“Yes,” Rae said. “Though he definitely lied about his height.”
“Why do guys do that? We find out in the first two seconds once we meet them.”
“And he made the waitress take back his drink because he didn’t think it was strong enough.”
“Red flag,” Ellen said. “Two red flags in one, actually. High maintenance and potential alcoholic.”
“And it was really hard to hear in the bar. When I told him my parents were divorced, he thought I said my parents had a horse. I had to shout it like five times.”
“You told him your parents were divorced?”
“Well, yeah,” Rae said. “He asked if my family was back in Indiana.” He’d actually asked if they were back in Illinois, but she’d been so grateful he’d brought up a topic so that she didn’t have to scrounge for one that she hadn’t been nearly as offended as she usually was when people mixed up the two.
“I’d maybe wait until a second or third date to bring that up,” Ellen cautioned.
“Why?” Rae said, prickling as she turned west onto Perry Street, lined with mostly alive oak trees whose golden leaves had nearly all abandoned the branches by this time of year. She crunched a few of the fallen leaves with her heels to release some anxiety, immediately feeling remorse for breaking them into bits. “I didn’t tell him all thegory details, but I’m not going to pretend that my parents are still together.”
Ellen had one of those perfect families whose Christmas card photo was an actual representation of their closeness. Rae usually shared in Ellen’s happiness and liked knowing that those kinds of families could exist, but she wasn’t above the occasional twinge of resentment.
She thought back to Tim’s “Oh, that’s a bummer” reaction when she’d mentioned her parents were divorced.Investment risk, he must’ve been thinking. Ellen was right. Rae had scared him away.
“He just wasn’t my person,” Rae said aloud as she chided herself. “It’s fine.” She was far more compatible with Tim the Character she’d invented in her head than she was with Tim the Real Live Person.
“So how did you leave it?” Ellen asked.
“I think he said nice meeting me and I think I repeated it back. I can’t really remember, I was just focused on avoiding a kiss.” The verbavoidingdidn’t really fit, as he’d made no attempt, but better safe than sorry.
“Well, I’m proud of you,” Ellen said. “I wish I were there to celebrate with you and Ben & Jerry. Best kind of double date.”
“I’m just going to write my haiku and go to bed.” Rae had decided she’d write a haiku after all of her first dates to highlight key takeaways and help her home in on the right match. A poem was more elegant than bullet points, and a haiku was the most efficient form for the task.
After saying good-bye to Ellen, Rae reached their apartment building, an ugly concrete outlier among the brick and brownstones. The unrefined paintbrush of time had streaked it with yellow and gray, and boxy air-conditioning units protruded from the grilled windows, dripping unclean condensation and threatening to topple out altogether onto the heads of pedestrians below. A precarious-looking metal fire escape zigzagged all the way up to sixth-floor penthouse. In the event of an evacuation, Rae had decided that it wouldbe far more dangerous to trust those stairs to hold her weight than to jump out the window with a bedsheet parachute.
Opening the door with an old-fashioned brass key that got stuck in the moody lock about half the time, she started up the narrow stairs, not even bothering to avoid the vomit stains on the pilled carpet like she usually did.
Sucked in by the dating app, she swiped through a fresh batch of profiles as she finished trudging up the ninety-six steps. Once inside the apartment, she wrapped herself in her robe and sprawled out on the little couch that felt too big without Ellen.
Feet hanging over the armrest, she wrote her first haiku on a pale-yellow Post-it note.
On date number one
I learned not to shake his hand
or mention “divorce.”
She stowed it under a stack of student loan paperwork so no one would see it, least of all her, and then checked her phone to see if Tim had texted her. He hadn’t. She didn’t really want to go out with him again anyway, but she at least wanted him to ask.
After setting her alarm for 5:50A.M., she turned off the light and jammed in foam earplugs to partially dampen the horns and sirens and errant hollers of drunkards, all competing for attention in this urban circus ring.
CHAPTER FOUR
DATE SUMMARIES
“That’s it,” Rae said, panting into the penthouse after her tenth fruitless first date. “I’m burned out.”
She yanked off knee-high boots and made a beeline for one of the ice cream pints packed into the woefully small freezer.
“What was wrong with this one?” Ellen asked, folding laundry in the living room, or at least clumping the clean clothes into piles.
