Dating Without Novocaine. Lisa Cach

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      “Women are having children well into their forties—”

      “I don’t think any of us wants to be eligible for social security when our kids graduate from high school,” I said. “I don’t want to worry that my husband is going to die of a heart attack while playing basketball with my son. I don’t want people to assume I’m my daughter’s grandmother. I’ve got an independent career, I make my own hours and my own money, now I want a husband and to start a family. It’s time, whether the universe thinks so or not, and I’m going to do something about it.”

      “Jeez, Hannah, you sound like you’re about to start a military campaign,” Scott said.

      “That’s no way to find love,” Cassie said.

      “She’s right,” Louise said. “I don’t know about the universe knowing when the time is right, but guys can sense it when you’re desperate, and they run. Right, Scott?”

      “You might as well have a trio of redneck brothers standing behind you with shotguns.”

      “I’m not desperate,” I said. “I’m organizing. The universe helps those who help themselves. I can’t expect the guy to just turn up on my doorstep one day, can I? Don’t you all want to find your soul mates?”

      A silence descended around the table, a pocket of quiet amid the voices and dish-clattering of the restaurant.

      “Well, yeah, I want to find him,” Louise finally said. “But how?”

      “That’s what I’m going to figure out.”

      Three

      Gypsy Scarf

      “Y ou keeping busy?” Robert asked, handing me the armload of pants and jackets that needed hemming. Robert was a salesclerk at Butler & Sons, an expensive sportswear shop where I got a lot of alterations work. He was six years older than me, tall and slightly overweight, with a fresh face that lit up whenever I came in. I suspected he had a crush on me, but I couldn’t quite come to grips with the idea of dating a guy in his mid-thirties who still worked retail. Ambition and confidence were attractive, and Robert had neither.

      Or maybe he didn’t have a crush, and was just happy to see someone fairly near his own age. The clothes Butler & Sons sold looked as if they were meant for golfers and the country club set, or whatever passed for the country club set in Portland. The customers who came in for the taupe pants and boxy argyle sweaters were not likely to be young single women.

      “Pretty busy,” I said, taking the clothes. “I’ve got three appointments lined up for this afternoon.”

      “Have you had a chance to eat?” he asked.

      I avoided his eyes. Any mention of food was a danger sign. It seemed to go back to some primitive time when Man bring Woman meat, good, eat, eat. Which was fine, if Woman want Man, Man kill many mammoth, make good fire. Not fine, if Man kill one old pigeon and have wet wood. I wanted a good provider.

      “Joanne usually feeds me,” I said, which was pretty much the truth. She was my next appointment, and she usually did have muffins or coffee cake she encouraged me to eat. It wasn’t a meal in the traditional sense, but I’d been counting on it as lunch.

      “Oh.” His face fell, and then he struggled to put the cheer back into his expression. “Maybe next week we can grab something to eat together. The food court has some pretty good stuff.”

      I smiled, rather painfully. “We’ll see.”

      It was as good as I could do, for a response. It was neither dashing nor encouraging his hopes, although dashing was what I knew I should do. “You have to be cruel to be kind,” and all that, which I think is almost harder on the dasher than on the dashee. But I got a lot of business at this store, and didn’t want to create bad feelings with an employee.

      Maybe he’d get the hint when I was too busy next week, and the week after, and then we could both pretend he had never expressed anything but friendly interest.

      Butler & Sons was in the lower level of Pioneer Place Two, the new addition to the upscale shopping center in the heart of downtown Portland. Pioneer Place Two was connected to its older twin by a sky bridge and an underground tunnel, and it was along this tunnel that I walked with my armload of sportswear, following the streamlike undulations of decorative blue glass under my feet. The stores on either side were mostly the same chains found in every other city: the Body Shop, Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, Banana Republic, Eddie Bauer. I much preferred to go to Saks to steal my ideas for clothes to make. Somehow everything looked just a little more beautiful there.

      The tunnel came out in the lower level of the original Pioneer Place, in the atrium center where switchbacks of escalators rose up four floors to a skylight roof. Thirty-foot bamboo grew in enormous pots, and smooth oak benches curved around a fountain that bubbled from several spouts, the sound rebounding off the bare floors and the glass walls of the surrounding shops. For some inexplicable reason someone had thrown a bright red toothbrush into the fountain, to lie at the bottom amid the pennies and dimes.

      I spotted a rack of Willamette Week, and lay the clothes over the back of a bench as I took a copy and sat to peruse the back pages. It’s a weekly paper, the main alternative to the more run-of-the-mill Oregonian. No one I knew actually read the articles: all we wanted was the entertainment section and the personal ads. What I wanted today was found in the last few pages: ads for singles’ activity clubs.

      “Women Call Free! Meet Quality Singles Like Yourself!” This, written above a heart with a photo of a blond woman seductively talking into a phone.

      What women are willing to call those numbers? And what men do they find on the line? It was hard to not think of the “slimers” Louise talked about, who called the crisis line: men who would call up and pretend to need counseling, but there was always a telltale hitch in their voices that said they were jacking off. Apparently all they needed was a woman’s voice to get them to blow weenie phlegm into their hankies.

      “Summer Fun! Rafting! Hiking! All Singles!” another of the ads read, over a black-and-white photo of young, handsome people screaming in delight as they shot the rapids, water splashing up around their rubber raft, their paddles raised, their life jackets turning them into uniform human cubes of athletic enthusiasm.

      This sounded much more like what I was looking for, but I had a feeling there was going to be a hefty membership fee. If I couldn’t afford health insurance, I couldn’t afford to fork over hundreds to go rafting with other desperate singles.

      No, not “desperate,” I reminded myself. Organized.

      But still, there was something I didn’t like about the idea of paying a membership fee. It seemed so…forced. I wanted to be organized, but I also wanted to preserve a bit of the illusion that I would meet Mr. One-in-a-Million by fortuitous chance.

      I flipped back through the pages toward the Culture section, stopping briefly in the personals at Men Looking For Women, but then deciding to save that entertainment for later.

      The Culture section had everything from music clubs to art gallery listings, and went on for pages and pages. I browsed through it and found a college production of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”, performed on СКАЧАТЬ