by Wendy Chen
Tonight they were trying out a new restaurant in Chelsea, so Kate decided to go with something fun that she knew the girls would get a kick out of—a pink wig. A cute, pale pink chin-length bob, to be exact, which went perfectly with her silver smoky eye makeup for a look that was edgy and slightly sweet. She threw on a silver strapless dress and a favorite pair of Jimmy Choos. Maybe she was a little overdressed, with jeans and flip-flops viewed as acceptable attire for nearly any occasion these days, but Kate loved getting dressed up. It wasn’t until she was in college that she paid the least bit of attention to fashion, much less to cultivating her own sense of style. But once she started, she relished any opportunity to try out different looks, particularly ones that she couldn’t get away with in the office. Kate put her phone, wallet, and keys into her tiny clutch, grabbed her “engagement ring” and headed out. She didn’t always wear the ring—only her girls, Alberto, and Kate knew the true nature of the arrangement, and nothing was a bigger turnoff to men than a giant rock that looked real. But the girls were more than a little concerned about her decision, and she had to show them she was comfortable with her plans.
When Kate arrived at the restaurant, Cass noticed her first and did a double take before grinning widely at the new look. As usual, Kate was the last to arrive, but they’d already ordered her a dirty martini, and they did a quick toast to surviving the end of another workweek. Some friends would gather on a Friday night for this, but as a busy wedding planner, Cassandra rarely had weekends free. All three gushed for a moment about how much they loved Kate’s wig, and Suzanne of course commented that only Kate could pull something like that off. But it was only a matter of minutes before they were peppering her with questions about Alberto again.
It seemed that it was Cass who was nominated to broach the topic this time, and Kate admitted that it made sense for her to ask what kind of celebration she planned on, and if Cass should pencil in a date to start the planning?
“Oh, nothing you have to worry about too much. I’m thinking we’ll just go to Disney World and do the Cinderella castle thing,” Kate said. She saw her friends’ mouths agape and added, “I’m kidding, you guys. You know that’s nothing like me.”
“Getting married is nothing like you. Multiple dates with the same guy is nothing like you,” said Mia, always the straight shooter of the bunch.
“Alberto is too talented a musician and loves New York too much to go back to Spain.”
“And you’re too fond of him as a bedmate.” Mia and Cass clinked glasses in agreement.
“I have always been fond of friends with benefits,” Kate laughed. She and Alberto had hit it off ever since the first week of business school, even when she took the straight and narrow path toward a career in investment management, while he developed buyer’s remorse soon after graduation and gave up an offer at Lehman Brothers to become a starving artist. Kate supported him then—the fact that Lehman went bankrupt always served as evidence that he’d made the right decision—and she would now, as his back-up plan if he needed her.
“Marriage is really serious business,” Suzanne chimed in. “Are you sure you’re thinking this through?”
Kate wanted to keep this light, even though it was clear her friends had another agenda. “You of all people should be loving this, Suzanne! This is the old-fashioned arranged marriage between two friends. We’ll have a prenup, of course. It’s a business arrangement that happens to extend to the bedroom on occasion.”
“But what if one of you wants more out of the relationship than that?” Suzanne asked, ever the romantic.
“Or what if one of you wants to get out of it?” Mia said matter-of-factly. “You could fall in love with someone else.” Kate just stared at her. “OK, maybe he could fall in love with someone else.”
“People get divorced all the time,” Kate responded. She knew Suzanne recently found out that her ex-husband was getting remarried, and that Suzanne had not been having great luck with dating recently, so she wished they would move on from this topic. Her arrangement should not be, would not be the reason to dredge up heartbreak for her friend. “Anyway, we’ll probably just do some City Hall ceremony once we find out for sure about his visa. I’ll try to let you know ahead of time if you feel like coming.” She could tell these responses were not satisfying her friends. “Listen,” she said more seriously, “we all know that married people get all the perks—better job opportunities, better apartments, the list goes on. I’ve merely figured out how to reap the rewards without the baggage.”
“Baggage like monogamy?” Suzanne said sarcastically.
“Exactly!” Kate responded brightly. “Now can we be done with this conversation?” She smiled at a guy at a table a few feet from theirs. But apparently he was on a date from the glare he got from his companion. Kate rolled her eyes. She wasn’t a homewrecker, but believed in Rule Number Two: He’s not “taken” unless he’s married. The game’s not over until the ring’s on his finger.
“Speaking of monogamy,” Kate said under her breath as she recognized a couple at a table several feet away. She gave a friendly wave and smiled. The man lifted his hand politely in response and the woman gave her a tight smile before they both turned away.
“You feel those daggers?” Cass rolled her eyes. “What did you do, sleep with her husband?”
Kate remembered being shocked at the news, the awkwardness in his voice when she’d called him to see if he wanted to get a drink a few nights after they’d slept together. How for a few weeks afterward she’d had to remind herself that she’d had as much fun as he did and that she’d gone into the hookup with no expectations. She shook off the memory and shrugged. “I had a crush on him in college. When we ran into each other a few years later, he said he was on a break from his girlfriend. Next thing I know, he’s married.” Kate grinned broadly, even though she didn’t quite feel it. “This is why I can only be friends with you three. I can keep track of your men and avoid pissing off the entire female population of Manhattan.” She took a big gulp of her drink. “Some people need to get out of the past.”
Sometimes New York felt really, really small.
The rest of the evening felt a little more normal to Kate. They had more drinks, critiqued their food, and ate off each other’s plates to make sure they all got to try a little of everything. She loved having girlfriends, knowing they cared about her enough to question her recent decisions. The fact that Cassandra and Mia were both in monogamous relationships and that Suzanne was always on the quest for the same made little difference. Kate knew that she was unlike most women in terms of how she actively avoided looking for Mr. Right and wasn’t looking forward to starting a family—at all. The fact was, she had enough of a “family.” She had these girls at this table, she had Alberto, she even had Adam when she felt nostalgic. They all fit in with her life in different ways. She just didn’t need the traditional husband/wife/kids structure to feel fulfilled, and she certainly didn’t need the kind of distractions to her career that a traditional family would create.
Back at home, Kate kicked off her shoes, shook her hair out of the wig, and pulled it back into a loose braid. She stayed in her dress as she sat at her computer, having paid enough for it that she didn’t want to take it off right away. She looked at the pile of bills stacked neatly on her desk and decided to get them out of the way. She had learned from her mother all right and paid her credit card balances, always in full, always on time, even back when she had student loans to pay, even when she’d splurged a little that month. And just like every other month when she went through this routine of checking bank statements, receipts, and invoices, she was grateful that she’d followed her mother’s advice not to follow in her footsteps. Kate didn’t have to debate which bill would be paid late or not at all, didn’t have to ask her spouse why he spent three hundred dollars at the bookstore.
She decided to check Facebook before going to bed. She didn’t often post updates about herself and was cert
ainly not one to share photos of her weekly mani/pedi like some. She hadn’t initially thought of herself as a social network type of person, but its snapshot view of all her friends and family was addictive in a voyeuristic way. She had spent hours flipping through photos of old college friends, amazed at how their lives had changed since she’d first met them, wondered at the self-proclaimed cultural snob’s choice of reading online celebrity gossip sites, and chuckled at how much time some colleagues spent playing games. And of course there was a part of her that just liked knowing more about their lives than they knew about hers.
She had a message from Adam, asking about her engagement like so many others had. She knew that updating her relationship status would generate some questions, but she didn’t anticipate how many. Just because she didn’t post “couple” photos and update her status in first person plural all the time, was it really so surprising that she could be in a relationship?
Well … maybe it was.
Thank goodness she had already told her parents, or at least her mother, before then. Linda Wallace would not have been pleased to find out about her only child’s impending nuptials through a Facebook post. Linda—and Kate called her Linda—had taken the news about Kate marrying an old friend from business school just as Kate thought she would. She was skeptical about relationships in general, having divorced Kate’s father after nearly twenty years of marriage. But as long as Kate kept her career and financial independence (and didn’t mention Alberto was a musician), Linda wished her the best and would fly out for the wedding. And if there was anything else Kate wanted Linda to do, like those mother-of-the-bride type things that some of Linda’s friends talked about, Kate should just let her know. There were no happy tears from Linda or emailed suggestions for wedding gowns or floral arrangements. The day after Kate told her, Linda had sent her a text:
If you buy an apartment make sure your name’s on the title.
Followed by:
Nothing wrong with separate bank accounts for percentage of own earnings.
Kate wasn’t sure what she wanted to tell Adam about the nature of her engagement. They’d become best friends after their freshman biology teacher sat them alphabetically, and Adam Ward was seated behind Katie Wallace. He’d borrowed a pen from her the first day of class, muttering something about his brothers melting the points on his, and he’d spent the rest of the semester whispering science jokes that only two geeks like them would find funny. There had been a time back in high school when she would have confided everything to him, when he had been her closest friend, helping her through her parents’ divorce just by being around for her when she didn’t want to be alone. She tried not to think about that time now; she had come so far from being that mousy, lonely girl. Adam had been vague about how his own relationship had ended several months ago, and she wasn’t sure who he still kept in touch with from their hometown. Ultimately Kate didn’t want to risk having to explain to Linda that the engagement was a business arrangement, so she only wrote back the standard answer she had been giving to everyone:
He’s a guy from grad school. No date set yet.
A message from her father came in, and Kate groaned before she opened it. Dad was in pitch mode, and he had just sent out fifty letters to literary agents with his latest book proposal for a novel yet to be completed. Growing up, Kate’s mother used to say what a brilliant writer her dad was, only he lacked focus. Kate didn’t quite know what that meant back then, but she surely saw it now. Her dad had new ideas for his “next great novel” all the time and did not seem to be deterred by the fact that he had yet to complete the first one, the one that he’d been working on when he married her mother, the one that was going to take care of them all “as soon as he got an agent, as soon as he got a book deal.” Thank goodness Dad had discovered blogging in the last few years and now had an outlet for all his snippets of ideas and opinions. When she was younger, he would proudly proclaim how much Kate was like him—how creative they both were, how much they enjoyed life. As long as someone’s supporting that life you enjoy, Linda would mutter. “Good luck” was all Kate wrote back to him. What could she say? “Hope you don’t get more rejections?” “How about finishing the first one?”
Kate went back to read a long message from her friend Elizabeth, her darling, darling friend Elizabeth, who had been her roommate at Columbia and whom she missed dearly ever since Elizabeth moved to the Midwest after college. She hadn’t had time to read the message when it first came in and wanted to give it the attention it deserved. Elizabeth had married her college sweetheart and followed him to Chicago when he went to medical school before settling down in Minneapolis near his family. They had three kids now, and Elizabeth became a stay-at-home mom after their son developed some health issues. Kate knew parenthood sometimes wore her out more than she liked to admit. In this message, Elizabeth was saying how exhausted she was, having been up all night managing one kid’s latest bout with asthma, another’s sleep training, about how critical her mother-in-law has been, how disinterested her own parents have become, as retired Upper East Siders living in Palm Beach. Elizabeth’s was not a life that Kate knew how to relate to, but she always felt she owed Elizabeth so much, that she truly loved her as if they had been sisters, that she tried hard to at least be the safe shoulder for Elizabeth to cry on.
When Kate met Elizabeth on that first day when everyone was moving into their dorms, she had felt intimidated by this outgoing girl who had already decorated her half of the room with Picasso and Monet posters and a garland of artificial flowers along the ceiling, and lined up ten pairs of shoes in all different styles. Kate had expected Elizabeth to take one look at the two (just two) suitcases that Kate had been able to bring on the plane and go ask for a room change. But instead Elizabeth sat cross-legged on her Calvin Klein comforter and chatted while Kate unpacked.
“It was smart not to bring too much with you. That way you can just buy what you need once you figure it out.” Elizabeth snapped her gum in her teeth the way Kate had repeatedly tried … and failed. “I had to bring everything. It was either that or throw it out so my parents could have a guest room.” She blew a bubble, then popped it. “I’ve never seen my dad as excited as he was pulling a U-Haul up to our building. They couldn’t wait to get me out of the house,” Elizabeth had said, chuckling. “Some people just should never be parents, you know?” Kate had just smiled, not wanting her new roommate to think she was passing judgment so quickly. But she’d felt the tension leave her shoulders then, with the knowledge that they had more in common than she’d initially thought.
When Kate self-consciously unpacked the meager two pairs of shoes she had brought, she first thought Elizabeth was making fun of her when she gushed over how cute the flowered sandals were. But she would soon learn that there wasn’t anything disingenuous about Elizabeth. By the end of their first week of school, Kate realized that she had never met anyone quite like Elizabeth, a girl who had grown up with lots of financial privileges in New York, who had clearly never lacked for friends or popularity, who always seemed to have the right outfit and attitude for any occasion, and who actually seemed to like Kate.
As long as she had Elizabeth, Kate felt OK being at Columbia, far away from home, far away from Adam. She had someone to eat meals with, to walk to the bookstore with, someone to study with. And even though Kate wasn’t nearly as talkative as Elizabeth, she never felt awkward or stupid. Maybe Elizabeth somehow knew that Kate was busy taking it all in, seeing how open and friendly Elizabeth was to everyone and how much they all liked Elizabeth in return. And that was part of the problem. Everyone else wanted Elizabeth, too. She was constantly being invited out to things—parties, meals off campus, movies. And it became obvious that Kate didn’t, or couldn’t, fit in with Elizabeth’s other friends. Finally, after a couple of months of feeling like the fifth wheel at every outing, and after her falling-out with Adam, Kate asked Elizabeth for help.
“You know, I think I finally figu
red out what I want,” she mentioned to Elizabeth casually one night, when they were both getting ready for bed. In the safety of the dark, Kate was able to say, “I couldn’t really bring a whole wardrobe with me, so I think I need to get some things.” She could tell Elizabeth was excited to help her. She had been more than generous with offering to let Kate borrow whatever she wanted. Kate always declined, not wanting to accidently ruin any of Elizabeth’s things.
“We can find some great stuff downtown!” Elizabeth had said excitedly. “Just a few things, you know, to accessorize what you already have.”
That weekend Elizabeth introduced Kate to the Greenwich Village shops along Broadway, picking up cute skirts and tops at Unique Boutique, Canal Jeans, and Le Chateau. Even the Gap was more fun to shop in with Elizabeth there to pick out the right cuts and colors for Kate, who finally figured out that she’d been wearing clothes two sizes too big. And even with the modest budget provided by her part-time job at the library, Kate felt like she had a brand-new wardrobe.
“I want to cut my hair, too,” Kate said as they passed a salon. It was all one length and to her waist now, and she still wore it in a braid all the time—far from the just-below-the-shoulder layered cuts that all the other girls, including Elizabeth, wore.
“What?! Your hair is gorgeous,” Elizabeth protested. “I would kill to have hair that shiny.”
“I need a change,” Kate insisted. “This place takes walk-ins.”
Elizabeth turned Kate away from the salon window by her shoulders. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Then we’re going to do this right. I’ll call my stylist, who I’ve been going to for forever. If he can get my mass of curls to look halfway decent, you’re going to be a knockout.” Elizabeth smiled. “Not that you aren’t already.”
