Wallflower In Bloom

by Claire Cook

  The costume really did help. The Spanx reminded me to pull in my stomach and the corset helped me stand up straighter. When the long black fringe of my minidress brushed across my thighs, I felt sexy, and when my sequins sparkled in the mirror, I could almost believe, just for a moment, that I was the one who was sparkling.

  “Smooth” was the perfect song. Ilya played the first part over and over and over again, and I never got sick of it. When Santana sang the line about hearing my rhythm on the radio, I actually felt Ilya’s rhythm, my rhythm, the rhythm we were creating together. And the part about being like the ocean under the moon got to me every single time—it reminded me of home, but also moving beyond home, heading out to sea and on to my next horizon. Ilya got into it, too, and after a while, every time the forget about it line came around, we’d both yell it out loud.

  Sometimes, when I really needed to lift my spirits, I’d put on a great old song like that and dance all around the sheep shed. I’d play it over and over and over again. I’d forget about how I probably looked and just have fun. I’d work it. I’d own it. And before I knew it I could feel all the bad stuff slipping away and I’d truly believe that my life could only get better.

  In some ways, dancing with Ilya was starting to feel a lot like when I danced in secret, only a zillion times better.

  Step up that pep and put some pep in that step.

  As soon as we’d put in our five hours, Ilya had given me a grocery list and directions to the nearest Whole Foods.

  “Don’t forget to eat,” he said, as if that had ever happened in my entire life. “You need the energy. Just remember, put only the high-test fuel in your tank.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Did you just call me a tank?”

  “You are a beautiful woman, Deirdre Griffin. The only thing left is for you to start behaving like one.”

  “Ha,” I said. “And to learn how to dance.”

  He grinned. “Okay, two things. Now go get some rest.”

  I sat in the Whole Foods parking lot and turned my phone on again just long enough to delete some more messages from my family. There were a whole slew of numbers I didn’t recognize, too. I decided to save them until I had more energy.

  Mitchell called as I was climbing out of the Land Rover to head into Whole Foods, my thumb poised to power off my phone again.

  “What?”

  “I just remembered that I forgot to tell you that my leg’s fine. I mean, it’s still sore, but nothing was broken or anything. I just didn’t want you to feel guilty.”

  I held out the phone so I could roll my eyes at it, then put it back to my ear. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t.”

  “Okay, I’m just going to come right out and say this. The whole time everything was going on . . . You know, the whole baby and wedding thing. . . I kept thinking that if I was ever going to get married, it should have been to you, Dee.”

  “You asked me once, remember?” I heard myself say. It was years ago now, at least five, maybe more. Mitchell had come home from a friend’s bachelor party, woken me up from a dead sleep, knelt on the floor by the sheep shed bed. “Marry me,” he’d said. “You’re the best goddamn thing that ever happened to me. You’re the moon and the stars and the goddamn solar system all rolled into one.”

  “Yeah, I remember. You told me to sober up and ask you again in the morning.”

  I remembered that, too. And I remembered waiting, not just the next morning but for weeks, maybe months, until I pretended I wasn’t waiting anymore. “You never asked me again, Mitchell.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have shot me down when I asked you the first time.”

  I didn’t say anything. I threw some organic chocolate double-chunk brownies into my cart, then remembered Ilya’s list and put them back on the display stand.

  “Okay, you’re right,” Mitchell said. “I should have asked you again. I don’t know, maybe I thought we had a good thing going and I didn’t want to ruin it. And maybe sometimes I have a tendency to be kind of selfish.”

  “Ya think?” I lowered a six-pack of lemon-lime seltzer into my cart.

  “Would it be okay if I came out there to see you? You know, just hang out, talk things through. I could really use a break from everything around here, and I don’t know, I was thinking maybe you could use some company.”

  I stopped in the middle of the aisle. I couldn’t believe he was going there. And the scary thing was, I could almost picture going there, too.

  “Good-bye, Mitchell,” I said. I pushed End Call, then closed my eyes and shuddered.

  I navigated the crowded aisles, tossing a premade salad with mixed baby greens, walnuts, cranberries, and goat cheese into my cart. And a veggie roll-up on whole grain. Plus a box of Skinny Cow fudge bars.

  As I carried everything out to my rental car, thoughts of Mitchell still danced in my head. I pushed them away.

  Traffic was a nightmare, but eventually I made it back to the apartment and curled up on the sofa with my dinner. No offense to Afterwife, but it was the best meal I’d had in ages. I savored every bite. When I was finished I felt satisfied but not stuffed.

  “Delish,” I said. My whipped chocolate dessert was refreshingly cold and lighter than air. I lapped the last of it off the stick and wondered how many of these I’d have to eat to start feeling less like the cow and more like the skinny.

  I fed Ginger and Fred. I tracked down the washer and dryer on the floor below and threw in my wardrobe of yoga pants and baggy T-shirts along with all my new underwear. I was exhausted, but it was a good tired.

  I waited till the underwear was draped over my shower curtain rod and the rest of my clothes were twirling around in the dryer. Then I found my cell phone and scrolled past some messages from my family and about a gazillion e-mail requests for Tag. There were a few e-mails from friends, too, and a crazy number of requests to interview me. A message from someone at DWTS said that the contract would be on its way shortly.

  I tapped the Phone icon. I found Steve Moretti’s message and listened to it twice. Every time I got to the part where he said, “Hey, this is Steve. The guy you just kissed and ran away from?” I scrunched my eyes shut.

  Did he really want to use me to get to Tag, or had I simply jumped to that conclusion because it was the tape that played, over and over in my head, whether it applied to the situation or not? Why was it so hard for me to believe that someone might actually want me?

  I stared up at the ceiling and tried to remember exactly what had happened in Austin. First I said the Tambourine Twins’ boots looked stupid with sundresses, admittedly not my finest moment. Then Tag said something about Steve and a business deal or talking business or something like that. And then Tag went right for the jugular, like he always did, and accused Steve of trying to get more money out of him by hitting on me.

  It didn’t even make sense.

  Okay, so maybe I overreacted. Maybe I got the whole thing a little wrong.

  Like a lot wrong.

  Actually, totally wrong.

  In fact, maybe I needed to call him right now.

  Somehow I hit the Call icon before I had time to rethink my rethinking. Two rings in I remembered it was after 10 p.m. on the West Coast, which would mean it was after 1 a.m. on the East Coast.

  I started to hang up and then I remembered caller ID. Whose genius idea was that, anyway? I mean, I grew up in the generation where girls called boys only to chicken out and hang up when they answered. It was a whole new world now.

  “Hello,” Steve said. He sounded pretty good considering the hour.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m really sorry—”

  “I can’t answer the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

  The thing about voice mail beeps is that they always come before you’re ready for them.

  “Hi,” I said after his finished beeping. “Sorry to call so late. Um, you might not remember me anymore, but you asked me to have breakfast with you? In Austin? Anyway,
um, I just wanted to say I would have liked to have done it with you. Ha, I meant have breakfast if that came out weird. Anyway, long story, but I’m actually kind of tied up for the next couple of weeks, but I can talk at night. Pacific time. Oh, I forgot to say this is Deirdre. Griffin. Tag’s sister? Okay, hope you got that job you pitched at the university. And, well, bye.”

  After I hung up, I stared at my phone and tried to judge how bad the message I’d just left had been. I mean, on the leaderboard of phone messages I’d left for men over the course of my life, where would it rank? Definitely not at the top. I knew it wasn’t a brilliant message. But was it so bad that it didn’t deserve a callback? Someone really should invent a voice mail message retriever or even an Undo button.

  A jolt of adrenaline hit me like lightning. Who the hell cared whether or not I’d just left an embarrassing phone message? In less than a week I’d be embarrassing myself in a much bigger way, in front of most of the world’s television-viewing population.

  With that thought, I decided to pack it in early. Dancing five hours a day makes sleep look like the best thing ever. I could feel every muscle in my entire body yelling sleep, sleep, sleep. I dragged myself back down to the little laundry room and back, draped my dry clothes over one of the little kitchen chairs, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.

  I conked out almost immediately, just as I had the last two nights. But a nonstop series of dreams kept waking me up. I dreamed that Tag was chasing me down the street with a golf club. You know who you dance like? he yelled. Miss Piggy. Just as I turned around to see where he was, his golf club turned into an umbrella. Step up that pep and put some pep in that step, he roared down to me while he floated away like Mary Poppins. Somehow I was holding my own golf club now, but I couldn’t get it to turn into an umbrella. I held it up as high as I could and tried my hardest to float away like Tag. I jumped, I kicked, I even twirled the golf club like a baton, but inside I knew I was just too much of a porker to ever become airborne.

  I dreamed that Joanie Baloney had mailed me a big box. When I opened it, it contained matching orange-and-yellow cha-cha costumes for her whole family, even the dog. Where’s mine? I said, over and over. She kept turning her head, and I kept dancing around to her other side to try to get her to look at me. Come on, I said. Where’s mine? She turned and gave me her meanest look. You should have thought of that, she hissed.

  I dreamed that I had to go into a big computer room and take a test before they’d let me into the DWTS ballroom. The test was multiple choice, and every time I clicked on one of the little circles to select it, I’d realize it was the wrong answer. But when I clicked on my new choice, my first answer disappeared, but the computer wouldn’t let me input my new answer. I was so panicked my heart started thumping and I thought it might jump right out of my chest. I decided I’d copy the questions onto a piece of paper to prove that I knew the answers, but when I finally found a piece of paper, the words started disappearing faster than I could write them down. Can I at least keep the underwear? I sobbed. Karen the producer leaned over my shoulder and turned off the computer. Sorry, she said, policy.

  When I heard the toilet flush, at first I thought I was in a new dream. I opened my eyes. I was definitely awake and I was absolutely positive I’d heard the toilet flush. My heart started beating a mile a minute in real time. My next thought was that if Mitchell were here I could make him deal with it and I could just hide under the covers. The absolute worst part of being single was that there was no one to pass the buck to.

  I flashed back on a story I’d once read about a guy who’d broken into a woman’s house to take a shower. She wasn’t feeling well and came home early from work to discover him in her bathroom. She banged on the door and asked reasonably, “Why are you in my house taking a shower? Who are you?”

  The guy introduced himself through the closed bathroom door.

  “I’m calling the police,” she said.

  “I already called nine-one-one from my cell phone,” he said politely. “I was afraid you might have a gun.”

  Given my luck with men, the intruder in my shower was probably not that conscientious. And like an idiot, I’d left my cell phone on the kitchen counter. Wait. Maybe it was Steve Moretti. He’d been so excited to get my message, he’d jumped on the first plane. I tried to do the math—length of flight minus time difference plus time to figure out where I was staying and then to break into my apartment—but it was too much for my sleep-addled brain.

  As soon as I faced the reality that it probably wasn’t Steve, my heart started beating like crazy again. Okay, my only hope was to get out of bed fast, run to the kitchen, grab my cell and keys, and call 911 on my way out the front door.

  The apartment walls were so thin I heard the water in the bathroom sink turn on. At least he was a hand washer.

  I slid out from under the covers. A tiny bar of light from the hallway guided me to the door. I’d just found the doorknob when I remembered Fred and Ginger. I turned and followed the wall with one hand until I came to the little dresser.

  I reached for the fishbowl.

  I heard the clunk of the water shutting off next door.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I whispered. I wondered if the tiny bedroom closet was big enough to hide the three of us.

  Just because he was clean didn’t mean the guy in my bathroom wasn’t a serial killer. I decided to make a run for it.

  I tucked the fishbowl under one arm like a football and opened my bedroom door.

  If you give a woman a fish, she will eat once, but if you teach her to fish, she’ll open up a pet store.

  The bathroom door and the bedroom door opened at the exact same time.

  I didn’t consciously scream. It was more like I heard a loud scream and realized it was coming from me.

  Ginger and Fred started to slip out from under my arm.

  Tag dove. Star that he was, he executed a perfect catch and landed on his side holding the fishbowl. Not a single drop sloshed over the edge. It was like a page from our childhood favorite, The Cat in the Hat. Tag was Thing One and I was Thing Two.

  My brother peered into the bowl. “Mmm, sushi.”

  I grabbed the fishbowl away from him. At first I thought my heart was pounding right out of my chest, but then I realized someone was banging on the door to the apartment.

  I looked at Tag.

  “What?” he said. “It’s not my place.”

  “Get up,” I said. He pushed himself up off the floor, and Ginger and Fred and I followed him to the door.

  “Everything okay in there?” the building super asked when Tag opened the door. He was wearing the top half of a pair of old-fashioned pajamas over boxer briefs, and he was carrying a baseball bat.

  “No problem, buddy,” Tag said. “I told you it’d be fine. My sister was just jumping for joy to see me. Sorry. I’ll make sure she keeps it down.”

  I peeked around Tag so I could yell at the super. “I can’t believe you let him in. He could have been anyone.”

  The super looked at me like I was dense. “I have every one of his videos.”

  Tag looked back at me over his shoulder. “I autographed them all, of course.”

  The super nodded. “And then we had a few beers. And then we got hungry so we sent out for pizza.”

  “Dirk knows the best pizza place,” Tag said. “Thin, thin crust, just the way I like it.”

  “Who the hell is Dirk?” I said.

  The super gave me a hurt look.

  “You’re Dirk,” I said. “Sorry.” It was the story of my life. I could live with someone for ten years, and then Tag would breeze in and in ten minutes he’d find out a whole laundry list of things I’d never even thought to ask. Case in point, I actually had lived with Mitchell off and on for ten years, and who did he go running to as soon as he decided to get married? The one and only It Guy.

  “I’ve got an early morning,” the super said. “Remember? The callback on that Animal Planet show I was telling you
about? So, as long as everything’s okay here. . .”

  “Good luck, man.” Tag reached out to knuckle-bump him, then he nodded at Fred and Ginger. “And remember, if you give a woman a fish, she will eat once, but if you teach her to fish, she’ll open up a pet store.”

  “Ha,” the super said. “That’s a good one.” He turned and disappeared down the hallway.

  “Write it down,” my brother actually said to me.

  “In your dreams.” I took the three baby steps required to see the little clock on my little stove. “Do you know what time it is?” I said.

  Tag shrugged. “I’m still on East Coast time, so it’s actually three hours later for me.”

  “Oh, shut up.” I shifted the fishbowl to my other arm. “Listen, if I don’t get back to sleep right now, I’ll never make it through tomorrow. The extra bedroom’s the last door down, if you haven’t already taken it over. And if you left the toilet seat up, go put it down right now.”

  Tag grinned. “What’s up with all those girlie-girl undies in there?”

  I glared at him.

  Tag yawned. “Nice to see you, big bro. Thanks for flying all the way across the country to see me.”

  I yawned, too. “Make yourself at home. Oh, wait. You already did.”

  Tag disappeared into the guest room and came back with a red plastic folder.

  Just in case he was madder than he was acting and might explode, I took a step back.

  He opened the folder to reveal a pile of photocopies. “From Mom. She said to tell you she’s keeping the originals to make a scrapbook for you.”

  “Original what?” I said.

  Tag pulled out one of the pages. “First Non-Celebrity Woman Becomes Dancing With the Stars Contestant. Thousands cry, ‘She’s one-of-us!’ and pledge their support on the Internet.”

  I grabbed it away from him. “Seriously?”