“Sure. I’ve dropped my phone in the toilet before.”
Margo laughs before returning to the horror of her story. “I just remember literally thinking ‘is his face moving closer to mine?’ ‘Is he pouting his lips?’ ‘Is he actually trying to kiss me right now?’” She moves her open palm towards her face to indicate the motion.
“Please tell me that’s when you kneed him in the balls.”
“I didn’t knee him in the balls. But I was so stunned, right, that I moved away way too late. So he’s already bent over, like inches away, mouth already open…and that’s when I step back, like I suddenly woke up, and he’s still standing there, bent down, kissing air.”
I laugh as I say, “That’s amazing,” bringing my hand up for a high-five that Margo meets me with almost instantly.
“I think that was one of my top three worst ever dates. And that’s a pretty competitive category.”
“We should mention that we didn’t pick these dates ourselves,” I say.
“No, although I would love to see this guy’s profile. No way would a guy like that not have a profile with red flags all over it.”
Margo sighs at the camera, then looks at me for a few seconds, a smile on her face that I can’t quite read. It’s not the first time we’ve shared stories of bad dates, and it’s always cathartic, but something here, now, is different. I know it’s not the cameras, it’s something between us.
“To be honest,” I say, mischievously, “you don’t really pick dates that well when you do it yourself anyway.”
Margo sucks air through her teeth. “Low blow, Owen!”
I shrug apologetically. “Just saying. Maybe you need someone to show you what you need, rather than what you want.”
“And you think you know what I need?” There’s a flicker of a frown on Margo’s face, something real beneath the good humored chat for the cameras. Something she wouldn’t hide so quickly if we weren’t being filmed. “Are you thinking what I hope you’re not thinking?” she says.
“I don’t know—tell me and find out.”
“That you want to choose my next date for me.”
I pretend to be surprised. “Oh! That’s a great idea! I mean, if you really insist.”
“Fine.” Margo laughs and adds, “Only if I get to pick yours, too.”
“Ok,” I say, offering my hand and pulling up my sleeve, “deal.”
“No deliberately bad dates, no prank ones, or anything like that—please! I just wanna meet a nice, normal guy.”
“No bad set-ups, I promise,” I say. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Margo’s face softens, a rare sight, her eyes going rounder, glistening a little. “I wouldn’t do that to you either,” she says, in a tone too sweet, too intimate, for a studio filled with cameras. The kind of tone women usually use only across a pillow.
I look at the camera and wink.
“Did you just wink at the camera?” Margo laughs, punching me gently in the arm. “You’d better not even thinking about screwing me, Owen!”
I almost tell her right there, in front of the cameras, that it’s all I can think about right now.
10
Margo
My sister’s standing at my apartment door when I open it. She’s holding two jumbo-sized bags of potato chips in one hand, a bottle of champagne in the other, and her hair color is now a grayish-lavender platinum blonde rather than the strawberry blonde it was when I saw her two days ago.
“Classic movie night!” she squeals, throwing her arms around me.
When we were little girls, Louise and I loved old movies. We built our own imaginary world—I guess most sisters do—and the classics provided the backdrops, characters, and storylines that informed it. It wasn’t that we were trying to escape anything, because to be honest, our childhood was pretty great, but real life couldn’t compare to cinema.
What made it even more of a bonding experience was that while our friends were watching the emergence of reality shows and gross-out comedies, Louise and I were stuck with a crappy black and white fourteen-inch TV in the attic room we shared that couldn’t get reception. It was effectively useless except that it could play VHS tapes, so we raided our parents’ video collections, neighborhood yard sales, and charity thrift shops when we visited the city for any and every faded old video tape that caught our eye.
So our imaginations were fueled by actors and actresses in dreamily monotone, grainy images. Classic American cars rolling down surprisingly empty streets, conversations from phone booths, and ever-elegant clothes. Audrey Hepburn being three kinds of beautiful at once, Mae West sassing men before she devoured them. Meryl Streep making you forget she’s Meryl Streep and Olympia Dukakis making you forget she’s old enough to be your grandma.
I mostly grew out of it when I got involved with band and the school paper, sometime during high school—but Louise always clung to those visions of glamour. I think that’s what made her want to become an actress. And ever since we watched The Seven Year Itch where Marilyn Monroe dips chips into champagne, Louise wanted to try it. Eventually we did, as teenagers fooling around at a wedding party while the adults were all dancing drunkenly.
I can’t tell if Louise actually liked it, but somehow it became a tradition for us, as soon as we were hold enough to legally drink—to cheer ourselves up when times were tough with chips in champagne.
“Any news on your audition?” I ask, as she manages to squeeze the life out of me despite holding the food and drink.
She pulls away and steps inside as I close the door, striding toward the living room.
“Worse,” she says, “no news. I’d even take bad news right now, just to put me out of my misery.”
I walk into the living room where she’s already popped open one of the bags of chips and stretched herself out on my comfy, overstuffed loveseat.
“What happened to ‘trying not to think about it’?” I tease.
I go to the kitchen and grab some glasses while Louise chomps through the chips in her mouth enough to speak.
“Do you know how hard it is not to think about something?” Louise says, wiping her hands on her jeans and grabbing the champagne to open it. “You try to ignore something and it just turns into this giant, looming shadowy monster in your mind, waiting behind every other thought. Slipping just in and out of view like some killer in the trees.”
The champagne pops and Louise squeals slightly, then notices the hard look on my face. “What? Did I scare you?” she asks.
“No. That’s just a pretty good way of describing it. And yeah,” I say, holding up the glasses for her to pour, “I do know how hard it is trying not to think about something.”
Louise peers at me over a champagne glass she’s preparing to dunk a chip into.
“The Owen thing? Did you think about what I said? Might be worth a try…”
“Never mind,” I say, waving her comment away as I settle myself beside her on the loveseat and grab a chip. “What’s up with the audition stress? It’s only been two days.”