Wallflower In Bloom (10 page)

When we got to my house, I invited him in. My mother was baking chocolate chip cookies. Then Joanie wandered into the kitchen and never left.

By that weekend, she had a date with him.
Don’t look at me
, she said when I threatened to kill her.
He told me you were just friends
.

Freshman year in college, I stood in line on Sundays to call my parents collect from one of three dorm phones. I drifted, rudderless, not sure who I was without being wedged in between my siblings. I switched majors twice. The next year I switched dorms. I made friends and had boyfriends, lovers even. When we graduated, two friends and I landed jobs in Denver. I had a boyfriend named Ethan, and we hiked and climbed and went river rafting together. Still, my homesickness was like a low-grade fever. Maybe a childhood spent being a conduit for my siblings had left me without the ability to thrive when I pulled the plug.

After a year, I moved home and barely left the beach for a month. Being near the ocean was soothing. The rhythm of the sea felt like home. It was as close to climbing back into the womb as I could get without completely humiliating myself.

I stayed in the area and worked a series of dead-end local jobs and dated a series of dead-end local guys while Tag’s star began its meteoric rise. When he hired me to be his PA, it actually worked for a while. It was fast-paced and every day was different. I was good at it, and even reflected glory can be intoxicating. Nothing was ever enough for Tag, though. Before long my job had swallowed most of my life, and what was left I’d squandered away on Mitchell, whom I’d just begun to date.

I loved denial—it was warm and cuddly like a favorite childhood blankie—but standing here now, sweats rolled down over my hips, I forced myself to push it away and look at the facts. I’d spent the last decade in and out of a dead-end relationship as I worked seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day at a job that made me disappear bit by bit on the inside, as I bulked up inch by inch on the outside.

I shook my head to clear away the past and turned to take in the depths of my walk-in closet. Some women arrange their clothes by season: winter-spring-summer-fall or spring-summer-fall-winter. Others do it by color: lightest to darkest or darkest to lightest or even
whites here, blacks here, and colors over there. Some just cram everything in wherever it will fit.

I had a system, too, though I was pretty sure I’d never acknowledged it before, even to myself. My closet was arranged by size: Now, Not That Long Ago, Once Upon a Time, Never Again, and In Your Dreams. I didn’t even have to check the tags to verify the humiliating range of ever-increasing numerals displayed on them.

I wondered what size I’d be when I’d finally had enough.

Let go of the past and go let the future in
.

O
kay, so mixing a drink was probably not the best next move. It was definitely five-thirsty somewhere in the world, but we still had a few hours to go in this neck of the woods. And I wasn’t really even that much of a drinker. If I were to get all Dr. Phil, the truth was that food was my drug of choice. I ate to self-medicate, to soothe and calm myself, to distract me from my troubles.

Then I drank to give the food something to absorb. Or possibly because I got tired of all that chewing. Or maybe to me alcohol was like a fork-free version of dessert.

I had to admit that boozewise, I leaned toward the sweet stuff. Baileys Irish Cream, frozen strawberry daiquiris, Kahlúa sombreros, piña coladas. And I also had to admit that right now I could have killed for a bottle of ChocoVine.

Killed
made me think of golf carts and Mitchell and marriage and some other woman having my baby. I tried to conjure up an image of an ugly little Tweety Bird–headed infant in smelly diapers to make myself feel better, but it didn’t help all that much.

And then I started thinking about Steve Moretti again. Which made me realize I hadn’t checked my cell phone since I’d turned it off when I climbed into the town car at Lake Austin Spa Resort. There
might actually be a message on it from Steve. Wasn’t there an old saying about how letting go of one thing made room in your life for something better? If there wasn’t an old saying like that, there really should be.
Let go of the past and go let the future in
. It wasn’t the most brilliant chiasmus I’d ever come up with, but I could work with it.

But then again, there might not be a message on my cell from Steve, and even if there was, it might not necessarily be something I’d actually want to hear. And there sure as hell would be lots of angry text messages and voice mails from Tag, and possibly from my parents, as well as about a zillion Tag-related messages I’d have to decide whether or not to deal with. I mean, I’d quit, but had I really
quit
?

So basically what it came down to was that I was simply too tired and beaten down to handle turning on my phone without a little fortification. And for the first time in my life I could remember, I was too wiped out to feel like eating.

So that left liquid reinforcement. I clomped back down the steep stairs to the lower level of my sheep shed, turning sideways because the treads were so narrow you couldn’t get your whole foot on them. I opened my tiny refrigerator to inspect the contents. I’d grabbed a few bottles of wine from Tag’s wine fridge, and also a bottle of some fancy shmancy Russian vodka he kept in his freezer. I usually made it a point to stay away from the triple-digit-proof stuff, but it looked so cold and refreshing I’d snagged it anyway. I’d also taken some chocolate soy milk that Afterwife had started carrying, mostly because I liked the old-fashioned glass milk bottle it came in. I’d had a vague idea that after I drank the milk I’d use the bottle for a vase to hold the flowers I was going to pick from one of my brother’s gardens to make myself feel better.

I leaned my head against the refrigerator door as a new revelation hit me. If I’d really quit, I couldn’t even ask my ex-sisters-in-law if they’d let me in on Afterwife, maybe take over the marketing end of the business.
Because I’d never been a wife
. If Mitchell somehow
managed to die from his golf cart injuries, I wouldn’t even get the street cred of being his widow. His pregnant bride-to-be would be his almost-widow.

I’d be nothing.

I dug out my blender and slammed it down on the counter. I shoveled in some big scoops of the Ben & Jerry’s Triple Caramel Chunk ice cream I’d grabbed at Tag’s, then buried it in chocolate soy milk. I opened the bottle of pretentious vodka and filled the blender right to the tipitty top. I knew the proportions were off, but at the moment, I didn’t really give a triple caramel shit.

“Let the pity party begin,” I said.

I curled up on my loveless love seat in my tiny great room. I thought about starting a fire in the little fireplace and burning my pitiful underpants one by one, but I was afraid all that scorched elastic might set off the smoke alarms. So I turned on the TV instead.

I lucked out and found a
Mary Tyler Moore Show
rerun. Growing up, I’d watched the show religiously with my family on Saturday nights, long before I understood what it meant to be a single woman who knew she needed to move away when a long-term relationship ended.

It wasn’t just any episode I’d stumbled upon, but Season 1, Episode 1, “Love Is All Around.” Mary has just moved to Minneapolis when her neighbor Phyllis butts in and invites Mary’s old boyfriend Bill to visit. Bill is a doctor and such a jerk that he even brings Mary flowers he stole from a patient’s hospital bedside. Finally,
finally
Mary gets up the courage to tell him good-bye for good. When he leaves, she tears up and tells herself how lucky she is to be rid of him.

I wiped my eyes as the credits rolled. “I’m really lucky, too, Mary,” I said. “I’m so lucky.”

I took a long drink from my tall glass. It was like the world’s most incredible milk shake. The vodka had completely disappeared into the rich, sweet chocolate-covered caramel of the ice cream. Boyohboy,
Ben and Jerry sure knew their stuff. I wondered if one of them was single.

I drained my glass and shivered as the Russian vodka hit my brain. American men could mail-order Russian brides—who knew, maybe if I placed an ad, a Russian man would order me. Totally cracking myself up, I took a moment to laugh, then clicked off the TV. I picked up the glass again and tucked my cell under my armpit on the same side. I took the handful of steps required to get to the kitchen and grabbed the blender off the counter with my other hand. Then I worked my way back up the steep stairs, occasionally putting the blender down and leaning on it for balance. I decided my next house would be a single story ranch in the south of France. And I was a poet and I didn’t even know it.

I threw my phone on the comforter I’d been meaning to replace for at least two years and put the blender down carefully on the table at my side of the bed. Wait a minute. I didn’t even like this side of the bed. Ten years ago Mitchell had claimed the other side. And I’d let him. But they were both my sides of the bed now.

I moved the blender over to the table on Mitchell’s former side, just because I could, and poured myself another glass of frosty heaven. I wondered if Ben and Jerry would be open to expanding with a line of soy-and-vodka-based ice-cream drinks. Frosty the Snowsoyshake? Shake, Rattle, and Drink? As soon as I had a good night’s sleep, maybe I’d pitch them. I mean, my time working for Tag certainly qualified as product development, so I had plenty of experience.

I took a long rejuvenating drink. And another. Those Russians sure knew their vodka. Then I decided I’d cruise the Internet for a little while, catch up on the state of the world, and work up to the messages on my cell phone. My laptop was all the way over on the little desk on the other side of the room, which was starting to feel like a long, long way to go just to catch up on the state of the world, but its larger
screen seemed like a good thing right about now, and I had to pee anyway, so if I made it all part of one loop, then it made sense.

I should have gone to the bathroom before I picked up the laptop, but I didn’t think of that until I got to the bathroom. But no worries, I just put the laptop on the floor. When I bent down to pick it up again, I got a little bit wobbly. Lack of sleep and those damn time zone changes will do it to you.

As soon as I got back to my bed, I was okay again. It was like my bed was this great big soft fluffy life raft, and I was just floating around in the middle of the ocean. The water could be teeming with sharks and stingrays and idiot boyfriends and guru brothers who could suck the life out of you, but as long as I stayed right here, nothing could touch me.

I fired up my laptop and opened a news site. I clicked past a bunch of burglaries and shootings and wars and cheating politicians and rising this and shortages of that, looking for a ray of sunshine. I mean, what a world.

A headline jumped out at me: “Celebrity Dancer-to-Be Checks Into Rehab,
Dancing With the Stars
Viewers to Choose Last-Minute Replacement.” A producer from
DWTS
had been trying to get Tag on the show for at least three seasons now. Tag was pretty athletic, but he danced a lot like Elaine on
Seinfeld
, so it had become kind of a family joke. Maybe I didn’t get the pick of the gene pool when it came to some things, but I’d been the best dancer in the family by a long shot.

Oh, how I’d loved to dance when we were kids. And I was good. Everybody said so. Even in my crib, according to my parents, as soon as I’d hear music I’d pull myself up by the rails and start bouncing away in perfect time to it.

I started dance classes at five. I was a fluffy ducky in my first recital. When it was over I refused to take off my scratchy yellow tutu. I even slept in it until it fell apart. By third grade I was so good I was ready
for a double promotion. The teacher moved me into Colleen’s ballet, tap, and modern jazz combo class. I pointed, I tapped, I made jazz hands. I practiced all week on the linoleum floor in the kitchen so I could keep up with the big girls on Saturday mornings.

And then my mother,
my own mother
, talked the teacher into letting Joanie into the same class. Just so she wouldn’t have to spend the whole morning chauffeuring us around to different activities.

“Oh, she’s adorable,” everybody said. And then suddenly Joanie was the family dancer.