Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [90]
Her mom had left them to it, let them carry the bowl to the upstairs bathroom and dump Rudy in the toilet. Her dad had started to carry the bowl to the downstairs bathroom, but her mom yelled at him, “That’s the guest bathroom.” She said it like he was crazy, like everyone knew you weren’t supposed to flush fish in guest bathrooms. She shook her head and said, “Take him upstairs.”
“Do you want to do it?” her dad asked, and Lauren shook her head. He looked relieved and pressed the flusher. They stood next to each other and watched little Rudy go round and round.
Lauren didn’t cry during the flushing, and she was embarrassed when her dad hugged her good-bye. But that day in school, during a spelling test, tears began to fall out of her eyes. She was mortified. You didn’t cry in sixth grade. Lauren especially didn’t cry in sixth grade. She was tough. But as the teacher read the words “Submarine, crystallized, immigrant,” Lauren’s tears dropped onto the page and made a mess of her test. She felt awful that Rudy had died. She couldn’t even remember if she had checked on her the night before or not. What if Rudy had been dying all night? The tears came faster, sliding in one motion down her cheeks and falling with a plop on her paper. Finally she raised her hand and didn’t wait for her teacher to say anything before getting up and going to the bathroom, where she locked herself in a stall and cried until her friend Lizbeth was sent to check on her.
She told the whole class that she’d had an allergic reaction to the kind of cereal she’d eaten for breakfast that morning. It was a reaction, she said, that gave her a sudden pain so bad that she cried. When Tina Bloom suggested that Lauren’s story was a lie, because her dad was an allergist and she’d never heard of such a thing, Lauren told her she was stupid and, above all, mean for not having more sympathy, and none of the girls in the class talked to Tina for a week.
On their tenth date, Mark told Lauren he never wanted to live with someone else.
“Never?” Lauren asked.
“Never,” he said. He didn’t sound sorry about it. Lauren wasn’t sure that she ever wanted to live with anyone else either, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you said aloud. It was something that you kept to yourself, knowing that if you ever found yourself seriously dating someone or getting married, that you would just do it. Because that’s what people did.
“So, what’s your plan?” Lauren asked.
“My plan for what?”
“I mean, let’s say you meet someone one day and get married. Separate residences?”
“Maybe,” Mark said. “One uptown and one downtown? Or maybe just two separate apartments that join together somehow?” He was lost in thought and Lauren was horrified for him. It was like on their fifth date, when he’d tied a windbreaker around his waist and had no idea that he should be embarrassed as they walked around the Central Park Zoo.
“Maybe you’ll change your mind someday,” Lauren said finally. She wanted him to stop thinking about it.
“Maybe,” Mark said. “But I doubt it. I don’t like other people touching my stuff.”
Lauren met the Kansas City couple on their closing day. The wife was wearing a plaid dress and a headband. “Congratulations!” Lauren said. “You’re going to love New York.”
The couple walked around the empty apartment and Lauren recommended a cleaning service they could use if they wanted to get it scrubbed down before they moved their furniture in. She found the wife standing in front of the new wall that had been put up to make the second bedroom.
“Is everything okay?” Lauren asked.
The wife smiled at her. “I just never pictured myself here, you know?”
“Yes,” Lauren said. “I know how that goes.”
On their fourteenth date, Lauren brought Mark over to Mary’s apartment for dinner. Mary and Isabella had been hounding her. “It’s really weird that we haven’t met him yet,” they’d kept telling her. “Fine,” she’d said. “Fine, we’ll come to dinner.”
Henry took an immediate liking to Mark. Henry always chose the person who paid him the least attention