Big Summer(8)
Mostly, my life was in a holding pattern. I spent most of my spare time exercising, counting calories or points, weighing food, desperate to transform myself, to find the thin woman I just knew had to be living somewhere inside me. My only non-dieting activity was crafting. My mother was an artist and an art teacher and, over the years, with her tutelage and on my own, I’d mastered knitting, crocheting, embroidery, and decoupage, anything I could learn to make something beautiful with my hands. Needle felting was my favorite: I would stab my needle into the clump of wool, over and over and over, each thrust a perfectly directed excision of my anger (plus, the motion burned calories). When I was sixteen, I’d set up an online shop on Etsy where I sold my scarves and purses, embellished birdhouses and stuffed felted pigeons and giraffes, and a blog and an Instagram page and a YouTube channel where I’d showcase my work to the few dozen people who wanted to see it. I never showed myself, not my face or my body. I told myself, As soon as I lose twenty pounds. Twenty-five pounds. Forty pounds. Fifty. As soon as I can shop in normal stores and not have to buy plus sizes; as soon as I’m not ashamed to be seen in shorts or a tank top or a swimsuit. Then I will go dancing. Swimming. To the beach. Then I’ll take a yoga class, take a plane, take a trip around the world. Then I’ll download those dating apps and start meeting new people. But that one night, I felt so tired of waiting, so tired of hiding, that I let the girl I thought was my best friend talk me into meeting her for drinks and dancing.
I’d dressed with special care, in my best-fitting pair of black jeans and a black top, slightly low-cut, to show off my cleavage, hoping that the black would be slimming and that the boobs would distract any man who looked my way from the rest of me. Years of practice had given me the ability to blow-dry and straighten my medium-brown hair and apply my makeup without ever actually looking at myself in the mirror. My minimizing bra had underwires; my shoes had a little bit of a heel; I wore Spanx underneath my jeans; and I’d contoured believable shadows beneath my cheekbones. I felt okay—not good, but okay—as I met my best friend, Drue, and her friends Ainsley and Avery on the sidewalk. The three of them had squealed their approval. “Daphne, you look hot!” Drue said. Of course, Drue looked stunning, like an Amazon at Fashion Week, with red-soled stilettos adding three inches to her height, leather leggings clinging to her toned thighs, and a cropped gray sweater showing just a flash of her midriff.
There was a line out the door at Dive 75. Drue ignored it, sauntering up to the bouncer and whispering in his ear. I had my fake ID clutched in my sweaty hand, but the bouncer didn’t even ask to see it as he waved us inside.
We found a high-top table with four tippy barstools in the corner of the bar. Drue ordered a round of lemon drops. “The first—and last—drinks we’ll be paying for tonight,” she said with a wink. Lemon drops weren’t on the list of low-calorie cocktails that I’d memorized that afternoon, but I sipped mine gratefully. The vodka was icy-cold, tart and sweet, the grains of sugar around the rim crunched between my teeth. The bar was dark and cozy, with booths and couches in the back, where people were eating nachos and playing Monopoly and Connect 4. One drink became two, and two became three. With my friends by my side and the music all around me, I was happy and relaxed, as comfortable as a girl with wire digging into her breasts and heavy-duty elastic cutting into her midsection could be, when Drue whispered, “Daphne, don’t look, but I think you have an admirer.”
Immediately, I turned around, peering into the dark. “Don’t look!” Drue said, fake-punching me and giggling. Right behind us was a table of four guys, and one of them, a young man in a dark-blue pullover with red hair and freckles, was, indeed, looking right at me. Behind me, Drue waved. “Lake! Lake Spencer! Oh my God!”
“You know him?” I asked as the guys crowded around us, dragging their chairs and pushing their table up against ours.
Drue took the guy’s hand. “Lake is one of my brother Trip’s friends. Lake, this is Daphne. Daphne’s one of my best friends.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” said Lake, nodding at my empty glass. “Get you another one of those?”
I thought of the poem attributed to Dorothy Parker: “I like to have a martini Two at the very most Three and I’m under the table / Four and I’m under the host.” “Sure,” I said, feeling reckless, as Drue nodded her approval. The guy disappeared, and Drue wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “He likes you,” she whisper-shouted in my ear.
“He just met me,” I protested.
“But he was checking you out,” Drue said, and hiccupped. “He’s into you. I can tell. When he comes back, ask him to dance!”
I cringed. Across the table, Ainsley and Avery were chatting with two young men, while two more were staring at Drue, clearly impatient for her to finish up with me and pay attention to them. Then Lake was back, with my drink in his hand. I took a gulp and slid off my stool, hoping I looked graceful, or at least not like a blubbery trained seal sliding off its box after its trainer had tossed it a herring. The music was so loud I could feel my bones vibrate. “Want to dance?” I hollered at him, and he gave me a thumbs-up and a smile.
On the dance floor, I quickly discovered that Lake’s version of dancing was hopping up and down at a pace that had no relation to the beat. Oh, well, I thought as we started to shout our biographies into each other’s faces. I learned that he was a senior at Williams, studying philosophy, that he and his family spent their summers in the Hamptons, near Drue and her family, and that not only was he friends with Trip, his sister and Drue had been debutantes together. Lake’s skin was milky-white under splotches of dark freckles; his nose was a sharp blade with flaring nostrils. His reddish hair was thick and wiry, full of cowlicks, the kind of hair that wouldn’t stay in place, no matter how carefully it had been cut, and when his face relaxed it assumed an expression just short of a smirk. Not cute. But who was I to judge? He seemed interested in what I had to say, or at least he was acting interested, and I hadn’t noticed his attention straying to any of the prettier girls on the dance floor. We danced, and talked—or, mostly, Lake talked and I listened—and I wondered what would happen as the clock ticked down toward closing time, and the moment when the bartender would inevitably holler, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!”