Lisa Cach - Dating Without Novocaine

We repeated the mantra at the end of the class, Sapphire gave us a homework assignment of watching for circularity in our daily lives, and then Cassie and I were out the door and headed to the car. Sapphire’s house and dance studio were a few miles east of Portland, where suburbs give over to pockets of country, and we could hear a concert of frogs croaking in the spring night air.

“So what’s with that blue rhinestone Sapphire had glued between her eyebrows?” I asked Cassie as we were driving home.

“I knew I shouldn’t have brought you. You’re going to make cracks about this for the next week and a half, aren’t you?”

She knew me well. “And how about those little dots and diamonds beside her eyes? Suppose she used organic eyeliner to draw them? I mean, what are they supposed to signify? They make her look like a playing card.”

“You don’t have to come again.”

“I don’t think my chakra got any looser.”

“It’s not the only thing about you that’s blocked,” Cassie said, and turned on the radio so she wouldn’t have to listen to me yak.

The dance lesson hadn’t been a complete waste of time. Watching pervert-boyfriend woman move with sensuous grace, I’d imagined her fat-folded belly transformed from a disfiguring burden into some sort of symbolic representation of Mother Earth, ample and giving. Despite the woman’s lousy taste in men, the flowing way she moved showed she was in tune with herself in a way I decidedly was not.

I didn’t want to admit that to Cassie, though—it went against the firm stand I had taken against New Age flakiness and vegetarianism. I also didn’t want to tell her that while looking at myself in the mirror amid those other women, I’d realized I was neither as fat nor as tall as I’d thought I was. I was altogether smaller than in my own mind, and I didn’t know if that said something good or bad about the inner me.

It occurred to me that I had been unfairly obnoxious about the class in my quest to not admit to kind of liking it. “Sorry, Cass,” I said above the noise of the radio. I had been making fun of her religion, after all. “Want to stop at Safeway and pick up some Ben & Jerry’s? I’ll treat.”

“Cherry Garcia?”

“And Chunky Monkey.”

“Kewl.”

That was the great thing about Cassie. She never held on to her pique, and any difficulty could be smoothed over and forgotten with a bit of ice cream. A girl could do worse in a housemate, and the Goddess knew I had.

I’d known Cassie since my first year of college, down in Eugene at the University of Oregon. Three years older than me, she’d already been at the school off and on for four years when we met. She’d joked she was on the five-year plan, then a year later, on the six. She finally abandoned all pretense of finishing her degree in sociology and turned her talents to her boyfriend’s scented-candle business. She’d spend her Saturdays sitting in a stall at Eugene’s open air market, candles arrayed around her, a book on how to awaken your intuition in her hand. To the right had been a booth selling incense, to the left one selling little pewter sculptures of dragons and wizards holding crystals.

When the boyfriend started dipping his wick in wax pots other than her own, Cassie moved up to Portland and went to work at Shannon’s Pub as a bartender. She’d been working there ever since. Sometimes she sent away for brochures for career training programs, but they sat on the coffee table gathering dust and crumbs, until finally three or four months down the line, during one of our rare cleaning binges, I’d hold them up in question, she’d shrug, and they’d get tossed into the recycling bin.

She swung her hips to a wild and foreign drum, did Cassie, and I couldn’t decide if I admired her for it, or wished she’d grow up and join the same concrete world as the rest of us.

Well, most of the rest of us. Sapphire and the woman who held psychic tête-à-têtes with her dog obviously lived in another realm entirely.

Later that night, as we sat on the futon eating ice cream and watching TV, a question slipped out that by all rights should have stayed tucked behind my lips. Maybe it was something about the dance class that had stirred it up. I don’t know.

“Are you happy, Cass?” I asked, as on TV a woman with an ultra-white smile held up a tube of toothpaste.

Her slanted, lovely eyes glanced at me, the light from the television reflecting off them in the half dark of the living room. “Happy? What do you mean? Right now, at this moment?” She held her spoon motionless above her container of Cherry Garcia.

“Happy with your life, with how it’s going. Is this where you expected you would be, when you became an adult?” I thought it came out sounding judgmental, as if I had decided already that she was not showing the proper drive and ambition of any self-respecting American. But the question wasn’t truly directed at her, and she sensed it.

“Aren’t you happy?” she asked me, and if there was a Goddess, she seemed to be looking at me with infinite compassion from Cassie’s eyes.

I felt tears start in my own, taking me by surprise, and I tightened my lips against the sudden quivering there.

“Oh, sweetie,” Cassie said as the X-Files theme started whistling in the background. “It’ll be all right. You expect too much of yourself, is all.”

“But…” I blubbered, a vast blackness of want seeping up from the dark depths, the ice cream in my hand a cold and empty comfort. “But there’s so much I—”

“So much you thought you’d have by now? Husband, children, SUV, golden retriever? A house in the west hills?”

“A Volvo, not an SUV—”

“Hannah, you’re so predictable,” Cassie said, and somehow her gently sardonic tone was comforting. “Everyone thinks they’re supposed to want those things, but I don’t think you really do.”

“Yes I do. Especially the husband.”

“If you were ready, you’d have one. Maybe right now you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.”

I looked down at my Chunky Monkey. “You think so?”

“It’s your sewing business that matters to you. That’s why you moved up to Portland to begin with. Concentrate on that, and let the universe handle the rest in its own time.”

I wished I had her faith that all would come right in the end. It seemed to come so easily to her, so naturally. I never saw Cassie worry about anything. “Can’t I have a little of the rest right now? Like a boyfriend?” I asked.

“He’ll come when you’re ready.” She smiled. “In the meantime, there’s David Duchovny.”

I looked at the screen, where Mulder and Scully were arguing in a repeat episode, and sniffed back the remainder of my weepy self-pity. “I don’t want him.”

“Why not? I’d do him.”

“He never smiles,” I said.

“You don’t want a guy to be grinning while he’s got your legs over his shoulders. Talk about creepy.” She shuddered, and I gave a small laugh, glad of the change of topic and of mood.

“Can’t be much worse than how they usually look.” I squeezed my eyes shut and groaned as though I was in pain, straining out the words, “I’m coming, I’m coming! I’m almost there… Can I come? Can I come now?”

“They ask you that?”

“One of my ex-boyfriends used to.”

“Did you let him?” Cassie asked.

“Depends how long he’d been going at it. Past a certain point, I just wanted him to get it over with. I started thinking about urinary tract infections.”

Cassie winced, and I knew both our minds had gone to the unopened jug of cranberry juice in the cupboard, kept there in case of emergency.

“Maybe it’s for the best that your sex chakra is blocked up,” Cassie said.