Friday Nights
Tara Avery
She falls in love the way other girls change their shoes. Sometimes there’s a struggle, a decision to be made between sling-backs or flats, but mostly it happens easily, without thought. She’s not proud of it, no, definitely not, but she can’t help it. All it takes is a kind word, a gentle smile, and she is smitten. She loves easily and with great passion—everything is all or nothing with her.
Sometimes, when she is alone for a while, or when night falls and she finds herself watching the flicker of lights across her dark ceiling, she wonders if it will ever end.
She isn’t miserable, but she’s not exactly happy, either. When the cute boy in the video store grins at her, she imagines white picket fences. She smiles prettily at him and he asks her name while he rings through her DVD. She tells him and asks his in return. By the time the transaction is finished, they’ve set a date for Friday night.
On Friday she is nervous. She doesn’t remember if the boy’s eyes are light or dark. Since they’ve decided to meet at the theatre, she’s afraid she won’t recognize him. Still, she dresses with care. She remembers the kindness of his smile and imagines he will be the man to keep her, the man from whom her attention and adoration will never stray. She longs for it.
She looks at her crushes as illnesses, small fevers which spike quickly and break, leaving her shaky and pale, hollow on the inside. She’s always exhausted, shattered with too much feeling.
When she arrives at the theatre, he’s standing outside waiting, a single rose clutched in his fist. He gazes at her for a moment, as though making sure she’s real. She knows this expression well; she’s witnessed it before. She notices his eyes are dark hazel, saved from brown by a touch of green near the pupil. She likes his eyes. She likes the rose. It’s a nice touch.
During the film, she edges her hand closer to his until she feels warm fingers wrap around hers. The pads of his fingertips are rough, but this detail only makes him seem more real. She squeezes his hand and he squeezes hers right back.
Glancing sideways in the dark, she watches his profile by the flickering light of the screen. His nose is slightly crooked. She doesn’t know what the movie is about, but she knows he seems smart somehow, and handsome, and very sweet. She wonders what kind of father he’ll be.
When the movie ends and he invites her to join him for ice cream, she’s already a bit in love with him. She doesn’t tell him yet, of course, although it’s only a matter of time. She’s frightened away many a promising prospect by admitting her passion too quickly. Mostly it’s better if she doesn’t say anything at all. She figures it will make everything seem less strange when she falls out of love as quickly as she fell into it. It’s better if they don’t know.
This thought depresses her, even with his nice hand in hers, even as she accepts the nice ice cream cone he offers. She’s already thinking about the end. This can’t be good. She imagines love—true love—the kind of love that lasts—wouldn’t imagine an end after only three hours’ acquaintance.
If her smile is not as bright, her conversation less sparkling, he doesn’t seem to notice. The ice cream sends a melting rivulet down the cone and across her fingers. She has chocolate on her skirt before she can stop it. This seems foreboding, another bad sign. He doesn’t notice. This is even worse.
He doesn’t kiss her goodnight. She’s not sure if it’s because he doesn’t want to, of if it’s because he wants to seem a gentleman. She doesn’t much care—she just knows she’s not particularly disappointed.
When the temp in her office tells her she looks pretty in blue, she forgets the video store clerk altogether. She gets a membership at a new store and throws out the chocolate-stained skirt.
Of course, she only loves the temp for a month—long enough to speak the words and have him touch her cheek gently in parting. She knew he didn’t feel the same way, but she couldn’t help it. The words were poison, eating her alive. Speak them or die.
She can’t figure out if she’s in love with love or in love with sadness, but she knows her happiness probably lies in figuring out the answer.
She goes through a dry spell then: long, empty nights spent watching mindless TV; books devoured only to be forgotten the next day; simple dinners prepared and eaten alone. No man’s smile seems warm enough; she doesn’t even notice the usual set of admirers: bartenders who pour free drinks to no avail; waiters, offering free dessert; the handsome accountant who helps with her taxes and doesn’t charge as much as he should. She grows tired of spaghetti and single-serving frozen meals; she grows tired of loneliness.
Everything changes one Friday night, not very different from any other Friday night, really—long after she’s forgotten the temp’s name, let alone the color of his eyes or the shade of his hair—as she wanders listlessly through the grocery store. She prefers shopping on weekend evenings—it is much less likely she’ll encounter parades of happy couples holding hands and laughing over inside jokes.
On this unassuming Friday night she catches a glimpse of the first man to give her pause in weeks, months. At first she doesn’t understand what’s happening. Her palms grow suddenly sweaty; right there next to the asparagus her heart begins to race. At first nothing seems demonstrably special about this man: he is tall but not too tall; fit but not too fit. His hair is neither dark nor light; his clothes are fine but a little rumpled.
She realizes the angle of his head as he regards the produce in front of him is what transfixes her. This angle worries about the difference between green bell peppers and red. He lifts a red pepper in his left hand—no ring—and examines it the way a connoisseur might regard a glass of fine wine, or an art collector a newly acquired painting.
“They’re good this time of year,” she calls out, awkwardly loud, regretting her forwardness instantly.
“Thanks,” he says, smiling over his shoulder at her.
Wheeling her cart as quickly as she can, she abandons him to his vegetables, choosing instead to hide in the baking aisle.
This debacle in the grocery store leaves her out of sorts for days. Whenever she thinks about how she called out to him, she breaks into a cold sweat. She has to do twice the usual amount of laundry, just to keep herself in clean shirts. For three weeks she avoids the grocery store on Friday nights, darting in just after work to grab necessities like toilet paper and milk. She certainly doesn’t linger in the produce department. If not for bottled orange juice in the vending machines at the office, she’s pretty sure she’d be a prime candidate for scurvy.
After a month she decides to return to her usual schedule. She has almost forgotten the nausea induced by his smile; she has almost forgotten the tender way he held the bell pepper, as if he truly cared about choosing just the right one. Strolling through the aisles, she shops bravely. She lingers in produce, just to prove she can buy fruits and vegetables like everyone else.
She turns the corner into dairy and there he stands, this time deliberating over brands of yogurt. He smiles as if he recognizes her, so she freezes, unable to move and unable to speak until he says, “Hi. You’re the pepper girl, right? From a few weeks ago? You were right. The red ones were very good. Do you have an opinion on yogurt?”
“Don’t get non-fat,” she croaks in the voice of a very old woman. A very old, nervous woman. A very old, nervous, possibly crazy woman. “It’s too watery. At least get 1%. That French vanilla one is good. I usually have it for breakfast.”
His smile widens into a full-fledged grin. “We’ve only just met and I already know what you eat for breakfast.”
“Not every day,” she babbles, wishing for a hole to open up under her feet—a sudden earthquake; the escaping hordes of hell, she’s not fussy—“sometimes I have cereal. Cheerios. I like Honey-Nut Cheerios.”
He laughs. “Good to know. I’m a bacon-and-eggs kind of guy, myself, but I’ll make due with Cheerios if that’s what’s on offer.”
“Oh, I wasn’t—”
“I’m James,” he says.
“Oh,” she replies.
“And you are?”
She grimaces. “I don’t want to say.”
He looks mildly affronted. “Even after we’ve shared breakfast preferences? I mean, at least this time you didn’t run away from me. I suppose I should count it as progress. Maybe in another month you can tell me your name. I’ll look forward to it.”
“Jamie.”
“No, James,” he admonishes lightly. “I hate Jamie.”
“My name. Is Jamie.”
“Oh,” he replies, echoing her tone perfectly. “Well, there’s nothing for it, then.”
“Nothing for…?”
“If we’re going to have dinner next Friday night, one of us will have to change our name in the interim. I nominate you.”
What follows the next Friday is, superficially, the single most disastrous date she has ever had. And the best.
Torrential rain ruins her hair and makeup, and soaks her nearly through. A suicide in the subway stalls his train for an hour, and lack of reception underground means she waits, hair drying into an unruly explosion of frizz, nursing a glass of red wine in a small restaurant where no one knows her, but everyone knows she’s been stood up. He arrives just as she tosses money onto the bar and is about to leave.
Instead, he snags them a table even though their reservation has long expired, and they share a bottle of mediocre Pinot Noir. She sloshes a little on her (new) white shirt, and hardly notices. The food is overcooked, the service terrible, and still she can hardly look away from the man who almost-but-not-quite shares her name. Her face hurts from smiling, from laughing.
After she tries to pay and he refuses to let her, they attempt to flag a cab—not easy on a Friday night at the best of times, but rendered all but impossible by the clogged subways, the rain, their Brooklyn destination. The rain refuses to let up, but the air is unseasonably warm, and she’d almost enjoy it, if not for the heels slowly laming her. When he notices her limp, he hoists her onto his back, and, shrieking with a mixture of dismay and delight—she’s sure every passerby is privy to an unparalleled view of her underwear—she clings to his neck.
Finally, an off-duty cabbie on his way home takes pity and drives them over the Brooklyn Bridge.
He walks her to her door and for a moment she thinks he will walk away, he will walk away and not kiss her, and it matters, it matters in a way it never mattered with the video store clerk or the temp or any of the other men she’s walked away from on Friday nights past. At her sides her hands clench into impatient fists.
Still, if she was the kind of woman who cared about signs, who threw away skirts and relationships on the basis of chocolate stains, she’d never have consented to a second date, let alone—
“Wait!” she cries, and at the same time he turns back and says, “I forgot—”
She has never been the initiator of a first kiss, but she reaches out to him now, desperate, and presses her lips to his still open mid-sentence. An hour passes while they stand in the rain outside her house, an hour or a year or a decade. She doesn’t notice. She doesn’t care. She kisses him in the rain, and when he reluctantly turns away to walk to his own house, she isn’t thinking about endings or even white picket fences. Watching the elegant line of his back moving away from her, she thinks about their perfect kiss—not whether he will make a good father to phantom children.
No one is more surprised than she when week after week they go on seeing each other on Friday nights. Soon enough Friday nights become Friday-nights-and-Saturday-mornings become whole weekends become her sleeping in his giant bed far more often than she sees her more modest double.
She no longer notices the kind words and gentle smiles of other men—or if she does, they merely flatter, but do not render her senseless. She is too busy thinking about her dinner plans—about the long weekend in Boston, Thanksgiving with his parents, Christmas with hers. She loves how he holds her hand the way he might hold a baby bird, or a perfect pepper. She loves that when they argue, he does not disappear from her life—he insists they speak, he insists they resolve things. She loves the way he smiles as though she is the only other person in the world. Sometimes, when he thinks she’s not looking, she catches him gazing at her with such a longing, unguarded expression she can hardly contain her own love.
But she holds this word inside her in a way she has never done before. Whenever her lips part to speak it she pauses, rendered silent by the possibility of losing him, of seeing a sadness in his eyes never there before, of his gentle hand pressed to her cheek in parting—like the temp, like the waiter, like the first lover she ever had, once upon a time.
Finally, one night, just before falling asleep, with him curled warm and solid against her spine, she whispers, “I love you,” for the first time.
She feels his answering smile against the top of her head. “I love you, too.”
“But I’m in love with you,” she insists.
“And I’m in love with you. Sleep now, love. I’ll be here in the morning.”
“So will I,” she says, wonder in her tone.
“I know.”
He presses a kiss to the nape of her neck, curling his arm over her waist, tangling his fingers with hers, and she has never known happiness like this.