled about that Ace of Swords, and disinclined to give a generous interpretation to the cards. Hatred or love, change for the positive or change for the negative—huh! Very helpful, thanks so much!

“It is for you to decide what they mean,” she said.

I continued to study the cards, unhappy that some of them seemed to fit my situation so well, while others did not. I wanted it all to be garbage, or all to be true. I don’t enjoy ambiguity.

She let me stare at the cards a little longer, then scooped them up and put them back in the deck, wrapping the deck in a blue silk scarf. “You can make of it what you will,” she said, “but at least look for synchronicities in your life. Whenever I get The Magician, strange things seem to happen, and I usually learn something from them.”

“What types of strange things?”

“Oh, like maybe I’ve chosen five books at random from the fiction shelves at the library, and when I take them home and read them I discover that they all have a villain who looks and acts like Teddy Roosevelt.”

“What on earth could you possibly learn from that?”

“It’s like the cards. You can find the parallel in your own life, if you look for it. Maybe I’m dating a guy who reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt in some way, and the synchronicity is telling me that he is bad for me, that he’s a villain. I don’t know. It depends.”

“Cassie, sometimes you’re a very weird chick, you know that?”

“Am I?” she asked, sounding pleased.

“Definitely.”

Louise got up and went to the refrigerator, returning with a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi. She refilled our glasses. “Have you outlined a plan of attack for finding Mr. One-in-a-Million?” she asked, capping the bottle and setting it on the coffee table, then sinking cross-legged onto the carpet.

“Somewhat.” I told her about the events I’d found in the papers, and asked if she’d want to go to the free concert in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

“Jazz? I don’t know,” Louise said. “Maybe Cass will go with you.”

“No way,” Cassie said. “Guys who like jazz take themselves way too seriously.”

“Or you might be able to get Scott to go,” Louise said.

“What would be the point of going to a concert to meet guys, if I’m with a guy already? No one would approach me.”

“Oh. That’s right.”

“Maybe I’ll just do the gorge hike. Even if I did find a single guy at the jazz concert, he’d probably make me a tape of his favorite music, and then be all disappointed when I didn’t like it.”

“They’re so cute when they try to share,” Cassie said.

“I was also thinking of trying Internet dating. It seems like an efficient way to look for what you want. Sort of like shopping.”

Louise made a face. “Are you sure about that? It’s kind of dangerous, isn’t it?”

“I shouldn’t think it was any more so than meeting someone at a dance club.”

“But people can lie when they’re hidden behind their computers,” Louise said.

“They can lie in real life, too. I’ve looked at a couple of the sites, and they seem pretty safe. You get a code name, and they give you a mailbox on the site, so no one has your real e-mail address.”

“I don’t know, Hannah, you hear all sorts of stories…”

“You hear good stories, too.” I lowered my voice to a confidential, persuasive level. “Aren’t you even a little bit curious about it? There might be a college professor or an artist on there right now, just the type you’re looking for.”

“You don’t want me to try it, do you?” she asked.

“Why not? We all could, you, me, Cassie and Scott. You’d do it, wouldn’t you, Cassie?”

“Yeah, sure, for a lark. Why not? I see plenty that goes on at the pub, and I wouldn’t mind having a computer screen between me and some of the snakes out there while I’m looking for a date.”

“Some of the sites are free,” I continued, “and others give you a trial membership. Think of how many ‘possibles’ we could sort through, from the comfort of our own homes! And if they’re all weirdos, we don’t have to meet any of them in person.”

“I don’t know…”

“Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“If you can get Scott to do it, too, then maybe I will.” She sounded far more reluctant than enthusiastic.

I grinned, victory within my grasp. “This is going to be great.”

“Is it?” Louise asked weakly, and reached for the bottle of Diet Pepsi.

“It’ll be an adventure!”

“Wonderful.”

Four
Black Leather

“H ey, Hannah, you should have stopped by my office today,” Scott said, closing our front door behind him. It was three days after our dinner at the restaurant. “This woman came in with an abscess under one of her molars. The infection went all the way down into the jaw, where it had eaten out a pocket of bone—”

“Oh, God, Scott, shut up!” I said, covering my ears and ducking my head toward my lap in an effort to shut out the image he was conjuring.

“I had to drill through her tooth, and when I did, this spurt of pus—”

“I’m going to throw up.”

“And the smell—”

“Stop it!”

“I second that,” Cassie said. “That is beyond gross. Jeez, Scott, you’ve been sucking ether too long if you think that makes interesting conversation.”

“We don’t use ether. That went out in the fifties.”

“You get my point.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s safe, Hannah. The beast has been silenced.”

I glared at Scott, then spun ninety degrees in my desk chair and stood, going to snatch the grocery bag out of Scott’s hands. “What’s in here?” I asked.

“Greedy thing, aren’t you?”

“You went to Zupan’s? We’ll have to get out the linen tablecloth.” Zupan’s was the aesthetically pleasing grocery store a few blocks down from our house. Cassie and I usually shopped at Safeway, assuming that any supermarket as attractive as Zupan’s must be beyond our means.

“That’s me, Dr. Deep Pockets. I picked up some things to make this torture more endurable.”

I dug through the bag. Purple grapes, store-made brownies, red wine and Tater Tots. I pulled out the bag of frozen potato product and held it up, making a questioning face.

“Don’t you like Tater Tots?” Scott asked.

“Don’t they remind you of school lunches from grade school?”

“If you don’t want any, it’s more for me.”

Cassie took the bag from my hand and carried it into the kitchen. I heard banging as she dug out our one cookie sheet.

“Did you get the photos scanned?” I asked.

“I e-mailed them to you,” he said, flopping down onto the lumpy futon with its stained blue-canvas cover. He looked perfectly at home. Our nasty beige shag carpeting never kept him from sitting on the floor, either, and it didn’t seem to bother him that half our glasses were jelly jars.

I would say that was because he was a guy, but I’d seen his place, a condominium on a bluff overlooking NW Portland, and I knew better. His taste went toward black leather furniture and lots of stereo equipment, and he had recently purchased a mission-style cherrywood dining table.

Of course, all his furniture was buried under dirty clothes, magazines, dishes, and the unnamed effluvia of male existence, but the finer things were there, underneath. He’d once explained that he had to be so clean all day at work, he couldn’t stand to extend the effort to his home.

That was dentists for you. Bunch of weird-os.

Louise showed up, her dark brown hair flying in wild curls around her head, tossed by the wind. The touch of pink in her cheeks made me realize anew how pretty she was, and my eyes went to Scott, wondering if he ever regretted that things had not worked out between them.

He seemed more interested in snooping through our bookshelf. I wondered whether he’d mention the guide to tantric sex that Cassie had recently added.

“Hannah, I think I got another client for you,” Louise said.

“Oh?”

“Derek, at work. He’s lost a bunch of weight and needs some suits altered. I gave him your card.”

“Is he the one who just got divorced?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, and the corner of her mouth crooked in a smile.

I raised my eyebrows. Scott stopped browsing the bookshelf, and Cassie appeared from the kitchen doorway, plate of Tater Tots in hand.

“What?” Louise asked.

“You tell me,” I said.

“What? About Derek?”

“Don’t say you’re going for a guy who just got divorced,” Scott said.

“I’m not! Who said I was? I’m not interested. He has two teenage kids, you know. He’s too old for me.” She smiled like a naughty child. “Looks pretty good since he lost that weight, though. Oh, I’m just kidding,” she said before any of us could say anything. “You think I’m stupid? I have a degree in this crap, I know what not to do.”

Cassie put the plate of Tater Tots down on the coffee table. “You’re the one who told us that counselors were the most screwed up bunch of people on the face of the planet, and not worth dating.”

“That’s true enough.”

I went over to the computer and woke it from sleep mode as Louise shed her coat and Cassie poured her a jelly jar of red wine. Scott went to work on the Tater Tots, squirting ketchup in a big puddle, and Cassie sat lotus-style and straight-backed on the floor and picked up a brownie. No one had touched the grapes, perhaps because they were fresh and unprocessed and therefore good for one. I tore off a small bunch and took them with me back to the computer desk, a few feet from the coffee table, just so they wouldn’t look scorned.

“I don’t have to write my own ad, do I?” Scott asked as I connected to the Internet. “You three should write it for me. You know what women want.”

I peered at him over my shoulder. “The idea here is to find your one-in-a-million match, not to score as many babes as you can.”

“That sucks. Maybe I’m not ready for my one-in-a-million.”

“Yes you are,” Louise said. “You’ve been messing around long enough.”

“No I haven’t. I just got the BMW six months ago. I need to cruise! I need to impress chicks with my wheels!”

“What are you, sixteen?” I asked.

“I need to put the top down and leer at women on the sidewalks. I need to have hot tub parties.”

“You don’t have a hot tub,” I said.

“And your car is not a convertible,” Louise said. “And this is Portland. Who has a convertible? It rains too much.”

“Don’t spoil my fun.”

“Don’t you ever wonder what germs might live in hot tub water?” I asked as I logged onto the personals site I had chosen for our group experiment. “You think of hot tubs at apartment complexes, and what scungy people might get in there nude, oozing fluids left and right. And then it just stays there, bubbling. Don’t bacteria multiply in the heat?”

“Hannah, yuck,” Cassie said. “I was going to go to Carson Hot Springs next weekend, too.”

“Half a cup of Clorox might help,” Scott said.

Cassie grimaced. “That’s just what I want, to breathe in steaming bleach. That is not why one goes to natural springs.”

“It’s probably hot enough you don’t really have to worry about anything,” he said, and popped a Tot into his mouth.

“Okay, here we are,” I said. “Who wants to go first?”

Louise came to stand behind me. “Let’s look at some of the ads before we begin.”

“Men or women?”

“Guys. I’ve got to see if there’s anyone even worth bothering about.”

I clicked my way to the search page, and filled out the obvious criteria of age range and marital status. “We can search by words in the ads, too.”

“‘Vegetarian,’” Cassie said.

“No!” Louise and I said in unison. “No vegetarians,” I said.

“Why not?”

“They’re high-maintenance eaters,” I said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Oh, Cass, you’re fine, you don’t make a fuss. But for dating—I don’t want some guy taking me to organic restaurants. And how could I bring a vegetarian home to Mom and Dad?”

Scott paused in his Tater consumption. “They’ll only let you marry a carnivore?”

“Omnivore. It would just be too embarrassing. Can you see it? ‘Sorry, Dad, Jeremy won’t be eating any barbecued spare ribs. Could you grill this soy burger for him?’ I’d never hear the end of it.”

Cassie was still looking pouty. “I don’t see why you should be embarrassed for someone else’s eating habits. If he’s fine with it, you should be, too.”

“I’m too immature to separate my identity from my date’s,” I said.

“As if maturity had anything to do with it,” Louise said. “None of us can do that. I certainly can’t.”

“That’s a chick thing,” Scott said. “Guys don’t care what a girl eats, or what others might think of her taste in clothes, or anything like that.”

“Bullshit,” Louise said.

“Louise!” I said, rounding my lips in fake horror at her language.

“We don’t!” Scott insisted.

“What a load of crap,” Louise said. “You guys care, you just choose different criteria.”

“We do not.”

Louise nodded her head, bouncing it up and down like a street fighter getting ready to brawl, her jaw thrust forward. “You want your date to have big breasts and long hair. You want her to have a nice butt that other guys will stare at.”

“Hey, that’s got nothing to do with image.”

“Sure it does,” I said, catching Louise’s thought. “The better-looking your girlfriend, the more of a ‘man’ you appear. You could look like a dead possum yourself, but if you had a beautiful woman on your arm other guys would assume you were something special. Even other women would assume it. They’d think you were rich. Either that, or…”

“Or what?”

“Never mind.”

“Or what, Hannah?”

“You know.” I cast a quick glance at his crotch.

Louise affected a Texas drawl. “They’d think that was a mighty fine cut of swinging sirloin you had between them thar legs.”

“Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that type of thing,” Cassie said, “being a vegetarian.”

I spoke primly. “Some girls eat meat, some don’t.”

Scott gaped at us. “And they say guys are bad. You three are worse than any group of men.”

“Oh, we are not,” Louise said, swishing her hand dismissively.

“My privates are not up for discussion.”

“You were the one who insisted,” I said. “And why is it always referred to as a meat product? Sausage, salami, meat, sirloin, and having sex is ‘porking.’”

“Because you women are the ones who spend all your time discussing it. In centuries past you were all in the kitchen. With the meat.”

“Yep, that’s where we were. Toiling with the meat,” I said, and giggled, and saw Cassie and Louise bury their noses in their jelly jars. “But bread would have done as well. ‘My man’s got a fine loaf.’ I could see that. ‘I was up kneading it all night.’”

“It wouldn’t rise,” Louise said. “I put it in a warm place, but nothing happened.”

“Maybe my yeast wasn’t fresh,” I said.

Cassie groaned. “Yeast. Oh, gross.”

“I know, I’m terrible.”

“You’re as bad as Scott,” Louise said.

He spoke around the last of the Tater Tots. “Hey, I contributed nothing to this line of discussion.”

“You’re guilty by association,” Louise said. “You two should write a horror novel together. You could sit for hours thinking up revolting images.”

“Only if the monster was a dentist,” I said.

“He could never fit his hairy paws into his patients’ mouths,” Scott said. “He could carry off an ornery seamstress, though.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, and turned back to the computer, suddenly feeling awkward and wanting to change the subject. “We’re never going to get anything done at this rate.”

Sometimes I got the littlest bit flustered around Scott. I knew he wasn’t flirting with me, I knew that, yet when a cute guy makes a comment about carrying you off, you start wondering things you have no business wondering about your best friend’s ex-boyfriend.

“Put in ‘cooking,’” Louise said.

“Okay.” I hit Search, and a few seconds later a list of names came up, some with a small camera beside them to denote a photo. “Here we go.” I clicked on the first name with a picture as Scott and Cassie joined us at the computer.

A blank square came up, then the picture started to fill in, top to bottom.

“A tree, so far so good,” Scott said.

The top of a head appeared, dark-haired, then a forehead. A face, long and narrow. Neck. Shoulders.

“Wait a minute,” Scott said. “Is he in the tree?”

Louise put her hand over her mouth, laughing, as his lower body formed, and we could see his feet bracing him in position in the Y of tree branches. “What the hell kind of message is that supposed to send?” Louise asked. “‘I am a squirrel’?”

“It’s kind of cute,” Cassie said. “Makes him seem boyish and playful.”

“Thirty-four, software engineer—of course—never married, no kids, blah, blah, blah,” I said, reading, then hitting the scroll bar to move past the bare stats to the paragraph Squirrel Boy had written about himself.

“‘Handsome, fit, creative professional seeks an active, petite woman to share wild times and walks on the beach,’” I read, then groaned along with the rest. “Walks on the beach, why do they always talk about walks on the beach? Strolls in the moonlight, candlelit dinners, snuggling in front of the fire. Why can’t they show some originality?”

“Don’t forget ‘rainy nights,’” Scott said.

“Those are a step above. It takes a slightly finer aesthetic sense to appreciate rain.”

“What does he mean by ‘petite’?” Louise asked. “Does he mean short, or skinny?”

I scrolled back up to the stats. Squirrel Boy was five-eight, one hundred and thirty-five pounds. “I’m guessing both. I don’t know many guys who want their date to be bigger than they are.”

“Skinny guys sometimes like plump women,” Scott said. “It’s no good having your bones rubbing against hers.”

I frowned at him over my shoulder.

“Don’t look at me like that. Most guys I know would rather have a girl with a little extra on her, than too little. You need something to hold on to.”

Cassie nudged me from the other side. “I told you so. You can’t be a good belly dancer without any belly. It looks wrong. Women are supposed to be soft.”

“Mmm.” I was not convinced. I wanted to be convinced, I would dearly love to believe those extra ten pounds were beautiful, but I would have to isolate myself from the rest of the U.S. to believe it.

I had a disturbing inkling that even if ten pounds were to fall off overnight, I would still think ten more needed to go. And then there were the two acne scars on my cheek I’d want lasered off, and the chin tuck, and the electrolysis for those nasty hairs around my navel and—horror upon horrors—my nipples. There was no end to the improvements to be made.

“This one’s boring,” Louise said. “Let’s look at someone else.”

The next photo was of a buff-looking guy leaning against a polished pickup, the sun glaring off the fenders and his sunglasses. His jeans were tight enough that the bulge of his penis was visible.

“Full of himself. Next,” Louise said, not even giving me time to scroll down to read what the guy had to say.

A balding guy, going to fat, crouching down next to a Labrador. “Maybe,” Louise said.

Scott made a noise of disbelief. “Him?”

“It’s the dog,” Louise explained. “Makes him look caring.”

“Remind me to get a pet. A cat would be good. They’re independent, not much trouble.”

“Don’t get a cat,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Guys with cats are weird.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Why?”

“They just are. They start talking about ‘kitty did this’ and ‘kitty did that’, and it’s just wrong. Besides, your apartment will smell like dirty litter, and that’s nothing to bring a girl home to.”

“She’s right, there,” Louise agreed. “The way you keep house, you’re better off with… Huh, I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t eventually smell.”

“We’re going to be here all day if you two keep looking through ads. Come on, let’s get going.”

“Ooo, you’re such a man,” I said. “So task-oriented.”

“That’s me.”

Nevertheless, I could see his point, and over Cassie’s and Louise’s protests I clicked through to the ad-writing screen. “Who first?”

“I’ll go,” Cassie said. “I’ve got to get ready for work in a bit.”

I slid out of the desk chair and Cassie took my place. I went and sat at the other end of the futon from Scott, snatching another bunch of grapes on my way.

“There’s a problem with your one-in-a-million mate theory, at least as it applies to Portland,” Louise said, sitting in our battered old rocking recliner, rescued from a neighbor’s yard sale.

“What’s that?”

“Proximity. There may be two million people in the greater Portland area, but that covers a lot of space. Studies have shown that we tend to get involved with, and marry, those who live closest. Take two dating couples, one who lives twenty miles apart, and the other who lives five miles apart, and the five-milers are more likely to wed.”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“I’ve been reading up on it.”

“Makes sense,” Scott said, working on the brownies now, one leg crossed over the other in that knees-wide position used only by men. “It’s a lot less bother to pick a girl up five minutes away, than half an hour.”

“You’re so romantic,” I said. “Sounds like you’d walk through fire for your true love.”

He shrugged, brownie in hand. “It’s the truth. Men are lazy slobs. You should know that by now.”

“So the point is,” Louise said, “if it’s only the closest people we can fall for, then we aren’t really searching all of the greater Portland area, which means less of a pool.”

I chewed my lip, considering. “No, I don’t think that’s a problem. The idea was not that there would be one million single guys our age who wanted to get married: it was that there were one million males. We’re already draining away most of the pool just by selecting for age and marital status. So we drain out a few more by location. No problem. Although I admit, it sounds like the pool is turning into one of those shallow mud baths the zebras wallow in during the dry season.”

Cassie looked over her shoulder. “Welcome to the dating world.”

The Serengeti image was strangely appropriate, and put a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm for the project. I’d briefly managed to see Portland as a vast uncharted sea of men, but now I was back to the mud wallow.

“What else have you been discovering?” I asked Louise, in hopes of something cheering. She had a mini psychology library in her apartment, and between that and working with fifty-odd counselors and social workers, she usually had good access to interesting information. She was enough of a cynic about life and love that she was constantly looking for a scientific explanation for personal things that the rest of us took for granted.

“Along with the proximity, is familiarity. It’s not that we know what we like—we like what we know. So the more time you spend with someone, the better you like them.”

“Doesn’t that work the opposite way?” Scott asked.

I made a face at him. He grinned.

“Same thing happens with music, or a piece of art,” Louise explained. “Or fashion. You ever notice how when something new comes out, you swear you will never wear it, and then six months later it’s in your closet.”

“Unfortunately,” I agreed.

“Then there’s similarity,” Louise went on. “Age, race, ethnic background, educational level, social status, family background, religion.”

“I can see that. Less to argue about,” I said. “Less to get adjusted to. And if you got involved with the person because they lived close by, you probably have a lot in common already.”

“Social status?” Cassie asked, turning away from the monitor. “You mean, like class differences? Where are we, India?”

Cassie was maybe the one person I knew who I could imagine being equally comfortable in the company of a drug addict who had dropped out of middle school or a middle-aged society matron from the West Hills. She was so firmly in her own world, the relative positions of others could not shake her.

There were times I hoped I would grow up to be like Cassie.

“And last but not least,” Louise went on, “physical attractiveness.”

“Hoo-rah!” Scott said.

“Oh, stop it,” Louise scolded. “You’re not nearly the animal you think.”

“Ha. What do you know?”

“You’re a ‘nice guy,’” I said, feeling wicked. “You’re the type that women like to have as a friend.”

“Kee-rist! Thanks a lot! Could you be a little more insulting?”

I gave a toothy grin.

“When’s the last time you had a checkup? Maybe it’s time for some dental X rays.”

“Don’t be mean.” Memories of hard cardboard edges poking my gums filled my mind, and the heavy weight of the lead apron on my chest. The smell of alcohol, the taste of the latex-gloved fingers against the edge of my tongue…

“The thing about the physical attractiveness,” Louise said, “is that we go for someone as attractive as we think we can get without risking rejection.”

“That must be why handsome men are so terrifying,” I said.

“I scare you that much?” Scott asked.

I snorted.

“Come on, Scott, you’re the same way,” Louise said. “I’ve been with you when you’ve refused to approach a woman because you thought she was too beautiful for you.”

That was interesting. I never thought of Scott thinking himself not good enough for anyone. Who wouldn’t want a good-looking guy who was a reliable provider? What did he have to be uncertain about?

“You know,” I said, “you see rich, ugly men with beautiful women, but you never see a rich, ugly woman with a handsome man. Never. The closest you get is a famous, rich older woman with a young guy, but even then she’s got to still be looking pretty good.”

We looked at Scott.

“What? I didn’t do anything.”

“Guilt by association,” I said.

“I thought I was a ‘nice guy.’”

“So you’d date a woman less attractive than yourself?”

“That’s not a fair question.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I answer honestly, I’ll sound like a pig.”

“What’s unfair about that?”

“You already know the answer. Everyone knows, you don’t need a scientific study to prove it. Guys are visual. We want someone good-looking, if we can get her.”

“And even if you can’t,” I said, beginning to get steamed by the injustice of it. I hated caring about my appearance as much as I did, I wanted to believe it didn’t matter, that it was inner beauty that counted, but every time I almost started to convince myself of that, something came along to say I was wrong.

“I saw an interview on TV,” I said, “with some guy who said his only intimate relationships were with prostitutes, because the women that he found attractive in daily life did not find him attractive in return. So he’d rather pay for it, and have it fake, than get to know a real woman he could maybe build a life with.”

“For God’s sake, Hannah. Now you’re comparing me to a guy who sleeps with hookers? All I said was that I’d prefer someone attractive. So would you. So would anyone. Listen to Louise, she’s the one who read the study!”

“I’m putting that in my profile,” Cassie said. “‘Must have no history of dating prostitutes.’ Do you think that will put anyone off?”

The tension broke, and I relaxed back against the futon. Scott nudged my knee with his foot, and I slapped it lightly away, looking at him from the corner of my eye and not quite able to keep from smiling.

“If it does,” Louise said, “it’s just as well. Think of the diseases! Bleh!”

Five
Mourning Clothes

M y mobile phone rang as I slowly cruised the residential street of tract mansions looking for Kristina DeFrang’s house. She was a new client, referred by Joanne of the muffins and too much clothing.

I pulled to the curb and stopped before answering, having promised myself when purchasing the thing that I would not annoy the rest of humanity by driving and talking at the same time. I’d come near to breaking the promise a hundred times, and who would know? But I didn’t want to be one of those cell phone users. I wanted to be one of the good ones, who when in public huddled in a corner and whispered a brief conversation, then hung up quickly.

Perhaps that was another criteria to put in the personal ad, besides no history of dating prostitutes: does not use mobile phone while browsing at Barnes & Noble or standing in line at Starbucks. Cassie would qualify that with: prefers independent businesses to chains, and does not know the difference between a Grande and a Tall.

I, on the other hand, thought Starbucks and Barnes & Noble were both good places to look for guys. Some guys apparently thought the same thing about bookstores: I’d once been followed aisle to aisle by a lummox carrying a copy of Chicken Soup for the Single’s Soul.

“Hello, this is Hannah.”

“Hannah! Are you on the phone?”

It took a daughter to translate Mother-speak correctly. “Hi, Mom. I’m on the cell phone, in my car.”

“You aren’t driving, are you? Should I call back?”

“It’s okay, I’m parked. What’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“Nearly to Camas, looking for a client’s house.” Camas was across the river, in Washington state, about half an hour from Portland. “She’s supposed to have a big job for me, something about redecorating her second house.”

“Dad can’t get the VCR to work.”

The abrupt change of topic was nothing new, and I tried to not take offense at her apparent lack of interest in my work. And it was only an apparent lack: I knew that she cared how I was and that I was able to make ends meet, but the specifics of that struggle and of my work were beyond her present life.

Mom and Dad were nearly seventy, having had me late and as a bit of a surprise. Mom was a retired grade school teacher, and Dad had been a carpenter and was now a housing inspector. He talked about retiring, but I doubted he would unless forced to. They lived in the house I had grown up in, in Roseburg, three hours south of Portland. It wasn’t the boonies, but it was pretty close.

“Put him on,” I said.

There were scuffling sounds, muted voices, then Dad. “I followed your instruction sheet, but it didn’t work, and now I can’t get the regular TV stations, either. I think the remote’s batteries need to be changed.”

I stifled a sigh. How could a man who could spot the first faint signs of dry rot and tell the exact remaining life span of a roof be stymied by a couple of black buttons?

“Get the biggest remote…” I said, and within half a minute I heard the static disappear from the background, and the voice of a newscaster caught mid-drone.

“Thanks! I think I can remember how to do that,” Dad said, and then Mom was on the phone again.

“He’s rented some awful gangster movie. He knows I don’t like those.”

“What is it?”

“Analyze This.”

“You might like it. It’s a comedy.”

“I don’t know how gangsters can be funny.”

“I gotta go, Mom, or I’ll be late.”

“Okay. When are you coming down for dinner?”

“I’ll call from home. I really have to go.”

“They’ve seen bears in the park, coming out to go through the garbage. The salmon berries are late in coming out this year.”

“I gotta go, Mom!”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I hung up, feeling the mix of guilt and love and worry that I usually did after talking to my parents. In the back of my mind sat the realization that death or accident or illness was not just a possibility, but an inevitability. What would happen to one, when the other died?

What would happen to me?

I picked up the instructions to Ms. DeFrang’s house, looked again at the address, and coasted down the street, trying not to think of the future.

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