Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [35]
After Preston broke up with her, Lauren started going to the park during the day. All of her friends worked in offices and she couldn’t stand to be in her apartment alone. She would go to the park and lie on the grass, waiting for the day to be over so that she could start her shift at the restaurant. She liked watching the clouds. She liked the way they always kept moving, even if it was so slowly that you couldn’t tell which way they were going.
Lauren bought a book about weather and learned the names of the clouds. She would chant them under her breath as she looked up: “Cumulus, stratus, cirrus, pileus.” She learned everything she could about clouds to fill up her time. She learned that cirrus was a Latin root meaning curl of hair. “Cirrus,” she’d whisper, standing behind Preston, staring at his hair. “What?” he’d say. “Nothing,” she’d answer. Her favorite cloud was cumulonimbus. It sounded like a magic word. It sounded like something dirty.
Her friends were concerned that she was going crazy. “You should quit your job,” Shannon told her.
“Yeah,” Isabella agreed. “Don’t make yourself sick over this guy. He’s just a dirty bartender.”
“A dirty sexy bartender,” Lauren said.
Shannon nodded sadly. “Yeah, he is. You should definitely quit.”
Preston walked in late for the lunch shift and slid behind the bar to start cutting fruit. Lauren raised her eyebrows at him from across the room, where she was rolling silverware. “You’re late,” she said to him.
“Really, my dear?” Preston asked. “I thought I was right on time.” Preston was a person who got away with saying things like “my dear” to girls he’d just dumped. Lauren hated him for this.
“Late night?” Lauren asked. “You look like shit.” Preston laughed because he knew he didn’t and tucked in his shirt.
Carly, the other waitress, burst in and threw her bag down before running to the bathroom. On Lauren’s first day of work, Carly had told her that she had a tattoo of a lawn mower on her pubic bone. “See, the lawn mower is right here,” she said, touching the space right above her crotch. “And then I shave the hair in front of it to make it look like it mowed a path. Upkeep’s a bitch, but guys love it. Want to see it?”
“No thanks,” Lauren said. “Maybe another time.”
Lauren was sure that she would die young. Maybe she would get a tumor or die in a freak subway accident. More likely, she would be murdered by a serial killer. Dateline would do a special and interview everyone at the restaurant. “She was a pretty nice girl,” Carly would say. Maybe she would offer to show the cameraman her tattoo. Preston would pretend to be upset, but would really be excited at the thought of being on TV. “We dated,” he would tell them. “She was a special girl,” he would say, and then look down for dramatic effect.
People who knew Lauren from college would watch this and wonder what the hell happened to her. They would ask each other why Lauren was hanging out with Ms. Lawn Mower Tattoo and Mr. STD Bartender. They would be sad for the way things turned out for her, and then they would turn off the television and forget about it.
Lauren tried to go out with her friends and have a normal social life. She would meet them after her shift ended and pretend that she wasn’t exhausted and didn’t smell like hamburger meat. She told herself that she needed to keep doing this.
“I have to find a real job,” she would tell her friends.
“So find one,” they would say. They didn’t understand. They talked about e-mail programs and corporate retreats. They compared health plans and 401(k)s and Lauren felt lonely.
Carly came out of the bathroom and asked Preston for a glass of cranberry juice. “I have a UTI,” she confided to Lauren. Lauren just nodded and continued to roll the silverware.
“It’s that new guy I’m seeing. I can’t get enough!” Carly bumped her hip against Lauren’s as though they were old friends, two gossiping gals trading sex stories.
Lauren excused herself from the UTI talk to go back to the manager’s office. She had requested next weekend off and wanted to make sure