time and watch me eat. Every time the phone rings, I take a moment to prepare my Zeke speech, but it’s never him.
“Eve Vitali.” I answer my phone a week later. This time it’s Roseanne, one of my best friends from college.
“Hey, Eve. What’s going on?”
“Not too much. Just hanging out. Dodging phone calls from some guy.” Roseanne will appreciate this, as she is known for having sketchy encounters with what I like to think is a lower-caliber guy. I give her the details.
“Oh, my God.” She is laughing over the hairy shoulders. “But at least he’s got a cool job. I’ve been meeting a bunch of convenience store workers up here.” Roseanne lives just outside of Hartford. She got a job in some random finance department right out of school. She’s been there for a year. She finished school in four years.
“So how’s work, Ro?”
“Well, it’s kind of boring.”
“What? Finance? I can’t believe it.”
“No, I’ve been giving some thought to what we talked about.”
“Oh,” I say, trying to remember. Roseanne has an even better tolerance than I have. She’s Irish. “What do you mean?”
“You know, about living together. Remember?”
“Well, I don’t really want to move to Hartford.”
“No, kookhead—” a classic Ro term of endearment “—I’m moving to New York.”
“Really? Do you have a job?”
“No, but I’m a woman in finance. I’ll get a job. Besides, I’ve got savings.”
“Rent is pretty expensive.” I’m not sure why I’m not thrilled about this. I don’t know why I’m being held to a drunk promise I can’t even remember. I love Ro, really I do, but she’s from some cheesy town in Connecticut and besides, finance.
“I know that I’m prepared, besides, aren’t you dying to move out? Isn’t this what you want?” She makes a good point, it is time to move out of Victor and Janet’s house.
“When were you thinking of moving down?”
“Two weeks.” I swallow my iced cappuccino. “I can look for a job and an apartment at the same time. We can move in by November first.” It’s almost October.
“It might take a while to get something.”
“C’mon, didn’t you tell me that night that it’s all about being ready to just jump off the cliff and decide that you’re ready on the way down?” Did I say that? “Well, I’m ready. I want to go to movie premieres, hobnob with celebrities, make the big bucks.”
“Ro, I think you need to be realistic.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I will be, but if I don’t do this now, I may never do it and I want to. It’s good for you, too, it’ll light a fire under your tail.” My tail? How can Roseanne expect to move to New York when she can’t even say the word ass?
“Well, okay.”
“So do you think I can stay with you for a couple of weeks?”
With that, it’s basically settled. Roseanne has made up her mind. She is moving down and I am moving out. I suppose I should see this as a good thing. Roseanne can be a lot of fun. She likes to party hard. While her taste in men can be a little, shall we say, juvenile, she’s a good person.
There would be definite advantages to moving out. Commuting was taking a lot out of me. Once I move to the city, everything will be different. As it is, I spend an hour on New Jersey Transit. I live in Oradell, quaint but sickeningly suburban. My parents have a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom house and three-car garage. My father owns a plumbing business and my mom is a part-time travel agent.
I wish I could hate my parents, but they aren’t all that bad. I mean they seem perfectly contented with their suburban life. Although my mom gets great deals on airfares all over the world, they usually take their vacations to Florida. Their biggest concern about my job is that I don’t get benefits. I wish I had a worse childhood, sometimes, I think my childhood was too average to ever have the type of life I would want. Plus, I’m from Jersey. The stigma is unbelievably harsh. When I move into the city I will never again admit my roots. I will be rootless. Rootless is cooler.
“How was work today?” My mother asks me this every day during dinner as she passes over whatever vegetable we’re having. One thing about my mother, she insists we eat together. Mom basically holds the family together with her chatter.
“It was okay.” Living at home after college is a lot like being in high school. Every day your parents think that some tiny item of your day will catapult them back to the happier days of their youth. What they don’t understand is that the actual events I could possibly share with them (which excludes drinking, boys and general debauchery) have become as mundane as theirs. It’s tough.
After dinner, I sit in the family room and watch my dad flip through the stations for a while. My mother asks me for help with the Bergen Record Crossword. It’s times like this when I know I need an apartment in the city. I finally go to bed when Leno comes on, but I can’t fall asleep. I guess what is concerning me is that I will lock myself into a situation with Ro and there will be no way out. I think I have a fear of commitment. In college, it took me a long time to declare journalism my major. I had to keep taking intro business classes to keep my parents happy. I skipped most of them and got passing grades, until it seemed to be apparent that I wasn’t going to be a stockbroker.
Another issue is that now my life was going to be scrutinized by the likes of Roseanne. What if it just didn’t measure up? Did I care about her reporting to the crew from college about my New York life? Of course, a finance job couldn’t possibly live up to the excitement that was my high-powered publishing job. Ridiculous as I knew it was, I could always manage to impress people with working for Prescott Nelson Inc.
The biggest thing would be breaking the news to Tabitha. She was weird about new people and I’m not sure what I had told her about Roseanne. I sometimes have a tendency to exaggerate stories when I think the parties involved will never meet. I’m sure I had done that with Roseanne. If they hung out would their impressions of each other in any way affect their impressions of me? But, I was getting ahead of myself. I probably never mentioned Roseanne, except in passing.
“You mean the one who gave the guy a blow job in the bathroom of some dive?” Even over the blaring ambient music, she’s a little loud. I’ve waited a week to tell her. We are at a party for some female poet who just published a book. An old friend of the Big C’s. I break the news to her after we are both nicely toasted. Some obnoxious looking guy smirks at Tab at the reference to oral sex. She glares at him. “What? Is that a term you’ve never heard? Anyway, is this Rhoda girl gonna really come down?”
“Roseanne. I forgot I told you that story. I think you’ll love her. She’s lots of fun.” Tabitha seems unconvinced, she puts some truffle pate on her plate. “Is the Big C coming?”
“Probably for about ten minutes. I know she’s got her yoga class and then she is getting her eyebrows shaped. She rolled her eyes when she got the invite. This food is awful.”
“She
