The Spinster Diaries

by Gina Fattore

  In fact, it’s what she did do.

  No matter how bleak and hopeless things got—no matter how low she fell—she just kept writing.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007

  IT’S OFFICIAL. Indecision over. Second-act problem solved.

  I’m going to have brain surgery.

  I’m going to be brave, suck it up, and do it. I may as well, right? I mean it’s just a little brain surgery.

  It’s not like being trapped in a castle with a mad King, a passive-aggressive Queen, and a tyrannical German boss.

  Or getting jilted by Colonel Digby.

  It’s nothing compared to what the spinsters of the past had to endure. Governessing. Living with their mothers. Falling prey to adventurers, if they were rich. Not falling prey to adventurers, if they weren’t rich. Heck, what I’ve got isn’t even a life-threatening illness, like ovarian cancer, which is the life-threatening illness I totally thought I had for a while there back in January, when I seemed to be losing my shit and crying all the time in the workplace.

  January, it turns out, was my Devastating Setback/Point of No Return (Rule # 20), i.e., the moment when all hope seems lost.

  In retrospect, I should have known that because of the tears—romantic comedy heroines always tend to sob uncontrollably near the end of the movie, usually when they’re all dressed up for some big event. For me, it came not at my best friend’s wedding, a super high-stakes client dinner, or an awards ceremony, but last Friday afternoon at 1:45 p.m. at the radiology place on Wilshire and LaPeer. After all that watching and waiting and scanning and probing—after thirteen months of it—that’s when I finally just lost it and started sobbing uncontrollably in one of their tiny little changing rooms. When the technician lady came to get me, I tried to explain to her, mid-sob, exactly why I was sobbing, but she didn’t seem too fazed by me and all my third-act craziness.

  She was actually the same technician who’d given me two previous ultrasounds, the one in June and the one in January, which was kind of nice, to see a familiar face in that context. Before starting the horrifically painful test, she decided to do another ultrasound—cool, whatever, I’m used to that. But after she did it, she left the room for a very long time (obviously you would edit this part out in the movie version), and I just kept crying and crying, and when she came back, she had this radiologist with her—a silver-haired gentleman in a white lab coat who looked like he should be playing a radiologist in a Woody Allen movie—and he appeared quite visibly annoyed with the crying. You could tell he was totally over it, like, hello, no one wants to see the thirty-eight-year-old wacky best-friend character break down crying, even if it is her Point of No Return. But there really wasn’t much I could do about the crying, and in my defense, I did stop crying when he told me the good news…

  SILVER-HAIRED RADIOLOGIST

  Well, you’re just fine. There’s absolutely nothing here at all.

  Or words to that effect.

  That’s not an exact quote. I mean it is an exact quote from Hannah and Her Sisters, but it’s not what the silver-haired radiologist actually said to me that day, because it was a while ago now and it’s not like I took out a pen and jotted it all down. Basically, he just told me that I was free to go because—voilà, whatever weird thing was abnormal on my last ultrasound wasn’t abnormal anymore. So I just got dressed and went back to the set of Episode 16 for the rest of the day, and I have to say…

  I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to be on the set.

  I didn’t even care that we shot until 2 a.m. that Fraturday night, and if I really did experience a Climactic Moment of Character Growth (Rule # 25) following my Point of No Return, I suppose for the rest of my life I will always enjoy the set. I can see now how it’s not the worst place in the world, especially compared to the radiology place at Wilshire and LaPeer. It’s especially fun if you hang out with the sound guy who always has Altoids or ask the DP for stories about when he used to work on Magnum P.I. Sometimes you have to talk to the actors, but what’s more important, when you’re a writer-producer on a set, is to listen to the actors. Because no matter what age or gender they are, most actors are a lot like teenage girls: they’re inordinately obsessed with their hair, and what they want more than anything else in the world is reassurance from some type of authority figure—someone who seems like she knows what she’s doing. The missing piece of the puzzle I never had before is that I am an authority figure.

  I am a person who seems like she knows what she’s doing.

  Someone who’s brave and tough and bold and confident.

  Someone who’s totally going to have brain surgery. I just pulled the trigger and called the brain surgeon’s office a few minutes ago, and they’re going to get back to me right away with a date. Turns out you only have to give them like two weeks’ notice if you want to have brain surgery. It’s not like getting your hair dyed or your eyebrows tweezed, which has to be scheduled months in advance. My little sister promised to fly in from the Midwest, but until we know the exact date, we can’t get her a plane ticket, so now the only thing left to do is wait. And frankly, I’m used to that. I could watch a little TV, except that over the weekend something went horribly wrong with my TiVo and now I can’t figure out how to hook it all back up, so basically it’s like a huge part of me—everything I ever recorded on that TiVo—is irrevocably lost and can never be recovered.

  An episode of Taxi from 1978 about Angela the fat girl.

  A Bette Davis movie from Turner Classic Movies that isn’t available on DVD.

  Three episodes of a superhero show Arnie Green-blatt wants me to watch because he thinks he can maybe get me a job there when the show I’m on now inevitably gets canceled.

  In an instant, it was all lost, and I’ve got absolutely no way to get it back. Except for Dave, I guess.

  That’s sort of vaguely hopeful, isn’t it?

  Dave did offer to come over some time and fix my TiVo for me, which was totally nice of him, although I’m sure he won’t actually do it because no one in LA ever really does anything they say they’re going to do. It’s just not the LA way. For a long time, I thought I was imagining this phenomenon, but apparently they actually discuss it in the Lonely Planet Guide to Southern California. Comp Lit Guy told me this last year when he took me out for Korean food that resembled weeds. He’d lived all over the world in the fifteen years since college—Siberia, Nepal, Mongolia, the Sichuan province, all over South America—and for a while he was a diplomat in Switzerland; yet before he moved to LA, he still felt compelled to consult the Lonely Planet Guide to Southern California in order to get to a grip on the strange ways and alien customs we have here. He didn’t last long in LA. After a couple months, he moved back to New York, and I can’t say I blame him. I know everyone jokes about it all the time, especially in Woody Allen movies, but I’m starting to think maybe there is something truly awful about LA. Maybe there’s something in the water here? Obviously, it would have to be in the bottled water. Something that makes people lie all the time and constantly say they’re going to do things that they don’t really do.

  Although I swear I really am going to have brain surgery.

  Obviously, yes, there’s a great opportunity here for me to get in one last round of second-guessing. After all, hospitals are terrifyingly germ-filled places, surgeons routinely amputate the wrong limbs, etc., etc., &c. But fuck it, now that I’m past the Point of No Return, it’s far too late to think about all that shit.

  Really.

  Seriously.

  I had to put a thousand-dollar deposit on my Visa card, and I’m pretty sure they won’t give it back if I chicken out.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2007

  ON MY LAST DAY at the office, the winner of the shoe contest offered me a solution to my spinster problem. She didn’t call it that, but we both knew what she meant. She says that if I go to a place called Café Stella in Silver Lake, sit with a book, and have a drink, a guy will come up and talk to me. That�
�s it. That’s the plan for how I would cross over to the other side and become a full-time, non-spinster resident of GirlWorld—the kind of girl who has Love Interests and goes on dates. It’s simple. It’s elegant. And I’m sure it would work except for one thing: I’m me, and I don’t look even the slightest bit like the shoe girl who suggested this plan. I am not six feet tall and blond and really skinny, so no matter how long I sit reading a book in a fashionable Silver Lake café, a guy is never actually going to come up and talk to me.

  But I appreciated the advice.

  It was clearly offered from a place of friendship and goodwill. The whole reason we started discussing the subject in the first place was that she said she liked my dress. It’s black and sort of ’50s inspired, and of course I found it on the sale rack at guess where? Banana Republic. So it’s not really all that exciting. Mostly I just bought it because it looked like the sort of thing a grieving widow might wear in an Italian neo-realist movie. She said it looked great on me, though, and that’s when she laid out the plan for how I would leave behind The Spinster Way and cross over to the other side. She said that after work, while I was still wearing the dress, I should go to a bar, and then perhaps sensing that she had already lost me, she named a specific bar—Café Stella in Silver Lake—and said I should go there and sit at the bar and have a glass of wine and read a book: an interesting, vaguely European book. I believe Camus was suggested, and I think she also may have advised me to keep my sunglasses on indoors, but she definitely closed with a promise that if I did all these things, a guy would come up and talk to me. I remember that part because it seemed so completely at odds with all my previous life experience, but I’m sure it’s exactly the sort of thing that happens to her all the time as she goes about her LA existence. Otherwise she wouldn’t have said it with such conviction.

  Oh, and she also suggested I have an affair with my brain surgeon.

  Apparently, that happened to one of her friends who had to have surgery for something. I don’t know her at all (the friend of the shoe girl, that is), but I’m sure she was a shoe girl as well. You’d kind of have to be, wouldn’t you? To end up sleeping with the guy who’s cutting you open. Me, I could have ten consecutive brain tumors—they could cut this one out of me tomorrow morning at 8:15 a.m. and nine others could grow back in its place—and still, it would never occur to me that I should try to sleep with the brain surgeon.

  Just like it’s never occurred to me to try and set the brain surgeon up with any of my single friends.

  I got in trouble for that the other night. I was having dinner with some female writer-friends who knew I was about to have brain surgery, and one of them asked me a very LA question. She asked me what the brain surgeon looked like. I had never given the matter much thought, but one of the brain surgeon’s distinguishing physical characteristics is that he’s black—you know, of African American descent—and apparently, it’s a pretty big crime in GirlWorld if you meet an African American brain surgeon and fail to pry into his personal life and attempt to set him up with all of your single, African American female friends. At the very least you’re supposed to do some sort of due diligence. You’ve got to get in there and investigate the successful African American professional you’ve met and make sure he’s not the same one your friend is supposed to marry. Otherwise, she might have to be single forever and then it would be all your fault. I don’t know—maybe it was just the fourteen-dollar raspberry lemon drop I was drinking—but I have to say that kinda blew my mind.

  All the progress I thought I had made in understanding the shoe girls and the bizarre, unfathomable ways of GirlWorld suddenly went right out the window.

  Basically, what she was saying was that in Girl-World, not only are you supposed to be constantly on the lookout for your own husband—you know, like Jill says the shoe girls are—but I guess you’re also supposed to be watching out all the time for other girls’ husbands. Frankly, I don’t know how everyone in GirlWorld is able to accomplish this and still have time left over to shop for $500 shoes. To me, it all just sounds incredibly exhausting.

  Much worse than having brain surgery.

  Although not as bad as having to face your brain surgeon after one of your Hollywood screenwriter friends has called his office and inquired about his marital status.

  That’s kind of embarrassing, don’t you think? I’ll have to mention it to him at some point, won’t I? Like should I apologize for it? Or can I just ignore it? What’s the etiquette here? I swear I could tell you exactly how all the various members of the Bennet family are supposed to act at the Netherfield ball—how Mary shouldn’t play the piano so long and Kitty and Lydia shouldn’t chase the officers and Mrs. Bennet shouldn’t talk so loudly about what an uptight douchebag Mr. Darcy is—but I have no idea what you’re supposed to do when one of your Hollywood screenwriter friends calls your brain surgeon and tries to set him up with another one of your Hollywood screenwriter friends. I’m just not prepared to deal with that eventuality right now.

  Why do we all have to go to all this trouble anyway? Why do we have to be calling people up we don’t even know and asking them about their marital status and working every minute of our lives to get skinnier and prettier and driving across the country in diapers like that crazy astronaut lady who tried to kill someone or something? That caused a little mini-debate in the room the other day. Jill was pro–crazy astronaut lady. She thought it sounded pretty cool—you know, the way love could be so strong and powerful that it would make you do crazy things like that. Honestly, I don’t see the attraction. I mean can’t we all just be ourselves and not wear makeup and die alone? That’s always seemed like a viable option to me, and I don’t understand why more people don’t get on board with it. Once you sign all the relevant documents telling them to unplug you if something goes horribly wrong during your brain surgery, it’s really not so bad. I mean when you think about it, dying alone is just the way of the world. Or, at least, of the heterosexual world, because women almost always outlive men. That’s a known scientific fact. So even the girls who’ve won the ultimate grand prize in all of GirlWorld, the prize that’s bigger than sleeping with actors or winning the shoe contest or getting your pilot picked up—even the ones who have actually gone out there and somehow managed to find this elusive quantity known as True Love—well, most of them are going to die alone, too.

  After all, that is what happened to Fanny.

  Fanny died alone in Bath on January 6, 1840, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven.

  I think I’ve mentioned that before. I must be preoccupied with death or something. Of course, when I say she died alone, I don’t mean totally alone because of course she had those devoted nieces by her side. I’ve got three at the moment. Three nieces. But the oldest one is only eight years old, so if I die in a few hours while I’m having brain surgery, it’s not super likely that she’ll take it upon herself to edit and publish all my Journaling for Anxiety™ the way Fanny’s niece Charlotte Barrett did with hers. My two sisters are the ones who would come and clean out my apartment if I died, but since they don’t work in the entertainment industry, it’s not like they’re going to have any idea what to do with the first two parts of an ill-fated, six-part miniseries set in the eighteenth century and two-hundred-some-odd pages of mad ramblings about brain tumors and shoe contests. Even if they did have the wherewithal to give it to my agent, Arnie Greenblatt, he would probably just give them the same speech he’s been giving me for the past ten years. You know, the one about how no one’s ever going to give a shit about your passion project until you make shitloads of money doing something totally unrelated to your passion project.

  Only this time, the speech would be largely wasted on me because I would be dead.

  Just like Fanny.

  She outlived most of her contemporaries.

  All three of her sisters.

  Both brothers.

  Her friends.

  Her coworkers.

  Her bosses.
<
br />   All of her many Love Interests.

  That’s what happens when you live to be eighty-seven.

  Everyone who ever guest-starred in your diaries goes before you.

  The Honorable Stephen Digby died the same year as Fanny’s favorite sister, Susanna. He didn’t even make it into the nineteenth century. And you know what’s kind of sad and weird? Miss Gunning, with her 10,000 pounds, the one who bested Fanny and got the honor of becoming Mrs. Honorable Stephen Digby? She lived only four more years after she won that honor.

  Boswell died in 1795, but based on what I’ve read of his diaries, Boswell had a lot of venereal diseases, so I’m kinda surprised he lasted that long.

  Edmund Burke, who has the distinction of being the only person in Fanny’s diaries more nearsighted than Fanny—he died in 1797.