Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [3]
Sometimes, if she was lucky, Isabella could convince Mary to go out. They usually just went to Gamekeepers, the bar right down the street. “Come on,” Isabella would say. “It’s so close! We can be there in two minutes and have a drink and be home in an hour.” She always hoped, of course, that once they got there Mary would stay out later, but getting her out was the first step.
Gamekeepers was a brightly lit bar, with neon signs on the walls and a black-and-white tiled floor. In the back room, there was a whole wall of bookshelves crammed full of every board game ever made. The first night that Isabella and Mary went there, they stood in front of the wall and stared at all of the games. The bar had all of the big hits—Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly—and some older games too, like Operation, Boggle, Life, and Sorry!
“Whoa,” Mary said, as they stared at the shelves. “This is crazy.” All around them, people were playing games on long wooden tables, rolling dice and slapping cards.
“Oh my God,” Isabella said. She pulled a box off the shelf. “Look, they have Pig Mania. I can’t believe it.”
“What is that?” Mary asked. She looked at the box.
“It’s this game, from the seventies, I think. You roll pig dice and get scores for different things.”
“Weird,” Mary said.
“The seventies were weird,” Isabella said. “Come on, let’s play.”
They rolled the pigs, but Isabella could tell that Mary wasn’t into it. Two guys came over to join them, which was encouraging at first, but then they started snorting and squealing when the pigs rolled into any position that looked dirty. “I got Makin’ Bacon!” Isabella screamed, and they just snorted louder. One of them was so drunk that he kept swaying and bumping into the table, causing their drinks to spill and the pigs to topple.
“I think we should go,” Mary said. She stared at one of the snorters. “I have to get up early to study anyway.”
“Fine,” Isabella said. She surrendered the pigs to the boys so that they could roll them alone.
“You’re leaving?” the drunk one said. He closed his eyes and Isabella wondered if he had fallen asleep, and then he opened them and repeated his question. “You’re leaving?”
“Yeah,” Isabella said. Mary was waiting for her by the door. “I have a lot of things to do tomorrow,” she said. “Just a really busy day.”
Isabella met a boy named Ben and went on a date. She wanted something to fill her empty weekend days when Mary was studying and Kristi and Abby did things that Isabella had no interest in, like going to the gym or shopping in SoHo. Isabella went to the gym with them once, and Kristi wore earrings and a necklace while she ran on the treadmill, which bothered Isabella so much that she couldn’t ever bring herself to go back again.
“I’ve never been on a date before,” Isabella said to Mary as she got ready that night.
“You’ve been on plenty of dates,” Mary said.
“No,” Isabella said. “I’ve been out to eat with boys who were my boyfriend, but that’s not dating. That’s just parallel eating.”
Mary looked up from her books and tilted her head. “Parallel eating,” she said. “Huh. Sometimes I think you should have been a lawyer.”
Isabella and Ben starting spending a lot of time together, but he never really wanted to do anything. He was fine sitting on the couch in their apartment. “Maybe we should go out?” Isabella would suggest. “To a museum or the zoo or something?” Ben just laughed at her and patted her knee.
She and Ben went to bars with flip-cup tables and jukeboxes that played Neil Diamond. They danced on floors covered with sawdust and drank shots with clever names like Baby Guinnesses and Buttery Nipples. On the weekdays, they’d drag themselves out of bed, get bagels at the corner, and head off to work on different subways. On the weekends, they’d stay in bed for most of the day, getting up in the late afternoon to get brunch.
They mostly stayed at Isabella’s apartment, because Ben’s place smelled like ramen and feet and had a sign over the door that said “Beware Pickpockets and Loose