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.
