Time was running short. Half a dozen times Friday morning I reached for the phone—to call Merijoy and beg off the dinner invitation. And each time I chickened out.
It wasn’t that I wanted to go to her party. I just didn’t want to be the pathetic soul who couldn’t scare up a date for a stupid little dinner party.
But it was true. My date prospects were nil. Most of the men I know in Savannah were either married or gay. I did have one bona fide single straight male friend—Tony Fields. We’d been friends since grade school. He and his second wife, Bonnie, had split up six months before my divorce from Tal. We’d had lunch together a couple of times, but mostly just to commiserate about the trials of being suddenly single.
The trouble with inviting Tony was that I knew he ran in Merijoy’s crowd. He even played golf with Randy Rucker. I didn’t want people to start thinking we were an item—because realistically, we never would be.
To get my mind off my troubles I decided to check out an alleged estate sale in Baldwin Park.
Did I say estate sale? The ad in the Pennysaver promised antiques, but the offerings consisted mostly of a garageful of ugly outsized polyester frocks, a broken riding lawn mower, and a mound of mismatched plastic giveaway cups from fast-food restaurants. I knew there were people who collected things like NASCAR cups or Star Wars action figures, but frankly, I’m not into plastic.
The morning wasn’t a complete loss, though; on the way home I stopped off at the Goodwill, where I picked up four green Depression-glass sherbet cups in the Horseshoe pattern, which is a fairly unusual pattern, for fifty cents apiece. I didn’t have to look at my price guide to know that the cups booked out at fifteen dollars apiece.
The phone was ringing.
“Weezie?”
A man’s voice, one I didn’t recognize.
“This is she,” I said warily.
“It’s Daniel,” he said. Funny, he sounded different over the phone. His voice was low, the Savannah accent not as pronounced. He sounded like a college professor, if you want the truth.
“Oh.” I was stumped for something to say. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. You all right?”
“Pretty good,” I said. “Think we’ll get any rain?” Truly, this was the most inane conversation I’d ever participated in. Pretty soon I’d be asking him how much mileage his truck got, or for his opinions on term life insurance.
“Look here,” he said. “I hate this kind of thing. BeBe was by the restaurant this morning. She happened to mention that you need a date for something you have to go to tonight. And here’s the thing…”
“I do not need a date,” I said, my voice dripping ice.
“Suit yourself,” he said, sounding annoyed. “Sorry to bother you. Guess I misunderstood. See you around.”
He was about to hang up. It was after one o’clock. There was no way I could scrounge up anybody with a pulse and a penis this late in the day. And Merijoy would be furious if I showed up alone and messed up her seating chart. My already sullied reputation would be worse than mud.
“Daniel. Wait.”
“Something wrong?”
“I, um, well, look. I’m in a situation. I let myself get talked into going to this dinner party tonight. The hostess is an old classmate of mine, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. And it’s a couples thing, and it’s such late notice…”
“The Ruckers,” Daniel said. “BeBe told me all about it. They come into the restaurant all the time. What time?”
“Seven-thirty. Sharp.”
“Coat and tie?”
I hadn’t thought to ask. But it was deep summer. Usually in Savannah a golf shirt would suffice, but then again, if this supper club was as fancy as BeBe claimed, that would be all wrong. Again I was wracked with indecision.
Daniel had no such problem.
“I’ll wear a sport coat and bring a tie. That all right?”
“Yes,” I said gratefully.
“You sure now?” he drawled. The old Daniel was back. “Your rich friends ain’t gonna think you’re slummin’—taking a short-order cook to a fancy house in Ardsley Park?”
He was laying it on thick. And I probably deserved it. “They’ll be lucky to meet you,” I said. And I was surprised to find that I meant it.
With my date dilemma solved, I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting at the computer, listing merchandise on eBay.
Not all the stuff I buy is suitable for selling at an on-line auction site like eBay. Furniture, for instance, which most people like to see before buying, not to mention the prohibitive cost of shipping. I rarely sell fine crystal on-line either.
But in the past year, I’d starting selling lots of smalls on the Internet. I did really well with things like silver, linens, china, pottery, jewelry, and even a few small oil paintings and water colors. I’d bought myself a good digital camera, and after only a few false starts, I’d gotten pretty good at photographing my antiques to their best advantage.
I didn’t make a ton of money on the Internet, but I’d discovered it was a great way to find a market on a much larger scale than I could ever have dreamed of reaching otherwise.
Generally, I spend one day a week cataloging merchandise, updating my Web site, and checking auctions in progress, and another day packing and shipping items to be sent, literally, all over the world.
I had mostly odds and ends to add to the site today. Some funky fifties costume jewelry, a peacock-pattern chenille bedspread, and a gorgeous banquet-sized damask tablecloth and twelve matching hemstitched napkins, which would, I hoped, bring around a hundred dollars.
I’d picked the bedspread and table linens up with a five-dollar box lot of linens at an auction in Pooler, but it had taken time to get them ready to sell.
Like a lot of vintage linens, my tablecloth had been packed away for decades and had yellowed with age, with several prominent brown stains on the cloth and the napkins.
I used my meemaw’s favorite stain-removal method to clean them, making a paste of equal parts automatic dishwashing powder, an old-fashioned powdered detergent called Biz, and baking soda. You launder the linens, and then, while the cloth is still damp, you put the moistened paste on any stains and let the paste dry, preferably outside.
The outside drying had been another bone of contention with Caroline. She was horrified the first time I hung laundry to dry on the little clothesline I rigged on my side of the courtyard fence. Tal had even called his lawyer, who had called Uncle James, to make me take the clothesline down.
Needless to say, I hung my linens out whenever I felt the urge.
The tablecloth and napkins had pressed up beautifully, using Meemaw’s method of sprinkling the linens until just damp, then rolling them, placing them in a plastic bag, and chilling them overnight in the fridge. I took a weird pleasure in setting aside a morning to iron, sipping a glass of iced tea and watching the steam rise as the iron hit the cool, damp fabric. Maybe it was a way to connect with my long-dead meemaw, who had made such an art out of domestic science. Or maybe it was just my own perverted need to rebel against permanent press and drip dry, which, along with takeout and Lean Cuisine dinners, were such a staple of life with Mama.
I logged off the Internet at four o’clock and started obsessing about what to wear to Merijoy’s.
There weren’t that many choices. Although I love the look and feel of beautiful vintage clothes, the reality of my postdivorce life is that I rarely need anything more than a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops.
Three choices emerged from the walk-in closet I’d carved from the loft level of the carriage house. A hot-pink-and-white sleeveless Lily Pulitzer print shift straight out of the sixties, a floaty ankle-length white lawn Victorian slip that I wear as a summer dress, and a black cap-sleeved silk shan-tung sheath that, surprise of surprises, had actually once been Mama’s.
I tried all three outfits on at least twice. The Lily Pulitzer was fun, cool, and definitely back in vogue. But the pink was questionable with the current hue of my red hair. The Victorian slip was too waifish; I’d lost so much weight, it gave me the look of the poor little match girl.
The black, I thought, turning around and around in front of the full-length mirror. Definitely the black. Hard to believe Mama had ever worn anything this racy, but when I’d dug it out of the cedar closet in her room, she’d gotten a faraway look in her eyes and told me about her first date with Daddy, when he’d taken her out dancing at Barbee’s Pavilion, at Isle of Hope.
“I bought that dress with my first paycheck from the telephone company,” Mama said. “It cost almost forty dollars at Adler’s on Broughton Street, and your meemaw had a fit when she found out what I’d spent. I had black ankle-strap spike heels I wore with it, but I don’t know what ever happened to them.”
I’d never tried the dress on before. Tal never liked me in black. Even ten pounds lighter than usual, I had to suck in to zip up Mama’s dress. It had a low scoop neck and a cinched-in waist and a tight skirt, and when I looked in the mirror I hardly recognized myself. It was, to my mind, an exact copy of my favorite Barbie doll dress as a kid.
The only problem with the dress was that Mama was four inches taller than I am. The hem hovered down around the middle of my calves, giving me the appearance of a little kid dressing up in her mama’s cocktail dress.
I sat on the edge of the bed and hastily turned the hem up so that it touched four inches above the knee—sexy but not slutty. There was no time for sewing, so I resorted to the Catholic schoolgirl’s favorite device—Scotch tape. As I taped I prayed the dress would hold together. It was well made, with beautifully finished seams, but the forty-year-old silk seemed a little on the fragile side.
Barbie had a pair of black plastic mules she wore with her dress, but the closest I could come was a pair of high-heeled black sling-back sandals.
Panty hose were out of the question. For one thing, it was too hot. And for another, after my divorce, I’d done my version of the Scarlett O’Hara vow, clenching a fistful of the hated hose and swearing “As God is my witness, I will never wear panty hose again.” And while we were on the subject of undergarments, a bra was also impossible because of the way the neckline was cut.
So there I was, at 7:15 P.M., dressed in a dress that was older than I was, wearing nothing underneath but a pair of skimpy black lace panties. The high-heeled sandals made me teeter to begin with, but to calm my nerves I fixed myself a double vodka and tonic and slugged it down like ice water. My first date. My first date after ten years of marriage and the divorce from hell, and the datee was a man with a tattoo.
The doorbell rang. My pulse raced. I seriously considered passing out. Or running out the back door. Instead, I took a deep breath and tried not to exhale, for fear of having my breasts explode out the front of my dress.
I opened the door.
He was standing there, one hand resting on the doorjamb. He wore a crisp red-and-white striped dress shirt, khaki slacks, loafers with no socks, and a navy blazer with a tie poked in the breast pocket. The bright blue eyes swept me up and down. He grinned. “Damn, Sam. You look good enough to eat.”
Under the circumstances, I don’t think slamming the door in his face was such an unreasonable reaction.