I didn’t marry—I dreamed of the life I have now. I figured it would be mine for the taking, because most things were.
Be careful what you wish for—or so they say.
They being the same they my grandmother is always quoting; the they who say beauty is only skin deep, and when the cat’s away, the mice will play, and love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.
Or was that Frank Sinatra?
Not that it matters. Grandma Alice quotes him, too.
The thing is, there’s truth in all clichés—that’s why they’re clichés.
So here I am, a living cliché, on the cusp of my fortieth birthday, reminding myself that I have everything I ever wanted—and trying desperately to remember why the hell I wanted it in the first place.
two
The past
“If I were you,” Valerie told me, lounging on her unmade bed and polishing her toenails that stifling July night, “I’d wear the red. Mike likes you in red, right?”
“He does, but…” I surveyed my image in the full-length mirror we had bought at Woolworth’s and tacked to the back of our closet door only a few days ago. God only knew how we had managed to live in that apartment for almost a year without a full-length mirror.
But Valerie claimed that when she couldn’t see the thirty pounds she had to lose, she didn’t worry about them.
The day after we bought the mirror—my idea—she went back on her diet. It was the same diet she had been on—and off—for the past year or two.
You would think something as drastic as eliminating all fat grams from one’s diet would work. At least, Valerie would think that. It seemed a little extreme to me. But then, I was blessed with a normal weight and a high metabolism. I couldn’t imagine giving up ice cream, chicken chimichangas with cheese, or Popeye’s fried chicken with mashed potatoes and Cajun gravy.
Whenever Valerie was on her low-fat diet, I had to sneak my indulgences so that she wouldn’t be tempted to stray from her oat-bran-strewn path. Of course, sooner or later, she always did, but at least I knew it wasn’t my fault.
“This is new. Don’t you like it?” I asked Valerie, gesturing at the black spandex minidress I was wearing.
I wiped a trickle of sweat from my forehead as she contemplated my appearance. Damn, it was hot, despite the open window and the rotating floor fan in front of it. This was my second summer in Manhattan. Last year, I was so thrilled to actually be living here that I guess I didn’t notice the heat in our fourth floor, un-air-conditioned one-bedroom walk-up.
I do remember noticing the street noise—the round-the-clock horn-honking, sirens, construction-site jackhammers, the throbbing bass from passing car radios and neighborhood bars. It took me a while to get used to the incessant din that accompanied daily life on the Upper West Side. After I did get used to it, whenever I went upstate to visit my family, the nights seemed preternaturally quiet.
Valerie shrugged, set aside the bottle of pale frosted pink polish and said, re: my outfit, “I don’t know, Beau. Don’t you think it’s kind of…”
“Short?”
“Yeah, that. And…”
“Dark?”
“That, too. But also kind of…”
I opened my mouth again, but this time Valerie finished her own sentence.
She finished it with “slutty,” and I grinned.
“I haven’t seen Mike since April, Val. After three months apart, maybe I want to look slutty.”
“No, you want to look sexy. The red one is sexy. This one is slutty. There’s a big difference. Hey, I love this song!” She reached toward the stacked plastic milk crates serving as a nightstand between our two beds and turned up the volume on the boom box.
“I hate this song,” I grumbled, recognizing the all-too-familiar opening strains of Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl.”
“I thought you loved it.”
“I didn’t ‘love’ it, I liked it. And that was last month, before they played it every five minutes on every radio station in New York.”
As Valerie sang the opening, “Hey, baby,” in an off-key falsetto, I couldn’t resist adding, “Anyway, I like new-wave stuff much better than pop. Pop is so over.”
“That’s what you said about Madonna last year, and now look. She’s everywhere again.”
“I give her five minutes,” I said darkly. “And Paula Abdul gets ten. Nobody will ever have heard of either of them in a few years. But INXS and The Cure will be around forever, like the Beatles. Mark my words.”
She was too busy singing along with flash-in-the-pan Paula to mark my words, so I picked up the hanger draped with the red dress. It was a month old and I had worn it at least three times already, but of course Mike had never seen me in it. Holding the hanger against my shoulders, I surveyed my reflection.
The short skirt had a ruffled flare, reflecting the lambada craze that had overtaken everyone’s wardrobe that summer. My light brown hair was pretty much bigger than the skirt: long, kinky-permed and teased on top, with the bangs sprayed fashionably stiff and curving out from my forehead like a tusk.
“I don’t know,” I told Valerie. “I think I like the way the black clings better.”
Lying on her back and waving her legs around in the air to dry her toenail polish, Valerie interrupted her singing to say, “I’d kill to like the way something clings on me.”
I never knew how to respond when she made comments like that. It wasn’t easy being five foot seven and a hundred and twenty pounds when your best friend was six inches shorter and a good thirty pounds heavier.
I know, I know…it was probably much harder to be the shorter, heavier one. But I couldn’t help feeling awkward whenever Valerie looked at me with blatant envy…like she was right now.
I tried to think of something nice to say about the neon-blue spandex bicycle shorts she was wearing with an oversize neon-orange T-shirt, but I was at a loss. Spandex wasn’t the most flattering trend if you weren’t built like a pencil. Which, fortunately, I was. And which, unfortunately, Valerie wasn’t.
“My toes are never going to dry with this humidity. Wouldn’t you kill for a window air conditioner?” Valerie asked, still waving her legs around in the air.
“Maybe we can scrape up enough money to buy one.”
“Yeah, right.” She snorted.
So did I. Naturally, we were both broke. She made eight bucks an hour as an office temp and had yet to land a full-time job with benefits. I had the full-time job and the benefits, but I made a mere seventeen thousand dollars a year. Back in my small hometown, that would have been a fortune. Here, it barely covered the absolutely vital three Cs in every girl’s life: cocktails,
