Big Summer(32)

I blinked.

“He’s going to make brain-food smoothies! Smoothies with organic ingredients designed to boost mental performance.”

“So, not smoothies made out of brains?”

Drue shook her head. “No brains. Just oat milk and CBD oil. Folic acid. Manganese. All that good stuff!”

Stuart hurried over. He was smiling, but his expression was vaguely alarmed. “Are you making my smoothies sound silly?”

“I’m not making them sound anything!” Drue said, snaking her arm around his waist and resting her head on his shoulder. “I’m describing them in a full and factual manner.”

“She’s making them sound silly,” Stuart said, half to me, half to himself. His smile seemed to have lost a few degrees of wattage. “They’re not. We’ve got researchers on our board. These ingredients have been scientifically proven to boost performance.”

“Mental performance,” said Drue. “Not sexual.” She nudged him. “Maybe in a year or so, we’ll roll those out.”

Stuart’s smile showed his teeth. He gave her a squeeze that looked like it might have hurt.

“Sex smoothies!” I said. My voice was too loud, too hearty, too big. “My goodness. The future is now!”

“You know it.” Stuart looked past me, over toward the door, his face lighting up as he saw someone. “Brett!” he hollered. “Hey, man, over here!”

Brett came barreling toward Stuart, arms open for a hug. As the two of them thumped chests and slapped backs, I felt my heart fall, as if someone had opened a trapdoor in my solar plexus and my insides were preparing to plummet onto the floor. I shrank backward, shot Drue a desperate look, then stood up, fast, and said, “I think I’m going to get another drink.” I hurried over to the bar, head down, with Drue right behind me.

“What?” Drue asked. “What is it? Do you know Brett?”

Did I know Brett. The previous fall, I’d finally worked up the courage to download a dating app, the one that introduced you to friends of your friends. I had not been hopeful, but the weather had turned cool, and the holidays were coming. I pictured myself walking through Central Park underneath a canopy of bright leaves, holding hands with a faceless man, or bringing someone home for Chanukah for my parents to meet. So I’d tried. I’d posted a shot of my face and had taken care to also include not just a full-body shot, but a picture where I’d posed with other women, in case potential matches wanted to compare and contrast. After rejecting “full-figured,” “plus-size,” “curvy,” and “Rubenesque,” I’d used the word “fat” as part of my description. Brett and I had exchanged phone numbers, texted for three days, and talked on the phone for two more, conversations that started off superficial—Where do you live? What do you do?—moved through personal, and tiptoed right up to the edge of racy. By the time we were ready to meet in person, he was calling me Daph, and I knew the names of his parents, his childhood dog, and his favorite book and sports team, and the story of his last relationship. He already sounded a lot more impressive, a lot more lively, than my previous beau, whose finest quality, according to Darshi, was that you barely knew he was around.

By the night we were going to meet for drinks, I was sure he was The One, the pot of gold at the end of my rainbow, the man I would marry or, at least, have fulfilling sex with. I used a Groupon to have my hair blown out and styled, and gave the girl who’d shampooed me an extra ten bucks to stick a pair of false eyelashes on my lids, a feat I could only manage about fifty percent of the time. I wore one of my favorite dresses, a form-fitting knee-length tank-style in a flattering shade of fuchsia. I got to the bar early and arranged myself at a high-top table for two, sitting very straight, with my knees pointed one way and my neck angled in the opposite direction, because, once, I’d read a model saying that the less comfortable you felt, the more natural you looked. My lipstick was perfect, and my curls were still curling. When Brett walked in, in navy-blue suit pants and a light-blue shirt, with his suit jacket hooked on two fingers and hanging over his shoulder, my heartbeat sped up. Our eyes met. I waved. He smiled.

“You must be Daphne,” he said.

“I must be.” In person, he was a little older-looking than he was in his pictures, his hair a little thinner and his teeth less bright, but who was I to complain? He was the guy whose voice I’d fallen asleep to the night before, lying in bed with the phone pressed to my ear.

He looked me over—or, at least, he looked over the parts of me that he could see. “I’m going to get a beer. What would you like?”

It was the year that everyone was drinking Aperol spritz, so that’s what I requested. I watched his back as he went toward the bar, the bald spot that had not been part of my fantasies gleaming under the bar’s pin lights. I watched as he walked past the bartender, past the people sitting at the bar, all the way to the hostess stand. I watched as he walked past the hostess. I watched as he walked out the door.

For a minute, I just sat there, stunned, numb, sad, ashamed. Angry, too. I imagined getting up and giving chase, running him down on the sidewalk, demanding to know what the fuck his problem was. Big I might be, but I was also in good shape. I didn’t think I’d have trouble catching up. Only I knew what had happened. He thought he’d known what I looked like, and that he’d be okay with it, but I’d been worse in person, worse than he’d even imagined. Besides, I couldn’t make a habit of telling guys off in bars, in a world where any random stranger could record it and put it online. Once was a novelty. Twice was a pattern. I wouldn’t be able to write about this for my blog or my Instagram stories. Not anytime soon, at least. Not while it was still so raw. It hurt. And nobody wanted unvarnished pain on their feed, unless it was served up with a side dish of uplift, or some kind of lesson—and that’s when I learned that superficial, small-minded men don’t matter, or and that’s when I realized that, if I loved myself, it didn’t matter if some jerk from Tinder didn’t want me. Maybe I’d get there in a few days, I thought, as I peeled off my fake eyelashes and began the slow trudge home.