Praise for Sarah Mlynowski

“This entertaining debut [offers] both humor and substance…. [Anyone] who’s ever been bored by an unfulfilling job…jealous of a roommate who has it all together…or thoroughly perplexed by boy-speak will find something to enjoy here. Mlynowski may not be able to provide all the solutions, but she certainly makes the problems fun.”

—Publishers Weekly on Milkrun

“A likable heroine.”

—Booklist on Milkrun

“Milkrun by Sarah Mlynowski is funny, touching, sassy, and bright. It’s as spicy as cinnamon-flecked foam on cappuccino and as honest as strong black coffee.”

—Anthology magazine

“Mlynowski is out for a rollicking good time from the start.”

—Arizona Republic on Fishbowl

“A fresh and witty take on real-life exams in love, lust, trust and friendship.”

—Bestselling author Jessica Adams on Fishbowl

For Elissa Harris

who always knows just what I mean

and lets me call her Mom.

Milkrun
Sarah Mlynowski

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With many, many, many thanks to the people who helped me not become that-girl-who-always-blabbed-about-one-day-maybe-in-the-far-distant-future-writing-a-book: Sam Bell for being the nicest editor a North American girl could hope for and for showing me how to make it “spot on” (I think that means just right in British-talk). Merjane Schoueri for being a marketer extraordinaire and for literally giving me the shirt off her back. Margie Miller and Tara Kelly for the perfect cover. Randall Toye, Kathrin Menge, Natasa Hatsios, Susan Pezzack, Julie Haroutunian and Louisa Weiss for being bottomless pools of encouragement. My dad for being proud of me and for trying really, really hard to salvage chapter ten after I dropped my laptop again. Laura Morris for her one-liners. Bev Craig for the initial inspiration. Robin Glube for being my Boston tour guide and personal copywriter. Shoshana Riff for her Back Bay road trip. Kate Henderson and Michael Hilliard for helping me with those legal issues. TOR Retail for their constant support and for letting me hog the printer while I printed out, um, reports. Bonnie Altro, Rebecca Sohmer, Jessica Davidman, Lisa Karachinsky, Ronit Avni, Jess Braun and Judy Batalion for being my personal focus group, fabulous friends and for letting me talk about my book ad nauseam. Aviva June for giving me stuff to write about. And of course, Todd Swidler, because without him this book would not exist. And yes, Mom, thanks again.

Contents

1 Jerk

2 No, I’m Not a Hooker But I Sometimes Like to Look Like One

3 Orgasming

4 Why Bother Getting Up?

5 Run Your Fingers Through Your Own Damn Hair

6 Surge Your Manhood Somewhere Else

7 More Beef

8 Ball of Crap

9 But I Want to Be a Princess!

10 Fifty Bucks to a Whole New You

11 Oh, Brother

12 Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder, Week 1, Monday

13 The Quasi Girlfriend Sighed

14 Why is there a Worm in My Big Apple?

15 The Milkrun—Literally

16 Why Can’t I Just Turn into a Pumpkin?

17 Happy New Year!

18 Can I Be Jo-Jo?

19 Happily Ever After—Kind Of

1
Jerk

JERK. JERK, JERK, jerk.

I can’t believe what a complete jerk he is.

I am constantly debating whether or not I have a reason worthy of aggravating my boss by making a personal long distance call to Wendy in New York. All minor emergencies merit phone calls to Natalie right here in Boston: tension with a coworker, plans for the evening, boredom…But this—this complete and utter humiliation at the hands of a male, this travesty, definitely merits an emergency-Wendy phone call.

I minimize my e-mail screen in case my boss, the copyediting coordinator, walks by. Instead of seeing Jeremy’s random act of devastation in the form of an e-mail from Thailand, Shauna will see Millionaire Cowboy Dad, the manuscript I’m supposed to be copyediting. I dial Wendy’s number at work.

“Wendy speaking,” she says in her investment-banker-don’t-mess-with-me voice.

I hate him. I really hate him. “It’s me,” I say.

“I must be psychic. I wasn’t going to pick up, but I thought it might be you.”

No time for small talk right now. “Did you also have a premonition that the jerk would meet someone in Thailand and then write me to tell me about it?” I will never speak to him again. If he e-mails I will press delete. If he calls I will hang up. If he realizes he cannot live without me, jumps on the first available flight to Boston, and comes straight to my house with a diamond ring worth five months of his salary, that is, if his salary weren’t nonexistent, I will slam the door in his face. (Okay…I’ll probably get married. I’m not that crazy.)

“Shit,” she says. “Who is she?”

“Don’t know. Some girl he met while he was busy ‘finding himself.’ I don’t hear from him for what, three weeks? Then he writes to tell me hi, how are you, I’m good and I’m in love.”

“He actually said the L word?”

Jeremy has never even written the L word, let alone said it aloud. I think his hands and lips are genetically programmed to be incapable of combining the letters L-O-V-E.

I really, really hate him.

“No. He said he just wants me to know that he’s seeing someone.”

“But you did tell him he could see other people, right?”

“Well, yeah. But I never believed he would actually do it.”

Unfortunately, I constantly imagine him doing it. I dream about him having orgies with groups of naked and frolicking Thai women. Instead of working on Millionaire, I find myself picturing him having wild, drug-induced sex with a six-foot Dutch goddess who looks like Claudia Schiffer and backpacks in stiletto heels and capri pants. But up to now I believed that these self-inflicted tortures were manifestations of my overzealous why-would-he-want-to-travel-without-me-if-he-really-loved-me paranoia. Jeremy was supposed to come home after one month and tell me that, while he was away finding himself, he realized how much he truly loved me and that he wanted to spend the rest of his adult life ravishing my naked body with kisses, using the L word over and over.

Of course he had to go and ruin everything.

“Jackie, he’s been backpacking through Asia for over two months. He’s probably slept with half of Thailand by now. Let me hear the e-mail.”

Will my computer malfunction if I throw up all over it?

“I can’t read it out loud at work. I’ll forward it to you. Hold on…one second…did you get it?” Millionaire returns to my screen.

“Call waiting, hold on.” She puts me on hold and an elevator rendition of Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration” plays in my ear.

Oh, God.

I know I’m about to start crying because the computer screen is slightly smudged as if it had been run over by the crappy orange eraser on the end of a cheap pencil.

Must think happy thoughts. Julie Andrews dancing. Cadbury’s chocolate Easter eggs. My sixteen-year-old half sister Iris believing I’m the coolest person ever. Jackie, you look just like Sarah Jessica Parker, only prettier.

Okay, I can kind of see again. The screen has almost returned to its previous non-orange color.

What other happy thoughts? The way Jeremy used to draw little circles on the inside of my arm with his thumb.

Shit, shit, shit.

Try again. The ninety-two percent Professor McKleen gave me on my Edgar Allan Poe essay. The day I got my braces off and my lips felt like they were sliding off my teeth and I kept smiling in the mirror. Okay. I’m all right now. Nothing to see here, folks.

Yuck. I notice that Helen, the associate editor who sits in the cubicle beside me is peeking over our wall divider. She always pops up at the exact moment I don’t want her there. Like how you always get your period on prom or Valentine’s or pool-party day. Whenever I’m checking out new-movie sites on the Net, or sneaking in just a few minutes late, there she is. It’s like some kind of superpower.

Her hair is pulled back into a frizzless tight bun, and as usual, not one hair has strayed. I think she uses glue; she looks frighteningly like Lilith from Frasier.

“Yes?” I ask in my I’m-very-busy-here voice.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but would you mind…um…refraining from making so much noise?” she whispers, putting her index finger up to her lips in her be-quiet motion. “I’m having concentration difficulties.”

I resist the urge to tell her to kiss my butt. On my first day of work at Cupid almost two months ago, I decided I would not allow this type of person, this presumptuous know-it-all, to get to me. On that first day, when I told her I had gone to Penn, she said she knew someone who had transferred there after he hadn’t been able to take the pressure at Harvard. She, of course, was a Harvard graduate.

And then there was the time when I swear I was still willing to give her a chance, and I peeked over her cubicle and said, “Helen, Shauna wants to talk to you and I.” Without looking up, she answered, “Jacquelyn, it’s…um…Shauna wants to talk to you and me.”

And for some reason, most of the other copy editors seem to think she’s God’s gift to Cupid. “Oh, Helen,” they chime. “You’re the queen of commas.” And “What was it like at Harvard, Helen?” Or “Tell us your theory of deconstruction and subjectivity in Joyce’s Ulysses, Helen.” Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but tell me, what normal person spends her lunches reading Paradise Lost and The Metaphysical History of Literary Criticism?

I’m sure she has a few theories on deconstruction and subjectivity that she’d be delighted to explain to me. “When I was a freshman at Harvard, Jim, my world-renowned professor, insisted on flying me across the country to present my original thesis…” Blah, blah, blah. I did my M.A. in literature, too, you know, although she never lets other people talk about themselves. A half an M.A., actually. I completed the first year of a two-year program. But why is a Harvard graduate working here, anyway? She should be off editing Michael Ondaatje and discussing the profound meanings of life—not the torrid love affair between a robust cowboy and his virgin twenty-five-year-old bride. She obviously had lousy grades in school.

See? I’m just not letting her get to me.

“Sorry,” I say, incredibly, with a straight face. “It’s just that I’m having a semicolon crisis and I’m finding it very unsettling.”

“Really?” Her eyes swerve back and forth between my computer screen and my telephone. She’s not sure if she should take me seriously. “Well, I could help. I was a copy editor before I was promoted to associate editor. I would consider scheduling a combined colon and semicolon meeting this afternoon. If you’re serious.”

“Of course I’m serious.” I’m amazed that people like her exist in real life. Do geeks know they’re geeks? Does she wake up in the morning, look at herself in the mirror and think, “Wow, I’m such a loser”? Probably not. Does that mean that I, too, might be a complete freak and totally unaware of it? Do stupid people think they’re smart? Do ugly people look in the mirror and see Cindy Crawford? Is it possible that I’m not as cute and witty as I think I am? Is that why Jeremy doesn’t want me? Am I a hideous, moronic freak?

Helen taps her pen against our divider, a signal that she has decided to believe me. “All right. Since other people have voiced concerns as well, I’ll schedule a discussion group.” Her cheeks start to flush with excitement. Punctuation appears to be foreplay for Helen. “Is 3:45 a good time for you?”

Yeah, a real good time. “Sounds fantastic.”

“Excellent. I’ll send out a group e-mail to all my copy editors.” Her head finally disappears behind the cubicle wall. Like she can’t just pop across the hall to tell Julie. The only copy editors who work on her series, True Love, are Julie and me. And I’d like to further object to her using the possessive term “my.” We do not belong to her. Shauna is the coordinating copy editor. Shauna writes our reviews. Helen’s series just happens to be one of the many we have been assigned.

“Sorry,” Wendy’s voice resurfaces on the phone. “Okay, I’m reading it now. Blah, blah, blah…‘Today I did E again’…Why were you wasting your time with that druggie?…‘Someone stole my green J. Crew shirt from the balcony’…God, what a loser!…‘I’m seeing a great girl and we’ve been traveling together for the past month—That’s it?”

“No, you forgot the ‘I thought you might want to know’ part.”

“‘I thought you might want to know. Take care, Jer…’Is this a joke? Is this some kind of sick joke?”

“Unfortunately not.” But wait! What if it is a joke? Or maybe some kind of new computer virus tapped into my wildest fears and mutated accordingly.

“And you’ve been sitting on your ass every weekend while he’s been slutting around? Ridiculous. Do you realize you haven’t met one guy since you’ve moved?”

Sometimes I think Wendy definitely lacks in the sympathy department. “I’ve met guys,” I respond defensively. “I just haven’t dated any of them.”

“You’ve been pathetic.”

I have been pathetic. I even refused to go out with Jason Priestly’s look-alike, introduced to me by Natalie, because I was worried that word would somehow get to Jer and he’d feel the need to get back at me and go ahead and fall in love with someone else. And what if Jer called while I was out? I could never have brought a guy home—my room is a shrine of pictures of Jer: Jer and me at the park; Jer and me at formals; Jer’s graduation; pictures of Jer, Jer, Jer. It never occurred to me that Jer wouldn’t have a picture of us next to his sleeping bag, that maybe it was time for me to buy one of those funky photo boxes and do some filing.

Pathetic.

Hmm. Wait a second. “Is it possible seeing just means seeing? Like with his eyes?”

Pause. “No.”

Sigh. Yeah, that sounded lame even to me.

Pathetic.

“You’re right. I’m going to start dating again. I’m going to become Crazy Dating Girl. I’m going to date every guy in Back Bay.” Back Bay is the oh-so-hip, oh-so-overpriced area in Boston where I live.

The time has come.

I will date witty, hot, ridiculously rich men who will shower me with expensive jewelry, send roses to my office, and whisper how wonderful I am in my ear while massaging my I-sit-all-day-in-front-of-a-stupid-computer back. Life will be wonderful. I will wake up every morning with a smile on my face like the perma-smile women in coffee commercials.

“You’re right. No more whining.” But I can’t go out by myself, can I? “I don’t have any friends to go out with,” I whine.

Pause. “Don’t you have any girlfriends?”

“Not really.” Everything sucks. I hate my life. I will have to send roses to myself with an anonymous love letter and whisper sweet nothings into my own ear. “I guess I can always call Natalie.”

“You must have someone else to call.”

Wendy does not like Natalie. All three of us used to live on the same floor in a student dorm at Penn. Natalie calls Wendy an intellectual snob. Wendy calls Natalie a Brahmin elitist. Truthfully, Wendy is an intellectual snob and Natalie is a bit of an elitist. I didn’t even know what a Brahmin was until Wendy explained that Natalie belongs to the upper caste of Boston society. “It does sound kind of snooty when you say it like that,” I told Wendy.

“Unfortunately, I have no one else to call.” The only new people I’ve spoken to since I moved, besides the weirdos at work, are my fifty-year-old manicurist and my superintendent. I haven’t left the apartment much, devoting my spare time to Seinfeld reruns and reading Cosmo, Glamour, City Girls and Mademoiselle to try to mentally collect what I refer to as the Fashion Magazine Fun Facts. These are life rules that will one day help me pinpoint all the things I did wrong in my relationship with Jeremy, make me a better person, and allow me to live a successful, sexy and ultimately satisfying life. Page five says ask him out, page seventy-two says wait for him to call me, page fifty says he wants an independent woman, page fifty-six says he’ll walk if I don’t make him feel needed…Will smoky-colored eye shadow really make me more desirable? More desirable than a Brazilian bikini wax will? What is a Brazilian bikini wax? It’s all very confusing.

“So go out with Natalie tonight, but then you’ve got to find new friends. What about Samantha?” she asks.

Sam is my annoying roommate. She and her boyfriend are always all over each other. “I don’t like her. She makes me use color-coordinated sponges in the kitchen—blue for dishes, green for pots, pink for the counter.”

“That makes sense.”

Maybe it makes sense to people like Wendy who open public bathroom doors with their feet because they don’t want to touch the handle. Not to me. I wonder why I surround myself with such anal personalities.

Still, anal friends are better than no friends.

“Again, why do you like Natalie?” Wendy asks.

Natalie may not be the brightest star in the solar system, but she’s fun. Brahmins do have some advantageous qualities. She knows the whole world and would be great at introducing me to lots of Brahmin men, if I ever let her. When I called to tell her I was moving to Boston, she had me hooked up to live with Sam in less than a week. “If you moved here I could hang out with you. Since you don’t, Natalie is my only option.”

Let’s face it, Wendy is a bit of a snob. She is one of those A-plus girls who have no patience for stupidity. We’ve known each other since Mrs. Martin, our second-grade math teacher who wore the same gray turtleneck every day and smelled like Swiss cheese, sat us next to each other at the back of the class. We bonded over our love for Michael Jackson and Cabbage Patch Kids, remaining inseparable through the traumas of middle school, high school, university, and Ted Abramson. Ted Abramson actually falls somewhere in the middle school/high school range, more specifically when he broke up with me after fifth grade and asked Wendy out at her bat mitzvah, then dumped her during the summer and liked me again in eighth grade.

But we survived the Ted crisis just as we survived my accidental disposing of her retainer into the cafeteria wastebasket, even though to this day I insist she left it wrapped in tissue on top of her lunch bag and it did look like garbage. And in our junior year at university, she survived me almost killing her after she told Andrew Mackenzie, her lab partner in her calculus class—I’m still not sure why math class has a lab—that I thought his friend Jeremy was a hottie. We spotted Jeremy exactly three years ago in American Prose, which came right before Wendy’s calculus class. The farther Huck Finn floated down the river, the more smitten I became. Of course, Andrew told Jeremy. Very embarrassing.

I should never have forgiven her so easily.

“It’s all your fault, anyway,” I snap.

“What’s my fault? Your not having friends? Let me remind you that you were still in school when I was offered this job, and besides, how could I possibly turn down Wall Street?”

Wendy had been offered investment banking jobs at every company she applied to—not only because of her perfect Grade Point Average at Wharton, Penn’s business school, but because she had volunteered at food banks, wrote for the school paper, taught English in Africa for a summer, and worked part-time for the computer center, training students in Excel. While most people, including me, took Space, Time, It Doesn’t Matter 101—a one-hundred-percent paper physics course where I was allowed to write about the physics of dating—as an option, Wendy took Deconstructing Post-Colonial Narratives and Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism. Conveniently, her optional courses were my compulsory courses, so we got to hang out a lot. I also got to skip many classes because not only did Wendy type up her notes, she also made detailed indexes and four-color pie charts.

“My entire relationship with Jeremy is your fault. You fixed us up.”

“Quit whining. You shouldn’t be surprised, after all the crap he’s pulled.”

I hate when she uses against me things I tell her. “I so don’t want to get into this now, ’kay?”

“Fine. Call Natalie. Tell her you want to go meet boys. Immediately.”

Doesn’t Wendy have enough people to boss around at work? “Fine, I will.”

“Good.”

“Fine.”

“Good luck, I love you, call me later,” she says, and slams down the phone.

I dial Natalie’s number at home. Except for university, my Brahmin friend has lived with her parents in Boston all her life. She spends her time shopping, getting her nails done, looking for a husband, and if there’s time, doing volunteer work.

One ring. Two rings. I know she’s checking her caller ID.

“Hi!” she exclaims in her high-pitched voice that sounds as though she ingested a minor amount of helium. “How are you?”

“We’re going out tonight so I can flirt with everyone. Where are we going?”

“Sorry, but I can’t leave my house today. I’m having a major fat day.”

Natalie weighs about eighty-seven pounds. I have no patience dealing with her ridiculousness.

“How am I supposed to meet guys if I don’t go out?”

“Why are you suddenly meeting guys? What happened to Jer?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s over. I need to meet men.”

“Well—”

“Please? Please please please please?”

“Uchhh, fine. I’ll meet you at your place at nine. We’ll go to Orgasm.”

Orgasm is a very trendy martini bar about four blocks away from my apartment. Very hot men go to Orgasm.

“Perfect,” I say.

“Get the vodka ready. I don’t know if any of my clothes will fit me, though. I may have to borrow something of yours.”

Hmm. Thanks.

Helen peeks over the divider again. “Jacquelyn…”

“Deal,” I say to Natalie. I smile sweetly at Helen. “I’m really sorry, Helen. I’m feeling punctuation-overwhelmed. I’m sure you understand. See you later, Nat.” I hang up the phone without looking up.

I will date. I will become the queen of dating. I will forget all about him. I will sit on patios wearing strappy sandals and skimpy sundresses, drinking Cosmopolitans and flirting with my new boyfriend. Make that plural. Boyfriends. Jeremy who?

Jeremy the Jerk. Jeremy who is dating a tall, leggy blonde who wears crop-tops to expose her navel ring. She’s probably gorgeous and brilliant, and he sends her roses, and scatters love notes on pink heart-shaped paper around their hostel.

Jackie? Jackie who? Oh yes, that’s right, that other girl I dated in university before I fell madly in love with my leggy navel-pierced blond goddess.

She must be from Holland. The Dutch are all gorgeous. He doesn’t even care that we’ve been dating on and off since our junior year in college, and that up to about sixteen minutes ago, he was the center of my life. All I wanted was for him to ask me to come with him, but apparently, finding yourself is something that a man has to do without his girlfriend. Even a girlfriend who is so in love that she’s prepared to drop everything and run away with him.

I need a new boyfriend. Somewhere in Boston there is a man who will realize how wonderful I am. There must be a ton of eligible men in the Hub. There are at least…well…I don’t even know how many people there are in Boston.

Luckily, the Internet knows everything. Yay! Project. How many eligible men are there in Boston? Hmm. How many eligible men are there in Boston between the ages of twenty-five and thirty? Search: single men.

After about forty-five minutes of looking at unrelated sites—Love Match, How to Catch a Sexy Single Man, What Men Want—I find the U.S. Census. Fifteen minutes after that, I find information on Boston. Median rent: 581. Five hundred and eighty-one dollars? Are they paying in English pounds? Do they live in a bathroom?

Almost three million people live in Boston: 1,324,994 men, 1,450,376 women. Damn. Bad ratio.

Okay, age range…eighteen to twenty. Too young.

Twenty-one to twenty-four. Still too young.

Twenty-four to forty-four. To forty-four? That’s quite a range. My dad is practically forty-four. Actually, my dad’s fifty…fiftysomething. I don’t remember. I can’t be expected to remember every detail. Hmm. At least forty-year-old men are established. There are 210,732 people between the ages of twenty-four and forty-four. That makes about 100,000 men. I wish Wendy were here to draw me a graph.

One hundred thousand. And all I’m looking for is one. One man who is attractive, intelligent, still has hair (and doesn’t part it on the side to cover where he doesn’t have it), has an exciting and promising career (I wouldn’t mind an equally exciting and promising car), never wears turtlenecks (straight men shouldn’t wear turtlenecks), doesn’t have back acne (aka backne), wears a nice cologne (preferably something musky), is nice to his mother (not a mama’s boy), and is sensitive…no, strong…no, sensitive…definitely sensitive…but not too sensitive…would he be able to cry in front of me? He has to be able to cry…but not often…sometimes…

You have mail. Would you like to read it now?

Maybe Jeremy has realized that he is actually completely in love with me, can’t live without me, and is bored with the hot Dutch bimbo.

Attn: True Love copy editors. The emergency semicolon meeting will take place in the production boardroom in exactly five minutes. Please be on time.

Helen

Damn.

I will have to listen to Helen ramble for an hour, and I am entirely to blame. I imagine strangling her with different types of punctuation. I imagine wrapping a nice, fat em dash around Jeremy’s throat.

Jerk. Jerk, jerk, jerk.

2
No, I’m Not a Hooker But I Sometimes Like to Look Like One

“HELLO? SAM?”

Yay! No one’s home. I love nothing more than walking into an empty apartment. It wasn’t always this way. When I went to Penn and lived with Wendy, there was nothing I loved more than coming home to see my best friend flopped upside down on the couch watching TV, her legs thrown over the red and pink flowery pillows her grandmother had given us. “Yay! You’re home,” Wendy would say, and we’d make French Vanilla coffee (two Sweet’N Lows for me and one spoon of sugar for her), and describe our days in excruciating detail:

“And then I walked to the cafeteria and saw Crystal Werner and Mike Davis.”

“They’re still together?”

“Yeah, after he cheated on her. Can you imagine?”

I think it was kind of selfish of her to go off to New York and leave me all alone like this.

A red light on my phone is flashing, signaling I have messages. “You have three new messages,” the voice in the receiver says.

I will not think that maybe one is Jeremy. I will not hope that he has changed his mind and that as soon as I press play, I will hear, “Hi, it’s me, I really miss you” in his radio-talk-show, native–New Yorker voice. I know there will be a message from him only when I least expect it. That’s the sick way the world works. I can see the picture clearly: I will absentmindedly hit the play button, his name not popping into my mind even once, and “Hi, it’s me, I really miss you” will hit me like the ice-water showers I have to take every morning because Sam uses up all the hot water with her forty-five-minute marathons.

Look at that! I have messages! La-la-la. Whoever can they be? I’ll just casually listen and not really care about who it might be.

“Hi, Sam, it’s your mother. Call me back.” Beep.

“Jackie! Jackie, where are you? I called you at work and you didn’t answer. I’m going out now, but I need to talk to you. I’m having an emotional crisis. Matthew told Mandy that he likes me and I don’t like him, so what do I do? Call me as soon as you get home. But I’m going out. So leave a message.” Beep. Iris is always having an emotional crisis. Who’s Matthew?

“Hello, Jacquelyn. It’s Janie. Just calling to say hello. Call me back when you have a chance.” Beep.

Damn.

Janie is my mother. When I was four, she insisted I call her by her first name. This ban had something to do with the label “mother” being part of a bourgeois ideological conspiracy to maintain the power and position of the ruling class—the parents. But by the time I was five, my father was promoted from manager of the ladies’ innerwear department to the director of ladies’ outerwear, and my mother began to shed some of her Marxist philosophies, discovering her inner material-girl self. But by then it was too late for me to start calling her Mom again. The imprinting was complete. I love Janie dearly, don’t get me wrong, but she’s a wee bit flaky.

Fern Jacquelyn Norris is my official name. I never use the name Fern. I hate the name Fern. I’m still not sure why my parents gave me such a god-awful name. I think Janie must have named me while on some kind of mind-altering drug during the seventies. I’ve convinced Janie to call me by my middle name, but my dad seems to have a learning disability on the subject.

Once upon a time I lived with Janie and my father in a house on a street called Lazar in Danbury, Connecticut, and my best friend was a my-size pigtailed girl named Wendy. Today Wendy is a lot taller, still my best friend, and gone are her pigtails (they reappeared for a short stint in the 90s to capture that “cute” look). My dad—named Tim, but I was allowed to call him Dad—as I mentioned, made women’s clothes while Janie made bracelets. She made thousands of these, some with rhinestones, some with little silver moons and stars. She sold a couple to the local boutiques, but stored most of them in old shoeboxes that she stacked like building blocks beside the bookshelf. It’s a good thing that by this time she was into fashion and was buying many pairs of shoes.

When I was six, I found out that my parents, who I believed belonged to a wonderful marriage, did not like each other. This makes perfect sense to me now. Everything is always so clear when you look back—the right answer on the exam, the guy who liked you but who you thought was only so-so until the popular cheerleader started dating him, the blind spot you definitely should have checked before you made that sudden turn and lost your side mirror—but at the time, I found their sudden change of heart horrifying. Dad moved into a bachelor pad, and Janie and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment across town.

A few months later, Dad married Bev, a part-time travel agent, and they moved into a house on Dufferin. A few months after that, Janie married Bernie, a sales guy, and we moved into his two-bedroom apartment, which was only slightly larger than our old one, on Carleton Avenue. Then when I was eight, Janie got pregnant with Iris, and the three and a half of us moved into a three-bedroom on Finch. (Iris, by the way, was encouraged to call Janie “Mom.”) When Iris was four, Janie decided she was sick of hearing neighbors on top of her, sick of feeling as if she lived under a bowling alley, sick of not being able to blast her Beatles CDs without the police coming and telling her to turn it down (yes, that actually happened), and that we were moving into our own house.

We moved to Kelsey Avenue, and stayed there until Janie decided she’d had enough of not being able to happily wear her Birkenstocks without fear of deer ticks and that we were moving to Boston. Thankfully, we didn’t include me. That’s when I went to Penn. They lived in Newton for four years until Janie decided to move to Virginia because “everyone should be able to walk for less than fifteen minutes and dip her toes in the ocean.”

In my twenty-four years on this planet I have had, to date, fourteen different bedrooms. To reach this number, I have to include university residence, my first apartment at Penn with Wendy, my second apartment at Penn with Wendy, and my own apartment at Penn after Wendy got her investment banking job in New York. I stayed, in principle to do my M.A., but really to be with Jeremy. This list also includes the apartment my parents lived in when Janie was pregnant with me.

I don’t feel like calling Janie back just yet. I prefer to lie on my couch and watch some mind-numbing television. Click. Click, click. Nothing on but boring news.

I decide to admire the black leather knee-high boots I purchased on Newbury Street on my way home from work today. Every newly single girl needs new boots. It is step one in the recovery process.

There are actually five steps to recovery. Wendy and I wrote them up in college after she broke up with…what was his name? The economics major who cheated on her with the green-braces girl…oh, yeah, Putzhead.

I find the list in my stuff-drawer, between a Valentine’s Day mix tape featuring classics like “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” “Lost in Love,” and “Glory of Love” and two New Kids on the Block concert ticket stubs. I think we were planning on sending it into Cosmo or something. The list, written in purple ink, smells like stale Marlboros. It was during our wannabe-smokers days.

How to Recover from a Breakup

1. Buy knee-high black leather boots.

2. Get a new haircut. Find an extremely outrageous hair salon, where coffee is brought to you and gay men tell you that you have the most gorgeous hair they have ever seen.

3. Call a female friend so that you can talk about how much you miss your ex, and the friend can remind you of all the times he pissed you off, admitting that she never thought he was nice or attractive, that you could do much better, that he was cheap, that he had a strange smell, et cetera. This step is best accomplished with a mediocre friend as opposed to a best friend, in case of boyfriend reconciliation.

4. Call male friends so that you can be reminded of how desirable you are. Do not actually fool around with these friends. You’ll need them around or several months following your breakup.

5. Buy chocolate chip cookie dough and/or a box of tremendously expensive chocolates filled with different types of pastel-colored creams, and eat the entire box.

Amazing! Five years later and the steps are still (almost) valid:

1. Boots. Check.

2. Hair. I need to do some careful research before attempting this step. Nothing is worse than number two ending with tears and me having to wear that Red Sox baseball hat Jeremy bought me so that I would look like a native.

3. Friend phone call. Check. Well, kind of check. Considering Jeremy and I have broken up five times in three years, I have already lost all my mediocre friends, and I refuse to take chances with the ones I have left.

4. Male friend phone call. This one is a bit of a problem due to my lack of maintaining or acquiring male friends since Jeremy and I started dating.

4.a. Make male friends.

4.b. Call male friends.

5. Chocolate. Check. Having emergency cookie dough in your freezer is as crucial as having an emergency twenty in your wallet. Not that I can ever save the twenty in my wallet. I have recently modified Step 5. Eat chocolates while watching Sex and the City or Ally McBeal to remind me that there are other attractive, successful single women out there, and that they, unlike me, are over thirty.

Steps one through five should be repeated freely until girl is over breakup. Steps one and two should be slightly altered with each revisit, by the use of sexy sandals, leather pants, a backless tanktop, highlights, perm, layers…You get the idea.

Tonight, however, there is no time for cookie dough.

I shower, in hot water for a change (I even use the yummy-smelling soap sample I was saving for Jer’s return. See? I’m practically over him already), blow-dry my hair straight (it takes forever and I keep burning my fingers, but I don’t care because it makes me look very chic), put on my black knee-length skirt that has a slutty slit right up the thigh, a relatively new slinky red tank top and my new boots that right now feel so worth the 150 I can’t afford.

Yup. I’m pretty hot.

I find the smoky eye shadow page in Cosmo and try to follow the directions without poking my pupil. I will dazzle men with my hazel eyes, I will use lip liner to show off my smile, and I will smile to show off my dimples.

I am even wearing a thong for good luck.

I’m tired of waiting for things to happen to me. Time to get out there and grab life by the…well, you know. I am twenty-four, I am young, I refuse to sit around watching my butt get bigger while Jeremy runs around enjoying himself. Women are always waiting for men to come over to them, for men to ask them out, for men to kiss them.

Wait, wait, wait! The first time I waited for a kiss was when I was in middle school. It seemed as if everyone else in the world had already been French kissed (I imagined French women all walking around licking everyone), including Wendy, who had played spin-the-bottle at her cousin’s birthday party. Ted and I had already been going out for two days, and we were sitting at a picnic table outside at a school dance, talking about nothing (warm out, isn’t it?), experiencing that sweaty-palmed, irregularly palpitating-heart, what-happens-if-I-pass-out-I-think-we’re-about-to-kiss feeling. Finally, his face just kind of fell on top of mine, and there we were, kissing. Well, not exactly kissing, since our mouths were closed and our lips just kind of bumping as if we were two people in a crowded subway who just happen to be sharing the same pole. Then suddenly we were kissing. Wendy’s instructions surfaced in my mind: just keep your mouth open and move your tongue around. His tongue was mushy and I could taste Clorets at the back of his mouth.

Waiting never gets easier. After the first kiss, girls have to wait for their first love, and then they have to wait to lose their virginity. Or, if you’re tired of searching for your endless love, you can sleep with Rick the Deadhead, who called (and probably still calls) everyone “dude” and wore (and probably still wears) tie-dye. Yup, you can screw waiting, like I did.

You know what I hate about TV and movies? People never just fool around. They either kiss or they have sex. A guy starts unbuttoning a girl’s jeans and the girl says, “I’m not ready to have sex with you,” and the guy says okay, and her pants stay on, and it just ends there. You never hear about any of the bases that everyone I knew went through before the idea of actually doing it even occurred to them. Well, I’m sure it occurred to them.

I didn’t sleep with Rick right away. We went around all the bases, around and around and around, until the end of my first year at college when I finally got tired of the idea just occurring to me and decided that I wanted to do it already.

Our first time was on a Sunday night, on his cramped dorm bed, with Skeletons from the Closet playing on the stereo. By the time we got to “Truckin’,” the second track, it was all over. My body felt as if it had been clawed open, as we sat on his bed smoking cigarettes. My hands smelled like rubber elastic and I remember thinking, That’s it?

With Jeremy everything was suddenly…different. He would run his hand along my lower back and I would lose all ability to focus on anything but his fingers. He had perfect guy hands. About twice the size of mine, they never got sweaty and they smelled like burning leaves. In a good way. He wasn’t into holding hands, but he always had his arm around my shoulder, or on my back, or on my knee.

Enough of that. Change the channel in my head.

JulieAndrewsJulieAndrewsJulieAndrews.

Chocolate Easter bunnies.

Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee.

Well, not quite Sandra Dee. I’m waiting in full slut-attire for Natalie, when I hear Sam and Marc approaching the front door. Giggling. They’re always giggling. They’re also one of those couples who are always touching each other, making everyone around them uncomfortable.

I didn’t realize when I signed the lease that I would have two roommates instead of one.

Okay fine, the truth is that I hardly ever see Marc. Sam has a TV and a bathroom in her room, and they hardly ever come out. They just have sex. A lot. And they watch Law and Order, which for some reason seems to be on about six times a day.

What really bugs me about Sam is her why-can’t-you-cleanup-cuz-your-mess-is-really-annoying look. Like when she finds my socks on the coffee table. Or when she asks why I always leave the remnants of things in the fridge, like a milk container, a pizza box of only crusts, the pitcher of iced tea that has a rim of brown gel on the bottom but no tea. Once, she told me as she tossed my moldy half-leftover cheese sandwich in the trash can, that next time I didn’t have to save her any. No, no sarcasm there.

Here’s the thing: finishing something usually involves cleaning up or throwing something out, which probably also involves replacing an already full garbage bag with an empty one and then having to bring the filled one to the garbage chute—which all together spells too much work.

I have the same issues with filtered water. I never finish the pitcher. I hate having to fill it up.

I guess I haven’t as yet discovered the joys of closure.

Sam gets annoyed that I make everything her responsibility. Like collecting the rent, paying the bills, watering the plants, feeding the cat…I always assume she’ll take care of it because I take care of the other stuff, right? Don’t ask me to define the other stuff; right now, I’m into the intangible (Jer, Jer, Jer). Luckily, Sam always ends up doing everything, because otherwise we’d have an eviction notice, brown plants, and a dead kitty.

I’m kidding about the cat. I’d remember to feed a cat. We don’t even have a cat, I swear.

Sam opens the door. She and her attachment are each holding a bag of groceries.

“Look at you! Sexy stuff! What are you up to tonight?”

“I’m going to Orgasm.”

Marc laughs. “Lucky you.”

Sam giggles again, drops her bag of groceries, and grabs Marc around the waist. “The bar Orgasm, silly.”

“I know. I was just teasing, Sessy Bear.”

Marc calls Sam “Sessy Bear.” I don’t know why. I don’t even know what it means.

“I know, Biggy Bear.”

Sam calls Marc “Biggy Bear.” I don’t know why. I don’t want to know why.

“Who are you going with?” Sam asks.

“Nat. We’re going to get very drunk and meet men. You two wanna come?” Please say no.

“Sounds like fun,” Marc says. “But we’re going to watch ‘L and O.’”

Thank God.

Sam giggles. “Is that the new name? Like SNL and KFC?”

“It’s all about acronyms now, you know,” Marc says. “If you’re nice, Sessy Bear, maybe afterwards we’ll get an ice cream from DQ.”

“Is it normal that someone could be such a geek?” Sam asks me, playfully patting Biggy Bear on his behind.

“You’re the geek,” says her attachment.

For the second time today, I think I’m going to throw up.

After they disappear behind a thankfully closed door, I decide to prepare the instruments of our intoxication while I wait for Nat.

I take out the vodka and two shot glasses. She’ll be here any second. I might as well pour while I wait.

Yay! I’m going out tonight! Although I’ve never been to Orgasm, I’ve heard many detailed descriptions from Natalie. “It’s the place to be seen,” she once explained after I had lied about having too much work to do to go. As if I ever brought work home. They certainly aren’t paying me enough for that. Paying me enough, period.

“Anyone who’s anyone goes there,” she said. I was slightly surprised that people besides the prom queen on TV movies actually used that expression.

Whatever. Tonight I’ll be seen. If Natalie ever gets to my house, that is. Nat, where are you?

Jeremy, where are you? Long, Dutch legs come to mind.

I might as well get started and have mine. Drink, that is. Not long legs. All fantasy should be based on some degree of truth; what’s the use of yearning for something that can absolutely never happen?

Ouch. That burns. The drink, that is, not the truth (although that, too, can jolt a girl if she lets it).

Damn slut and her damn Dutch navel ring.

Now Nat’s shot is just sitting there, all alone, like the last lonely chocolate chip cookie in the box.

So I down it just as the downstairs buzzer rings. “I found something to wear,” Nat’s voice flows up through the intercom. “Come downstairs.”

See? If I hadn’t had those shots, they would have gone to waste.

3
Orgasming

“HI, HON! SHALL WE WALK?” Natalie asks, slinging her arm through mine.

“Of course we should. It’ll only take us eight minutes.”

“Which way is it?”

Silly Natalie. It’s not that I’m a walking compass or anything, but I pass the bar at least twice a day. So does Natalie. True, Boston’s not the easiest city to navigate; streets tend to inexplicably change names from Court to State, from Winter to Summer, and then disappear altogether. I’m no stranger to getting lost-induced panic attacks (I will never find my way home, I will end up in a bad neighborhood, I will get robbed and killed and no one will notice until months later when they find my decomposed body still strapped to my ten-year-old Toyota in the river—for the love of God, why don’t I have a cell phone like everyone else?), but Back Bay is pretty much a grid.

“Tonight I can have three shots,” she says.

Sobriety is not Nat’s concern. She is a self-admitted obsessive calorie counter. She carries a yellow spiral notebook with a picture of grapes on the cover, a purple felt pen, and a highlighter everywhere she goes. She writes down everything she eats. She even highlights her “boo-boos” (her word choice, not mine).

“You know,” she continues, “one shot of vodka has sixty-two calories.”

No, I don’t know. Or care. This week, anyway. One hundred and twenty-four calories down. Six zillion to go.

Today, Natalie does not in fact look fat. She looks exactly the same as she always does—very, very skinny and very, very tall. Well, not very, very tall, but tall compared to me (everyone is tall compared to me, since I measure about three inches over five feet). Natalie is probably only five foot six, but standing next to me I tend to think of Michael Jordan.

Actually, she looks more like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except that Nat has brown hair. Though she’d never admit it, according to Sam, Natalie paid a visit to Dr. Harvey Gold, one of Boston’s top nose-job specialists, as a combined high school graduation/birthday present from her parents (Nat, that is, not Buffy). The first time I was at her house in Beacon Hill, I examined every photograph, searching for a before-picture. Of the thirty-five frames prominently featured throughout the huge house, not one featured her before the age of eighteen. Suspicious?

And she dresses just like Buffy (sort of). Her Dolce and Gabbana black tube top and tight red pants must have cost more than my month’s rent. Luckily, she’s the type of person who can pull that outfit off—financially and aesthetically. As for myself, I tend to camouflage instead of highlight.

Nat volunteers at various mental-health clinics. One day she plans on doing her master’s degree in psych. One day mentally disturbed people might go to her for help. Scary. Even the remote possibility that she actually gets in to one of these programs terrifies me.

Eight minutes later, as promised, we arrive to find twenty fidgeting people lined up by the door, huddled under the metallic silhouette of a woman’s head thrown back in complete orgasmic abandon.

Natalie walks to the front. “George!” she squeals to the intimidating six-foot, very bald bouncer whose wraparound sunglasses remind me of the Terminator.

“Hey, sexy,” he says. Kiss, kiss. Kiss, kiss.

“George, I want you to meet Jackie. She’s one of my best friends.”

“Hi,” I say meekly, and into the bar we walk.

“How’s the sky?” Natalie says, raising her head. That’s her code phrase for “Do I have snot in my nose?”

“Clear,” I answer.

“And the street?” That’s the code for “Do I have anything in my teeth?” What could possibly be in her teeth escapes me, considering I’m pretty sure she doesn’t eat. Her smile gleams the way I’m sure capped teeth should.

“Clean. Me?” I ask just in case. I go for the two-in-one: I smile and tilt my head simultaneously.

On our left is the coat check. I’m thankful that this late September weather has allowed me to get away without wearing any kind of overclothes. (I need to expose as much as I can get away with right from the start; Nat, on the other hand, could wear a burlap sack and still leave ’em panting.) On our right is the dance floor. Some scantily clad women—good God, do I look like that?—are gyrating to a thumping song I am having difficulty deciphering: boom, boom, boom slut, boom, boom, boom, go down on me. Lovely.

“Let’s go.” Straight ahead is the bar. I motion in front of me, maneuvering my way through the crowd. A waitress with way too much breast exposure asks me what I’d like.

I’d like to have your cleavage, I think but don’t say. She’d think I was some sort of pervert if I did. But I really, really would like to have her cleavage. It’s true I fill out a solid Victoria’s Secret B-cup, and Jeremy certainly seemed happy enough (“More than a handful…” he’d say), and this waitress can’t possibly be wearing more than I am, but let’s face it, I’d need a serious WonderBra to achieve that look. But here’s the thing: what happens when you take a guy home and the bra comes off? How does one explain that exactly?

I order two Lemon Drops and try to keep my eyes leveled on the busty waitress’s face. I love this shot—first you lick a sugar-covered lemon, then you shoot the vodka, and finally you suck the lemon. Very fun. It’s like buying a bingo lottery ticket; it not only serves its purpose, but doubles as an activity. “Ready?” I ask.

“Cheers,” says Natalie.

Yay! I’m going to get drunk! I’m going to have fun! I’m already having fun. I’m having so much fun, I’ve practically forgotten about the jerk.

Natalie reaches into her bag and takes out her calorie notebook. I’m surprised she didn’t ask for Sweet’N Low for her lemon. “Look, there’s Andrew Mackenzie!” she says, pointing across the room and waving.

Please, please tell me, how am I supposed to forget about Jeremy when his Penn buddies are all over the place? Particularly the one who practically fixed us up.

Andrew waves back and pushes his way toward us.

“I was hoping to run into you, hon,” Natalie says. “I heard you were in town. We were just talking about you.”

We were?

“What were you saying?” he says, kissing her lightly on the cheek.

What were we saying?

“Just how sexy you are,” she says, wrapping her arms around his neck.

Natalie is a terrific flirt. She may not know which way is north, but she can certainly find her way around the male species. She’s not exactly the queen of originality, though. Who uses a line like “just how sexy you are”? But usually these guys just lap up anything good ol’ Nat has to offer. And at this moment I’m not sure what her sudden interest in Andrew is all about, because I tried to set her up with him about a gazillion times so that Jer and I would have someone to double with. Correction: could have had someone to double with. Anyway, Andrew had been all for it, not that this was much of a surprise—what guy wouldn’t be interested in Nat? But she claimed he wasn’t her type. Too nice, she said.

“Jackie!” he says, untangling himself from Natalie’s arms. “I didn’t know you were in Boston.”

Oh, God, oh, God. That means that Jer doesn’t talk about me to his friends! Apparently I’m so insignificant in his life that I don’t even merit being mentioned. Jackass.

Or maybe Andrew and Jer aren’t even talking anymore. Yes. I like that possibility better. They are so not talking anymore.

Andrew even kind of looks like Jer. Well, not really. They’re both pretty tall (I know, I know, everyone is tall next to me). Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Jer is more Ethan-Hawke-hot, scruffy-sexy (he even had that goatee thing going for a bit) whereas Andrew is more clean-cut, boy-next-door cute. Jeremy’s hair is light brown and Andrew is a redhead. Not redred, but blond with red highlights. Real ones though, not chemical dirty blond streaks like mine. And Andrew’s eyes are brown. They’re a nice brown, though, like dark chocolate, but they’re not Jeremy’s big baby blues. Okay fine, Andrew looks nothing like Jer, but they used to hang out, so he reminds me of him, okay?

“I got a job here,” I answer.

“Where? When did you move?”

“Cupid’s. A few months ago.”

“Really? Are you writing?”

“No. Editing.”

“Good for you. Have you met Fabio?”

I’m not sure why everyone asks me this question whenever I mention I work for Cupid.

“No, I haven’t met Fabio. I don’t deal with the covers that much. What have you been up to?”

“I was working in New York the past couple of years and now I’m doing my MBA.”

“Really? Where?”

“Harvard,” he says, trying to hide his smile in a I-love-beingable-to-say-I-go-to-Harvard-but-I-don’t-want-to-sound-like-a-show-off kind of way.

Aha. This explains Natalie’s sudden interest.

“That’s fantastic,” I tell him.

“It’s quite incredible, Andy,” Natalie coos, placing her hand on his shoulder. Andy? Since when is he Andy?

“Thanks,” he says. “Do you girls want a drink?”

Natalie’s attention is already distracted. Some tall guy in an Armani suit is beckoning from across the bar. “I’ll be back in a minute, ’kay?” And off she goes.

“Sounds like a plan,” I say. We push our way back to the bar. I wonder if I should ask him about Jeremy. No, bad plan. Even though I’m absolutely convinced the two aren’t talking to each other anymore, what if he tells Jer I asked about him, and I look completely pathetic?

Ms. Cleavage asks Andrew what we want. His eyes flick to her exposed flesh and then back to me. “What’s your drink of choice?”

I will not ask about Jeremy. I will not ask about Jeremy. I will not even mention Jeremy’s name. “How about Lemon Drops?”

“The lady has decided,” he says, placing his plastic on the counter.

Lady? “How much?” I ask.

“My treat.”

“Thanks.” Sounds good to me.

“Ready?”

“But of course.”

Sugar…vodka…lemon…mmm.

“Ready?” he asks again.

“Yup.”

Sugar…vodka…lemon…mmm.

He motions to two empty seats along the bar.

I will not ask if he’s heard from Jeremy. I will not ask if he’s heard from Jeremy. I will not ask if he’s heard from Jeremy.

We sit down.

“So what’s new with you?” he says.

“Not much,” I answer. “Have you heard from Jeremy?” Damn.

“No, not since he left for Thailand. You guys still together?”

Uh-oh. Suddenly tears are dripping into my mouth and I’m tasting a weird lemon/sugar/vodka/salt concoction. I will never mention Jeremy’s name again. If I absolutely have to think about him, I will use an abstract symbol, like Prince did. From now on he is “.”

I cover my eyes with my hand so that maybe Andrew won’t realize I’m crying. I feel like that kid in the second grade who used to cover his nose with one hand while he picked it with the other. Except we all knew what was going on.

Andrew, of course, knows what’s going on. He puts his arm around me and I start to cry right into his chest. I’m probably making a huge wet stain on his gray shirt, and my mascara is going to be all over my face, making me look like as if I’m in the middle of exams and haven’t slept in weeks, only periodic naps at the library between several cups of black coffee—

His chest is awfully hard.

Okay, so he’s no Ethan Hawke, but he’s certainly cute, and an MBA from Harvard will make him even cuter. I can seduce him tonight and we could have wild, passionate animal sex and then we’ll wake up smiling in each others arms and go for breakfast, strolling hand in hand along the river—

He smells very, very good.

He smells like .

I absolutely cannot have a wild affair with anyone who wears cologne. You see, the whole point is to be with someone who does not remind me of , who will in fact make me forget him. For a little while, anyway. Here’s the plan: will be so devastated that I have fallen for someone else, he’ll realize I am his true love and ask me to get back together. And then we’ll live happily ever after.

I’m not supposed to think that out loud, am I?

I know I’m supposed to want to meet someone else with whom I can have a healthy relationship, but in all reality, I would be perfectly content to use the other person to get Jeremy to want me back.

Sigh. I know. I’m hopeless.

I pull myself away from Andrew. “I’m really sorry. I should go fix myself up.” A wet stain is smack in the center of his shirt.

“No problem.” He scribbles something down on a matchbook. “Call me if you ever want to talk, okay?”

“Thanks.” I am becoming increasingly mortified by this entire experience.

What a nice guy.

I push the washroom door open to ten women unreservedly checking themselves out in the overhead mirrors. I’m not sure what it is about ladies’ rooms at bars, but women become animals. They fiddle with their breasts and wedgies, and line up their makeup like ammunition along the sink. Case in point: a woman in a short snakeskin skirt pulls a full cosmetic bag out of her purse, empties it along the porcelain, and retrieves her eyelash curler.

I look at myself in the mirror. Instead of appearing smoky, my Cosmo eyes look as if someone rubbed a dirty ashtray around them.

“Excuse me,” I ask the snake-woman. “Any chance you have any eye-makeup remover?”

“Of course, honey,” she says. (She’s a lot older: hence the “honey.” There is a distinct difference between “hon,” which Natalie likes to use, and “honey.”) “Here’s a cotton ball, too, honey.”

“Thanks.” I practice smiling into the mirror. I smile again and again until it looks fake and evil. Maybe I’ll become the bitch. Guys love the bitch.

I push my way back out the door and head back to the bar.

“One Sex on the Beach, please.” Sitting on a stool, I try to stop myself from swerving back and forth with annoyance. A blow-dried blonde twirls her hair and bends over so that the suit she’s talking to has to look down her shirt. The three men on the other side of me call out numbers, rating the women as they walk by. A man with sagging skin vocally calculates a nine and a half for the brunette sitting four stools down. She’s wearing a long skirt with a slit up to her armpit. His face looks like a rotting peeled grape; his eyes are like raisins. When he says eight, I think he might be referring to me. I’d like to pour my drink over his head, drama-queen-like, but I decide to stare him down instead. After all, a drink’s a drink, not to be wasted, but to get us wasted. I stare at him until his skin turns into dots of brown and then into specks of orange, as if I’ve been sitting too close to the TV.

Why am I here? Why am I not at home watching TV? It’s almost eleven and I could be watching “L and O” with Sam. The blow-dried blonde’s giggles sound like recorded sitcom laughter. I hate Orgasm, I hate Boston, and I hate Natalie. Where is Natalie?

Wait.

Is that who I think it is?

Jonathan Gradinger?

Foxy Jonathan Gradinger?

Foxy Jonathan Gradinger who grew up in Danbury and played Danny Zukoe in our high school’s rendition of Grease when he was a foxy senior and I was an eager freshman? I sat in the front row for three nights straight because he was such a fox. Jonathan Gradinger’s picture, cut out from the playbill, was taped to the inside of my locker, right up there beside my poster of Kirk Cameron. My five-section binder was covered with sprawls of Jackie Gradinger, Jacquelyn Gradinger, Fern Gradinger, Fern Jacqueline Gradinger, and Fern Jacquelyn Norris Gradinger. I knew Jonathan’s schedule by heart and would casually happen to be walking behind him on the fourth floor staircase between second and third period, just as he was going from chemistry to trig. So what if my English class was in the basement? Thankfully he had been way too cool to notice some crazed groupie trailing after him.

It’s getting hot in here. My chills are multiplying! Grease lyrics hurl through my head. I sip my Sex on the Beach and think of lightning.

From the back it looks like him. He’s wearing a button-down shirt that looks like the type of shirt Jonathan Gradinger the fox would wear.

I’d know the back of that head anywhere.

He just needs to turn a bit to the left…a bit more…a little bit more…why is that wench distracting him? He’s walking away! Stop! Stop!

I try sending him telepathic messages. “Turn around. Turn around right now. Turn around right now, foxy Jonathan Gradinger. Fall madly in love with me.”

My telepathy is not working. Drastic measures are called for.

I accidentally let go of my glass. Better to waste a drink than an opportunity.

Smash.

It is him. It’s foxy Jonathan Gradinger from our senior/freshman year! And he’s looking at me! He’s looking right at me!

Okay, I know. Everyone’s looking at me. I think Raisin-Eyes has demoted me to a six.

“Are you all right?” the breasted bartender asks.

“Yeah, fine. I’m sorry about that. I really don’t know how this happened.” Yes, I do. I know exactly how this happened. And I know that it worked, because Jonathan Gradinger is coming over.

Omigod.

He’s coming over.

I’ve never actually spoken to Jonathan Gradinger.

What can I say to Jonathan Gradinger?

I need a drink. Where’s my drink?

Oh, yeah. Damn.

Breathe. Calm. Damn. Think calm thoughts. Hot bath with vanilla-smelling bubbles. The two-hour massage I used to get from Iris in exchange for two dollars in coins (but look how much silver it is!). A couch, my duvet, the cchhhhh of background TV…

Mmm. I’m getting…mmm…sleeeepy.

“Hey,” a very foxy voice pleasantly intrudes upon my reverie. “I recognize you. Are you from Danbury?”

Jonathan Gradinger is talking to me.

Jonathan Gradinger is talking to me.

Jonathan Gradinger is talking to me.

Jonathan Gradinger is talking to me.

Wendy is not going to believe this.

Calm. I can do this.

“Shfjkd sjsydhd jksav jasdadgaj dghykg.”

“Excuse me?” he asks, which is a perfectly logical question considering I’m not sure what I just said. Or what I was even trying to say.

“Hi.” One syllable at a time. No problem. “Yeah.” There, I’ve said two words to Jonathan Gradinger. I now have something to tell my grandchildren.

“Did you go to Stapley High?” he asks.

More? Oh, my—he wants to have a conversation.

“Yeah.” I nod. I’m doing it! I’m conversing!

“Were you in my grade?” He’s running his hand through his gorgeous, thick hair—thin hair now, actually. What happened to his gorgeous, thick hair?

“Actually I was a few grades behind you.” If I don’t think and just say all my words in one motion, gosh darnit, I think I can do this.

“Wait a second,” he says and smiles his still very foxy smile. “I remember you. Weren’t you that girl who used to follow me around? Jackie something?”

Oh. My. God. He knows my name. Danny Zukoe knows my name.

I nod. I can’t speak. My tongue has been sewn to the roof of my mouth.

“Do you want a drink?” he asks.

Jonathan Gradinger is offering to buy me a drink. I nod again. Actually, I don’t think I actually stopped nodding. It’s not that I expect myself to suddenly sound like a loquaciously articulate Dawson’s Creek character, but this is getting old.

“It appears,” he looks at the floor, “that you like Sex on the Beach.”

“Especially if it’s with you,” I say. Just kidding, I didn’t really say that. I continue nodding.

“So, how are you liking Boston?”

“Now that I’m talking to you, I’m liking it a lot.” Wait—this time I really did say that. That so wasn’t supposed to be out loud. But what’s this? He’s laughing! He thinks I’m being funny. He thinks I’m flirting with him. I am flirting with him. I’m flirting with Jonathan Gradinger.

“Actually, I do like it here,” I say seriously. “What about you?” Okay maybe not a witty or sexy response, but two full sentences, one that requires a response. Give me a break here.

“I’ve been here awhile already. I like it. I’m used to it.”

“When did you move here?” That makes two questions. I’m on a roll.

“About eight years ago.”

“You’re practically a Brahmin by now.” Another joke!

He laughs. Yay! “Not quite. I haven’t moved up to Beacon Hill just yet.”

Pause. One-second lapse. Two-second lapse. Uh-oh. What do I do now? Wait, I’ve got an idea. “So, what are you doing in Boston?” The ultimate crowd pleaser—giving men the opportunity to talk about themselves.

“I’m a doctor.”

Reee-lly.

“What kind of doctor?” A pediatrician? An E.R. resident? A heart surgeon?

“A podiatrist.”

“A what?”

“A foot doctor.”

I know that. I’m an editor. Someone who cares for and treats the human foot. “That must be…interesting.” C’mon, what else was I supposed to say? How about that athlete’s foot? At least I have nice feet—they’re a size 6 1/2 and very cute, if I do say so myself. My pedicurist even says they’re a pleasure to work with, although she’s probably just buttering me up for an extra tip, which is ridiculous because she owns her own place. You’re not supposed to tip the owner, everyone knows that, but I once saw a fake-nailed snob leave a four-dollar tip for a twenty-dollar manicure and then I had to leave four dollars, too, and now every time I go I have to leave twenty-four dollars instead of twenty. As far as I’m concerned, she should say, “Don’t be silly! Take your four dollars! You’re insulting me! I’m the owner,” but instead she just takes it. It’s all so absurd.

Anyway.

“So I guess you went to med school here?”

“Tufts. What about you?”

“I’m an editor.”

“Really? Where?”

“Cupid’s”

“Cupid’s?”

“We publish romance novels.”

“Oh, my mom reads those! Do you know Fabio?”

I giggle my oh-that’s-so-clever-and-original flirty-laugh (I’ve been friends with Nat for long enough) and pat him on the shoulder. “Unfortunately not. Do you?”

“He’s actually a patient of mine. He has really nice feet.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I ask.

“Right. But you know what they say about people with nice feet.”

“What?”

“Nice shoes.”

Can I handle feet jokes? I do the laugh again.

“You have quite a pair of shoes on,” he says, looking down.

“Thanks. Fresh purchase. Single-girl boots.”

“Why is that?”

“Because they’re notice-me boots.”

“I’m noticing.”

He’s noticing?

“Good.” I smile demurely.

“You’ve certainly grown up.”

“You haven’t seen me since I had pink braces and crimped hair.”

“You look great, Jackie.”

“Thanks. So do you.” You’re a hottie. A total hottie with a little less hair and a little more love handles…but still very, very hot.

“So you’re not dating anyone?” he asks.

That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. “No. What about you?”

“Single as charged.” His hand is suddenly on my shoulder. Hello there.

“Jackie! Jackie!” Nat is yelling in the background. I’m not sure how I hear her over the thumping boom, boom, getting laid, boom boom, but I do. And it’s very distracting. Her arms are flying over her head now.

“Can I have your number?” At last. The magic words have escaped his lips.

“Sure.” I feel a bit like Cinderella, although my fresh-purchase single-girl shoes are definitely a lot funkier than glass slippers. Although I have always wanted a pair of those, too. I ask Ms. Cleavage for matches, and reach into my purse for a pen. She gives me the evil eye but no matches.

He takes the pen from my hand, and little tingles kind of like little ants, the black kind not the poisonous red ones, scramble up my arm. “Shoot.”

I recite my number, and good God, he writes it across his hand.

“Jackie! Jackie! Jackie!”

“I have to go,” I say, motioning to Natalie. He sees her. This is good. It looks as if I have friends.

“Great,” he says. “I’ll call you.”

Please do.

I spend the rest of the evening being introduced to anyone who’s anyone, but mostly posing so that Jonathan Gradinger can see how sexy I am. I’m also watching him carefully to see that he doesn’t smudge my number up against any potential rivals. Mind you, I’m being very discreet; no more overt stalking for me.

Will he call? It’s Friday, so maybe he’ll call tomorrow. Maybe tonight? Maybe he’ll call me the second he gets home. Maybe he’ll say he can’t sleep until he hears the soft, inviting lilt in my voice.

“Having fun?” Natalie whispers, as much as one can whisper over the music. We sit at a table with the Armani guy and three of his friends. One of them keeps talking to me with a thick French accent. I keep nodding, not really understanding anything he says. The only words I can make out are, “More drink, yes?”

Definitely yes. What a wonderful night. I am going to have the most perfect boyfriend in the whole world. He’ll want to get married, and because he’s a doctor I probably won’t have to start with the No dear, that’s not the clitoris thing, and he’ll want to get married, and he’s brilliant and the rest of my high school class is going to kill themselves with envy, and he’ll want to get married. I particularly like the envy part of this whole fantasy. Hmm…snotty Sherri Burns thought she was so cool. Oh, look at me, I’m the only freshman cool enough to get cast as a pink lady; oh, look at me, I’m so cute; oh, look at me, I’m going to wear my pink lady jacket every single day.

I can’t wait ’til she hears about us. I’m sure she had a thing for my Jonathan, but what does it matter now? I can be big about the whole thing. Maybe I’ll call her tonight and let her know about my engagement, although I don’t even know where she lives. Maybe I should plan a reunion; it’s been at least eight years since we graduated. I’ll just let it slip out: “I’ll be coming with my fiancé. You might remember him, Jonathan Gradinger?” Maybe I’ll wear pink.

Or I could send a picture of us to the Stapley alumni Internet site. I’ll just have to remember to bring a camera on our date.

I like that idea better.

“Tomorrow, we’re going to hit The G-Spot, ’kay?” Natalie says, grabbing my hand. I assume she’s talking about a bar.

“Sounds good.” I answer, wondering if I can get away with wearing this outfit again.

4
Why Bother Getting Up?

MY FIRST THOUGHT THIS MORNING is about Jonathan Gradinger. It is not about .

Therefore I am officially over him.

Actually, my first real thought is djjfhskakd—why, oh, why, is my phone ringing at 9:15 on a Saturday morning? Someone had better be on fire. Secretly, it’s only six minutes past nine. I set my huge clock (oversize so that I can see it without my contacts in) nine minutes fast in the hope that somehow this deception will make me on time.

“Hellooo?” I say.

“Fern!” It’s my dad. “Are you still in bed?”

“No.” I always say I’m awake when I’m asleep. Don’t know why.

“But you’re wasting the day!”

“I’m awake.” Eyes…heavy. Mouth…can’t open.

“Good. What’s new?”

Uh. “I forget.”

“Do you want to call us back when you wake up?”

“No, now’s good. Nothing’s new.” Okay, okay. I’m sitting up. I’m awake. I’m going to have dark circles under my eyes and I’m practically out of concealer and no man will fall in love with me and it’ll all be your fault.

“If nothing’s new, why have you been too busy to call us back?”

Whoops. It’s not that I ignore them on purpose. I am just constantly forgetting that they exist and that I should call them. “I’ve been busy at work.”

“Work is good. What have you been editing?”

“A book.”

“A book about what?”

Did he wake me up to learn more about Millionaire Cowboy Dad? How come he’s not a millionaire daddy? “A romance, Dad. Same story as every other story.”

“What’s that?”

“Girl meets boy. Girl loves boy. Boy screws over girl.”

“That’s the story?”

I must really not be paying attention if that’s what I just told my father. Why is he calling me so early? This I don’t ask either, afraid to risk another lecture on how the early bird gets the worm. “No, that’s not the whole story. Boy apologizes and they get married and live happily ever after.”

“That’s nice, dear. But you know what they say, all work and no play makes for a dull life. And what about you? What’s happening with the boys? Are you still seeing Jeffery?”

“No, Dad. He’s screwing girls in Thailand right now.” I don’t really say that. I don’t want to give him a heart attack; he thinks I’m still a virgin. “It’s Jeremy. And no, I’m playing the field right now.”

“No rush, dear, no rush.”

Most parents would be bugging you to start thinking about getting married, or at least tell you to find a boyfriend by the time you’re twenty-four, but not my dad. He still thinks I’m fifteen. Whenever he goes on business trips, he still buys me those “Welcome to (insert name of visited state here)” T-shirts in children’s sizes. Janie, on the other hand, constantly reminds me that she does, in fact, “want to be called Gramma someday.” If I ever do have kids, I might insist they call her Janie. Just to annoy her.

“What’s new with you, Dad?”

“I joined a new jogging group.”

“That’s good. How’s work?”

“Good. I’m only working four days a week now.”

“How come?”

“I want some time for myself. Life’s not a dress rehearsal, you know. I have to live for the moment. I can’t waste all my time working.”

Definitely Bev’s influence. I may have even heard her use the exact phrase “Life’s not a dress rehearsal,” followed by “We only have one life to live.” My dad used to be a workaholic, especially after the divorce. Since Bev got him into psychoanalysis, he’s become more of the how-does-it-make-you-feel and listen-tome-recite-clichés type of guy.

I hear Bev’s voice in the background. “Tim, is that Fern? Can I talk to her?”

“Bev wants to say hello. Love you, bye.” He passes off the phone.

It’s far too early in the morning to talk to Bev. It’s not that I don’t like her. I do, really. I just have a few minor issues with her. Bev is a fanatic; she’s addicted to talk shows. Specifically Oprah. And instead of working like a modern woman in the twenty-first century, her calling herself a part-time travel agent is a euphemism for “she plans her own vacations.” When she’s not traveling, she spends all her time watching Oprah, doing Oprah makeovers, and cooking low-fat meals from Oprah’s recipe book. Verbs like share and discover are too often combined in her speech pattern with nouns like soul and self.

“Hi, Fern. How’s your spirit?”

“My spirit’s fine, thanks. How’s yours?”

“Wonderful, wonderful. Quite phenomenal. How’s therapy going?”

“Great.” Bev has convinced my father to give me seventy-five dollars a week for one-hour therapy sessions. She’s convinced that kids never get over divorce and that my sudden move to Boston might throw me over the edge. The money has been very therapeutic so far; I’ve bought new sunglasses and my hooker boots, and I’m saving up for a CD player for my car.

“So what have you learned about yourself this week?”

“Not much,” I answer. It’s way too early for psychoanalytical babble. “What’s up with you?”

“Oh, the usual. Power walking. Writing in my gratitude journal.”

I refuse to ask her what a gratitude journal is.

“And I just read the most amazing book last week,” she says. “I’m sure you’d love it.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, um…um. It’s about an underprivileged girl who was a victim of incest. Gosh, I don’t remember the name, but the story hit home.”

I don’t quite see the relation between the unidentified novel’s protagonist and my Manhattan-born stepmother, who spends Saturday at the hairdresser, Sunday at the manicurist, and Monday through Friday at the mall when not watching Oprah. However, we’ve never quite reached the level of intimacy that would allow me to point that out. “Let me know the name of the book when you remember it, and I’ll buy it, okay? I gotta go now.”

“Okay, bye. Remember your spirit.”

“Of course.” I hang up the phone and fall back asleep.

When I wake up at 1:30, I have my first coherent thought. It’s 1 A.B. (After Breakup), and I have already kindled a relationship with my future husband.

I may have a date. Soon.

Yay!

With Jonathan Gradinger. The thing is, once we get married, I’ll have to stop referring to him by his full name. I’d sound like a character in a Jane Austen novel: “Good morning, Mr. Gradinger. Please pass the newspaper, Mr. Gradinger.”

Why hasn’t he called yet?

I’ll admit I’m being a bit crazy. According to Swingers, he has to wait at least three days. Or is it five days? How am I going to wait five days?

I must call Wendy.

I dial her number at work. How pathetic is that? It’s Saturday afternoon and I don’t even bother trying her apartment.

“Wendy speaking.”

“Hi!”

“Hello,” she says. I hear her rummaging through some papers. “So? How was it?”

“Wonderful. I’m completely over Jeremy.”

“Sure you are,” she says. Do I detect sarcasm?

“I am. I ran into my future husband.”

“That’s good. Do I get to be the maid of honor?”

“No. You can be a bridesmaid. Iris made me swear she’d be the maid of honor. But you can plan the bachelorette party.”

“Seems fair. But you still have to be my maid of honor. If I ever have time to date again, that is.” Wendy has been unwillingly practicing abstinence since she started her job.

“Of course I’ll be your maid of honor! I’ve already written my maid of honor speech,” I tell her. Well, not all of it. But sometimes really funny things happen, and if I don’t write them down right away, I’ll never remember everything I should have said and then…fine. I’m a geek.

“I’m sure you have. So, who’s the future Mr. Norris?”

I pause for effect. “Jonathan Gradinger.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“My God! Where did you see him? Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” It wasn’t a dream. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a dream. Was it a dream? I look around my room for evidence of the Orgasm excursion. My black skirt is lying on the floor where I dropped it last night. I grab it. It smells like smoke and Sex on the Beach. P-hew.

“How did that happen?” she asks.

“He saw me at the bar.” I leave out how that came about. “We talked. He asked me for my number.”

“That’s amazing! Is he still a fox?”

“Of course. Maybe not the fox, but still foxy.”

“Has he called yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh.”

Oh? What does she mean, oh? “He wouldn’t have, Wen. What guy calls the next morning? He’ll probably call tomorrow night. At 8:30. After The Simpsons.”

“Not if he wants to go out tonight.”

“He’s not going to ask me out for tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Because then he would look desperate. Trust me, Wen, that’s not the way the game is played.” Dear sweet Wendy. Dear sweet, naive Wendy.

“How do you know how the game is played? You’ve been on the dating scene for one day.”

Hey, I can remember L.B.J. (Life Before Jer). I did have a life, you know. “He’ll call me on Sunday and ask me out for Tuesday, so he can see me on Tuesday and ask me out for next Saturday. See?”

“I see. Where do you think he’ll take you?”

“On Tuesday or Saturday?”

Wendy doesn’t answer. I can tell that all this is getting a little too complicated for her. Not dating in over a year has started to melt her brain.

“Sherri Burns is going to die,” she says.

“I know! Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Would she ever find out? Besides by reading the wedding announcement in the Times, of course.”

“I was thinking of taking a picture on our date and posting it on the Stapley Internet site.”

“Not a bad plan. Uh-oh. I have a meeting. Gotta go.”

“A meeting? Who else is in the office on Saturday?”

“Who’s not in the office?”

“Poor you. You sure you don’t want a normal job?”

“I am far from sure. We’ll chat later.”

“Bye.”

What should I do now? Probably get up. It’s already two.

“Hello?” I call from my bed. “Anyone home?”

“Hi!” Sam hollers. “I’m cleaning the bathroom.” I’m pretty sure she cleans her bathroom every day. I’ve seen her sneak into the bathroom with disinfectant after a guest uses it. She’s just as psycho with the fridge. She has a bit of an expiry fetish. She spills out her milk exactly three days after it’s been opened. It doesn’t matter what the expiration date says, either. For some reason I can’t seem to convince her that the expiration date refers to the date you buy the stuff, not when you have to throw it out. “You’re not really going to eat that?” she asked me yesterday, staring in disgust at my six-day-old package of sliced turkey. Um…I was. If I did things Sam’s way, everything I own would be in the trash can or down the toilet.

I throw off my duvet and slide my feet onto the floor. The cold floor. Where are my slippers? Do I have slippers? No, I do not have slippers. Why don’t I have slippers? Where are my socks?

I slip on some shorts. Not even Sam wants to see my Granny panties. I walk into her room. “Morning.”

“Afternoon,” she says. She is using some sort of contraption to scrub the tiles. “Late night?”

“Yeah. Very fun.”

“Good. I’m almost done. You can borrow my supplies if you want to clean your bathroom.”

I’m not sure, but I think that’s a hint. Oh, well, I have nothing else to do today, anyway. And my bathroom is pretty gross. The last time I cleaned it was…let me think. Have I ever cleaned it? “Thanks. I’ll do it right after breakfast. I mean lunch.”

I make myself a sandwich. A pretty lame sandwich because now that I have no turkey left, all I have left is lettuce. Okay, I’ll clean the bathroom right after lunch and an hour of TV.

What’s on? Click, click. A Cheers rerun! That Diane. So literary. I always kind of hoped she and Frasier would stay together. Lilith/Helen didn’t deserve him. As soon as I got to Boston, my first excursion was to the Cheers bar. Quite disappointing. No one screamed “Jack!” when I walked in. Okay. Three o’clock. Time to clean. But Blind Date is on. I love that show. Maybe I’ll just watch until the first commercial…

It’s five o’clock and I haven’t moved. My butt feels asleep. I really should get up. Sam left all the cleaning supplies on my bathroom floor.

Why hasn’t he called yet?

Six-thirty. I’m hungry. Macaroni and cheese? I have no milk left. I hate when it’s too margariney. I order a pizza. Extra pepperoni. What am I going to do tonight? Natalie mentioned The G-Spot. I should call her. At the next commercial.

Seven-fifteen. I’m still hungry. Where’s my pizza? What happened to thirty minutes, fast and free? I dial Natalie’s number.

“Hi, Jack,” she answers.

“What’s up?”

“Not much. I’m just getting dressed.”

“Where are you going?”

“For dinner. With E-reek.”

“Who’s Eric?”

“E-reek. The guy I was talking to last night.”

Wait a second. A guy she met yesterday has already called? “The guy in the Armani?”

“That’s him. He called this morning. I think he might be royalty, but I’m not sure.”

I ignore her latter comment and focus on the more surprising element of her declaration. “He called this morning?”

“Yup.”

This morning? “And he asked you out and you said yes? For tonight?”

“Yeah. Should I have said no? He actually asked me last night, and I said we’ll see, but he called me at eleven to confirm, so I said, Why not?”

Why not? What am I supposed to do tonight? “Didn’t we have plans?”

“Oh…did we? I didn’t think you’d care.”

“Well, I do.” Knowing quite well that if the situation were reversed, I’d do the same. Fashion Magazine Fun Fact # 1: let no man come between two best friends. And let no man come between two mediocre friends unless he’s really hot. I mean, let’s face it; why else would you go to a bar with a mediocre girlfriend on a Saturday night in the first place? To discuss politics? So, when a guy like my Jonathan calls, you expect your friend to be understanding, even if you don’t like it when she does it to you. Not that someone as cool as my Jonathan Gradinger would call so soon.

“You don’t want me to cancel, do you?”

Yes, I do. “No, go. Have fun.”

“You can still go to The G-Spot.”

Who goes to The G-Spot alone? I’d have to wait in line for three hours by myself. And then I’d have to talk to myself at the bar. “No. It’s okay. I’m tired, anyway.” Someone knocks on my door. “The pizza’s here. Gotta go.”

“Swear you’re not mad?”

I’m mad. “I’m not mad.”

“Good. Love ya, hon! Have fun!”

I was only going to eat half the pizza and save the rest for Monday’s lunch, but now that I don’t have to wear anything tight tonight, I’m going to eat the whole thing and stuff myself with misery. I hate my life. I’m spending an entire Saturday in front of the TV. Jeremy doesn’t love me. Jonathan Gradinger doesn’t want me. Natalie’s guy called the next day.

Sam walks into the living room. If she asks me if I’ve cleaned the bathroom yet, I’m going to take the pizza and rub it all over her toilet.

“What’s up?” she says.

“Nothing.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Nothing.”

“Wanna come see the new James Bond movie with us tonight?”

“No.” Actually, I do want to go see the new James Bond movie with them tonight. “Well, maybe.”

“Come on! Why not? You haven’t moved in six hours.”

“Since when is a movie aerobic? Are we going to be fighting crime along with Jimmie?”

“At least you’ll have to get off the couch to walk to the car.”

This is true. Although at this particular moment it seems like more work than it’s worth. “Okay, I’ll come.”

Standing in the shower, I try to ignore the greenish-brown circles of dirt that sporadically appear on my tub. Tomorrow I’m definitely cleaning.

Marc pulls up at a quarter to nine. He rolls down the window of his brand-new two-door Civic, and Sam plants a kiss on his lips. If they’re going to be smooching all night, I’m sitting by myself.

I maneuver my way into the backseat, through the seat belt that is doubling as a limbo stick, recalling an earlier conversation overheard through paper-thin walls. “We weren’t arguing—we were discussing,” Sam told me later.

Sam: “Two-doors? We’re not sixteen.”

Marc: “A four-door? What am I, thirty-five?”

This went on all night—two doors or four, four doors or two—the same old thing over and over, keeping me awake (I was forced to sit in a rigid position, with my ear cupped to the wall) until I went to my desk to write Honda a letter begging the company to please produce a three-door vehicle so that Sam and Marc would just shut up already.

I step on a crumpled old burger bag on the floor of the backseat. It smells like rotten vegetables. Sam lets him get away with that?

“We should take your car for a wash,” Sam says, sniffing. She picks up an old Big Mac carton with her thumb and index finger as if she’s holding a soiled diaper, and folds it into a compact rectangle.

“Yes, Mom,” Marc says, and turns on the radio. There’s only so much nagging even he can take, I suppose. I wonder if he’s ever tempted to smear stale McDonald’s fry grease on her toilet seat?

“Don’t be rude,” she says.

I’m feeling a bit like their kid in the backseat. “Are we there yet?” I ask.

“Soon,” he says.

We pull into the twenty-four-theater multiplex parking lot, which is already crammed with at least a thousand cars. Apparently, we’re not the only ones with a let’s-go-to-the-movies-and-see-the-stars idea. Don’t any of these people have a real life? We pull into a tight spot at the back of the lot.

“Couldn’t you have let us off in front?” Sam asks.

“Sorry,” Marc says. “I forgot.”

A front drop-off would have been nice. Some sort of trolley would have been even nicer. Couldn’t you have built us a trolley, Marc?

Not a bad business proposal, actually. A trolley that runs up and down the parking lot, picking up and dropping off passengers like at Disney World. But people would constantly want to get on and off, the train would have to stop every few seconds, and it would take longer to get a lift back to the car than to actually walk.

“Hurry up, girls, we’re already late,” Marc tells us. Tells me actually, because I’m the one slowing us down. I’m a slow walker. Is it my fault that short people have short legs?

If he had dropped us off at the front door, like a gentleman, we’d have tickets by now.

The multicomplex looms in the distance like Cinderella’s castle. Three-D cartoon animals impressively swirl over the entranceway. The theme-park adventure continues with giant bats, which would have terrified a younger, less mature version of me, that hang threateningly from the ceiling. We buy tickets and then join the popcorn line. Sam and Marc buy jujubes and two Diet Cokes. Puh-lease! Not buying popcorn at the theater is like going to a baseball game and not buying a hot dog. Why else do you go to a baseball game?

“We’ll get seats,” Sam says, and they disappear hand in hand.

“One small popcorn with extra butter and a small Orange Crush, please,” I tell the eyebrow-pierced teenager with bleached-blond hair.

“Would you like to upgrade to a large, ma’am? Then you get free refills.”

Ma’am? Ma’am?? “No, thanks.” The smalls are already giant size.

“It’s only an extra thirty-five cents,” the pierced kid says.

“Well…okay.” For an extra thirty-five cents, why not?

“Would you like to upgrade your popcorn to a large, ma’am? It’s only an extra sixty-five cents.”

“No, thanks.”

“You get free refills, ma’am.”

I’m not sure when exactly I’m going to refill, considering that the movie is starting in about thirty seconds. But free is free. I can do the refill right after the movie. I can bring a snack to work.

The pierced kid hands me two huge cartons, a drink about the size of a two-gallon container of orange juice, and a popcorn the size of a water cooler.

Oooh! Sour berries! I love sour berries! “Can I have those, too?”

“Here you go, ma’am. That will be $15.50.” Fifteen-fifty? Why is my snack twice the price of the movie?

Uh-oh. I have to pee. Maybe if I go now, I won’t have to go in the middle of the movie. One can always hope. Only now I feel kind of like a kid in a snowsuit. How can I carry the tub of popcorn, a pack of sour berries, a gallon of soda, and a separate straw into the cubicle without spilling everywhere?

The first life-lesson Jeremy taught me was that I should never put my straw in my drink at a movie theater until after I sit down, in case of leakage. Seems like a simple enough strategy, except you’d be amazed at how many times I’d left the theater with orange stains on my jeans before I started dating him.

The last life-lesson I learned from him was to never date a backstabbing selfish bastard.

I can hold it in.

The theater is dark, and the please-turn-off-your-cell-phone-because-it’ll-really-piss-everyone-off-if-it-rings announcement flashes across the screen.

How the hell am I going to find them in here?

I walk down the aisle and peer. I feel like I’m looking for Waldo.

No.

No.

No.

I arrive at the screen amid a chorus of “Hey, sit down!” and “Get out of the way!” and “What’s the matter with you?” God forbid they should miss the ads. So where are Sam and Marc? They’re probably sitting in the back. I must have passed them.

They’re not in the back. I turn around again, and make my way back toward the screen.

Sam waves from the front row. “Sorry, I forgot my glasses,” she whispers. “Hope you don’t mind.”

I wonder if it’s rude to sit by myself, in the middle of the theater like a normal person. What if a potential date is in the theater and sees me sitting by myself and concludes that I’m a complete misanthrope who has to go to the movies alone on a Saturday night to try to pick up men, or maybe not even to pick up men but just to get out of a cat-infested apartment for a few measly hours? What then?

I sit down next to her in the front row. I tilt my head eighty degrees and try to get comfortable.

This isn’t going to work.

“I’m going to find a seat in the middle,” I whisper to Sam. I’m a big girl. I can sit at a movie by myself. I scout for an empty seat. I spot one next to a blond girl about ten rows back and push my way through.

“Hey, sit down!”

“Get out of the way!”

“What’s the matter with you?”

I slide into a seat, trying to make room for my industrialsize purchases.

Jeremy and I always sat on the aisle. Correction: Jeremy always sat on the aisle. He liked the leg room. Of course he never asked if I wanted to sit in the aisle seat. I always sat near the weirdo who left his arm on the seat rest. I was always the one who had to feel the weirdo’s arm hair brush against my skin. Let me ask you this: if there’s only one armrest between the two of you, why does the other person always assume it’s his right to take it?

Oh, well. At least the girl next to me is giving me a lot of space. She’s snuggling with her date. I can’t see his face, but she’s all blond and shiny and I’m really trying not to hate her.

I have to pee. I really should have gone before the movie started.

Wow. Pierce Brosnan is really hot. Natalie says he’s too pretty, too good-looking. What does this mean exactly, too good-looking? She says she could never go out with a guy prettier than she is. She says she hates going to a restaurant and everyone looks at the guy instead of her. Such problems I should have.

Look at that bod. Maybe I should suggest we do spy books at work.

I really have to go to the bathroom.

I try crossing and uncrossing my legs. I’m not sure why, but I drink more of my Orange Crush.

Maybe I can convince the marketing people at work to put Pierce on the cover of our new spy books. Of course, I won’t be invited to the shoot, but Pierce will hate the fake-blond bimbo chosen to model with him. I, of course, will happen to be passing through the room, and he’ll ask “What about her?” in his husky British voice. “Her?” Helen will say (although she is only an associate editor, not a senior editor, so she won’t have a fat chance of being there, either). “But she’s just a copy editor!” The whole scene will unfold with perfect timing and I’ll say, “Me?” And he’ll nod enthusiastically, beckoning me with his wonderfully strong hands, and I’ll join his pose. And while the wind machine blows my hair, he’ll turn to me and say, “Will you be my next Bond girl?” And I’ll play a DNA expert who runs around the hospital in a tight white tank top and silver stretch pants.

Oh, God. It’s a waterfall scene. This isn’t going to work.

I have to use the washroom. Now.

“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me…”

“Hey, sit down!”

“Get out of the way!”

“What’s the matter with you?”

I sprint to the ladies’ room and run into an empty stall. I carefully place a paper toilet cover on the seat. I’m not Sam, but I’m not crazy.

And then just when I’m minding my own business…swoosh.

What is wrong with these automatic bathrooms? Why do they flush while I’m still using them? How can I be a Bond girl when I can’t even figure out how to work a toilet?

I sneak back into the theater (“Hey, sit down!” “Get out of the way!” “What’s the matter with you?”) and despite the temptation, I don’t ask the blonde what I missed. After all, she might think I want to be friends with her, which probably wouldn’t be so bad since she probably can get any guy she wants and therefore has great castoffs. Forget that; I don’t want her to think I’m friendless as well as annoying—or, God forbid, desperate.

When the credits start to role, I leap up to make a quick exit to beat the refill line. Granted, I barely even ate a quarter of it. But I paid for a refill and dammit, I’m going to get it.

“Jackie?”

I turn to the seat next to me and see Andrew Mackenzie’s lightly freckled arm curled around the blonde.

I am never sitting by myself at a movie ever again.

The blonde is checking me out, most likely thinking, So this is what a person who has no friends looks like.

“Hey! Andrew. I know it looks like I’m here by myself, but I’m not. I’m here with friends. Really. But they’re sitting in the front row, and it was hurting my neck…” They both stare at me, expressionless.

Andrew is going to tell Jeremy I went to see a movie by myself on a Saturday night. I might as well just throw myself in front of Marc’s two-door Civic.

“How are you?” he asks. Smiling, he motions for me to exit into the aisle.

“No, really. I’m not here by myself.” I’m not exiting anything until Marc and Sam walk by so I can prove that I am not here alone.

“Jackie, this is Jessica. Jessica, Jackie.” I shake her perfectly French-manicured hand. She looks like a Jessica. She looks like how I used to picture Jessica Wakefield, the Sweet Valley Twin.

Who is this Jessica? And why didn’t he mention a girlfriend? Not that I gave him much of an opportunity at Orgasm to talk about himself.

Sam and Marc are already near the doors. Damn. They went around the other side.

“Nice to see you, and nice to meet you. I have to go,” I say, choosing not to prolong the misery. I hurry out of the theater.

At least there’s no line at the popcorn counter.

No line because it’s closed. What a rip-off. This sucks. I’m the worst Bond girl ever.

“I’ll get the car, girls,” Marc says.

“Oh, you’re so sweet, Marc.”

“That’s Bear. Biggy Bear.”

Never mind. I don’t want to be a Bond girl, anyway. I hate silver stretch pants.

No message. Not that I’m expecting one, but you never know. He wouldn’t call on a Saturday night. If he does, it would mean that he thinks I’m home, meaning he thinks I have nothing better to do but stay and wait for his call. And why would he be home on a Saturday night, anyway?

Thank God he didn’t call. I don’t go out with losers.

I wash up. The green mold around the drain is starting to scare me. I really have to clean the bathroom. Where are the supplies? Why did Sam take them away? Tomorrow for sure I’ll do it. I’ll even set the alarm. For nine. Okay, nine-thirty. Ten.

Brrring… It’s 9:57. Secretly, 9:48. I still have three more minutes. I am not answering. Go away, Dad. I unplug the phone and turn off the alarm.

Shit. It’s 12:40. I’ve got to clean the bathroom. But wait, I have a message. It wasn’t Dad who called; the caller ID says Anonymous. What inconsiderate fool calls at 9:57 on a Sunday morning?

“Jackie, this is Jonathan Gradinger calling. My number is 555-2854. Call me back when you get a chance. Call me back when you get a chance.”

5
Run Your Fingers Through Your Own Damn Hair

YAY! HE CALLED. YAY! YAY! YAY! Thank goodness I didn’t pick up when I was asleep. I might have said something awful. I might have told him how foxy he was. Why did he call so early? He must really like me. I mean really like me. He thought of me as soon as he woke up. Assuming he wakes up at around 9:30, which is pretty probable considering that’s a usual wake-up time. Or maybe he woke up at eight, thought about me, decided to go for a run to diffuse the energy building up in his loins, and when he couldn’t take it any longer, called me.

Omigod. What if he wants to go out tonight? Or what if he wants to go out today? What if as soon as I call him back he asks me if he can come by and pick me up for lunch, and what if once he comes inside he has to use the bathroom? I’ve got to clean it now and only after I clean it, can I call him back.

I walk into the bathroom. Strands of my hair have woven themselves into a blanket on the tiled floor. “Sam!” I holler, close to tears. “Help! I don’t know how to do this!”

In a jumping-jack five-second flash, in comes Sam, fully equipped with liquid cleaner, yellow gloves, and some sort of brush I’m pretty sure is supposed to go in the toilet but I’m not a hundred percent.

“Why don’t I have one of those?” I ask.

“They don’t come with the toilet, my dirty friend, they’re sold separately. Like batteries.”

“Got it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“I’m not cleaning it for you. I’m just showing you how.”

“Oh.”

A half hour, a half bottle, and two rolls of paper towels later, I am satisfied.

Now I can call him back. Maybe he’s planning an afternoon picnic with champagne and strawberries and cut-up tuna sandwiches. But first I have to make myself presentable. Right now, my frizzies are pointed in many obtuse angles. I feel like Pippi Longstocking. I shower, blow-dry my hair, and squeeze out what’s left of my concealer. And a little lipstick. I put on my bathrobe. I don’t want to get dressed if I don’t know where we’re going. Duh.

I listen to his message again: “Jackie, this is Jonathan Gradinger calling. My number is 555-2854. Call me back when you get a chance. Call me back when you get a chance.”

I’m not sure why he says that last part twice. His message reminds me of the ones Wendy’s grandmother used to leave when Wendy and I were at Penn together: “Vendy, this is your bubbe calling. Your bubbe called. Call your bubbe. Call your bubbe.”

I write down his number. I dial.

“Hi,” his sexy voice says. Omigod. I’m talking to Jonathan Gradinger.

“Hi, Jonathan?”

“This is Jonathan Gradinger. I can’t get to the phone right now. Please leave your name and number and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. So leave your name and number and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Have a great day.” Again with the double statements. That should tell me a little something, but do I have foreshadowing on my mind? No, foreplay is more like it. At this point all I can think of is, omigod, I’m talking to Jonathan Gradinger’s answering machine! Forty-eight hours ago I never would have believed that I’d be leaving him a message. If some psychic had read my palm and told me that in a few days I’d have Jonathan Gradinger’s home phone number—so much more intimate than a cell phone—I would never have believed it.

Wait a minute. How do I know it’s his home number?

Beep. I have to leave a message. Beep.

My mind is blank. I have no idea what to say. Beetlejuice, beetlejuice? I stare at the receiver and hang up.

My fault. I should have known to be prepared. Where’s my red felt pen? Okay, let’s keep it simple.

Hello, Jonathan. This is Jacquelyn.

Too formal.

Hi, Jon, it’s Jack.

Too close. We’re not even phone-acquainted yet. And what if he thinks I’m a guy?

Fifteen minutes pass and I’m still struggling.

“Your bathroom looks great! I’m impressed!” Sam calls out, interrupting my concentration. “Jackie, where are you?”

“In my room.”

“What are you doing?” She enters tentatively, as if expecting something alive to jump out of my overfilled laundry basket and attack her.

“Composing.” I outline the situation for her.

“Okay,” she says. “How about this. Hi, Jonathan, it’s Jackie returning your message. Give me a call when you have a chance.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant. What comes after ‘message’ again? Say it slowly so I can write it down.”

“You’re a nut.”

“Never mind. I remember.”

“Don’t forget to block your number.”

“Why?”

“What if he has call display? You already hung up once. It’ll look funny if it says your name twice with only one message.”

“Soooo clever! You’d be single-girl extraordinaire.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

I pre-dial the code to withhold my number, then re-dial Jonathan’s. Sam holds my other hand for moral support.

“Hi. This is Jonathan Gradinger. I can’t get to the phone right now. Please leave your name and number and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. So leave your name and number and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Have a great day.”

Trying to make my voice sound as natural as possible, I read my scrawled message and carefully place the phone back on the receiver.

Now all I have to do is wait.

Hmm, hmm, hmm.

How am I going to wait all day?

How is he supposed to pick me up for our picnic and see my clean bathroom if he doesn’t call me back?

“What should I do all day, Sam? What are you doing all day?”

“Correcting some homework.”

“You give homework to fourth-graders? That’s mean.”

“I have to give a little homework.”

“Wanna go shopping?”

“I can’t. I’m broke.”

“Yeah, so am I. So what’s your point?”

“I find window-shopping depressing.”

Oh. Oh, well. I’ll just watch TV then. Jonathan will call back soon.

Six o’clock. No Jonathan.

Seven o’clock. I’m sure he’s just out for the afternoon.

Eight o’clock. He just got home now. He’s turning on the TV. Getting ready to watch a new episode of The Simpsons.

It’s the last scene. Any minute now.

It’s over. Any second now the phone is going to ring. Any second now. C’mon, phone, don’t be shy.

It’s eleven and I’m not waiting anymore. I detest Jonathan Gradinger; he obviously met someone else tonight, fell in love, and forgot all about me. No one will ever love me again. My days will consist of work, my nights will consist of TV, and I will spend Saturday nights from here on at the movies—alone.

And so I go to bed—alone.

The next day at work I try to proofread a manuscript, but every time I get to the end of a paragraph I call in for my messages. “No new messages,” the anal recorded bitch says.

I get home feeling pathetic. But what’s this? From the doorway I see the flashing red light. I leave my shoes on—I mustn’t waste any time!—even though I know Sam will shoot me. Please don’t be Janie, please don’t be Janie, please don’t be—“Hi, Jackie, this is Jonathan Gradinger again. Give me a shout back. My work number is 555-9478. My work number is 555-9478.”

No waiting this time, no bathroom cleaning, and no red ink preparation. I don’t care if my bed isn’t made, I’m calling him back now.

“Dartmouth Clinic,” a woman says.

“Hi, can I speak to Dr. Gradinger please?”

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Jackie.” I’m still not crazy about the repeating everything on the answering machine thing. Half the point of the recorded message is so you can listen to it again if you need to. Or again and again and again like I might want to do with this one.

“Jackie who?” Okay this woman obviously wants a piece of my Jonathan. Maybe she’s already had a piece of him. Maybe that’s where he was last night.

“Hello?” she asks somewhat impatiently.

“Norris. He knows who I am. He called me. I’m calling him back.”

“One second please.”

I’m on hold. What type of date will he propose? You can tell a lot about a guy from the type of date he suggests. Dinner means he’s not afraid to jump right into it.

“Jackie?” he says in his foxy, sexy voice.

Coffee means he’s a coward. “Jonathan! Hi.”

“Great to hear from you.”

On the other hand, it could mean he’s sensitive. “Great to hear from you.”

He laughs. “I told you I’d call.”

“I know.” Drinks would be best. So trendy.

“How was the rest of your weekend?” he asks.

“Good, thanks. Yours?”

“Great.”

Great? Why great? What made it great exactly?

“What are you doing Thursday night?”

“Nothing, why?” Why? I can’t believe I asked him why. Sometimes the stupidity that comes out of my mouth even amazes me.

“I was hoping you’d come see The Apartment with me.”

This I am not expecting. Tickets to The Apartment are a gazillion dollars apiece, never mind completely sold out.

“I’d love to.”

“Perfect. The show starts at eight. I’ll pick you up around six-thirty and we’ll grab a bite somewhere, okay?”

“Sounds perfect.”

“I’ll call you on Wednesday to finalize everything.”

“Okay.”

“Great. Have a good week.”

“You, too.”

I stare at the dead receiver in my hand and place it down gently in its cradle. I remove my shoes and leave them near the door so that Sam won’t find out that I wore them into the house.

Yay!

I’m pretty sure taking me to a play symbolizes more commitment than drinks do.

Omigod. I’m practically engaged.

“I think it’s a little sketchy,” Wendy says. “He bought the tickets before he asked you?”

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