Rotten Dates
by Vinnie Hansen
In the back courtyard of the Jahva House the clientele ranged from deadhead to gothic. Suzanne's hot pink fingernail traced a personal ad. To me, the idea of dating seemed as oppressive as the steamy weather.
Suzanne read aloud. "Divorced white male, forty-two, rich, handsome, brown, brown, six feet of solid muscle ready to satisfy your every desire. Has a brain, too. In search of a fit, pretty woman thirty to forty. Call now. Won't last."
The actual text looked like hieroglyphics: DWM, 42, rich, hdsm., br.br.6' . . . . Call now.
The "won't last" had been Suzanne's little improvisation. She aimed a dazzling smile at me. "Perfect, Carol."
"Not if he won't last." I broke off a piece of our shared vegan cookie, Suzanne's choice. I didn't care for sweets since I baked them all morning, but vegan cookies were too plebeian for Archibald's, our place of employment. Archibald's was a creme brulee and mousse kind of place. I set aside the piece of cookie and broke off another.
Suzanne wrinkled her forehead at the cookie mutilation. Her golden shoulders glowed in the sunshine.
Suzanne Anderson was the type of woman who inspired the chick.click web site where one could force feed a model until she exploded. Suzanne had been so unfairly endowed: a five-foot-six body that stayed slim regardless of what she ate or did, tawny curly hair, flawless skin, and sweet brown eyes. And, most obnoxious of all, the sweetness was sincere.
I sipped my French roast and felt the muscles in my face setting like concrete. Stubborn my mom would call me. Too stubborn to be born.
"What makes you think I need a man?" I finally asked.
"Okay. How 'bout a woman?" she asked brightly.
Painful as this conversation was, it was preferable to following my thoughts toward my mom, who had recently decided to retire to Santa Cruz.
"Look," Suzanne campaigned. "You and Chad haven't slept together since you asked him for a divorce, right?"
I nodded curtly. The divorce had sailed peaceably and cheaply through a legal service, no lawyers, and little acrimony. Chad had been annoyingly accommodating. After the fact, I'd learned that he had a crush on the twenty-five-year-old receptionist at the roofing company where he worked. Even though Chad had not acted on his crush until we were separated, I felt deceived. He'd allowed me to believe that the divorce was all my idea. I resented assuming all the guilt.
"So, Carol?" Suzanne raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, sipped her soy mocha chai.
"So?" I echoed in a snotty voice. I plunked my finger on an ad. "Here's a good one for me." It said "Mr. Wrong," and gave a number.
Suzanne's amber eyes laughed at me across the top of her mug. Diversionary tactics were not about to work. "So that's been--what? Six months?"
"Something like that." I averted my gaze to the brick of the coffee house which had once been a repair shop for electric motors.
Suzanne had deposited her flowered scrunchie on the rotted cable wheel table. Blanketed by my auburn hair, my neck felt as though I were in a steam room. I lifted the heavy mane and fastened it into a ponytail with Suzanne's ruffled band.
This amused her, too. "Hot?" The innuendo dripped like the sweat on my neck. Her rose lips stretched into a closed mouth smile with a little dimple on one side. "So?" She chewed a dismembered piece of the cookie and continued to laugh at me with her eyes.
"So, so, suck your toe all the way to Mexico."
"Oh, that's mature."
"So what, Suzanne?"
"So look at you."
I scrounged in my purse and pulled out a mirror, a rectangle job with a bank's advertisement on the maroon plastic case. To be sarcastic, I inspected myself. My blue-green eyes looked tired. "Why didn't you tell me that I had flour up my nose?" This was a baker's occupational hazard.
"Sorry I didn't bother to check out your nostrils. If this doesn't prove my point, Carol, I don't know what does."
I was unaware that Suzanne had made a point, but in spite of the current, elliptical conversation, she was not the stereotype of a dumb blonde. Suzanne was the garde manger, and in many ways, the most sensible person in the kitchen of Archibald's and my best friend from work. "I can see me meeting this handsome, satisfy-all-your-desires stud," I said. "He'd look at my nostrils and hand me a spoonful of cocaine."
"There's a pay phone on the corner."
"Geez and my mom thinks I'm stubborn."
"I'm not stubborn," Suzanne rejoined. "I'm persistent. And you're not stubborn, either, just in need of a good lay."
"You want to walk down to the Hinds House and tell that to my mom?"
Suzanne smiled. "Call now."
"No way."
"No way you need to get laid? That's why you've been so calm and pleasant lately?"
"If I wanted to meet someone through advertising, I could use the Internet." I was a technological moron, but my classes in criminology had convinced me that I would need a computer for locates and basic background searches, and I was gradually warming up to my new PC.
"These ads are local and more effective."
"No way I'm going to answer an ad to find sex."
Suzanne's eyes stared down at her tea. Then she looked at me, her face flushed. "It's working for me."
"You answered an ad!" I knocked my coffee mug and sloshed French roast onto the silvery gray wood. This was a woman who stopped production whenever she walked across the kitchen.
"I answered one, but the guy didn't respond, so I decided to place one."
I snatched the Good Times from in front of her. "Is your ad in this week's?"
"Yeah," she said shyly. She patted her forehead with a paper napkin. A Santa Cruz rarity, the day cooked, in the upper eighties.
"I can't believe you called and a guy didn't answer." Until this moment the tattooed and pierced crowd in the courtyard had considered us about as interesting as dust bunnies. Now, at my near shriek, even the Grateful Dead contingent roused from their retro oblivion and turned their heads toward us. I modulated my voice. "If a guy didn't call you, why in the world do you think one would call me?"
Suzanne grimaced and shushed me. A shirtless young man with two silver rings in his left nipple lazily rolled his shaved head against the wooden fence. He'd been sunbathing, the sunburst tattooed on his hard stomach engaged in a stare down with the sun overhead. Now black sloe eyes mercilessly checked out Suzanne.
I gave him a dirty look, a skill honed in teenaged battles with my mother. He met my gaze with all the who-gives-a-shit attitude that supposedly characterized Generation X, although he seemed to care about winning our eye-to-eye combat. After a minute he smiled, or sneered, and drawled, "Whad'z up?" I turned away, disconcerted, which I guess meant that he'd won.
"Let's go," Suzanne said.
I didn't want to go. I wanted to find and to read Suzanne's ad, but I followed her into the high-ceilinged gloom, the Good Times tucked firmly under my arm. On the order counter a chalkboard advertised the daily special. "Tomato tofu soup. Think we could persuade Eldon to offer that?"
Suzanne shrugged, not wanting to be distracted from her mission. "Not by me. Ever since I told him about the herpes, he's acted like I might infest a salad. I feel like telling him it's not true."
The herpes story had been Suzanne's ruse to relieve the big, pudgy kitchen manager of his hopeless crush on her. We exited the cool building on to Union Street. "Come with me down to Hinds House," I begged.
"Do they have a phone?"
"In every room."
We turned to the right, toward the Santa Cruz institutions of India Joze and the Goodwill. Anything that still occupied the same building after the 1989 earthquake counted as an institution to me. My mom had been delighted to find a Goodwill only blocks from her new residence.
"I'll meet your mom if you either answer an ad or place one."
"That's extortion."
"Yup."
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