Perfect Imperfection – Chapter 3 – Pretty Me

Tessa took one picture.

She had the same grey backdrop set up in the boardroom, just for me, and the ring light from her desk, and she did the thing where she tells you to relax your shoulders. Then she clicked once and turned the camera around.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow. Okay.”

I looked at it.

“That one,” I said.

“You don’t want to do a few more? Just to have options?”

“No. That one.”

She looked at me like I’d said something in a different language. Then she shrugged and said, “Honestly? Same,” and it was on the website by Friday.

On Monday, Kevin got into the elevator on the second floor. I was facing the doors. I’d stopped facing the button panel a few weeks before without really deciding to, the way you stop wearing a watch.

“Hey, Erin,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Saw your picture on the site. Looks good.”

“Thanks.”

He got off on four. I went to three.

My Facebook profile picture had been the same photo for six years. It was a sunset. Not even my sunset. I’d saved it off Google.

On a Tuesday night I changed it to a picture Dana had taken of me at brunch, laughing, looking straight at the camera. Facebook asked if I wanted to share my new profile picture, and I stared at that little blue button for about four minutes, and then I pressed it.

Sixty-four likes by morning. I’d never had sixty-four of anything.

My aunt in Winnipeg commented: Is that our Erin??? Gorgeous!!!!

My cousin commented a fire emoji. A girl I went to high school with, who I don’t think had spoken to me since grade eleven, commented Stunning.

My mother didn’t like it. She didn’t comment.

Or maybe she didn’t see it.

I checked. She’d liked Marta’s daughter’s wedding photos the same night. All forty-two of them.

I didn’t say anything about it. Neither did she.

My old profile pictures were all still there, in the album, if you scrolled. I didn’t scroll.

On Saturday Dana took me shopping, which she’d been trying to do for eleven years.

I used to hate clothes shopping more than the dentist. At the dentist, at least, nobody hands you something and waits outside a curtain for you to come out and be judged. I had a system. Buy online. Buy the same black things. Buy one size up so nothing clings to anything.

Dana pulled a dress off a rack. It was green, tight, with thin straps. The kind of thing I would have walked past and felt a little sick about, the way you feel walking past a party you weren’t invited to.

“Try it,” she said.

“No.”

“Try it or I tell your mom about the time in Kelowna.”

I tried it.

There was a three-way mirror at the end of the fitting rooms. Three panels, angled, so you see yourself from the side and from the side again, all the angles you never get to see. That mirror used to be the worst thing in any store. I’d change in the stall and come out already facing the exit.

I came out and walked right up to it.

I turned. Left. Right.

I stood there so long a teenager behind me said, “Sorry, are you done?”

“No,” I said.

Dana was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, watching me watch myself.

“Who are you?” she asked. She was smiling. Mostly.

I bought the dress. I bought two more things I would never have bought. On the way out I caught myself in the window of a Sephora and I didn’t look away, and I didn’t look for flaws either. I just looked, like you’d look at a friend across a street.

Dana set up my dating profile at her kitchen table, which is also where she’d set up my first dating profile at twenty-six. That one had four pictures. In one of them I was wearing sunglasses and a hat. In another, I was mostly a dog.

This one had six pictures, all of my face.

“Okay,” she said, handing me back the phone. “Now we wait.”

We didn’t have to wait. By the time she’d made popcorn I had forty-one matches. By the next morning I had over two hundred. I kept refreshing it like something was broken.

The messages were different too. Before, when I got messages at all, they were hey or hey whats up or, one time, just an eggplant. Now men wrote paragraphs. They asked about my job. They asked about my weekend. They said things about my smile and my eyes, and one of them said he loved that I “looked like a real person, not like all these fake girls on here.”

I read that one three times.

And on the third day, I matched with Ryan.

Ryan and I had gone on one date in 2019. It was fine. We’d had tacos. He’d been nice, a bit loud, and I’d gone home and waited for a text, and two days later he’d sent a message saying he’d had a great time but he “just wasn’t feeling a spark.”

Now he wrote:

Okay I have to say something. I’ve been on this app for 6 months and your profile is literally the first one that made me stop scrolling. You have the kind of face that looks like you’d laugh at my bad jokes. Also I see you like Thai food. I know the best place in the city. I’m not kidding. Let me prove it.

He didn’t recognize me.

He’d sat across a table from me for two hours. We’d split a plate of tacos. He’d told me about his brother’s divorce in detail.

I screenshotted it and sent it to Dana.

isn’t that the no spark guy, she wrote back.

yep

omg

omg erin

are you going to answer

I didn’t answer. I didn’t unmatch him either. I just left it there, and some nights I’d open the app and read it again. I don’t know what I was looking for. I think I just liked knowing it was there.

The worst thing that can happen to a bitter person is finding out they were right.

In April I needed a shower curtain rod. I asked a man in an orange apron where they were, and he didn’t point. He put down the box he was carrying and walked me all the way to aisle nine. Then he stood there while I picked one, and told me which one not to get because the springs were garbage, and asked if there was anything else I needed.

I’d been going to that store for six years. I knew exactly where the shower curtain rods were.

I don’t know why I asked.

I told a joke on a date that same month. I’ve been telling it for ten years. It’s about my mother and a raccoon and a snow shovel. It had never been funny. Not once. People smiled politely at it the way you’d smile at someone’s baby.

This time the man laughed so hard he had to put his drink down.

It was the same joke. I’d told it the same way.

In May, Dana and I went out for her birthday. A wine bar downtown with low lights and a bartender with a moustache that looked like it had its own agent. He saw us before we’d even sat down.

We’d been there ten minutes when he put two glasses of something pink in front of us.

“From the gentlemen at the end.”

We both looked. Two guys in quarter-zips raised their glasses. One of them was looking at me the way you look at the last slice of something.

“Oh my God,” Dana said, and laughed, and then she did this thing I’d never seen her do. She fixed her hair. Quickly, with one hand, without looking.

“This is insane,” she said. “I used to be the hot one.”

She said it like a joke. It was a joke.

“You’re still the hot one,” I said.

“Shut up. I’m the funny one now. I’ve been demoted to funny.”

She laughed again and drank the pink wine. I laughed too. She talked to the quarter-zip guys for a while and made them both laugh.

His name was Sam. He was a physiotherapist, and he had very clean fingernails and a dog named Pancake, and on our third date he asked if I wanted to come up.

His apartment had big windows and a lamp in every corner, like someone who was afraid of the dark. We kissed in the kitchen and then in the hallway and then we were in his bedroom, and it was dark except for the city coming in through the blinds in stripes.

He reached for me. I reached past him for the lamp.

I don’t know who was more surprised. The light came on, warm and yellow and much too bright, and he blinked at me, and I stood there in the dress from the three-way mirror with my hand still on the switch.

“You want it on?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I want it on.”

He left it on.

Afterwards he fell asleep on his stomach with one arm hanging off the bed, and I lay there with the lamp still on, looking at the ceiling, which I could see. It was white. There was a small crack near the light fixture shaped like a lightning bolt.

He’d looked at me the whole time. I kept waiting to want to hide, the way you wait for a sneeze. It never came.

I saw Sam four more times. Then he took a job in Toronto, and we said it was a shame, and it was.

In June a man came to the front counter at work with an invoice in his hand.

Front counter wasn’t really my job. I did accounts receivable, which meant I mostly sent emails that started Just following up on the below to people who didn’t answer them. But the receptionist was at lunch and the bell rang, so I went out.

He was a little older than me. Mid-thirties, maybe. Work boots, a navy company jacket with Harlan Commercial stitched on the chest, a lanyard with a badge he’d forgotten to take off. Tall, but he stood like he wasn’t sure it was allowed. There was drywall dust on his left sleeve.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m looking for Erin Kowalski? In accounts?”

“That’s me.”

“Oh. Okay. Hi.” He put the invoice on the counter. “I’m Matt. From Harlan. I’m new. I think you’ve emailed me four times.”

“Five.”

“Five.” He winced. “Yeah. The guy who had my job before didn’t really – he left some stuff. I’m trying to clean it up. I think we got double-billed on the Riverside job, but I’m honestly not a hundred percent, so I figured instead of email number six, I’d just come in.”

He turned the invoice around so it faced me. He pointed at two line items with a pencil that had been chewed on the end.

Then he looked at the invoice. Not at me. At the invoice. He read it again, frowning, moving his lips a little, the way people do when they’re doing math.

I realized I’d been waiting for him to look up. For the extra second. I’d gotten so used to it in four months that I’d started standing a certain way to receive it, like when you hold your hand out for change.

He didn’t look up.

“See, here,” he said. “And here. Same PO.”

He was right. We had double-billed them. I told him I’d fix it and send a corrected invoice by the end of day.

“Great. Perfect. Thank you.” He straightened up, and picked up his pencil, and said, “Sorry about the five emails.”

“It’s my job to send them.”

“Still.”

He walked to the door. He had his hand on it. Then he stopped, and turned around, and stood there looking at the floor between us for a second like he was measuring it.

“This is weird,” he said. “I looked you up on your website. So I’d know who to ask for.”

“Okay.”

“And I’ve been – I’ve never actually done this at a counter before. At a business. Is that allowed?”

“Is what allowed?”

His ears had gone red. He looked at me then. Straight at me, finally, for the first time since he’d walked in.

“Would you want to get a coffee sometime?”