by Laura Levine
She then turned and saw me. “Oh, hi, Jaine. You have the script?”
“Right here,” I said, waving the pages. “I think it turned out very well.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
And at that moment I knew without a doubt that I’d be rewriting this script right up until she and Dickie said “I do,” sweating bullets for every one of those three thousand dollars.
I was standing there, wondering if it was worth it, when a stunning brunette stepped out of one of the dressing rooms. With a sinking sensation, I realized it was Denise Gilbert.
The dewy good looks of her youth had been replaced by an air of sleek sophistication. But basically she was the same beauty she’d always been—only thinner. Was there no justice in the world? Was I the only Hermosa High grad who’d packed on a pound or two?
“What do you think, Patti?” she asked, twirling around in her dress.
It’s not easy to look chic in a bridesmaid’s dress with big puffy sleeves and a bow in back, but somehow Denise managed to pull it off.
Patti’s eyes narrowed.
“The bow needs to be bigger.”
“But Ms. Marshall,” Cynthia protested, “if we make it any bigger, it’s not going to be very flattering.”
Of course it wouldn’t. That’s why Patti asked for it. You didn’t have to be Siggy Freud to figure out that the last thing Patti wanted was to be upstaged by a stunning bridesmaid.
“Besides,” Cynthia said, her tic more noticeable than ever, “I’m not sure we’ll have time to import more fabric in time for the wedding.”
Patti shot her a look that could melt steel.
“Make time.”
“Yes, of course. Of course.” By now poor Cynthia’s tic was out of control. “I’ll go see to it now.”
She and the seamstress scurried off into the back room, no doubt to hit the vodka bottle.
Throughout the preceding exchange Denise had just stood there, smiling pleasantly, her face an impassive mask.
“Jaine,” she said now, noticing me for the first time. “Patti told me you’d be here. How nice to see you.”
Her eyes raked me over.
“You haven’t changed a bit.”
Translation: My God. She still has that same zit on her chin.
“You, either,” I said. “So how’ve you been?”
“Wonderful,” she said. “I’m an attorney now.”
Thin and rich. How depressing.
“And what about you, Jaine? What have you been up to?”
“As Patti probably told you, I’m a writer.”
“Yes, she did mention it. In a Rush to Flush? Call Toiletmasters. How clever.”
Was there just the tiniest trace of a snicker in her smile?
“And what else is going on in your life?”
“Yes, Jaine,” Patti chimed in. “I meant to ask you. Any men in your life? You married?”
“No, not married.”
I didn’t tell them about my ex-husband, The Blob, a guy who wore flip-flops to our wedding and watched ESPN during sex. Somehow I didn’t think they’d be impressed.
“Any boyfriends?” Denise asked.
“Yeah,” Patti echoed. “Any boyfriends?”
They shot me laser beam looks. And suddenly I was back in the hallway at Hermosa High, wilting under their supercilious gazes, a newborn zit ablaze on my chin.
“So, Jaine? What about it?” Patti wasn’t about to let me off the hook. “Any special guy in your life?”
“As a matter fact, yes.”
Where had that come from? The only special guy in my life was the Domino’s delivery guy.
“I’m engaged to be married.”
Huh?
“To a doctor.”
What the hell was I saying?
“Yes.” I persisted in my madness. “A neurosurgeon.”
Maybe it was some form of Tourette’s.
“Right,” said Patti. She and Denise exchanged sidelong glances, skepticism oozing from their pores. They weren’t buying any of this. Not for a second.
“Congratulations,” Denise said dryly.
“I just had the most wonderful idea!” Patti cooed, a nasty glint in her eye. “You and your neurosurgeon fiancé simply must come to my wedding.”
Okay, no need to panic. I’d just tell her my fiancé was out of town. Yes, he was in Africa, helping sick Africans. I’d tell her I was flying there to join him. And we couldn’t possibly make it to her wedding.
The words that actually came out of my mouth, however, went something like this:
“Francois and I would be delighted to come to your wedding.”
Francois??? Had I totally lost my mind??
I was about to commit myself to the home for the terminally mendacious when a pudgy woman in a polyester jogging suit walked in the shop. She glanced around timidly, then waved when she spotted Patti and Denise.
Patti took one look at her and went ballistic.
“Cheryl!” she hissed. “You look awful.”
Cheryl? Was this frumpy woman with the frizzed-out hair the same delicate beauty I’d known in high school? At last I’d run into someone who’d packed on some pounds since graduation. But for some reason, it didn’t feel nearly as gratifying as I thought it would.
“For crying out loud, Cheryl,” Patti snapped. “You promised you’d lose weight.”
Cheryl stood there, red-faced with shame.
“I’m sorry, Patti. I tried. Really I did.”
“Did you eat all the Jenny Craig meals I sent?”
“Yes,” she murmured, eyes lowered, like a kid called to the principal’s office.
“Probably all in one day,” Patti sneered. “You realize the wedding’s next week?”
Cheryl nodded.
“You’ll never lose the weight by then. And I can’t possibly have a fat bridesmaid. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Cheryl nodded again.
“You’re out!” Patti said, with all the finesse of a guillotine beheading. “You’re no longer in the wedding party.”
“I’m so sorry, Patti,” Cheryl mumbled, eyes still lowered.
“You should be. Do you realize how difficult you’re making things for me? Where the hell am I going to get another bridesmaid at this late date?”
She gazed in my direction for the briefest instant, but then looked away, having clearly dismissed me as unsuitable wedding party material.
“Oh, well,” she sighed, the bridal martyr, “I’ll manage somehow. I always do.”
At last Cheryl looked up, and I saw that her big blue eyes, always her best feature, were blinking back tears.
In spite of how mean she’d been in high school, I felt sorry for her. And actually, when I thought about it, Cheryl hadn’t really been all that mean. It was always Patti who’d been the nasty one, the instigator. Cheryl and Denise had been more of a Greek chorus, backing her up in her many acts of torture.
I had a fleeting impulse to put my arm around Cheryl and console her with the dusty Almond Joy in the bottom of my purse.
But I didn’t, of course. I had troubles enough of my own. In case you forgot, I had less than a week to find myself a fiancé. A neurosurgeon, yet. Named Francois.
“A neurosurgeon fiancé? Have you lost your mind?”
I was sitting across from my best friend, Kandi Tobolowski, at our favorite restaurant, Paco’s Tacos, a colorful joint with burritos the size of cruise missiles.
“How could you tell such a whopper?” Kandi stared at me, wide-eyed. “Couldn’t you have made him something more believable, like a dermatologist?”
“You’re missing the point here, Kandi. It doesn’t matter what sort of doctor he is. What matters is, he doesn’t exist.”
I stared morosely at my Chimichanga Combo Plate. Why the heck had I ordered such a calorie-fest? I should be eating something sensible like Kandi’s mahimahi if I wanted to look decent for the wedding.
“I still can’t understand
why you did it,” she said, taking a dainty bite of her fish.
“I don’t know.” I sighed. “It was just like the time in high school when Patti and Denise cornered me in the locker room and asked me if I had a date for the prom. They knew I didn’t, but they wanted to see me squirm. So I lied and said I had one.”
“How’d you weasel your way out of that?”
“Well,” I said, thinking back to those long-gone days, “there was this guy at school I was interested in. His name was Dylan. He’d just transferred from back east. He had huge brown eyes and a sad soulful look. Everywhere he went he carried a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. For some reason, that impressed the heck out of me. I couldn’t believe that there among the beach bunny heathens at Hermosa High was an actual eastern intellectual.
“So I decided to ask him to the prom. I figured what the heck. I had nothing to lose. I spent hours in front of the mirror, rehearsing what I was going to say. Finally I got up my courage to approach him. He was sitting in the schoolyard, staring out into the horizon, his copy of Nietzsche on his lap. Somehow I managed to sputter an invitation.”
“And? What did he say?”
By now Kandi’s mahimahi was forgotten on her plate. Kandi often forgets to eat, one of the reasons why she, unlike yours truly, can step on the scale at the doctor’s office without breaking into a cold sweat.
“He said yes.”
“Wow,” Kandi grinned. “So lying paid off.”
“Not exactly,” I sighed. “Don’t forget, I’d never actually had a conversation with the guy. He showed up at my house the night of the prom reeking of marijuana. That Nietzsche book of his wasn’t a book at all, but a hollowed-out box where he kept his drug supplies. The guy had a vocabulary of about six words and five of them were, ‘Hey baby, wanna get high?’”
“Omigod, this is as bad as my prom. I went with my cousin Barry. I could’ve killed him. He spent the whole night at the punch bowl flirting with Mrs. Handler, my English teacher. When I think of all the hours I spent shopping for my prom dress—”
“Kandi, could we please stick to my nightmare?”
“Right,” she said. “Sorry. So what did you do?”
“What could I do? I had to show up at the prom to prove to Patti and Denise that I had a date.”
“Did they see you?”
“They saw me, all right. In addition to being a pothead, Dylan was an awful dancer. And not just run-of-the-mill awful. Extravagantly awful. He spun and dipped and swirled me so much, I felt like a human salad spinner.
“At a certain point, everybody cleared off the dance floor to watch us. I could see Patti and her gang standing on the sidelines, enjoying every second of my misery.
“At last the song came to an end. And that’s when Dylan gave me one final spin. Only this time, he let go of my hand. And the next thing I knew I was spinning across the floor and straight into Principal Seawright’s lap.”
“Omigod,” Kandi gasped. “You landed in the principal’s lap? What did he say?”
“If memory serves, his exact words were: I believe this seat is already taken.”
“Oh, wow.”
“If I live to be a thousand, I’ll never forget the expression on his face. I practically got frostbite just looking at him. Honest, Kandi, I thought I was going to die.”
Having finished my tale of woe, I picked up my fork to dig into my dinner and saw to my amazement that I’d somehow managed to polish off every bite of my Chimichanga Combo Plate. Can somebody please explain how I’d done all the talking and yet Kandi was the one whose dinner was practically untouched?
Well, that was it, I vowed. Not another bite of food would pass my lips. I simply could not afford to gain a single ounce for the wedding.
“Ah,” Kandi said, shaking her head solemnly, “what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.”
“What??” I gasped.
“I’m sorry, Jaine, but that’s what you get for lying.”
“My God, Kandi. Look who’s talking. The woman who pretended to be an alcoholic so she could meet guys at AA.”
“Oh, please. That’s entirely different.”
“And just how is it different?”
“Don’t you remember? I met that cute stockbroker. We dated for three months before he fell off the wagon and ran off with a barmaid. My story had a happy ending. For a while at least.”
The woman’s logic defies explanation.
“So what are you going to do about your date for the wedding?” she asked, pushing her refried beans to the side of her plate out of eating range.
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“You want me to fix you up with one of the insects on my show?”
The insects to whom Kandi referred were the actors on Beanie & the Cockroach, the animated cartoon show where Kandi toils as a writer.
“I think Manny the Mole might be available. He’s a really nice guy, if you don’t mind your neurosurgeon being 5’3” in his elevator shoes.”
“Let’s save Manny for plan B.”
“I know! How about an escort service?”
“An escort service? Are you crazy??”
“They’re listed in the Yellow Pages.”
Well, dear reader, if you think I was about to degrade myself by paying for a date with a guy who was just one step up from a male hooker, all I can say is—you’re a very perceptive reader.
“I’ll call first thing tomorrow,” I said, reaching for a forkful of Kandi’s refried beans.
YOU’VE GOT MAIL
To: Jausten
From: Shoptillyoudrop
Subject: Marvelous News!
Jaine, honey, you’ll never guess who’s coming to stay with us. Roberto Scaffaro! I told you about Roberto, didn’t I, the darling young man I met in Rome the summer I graduated from high school? He was a waiter at the pensione where I was staying. Every day after work he showed me around the city to charming places I never would have discovered in the guidebooks.
He didn’t speak a word of English and I didn’t speak any Italian but we used my Italian–English dictionary and had the time of our lives. I’ll never forget the night we ate al fresco on the Spanish Steps. Or is it al dente? I always get those two confused. All I know is that it was a picnic, and it was magnifico!
And to think that was all more than forty years ago! Over the years we’ve exchanged Christmas cards, and then just the other day I got a letter from one of his children (Roberto’s English is still pretty terrible) telling me that Roberto’s wife died last year and that he’s coming to the states to visit his son who lives in Arizona. And he wants to stop off first to see me.
I wrote back and told him come right over “presto.” That’s Italian for “quickly.” Or is it “prego”? Or is that a spaghetti sauce? Oh, dear. I guess my Italian’s still pretty terrible, too. Anyhow, I insisted he stay here at the condo, and I can’t wait to see him.
Of course, the place is a disgrace. I absolutely must change the curtains in the guest bedroom and get some new towels. I saw some fabulous Egyptian towels on the shopping channel, a whole set for just $29.95, plus shipping and handling. If I put in my order now, they’ll be here in time for Roberto’s visit. I can’t possibly have him using the ratty old guest towels we’ve had since you were in kindergarten.
Must run, darling, and place my order before they sell out.
Arrivederci!
Mom
To: Jausten
From: DaddyO
Subject: Steams My Beans
Hi, Lambchop—
Have you heard the news? Your mother’s former lover is coming to stay with us. I consider myself a pretty open-minded fellow, but the thought of having her old “amore” stay under my own roof just steams my beans.
Your mom insists nothing went on between them, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I know those Italian guys and their animal magnetism.
Oh, well. It’s a good thing I’m not the jealous type—Whoops. Gotta go, sw
eetpea. The mailman’s here and I need to screen the mail for love letters from Italy.
Love & kisses from,
Daddy
To: Jausten
From: Shoptillyoudrop
Subject: Did You Ever Hear Anything So Silly?
Daddy’s impossible. He’s convinced Roberto and I were lovers! For heaven’s sake, Jaine, I met Roberto when I was eighteen years old, back in the years when young women waited to get married before they had “ex-say,” if you get my drift.
Honestly, Jaine, I think Roberto kissed me once the night before I left to come back home, but it was all so innocent. Now your father is running around acting like we left a trail of blazing mattresses across Italy. Of course, it doesn’t help that Roberto’s wife died last year. Daddy’s convinced he’s coming here to make me his new signora.
Did you ever hear of anything so silly? I’ll bet by now Roberto’s a fat middle-aged man with a potbelly and no hair.
XOXO,
Mom
To: Jausten
From: DaddyO
Subject: Rigatoni Romeo
Just what I was afraid of. Another letter from your mom’s boyfriend. This time he sent his picture. Typical continental casanova. Tall, dark, and what some people might call handsome. You should’ve seen your mother swoon. You can’t tell me they weren’t a hot ticket back in Italy. If she thinks I’m helping her hang new curtains for that rigatoni romeo, she’s sadly mistaken.
I’m off to the library to return a book. And I just may stop off for a hot fudge sundae on my way home. I’m supposed to be watching my cholesterol, but who cares if I clog my arteries? Certainly not your mother. She’s too busy fixing up the guest bedroom for her future husband.
