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
