Marrying Up (2 page)

Of course, poor Mrs. Whitney loved her son dearly despite his many vices, and requested that we gloss over the incident in his obituary. “He was so good at football,” she told me plaintively over the phone, “and crafts, too.” Turns out the guy was the Martha Stewart of Death Row, finding solace among his beeswax candles and Christmas wreaths, which he sold to the guards’ wives for cigarette money. But the state wasn’t nearly as impressed, and in the end, not even his God-given talent for macramé was enough to save him from Old Sparky. But I made sure to include it in his final tribute.

It may sound overly forgiving—what of the poor mayor (a bigot and a drunk!) and his grieving widow? (a two-timing tramp!)—but that’s just part of what we obituarists some
times have to do: rewrite people’s less-than-stellar lives into pleasant little blurbs to help friends and relatives feel all warm and fuzzy about them. It’s the ultimate final makeover, and I believe everyone deserves at least that.

Everyone except me, it seems.

There is nothing warm and fuzzy about my life lately, unless you count the chenille throw I’d taken to huddling beneath on the sofa, emerging only for work and a few hours of drunken weekend abandon, with the occasional booty call from an idiotic bicycle messenger thrown into the mix. If there is merit in there somewhere, damned if I can see it.

The upside of such a mundane existence is that I am left with plenty of time to wonder about the meaning of it all. Where is my life going? Will I ever have a real boyfriend? Do I have a destiny? And if I do, and it turns out to be a shitty one, will it be possible to change it?

Answering these questions has recently become Number One on my priority list, relegating to Number Two for the first time in three years my plan to save up enough money for a set of large but not huge breast implants. The tasteful kind.

As the waves of existential angst wash over me day after day, week after week, month after month, much as they had in high school (minus the haunting Bauhaus soundtrack), it has begun to dawn on me that there might be more to it all than an okay job and a rundown two-bedroom flat over Marg’s Olde-Tyme Medieval Shoppe.

Which brings me back to why I really spent the better part of this morning writing my own obituary and cursing the cats I didn’t have. It’s not as morbid as it seems, actually. Plenty of obituarists while away the hours in between jobs perfecting their own final tributes, as well as those of friends and loved ones, or even, if the mood for vengeance strikes, those of enemies, bosses, ex-lovers and so on.

Of course, I usually while away those very same hours tak
ing classified ads for free puppies and used cars, since I wear many different hats at the
Bugle.
Many ugly, unflattering hats, including one Get-Me-A-Coffee-Will-Ya-Holly fedora, ungraciously bestowed upon me most mornings by the Life & Style Editor, Virginia Holt. Not that I even work for her, but what can I say—no? I don’t think so. Not if I want her to accept one of my story pitches before the end of time. One day, I hope she and her enormous crocodile Hermès Birkin bag—which I would bet a year’s salary was the only one in the entire city—will be kissing my arse, but until then, my lips are glued to hers.

Anyway, maybe it’s because I’m superstitious, but I have never been able to shake the feeling that if I wrote my own obit, there would suddenly be occasion to use it, like the second I left the building a giant anvil would fall on my head and pound me into the pavement à la Wile E. Coyote. The same reasoning prevents me from signing the organ-donor spot on the back of my driver’s license, something which I believe is tantamount to suicide. It’s like saying, “Hey! Whoever’s up there—I’m ready! Take me now and feel free to use my parts!”

I explained all this to Dr. Martindale last week after he suggested the exercise as a way to pinpoint the source of my growing anxiety, but he wasn’t buying it.

“Nope. It’s a bad idea,” I told him. “Definitely a bad idea. Hits too close to home.”

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“Ummm, dying?”

“That’s original.”

“I’m in no position to be taunting the gods, Doctor M. No way.”

“It’ll help you learn a little bit about yourself. Writing one’s own obituary is a fantastic impetus for action. I recommend all my patients do it—even the ones who don’t happen to write them for a living.”

“Ha, ha. But seriously…I can’t do it.”

“Sure you can.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe I don’t want to confront my own mortality?”

That sounded good.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But maybe…just
maybe
…you’re afraid of confronting your own
vitality.
” He pronounced the last word slowly, as if I needed help figuring out how very witty he was. Utterly spent, he leaned back in his big leather chair and folded his hands triumphantly over his belly.

I squirmed on the couch. “Are you going to put that in your next book?” I asked. “It’s pretty cheesy, if you don’t mind me saying so. Oh, but that reminds me—I’ve been meaning to tell you this—since it doesn’t look like I’ll be writing
my
book any time soon, I thought maybe
you
could immortalize me by using me as one of your case studies. Whaddya think?”

“I think you’re using humor to avoid a difficult topic.”

“…maybe something like, ‘Holly H., moderately insane twenty-eight-year-old brunette with flat hair and obsessive-compulsive tendencies including but not limited to a fear of free-falling anvils and severe stove-checkitis?’ That would be fine with me, if you want. And maybe you could also mention that I’m cute and not currently seeing anyone.”

He smiled broadly. “Is it really any wonder why?”

Even my own shrink didn’t think I was relationship material.

“Careful…” I told him. “I know you have a son, and I know he’s single. You don’t want me looking him up now, do you?”

“He doesn’t go for pretend-crazy, Holly. He prefers the real
thing,” he said without skipping a beat. “And if you want me to use you as a case study, you’re going to have to give me a little more than just garden-variety phobias and general wishy-washiness. Not if it’s going to be a page-turner.”

“I’m sorry my misery bores you, Doctor M.”

“Not always. Have you had any more poodle fantasies lately?”

“Huh?”

“Oh…sorry,” he said, flipping back through his pad. “That was my eleven o’clock.”

Nice. How could I beat that?

“I do have a recurring nightmare about Phil Collins. I think it might be sexual. Does that help?”

“Not so much, no.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

Dr. David Martindale is a very well-respected and widely published psychologist on the self-help circuit, and I was lucky to count myself among his patients. Still, I wasn’t so sure it was going to work out between us. The butterflies were gone, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah, so I’m a therapy junkie. I’ve been to twelve different psychologists and psychiatrists over the past five years and I’ll make no apologies for it. I see the entire mental health profession as a sort of sanity buffet from which I can pick and choose what I like and pass over the rest. The breadth of my phobias and anxieties demands a holistic approach.

Hmmm…

Okay. So maybe I’m making it sound a
little
worse than it actually is. I am in fact quite a normal person. A normal person who simply has no luck with men, feels underappreciated at work and whose self-esteem just so happens to be in free fall at the moment. That’s the problem, I guess. I figure if I keep digging a little deeper, I’ll find something fascinating behind my averageness. Something less mundane than the
truth, which is that growing up being relentlessly teased by my three older brothers and for the most part ignored by my beaten-down parents has turned me into one of those self-deprecating panicky types looking for love and appreciation in all the wrong places.

I know it may seem self-indulgent on the surface, since I don’t have any
real
problems to speak of, but therapy has changed my life. It has helped me learn who I am—privately quirky, a little bit dark, but ultimately hopeful—and imparted to me the gift of self-awareness. You see, monitoring my own thoughts and feelings saves me from the thing I fear the most: Limping through life like a mindless automaton. The woman in the gray flannel suit. The lovesick puppy dog. The enthusiastic imbiber of cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid.

The problem, I’m beginning to realize, is that all this heightened consciousness comes at a price. When you finally start to see yourself as the universe sees you—one of roughly six billion ants living beneath a perpetually upraised foot—desperation and apathy cannot be far behind. So, to take the sting off the inexorable march to the grave, I sometimes enlist the services of other ants with medical prefixes to help me turn my frown upside down.

I’m currently involved with two therapists. They don’t know about each other, but I’m thinking of telling Berenice about Doctor M., just to spice things up. Since she sees all psychiatrists and even most psychologists as pill-pushing whores in cahoots with evil pharmaceutical conglomerates, it’ll give her some incentive to come up with something a little more inspired than Saint-John’s-wort and a bubble bath, those panaceas of the antiProzac set.

Despite my misgivings about Martindale’s commitment to the seriousness of my complaints—I had to admit that his obituary exercise sounded a lot more promising than Berenice’s solution (which involved some sort of birth reen
actment), so I decided to throw caution to the wind and give the obituary thing a shot. There was just too much junk swirling around in my mind, and it seemed like a decent way to start clearing it out.

As I reread the news of my passing, one possible path laid out before me, I have to wonder: What would it take to rewrite this life? Defined by one horrible crime and faced with years of boredom and loneliness and regret on death row, John Michael Whitney clung hopefully to his pine cones and glitter glue. I’m sure, in his own mind, he saw himself not only as a murderer, but as an artist, with something positive to offer the world. But what about me? Is there anything out there to redeem
my
existence, before it’s too late?

The prospect of emerging from Berenice’s giant plastic womb a brand-new person suddenly sounds a whole lot easier than figuring that out.

Writer’s Block

E
ven though I knew George was probably busy—Fridays being the day she rips the covers off mercifully unsold fantasy novels at the Book Cauldron and sends them back to the publishers—I called and asked her to meet me for an emergency lunch. I calmly explained that if she didn’t come and rescue me from myself, I was bound to dash immediately across the street and buy seventeen cartons of cigarettes, after which I would be only too happy to ditch work and spend the rest of the afternoon in the park, smoking one after the other until there was nothing left of me but a bit of charred lung and one diamond earring. (I’d lost the other last week, and was hoping that the remaining stud, in its loneliness, might magnetically guide me to its partner’s hiding place.)

“Why all the doom and gloom?” George asks as she plops down into the booth.

“Look, you know me,” I say. “I’m an optimist.”

“Mmm, I wouldn’t say that. You’re too superstitious.”

“Fine. Then I’m a
guarded
optimist….”

“More of a fatalist, I’d say. But a cheery fatalist.”

“George! Just listen. The point is, I think I’m losing my grip on happy thoughts. Something’s got to be done.” I pull the tattered obituary out of my purse and slide it across the table.

“What’s this?”

“Just read it,” I tell her, exhaling dramatically.

As she does, I signal the waitress. “I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger, a double order of fries, and a Jack and Coke.”

She looks up from her pad and pushes her sliding glasses back up her nose with her pencil. “We don’t have a liquor license here, ma’am.”

Nice. The one day when I could really use a bit of liquid lunch.

“Fine. Make it a milkshake, then. Chocolate.”

“I’ll have the Nicoise salad,” George says. “With the dressing on the side, and no potatoes. Oh, and are there anchovies on the salad?”

The waitress nods.

“Were they packed in oil?”

“I would say so, miss.”

“Hey!” I interrupt. “Why is she a miss and I’m a ma’am?” The nerve.

They stare at me blankly, then return to the business at hand. “Well, then forget the anchovies,” George tells her. “No, wait. Keep them. No wait! It depends on the tuna. Was that packed in oil?”

“I don’t know,
miss.
”

George is utterly confounded. “What should I do?” she asks me.

I shrug.

“How about I just bring you a nice green salad?” The waitress suggests.

“Okay,” George smiles, relieved. “Oh, and a Diet Coke. With a wedge of lime.”

The waitress shakes her head and shuffles off in her sensible orthopedic shoes.

“Dressing on the side!” George calls after her. “God. That was close. Which do you think are worse—carbs or saturated fats?”

“Are you kidding? I have no idea,” I say impatiently, motioning for her to keep on reading. In the meantime, I snack on my fingernails.

As soon as she finishes, she reads it again, then ponders for a minute or two. “I think you’re nuts. Why did you write this? Didn’t you say you’d never do your own?”

“Yeah, but Doctor M. said it would help me see where my life is going, give a voice to my hidden fears and then identify new goals for myself.”

“And the problem is…what exactly? You’re afraid you’ll never have a cat? ’Cause if that’s it, we can get you a cat. I think there might even be a sign up at the store. Black kittens or something…”

“Ha, ha,” I manage weakly.

“Look, Holly. If you’re for real about this…”

“I am. I
so
am. Help me.”

George nods seriously. “Okay. Where to begin? Well, I guess everyone’s afraid of dying…”

“I’m not afraid of dying,” I tell her. “I’m afraid of dying
alone.
I’m afraid my life will have meant nothing to anybody.”

“I get it, I get it.” She thinks about it for a second, then adds, “Look. It’s okay to want to change your life, to write a book or whatever. It’s okay to want a better job. Work on that. Fine. But you’re afraid of being single? Come on. That’s so…mundane.”

“I know. But all of a sudden I can’t help it. I just never thought my life would turn out like that. And looking back over my eighty-five years—what did I really contribute?
Nothing!
God, what a waste! And I had so much love to give…
so much love to give…!
”

My throat tightens and my ears begin to ache. I flash back to Dr. Pink, a self-styled “lacrimal therapist” from a few years back whose clinical methodology involved systematically reducing her patients to tears. She believed that public crying was not a sign of weakness and emotional instability, but rather a healthy purging of inner turmoil and a sacred statement of communal trust to be celebrated by anyone fortunate enough to witness it. But I hated crying—here, there, anywhere. No wonder Pink only lasted three sessions.

I gulp back the tears, but George is unimpressed. “Okay, first of all, Holly, you’re still alive. All right? You didn’t die single. You didn’t even die. For God’s sake, you’re only twenty-eight. So it’s not like you can say your life ‘turned out’ like anything, because you haven’t even lived it yet.”

“Exactly,” I whimper.

“Huh?”

“I’ve got to
do
something, G. Before it’s too late.”

“So do something. Take action, girl!”

“But what? That’s the problem.”

“Why don’t you just try to write something?”

Just what I need to hear. “You write,” I snap, a little too cruelly. It’s a sore point for her. George has been working on the same
Star Trek
screenplay since our second year at Erie. By the time she gets around to finishing it, the actors who play the characters will all have boldly gone into retirement.

She twirls a dark and frizzy curl around her finger and stares down at the table.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re absolutely right. I should try. I really should. But…but you know how hard it can be. It’s like,
I work all day, and I finally get home and the last thing I want to do is stare all night at another screen.”

She snorts.

“TV doesn’t count.” Just try and come between me and my set.

The waitress delivers our meals and leaves before I can complain.

“This is wrong,” I whisper, knowing George will forgive me if I can make her laugh. “Didn’t I ask for chocolate? What’s the point of vanilla? Who would want a vanilla shake? It’s the complete antithesis of chocolate—it’s the absence of flavor!”

The waitress glances over at me from the cash with a dour look.

“You want me to get her back?” George giggles as she wrings every last drop of flavor from the lime wedge into her Diet Coke.

“Don’t you dare!” She knows I am deathly afraid of incurring the wrath of food-service persons. They have so much power. Complain one too many times and God only knows what might find its way into your tuna-salad sandwich.

“You’ve seen too many
Datelines,
” she informs me as I sullenly drink my shake.

“Hidden cameras will be America’s new conscience in the twenty-first century,” I say between slurps. Vanilla isn’t so bad, really.

“Now
there’s
a topic worth exploring….”

I’ve spent the past five years trying to come up with a great idea for my book, and George is always trying to help.

“Naw, it’s already been done.”

Since September 11th, countless writers have taken fear and ignorance to the bank, but I feel that people are ready for happier thoughts, instead of just another paranoid title like
The Osama Next Door,
or
Nine Legal Ways to Watch Your
Nanny
, or
Why Vegetables Cause Cancer
. Unfortunately, though, thoughtful critiques of consumer-health alerts and diatribes decrying the end of privacy have also been done to death. But what if I incorporated those themes into a novel?
Hmmm…
It just might be crazy enough to work.

“Holly?”

…a sort of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
meets
1984
meets
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution…

“Holly? Hello?” George snaps her fingers.

“Sorry,” I mumble, and promptly lose my train of thought. Ideas for my book are so exquisitely rare and delicate that the mere act of remembering them crushes their goodness into oblivion. I’ve all but resigned myself to the impossibility of writing a single word.

“You just need a little inspiration.”

“How can I get inspired when all I do is work, come home, watch TV and boink the bike messenger?”

Oops.

“Aw, tell me you’re kidding! You
didn’t!
Not again! Ew!”

“I did,” I reluctantly admit.

“But he’s so…he’s so…”

“Gross? It’s okay. You can say it. I know he is.”

“I knew I should have come over last night. You’re not to be trusted. How many times do I have to tell you? Holly Hastings
good.
Bicycle boy
bad.
”

“I was working late, and he was there picking something up….”

“Mmm-hmm…”

“Look, I finally finished the piece about that new parking lot on Broadway and I wanted to celebrate! Is that so wrong?” Very occasionally, when they tired of my constant begging for assignments or felt a hint of guilt after turning down yet another one of my story proposals, one of the editors will ask me to fill a few very unimportant inches, usually
sandwiched on some back page between the calls to tender and the previous day’s corrections.

She peers at me skeptically. By now, George has long since inhaled her salad and has moved on to eating her dressing-on-the-side with a spoon.

“Well, I was home alone, and would have been delighted to go out for a drink.”

“Umm…didn’t you have that coven thing with your mom last night?” As the product of a mixed lesbian marriage, George was half Wiccan, half Jewish.

“Oh please, Holly.”

It was worth a shot. I knew full well that the next Wiccan day of worship wasn’t until the fall equinox.

“Okay, so maybe I just needed to be held.”

“But by Jean-Jean?”

“What can I say? I’m pathetic,” I groan. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You’re just a lonely, lonely woman. You know, I bet if you found a job you liked better, everything else would fall into place. And one that uses FedEx instead of that shitty messenger service.”

Oh, if only it were that simple.

“There’s nothing really wrong with my job. I can think of at least a half dozen people who would kill to work there. It’s me, G.I know it is! It’s like all of a sudden, I’m so bloody bored and frustrated and negative about it that I don’t know what to do with myself. And it’s not like I’d be able to find something better in Buffalo, anyway… I’d have to move to New York for that, and God knows that would be a little more than I could handle right now! Besides, I’d rather be at the
Bugle
even if there’s no chance of me ever getting promoted to anything,
ever,
than at some boring software company or bank writing internal newsletters. My job’s fine. It’s me that isn’t!”

“Well, that’s a relief. Because frankly, just being bored at work isn’t a good enough reason to drive you into the arms of Jean-Jean.”

“I’m teetering on the brink!” I shriek. “I’m playing Russian roulette with my love life…. God! I must be
insane.
Who knows what else I’m capable of!?”

She nods sympathetically and glances around to see if my ranting is disturbing any of the other patrons. “I know, Holly. It sucks.”

But there’s no stopping me. “You know, up until a couple of years ago, everything was fine…. I liked work. I was proud of my job. Yeah, I was! I learned something new every day, even if it was just useless stuff like how much Sabres tickets were going for, or how to spell the names of rare diseases. And you know what else? I was even able to write. Not that I always did, mind you, because usually I didn’t, but I could, you know? When I wanted to…”

“Calm down. I remember. There was that short story about the big empty house with all the locked doors and the kid with the key-shaped fingers. It was very
Twilight Zone.
You could have submitted that somewhere, you know. It was good.
Really
good.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Maybe I should have written a whole book of short stories,” I sigh. “It was totally my genre.”

“Still could be.”

“Don’t you ever just feel like things used to be better in general? Like weekends. Weekends used to be so much fun, remember? Clubbing Fridays
and
Saturdays. Sometimes even Thursdays. Waiting in line at Blaze all night. Who cares if we even got in? That was fun! Why don’t we ever do that anymore?”

“Blaze burned down. And I think you might be roman
ticizing things a little…. We mostly just got drunk at McGinty’s. There was never any lineup there.”

I laugh. “Probably because there were no doors on the stalls in the bathroom. What a dive! Still, it was great, wasn’t it? But now whenever we go somewhere, I feel like everyone’s five years younger than me and five times hotter and has better clothes and better jobs. Don’t you find?”

“Um, this is still Buffalo we’re talking about. You may very well have one of the best jobs in town,” she points out. “And
nobody
has good clothes.”

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Except you,” she corrects herself.

“Thanks. But I have to buy everything over the Internet because you can’t find so much as a Louis Vuitton key fob in this town, not that I can afford one, anyway. I
hate
Buffalo, I feel like I’m over the hill at twenty-eight and…oh, screw it—I’m just going to say it. I want a boyfriend! I know it’s wrong, but I want a boyfriend. I want to be in love.
So
badly. It’s pathetic, I know, but I’m ready for my man. I really am. I’m tired of being above it all.”

George stares at me blankly. I’ve broken a sacred secret contract, and admitted That Which Should Never be Admitted by enlightened twenty-first-century women.

“Don’t look at me like that.”