The Blonde Theory

by Kristin Harmel

  “Maybe you shouldn’t tell them what you do for a living,” Emmie was suggesting helpfully as I tried steadfastly to ignore her unsolicited help. “I mean, that seems to be what scares them away, you know.”

  “What, so I’m supposed to lie?” I asked petulantly, pushing my eggs around on my plate with considerably more violence than they deserved.

  “I don’t know,” Emmie said. She shook her head. “Not necessarily lie. Maybe just not bring it up.”

  “But I don’t bring it up,” I protested. “You know that, Em. In fact, I avoid it for as long as I can. But it always comes up. How could it not?”

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t tell them,” Jill chimed in. “Even if they ask.”

  I shook my head. “It’s part of who I am,” I said stubbornly. “I don’t want to lie about that. Why is it so scary anyhow?” After all, even if it was the death knell to my love life, I was proud to be a lawyer. It’s what I had wanted to do since I was a little girl, and I had done it, even though there had been lots of people who had tried to discourage me along the way. I was happy with my job, and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to at least mention it. It was a part of me.

  “Men are jerks,” Emmie said simply. “They’re scared to be with a woman they feel at all threatened by. And lots of them feel threatened by women who are smarter or more successful than them.”

  “So basically, it would be easier to get dates if I were just a dumb blonde,” I muttered, reaching up to tug at my naturally blonde hair, which, almost unfortunately, hadn’t actually succeeded in making me less smart. So much for the theory that blondes have more fun. I was the walking antithesis to that. “Because then I wouldn’t be the Scary Lawyer Lady. Is that what you’re saying?”

  The girls were silent for a moment.

  “No, not necessarily,” Jill said uncomfortably. Emmie looked nervous, and Meg looked lost in thought. I knew what they were thinking, and they were right. It sure would be a lot easier if I didn’t have anything going on north of my neckline. Whoever thought that intelligence—and the courage to go after what I wanted—would wind up being such a curse?

  “Say that again,” Meg said finally, breaking the stifling silence and turning to me with a gleam in her eye that made me a bit uneasy.

  “Say what?” I asked, looking from Jill to Emmie, who shrugged.

  “What you said a second ago,” Meg said, sounding excited.

  “What, that it would be easier to get dates if I were just a dumb blonde?” I glanced at her nervously. I knew Meg well enough to know that I should be more than a bit worried about the look on her face. I’d seen that look before. And it never ended well.

  “Yes!” she said triumphantly, grinning at us and clapping her hands with glee.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Emmie asked, staring at Meg skeptically. “You’re being weird.”

  “Nothing’s wrong!” she exclaimed. “I just had the best idea! For ‘Dating Files’!”

  “Dating Files” was one of the sections that Meg edited in Mod magazine. Each month, a different dating topic or strategy was dis-cussed. To be honest, I thought it was sort of ridiculous. I mean, I’d been reading “Dating Files” since Meg started working at Mod, and look where it had gotten me. Absolutely nowhere. I had even resorted to taking notes on the columns in one particularly discouraging dateless slump in my late twenties—and still nothing.

  “I’m trying to assign out ‘Dating Files’ for August, and none of our stringers’ suggestions or the suggestions we came up with at the editorial meetings really struck me as right,” Meg bubbled on. “But this. This is perfect!”

  “What’s perfect?” I asked slowly, knowing Meg well enough to be feeling just the teensiest bit apprehensive as she grinned at me like a lunatic. I had a bad feeling about whatever was about to come out of her mouth.

  “You’ll write ‘Dating Files’ for the August issue!” Meg said, clapping her hands again.

  “I will?” I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about, but I knew I would have remembered agreeing to pen a column for her.

  She just kept on talking, as if she hadn’t heard me. “It’s perfect,” she said gleefully. “You can try dating like a dumb blonde for two weeks and write for Mod about how it changed your life!”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked slowly. “And what exactly is dating like a dumb blonde?”

  Meg shrugged and thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know, just acting ditzy, vacant, airheaded,” she said finally. “Stereotypically blonde. No offense to the three of you.” The three blondes at the table—me, Emmie, and Jill (who wasn’t really a natural blonde, but who was keeping track?)—exchanged glances. “We’ll iron out the details later,” Meg continued excitedly. “But you’re not allowed to say you’re a lawyer. You’re not allowed to say anything smart. Just act brainless and see how it changes your life.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” I asked dubiously. Emmie and Jill were both grinning and nodding with what appeared to be agreement to Meg’s harebrained plan.

  “Because it’s about time you put your money where your mouth is, Harper Roberts,” Meg said, suddenly as stern and as mother-like as I’d ever seen her. “You’re always talking about how it would be so much easier to date if guys didn’t feel so threatened by you and your job and your intelligence. Well, let’s see.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said skeptically. It sounded insane. How was I supposed to be a dumb blonde? I wasn’t a dumb blonde. Besides, wasn’t the whole concept offensive anyhow?

  “Ooh, you should do it, Harper!” Emmie said excitedly, tossing her own blonde curls.

  “We’ll call it The Blonde Theory,” Meg went on, also ignoring me and grinning like a lightbulb had just gone on in her head. “The theory that acting like a dumb blonde will make you have more success with guys. We’ll see if dumb blondes really do have more fun!”

  “I love it!” Jill gushed, reaching across the table and squeezing my hand. “You have to do it.”

  “The Blonde Theory?” I asked skeptically. I looked around at the three of them. Their eyes were all gleaming—with excitement or with vulture-like hunger, I couldn’t tell. They looked insane. Actually, this whole plan was insane. “No way. I’m not going to do something like that. It sounds crazy. You guys are crazy.”

  “Are you scared?” Jill asked, innocently cocking her head at me, a devilish grin dancing across her face.

  I turned to her. “What?” I asked sharply. She knew better than to ask that. Nothing scared me. “No,” I said defensively after a moment. “Of course not. I just think it’s a dumb idea.”

  “So you’re scared,” Jill singsonged triumphantly.

  I glared. “I am not.” For a moment, I felt like we were back in junior high again.

  “So what’s the problem, then?” Jill pressed on. “You’re always saying that it would be easier to date if you weren’t smart or didn’t have such a good job.”

  I knew she was trying to goad me into saying yes. So were Meg and Emmie, who were staying conspicuously silent as Jill pressed me.

  “I don’t know...,” I said reluctantly, half swayed by Jill’s implication that I was wimping out, half swayed by the idea that maybe this was the way to test the theory I was always whining halfheartedly about.

  “C’mon, Harper, you’ll find out once and for all if it really is easier to date if you don’t have a brain in your head,” Jill coaxed. I bit my tongue before I said something I’d regret, like something about how she had seemingly already proved this by batting her eyes right into the heart of Dr. Alec Katz, who didn’t seem all that thrilled when Jill expressed a thought or opinion of her own. Emmie, Meg, and I didn’t like him much—he seemed pompous and superficial—but we had thus far restrained ourselves from saying anything negative about him since the day Jill had announced she was marrying him.

  Instead, I tried my best line of defense. “I don’t know how to act like a dumb blonde,”
I declared with finality, looking suspiciously among the three girls. They’d clearly already made up their minds. I suddenly felt like the odd man out.

  “I’ll help you, I’ll help you!” Emmie exclaimed, clearly so excited that she felt she had to announce it twice. “I’ll give you lessons!”

  “She is an actress,” Jill pointed out helpfully. Then she paused for a moment, her eyes gleaming. When she spoke again, her words were slow and deliberate. “C’mon Harper. We dare you.”

  I sucked in a quick breath. Oh geez. She had said the magic words. We dare you. I knew from the looks on Emmie’s and Meg’s faces that they’d realized what had just happened, too. It was common knowledge in our group—heck, in the whole town of Worthington, Ohio, where we had grown up—that Harper Roberts never turned down a dare. But this was different from the dares of our childhoods, where I was sent out to trip dumb boys in the junior high hallways or to hide frogs caught at the creek in the desk of our unpleasant science teacher. This was a real dare with real consequences.

  I knew I couldn’t say no.

  Three years was an awfully long dry spell, I had to admit. And this could be my chance to find out the truth. Were men scared away because I was smart and successful (horror of all horrors)? Or because I was me? The latter was a possibility I had been trying to ignore as long as possible, but maybe the problem was just that I wasn’t attractive to guys. What if, smart or dumb, they just didn’t like me? If I could do an experiment to control the intelligence factor, at least I’d know where the problem lay.

  “Harper, you have to!” Emmie said, unaware that I had already made up my mind. “It would be so fun!”

  “Two weeks?” I asked finally, trying to sound reluctant. I didn’t want the girls to know that in reality, frightening as it was, I was actually starting to embrace the idea of dating as someone other than me. After all, dating as myself hadn’t exactly been a resounding success.

  “Two weeks,” Meg confirmed with a confident nod, reaching over to begin buttering her bagel.

  “And all I’d have to do is act like a dumb blonde?”

  “In every dating situation,” she confirmed with a nod. “On dates. At bars. At parties. Wherever.”

  All three of them were looking at me eagerly.

  “Fine,” I said finally, nodding. I took a deep breath and smiled at my friends. “I guess I’m in.” The contents of my stomach shifted as I said it, and I felt vaguely queasy, but I tried to ignore it.

  A cheer went up from our little table, and Meg proposed a mimosa toast. As I raised my glass and looked back and forth among my three maniacally grinning friends, I wondered momentarily what I had just gotten myself into. What if the theory didn’t work and the only thing that I discovered was that men didn’t like me no matter what?

  “We start tomorrow night,” Meg said ominously as we all downed our orange-juice-spiked champagne. “Mark it on your calendars, ladies. May twenty-third. The day that Ditzy Harper will be born.”

  Chapter Three

  D-Day was May 23, the day that a new and infinitely more datable Harper Roberts would hit the streets of New York, the day that all my luck would change.

  Right?

  I sure hoped so. Because the alternative would be that I’d spend the next two weeks acting like a complete idiot for no reason whatsoever.

  Oddly enough, that did not exactly appeal to me.

  Having already established that naïveté and empty-headedness wouldn’t go over very well in the law offices of Booth, Fitzpatrick & McMahon, I had received “permission” to act like my normal self at work, where I was operating under the assumption that the corporate attorneys, engineers, and chemists that I dealt with on a routine basis as a patent attorney would be less than enthusiastic trusting their financial futures to a half-wit. Elsewhere, in all other situations, I was to become a vacant Barbie doll. Well, a Barbie doll without the 39–21–33 to-scale measurements, of course. Mine were 34–29–36. More Raggedy Ann than Barbie. But I digress.

  I was thankful that I could at least act normally at work, because it was the only place in the world where I truly felt at home. I know, that’s a sad statement, right? But they say home is where the heart is. And due to my conspicuous lack of any guys worthy of giving my heart to (okay, or any guys who actually stuck around long enough to consider such heart giving), I had thrown all my energy—and all my heart—into my job, which I really, truly loved.

  I once read that only 1 percent of Americans had what they considered a “dream job,” a job that made them excited to go to work every morning and let them leave entirely satiated at the end of the day. I knew without a doubt that I was one of those lucky few. I had become a patent lawyer because I couldn’t decide between chemical engineering (which I loved because of the fascinating interaction between chemicals, but I won’t go into the details...I’ve been told that when I start rambling about ionization and the periodic table, I’m a really dull conversation partner) and rhetoric (I’ve always loved talking circles around people by using logic and spinning my thoughts into cohesive, convincing phrases). So after earning my bachelor’s in chemical engineering and graduating summa cum laude from Ohio State in just three years, law school felt like a natural fit. I graduated at the top of my Harvard Law class then went on to study for the patent bar, because chemical engineering and law were inextricably wed in my mind. And patent law was the best way to combine my two loves.

  Little did I know that the marriage between chemicals and legal terminology would be the only successful wedding I’d personally experience in my first three and a half decades of life. But again, I digress.

  I felt like the luckiest girl in the world, because I got to do something different every day. Okay, it probably sounds boring to you, but I got such a rush out of hearing a chemical engineer at 3M tell me, his eyes shining excitedly, about a new adhesive he’d discovered to make tape seven times stickier. Or a pharmaceutical engineer at Mabry tell me about the new compound she’d engineered that would make headache medications work up to three times faster. Or the chemical engineer at BakersGrain tell me about the new preservative that would double the shelf life of cornflakes.

  Seriously. It was awesome because I understood it all. And I loved helping engineers and chemists secure patents for their developments. I loved knowing that I played a small role in all sorts of new products and designs that made differences—however subtle—in the world. I loved the intellectual stimulation of being surrounded by both scientists and lawyers, tickling both the creative and logical sides of my brain. I loved arguing cases in front of the patent board, convincing them that my clients weren’t infringing on other patents and should have full rights to their ideas. I loved it with all my heart.

  But loving your job wasn’t cool. At least not when your job involved complicated chemical formulas and legal intricacies and netted you three hundred grand a year. Nope, then it was just intimidating. In terms of dating, I’d be much better off with just a high school diploma.

  Thus, The Blonde Theory.

  AFTER A RELATIVELY normal morning of using my man-repelling brain to write a quick brief and begin work on a series of contracts associated with a bizarre “miracle cream for breast enhancement” that one of my clients had brought me last week for patenting, I headed to the set of The Rich and the Damned to meet Emmie for a quick lunch. She had said she wanted to talk with me about The Blonde Theory, and I figured I had nothing to lose. Who better to take dating tips from than my friend who seemed to be a pied piper of men, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind her wherever she went?

  “I only have an hour,” I said when she met me at the stage door, which she opened to let me in so that we could avoid the bleached-blonde, gum-snapping receptionist, who always took at least twenty minutes to issue security “clearance” to visitors, which consisted only of photocopying their IDs and giving them a visitor’s badge. “I have a mound of work to do at the office. Maybe we can grab something quick at the deli on the
corner.”

  “Oh, we’re not eating today,” Emmie said, grabbing my arm and yanking me inside. The stage door shut behind us, rather ominously, I thought.

  “We’re not?” I asked suspiciously. Emmie was in full makeup for the show, as she often was when I visited her, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was being led down the hallway by an overly enthusiastic clown with a face full of matte pancake makeup and bright red lips. The only thing missing was a big red nose.

  “No,” she said cheerfully.

  “Then why am I here?” I looked at her blankly. “I thought you invited me to lunch.”

  “No time for small talk. We have to get right to work,” Emmie said mysteriously, ignoring my question. “Follow me.”

  Checking my watch and trying to shush my grumpily grumbling stomach, I followed her down the darkened hallways. Still holding my hand, as if she were afraid I would dart away if she let go (well, maybe I would have), she click-clacked in her high heels past doors decorated with actors’ names inside stars, then on past Sound Stage 1, currently set up to look like a hospital room.

  “One of the characters is in a coma,” Emmie explained hurriedly as we passed by. Of course. One of the characters was always in a coma. Except during the times when one was awakening from a lengthy coma or returning from the dead or some such thing.

  For two years now, Emmie had played the assistant to the devilishly handsome Dr. Dirk Doubleday on the soap, and she was convinced it was the first step toward her big break, the role that would lead to her being noticed and cast as a lead on a prime-time drama series, which would, of course, lead to her being cast as the lead in next summer’s box-office-breakout romantic comedy. She already had her sights set on the mansion next to Tom Cruise’s. Seriously. She had a photo of it pinned to the mirror in her dressing room.

  Emmie turned down the hall leading to the makeup room with me following two paces behind, wondering where she was taking us. My nose told me we were leaving the general vicinity of the tempting buffet table.