Holly and Her Naughty eReader (3 page)

“Wow…it’s been years since--”

 
“I really don’t want to drop acid tonight,” I
said. “I was just thinking about that play.”

We drove in silence for a
moment, then Vivian said, “I’m sorry things didn’t work out with your fiancée.”

I should pause here to make note
of another distinguishing characteristic of my generation. We are the first to
have an utterly meaningless high school reunion—a fact that occurred to me with
Vivian’s condolence for my breakup. It was only a few years ago that you could
go to your high school reunion and actually, you know, reunite. Now, thanks to
Facebook, we all know everything about everyone.

A week after I found Derek in
bed with…
her
…I changed my
relationship status to single. Facebook, being evil, posted that status change
to my page for me, and that was that. I got fifty little frowny faces mixed in
with some
oh no’s
and some
sorry sweetie’s
in the comments of that
status change, and I’m certain that day there were a hundred private Facebook
chats among my friends where word got out of how it all went down.

“Well…” I said, “that’s just…”

I couldn’t finish my sentence
because my mind drew up a fun fantasy that, being drunk, I had to indulge at
that very moment. In this fantasy, I saw a picture of Derek and his little
slut, caught together in bed, posted on Facebook. If I had been thinking
clearly that day, I wouldn’t have wasted any time throwing the engagement ring
at him. Instead I would have pulled out my phone and taken a picture.

“That’s just life?” Vivian said.
“Is that what you were going to say? Because that’s not just life. That’s crap
is what that is. How long were you together?”

There she went again. Vivian,
asker of direct questions. Had she hit me with this when I was sober I might
have shut it down and said there was no reason to talk about it, but the booze
I’d downed at the reunion made me friendly and open.

“Six years,” I said. “Derek and
I were together for six years.”

“And he cheated on you,” Vivian
said.

“Yep.”

Vivian turned left onto San
Mateo Boulevard.

“Some men are just fuckers, you
know?” she said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“I mean…you gave him six years
of your life,” Vivian said. “When he cheated, he wasn’t just disrespecting you
as a person, he was disrespecting your time. For years you wait around for
someone, and he knows you’re waiting on him, he’s stringing you along, acting
like everything’s cool and all this waiting is worth your time, and all the
while he’s doing someone else. It’s such shit.”

“It sounds like you’ve got your
own story to tell,” I said.

“I’ve had a few men string me
along,” said Vivian. “Nothing like your story, but enough to know how it
works.”

We drove a few blocks and she turned
right on Central Avenue.

“You’re not taking me downtown
are you?” I said.

“No, I’m not taking
you
downtown,” Vivian said. “I’m taking
us
downtown. And it’s gonna be a great
time.”

Twenty minutes later we were on
Albuquerque’s little downtown party strip, where two adventurous ladies could
hop between a dozen bars all within walking distance of each other.

At the Anodyne we played pool
with some hipsters. At Burt’s Tiki Lounge we had Mai Tai’s while some kids
barely older than my students flirted with us. At The Launchpad we drank Cosmos
and listened to some band called Dirty Carburetor (they were awful).

Our final bar of the night was
the Downtown Distillery, where we stumbled into a booth at 1:30 in the morning
and ordered two beers. The music here was low enough that we could talk, and
our conversation drifted back to my failed relationship with Derek. This time I
gave Vivian the complete story, starting at the educator conference where I met
him and continuing through his rise up the ranks of the Dallas Public Schools,
from history teacher to assistant principle to city councilman.

“It was all kind of thrilling,”
I said, “and I was so sure he was the one. He was handsome and well-spoken and
a gentleman and he treated me like his trophy wife. Once he won the council
seat we started hanging out with all the local power players. We had lunch with
the mayor, we played tennis with a news anchor and her husband, we went to
black tie charity galas, and everybody treated me like a queen when they found
out I was a high school teacher. To these people, I was everything that was
right with the world. It really was a great time, and I was having so much fun
I was totally oblivious to what was happening between Derek and Marianne.”

“Ah, so now she has a name,” Vivian
said. “Tell me more about Marianne. I can already tell she’s a world class
bitch.”

“Marianne was a volunteer on
Derek’s city council campaign,” I said. “A nineteen-year-old volunteer.”

Vivian shook her head in
disgust.

“And before she was a volunteer
on Derek’s campaign, she was a student in his class,” I said.

“No!” Vivian gasped. “He cheated
on you with a student?”

“A former student. She had Derek
for U.S. history when she was a junior in high school. When I caught them naked
in bed together, she was a freshman at U.T. Dallas.”

“So she was legal,” said Vivian,
clearly upset that I wasn’t able to catch Derek in an act of statutory rape.

“Yep. Legal and hot and a total
slut. I should be thankful, really. Were it not for Marianne, I would have
married that prick.”

“Well then,” said Vivian,
raising her glass. “To Marianne, the slut who saved you.”

“To Marianne,” I said, then
downed the last drink of the night.

Neither of us was in a condition
to drive home, so we got in a cab at two in the morning.

“You have any more party in you
tonight, or are you done?” Vivian asked me as the cab drove east on Central.

“Neither,” I said. “I want
pancakes.”

“Pancakes?”

“I can’t help it. My friend
Natalie always takes me to IHOP after a night drinking.”

Vivian laughed. “Okay. But I
can’t do IHOP. That place grosses me out.”

“Village Inn?” I said.

“No greasy spoons,” said Vivian.
“If you want pancakes, you’re coming to my house and I’m making you some.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes! My sister brought me a
gallon of maple syrup from Connecticut last month and I need an excuse to use
it. Besides, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Meet someone at your house?
Vivian, it’s awfully late to--”

“No more questions,” Vivian
said. “You’ll see when you get there.”

She had the cab driver take us
to a one-story brick house in Albuquerque’s Southeast Heights. Vivian fumbled
with her keys and dropped them twice before she was able to get the front door
unlocked, and, drunk as we were, we thought this was the funniest thing ever.

The giggle-fest continued as we
stepped inside and Vivian knocked over a lamp and left us tripping over each
other in the dark. By the time Vivian got a light on, I was sprawled on the
carpet, laughing like a hyena. And then laughing like a quiet hyena. And then a
quiet baby hyena. And then a sleeping baby hyena.

Awww….I’m a little baby hyena.

I woke up from my little hyena
doze to see a man with curly black hair and a familiar face standing above me.

“Viv? What’s going on?” he said.
He was wearing Superman pajamas. Oh Lord can I tell you how thrilling it was
for me to see him in Superman pajamas. “Who is…”

He didn’t finish his last
question because, even though I was on my back and making a total ass of
myself, even though he hadn’t seen me for ten years, the man recognized me.

“Holly, is
that you?” the man said.

I looked at
him, wondering if that last drink had taken me too far and I was hallucinating.
Even though I knew right away who this man was, it took me a minute to say
anything. I had to be absolutely certain.

So I stared at
his face for a moment. I allowed it to age backwards in my mind, to shrink and
unwrinkle and go back to the eighteen-year-old version that I remembered.

Yep, it was
him.

“Max Brody,” I
said. “How the hell are you?”

Then I broke
into a fit of laughter.

Chapter 4

Vivian helped me up from the
ground, with all the tripping, dizziness, and giggling you’d expect from two
gals in our state.

“How much have you all had to
drink?” Max said.

“How many pancakes does it take
to fill the Empire State Building?” was my response. It was a question I’d
heard on the last day of spring semester. Two of my students were playing an
oddly entertaining game where they had to ask each other obscure, random
questions, as fast as they could. Other questions I remember hearing from that
game were:
Why do kids love cheap Easter
crap?
and
What is your second
favorite kind of tree?

The kids spat out the questions
in rapid fire fashion, not taking any time to think, just saying the first
random, odd thing that came to mind. It was a funny game, and I was in the mood
for fun, so I spat out my own random question, this one directed at Max.

“Why did you stand me up ten
years ago?”

Silence. Max looked at me with
curiosity, like I was an animal at the zoo.

“I’m sorry, what?” he said.

“Pancakes!” Vivian said. “That’s
why we’re here!”

She went up to Max and put her
hand on his chest. “You go back to bed. Sorry we woke you.”

And then she kissed him on the
lips.

What the hell was going on? Max
and Vivian were….how come I didn’t know about….

“Max, I thought I saw on…”

That was all I got out. Even
inebriated, I knew better than to try and figure out what was happening right
now. I was about to say to Max,
I thought
I saw on Facebook, cause you know, I profile stalk you plenty, that you married
a black woman and had two cute little mixed race babies.

But clearly whatever I thought
was wrong. Not unless the guy who stood me up ten years ago was a polygamist in
Superman pajamas and the black woman I thought was his wife was about to join
us for pancakes and invite me to be Wife #3.

“Holly, it was good to see you
again. I assume you’ll be sleeping here tonight. Have Vivian show you where the
bathroom is. Good night.”

As Max left, I turned to Vivian
and said in an obnoxiously loud whisper, “What the fuck was that all about?”
which, in that moment, was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

It wasn’t until we were in the
kitchen, with pancakes in our bellies and a mess of batter all over the stove
and counter, that we were sober enough to work through what just happened.

“Max just wrapped up a nasty
divorce,” Vivian said. “Left him totally broke. I told him he could crash here
until he was back on his feet.”

“But…you kissed him.”

“Yeah, I don’t think he was
planning on things going there, but I have to confess that I was,” said Vivian
proudly. “The minute I heard he was available I pounced on that shit. I called
him up and offered my shoulder to cry on. We started having regular meetups at
the Starbucks on Central. One thing led to another, and when the time was
right, I asked him to move in. He gets a year as my roommate while his family
figures out I’m more than a rebound girlfriend. Then I’m closing this deal.”

“Is that so?” I said.

“Hell yeah it is,” said Vivian.
“Max is a real find and I intend to keep him. His first wife was a grade-A
screeching banshee bitch and he was lucky to get away from her. I’ve let too
many good men pass me by because I was focused on my career. This one’s mine.”

“Well alright then,” I said,
thinking I’d keep my own story about Max Brody and a solo afternoon at the ice
skating rink to myself.

“You’re judging me,” Vivian
said. “I can tell.”

“I promise you I’m not,” I said.
“I think it’s all good, and even if I didn’t, I’m not in a position to be
judging anyone.”

Vivian took a swig from her
water glass. She stared off into space for a second, then she said, “Do you
ever feel like the women of our generation got duped?”

“How do you mean?”

“Think about it, Holly. You and
I both graduated near the top of the class. We had the whole world telling us
we could do anything we wanted so long as we played by the rules, and what are
the rules?”

“I have no idea what the rules
are. Maybe I’d be doing better if I did.”

“The rules are: go to college,
get good grades, go to grad school, get a good job, don’t date a loser, and
don’t get knocked up,” Vivian said.

“Good to know,” I said. “I
almost nailed all of them. Unfortunately, I messed up on the don’t date a loser
part.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered, Holly.
It’s all a lie. You and I and all our peers are living the dreams of our
mothers. They saw themselves as crusaders for women’s rights, as guardians of
the feminine mystique, and drilled into us that the world was ours to have so
long as we didn’t let some selfish, lazy, evil man take it away. They saw their
own marriages and children as shackles that held them down and were certain
that we, their daughters, needed to put our careers first to avoid their
mistakes.”

I thought about my own mother,
who did in fact marry a selfish, lazy, evil man, and spent the better part of
her adult life recovering from that mistake.

“But they didn’t think it
through,” Vivian continued. “I did exactly what my mother wanted. I got a
degree in French literature, I went to law school, I clerked for a federal
judge, I make 80 grand a year, and I’m on pace to become full partner by the
time I’m forty.”

“Wow. Eighty grand?”

“A third of it goes to the
student loans,” Vivian said. “Debt slavery is part of the lie.”