“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to go in another room and you have to count to a hundred and then come find me. You can cal my name three times. Wait, no, only two times. If you cal my name three times, then you lose points, okay? And I’l answer you so that you can try to hear where I am.”
“Got it,” Isabel a said.
“Okay. This is hard, though, Auntie Iz. You have to listen with your insides. You can listen in a way that you didn’t before. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Connor walked out of the room and then Isabel a heard him stop. “But Auntie Iz? If you get scared or fal down, you can take it off, okay? That’s okay.” Isabel a nodded. She felt Connor touch her eyes softly. “You real y can’t see, right? Okay, here we go.”
Isabel a heard him run out of the room and shout, “Okay, go!” She was counting to one hundred in her head, and then she heard him say, “Auntie Iz, you have to count out loud!” So she started over. “One, two, three, four,” she said, and then she heard him scream, “Slower!” so she slowed down.
She heard a door slam downstairs and then voices. Her mother was talking to Connor. Isabel a could tel that he was frustrated that she was interrupting the game. Then she heard her brother’s voice. They were talking to Connor like he was younger than he real y was, and Isabel a felt bad for him. She hadn’t noticed how their voices changed when they talked to him. She heard them ask him about where she was.
“No,” she heard him say. “No, you can’t get Auntie Iz now. She can’t come in here yet. She’s blind,” and Isabel a was struck by how he said that last word. He said it like he was proud of her for choosing the blindness, like he was amazed that she would choose not to see.
She could hear Connor’s voice start to rise. His pitch got higher and his volume louder as he said, “No, you said three-thirty and it’s only three o’clock. I’m not ready. I’m not finished.” Isabel a knew that he was shaking his head as he said this, tightening his arms and shaking them back and forth with quick, little movements. She had seen him work his way into a fit a number of times in the past week, but now she just listened.
“I’m not done, I’m not ready!” he said. “Izzy is stil blind, and I didn’t know you were coming yet. I’m not done! I’m not done!”
Isabel a listened to him as he shrieked so high and loud that she knew the neighbors could hear. “This isn’t how it was supposed to go!” he yel ed. She listened to her mother and brother try to quiet him down, try to plead with him to settle himself. But he didn’t. Connor screamed with al of his might. He fought against it with everything he had. Al he wanted was to know what to expect. His world didn’t look like he’d thought it would, and she understood. How could he keep calm if he couldn’t see? Isabel a lay on the floor of the playroom upstairs and listened. She heard the screams and she knew exactly how he felt. He was right—she could hear it on her insides.
T he bartender at McHale’s was sleazy in an attractive way. This annoyed Lauren. She couldn’t make sense of it. She was disgusted with Preston, yet stil happy whenever he threw a lime at her from behind the bar. “He’s gross,” she tried to explain to her friends. “He has dirty blond hair that he slicks back behind his ears with little curls at the end. It always looks greasy. His eyes are a filmy blue, like he’s thinking pervy things. And he has this big scar on his chin that I just always want to touch.”
“So he’s dirty sexy,” her friend Shannon said.
“Yes!” Lauren said. “But why?”
“Dirty sexy can’t real y be explained,” Shannon said. “It’s kind of like ugly sexy. Only you feel worse about it because you think you should be above the sleaze.”
Lauren felt better for the explanation, but it stil unsettled her to be around him. “I wil not sleep with him,” she told herself. Two weeks after she started working there, she stayed with Preston to have a drink after work and found herself having sex with him in the walk-in fridge. One second she was drinking a vodka soda, and the next thing she knew there was a bin of lettuce shaking above her head. She couldn’t serve a salad for weeks without feeling trashy.
“So much for that,” she said to Shannon. Shannon just shrugged.
Lauren was sure that Preston was not the right guy for her. But stil , she found herself in his bed. She lay behind him and sucked his blond curls when he was sleeping. She knew it couldn’t end wel .
Lauren was almost out of money when she decided to be a waitress. She had been looking for PR jobs in New York for a month and hadn’t even gotten an interview. So she started applying at bars in SoHo and gastropubs in the West Vil age. (She figured if she was going to be a waitress, she would like to do it in a place where she might see famous people.) But none of those places wanted her. It turned out that being a waitress in New York was more competitive than being in PR. Aspiring models and actresses flooded every restaurant, elbowing one another with bony arms to win the right to serve food. Lauren didn’t have a chance.
A friend suggested that she apply at McHale’s, an old-fashioned restaurant in Midtown with a wood-paneled dining room and a meatloaf special on Wednesdays. McHale’s was the kind of place that made people nostalgic for a time when businessmen drank at lunch and people ate pot roast on Sundays. It had a bar with red leather stools and a mean vodka gimlet. They offered Lauren a job the day she walked in and she took it.
And just like that, Lauren was a waitress. It was only temporary, of course. It was just an in-between job, something to make money while she was looking for her next move. She could tel that it made the customers happy when she told them this. They were more comfortable once they knew that Lauren had plans. She was just too pretty, too charming to simply be a waitress.
Lauren figured she would work at the restaurant for three months, maybe six months max. But a year went by and she was stil there. She stopped sending résumés out to PR firms. She couldn’t even remember what she thought she had wanted to be.
At the very least, Preston was a distraction from the detour her career had taken. He wasn’t a big talker, and Lauren found herself fil ing up the silence when they were together. That was how she came to tel him the story of the ham.
In her high school biology class, Lauren dissected a pig. Each pair of students got their very own formaldehyde-soaked piglet to cut up. As they sliced and dismembered the little porkers, the teacher told them different facts about the pig’s stomachs and reproductive organs. He walked over to Lauren’s pig and pointed to the rump. “This is where ham comes from,” he told her. Lauren looked up. “Ham comes from pigs?” she asked.
“Doesn’t ham come from a ham?” Everyone laughed. As soon as the question was out of her mouth, she knew it wasn’t right. A ham wasn’t an animal, of course. She was only confused for a second or two. But the thing was, she knew what the ham would look like if there was such a thing.
She could picture it perfectly, as though she had actual y seen it before.
She told Preston this story when they were lying in bed together. She didn’t know why she told him. Lauren hated the story, hated explaining how she’d thought a ham was an oval-shaped hunk of an animal that slurped across the ground. “You know,” she said, “I thought it would be a ham.” As she said this, she moved her hands in an oval motion. “A ham, ” she emphasized, as though this would explain it.