Girl's Guide to Witchcraft by Mindy Klasky Page B

Although she hadn’t met him yet, she knew that the Man was educated. He was sensitive and caring and not intimidated by her running her own business. He was independent enough to give her breathing room, but reliable enough that he’d show up when he said he would. He had to be physically stronger than she was, and taller, and he had to have all his own teeth and hair. Too preppy was out, too grungy, too punk. Basically, she was looking for an impossible fiction, created by magazines and beach reading and endless, repetitious conversations with girlfriends.
    But Melissa structured her search. She auditioned one new candidate every two weeks, rotating her stock from various resources: Dedicated Metropolitan Singles (an organization devoted to conducting volunteer activities with teams comprised of equal numbers of men and women); Washington Today personal ads (the magazine was read by lawyers, lobbyists, and other upwardly trending intellectuals); FranticDate. com (not really the name of the Web site, but I could never remember what it was actually called); and Independents (recommendations from friends, relatives and anyone else who thought they should have a say in her love life).
    “This one was a Dedicated, wasn’t he?”
    “Oh, yeah,” she said, popping a Bunny Bite into her own mouth. The guy must have been a disaster. Melissa never ate her own wares. “Dedicated to his mother.”
    “We’re talking a Norman Bates–type thing?”
    “Just about. He phoned mumsy when he picked me up, ostensibly to make sure that she’d gotten home from her card game all right. And then he called her during dinner. And she phoned him while he was walking me home.”
    “But what was he like? I mean, couldn’t you work with him on the phone thing?”
    “Oh, the calls were only the beginning.” She checked her watch to make sure that it was six-thirty before she walked around the counter. When she reached the door, she flipped the hand-lettered Walk On In sign to Walk On By and turned off the outside light. She flipped another switch, and the four two-tops at the front of the shop disappeared in shadows.
    I picked up a towel, well-accustomed to the routine. I didn’t pay for my Bunny Bites, but I washed plates, coffee carafes and whatever else was left around at the end of the day. As Melissa filled the sink with hot, soapy water, she shook her head. “I tried to compliment him on his tie, and he told me that his mother had brought it back from Singapore. I asked him what had made him sign up with Dedicated Metro, and he said that his mother’s garden club was a sponsor.”
    “Sounds like a real winner.” I shook my head and started drying the Dreams plate.
    “I’m telling you, I was through all Five Conversational Topics, and we hadn’t even finished our appetizers.”
    Despite all her practice, Melissa got nervous about dates. She was always afraid that she would say the wrong thing, or—worse—say nothing. So before each and every encounter, she drew up a list of Five Conversational Topics. She wrote them down on a piece of paper and committed them to memory. She tried to use them sparingly, exploiting the complete depths of each subject before going on to the next. Typically, they were masterpieces of open-ended questioning, and I’d never known her to go through all five. Two, usually. Three, if she was with a guy who was really hard to draw out. Four, if he was the shyest man in the world—most of her Four nights had been FranticDate guys.
    But Five? And with the appetizer plates still on the table?
    “What did you do?”
    “I yielded to the inevitable.”
    “And that was?”
    She shrugged and pulled the plug in the sink. We watched the water swirl away, and the slurping sound at the end seemed a comment on our love lives. “I asked him what his mother thought made an ideal woman.”
    “You didn’t!”
    “Oh yes, I did.” Her jaw was grim as she dried her hands on a towel.
    “But what if he’d