Eye to Eye Read online

  What he thought I meant was the fight we’d had the week before. It started out innocently enough. I’d bought a fabulous vintage piece of lingerie off of eBay, in which I felt very Marilyn. It was a baby-doll slip-type piece in sheer pink. Nothing kiddie-porn, but still naughty enough to be nice. And did Zach, the überhippie of my dreams, even notice? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. He took one look at me and said, “Jesus, you trying to look like Mrs. Roper?” Then he tried to recover with: “You know I just like you naked, baby.” To which I responded, “Of course you do, it requires the least amount of effort.”

  So much for a sexy evening. I then proceeded to turn into someone’s mother, yelling things like “YOU HAVE TO FINISH YOUR DISSERTATION.” In a pink nightgown. In false eyelashes. I was going for a look. “YOU CAN’T QUIT AND OPEN SOME STUPID MOVIE THEATER.” Just plain mean of me—stomping on the however ludicrous dreams of another.

  Our final weeks together in Langsdale didn’t do much to repair any of the damage. And my last night in town felt more like the last night before an execution. Painful and full of dread.

  “He’s still staying here in Indiana,” I said to Ronnie, sloshing around my watered-down Jack and Coke and lone cube of ice. “I think we might have technically broken up last night. But it was such a horrific conversation that I refuse to go back in and clarify. I think that when I get to Atlanta, I’m trading in the whole men thing for a dog. Something I can properly accessorize that leaves me alone when I’m trying to write poetry and shuts up as long as it’s fed.”

  “You think that a dog’ll do that?” Earl asked, laughing. “Poor dog!”

  Zach returned from the bathroom and sat next to me with his legs splayed apart at a ninety-degree angle, rubbing the fine hair on his knees and putting as much emotional distance between the two of us as possible.

  “Don’t know,” I replied, thinking that I still wanted to cross that distance between us, that even his knobby, hairy knees were making me sad tonight. “The way things are going, it’s worth a shot.”

  And then Zach and I did clarify things. We broke up, at least temporarily. Six weeks and then he says he’ll visit, that we’ll re-evaluate, blah, blah, blah. Two days later he called to say that it was all a mistake, that he would come to Atlanta before the semester started and we’d talk about things then. Now, he’s canceled. Sometimes being in a relationship feels like having eternal detention, where you just keep getting re-evaluated and hoping that some one will either promote you or let you off the hook once and for all.

  This afternoon, though, in my Atlanta office with a ninety-five-degree heat, and ninety-five percent humidity, it feels more like Doris + boxes piled all over office of fabulous new job + only Doris to unpack them = maybe Zach and I should have tried a little harder. Still, I can’t turn this into Sadlanta, or I won’t be putting my best foot forward at the new job, and I’ll have that horrible stink of needy and alone, which potentially healthy-minded new friends and boyfriends can smell from miles away. I do not want to become the emotional equivalent of deershit, in which only animals with no home training are permitted to roll.

  I take the opposites attract mug, wrap it back in newspaper, and return it to the box.

  After finishing class prep for my first day, I load my exhausted self into the Toyota and head back to my apartment. Frankly, I have decided that I would be doing well if all I did at the end of the day for the next six months is go home and tune in to find out just who will be America’s next top model. If item one on my to-do list is “do new job well,” then item two is the recycled-from-kindergarten “make new friends!”

  The only thing more challenging than finding a new boyfriend in a strange city, which I honestly can’t even begin to think about right now, is finding a new girlfriend. And no, I don’t mean that I am taking “Make it New” to mean my sexuality. Aside from having no real inclination to lesbianism, I feel that having dedicated the past fifteen or so odd years to understanding men, I couldn’t even begin to take on another gender and the attendant issues. No, I mean the sort of girlfriend/wingwoman you need for cruising the local hot spots, gossiping about your bad dates, and talking each other into unnecessary purchases at the Lenox mall. I don’t mean a best friend, as I couldn’t begin to replace Ronnie, but someone who is not backstabbing, overly obsessed with finding a husband, borderline in the single-white-female sense of appropriating one’s hair/fashion sense or is just plain boring as sin.

  I do have a candidate for girl-friendship, who is qualified in virtually every respect mentioned above, aside from the husband-hunting, which I now believe she has taken to such extremes that it almost wraps back around to not caring at the end of the day. The candidate in question is my next-door neighbor, Antonia, or “Toni” as she likes to be called.

  I met Toni not long after I moved into my apartment. My first few nights in midtown, I started to wonder if I’d made the right choice about neighborhoods. When Zach and I visited Atlanta, midtown seemed like the perfect place—liberal, centrally located, dog friendly and relatively safe. At the time, Zach was happy that most of the hot boys were gay, but now it was starting to feel like one of those cruel “water, water everywhere” jokes that God occasionally plays on single women. Anyhow, my first week in the apartment, it seemed as if police sirens were going off every night: faint and intermittent, but frighteningly regular. I’d look outside my window or peek outside the doorway, but nothing ever seemed to materialize. Then I started to hear them during the day, and then, although I was beginning to question my own rational powers, it sounded as if they were coming from the apartment next door. I suppose it’s possible that there was someone TiVo-ing COPS and playing it loud all night long, but then that raised an even more challenging question. Why would anyone in their right mind do such a thing? Besides, it didn’t sound like television, it just sounded like a siren.

  So I took it upon myself both to make new friends and find out what the hell was going on. I’d seen my neighbor once or twice disappearing in and out of her apartment. What I could tell about her was that she had a large blond afro and impeccably high-end bohemian fashion sense. Aside from that, I assumed that she was biracial, as she had toffee-colored skin and blue-green eyes. However, she could also have been an extremely funky white girl with a mystic tan obsession. Aesthetically, regardless of race, women in Atlanta tend to skew toward looking like Barbie. I pegged her at anywhere between twenty-six and thirty-five. When the sirens weren’t going, I could hear her music, old-school R & B played late and loud, but not so loud that I couldn’t get work done or sleep. I prayed to God that she wasn’t a teetotaler and knocked on her door with a bottle of wine.

  She opened the door wearing a pair of blue sweatpants, brushing her teeth and looking slightly bothered. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled through the toothpaste, “I wasn’t expecting anyone.” Without waiting for me to respond, she made a “stay there” gesture and went to rinse out her mouth.

  “Don’t say it,” she said. “You’re the new neighbor come to kill me over that freakin’ parrot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That.” She gestured to the corner of her apartment, where a parrot the size of my right forearm was suspended upside down from a cage that took up half the wall. The bird flapped its wings, nonplussed, and let out a sound that was part police siren, part car alarm. “My ex-boyfriend’s idea of a gift to me. He found it in the classifieds and said that he wanted to give me something to last as long as our love. We dated two more months. But that freakin’ parrot is for-freakin’-ever.”

  “A parrot is making that noise?”

  “Nice gift, right? He gets it from this guy who bought it with his lotto winnings. It can mimic police sirens, ambulances and,” she looked at the parrot and asked, “What’s your favorite thing to say to the ladies?”

  The parrot perked its head up and said, “Nice ass, beeatch.”

  Toni shook her head, and I couldn’t keep myself from laughing.

  “That�
��s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said. “What’s its name?”

  “Lotto,” she said. “They probably had a dog named ‘Bingo’ and a goat named ‘Craps.’ But I guess the winning streak finally ended because they couldn’t afford to keep him. So now the traumatic beginnings of his life have become the soundtrack to my own. I kept hoping that you couldn’t hear it through the walls. I’m really sorry if it’s disturbing you. I haven’t quite figured out yet how to make him stop.”

  I walked over to the parrot’s cage and tried to rub its beak through the metal grid.

  “Fatties rule,” the parrot said. “Fatties rule.”

  Toni shook her head. “I choose to believe that he means people.”

  “Can you get him to learn new things?”

  “Only obscenities seem to take,” she said. “We’ve been working on ‘foxy lady’ for the past week, but all I get back is ‘nice ass, bitch.’”

  “Nice ass, beeeeatch,” the parrot corrected her, and started dancing from foot to foot, craning its head from side to side with spastic glee.

  “I think he might have a personality disorder,” Toni muttered. “So let me take the wine. You want a glass?”

  “I’d love one.”

  I sat down on the overstuffed cranberry couch and Toni took the matching overstuffed chair to its right. She handed me an oversized wineglass, filled about an inch and a half with chilled white wine. I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, with giant furniture and giant utensils and a mad parrot bobbing in the background.

  “So what do you do?” she asked.

  “I’m a writer,” I replied. “I write poetry, and I’m just starting a job teaching at Atlanta State.”

  Toni pulled a bottle of nail polish from a basket underneath the coffee table.

  “Very cool,” she said. “You mind? I need to do my toenails. I had an ex-boyfriend who couldn’t stand to look at feet.”

  “I have nothing against feet.” I immediately thought of Zach, who was prone to cutting his toenails in public. “So what do you do?”

  “Long version or short version?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Toni fanned the toes of her right foot as wide as possible and deliberately painted a thin coat of metallic champagne across the toenails. “So I did my undergrad at Vassar, in sociology, and thought I wanted to go abroad and study different people, all that. Did it for a year and hated it. So I thought maybe first-world social work was the thing for me. Didn’t hate that, but it didn’t pay the bills, either. So now I work at that part-time, consult for private industry part-time, and in my downtime, I’m writing a book, but it’s a book with a sociological bent.”

  “Really,” I said. “That’s very cool. What’s it about?”

  “Dating. It’s sort of half–Susan Faludi, about how the world is out to make single women in their thirties feel like they should be taken out and stoned and just put out of their misery, but I’m also interested in age, race, class and education and how they play out in Internet dating. So it’s sort of a performance art piece, as well. I have about twenty profiles up on dating sites in the area. In some I’m young, in some I’m older. You know, twenty-eight, thirty-two, thirty-six, thirty-eight. In some I list myself as white, in some as “other,” in some as African-American. And I change my education level, too, just to see if people spin themselves differently. Then I go on the dates to see how people act, what they say. What the white boys have to say when white Toni asks them why they only date white women, things like that.”

  “Any broad and sweeping conclusions?” I ask, sincerely curious.

  “With race, whether they want a Nubian queen or a princess to pamper, the words may change, but the melody remains the same. The age thing is for real, though, and I’m trying to figure out whether or not the media generates ageism on the Internet, and whether or not men even really recognize when they’re being ageist.”

  I find myself nodding along, Lotto style.

  Toni reaches into the drawer of the mahogany end table next to the couch and pulls out a stack of magazine and newspaper articles. “If you don’t mind me asking,” she asks, “how old are you?”

  “Thirty-two. Birthday’s in a few months.”

  She considers this for a moment. “You’ve got plenty of time. But hear me on this, when you turn thirty-six, thirty-eight, the prospects get drier than the desert in August. And look at this, none of this is made up.” She passes me an article that I skim quickly, making the case that men are happier marrying women who make less than they do and have no careers. Then she passes me a magazine clipping making the case for women under the age of twenty-five having the smartest and healthiest babies, then she hands over one about the chances of a woman over the age of forty getting married, and her waning fertility. By the end of the stack, I feel slightly dizzy.

  “And people still argue against feminism,” she scoffs. “You tell me the world doesn’t still have a chip on its shoulder against a strong, successful woman.”

  “How recent are these?” I ask, looking for the dates.

  “All within the last year,” she answers. “I’m trying to compare societal attitudes against the real world. But the man online who is well over thirty-five, but won’t date a woman over thirty-two, is alive, well and multiplying at a rapid rate. So you might as well get in the pond while you’re still one of the sought-after fish.”

  For the first time since yesterday, I feel actual fear at the thought of Zach disappearing back into the alpha-male ocean.

  “So what’s your real age?” I ask.

  “Thirty-four,” she says. “Cusp of undesirability.”

  “That is sooo depressing. And you’re still totally gorgeous.”

  “Age may be nothing but a number, but it’s another of those real fictions. In Atlanta, today, you live the number.” She finished applying a second coat of polish and gingerly placed her feet on the brown shag rug—very ’70s retro-chic. “And because you’re probably too polite to ask, I’ll tell you my real race shakedown. My dad was Japanese and Swedish, and my mom was African-American and Irish, so I’m just about anything anyone thinks I am.”

  When I look at her face, I suppose that I can see all of it.

  “What are you?” she asks.

  “Irish, German, French, Native-American, and a little bit of Swedish for good measure.”

  “McMutt,” she says. “American white girl.” Then she yawns. I take this as my cue to make a polite exit.

  Making new friends is never easy. Back in my apartment, I feel guardedly optimistic about Toni, but there’s nothing like the ease of an old friend. I pour the dregs of a three-day-old bottle of chardonnay into a juice tumbler and dial Ronnie.

  “Hello,” she whispers.

  “Ronnie,” I say. “Why are you whispering?”

  “Earl’s asleep. He’s working nights at the bar. Hold on, I’ll take this outside.”

  There’s a long pause, and I hear the faint drone of Lotto in the background doing his best will-the-ambulance-make-it-on-time screech.

  “Okay,” she says. “I’m outside. I have to drive over to Beverly-fucking-Hills in an hour to spar with Ian, so I’m gonna have to go in about ten. Teenagers with BMWs and personal trainers. Kid probably gets more in allowance money than they’re paying me. So. Atlanta. You all moved in?”

  “Unpacked the last box yesterday and even talked to the neighbor.”

  “So?”

  “She was nice enough, I’m going to start a slow campaign to make her be my friend.” I take a sip of my chardonnay, which has turned overnight from “oak-y” to “ass-y.” “So tell me more about what you two are doing? Is that kid as bad as you say? Remember that girl I had at Langsdale, the one who was later picked to be on The Real World, New Orleans? I was teaching that class on autobiography and identity, I had them all reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and she looked at me with her terrible blond perm and god-awful Texas accent and said, ‘Miss Weatherall, I think Malcolm
X was a whiner!’”

  Ronnie laughs. “I remember that. Ian’s the other kind. Down-with-the-people from his mansion on the hill. I’m not sure which is worse.”

  “One-on-one is probably always worse. How about Earl? Is he going over as bartender to the stars?”

  I conjure an image of Earl, in his mail-order Camel Lights T-shirt and tight jeans, trying to make an organic apple martini for a gaggle of starlets with surgically attached cell phones and Ugg boots, wearing those bizarre ruffled miniskirts that look like ass-doilies.

  “Everyone loves Earl. Maybe even more than they did at the Saloon. He’s got the other bartender ready to buy cowboy boots and ride off with him into the sunset.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to have to play sheriff? Knock some heads in the nouveau Old West?”

  Ronnie gives a confident half-chuckle, which I remember well.

  “So what’s going on at school? Sounds crazier than Langsdale. And you have to fill me in on Zach. I can’t believe you two would actually call it off.”

  “It’s more like we called a time-out, but you know what that means.”

  “Maybe with someone else,” Ronnie says. “But Zach may just need some time.”

  “Why do you say that? Did Earl talk to him?”

  “No. But remember, as hard as it is to leave someone, sometimes it’s even harder to be left behind. Try to remember how he might see things.”

  All I can see is the accusatory black typeface from Toni’s headlines of horror—MEN DON’T WANT A MORE SUCCESSFUL WOMAN. “I am,” I say. “But it’s not making me feel any better.”

  ronnie

  With all my worrying about not having a job, I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Charlie, who’d gotten me my job in the first place, would be after my ass, as well. He hadn’t wanted to suggest me to the Bernsteins at all until I’d convinced him that I did know how to teach, that all my time in grad school hadn’t been spent drinking and writing stories that nobody wanted to read. He’d never really understood the whole MFA thing in the first place. “What was that, exactly?” he asked. “So you, like, study writing, and that’s it? They give degrees for that? And what are you supposed to do with that degree anyway? What kind of job? You couldn’t possibly make any money with that sort of thing, could you?” I had sat next to Earl at their long dinner table that had been battered and sandpapered and then stained so that it would look as if they’d just found it in a barn somewhere and had not paid, Bita told me, three grand for it.