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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.
