Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [8]
On the altar, mini Mary said something to Caroline and then petted her as though she were a real cow. Caroline stared at the doll in the manger and Isabella felt something like jealousy. After the pageant, they all walked out into the cold air, their breath making white clouds as they wished everyone they saw a Merry Christmas, and Isabella thought that it didn’t feel like Christmas at all. All the kids went to their own houses to wait for Santa, and in her bed that night, Isabella missed the sound of other people’s breathing.
Back in New York, everything was cold and slushy. “At least the snow was pretty for a minute or two, right?” Isabella asked Mary. Mary just shook her head and closed her door. She had a head cold and new classes to deal with.
Ben was around less and less, and when they were together they seemed to squabble. “Don’t put all your chickens in one pot,” Kristi advised her. “That boy wasn’t for you anyway.” She said it with such authority that Isabella almost believed her.
Isabella got knee-high rubber boots to wear on her walk to work. When she’d first seen people wearing these, she’d thought they were just trying to be cute, but now she realized they were necessary for the three-foot-wide puddles of dirty, cold water that surrounded the curbs and gathered in the streets.
Sharon had decided to go on a diet for New Year’s, and so the muffin game got more complicated. “Are you sure?” Isabella would have to say. “I can’t believe you’re on a diet,” she would sometimes add. The one morning she didn’t get a chocolate chip muffin, Sharon made her file clients by their Social Security numbers. Isabella never made that mistake again.
Even with her boots, Isabella’s feet always felt wet and cold. The heat in their apartment was on full blast, and there was nothing they could do to turn it down. They had to keep the windows open to avoid suffocating, and Isabella was always afraid that the pigeon would come back. At night, she woke up in the apartment sweaty and dehydrated, flapping her arms to protect herself from imaginary birds.
It seemed like spring would never come, but it did. And mysteriously, Ben started appearing more and more. He offered no explanation of where he had been all those nights when she’d tried to call him. He just showed up all the time again, wearing his white baseball hat, smiling and laughing, buying her drinks, dancing, and waking up in her bed.
“What do you think happened?” Isabella asked.
Mary shrugged. “Maybe he was hibernating,” she suggested.
Isabella was promoted at work, and a new assistant was hired to get muffins for Bill and Sharon. When Isabella was training the new girl, Bill said to her, “You have some big shoes to fill. This one here was a dynamo.” He put his hand on Isabella’s shoulder, and she could smell onions. She hoped the odor wouldn’t stay on her sweater. Sharon wished her luck, shook her hand, and gave her a card that had an office full of monkeys on it. On the inside of the card it said, “We’ll miss you at this zoo!” Isabella moved to the floor above and didn’t see any of them much. Sometimes she found herself at the bakery downstairs about to buy muffins before she realized she didn’t have to do that anymore. She thought of Sharon saying, “Oh, I couldn’t,” as Isabella placed the muffin on her desk, and she hoped the new girl understood the rules and remembered what to do.
Mary started her summer internship at a law firm downtown, but at least she was more willing to go out at night. At Gamekeepers, over a game of Scrabble, she told Isabella that she’d be moving out in the fall.
“I need my own place,” she said. “I love living with you, but I have to study all the time. Plus, I should live closer to campus. And you don’t want to live all the way up there.”
“I know,” Isabella said. “I’m distracting.”
Isabella found a one-bedroom apartment on the West Side. She was sad not to be living with Mary anymore, but the new apartment had screens, so that was something.
The last night in the