Ladyparts by Deborah Copaken

Author:Deborah Copaken [Copaken, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

The Church for Wayward Hearts

FEBRUARY–MAY 2015

Valentine’s Day evening, 2015, I arrive home from a slice of pizza date with my kids to a giant bouquet of magnolias outside my front door. And I mean giant: three feet wide, two feet high, arranged into the shape of a small tree, with a card containing a hand-drawn heart but nothing else. My kids are as perplexed as I. “Maybe Dad sent them?” says my daughter. I text my ex-husband: Did you send the kids and me flowers? An immediate text bubble appears with three dots followed by a long pause and then: No, should I have? I text my college boyfriend, the one from senior year who never married or had kids. We’d fallen into bed two weeks earlier for old time’s sake, both of us quickly regretting it after. Of course. They must be from him: a way of acknowledging the sweet time warp we shared while at the same time accepting we can never be. How kind. The flowers are not from him either, he writes back, but he wishes he’d thought of it, and oh, happy Valentine’s Day. Then I notice a clue on the envelope: the phone number of the florist. I call the number and ask if they’d mistakenly forgotten to include another card with actual words on it instead of just a heart. No, says the florist, and, sorry, no, she’s not at liberty to divulge the identity of my secret admirer. He’s asked to remain anonymous.

I’d redownloaded Tinder and had been on two other app dates: a lovely one with a younger shrink, who lived far away in Kentucky, so oh, well; another with an alleged designer of T-shirts who claimed to be fifty-three on his dating profile, but who, when I arrived at the appointed meeting place at the appointed time, looked to be in his early seventies: my parents’ generation, not mine. “You’re disappointed, aren’t you?” were the first slurred words out of his mouth, after I finally located him nursing what must have been his third or fourth martini.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Because you lied. So that doesn’t really start us off on a good footing, now does it?” I didn’t take off my coat or sit down. I’d already prepared the perfect escape, in case the date was a bust, in the form of a large industry party to which I’d been invited. Our date was officially over before it even began because of his lie, I told him, but if he still wanted to come to the party as planned, that was fine with me. Maybe he could meet someone more age appropriate there. Still trying to argue the case for why he had to lie—“You wouldn’t have swiped right on me!” (Yes, precisely.); “I deserve love!” (We all do, dude, but we also all deserve honesty.)—he followed me around the corner to the party, and I lost him in the crowd.

When he finally reemerged, an hour or so later, he seemed concerned.

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