decide for themselves what they wanted. There was too wide a range of tastes out there for me to try to advise anyone, based on my own limited preferences.
My pants were creased from sitting, blue threads and fabric fuzz stuck to them like paint on a Jackson Pollock. I stripped the pants off and pulled on a short tailored skirt of gray faille. I had sixteen skirts of the exact same cut, made from fabric remnants from various jobs. On top I wore a short-sleeved light blue cashmere crew-neck, found for twenty-four dollars at Nordstrom Rack. I’d repaired the hole in the armpit that had relegated the treasure to the bargain pile. It brought out the blue in my blue-gray eyes, and was my favorite piece of clothing.
I put in small crystal studs and gave my chin-length bob a quick brushing. The color was presently a soft honey-blond, darker than the over-highlighted tresses I’d worn in Eugene. When the boyfriend had gone, so had my long hair. I’d sat myself down at the salon and told the stylist to give me hair that would attract professional men with marriage on their minds, instead of the usual unemployed gorillas who came on to me. I’ve never understood why it is that the men with the least to offer are the ones the most willing to make a pass at a woman.
My new hair hadn’t given me any success with the eligible men yet, but at least the shiftless ones had left me alone. Louise said it was the new, determined look in my eyes that scared the losers away, not the hair. I hoped that wasn’t the explanation for the lack of professional men, as well.
Scott and Louise were waiting in the foyer of the restaurant when I arrived, sitting on a bench eating chips. The peasant-bloused staff gave out baskets of them when the wait for a table was over ten minutes, which was one reason the place was a favorite of ours.
“Hannah!” Louise said, scooting over to make space for me on the bench. “Where’s Cassie?”
“I don’t know. She’ll be here. Hi, Scott.”
“Hi,” he said, smiling his usual friendly smile. He and Louise had been boyfriend and girlfriend senior year in high school, and he’d been Louise’s “first” in both love and sex. The relationship hadn’t lasted over a year into college—Scott had gone to Cornell, Louise to Oregon—but they’d remained friends, and Scott had become friends with Cassie and me, as well, when each of us in turn had moved up to Portland.
It was silently understood that Louise, while willing to share Scott as a friend, would not look kindly upon either Cassie or me taking him on as anything more. I couldn’t blame her—the thought of my first love sleeping with either Cassie or Louise set my teeth on edge.
With that past relationship serving as a symbolic sword on the bed between us, I’d found that I was more comfortable with Scott than with men who were available. He was tall and reasonably good-looking, with dark hair and a slightly boyish face with a dimple in his chin. I occasionally helped him shop for clothes, and when the weather was nice we’d sometimes go for a hike together.
“Hey, Scott, I’ve got a new one for you,” I said, leaning forward to see him around Louise.
He groaned. “Your jokes are never new. I’ve heard them all a hundred times.”
“This one’s a limerick.”
“Please, no.”
“I want to hear it,” Louise said, brown eyes sparkling in her freckled face. She enjoyed teasing Scott about his profession nearly as much as I did.
“Okay, here goes.
‘There was a young dentist Malone
Who had a charming girl patient alone
But in his depravity
He filled the wrong cavity
My, how his practice has grown!’”
Louise laughed, but Scott put his hands over his face and shook his head. “That one’s older than George Washington’s dentures,” he complained. “I have to listen to this type of lame humor all day at work. Why do you have to inflict it on me after hours?”
“Because dentists deserve punishment. They’re evil people.”
Louise put her hand on my knee and gave me her mock therapist look. “I’m sensing a deep childhood trauma, Hannah. You’re safe here. You can talk about it.”
“The memories, I only see flashes of them, a man in a white coat, the whine of a drill—no! No!”
Louise turned to Scott. “She’s repressed the memories. We’ll have to try hypnosis. This woman has been deeply scarred. Your presence obviously brings up painful feelings for her.”
Scott was about to respond when Cassie swept in, bringing a wave of patchouli and sandalwood with her that temporarily overwhelmed the chili pepper odors of the restaurant. “Sorry I’m late! Practice ran later than expected.” Cassie belonged to a semi-professional belly dance troupe, and her first public performance was coming up in a few weeks.
Louise waved her hand in a gesture to say it didn’t matter. “Our table isn’t ready yet anyway.”
The teenage hostess called Louise’s name just then, and we followed her swaying, tiered gathers of orange skirt with pink bric-a-brac into the dining area, Scott and me falling behind Cassie and Louise.
“Did I tell you about the Japanese exchange student I saw last week, the one who hadn’t been to a dentist in over ten years?” Scott asked. “One of his molars had cracked, and the nerve was exposed. I had to—”
“Stop it! Stop it!” I cried, putting my hands over my ears. Hearing about dental disasters was even worse to me than listening to stories about someone getting their eye poked out. This, however, was Scott’s usual revenge for my dentist jokes: his most revolting cases recounted in excruciating detail for my torture. I don’t think he knew how very real my fear of dentists was, under all the joking.
And it wasn’t that anything truly horrible had ever happened while I was under the gas and drill: no wrong tooth accidentally removed, no hygienist slipping with her little metal scraper and gouging my gums, no near-choking experience with those tooth trays of drool-producing fluoride I got as a kid.
It was instead a lifetime’s worth of anxious dread, of the taste of topical anaesthetic before the needleful of novocaine went in, of spitting out small chunks of tooth after the drilling was finished and the filling put in.
I hated going to the dentist, I hated dentists on general principle, and since I had no insurance I was enjoying the relatively guilt-free thought that I couldn’t afford to go to one for quite a long while.
We gave our orders and settled down to a fresh basket of chips, two types of salsa and kidney-straining quantities of diet soda. Except, that is, for Scott, who rode his bike about forty miles every other day and didn’t have to worry about the dimensions of his derriere. He eschewed diet soda for a Dos Equis.
“I can’t believe I’m going to have a normal life,” Louise said, her straw making loud suction sounds at the bottom of her ice-filled glass. Scott flagged down a passing busboy, who took away Louise’s empty glass for replacement. “My life will no longer revolve around sleep! I can go out in the evenings, I can see the sun on weekends. I’ve already taken the blankets down off my windows.”
“You’re like a plant, ready to grow,” Cassie
