I’m a married woman.
It wasn’t a great marriage right now, but she had the certificate.
And Nina had responded with,
I know, but that’s not the point. The point is sitting across from a stranger and being interesting. When was the last time any of us had to be interesting?
Claire didn’t have an answer for that because the honest answer was really embarrassing.
The last time she’d been interesting to a stranger was so long ago she couldn’t even remember it. The last time she’d been interesting to her own husband was even longer ago.
She was a third-grade teacher who organized pantries, baked pound cake, and slept in the guest room of a marriage that had gone so quiet you could hear the refrigerator hum.
She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, her in her Rosewood lipstick.
She’d chosen a green blouse that she bought last week, and she never would have chosen it six months ago because it was way too bright and noticeable.
Her hair was down. She was even wearing earrings.
Greg was in the den, of course. It was hard to tell the den and Greg apart these days. Greg was more married to the den than to her. She could hear the television through the wall, the murmur of a game or a show or whatever it was he had retreated into tonight.
She had told him she was going out with Nina and Harper, and he’d said, “Have fun.”
Two words.
The same two words he said every time she left the house now, delivered with the same flatness, as if she were a neighbor he was being polite to rather than a wife he was losing.
She hadn’t told him about speed dating. She told herself it was because he wouldn’t understand, which was completely and totally true.
But the deeper truth was that she didn’t want to see his face when she said it.
She didn’t want to watch him process the information that his wife of two decades was sitting across from another man, not because she wanted another man, but because she wanted to remember what it felt like to be seen.
Greg would hear the term “speed dating” and just assume she was looking for a replacement.
She absolutely wasn’t. She was looking for a mirror.
She wanted to sit across from someone and see them recognize her worth in four minutes of attention. She wanted someone to ask her questions and really listen to her answers.
She put the lipstick in her purse, turned off the bathroom light, and left.
The wine bar was on East Bay Street. That was Harper’s territory. So Harper was already there, sitting at the bar, drinking a glass of something that was expensive, obviously.
“There are name tags,” she said instead of greeting them. “They want us to wear them.”
“Well, that’s kind of how speed dating works,” Claire replied. “These are strangers who don’t know our names.”
“I’m the vice president of a major financial firm. I don’t wear name tags. If I wanted to wear a name tag, I’d be a mechanic or a refrigerator repairman.”
“Well, you wore a name tag at the tattoo parlor.”
“That was a sticker Wren put on me as a joke. I didn’t even notice until we were in the car.”
Nina arrived looking like a totally different person. It was like watching an old photograph slowly develop.
She was wearing a dark red dress that Claire had never even seen. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she wore a necklace that caught the light as she moved.
She looked kind of like Nina from before, but not exactly. She looked like a new, upgraded version, one that had the same history but operated differently. Kind of like when you upgrade your computer’s operating system. You still have the same computer, but it works in a completely different way, with entirely new features.
