Marrying Up (3 page)

“Sorry. I was just wondering what a key fob is.”

“I guess I thought that once I truly stopped caring about being alone, I wouldn’t have to be.”

“Like attaining nirvana the moment you shed all of your worldly concerns?”

“Exactly.”

The waitress, who has been listening in on most of our conversation, pops over to strike while the iron is hot. “Dessert, ladies?”

“Cheesecake,” I manage faintly.

“And two forks,” George adds. “You
will
find him, Holly. You’re both just doing your thing until you’re ready to meet, remember? And when you do, it’ll be forever. Isn’t that your theory?”

It is, but the whole Someday-My-Prince-Will-Come thing just isn’t working for me anymore. What I need is a warm body. With a heart. And a head. And a… Hell, who am I kidding? I want the whole damn package.

“All these years…” I moan weakly. “All these years, and I’ve just been sitting on the shelf, like an unwanted carton of milk about to expire.” The painful truth is that I’ve only had one long-term relationship, and that was back during my first year at Erie.

“That’s not exactly true…”

“Jim doesn’t count. Our relationship was based on a lie.”

After the crushing disappointment of graduating from high school still a virgin (I was pretty enough in a plain sort of way, just ridiculously shy around guys), I allowed myself to be tricked into a relationship with one of my brother Bradley’s loser friends. Jim was four years older than me, something that impressed me to no end, and still a virgin, too. I would later discover that as part of Bradley’s continuing efforts to get poor Jim laid, he and his friends decided I would make the perfect sacrificial lamb, since apparently none of the girls his own age would have anything to do with him and my thoughtful brother had overheard me crying to a friend about the humiliating prospect of entering college never having gotten any myself.

Bradley told me Jim liked me, and I eagerly fell in love with him before our first date. Things really blossomed from there. Jim and I were both glad to finally be having sex, so much so that he was even willing to endure the constant ribbing from his friends at not kicking me to the curb the morning after I gave it up, precisely seventy-two hours into
our courtship. For my part, I was happy to overlook his dubious career goals—any job that allowed him to collect a paycheck while still being able to smoke pot all day long, a plan that came to glorious fruition in a part-time gig he landed driving one of those mini sidewalk-snow-removal buggies. Naive young thing that I was, and because Jim wasn’t exactly an evil person, I was also able to overlook those defects in his hygiene and intellect that had likely offended every other woman he’d met prior to me in order to experience the joys of couplehood for the first time.

Alas, the beautiful thing that was us casually dropped dead at a New Year’s Eve party about a year and a half into our romance, when Jim’s beer-soaked buddy Wojack marveled aloud at how much money had changed hands over the consummation of our relationship. I dumped Jim on the spot, after he high-fived Bradley instead of trying to lie his way out of it. And if I could have dumped Bradley that night, you can bet your life I would have. Making book on the Sabres was one thing, but your sister’s virginity? It’s no wonder my self-esteem’s a little shaky when it comes to men.

“The years are flying by, G. By the time someone wants me, I’ll be rotten and lumpy.”

“Lumpy’s not so bad,” George says. “I’m already lumpy.”

“But you’re
good
lumpy.”

My best friend’s waist-to-hip ratio is fairly generous, though it certainly doesn’t seem to bother anybody except her. When we walk down the street together, George’s jiggles and curves and curls garner far more lustful stares than my straight lines do. Still, she’s pretty timid when it comes to men, and almost completely oblivious to her effect on them. Her “sort of” boyfriend—one of our old creative-writing profs, a serial student-dater who’s been toying with her for years—isn’t helping
her
self-esteem much, either.

“Good lumpy? I wouldn’t go that far.” She snorts at the
suggestion that such a thing might actually be possible. “I’d take an A-cup any day. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

“So why hasn’t it happened for me yet?”

The closest I’d ever come to a relationship since Jim (and now Jean-Jean, I suppose) was a string of three one-night stands with the same guy. Over the course of two semesters. He was a fairly cute bartender at a popular club just off campus—quite a coup, but I could never shake the feeling that Freddie thought I was a different person each time.

“Just give it time, Holly. It will. I promise. For both of us. And we’re in it together till then…”

At least I have that. With George around, I know I will never really be alone. We sit in silence for a bit, finishing the cheesecake. Good old cheesecake. How can you be sad when it’s giving you a great big hug from the inside?

“Maybe I just need to regroup,” I say finally. “Get a handle on things. Figure out where my life is going.”

“That’s the spirit!”

We pay the bill and head outside. It’s late August, and very, very hot. Three blocks away, the mirrored windows of the
Buffalo Bugle
tower shine brightly before the mostly older buildings of the city skyline. Inside, I know exactly what’s going on: absolutely nothing of any interest whatsoever. Today is exactly the same as yesterday, which was exactly the same as the day before that, and the day before that. I want to walk in the other direction.

“I haven’t taken a holiday since Christmas, you know.”

“Nobody could fault your work ethic.”

“It’s not doing me any good. Nobody notices. I’m there late all the time, working on all kinds of things that aren’t even part of my job description.”

“They notice, Holly. You’re really good at what you do. Look, call me later and we’ll figure it out. Just promise me you won’t start smoking again! At least not today…”

“Smoking, drinking, snorting—what’s the difference?” I laugh. “Remember, I know how it’s all going to end, anyway, so I may as well have a good time now. In fact, we should probably go out tonight and toast my long, lonely life. Like a premortem wake!”

“Oh, yeah!” She grins. “Now,
that’s
my girl!”

We part ways and George heads back toward the dingy bookshop and her own lame job, which is just as boring and futile as my own, although, it suddenly occurs to me, she never really seems to complain about it.

Fortified by diner food and the promise of a good night out, my optimism surges. And thinking about John Michael Whitney reminds me that my life—even the sad and lonely one I’d envisioned for myself that morning—reads like an absolute fairy tale. My obituary will be a call to arms; things are going to change.

Cy will have to understand. Though ground down by years of unpaid overtime, he rarely takes a day off, opting instead to live and eat and sleep in his office and take it all way too seriously. It’s not that Cy’s nasty, or even sexist—something I’d heard implied more than once by my oft-over-looked female coworkers—but he just doesn’t seem to get that not everybody can give one hundred and ten percent for $24,500 a year and no dental benefits.

“I need to take some personal time,” I tell him as soon as I get back from lunch.

Personal time, I am fully aware, does not count toward employees’ vacation time, of which I still have one week left and am hesitant to squander before Christmas. Though a right guaranteed by law, taking personal time usually imparts a faint whiff of mental instability, unless of course there’s been a death in the family. If Cy perceives my asking for it now as crazy or, even worse, frivolous or lazy, it might move me down a notch in his
books, and I need him on my side if I am ever to get ahead at the
Bugle.

“I see,” he says without looking up from his screen. “How much?”

“A week.”

“When?”

“Starting Monday?”

He glances at me. “That’s soon. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “But I’m a bit…burned out.”

That oughta work.

Most of the senior reporters and editors I know seem to regard journalism as a sort of religion, with cynicism standing in where faith should be. It’s their lives, twenty-four/seven, and it’s easy to become weary under the weight of it all, whether you’re reporting live from the trenches of a war-torn Iraq like Christiane Amanpour or penning “The Buffalo Entertainment Beat” like the
Bugle
’s own Bucky Jones. In theory, it should be no different for me. Invoking a burnout, like losing the faith, is a serious admission, and one not to be taken lightly. Plus, it might even have the added benefit of suggesting to him that I take my job more seriously than I actually do.

“Okay,” Cy says. “Just get that intern whatsisname to cover you.”

“That’s all?”

“Yup. Have fun. And shut the door on your way out—I can’t seem to get a fucking moment’s peace today.”

So that’s it. I am so easily replaceable that an unpaid intern whose area of expertise is photocopying his ass is able to do my job on a moment’s notice.

I back out of his office and shut the door. His name, stenciled in stout black capitals, stares me square in the face: C
Y
T
HURRELL
, S
ENIOR
A
SSOCIATE
E
DITOR
. Cy had finished school nearly two years after I did, though he was only
one year younger. He’d started at the
Bugle
as a lowly free-lancer three years ago and moved up the ranks at the speed of light.

It has actually turned out to be a pretty big news day for Buffalo—a small warehouse fire and a hit-and-run involving a monster truck and a traffic light downtown—so the frenzied comings and goings of my coworkers are more than enough to distract me. The prospect of an accidental death or two has whipped me into stand-by mode, and I await intelligence of any fatalities with my usual combination of concerned journalistic professionalism and detached personal curiosity.

Now I suppose I should ask anyone who might find my anticipation of tragedy distasteful or inappropriate to please keep in mind that this is what I do, day in day out, and am no more eager for news of someone’s death than a garbageman is eager to see the can on the curb. But I will admit that five years at this gig may have hardened me a little to the whole concept of death and dying, to the point where I can probably think of it and speak of it with more ease than most. I consider this a blessing of sorts, since it has freed me from the usual hang-ups and sentimentality associated with the whole mess, provided the death in question is not my own, of course.

The key, in my line of work, is to strive for balance. And what could be more life-affirming than someone who makes you thank heaven you’re alive? Jesse, a reporter for the City Desk and deliverer of a crush that comes and goes, scoots over on his chair to apprise me of the situation.

“Fire’s not too bad. Team’s there now,” he says, with a crack of his gum. Normally, that sort of terse sexiness would be enough to send me into a tizzy of stuttered responses and imagined wedding-planning, but today I’m not up for it, even though he is in Abercrombie & Fitch from head to toe.

“What about the monster truck?”

“No word on any casualties yet, Hastings.”

“Except for the light, of course.”

“Ha! Except for the light, yeah.”

I’m always my bravest around Jesse when the crush is in its dormant phase. Nevertheless, I half hope my sympathy for defenseless city property and humor in the face of senseless tragedy might awaken him to all the many wonders of me, but instead of asking me out, he just grins and propels himself backward down the corridor on his squeaky old office chair, quads bulging suggestively through perfectly worn-out khakis.

I long ago dismissed the possibility of anything ever happening between us, owing in equal parts to his gorgeous girlfriend and the fact that he rarely gets my jokes, which I know make me come off as an absolute idiot. Still, I can’t resist, meaning the better part of my interaction with Jesse consists of awkward explanations. So the traffic light quip was a significant achievement, and by the end of the day, I’ve decided that we’re going to have exactly four children: two boys and two girls, all black-haired and blue-eyed like him, but the girls would have my adorable freckles.

In the end, the monster truck claimed no human victims, so I have no subjects today other than the usual cancer-stricken and myocardially infarcted—and myself.

Goodbye, Norma Jean

S
aturday afternoon and it’s Madison’s sixth birthday party. I have spent the past week trying to change my future and this is my reward. I brought George along to dull the pain, since I’ve already spent three out of the last five weekends watching my various nieces and nephews blow out candles and tear through stacks of gifts like tornadoes. Don’t get me wrong—I love each and every one of the little brats dearly (except for maybe the twins), but they do try the patience. To complicate matters further, I am seriously considering hooking up with the usual entertainment: the guy in the furry purple Barney suit. Not that I’ve ever seen his face, but that’s part of what intrigues me about him.

In addition to the possibility of seeing my mystery man, I am also hoping the party will give me a chance to talk to my brother about his job. Cole works at a car-parts factory in a depressed little rust-belt town northeast of the city.

“If I’d known there was going to be so much food, I would have stayed home,” George complains sullenly as we settle into lawnchairs as far removed from the mayhem as possible. “I’ve resolved to lose ten pounds by Thanksgiving or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I’m blaming you.”

“Auntie Holly! Auntie Holly!” My niece Savannah comes squealing around the corner and jumps onto my lap. “Save me! AAAAHHH!!! Don’t let them get MEEEEEE!!!” Two boys I don’t know and one of the twins—Harrison, I think—are close on her tail, brandishing neon plastic weapons of some sort.

“Stop right there,” I demand. “What are those?”

“Thuper Thoakers!” Harrison growls.

“What?”

“Super Soakers,” George explains. “They’re water guns.”

“Oh, don’t even think it…” I tell them as I try to pry Savannah’s sticky fingers from around my neck.

“She said we were worm barf,” one of the boys explains matter-of-factly. “And now she must die.”

With that, they all open fire. Savannah takes off shrieking, but we’re already soaked.

“Fuck,” George says as she stands up to shake herself off. “I think it’s lemonade.”

I try to use the hose to wash off, but there’s no water.

“We turned it off this time,” Olivia, my sister-in-law, explains as she dashes by with a tray of hamburgers. “They kept spraying into the house last time.”

“Great.” As I go inside to wash up, I can’t help but notice that Cole and Olivia’s house might benefit from a spray or two. The decor, courtesy of their three small kids and two large dogs, is suburban eclectic: broken plastic toys in primary colors, couch-pillow forts, Elmo paraphernalia as far as
the eye can see and fur-covered wall-to-wall carpeting, which thanks to a little foresight on Olivia’s part, is roughly the same shade as the dogs. At four-year-old hand level, black splotches of what might once have been grape juice provide a lovely focal point for the room.

When I finally make my way outside again, George is talking to my parents. Well, just my mother really, because my dad doesn’t talk so much. He just sort of stands there next to my mom thinking about other things. Or maybe he’s just standing there not thinking anything. It’s impossible to tell.

“George just mentioned you took the week off?” Mom says while trying to untangle the chains from the three pairs of glasses dangling around her neck. “Do anything fun?”

I glare at George. “Nope.”

“That’s too bad. Did you have any cake, dear?”

“Yes.”

“And did you see the kids?” she asks, looking past me toward the sandbox where Madison is hitting another little girl in the face with a plastic shovel.

“What kids?”

“Well, we’re going to go on over and say hi to the birthday girl. C’mon, Larry.” She makes a beeline for the sandbox and my dad shuffles off behind her.

We lie around in the sun for a while drinking beer, waiting for the entertainment to arrive. Alas, my furry purple hunk of burning love is a no-show, or maybe this particular group of kids has just seen enough of Barney for one summer, and so we are left with an adolescent acne-scarred magician. The kids, of course, are more interested in trying to steal his wallet than any of the handkerchief tricks he’s performing.

George, who’s been scanning the scene of frenzied, foaming six-year-olds and their wasted Stepford parents with as much interest as she can muster, turns to me languidly and slurs, “I don’t think I want kids.”

“Oh, come on—don’t base your maternal future on one six-year-old’s party.”

She waves me off. “I just don’t think I’m the breeding type. It’s too much responsibility, raising a kid.”

The thought of remaining childless by choice seems odd to me. “But what will you leave behind? It’s our duty as human beings to make sure our genetic material continues its evolutionary march toward perfection.”

“Big deal. There are plenty of others willing to carry that torch.”

“I suppose.”

“And you could choose to be single too,” she adds. “Imagine the freedom. To actually
try
to stay single forever.”

“That’s warped.”

“Think about it, Holly—it sure would take the pressure off. Men do it all the time. And it’s not like either of us will have to deal with any backlash from our parents or anything like that….”

George’s mothers, while perhaps overly involved in their daughter’s life, would never dream of pressuring her into couplehood or marriage. The possibility that a woman’s happiness or self-esteem might be dependent on anyone with a penis was simply beyond their sphere of comprehension. And my parents are more like spectators in my world, instead of active participants. They’re pretty old (I was a fortieth birthday surprise package for my mom) and besides, their urge for grandkids has already been filled eight times over by my brothers. So my mother isn’t all that interested in my social life, while my dad is so obsessed with model trains that he’s hardly come up from the basement since he retired and probably wouldn’t notice if I brought Marilyn Manson home for dinner.

“…although, since I am so truly fabulous it would be a crime…no, a
sin
—a sin of omission!—to deprive the world
of my offspring. Hey, I know! Maybe I could just be an egg donor instead!”

George always gets a little cocky and grrl-powerish when she’s drunk, and the Perlman-MacNeill family values come flooding through, unrestrained by her usual mild-mannered self-deprecation.

“Sounds great,” I tell her.

“They pay you, like, a couple thousand bucks a shot for that, you know. And it would be a real mitzvah, helping an infertile couple get pregnant….”

The thought of George in stirrups with some mad gynecologist harvesting her eggs was a little far-fetched. “This from somebody who’s afraid of tampons.”

“Yeah, but I still use them,” she giggles, propping herself up on a plump elbow. “I’m sorry, but if you
really
think about it, the idea is just totally gross. Admit it!”

After debating internal vs. external feminine hygiene products for a good twenty minutes, I’m ready to go bug my brother for a job. By the time I make my way over to the patio, Cole is a bit drunk and bleary-eyed himself, and his face is smudged and sweaty from standing over their old barbecue all afternoon.

“Aw, come on, Holly. You don’t want to work with me. You’re a writer, not a drill-press operator…aw,
shit
…would ya look at that? Mackenzie!
Mackenzie!
”

Three little girls turn their heads.

“But Cole—”

“Mackenzie go inside if you have to go potty! Sorry Holly, what did you say? Goddamit, like the dogs don’t do enough damage to the grass….” Fluffy glances over at him from his spot in the shade and growls. Cole shakes his head and tosses him a hot dog that has been charred beyond recognition.

“Look, the truth is my job is totally dead-end, anyway. I’ve
got to make better money so that I can save up and then take a year off to write a book.” Not a bad plan. I’d come up with it during a
Roseanne
rerun—one of the episodes after the Connors win the lottery and we find out that Roseanne the writer had been imagining the windfall all along (a dreadful ending to a perfectly good sitcom, but inspirational for my purposes nonetheless). Since I couldn’t count on winning the lottery, I needed to find a way to make good money fast.

“I don’t know…”

“
Please!
I
need
you to get me in.”

“Olivia!
Olivia,
goddammit! Skyler’s playing with dog poop again!”

“Come on, Cole—you’re union. You make tons of cash and you get amazing benefits.”

“Yeah, compared to you, maybe, but I have all this to pay for.” He makes a vast sweeping gesture with his spatula, indicating the yellowing sliver of lawn and modest house owned, for all intents and purposes, by the bank. “You don’t want to work on the line, Holly. And you’d suck at it, anyway.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Yes, you would. It would kill you. Shit. It’s killing
me.
You think this is what I wanted to do with my economics degree?”

Before I can respond, the back of my mom’s red helmet of hair blocks my field of vision. “Cole, your brother wants another cheeseburger,” she says, holding out a paper plate.

“Mike, you lazy bastard!” Cole yells. “Come and get it yourself! You’re ten feet away! Ma, he’s ten feet away…”

Mike, who’d been dozing in a lawnchair for three hours, flips him the bird, inspiring a hard punch from his wife, Lindsey.

Cole shakes his head and puts another burger on the plate for my mom to bring him.

“That’s his fourth one,” Cole says. “No wonder he looks more pregnant than Lindsey.”

My three older brothers are nothing if not virile. Cole has three, Mike’s waiting on his fourth (as if the twins weren’t enough), and Bradley, who lives in Detroit, has two, but his wife Bonnie is also pregnant.

“Cole, you’re not listening to me.”

“Why should I? It’s a stupid idea.”

“Hey—I think it’s a great idea!” Mike pipes in from behind.

“Shut up, Mike. No one’s talking to you.”

I’ve learned the hard way not to expect any genuine support from Mike. (My brothers really are a bunch of jerks—until the age of thirteen, I honestly believed my mother was planning to sell me to the circus when I was born, but that my father had discovered her plan at the last possible moment and intervened, saving me from a life of shoveling elephant shit.) Cole’s the only one of them who takes any responsibility for the endless teasing and torturing they subjected me to while growing up, and I’m pretty sure that’s because Olivia talked some sense into him over the years (she’s like the older sister I never had). Mike and Bradley
still
snap my bra strap, and sometimes even practice wrestling moves on me when my parents leave the room.

But old habits die hard, and Cole feigns intrigue. “So tell me, bro—why should I get her a job?”

“Well, she has skinny fingers, so she might be useful for fixing the machinery…”

“True. Go on…”

I can see
exactly
where this is going. “Shut up, Mike! Cole, don’t listen to him,” I beg.

“…and she wouldn’t be a distraction to the other guys, that’s for sure.”

“She wouldn’t? Why not? Because I was kinda thinking she would…”

“Naw…no boobage!”

Cole stifles a laugh and elbows me playfully in the ribs, while Mike endures two more punches from Lindsey.

“Fuck off. Both of you.” I grab another beer and make my way back to George.

“What was that about?”

When I tell her, she laughs. “Great idea, Norma Rae. So this is what you’ve come up with after a week on the couch?”

“Could it be any worse than what I’m doing now?”

“Uhhh, yeah.”

“At least I wouldn’t be broke.”

“Please. You would not last a single day working on an assembly line,” she says between bites of an empty hot dog bun. Apparently, she’s decided that fat is indeed worse than carbs. “Your brain would revolt.”

“I’ll adapt. I’ll write my book in my mind while I work,” I inform her. (I’d thought it all through very carefully.) “The blue-collar experience will also contribute to my growth as an artist. And what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, you know.”

“Maybe, but it also hurts a hell of a lot.” She shakes her head and starts in on another bun.

“G, I am so sick and tired of being broke. And I’m tired of saving up for months to buy a proper pair of black boots.”

I’ll admit that it took me quite a while to realize that just because I had a real job didn’t mean I could actually
be
Cosmo Girl and go out and buy all the pretty things I saw in
In Style
magazine. It required more than three years of scrimping and saving for me to pay down the unholy credit-card debt accrued during my first six months at the
Bugle
—something George will never let me live down. Despite that initial lapse in judgment, however, I remain a proud member of the Spend-a-Lot-on-Your-Bag-and-Shoes school of fashion. A true classic never goes out of style, and expensive accessories have the power to redeem the rest of a lackluster wardrobe.

“Well, no one said they had to be Jimmy Choos,” she says coolly.

They were my one splurge this year; an investment certain to yield years of pointy-toed pleasure.

“Yeah? Well, I’m even
more
sick of having to shop online. I can’t believe I live in a city that doesn’t even have a Prada store….”

“As if you’d be able to shop there, anyway! You can’t even afford the Saks outlet!”

“Maybe not, but I bet just knowing a Prada’s around is a damn good feeling.”

“If you want to move to New York, just do it already, Holly! You’ve been talking about it for years. But if you decide to stay, then we can probably both agree it doesn’t really matter if Buffalo has a Prada store or not because unless their spectator pumps come in a steel-toe version, I highly doubt they’d pass the safety codes at the factory. And if they did, it would spoil your plan to save up enough money to take a year off, anyway!”

She’s right. I am afraid. Afraid of New York—where real writers live, where rent exceeds my current annual income, where people toss last season’s Jimmy Choos out with the trash. Why did it all have to be so damn hard? Why couldn’t I just be one of those lucky people who has everything she wants, from guys to Gucci and back again? I quietly eat the icing off my third slice of birthday cake.