Girls in White Dresses

he had. Al he wanted was to know what to expect. His world didn’t look like he’d thought it would, and she understood. How could he keep calm if he couldn’t see? Isabel a lay on the floor of the playroom upstairs and listened. She heard the screams and she knew exactly how he felt. He was right—she could hear it on her insides.

T he bartender at McHale’s was sleazy in an attractive way. This annoyed Lauren. She couldn’t make sense of it. She was disgusted with Preston, yet stil happy whenever he threw a lime at her from behind the bar. “He’s gross,” she tried to explain to her friends. “He has dirty blond hair that he slicks back behind his ears with little curls at the end. It always looks greasy. His eyes are a filmy blue, like he’s thinking pervy things. And he has this big scar on his chin that I just always want to touch.”

“So he’s dirty sexy,” her friend Shannon said.

“Yes!” Lauren said. “But why?”

“Dirty sexy can’t real y be explained,” Shannon said. “It’s kind of like ugly sexy. Only you feel worse about it because you think you should be above the sleaze.”

Lauren felt better for the explanation, but it stil unsettled her to be around him. “I wil not sleep with him,” she told herself. Two weeks after she started working there, she stayed with Preston to have a drink after work and found herself having sex with him in the walk-in fridge. One second she was drinking a vodka soda, and the next thing she knew there was a bin of lettuce shaking above her head. She couldn’t serve a salad for weeks without feeling trashy.

“So much for that,” she said to Shannon. Shannon just shrugged.

Lauren was sure that Preston was not the right guy for her. But stil , she found herself in his bed. She lay behind him and sucked his blond curls when he was sleeping. She knew it couldn’t end wel .

Lauren was almost out of money when she decided to be a waitress. She had been looking for PR jobs in New York for a month and hadn’t even gotten an interview. So she started applying at bars in SoHo and gastropubs in the West Vil age. (She figured if she was going to be a waitress, she would like to do it in a place where she might see famous people.) But none of those places wanted her. It turned out that being a waitress in New York was more competitive than being in PR. Aspiring models and actresses flooded every restaurant, elbowing one another with bony arms to win the right to serve food. Lauren didn’t have a chance.

A friend suggested that she apply at McHale’s, an old-fashioned restaurant in Midtown with a wood-paneled dining room and a meatloaf special on Wednesdays. McHale’s was the kind of place that made people nostalgic for a time when businessmen drank at lunch and people ate pot roast on Sundays. It had a bar with red leather stools and a mean vodka gimlet. They offered Lauren a job the day she walked in and she took it.

And just like that, Lauren was a waitress. It was only temporary, of course. It was just an in-between job, something to make money while she was looking for her next move. She could tel that it made the customers happy when she told them this. They were more comfortable once they knew that Lauren had plans. She was just too pretty, too charming to simply be a waitress.

Lauren figured she would work at the restaurant for three months, maybe six months max. But a year went by and she was stil there. She stopped sending resumes out to PR firms. She couldn’t even remember what she thought she had wanted to be.

At the very least, Preston was a distraction from the detour her career had taken. He wasn’t a big talker, and Lauren found herself fil ing up the silence when they were together. That was how she came to tel him the story of the ham.

In her high school biology class, Lauren dissected a pig. Each pair of students got their very own formaldehyde-soaked piglet to cut up. As they sliced and dismembered the little porkers, the teacher told them different facts about the pig’s stomachs and reproductive organs. He walked over to Lauren’s pig and pointed to the rump. “This is where ham comes from,” he told her. Lauren looked up. “Ham comes from pigs?” she asked.

“Doesn’t ham come from a ham?” Everyone laughed. As soon as the question was out of her mouth, she knew it wasn’t right. A ham wasn’t an animal, of course. She was only confused for a second or two. But the thing was, she knew what the ham would look like if there was such a thing.

She could picture it perfectly, as though she had actual y seen it before.

She told Preston this story when they were lying in bed together. She didn’t know why she told him. Lauren hated the story, hated explaining how she’d thought a ham was an oval-shaped hunk of an animal that slurped across the ground. “You know,” she said, “I thought it would be a ham.” As she said this, she moved her hands in an oval motion. “A ham, ” she emphasized, as though this would explain it.

Preston laughed so hard that he cried. “Did you think it had just that one bone?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I didn’t think about it.”

He held his stomach and rocked back and forth. “Ow,” he said, wrapping his arms around himself. “Ow, it hurts! I can’t stop!”

A week after that, he woke up and said, “I don’t think this is going to work.” She was stil in his bed in a T-shirt and underwear and didn’t know what to say. Immediately she felt sorry for the ham—it had been a mistake to tel him about it. That much she knew.

After Preston broke up with her, Lauren started going to the park during the day. Al of her friends worked in offices and she couldn’t stand to be in her apartment alone. She would go to the park and lie on the grass, waiting for the day to be over so that she could start her shift at the restaurant.

She liked watching the clouds. She liked the way they always kept moving, even if it was so slowly that you