Getting Warmer Read online

  Nicolette (“Miss Badanski”) was twenty-one and enmeshed in the process of choosing her bridal registry. Right now she was showing Jill a flier from Bed, Bath & Beyond. “I was totally set on that eggplant-colored duvet cover from Linens ’n Things—remember I showed you the picture last week? With the gold trim and the fringed throw pillows? But now I’m looking at this other one, it’s—what do they call it?—claret-colored. Totally classy. But if I go this way, it means I’m going to have to change my towels. Macy’s has me down for eggplant, but I’m thinking beige might be safer. But then I’m all—beige? Is that totally boring, or what?”

  Jill studied the picture. “I’d stick to the eggplant. This one’s a bit, I don’t know. Too much.”

  “Miss Quackenbush? What do you think?” Nicolette asked.

  I looked at the picture. Ick. “I’m with Jill. This one’s a little overwhelming.”

  “Nicolette wants to go out with us sometime,” Jill said to me. I glared up at her. We had never discussed enlarging our “circle” of two. Besides, Nicolette would get all the attention; she was blessed with the biggest breasts I’d ever seen on a thin person who had never undergone a boob job. (Hers were certified genuine; much of the staff had witnessed her girl-to-woman transformation during the spring of her freshman year. “Like she sprouted pillows overnight,” was how one teacher described it.)

  “Yeah,” Nicolette said. “I’ve got to start meeting men. The guys around here are all losers.” For all her registry talk, Nicolette was not only unengaged, she was unattached. She was weirdly rational about her burgeoning registry, which she had started the year before, following Dawna’s marriage to Chad Johnson. Dawna had a brief (nine-day) engagement after discovering that “God had blessed her” with what was to become little Chenille. A scattering of high school friends (she had graduated the year before) and teachers had crowded in her parents’ tiny backyard on a sweltering October day to hear Dawna and Chad pledge eternal devotion.

  For all its shaky beginnings, the marriage seemed to be progressing smoothly. Chad took care of Chenille during the day; evenings he worked as a bellhop. Dawna took copious photos of their “family time,” which took place between the hours of 3 and 5 P.M. When Chenille went to bed each evening Dawna posted the photos into scrapbook after scrapbook.

  But Nicolette was unimpressed by Dawna’s marriage. She focused exclusively on the wedding and what she considered a paltry take: a handful of gift cards (two for Wal-Mart), three salad bowls, two platters and too many candlesticks and vases to count. As documented in her scrapbooks, Dawna, Chad and little Chenille ate their four o’clock dinners off mismatched thrift store plates and drank their milk from plastic glasses. Their tablecloth was vinyl.

  The lesson had not been lost on Nicolette. “I’m going to be ready,” she said. “Even if I elope, I’ll be prepared.” She was currently registered at Linens ’n Things, Macy’s, Robinsons-May, Target and The Great Indoors. She had gone so far as to get the registry form from Bed Bath & Beyond but was concerned that that might be overkill.

  I let Jill have it when we sat down at our favorite corner of our favorite table in the teacher’s dining room. “I can’t believe you invited Pamela Anderson out with us.”

  “Not fair,” Jill said, popping open her Diet Coke. “Nicolette’s boobs are real.”

  “So are Pamela’s. She had the implants removed. I read it in People.”

  “When do you have time to read People? Aren’t you supposed to be reading The Odyssey?”

  I sighed and pulled out my yogurt and apple. “I bought the CliffsNotes. I just couldn’t keep up with those kids.” That would be my ninth-grade honors class, which I’d inherited when the woman who had been teaching it since the seventies had a nervous breakdown on the second day of school.

  “Would anyone believe Nicolette is a man?” Jill asked.

  “Oh, God, is that what this is all about?” I peeled the foil off my yogurt. Jill unzipped her padded blue cooler and pulled out a hunk of French bread. “What is that?”

  “Roast pork loin sandwich with roasted red peppers and goat cheese.”

  “Wanna trade? I won’t complain about Nicolette anymore.”

  “Not a chance.” She bit into her sandwich, and a look of bliss flickered across her face. “So what do you think? We try the transsexual routine with Nicolette, see if anyone falls for it.”

  “You don’t look like a man,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to have every guy you’ve ever dated beg you to play volleyball for his company team.”

  The door to the dining room swung open. “It’s Mr. Handsome,” I whispered. He was carrying a plastic orange tray.

  “Gay,” Jill muttered.

  “Is not.”

  “Just try not to look desperate.”

  I caught Lars’s eye and waved. “Desperate,” Jill hissed.

  “Ssh.”

  Lars said hello to a couple of teachers and strode over to us. “Ms. Quackenbush. Ms. Green.”

  “Hello, Lars,” I said in a decidedly casual, un-desperate way. Lars Hansen had flippy blond hair (“Too pretty,” Jill said), a gym rat body (“Too vain”), and an easy sense of humor (“Too smooth”). He was twenty-six years old (“Too young”). Like me, he taught English, though he also had one drama class and responsibility for the school play (“Gay, gay, gay”). Lars was madly in love with me. He just didn’t know it yet.

  Lars put his tray on the table. Today’s cafeteria lunch: a hunk of gray-brown meat, canned string beans, glutinous mashed potatoes. I could never be that hungry.

  “Natalie has a date tonight,” Jill announced.

  “A blind date,” I quickly clarified before wondering if I should have given him an opportunity to be jealous.

  “Anyone I know?” Lars asked.

  “She doesn’t even know him. It’s a blind date,” Jill said in her teacher-talking-to-an-especially-dumb-student voice.

  “Oh! Right! Well, good for you. I guess it’s hard to meet men around here.”

  two

  Three years ago, I swore off blind dates forever, but it turns out that forever was not as long as I’d expected. I’d been having one of those “crisis years,” when everything in my life changed in rapid succession: my boyfriend, my apartment, my job.

  My boyfriend’s name was Ron, and while my mother still thinks I should have married him (her mantra: “Dartmouth undergrad, Harvard Business School, a promising career in investment banking—what more do you want?”), I have never regretted my decision to send him packing (well, to send myself packing; it was his apartment), though I occasionally wish I’d fought harder for the DVD player.

  We were living in Boston. We’d been together almost four years, and everyone assumed we’d eventually marry. My parents had just sold their house in Newton and moved to Scottsdale. Their move hit me harder than I had expected. Suddenly, I had nowhere to go for Sunday dinner. Suddenly, Ron was my only “family”—and he didn’t care about me enough to make me mashed potatoes and carrot cake.

  It was more than that, though. While Ron obsessed over whether he’d be able to make his first million by the time he hit thirty (he was twenty-eight; I was twenty-six) or whether he had to wait till thirty-five (and if so whether he should adjust for inflation and raise his goal to 1.1 million), I was making my mark on the world by doing production work for a direct mail company, helping to create and distribute flyers for cabinet refacers, Chinese restaurants and cut-rate law firms.

  My epiphany didn’t come at once. Rather, it grew in my subconscious, kind of like when you get a glossy ad for a mattress and you throw it out, and then you get another mattress advertisement and you throw it out, and then you get another and you throw it out, and then one day you wake up at three o’clock in the morning, and you can’t get back to sleep, and your spine hurts and your leg twitches, and it hits you like a ton of bricks: you need a new mattress!

  But I didn’t need a new mattress
(well, not yet, anyway, though I would once I moved out). I needed a new boyfriend—or, failing that, I needed no boyfriend. And I needed a new career, preferably one in which I wouldn’t profit from annoying people.

  Teaching seemed perfect. I could indulge my love of literature while fulfilling my sense of service. Plus, I’d get to leave work at three o’clock every day and get summers off.

  I didn’t transform my life overnight, of course. There were applications to be filed, loans to acquire, new roommates to be found. There was a part-time waitressing job to endure, classes to attend, papers to write, a student teaching stint to complete.

  While I remade my identity, Ron solidified his. A month after claiming he’d never be able to love or trust another woman, he hooked up with another Harvard Business School graduate four years his senior. Together, they bought a condo with views of the Charles River. I expected to be jealous. Sometimes it worried me that I wasn’t, that there must be something wrong with me if I could care so little for a man I almost married.

  My friends rallied. They assumed I was devastated and set to work hooking me up with every single man in Boston between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. After awhile, the men began to blur together. John had just returned from backpacking in Hungary. Steve was from California and missed the sun. Pete was doing a PhD in molecular biology. Chris had just broken up with his college sweetheart. And on, and on, and on.

  They weren’t all duds, but I was too tired to make much effort. When my friends called for the post-date play-by-play, I’d report back that, “He was nice, but . . .” John was too immature, Steve was too flaky, Pete was too nerdy, and Chris was still hung up on his ex-girlfriend.

  Eventually, I exhausted the entire supply of my friends’ unattached male friends. Or maybe my friends just got fed up with me. It didn’t matter, anyway. When I failed to find a teaching job in the Boston area—the result of too many universities cranking out too many teachers—I heeded my parents’ advice and applied for my Arizona teaching certification. After a round of interviews, I received several job offers in the booming, sprawling Phoenix Valley and accepted the one closest to my parents’ house in North Scottsdale.

  As I moved cardboard boxes into my new bedroom (which has cathedral ceilings, a walk-in closet and its own bathroom—though I still prefer my parents’ double-headed shower in the master bath), my parents told me I was welcome to stay with them for now, “though you’ll probably be wanting a place of your own soon.” When I received my Fannie Mae student loan payment book and started to hyperventilate (I’d be almost fifty by the time I paid everything off), they suggested I go soak in the spa and said that of course I could stay until I got on firmer financial footing. Now that I’ve been here a year, we don’t talk about me moving out. They simply remind me to water the plants when they leave town.

  And they leave town a lot. Typically, Scottsdale’s daily high temperatures start nudging toward one hundred in the middle of April. There are no spring showers. The average daily lows creep up gradually, peaking around eighty in July and August. Understand that “low” temperature hits at around four o’clock in the morning. Summer evenings rarely fall below ninety.

  In June, just after I had finished up my classes for the year, my parents headed for higher elevations (while I headed for a mind-numbing summer job answering phones and filing permits in an architect’s office). Their new best friends, Barbara and Stan Gillespie, have a cabin in Flagstaff, and my parents were able to secure a rental condo nearby. They came back for a couple of nights in July before flying East. My sister, Shelly, a graphic artist, a.k.a. “the creative one,” lives in Rhode Island with her long-term, perpetual grad student boyfriend, Frederick, a.k.a. “he who will not commit.” My aunts live in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. By mid-October, having exhausted their entire reserve of friends and family with nice guest rooms, my parents will fly back to their Spanish-tiled dream house—just in time to see the mercury plunge.

  When people ask me where I live, I’ve taken to saying, “I’m house-sitting for my parents.” I don’t even like to admit to myself that I’m twenty-nine years old, unattached, mired in debt and dependent on my parents—not quite the idealistic save-the-world existence I’d envisioned. At least they have a killer pool.

  And, yes, I’ve thrown myself back into a different kind of pool: that of eligible singles. Another English teacher, Mrs. Clausen, arranged tonight’s rendezvous. Paul is a nice young aerospace engineer who works with her husband. Like me, he’s from the East, so if we run out of conversation, we can always bitch about the weather and compare snake sightings. Mrs. Clausen met Paul at her husband’s company picnic, got his number and, voila! I’ve got a date.

  I arrived at Route 66, Scottsdale’s coolest restaurant, at six o’clock—right on time. My blue shirt and skirt felt too English teacher-y, my dangling silver earrings too predictable. I looked like I could burst into a lecture on Catcher in the Rye at any minute.

  I spotted Paul immediately. He was sitting alone at the neon-lit chrome bar, the only person in the place who looked even less trendy than I did. He was wearing a yellow golf shirt, khakis and brown cowboy boots.

  “Paul?” I asked with a smile, thinking: maybe I can be out of here by eight.

  He turned, looked momentarily confused, smiled back. His grin transformed his face, making him not handsome, exactly, but certainly appealing. His eyes were brown with little flecks of gold. They crinkled nicely at the corners. His hair was sandy and wavy, flecked here and there with gray. He looked older than I expected, maybe in his mid-thirties. His nose was sunburned and just starting to peel.

  “I’m Natalie,” I said. “I think our table is ready, if you want to eat now. Or we can have a drink first, if you’d like.”

  “I’d love to have dinner with you,” he said. His voice was warm, easy. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I looked forward to spending the evening with him.

  “Okay, then.” I smiled and started to walk toward the hostess stand.

  “But I’m not Paul.”

  I stopped and turned around to stare. His brown eyes twinkled.

  “Natalie?” said a voice right next to me. I spun around. This, then was Paul: medium brown hair, light eyes, average height, athletic build, around my age. He was interchangeable with at least five guys I’d been set up with before. He wore a black silk camp shirt, gray trousers and man sandals. He didn’t look like an engineer. He looked like a Route 66 regular, only straight.

  “Paul?” I asked. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself again.

  “Yes,” he said. I smiled. He smiled back. Sort of.

  “Our table’s ready,” I said. “You want to sit?”

  “Okay . . .” he said.

  We sat down at our shiny white table, which sat in the middle of the restaurant, leaving me feeling far too exposed. I pulled my napkin off the table and smoothed it across my lap. My palms were sweating.

  “Is this your first time here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s a fun place,” I said. “The cocktails are good. And you’ve got to check out the bathrooms. The stalls are mirrored.”

  He was looking at me funny. I cleared my throat. “Not that I like to watch myself, you know. Using the, um, the restroom.”

  He was still staring at me. I tugged at my napkin. “And I’m sure the men’s room has urinals, so if you don’t like the whole mirror thing, you don’t have to. You know. Use the stalls. Well!” I smiled at him. My face hurt. When you’re in a hole, stop digging, I chided myself. Stop digging!

  “You don’t remember me,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Michelle Stevens set us up a few years ago. In Boston.”

  I stared at him. So, he wasn’t just interchangeable with other blind dates—he was one of my blind dates! I’d been set up so many times, I had run out of new men to meet. I was starting to recycle.

  “Right! Ohmigod! How are you?” I was trying to place him. “How’s Mi
chelle? I feel so bad that I haven’t called her.”

  “Michelle’s good,” he said evenly. “She has a new job—human resources for a nonprofit.”

  “That sounds great. This is so weird. Like, maybe it’s fate or something.” I’d written Paul off in Boston, but then, I’d written everyone off in Boston. As far as I could tell, he was an improvement over most of the men I’d met in Arizona. Maybe I’d give him a second chance.

  Paul looked at me calmly. “You told Michelle that I spent the whole evening talking about myself.”

  “I said that? She told you I said that?”

  “And that I had no sense of humor.”

  “That’s—I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

  “And that all I cared about was running and I automatically assumed everyone else would be interested in hearing about training for the Boston Marathon.”

  The Marathon Guy! Now I remembered him!

  “I’m sorry,” I said with as much contrition as I could manage, though all I could think was: Michelle! What a bitch! “I was going through a rough time. It had nothing to do with you.”

  Paul stood up. “I’ll tell Michelle you said hello.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I wouldn’t want you to waste another evening on me,” he spat. “And I have no desire to waste another on you.” He turned and strode out of the restaurant.

  My first impulse was to bolt. But I didn’t want to run the risk of seeing Paul outside. I couldn’t stay at my table; my sudden solitary status felt too conspicuous. So I headed for the bathroom and shut myself in a stall.

  Mirrors. Given my inane ramblings merely moments before, you’d think I wouldn’t have jumped when I closed the stall door only to see myself in front of myself and on either side of me. Four of me, all lit in pink neon—as if one wasn’t enough.

  I looked like shit. No, that’s not true. If I was someone else looking at me, I wouldn’t think I looked bad. I simply wouldn’t notice me at all. In preparation for my teaching interviews, I’d chopped my long hair and kept it that way ever since. I tried to tell myself that the short hairdo looked chic, but really, it just looked short. My face wasn’t pretty enough to pull off such a severe cut. I was tan—it was hard not to be around here—but after two weeks in the classroom, my skin was already getting that faded, sallow look. My blue clothes were even more wrinkled than they had been this morning. My scarf belonged on someone twenty years older. I looked like someone named Mrs. Quackenbush.