Evelyn flinched with each word, trying to back away farther, but there was nowhere to go.
“I’ll tell you what you can do with this goddamn Tinker Day souvenir,” Barbara said. She whirled and walked toward a wastebasket, then paused, doing an about-face to the bathroom, brushing by Evelyn so hard that their elbows collided. Evelyn stood still with her eyes shut, trying not to breathe too aggressively. She heard a flush, then water from the sink, and then the bathroom door close. Evelyn wondered how still she could make her body. She was afraid that if she made too much of a sound, it would make her mother exit the bathroom before the anger had blown over. So she stood, hands at her sides, listening only to the whir of the air conditioner go on and then off in even pauses as it tried to keep the room a constant temperature. She found that if she breathed just a half amount of the normal air through her nostrils, her chest would not even rise. She could even very nearly float out of her body, and look at the top of her head from the ceiling.
CHAPTER NINE
Wall Street Blues
The Amtrak deposited Evelyn at Penn Station, and she followed the crowd up the escalators and into the waiting room, still fogged with the New York of sixteen years ago. She got a cab in seconds, as the long July Fourth weekend had rendered the city empty on a Sunday. Her family had gotten through the Channings’ party, as Evelyn knew they would, Barbara forced and gay, Dale discussing a motion, Evelyn hanging back by the crab cakes and deviled eggs. No one, inside the family or out, had mentioned the grand jury investigation again. Still, Evelyn was drained from the weekend, and she tapped her finger against the cab’s window, wondering if it was too late to cancel her second date with Scot that night. He’d chosen a French bistro on Sixty-ninth, and the thought of watching Scot dither over steak tartare versus steak au poivre sounded deadly. After the cab dropped her at her apartment, though, the investigation was taking over her thoughts, and she decided she needed to get outside and interact with someone. She would pay for her half of the meal, she reasoned, and let Scot know at the end of it that while she had enjoyed meeting him, this—them—wasn’t quite working.
Evelyn had reluctantly agreed to a first date with Scot when he’d called after the Lake James weekend. She had come to the date armed with four or five conversational topics but hurtled through these before the waiter even put down the bread basket. She was pulling the conversation, and the yoke was heavy. They traded sentences about themselves: he grew up in California, but moved to Arizona after his mother got remarried, and had always felt like he wasn’t an Arizona guy, but hadn’t really felt at home until getting his MBA at Harvard. She said that she grew up in a Chesapeake Bay town, and the water and the shore were beautiful. He talked about his college thesis on the overlap between Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, and she tried to stifle a yawn. So he changed the subject, or thought he was changing the subject, to talk about the capital-gains tax rate, but that led to an argument with himself over the inheritance tax. He was sweet, a nice guy, and when he kissed her after the first date and she rather obviously wiped the saliva from her mouth, she felt like a jerk. She also couldn’t nail down a good reason not to go out with him again.
Evelyn prepared for dates like she was cramming for a test in a class she’d barely attended. For Harris Reardon, a dull McKinsey consultant she’d dated straight out of college, Evelyn had studied fantasy baseball until she had strong opinions on B. J. Upton’s RBIs. For Jack Lynch, a friend of a friend of Charlotte’s who was a research analyst at Bear Stearns, she’d tried to learn enough about wine that she could talk of the nose and the bouquet as pretentiously as he did. This was how she approached all men, figuring out which version of herself to present in order to get a guy interested in her.
Evelyn couldn’t quite put her finger on why her dating life had never taken off. It had been slow from the start, in Bibville. The boy she had a crush on in middle school, Josh Meisel, had shown a brief and surprising interest in her in sixth grade, when he would call her on her private line during Quantum Leap to ask about the math homework, but at school Evelyn was too nervous to talk to him and, during their rare conversations, stared into the middle distance with an expression she thought looked European. It did not entrance him.