Evvie Drake Starts Over(58)
In the afternoon, she sat in the tub, shaving and trimming various zones with a precision she’d previously associated with building ships in bottles, then slathering everything with lotion. Wishing she’d had a pedicure, she scraped at her softened heels with a pumice stone and sprayed her feet with a peppermint foot spray.
Out of the tub, she wrapped up in a robe and went downstairs, where she ate a peanut butter sandwich in her bare feet and tried to relax. In September it would be two years since Tim had died, which meant she hadn’t had any sex of any kind in even longer than that, and she hadn’t had any with anyone except Tim, ever. She hadn’t thought about it all that much until recently—it was part of widowhood, part of not being a wife anymore, and it was all wrapped up with her other questions about what she should do now that everything she’d planned originally and also everything she’d planned as her escape had evaporated.
She remembered wondering in that first December whether this meant that she would never have sex again. What if nobody else had any interest? What if she just didn’t feel like it, forever? What if there was a rule she hadn’t read that required her to abstain until Tim’s parents died? What if the town passed a resolution to encase her in glass and prop her up in front of the post office as her late husband’s memorial installation?
It was sometime after the peanut butter sandwich when she decided to do something stupid. She opened her laptop and googled “Dean Tenney girlfriend.” Then she clicked on “Images.”
“Oh, fuuuuu-uuuuu-ck,” she said softly. She’d known about Melanie Kopps, the actress he’d been seen with right before the end of his career. She was a redhead, with super-pale skin and eyebrows that looked like she won them playing poker with Audrey Hepburn’s ghost. In one picture, she clung to Dean’s arm in a green dress that plunged almost to her waist, which was to say almost to what there was of her waist. But here, too, was a picture of Dean with a professional surfer, who was blond with powerful shoulders and a splash of freckles. And then Dean with a singer named Bev Bo, who was famous for mixing gentle vocals with an electric cello. She was also really, really beautiful, with dark skin and gorgeous black hair.
Evvie slammed the computer shut and went to the bathroom mirror. She had two acne scars on her forehead. She had one slightly dark spot of undetermined origin on her cheek that a dermatologist had assured her was not lying in wait to kill her. Her nose was slightly crooked, and her front teeth were, too. Through the robe, she poked herself in the softness of her belly with all her fingers. She put her hands on the sides of her waist and sucked in her breath. She had tree-trunk legs, according to a girl who’d been briefly in her class in ninth grade, and while she’d always been reasonably satisfied with her boobs, they already weren’t quite as satisfactory as they’d been when she was twenty.
Evvie leaned in close to the mirror. She picked up tweezers from a little silver tray and squinted. As always, tweezing her left eyebrow made her sneeze, but she cleaned up the space between her brows, the parts where little straggler hairs kind of disorganizedly wandered toward her temples, and some that just didn’t belong where they were, like calves somehow separated from the herd. She rubbed her face with a cream cleanser, hoping it wasn’t the kind with plastic beads that were bad for dolphins or turtles or whatever it was, and she followed it with a moisturizer that promoted itself as “revitalizing.” She hadn’t yet turned to “anti-aging,” but she figured “revitalizing” was for over thirty and under forty, “anti-aging” was for over forty and under seventy, and then when you were seventy, you just told everybody to fuck off. She put three drops of an eye serum under each eye, because eye skin was apparently not made of regular skin, and she slicked her lips with a balm she suspected was secretly made in the same factory as ChapStick, but at the end of the mixing process, instead of pouring it into a tube, they poured it into a little round plastic thing, added a drop of vanilla, and sold it for sixteen dollars.
Her hair had a natural curl to it, which she’d battled intermittently for a few years in high school after she overheard her grandmother Ashton telling her exhausted father that he ought to do something about “that rat’s nest.” Aw, Gran, rest her soul, preferably in a highly judgmental salon waiting area forever and ever. Sometimes Evvie blew her hair out straight when she was dressing up—back when she dressed up, that is—but if she did it now, it would look like she was trying too hard, wouldn’t it? The idea here was to look like she happened to be a sex goddess, not like she spent the entire day on it. So she settled for a curl-taming lotion and hoped for the best.
And then, to the closet. She picked through a drawer full of jeans until she found her nicest and darkest ones, the straight-leg pair that she considered the most flattering. She put them on the bed and started sifting through hangers in her closet. She had a black slouchy top with a ribbed waistband, and a black wrap top that tied at the side, and a lightweight short-sleeved sweater. Without knowing where they were going, it seemed awfully hard to pick. The idea was to achieve a result that was only possible with sustained effort, but without giving the appearance of any effort at all. She could not look like she was not trying. She could not look like she was trying.
She pulled out the sweater and laid it on the bed. But what about a whole different approach? What if she wore her Decemberists concert shirt? Wouldn’t that be casual? Wouldn’t that be effortless? He’d come home, and she’d be padding around the kitchen in her—no, that would be different jeans, and not nice enough for dinner, and for the love of God, she thought, just pick something. So she slipped out of the robe and shimmied into the black underwear and wiggled everything that belonged in it into the black bra, and then she slipped on the jeans and the sweater and gave her hair a toss. She was almost done. Almost.