"Hey, are you going to be all Leslie Knope about this?" Jed asked, raising an eyebrow at Mary who'd taken off her wool pea-coat to reveal a pink satin bowling shirt with her name embroidered in black silk and nearly matching pink bowling shoes emerging from a bag. He had gleaned, in that first moment of seeing her in rosy glow of the shiny fabric, that her bowling ball would also be swirled pink, as if it were made of strawberry ice cream and cotton candy, sugar and sweet and murder on the pins.
"I wasn't planning to be—are you?" she replied, giving him a fairly impressive side-eye for his own attire; he'd scoured the thrift shop in his neighborhood like a fourteen year old girl until he'd found "Herb's" old powder blue bowling shirt with its 70s collar and minimal sweat stains. He'd rented the shoes but he had arrived early to scope out the options and decided the burgundy pair would go better with his dark jeans and that with enough cheap beer, the nachos would be manageable.
"Don't you know? I'm obviously Chris Traeger. I'm not Libertarian enough to be Ron and honestly, I don't think I can bowl that well. Full disclosure," he said, smiling.
Mary was prettier than Amy Poehler, as pretty as Rashida Jones, but he still wondered if the night would end quickly with a series of strikes and then him striking out, Mary kindly but firmly making it clear she had an early meeting the next day. She might, but they'd picked this night for the quasi-double date with Emma and Henry ostensibly because no one had to work especially early the next day; he was prepared to take the polite brush-off but he hoped, oh how he hoped!
"Really? Well, we'll have to see. Emma and Henry just got here, but she dawdles getting to the lane, every time. I'd swear she didn't like to bowl, but it was her idea for us to join a league," Mary said, stepping closer to him unexpectedly.
She was wearing perfume, something spicy and herbal, something expensive, and he felt his confidence rise, that she'd bothered to put on fresh perfume before this outing, knowing he'd only smell it over the scents of the alley if she stood close to him. He'd never smelled this fragrance at work; there he'd just known the bleached smell of the hospital's laundered scrubs on her, the industrial grade soap, the musky sweat of a long day, a bad code, the work-hour regulations bent if not broken since they were fellows and not interns.
"And you—this is how you like to spend your free time?" he asked, softening the awkward judgmental sound with a smile, a gesture with his hands that took in the classic Americana of the bowling alley, the uniformed friends and neighbors in Kmart jeans and untucked shirts, squabbling gently, familiarly, over balls, the pale beer, Coors or Bud Light even more underwhelming out of the bottle, the forgotten string of Christmas lights over the Ladies' room door.
"In between reading Proust and listening to opera? Jed, I'm from a town twenty miles outside of Manchester, New Hampshire. I don't think I went to a restaurant without paper napkins until I was at college. Bowling's…comfortable for me. Not my favorite, but you know, when it's something you've always known…" she trailed off.
He was pleased; the banter was all well and good, delightful really because she was so damn quick and didn't give a shit if he wasn't quite able to keep up with her, but this was what he'd wanted tonight, a chance to start to know her, to be something other than Phinney and Foster, 2nd and 3rd year fellows, jockeying for the attendings' favor and patronage. Well, he was doing that and she was just trying to be the best doctor she could but she somehow managed both and he would have thought it was effortless except for finding her slumped at the foot of her locker in tears one day when they nearly hadn't saved the kid and the new attending had screamed at all of them for not calling for a PICU transfer sooner. Or when she just slept in the call room rather than head home because she was too tired to walk to the T and she did pre-rounds, without exception, starting at 4:30.
"Do you read Proust though, too?" he asked. She was different in her pink lady bowling shirt, her hair in one of those complicated fashionable braids, gussied up for bowling and maybe, just maybe, for him. She might answer anything at all and he'd not be able to guess.
"Well, not in French. And I prefer Henry James or an Aurelio Zen. Here's Emma and Henry, hi!" she replied, greeting her friend with a hug, a real one, not like the girls he known growing up, and exchanging a briefer, looser embrace with Emma's fiancé. Jed was surprised by how much he didn't like seeing tall, handsome Henry throw an arm around Mary, even though he knew, even from their short acquaintance, how soppily head-over-heels the other man was over Emma.
"How worried should I be, Emma?" Jed said, watching as she settled her monogrammed bowling bag on the curved orange plastic bench and, most amusingly, put on a pair of tortoise-shell framed glasses and adjust them carefully on the narrow bridge of her nose.
"Very. Not so much of me, I'm only mediocre, but Mary- watch out! D'you remember that episode of Parks and Rec?" Emma replied, preening a little for Henry's eyes. She had the best micro-surgical technique of all of them but who would think it now, to see her?
"Yeah. So Mary's stealthy and impressive, like Ron? Will she just want her name up there as 'Woman?'" he joked. Henry laughed and Mary wrinkled her nose at him, purposefully adorable Jed thought and it was as if he'd drunk the whole pitcher of beer, that joyous bubble inside his chest.
"No, of course not, brainiac. She's Leslie, like 110% except for the whipped cream," Emma said.
Now Jed laughed and saw Mary smile at him and he was very glad when Henry interrupted to ask questions about entering names and who'd bowl first, because the juxtaposition of Mary and whipped cream and that winning little look she'd given him, how he recalled the episode had ended, was highly inappropriate for a real-life Boston bowling alley on a late November night, where they couldn't fade to black.