Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never Too Late for Her Dumb Ass to Learn Why Froot Loops Are Not for Dinner (11 page)

As for the Barbies, I simply tell everyone that I’m a collector. Of course, true collectors never take their prizes out of the box to see if they can finally master the art of cutting bangs, but whatever.

“Just give it to me and I’ll deal with it,” I say all businesslike and officious, quickly stuffing Barbie into one of the bags we’re moving ourselves. Then I try to look busy so she doesn’t ask why a forty-two-year-old woman is still playing with dolls.

While I attempt to chisel apart my office supplies, it occurs to me:

I should find a more grown-up hobby.

Between moving and unpacking and settling into my first real home, I sort of forget about my deep and abiding love of all things
Barbie. I still keep my
Mad Men
Barbies on display because they’re so impeccably assembled. I mean, Miss Joan is wearing a tiny bustier and seamed stockings! Betty has a wee gold compact with a mirror inside! That’s just badass at any age. But the rest of my collection lives in the closet and has seen the light of day only when friends’ daughters have visited.

I can’t say that I fell out of love with my Barbies but there’s something about writing my first mortgage check that made me go, “You know what? Not so into the toys anymore.”

Plus, many of the enriching activities I learned about while writing
My Fair Lazy
actually stuck. Turns out I’d rather spend time crafting my own elaborate updo than Barbie’s, particularly when it means I’m going somewhere fancy; convenient because… Joanna and I are opera aficionados now!

Okay, by aficionados, I mean we went once but we both seriously dug it! The thing no one tells you about the opera is how many cocktail breaks are involved. With multiple intermissions, one never needs to lose one’s buzz and champagne makes everything better.

We saw
A Masked Ball
in December and were absolutely taken by the spectacle of it all. Between the music and the costumes and the set, the whole night left us breathless. [
Oh, and we found out my friend Caprice was wrong and it actually isn’t appropriate to shout, “Show us your tits!” after a particularly stirring solo.
] As much as I love to people watch, the opera is the perfect place for it because every walk of humanity is represented, at least sartorially. There were folks from kids in jeans to men in tuxedos, capes, and big top hats, and all fashions in between.

Because we really want to make tonight’s showing of
Carmen
special, we’re treating ourselves to a hotel room. I want to do it up right because in the fifteen years I lived in town, I never once stayed anywhere except my own apartments. So I figure if I’m going whole hog, I’ll book us at the Peninsula.

Joanna and I debated whether or not we wanted to share a room, but we realized we spent our entire freshman year in an eight-by-ten cinder-block dorm room, and that’s without the benefit of room service or seven hundred fifty thread-count sheets, so we’d probably manage being together for sixteen hours.

Before the show, we have dinner at the Purple Pig, a restaurant known for charcuterie. We sit at a community table and make friends with the conventioning Minneapolis-area anesthesiologists sitting around us—sharing a couple of bottles of wine and bites of a sugar-seared rib eye. [
Sounds so wrong but tastes so right.
] The doctors are leery about our order of roasted marrow, so they leave us to sample it ourselves.

Truly? My stomach turns a little when the plate is served. There’s a big round bone with a gelatinous blob of grayish brown in the middle, paired with slices of bread and a bowl of chunks of Himalayan salt. Tentatively we spread and salt the goo, and with our napkins at the ready, we taste it at the same time.

And then we lose our minds.

The marrow is why meat cooked on the bone is always so much more delicious than its filleted counterparts. Marrow is what gives braised short ribs their flavor. Marrow is the essence of beef and eating it is like biting into a thousand pot roasts all concentrated into one little smear of perfection. [
No lie, as I write this description my mouth is watering.
]

We spend the next twenty minutes saying over and over again, “Oh, that marrow!” It’s all we discuss on the way to the theater and it’s our main topic of conversation over opera cake and cappuccinos during second intermission. And even though everything about
Carmen
is spectacular, when I look back on this night, marrow is what I’ll recall most fondly.

After a drink at the bar, we call it a night. We’ve got our bathroom kung fu timed perfectly and after a little
Real Housewives
, we’re ready for bed.

In the dark, I can tell by her breathing the exact moment Joanna falls asleep, having heard it so many times before. I can’t think of a single instance when we lived together that she wasn’t out first. I’ve never been a great sleeper, particularly when I’m not in my own bed, and until I discovered the tiny white miracle called Ambien, it would take me hours from the time I hit the sheets until I dropped off.

I had cocktails earlier in the evening, so I don’t take my Ambien because that’s a recipe for accidentally ordering an entire new suite of bedroom furniture. [
Trust me on this one.
]

Joanna went down around twelve thirty a.m., but it’s one thirty now and I still feel wide awake. I suspect any fatigue may have been counteracted by the coffee I had during dessert. I toss and shift, but I can’t seem to get comfortable. At two thirty, I have to employ desperate measures—pillow flipping—in the vain hope that the cool side will help me nod off. It doesn’t.

Around three, I feel myself drifting off to sleep FINALLY, only to be awakened five minutes later by Joanna’s snoring.

This is new.

If she snored as a freshman, we’d have never been together long enough to form a twenty-five-year-long friendship.

I have no problem falling asleep to music and when I was a kid staying at my grandparents’ house, my grandfather would blast talk radio all night long. To this day, I adore talk radio because of him and it always makes me feel comforted. Put golf or baseball on the television and I’m out in seconds flat. And whenever I’m on the road, I like to sleep to old sitcoms on Nick at Nite.

But the snoring?

I have a problem with snoring.

Joanna snores lightly, but insistently. Really, it’s more of a loud breathing deal and there’s no vibrato or anything, but I can definitely hear her.

Maisy started snoring in the past few years, too. Between her and Fletch [
Who also came to snoring far too late into the relationship to break it off.
] I find myself sneaking into the guest room more often than not.

I put in my earbuds to see if that blocks her out.

Zzzz.

Nope.

I decide to take a bath, hoping that will put me out.

Zzzz.

Nope.

I push her a couple of times, but feel bad doing so. She probably doesn’t normally snore except we talked so much we’re both kind of hoarse, plus she’s had a night full of cocktails, marrow, and cake. That’d make anyone snore.

So I’m not mad about the snoring. But sleep is impossible.

And then she begins to thrash.

That’s new, too.

At four a.m., I can’t take it anymore. Because I don’t want to wreck her beauty rest, I decide to just go home. As quietly as I can, I collect my things and in the dark I write her a note.

I find out later that my night penmanship is wanting and pretty much the only part of the note she could decipher said YOU SNORE in big, shouty letters. I’ve come to find in every relationship, one person is inevitably more of a jerk than the other. In the case of Joanna and me, I’m clearly the bigger jerk, but I’m fortunate that we established this long ago, so really, nothing inconsiderate I do now comes as a surprise. [
Luff you, sweet JoJo.
]

I stop by the front desk to make sure that the whole room is taken care of because I’m not sticking Joanna with the bill, especially as I’m bailing in the middle of the night. Also, I need the valet to bring my car.

Funny thing about hotels that I’ve found out over five years of early-flight-based departures: no matter how fine the establishment, ninety-nine percent of women sneaking out in the wee hours of the morning are prostitutes.

So as I stand there making arrangements in my sweater set, holding my big pink and green toile overnight bag, makeup off, hair in a ponytail, the desk clerks have no choice but to imagine that I am the oldest, fattest call girl they’ve ever seen.

Then when I tell them the make and model of car that I’m collecting, they stand there with their mouths agape, faces set in expressions that range from horror to admiration, wondering exactly what kind of freaky shit I might perform.

As I head downstairs to meet the valet, I swear I hear one of the girls calling, “Teach me!”

This? Right here? Is why people hesitate to embrace new hobbies.

My latest pastime develops so organically that I don’t even realize it’s anything but a chore at first.

Our house has an unholy amount of built-in bookshelves. Mind you, we own many, many books, at least according to the disgruntled men who had to move them all. Considering I’ve been reading for almost forty years [
And have a demonstrated dislike for throwing things away.
] I can fill ten bookcases. This works out nicely seeing how I own ten bookcases. I was faced with the dilemma of stocking a bunch of naked built-ins because if I placed my collection on the shelves, I’d be left with a bunch of empty bookcases and that would make my house look like it were having a going-out-of-business sale.

Whenever I peruse catalogs, I’m most intrigued by the items that aren’t for sale. Like when Pottery Barn displays a lovely bedroom set, covered in a crisp linen duvet and piled up with pillows—inevitably I want the battered silver pitcher that’s filled with hydrangeas in the corner of the shot. That’s why mass-produced furniture always looks better in print than it does in my living room; even if I were to buy everything on the page, [
See:
Ambien Binge, Shopping on an
] I’m still missing the crucial elements that give the catalog rooms soul.

I keep an eye peeled for estate sales because I heard they can
be an amazing resource for cheap vintage finds but I hadn’t seen any until one day when Joanna and I spot a sign after being out for lunch.

“Look! Estate sale! Are you game?” I ask from the passenger seat of her station wagon.

“Sure! Get your phone out so we can practice navigating! We’ll both Google the address and we’ll see who gets it first!” Joanna and I are convinced that we’d kick ass as the College Roommates team on the
Amazing Race,
for no reason other than sheer delusion, particularly since I hate to run, solve puzzles, or for that matter, travel.

Also? Not a team player.

Even though I’ve yet to see a single challenge in which I’d not fail spectacularly, the dream remains alive.

We both dig out our iPhones. Her navigation application isn’t working because she can’t get a cell signal and I don’t have any apps [
Don’t get me started on the app thing.
] and Google maps is way too small for me to decipher without reading glasses.

After five minutes of swearing and cursing the name of AT&T, Joanna notices that the estate sale sign not only listed an address, but also is in the shape of a giant arrow, pointing in the direction of the sale.

You know those assholes who are always cut the first challenge, five minutes after the race starts? Yeah. Says Phil Keoghan, “I’m sorry, College Roommates, you have been eliminated from the race.”

Anyway, the sale items are all way too modern for my tastes, so Joanna suggests I hit some consignment stores to find
vintage pieces. We find a local charity shop, I discover a massive footed Waterford trifle bowl for fifteen dollars and thus, a hobby is born.

At first, I’m all about snapping up pieces to fill my empty built-in china cabinets. Although I’ve been blessed with eight thousand (unmatched) wineglasses, I’ve never owned plates that weren’t basic white diner dishware. We needed money for rent when we were married, not flatware, so we never registered for anything made of crystal or covered in silver plate or designed for the single purpose of holding hot gravy. Plus, we figured we’d be bored of whatever we picked out a few years later.