We’re sitting by the window down by the river with this gorgeous view of the downtown skyline. Elizabeth is wearing a slinky black jumpsuit and her hair is slicked back. Her nails are painted.
The wine comes, and she hands it to me to taste, and I say it’s good when to be honest it just tastes kind of tolerably bad to me the same way all wine does, and then I order shellfish because I guess I’m supposed to. I’m trying to figure out if I’ve ever been on a dinner date like this before. I didn’t know people still did this. Elizabeth looks so comfortable, settled in her chair like it’s her living room. I can’t get over the way she holds the wineglass, how her wrist is so loose and casual, how elegant her fingers look.
She smiles just with her eyes and says, “Tell me about your day.”
There is no answer I can come up with that’s worthy of being looked at like that, and certainly not anything close to the truth.
“Just same old, same old,” I say. “Worked. One of our dancers is leaving, and it’s sad because she’s been with us for, like, five years, but she’s going back to school to teach, which has been her dream forever, so we can’t really be mad.”
“Following her bliss,” Elizabeth says.
“Yeah.”
“How about you?” she says. “What’s your dream job?”
“Are you saying most little girls don’t dream about being the staff manager of a strip club?”
She smiles.
I wish we could just talk about her instead. “I don’t know,” I say. “I was never…you know, the kid who had a dream job. I think I’m going to probably end up in some job that I’m fine with, but I don’t feel like I’m ever going to… Like, Ivy, my best friend—”
“I know who Ivy is,” she says, and I bite my cheek. Yeah. It’s possible I’ve mentioned her in texts one or two times. Or a hundred. Who’s counting, right?
“Yeah,” I say. “So she’s in school for fashion merchandising and that’s, like…she’s going to be a big deal. And she’s always wanted that. She’s driven.” I take a sip of wine just to shut myself the fuck up. “Did you always want to be a vet?”
She nods. “It’s one of those childhood dream careers. Vets, doctors, firemen, and meteorologists.”
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a stegosaurus,” I say.
“Also good.”
“Still working on that, I guess.”
“So what are you passionate about?” she asks me.
I laugh a little. “What?”
She smiles. “It doesn’t have to be something you can make into a career,” she says. “But I’m sure there’s something you really care about. I like hearing what people really give a shit about.”
Even I’m not socially stunted enough to think Ivy is an appropriate answer here. So I go with the other answer. “I like love stories.”
“Mmm.” She sips her wine. “I assume you don’t mean those, you know, the supermarket paperbacks.”
“Oh, um…”
She holds her hand out. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”
“No, I mean…you’re right. They’re embarrassing.”
“Everyone deserves a guilty pleasure,” she says. “I’m sorry. I bet they’re really fun.”
“I mean, not just those,” I say, and she nods and probably thinks I’m about to say I also read leather-bound Russian literature or some shit. God. “Like…okay. So my parents?”
“Okay.”
“They’ve been together for ages. They met when my dad was eighteen, I think. And my mom got pregnant with my brother and that wasn’t planned and my dad just stepped right up, and, like…they still make each other laugh all the time. They tell these stupid jokes and they just, like, delight each other. And my dad…he’s had some setbacks. It hasn’t always been easy. And my mom’s been there for him the whole time and he always makes sure she knows that he notices. They’re just good to each other.”
There’s a moment where she doesn’t say anything, just watches me really intensely, and I’m totally nervous until she says, “I love that. That real shit. What it actually looks like.”
I nod.
“Yes,” Elizabeth says decisively. “Yes. That’s very good.”
I feel myself exhale.
…
It gets easier after that. Probably helps that the food is so unbelievably good that it’s hard to focus on anything else, even if I do have a seriously intimidating number of forks.
It also helps that Elizabeth does most of the talking, and she’s so damn interesting. Her family moved around all the time when she was growing up, and she’s lived in China and New Zealand and the Philippines. She’s only in Providence because she went to Brown. Meanwhile I’ve barely ever left Rhode Island and the closest I’ve come to college was when I felt up a girl wearing her sister’s Johnson & Wales sweatshirt.
But she doesn’t ever tell these stories like she’s judging me or even like she expects me to match them, but just like she’s letting me in on a secret. She lowers her voice and sends me these small smiles, and it’s like every time she finishes telling me about the fish markets in Manila or the dragon boats in Hong Kong, those stories sort of become my stories, too, just a little bit. She tells me them like I deserve to hear them. Like I’ve somehow earned them by sitting here and babbling about my parents and stumbling my way through eating an entree she pays for.
My dad needed the car tonight and Ivy was out, so I took an Uber to get here, but Elizabeth drives me home. Ivy’s car is in the driveway when we get back, so I assume there’s a strange girl in my house. Ivy’s been living here for three weeks now, so I’ve gotten pretty used to the parade of shame every time she fails to sneak someone out before we get back. She’s supposed to be saving up for her own apartment, but she’s going to go broke paying cab money for club girls to get out.
I must not roll my eyes internally enough, because Elizabeth laughs and says, “What?”
“Sorry. Nothing.”
She turns off the car and just says, “Hmm.”
I don’t know what’s supposed to happen now. If this were a romance novel, we’d magically lean in toward each other at the exact right time. If this were one of my friend’s lives, we’d already be fucking in the back seat.
“Thank you for the ride,” I say.
“Of course.” She smiles gently. “Come here.”
Oh. I guess that can happen, too.
So I scoot closer to her, and she kisses me, softly at first, and then hard, her hands in my hair, the kind of kiss I feel all the way down to my feet. And there’s something so fucking hot about that, as if she meant to kiss me formal and controlled but she couldn’t, she got carried away. As if in some reality, it’s possible that someone like me could overwhelm someone like her.
She smells like vanilla and peppermint and her dress feels cool under my hands like some sort of very expensive water, and oh, I like this. I like this a lot.
When was the last time someone kissed me who wasn’t Ivy?
I’m about to invite her in, I’m so close, when she pulls back and kisses me one more time, short, soft. “I’ll call you?” she says.
Oh. Right. Classy shit. Not having sex on the first date. I’ve heard about this.
She waits until I’m inside the house to pull away, and I kind of…float around for a while, making enough noise in the kitchen that maybe Ivy will realize I’m home and wrap it up. I can hear voices upstairs, hers and—surprise surprise—one I don’t recognize. They’re finally coming downstairs about ten minutes later, a tall, half-dressed girl with curly hair and Ivy in one of my brother’s T-shirts, when the doorbell rings.
“Are we expecting more?” I ask Ivy.
She cranes her neck to see out the window, then laughs and rolls her eyes. “Ah, fuck.”
“Don’t tell me—” I say as I open the door, but sure enoug
h, there’s Dot, winged eyeliner and red lipstick and French braids and jeans and a T-shirt, holding a reusable shopping bag. She raises an eyebrow at Ivy’s girl, who pushes past her and out the door like she’s afraid of being caught.
“Something tells me you can do better,” Dot says to Ivy. “Hi, Andie.”
Ivy sits on the stair and leans her head against the banister. “I told you, you cannot just show up here.”
“At my house,” I say.
Dot holds up the bag. “I brought ice cream.”
Ivy sighs. “Okay. Come in.”
“Ivy!” I say.
“She brought ice cream!”
“I hope you think of that ice cream fondly when she’s murdering you,” I say, shutting the door behind Dot as she skips in.
“She’s not that kind of stalker,” Ivy says. “She’s the nice kind.”
Variations on this theme have happened a few times over the past few weeks. I have never seen someone this goddamn persistent, and Ivy for some reason keeps…letting it happen. She turns Dot down about half the time, but that never seems to convince Dot not to just try again next time, somehow, and then hell if the next time she doesn’t just shrug and let Dot in or bring her home from the club or say she’s going home with some other girl and then in the morning, who’s making scrambled eggs but Dot.
If she weren’t still screwing other girls constantly, I’d be afraid she’d been body snatched. Or that Dot was drugging her.
“We’re not having sex tonight,” Ivy says to Dot over her shoulder, on her way to the kitchen.
“Yes, I imagine you’re tired,” Dot says diplomatically.
Ivy gets bowls out for ice cream, and I sit down at the kitchen table while Dot leans against the counter and watches Ivy. I say, “I’ve got to wonder if this would have worked for every girl Ivy’s blown off if they’d tried it. Maybe you can’t reject someone who just flat-out refuses.”
“I never claimed to be lazy,” Dot says.
“Yeah, or subtle,” I say, which is supposed to be a little bit of an insult, but fuck if she doesn’t laugh. And Ivy does, too! Christ.
“Your foundation looks weird,” Ivy says to her, handing her a bowl.
“I know, it’s breaking up around my nose. I’m trying it for a review video. Not going to be a winner. Did I tell you about that eyeliner stamp?”
“Mm, no time,” Ivy says. She points to me with a spoon as she sits down at the table, Dot right on her heels. “I need to hear about Andie’s date.”
“Ooh, you have a date?” Dot says. “When? I can do your makeup.”
Dot has not seemed to realize I am not her friend any more than she’s realized Ivy is not her girlfriend.
“It already happened,” I say. “I did my own makeup.”
“Of course,” she says smoothly. “It looks great. Where did you go?”
“Clair de Lune.”
“Oh shit, that place is nice.” Dot nudges Ivy. “How come you never take me anywhere like that?” she says, and I just about choke to death on my ice cream. Seriously, who the fuck does this girl think she is? Who asks that? Who asks Ivy that?
Ivy somehow manages to just roll her eyes. “Because I don’t date,” she says, with the voice of someone who’s told an overeager seventeen-year-old this many, many times. “And I don’t need to pay a hundred and twenty dollars to have sex.”
“We didn’t have sex,” I say.
Ivy says, “Ah, the other problem with dating.”
“You said we weren’t having sex, either,” Dot points out.
“Yes.” Ivy slides a spoonful of ice cream into her mouth, smiling. “And for free.”
“Elizabeth’s, like…amazing,” I say. “She’s lived all over the world. She speaks three languages.”
“Hey, that’s one more than you,” Ivy says to Dot.
“And two more than you!” she says back.
“She was telling me all about her life and… God. I have no idea why she’d be interested in me at all.”
Ivy looks at me with an eye roll. “Because you’re amazing, obviously?”
I am so not about to blush in front of Dot. I will not. “Come on,” I say.
Ivy ticks things off on her fingers. “You’re gorgeous, you’re smart, you’re funny, you’re a great friend, you care about your family. And I’m not feeling real great about someone making you feel like that shit doesn’t matter because you haven’t lived in Antarctica.”
“No, it’s not her,” I say. “She didn’t say anything like that.”
Ivy shrugs, digging into her ice cream.
“Oh, what?”
“Nothing, I just think she sounds kind of…pretentious.”
Here we go. “She’s not pretentious,” I say.
Dot says, “I think she sounds pretentious.”
Shocking. “Ivy could say she sounded like she’s secretly a mermaid and you’d agree with her.”
“She has good judgment,” Dot says, gazing at Ivy all fucking doe-eyed.
The truth is, Ivy’s always critical when I date someone. And…I mean, it’s not ridiculous to think that maybe that’s because she wants me for herself, right? That’s not really a stretch. She probably hasn’t even admitted it to herself, but someday when she’s going to be ready to fix whatever it is about her that her mom or her dad or society broke and stop chasing everything that moves and actually feel something…she probably doesn’t want me to be with someone else, right?
I’m not saying it’s sweet of her or even something tolerable; I’m just saying, there’s basis there.
But it does get kind of exhausting, so I change the subject pretty quickly after that, and then they stop paying attention to me whatsoever, because Dot mentions some weird, obscure artist Ivy likes that she’d probably Googled on the way here so Ivy would think she was interesting, when, like, when has Ivy ever cared if the girls she sleeps with are interesting, but okay, Dot.
I go out to the back porch to water the plants and come back inside just as my parents are getting home. They have season tickets at this rinky-dink community theater because they’re both total drama geeks, and so once a month they go out to dinner and a play and they get all dressed up and excited about it every time. It’s cute.
They say hi to Dot, and Dad asks her about school while Mom asks Ivy if she’s taken the trash out yet (she has). Dot smiles and charms and gives cute answers to my parents’ questions but before long says she should probably head out. Ivy waves with her spoon and, once Dot gets up, brings her dishes to the sink and washes them and puts them away. She never lets them just sit in the sink like the rest of us do. I don’t think she’s used to having a dishwasher still.
“Sweet girl,” Mom says as the door closes.
“Yeah, she is,” Ivy says. “How was the play?”
“Amazing. They had a six-year-old in the cast and goddamn could that girl sing.”
Dad comes over to get a glass and touches Ivy’s elbow. “You should have seen the costumes.”
“Oh yeah?” she says, and he starts describing them to her and she’s immediately on her phone trying to find out who the designer was.
I’m tired, all of a sudden, so I slip upstairs to my room and flop down on my bed to waste some time online. There’s a knock on my door a few minutes later, and my mom’s there, taking off her makeup with a wipe.
“Sounds like you had a good time,” I say.
“We did. And how was your evening?” As far as she knows, I stayed here and watched TV with Ivy. You can’t tell my mom about a new girl too early. It just means too much to her.
“Fine.”
She studies me.
“What?”
“I’m just wondering, again, if my instinct to invite Ivy to stay here wasn’t the best.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know if having her here is good for you.”
“I’m with her all the time anyway.”
She gives me a hard look. “Which is the problem.”
“You have a very active imagination,” I say. “You should put it to good use.”
“Well, maybe I should give her some kind of… I don’t know. What do you call a curfew when it’s not about staying home but instead about not inviting a sex parade of young women through my foyer?”
“A sex parade?”
“I don’t know what you kids call it nowadays.”
“I’m used to Ivy’s sex parades,” I say. “This isn’t news. It doesn’t bother me. And I’ll have you know I had a date tonight, so get ready for me to start, y’know, marshaling my own parades.” Sometimes you gotta bite the bullet.
Her eyes light up. “Andrea Jean. A date?”
“Miracles happen.”
“Well.” She comes in and sits on the foot of the bed. “Tell me everything.”
“I will tell you nothing, because you’ll start picking out wedding venues.”
“I’ll remain calm.”
I sigh deeply and say, against my better judgment, “She’s a vet student.”
Mom clasps her hands together.
“Oh my God, Mom.”
“A doctor.”
“She’s not a doctor.”
“A white coat. That’s a doctor.”
I flop backward on the bed.
“So how did it go?” she says.
“She’s nice.”
“And…?”
“And she’s nice. And I’m going to see her again. So you don’t have to make my best friend homeless to be a good mother. Ivy’s never-ending ability to find new eligible lesbians is not a problem just because it’s here instead of at her place.”
Mom watches me.
“Nothing’s changed,” I insist.
She’s quiet for too long, then she says, “I like Dot,” with her voice very even.
“Yeah, apparently everyone likes Dot. Who knew obnoxiousness was so endearing.”
She raises an eyebrow.
I laugh. “What, you think I’m jealous of Dot? Sorry to wreck yet another theory, but she just came over tonight with ice cream. They didn’t even sleep together.”
The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe Page 5
