Starting From Square Two. Caren Lissner
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and buses change every year, but if you look at a passing freight train, with its string of yellow and orange and brown boxcars, it looks the same as it did fifty years ago. And trains travel through the most historical points in the country, too. They’re like moving museums of America. But when I first saw the ad, I didn’t know if I should go to the info session. It didn’t seem like a job that people who went to college did. I tried to talk myself out of it.”
“Yeah….”
“But I realized something: I had majored in history because I loved it. And now I could look into a job I might love, too. My heart told me to go.”
“And you went,” Gert said.
“And I went. The recruiters actually try to talk you out of it. They tell you about the crazy scheduling, the long hours, the drug testing, and the hard work. But everything they said to scare us off was something that made me want to do the job more.”
“That’s great,” Gert said. “A lot of people don’t follow their heart.”
“Especially about work.”
He asked Gert where she’d grown up. She said she was from L.A., and that her parents were still there. She said she’d come east for college. She didn’t say she’d stayed and married a Bostonian, though. She told Todd that her younger brother was still in L.A., and that he’d done nothing for two years after high school and was now waiting tables. She told him about her best friend from childhood, Nancy, who lived there with a husband and two kids. She said she usually talked to her about once a week, and the same with her parents.
Todd told her that the friend she had met at the bar, Brian, was someone he’d known since elementary school. He said he only had a few close friends, but once he got along with someone, they were friends for life.
Gert realized by the time they’d finished dessert that she had gone for more than an hour without thinking of Marc. It was the first time in a year and a half that that had happened. Even when she was sleeping. She’d had a dream two days earlier, in fact, in which she was sure he was right next to her. She could even smell him. Then she awoke. She wanted to crawl back into the dream. She wanted so desperately to fall back to sleep.
When Todd asked whether she still wanted to see a movie, she was glad, because she’d been wavering on it. What she really wanted to do was find out more things about him—not sit in a theater with her mouth shut. But she wasn’t going to say that, because then he might suggest going back to his place, and that would ruin everything.
“Well,” she said, “it is pretty late.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Todd said. “I hate to be a wet blanket, but I have to go to work at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow. Could we do it another time, though?”
He wasn’t trying to get her back to his apartment! And he wanted to see her again. She hadn’t botched the date. What luck!
“Sure,” she said. “That sounds good.”
“Do you want to take a walk before we head home?”
It was bitter cold outside. He took her hand for a second, without thinking, and then let go when they got near the waterfront. “What’s out there?” he asked.
“Water,” Gert said.
He laughed. “I knew you were smart,” he said. “It looks like an island.”
“Long Island?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a bench facing the water, and they sat down. She wondered if he was going to ask The Question. At what point did guys ask women about their ex-boyfriends and past relationships? It didn’t happen on a first date, right? She wasn’t sure.
The women in her support group had talked about this: If you met someone new, at what point did you tell him that your husband had died? For the older women, it wasn’t much of an issue, because their suitors generally figured they were either divorced or widowed and asked about it. But with younger women, it wasn’t expected at all. And Gert had found that when you told someone such news, particularly young people, they often had no idea what to say. Sometimes they just stared at her, stunned. It was almost as if they were waiting for her to comfort them.
But Todd didn’t ask about Gert’s former boyfriends. He asked about her friends, her college, her dreams. He told her that he figured that someday he’d have kids, travel and see the world—not by train—and be a good person so that he’d be satisfied when he got old and looked back on his life. He said what was most important to him was to be with the people he cared about and make them happy.
He was simple, Gert thought. Much simpler than Marc.
But he was the kind of guy, she thought, that someone could fall in love with.
Gert found out Todd was younger than she was—twenty-six. Hallie had a “Rule of Twenty-Seven.” If a guy was still single after twenty-seven, she said, there must be something wrong with him. If he was decent, it was unlikely that he’d even get that far. So once a woman surpassed the age of twenty-seven, she would always be dating guys younger than her.
Todd was Gert’s brother’s age, which she found a little strange. It was like dating one of her brother’s meatheaded friends. But Todd wasn’t anything like her brother. Gert loved her brother, but he could definitely be a meathead sometimes.
They made plans to see a movie the weekend after next. Then Todd gave Gert a quick kiss on the cheek.
She could still smell his cologne and feel the brush of his stubble afterward. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed that.
Chapter
3
“You can’t start dating the first person you meet,” Hallie said.
They were at a dingy coffee shop on the Upper West Side, near Hallie’s apartment.
“Did Brian say anything about me?” Erika asked Gert. “I don’t want to date him…I just want to know why he didn’t like me.”
“I’ll ask the Saturday after next,” Gert said, feeling suddenly tired of Erika. She elected to forget the “big hair” comment.
“But you were supposed to come to a party with us on that Saturday!” Hallie said. “You can’t go out with him that day. Can’t you see Todd on Sunday?”
“He’s working on Sunday,” Gert said. “He’s working for a week straight after that.”
“Now she knows his schedule,” Erika said.
“They’ll have to have their wedding when he’s not on call,” Hallie said.
“They won’t be able to have alcohol at the reception,” Erika said, “because Todd can’t drink.”
“Then I’m not coming,” Hallie said. “How can a single girl get through a friend’s wedding without alcohol?”
“Will you guys stop!” Gert said. “We’re not getting married.”
“You act like it.”
“You know, all the two of you do is complain,” Gert said. “It almost seems like you’re upset that I spent an evening with someone nice.”
There was silence.
“You know we just want you to be happy,” Hallie said.
“Yeah,” Erika said. “We know what guys are like. We don’t want you to get hurt.”
Gert didn’t want that either. But sometimes it hurt to get up in the morning. Whatever was coming couldn’t be much worse.
Every other Christmas, Gert and Marc had stayed with Marc’s parents in their huge warm house in Massachusetts, where all four brothers had grown up. Gert loved that house. It held oodles of guestrooms, a fireplace