NELLE 7 | 2024
Roz has been on fourteen dates now without breaking down any of them to Taylor. She dates like it is her job, like she is hell-bent on eradicating free time. She is hell-bent on eradicating free time. And of eradicating her thoughts and, she is sure, some other eradication she doesn’t really want to think about. She misses Taylor—her best friend, her former best friend?—or she did two months ago, after Taylor started spending all of her time with Neil. And then something about her absence started to feel familiar, and Roz began to feel smug about it, how easy it was to remember living without her. That smugness is ugly, she knows, but something about that ugliness feels good. She is strong, Taylor helped make sure of that in junior high, all those year ago, the time they never talk about.
Well, now they never talk about anything.
She feels like some half of a scientific team that’s lost its partner. She is Clark, no Lewis. She is Lomb, no Bausch. She gets why doing things in teams can be so fruitful. She is fruitful anyway. She dates almost indiscriminately: an office supply salesman for 3-M, an over-dyed divorce lawyer, an agoraphobic video game designer, a bisexual with indeterminate income sources, a woman with an IMDB profile that lists her as the winner of a cooking show she’s never heard of, and a guy whose ex-girlfriend is a roller derby star. This last one is Byron. She goes with Byron to see her, Full Metal Jackie, even though Roz knows that is weird, and the amount of time he spends explaining how platonic their relationship is only convinces her of the opposite. It doesn’t matter. She is not dating for love. She is dating to keep herself busy. She is dating to feel something other than absence. She will cheer for Full Metal Jackie. She may even cheer for Jackie to see Byron and feel jealous, which is clearly his goal now, as they enter the derby arena. She wonders about making this a project: going on online dating sites and offering herself up as a prop for men rather than a romantic partner. She’d still get all the activities, sex when she wanted it, but she wouldn’t have to be so polite, act so interested. She’d get to know them well enough to strategize with them, and then she’d help find them a worthy girlfriend from inside the system. It takes a date to get a date, that’s what they say. It’s the kind of idea that could get you a book deal. She doesn’t have the energy for that, but maybe a book deal would help find her some energy.
She has at least one idea like this a day: the project or life initiative or Instagram account that will change everything. She used to tell them to Taylor. Now she forgets about them.
They wait in line for beer, and then Byron leads Roz to a spot on the floor at the edge of the rink. It is where he always sits, he says. Which means: it is where Jackie will know to look for him. The roller derby stars are loud and tattooed and covered in cuts and bruises. She admires their thigh muscles and their sexy-but-pretending-not-to-care outfits as they mingle with the crowd on the other side of the rink, waiting for the game to start. Game? Match? Bout? She isn’t sure. Across the room, already in their skates, the women appear to float.
Roz understands what it would take to make Byron like her. Questions about himself, easy laughter, eye contact. But it is hard to focus for the crowd. There is too much ambient noise, and Byron either talks too softly or she is already too bored to listen. She finds most men boring; she is more interested in listening to her own responses to what they say than anything else. Or she finds them creepy. So many of them are creepy.
She has wondered, many times, what it was about Neil that got to Taylor. Roz and Taylor had been hanging out together, of course, when they met him, and she remembers feeling like she could have stepped forward and claimed him. They were at a bar playing darts, and right after they ordered their second pitcher, Neil and his friend came over and asked to join them. She’d decided to be generous, to recede, let Taylor get the attention for a change. Maybe she’s always felt that way—as Taylor’s sexual superior—or at least she has since college. She took one for the team, as they say, those who are still on teams, and talked to Neil’s friend, the short one, who had his phone attached to his belt. They had agreed years before, during one of their list-making phases, not to talk to men who wore their phones on their belts. Or men who wore sandals or drove yellow cars, men who went shirtless in public in non-swimming situations, who did not have best friends, who did not like pets, who put too much faith in religion of any denomination or, conversely, did not allow the possibility of something greater than themselves guiding the universe. Neil, it turned out, was a dentist. This was not on the list, but shouldn’t it have been?
Roz’s list of unacceptable traits is too long to list now. Or maybe it is just men—the maleness—she finds unacceptable.