The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (27 page)

Except she had stopped going outside. Except the curtains were all drawn on her gorgeous ocean view. Except she kept the lights low, which
made it very hard to see in her living room. Except the TV was always on now, the volume turned up loud enough to be heard as far away as the back bathroom, like Tammy couldn’t bear to be alone with her own thoughts even on the toilet. Except both Tammy’s BlackBerry and her home phone kept on ringing, and she’d check the caller ID, but never bothered to answer it unless it was Risa. Except I suspected that she still hadn’t told her family how sick she was. Except when I suggested we take a walk on the beach lying right outside her building’s back door, Tammy always said, “Not right now.” Except she randomly broke down crying and never wanted to talk about it.

So I started bringing Tammy books: cancer memoirs, spiritual memoirs, books with beautiful heroines who died with their heads held high, romance novels that had nothing to do with cancer to take her mind off her situation.

Tammy thanked me for all these books with a gracious smile, and put them on the end table where she kept her mail. They stayed there, and nothing changed except the height of the stack, because Tammy wasn’t reading them.

I offered to read them with her. “Like a book club,” I said.

Tammy shook her head. “Thank you so much for that offer, but I’m a little tired. Do you mind just watching
Dr. Who
?” Tammy was always tired. She always had an excuse for not doing something. She always only wanted to watch
Dr. Who
.

And I wouldn’t have minded. But while keeping Tammy company on the Saturday night before Halloween, which would fall on a Monday that year, I looked over at Tammy lying on the couch with a scarf wrapped around her head. And as the television blasted and cast a bluish light over my friend’s face, I realized something:

Since beginning my quest to make partner by the end of the year, I myself only went outside to work and to visit Tammy. If one of my programs was on and a friend or family member called, I checked the caller ID but usually didn’t answer it. And though a junior accountant had invited
me to his Halloween party that night, I had turned down his invitation. And that Davie Farrell book that Tammy had given me last year? Well, it was still sitting on my bookshelf unopened.

I myself always felt tired lately. I myself always had an excuse for not doing something. I myself only wanted to watch
Dr. Who
on Saturday nights.

I realized that if I wasn’t with Tammy at that moment, I would be lying on my couch, a scarf around my head, with nothing but the light of a sci-fi show illuminating my night.

But the thing was, I wasn’t dying of cancer.

“I have to go,” I said out loud.

“Okay,” Tammy said. And that was all she said. She didn’t take her eyes off the large flat-screen or ask where I was going, or why it was suddenly so important that I leave now. She just watched the TV, already dead, already not living, because the doctors declared her terminal.

What time did Halloween stores close?
I wondered. The accountant lived in Culver City. Maybe I could pick up a costume on the way there. Maybe I could go as Martha, the first black assistant on
Dr. Who.
Or maybe I could go as an accountant, since I was already wearing a gray suit. So many possibilities. My life, unlike Tammy’s, I realized, was wide open. I could do anything, go anywhere, and, and …

“I don’t want to make partner at my firm,” I said, when Thursday unexpectedly called me in my car a few minutes later. This was how I answered the phone.

“What?” Thursday asked. “What happened?”

“It’s already a lot of work to be a senior accountant. And if I want to take a vacation, I won’t be able to because I’m so busy trying to prove that I deserve to be partner. When you make it out of the hood, people act like it’s your duty to grab the highest possible ring.” Every word I said to Thursday felt like a new fact being downloaded into my head from God above. “But I’m sick of working on Saturdays, and you know what, I really want to take a vacation, Day. Hey, do you want to take a vacation with me?”

Thursday laughed. “Am I still talking to Sharita?
Sharita
-Sharita?”

“Let’s go to Jamaica. Or better yet, Europe. They’ve got great churches over there, right? Let’s go next month as soon as I can get off. How long does it take to get a passport?”

“First of all, it takes more than a month to get a passport, especially this close to Christmas. Second of all, I can’t afford to go with you. I’m unemployed, remember?”

“Oh,” I thought about that. “Then I guess I’m going to have to go by myself. I really want to take a vacation, but I’m not going to loan you money to come with me.”

“Okay,” Thursday said.

“Normally I would, but I don’t think I should be loaning anybody money anymore. It makes me too resentful.”

“I think you’re right about that,” Thursday said, sounding amused.

“I’m serious, Day,” I said. “I hope things work out with you and Caleb, and I hope even more that you set up a rainy-day account with that Mike Barker money like I told you to back in December, just in case things don’t work out with him. But either way, I’m not bailing you out anymore, even if it means you’re going to get mad and stop talking to me again.”

Thursday surprised me by answering, “Okay, that’s fine. I hope you do take that vacation, and I’m proud of you for finally standing up for yourself.”

Now I became confused. “Didn’t you get mad at me before because you didn’t think I was being a good enough friend?”

Thursday sighed. “I’ve just now realized that I wasn’t mad at you for not being a good enough friend. You’re a great friend, and you’ve always been there when it really counted. What made me mad was that you weren’t being a good friend to yourself. Skipping my party in order to hang out with some dude who didn’t respect you or treat you well, you were doing yourself more of a disservice than you were doing me. You’re a great person, and I just want you to manifest that in relationships. Come to things I invite you to or don’t come. I don’t care anymore. Just make sure that if you don’t come, you’re not coming for the right reasons, okay?”

I became overwhelmed with love for my friend, and I couldn’t believe I had wasted a whole eight months being mad at someone who had only ever had my best interests at heart.

“Thursday,” I said. “Thank you. You’re a good friend. I’ve never said that to you, but you know that you’re a good friend, too, right?”

“Thanks, Sharita,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, girl.” And I got off the phone feeling brand new.

THURSDAY

I
should’ve felt all warm and fuzzy when I got off the phone with Sharita; I should have felt like I was telling the truth when I said that I only wanted what was best for her. I should have been so very proud of her for finally growing a backbone and learning to put herself first. I would have liked to have felt all of those things, except in this case it was just really—seriously, I could not stress this “really” hard enough—
really
bad timing. Because less than an hour before Sharita had her epiphany, this was what happened to me:

First of all, Caleb’s and my one-year anniversary had come and gone. He had taken me to Ethiopian Row to eat at Rosalind’s, the same restaurant where we’d had our first date. The food was great, and I loved the fact that we were cool enough to celebrate our anniversary at an unpretentious hole in the wall, but all we did was eat dinner, and then we left.

We had a nice (if a bit perfunctory) round of sex when we got home, and then he kissed me and rolled over. And that had been it. No proposal.

This shouldn’t have upset me. Unlike my parents, who promised to be together forever within six weeks of meeting each other, most people didn’t get engaged before they even knew each other’s middle names. But …

Tammy had never called me back about that job at Farrell Cosmetics, and this weird feeling had begun to dog me as of late. It felt like I should be doing something other than what I was doing. Back in college and grad school, it had always been hard for me to go out to parties with Risa when I had a big assignment due. My homework would nag at me, infringing upon my good time, until I called it a night and finally just returned to my room to do the assignment.

I had been out of grad school for over five years at that point, but for whatever reason, this huge homework-assignment feeling had been looming
over my life, setting me on edge, making it hard for me to be the happy, free-spirited woman I wanted to be for Caleb—who hadn’t asked me to marry him on our anniversary as I thought he would.

But I had no right to be angry, I told myself in the weeks that came after our anticlimatic anniversary dinner. Caleb was still the nicest guy I had ever dated and he’d been supporting me for almost six months at that point. Why couldn’t I just be grateful for that? However, instead of doubling down on my gratitude for having a great boyfriend, the pending-homework feeling grew into a burning sensation in my gut.

Don’t be pathetic, don’t be pathetic, don’t be pathetic!
My mother’s words circled around my head, whenever I thought of bringing up the topic of marriage with Caleb.

Throw yourself off the roof, throw yourself off the roof!
An uglier voice said. If I couldn’t do the homework, it asked, why did I insist on taking up space on this planet?

I didn’t tell Caleb that I was leaving the apartment on the Saturday night before Halloween. He was on the phone with someone—a client, judging from the careful way he spoke. Also, he would have asked me where I was going. My emotions had gotten so thin inside my heart, making it harder to hide the depression. If he’d asked, I might have confessed that I was getting away from him and to low ground, so that I wouldn’t turn
pathetic, pathetic, pathetic,
so that I wouldn’t
throw myself off the roof, throw myself off the roof.

So I left without telling Caleb and walked around downtown. I found it inspiring to walk around an area of town that had been a grocery-storeless pit when I had first moved to Los Angeles in 2006. Back then, no one but homeless people, drug addicts, and the most starving of artists had lived on this block; in other words, only the completely desperate had this address.

But then developers had come in, the Nokia Center had been built, and a grocery store opened. In a surprisingly short time, the area went from
special-ed wallflower to goth girl homecoming princess. It would never be the most popular girl at school like Beverly Hills, or even the most beautiful like the Westside, or the coolest like Silver Lake, but it was starting to make its own kind of splash in the sprawling high school that was Los Angeles.

And at the risk of wearing this metaphor thin, I had taken to roaming the streets outside of our loft in the hopes that I could figure out how to make myself over in the same vein.

Don’t be pathetic! Don’t be pathetic! Throw yourself off a roof!

A good main character, I had learned in grad school, was supposed to have a strong want. But what did I want? I had a great guy already. What else could I possibly ask for?

The answer came to me so suddenly that I stopped in my tracks.

This strong but vague yearning—maybe that’s what it felt like when you were ready for kids. Caleb, I knew, was ready for kids. Though he considered himself a feminist (as nearly all white men who went to liberal arts colleges in the nineties considered themselves to be feminists), his own mother had been a stay-at-home, and he had even hinted once or twice that he wouldn’t mind supporting a wife and kids.

This new road built itself with neat, perfectly straight gray bricks. Like a gift, it laid itself out in front of me. I could see a three-bedroom house in my future, with a yard and a fence. I could see myself being that fun mom who played with my kids and cracked them up with sly jokes. I could, I thought, make myself be happy. I could decide to be grateful for the writing and comedy careers that had gone nowhere, because they had led me to this man who didn’t yell at me, didn’t put me down, and would never embarrass me in front of my daughters by leaving to go out with his mistress every weekend and often not coming home until the next Monday.

Yes, I could see it now. My real future glistened under the bright lights of downtown L.A. And who cared if it was boring? It was mine. And it was real and, unlike day jobs or writing or comedy, motherhood wouldn’t leave me depressed and wanting to kill myself all the time.

I turned around and ran back to the loft, my cheap flip-flops slapping the pavement. Aflame with the need to tell Caleb how much I loved him, I tore up the building’s metal stairs. I was a feminist. I could ask
him
to marry
me
, I realized. Then, when he accepted, I’d let him know how excited I was about our future together, a future in which I wouldn’t be depressed anymore because I would be too busy attending to the important work of motherhood.

“Caleb!” I called as soon as I came in the front door. I jogged over to the office partition, but he was no longer in his workspace. His Sennheiser headphones lay abandoned on his not-quite-vintage art deco desk, with music still bumping out of them.