Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [29]
“Hey-a,” she said. She meant to say hi, but it came out wrong. It was just that she was shocked that she was on a date with a gay man.
“First obese and then gay,” she said to Lauren later that night.
“At least it wasn’t both at once,” Lauren said.
“Are you ever afraid that you aren’t going to meet anyone?” Isabella asked Lauren one night. They were finishing their last drinks at the bar, and Isabella finally asked the question she’d been thinking for a while now. She didn’t want to say it out loud. She was embarrassed that she even thought it, and waited for Lauren to lecture her about being a strong woman. Instead, Lauren finished her drink, crushed an ice cube in her teeth, and said, “All the time.”
“I’m exhausted,” Lauren said. She was on two kickball teams, a softball team, and was an alternate for a beach volleyball league. “I have scabs all over my legs,” she said, pulling up her pants. “Look! Look at this!”
“I don’t think the summer of yes should be taken so literally,” Isabella said. “It’s not like you have to do everything people ask.”
“Yes, I do,” Lauren said. “That’s what I set out to do, and now I have to follow through. I just didn’t know that everyone was going to ask me to be on so many intramural teams. Am I that athletic?”
“Not really.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Isabella met a guy selling art at a street fair on the Upper East Side. “I’m just trying to make a living doing what I do,” he said. “I’m trying to perfect my craft.”
He was handsome, and so when he asked her to hang out, she said okay. “I will ignore his weirdness,” she told herself. “I will not be judgmental. This is the summer of yes.” She gave him her number and he called the next day.
“A friend of mine from art school is having a party in Greenpoint. You want to go? You can bring some of your girls if you want.”
“Yes,” Isabella said. She hung up and went to Lauren’s apartment to beg her to come with.
“Please?” she asked. “Please? For the sake of the summer of yes?”
“Fine,” Lauren said. “But if anyone there asks me to play on any teams, then I’m saying no.”
“Fair enough. Oh, and it’s also a costume party,” Isabella said quickly.
Lauren stared at her. “What kind of costume party?”
“Um, so Kirk kind of explained it as that—well, um, okay. So, what everyone is going to do is dress up as their spirit animal.”
“Isabella, are you serious?”
“Yeah. He kind of sprung it on me at the end.”
“He sounds like a freak,” Lauren said.
“Yeah, he might be.”
“I hate the summer of yes,” Lauren said.
“I don’t think I have a spirit animal,” Isabella said.
Lauren ended up making out with a guy at the party who was wearing a green sweatsuit and shamrock antlers. “What are you?” Lauren asked him when they walked in.
“I’m the spirit animal of St. Patrick’s Day,” he said.
“That’s really stupid,” she answered.
“That’s what I’m going for,” he said. Twenty minutes later, they were grinding on the dance floor and Lauren was wearing his shamrock antlers.
Kirk was dressed up as a deer. “I’m gentle inside,” he told Isabella. She wanted to hit him with a car.
“What are you?” he asked her.
“A bunny,” she said.
“That’s your spirit animal?”
“No, it’s just the costume I had.”
“Isabella, do you mind if I make an observation?”
“Go for it.”
“You strike me as a closed-off person.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“That’s too bad,” Isabella said. She watched Lauren and tried to gauge how much longer she would have to stay.
“Would you like to have dinner with me?” Kirk asked.
Isabella thought for a moment. “Absolutely not,” she said.
Isabella decided to quit her job at the mailing-list company. “I don’t even understand what I do,” she would say when people asked her to explain her job. “I organize lists, okay?”
The thing about this job was that Isabella was good at it. She had been promoted three times since she’d started. “I am now an account manager,” she told Mary. “I am an account manager of a mailing-list company.”
“It’s a good job,” Mary said. “Your salary