Girls in White Dresses

by JENNIFER CLOSE

  Every piece of information she got about him felt like a gift. She gathered al that she knew and went over it in her head. He had two brothers, he was the youngest, he liked gherkins and sour Altoids but hated any kind of soda. He was a Yankees fan, cal ed his grandfather “Oompa,” and looked best in light pink shirts.

  They talked about col ege, and she found out that he’d played lacrosse. “Wel ,” she said, “that’s no surprise.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked her.

  “Just that, you know, you kind of look like a lacrosse player,” Mary said.

  “Real y?” Brian asked. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, you just look like you went to prep school and played lacrosse. I don’t know.” Mary took a drag of her cigarette and tried to sound not stupid. “Al the boarding school boys at my col ege, they al played lacrosse and just had a look.”

  “Wel , I did go to prep school,” Brian said. “But I didn’t go to boarding school. My roommate did, though, and he was weird.” Brian stopped talking and Mary wasn’t sure if he was done. Then he flicked his cigarette and continued. “I’d never send my kids to boarding school,” he final y said. “It fucks them up.”

  Everything she learned in these five-minute conversations just made Mary like Brian more. And once when she was assigned to his case in a big meeting, he winked at her, and she thought that maybe she didn’t have control of her brain anymore. With each day, there was a greater chance that she was actual y going to act on one of her total y absurd thoughts. There was no going back.

  Mary told her friends that there was a cute lawyer at the firm, but that’s as far as she let herself go. They were out for drinks one night and she just wanted to say his name, so she said, “There’s this guy at my firm, Brian, who’s pretty cute. He’s a partner, though.” Then, because she regretted saying his name, she said, “I’m not interested in him or anything. Maybe he’s not even that cute. I can’t tel anymore.”

  Lauren nodded and said, “It’s probably the cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome.”

  “The what?” Mary asked.

  “Cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome,” Lauren repeated. “You know, when you spend al your time in a class and it’s boring and you get a crush on a guy, who looks super cute in the class but then when you go out in the real world, he’s not. It’s just that you were only comparing him to that smal group, so there was a curve.”

  “Huh,” Isabel a said. “I never thought about it like that.”

  “I mean, that’s just the name, but it applies to al sorts of things. Like why camp boyfriends always turned out to be nerds. Or how a work crush can happen on a guy that’s real y not al that great.” She shrugged and tried to look modest, as though she were the one to discover this phenomenon.

  “It’s good to remind yourself of it, though,” she said. “So you don’t end up sleeping with a bartender who’s a total life loser, or something like that.”

  “Or something like that,” Isabel a said. Mary nodded, as though they had figured it out, but she knew Brian didn’t fal into that category. She didn’t know where he fel , but it wasn’t there.

  They kissed one night in her office, late, after everyone else had gone home. The two of them had ordered Thai food, and Mary had eaten very little, afraid that her skirts were going to stop fitting soon, and sure that when Brian looked at her, al he saw was a big ass.

  He came into her office and stood behind her so that she couldn’t breathe. When she got up to go get a piece of paper from the other side of the room, she turned and was facing him, their mouths close. And then they were kissing, and she tasted the curry he’d eaten that day. It made her dizzy, but it al seemed a little unreal, like walking outside in pajamas.

  When she got home, it was hard to remember if it had happened or not. She barely slept, and when her alarm went off she was happy to get up.

  She laughed in the shower as she got ready; giddy and tired, she lathered her hair and laughed.

  She didn’t see Brian al day. He wasn’t on the roof that night, and she knew something was wrong. Two more days passed and the only time she saw him was from down the hal as he went into a meeting. She was such an idiot. He was her boss. This was not something she would ever do, and she decided that she would clear it up as soon as she got the chance.

  A few nights later, she was in her office and he walked by. Before she knew it, she was cal ing out his name. He looked surprised, but just raised his eyebrows and stepped inside. “Yes?” he said.

  “Hi,” Mary said. “So, I just wanted to apologize for the other night. It wasn’t professional, and I regret it.”

  “Okay,” Brian said.

  “Okay,” Mary said. He looked like he was going to leave, but Mary wanted to say more. “I mean, if there were different circumstances, maybe. But you’re my boss, and we work together.”

  “That’s the least of it,” Brian said.

  “What?” Mary asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Mary,” Brian said, “I’m engaged. You knew that.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Mary said. “How could I have known that?”

  Brian laughed. He sounded a little evil. “You knew,” he said.

  “I didn’t know,” Mary said. Her voice sounded like she wasn’t sure if she believed herself or not.

  “Of course you knew,” Brian said. He sounded impatient. “Remember the week after you started when everyone had cake in the big conference room? It was for my engagement. Carla arranged it.” Mary vaguely remembered standing with plastic plates, eating white frosted cake that wasn’t good but was better than sitting at her desk.

  “No,” she said. She shook her head. “No, I don’t remember.”

  Brian laughed meanly again, and Mary realized that he was maybe the kind of guy who contained the potential to be very cruel, the kind of guy who believed the lies he told. “Look,” he said. “Whatever you need to tel yourself. Just don’t repeat it around here.”

  “I wouldn’t tel anyone. Don’t you tel anyone.” This came out sounding stupid, like a child deflecting an insult by repeating it.

  Brian just nodded. “Okay,” he said. He turned and walked out of her office.

  Mary sat at her desk for a while, not knowing what to do. She’d never done anything this bad in her life. She’d never cheated on anyone, never stolen a friend’s boyfriend, never kissed a guy who was taken. Engaged. The word was weighted.

  Had she known? She didn’t think so, but maybe she was just trying to make herself feel better. She considered going to confession and then decided against it. She’d always hated confession, ever since the first time she went, when she told the priest that she was afraid of the albino janitor who cleaned the school.

  “I’m afraid of Andy the janitor,” she’d said. “Because he’s an albino.”

  “That’s not a sin, Mary,” Father Kel y had said. He’d sounded annoyed, like she didn’t understand what it was she was supposed to tel him. But Father Kel y was wrong. Mary knew that it was a sin to be afraid of Andy the albino. She didn’t want to look down when she saw him, didn’t want to go to the other side of the hal when they passed each other. He always smiled at her, like he understood, and that made the whole thing worse.

  She wanted to cry when he did that. She didn’t want to be afraid of him, but she couldn’t help it and it made her feel awful, like she was the worst person in the world. And no matter what Father Kel y said, it was a sin. She knew that much.

  Mary turned back to her computer as if she was going to do more work, and then she decided against it. She had to get out of the office. She walked al the way home, even though it was so cold that she couldn’t feel her toes after the first block. She didn’t want to stop for anything, didn’t want to wait for the train to come. She just wanted to keep moving, and so she did. She walked forty blocks to her apartment, and by the time she got there, her nose was running and her eyes were watering, spil ing down her face. She wasn’t crying, though she wi
shed she were. It was just the cold.

  She went up to her apartment and started running a bath, which she’d never done the whole time she’d lived there. She had trouble unbuttoning her blouse because her fingers were numb, but she managed, and got into the bath, which was so hot it burned her skin for the first few minutes.

  Mary stayed in the bath for over an hour. Whenever the water started to cool, Mary drained a little bit and added more hot water. When she was sure she could feel her fingers again, she got out and put on her most comfortable pajamas, thin flannel pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt that was worn and soft. She curled up on her couch underneath the blanket. She wanted a cigarette. But she wouldn’t let herself have one. Not tonight and not ever again. She sat there for a moment, and then she got up and started lighting al of the candles in her apartment. This would have made her mother very nervous. “You’l fal asleep and burn the place down,” she would have said. But Mary was wide awake and not afraid of starting a fire.

  She turned off the lights and sat on the couch, watching al of the flames light up the room. She breathed in and out until she didn’t want a cigarette anymore. She sat there for a while, and then she leaned over to the candle closest to her and blew, softly at first, and then harder, so that the flame vanished. She got up and walked around to each candle, blowing them out, watching as the flames turned into long winding tails of smoke, and she watched them curl and twist, up in the air, until they were gone. And then she went to bed.

  H is name was Harrison, but no one ever caled him Harry. Isabela learned that right away.

  Isabel a was drunk. It was happy hour and her friends had ignored her requests to go somewhere that served food. She’d ended up sitting on a bar stool in her rumpled work clothes, plotting to stop for pizza on the way home, when Harrison approached her and introduced himself. And because she could think of nothing better to say, she asked, “Do people cal you Harry?”

  “No,” he answered. He looked as though she’d asked if people cal ed him Bob or Walter.

  “Oh,” she said. She shouldn’t have had the third dirty martini. She could hear her voice from somewhere deep inside her head. And from in there she sounded retarded.

  Isabel a was tired. It was already almost eight o’clock and it would be a lot of work to talk to someone new. She had to be at the office early the next day. She contemplated excusing herself, getting up, and leaving. She could be home in her pajamas with pizza in thirty minutes.

  But then her plan seemed too hard to carry out and so she let herself sit there. And after a few minutes, she leaned forward on the stool in a wobbly way and kissed Harrison in a crowded bar.

  And that was how Harrison and Isabel a met.

  Her friends cal ed him handsome, but what he was, was pretty. He had high cheekbones, delicate features, and flawless coloring—porcelain skin and cheeks that flushed natural y when he was excited. His shirts were never wrinkled. Even untucked at the end of a day, with his tie pul ed loose, he looked staged, like somebody had gotten him a wardrobe for “end of the workday.”

  Around him, Isabel a felt sweaty and bloated more often than not. She wanted to apologize when she got a pimple or had to blow her nose. She was fairly certain he never had boogers.

  Harrison met new people graceful y, shook guys’ hands and grasped their arm with his left hand. He kissed girls on the cheeks and remembered names. He was always interested in conversation, tilting his head at whoever was talking, nodding and interjecting every so often, but not enough to be obnoxious.

  “He’s the one!” Isabel a’s friends said. “We can’t believe you found him!”

  The ones with boyfriends and fiancés were relieved for Isabel a. She was twenty-seven and they al agreed it was about time. The single ones were sort of happy and a little annoyed. They’d been at the bar that night too. Isabel a was pretty, but not gorgeous. Where had they been when he’d come up to her? (But for the most part, they were happy, of course.)

  Harrison knew how to date. He made plans to go to dinner at restaurants where they could drink margaritas and hear each other talk. He took her to movies and then to a diner for gril ed cheese. He always paid. He cal ed when he said he would, and held the door for her. The first night she stayed at his apartment, he woke up early and came back with two cups of coffee.

  “I like him,” Isabel a told her friends. She sounded miserable. “He’s real y fun. It makes me feel sick.”

  Isabel a knew enough by now to know that this wasn’t a common occurrence. You didn’t just bump into a nice guy that you liked every day. She was positive that she was going to mess it up.

  Harrison and Isabel a had been dating for three weeks when he mentioned the ski trip. He brought it up casual y one day, as though the thought had just occurred to him that very moment, asking, “Do you want to go skiing for New Year’s?”

  Isabel a was in a panic almost immediately. She had been up most nights wondering if they would exchange Christmas presents, imagining the horror of handing him a wrapped box and being greeted with an uncomfortable look. New Year’s hadn’t even entered her mind yet. She was trying to deal with one holiday at a time.

  “Isabel a?”

  “What?”

  “New Year’s? A bunch of my friends are renting a house in Vermont. It should be fun.”

  “Fun” was a relative term, Isabel a knew. Something that seemed fun when compared to doing nothing could real y end up being a horrific mistake. And a weekend with strangers could be up there with a car crash.

  “Do I know any of them?”

  “Um … I’m not sure. You met Parker, right?”

  Isabel a shook her head.

  “Oh, I thought you did. Wel , look, they’re a fun group. It’s not that big of a deal. If you want to go, great. If not, don’t worry about it.”

  “Do you even want me to go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It just kind of sounded like maybe you didn’t real y.”

  “If I didn’t want you to go, I wouldn’t ask you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Stop being so weird,” he said, and poked her in the stomach. “It’s real y not a big deal. Just let me know.”

  “Okay.”

  Isabel a wondered what it would be like to be a boy. She knew that Harrison meant it when he said it wasn’t a big deal. He real y wouldn’t care. He didn’t have to obsess over her response or if she would go or not. If she were a boy, she would be much more successful. She was sure of it. As it was now, she wasted days at work analyzing things that Harrison had said to her. When he told her it was interesting that she had a goldfish, she lost a week of productivity.

  What did she know about dating, anyway? Nothing. She thought back to the sixth-grade sex-ed class they’d had at St. Anthony’s. The girls were put in a room with the school nurse and forced to read scenarios out of an old pamphlet. “Kate and Michael have been going steady for a month,”

  the book read. “Michael wants Kate to try heavy petting, but Kate doesn’t feel ready. What do you think she should do?”

  The nurse cleared her throat, blushed, and addressed the girls. “So, does anyone have a thought on what Kate should do?” The room was silent.

  Final y someone asked, “What’s heavy petting?”

  In the other room, the boys told them later, a priest had drawn a large dome on the blackboard. “Do you know what this is?” he asked them. He sounded angry and annoyed. He put a dot on top of it. “That’s a penis,” he said.

  That was her education? How was she prepared for this? There was no scenario in that book about starting a new relationship with a Harrison.

  There were no tips on whether or not to go on a trip so early in a relationship. (Or if there were, they never got to them. Because once they found out what heavy petting was, they laughed for a week and a half.)

  “You should go,” her friends al said. The fact that she hadn’t skied in years and didn’t real y miss it wasn’t something they were concerned with.

/>   The drive up there would take almost five hours. What would they talk about? They had never been in a car alone that long. What if it was just silence? After sleepless nights and countless conversations, she agreed to go. Immediately after, she felt sick.

  The ski house was built to sleep as many people as possible. Most rooms had two sets of bunk beds and stairs that led to another room with a futon. When they got there, it was already dark and she could hear laughing as they stood outside the door. It was so cold that Isabel a could feel the inside of her nose freeze when she breathed. The night seemed darker after coming from the city, and it made Isabel a shiver. More than anything at that moment, she wanted not to be there. What had she been thinking coming up here? She didn’t know these people.

  Isabel a let Harrison walk in front of her and she walked behind him, pretending to look for something in her purse. There were about a dozen people in the kitchen and living room, sitting around, drinking and laughing. There was a footbal game on the TV, which no one was watching.

  Everyone smiled and there were shouts of “Hey” and “What’s up?” Isabel a waited for Harrison to introduce her and then stood there while he pointed to everyone and said their names. She didn’t remember any of them.

  Harrison grabbed her bag to take it upstairs and she fol owed him. They peeked in the rooms, looking for an empty one, but there were bags on al of the double beds. The only thing free was a set of bunk beds in the corner of one of the rooms.

  “Looks like this is us,” Harrison said. “Do you want the top or the bottom?”

  Isabel a wasn’t sure. If she slept on the bottom, she would be eye level with the other couple staying in the room. If she took the top, she ran the risk of fal ing out of bed and paralyzing herself while waking the whole house up.

  “Um, the bottom, I guess.”

  “Okay.”

  Harrison threw the bags on top of the beds and turned to her. “You ready for a drink?” he asked. She nodded and fol owed him downstairs silently.