There's Cake in My Future

by Gruenenfelder, Kim

  “How old are you?” he asks me right off the bat.

  I hate him already. “How old are you?” I answer back.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he tells me as the waiter puts down our shrimp cocktails. “A man can impregnate a woman well into his eighties. By the time women are thirty-five, genetically their eggs are inferior, and their ovaries are starting to shrink.”

  I force a smile. “In the first place, that’s biologically incorrect,” I tell him. “But the point is moot, since you won’t be getting anywhere near my ovaries anyway.”

  The minidate during the salad course starts out fine, albeit a bit strange. A nerdy, slightly overweight gentleman introduces himself as Chester (are men still really called Chester?), then begins to talk to me. “So what would you do if you won the lottery and never had to work again?”

  I start off with a joke. “Well, in the first place, I don’t play the lottery, since I figure my odds are the same of winning either way.”

  This falls flat. Chester looks at me, confused. “That’s not true. In the California Lottery, your chances of winning are one in forty-one million, four hundred and sixteen thousand, three hundred and fifty-three. Therefore, if you played eleven tickets per game, your chance would be one in less than four million. Not great odds, but certainly not the same as not playing.”

  I have no response to that. “True,” I finally concede. “I don’t know. Travel, maybe? My friend just won the lottery. She’s traveling.”

  “Really?” he says to me, fascinated. “So, is your friend single? Because, let’s face it, we have no heat here.”

  Soup guy opened with, “Have you heard the word of Jesus?”

  Entrée dude opened with, “So what political party are you registered with?” (By the way, never answer that. No matter what political party the guy is in, you are just encouraging an angry monologue.)

  By dessert, my ego wasn’t yet shattered, but it was definitely cracked. So when my date said to me, as I put the spoon of chocolate mousse up to my mouth, “Are you really gonna eat that? Because, you know, a moment on the lips, an eternity on the hips,” I responded with an irate, “You, sir, just blew any chance of spending an eternity with these hips.” And proceeded not only to eat my chocolate mousse, but his crème brûlée as well.

  At the end of the night, I decided to chalk up the evening as an amusing aside for my future memoirs.

  Thirty-six

  Nicole

  In the dead of night that Friday, lightning is flashing through my bedroom, thunder is booming, and I have just been awakened by a colossal kick in my stomach.

  “Ugh … Son of a … bitch,” I call out, the wind knocked out of me.

  I open my eyes. Attached to my stomach is Malika’s foot.

  She’s terrified of thunderstorms, so I told her she could sleep with me tonight.

  No good deed goes unpunished. That tiny girl has managed to stretch out her entire body across our bed to lie in an odd little asterisk position to take up most of the king-size bed, leaving me to move my body farther and farther out to the side, until I look like a car halfway over a precipice.

  I sit up in bed, move Malika’s head onto Jason’s empty pillow, and her feet down to the foot of the bed. “Honey, wake up,” I say to her sweetly.

  She’s out cold, her mouth is slightly open, and she’s doing this little snoring thing that makes me worried she needs to have her tonsils and adenoids removed.

  “Honey,” I whisper. “The storm is passing. You can go to sleep in your own room now.”

  BOOM! pounds the thunder.

  Malika sits bolt upright, but with her eyes still closed. As I start to softly repeat, “Sweetie, you can move back to your own room,” her whole body plunges down diagonally right at me, full force. I scurry out of the way, leaping out of bed just as her head hits my pillow with a thud.

  Great. Now I’m standing outside of my own bed, trying to figure out a way in.

  First, I try Jason’s side of the bed, empty due to a road trip. I slowly and silently lie myself down, trying not to disturb her royal highness. Malika immediately whips her body around to me, then throws her entire body on mine.

  It’s like in the middle of the night, she becomes a heat-seeking missile. Owww …

  I give up, get out of bed, and putter down to the kitchen to have a glass of wine recommended by the guy at Wine Library TV.

  I open the refrigerator to look for the rest of a bottle of chardonnay Jason and I shared last night after he got home. It’s not there. Sigh. Jason must have had the last glass before the car picked him up to take a red-eye to New York for some NBA Cares charity event.

  He doesn’t even like chardonnay.

  I pour myself a mug of milk, stir in some Hershey’s syrup, then throw it in the microwave. As my hot cocoa heats, I walk to the desk in my office and turn on my computer. Then I walk back to the kitchen and retrieve the unopened mail from our mail bowl. A letter that I didn’t notice earlier today from the Toluca Lake Post, a (very) local weekly paper. I open it and read:

  Dear Ms. Eaton,

  Thank you very much for your inquiry for our new opinion column. I was very impressed with your reporting in the Tribune, as well as with your writing sample on the Pros and Cons of Charter Schools.

  Unfortunately, we are not able to use you at this time. A woman of your caliber should be at a large daily paper, not at a small independently owned weekly like ourselves.

  Best of luck with my future endeavors, blah, blah, blah.

  I rip it up and throw it in the trash. Man, when you can’t even get a weekly column at a paper that pays pretty much nothing, your life is definitely not on plan A.

  The microwave beeps. I grab my cocoa, head back to my office, then check my e-mails. This week, I was really trying to get my career back on track, so I sent out inquiry e-mails to every reporter and editor friend I had. My efforts so far have led to twelve incredibly nice rejections, each one filled with flattery and accolades but no job leads.

  So this evening’s e-mail rejection from an old editor friend who now lives in San Francisco shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

  To: Nicole

  From: Gerry

  Subject: I’m sorry

  You know I adore your writing, and we love you over here, but there are just no openings—even for freelance. What are the odds that we could get you to do a blog for the paper’s Web site? No pay, but sometimes that leads to something.

  Please don’t take this personally. Our business is just in shambles right now, and my priority is to keep what few staffers I still have left.

  Give the blog some thought.

  Hang in there baby,

  Gerry

  Sigh. I go to Facebook to click on Mafia Wars—I’m ready to shoot something or someone, even if it’s just online.

  KEVIN: What are you doing up at 2 A.M.? I thought you were a lark.

  NICOLE: Malika is afraid of thunderstorms, so she’s in our bed tonight. She was kicking in her sleep, probably from all the thunder. What are you doing up?

  KEVIN: Playing Farkle and avoiding writing. How are you?

  I stare at the computer screen. How am I? How am I?!

  NICOLE: Not a great day to ask. How are you?

  KEVIN: Boing!

  NICOLE: What’s that mean?

  KEVIN: Boing! That’s you deflecting my question. What’s wrong?

  NICOLE: I’m just having a bad day. Jason had to leave town for the weekend for this charity event. I couldn’t go because the girls’ mother is in Sacramento for work until tomorrow morning and someone had to stay with them, and it’s raining so hard I feel like I should be looking up blueprints online for an ark. Whatever. It’s fine. I am very lucky, I know that. I have absolutely no right to complain.

  KEVIN: You do remember I was a psych major, right?

  NICOLE: Yeah. So?

  KEVIN: So then you know that I’m going to point out that when people think they have “no right” to complain, what
they’re really saying is they have no right to have their feelings.

  I read that sentence over and over. Decide to let his hint drop. Eventually, I see the little icon pop up that tells me Kevin is typing. Then this comes up:

  KEVIN: So start your next sentence with “I feel like…”

  I take a deep breath. Okay, what could it hurt to tell someone who, in effect, is a total stranger these days a bit about how I’m feeling? And frankly, it would be nice to vent.

  Before I realize it, my fingers are flying over the keyboard.

  NICOLE: I feel like I don’t even recognize my own life anymore. It’s like I made all of these decisions that I thought would make me happy, and I put all this work into doing things that I thought would make me happy and … I don’t know. I’m not unhappy. It’s just—things aren’t what I thought they’d be. It’s like I was on this path, and I zigged when I should have zagged. Or maybe I stopped when I should have run, or run faster when I took a break. I don’t know. And the worst part is, I don’t even know how to get back on track. I don’t even know what my life’s purpose is supposed to be anymore. Plus there’s this charm I pulled from this cake that told me my fortune was to have a baby. Which is fine, it’s good even. But I had rigged my charm to be one of work. And then I pulled the wrong charm, and that charm is so symbolic to me that life isn’t working out the way I planned.

  And if I say any of this to Jason, it’s just going to cause a big fight. The guy is working really hard at his job and he’s raising his kids without much help from their mother. I can’t be one more problem for him to deal with, you know?

  And I can’t tell my friends, because they have all these things going on in their own lives. Mel just had to dump Fred because he’s been cheating on her for years. What am I going to say to her? “Yeah, I know you desperately want what I have, and you probably have a bit of frenemy jealousy over it, but hey, feel sorry for me because I’m not happy, even though my life is perfect.”

  I hit send without even thinking. Kevin doesn’t write back for a while.

  Why did I do that? I spent years fantasizing about running into Kevin, looking amazing, having a fabulous career, and proving to him that moving on from him was the best thing that I ever did. Now I’ve just gone ahead and shown him that all those things I demanded and planned for when we were in our twenties didn’t pan out anyway. He was right, I was wrong.

  KEVIN: I’m going through a lot of those same things myself. Tell me more.

  And so I did. Until about six in the morning, when the sudden September storm cleared up just as quickly as it had come. For those four hours I got to tell someone all of the worst things going on in my mind, all of my self-doubts, all of my failures to date, and all of my flaws. And I got to hear from an ex-boyfriend (an ex-enemy, if you will) that his life hadn’t turned out the way he planned either—and that maybe some of what both of us were feeling was just an early midlife crisis.

  Albeit, if we die at sixty-four, but still.

  Thirty-seven

  Seema

  “Whoa!” Scott exclaims approvingly as he opens the door to greet me at his loft that Saturday night. “Planning on hooking up with some dude later?”

  Indeed, I think to myself as I walk in, happy that he has noticed my red minidress and red strappy high heels.

  I am pulling out all the stops tonight. I spent the whole day getting ready: I got my legs waxed (below and above the knee) and bought a new dress at a little shop off of Melrose and some fabulous new shoes I couldn’t afford on Rodeo Drive. I even bought new lingerie—just in case.

  “What do you think?” I ask, spinning around to show off all of my assets.

  “I think my end-of-the-day T-shirt and jeans look like crap, and I better take a quick shower and throw on some new duds.”

  “Like your gray suit?” I ask him, hopefully.

  “Don’t push it, Singh,” Scott says jokingly as he closes the door behind me. “So, what are you drinking?”

  “Champagne,” I say, pulling out a bottle left over from Nic’s shower.

  “Wow. Okay,” Scott says, walking over to his kitchen to get us some glasses. “By the way, did you remember to bring—”

  “My shovel,” I say, finishing his sentence as I pull it out of my purse. “Yes. Now what else can it mean besides a lifetime of hard work?”

  An enigmatic smile creeps onto Scott’s face. “I’ll let you know next week, when my show is up and my piece is finished.”

  He sets the charm down on his kitchen counter, then pulls two beautiful new wineglasses from his cabinet as I take a seat. They’re interesting: both glasses have a purple mask with gold accents hand painted on the bowl, purple, green, and gold feathers painted on the rim, and three masks painted on the bottom of the stem of the glass. Also on the stem is a purple and gold feather. A real feather. The glasses are very silly, very fun, and totally Scott.

  “Those are cool,” I say.

  “You like them?” Scott asks me distractedly. “The pattern is called Masquerade. Hand painted by a former advertising executive who decided to shuck her old job and follow her bliss.”

  “They’re really funky. I like the colors.”

  He holds up the wineglasses. “So they don’t bother you?”

  “Um … no,” I say, wondering where he’s going with this. “They’re beautiful. Why?”

  “I bought these earlier in the week when I was with Britney. She said you’d hate them.”

  “I don’t hate them,” I say, hating her more all the time.

  “Even though they’re wineglasses, and not specifically champagne flutes?” Scott asks me.

  I eye him suspiciously. “Am I in trouble just because I own champagne flutes?”

  Scott smiles at me. “You’re not in trouble for anything,” he assures me, his voice softening. “I’m sorry. I’m in a weird mood.” He gives me a kiss on the forehead, then pops the champagne.

  As Scott pours the champagne into his cool new glasses I ask, “You wanna talk about it?”

  Scott seems to be debating whether or not to answer my question. As he hands me my glass of champagne, he asks me, “That movie we were watching last week before Britney came over. How does it end?”

  “When Harry Met Sally? They get together, just like you predicted,” I tell him. Then I take a sip of champagne. “Why?”

  Scott pauses again before he answers me. It’s only a pause of a few seconds, but I think it means something. He has a drink of champagne to stall a few more seconds before telling me, “Britney said you and I have an unhealthy relationship. We actually got into a big fight about it. She said our watching that movie in the middle of the night on a Saturday night was either me trying to put the moves on you without taking responsibility for my actions, or you hinting to me that you wanted me to get rid of Britney so that I could be with you, not her.”

  Spot on, Britney. “I’m sorry she thought that,” I say noncommittally. “What did you tell her?”

  Scott shrugs. “In fifty words or less, I said that I have a lot of beautiful women friends and that she needed to get over it. She said she couldn’t. So we broke up.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him, sympathetically.

  “I’m not,” he assures me.

  Scott takes a swig of champagne, then puts down his glass. “So, obviously you are not dressed for a sleazy dive and Jack and Cokes. What do you say I rinse off and change, we quaff the champagne for a bit, cab it over to Little Tokyo for sushi, then down to the Ritz-Carlton for some fancy drinks?”

  “That sounds perfect,” I say, surprised that he has suggested such a romantic evening.

  “Great. Have some more champagne. I’ll only be five minutes.”

  And with that, Scott turns around and walks into his bathroom for a quick shower.

  There’s no Britney anymore. No Conrad, no Sherri, no Greg, no five-foot-ten bimbo whose name escapes me.

  For the first time in our relationship, we’re both free and clear.
If I wanted to, I could walk into that shower and join him. Just unzip my dress and let it fall to the floor while I open the door and …

  Oh, for God’s sake—I am not Charlize Theron in that perfume commercial. I can’t pull off the attitude or the dress.

  Thirty-eight

  Melissa

  With Jason out of town, and the girls finally with their mother, Nic called me that Saturday evening to see if I wanted to go out. Since it was Saturday night, I suggested a hip new club with a velvet rope, eighteen-dollar drinks, and paparazzi outside to snap pics of young Hollywood starlets leaving the VIP room.

  Nic politely suggested that I get my head examined. “We’d be the oldest ones there.”

  “We would not be the oldest ones there,” I said to her firmly. “There’ll be a film producer in the corner in his late fifties who will offer to buy everyone a car.”

  “Nonetheless,” Nic said, “I’m more in the mood for a Kobe burger, craft beer from a tap, and, most important, not dressing like a slut and hitting on men like an idiot.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re married now. The hunt is over.”

  “Oh, I still dress like a slut and hit on Jason from time to time. But tonight I want to be in jeans,” Nic told me dryly. “I’m hungry. Pick you up in thirty?”

  “Done.”

  So the two of us went to our favorite beer joint, Blue Palms Brewhouse in Hollywood. She had the Kobe beef burger with the sweet potato fries, I went with the fish and chips. Then we perused the selection of beers. For me, there was only one choice: the beer from the cask is a vanilla bean porter from Stone Brewing Company—it’s ice cream in a glass. Nic opted for the five-beer sampler—which is five four-ounce tastings of any of their twenty-four beers on tap. Besides a few standards, she opted for a coffee stout, a hefeweizen, and one beer that smells and tastes like a Christmas tree.

  I’ll admit, it was nice not to go to any great efforts for a change. The food and drink are gourmet, but Blue Palms is casual. The patrons here are mostly dressed in jeans (as are we). There are plasma screens around the room, and a game is on, but it’s not so loud as to be distracting. Plus, there are more men here than women, which is very nice.