Starting From Square Two

“You can’t fire her,” Erika said. “She makes you feel better about your own life.”

“I know,” Hallie said. “I may be twenty-nine and single, but at least I’ve never put Tiger Beat posters on my walls. And now she keeps disappearing every day between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m., and she thinks we don’t notice. I don’t know where she goes.”

“Do you have any idea?” Gert asked.

“No,” Hallie said. “My boss is going to have me follow her.”

Gert sensed someone sitting next to her. She felt the brush against her shoulder before she even looked. Two men were sitting down. They weren’t looking her way, though. They were talking to each other. She snuck a peek. They were both wearing leather bomber jackets. They were average-looking and clean-cut.

“Fresh meat at three o’clock,” Erika said.

Hallie took a quick look at the guys, then went back to Erika. “They’re short, though,” she reported.

“Did I ever tell you that Ben’s bitch wife is an inch taller than he is?” Erika said. “I can’t imagine what happens when she wears heels. The two of them must look like a circus act.”

“Maybe she doesn’t wear heels,” Gert said.

“Don’t be funny,” Erika said.

Gert heard the guy to her right say to the bartender, “Just a cranberry juice.” The bartender looked at him strangely before going to get the juice.

The guy noticed Gert looking at him. “I’m all for girly drinks,” he said, smiling.

“Oh,” Gert said. “This may shock you, but so am I.”

“What kind?”

“All kinds, as long as there’s citrus fruit involved.”

“It prevents scurvy,” the guy’s friend said.

“Health is always important when ordering alcoholic beverages,” Gert said.

“So I should order one for you, then,” the first guy said.

Gert said, “You could.”

Erika whispered to Hallie, “Hook-up at stage right.” Gert ignored her. The guys both seemed nice.

“Cranberry juice is…” Gert started, but then she stopped. What she’d thought of was that it was good for urinary tract infections. But that was not appropriate dating conversation. Damn—she was going to have to start thinking like that now. With Marc, of course, she could have said anything. She could have gone to the bathroom in front of him, although she preferred not to.

It was back to square one on everything. Well, at least she was older now. Square two, then.

“Cranberry juice is…good for you,” Gert finished.

“It’s good for urinary infections,” the first guy said.

Erika leaned over Gert’s seat and said to him, “Are you a doctor?”

The guy looked at her for a second.

“No,” he said, laughing. Erika shrugged and went back to her drink.

“Anyway, there’s a reason I can’t drink,” the guy added.

“What is it?” Gert asked.

“He’s on the extra board,” his friend said.

Gert looked at them blankly.

“That means I’m on call for work,” the first guy said. “But even when I’m not on call, I’m never allowed to drink.”

“Are you a cop?”

“Nope.”

“Guess what he does,” the guy’s friend said. “Guess. No one can ever guess it.”

“Gert,” Hallie called from two stools down. “Do you want a drink?”

Hallie had drained two cosmos in ten minutes. She was giving Gert a look like she wanted to know if Gert needed to be rescued. Gert didn’t know why. All they were doing was talking. “No, thanks,” Gert said. “I’m okay.”

“Gert!” Erika said. “Hallie and I are going to the girls’ room!”

“Fine,” Gert said. “See you.”

“Gert!” Erika called. “Let us know if you want a drink.”

Gert nodded.

“Your friends are loud,” the guy’s friend said in a low voice.

“They’re really nice people,” Gert said.

“You must be nice to defend them,” the first guy said.

“It’s the least you should expect someone to do,” Gert said, “defend their friends.”

“Anyone who has a rule like that,” the first guy said, “I’m all for.” He smiled. He had a small scar on the bridge of his nose. It looked cute.

“Todd defends me, right, Todd?” the second guy asked.

“Yeah, I do,” Todd said in an authoritative voice. “Two more guesses.”

“You’re a treasury officer,” Gert said.

“Hey, is that an Untouchables reference?”

“Yes,” Gert said.

“That’s like my favorite movie. How’d you know?”

Gert said, “I just knew.”

“Brian, isn’t that like my favorite movie?”

“It’s like his favorite movie,” Brian said.

Erika and Hallie hadn’t gone to the bathroom as promised. They were staring at Gert.

Hallie elbowed her.

“Why don’t you introduce us?” she asked.

“Oh,” Gert said. “Todd and Brian, this is Hallie and Erika.”

“Hiiii!” Hallie said, pulling her stool around so that she could see them better. “What do both of you do?”

“I was just trying to guess that,” Gert said.

“I’m a stockbroker,” Brian said. “But Todd’s the one with the interesting job.”

“I think stockbrokers are very interesting,” Erika purred.

“Well, Todd’s job is more interesting,” Brian insisted.

“He can’t drink,” Gert added. “So I guessed that he’s an officer of the treasury.”

Hallie and Erika looked clueless.

“The Untouchables. They went after alcohol during Prohibition….”

“That movie rocks,” Brian said.

“Oh, right!” Erika said. “Wasn’t Kevin Bacon in that?”

“Costner,” Brian said.

“Yeah,” Erika said. “My ex-boyfriend was into that movie. He married a girl who keeps a Web log.”

“How many more guesses you want?” Brian asked Gert.

“One more,” Gert said.

Todd pursed his mouth. He had dark hair, a little curly behind his ears.

“Truck driver,” Gert guessed finally.

“Close,” Todd said.

“Oh…I give up.”

“I work for Norfolk Southern,” Todd said. “I’m a conductor on a train, and we get twelve hours on and twelve hours off….”

“Those are freight trains, right?”

“Yeah, and you have a couple of guys on each run, one driving and one making sure everything’s okay. It’s too dangerous to be drinking off-duty, because they could call you all of a sudden to come in. So they don’t let you drink at all, ever.”

“That’s too bad,” Gert said. “I mean, if you think it is.”

“Nah.” Todd shrugged. “I did enough of that in college. It’s okay.”

“So, Brian, how long have you been a stockbroker?” Erika asked.

“Since college,” Brian said. He looked at his watch and nudged Todd. “I think we’d better get going.”

“Yeah, we’re meeting friends,” Todd said. “It was nice to meet you, though.”

Gert didn’t know if he meant all of them.

“So…” Todd said “…if you have a number, I mean, would you mind if maybe I gave you a call sometime?”

Gert thought about it. There couldn’t be much harm. Besides, the practice would do her good. She searched in her purse for something to write on—it had been a while since she’d done this—and finally came up with an inky business card. She scribbled her home number on the back.

Hallie and Erika looked on, concerned.

Then, the men were gone.

“The only person to even talk to a normal guy was Gert,” Erika whined in the subway in the wee hours.

“Neither of you would have even talked to Todd,” Gert said. “You didn’t like that he’s a train conductor.”

“Well, I did like Brian,” Erika said.

“Based on what?”

“I don’t know. He was cute. So thanks for not helping. You were like, ‘I’m taking Todd and that’s it.’”

Gert sighed. “I wasn’t taking him. He just seemed like a nice guy, so I talked to him.”

“Why didn’t Brian like me?” Erika wailed.

“Maybe Todd only wanted my number so he could call me to get yours,” Gert said.

“Well, if he calls, don’t give it to him,” Erika said. “They were short.”

Now Gert knew the truth: Hallie and Erika were single because they were crazy.

“How did you know to mention his favorite movie?” Hallie asked.

“Oh,” Gert said. “There’s a canon where guys are concerned. Marc was always quoting lines from that movie. If you quote certain things, you can slide right into their conversation.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“We’ve got nothing to lose.”

The canon for guys in their twenties and thirties

1 The Simpsons

2 This is Spinal Tap

3 Star Wars

4 Monty Python

5 Star Trek

6 The Princess Bride

7 The Untouchables

8 The Hobbit

9 The Matrix

10 Office Space

“Excuse me,” Erika said. “Don’t you mean, ‘The canon for nerds’?”

“No. There are cool guys who like those things.”

“Hey,” Hallie said. “Maybe we should get together at my place this weekend and rent these flicks.”

So they put it on their schedule.

When Gert got home, she was exhausted. Her bed felt soft and wonderful.

She’d spent the last five hours trying to put something out of her mind that she hadn’t really wanted to put out of her mind. She’d been in an environment where everyone was supposed to appear carefree and happy, but her feelings had veered between torture and just getting a mild drubbing. Even if the bar scene hadn’t been as horrible as Hallie and Erika made it sound, there was a real harshness to it. It was unsettling. It wasn’t at all like what she would have done that night if Marc had been there.

If he had been there, they probably would have gone out to dinner, and then taken a walk through Manhattan. Or maybe they would have snuggled on the couch and watched a movie. Even cleaning the house with him would have been better than going to the bar. Playing a rousing round of that silly plastic foosball game he’d insisted on keeping in the living room would have been better. It was too hard to fall in love with someone, learn all of their quirks and passions, assume you’d spend the rest of your life with them, and then suddenly have them snatched away forever.

Slowly, in bed, Gert spread out her bare arms. Sleeping barearmed, feeling the sheets against her skin, was the closest she got to a caress these days.

She knew she had to stop thinking about what she could have done if Marc had been there. This was the new reality. He never would be.

But did she have it in her to start fighting her way through leather-jacketed and miniskirted crowds in search of a second miracle?

It didn’t seem worth it.

Erika brought two bowls overflowing with popcorn into Hallie’s living room. It was Friday night. The room had one wide window that was being pelted by the rain. Hallie popped the tops of three Diet Coke cans and a no-frills carbonated fruit punch and let them fizz on the coffee table.

Gert and Erika, sitting on the couch, reached for the diet sodas.

They left one for Hallie’s often-absentee roommate, Cat, who was rumored to be making a rare appearance within the hour. Although with meek Cat, who spent weekends with her family on Long Island, it was always hard to be sure.

Why, Gert thought, does it seem wrong for us to be having a slumber party for twenty-nine-year-olds?

Because this is not what you expected. You don’t have a sleepover party with your twenty-nine-year-old girlfriends. You and your husband have kids, and THEY have sleepovers, and the two of you stand in the doorway beaming, pleased to see the kids so excited, remembering what it was like back then—and thrilled to have your own best friend to sleep with.

“You know what would be great?” Hallie asked, lying on her stomach on the floor and painting her nails. “If the rain turned to snow, and it piled up, and we were stuck here for three days.”

Erika, on the couch, pulled a blanket around herself and shivered visibly. The rain snapped more loudly at the windows. “What would we do?”

“We’d hole up right in this room in our sweatpants and play truth-or-dare and confess our deepest secrets to each other,” Hallie said, “and order heaping bowls of pad Thai and drink cheap wine.”

“I want a guy to do those things with,” Erika whined.

“Well, you ain’t got one, so shut up.”

“I’m twenty-nine,” Erika said. “It isn’t even healthy to be boyfriendless this long. My body needs to be physically touched by a member of the opposite sex.”

“Get a root canal.”

Gert gazed over the blankets neatly laid out on the floor, and at the popcorn on the table, and really did feel like a kid at a sleepover. She wondered if later Erika would break out the Ouija board, hoping to channel Elvis, and after that the three of them would try to levitate themselves, chanting, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board….”

The door opened, and it was tiny Cat, lugging a doggie bag from whichever pricey restaurant she’d been to with her aunt. Gert had only met Cat a few times. Cat constantly complained, in her squeaky voice, that she wasn’t meeting anyone, but turned down every invitation Hallie and Erika made to go out, whether it was dancing at Polly Esther’s or rinsing trays at the University Community Soup Kitchen. She was “too tired,” or it was too cold out, or she was spending the weekend with her family. Hallie and Erika privately ragged on her, but at the same time, they loved it when she actually did come out with them, because her shrinking-violet existence made them feel good about their own lives. At least they’d had real relationships.

One more thing about Cat was that she wasn’t willing to accept any degree of obnoxiousness in boys. If a guy even made a joke about sex, Cat looked intimidated, and she retreated. Gert was glad that Cat stuck by what she believed in, but Hallie and Erika said that Cat would be alone until she was sixty-five. Then she could meet a nice guy who had prostate cancer and just wanted to be her very good friend.

Hallie got up and turned off the light so the women could watch the male canon movies they had rented: Monty Python’s Holy Grail, This Is Spinal Tap, and number eleven in the canon, Reservoir Dogs. Gert was hoping Hallie and Erika would like the movies, but the odds were against it. She’d never had a female friend who had the same sense of humor as she did, except for her high school friend Nancy, who lived in L.A. now.

Even before the movie started, Gert’s prediction was proven right. Instead of paying attention to the opening scenes of Holy Grail, Erika was fussing over her throw pillows. Hallie was finishing with her nails. Cat had already gone into her room.

Hallie got up and paused the DVD. “I forgot,” she said. “Before the movie starts, I have to tell you this. I thought of a great question for the two of you today.” She was wearing an orange long-sleeved T-shirt and gray sweatpants that Gert thought looked cute. Even though Erika was around making her nervous, Gert realized that at least this was just a no-pressure girls’ night. They didn’t have to worry about how they looked or how they dressed. Maybe it could be fun.

“Not another of your profound probing questions,” Erika said to Hallie, flicking a piece of popcorn across the coffee table.

“No, this is great,” Hallie said, prying and probing as usual. She crawled over to the table and waved her nails to dry them. “Let’s say a soothsayer told you that you would not meet the man of your dreams for eight more years.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Let’s say that the soothsayer said that without a doubt, when you turned thirty-seven, you would finally meet someone, fall madly, madly in love with him, and live happily ever after. Would you still date people in the interim?”

“No,” Gert said.

“No,” Cat said, coming back into the room.

“Probably not,” Erika said. “I wouldn’t bother.”

“Interesting,” Hallie said. “So dating is just a means to an end for all of you. It’s not about fun or socializing or sex.”

“I have enough fun,” Gert said.

“I do enough socializing,” Erika said.

“I…do enough socializing,” Cat said.

“Most people won’t admit that,” Hallie said. “They won’t admit that dating is work. Maybe we should all decide we’re going to meet the man of our dreams when we’re thirty-seven. Then we’ll stop squeezing into tight shirts and walking around half-naked and analyzing every encounter as future husband material. We’ll stop feeling the need to put on makeup to take out the trash just in case he’s walking by. Maybe we should just assume that we’ll meet our dream man at some future point, and stop driving ourselves crazy before then.”

“I already met the man of my dreams,” Erika said. “He’s married to a bitch.”

“I already met mine,” Gert said. “And then he was gone.”

The room was silent for a minute.

Cat said, “Anyone for Ouija?”

The movies ended up largely ignored for the night, as a half hour into the first one, something reminded Erika of Ben, and she said she just had to show Hallie and Gert what had happened on Challa’s Web site that day.

Gert had sighed. Erika had the attention span of a Chihuahua.

Standing in Hallie’s room by the big bed, they waited for the Web site to load. Hallie’s bedroom was mostly black, with a black comforter over the bed and black furniture. She still had the same purple telephone from college, Gert noticed, and she wondered if it still had the same sticky goo around the push-buttons.

Across the computer screen flashed a page with a rich blue background and the words “Challa’s Corner.” A gliding pastiche of photos swirled across the screen, most of them of Challa, Ben and their baby. On the left was a list of links to things like the Weather Channel and Elle magazine.

Gert had to admit to herself that it looked cheesy.

And at the bottom of the screen was the bane of Erika’s existence: The Web log.

Standing in front of Hallie’s computer, the three women read that day’s blog entry from Challa.

Last night was cold out, and we stayed in and put the baby to sleep and made dinner. I cooked linguine and mussels, and Ben tossed a salad. It was soooo romantic!;) We polished off an entire bottle of red wine LOL!!!

Gert suspected that deep inside, all of the women were thinking that mussels and wine sounded a lot better than soda and popcorn at 11:00 p.m. Gert almost felt her body ache, remembering the effort and passion that went into something as mundane as preparing dinner together.

Erika returned to the home page and clicked a link that said, “Message board.” That was where Challa’s friends could leave comments like: “Hi, Chall!” “Hey, girl, love the new pix!” “Thanks for helping me waste time at work.”

But recently Erika had started to leave messages, too.

She’d used all seven of her America Online screen names to create aliases to post things. Some were meant to annoy Challa, and some were just meant to confuse her. She told Hallie and Gert that Challa deserved it. Why did Challa have to shove everyone else’s face in her and Ben’s bliss all the time? Erika said that if she herself were married to someone as passionate and artistic as Ben, there was no way she would waste her free time writing blog entries about it.

The three of them read what Erika had posted on the message board that morning.

“You are banal,” Erika had written under the screen name Mr. HushPuppy. (She chose screen names completely at random, based on whatever she happened to see from the Internet café while she was typing. That day, someone had walked by in Hush Puppies.)

“Yes, she is, isn’t she?” Erika had responded to herself, this time using the name LadyAndTheTrump. “She started a whole Web site dedicated to herself. Sweetie, you don’t need TOO much attention, do you?”

“Challa’s a ho and a slut,” Mr. HushPuppy wrote.

“Ho, ho, ho, Merrrryyyyy Chall-mas,” wrote “JenDurr.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if Challa did name a holiday after herself,” Mr. HushPuppy wrote. “Too much attention isn’t enough for this girl. She should be lucky for what she has, not clog everyone else’s cyberspace with her binary spittle.”

“You’re a sick girl, Erika Dennison,” Hallie said, laughing.

What really got a rise out of Erika and Hallie that evening was that Challa, who previously had been ignoring the posts, was now getting into fights with the “writers.”

“Can’t you at least say something meaningful between your insults?” Challa had written back to Mr. HushPuppy. “If you hate me so much, then please don’t read this board. I didn’t invite you. At least LadyAndTheTrump sometimes has something meaningful to say.”

“Ah,” Erika said aloud, triumphantly. “She’s using me as an example for me to follow.”

Gert worried that someday, Erika would take this too far.

Chapter

2

“This girl, Erika, told me she’s just like me, but we’re really very different,” Gert told her support group on Long Island.

The group was for young widows. Until a few years ago, most of the “young widows” in Gert’s area had been in their forties and fifties. Now there was a handful in their twenties and thirties, too. Gert found it worth the forty-five-minute rail jaunt each Saturday morning to talk to people who could understand what she was going through.

She hadn’t gone to the group right away. In the weeks after Marc had died, she’d been surrounded by close friends and relatives. They were at the funeral, at Marc’s parents’ house, stopping by Gert’s apartment. Gert needed to be squeezed among a crushing throng of people who knew Marc so well that they understood the profoundness of the loss; people who knew his interests, his kindness, the expressions on his bespectacled face. Only people who knew him as well as she did could understand the depth of the void.

Right after the accident, Gert’s mother temporarily moved into Gert’s condo in Queens. She had already tried to convince Gert to move back to L.A., but failed. Gert’s best friend from childhood, Nancy, had tried, too. But Gert wasn’t sure she wanted to go back yet. All the experts said that you shouldn’t make major changes in your life within a year after a death. Besides, deep inside her, she feared that going back home would make her feel even lonelier. At least in New York, there were people like her. Alone.

For a while, relatives stopped by her condo to visit. Co-workers of Marc’s from the brokerage firm sent cards and flowers.

Then, slowly, the comforters tapered off. That meant that entire days yawned open with emptiness. Gert would pull herself out of bed, slog to work, get the occasional call from a friend who’d emit platitudes about taking things one step at a time, come home and, if she could stand to do something normal for two hours, watch a movie. In the past, no matter what happened to her, she knew he would be at the end—the end of the phone line, the end of a rough day, the end of the long commute home. Now, only she was there. All she had left to cling to were the vestiges of old routines.

Gert’s parents found her a therapist on Fifth Avenue. For the first six months, she went every week and talked to an overly clinical woman who was nevertheless a good listener. But she realized that she would have rather stayed home. What she really needed, she decided, was to interact with people her own age who’d lost a spouse.

Gert knew she wouldn’t have found such a support network if not for September 11. Most of the young widows’ support groups in the area had sprung up because of that day. Marc had died only four days before that, on the seventh. The funeral was two days later. If it had been two days after that, it probably would have had to be postponed. She’d lost him, buried him and forty-eight hours later the world had exploded.

She found several groups advertising on the back page of the Voice. The first day, she had felt intense self-loathing as she walked into the room. All of the women were strangers, and they looked strange, too. Strange and sad. They were women who had absolutely nothing in common with her—except for one horrible event. But she had forced herself to hold back her tears. She sat down in a hard school chair in the circle. She listened. And she talked. She found out they all had similar experiences to hers. The other women in the group were prone to dazing out for five minutes at a time for no reason, too. They, too, were still getting sales calls for their husbands and not knowing how to respond. They, too, were incessantly told by well-meaning people that they would feel better soon. They, too, had assumed they would be married to one person for the rest of their lives—and suddenly had had that person yanked away forever.