Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [70]
As the night went on, the grown-ups would gather on the porch and the lawn, drinking vodka tonics or beers. On that night, instead of their usual jeans and chino shorts and tennis skirts, they’d get dressed up, the men in button-down shirts and jackets, and the women in Lilly Pulitzer skirts or sundresses that left their tanned arms and shoulders bare. Some of them still smoked back then, and I remembered looking at the lit cigarettes bobbing and darting like fireflies, music coming from a CD player plugged in on the porch, the sound of their laughter, and how I would think, This is how I want it to be when I grow up.
Darren and I met at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. Where else, I thought wearily, would a committed hipster take a girl for lunch? He’d already staked out a bench when I arrived and was waving at me, wearing his glasses, khakis, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, checked blue-and-white, which looked like it had been swiped from some homeless man’s closet. I was in my usual office wear, an A-line black cotton skirt, a plum-colored boatneck sweater with three pearl buttons at each sleeve, low-heeled shoes, and a gold necklace. “Chocolate? Vanilla?” Darren asked, holding out two cups. “The line gets crazy, so I bought one of each.” He’d also gotten two cheeseburgers with everything and an order of fries.
He opened the paper sack, and we spread our lunch on our laps. Darren took a big bite of cheeseburger and sighed happily, the way a man with his mouth full of meat will, as I removed the lettuce and tomato from my own burger with my fingertips and set them aside before carefully peeling away the cheese.
“Oh, come on,” he said as I took a small bite. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those rabbit-food girls.”
I didn’t bother to respond. For years, I’d read those “Make the Most of Your Figure!” articles, the ones that told you how to dress if you were a pear or an hourglass or an inverted triangle, and I’d used all the tips they’d recommend to try to balance my narrow shoulders and flat chest with my wide hips and heavy thighs, but I wasn’t sure whether any of it did much good. Nor did dieting help. I’d done the rounds with that in high school, two weeks of grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs, a stint on Weight Watchers sophomore year and another on Jenny Craig when I was a junior. When I started college I’d tried a few of my roommate Vanessa’s diet pills, but all they did was give me a permanent headache and make my mouth feel like it was crammed full of cotton. Each time I’d lose ten or fifteen pounds, but it never changed my essential imbalance, the way that my body looked like one woman’s torso grafted onto another woman’s bottom.
“I think you look fine,” said Darren, eyeing me slowly, up and down. His ridiculous glasses bobbled on his cheeks as he raised his eyebrows. “Nice gams.”
I yanked at my skirt. “Nice gams? What are you, Raymond Chandler?”
“I am a detective,” he said, and poked a straw through the top of a waxed-paper cup, sucking down his chocolate shake with a noise that sounded like a clogged toilet finally managing a flush.
“I just like to eat things one at a time,” I explained.
He looked at my lap, where I’d arrayed the burger, the bun, the cheese, the lettuce, and the tomato, each in its own place on the white waxed paper. “Is that, like, a condition?”
“Habit.” I took another bite of the burger, holding it carefully with the pads of my fingertips.
He wolfed down his own lunch in half a dozen jaw-distending bites while I looked him over. He was a rangy guy with broad shoulders and thick legs, full lips and a cleft chin and a surprisingly dainty nose. Thick eyebrows, light eyes, pale skin, and an unlined brow that made him look