The Dictionary of Failed Relationships

by Meredith Broussard

  Of 10,904 men who were married at the beginning of the trial, the researchers found that those who stayed married were less likely to die from a number of causes than those who divorced. Of those who divorced during the trial, 1,332 died from various causes, including some 663 from cardiovascular causes. (Reuters)

  Information is so invigorating, yet enigmatic. So much of it on how to get a man, so little of it on how to get rid of one. To this end, I proffer a handy list, which I have been compiling for my divorcing girlfriends, some of whom have clearly been born yesterday and need my advice as well as physical intervention. One of them actually had moved out from her home after she caught her rabbi husband with his hand up the nanny. I immediately alerted said girlfriend to the folly of her actions, installed her back in her home, and changed the locks myself. As for the mezuzah on the doorframe, I bashed it off with a sledgehammer and mailed it to his temple, along with the Polaroids (one needn’t ask what was within the photos; Polaroids are never lucky, I am afraid, unless properly dealt with). She looked on as I sealed the envelope, tears frozen on her once-blossoming cheeks, which had turned the color of ash.

  Yes. It is sad what ignorance does to women without resources who have been struck with an infidelity. It can and will render them childlike, like palsied Shirley Temples, throwing themselves on the floor and crying about the general unfairness of life, et cetera. I try to be kind but firm, and in the end they all thank me. It is a veritable hothouse here come Christmas, so numerous are my bouquets of thanks from women who have lost neither their minds nor their shirts.

  I hope that no one reading this will ever be faced with the travesty of divorce. It should not happen to any good woman. But if it does? If you fall in with the wrong kind, the way I did? Be glad for divorce. It is God’s way of telling you, “Girl? You have fucked up again! Now, here I’m going to give you a chance to start over. Go out there and please, please, please show some sense. Don’t make me come down there again and bail your ass out.”

  Ten Simple Yet Elegant Tips on Divorce

  Change the locks.

  Make him pay for the divorce—and anything else you can.

  Keep everything beginning with consonants (children, money, house, cars, furniture, real estate, medical benefits, retirement funds, linens).

  Allow him to keep everything beginning with vowels (armoires, umbrellas).

  Sequester precious items at a friend’s house. Men never remember what they have—if they did, they would not have ruined their lives by running around with whores.

  Don’t fight in front of the children . . .

  . . . This includes your X/STBX—it only adds gasoline to the fire, and they don’t care how angry you are, because they exist wholly in their own tiny birdcage of a brain.

  Take frequent hot baths; get manicures and pedicures; have your hair expensively cut.

  Everything, no matter how ludicrous and squalid it seems at the time of the split, will get better and better, until you will wonder why you cared so much in the first place.

  When confronted with a question regarding fairness to your ex, err on the side of Lifetime Vendetta. That way, you will never feel a fool, and you will also have kept everything of worth in your rightful possession. In short: You may have once been in love, or you may still be in love—but you are not crazy.

  YUPPIE

  By Lucinda Rosenfeld

  yup·pie ’y-p noun, often capitalized [probably from young urban professional + -ie ] (1982) 1: a young, usually college-educated adult who is employed in a well-paying profession and who lives and works in or near a large city. 2: anyone employed in the Internet industry during the late 1990s’ economic boom.

  All the women in my family—minus me, since I don’t cook— take turns putting on Thanksgiving. This year, it was Aunt Judith’s turn. I figured that whatever she served up couldn’t be any worse than the cremated turkey my mother laid out last year. My boyfriend Rob and I had set off from the city that morning. We arrived in the Berkshires around noon. “Hey, Judy,” I said, walking into the kitchen, where my aunt, a curator of Renaissance painting at the Met, stood in a black cowl-neck dress and fresco apron, chopping a bulbous-looking head of celery root. She looked even more anorexic than usual.

  “Well, fancy seeing you here, Rachel Epstein!” she announced with those popping eyeballs of hers. She laid down her knife, wiped her hands on a pair of rosy-cheeked putti, and came over to kiss me hello, smelling faintly of after-bath splash.

  “This is Rob,” I said, motioning to my left.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” said Rob, extending a hand.

  “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, too, sir,” said Aunt Judith, returning the compliment, but you could tell she was mocking him with that whole “sir” business. And then she leaned toward him, chicken neck extended, as if she were gearing up to take a bite out of his nipple, her thumb and forefinger affixed to the right hinge of her oversized red frames. “In and Out Burger,” she said, squinting at his T-shirt like she was reading hieroglyphics. “What in the world is that?”

  “It’s a fast-food chain in southern California,” he told her.

  “A fast-food chain—how extraordinary,” she muttered incredulously, as if ours were a family for whom the taste of frozen hamburger patties was an alien one—as opposed to a bunch of New York Times Magazine recipe victims brainwashed to believe that the greater the number of ingredients, the tastier the meal.

  “We’re going to go put our stuff upstairs,” I said, already ready to get out of there.

  “Okay, you two,” she said, waving us away with a flick of her microscopic wrist. And then, “Oh, Rachel—I think Joan wants you in the red room . . .”

  “No problem,” I called back, even though the red room was the only one in the house with twin beds in it (thanks, Mom). No doubt my dork-face of a federal prosecutor/brother Ben and his ugly, human rights lawyer/fiancée with the short bangs, Nathalie, had gotten the yellow room, which had a nice queen-size bed in it. It was all so typical. I didn’t even know why I’d bothered coming.

  Except, of course, for the opportunity to flaunt my white trash boyfriend in everyone’s face.

  The ride up had taken forever. It was sleeting, or hailing, or freezing-raining, or whatever it’s called when little turds of ice fall from the sky and make a racket on the windshield. All these cars had gone off the road. There were dead animals everywhere. Rob and I passed the time looking for good songs on the radio and talking about which Hollywood actresses we thought were hot. Of course, I ended up getting insulted because everyone that Rob named was blond with big breasts. (I’m a small-chested brunette.) But I could only blame myself, since I was the one who started the conversation.

  At another point, I tried to prep Rob on members of my family to avoid having prolonged conversations with, beginning with Aunt Judith, but continuing with my cousin Delmore, who was probably just another depressed Ph.D. candidate when he was back at U.C. Santa Cruz studying the history of consciousness, but who, in the company of the extended Epstein clan, felt somehow compelled to inject the word queer into every sentence he uttered (it was like—yes, Delmore, we know you prefer cock to pussy) in a barely disguised attempt to make everyone else feel guilty about still being heterosexual.

  But Rob was like, “Don’t worry about me—I get along with everyone.”

  It was scarily true. Half the time, he didn’t even notice when people were busting him. The other half, he didn’t seem to care. He had this talent for disarming people. At least, he’d disarmed me. He was like, “Hey, I’m Rob”—we were both at this bar in midtown after work—and the next thing I knew, we were sitting across from each other over dinner, and he was telling me all these stupid high school driving stories that were actually pretty funny, especially the one about rear-ending a bus containing an entire Little League team.

  That was nine months ago. But it was already pretty serious. I saw us moving to Westchester or Connecticut in a c
ouple years’ time, to a three-bedroom colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac, where we’d watch obscene amounts of TV on some convertible sofa bed, when we weren’t busy going at it on the wall-to-wall carpeting. That was my fantasy. I dreamed of culture-free days spent pushing strollers through the mall. I saw Rob and me floating on our backs in some kidney-shaped pool, eating Pringles and reading thrillers by Dean Koontz.

  All I’d ever wanted was to be normal—to have had an adolescence shaped and honed by Pat Benatar and Big Macs and fast cars and cute guys and Ron Duguay and Def Leppard and softball and Sabbath and Sylvester Stallone.

  Instead, I spent my formative years being force-fed a steady diet of Modified Marxist Cultural Criticism written by midcentury German-Jewish émigrés (Dad) and two-thousand-page works of Victorian literature (Mom). Indeed, the concept of leisure was an unknown one to the Epstein family of West Sixty-seventh Street (and, on holidays, Great Barrington, Massachusetts). When I tried to watch TV, my father turned it off. I still haven’t forgiven my mother for canceling my subscription to Seventeen. For my parents’ efforts, I awarded them with a learning disability and developmental issues. I had an imaginary friend named Zemulus the Pontificator. I had to go down one step for every two steps I went up. I was obsessed with palindromes. Able was I ere I saw Elba, and A man, a plan, a canal—Panama. It was the seeming impossibility of those phrases reading backward as they read forward that gave me hope. They seemed like proof that life was this magical thing that could turn course at any moment, as opposed to boring and lonely and predictable, which turned out to be closer to the truth. I went to Friends, and had none. Later, at Sarah Lawrence, I developed a recreational heroin habit and launched my own line of baby-doll dresses under the label “Blow Up Doll.” I was angry at my family for putting so much pressure on me to succeed, but also at myself for being such a failure. I had some body-image issues left over from all the years of mandatory ballet. I had issues with my sexuality, too. (My parents could only talk about screwing in the context of French people.)

  After two years of college, I’d had enough. I moved to Seattle with my boyfriend, Dewey. Everyone called him Dewey Nothing behind his back, and, eventually, so did I. At which point I moved back to New York and got a job in the promotions department of a luxury leather goods conglomerate—mostly to spite my parents. True to form, they took the news badly and tried to lure me back to school with promises of unconditional love and interest-free loans. That was six years ago. Since then, I’d been promoted to Director of Special Events for the United States and Canada. I was currently pulling in twice as much money as my mother ever made teaching her students about George Eliot at the CUNY graduate center—as if it made an impression on anyone in my family. They still treated me like a charity case. Not that I cared what they thought of me. I was through with trying to please the Epsteins.

  Still, I admit that a critical, petty side of myself would have been happier if Rob had been wearing another shirt—really, anything but that “In and Out Burger” one. (With any luck, he’d change for dinner.)

  Just as Rob and I were climbing the stairs, the whole “gang” came in—a whole Subaru station wagon’s worth of them outfitted in corduroy and Polartec, their arms loaded up with white paper bags filled with McIntosh apples, their faces gleaming from the cold. Rob and I stopped on the landing. “Rachel!” someone said, but everyone was looking at Rob.

  “Hey, you guys,” I said, trying to pretend I was happy to see them. “This is Rob.”

  “Hi, Rob,” said everyone, practically in unison.

  “Hey,” he answered, palm raised like a mellow traffic cop. “Nice to meet you all.”

  “Did you just get here?” asked Sara, my beyond-boring, East Asian studies professor cousin, trying to be conversational, I guess. (It was like—no, we’re just toting our weekend bags around the house for fun.)

  “Just a few minutes ago,” volunteered Rob, as usual picking up my slack. “It was pretty slow going with the weather.”

  “We’re going to put our stuff away,” I said, offering a glacial smile and climbing another step, so the point wouldn’t be lost.

  “Well, just let me know if you two need anything,” said my Aunt Lila, moving to the front of the pack. Lila was my mother’s incredibly earnest younger sister. She worked with disadvantaged students in Cambridge and lived for National Public Radio. “Joan and Susan are antique shopping in Stockbridge.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, climbing another step.

  “Seem like nice people,” was all Rob said when we finally got upstairs.

  Unable to offer up any compelling evidence to the contrary, I made a face and said nothing.

  Dinner was still an hour off, so Rob and I took off our clothes and got under one of the garish Marimekko quilts that had won our bedroom the red room designation. Rob started pressing into me, but I wasn’t in the mood. “Let’s just cuddle,” I said. He didn’t seem to mind. It hadn’t always been that way. One night, when we were first together and I’d had my period, he’d gone and slept on the sofa because he didn’t think he could make it through the night just lying next to me. More recently, his Chia Pet-like tendencies aside, he’d learned to turn his sex drive on and off like a light switch. In fact, within minutes, he was snoring his weird ventilation system of a snore. At some point, I must have dozed off, too.

  I woke to find him on the other bed, feet up, leafing through Sports Illustrated. “Mornin’, sweetheart!” he said in his fake country-bumpkin accent. (He had grown up near Atlanta, but was born in Tennessee.)

  “I wish it were morning,” I grumbled into my pillow.

  “Yeah, well, Miss Bitter, it’s time to rise and shine,” Rob went on. “I think we’re the only ones not down there. They’re probably getting paranoid that we don’t like them or something.”

  “Where would they get that idea?”

  “Hey, you just sit there glaring at everyone, and I’ll make the small talk. Okay?”

  I had been staring at a framed copy of that New Yorker poster in which the rest of humanity is reduced to a suburb of New York City, and thinking how annoying and insider-y it was. Now I looked over at Rob—at his pink cheeks and giant sock feet—and a wave of tenderness washed over me as I contemplated the possibility that life had its whimsical aspects, after all. “Will you give me a wake-up kiss?” I moaned at him.

  “One wake-up kiss—coming right up,” he declared, hoisting himself off his bed and delivering the promised smack.

  “You’re cute,” I said, stroking his flushed cheek.

  “Not as cute as you,” he said, squeezing one of my nipples.

  “I wuv you.”

  “The feeling’s mutual.”

  We got dressed—Rob, to my relief, in an unobtrusive, pale blue button-down shirt and khakis—and went downstairs.

  I kissed my short, fat, sweet, bald, totally irritating father, who was currently the publisher of a (snooze) middle-of-the-road Jewish newspaper hello (“Hi, Honey”), then my short, not-quite-as-fat-but-equally-if-not-more-annoying mother, Joan (“Hello, Rachel”). Then I introduced them to Rob. As far as I was concerned, my brother didn’t exist. His main crime? Living.

  “So, Rob, I understand you sell coffee,” my father began. “Tell me—what’s the most popular flavor these days?”

  It was so like my father to ask a retarded question like that. The guy was a genius, except when it came to real life. “Dad,” I hissed. “Rob trades coffee on the commodity exchange—he’s not a frigging street vendor!”

  “Well, I didn’t—” my father started to say, all defensive, as usual.

  But Rob interjected with, “Actually, I wish I knew the answer to that question, Mr. Epstein, but I don’t sell coffee so much as I speculate in coffee futures.” (I don’t know how he did it.)

  “Coffee futures—I see,” said my father, lips pursed, head waggling like an Orthodox Jew reciting his morning prayers, even though you knew he had no clue what Rob was talking about, and no intere
st in finding out, either. (Thanks to the classic six apartment we’d inherited from Mom’s parents, he could afford to be a moron when it came to money.)

  We all sat down. My uncle Ralph, who taught Literature Between the Wars at Columbia and fashioned himself a kind of one-man anti-political-correctness militia, was seated at one end of the table. (The guy was convinced that Toni Morrison had only won the Nobel because she wrote about slaves. Whatever.) My father was at the other. I was between Rob and Aunt Lila. “So, what glamorous things are you two city slickers planning for New Year’s?” she asked me. (Why did everyone in my family have to be reduced to a type?)

  “We haven’t really planned anything yet,” I told her, then turned my back to nuzzle Rob. Which seemed to shut her up for the while.

  My mistake was to compliment Uncle Ralph on his choice of wines. “There’s actually an interesting story behind the Château Cos d’Estournel label,” he began to sermonize while undoing the first cork. “A love story of sorts . . .”

  I felt my lids begin to droop.

  There were toasts, a family tradition. My father raised a glass to Edward Said, “For enlightening those of us in the intellectual community who were under the apparently mistaken belief that the pen is mightier than the sword—or, perhaps I should say, mightier than a certain kind of naturally occurring, hard, round object.” A sprinkling of clinks. A few tight smiles. I rolled my eyes. Ever since chucking that rock on the West Bank, the great Palestinian orator had become my father’s Public Enemy Number One. (It was getting a little tired.)

  One of the younger generation, a habitually ironic policywonk cousin named Jake, followed with a raised glass to “Paul Stanley né Stanley Eisen and Gene Simmons né Chaim Witz on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of their breakthrough album, Alive!, for ushering in the Golden Age of the Kabuki Jew.” Real laughter. More clinks, especially among the younger generation. “Who is this?” said my father. More laughter. Rob looked equally baffled by Jacob’s toast. In lieu of trying to explain to him why it was that secular Jews were so obsessed with identifying their “own” in the fields of sports and entertainment—not that I knew the answer—I gave him an under-the-table hand squeeze and whispered, “Don’t worry—they’re all insane.”