How to Be Single

by Liz Tuccillo

  But she was trying very hard to fight the slide. She was on the floor of her bedroom doing sit-ups, trying to get her endorphins going. After meeting with Serena, and hearing about Joanna and Robert, she was reminded just how short life is and how you shouldn’t be wasting any of it crying over regret and things that could have been. But nevertheless, as she was doing her crunches, she was thinking about how that sperm might have made a baby and how cute he or she would have been. Serena popped her head in the room and mentioned that she had just spoken to Alice and she was going to Iceland with them. Ruby stopped crunching.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland! Reykjavik is supposed to be amazing! Can I come, too?” Ruby said, excited. Serena looked surprised.

  “Um, I would think so…you might want to call…?”

  “I’ll call Alice to make sure.” And with that Ruby hopped on the phone.

  After their meeting with Serena, Georgia had also gone home thinking about the love of her life. She wondered if it was a cop-out to think maybe her children could be the loves of her life. She knew that they weren’t a replacement for a man or an intimate relationship—but it was love. They were two people whom she loved more than anything else in the world. Two little people who, for as long as any of them were alive, would always be her children. And this coming weekend, they were going to be with Dale. And now that she wasn’t spending all her time hating Dale and chasing after men, she literally had nothing to do but be lonely. So when Alice called her up and told her that Serena, Ruby, and I were joining her in Iceland for her honeymoon that would never be, well, she decided to whip out that credit card and climb on board, too.

  I think you can tell a lot about a place by the ride from the airport. I’m always a little disappointed if there’s no sense of foreignness about it. There’s nothing like flying twenty hours just to look out your car window and see the same old telephone wires and concrete. But the drive from the airport in Reykjavik to the heart of the city was through a landscape that I had never before seen or even heard about. The only way to describe it was lunar; imagine landing on the moon, which happens to be covered in a lovely green moss, then discovering that it’s inhabited by lots of really good-looking blond people.

  Now as I arrived on this moon, I couldn’t have been feeling more sorry for myself. I was still humiliated by what happened in China, and still traumatized by Mumbai. I wanted to be somewhere as far away from there as possible. Reykjavik seemed like it was going to be just the place.

  When I got to the hotel, I was exhausted. It was a tall, corporate-looking skyscraper, owned by Icelandair—not very quaint for Iceland or a honeymoon choice. I checked into Alice’s suite. She would be arriving in the morning, so I would have the room to myself for the night. The room Alice booked was spacious—with a living room and kitchenette and king-size bed. But it was more suited for a busy executive than amorous newlyweds. I imagined Alice getting married in the dark, then coming back to this minimalist room to have cold executive sex, and I got ashamed all over again. Why had I encouraged her to go through with the marriage? Who do I think I am anyway? I have no business calling myself a friend, and certainly no business writing a book about anything.

  At 7 A.M. I was woken up by my four friends barreling into the room. It was still pitch-black out and I was a bit disoriented, particularly from seeing my normally disparate friends all arriving in one bunch, in Iceland. It took me a minute to get my bearings.

  “Thank God I booked this room for last night. You should see the mobs of tourists in the lobby. It was ghastly,” Alice said as she took off her parka.

  “It’s true, there’s just dozens of poor slobs who just got off some redeye flight, nodding off on the sofas, waiting for checkin,” Georgia said as she sat on the bed.

  “Which is at, like, three,” Ruby added, exploring the minibar. Then she turned around and stared at me. “I’m so glad to see you! It’s been so long!”

  I sat up, leaning on the copious pillows, and crossed my legs. “It’s so good to see you! I missed you all so much.” Serena leaned over and gave me a good, long hug. It felt like she might just burst out crying right there, but she let go and got up.

  “I have to pee,” she said, sniffling.

  Alice looked around. “So this was where I was going to spend my honeymoon, huh? I guess I didn’t research that very well, did I?”

  “Why don’t we go downstairs and have some breakfast and then go to the Blue Lagoon?” I said, brightly, seeing that things in this room could turn morose very quickly.

  “What’s the Blue Lagoon?” Ruby asked.

  “It’s a natural thermal pool—a big tourist spot, but the locals go, too. I read about it on the plane.”

  Alice added, “Jim and I were going to go there the day after our wedding.”

  “Well, let’s go,” Georgia said. “We can sleep later!”

  They went downstairs to the buffet while I changed. As I was putting on my jeans, my cell phone rang. It was an “unknown” number so I assumed it was from the States. When I picked up, I heard Thomas’s voice.

  “Hello, Julie? It’s me.”

  Don’t you dare say “it’s me” when you call. As if we’re still intimate. I wanted to throw up.

  “Please, leave me alone,” is all I managed to get out.

  “I’m sorry, Julie, I am. I just needed to tell you again how sorry I am. This all was very difficult.”

  “I don’t really want to talk to you right now. I’m sorry. It’s too sad for me.” I closed my phone. I leaned against the desk for a moment. If I let myself cry again, I would never get out of this hotel room. So I took a breath and went down to breakfast.

  Alice, being Alice, had rented a car at the airport, and had directions to the Blue Lagoon ready. So we all piled in and drove the forty-five minutes out there. It was still dark out, so it was difficult to see where we actually were. But as we got closer, it appeared as if we were driving to a big hole in the ground puffing with smoke. We got out of the car and marched through the turnstile and into the locker rooms, where we put on our bathing suits and showered. We walked right out into the pool.

  It was freezing, so we quickly got into the water, which was warm and soothing. There was soft sand under our feet. We walked around for a bit, crouching so that the warm water covered our whole bodies. We settled into a little corner where steam was gushing out of the crevices of some rocks. It created a little shower for us while we soaked. The view was stupendous. The sun was rising so the sky was filled with pinks and blues. There was a geothermal power plant next to the lagoon, and while it spoiled the view a bit, it also puffed out clouds of steam that spilled over the mountains. We definitely weren’t in America anymore, and I wasn’t quite sure if we were even still on planet Earth.

  As I sat there taking in this otherworldly beauty, Georgia was having an entirely different experience.

  “Here’s the thing with hot springs—the water’s so cloudy, there’s no way to tell how clean it is.” I didn’t know how to answer her. I was too relaxed to worry.

  Alice reassured her. “I read all about it. The water gets pumped out regularly, so it’s always being cleaned.”

  Georgia looked around. “Good, because I’m sure people come here with all sorts of skin problems that they’re hoping to get cured. It could be really gross in here.”

  Serena looked at Georgia. “Why don’t you just try and enjoy the water? It feels so good.”

  Georgia nodded. It was Saturday, and tourists and locals alike were starting to wade in. Two women sat near us. One blond, the other with darkish red hair. They both were in their early forties and very tall and beautiful. They were speaking what seemed to be Icelandic.

  “Excuse me,” Georgia called to the women. “Do you know if the water here is clean?”

  The women looked at Georgia. I was worried that this might appear to be a rude question, but the women didn’t seem to mind. They also didn’t flinch at her assumption that they understood a
nd spoke English. Yes, we’re Americans.

  “Yes, it’s clean,” the blond women said, in a thick Nordic accent. “I come here all the time.”

  The other one shrugged. “I don’t like it as much, swimming with all these people, but I think it’s clean.”

  Georgia smiled at them sweetly. “Thank you so much. I appreciate it.” Georgia crouched down even lower in the water and let it come up over her neck.

  Alice looked around. “It’s so strange to be here. Tonight would have been my wedding night…”

  I tried to keep her level. “But you must know you did the right thing, don’t you?”

  Alice shook her head. “I don’t know that. I don’t know that at all. What if he was my last chance? What if I’m never going to have another boyfriend again, let alone another husband?”

  Again, no one knew what to say. How could anyone predict the future? We were all trying to heal our battle scars here in the Blue Lagoon, and no one had a lot of optimism to share.

  Georgia spoke first. “All you need to know is that you tried very hard to go through with it, and you couldn’t. That’s your answer. You didn’t have a choice.”

  Alice nodded as if she understood. But then her face crumpled into tears. “But why couldn’t I? What’s wrong with me? What am I holding out for?” I waded over and put my arm around her.

  Serena had been fairly quiet since we got here, but now spoke up. “Our time is so precious. You’re holding out for someone who you really want to spend all your time with. Otherwise, there’s no point to it.”

  Alice wasn’t so sure. “Maybe there is a point to it. Just so you don’t have to be so alone.”

  And at that, I burst out crying. I had been holding it in since my phone call with Thomas and it just came out right then and there. “We’re so fucked. We are. We’re screwed. We’re this generation of women who are just as lonely as any other, but we’re just unwilling to settle or compromise to get ourselves out of it. So we’re all just waiting for the fucking needle-in-a-haystack guy who we’re going to love, who’s going to happen to love us, who we’re going to meet just at the time when we’re both available and living in the same city.” Tears were now streaming down my face. “We’re totally fucked.”

  Ruby burst out crying as well. “Oh my God, you’re right. You’re absolutely right.”

  Serena had tears streaming down her face, too. Georgia looked at all of us whimpering and tried to lighten things up. “This is not the kind of honeymoon I expected.”

  We tried to laugh, but we were still crying too hard. The two women who were sitting near us were looking at us, concerned and puzzled. They were talking to each other in Icelandic, while they both looked over at us. We were making a spectacle of ourselves, all the way on the top of the world, and people were noticing. Georgia looked over and for some reason felt the need to explain.

  “We’re just all going through a very hard time right now. That’s all.”

  If I had to guess, I think it must have been fairly shocking to see such an outpouring of emotion, here in the relaxing geothermal hot springs, amid a sea of reserved Scandinavians and happy tourists.

  “Do you need any help?” the redhead asked.

  Georgia just shook her head. “No, we’ll all be fine, um, someday, hopefully soon.”

  The blonde couldn’t help but inquire further. “What is the matter? May I ask?”

  Georgia looked at us all. She pointed at each of us, one by one. “Alice just called off her wedding, Julie had an affair that went very badly, Serena watched someone die, I almost got my children taken away from me, and Ruby is clinically depressed.”

  The two women nodded, looking sorry that they had asked, and went back to talking among themselves. They looked so rugged, these women, with their strong jawlines and their dark eyes. They turned to the rocks and started rubbing them, taking the mud from the rocks and putting it on their faces. They leaned back and let the steam and mud work its magic.

  Georgia looked at them, impressed. “Wow, these ladies know their lagoons.”

  We stayed in the pool for another hour. We didn’t necessarily come here to be healed from a skin disease or get a natural lava facial, but we definitely needed a good cry, and that we did.

  When we were back in the locker area, the two women whom we were sitting near walked in and glanced around at us. We were all taking off our bathing suits. I was in my bikini top and surfer shorts. From the looks of the two women, and from my own common sense, I realized that here in Reykjavik, far away from vanity and supermodels and plastic surgeons, I looked like a clown in crazy balloon pants.

  Georgia seemed to be fascinated by these two women and couldn’t stop staring at them. Finally as they were putting their coats on to go back into the wintry day, Georgia spoke to them again.

  “Excuse me, I was just wondering if you could tell us a good place to eat tonight in Reykjavik?”

  The blond woman nodded. “There is a very nice place, Silfur, at the Hotel Borg. We are eating there tonight with some friends. It’s a little expensive, but has very good fis.” I assumed this meant “fish” but I didn’t want to interrupt.

  The other woman added, “There’s also a place called Maru, very nice sushi, and Restaurant Lækjarbrekka is more casual, but very good food.”

  Georgia nodded her head gratefully at them. “Okay, thank you so much!” They walked out, saying polite good-byes to all of us.

  “I don’t know what it is, I just love those two ladies,” Georgia said. We all put on our coats, and our gloves and hats and scarves, and braced ourselves. It was time to leave the lovely, warm amniotic sac of the Blue Lagoon, where we got to feel sorry for ourselves and everyone else we knew, and venture back out into the cold winter air.

  After we took naps, we all dressed for dinner in our Nordic finest—turtlenecks and down vests and sturdy winter boots. It wasn’t snowing, but it was windy and cold, around ten degrees Fahrenheit. The ladies gathered in my room; everyone was doing her best to make sure there wasn’t any downtime on Alice’s wedding night. We drank some white wine in the room and tried to keep things light.

  “Thank God we didn’t go to Finland. I heard Finnish men’s penises look like logs of Roquefort cheese,” Georgia said.

  We all shrieked in our own different ways.

  Ruby was appalled. “What?”

  “My girlfriend told me that. That they looked, well, marbleized.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, how am I going to ever get that image out of my mind tonight?” Alice asked, almost spitting up her drink.

  “Well, here’s to us not going to Helsinki for your honeymoon,” Serena said, raising her glass of white wine and smiling.

  We stood around in the hotel room laughing. Alice was having a good time and we were all getting a little tipsy.

  We took two cabs to the restaurant. We chose the restaurant Silfur, basically because we knew those two women were going to be there and Georgia wanted to stalk them. We walked in, and immediately realized we were underdressed; this restaurant was bathed in art-deco elegance, and we looked as if we were going to dinner in an igloo. A trendy igloo, but an igloo nonetheless. We took our seats and immediately ordered white wine. All the waitresses in the restaurant were blond and beautiful. They suggested we order the fis, particularly the lobster. As we were looking at the menu, with all the crazy, crazy Icelandic words on it (chicken breast is, phonetically, “koo-kinkablinka”), the two ladies from the Blue Lagoon walked in with two men and two other women. I saw them see us and look at each other. I nodded toward the door and Georgia turned. The waiter was seating them at the table next to us and Georgia waved. “Hi! We decided to take your suggestion and come here!”

  The blond woman smiled politely. “I’m so glad. I know you’re going to like it.” She then put out her hand and said, “I’m Sigrud. This is my boyfriend, Palli. And these are my two friends DrÖfn and Hulda.” DrÖfn was a woman in her late twenties with long white-blond hair and a huge mouth w
ith big white teeth. Hulda was in her late forties, with blond hair in a close pixie cut, a pierced nose with a tiny little stud in it, and large hoop earrings dangling down from her round, pretty face. The redhead from the lagoon introduced herself as well. “I’m Rakel, and this is my husband, Karl.” Even if I hadn’t had a few glasses of wine in me, I wouldn’t have had the foggiest idea how to pronounce all their names.

  We introduced ourselves. Georgia explained to the others, “We met at the Blue Lagoon today. We’re from New York and we were all a little depressed.”

  Karl nodded. There was something about his demeanor that immediately broadcast a kind heart and good humor. “Yes, well, Rakel kind of mentioned it.” The whole group started smiling. “Why are you so sad? You’re in Reykjavík now; this is where you come to have a good time.”

  Ruby joined in. “Well, that’s what we’re trying to do now. We’re out to have a good time!”

  Karl looked at us all and said, “Come, you must sit with us. We’ll all eat together.”

  We all looked at one another. They were a big group as it was, and so were we—it seemed like a very burdensome idea. Rakel and Sigrud joined in immediately, though.

  “Join us. We’ll have some fun,” Rakel said.

  Sigrud added, “We don’t have any friends from New York; come.”

  Georgia didn’t need to be asked twice, and soon enough we were all crammed into a large circular table for ten, even though we were eleven. Soon the white wine (or “veet veen,” as they called it) was flowing and we were regaling them with our tales of woe. Somehow it all seemed quite hilarious when we told it to these folks: Ruby’s stint at the animal shelter, my China calamity, Georgia’s domestic nightmare. Hilarious. The only thing that could never be spun as comic was Robert, and Serena didn’t bring it up.

  Karl egged us on. “So Julie, tell me about this book you’re writing.”

  I groaned loudly. “I’m not writing it anymore. I’m going home and giving the money back to the publisher. I hate my book. I don’t know what I was thinking.”