of voice was only one of the many ways in which Sheila and I were different. Take the copy of Pucker laid out on their tree-trunk cross-section of a coffee table for everyone to see. And which I made the mistake of glancing toward. Sheila tilted her head, following the direction of my eyes. A shameless celebrity gossip junkie, Sheila was the last person I would ever admit my Pucker fixation to…because she would seize any opportunity to interrogate me about my clients, hooking me up to a lie detector machine, trying to get me to break confidentiality by naming names. Mercifully that day, she was more focused on the issue at hand….
“You don’t under-stand!” She sniffled. “She knows that it’s ugly, because…because how could she not? And she knows that I have to wear it, because she bought it for me. We’re all going out to dinner tonight, with Josh’s entire extended family! So I’ll either look like an ungrateful daughter-in-law or someone who accidentally wandered in from a Bon Jovi concert, circa 1982!”
While Sheila was only one year younger than myself, at times the gap seemed closer to twenty. Hissy fits like this one were part of the reason why I still had trouble thinking of her as a married woman. Her husband was the loving but spineless Joshua. And in the most storybook fashion, they had met one night when she came in to the emergency room seeking stitches for a gash across her forehead.
The kind Jewish medical intern not only sewed her up, but managed not to laugh while she described the spill off her five-inch heels that resulted in a nosedive into the pavement outside a West Hollywood nightclub. She walked all over him, and saw nothing wrong with his lack of interest in getting up off the floor, until she realized that she wasn’t the only woman making heel marks on his face. He had been in training, in fact, having spent his entire lifetime balancing on eggshells around his mother. About a year into their marriage it was clear that the coach wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of another voice barking orders at her team.
“Your problem,” I began, “is that you’re trying to beat her at her own game by figuring out her rules and then playing them against her. The only way you’ll win is if you refuse to play her game at all. When she presumes that you’ll spend every other weekend at her place, announce how much you would love to but that you already have plans to go to dinner with the chief surgical resident and his wife, which you are sure she will agree is the best thing for Joshua’s career. When she tells you that your choice of lipstick is interesting, play dumb and ask her, in front of everyone, to explain what she means by that because you really value her opinion. When she insults your food by asking if you would like her extra set of measuring spoons so that you won’t be so aggressive with the salt next time, don’t laugh it off!”
“But I don’t want to be a…a bitch,” she lowered her voice, as if the lamp might hear us.
“Fine, then act like a wounded bird,” I said and rolled my eyes. “But whatever you do, don’t act like it’s no big deal. Don’t make it so easy for her. Maybe if you’re visibly hurt in front of your family, then Josh will finally grow a pair and start defending his wife.”
Adept already at the wifely art of choosing her battles, Sheila slam-dunked the dress behind the couch and silenced me with a glance the moment she heard Josh’s key in the door.
“So anyway…like I was saying.” I shifted gears, widening my eyes and acting about as casual as the kid at Fat Camp with the remnants of a Snickerdoodle clinging to his chin. “My mom says she’s moving back to L.A. And she’s serious, Sheila. She already bought a house.”
“Really?” Joshua asked, bounding in from his bike ride, but apparently deeming himself not-quite-sweaty enough to forgo a kiss to the forehead of his giggling bride. “Is this because of Raj and you breaking up?”
“We did not break up,” I warned him, with a cautionary glare at Sheila. “It’s temporary. Do you tell him everything?”
“Of course she does, we’re married. So then you didn’t tell your mom about Raj?” he yelled from the kitchen, banging the refrigerator door shut. “But she’s your mother.”
“She didn’t, honey, no,” Sheila answered for me after wiping her forehead with her sleeve. “I told you that she’s afraid of her mother.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, leaning against the doorway defensively.
“Nobody’s afraid of anybody,” I interjected, trying to steer the focus back onto myself. “I haven’t told my mom about Raj because there is nothing to tell. We have not broken up. We’re taking a breather.”
Besides, I thought, reaching for the remote control, my mother always got way too involved with opinions that were completely misinformed when I let her anywhere near my personal life. And as if God didn’t have just the most perfect timing…
“Hollywood studios are abuzz this week with news of one of the biggest screenwriting sweetheart deals to have been signed by Paragon Pictures in years,” some Entertainment Tonight reporter wearing no less than eight necklaces and an entire tube of lip gloss prattled on.
And then they cut to the videotape of Alex.
With that same warm smile. That same humble manner. Those same unmistakable dimples sneaking in an appearance as he sat back and watched the filming from his consultant’s chair on the set of the movie that launched his career.
“Rumor has it,” the talking head continued, “that the movie studio has just inked a landmark seven-figure, two-script deal with the screenwriter whose first movie, Like You Mean It, was the sleeper hit of last summer.”
“Oh, honey.” Sheila sat down beside me. “I’m sorry. You know I only watch that for the celebrity stuff. Let’s change the channel.”
“Come on, Sheila,” I insisted, in a voice that wouldn’t have even convinced a total stranger, “don’t be silly. I can be happy for him, can’t I?”
The first time Alex told me that he loved me was when he came home from a morning run to find me awake and curled up in his dorm-room bed, wearing one of his T-shirts and reading the original version of Like You Mean It. I could tell by the way he said it that he’d startled himself, as much because he’d blurted it out, as because of realizing that it was true. Although my first instinct was to drop the script, grab him by the neck and yank him down on top of me, he held me back, asked me to finish reading first, and made me promise to tell him what I really thought when I was done. Total honesty, he announced with an idealism that only someone under legal drinking age can muster, was the only way that this relationship would ever work.
So like most young couples we managed to be completely honest with each other for the next two years, except, of course, for those little things that we held back. Harmless things, at first, like my insisting that his snoring never bothered me in the least, and his swearing up and down that I was cute when I was drunk. We knew what we had and we shared a quiet instinct to protect it, even from ourselves. It worked for me because by definition a girl’s first real love is the guy who feels like family. And it worked for him because rather than feeling skewered by my gut reaction to his work, he told me that he finally felt as if he had someone on his team.
Yes, we kept up a relationship of comfortable truth even through the summer when he tattooed his biceps and bartended on Sunset, while I donned my sensible suit and interned at an emerging-markets hedge fund. At the time, Alex forcing me to admit that I had gone corporate to appease my father only made me love him more. But when the summer was over…
“What do you mean What am I gonna do after school?” he asked, while hefting my bookcase
