On their second date, Mark brought Lauren a goldfish, which made her nervous. Lauren knew that the normal life span of a goldfish was about five days, but growing up she’d had one that lived for five years. And so, it seemed a big commitment when Mark gave her the plastic bag with the fish in it.

“Here,” he said, “I got you this.” He held out the baggie like he had just found it in the hallway before he came into her apartment, like it was a normal thing to do to hand a goldfish to a girl you barely knew.

“Oh,” Lauren said. “Thank you. I guess I should put these in some water.” Mark didn’t laugh. Either he didn’t get the joke or he didn’t think she was funny. She couldn’t decide which was worse.

Mark stood by the door while Lauren looked in her cabinets for an appropriate fish bowl. She finally settled on a glass mixing bowl she never used. Was the water supposed to be lukewarm or cold? She didn’t know. She settled on lukewarm so that the fish wouldn’t be chilled, and dumped him into the water. It smelled.

Lauren had won her other fish at the Pumpkin Festival when she was seven, and named her Rudy, after Rudy Huxtable from The Cosby Show. Her parents were annoyed. “You won a fish?” they asked when she came home. They rolled their eyes and warned her that it would probably die soon. They dug up an old fishbowl from the basement and bought fish food. “Don’t get too attached,” they told her. But little Rudy raged on. She swam fiercely year after year. When they finally found Rudy floating belly-up at the top of the bowl, the whole family was shocked. It was as though they’d expected her to live forever; as though they’d forgotten that her dying was even a possibility.

Lauren watched the new fish swim around. He looked weak. Not like Rudy at all. “I guess I’ll need to stop and get fish food,” she said.

“Just give it some bread crumbs,” Mark said. He sounded like he wasn’t the one who’d brought her the fish in the first place.

“I’m not sure that fish can eat bread,” Lauren said. Mark just shrugged.

“What are you going to name him?” he asked.

Lauren considered this. Should she name the fish Rudy as a good-luck gesture? Maybe it would help strengthen the little guy.

“Willard,” she finally said. “After Willard from Footloose.”

“Where?”

“Footloose. The movie?”

“Never heard of it,” Mark said. He looked at his watch and then back at Lauren.

“Well then, we’ll have to watch it,” Lauren said. “It’s amazing.”

“You ready?” Mark asked. Lauren nodded and put her coat on.

“Good night, Willard,” she said to the bowl. She left the light on in the kitchen so that he wouldn’t be disoriented.

Mark was odd. Lauren knew that. She knew from the time that he approached her in the deli that he was not normal. He interrupted her while she was putting Equal in her coffee. “Hello,” he said, and she jumped in mid-stir.

“Hi,” she said. She was running late to meet a client and didn’t have time for pleasantries with a stranger.

“I’ve seen you here before,” he said. “Every morning around this time, I see you here getting your coffee and sometimes a bagel.”

Lauren stared at him. She had never noticed him before. “Really?” she asked. It didn’t occur to her until later that she should be nervous.

“Here’s my card,” he said. “Call me. I’d like to take you out.”

Lauren took the card, but didn’t look down at it. “Okay.”

“I look forward to hearing from you,” he said. Then he turned and walked out.

Lauren thought that was sort of cocky. He was very handsome. She could give him that. But still, people didn’t just approach other people in the middle of their morning coffee to ask them out. Did they? No, they did not.

Lauren thought about him all during her appointments that day. She was escorting a young Kansas City couple around. They were relocating to the city and wanted to find a place immediately. The wife had blond hair and wore a pastel minidress. She complained about every place they saw.

“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “It’s so small. It’s just so small.”

“This is pretty standard for a one-bedroom in New York,” Lauren said. The wife glared at her.

“We want to have children soon. Babies,” the wife said. Lauren nodded.

“Right. Well, a lot of people in this building put up a wall for a second bedroom. It’s a pretty nice size, so you wouldn’t feel so tight for space.”

The wife looked at Lauren’s hand. “Are you married?” she asked.

Lauren shook her head. She reminded herself to be nice so that she wouldn’t lose a good commission. This couple had to move soon. They were against renting. They were a guarantee buy.

“I’m not married,” Lauren said. “But one of my best friends lives in a building very similar to this one, and they put up a wall to make a bedroom for their little boy. It might be hard to imagine what it would look like, but if you picture it over there you might get a better idea.”

“I think that would work nicely,” the husband said. “Don’t you?” He put his arm around his wife and squeezed her shoulder. He had been chipper all day. He felt guilty for making them move and was trying to make it up to his miserable pastel wife.

“If you want to see some bigger places, we could look in Brooklyn or maybe Hoboken,” Lauren offered.

The wife shook her head. “No,” she said. “We want to be in Manhattan. We told you that. Didn’t you listen?” She walked away and stood facing the wall with her arms crossed. Her husband gave Lauren a little smile and went to stand next to his wife. Lauren waited quietly while the couple stared at their imaginary baby’s imaginary room. Sometimes, she knew, people just needed a little time to be able to picture themselves in a new place, to see possibility in a blank space. And so she waited.

Lauren called Mark that night. She didn’t even mean to. Not really. She was eating take-out sushi and saw his card in her purse. She dialed before she could really think about it.

“Hi,” she said when he answered. “Mark?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s … hi, it’s Lauren? From the deli?” She realized after she introduced herself that she had never told him her name.

“Hi, Lauren.” He sounded not one bit surprised. He sounded like he’d been waiting for her call.

“So,” she said. “So, I decided to give you a call.”

“So you did.” He was silent and Lauren waited. She decided not to say one more word and just when she was about to give in, he asked her to dinner.

“Sure,” she said. “That would be fun.”

“It’s nice,” Mark said on their third date, “that you eat.” Lauren had just ordered steak. His comment made Lauren sure that he had only dated anorexic girls in the past, thin, waify people who only ordered salad. The whole idea made her tired.

They went back to his apartment that night. It was clean. No, not clean. It was OCD. There was almost nothing on the shelves. No magazines lying around the coffee table. No pictures or knickknacks. Nothing. It looked like an apartment after she’d staged it to be sold, wiped clean of all traces that a human lived there.

“It’s nice,” she said.

“I know,” Mark said.

His bed was low to the ground, with a plain, dark blue cover. He stood in the bedroom and started taking off his shirt, unself-consciously, as though they had been together for years. He hung it up in his closet and then took off his pants. Lauren stood there, trying not to watch but also trying not to have it be obvious that she wasn’t watching.

“Do you need a shirt to sleep in, or are you okay in your underwear?”

“A shirt would be nice,” Lauren said. Who the hell was this guy? He went over to his drawer and took out a perfectly folded T-shirt that said “Colgate” on it.

“Did you go to Colgate?” she asked.

“No, I went to Princeton.”

“Right.”

Lauren went into the bathroom to change, and for the first time that night got very nervous. She didn’t know this guy at all. She had never met any of his friends, had no idea if he was telling the truth about where he worked, or even what his name was. Lauren had just watched American Psycho on TV the other night, which was a mistake. She was short of breath. Had she even agreed to stay over? All he’d said was “Do you want to come back to my place?” This was pretty presumptuous of him, wasn’t it?

She took her phone out of her purse and sent Isabella a text message that she was at Mark’s apartment, and then she sent the address. At least someone would know where she was. Although, if she was dead, it wouldn’t help much, would it?

When she got out of the bathroom, Mark was sitting up in bed reading a thick book. “You are crazy,” Lauren told herself. “You are nuts. You have just been single for too long.” Lauren imagined that with each year she lived alone, she would get crazier and crazier. She would be stuck in her weird way of living and would never be able to meld together with someone.

Mark smiled at her when she came out of the bathroom, and waited for her to climb into bed before he turned off the light. She felt his lips on her neck, and then he positioned himself over her while he softly sucked on her clavicle. No, she decided. He is not a killer.

Lauren waited for Mark to get less weird, but it didn’t happen. He changed his pillowcases every other night and left porn magazines in plain view in his bathroom. He had certain ties that he wore only to meetings, and he wouldn’t let Lauren sit on his bed when she was wearing clothes she had worn outside. But hands down, the weirdest thing about Mark was this: His favorite food was macaroni and cheese.

He didn’t like the fancy kind of macaroni and cheese that was retro-trendy and served in pricey restaurants, with Gruyère and lobster. He didn’t even like the homemade kind that was gooey and comforting. No, Mark favored the fluorescent noodles that were created from powder, milk, and butter—the kind that came in a box for $1.79.

At least once a week, Mark made a box of macaroni and sat down in front of the TV to shovel it into his mouth. He didn’t share. He ate straight from the pot. He ate the whole thing.

If he were a different person, maybe this wouldn’t have been so shocking. But he wasn’t. He was Mark. He wore suits that Lauren was pretty sure cost more than the rent for her apartment. He sent back bottles of wine at restaurants after he’d tasted them and declared them “off.” She’d never met his family, but she was sure that they would be horrified to learn what Mark did with his macaroni. Could she date someone who attacked pasta like this? She watched him closely each time he did it, sure that she was witnessing something deeply personal and telling. It was like watching him masturbate, but Lauren couldn’t turn away. It was fascinating, disgusting, and delightful all at once.

“Do you like him?” her friend Mary asked after their seventh date. Lauren shrugged. She didn’t feel like talking about whether or not she liked a boy with her friends. It made her feel like a child they were all entertaining.

When they were younger, Lauren and her friends talked about boys constantly. They told each other every detail and dissected each sentence. But as the years went by and they moved into separate apartments, it changed. These weren’t just random boys they were going to date and then break up with. These were boys they might end up marrying. And so, they stopped sharing so many details without even realizing it. Well, most of them did. Their friend Annie was slow to catch on, got drunk on red wine, and told all of them that her boyfriend Mitchell had a tiny penis. At their wedding, it was all Lauren could think about.

Lauren wanted to tell Mary about the macaroni and cheese, and how when Mark had met her one-year-old niece, Lily, he had taken her hand without smiling and said, “Hello. Hello, Lily.” She wanted to ask Mary if it was bizarre to like a guy who’d brought you a fish. She wanted Mary to help her decide if Mark was a sociopath or just a little strange.

Mary looked at her expectantly, rubbing her stomach and groaning at fake contractions. Her little boy, Henry, bopped around the room, and Lauren knew she couldn’t do it. It was too odd to sit there and tell Mary these things, too strange to talk about Mark bringing her a fish, while Mary toddled after her toddler. So Lauren just said, “Yeah, I do. I do like him.” It was the truth, she thought. Just not all of it.

The day that Rudy died, Lauren went to feed her before school and found her belly-up and completely white. She let out a little scream and her parents came running. Her dad looked shocked, and her mom looked as though she had opened a Tupperware full of mold.

“We’ll have to flush him,” her dad said.

“Rudy’s a she,” Lauren said.

“Of course she is.” Her dad put a hand on her shoulder.

Her mom had left them to it, let them carry the bowl to the upstairs bathroom and dump Rudy in the toilet. Her dad had started to carry the bowl to the downstairs bathroom, but her mom yelled at him, “That’s the guest bathroom.” She said it like he was crazy, like everyone knew you weren’t supposed to flush fish in guest bathrooms. She shook her head and said, “Take him upstairs.”

“Do you want to do it?” her dad asked, and Lauren shook her head. He looked relieved and pressed the flusher. They stood next to each other and watched little Rudy go round and round.

Lauren didn’t cry during the flushing, and she was embarrassed when her dad hugged her good-bye. But that day in school, during a spelling test, tears began to fall out of her eyes. She was mortified. You didn’t cry in sixth grade. Lauren especially didn’t cry in sixth grade. She was tough. But as the teacher read the words “Submarine, crystallized, immigrant,” Lauren’s tears dropped onto the page and made a mess of her test. She felt awful that Rudy had died. She couldn’t even remember if she had checked on her the night before or not. What if Rudy had been dying all night? The tears came faster, sliding in one motion down her cheeks and falling with a plop on her paper. Finally she raised her hand and didn’t wait for her teacher to say anything before getting up and going to the bathroom, where she locked herself in a stall and cried until her friend Lizbeth was sent to check on her.

She told the whole class that she’d had an allergic reaction to the kind of cereal she’d eaten for breakfast that morning. It was a reaction, she said, that gave her a sudden pain so bad that she cried. When Tina Bloom suggested that Lauren’s story was a lie, because her dad was an allergist and she’d never heard of such a thing, Lauren told her she was stupid and, above all, mean for not having more sympathy, and none of the girls in the class talked to Tina for a week.

On their tenth date, Mark told Lauren he never wanted to live with someone else.

“Never?” Lauren asked.

“Never,” he said. He didn’t sound sorry about it. Lauren wasn’t sure that she ever wanted to live with anyone else either, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you said aloud. It was something that you kept to yourself, knowing that if you ever found yourself seriously dating someone or getting married, that you would just do it. Because that’s what people did.

“So, what’s your plan?” Lauren asked.

“My plan for what?”

“I mean, let’s say you meet someone one day and get married. Separate residences?”

“Maybe,” Mark said. “One uptown and one downtown? Or maybe just two separate apartments that join together somehow?” He was lost in thought and Lauren was horrified for him. It was like on their fifth date, when he’d tied a windbreaker around his waist and had no idea that he should be embarrassed as they walked around the Central Park Zoo.

“Maybe you’ll change your mind someday,” Lauren said finally. She wanted him to stop thinking about it.

“Maybe,” Mark said. “But I doubt it. I don’t like other people touching my stuff.”

Lauren met the Kansas City couple on their closing day. The wife was wearing a plaid dress and a headband. “Congratulations!” Lauren said. “You’re going to love New York.”

The couple walked around the empty apartment and Lauren recommended a cleaning service they could use if they wanted to get it scrubbed down before they moved their furniture in. She found the wife standing in front of the new wall that had been put up to make the second bedroom.

“Is everything okay?” Lauren asked.

The wife smiled at her. “I just never pictured myself here, you know?”

“Yes,” Lauren said. “I know how that goes.”

On their fourteenth date, Lauren brought Mark over to Mary’s apartment for dinner. Mary and Isabella had been hounding her. “It’s really weird that we haven’t met him yet,” they’d kept telling her. “Fine,” she’d said. “Fine, we’ll come to dinner.”

Henry took an immediate liking to Mark. Henry always chose the person who paid him the least attention and then spent the night trying to win him over. This worried Mary. She was sure he was going to end up in some sort of abusive relationship. “It’s just so odd,” she always said. “It’s like he can sense who doesn’t like children and then he won’t leave them alone.”

This night was no different. Henry sat on the floor at Mark’s shoes and played with his shoelaces. Every once in a while, he patted Mark’s leg affectionately. Mary gave Lauren a look like she was sorry, and Isabella laughed and tried to distract Henry. “No!” Henry yelled at Isabella. “Go away.” He grabbed tight fistfuls of Mark’s pants and held on to them for dear life.

“So, he hates babies,” Lauren thought. She had kind of suspected it, but now Henry confirmed it. She watched Henry climb onto Mark’s lap and rest his head on his chest. “Mark,” he said in a perfectly clear voice. He’d never been able to say Lauren’s name right. He called her “Peg” for reasons that no one could figure out.

“I think the little guy might need a diaper change,” Mark said at one point. When Mary came to take Henry away, he screamed like she was a stranger ripping him out of the arms of his parents.

“I’m really sorry about this,” Mary said to Mark.

“Not a problem.” Mark brushed the legs of his pants where Henry had been sitting.

“I just don’t know what has gotten into him,” Mary said as Henry kicked and cried. She locked eyes with Lauren. Your boyfriend hates babies, her face seemed to say. “So what?” Lauren thought. She wasn’t so fond of them herself. But she didn’t actually hate them. You weren’t supposed to hate them, were you? Even if you didn’t know if you wanted them, you were supposed to like them a little bit. Lauren had never thought she would date a baby lover, but she’d certainly never thought she would date a baby hater. She searched Mark’s face for a sign that he was baby neutral, but she couldn’t decipher anything.

The day that Lauren’s sister had her baby, Lauren drove to Boston to see it in the hospital. She hadn’t been planning on it, but as the due date neared it was clear that it was expected of her. She was tired and a little hungover as she entered the hospital room. Her mom and Betsy’s mother-in-law were hovering over the bed, holding the baby like they were going to steal it. When Lauren walked in, they excused themselves to get some coffee.

Before Lauren could even say, “The baby is cute,” Betsy started talking.

“I ripped,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Lauren said.

“I ripped during the birth. The doctor I had doesn’t like to do episiotomies anymore, and he didn’t do one.”

“Epeeze-whats?”

Her sister sighed. “Episiotomies. You know, where they cut the vagina to make it easier to give birth.”

“No,” Lauren said. “I did not know.” She sat down, suddenly feeling light-headed.

“Well, the birth took forever and the numbness started to wear off down there and I could feel the tearing, and I said, ‘We should do something,’ but no one would listen.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Lauren said. She wondered if her sister was still drugged up. She must be, Lauren thought, otherwise she would never be discussing such things. Her sister was so embarrassed of everything that once, when they were teenagers, and Lauren asked her if she could borrow a tampon, Betsy turned bright red and called Lauren a pervert.

“They had to stitch me up, which I felt all of,” her sister went on. “I bet it’s a mess down there. I can’t even imagine. And now we have to be careful of infection.”

Lauren looked at her niece, who was red and sort of busted-looking. Her head was pointy and she looked like she had some pretty bad acne.

“It will go back to its normal shape,” her sister said.

“Excuse me?”

“Her head. It’s just in a cone because it took her so long to make it out of the vaginal passage.”

“Right,” Lauren said.

“Listen, Lauren, can you do something for me?”

“What?”

“Can you take a look down there and tell me what it looks like? I’m imagining Freddy Krueger’s face right now, and it would really help if you could tell me that it’s not that bad.”

“You want me to look at your stitched-up vagina and describe it to you?”

“Don’t make it sound gross,” her sister said. “Come on.”

Lauren pressed her lips together. She and Betsy had shared a room for fifteen years, and every single night, Betsy had turned to the wall when she changed into her pajamas. Lauren used to wonder if Betsy would ever let a boy see her naked. She’d honestly been surprised when Betsy had announced that she was pregnant.

“Please, Lauren? Please? Before Mom and Mrs. King get back? Please? I don’t want to ask Jerry to do it. It’s too humiliating.”

Betsy started to cry a little bit, her nose running and dripping down to her mouth. It made Lauren want to vomit.

“Oh my God, fine,” Lauren said. “Let’s just do this.”

Months afterward, when Lauren’s niece had turned cute and roundheaded, and Betsy had gone back to her prudish ways, Lauren teased Betsy about this moment.

“My vagina feels dry today,” she would say out of nowhere.

“You’re disgusting,” Betsy would say.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Are we not allowed to talk about our vagina’s moods? I was under the impression that this was a safe space,” she said, gesturing to the car. Lily babbled in the backseat.

“You know what, Lauren? Don’t be a bitch. I had just gone through thirty hours of labor and they should have done a C-section and they didn’t, and I hadn’t been alone with anyone I could talk to about it.”

“It’s fine,” Lauren said. “I’m totally cool with it.”

Once when they were walking down the street and saw a dead pinkish slug on the ground, Lauren hit Betsy on the arm and pointed to it. “Look at that. Did that fall out of your vagina?”

Betsy narrowed her eyes. “I hope when you have a baby, your vagina tears into a million pieces,” she said.

“Well, thanks to you, dear sister, I’m not sure I will ever have a baby.”

“Oh, you will.” Betsy laughed like she knew something. “Believe me, you will.”

Lauren was scared by Betsy’s knowing voice. Betsy was two years older and Lauren sometimes had to remind herself that Betsy didn’t know everything. Still, it scared her to think that labor had turned Betsy into a person who talked out loud about her vagina ripping. If that’s what it did to Betsy, what would it do to her? For a while, she stopped teasing Betsy about it. If karma existed, then it wasn’t a good idea, Lauren decided. Then, last Thanksgiving, when the turkey was all done and stuffed, little dried cranberries and hunks of corn-bread stuffing falling out of the open cavity, Lauren put her arm around her sister and motioned to the turkey.

“You know what that reminds me of?” she asked.

“Go to hell,” Betsy said, and Lauren laughed and laughed. Karma be damned.

On their twenty-seventh date, Mark made macaroni and cheese at Lauren’s apartment. They had planned to order Chinese food, but Lauren had had a late lunch and wasn’t hungry, so Mark decided to make a box of Kraft. They sat on the couch and watched sitcoms, and he ate the neon orange noodles as he always did, in huge, heaping spoonfuls. He ate the whole pot and then leaned back and rubbed his stomach. He let out a giant belch and then a happy sigh.

“Lovely,” Lauren said. He smiled.

The two of them sat and watched TV in silence. Then they got into bed and read. In the quiet, Lauren thought about her pastel client from Kansas City staring at the empty place where the baby’s wall would go. She looked over at Mark.

“That’s the first time you’ve ever eaten macaroni and cheese at my apartment,” she said.

Mark put his finger in the magazine to keep his place and moved his eyebrows together. “Huh,” he said. “I guess it is.” Then they both went back to reading.

Willard died on a cold November morning. Lauren found him tilted to the side. He was turning white and only one fin was paddling. She was sure he’d had a stroke. She sat in the kitchen with him for a while, and then (believing it to be the humane thing) she took him to the bathroom and flushed him. She did it quickly.

Lauren washed out the bowl, then threw it out. She should have gotten him a real fishbowl. He’d deserved that much. The kitchen looked empty without him there, and Lauren felt alone in her apartment. “This is so stupid,” she said aloud. “It was just a fish.” Then she laid her head on her arms and cried.

“The fish died,” Lauren said, “which can’t be a good sign.”

“Well,” Isabella said, “fish die a lot. I think we had, like, four hundred different goldfish at my house growing up. A couple of them committed suicide by jumping out of the bowl.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lauren asked.

“I’m just saying, it could have been worse.”

“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “It just feels like a bad omen.”

They were out to breakfast, eating blueberry pancakes on their forty-ninth date, when Mark said, “I would like to hire you.”

“Hire me?” Lauren asked. “You know, I’m already doing it for free. If you started paying me now, it would change the nature of our relationship.”

Mark smiled just a little. “I would like to hire you as a Realtor. I want to buy a new place.”

“Oh,” Lauren said. “Okay.”

Lauren had shown Mark only three apartments before he found one he liked. He went to see it seven times. On the eighth visit, Lauren didn’t even bother talking about it. They just stood and stared at the bedrooms. Finally, Mark said, “I think I’m going to buy it. I like it here.”

“Me too. Let’s look at the closets one more time.”

Mark nodded and went over to the front hall closet. He bent forward so that half of his body was inside. “I think you should live here,” he said. His voice was muffled.

“It smells like liver?” Lauren asked. She didn’t even know what liver would smell like.

“No,” Mark said straightening up. “I think you should live. Here.”

“Oh,” Lauren said. “That might be a good idea.”

“There’s enough closet space.”

“Definitely.” And the two of them stood and looked at all of the space in the empty liver closet.

The day they moved into the apartment, Mark brought Lauren a turtle. “Here,” he said, like he had just found it in the hall. “A turtle to replace the fish.”

Lauren took the plastic container and looked at the little turtle. She had always wanted one.

“I’ll have to go to the pet store,” Lauren said. “I don’t even know what a turtle needs.”

“What are you going to name it?” Mark asked.

“I’m not sure,” Lauren said. She put the box on the table and they stared at it. “Maybe Rudy?” she said. She considered it. It was definitely a possibility. A possibility now, where it hadn’t been before.