A Total Waste of Makeup

by Gruenenfelder, Kim

  When we got there later that morning, Drew took one step out of the plane, realized it was ten below with the wind chill factor, then turned back around to announce, “Let’s try Pittsburgh!”

  “What on earth for?” I asked.

  “If you truly want to get away from it all, you need to go where no one else is going,” he reasoned. “I don’t know anyone going to Pittsburgh.”

  So, off we went to Pittsburgh, where we had a very nice lunch, actually.

  Then it was on to Cleveland, where we took a tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Drew still complained of the bitter cold.

  Finally, we ended up at the Grand Wailea Resort in Maui. For a week. All of my expenses paid. So, you can see why I put up with him.

  Oh yeah, I actually like him, too. Not like-like. Just like.

  My home phone rings. Vowing once again to get a downstairs phone with a caller ID screen, I pick up my home line. “Mom, I have a job…”

  “He hasn’t called. Has he?” my friend Dawn says sympathetically.

  “Thank you for the vote of confidence,” I say dryly.

  “Oh. Am I wrong?” she asks hopefully.

  “No,” I’m forced to admit.

  “So, kick ’em to the curb. What are you wearing tonight?”

  “I’m not sure I’m in a ‘going out’ mood.”

  “No. You’re not sure you want to go out tonight just in case Lunkhead calls at the last minute to ask you out. You’re going. I have a limo and everything. Listen, I’m in Makeup on a Ja Rule video. Gotta go. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  And she’s off. I hang up. The phone rings again. Please, please, please be David. “Hello.”

  “What’s the word for using your feet as a tool?” my friend Kate asks.

  “Prehensile.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “P-R-E-H-E-N-S-I-L-E.”

  She pauses. Clearly, she’s writing something down. “Thank you. Do you happen to know how the French prime minister pronounces his name?”

  Shit. Now see, if she’d asked me to name the two youngest Brady kids, I would have gotten that. “I’m not sure.”

  Another pause on the other end of the phone. “Please tell me you know the name of the French prime minister,” Kate says.

  “I know the name of the French prime minister,” I confidently say back.

  “You’re pathetic,” Kate says.

  “I’ll know it by tonight,” I counter.

  “Oh good, you’re going,” Kate says brightly, then changes her tone. “Wait, but I guess that means he hasn’t called.”

  “Do you plan to say anything that will make me feel better during this conversation?” I ask.

  She thinks about it a moment. “No matter how old you get, I’ll always be older.”

  “And with a boyfriend,” I respond. “You’ll always be older with a boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. He’s my Fwip.”

  “Fwip” is short for “Friend with Privileges.” The term is Kate’s way of avoiding the inevitable. Kate has been dating Jack for nine years, since our senior year of college. Dawn set them up one night, they had what Kate thought would be a one night stand, and they’ve been dating ever since. He is her boyfriend. I don’t care what they call each other—they play slumber party four nights a week, and they are the last person the other one speaks to at night.

  Which gives me an idea of what to write next:

  If you’ve been dating someone for a year, you know if you want to marry them or not. Fish or cut bait. Either get married, or set them free. And if a man you’ve dated for a year hasn’t proposed—definitely cut bait.

  Which is great advice. And the minute I find someone who actually did get engaged in less than a year without getting pregnant, it’ll sound even better.

  “So what did you do last weekend?” Kate asks.

  “I had an incredibly romantic weekend,” I say, with a smile in my voice. “On Friday night we went to La Boheme…”

  “Jack and I got drunk and played Trivial Pursuit…”

  “Then Saturday we went to the beach all day…” I continue.

  “We painted the living room. Mr. Anal Retentive and Ms. Let’s Get This Fucking Thing Over With…”

  “Followed by almost a week of waiting by the phone.” I finish.

  You know, she may be able to pull a king and an ace, but I always have the trump card. My cell phone rings the cancan again. “Gotta go.”

  “See you tonight,” Kate says. “First round’s on me.”

  We hang up, and I check the caller ID on my cell phone. I click on. “Mom, this is supposed to be Drew’s line.”

  “I know, sweetie, but we’re having a crisis here, and I need your help. Is fifteen thousand dollars a lot for a wedding dress?”

  Good Christ. “You’re talking to the wrong girl. I think fifteen thousand dollars is a lot for a car.”

  “Well, Andy saw this wedding gown she thinks is perfect, but it would be a rush order, and it needs to be made with some special kind of silk or they won’t be able to bead it right. I don’t understand why she can’t just wear my old wedding dress, it’s still in perfect condition….”

  While Mom continues with her run-on sentence, I write the following:

  Never subject your daughter to your wedding dress. Styles have changed.

  I mean, should leg of mutton sleeves have ever really been in fashion in the first place? Besides, my mother, God love her, was five months pregnant when she got married. My sister is a perfect size two.

  Mom apparently is still talking. “…and besides that, if we really want to save money, the real trend right now is papier-mâché dresses. They’re really hip, you can’t tell the difference, and they’re only about a hundred dollars each.”

  Somehow, I do not see my sister in a papier-mâché dress. This is the type of statement I don’t think one should ever have to utter aloud. And I don’t want my mother to mention it aloud again—as this would increase the chances of yours truly wearing a silver papier-mâché dress.

  Mom continues, taking my silence as some form of encouragement. “I just wanted your opinion, and now that I have it, I want you to talk to your sister. Here!”

  Andy immediately gets on the phone. She has that same lovely, irritated voice she’s had ever since the one-and-a-half-carat ring was placed on her finger. “What?”

  I quickly jot down my next words of wisdom:

  Don’t spend your whole life looking forward to your wedding day. Don’t spend a year’s salary paying for your wedding day. It’s just a day. You will spend more time writing a term paper than you will at your wedding reception.

  As I’m writing, Andy spits out at me, “Heeellllooo? You know, I can’t hold forever. I have a dress to get. The rest of us have lives, too.”

  “How much did Mom say they would spend? Answer in letters if you need to.”

  “Chocolate,” Andy says, speaking in code. Mom must be hovering.

  C—the third letter in the alphabet. That means they said $3,000—max. “Don’t speak in code in front of me,” my mother shrieks from the other side of the salon.

  “We’re not speaking in code. I’m just hungry!” Andy yells back.

  “And how much is the dress you want going to cost?” I ask.

  “Donuts.”

  “Well, at least you aren’t hungry for eggs. Or jelly beans, for that matter. Put Mom back on the phone.”

  She does.

  “There’s no talking to her!” my mom says in that tone. You know the tone—every mom has one. “She thinks your father and I are made of money, like it’s not enough we’re throwing this shindig at the Bel Air, even though I got to be married at some neon-belled chapel in Las Vegas…but no, now we’re supposed to spend another fifteen thousand dollars on a dress she’ll wear once, twice at the most, and don’t even get me started on the costs of the bougainvillea.”

  Bougainvillea. Is that a flower, or some new drink? I wonder
to myself. Back to the matter at hand. “Well, when Andy and I went dress shopping last week, we did see a lovely dress in that very store for only four thousand dollars. You think you and Dad could pop for that?”

  Dead silence. Dead silence is never good with my mother. Well…actually, it’s good until she talks again.

  “How do you know what store we’re in?” Mom asks suspiciously.

  Shit! “Well, I…”

  “Andy, show me this four thousand dollar dress your sister likes so much!” my mother bellows right into my ear.

  There’s a beep. “Mom, I have another call. Can you hold?”

  “You put your own mother on hold…”

  I click over. “Hello.”

  “Do you want to see hell today?” Drew purrs into the phone. He must still be looping. Hard to find a man who purrs, unless you have your mouth around his—But I digress.

  “Hold on,” I say cheerfully, then click back over and return to my normal voice. “Mom, it’s Drew. I’ll call you later.” I hang up on her. Saved by the beep. I click back to Drew, and try to make my voice as cheerful and sweet as is humanly possible. “Hi. Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay. Listen, can you find out if Julia Roberts is available?”

  “Available for a date, or a movie?”

  “Well, both I suppose.”

  “She’s with someone,” I tell Drew. I haven’t checked lately, but it’s probably true.

  “Goddamn it!” Drew belts out at me. “Why doesn’t anything ever go my way? I’m gonna die alone!”

  Apparently the fact that he’s a gorgeous gazillionaire doesn’t count toward “things going his way.” But before I can point that out in an ever so diplomatic fashion, Drew changes the subject. “I have my interview with People magazine this weekend, and the house looks like hell. The dining room is this horrible shade of yellow—I agreed to a color called butter. A good butter where I come from is almost white. This isn’t butter. This is…some shade much worse than butter. Margarine, maybe.”

  I want to point out that he has twenty-two other rooms in his fourteen-million-dollar Brentwood mansion. But I also want to keep my job. “I’ll call the painters and have them fix it.”

  “Do you think five hundred thousand dollars is a lot for a car?”

  You’re asking the wrong person, I think to myself. I think $500,000 is a lot for a dress. But I would never say that. I like my job.

  Drew just reminded me of a good one. I write in my leather book:

  Don’t ever read People magazine. It will make you feel bad about your own life.

  I’m not sure which type of article in People bothers me more: the weddings where everyone’s happy, or the drug ODs where we’re supposed to feel sorry for the forlorn and tormented millionaires. I mean, Matthew Perry was still dealing with a drug addiction when he was making $750,000 a week? Please.

  Anyway, before I can answer, Drew says, “You know, I’m just gonna buy it. I mean, if I hate it, I can always give it to my next ex-wife. Call’s at seven A.M. Monday, right?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Great. Take the rest of the day off. Love you,” he says, then hangs up on me.

  My home line rings. With tremendous self-control I wait until the second ring, then pick up with a bright, “Hello.”

  “I have, like, two seconds to talk,” my happily married cousin Jenn says. “You sounded awful on the machine. What’s up?”

  “Tell me again why it sucks to be married,” I say. Usually she’s good for that—even if she doesn’t mean a word of it.

  “Are you waiting by the phone?” Jenn asks knowingly.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay—here’s one. I haven’t waited by the phone in six years. The love of my life has called me eight times today. Once to tell me he’d be late tonight, and can I somehow convince a three-year-old and a four-year-old to wait for dinner? Once to tell me that my mother-in-law will not be able to take the kids this weekend so he upgraded the hotel room of our romantic getaway to accommodate our lovely offspring, ‘Did not’ and ‘Did too.’ Once to tell me the cat—”

  I have to interrupt. “At least you have someone who wants to have a romantic weekend with you.”

  “At least when you go to bed with someone, you don’t wake up to a little person between you in wet pajamas,” she counters.

  “At least you have someone who loved you so much he wanted to create a little person with you.”

  “Get those handcuffs off your brother right now!” Jenn screams away from the phone.

  Jenn returns to her normal voice as she comes back to me. “Sweetie, I love my kids, but having a family is not the only way to guarantee happiness in life. It’s a lot of work, it’s very draining, and once you start, you can’t go back. You lead an amazing, glamorous life. Try to be happy having this time to yourself. It’s a luxury. It goes by so fast. And you’re going to miss it when it’s gone.”

  God, I hope she’s right. I hope there will come a time in my life when I’m so content, I miss being alone sometimes. When I’m actually happy enough to look back on my single years fondly.

  “Alex just threw up on the dog,” Jenn says, cutting into my thoughts. “Is it okay if I go?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.” And she’s gone.

  I stare at the phone and blow out a big sigh. Maybe she’s right, maybe I should be happy with all this free time. Maybe the grass is always greener. Maybe I should appreciate the luxury of getting to do whatever I want, whenever I want, and not needing to ask permission from anyone about my choices. Yeah, I could go to Paris this weekend if I wanted to. Just get my passport and my Visa card and—

  The phone rings. I wait until it rings a second time before I pick up.

  Maybe I’m a big hypocrite.

  “Hey, you waited until the second ring. Good for you,” my younger brother Jamie says.

  “He still hasn’t called,” I say. “Why do men say they’re going to call, if they’re not?”

  “Because we tried saying, ‘Hey, great lay. Listen, I may call you at two in the morning when I’m drunk and near your place,’ but you repeated it to all your friends.”

  “I didn’t sleep with him,” I say self-righteously. Though frankly, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it to my baby brother. “So what does it mean when a guy says he wants to ‘go out’ with you, but he’s not sure if he wants to date you?”

  “It means he wants to sleep with you, but doesn’t want a commitment.”

  “Pig!”

  “Me or him?”

  “Both.”

  “Hey, why you wanna kill the messenger?”

  “Because you’re all pigs.”

  “See, that’s just offensive limited thinking. The dude was honest with you. He said, ‘I wanna go out with you, I just don’t want to date you.’”

  “And that naturally means he wants to sleep with me?”

  “Yes,” Jamie says definitively. Then he thinks about his statement. “Actually, any man you go on a date with wants to sleep with you.”

  “Great.”

  “And any man you say ‘hi’ to in a bar—”

  “You can shut up now,” I say calmly.

  “Frankly, any man you’ve ever made eye contact with who’s not gay—”

  “I’m hanging up on you now,” I tell him.

  And I do.

  I spend the next five minutes relieved that no one calls, and debating what to write next:

  This may be sexist, but…when dating, always remember, the treasure doesn’t do the hunting.

  I paid my therapist $100 an hour to be told the treasure doesn’t do the hunting. Sounds great in theory. But how do you feel like a treasure when men have been making you feel bad for more than ten years?

  The Dave thing is a perfect example.

  You know, if he’d called me Monday, he would have freaked me out.

  But on Tuesday I missed him. He crept into my mind between my coffee
and my fudgsicle.

  And on Tuesday night, I asked my friends about him. And on Wednesday morning, I told my Mom about this nice guy I met.

  On Wednesday night I had a date with someone else. And as he plied me with Merlot, and charmed me with his sardonic wit, I thought about how Dave looked when he napped on my couch after a long day at the beach. And I wondered if he liked red wine or white. And if he really wanted girls more than boys, like he told me on our date when we talked about kids.

  By Thursday, I wanted another magical weekend. But the thing about magic is if you know the trick, it’s not magic anymore. I wondered why he didn’t like me so much, and what was so wrong with me that he didn’t call.

  Let’s see, there was that thing where he asked my age, and I wouldn’t tell him. No, it must have been when I said that I hated high school, but he was the captain of the football team. No, I mentioned an ex. That must have been it. No, it must have been because he thought I was fat.

  Oh please, Dave, call me right now, and I’ll fall in love with you. Just be the one nice guy I’m allowed to fall in love with, and it’ll be okay and I won’t be hurt, and everything will be the way I thought it would be growing up. All I want is the one phone call. Please, let someone I like actually like me back, even if I don’t deserve him. Please?

  I stare at the phone. Pick it up. Listen for the dial tone. Damn, still there.

  It’s Friday, and I could have fallen in love. By tomorrow, I’ll remember that I have a life to attend to, that magical weekends don’t really happen, that there are no nice guys in the world, and these final words of wisdom:

  When men say they’ll call you, what they usually mean is “good-bye.”

  Two

  Don’t smoke.

  I write in my notebook as I light up a Marlboro. Well, it is good advice. Unfortunately for me, those Ben & Jerry’s calories don’t just burn up themselves.

  Some people tell me I look a little like Charlize Theron. Granted, these people are mostly in bars, and are trying to get me into bed, but I’m taking the compliment anyway. In reality, I’m a few inches shorter and a few pounds heavier. I suspect Ms. Theron gets her body through working out. I get mine from Marlboros. A girl has a choice when she eats like I do: take up smoking or jogging. I am not a jogger. And I do plan to lose those ten pounds sooner or later, but I don’t believe in New Years’ resolutions, so it’ll probably be later.