Matchmaking for Beginners

by Maddie Dawson

  “Moots!”

  “And how do we eat pizza?”

  “With our hands!”

  It’s glorious inside Best Buds—all tropically fragrant and moist, with greenery in every corner, along with spikes of flowers: roses, tulips, gerbera daisies, mums. The perfect place for a Floridian. Orchids tower in one corner of the softly illuminated cooler, looking like birds preparing for takeoff. I take deep breaths and try to think what would be the best flower for Patrick: the gerbera daisy or the mum plant? An orchid he’d have to take care of, or a bouquet of roses?

  I finally take a bouquet of red and yellow roses up to the front counter and wait in line to be rung up by the slightly harried cashier. Two women are standing at the counter, looking unhappy, and the dark-haired one says to the other, “Come on! We’re getting a baby because of him, and I want to thank him. I’ll write him the letter if you won’t.”

  The other woman, who is wearing a ponytail and an emerald-green pashmina that I am coveting, folds her arms over her chest and says, “No! The flowers are enough. More than enough. If you write to him, believe me, he’ll be over all the time. I know this guy. He’ll be all up in our business.”

  “Some daisies and a nice short letter then. He doesn’t even know yet that the pregnancy test was positive. I think he deserves to know that.”

  The ponytailed woman scowls and looks away. Our eyes meet and she suddenly laughs. “Can you believe this conversation?” she says to me. “How to thank your sperm donor and make sure he knows he’s only a sperm donor.”

  “Well,” I say. “What about this? What if you sent him the flowers and a card that says, ‘Thanks for the strong swimmers! We got a hit!’”

  They look at each other and grin. And then the first woman grabs the pen and writes my message on the card, and they both give me a high five.

  After they leave, the next man in line orders a gigantic bouquet. The cashier, who by now has chattily told me that her name is Dorothy and that she’s actually the owner of the shop, is trying to get his bouquet just right. He’s kind of grim faced and unhappy looking, with such a muddy aura. Then the woman in line behind him laughs and says to him, “Wow, dude! Tell me this: Are you in trouble at home, or are you just a fantastic person?”

  I see Dorothy flinch a little, and the man looks down at his shoes and mumbles in a low, dreadful voice: “Not in trouble. My wife died of breast cancer two months ago, and every Friday I put a bouquet on her grave.”

  There’s a horrible silence as he reaches over and takes the bouquet. Dorothy thanks him and squeezes his hand. Nobody knows where to look, and I don’t know who I feel sorrier for—the woman customer or him. She’s turned the color of wax paper, and she tries to say something to him, tries to apologize, but he roughly turns away, and walks out, head down, ignoring all of us.

  “Whew,” somebody says. Dorothy mops her forehead.

  “You didn’t know,” I say to the woman.

  She puts her head in her hands. “Why am I always, always doing this kind of thing? I shouldn’t be allowed out of the house! What is wrong with me?”

  “You didn’t mean any harm,” I say. “He knows that. He would have been nicer about the whole thing except that he’s a wreck just now.”

  “That’s it. I am taking a vow of silence,” she tells me. Dorothy says, “Aw, you don’t have to do that. It’s all going to be okay. People gotta get through as best they can, you know?”

  “Come over here and smell these gardenias,” I say. “They’ll change your brain chemistry.”

  “They will?” the woman says, and I shrug. I really have no idea. I tell her they might. She laughs. As soon as she’s gone, along with all the other customers and their problems, Dorothy turns to me and says, “So when can you start?”

  “Start what?”

  “Working here. Can I get you to take a job here?”

  “Well . . .” I look around. Really? Should I go to work? And then I know that I definitely should. I’ll get to come here every day and smell flowers and talk to people. “I’m afraid I really don’t know much about arranging flowers,” I say.

  Dorothy shrugs. “Flowers, schmowers. I can teach you that. What I’m needing is a listen-to-the-story person. When can you start?”

  “Well. Okay,” I tell her. “I could start tomorrow, I guess.”

  She comes around the counter and hugs me. She has a slight limp, and straight gray hair pushed back off her face, and a sweet, sweet smile that transforms her tired eyes. “Come tomorrow at ten, okay? We can go over some things. I can’t pay a lot, but we’ll figure out something. Part-time okay?”

  “Yes. Yes, part-time is great!”

  I’m halfway down the block before I remember I need to tell her something critical—so I hurry back to the shop and call out to her.

  “Dorothy! One thing: I’m moving away at the end of the year! So this is temporary. Is that okay?”

  She comes out, holding on to a rose stem. “What? Oh! No, that doesn’t matter a bit,” she says. “Whatever.”

  And that appears to be that. I’m employed.

  I write to Patrick:

  Studying Brooklyn today with Jessica as my teacher. Pizzas are pies! Metro is subway. Convenience store is a bodega. #whoknew

  Youse are doing awesome. Watch out, or soon you’ll be saying fuggedaboutit.

  Also I accidentally may have gotten a job in a flower shop.

  I didn’t know people could accidentally turn into florists. Are you happy about this?

  I think so. I also think I need to go do a bunch of New York things. Carnegie Hall, jazz clubs, Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building, Broadway show, Times Square.

  (Patrick shuddering involuntarily, can barely type) Report back. I’ll be cheering you on from the curmudgeon seats inside my dungeon.

  You wouldn’t come?

  Marnie? Hello? I thought I explained to you that I’m an introvert. #ugly #recluse #irredeemablymisanthropic

  And what is there to say to that, except what I do say, which is:

  Open your door when you get a chance. I’ve left you a present. A pitiful attempt to make up for your beautiful sculpture that I smashed. Though nothing ever can, I know.

  Marnie, Marnie, Marnie. You didn’t have to do this. That sculpture was from another time. Another Patrick who doesn’t exist anymore. Not worth thinking about. You did me a favor. #outwithold

  TWENTY-NINE

  MARNIE

  One evening, as I’m putting away the supper dishes and Noah is sitting at the table scrolling through his phone, he says, “I just want you to know that losing you was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  I look out the window at the lights of Brooklyn. I can see right into other people’s apartments—see them gesturing; a man and woman are talking in one window; in another, a man is lifting a barbell high into the air. My stomach has dropped to my knees.

  With difficulty, I manage to say, “Noah. Come off it. You don’t believe that even while you’re saying it.”

  “I do believe it,” he says. “It’s true. And now some other guy has you. I lost out, and it was my own fault.” He shakes his head and smiles at me. “I’m just not husband material. Waaaay too fucked up.”

  “Way,” I agree.

  He says a whole bunch of things after that.

  He says, forgive me for saying this, but I don’t think you are even remotely in love with the guy you’re seeing now.

  He says, remember the time we woke up in the middle of the night and we were already having sex, but both of us had been sound asleep and we don’t know how it happened?

  He says, this is kind of like a secret time in our lives. Time out of time. Together but apart.

  “Not together,” I say with difficulty.

  “Have you told your family I’m here?”

  “Of course not.”

  He smiles and comes over and takes the platter out of my hands and places it up on the shelf I was straining to reach. He’s Noah, s
o he doesn’t simply come over and take the platter—he kind of saunters over. And when he reaches for it, his hand brushes against me very, very slightly. And then after he puts the platter up where it belongs, he stays there, standing so close I can see the little dots of stubble of his beard, can feel his breathing as though it’s my own breath he’s taking. His eyes are on mine and I know from the expression on his face what’s going to happen next. He’s going to lean down and kiss me.

  I brace myself against it. I think as hard as I can: no no no no.

  Then to my surprise, he turns away and goes back to the table, where he picks up his phone, and giving me a short wave, he leaves the house. The front door bangs behind him.

  I am shaking. I get a glass of water from the sink. A man in a window across the way is dancing. A man is dancing, and I am standing here drinking water, and somehow now I know that it is only a matter of time until Noah and I get to the kissing part.

  I have never wanted anybody more in my life.

  Jeremy calls me the next day on his way to work. I can tell I’m on speakerphone in his car, because I get to hear all the Jacksonville traffic—the whooshes of trucks going by and the snippets of other people’s radios as he passes them. I’m on my way to work, too, walking along Bedford Avenue to Best Buds, studying the people who are rushing past.

  “Hey! How are you?” I say when I pick up.

  As he always does, he plunges right into the list of things he’s done since the last time we talked. Went for a swim last night. Played checkers with his mom. Had pork chops for dinner. Went to bed early.

  “How are the patients? Any good stories?”

  “Well, Mrs. Brandon came in yesterday, and you know how it is. Poor thing, her sciatica is still bothering her, and she’s blaming the treatment, so I asked her if she’s taking the anti-inflammatory drugs, and she said she’s not because they hurt her stomach, and I said she should take probiotics at the same time, and she said she’d heard of those but never knew if they were safe.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  “Oh, but there’s this. You’ll be happy to know I got the carpets cleaned in the waiting room. Looks nice. A guy came in and said he could clean the whole office for fifty dollars, and I didn’t know if that was a good deal or not, but I don’t think the building management has cleaned the carpets in the entire time I’ve been there. Did you notice how soiled they were?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t,” I tell him.

  “Well, they’re awful. I thought you would have noticed.”

  “But sounds like they’re clean now,” I say.

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  I let a beat of silence go by and then say, “Hey, guess what! I got a job.”

  “You got a job? In Brooklyn? Why would you do that?”

  “Because—because I think it’d be good for me to be out around people more, and this woman in a florist shop asked me if I wanted to work there because I was sort of talking to some customers there, and she—”

  I stop talking because I realize he’s been trying to interrupt me the entire time.

  “No, I realize what a job will be like,” he says. “But what I’m wondering is—why are you embedding yourself in this community if you’re going to leave soon?”

  “Well, it’s three months. I can work for three months, can’t I?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you’d be busy getting the house ready to sell or something. Not going out and working in—what? A shop of some kind?”

  “For a florist.”

  “Yeah. A florist. You do realize I’m counting on you coming back, don’t you?” He laughs, a stiff little chuckle that rings completely false.

  “I told the woman that I’m only here until the end of the year,” I tell him. “Don’t worry. I’m coming back.”

  “Well,” he says and pretends to growl. “See that you do. Because there’s somebody on this call who’s getting very, very lonely without his girlfriend around.”

  I toy with the idea of dropping my phone in the storm drain.

  After that, it takes a little bit to put this conversation back on solid ground again. He tells me the weather is still hot, that he hopes to go see Natalie and Brian tonight, that he thinks Amelia looks like me. And then he says brightly, “Oh! I told my mom about our engagement. I know, I know. We agreed not to tell everybody until later on, but she was so down the other night that I wanted to cheer her up. And it did! She was thrilled. Over the moon.”

  “Oh, you know what? I’ve just gotten to work!” I say. “Gotta go! Have a good one!”

  I click the button, and jam the phone back in my bag. I’m nowhere near Best Buds, but I can’t take any more.

  What I want to know is what happened to the old snarky boy from high school, my old misfit friend, the one who could make me crack up with his constant sarcastic little asides? More and more I’m aware that that guy went through some kind of unfortunate cleansing or deprogramming situation.

  I’m going to have to figure a way to bring him back.

  In the flower shop that day, I help a woman pick out a bouquet for a man she loved who left her when they couldn’t have children, and then he married someone else and now that other woman has just had a baby, and—well, she wants them to know that she is happy for them, that she is genuinely, tragically, fully, and confusedly happy for them. After I make up the bouquet she requests, I make up one for her, too, and pay for it myself. I think she needs it more than the couple, frankly.

  There’s a guy who comes in and tells me proudly that he just proposed marriage to his girlfriend of nine years, and also today happens to be the day she gave birth to their triplets, and now he wants to send her three bouquets of pink roses. He disappears while I’m making the bouquets, and I find him sitting on the floor, his head in his hands, sobbing. “How do I deserve this?” he says to me over and over again.

  And an old woman in a baggy dress and sweater who comes in for one red carnation and pays for it with coins. She buys one every week, which is all she can afford, she tells me. It’s to remember her son who got shot. She tells me about his life, and how when he was five he told her that he was going to take care of her always, when he grew up.

  A man with laughing eyes orders daisies for his girlfriend and writes: “I’m going to be with you forever—or at least until I get deported.”

  I feel leveled by every story I hear.

  One afternoon I’m at home, talking on the phone with my mom, who is telling me about the progress in her lifelong argument with my father over which way to hang the toilet paper—she goes with under—when the doorbell rings.

  When I go to answer it, there’s an older, smiling man with deep-blue eyes standing on the stoop. He’s holding a brown paper bag that seems to be thrashing around in his hand. He takes his other hand to steady it, and I think I hear him talking to the bag.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Oh! Hi. I was just trying to calm the boys down a little bit here.”

  “The boys?” This may be why a person shouldn’t open the door without getting a background check on whoever is standing there.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’m Harry. I’d shake your hand but I better hold on to this bag instead. Anyway, I was friends with Houndy, and I don’t know why, but I went to his traps today, and found these beauties, and I just thought—well, I knew you were living here now, and I thought maybe . . . you know . . . you like lobster, and since these were Houndy’s really, I’d, uh, bring them over and see if you might want them.”

  “Oh!” I say. This is a relief. “Lobsters! How wonderful!”

  “Yeah. Well, they’re for you. I feel like Blix . . . and Houndy . . . they woulda wanted you to have them.” He has that expression that everyone else here has when mentioning Blix and Houndy: sad yet smiling. Remembering something.

  I ask him in for a cup of tea, but he says he can’t. He points to a pickup running at the curb. A woman waves to me from the passenger seat. So I thank him and take the ba
g of wiggling lobsters upstairs and wrestle the bag into the refrigerator and slam it shut.

  I think I can hear them in there disrupting the eggs and the milk.

  I text Patrick.

  Refrigerator is possessed by an alarmingly active bag of sea creatures with claws and tails. A gift from Houndy’s friend. Please help!

  What nature of help do you wish? Pro tip: I hear that some people like them with drawn butter and lemon.

  May I . . . could we . . . I need help with all aspects of this project. Chasing, cooking, eating.

  Ah, well. In the interest of being a good neighbor, I invite you to bring your sea creatures down. Also I believe Blix has some rather formidable lobster pots. We can take care of this problem.

  It turns out that there are four actual living beasts in the bag when I finally get it down to Patrick’s kitchen, and they are not interested in hanging out quietly while we prepare to boil them on the stove.

  Neither one of us has ever cooked a lobster before, so we call up a YouTube video on how you do it, and we drink a glass of wine to fortify ourselves while we watch it. Apparently someone has to boil water and then pick up this thing, this animal, and plunk it in the boiling water. It might make a noise when that happens.

  I take a deep sip of wine. “Okay, I’ll go back upstairs and make a salad while you plunge the lobsters, and then I’ll come down when they’re done.”

  He says, “I don’t want to plunge the lobsters.”

  “Well, somebody has to.”

  We sit there, staring at the computer monitor. There’s a crash from the kitchen, and we turn to each other.

  “They’re taking over,” he whispers. “They’re going to try to put us in the boiling water.”

  “We’ve got to go see.”

  “Don’t let them lure you into the pot. That’s the important thing.”

  We go to the kitchen in time to see all four lobsters scuttling along the floor, waving their claws at us.

  “What the hell?” he says. “They’re making a run for it! The video did not talk about this part!”