Dating Without Novocaine by Lisa Cach Page B

buttons?
    â€œGet the biggest remote…” I said, and within half a minute I heard the static disappear from the background, and the voice of a newscaster caught mid-drone.
    â€œThanks! I think I can remember how to do that,” Dad said, and then Mom was on the phone again.
    â€œHe’s rented some awful gangster movie. He knows I don’t like those.”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œAnalyze This.”
    â€œYou might like it. It’s a comedy.”
    â€œI don’t know how gangsters can be funny.”
    â€œI gotta go, Mom, or I’ll be late.”
    â€œOkay. When are you coming down for dinner?”
    â€œI’ll call from home. I really have to go.”
    â€œThey’ve seen bears in the park, coming out to go through the garbage. The salmon berries are late in coming out this year.”
    â€œI gotta go, Mom!”
    â€œLove you.”
    â€œLove you, too.”
    I hung up, feeling the mix of guilt and love and worry that I usually did after talking to my parents. In the back of my mind sat the realization that death or accident orillness was not just a possibility, but an inevitability. What would happen to one, when the other died?
    What would happen to me?
    I picked up the instructions to Ms. DeFrang’s house, looked again at the address, and coasted down the street, trying not to think of the future.

Six
Silk vs. Spandex
    â€œH ow much are you going to get for doing that job?” Louise asked, raising her voice to be heard over the shouts of juvenile delinquents. We were in the lobby of the Garland Theater, a one-time movie house that had decomposed into a venue for local bands and, twice a month, professional wrestling.
    If you wanted to call it professional.
    â€œI’ll have to figure it out, but I’m guessing about fifteen hundred. You should have seen her place: it was in one of those big new housing developments where every house has something like four thousand square feet, yet they all have these dinky little bits of yard. You could reach out a window and shake hands with your neighbor.”
    â€œWho’d want to live in one of those? They all look alike.”
    â€œYeah, I know, but this Kristina DeFrang’s house, it was different. You went inside, and you wouldn’t have known the house was brand new. You’d have thought Thomas Jefferson lived there, or King Louis the Something.”
    â€œLots of antiques?”
    â€œYeah, but not like some people do, where there’s Victorian junk clogging up all the space. This was…different. And it didn’t look like any one particular style. Everything blended.”
    â€œCould have been in House Beautiful? ” Louise asked.
    â€œI wish I knew how to put together a room like that.”
    And I wouldn’t mind someday being Ms. DeFrang. She was in her late forties, fit in that spalike way wealthy women look fit, but without the usual accompanying manacles of gold and diamonds on wrists and fingers. Her hair was cut in a bob similar to mine, and she wore minimal makeup. Her clothes were simple and obviously expensive, and I knew it would be beneath her dignity to show the name of a designer, or to sport a style that showed a hint of trendiness.
    How she’d ended up in that nouveau neighborhood, I don’t know. She seemed too good for it.
    She was too good for me, too, but she was the type who would consider it a mark of bad breeding if she ever let her awareness of that show.
    I’d felt like a tacky frump following her around her house, my shoes looking like the discount store copies they were, my pantyhose showing the coarseness of knit available only at the grocery store. My blouse I’d made myself, copying one I’d seen at Saks, but with its sleeves that belled at the wrist and the ruffle at the surplice neckline, it felt gauche when confronted with Ms. DeFrang’s timelessness.
    â€œShe wouldn’t be caught dead here,” I