Unwifeable

by Mandy Stadtmiller

  He speed-reads, then comes over to my desk and stops me mid-typing.

  “You see this?” he asks, pointing to one specific quote in the story where the girl is cringing about how the nerds on the site are attempting to romance her.

  The quote is:

  “This guy sent me a note that says, ‘You would so be the perfect copilot for my Death Star cubicle.’ I have no idea what that means. That’s bizarre.”

  It is pretty funny—her utter disdain for the earnest gamer boys trying their best at romancing a Jennifer Aniston–loving mind. But the rest of my story is filled with tangents and quotes from her about the state of dating in general. It is all over the place.

  Steve points again to that quote, in which she makes fun of the geeks wooing her.

  “That is the story,” he says. “Right there. Call her back and reinterview her to get more of that.”

  I do. With a sense of clarity from having a theme—a direction—I play the SAT “this is to this as that is to that” game with her to find out just how different she is from her suitors. I ask her, so if a guy is really into Dungeons & Dragons, what might be her poison instead?

  “I don’t know.” She thinks it over. “Shopping? Like, yoga maybe.”

  And if a guy is into anime, she might be more into . . . “Friends reruns,” she finishes.

  It is gold. With that ten-minute tossed-off tutorial Steve has taught me what my writing—and maybe even what my life—has been missing: focus. I learn so much from that one editing session. You don’t try to write the entire encyclopedia. You write the one entry that makes your heart sing. And if you’re lucky, you do the same thing with the people in your life.

  Later that day, at the copy machine, I meet a girl who is fretting over some papers related to her impending divorce.

  “Oh my God,” I tell her when she explains what she is doing. “I just got divorced!”

  I say it like I have just found out she is my long-lost identical twin sister. Can you believe this luck? How many more of us could there be?

  Then, before she has a chance to say much more, I pull out of my pocket a prayer I copied down a few weeks prior when I was staying at my great-aunt’s in Ohio, during my cross-country trip to New York.

  “Here,” I say, shoving the prayer into her hands. “Take this. It really helps. I have another copy, don’t worry.”

  She laughs and smiles at me.

  “I’m Mackenzie,” she says, introducing herself—and I realize she is Mackenzie Dawson, whose hilarious stuff I have been reading in the paper lately. Then she looks down and reads the prayer.

  Do not fear what may happen tomorrow;

  The same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you today and every day.

  He will either shield you from suffering or will give you unfailing strength to bear it.

  Be at peace and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations.

  —St. Francis de Sales

  “Thank you,” Mackenzie says. “I really like this.”

  “Let’s be friends,” I say.

  And we are.

  * * *

  I HAVE ONLY been at the Post a month before I decide to get out of town.

  It takes only that small amount of time for me to see precisely why and how dating in New York truly sucks. Mackenzie, Katherine, and I bond frequently over this fact.

  Anyone who’s ever watched an episode of Sex and the City knows this fact already, but when you experience it yourself, it’s a whole different ball game. Single, not-entirely-awful men in New York act like chicks. They are that rare and precious commodity, seeking to be wooed and convinced and courted, and they know it.

  “So it’s not just me?” I ask Katherine and Mackenzie over coffee as we sit together in the mint-green third-floor lounge. We are surrounded by both wizened old newscasters bemoaning the liberal media’s so-called War on Christmas along with young up-and-comers like Julia Allison, who shimmers and laughs, conducting a flirtatious preinterview before making rounds as an expert on Fox.

  “It’s definitely not just you,” they agree.

  So I say yes to the chance to celebrate the end of 2005 on a fancy vacation with Scott, who bought me a ticket to celebrate the Fiesta Bowl with him in Tempe, Arizona.

  I have just one rule for myself: I am not going to drink.

  “Welcome to Phoenix, New York girl.” Scott greets me with open arms when I get off the plane. I smile and kiss him.

  “Thanks,” I say, down now to 139 pounds and so proud of how prepared I am to play the part of the trophy girl with the eating disorder you fly out to see a bowl game.

  When we settle back into his hotel suite, one of Scott’s friends instantly offers, “Let me get you something to drink. You look thirsty!”

  “No, no, I’m good right now,” I say, just as I have practiced.

  I hold out a long two days in Phoenix—even at the Fiesta Bowl itself, where Scott wins one bill on the over-under—until, halfway through a boring night at dinner, I absentmindedly finger Scott’s martini glass and wonder aloud, “Maybe I should get a . . .”

  Before the full sentence has even come out of my mouth, Scott signals the waiter.

  “Can we get another martini over here?”

  If there is one universal truth it is this: Everyone loves when a girl drinks.

  A giggling drunk girl to a group of jocks and frat bros is as American as blue jeans, baseball, and apple pie. Because saying it’s as American as slurred non sequiturs, bad sex, and the morning-after pill just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

  The next morning, my head pounding, Scott and his friends turn on ESPN and excitedly realize it is the national spelling bee championship.

  “Every time it’s on, I watch it,” Scott says. “Every time.”

  His friends all join in the fun to roast the dorky girl on-screen. She’s from some highlight reel they are playing—ticky, squirmy, uncomfortable, and unabashedly joyful in her spelling out of “E-U-O-N-Y-M.”

  Everyone is rolling laughing, imitating her unselfconscious, unfiltered existence.

  “Holy shit, that girl is rough.”

  “Good thing she has spelling, because she is single for life.”

  “E-U-O . . . what a spaz.”

  I feel like I am going to be sick.

  It hits me right then. I can drink a million martinis, shape-shift into another person for extended stretches of time, I can even weigh under 140 pounds—but I can never really assimilate. These are not my people.

  “I’m going to go lie down for a while,” I say quietly.

  Scott enters our room and sits down beside me.

  “What’s going on?” he asks, placing his hand on my side.

  “I just kind of wonder,” I say, tracing the seam of the comforter on the bed, “about the casual misogyny of society, you know?”

  He looks at me with his big handsome brown doe eyes, a placid smile on his face and speaks with total sincerity.

  “What does ‘misogyny’ mean?”

  I glare at him.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He is not. Scott drops me off at the airport at the end of the trip, lends me his copy of FHM for the plane (so much for the “misogyny” speech), kisses me goodbye, and says, “I hope you got a lot of new material.”

  I nod. Once we land at JFK, I cast my eyes downward as I walk, trying to avoid people’s gazes but several jovial strangers take my clownish red Ohio State sweatshirt as an invitation for small talk.

  “Are you going to go back and celebrate?” an older man asks.

  “Good job yesterday,” a man in a suit says, patting me on the back.

  “We are looking at one very happy girl right here,” another says, pointing to me. “I can’t wait to hear what Regis has to say about this.”

  I realize something: Never has the world so lovingly embraced my six-foot-two body as when I am wearing a sports team sweatshirt. Everyone finally gets it. Oh, the g
iant girl—she’s a jock. Yeah, that makes sense. I can understand that. I think of the spelling bee girl they all laughed at on the trip, and I’m suddenly unable to stop crying.

  Walking off the plane, I hurry to the first concession stand I see and order a green tea and a seltzer water. I collapse into a plastic booth, trying to hide from the eyes around me. I stare at my phone. I turn it on and off, on again.

  Fuck it. I dial my ex-husband. I couldn’t feel much worse.

  “Happy New Year,” James says.

  “Happy . . .” I say, bursting into tears.

  “What’s going on?” he asks.

  “Oh, it’s just funny,” I say, voice uneven, bobbing my tea bag furiously, “because I went to the Fiesta Bowl and I’m wearing this big Ohio State sweatshirt and I feel so completely sad but everyone keeps congratulating me.”

  He pauses.

  “That is pretty funny.”

  “And . . . and,” I sputter, “the guys I was with, when we were in the hotel, you know, on this trip, they turned on ESPN, and they were making fun of the spelling bee girl on TV. And . . . like . . . I didn’t say anything, but James . . . they couldn’t see that . . . I’m that spelling bee girl, you know?”

  He is silent.

  “I know you are,” he says.

  I hang up the phone, softened but shattered.

  Images flash through my mind, as they do every time I speak to James. The gold card he gave me for our anniversary that said, “To Mandy . . . who gave me a life.” Our wedding vows written as we drove on the winding roads from the Grand Canyon past the Hoover Dam on the way to Sin City: “My love for you grows stronger every day.” And then five years later, the VHS cassette of our wedding in Vegas thrown in the trash, on top of a greasy pile of chicken entrails.

  That shakes me out of it. There is no going back.

  I rip the sweatshirt off, throw it in the trash, and resolve that I need to find people in my life who can see me. People who can see through my own bullshit even when I can’t see it myself.

  chapter three

  * * *

  The New Normal

  2006

  Men are a waste of time. My career is not. This is my new mantra.

  In journalism, there are the 5 W’s: Who, What, When, Where, Why. Before applying that basic premise to my stories, however, I first apply it to the animal of the newsroom around me.

  I notice quickly something that smart reporters do. You fake it until you make it. Big-time. This means that even when you don’t have a definitive lead, you kind of swagger like you do. During the first phone call I make to an A-list publicist to inquire about a boldface-name client, I say semi-apologetically by way of introduction in whispery upspeak, “I’m calling from the New York Post?”

  “You’re who calling from what? Who? What do you need?”

  This is not how things get done. Everything must be a statement. I am calling from the New York Post. You will give me the story. I am on deadline. Help me help you. I am a player. I deserve to be here.

  Different stories I am assigned dribble in—lots of last-minute celeb feud roundups (Lohan vs. Johansson! Letterman vs. O’Reilly!) and then there is what is known in the field, or at any J-school worth its salt, as the “enterprise” story.

  During my fateful Mexican restaurant brunch turned job interview with Steve a few months back, one story stuck out in my mind as the Post staple. Steve mentioned “huge Hummer strollers” as sweeping the city and this being a great get.

  It has everything: rich, entitled parents; something absurd in proportion to its usual size; newness; and, most important, a photographic element that pops. The Post runs on pictures and “high concept” ideas. This is what publicists always get wrong. If you can’t pitch a story in just a few words, your pitch is going to fail. You don’t go with “new eco-friendly strollers that help busy moms on the go.” You go with cognitive dissonance that grabs you by the eyeballs—or, even better, by the throat.

  “Hummer strollers!!!”

  You get it. Immediately. You can’t not get it. So I begin the hunt for my own enterprise masterpiece. Since I am such an avid dater, I try to think of the most salacious story I can—either from my own experience or based on anything else I dig up online. I keep finding one phrase that jumps out as the ultimate outrageous you-immediately-get-it concept in the Rants and Raves section on Craigslist. It strikes me as the perfect Post piece: a phenomenon called, classily enough, “dinner whores.”

  One poster bitches about a woman ordering drink after drink on his dime, all the while exhibiting no desire to ever see him again: “What the fuck? Did she think I was some asshole?”

  Yeah, this is my Post story, for sure. Now I just need to find women who will admit they are searching for guys whom they have no interest in dating—beyond the prospect of a gourmet meal and plenty of cocktails. While Katherine aids me in maneuvering assignments with everything from “you got this”–style encouragement to the much more practical brand of help like, say, telling me where the West Village is (west, it turns out), I use my evening hours to track down my dinner whores.

  I have something on my computer I dub “source list” (as it rapidly expands, I change the name to “new source list,” “hot source list,” and, eventually, “BEST NEW HOT SOURCE LIST”), which contains the names of a hodgepodge of people I meet, from strangers on the subway to old college acquaintances. I email them all asking if they know any women who might fess up to the maneuver.

  One after another, I make new friends who tell me their stories of suffering through boring-ass business guys who get them into Michelin-rated restaurants and how they feel no qualms about taking them for a $300 meal because the guy is getting their company.

  But no one wants to go on the record.

  Then I realize I’ve had the answer within me all along. Just like I was rediscovered through my self-published blog chronicling all my adventures, there have to be plenty of fame-seeking young New York women who would love to go on record who are self-promoting via their blogs.

  I google “New York,” “dating,” and “blogspot,” and a million combinations thereof and eventually hit the jackpot when I discover belleinthebigapple.blogspot.com and a blond, bubbly young lady who after several emails back and forth eventually identifies herself as Brooke Parkhurst, a former Fox TV intern (who pals around with Gawker’s favorite target, Julia Allison) who’s just landed a literary agent who is trying to sell her book. This, I soon learn, is key. When someone has something they want to push, they will work with you. Big-time.

  As I develop the story, I still fear everything will fall apart. Will Brooke and the other women I interviewed back out last-minute? Will the pics the photographer snaps not be Post-y enough? Will everyone realize I am a fraud and ought to be back in Chicago, still writing about science grants and languishing in an unhappy marriage?

  Wait—no. That is my impostor complex talking.

  Fake it until you make it. Fake it until you make it. Repeat it until you believe it. Tattoo it on your fucking forehead if you have to.

  During these early days at the Post, I think a lot about a fellow intern I worked with at the Washington Post right after graduating in 1997, one of the biggest name-droppers I’ve ever met. His tales usually involved a celebrity or politician he had just lunched with or, oh, here’s a funny coincidence, did you know the son of the newspaper’s editor actually lives in his dorm at Harvard, too? But that guy, man. He had more get-shit-done confidence than any young person I’d ever met. He just did not apologize. He walked around the newsroom like he owned it.

  I, by contrast, would go to intern parties; get drunk; look at my short, stringy, dishwater-brown hair in the mirror; then return to the party and proceed to kill the entire mood. Here’s a good recipe for how to do that in case it ever comes in handy: Say a bunch of unfunny, radioactively self-loathing (beyond the normal level of light self-deprecation) bons mots like, “I look like a drowned rat.”

  Everyone
will proceed to shift uncomfortably, staring down at their Grey Goose. The other intern, meanwhile, would find a way to work in that he had just grabbed a meal with David Foster Wallace.

  So now, as I returned to newspapers after a long-ass, marriage-filled absence, that dude became my spiritual guide. Here’s an actual non-sarcastic helpful trick: If you suffer from debilitating low self-esteem and crippling shyness most of your life, just pretend to be someone who has what you want instead.

  It was actually the year 2000 when I first really tested out the pretend-to-be-someone-else trick, during my first major impostor-complex experience, after having been hired by an Internet company called MarchFirst to fill a questionable position called “content strategist.” (I believe that job title went bust right when the economy did.) Formed a few months before the dot-com bubble burst, MarchFirst hired me after I rewrote my résumé enough times to make it look like I spoke Internet. My annual salary shot up from $32,000 to $47,000, and soon I was being flown from Chicago to Philly to talk to middle-aged chemical industry executives to justify my $200-an-hour bill rate.

  My boss at the time was a perky blond twenty-seven-year-old named Stephanie, who gesticulated wildly in front of the ever-present whiteboard while using made-up words like bucketizing.

  “We need to bucketize content!” she’d say, making exaggerated motions of what it would look like if content were physically plunked into imaginary buckets.

  So on my business trips, wearing my cheap Clothestime business suit that I got dry-cleaned until it had holes in it, I just pretended I was Stephanie. I was scared shitless. Stephanie knew how to take that scared shitlessness—and just bucketize it!

  Now, at the Post, I think back fondly to Stephanie, the confident intern, and every other prophet of big, brash, seemingly unwarranted confidence (not a dig—a necessity: Any performer you can stand to watch on TV for more than thirty seconds possesses it). And when Steve returns to talk to me about my pitch, I do not offer up the terror I feel inside. No self-loathing asides like “I look like a drowned rat” or “Oh God, my story sucks, doesn’t it?” Nope. Just chill.