Things I Learned From Holly
I am taking the seeds out of a Pomegranate the way I was shown by Holly, the forty-two year old woman who I worked with two jobs ago. You cut the Pomegranate into fourths, leaving the knife in what looks like a puddle of translucent, magenta-toned blood on the cutting board. You fill a large mixing bowl with cold water and roll up your sleeves. Rolling up your sleeves should maybe be the first step, but I inevitably forget to do it until later-sometimes until after I have already gotten them wet or stained with Pomegranate juice and am holding my dripping hands out in front of me, yelling to anyone within earshot, “Hey-can someone come in here and roll up my sleeves?” And I stand there, soiled and thankful, as my mother folds my cuffs back and pushes them past my elbows. I have lost two good shirts to pomegranate juice.
But roll up your sleeves and immerse one of the pomegranate pieces in the cold water, separating the white pulp from the bright, jewel-toned seeds. The seeds will sink to the bottom and the white pulp will float to the top, and the water will keep the juice from staining your palms, keeping you from looking like Lady MacBeth in the first scene of act five, which really is not such a great look for anyone. When I spilled things on myself as a child my parents would take the garment, running it under cold water, and chanting, “Out, out, damn spot!” I was seventeen years-old-a junior in High School, before I learned that the phrase “Out, out damn spot,” was not about getting food stains out of clothing. I was twenty-three before I learned how to open a Pomegranate. I do not know at what ages other people learned these things, or whether they learned them at all, so I have nothing with which to compare myself. I will assume, for the time being, that my experience is normal.
Holly introduced me to pomegranates. They were her favorite fruit, she said, and her husband would sometimes bring one home for her, the way other men would bring their wives bouquets of roses. When she said this I nodded quickly to give the impression of understanding, as if I received bouquets of roses all the time-as if the men hoping to meet me were lined up around the block, like the nannies in Mary Poppins who are eventually blown away by the wind.
I was twenty-three when I learned how to artfully open a pomegranate and I was twenty-four when I first went on a date, which was something no one had ever shown me how to do.
I knew nothing about dating. I had not had a great deal of luck with the opposite sex. The Dorothy Parker adage states, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” but I had discovered several unfortunate addendums, including: Men seldom make passes at girls who wear loafers, Men seldom make passes at girls who are constantly doing Walter Matthau imitations, and Men seldom make passes at girls who sit in front of their computer for nine hours, trying to beat their high score in Minesweeper.
I was not normal, and I knew that boys did not have crushes on girls that were not normal. I had learned from numerous 80’s movies that cool, popular guys would sometimes ask you to go to the prom with them, but when you actually arrived at the prom in your dress and corsage it would turn out to be a trick and the guy who had asked you out would be laughing at you, standing arm in arm with a popular girl who was usually blonde with feathered bangs and whose mother was ok with her wearing eyeliner. I spent a good amount of time horrified that I might find myself in this situation, and decided that the best way to avoid it at all costs was to avoid anyone who appeared to be interested in me. This led to a decade in which I became extremely adept at playing Boggle, Scrabble, and Tetris. Also, I read a lot.
My very first date ever was with someone I met online. I wore a brown cotton sweater from the Gap over a blue crewneck T-shirt. We went to a bar that had two bowls of pretzels to a table and beer advertisements from the 70’s on the walls, and he told me about himself and why he had moved to the area and what his plans were for the future. And the whole time I sat opposite him in my brown cotton sweater thinking, “I’m on a date! This is what a date is like!” And at some point he took a calm sip of whatever beer he had chosen and asked about me, and I answered cheerfully with what I realize now is the mortifying statement, “This is my first date ever!” And he exercised what must have been a great deal of restraint and said, “Ever?” And I said, “Yeah, ever!” And I do not remember specific details about him, such as his name or what he looked like, or anything he said over the course of the night, but when we parted ways he said, “I’ll call you,” which I remembered from the movies meant, “I will not call you.” And I parted ways with him the way I had parted ways with everyone up until that point. I smiled and extended my hand and told him it had been very nice to meet him and thanked him for coming out, grinning with a smile normally reserved for disappointing job interviews. And as expected, he did not call to ask for a second date. I assumed that my biggest mistake had been wearing the brown cotton sweater and the blue T-shirt. The sweater, I remembered, had never been particularly flattering.
At the job where I worked with Holly there was me and there were a lot of girls my age or a few years older, most of whom were blonde and lived in Hoboken, one of whom would not talk to me after she caught me eating popcorn out of the garbage can in my cubicle. (And I would like to clear my name by saying that the popcorn was not actually touching the garbage-it was still in the microwaveable bag in which I had popped it, and there was nothing else in my garbage can but computer paper, and I had initially thrown the bag away hoping that the act of putting it in the garbage would force me to stop eating it. But I had not really committed to throwing it away, since I had placed the bag, opening facing upward, gently on top of the garbage where it could easily be pulled back out. My paltry allotment of willpower is no match for the olfactory supernova of popcorn.) I liked Holly best out of the people in the office because she understood that there are certain circumstances under which it is ok to eat food out of an office trash can and she liked me because I understood that there are certain plays that cannot really be appreciated until you have seen them fourteen times, namely, the Broadway musical “The Light in the Piazza,” and anything starring Brenda Bleythn.
Holly’s husband, the one who would intermittently buy her pomegranates on a romantic whim, had worked in an office until he one day decided that he couldn’t go on working in an office any longer. And he had said, “I’m going to be a playwright.” And Holly had been a little nervous, because, as she reminded me, they had two children at that point, and the life of a playwright is not particularly lucrative, if it generates any income at all. But she had said, ok, we’ll try this, even though the whole idea sounded crazier than eating popcorn out of a perfectly clean garbage can, and he turned out to be a successful playwright, and now they lived together in their little house with the caddy corner piano in the living room, and the 1989 Volvo in the driveway.
When you fill out an online dating profile it is divided into two sections: what you are like, and what you are looking for, which might also be accurately labeled, “Outright lies,” and “horrifically unreasonable expectations.” My favorite online profile that I ever came across was a man who claimed to be a well-respected surgeon, who (when he was not saving lives by deftly cutting out tumors) was busy flying his private plane or playing catch with his 4 year-old Labrador retriever, Watson, throwing a tennis ball off the back of his deep sea fishing boat. He played in a band when he had the time, and had fond memories of his grandmother, and his favorite food was sushi, and his favorite movie was Finding Nemo. All of his photographs appeared to have been cut out of an L.L. Bean catalog.
An online profile will ask you to list a great deal of information about yourself and it is important that you be as accurate as possible, while being careful never to include anything unflattering or extremist. It is a pre-requisite of online profile composition that you include the line, “I love going out, but sometimes I also like to stay in.” People who do not enjoy both going out AND staying in are not eligible for online dating. The beginning of your profile will look something like the following:
· 24 year-old woman
· Brooklyn, New York, United States
· Seeking men 26-33
· Within 25 miles of Brooklyn, New York, United States
Sometimes it will ask you questions, such as, “What sort of music do you listen to?” and you have to be careful not to write something like, “I love Phil Collins and own two copies of the Tarzan soundtrack,” because even if it is true, very few people will read that sentence and fall head over heels in love with you. There will be some parts of the profile where you will get to write long passages about yourself and there will be some parts where they will offer you a series of boxes that correlate with people’s interests and will ask you to check all that apply.
I am interested in:
· Camping!
· Coffee and Conversation!
· Dining Out!
· Gardening/Landscaping!
· Movies/Videos!
· Museums and Art!
· Playing cards!
· Travel/Sightseeing!
· Wine tasting!
I found two pictures of myself that I did not think were terrible and uploaded them to the website. In the first one I am sitting in my office cubicle in a coat and scarf reading a book. In the second I am wearing a homemade Halloween costume, dressed as a “chick magnet,” clad in a chunky turtleneck sweater and jeans, which are covered in dozens of small, yellow chicks. For a brief period I put up a third picture, depicting Steve Carrell’s character from the movie “Anchorman,” but the site took it down, claiming that posting licensed photos was against site policy.
You pick photos that depict you as you would like to imagine you look every day. And you look over your profile to make sure it says all of the things you would like the world to know about yourself and that it reveals none of the things you were hoping to keep secret. And you look over your photographs, wondering if you have any that are better. And then you realize that this is it, this is all you have and all you are, and that maybe someone will like you and maybe someone will actively dislike you, but that most likely, no one will care one way or the other. You check back every few hours to see if anyone has left you a message, and most of the time nobody has.
I am pulling apart the pomegranate underwater, hundreds of clustered seeds nestling in its crevices. Pomegranates do not look like most other fruit-there is no meaty flesh to be scooped up by a melon baller, and you cannot bite through a thin skin, the way you can with a peach or an apple. The first time I saw the inside of a pomegranate, I thought that it had gone bad-that the pure white of the inside had been compromised by what appeared to be a series of thin red worms tunneling through the pulp.
“That’s a normal pomegranate,” said Holly. “That’s how they’re supposed to look.”
“It looks gross.”
“Try it.”
“It looks infested,” I said.
“Don’t be put off by how they look,” she said. “Lots of things look fine but taste terrible.”
Someone told me once that the apple that Eve samples in the garden of Eden is a mistranslation-that the actual fruit taken from the tree of knowledge is a pomegranate, which makes that particular creation myth more palatable. As a child my mother would pack me a bag lunch five days a week, consisting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (which, by my lunch period had been flattened to the thickness of a sparsely packed Fed Ex envelope) with a juice box and a Red Delicious apple, deep red and broad shouldered with a waxy shine to its skin. Every day she would pack me a Red Delicious apple and every day I would walk politely to the cafeteria garbage can, lift the lid, and deposit the apple as if I were mailing a letter. My mother purchased Red Delicious apples because they were inexpensive and because they didn’t go bad as quickly as some other varieties of apple, but failed to take into account that the reason they are so inexpensive is because in blind taste tests Red Delicious apples are indistinguishable from pieces of cardboard.
“You threw them away?” she asked, years later, after my confession that I had discarded thousands of untouched apples, all of which were nestled in a landfill somewhere, clustered like pomegranate seeds, covered by the thin membrane of the earth.
“I threw all of them away. They were bad. They were gross.”
“Red Delicious apples almost never go bad.”
And that was when I explained to her that Red Delicious apples do not “go” bad because they are already bad. That the word “Delicious” was included in the name to entice people to use them as something other than paperweights.
* * *
My first date that was not a complete train wreck was also with someone I had met online (Height: 5’11”, Eyes: Blue).
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. He was in his third year of a Ph.D. program and had a cat and liked comic books and we dated for three years, despite the fact that we had little to nothing in common aside from a love of spareribs and distaste for the movie “Seabiscuit.”
“How are things with Dan?” Holly asked occasionally. “Are you still together?” And I answered, “Yes,” for several years. And then at some point he realized that despite being in a relationship we were both lonely and not particularly well matched, and he broke it off. I was inconsolable for several months, at one point walking into a Ranch 1 Fast Food chicken restaurant and breaking into tears at the song, “My Boo,” being played over the loudspeakers.
And I would occasionally think of Holly and her wonderful family. Her husband, bent over his desk, scribbling endless pages of convincing dialogue. Her children asking if they could paint their rooms some horrible color like dark green or fluorescent orange and Holly politely telling them, “No, that is not such a good idea,” and the children exhibiting disappointment imbued with an absurdly mature level of understanding. Their home filled with warmth and good cheer and the innumerable things people hope to depict on holiday greeting cards. The last time I visited them at their house they were sitting around their Christmas tree, hugging each other. I wondered, at times, if I was visiting a co-worker or had undertaken a surrealistic journey through a Norman Rockwell painting.
* * *
I created a new online dating profile almost a year after my breakup, filled with fascinating tidbits about my personality (Pets I have: None! Pets I like: Dogs, Cats, Horses!) and forced myself to go out on dates. People would occasionally ask if all the bad dates blended together after a while, but I asserted that no, they were all unique in their awfulness. I had moved onto a new job in the city at that point and no longer worked with Holly, but e-mailed her occasionally to see how she was doing. She was always doing well, seeing Broadway plays and working and coming home to her two wonderful children and her cats and her two geckos and her wonderful husband who sometimes bought her pomegranates out of love.
I met a very nice guy online (Height: 6’0”, Eyes: Brown) who had curly brownish reddish hair and whose mother raised purebred dogs in Ontario. He was friendly and nice and we dated for a few months. He was many of the things I was looking for, which, rather than causing me to step up the intensity of the relationship, made me wonder whether the things I was looking for were horribly misguided. A friend of mine in college had once taken an evening and listed the traits of her perfect match-of her soul mate, she said. The list began with things such as:
· Funny
· Handsome
· Not allergic to dogs
· Gets along with my parents
· Kind
And in the middle it included things such as:
· Likes Thai food
· Speaks another language in addition to English
· Works in the music industry but volunteers at a Non-Profit
· Has a great singing voice
And at the end it included things such as:
· Has memorized the lyrics to “In Your Eyes,” by Peter Gabriel
· Favorite color is orange
· Second favorite color is brown
· Does not own anything from IKEA
· Is willing to watch my “When Harry Met Sally” DVD with me once every few months without complaining
And the very last bullet point, which is the only reason I remember her writing all this out in the first place, was the line:
· He should not meet all the criteria of this list.
* * *
The most ridiculous message I received while online dating was from a 33 year-old man living in Jersey City (Height: 6’2”, Eyes: Hazel) written under the subject line, “I hate puppies.”
“Hello,” he said. “I just read through your profile and thought, ‘Wow! I have never met anyone with whom I am so horribly mismatched and in whom I am so horribly uninterested.’ After going through your “About Me” section (and falling asleep several times, by the way) I made it to your “interests,” desperately hoping that you (like myself) are looking for a relationship based solely on a shared interest in seagull migration patterns and a passion for memorizing train schedules. That being absent, I thought that perhaps you were that person I have searched for all my life, with whom I could walk around lower-income Midwestern towns, buying antique Vaseline jars at garage sales. THAT being absent, I thought that perhaps you shared my disdain for adorable, large-footed puppies which, given the information in your profile, is also not the case.
All that being said,” he continued, “I really liked your profile and am horrible at writing to people online.”
I responded in the only way you can respond to a letter of that sort, which is to tell him that I was unable to write very much at that time, being that I was involved with a 3-day project involving Busby Berkeley choreography and tarantulas. And that the following evening I would have loved to chat, except that I would be busy translating the phrase, “Where have all the flowers gone?” into a number of Mayan dialects. And also, I confessed, in actual seriousness, that I was involved in a highly intensive online project that would be completed in two weeks. But if he would like to write e-mails back and forth for two weeks, that it would be a welcome break from the work. And he said “Fine,” and for the next two weeks I received lighthearted e-mails from him in which he pretended to be senator Chuck Schumer.
“I’m at home,” he said. “Watching this great Schoolhouse Rocks! special about how a bill becomes a law. I think I almost understand it. On Monday I’m going to try and explain it to Congress.”
And occasionally I would ask about one of the details of his actual life, wondering if I might learn something about him.
“You live in Jersey City?” I asked. “Do you like it?”
“What’s not to like about it?” he asked. “Jersey City is not only the birthplace of the toothpick, it’s also the first place where churned butter was genetically modified in our attempts to create a biological weapon in our epic struggle against the soviets. It’s also home to some of our most renowned scientists, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Jefferson Davis, E.O. Wilson and Georges Sand. Also, it was recently named ‘Happiest City in New Jersey’ by Jersey City Magazine-the first time it’s won the award in the publication’s 127 year history.”
“Are you ever serious about things?” I asked.
“I’m not wonderful at being serious,” he replied. “But I can try, if you really want me to.”
At the close of two weeks I asked if he would still like to meet up and he said yes, he would, very much. And he asked what sort of food I liked, and I said, “Anything except Indian food,” and he suggested Ethiopian food and since I did not want to appear to be an uncultured cretin, I said, “Yes, sure, Ethiopian food would be fine.” I remembered that in the movie “When Harry Met Sally” they go out for Ethiopian food and the movie ends well-with the two of them getting together, so maybe there is something about Ethiopian food that bodes well with budding relationships.
And I received the following message:
“So I’ll see you on Saturday night then. We can spend an hour or two chatting over Ethiopian food before leaving the restaurant in disgust (with each other-not with the food.) And then we can part ways and think about all the better ways we could have spent the evening."
Before I left the house I brushed my hair and put on a three quarter sleeve tomato-colored peacoat. I took the subway to West Fourth street and walked past the basketball courts and past the hardware store and past a parking garage and a nightclub called, “The Fat Black Pussycat.” I walked past dozens of people my age, some of whom seemed happy, some of whom seemed confused, sitting thoughtfully in pizza parlors or on stoops.
“So I’ll be able to recognize you?” I had asked. “You look like you do in your pictures?”
“Of course not,” he wrote. “I cut the pictures out of a Land’s End catalog that my mother was throwing away. I look nothing like any of my pictures. But meet me in front of the restaurant regardless-I’ll be the four-foot tall man in the Stegosaurus costume with the extending telescopic eye.”
“Ok,” I said quietly. “I’ll be the nine foot tall Elton John impersonator holding a taxidermied nightingale and reciting lines from Nicholas Cage movies.”
“Ok,” he said. “I will keep my eyes peeled. I am looking forward to meeting you.”
I am walking down the street in my peacoat, wishing I had worn gloves. I get to MacDougal street and begin walking down the street, staring up at signs, muttering the words, “Ethiopian restaurant, Ethopian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant.” I do not know exactly what I am looking for, but have the name written down on a torn piece of paper, which I continually pull from my pocket, unscrolling it and holding it taut between my cold, ungloved hands. I look down at the paper and up at the street and I hear a voice say, “Raquel?”
And I look up and standing politely by a doorway is a four-foot tall man in a stegosaurus costume, with an extending telescopic eye.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” he says, through an electronic voicebox that translates dinosaur-style grunts into conversational American English. His eye extends slowly, protruding from his reptilian face, looking at me for the first time.
“No, stop,” my mother said, as I recounted the story. “Tell the actual normal story.”
“Ok,” I tell her.
So I’m walking down the street in my peacoat, wishing I had worn gloves. I get to MacDougal street and begin walking down the street, staring up at signs, muttering the words, “Ethiopian restaurant, Ethopian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant.” I do not know exactly what I am looking for, but have the name written down on a torn piece of paper, which I continually pull from my pocket, unscrolling it and holding it taut between my cold, ungloved hands. I look down at the paper and up at the street and I hear a voice say, “Raquel?”
“And?” a friend asks.
“And I turn around to see Senator Chuck Schumer, handing out informational pamphlets.”
“Stop it. How did the date go?”
“It went fine.”
“Was he normal?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
So here is what really happened. Really. I promise. I heard a voice say, “Raquel?” and I turned around and there was a regular person behind me.
“What did he look like?” my friend asked.
“He looked like Waldo.”
“Waldo who?”
“You know Waldo from the ‘Where’s Waldo?’ books.”
“He looks like Waldo?” she asked.
“A little,” I said. “And a little bit like Adrien Brody. If Adrien Brody and Waldo had a baby, he would look like that.”
“Ok,” she said.
I looked at his face. He was tall and thin. He was handsome, with very dark brown hair and hazel eyes and freckles across his face and his hands. I looked behind him for lists of his interests or habits or an additional “More About Me” paragraph, but there was nothing except himself, wrapped tightly in a black jacket, hands stuck anxiously in his pockets. He extended one of them for a handshake, and his warm glove enveloped my hand.
“I’m Jonathan,” he said, and I smiled and said, “You seem sort of like a normal, regular person.”
“I am one,” he said.
“That’s ok,” I told him. “We might still get along.”
I am peeling apart the pomegranate the way Holly showed me, and pushing out the seeds, watching them float to the bottom of the bowl. I put them in the refrigerator so they will be cold for later, which was not one of the steps that Holly taught me, but you are allowed to add additional steps if you want to. There is no universal pomegranate preparation agenda.
I place the seeds in the fridge. I was twenty-three when I first learned how to cut up a pomegranate and twenty-eight before I had someone with whom to share one. In a basket on the counter are two additional pomegranates and zero Red Delicious apples. Later today I will bring one of the pomegranates out into the living room where Jonathan is sitting on our uncomfortable futon, reading a book, and I will offer to share it with him. We will sit in front of the gas fireplace and eat pomegranate seeds. I think back to Holly with her warm, enviable house and the visible vapors of bliss that emanated from her cats and her children and her husband and herself. I think back to her kitchen table where she sat, most likely, when her family ate casseroles or take-out Chinese food or pizza, and to their cared-for Christmas tree, and to the warm feeling I got being near her family, even though I am always notoriously cold, even when wearing layers.
“Teach me how to do this,” I wanted to say. “Teach me how to have what you have.”
I will be thirty years-old when Jonathan and I get married and start our ridiculous life together, but I was twenty-three when I looked over Holly’s shoulder, desperately trying to learn the two things she understood so effortlessly: how to be happy, and how to be loved. There is a lot of trial and error involved. I squinted and pursed my lips.
“Like this?” I asked her.
“Not exactly,” she said. “Try again. Sometimes it takes a little while before you get it down.” I nodded, trying to take in an invaluable lesson and still get home in time to have dinner with my parents.
“Like this?” I asked.
“No,” she said, frowning. “Definitely not like that.”
I paused, discouraged.
“Try again,” she says.
“Like this,” I say, with conviction. “You do it like this.”
“That’s it,” she says. “Like that.”
But roll up your sleeves and immerse one of the pomegranate pieces in the cold water, separating the white pulp from the bright, jewel-toned seeds. The seeds will sink to the bottom and the white pulp will float to the top, and the water will keep the juice from staining your palms, keeping you from looking like Lady MacBeth in the first scene of act five, which really is not such a great look for anyone. When I spilled things on myself as a child my parents would take the garment, running it under cold water, and chanting, “Out, out, damn spot!” I was seventeen years-old-a junior in High School, before I learned that the phrase “Out, out damn spot,” was not about getting food stains out of clothing. I was twenty-three before I learned how to open a Pomegranate. I do not know at what ages other people learned these things, or whether they learned them at all, so I have nothing with which to compare myself. I will assume, for the time being, that my experience is normal.
Holly introduced me to pomegranates. They were her favorite fruit, she said, and her husband would sometimes bring one home for her, the way other men would bring their wives bouquets of roses. When she said this I nodded quickly to give the impression of understanding, as if I received bouquets of roses all the time-as if the men hoping to meet me were lined up around the block, like the nannies in Mary Poppins who are eventually blown away by the wind.
I was twenty-three when I learned how to artfully open a pomegranate and I was twenty-four when I first went on a date, which was something no one had ever shown me how to do.
I knew nothing about dating. I had not had a great deal of luck with the opposite sex. The Dorothy Parker adage states, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” but I had discovered several unfortunate addendums, including: Men seldom make passes at girls who wear loafers, Men seldom make passes at girls who are constantly doing Walter Matthau imitations, and Men seldom make passes at girls who sit in front of their computer for nine hours, trying to beat their high score in Minesweeper.
I was not normal, and I knew that boys did not have crushes on girls that were not normal. I had learned from numerous 80’s movies that cool, popular guys would sometimes ask you to go to the prom with them, but when you actually arrived at the prom in your dress and corsage it would turn out to be a trick and the guy who had asked you out would be laughing at you, standing arm in arm with a popular girl who was usually blonde with feathered bangs and whose mother was ok with her wearing eyeliner. I spent a good amount of time horrified that I might find myself in this situation, and decided that the best way to avoid it at all costs was to avoid anyone who appeared to be interested in me. This led to a decade in which I became extremely adept at playing Boggle, Scrabble, and Tetris. Also, I read a lot.
My very first date ever was with someone I met online. I wore a brown cotton sweater from the Gap over a blue crewneck T-shirt. We went to a bar that had two bowls of pretzels to a table and beer advertisements from the 70’s on the walls, and he told me about himself and why he had moved to the area and what his plans were for the future. And the whole time I sat opposite him in my brown cotton sweater thinking, “I’m on a date! This is what a date is like!” And at some point he took a calm sip of whatever beer he had chosen and asked about me, and I answered cheerfully with what I realize now is the mortifying statement, “This is my first date ever!” And he exercised what must have been a great deal of restraint and said, “Ever?” And I said, “Yeah, ever!” And I do not remember specific details about him, such as his name or what he looked like, or anything he said over the course of the night, but when we parted ways he said, “I’ll call you,” which I remembered from the movies meant, “I will not call you.” And I parted ways with him the way I had parted ways with everyone up until that point. I smiled and extended my hand and told him it had been very nice to meet him and thanked him for coming out, grinning with a smile normally reserved for disappointing job interviews. And as expected, he did not call to ask for a second date. I assumed that my biggest mistake had been wearing the brown cotton sweater and the blue T-shirt. The sweater, I remembered, had never been particularly flattering.
At the job where I worked with Holly there was me and there were a lot of girls my age or a few years older, most of whom were blonde and lived in Hoboken, one of whom would not talk to me after she caught me eating popcorn out of the garbage can in my cubicle. (And I would like to clear my name by saying that the popcorn was not actually touching the garbage-it was still in the microwaveable bag in which I had popped it, and there was nothing else in my garbage can but computer paper, and I had initially thrown the bag away hoping that the act of putting it in the garbage would force me to stop eating it. But I had not really committed to throwing it away, since I had placed the bag, opening facing upward, gently on top of the garbage where it could easily be pulled back out. My paltry allotment of willpower is no match for the olfactory supernova of popcorn.) I liked Holly best out of the people in the office because she understood that there are certain circumstances under which it is ok to eat food out of an office trash can and she liked me because I understood that there are certain plays that cannot really be appreciated until you have seen them fourteen times, namely, the Broadway musical “The Light in the Piazza,” and anything starring Brenda Bleythn.
Holly’s husband, the one who would intermittently buy her pomegranates on a romantic whim, had worked in an office until he one day decided that he couldn’t go on working in an office any longer. And he had said, “I’m going to be a playwright.” And Holly had been a little nervous, because, as she reminded me, they had two children at that point, and the life of a playwright is not particularly lucrative, if it generates any income at all. But she had said, ok, we’ll try this, even though the whole idea sounded crazier than eating popcorn out of a perfectly clean garbage can, and he turned out to be a successful playwright, and now they lived together in their little house with the caddy corner piano in the living room, and the 1989 Volvo in the driveway.
When you fill out an online dating profile it is divided into two sections: what you are like, and what you are looking for, which might also be accurately labeled, “Outright lies,” and “horrifically unreasonable expectations.” My favorite online profile that I ever came across was a man who claimed to be a well-respected surgeon, who (when he was not saving lives by deftly cutting out tumors) was busy flying his private plane or playing catch with his 4 year-old Labrador retriever, Watson, throwing a tennis ball off the back of his deep sea fishing boat. He played in a band when he had the time, and had fond memories of his grandmother, and his favorite food was sushi, and his favorite movie was Finding Nemo. All of his photographs appeared to have been cut out of an L.L. Bean catalog.
An online profile will ask you to list a great deal of information about yourself and it is important that you be as accurate as possible, while being careful never to include anything unflattering or extremist. It is a pre-requisite of online profile composition that you include the line, “I love going out, but sometimes I also like to stay in.” People who do not enjoy both going out AND staying in are not eligible for online dating. The beginning of your profile will look something like the following:
· 24 year-old woman
· Brooklyn, New York, United States
· Seeking men 26-33
· Within 25 miles of Brooklyn, New York, United States
Sometimes it will ask you questions, such as, “What sort of music do you listen to?” and you have to be careful not to write something like, “I love Phil Collins and own two copies of the Tarzan soundtrack,” because even if it is true, very few people will read that sentence and fall head over heels in love with you. There will be some parts of the profile where you will get to write long passages about yourself and there will be some parts where they will offer you a series of boxes that correlate with people’s interests and will ask you to check all that apply.
I am interested in:
· Camping!
· Coffee and Conversation!
· Dining Out!
· Gardening/Landscaping!
· Movies/Videos!
· Museums and Art!
· Playing cards!
· Travel/Sightseeing!
· Wine tasting!
I found two pictures of myself that I did not think were terrible and uploaded them to the website. In the first one I am sitting in my office cubicle in a coat and scarf reading a book. In the second I am wearing a homemade Halloween costume, dressed as a “chick magnet,” clad in a chunky turtleneck sweater and jeans, which are covered in dozens of small, yellow chicks. For a brief period I put up a third picture, depicting Steve Carrell’s character from the movie “Anchorman,” but the site took it down, claiming that posting licensed photos was against site policy.
You pick photos that depict you as you would like to imagine you look every day. And you look over your profile to make sure it says all of the things you would like the world to know about yourself and that it reveals none of the things you were hoping to keep secret. And you look over your photographs, wondering if you have any that are better. And then you realize that this is it, this is all you have and all you are, and that maybe someone will like you and maybe someone will actively dislike you, but that most likely, no one will care one way or the other. You check back every few hours to see if anyone has left you a message, and most of the time nobody has.
I am pulling apart the pomegranate underwater, hundreds of clustered seeds nestling in its crevices. Pomegranates do not look like most other fruit-there is no meaty flesh to be scooped up by a melon baller, and you cannot bite through a thin skin, the way you can with a peach or an apple. The first time I saw the inside of a pomegranate, I thought that it had gone bad-that the pure white of the inside had been compromised by what appeared to be a series of thin red worms tunneling through the pulp.
“That’s a normal pomegranate,” said Holly. “That’s how they’re supposed to look.”
“It looks gross.”
“Try it.”
“It looks infested,” I said.
“Don’t be put off by how they look,” she said. “Lots of things look fine but taste terrible.”
Someone told me once that the apple that Eve samples in the garden of Eden is a mistranslation-that the actual fruit taken from the tree of knowledge is a pomegranate, which makes that particular creation myth more palatable. As a child my mother would pack me a bag lunch five days a week, consisting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (which, by my lunch period had been flattened to the thickness of a sparsely packed Fed Ex envelope) with a juice box and a Red Delicious apple, deep red and broad shouldered with a waxy shine to its skin. Every day she would pack me a Red Delicious apple and every day I would walk politely to the cafeteria garbage can, lift the lid, and deposit the apple as if I were mailing a letter. My mother purchased Red Delicious apples because they were inexpensive and because they didn’t go bad as quickly as some other varieties of apple, but failed to take into account that the reason they are so inexpensive is because in blind taste tests Red Delicious apples are indistinguishable from pieces of cardboard.
“You threw them away?” she asked, years later, after my confession that I had discarded thousands of untouched apples, all of which were nestled in a landfill somewhere, clustered like pomegranate seeds, covered by the thin membrane of the earth.
“I threw all of them away. They were bad. They were gross.”
“Red Delicious apples almost never go bad.”
And that was when I explained to her that Red Delicious apples do not “go” bad because they are already bad. That the word “Delicious” was included in the name to entice people to use them as something other than paperweights.
* * *
My first date that was not a complete train wreck was also with someone I had met online (Height: 5’11”, Eyes: Blue).
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. He was in his third year of a Ph.D. program and had a cat and liked comic books and we dated for three years, despite the fact that we had little to nothing in common aside from a love of spareribs and distaste for the movie “Seabiscuit.”
“How are things with Dan?” Holly asked occasionally. “Are you still together?” And I answered, “Yes,” for several years. And then at some point he realized that despite being in a relationship we were both lonely and not particularly well matched, and he broke it off. I was inconsolable for several months, at one point walking into a Ranch 1 Fast Food chicken restaurant and breaking into tears at the song, “My Boo,” being played over the loudspeakers.
And I would occasionally think of Holly and her wonderful family. Her husband, bent over his desk, scribbling endless pages of convincing dialogue. Her children asking if they could paint their rooms some horrible color like dark green or fluorescent orange and Holly politely telling them, “No, that is not such a good idea,” and the children exhibiting disappointment imbued with an absurdly mature level of understanding. Their home filled with warmth and good cheer and the innumerable things people hope to depict on holiday greeting cards. The last time I visited them at their house they were sitting around their Christmas tree, hugging each other. I wondered, at times, if I was visiting a co-worker or had undertaken a surrealistic journey through a Norman Rockwell painting.
* * *
I created a new online dating profile almost a year after my breakup, filled with fascinating tidbits about my personality (Pets I have: None! Pets I like: Dogs, Cats, Horses!) and forced myself to go out on dates. People would occasionally ask if all the bad dates blended together after a while, but I asserted that no, they were all unique in their awfulness. I had moved onto a new job in the city at that point and no longer worked with Holly, but e-mailed her occasionally to see how she was doing. She was always doing well, seeing Broadway plays and working and coming home to her two wonderful children and her cats and her two geckos and her wonderful husband who sometimes bought her pomegranates out of love.
I met a very nice guy online (Height: 6’0”, Eyes: Brown) who had curly brownish reddish hair and whose mother raised purebred dogs in Ontario. He was friendly and nice and we dated for a few months. He was many of the things I was looking for, which, rather than causing me to step up the intensity of the relationship, made me wonder whether the things I was looking for were horribly misguided. A friend of mine in college had once taken an evening and listed the traits of her perfect match-of her soul mate, she said. The list began with things such as:
· Funny
· Handsome
· Not allergic to dogs
· Gets along with my parents
· Kind
And in the middle it included things such as:
· Likes Thai food
· Speaks another language in addition to English
· Works in the music industry but volunteers at a Non-Profit
· Has a great singing voice
And at the end it included things such as:
· Has memorized the lyrics to “In Your Eyes,” by Peter Gabriel
· Favorite color is orange
· Second favorite color is brown
· Does not own anything from IKEA
· Is willing to watch my “When Harry Met Sally” DVD with me once every few months without complaining
And the very last bullet point, which is the only reason I remember her writing all this out in the first place, was the line:
· He should not meet all the criteria of this list.
* * *
The most ridiculous message I received while online dating was from a 33 year-old man living in Jersey City (Height: 6’2”, Eyes: Hazel) written under the subject line, “I hate puppies.”
“Hello,” he said. “I just read through your profile and thought, ‘Wow! I have never met anyone with whom I am so horribly mismatched and in whom I am so horribly uninterested.’ After going through your “About Me” section (and falling asleep several times, by the way) I made it to your “interests,” desperately hoping that you (like myself) are looking for a relationship based solely on a shared interest in seagull migration patterns and a passion for memorizing train schedules. That being absent, I thought that perhaps you were that person I have searched for all my life, with whom I could walk around lower-income Midwestern towns, buying antique Vaseline jars at garage sales. THAT being absent, I thought that perhaps you shared my disdain for adorable, large-footed puppies which, given the information in your profile, is also not the case.
All that being said,” he continued, “I really liked your profile and am horrible at writing to people online.”
I responded in the only way you can respond to a letter of that sort, which is to tell him that I was unable to write very much at that time, being that I was involved with a 3-day project involving Busby Berkeley choreography and tarantulas. And that the following evening I would have loved to chat, except that I would be busy translating the phrase, “Where have all the flowers gone?” into a number of Mayan dialects. And also, I confessed, in actual seriousness, that I was involved in a highly intensive online project that would be completed in two weeks. But if he would like to write e-mails back and forth for two weeks, that it would be a welcome break from the work. And he said “Fine,” and for the next two weeks I received lighthearted e-mails from him in which he pretended to be senator Chuck Schumer.
“I’m at home,” he said. “Watching this great Schoolhouse Rocks! special about how a bill becomes a law. I think I almost understand it. On Monday I’m going to try and explain it to Congress.”
And occasionally I would ask about one of the details of his actual life, wondering if I might learn something about him.
“You live in Jersey City?” I asked. “Do you like it?”
“What’s not to like about it?” he asked. “Jersey City is not only the birthplace of the toothpick, it’s also the first place where churned butter was genetically modified in our attempts to create a biological weapon in our epic struggle against the soviets. It’s also home to some of our most renowned scientists, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Jefferson Davis, E.O. Wilson and Georges Sand. Also, it was recently named ‘Happiest City in New Jersey’ by Jersey City Magazine-the first time it’s won the award in the publication’s 127 year history.”
“Are you ever serious about things?” I asked.
“I’m not wonderful at being serious,” he replied. “But I can try, if you really want me to.”
At the close of two weeks I asked if he would still like to meet up and he said yes, he would, very much. And he asked what sort of food I liked, and I said, “Anything except Indian food,” and he suggested Ethiopian food and since I did not want to appear to be an uncultured cretin, I said, “Yes, sure, Ethiopian food would be fine.” I remembered that in the movie “When Harry Met Sally” they go out for Ethiopian food and the movie ends well-with the two of them getting together, so maybe there is something about Ethiopian food that bodes well with budding relationships.
And I received the following message:
“So I’ll see you on Saturday night then. We can spend an hour or two chatting over Ethiopian food before leaving the restaurant in disgust (with each other-not with the food.) And then we can part ways and think about all the better ways we could have spent the evening."
Before I left the house I brushed my hair and put on a three quarter sleeve tomato-colored peacoat. I took the subway to West Fourth street and walked past the basketball courts and past the hardware store and past a parking garage and a nightclub called, “The Fat Black Pussycat.” I walked past dozens of people my age, some of whom seemed happy, some of whom seemed confused, sitting thoughtfully in pizza parlors or on stoops.
“So I’ll be able to recognize you?” I had asked. “You look like you do in your pictures?”
“Of course not,” he wrote. “I cut the pictures out of a Land’s End catalog that my mother was throwing away. I look nothing like any of my pictures. But meet me in front of the restaurant regardless-I’ll be the four-foot tall man in the Stegosaurus costume with the extending telescopic eye.”
“Ok,” I said quietly. “I’ll be the nine foot tall Elton John impersonator holding a taxidermied nightingale and reciting lines from Nicholas Cage movies.”
“Ok,” he said. “I will keep my eyes peeled. I am looking forward to meeting you.”
I am walking down the street in my peacoat, wishing I had worn gloves. I get to MacDougal street and begin walking down the street, staring up at signs, muttering the words, “Ethiopian restaurant, Ethopian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant.” I do not know exactly what I am looking for, but have the name written down on a torn piece of paper, which I continually pull from my pocket, unscrolling it and holding it taut between my cold, ungloved hands. I look down at the paper and up at the street and I hear a voice say, “Raquel?”
And I look up and standing politely by a doorway is a four-foot tall man in a stegosaurus costume, with an extending telescopic eye.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” he says, through an electronic voicebox that translates dinosaur-style grunts into conversational American English. His eye extends slowly, protruding from his reptilian face, looking at me for the first time.
“No, stop,” my mother said, as I recounted the story. “Tell the actual normal story.”
“Ok,” I tell her.
So I’m walking down the street in my peacoat, wishing I had worn gloves. I get to MacDougal street and begin walking down the street, staring up at signs, muttering the words, “Ethiopian restaurant, Ethopian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant.” I do not know exactly what I am looking for, but have the name written down on a torn piece of paper, which I continually pull from my pocket, unscrolling it and holding it taut between my cold, ungloved hands. I look down at the paper and up at the street and I hear a voice say, “Raquel?”
“And?” a friend asks.
“And I turn around to see Senator Chuck Schumer, handing out informational pamphlets.”
“Stop it. How did the date go?”
“It went fine.”
“Was he normal?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
So here is what really happened. Really. I promise. I heard a voice say, “Raquel?” and I turned around and there was a regular person behind me.
“What did he look like?” my friend asked.
“He looked like Waldo.”
“Waldo who?”
“You know Waldo from the ‘Where’s Waldo?’ books.”
“He looks like Waldo?” she asked.
“A little,” I said. “And a little bit like Adrien Brody. If Adrien Brody and Waldo had a baby, he would look like that.”
“Ok,” she said.
I looked at his face. He was tall and thin. He was handsome, with very dark brown hair and hazel eyes and freckles across his face and his hands. I looked behind him for lists of his interests or habits or an additional “More About Me” paragraph, but there was nothing except himself, wrapped tightly in a black jacket, hands stuck anxiously in his pockets. He extended one of them for a handshake, and his warm glove enveloped my hand.
“I’m Jonathan,” he said, and I smiled and said, “You seem sort of like a normal, regular person.”
“I am one,” he said.
“That’s ok,” I told him. “We might still get along.”
I am peeling apart the pomegranate the way Holly showed me, and pushing out the seeds, watching them float to the bottom of the bowl. I put them in the refrigerator so they will be cold for later, which was not one of the steps that Holly taught me, but you are allowed to add additional steps if you want to. There is no universal pomegranate preparation agenda.
I place the seeds in the fridge. I was twenty-three when I first learned how to cut up a pomegranate and twenty-eight before I had someone with whom to share one. In a basket on the counter are two additional pomegranates and zero Red Delicious apples. Later today I will bring one of the pomegranates out into the living room where Jonathan is sitting on our uncomfortable futon, reading a book, and I will offer to share it with him. We will sit in front of the gas fireplace and eat pomegranate seeds. I think back to Holly with her warm, enviable house and the visible vapors of bliss that emanated from her cats and her children and her husband and herself. I think back to her kitchen table where she sat, most likely, when her family ate casseroles or take-out Chinese food or pizza, and to their cared-for Christmas tree, and to the warm feeling I got being near her family, even though I am always notoriously cold, even when wearing layers.
“Teach me how to do this,” I wanted to say. “Teach me how to have what you have.”
I will be thirty years-old when Jonathan and I get married and start our ridiculous life together, but I was twenty-three when I looked over Holly’s shoulder, desperately trying to learn the two things she understood so effortlessly: how to be happy, and how to be loved. There is a lot of trial and error involved. I squinted and pursed my lips.
“Like this?” I asked her.
“Not exactly,” she said. “Try again. Sometimes it takes a little while before you get it down.” I nodded, trying to take in an invaluable lesson and still get home in time to have dinner with my parents.
“Like this?” I asked.
“No,” she said, frowning. “Definitely not like that.”
I paused, discouraged.
“Try again,” she says.
“Like this,” I say, with conviction. “You do it like this.”
“That’s it,” she says. “Like that.”