The Better to Hold You - By Alisa Sheckley Page 0,20
told me to come visit soon. He didn't mention Hunter.
I knew my work friends wouldn't call me, as they would see me tomorrow. I had lost touch with my college and high school friends; funny how you never see that in movies—the heroine always has at least two close childhood friends, each a little fatter or crazier than herself. Sometimes there's a third, a gay man who is smarter, more stylish, and underneath more tragic than the rest. I wished for such sidekicks. I wondered if you could put in a personal ad: Straight woman seeks gay man, straight women, for walks in the park, foreign films, impromptu make overs, well-chosen gifts. No secret competitors, annual migrators, or disappearing acts need apply.
Or maybe what I needed was a dog. Dogs don't wake up one morning and realize that the relationship isn't working for them anymore. Dogs don't lie about what they've been doing, or leave you to go explore other options. Like their wolfish cousins, dogs love for life.
Feeling maudlin, I decided to go for a long walk by the boat basin in Riverside Park, to get my endorphins flowing and work the wobble out of my thighs.
“I'm going out,” I told Hunter.
“Aah,” he replied, looking briefly in my general direction. Once out the door, I found it hard to move my legs very quickly. I contemplated taking a bus to the park, but then convinced myself that the urge to move would take hold once I got my feet near some grass.
A few runners passed me on Riverside Drive, looking lean and serious in skintight Lycra while I churned along in my gray sweat suit. A businessman with a plastic bag on his left hand waited for his mastiff to defecate. It's moments like these that make me love the city so much: Nowhere else is the natural made to seem so unnatural.
On Seventy-ninth I met a woman I'd gone to high school with in the suburbs. She told me she was writing plays and designing software. She had perfect toes in strappy sandals, and her stomach bulged with chic, designer-sweatered pregnancy.
“Are you married?” she asked me, not waiting for a reply. “I just married a lovely man from a small village in Italy. I can't tell you how happy we are. We got married in the little white church where Paolo was christened and the whole town turned out, all the young girls wearing ribbons. I remember you used to say you weren't going to get married. I always imagined you'd wind up in a big, funky apartment with a lot of cats.”
“No,” I said slowly, “that's my mother. I prefer dogs.”
Mrs. Small Village in Italy threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, that's what I remember about you, Abra. Your killer sense of humor. Let's get together for dinner sometime soon. Here's my number.”
I stuffed her card into a pocket and continued walking, passing young lovers in faded jeans, laughing and talking animatedly, their faces turned to each other.
On the way back, I shopped for dinner at the health food store, where I saw a woman in her fifties with stark black hair and oversized tinted glasses. She looked familiar, but I couldn't place her until she ran up and hugged me, explaining that she was my father's old girlfriend Rita, and she hadn't seen me since I'd been in college, and how was the old man.
“He's doing all right.”
“Is he with someone? He's always got to be with someone, your father.”
“He's with someone.”
She shook her head. “I just have no respect for people who have to be in a relationship at any cost.”
Rita embraced me again, enveloping me in strong perfume. She gave me her card in case I needed a job or some public relations, and then she finally left me free to examine the onions.
The problem with Manhattan is, everyone comes here eventually—all your old friends, enemies, lovers, demons. People you met on vacation in Nepal will wind up beating you out for a taxi. The bully who called you “Dog Breath” all through first grade will turn up at your local diner, and will remember you didn't come to his sixth birthday party, which is where the whole trouble began. Don't come to the big city to become anonymous. New York is like Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West turns out to be the lady who didn't like your dog back in Kansas.