This is exactly the type of conversation you would never remember having until, one day, for whatever reason, you have found yourself inside said apartment. Maybe hell has frozen over and I am cooking you dinner, or maybe it’s something closer to the suffocation scenario. Maybe there is a cleaning solution involved because this is a recurring nightmare I’ve had ever since my super bolted the air conditioner in place, thereby preventing me from opening any windows. So maybe you find me on the bathroom floor high on cleaning fumes. The tile is shiny, at least, since I have guests, and I am gasping for oxygen and mumbling something like, “A woman shouldn’t have to live in fear of cleaning her own shower!” At least that is how it happens in my dream.

Anyway, for whatever reason, you are inside my apartment. And you never imagined it was this small. This thought will come to you so suddenly and so distinctly that, like every visitor who has come before you, you will have no choice but to say it out loud.

“I know you said it was small, but I never imagined it was this small!” Then you will remember your manners and follow with, “But it really is so charming!” If you are from out of town, you will promptly put your bags down and stay anyway.

But it really is so charming, if I do say so myself. Take the mini fridge, for example. It’s adorable. Who needs to be able to fit a Britta filter in their fridge anyway? The water from the faucet is such a pretty shade of gray here. Besides, if you’re going to have a refrigerator in your bedroom, I should hope that it’s a small one. I also love that its small size forces me to be more selective about my inspirational magnets. Shouldn’t we all be more selective about our inspirational magnets? (Mom, I’m talking to you). Somehow a magnetic notepad my friend Margaret gave me made the cut. It has a faded image of a sassy old lady in a vintage bathing suit beneath the words “Maybe if I gave a rat’s ass.” Sometimes I look at it and think, “Maybe if I gave a rat’s ass, I wouldn’t still have a mini fridge.” And I definitely wouldn’t be able to read the magnets on it from my bed.

I should also point out that my apartment has beautiful hardwood floors. I should point this out because it can be very difficult to actually see them. On a good day, for example, after I have sent the laundry out, you can glimpse about ten square feet of them. But they are beautiful. And they are hardwood. And they are mine. And, by the way, what’s not to love about an apartment that gives you no choice but to send your laundry out? As in for other people to wash and fold and return it to you in neat little stacks with only the occasional foreign undergarment thrown in, all wrapped as tightly as possibly as to maximize exposure of the aforementioned beautiful hardwood floors. That, my friends, is luxury.

Speaking of luxury, I have yet to mention that my apartment is the penthouse. That’s right. It is at the top of five flights of stairs and maybe there’s no elevator, but everyone knows the penthouse is the best. Everyone knows this because that is what Richard Gere’s Edward tells Julia Roberts’ Vivian in Pretty Woman, so it must be true. And, lest there be any confusion, no, I did not have to sell my body to get this view. I didn’t even have to put up with some man insisting on calling me Vivian when, really, I am such a Viv. But Edward was right about one thing: the penthouse is the only way to go.

I hope this essay doesn’t come across as some sort of Napoleon complex of the living quarters. Because the only thing less attractive than a Napoleon complex is Napoleon himself. And I do hate to sound insecure about it. I promise it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m about to turn 30. Why would a monumental decade shift cause me to reevaluate the charms of my humble West Village abode? I am not the type to have trivial thoughts like I am about to turn 30, maybe I should own a sofa. Or I am 30, maybe I should start paying for internet. Because, really, what does one thing have to do with the other? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Besides, if I did ever feel any nonsensical anxiety of that nature, when the laundry is out, there is just enough space to spread out a yoga mat and do the Rodney Yee videos to relax. And I am never bitter that Rodney is on a beautiful, expansive mountaintop with his perfectly groomed ponytail blowing in the breeze, while I keep hitting my knuckles on the broiler. I never look just beyond my toes as I am stretching and think,“Oh my god, my bed is still on those plastic stilts I had in college. And I am (almost) 30!” I am only at peace and at one with the present…just like Rodney tells me to be.

So, yes, in the spirit of Rodney, I love my apartment. I love the big window by my bed, even if it is bolted shut. I can still see the sky and the occasional moon and the little jagged edge of West Village brownstones. Even through the slightly dusty window, it looks like a painting to me.

But it wasn’t always this way. I remember the day I signed the lease. It was my first apartment of my own and I remember thinking that making decisions for myself could be vastly overrated. There would be no one else to blame if things went terribly, terribly wrong. But I signed the lease because it just felt right which, if you think about it, is the same reason monkeys masturbate in front of children at the zoo.  It doesn’t make it okay.  And as with each big milestone, I wasn’t quite sure if it was the best decision I had ever made or the most tragically idiotic. I had spent all of five minutes in the space itself. I had inspected precisely nothing beyond turning on the faucet in the pedestal sink in the little bathroom. The day I moved in, I started to fear that only if that faucet were the fountain of youth itself, would the amount I had agreed to pay for a year in this place be justified.

Suddenly, all I could think was that the windowpanes seemed ominously large and inviting to criminals that may or may not lurk in the back courtyard. A friend joked that I had overlooked the possibility that a gang of ninjas might scale the building and creep in one by one. And, having signed all of those papers—so many papers!—this started to seem like a distinct possibility. No matter that when I imagined this inevitable ninja invasion in my mind, I could see only turtles sporting different colored headbands and fighting over my last slice of pizza. I think that had more to do with my limited frame of reference when it comes to ninjas than with the probability that they would actually be turtles, which, obviously, wouldn’t have been so scary to think about.

But I suppose it all worked out. After a few years, I am starting to have memories here, and not a single one involves a ninja, turtle or otherwise. I would even go so far as to say that this tiny little apartment is starting to feel like home.

There’s the day I discovered Draino and fixed my own fountain of youth without tears or help from the super. Then came the Christmas I insisted on a full sized tree, even if it meant giving up the Rodney Yee videos for a few months. It was the year I learned I feel the same way about Christmas trees as I feel about dogs: get a big one, or don’t get one at all. So I got a big one, and I insisted on carrying it all the way home as my incredulous suitor looked on. But I had a feeling the fresh pine smell would last longer than he did. And I was right. Another favorite is the weekend my twelve year old niece came for a visit and I could hear her singing Taylor Swift from the shower. A bigger place and I might have missed that one.

Then there’s the art deco mirror I bought from a thrift store the day I sold my first (and last, but who’s counting?…) story to The New York Times. I’d been eyeing it for months, but was unemployed with few prospects and little faith that I’d hold onto my apartment long enough to make it worth the money. It cost $50. Now it’s my “I’m in New York to stay,” mirror. And it really is made for that fireplace.

Not to mention all of those nights I promised myself, and probably my mother, that I would stay in and rest. But upon realizing, again, that I do not even have a sofa, I threw on a little black dress, ran down five flights of stairs, and into what I would call my life.

So, yeah, it’s small. But I love it. It’s such a great location.

]]> http://littleblackdressgirl.com/2011/07/08/resolution/feed/ 2 littleblackdressgirl http://littleblackdressgirl.com/2011/06/30/skinny-love/ http://littleblackdressgirl.com/2011/06/30/skinny-love/#comments Thu, 30 Jun 2011 03:21:47 +0000 littleblackdressgirl http://littleblackdressgirl.com/?p=156 ]]> Alright, I’m skinny. I am just going to say it. I am skinny and I eat whatever I want. I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I have always been skinny. But my mom insists that I will not always be skinny. She says that when I’m fifty, the party will be over, and I will have to stop eating for three months like she did. But this is not the whole truth. I will also have to get a rowing machine.

Anyway, do you know what goes hand in hand with still being skinny into your late twenties? Being flat. So, yes, I should just go ahead and tell you that I am skinny and I am flat.

I have had since Middle School to get used to this fact. When the other girls started getting boobs, and the boys started desperately wanted to see them, touch them and talk about them, I became invisible. I got called skinny and flat on a daily basis. It was sort of like when I went abroad to Florence, Italy and realized, for the first time, that I was American. Going to Middle School opened my eyes to the fact that I was, indeed, skinny and flat. To give you an idea of exactly how skinny and flat I was: I broke my collarbone after a girl walked into me during basketball practice. And when I cut my hair hoping to look like Jane on Melrose Place I ended up looking like Ricky on Silver Spoons. That one earned Ricky a headshot in the yearbook next to “Most Optimistic.” In keeping with my new title, I tried to look on the bright side. If my haircut wasn’t going to lead to a Spanish style abode with a central courtyard and kissing Andrew Shue, I thought maybe I could at least get that awesome train Ricky rode around his living room. That never happened. But I was cast as Charlie Brown in the school play.  We performed it for a group of senior citizens, all of whom believed I was actually a boy.  The sharpest lady of the bunch kept patting my yellow t-shirt and saying, “Great job, son.”

High school wasn’t much better. When I was a freshman, an upper classman called me Skelator and I cried for weeks. But not after calling him Gonzo for having a big nose. One day, shortly following the Skelator incident, I innocently wandered into a Lane Bryant at the mall. My eyes landed on one plus-sized scowl after the next until I realized one, me, was not like the other, them. And I got the heck out of there.

But the final straw was when the school held a blood drive and kids were rushing to the booth to do their part to save children in Africa and beyond. Never one to miss an opportunity to do very little, and be lauded as a hero, I rushed behind them, only to be rejected because I didn’t weigh enough. They didn’t want my skinny blood. It was one thing for my weight to keep me from most parties worth going to and a select number of amusement park rides. It was entirely another for it to interfere with my ability to help the children who needed me so desperately. So I tried to take matters into my own hands.  I ate peanut butter bagels for breakfast.  I learned to bench press. The bar. I had one friend who had just learned that you could burn 100 calories a day by bending your pointer finger relentlessly during class. I stared at her and said, “What are you insane?!” All those precious calories. Without building any muscle?” This lead to a scowl much like the ones I received at Lane Bryant, only younger. Then, when McDonald’s came out with their version of the Whopper, which was called the McDonald’s Big Extra (insiders called it the MBX), I decided to eat one MBX meal every day as an afternoon snack. I lasted three months before I never wanted to see another MBX again. I didn’t gain a pound. In fact, it took me nearly a year to break the 100 lb mark. And when I did, everyone knew about it. Walking through the halls other kids would say, “Hey, Liz, way to go. I heard you broke 100!” This must be how George Burns felt, I thought proudly. Unfortunately, given the fact that I had also sprouted to 5’7’’, I still didn’t weigh enough to give blood.

If I couldn’t save the children with my good health, I figured, I might as well get drunk.  So I begged some cooler, curvier friends to take me to a party. It was your typical parentless house on a hill situation, with older boys doing a whole lot of nothing in the basement. I ended up sitting beneath the deck with one of the cutest guys in our grade. He had clearly had one Zima too many, and smelled like he had just thrown up in his mouth, probably because he had. He went on a long rant that began, “Your face is so pretty,” which I thought was promising. Until he followed with, “It’s just such a tragedy it’s wasted on your body.”  It was the first time I had heard “tragedy” and “your body” in the same sentence, and there was something very discomforting about it.

The next day, I was so fed up that I decided I wanted to write a real earnest editorial about how everyone knew it was not nice to make fun of the heavy girls, but the skinny girls were open targets. And how unfair and terrible that was! Now I know that would have been ridiculous, because being skinny is awesome.

In fact, I credit my being skinny and flat with the fact that I came of age at just the right pace. Meaning that when the girls with boobs were widening my eyes with tales of how an older boy had taken their bra off, among other things, I was the girl who stood there, flabbergasted, and said, “What?! You wear a bra?!” The absolute betrayal felt in these moments was compounded by the fact that, at age 7, when my bosom was nary the size of two malted milk balls, I sat my mom down on the loveseat in our living room and told her that we needed to talk. My older sister was 13 at the time and I had just caught wind of the training bra craze.

“Mom,” I told her, “I think it’s time.”  She looked at me confused, likely wondering if it was time to change the sheets because I had peed my bed again. Or if it was time to clean yet another dead hamster off a pile of wilted cedar chips.

“It’s time,” I said again, sensing her mind wandering, “for me to get a training bra.”

She burst out laughing so fast and so hard and I burst into tears so fast and so hard, that it would have been nearly impossible for an onlooker to tell which had happened first. But I knew. First, she had laughed. Loud and hard and oh so sincerely. And then I had cried. Sensing her error, she tried to compose herself and said, “Of course, honey. I had been thinking the same thing.” She nodded towards the two fried eggs on my chest for effect and, to her credit, managed to keep a straight face. I was still skeptical until she agreed to take me to Marshall’s and give my budding female form the respect it deserved. We bought the smallest training bra we could find and it fit me like an oversized tank top. It was so big it covered my belly button.  It was white with hot pink hearts on it, and I thought it was just about the most grown up thing I had ever worn. As I slid under the sheets of my daybed that night, I resolved to get a perm and start secretly shaving my legs.

I did not yet know the great blessing that being skinny and flat would become. That it is a well-known fact that girls who get boobs earlier, often get into trouble earlier.  Just think what might have happened beneath the deck that night. And with a guy who had just thrown up in his mouth of all people. My being skinny and flat, on the other hand, paved the way for me to lose my virginity sober and at a highly respectable age within a mutually loving relationship with a guy who thought I looked like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love. Sure, she played a girl who could pass for a boy in that movie, but it was the first time I had been compared to a real woman. It is a lesser-known fact that boys who love flat girls in high school are really good people. They are.

I wish you could have seen his poker face when I showed up for our semi-formal pictures with a modest C-cup. Grown over night. I had returned from basketball practice the day before to my mother who greeted me at the door, whispering, “Come with me!” She was ducking, as if behind some invisible barrier that would keep my father and brother, who were watching television all of ten feet away, from seeing us. Mom, the pocket doors are open, I wanted to tell her, but any attempt to speak was met with a cool “Sshhhh!” It was in this manner that she led me to the deepest darkest bowels of our basement.

“Mom, what are we doing? Can we at least turn the light on?” I waved my hand in the air until I found the string attached to the light bulb in the ceiling and I pulled. The light shone brightly and my mom stood there, hands outstretched, as if she were offering the Holy Grail. It was a purple box about the size of a videocassette and on the outside, in a cursive script, it read, “Curves.”  Still quiet, my mother slowly opened the box to reveal what looked like two chicken cutlets we might toss in olive oil and grill up for dinner.  But there would be no reason to hide those from my father and brother. No doubt remembering the training bra incident, she chose her words carefully: “For your dress,” she said, referring to the Size 0 Guess ensemble that hung on me like a gunnysack. For weeks, I had tried it on, trying to ignore the gape between my chest and the dress. Trying not to think about the implication of by breasts being smaller than a size 0. Miss Most Optimistic, I thought, well, maybe I could put my purse in there, or if my boyfriend brings a flask, it will be the perfect hiding place. But my mother had a different idea. We were going to hide these chicken cutlets in there instead. I was skeptical at first, poking them as if they might be alive.

“It’s okay,” my mom said, “Go ahead. Pick them up.” And it turned out they were just like those jellyfish that don’t sting that my friends and I had played with at the beach that summer. Once I conquered my initial fear of touching them, they turned out to be a lot of fun. I slid them into my bra, placing what little bit of breast I had right on top of them, and voilà: Curves!

The cutlets made it all the way to college with me. They even outlasted the boyfriend. But outside of a relationship, they felt a little bit like false advertising and I never felt comfortable wearing them. So I lent them to a friend who wore them to a fraternity pajama party. As these things tend to go, she had a little too much punch and, whilst dancing on an elevated surface, she pulled the chicken cutlets out one by one and tossed them into the crowd. Then she told everyone they were mine. And that was the last I saw of anything resembling Curves.

These days, I suppose being skinny and flat does have its perks, so to speak. I don’t always have to wear a bra to work, for one. And I can run in those tank tops with the bras built in that are meant for most women to sleep in. I can run in those.  For miles. I am not going to have those wrinkles on my chest from boobs hanging over when I sleep on my side. I can even sleep on my stomach. When I have children, I will have a brief glimpse of what it’s like on the other side. The other side being having anything even resembling real breasts. And then they will wilt back to form like a circus tent when the pole is removed from its center. But at least they won’t cover my belly button.

I guess the hard truth here is that the flat thing will last and the skinny thing won’t. It could be five years, it could be ten, but I know these words will come back to haunt me. I will read about the MBX’s and my mouth will water. I will suddenly, and cruelly, remember what peanut butter smells like. I will wax nostalgic about the days when men actually wanted to have sex with me. Sober.  My eyes will trip over the words, “I’m skinny and I eat whatever I want,” and I will think, wow, I totally deserve this. It’s going to be awful. Comforted only by the fact that finally, I can give blood, I will take my newly fat ass straight to the Red Cross.

It amazes me now to think that there was something as rational as a plan for something as irrational as what I was about to do. But the plan was for me to drive across three states to profess my undying love for the man I had been engaged to nearly five years earlier. For some, his breaking it off, plus five years of distance, plus not one single piece of evidence to support that this person was comfortable being in the same state as me, might equal closure. But math was never my strong point.

There was also the card he had given me on my first birthday after the break-up. I had opened the envelope with an anticipatory hope that embarrasses me now to even think about. Where I expected a handwritten note on a blank card like the ones I had saved from when we were together, I found a glossy Hallmark card. There was a cow on the front, wearing a sombrero. On the inside it said, “I hope your birthday is moo-ey bueno.” This, in retrospect, should have told me everything I needed to know.

It should be noted that this man had no idea I was coming. I had tried to plan a visit by being polite and giving him warning just six months earlier. He had responded quite plainly, “My wounds have healed and I am not going to revisit them.” Which I, of course, interpreted as: I sit in the window every day reading Emerson and wondering: How much of life is lost in waiting?

But I had to be sure.

To add insult to injury and two hours to my drive, I had to attend my cousin’s baby shower the same day.  As if it isn’t difficult enough to pick what you are going to wear to ambush your ex-fiancée, and to leave, quite possibly, the last impression he will ever have of you, my outfit also had to be suitable for a baby shower. I opted for a 1930’s shirtdress that was off white with green flowers on it and a pair of dainty vintage pumps with an ankle strap.  I even curled my hair.  It pains me now to think of the hope, the optimism, the absolute distancing myself from reality that went into every single lift of the elbow, every single roll of a curler.

The shower was held in a tearoom just off the town square in one of those small Georgia towns where everything is just off the town square. Guests were required to pick an old fashioned hat off a nail in the wall and wear it for the duration. I chose a nice green felt number with a feather in it that made me look like a cross between the old lady in Driving Miss Daisy and Crocodile Dundee.  You know it’s a good day when sipping tea in a hat with a feather in it and having a distant aunt tell you that because you aren’t pregnant or engaged, you should throw yourself a “Power Shower,” is the least humiliating thing you will do.

Just as the last member of the plush circus was loaded into my cousin’s SUV so that it resembled Noah’s Ark, the sky opened up in appreciation. Rain and thunder and wind and lightning. Some might take this as a sign and reconsider. Not me. I may have been delusional, but I was not a quitter.

It was a five-hour drive each way. Five hours. Over mountains. In the pouring rain and some light to moderate hail.  I may or may not have spent at least one third of my journey fantasizing scenes resembling Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook. I imagined he had grown a beard and built our dream house in my absence. Our reunion would surely involve swans and impeccably tailored clothes. We already had the rain. If things went well, I would end up flushed, with tousled hair, wearing nothing but a red blanket. If things went badly…funny, I didn’t spend nearly enough time considering what might happen if things went badly.

As I got closer and as the hail got larger, the gravity of what I was doing began to set in. I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach that I quickly realized was not the jovial butterflies that sometimes flutter in waving the flag of love. It was more like a swarm of killer bees carrying the skull and crossbones found on pirate ships. I ignored them. Just as I ignored the hail and the wind and the cow in the sombrero.  Just as I ignored, five years earlier, the sinking feeling that we were not ready to get married. I ignored it all and I just kept driving, until I found myself outside of his house.

My only saving grace, as I turned the car off, was that I was not so crazy as to not realize how crazy I seemed. I was fully aware. I comforted myself with the thought that Glen Close’s character in Fatal Attraction never thought to herself, “Well, if I do that thing I’m thinking about with the rabbit, I’m a little worried what people might say.”

I had seen Law & Order and I knew that there is a limit to the amount of time you can spend in a car outside of someone’s house before the neighbors get suspicious.  So I tried to think fast. I remembered the seven years we had spent together. They had since been washed in that particularly rosy shade of pink that comes after someone has let you go; very gently, sure, but let you go just the same.

We had met our first week at college and were best friends for three years. We were friends until, one day, he looked at me in that very unassuming way that he has, and told me I looked pretty with my hair down. I started wearing my hair down all the time. Not long after, because I was the outgoing one, the pushy one, the one who would choose New York over the South, I had marched into his room and found him at his desk, his soft blue eyes intent on an economics book. It was the afternoon and I had come with sushi from our favorite place. I told him why I had been wearing my hair down so much lately, and asked if he felt the same way. He confessed that he did feel the same way; that he had always felt the same way. I sat on his lap in his creaky desk chair and we kissed. Then we ate our sushi.

This memory brought me back to the moment, to the car parked in front of his house, nearly ten years later, because I had actually considered bringing him sushi. So that if I couldn’t get the words out, he would know, right away, why I had come. Now, I have to thank the powers that be, for the rain or the wind or whatever it was that changed my mind about the sushi. Because the only thing weirder than showing up at your ex-fiancée’s house after five years, is showing up at your ex-fiancée’s house after five years with a dragon roll and miso soup.

After college, we had moved to Charleston, South Carolina where we lived together for three years. We rented an old cinder block duplex just over the bridge from downtown and painted our tiny kitchen bright red. I remember the first night we spent there. We didn’t have our furniture yet, so we made a pallet on the floor in the bedroom. As empty as the whole place was, it felt so full of promise. We had talked about New York when we graduated, but we had more than talked about getting a dog. A hyperactive black lab named Riley who we both fell in love with. And Charleston was more her pace. It was that rare and fleeting time in one’s life when it is perfectly acceptable to choose where you will live based on a puppy.  So we lived five minutes from the beach, where we walked her together in the evenings.  Our first Christmas there, we took pictures of her tangled up in colored lights.

One of our last winters together, we bought tickets to Florence, Italy on a whim. All of my friends were certain that he would propose to me there. I now know that there is a certain stage in a relationship where if the two of you step foot on a plane together, your female friends will insist that you are getting engaged. That sometimes it will even be true. But at the time, I told them they were wrong. We had talked about it. We had agreed we were not ready.

On our fourth night in Florence, he left the dinner table and came back wearing a tuxedo. I was seated in a chair by the window overlooking the Arno. The lights of the Ponte Vecchio shone in the distance. I had ordered a lamb shank, and would later use this detail as proof that I really had no idea what was coming. Because what woman in her right mind, knowing she is about to be proposed to, orders a giant hunk of meat on a bone?

When he returned to the table, I hardly noticed the tuxedo. All I could see were the beautiful flowers. They are still the most beautiful flowers I have ever seen. Poppies and berries, with bright reds and purples and deep greens. And even with the man I loved standing in front of me in a tuxedo, I couldn’t process more than the flowers. Until he knelt before me, and now the entire restaurant, including me, knew exactly what was happening. He said that nothing would make him happier than to be my husband. Then, in that very unassuming way that he has, he asked me to marry him. And I did what any woman with a lamb shank and a view of the Arno would do when presented with such a query from a man she happens to love deeply. I said yes.

He gave me a simple band dotted with cubic zirconia that he had bought at Money Man Pawn for $24. He called it a “bubble gum” ring; a placeholder until we could pick the perfect one together. It was too big and, afraid it might slip away, we had it sized by a fancy jeweler on the Ponte Vecchio the next day. On our way out, we laughed because they thought it was real.

We planned to get married the following fall. We bought a house just around the corner from our duplex. It was a little blue house with a big back yard and a white picket fence smothered in jasmine. We spent our nights hanging sheet rock, picking paint colors, and laying hardwood floors. We set a date for late September and planned to marry beside a lake between green mountains. I picked a dress. It was all lace with cap sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. The back was open, save the slightest bit of lace across the top to hold it all together. We hired a wedding planner, a caterer, and a band.

But as it got closer and as the guest list got bigger, the gravity of what I was doing began to set in. I was only twenty-four. I had always wanted to live in New York. I wanted to have a career. To work for a magazine. To be a writer. He built houses and worked for his father. Neither of which were possible in New York. He entertained the idea and there was a time I thought we might get married and go together, that everything would work itself out.

But one Sunday afternoon in February, almost exactly one year after he’d proposed, he told me that I needed to go. Alone. Just two weeks before was Valentine’s Day and he had given me flowers twice. He had planned to go to the store and get stuff to make my favorite meal from a restaurant we loved in Florence. Rigatoni and a pecorino and pear salad. I told him that was sweet, but we didn’t need to do anything fancy. That we had everything we needed to make a pot of chili. Now he was telling me that maybe he had pushed everything too quickly and that we were not ready to get married. But there was still leftover chili in the freezer. He said that we did not want the same things. The flowers hadn’t lasted that long. Maybe, he said, we were not right for each other at all.

I remember Riley’s claws on the newly laid hardwood floors, crawling under the bed to hide as he told me to pack my things. He left and went to an old hotel just down the street. I begged him to come back and we spent our last night together in our little blue house, curled into one another as if we held on tightly enough, it all might stick.

The morning came and he had not changed his mind. He said I needed to find some place to go. He said there are some things you just can’t force, or there will be cracks. I packed everything and moved out that day. I left my bubble gum ring on the kitchen table next to a pile of laundry with a plain white card that said, “I love you.”

I spent the next few months with a friend working part-time at a jewelry store, part-time at an art gallery, and full-time at trying to get him to change his mind. I tried to convince him that I knew what was important. That I didn’t need to go to New York, that I just needed him, that I was ready. But it is nearly impossible to convince another of something you are not sure of yourself. And as it became clear that he would not waver, I packed everything I owned into a rented mini-van and drove to New York City.

I arrived with the same sense of hope, possibility and utter fear I had on this day, as I sat in the car outside of his house. But I now knew that I did need New York. That had I never gone, it would have always been Xanadu, and any alternate life would have paled in comparison. Had I never landed my dream job at a magazine, that subsequently folded; had I never struggled to pay for my own tiny studio on a tree lined street in the West Village;  had I never trekked up five flights of stairs with a week’s worth of groceries for one, I would have resented it. And as I came to know this over the years, I romanticized that maybe he had known all along. I thought that maybe he was doing that if you love something let it go thing I had always read about and seen in movies. I wondered. And now, on this rainy day five years later, that question finally stood to be answered.

As I sat there in my rental car, trying to think of the best course of action, I considered the unthinkable, rational, and totally unromantic notion that maybe I should just call him. Then something happened. Something that dispelled any hint of rational thought immediately. I saw my dog. She had come from the house and, yes, she was connected to him by a leash, but just like the flowers, all I really saw was my dog.  I lost all ability to think clearly. I jumped out of the car as if it was five years earlier and I had just run to the grocery store to get eggs.

It should be said that Riley was very happy to see me. It was still raining and I was about twenty yards away, as they descended on what I presumed to be their regular Sunday afternoon stroll. The one where 51 times a year, their estranged ex-fiancée and deadbeat dog mom does not show up.

Riley’s excitement was palpable. I have read before that dogs have no sense of time, so in her world, it is quite possible that it was five years earlier and that I had just run to the grocery store to get eggs. I was strangely comforted by this. As increasingly excited as Riley became, the man I almost married still did not recognize me. And why would he? Because, really, what were the chances? To him, I was just a stranger, albeit a highly overdressed one. But soon enough, Riley came running towards me. For better or for worse, he was attached to her, and as they got closer, he figured it out.

He looked at me, stupefied. I was busy kissing the dog on the mouth.

“Liz? What are you doing here?”

That, I couldn’t help but think to myself, was a very good question. I became very self-conscious of what I was, in fact, doing there, and, strangely, of how overdressed I was. This was the first thing I felt the need to explain.

“I went to a baby shower,” I told him, looking down at the ankle straps on my dainty heels, which suddenly felt ridiculous in the rain, on this particular mountain.

“That’s why I’m so dressed up.”

He looked at me, exactly as confused as he should have been, and we embraced awkwardly. Riley, because time is of no essence, lost all of the excitement she had felt just two minutes before, and now, it seemed, had other business to attend to. Business that definitely did not factor in to the Nicholas Sparks scenario. As he worked to understand what I could possibly be doing there without my offering anything more than a defense of wardrobe choice, Riley promptly went to the bathroom.

“Did you drive here?” He still looked as if he’d seen a ghost. The fog and the rain and the flowing white nature of my dress probably didn’t help, and I have to give him credit. He still managed to open with two very valid questions.

“From New York? Ha! No!” I said this just how I meant it, as if that would have been ridiculous.

“Just from Atlanta.” He stared. Riley finished her business. I began to recognize the look on his face, and in his soft blue eyes, as concern.

“Is everything okay?” he asked me. This was the only time our eyes really met, and they rested there for a while, in the way that an old zipper always gets stuck in the same place.

“Yeah,” I told him, “Everything is okay. I just need to talk to you.”

We walked into his house and I was overcome with a strange feeling that was something like relief. I had imagined horrible things when I thought about this place over the years. Maybe just to torture myself, I had created a sort of bachelor Grey Gardens in my mind. I half expected a disheveled Drew Barrymore to emerge with an old can of cat food. But I was pleasantly surprised. It was spotless. There were photos of friends and family I recognized in silver frames I did not. There was art on the wall that we had never gotten around to hanging. There were, gratefully, no signs of another woman. A glance through the bedroom door showed that in the place of the rickety antique full-sized bed we used to share, there was a nice new king.

He pointed towards a red sofa I had never seen before, and I sat down. Riley, as if she knew what was coming, retreated beneath the bed, and the familiar sound of her claws on the hardwood brought the tears I had been fighting so hard.  And they just kept coming.

As I looked around, I realized this was the only thing that could possibly be worse than the Grey Gardens situation. This was the me sitting on his sofa sobbing situation. It was suddenly and cruelly clear. He was doing fine.  He had moved on. To a new red sofa and silver picture frames. I was still wearing a jacket his parents had given me one Christmas. And I had just driven across three states.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing here.” I said. Even as I spoke, I struggled, as I often had, to reconcile my absolute certainty that I loved him, with the sinking feeling that something wasn’t right.

“I still think about you all the time. I know that I still love you. I just don’t know what that means.”

He was sitting on the next sofa over.

“I know this must seem weird. But even after all this time, I still miss you. I can’t imagine the rest of my life without you.”

He was quiet and resting his face in his hands now. I tried to really see him. He looked mostly the same, though his light brown hair was shorter and missing the longer pieces that once waved behind his ears. I used to call them wings. He was still handsome in the way that he has always been; attractive in a way that is not completely obvious, so that with appreciation comes a certain sense of superiority; the distinct feeling of having discovered something and now, suddenly, of having lost it.

Finally, he spoke. “Liz, you know, I’m not sure we were ever really good together. Maybe we were always just best friends.”

And that was all it took. That and the long drive, and the hail, and the separate sofas, and the overwhelming sense that we had become strangers. Suddenly, finally, and far too late, some sort of self-preservation mechanism kicked in. I stood up and started walking towards the door. Riley sensed motion and came out from under the bed.

“I am just going to go,” I said.

“Please stay, we can talk.”

“No,” I was crying even harder now and I wished I was more like Glen Close. But I knew exactly how I looked. And the only thing worse was how I felt.

“I didn’t come here to convince you of anything. I came here because I thought maybe you would just know. And you don’t. And that’s okay.”

We said goodbye, and he hugged me.  I kissed Riley on the top of the head, and went back into the rain. I got back into the rental car, and drove back down the mountain. The light to moderate hail was now heavy and excessive. It didn’t stop for five hours.

***

My mom was waiting up with a cup of tea. My eyes were swollen shut from the tears, but I could see that she was sorry.

“I just thought you needed closure, honey,” she said just softly enough to make me think that tiger mom might have known a thing or two.

“I had to be sure,” I told her.

And now, finally, I was.

You look exactly like my mom.

Unless you’re Gwyneth Paltrow’s child, don’t tell me I look like your mom. I don’t care if I’m wearing a jean skirt and your mom used to always wear jean skirts. I don’t care if our forehead wrinkles in just the same way when we’re mad. And I don’t care if we’re at a party and we’re both wearing green dresses and it’s all too much for your simple brain to process. Just don’t do it.

Do we need anything besides light bulbs?

This may seem innocent enough, but it was only our third date. You should also never take a woman to a grocery store on a third date, but I’ll leave that alone because we’re talking about things men should never say, not things they should never do. So this guy looks at me honestly and says, “Do we need anything besides light bulbs?” Again, it was our third date. I had only seen his apartment in the dark. How the hell was I supposed to know if we needed light bulbs? And what was this “we” stuff all about? We are not a “we.” We don’t need anything. We are on our third date.

When you get pregnant, your boobs are going to be amazing.

Okay, so this one is tricky because I think there may be a hidden compliment in there like, that you want to have children with me. But all I really hear is that even when swollen, discolored, and full of sour milk, my small breasts will be more attractive to you than they are now.

I was a serial monogamist. Now I’m just looking to bang every blonde chick I see.

I guess this is where I have to admit that it actually worked. I am so mad at myself.

This same guy also once looked deeply into my eyes and said, “but what if I promise to use condoms with the other girls?

This seems obvious to me, but here’s a tip: If you’re trying to convince a woman to have unsafe sex with you, probably best to leave the “other girls” out of it.

You have small eyes.

This one is particularly brilliant, because it is nearly impossible to find something unattractive about a woman that she has not already identified herself. But before this guy pointed it out, it really never occurred to me that I had small eyes. Now my life is divided into two distinct periods. The 18 years I spent believing my eyes were a perfectly acceptable size, and the 12 years I have spent since, wishing they were at least as big as peanut M&M’s. Granted, when he told me this, we were playing that really fun game called, “If you could change one thing about me, what would it be?” I merely suggested that he shouldn’t do that thing where he flares his left nostril when he laughs. An easy fix if he were to get self-conscious enough about it. So it was hardly fair when he chose something that could never actually be changed.

That game, by the way, is right up there with “Which one of my friends do you most want to sleep with?” They always pick the same one and her eyes are the size of peppermint patties. Really, who thinks of these games? Fine, women do. But, men, please, you should never agree to play them! Because even now, I can be having a pretty good day, feeling relatively good about myself, and I’ll catch my reflection in a mirror and think, if only my eyes were bigger.

You look like a little boy.

It’s amazing these things have to be explained, but never tell a woman she looks like a little boy. This is particularly relevant if you are trying to sleep with her, because that is just creepy. Believe it or not, I have actually gotten this a few times. Once when I was wearing a baseball cap, once when I was water skiing in a wet suit, and once when I wore tuxedo pants to a gala. The last one was the worst. There’s nothing quite like aiming for Coco Chanel and looking like Ben on Growing Pains.

I have a nice house in Staten Island with a big backyard.  Do you want to live with me and be my girlfriend?

This one came from a taxi driver. I told him I would go to the gas station with him and I think it gave him the wrong idea. Actually, in retrospect, this one is kind of sweet. I wonder what he’s doing now.

And finally, because fair is fair, there is at least one thing I should never say myself.  As evidenced by the list above, the thing I should never say to a man, but all too often do:

“Sure, I’d love to go out with you.”

“You could be the next Little Miss Georgia Peach!”

From what I could tell, the Little Miss Georgia Peach pageant was a local beauty contest that would surely lead to world renown. By the time I got to the fine print, “Peach queens serve as official ambassadors of the Georgia Peach Festival,” I was sold.

Peach Queen! Ambassador!  Little Miss Georgia Peach!  As far as titles go, what could be better than Little Miss Georgia Peach? In just four words it spoke to my size, gender, origin, and favorite fruit. I had to have it. I had to be the Little Miss Georgia Peach.

So I hopped up from the table, nearly tripping on my tattered bunny slippers in excitement. Just moments earlier, my parents might have glanced over at their daughter, sleepy-eyed, reading up on the state of the world, and thought to themselves, we must be doing something right. But what I was about to propose would reassure them that that they were actually doing something very, very wrong.

“Mom! Dad! Look! Little Miss Georgia Peach! It’s a contest! Please can I do it?!”

I might as well have run around screaming, “I want to be objectified! I want to be judged on my smile and how delicately I can move about wearing taffeta! Please, won’t you subject me to traditional beauty ideals!?” All of which would have been bold statements for a pint-sized, stringy-haired blonde with approximately three front teeth, one of which boasted an unfortunate brown spot from too much Kool-Aid.

Also, what was worse, the subtext: “I am adorable! Don’t you think the judges will just LOVE me?!”

My mom glanced down at the ad, shot my father a look and said, “See, I told you we should have taken her out of self-esteem class.”

And who could blame her? Every Wednesday for weeks a counselor with coke-bottle glasses had been coming to teach my second grade class how to feel good about ourselves.  And every Wednesday for weeks I had rushed in from the bus with my bag full of “Warm Fuzzies,” or brightly covered synthetic puff-balls from some cheap craft store, each representing a compliment a classmate had given me.

“This one is because I’m pretty,” I said as I pulled out a little green puff. “Wait, no, this one,” holding a blue one now, “this one is because I’m pretty. The green one is because Charlotte loves my sweater with the horse mane on the sleeves. The purple one, that’s because I can read out loud really fast, and the orange one is because I’m smarter than everyone!”

Just one week of this and my mom considered calling the school to ask if I could be taken out for an extra recess or sent to the nurse’s office for a nap instead. My father pointed out that the self-esteem gurus would probably give me more attention if they thought I had some cruel and twisted mother who didn’t want me getting any compliments. Unwilling to risk this possibility, she decided to let me stay. But this moment confirmed that my mother’s original instinct had been correct. I had turned my blanky into a makeshift boa and was stretching it behind my head, shimmying back and forth while singing, “Start spreading the news!!! Little Miss Georgia Peach!!”

Maybe it is here that my mother saw her chance to reverse the damage all that silly self-confidence talk had done.  Or maybe, because my mother is also a woman who has never once gifted me a journal without inspirational quotes inscribed within, she couldn’t bear to stand between me and my dreams. But somewhere between my sliding across the kitchen island flashing jazz hands, resting my chin on my fist and shooting her a snaggletoothed grin, she said yes. She let me cut the ad out of the paper, write my name and address on it and send away for a full application.  One of the application questions was “What’s your favorite pastime?,” and I answered, without a doubt in my mind, “5pm.” My journey towards world peach harvest domination had officially begun!

The subsequent months were spent making important wardrobe decisions, trying to discover my talent, and learning to speak like a beauty queen. To this last point, my father offered one very key piece of advice.

“Never say yeah. When they ask you questions, it is yes, or no. Yes. Never yeah. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” I said. It did make sense.

According to my contestant packet, which I memorized as if it were the new Tiffany album, there were three stages to the competition, each requiring a different outfit.  As a child who managed to work 2 to 3 wardrobe changes into every ordinary day, this thrilled me to no end. Finally, somebody understood. The same outfit one wears to play in the front yard is simply not suitable for the back yard. The front yard called for a favored pair of hot pink leggings with neon suspenders that popped enough to be seen from the road, while the backyard allowed for a more laid back, sandbox chic, like my faded purple OshKosh B’Gosh overalls with a solid pocket tee.  I had tried to explain this to my mom so many times before, as she begrudgingly deposited more than three times the laundry my brother or sister required at the end of my daybed each week. But now here was a world where I was actually required to wear three outfits in one day. I felt vindicated. Lofty title aside, this was a dream come true!

The first outfit I had to choose was “Sportswear,” which would get me through my introduction, the group performance of “Tomorrow!,” and the casual interview.  For this, I chose a stone-washed denim mini skirt with a matching jacket that had little bows as buttons. My dad, who was way more into this than he should have been, suggested I top it all off with a hot pink baseball cap.

“It’s sporty,” he rationalized to my mother, “it will make her stand out to the judges.”

Another clue my father was starting to take things a bit too seriously was that he began referring to me in the third person, as if I were a pig they were fattening up for the county fair.  While my mom tried to keep a straight face as I stumbled over test interview questions, he looked me right in the eye and said, “We’ve got three months, she’ll be ready.”

Disappointed to learn there was no bathing-suit competition, I thought I’d found a loophole when I suggested I wear a Hawaiian print bikini with ruffles on the butt and a pair of turquoise heart-shaped sunglasses for my talent act, whatever it might be. When I bent over to touch my toes and moved my backside in a circular motion to show my mom how cool the ruffles could be, she shook her head in disapproval. In a rare show of good judgment, she flatly refused. “It’s too much, Elizabeth.” The next day she came home with a boring black leotard and opaque white tights.

Finally, there was the evening gown which I insisted be as large and as difficult to maneuver as possible. With my usual eye for excess, I found the dress of my dreams. It was a glittery pink gown with a white ruffled neckline that actually had a hoop in the skirt. With my limited frame of fashion reference, I determined it to be very Glenda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz. As I twirled and imagined a troupe of munchkins popping out from beneath my skirt, my mother got that now familiar “too much” look on her face and tried to distract me with a boring velvet party dress with a dainty sash.

“What do you think of this one, honey?” I waved an invisible wand in her direction and quoted my inspiration, “You have no power here! Begone, before somebody drops a house on you, too!”

While I was a natural at making wardrobe choices, the talent portion did not come as easily. This is because I clearly had none. I couldn’t sing or play an instrument or gyrate with any sort of rhythm while yielding a feather boa. I wasn’t a tap dancer, a magician or a ventriloquist. I wasn’t particularly flexible. The only thing I could do that was actually remarkable for my age was tuck my chin into my chest and completely deprive myself of oxygen so that I sounded exactly like Anthony Perkins’ character in Pyscho when he pretended to be his mother. I liked to repeat the refrain, “Kill her, Norman, kill her.”  It was uncanny, really, and adults found it hysterical. But something about Hitchcock felt a little too dark. If I must play down to the audience, I thought, I could recite The Wizard of Oz from start to finish. But that took too much time. Or I could tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue. But that didn’t take long enough (that’s what made it so impressive).  So my talent remained a blank not to be filled until just before the pageant.

Finally, the big day arrived. I brushed my teeth furiously, as I often did, hoping that little brown spot would suddenly disappear and then, upon realizing its unyielding prominence, practiced smiling without letting any teeth out, which, as excited as I was, was a bit like trying to stuff a bunch of helium balloons into a garbage can. Then I folded each outfit into a perfect pile and packed them in a small, pink duffle bag we had purchased for the occasion. I tossed it over my shoulder, on the same side as my perfectly curled ponytail, and strutted out to our grey Chevrolet Celebrity. I felt every bit the star. My parents exchanged nervous looks in the front seat, as I belted out “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya! Tomorrow! You’re only a daaaaaaay awaaaaaay!”

“Don’t worry,” my mom whispered to my father, “It’s a group number.”

The pageant was held in an auditorium in downtown Atlanta and the dressing room was a converted collegiate classroom with Little Miss Georgia Peach scribbled across a dusty chalkboard. Immediately upon entering, I felt like a local fair pony that had been thrown into the rink at the Hofburg Palace and expected to do dressage with the Lipizzaner Stallions. The other girls had make-up and costumes with sequins and that skin-colored mesh stuff I had only ever seen on television during the winter Olympics.  Their mothers wore whistles around their necks and screamed things like, “You’re still slouching on that last turn, Felicity. Let’s start from the top.”  My mother said things like, “Honey, fix your leotard. It’s going up your butt.”

Across the room, I spotted a tiny brunette wearing crushed velvet and a bow as big as two slices of pizza. She was studying a page of sheet music. My mind flashed back to the application. In addition to whether or not you wanted to be considered for superlatives like “prettiest dress,” “prettiest hair,” and “best personality,”—check, check, and check!—there was also a box to indicate that your act required a piano. Why would anyone need a piano, I had wondered, when boom boxes are so much cooler? Only now did it occur to me that some of these girls could actually play the piano. This was trouble.

After the interview portion went as well as it could have—my question was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered succinctly, “A movie star,” and did a curtsy—it was time for the moment of truth. The talent competition. I was starting to regret the gymnastics routine I had prepared to Debbie Gibson’s “Out of the Blue.” Gymnastics routine is a term I use loosely to describe my squirming around on a gray plastic mat we bought at Wal-Mart. Lest anyone be confused as to what this mat was for, it was covered in sketches of a woman performing various stretches in the correct posture. As the competition rushed on stage in a flurry of feathers, a blaze of a cappela glory, I stood behind the curtain, shaking.

When it was time for my big moment, my grand entrance consisted of me walking on stage with my boom box. I unfolded my little mat, pressed play, snapped my fingers and bent my knees in time with the music.  This went on for some time until, with no warning at all, I abruptly stood on my head.

A headstand. That was my talent. Not even a handstand, which required some measure of balance, or upper body strength, or something else I didn’t have. After 15 seconds, my face turned so red that the mc, a scary brunette with cavernous cleavage and Lee press on nails, rushed on stage and cut me short out of fear I might asphyxiate myself.

“Let’s hear it for Elizabeth McDonald, everyone!” She had been calling me this the whole time, even though it was NOT my name, and only now did I resent her for it. As the blood drained from my face, I started to hate her.  But as any respectable beauty queen would do, I smiled through the pain. I rolled up my mat, and gave the judges a wink and a close-fingered wave as I walked off stage.

In the end, having failed to land one of the top 3 spots, I came in 17^th because that was where Elizabeth McDonald fell in the alphabet. There were only 23 people in the competition.

Sometimes I defend this moment in my mind with the fact that Deborah Gibson was still Debbie then. We were all still coming into our own.  And just like when Deborah looks back and thinks, I can’t believe I ever went by Debbie and wore scrunchies in my hair before I got all sophisticated, changed my name and started posing nude, I do sometimes think back to that day, and wonder what, exactly, I was thinking.  Why the sad little gray mat? Why the pilly white tights? Why “Out of the Blue?” Why not something a little more up-tempo?

But I was 7.

So I have to look to the woman, the rational adult, who helped me make these decisions. My mother.  What was she thinking?

It has taken some time to realize she knew exactly what she was doing. The bedazzled competition, the plain black leotard, the headstand that might have resulted in public death, here was a lesson that counselor with the coke-bottle glasses never could have taught me. Humility.

More than twenty years have passed and my mom still thinks it’s hilarious.

“You know,” she is fond of saying anytime there is a beauty pageant on television, “I still think you could really blow these girls out of the water. If only you had any talent.”

“Thank you for choosing Verizon Wireless. How may I help you?” A thin, pimply guy in a pair of pleated black trousers with his cell phone holstered to his hip and a shiny red vest boasting the company logo rang out from behind the help desk.

“Well, I was just wondering, well, actually, a friend of mine was just wondering… if it’s possible, ummm, to block a certain number from my-err-her phone?”

“You little heart breaker! What do you have some maniac ex drunk dialing you at all hours of the night? Gettin’ tired of it, are ya?” Red vest was taking a flirty tone now and twirling his name badge cord with his right hand while tilting his chin towards his chest and grinning like the Cheshire cat.

“Umm, well, no, not exactly. My friend, well, she actually wanted to be able to keep from dialing a certain number. It’s not that she has someone calling her. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she has a LOT of people calling her. A LOT of really important people. There is just one little number she would rather her phone not be able to dial out.”

“But it doesn’t dial on its own, honey. Our phones are good, but they’re not that good.”

“Right, well, anyway, are they good enough that they can be programmed not to dial certain numbers? I mean, there must be something that can be installed to make the phone spontaneously combust if a certain number is dialed, or some new function that might refuse to connect to that number and will instead play a self-recorded message like, for example, oh, I don’t know, “You idiot. Go to sleep. He doesn’t love you.” Or something like that? No?”

“You could just stop calling him.”

Apparently Red Vest thinks self-control is something you can just add to the plan. Like unlimited text messaging or “I don’t particularly feel like chasing my phone down to the taxi lot in Queens again” insurance.

I wanted to scream, “Let me tell you something, mister, self-control is not something you can just add to the plan! It is something that I now realize—as adults stop hiding their secrets from me because I am starting to look like one of them—most people never attain! In fact, self-control seems inversely related to age as the older one gets, the more one drinks, the drama of it all wanes and the less things seem to matter in general. Self-control, as it turns out, exists only in movies with Sean Connery and Ralph Fiennes so that freakishly restrained actors can play to their full potential!”

Instead, I said, “Hmm. Really? Nothing? That’s interesting.” I tried to sound less personally invested and more curious as if I possessed a keen, hobby-like interest in cell phone function development like those men who are always reading consumer reports and weighing the pros and cons of the latest gps gadget.

“Well, you could stop drinking so much. Ha! Just kidding!”

What nerve. This guy was really getting too big for his pleated britches. It took all I had not to take that name badge cord and wrap it around his skinny little neck.

“But no, honey, to answer your question, there is nothing we can do. I’m sorry. But thank you for choosing Verizon Wireless. NEXT!”

I stood frozen. I felt helpless. This meant there would be no limit to the number of mornings I would have to wake up and count how many times I had called my ex on the cab ride home. Nothing to save me from the call log that would inevitably show a connection to his phone that lasted only 25 seconds, which doesn’t mean I got his voicemail—that registers at 45 seconds—but rather that he answered and promptly hung up. Again.

Fighting back tears on the sidewalk across from Bryant Park, I couldn’t help but notice that a number of responsible cell phone users from all over midtown had settled on little green folding chairs to engage in mutual, adult conversation. I immediately called my best friend and told her all about my devastating lunch hour.

“My attempt to make my cell phone work like self-respect has failed miserably!” I wailed. “They said there’s nothing they can do!”

“Well, of course there’s nothing they can do,” she laughed.

“But don’t let the trip be a total waste. Go back in there. Add insurance to your plan. You don’t want to have to chase your phone down to the taxi lot in Queens again, do you?”