Marrying Up Read online

  “Why all the doom and gloom?” George asks as she plops down into the booth.

  “Look, you know me,” I say. “I’m an optimist.”

  “Mmm, I wouldn’t say that. You’re too superstitious.”

  “Fine. Then I’m a guarded optimist….”

  “More of a fatalist, I’d say. But a cheery fatalist.”

  “George! Just listen. The point is, I think I’m losing my grip on happy thoughts. Something’s got to be done.” I pull the tattered obituary out of my purse and slide it across the table.

  “What’s this?”

  “Just read it,” I tell her, exhaling dramatically.

  As she does, I signal the waitress. “I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger, a double order of fries, and a Jack and Coke.”

  She looks up from her pad and pushes her sliding glasses back up her nose with her pencil. “We don’t have a liquor license here, ma’am.”

  Nice. The one day when I could really use a bit of liquid lunch.

  “Fine. Make it a milkshake, then. Chocolate.”

  “I’ll have the Nicoise salad,” George says. “With the dressing on the side, and no potatoes. Oh, and are there anchovies on the salad?”

  The waitress nods.

  “Were they packed in oil?”

  “I would say so, miss.”

  “Hey!” I interrupt. “Why is she a miss and I’m a ma’am?” The nerve.

  They stare at me blankly, then return to the business at hand. “Well, then forget the anchovies,” George tells her. “No, wait. Keep them. No wait! It depends on the tuna. Was that packed in oil?”

  “I don’t know, miss.”

  George is utterly confounded. “What should I do?” she asks me.

  I shrug.

  “How about I just bring you a nice green salad?” The waitress suggests.

  “Okay,” George smiles, relieved. “Oh, and a Diet Coke. With a wedge of lime.”

  The waitress shakes her head and shuffles off in her sensible orthopedic shoes.

  “Dressing on the side!” George calls after her. “God. That was close. Which do you think are worse—carbs or saturated fats?”

  “Are you kidding? I have no idea,” I say impatiently, motioning for her to keep on reading. In the meantime, I snack on my fingernails.

  As soon as she finishes, she reads it again, then ponders for a minute or two. “I think you’re nuts. Why did you write this? Didn’t you say you’d never do your own?”

  “Yeah, but Doctor M. said it would help me see where my life is going, give a voice to my hidden fears and then identify new goals for myself.”

  “And the problem is…what exactly? You’re afraid you’ll never have a cat? ’Cause if that’s it, we can get you a cat. I think there might even be a sign up at the store. Black kittens or something…”

  “Ha, ha,” I manage weakly.

  “Look, Holly. If you’re for real about this…”

  “I am. I so am. Help me.”

  George nods seriously. “Okay. Where to begin? Well, I guess everyone’s afraid of dying…”

  “I’m not afraid of dying,” I tell her. “I’m afraid of dying alone. I’m afraid my life will have meant nothing to anybody.”

  “I get it, I get it.” She thinks about it for a second, then adds, “Look. It’s okay to want to change your life, to write a book or whatever. It’s okay to want a better job. Work on that. Fine. But you’re afraid of being single? Come on. That’s so…mundane.”

  “I know. But all of a sudden I can’t help it. I just never thought my life would turn out like that. And looking back over my eighty-five years—what did I really contribute? Nothing! God, what a waste! And I had so much love to give…so much love to give…!”

  My throat tightens and my ears begin to ache. I flash back to Dr. Pink, a self-styled “lacrimal therapist” from a few years back whose clinical methodology involved systematically reducing her patients to tears. She believed that public crying was not a sign of weakness and emotional instability, but rather a healthy purging of inner turmoil and a sacred statement of communal trust to be celebrated by anyone fortunate enough to witness it. But I hated crying—here, there, anywhere. No wonder Pink only lasted three sessions.

  I gulp back the tears, but George is unimpressed. “Okay, first of all, Holly, you’re still alive. All right? You didn’t die single. You didn’t even die. For God’s sake, you’re only twenty-eight. So it’s not like you can say your life ‘turned out’ like anything, because you haven’t even lived it yet.”

  “Exactly,” I whimper.

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve got to do something, G. Before it’s too late.”

  “So do something. Take action, girl!”

  “But what? That’s the problem.”

  “Why don’t you just try to write something?”

  Just what I need to hear. “You write,” I snap, a little too cruelly. It’s a sore point for her. George has been working on the same Star Trek screenplay since our second year at Erie. By the time she gets around to finishing it, the actors who play the characters will all have boldly gone into retirement.

  She twirls a dark and frizzy curl around her finger and stares down at the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re absolutely right. I should try. I really should. But…but you know how hard it can be. It’s like, I work all day, and I finally get home and the last thing I want to do is stare all night at another screen.”

  She snorts.

  “TV doesn’t count.” Just try and come between me and my set.

  The waitress delivers our meals and leaves before I can complain.

  “This is wrong,” I whisper, knowing George will forgive me if I can make her laugh. “Didn’t I ask for chocolate? What’s the point of vanilla? Who would want a vanilla shake? It’s the complete antithesis of chocolate—it’s the absence of flavor!”

  The waitress glances over at me from the cash with a dour look.

  “You want me to get her back?” George giggles as she wrings every last drop of flavor from the lime wedge into her Diet Coke.

  “Don’t you dare!” She knows I am deathly afraid of incurring the wrath of food-service persons. They have so much power. Complain one too many times and God only knows what might find its way into your tuna-salad sandwich.

  “You’ve seen too many Datelines,” she informs me as I sullenly drink my shake.

  “Hidden cameras will be America’s new conscience in the twenty-first century,” I say between slurps. Vanilla isn’t so bad, really.

  “Now there’s a topic worth exploring….”

  I’ve spent the past five years trying to come up with a great idea for my book, and George is always trying to help.

  “Naw, it’s already been done.”

  Since September 11th, countless writers have taken fear and ignorance to the bank, but I feel that people are ready for happier thoughts, instead of just another paranoid title like The Osama Next Door, or Nine Legal Ways to Watch Your Nanny, or Why Vegetables Cause Cancer. Unfortunately, though, thoughtful critiques of consumer-health alerts and diatribes decrying the end of privacy have also been done to death. But what if I incorporated those themes into a novel? Hmmm… It just might be crazy enough to work.

  “Holly?”

  …a sort of Bridget Jones’s Diary meets 1984 meets Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution…

  “Holly? Hello?” George snaps her fingers.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, and promptly lose my train of thought. Ideas for my book are so exquisitely rare and delicate that the mere act of remembering them crushes their goodness into oblivion. I’ve all but resigned myself to the impossibility of writing a single word.

  “You just need a little inspiration.”

  “How can I get inspired when all I do is work, come home, watch TV and boink the bike messenger?”

  Oops.

  “Aw, tell me you’re kidding! You didn’t! Not again! Ew!”

  “I did,” I reluctan
tly admit.

  “But he’s so…he’s so…”

  “Gross? It’s okay. You can say it. I know he is.”

  “I knew I should have come over last night. You’re not to be trusted. How many times do I have to tell you? Holly Hastings good. Bicycle boy bad.”

  “I was working late, and he was there picking something up….”

  “Mmm-hmm…”

  “Look, I finally finished the piece about that new parking lot on Broadway and I wanted to celebrate! Is that so wrong?” Very occasionally, when they tired of my constant begging for assignments or felt a hint of guilt after turning down yet another one of my story proposals, one of the editors will ask me to fill a few very unimportant inches, usually sandwiched on some back page between the calls to tender and the previous day’s corrections.

  She peers at me skeptically. By now, George has long since inhaled her salad and has moved on to eating her dressing-on-the-side with a spoon.

  “Well, I was home alone, and would have been delighted to go out for a drink.”

  “Umm…didn’t you have that coven thing with your mom last night?” As the product of a mixed lesbian marriage, George was half Wiccan, half Jewish.

  “Oh please, Holly.”

  It was worth a shot. I knew full well that the next Wiccan day of worship wasn’t until the fall equinox.

  “Okay, so maybe I just needed to be held.”

  “But by Jean-Jean?”

  “What can I say? I’m pathetic,” I groan. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’re just a lonely, lonely woman. You know, I bet if you found a job you liked better, everything else would fall into place. And one that uses FedEx instead of that shitty messenger service.”

  Oh, if only it were that simple.

  “There’s nothing really wrong with my job. I can think of at least a half dozen people who would kill to work there. It’s me, G.I know it is! It’s like all of a sudden, I’m so bloody bored and frustrated and negative about it that I don’t know what to do with myself. And it’s not like I’d be able to find something better in Buffalo, anyway… I’d have to move to New York for that, and God knows that would be a little more than I could handle right now! Besides, I’d rather be at the Bugle even if there’s no chance of me ever getting promoted to anything, ever, than at some boring software company or bank writing internal newsletters. My job’s fine. It’s me that isn’t!”

  “Well, that’s a relief. Because frankly, just being bored at work isn’t a good enough reason to drive you into the arms of Jean-Jean.”

  “I’m teetering on the brink!” I shriek. “I’m playing Russian roulette with my love life…. God! I must be insane. Who knows what else I’m capable of!?”

  She nods sympathetically and glances around to see if my ranting is disturbing any of the other patrons. “I know, Holly. It sucks.”

  But there’s no stopping me. “You know, up until a couple of years ago, everything was fine…. I liked work. I was proud of my job. Yeah, I was! I learned something new every day, even if it was just useless stuff like how much Sabres tickets were going for, or how to spell the names of rare diseases. And you know what else? I was even able to write. Not that I always did, mind you, because usually I didn’t, but I could, you know? When I wanted to…”

  “Calm down. I remember. There was that short story about the big empty house with all the locked doors and the kid with the key-shaped fingers. It was very Twilight Zone. You could have submitted that somewhere, you know. It was good. Really good.”

  “You think?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Maybe I should have written a whole book of short stories,” I sigh. “It was totally my genre.”

  “Still could be.”

  “Don’t you ever just feel like things used to be better in general? Like weekends. Weekends used to be so much fun, remember? Clubbing Fridays and Saturdays. Sometimes even Thursdays. Waiting in line at Blaze all night. Who cares if we even got in? That was fun! Why don’t we ever do that anymore?”

  “Blaze burned down. And I think you might be romanticizing things a little…. We mostly just got drunk at McGinty’s. There was never any lineup there.”

  I laugh. “Probably because there were no doors on the stalls in the bathroom. What a dive! Still, it was great, wasn’t it? But now whenever we go somewhere, I feel like everyone’s five years younger than me and five times hotter and has better clothes and better jobs. Don’t you find?”

  “Um, this is still Buffalo we’re talking about. You may very well have one of the best jobs in town,” she points out. “And nobody has good clothes.”

  I raise an eyebrow at her.

  “Except you,” she corrects herself.

  “Thanks. But I have to buy everything over the Internet because you can’t find so much as a Louis Vuitton key fob in this town, not that I can afford one, anyway. I hate Buffalo, I feel like I’m over the hill at twenty-eight and…oh, screw it—I’m just going to say it. I want a boyfriend! I know it’s wrong, but I want a boyfriend. I want to be in love. So badly. It’s pathetic, I know, but I’m ready for my man. I really am. I’m tired of being above it all.”

  George stares at me blankly. I’ve broken a sacred secret contract, and admitted That Which Should Never be Admitted by enlightened twenty-first-century women.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Sorry. I was just wondering what a key fob is.”

  “I guess I thought that once I truly stopped caring about being alone, I wouldn’t have to be.”

  “Like attaining nirvana the moment you shed all of your worldly concerns?”

  “Exactly.”

  The waitress, who has been listening in on most of our conversation, pops over to strike while the iron is hot. “Dessert, ladies?”

  “Cheesecake,” I manage faintly.

  “And two forks,” George adds. “You will find him, Holly. You’re both just doing your thing until you’re ready to meet, remember? And when you do, it’ll be forever. Isn’t that your theory?”

  It is, but the whole Someday-My-Prince-Will-Come thing just isn’t working for me anymore. What I need is a warm body. With a heart. And a head. And a… Hell, who am I kidding? I want the whole damn package.

  “All these years…” I moan weakly. “All these years, and I’ve just been sitting on the shelf, like an unwanted carton of milk about to expire.” The painful truth is that I’ve only had one long-term relationship, and that was back during my first year at Erie.

  “That’s not exactly true…”

  “Jim doesn’t count. Our relationship was based on a lie.”

  After the crushing disappointment of graduating from high school still a virgin (I was pretty enough in a plain sort of way, just ridiculously shy around guys), I allowed myself to be tricked into a relationship with one of my brother Bradley’s loser friends. Jim was four years older than me, something that impressed me to no end, and still a virgin, too. I would later discover that as part of Bradley’s continuing efforts to get poor Jim laid, he and his friends decided I would make the perfect sacrificial lamb, since apparently none of the girls his own age would have anything to do with him and my thoughtful brother had overheard me crying to a friend about the humiliating prospect of entering college never having gotten any myself.

  Bradley told me Jim liked me, and I eagerly fell in love with him before our first date. Things really blossomed from there. Jim and I were both glad to finally be having sex, so much so that he was even willing to endure the constant ribbing from his friends at not kicking me to the curb the morning after I gave it up, precisely seventy-two hours into our courtship. For my part, I was happy to overlook his dubious career goals—any job that allowed him to collect a paycheck while still being able to smoke pot all day long, a plan that came to glorious fruition in a part-time gig he landed driving one of those mini sidewalk-snow-removal buggies. Naive young thing that I was, and because Jim wasn’t exactly an evil person, I was also able t
o overlook those defects in his hygiene and intellect that had likely offended every other woman he’d met prior to me in order to experience the joys of couplehood for the first time.

  Alas, the beautiful thing that was us casually dropped dead at a New Year’s Eve party about a year and a half into our romance, when Jim’s beer-soaked buddy Wojack marveled aloud at how much money had changed hands over the consummation of our relationship. I dumped Jim on the spot, after he high-fived Bradley instead of trying to lie his way out of it. And if I could have dumped Bradley that night, you can bet your life I would have. Making book on the Sabres was one thing, but your sister’s virginity? It’s no wonder my self-esteem’s a little shaky when it comes to men.

  “The years are flying by, G. By the time someone wants me, I’ll be rotten and lumpy.”

  “Lumpy’s not so bad,” George says. “I’m already lumpy.”

  “But you’re good lumpy.”

  My best friend’s waist-to-hip ratio is fairly generous, though it certainly doesn’t seem to bother anybody except her. When we walk down the street together, George’s jiggles and curves and curls garner far more lustful stares than my straight lines do. Still, she’s pretty timid when it comes to men, and almost completely oblivious to her effect on them. Her “sort of” boyfriend—one of our old creative-writing profs, a serial student-dater who’s been toying with her for years—isn’t helping her self-esteem much, either.

  “Good lumpy? I wouldn’t go that far.” She snorts at the suggestion that such a thing might actually be possible. “I’d take an A-cup any day. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  “So why hasn’t it happened for me yet?”

  The closest I’d ever come to a relationship since Jim (and now Jean-Jean, I suppose) was a string of three one-night stands with the same guy. Over the course of two semesters. He was a fairly cute bartender at a popular club just off campus—quite a coup, but I could never shake the feeling that Freddie thought I was a different person each time.