must have someone else to call.”
Wendy does not like Natalie. All three of us used to live on the same floor in a student dorm at Penn. Natalie calls Wendy an intellectual snob. Wendy calls Natalie a Brahmin elitist. Truthfully, Wendy is an intellectual snob and Natalie is a bit of an elitist. I didn’t even know what a Brahmin was until Wendy explained that Natalie belongs to the upper caste of Boston society. “It does sound kind of snooty when you say it like that,” I told Wendy.
“Unfortunately, I have no one else to call.” The only new people I’ve spoken to since I moved, besides the weirdos at work, are my fifty-year-old manicurist and my superintendent. I haven’t left the apartment much, devoting my spare time to Seinfeld reruns and reading Cosmo, Glamour, City Girls and Mademoiselle to try to mentally collect what I refer to as the Fashion Magazine Fun Facts. These are life rules that will one day help me pinpoint all the things I did wrong in my relationship with Jeremy, make me a better person, and allow me to live a successful, sexy and ultimately satisfying life. Page five says ask him out, page seventy-two says wait for him to call me, page fifty says he wants an independent woman, page fifty-six says he’ll walk if I don’t make him feel needed…Will smoky-colored eye shadow really make me more desirable? More desirable than a Brazilian bikini wax will? What is a Brazilian bikini wax? It’s all very confusing.
“So go out with Natalie tonight, but then you’ve got to find new friends. What about Samantha?” she asks.
Sam is my annoying roommate. She and her boyfriend are always all over each other. “I don’t like her. She makes me use color-coordinated sponges in the kitchen—blue for dishes, green for pots, pink for the counter.”
“That makes sense.”
Maybe it makes sense to people like Wendy who open public bathroom doors with their feet because they don’t want to touch the handle. Not to me. I wonder why I surround myself with such anal personalities.
Still, anal friends are better than no friends.
“Again, why do you like Natalie?” Wendy asks.
Natalie may not be the brightest star in the solar system, but she’s fun. Brahmins do have some advantageous qualities. She knows the whole world and would be great at introducing me to lots of Brahmin men, if I ever let her. When I called to tell her I was moving to Boston, she had me hooked up to live with Sam in less than a week. “If you moved here I could hang out with you. Since you don’t, Natalie is my only option.”
Let’s face it, Wendy is a bit of a snob. She is one of those A-plus girls who have no patience for stupidity. We’ve known each other since Mrs. Martin, our second-grade math teacher who wore the same gray turtleneck every day and smelled like Swiss cheese, sat us next to each other at the back of the class. We bonded over our love for Michael Jackson and Cabbage Patch Kids, remaining inseparable through the traumas of middle school, high school, university, and Ted Abramson. Ted Abramson actually falls somewhere in the middle school/high school range, more specifically when he broke up with me after fifth grade and asked Wendy out at her bat mitzvah, then dumped her during the summer and liked me again in eighth grade.
But we survived the Ted crisis just as we survived my accidental disposing of her retainer into the cafeteria wastebasket, even though to this day I insist she left it wrapped in tissue on top of her lunch bag and it did look like garbage. And in our junior year at university, she survived me almost killing her after she told Andrew Mackenzie, her lab partner in her calculus class—I’m still not sure why math class has a lab—that I thought his friend Jeremy was a hottie. We spotted Jeremy exactly three years ago in American Prose, which came right before Wendy’s calculus class. The farther Huck Finn floated down the river, the more smitten I became. Of course, Andrew told Jeremy. Very embarrassing.
I should never have forgiven her so easily.
“It’s all your fault, anyway,” I snap.
“What’s my fault? Your not having friends? Let me remind you that you were still in school when I was offered this job, and besides, how could I possibly turn down Wall Street?”
Wendy had been offered investment banking jobs at every company she applied to—not only because of her perfect Grade Point Average at Wharton, Penn’s business school, but because she had volunteered at food banks, wrote for the school paper, taught English in Africa for a summer, and worked part-time for the computer center, training students in Excel. While most people, including me, took Space, Time, It Doesn’t Matter 101—a one-hundred-percent paper physics course where I was allowed to write about the physics of dating—as an option, Wendy took Deconstructing Post-Colonial Narratives and Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism. Conveniently, her optional courses were my compulsory courses, so we got to hang out a lot. I also got to skip many classes because not only did Wendy type up her notes, she also made detailed indexes and four-color pie charts.
“My entire relationship with Jeremy is your fault. You fixed us up.”
“Quit whining. You shouldn’t be surprised, after all the crap he’s pulled.”
I hate when she uses against me things I tell her. “I so don’t want to get into this now, ’kay?”
“Fine. Call Natalie. Tell her you want to go meet boys. Immediately.”
Doesn’t Wendy have enough people to boss around at work? “Fine, I will.”
“Good.”
“Fine.”
“Good luck, I love you, call me later,” she says, and slams down the phone.
I dial Natalie’s number at home. Except for university, my 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