by Cat Gardiner
Taking off her coat, Elizabeth hit the playback button on her answering machine. Yes, she still had one of those, because frankly it was reserved for her mother and she took a great deal of satisfaction hitting rewind over her mother’s almost daily messages. After a while, those messages had become a source of humor rather than irritation. She learned years ago to view her mother through the only prism she knew to survive her – as a crackpot.
“Lizzy, this is your mother.”
She snorted. Who else would have that nasal intonation and drop her ‘r’s’ and turn her g’s into k’s with such Long Island proficiency?
“Where were you yesterday for your sister’s fitting? She looked wonderful, even if her belly was protruding just a bit. She gained weight! How could she do that to me? Oh, the humility – my beautiful model daughter, about to roll down the aisle like a donut. I swear, I think she’s pregnant, and there goes her million-dollar career. I can’t take this stress – she’s killin’ me. You should have been there.
Now listen to your mother, Lizzy, you need a date for her wedding, and while I’m not telling you what to do, I’m telling you, you better take my advice and get yourself a man. I have just the one for you, and he’s coming for an early dinner on Sunday. He has just moved to Meryton, so he doesn’t know anything about you; consider yourself lucky on that account. You better be there missy, because this man isn’t one of your city boys. He’s a hard working one with a stable job and willing to overlook your faults.”
The answering machine timed out and with a loud BEEP cut Frances off. “Serves you right mom. Even the answering machine didn’t want to listen to you.”
After pouring her wine, she slid her Josh Groban “Noel” CD into the Bose and sat on the floor with her take out salad, resting it on the coffee table. Raising the fork to her mouth with her right hand, her left index finger logged into the Strictly Personal website to see if she had any responses to her ad. She felt nervous, of course she would be - she had never done anything like this before. Not to mention her photograph was out there. That was a scary thought. What if someone she knew from the office saw it, or worse – one of her clients, or super worse – one of her sisters, or double super worse, Lydia’s boyfriend George Wickham? She shook off her fears when she saw thirteen potential matches of interest. Forcing herself to think positively, she resisted the urge to shudder at the prospect of thirteen comments.
“Woo hoo!” Her heart rate sped up in anticipation and fear.
Reply from FemmeArt:
Hello SWPF. It’s so nice to meet you and like you, I love the holiday season. Winter solstice is my favorite time of the year. I see from your profile answers that you enjoy the arts and museums. Well perhaps we’re a match made in heaven because I am an artist. Right now, I’m finishing an abstract entitled, “The Beautiful Vagina” for my gallery exhibit at the Leslie-Lohman. The 60 x 120 acrylic piece is a self-portrait. My exhibit opening will be this Friday the 6th. Perhaps we can meet.
“What on earth? Leslie-Lohman gallery is a gay and lesbian art gallery in SOHO.” With the tines of her fork, she clicked the ‘no match’ button. “Moving on.”
Reply from Mygirlsrock,
A carriage ride in Central Park sounds ideal and romantic. I would love to share all the beauty of Christmas in New York City with you. Judging from your profile answers and picture, we are kindred spirits. I’m also a big fan of Stella McCartney’s clothing designs. Her lingerie line fits me better than any other in the market. I’m a slave to good fashion …
“A guy who wears lingerie? Ah, no thank you. Next.”
She scrolled quickly down the remaining eleven replies.
… I’ve been out for the last ten years.
… I’m also a SWPF who is just looking for a good woman to spend my evenings with.
… As you know, it’s hard to meet women like us who enjoy the same romantic things of the season.
… Would you like to meet me for cocktails? No cock, just the tail. LOL
… You look and sound very feminine from your picture and bio. I’m butch. I think we would have a great time this holiday.
… I wasn’t always female but perhaps we can make a match anyway.
“Oh. My. God!” She shouted. Quickly clicking to review her personal ad, she saw the typo big and bold right there for everyone to misinterpret ‘SWP/F ISO SWP/F. What the hell kind of advertising executive would let that slip by her? To make matters worse – so much worse – in the advertising side banner, her personal ad profile and photograph was featured on New York Metro.com.
Quickly, she downed the glass of wine and poured a second.
Elizabeth dropped her forehead to the keyboard, repeating the action with mortification up and down against the keys, causing her laptop to beep incessantly from the errant typing her infuriated and frustrated head banging made.
“No … No … No! This cannot … be happening to me! Kill me … just kill me now.” She wanted to cry, close to weeping, actually. The closest she had come to dating this Christmas was with a lesbian. No, this was a bad omen – unlucky thirteen struck again.
She grabbed her cell phone and called Charlotte.
“Speak to me, Chica,” Char answered.
“Oh my God, Oh my God … the ad. I’m dying here!” Her breaths came short and frantic.
“Breathe, Lizzy. Stop hyperventilating and breathe. What about the ad?”
“I’m a lesbian! I mean, they think I’m a lesbian. In my ad was a typo. All my responses are from gay women. One said she wanted the tail and not the cock!”
“So? Big deal. You might make a nice, attentive friend.”
“I am NOT taking a lesbian to Christmas dinner! Do you have any idea what that would do to my mother?”
“Yeah, it might shut her up.”
“No, quite the opposite. She’ll gossip to everyone she knows how her unlucky daughter won’t be getting married.”
“You can get married in New York now.” Charlotte laughed.
“Stop it! This is not funny. To make matters worse, they featured my profile on New York Metro’s website. Every professional, single, white male in the city is going to think I’m gay. I’ll never meet a guy! God, what am I going to do Charlotte?”
“Laugh.”
“What?!”
“Laugh, Lezzy. This is too stinking’ funny not to laugh over. Look at it this way, now your mother will think we are a couple.”
Elizabeth couldn’t help but to smile. “Did you just call me Lezzy?”
She guffawed and Charlotte along with her. Together their laughs rose to out of control proportions. The tears flowed down their cheeks, prompting the silly jokes at both their mothers’ expenses. For the next thirty minutes, the two friends got drunk together over the phone laughing at the situation.
“Can you come uptown to hang out with me, Char?”
“I can’t. I promised to self-develop some of the photographs from a photoshoot I did today. The client didn’t want digital shots, and I have to have them ready for tomorrow. I’m sorry, my little lez-boo.”
“Very funny.”
She disconnected the call and walked to her Christmas tree. Holding tightly to the goblet in her hand, she looked at her little ornament of Emma Woodhouse. “I know you sucked as a matchmaker, but can you help me out here, maybe send me a dashing Mr. Knightly of my own? A man who can withstand my family on Christmas Day and overlook all my faults and unluckiness, someone who is perfect enough to not bring censure from my mother down upon me or him, and someone who’s not looking for forever, but just wants to enjoy the holiday season with me.”
A feeling of sadness came over her as she stood before the beautiful, glittering tree. The oppressive sense of unluckiness and with it a painful memory, vivid and detailed as though it happened just the day before, came to the forefront of her mind.
She sat aloft in her childhood tree house, the only sanctuary from her harping mother’s perpetual condemnation. Two acres from their
ranch house and up a thirty-foot maple tree still wasn’t far or high enough to escape Frances’s presence. Her words taunted her daughter’s mind, lingering like the bad luck she had been saddled with since birth.
That day was no different from any other day, only that day her bad luck came with a larger measure of mortification. Her feet hung over the edge of the wood structure and her arms rested across the horizontal wood beam bracing the house between two thick branches. She swung her jean-clad legs back and forth while staring aimlessly over acres of bursting corn seedlings. A Dave Matthews CD played behind her on the small boom box as her mind filtered the words of the song, “The Space Between.” The significance of the lyrics pulled her into a maelstrom of thoughts of how the words pertained to her life and the people in it. She wryly chuckled then spoke aloud as though to an imaginary friend.
“No doubt John will have seen it. God, what was I thinking by wearing that shirt for the yearbook photo?”
The shirt in question was the source of her mortification and newest evidence of her undeniable bad luck. It was one thing to be the brainiac nerd who had not yet come into any semblance of beauty and confidence, but it was another to be so aptly named Unlucky Thirteen Lizzy.
“One day,” she dreamed, but at only seventeen, a few things held her back from spreading her wings and flying free from small-town America as she yearned to do. John Lucas was one of those things. He needed her to remain faithful, supportive, and self-sacrificing until finishing his two-year Associate Degree at the local community college. She would stay here in Meryton beside him because he had told her he couldn’t stand it if she left him for D.C.
“Yes, you need him, too. You did the right thing by not taking that scholarship.”
With Jane away at college, he was the only important reason to remain on Long Island.
From up high, she watched him amble toward her between the rows of planted corn. His boots were muddy, but she knew he didn’t care. Nothing seemed to bother him. His manner was always carefree and unconcerned, unlike hers. She was reduced to living by lists and criteria, developed for survival purposes as insurance against screw-ups.
John always laughed at her lists. He laughed at everything, sometimes she wondered if he was actually laughing at her, but she rationalized that was just Johnny. She couldn’t deny that he made her laugh, too. He was a good-natured, happy go lucky and charming guy.
She ignored the promptings in the back of her mind that told her how he used all three qualities to efficiently and selfishly wrap people around his finger. She had fallen for him hard, hook, line and sinker. His smile, those riveting blue eyes and athletic physique were always her undoing, especially when he wanted something from her, no matter what it was: sex, money, attention, car washer, or just general doormat.
They’d been dating for two years. Why, she had yet to understand. It wasn’t as though her reputation hadn’t preceded her. Everyone in Meryton, particularly her best friend Charlotte’s family accepted that she was unlucky. It had been the Lucas’s swimming pool where Elizabeth threw up when she was thirteen. Yeah, that was bad luck for sure. Who knew her mother’s potluck meatloaf would do that to her?
As John neared the treetop perch, he waved, brandishing the offensive book in his other hand. There it was - the most mortifying thing to have happened to her as of yet – immortalized forever in the Meryton High School’s 2004 Yearbook.
His sandy brown, wavy hair was tousled from the breeze during his long hike to what he referred to as ‘their love nest’, the place where she had lost her virginity to him last summer. He was the most handsome boy in school, and she still wondered why he dated her.
“Did you see it Honeybee?” He laughed as though her shame was one big joke.
She wanted to cringe at his nickname for her, long ago acquired after her curiosity took her to Mr. Phillips’s farm bee box. Who knew that pretty, little white house was filled with bees? That was an unfortunate unlucky experience, too, resulting in a severe anaphylaxis from multiple stings. Oh Lord, her mother had a field day with that one.
“Yes, Johnny. I saw it. Just call me, ‘ass girl’ from now on. Everyone else is.”
He laughed again, as he took to the rungs of the ladder, the mud from his boots scraping off with each step up. “I told you to take off the sweater for the photograph, but nope – you wouldn’t listen to me. I told you, you should always listen to me. I know what’s best for you.”
Once he climbed the ladder, he sat next to her, and she pulled the book from his hand. “I’m burning this!”
“Don’t you dare, some of my best photographs from the Photography Club are in there! Including you waiting in line for said yearbook photograph wearing said tee-shirt.”
“You’re right; some of your best work is in the book. Sorry.”
“What did your mother say about your yearbook picture?”
“She said it serves me right for wearing a tee-shirt that read, “Sassy girl.”
“I thought the tee-shirt was cute, just like you. You are sassy.”
She looked over to his handsome smiling face, and could see right through that crooked, shit-eating grin of his. Narrowing her eyes, she rightfully accused, “You knew it read ‘ass girl’ with my sweater covering the ‘s’ and the ‘y’, didn’t you?
His smile broadened mischievously and he shrugged a shoulder. “Hey, it’s not my fault you didn’t listen to me when I said you should remove your sweater.”
“No, but I wore the sweater the entire day while at school. Not only does everyone think I’m into anal sex with you, but it’s now advertised in my yearbook photograph. You should read some of the comments people wrote in my yearbook.”
“Aww c’mon Lizzy, that’s not what ‘ass girl’ implies. I actually think it states the obvious: you have a great ass. That’s effective advertising if you ask me. You should go into advertising.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her into him. “Besides your tits, your ass is your second best feature. I love your ass. In fact, I’d like to wear it as a hat … now.” He wiggled his eyebrows to make his point.
She pushed him away, “Johnny, stop! You’re so vulgar. Is that all you think about or admire about me – my tits and ass?”
“I’m not being vulgar. I admire a lot of things about you. I love you and I’m also horny. You have no idea what that picture did for my ego and my libido.”
“You love me?” That was a first, to be sure. In all the years she had known and dated him, he had never told her that. She wondered if he spoke the truth, especially since she found out that he had been knocking boots with Mary King two months prior. In moments of clarity, she wondered why she kept on dating him, but then she’d come to her senses – he accepted her, her flaws, her bad luck and all. It’s not like there was anyone else who would want such an ugly, unlucky nerdy girl.
“Of course I love you. Why do you think I asked you not to take that scholarship to Georgetown University? I want you to stay here with me. Without you, staying in Meryton is a fate worse than death. I need you and apparently, based on that yearbook photo alone, you need me just as much.”
As he pulled her down onto the tree house floor and his hand snaked up her tee-shirt, she couldn’t help hearing the reasoning lyrics and how they spoke of lies and keeping safe from the pain. They played over in her mind as they did the deed, and she tried not to focus on just how empty it felt - including his proclamation of love.
Readying for bed, Charlie stood in pajama bottoms in the bathroom, brushing his teeth.
Jane laid flat on her back, wearing a simple gray tank top and panties, in the center of the massive bed with her long bare legs draped over the bottom edge, swinging to holiday music on the radio. Surrounded by luxurious, one-thousand count cotton sheets, she giggled when she popped another chocolate truffle into her mouth. She reveled in the great amount of satisfaction she felt at pissing off her mother with each bite of the rich, creamy European chocolate.
“Charlie d
o you know anyone we can set Lizzy up with?”
Muffled words of foaming toothpaste replied, “Are you eating those chocolates before bed? Man, Janie you’re insatiable.”
“Don’t blame me – you’re the one who brought them home. Do you know someone? I think Lizzy is really lonely this time of year, and I would hate to see her sitting by herself again at Christmas dinner. She puts on a good front, but I know it’s bothering her and my mother just makes it worse. You heard her at Thanksgiving, she was merciless toward Lizzy.”
Her handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed fiancé came to stand beside the bed, looking down at her with a naughty smile.
Charlie couldn’t help but to be amused by the sight of the droplet of chocolate on the side of his slender, supermodel’s perfect lips. He bent and licked it off. “Mmm, that one was peanut butter, and Janie … I thought Lizzy didn’t want to ever get married. Hell, the first time I met her I thought she was a lesbian.”
“You did not!”
He chuckled. “Really I did. She was pretty clear about her not wanting to settle down with a man, and well your mother talked about Lizzy’s best friend Charlotte being gay, so I just assumed.”
“Lizzy’s just gun-shy that’s all and Charlotte is definitely not gay, just in a rut. Lizzy’s another story … It’s because when she was younger she had a long-term relationship and it scarred her for life. So much so, I think she’s blocked out the memories of that jerk, but the after-effect has remained. Unfortunately, now she’s become this self-fulfilling prophecy - dating and continually faultfinding, pessimistic about every man, and looking for a reason not to find love. She hides it well, but she’s immobilized by the fear of rejection and hurt, which love tends to bring on occasion.”
