This would be her only engagement.
And what he was saying was actually perfectly reasonable. He wanted her to be healthy so she’d live a long time, so they could grow old together. It was a beautiful thought, really. A very loving sentiment.
So what was she doing being such an exacting pill about it?
“I agree,” she said, nodding more vehemently as the idea took hold. A lot of women lost weight to fit into their wedding gowns. It was a perfectly healthy, normal thing to want to do.
“You’ll do it?” he asked, looking almost as giddy as she felt.
“I will,” she said firmly, then laughed and put her arms around him, rolling him on top of her. “I will.”
“Congratulate me! I’m pre-engaged!” Holly looked at Lacey Schmidt over a crate of paintings they’d just acquired from an estate sale. She always hoped she’d find a Rembrandt or a Monet in estate sales, but the best she’d done so far was come across a forty-five-thousand-dollar Mark Strauss cow painting. Forty-five thousand bucks was nothing to sneeze at, but it wasn’t forty-five million, either.
Lacey raised a pierced eyebrow. “Pre-engaged.”
“Yes!”
“What the hell is pre-engaged?”
Another person might have been discouraged by Lacey’s less-than-enthusiastic response, but Holly knew this was how Lacey was. Always. She was a short, round fireball with pink hair, multiple piercings, and although she herself was an artist, she had a “thing” against the pretentiousness of most of the artists they dealt with.
And Lacey was always ready to be skeptical. As a matter of fact, pessimistic was her default setting.
“It means,” Holly said, “that we are going to be engaged.”
Lacey stopped and looked at her, her pink spiky hair standing straight up like exclamation points. “When?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t want to reveal the whole weight-loss thing. Other people might not understand. “Soon.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Lacey returned to pulling nails out of the wooden crate, but never one to let something rest if it didn’t sit well with her, she stopped again. “I mean, that’s like being a pre-lottery-winner.”
“No, it’s not. You never know if you’re going to win the lottery. Afterwards you might look back and remember when you were a pre-lottery-winner, but you can’t say you are in advance.”
“And that’s different how? Are you sure you’re going to be engaged?”
“Yes.” Wasn’t she? “Absolutely.”
“Then why aren’t you calling it engaged?”
Together they lifted a canvas out of the box and began to unwrap the packaging.
“Because engaged implies a date that’s already been picked out.”
“Does not. I know people who have been engaged for years.”
Holly raised her eyebrows.
“I know,” Lacey said, returning to the unwrapping. “That’s a whole different argument. We’re talking about you right now. So the date isn’t the thing, and don’t bring up the ring, either. I notice you don’t have one.”
“Yet.”
“Yeah.” Lacey snorted. “Not till you’re engaged.”
Even though this was just the sort of thing Holly had expected from Lacey, she was starting to feel a little deflated. “I practically am! You don’t understand, Randy and I had a whole conversation about this. We made an agreement.”
“To be pre-engaged.”
“Exactly.”
“So you know it’s going to happen.”
Twenty pounds. She’d done it before; she could do it again. “Yes.”
“Then by the same token, I’m pre-dead.”
Holly leveled a gaze on Lacey. “Correct.”
Lacey thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay. Then please accept my pre-congratulations.”
“Thank you.” Holly smiled. “Now, was that so hard?”
“Pretty hard, yes.” Lacey was so deadpan that Holly didn’t know for sure if she was kidding or not.
But, then, that’s the way it usually was with Lacey. Holly opted to believe she was kidding.
The best move at this point seemed to be to change the subject so that Lacey didn’t manage to dampen the mood further. “This is nice,” she said, gently brushing dust off an oil still life. “People love still life.”
“It’s just that I don’t like that jerk snowing you into thinking pre-engaged is a good thing,” Lacey said abruptly.
Holly was taken aback. “I’m sorry? That jerk?”
“Sorry.” This time Lacey sounded like she meant it. “It sounds like a blow-off to me, and I don’t want you to be disappointed. There. I said it. And you can hate me for it if you want, but at least I got it out.”
Holly smiled. This was the warmest she could remember Lacey ever being. “Would it make you feel better if you knew I was the one who wanted to put off the engagement?” It wasn’t entirely true . . . but mostly. It was too soon to get married, which had to mean it was too soon to get engaged, plus the whole “getting healthy” thing was for her, not for him, so, when she thought about it, she was as 100 percent behind this idea as Randy was. Which made it true.
“Yeah . . . were you?”
“Yes.” Holly took a box cutter and carefully slit the packaging on another canvas. Better that than her wrists. She didn’t want to look at Lacey, even though she believed what she was saying. “Yes, I was. Now, let’s get back to work. Time is money, and all that.”
Holly’s parents and her brother had reactions similar to Lacey’s. Her mom had tried to be encouraging, asking if she might consider getting married on their boat down in Tampa, but there was doubt about the whole thing in her voice.
Her father had been so confused as to what pre-engaged meant that she felt stupid for having mentioned it at all.
And her brother Sam flat out told her she was stupid, although he’d tempered it with, “Hey, seriously, if you’re happy, that’s all that matters. I’ll support you no matter what.”
So that little moment was nice, if pitiful.
But almost immediately after changing her Facebook status from Holly Kazanov is tired of her iPod breaking to Holly Kazanov is pre-engaged, the phone rang.
“Oh my God, you’re pre-engaged?” It was Nicola. The most supportive person Holly had ever known in her life.
“Yes!” Holly shrieked. She moved from her office chair to her bed to settle in for a long gossipy chat with her oldest friend. “I am!”
“Tell me everything. Who is he? What’s he like? What does he look like? And what’s the difference between pre-engaged and engaged?”
Holly’s heart sank a little. She’d hoped Nicola would understand it all right off the bat. Then again, she had to admit that a pre-engagement wasn’t all that standard. She knew Nicola would understand once she explained it a little. “Well, it’s like we’ve set a date to become engaged.”
“Why? Does he have to save up money for a ring?”
“No.” Damn! That would have been a perfect explanation for Holly to give Lacey. She wasn’t going to lie to Nicola, though. Maybe it was all the time they’d known each other, maybe it was the distance between them, but Nicola was one person Holly always felt like she could tell the truth to. “Can I tell you the truth?”
“You better.”
“I actually want to lose weight before we’re officially engaged.”
“Hm.” There was a long moment that felt like electricity crossing the phone wire—or air, at least in Holly’s case, since she was on a cordless phone—between them. “He asked you to marry him, and you said not until you drop a few pounds?”
“Sort of.” Holly’s shoulders sank. “Not exactly. It was a little more roundabout. . . .”
She explained it all to Nicola. The dinner, the accidental “diet,” Randy’s reaction, and the subsequent conversations. Relaying it this way reinforced Holly’s feeling that it was all fate—one fortuitous thing after an
other.
Nicola, on the other hand, was hesitant. “Why does he want you to lose weight before he’ll commit to you?”
“It’s not like that. That’s just how this happened to come up. He didn’t lay down the conditions in a ‘do it and we will, fail and we won’t’ way.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then, “You’ve done that before, you know.”
“What?”
“Changed yourself for a guy.”
“When?” Holly straightened her back. She had not done that. “Name me one time.”
“Andy Tervis had that whole Rollerblading thing he wanted you to do with him, even though you told him you weren’t athletic and you had a bad feeling about trying it.”
“That was a matter of doing things together,” Holly contended. “It wasn’t like he made me do it.” And frankly, it had been eight years now and her tailbone still hurt.
“Fine. What about when Seth Goldstein wanted you to convert to Judaism just to date him?”
“Goldberg, and he didn’t insist.”
“Would he have dated you if you hadn’t at least looked into it?”
Maybe not. “It was interesting to learn about another religion,” Holly dodged. “I don’t regret that.”
Nicola sighed. “Hol, even back at camp, you starved yourself into the infirmary because you wanted that counselor Danny to notice you.”
“Danny Parish.” Holly couldn’t help but smile. “Lord, he was so good-looking. Wasn’t he?”
“He was.”
“I wonder what ever happened to him.”
“He married some chubby girl and had a bunch of happy, healthy babies.”
Holly gasped. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t, but that’s what the smart guys do.”
“Randy is a smart guy,” Holly said. “That’s why I want to hold on to him. But believe me, Nic, there is nothing wrong with me dropping a few pounds before getting engaged. If I hadn’t brought it up, we never would have had the conversation at all.” That much she believed. “I promise you, he didn’t sit me down and give me an ultimatum.”
“Phew! You had me nervous for a minute, there.”
“Oh, no, he’s not that guy.”
“So you’re doing this for you, not for him?”
“Yes, absolutely.” She said it just a little too loud, maybe. But Nicola didn’t notice.
“Then congratulations on your pre-engagement!”
“Thanks! Now, tell me about you. What’s life like out in Hollywood these days?”
“Busy. I have a huge audition tomorrow for a movie with Steve Carell. It could be my big break.”
“Haven’t you already had your big break?” Holly asked with a smile.
There was a pause. “I mean that it would be a great opportunity.” Nicola’s voice was suddenly tight, and Holly realized that she must have accidentally insulted her best friend by insinuating that it was too late for big successes.
“I didn’t mean anything by that—”
“I know.” Nicola sighed. “It’s just always stressful to go to another audition. The preparing, the waiting in a room full of people prettier than me, the waiting . . . I wish I’d wanted to be an accountant.”
Holly gave a laugh. “That’s a hot business these days.”
“Too bad I can barely count.” Nicola laughed, and the conversation moved on to the other small details of their lives.
Over the past twenty years of their friendship, there had sometimes been long periods during which they didn’t talk, but they were available for each other. And whenever they took the time for a long gab session, it was like no time had passed at all.
Holly always found this comforting. It was like having her own private Dear Abby on the other side of the country, someone she could call in the middle of a cold, dark night who would answer, cheerfully, in the warm light of the other coast.
Until now, Holly had never held anything back from Nicola. She’d always been completely up front, no matter what was happening. But maybe that was because usually whatever was happening was totally, and clearly, beyond her control. If a storm flooded her basement, or a job was forced to cut back her hours, or if she failed a test because her stupid professor based it on material he hadn’t taught yet (she would contend to her dying day that that one wasn’t her fault), she could report on any of it and it didn’t reflect badly on her.
But if her boyfriend put what might appear to Nicola like aesthetic conditions on the survival of their relationship, she didn’t feel she could be totally up front about it. Not that Randy had done that, exactly. She half believed it when she told Lacey and Nicola that she was fully on board with this plan.
Privately, she wondered. Was this really okay with her? Or had she wanted a husband—and kids, and a house, and yard with azaleas blooming in the spring—so badly that she was, at thirty-three, willing to make sacrifices to make it happen?
Even slightly degrading sacrifices?
She sat with that for a moment.
Then she dismissed it.
Because what she’d said to Nicola was true: Randy hadn’t sat her down and given her an ultimatum. She’d agreed. She’d participated wholly in the conversation, and she’d decided to make a change in herself.
And it was a change she’d wrestled with all her life. She was too quick to be complacent with her shape. Every time she stopped thinking about dieting, she slipped up and found herself with a cookie in her hand.
She had to stop that. She wanted to stop that.
That put her in control of the situation.
Didn’t it?
3
Camp Catoctin, Pennsylvania
Twenty Years Ago
“I wish I had some makeup,” Nicola whispered to Holly.
They were, as usual, on Nicola’s top bunk, looking down at Lexi, Tami, and Sylvia, who were giggling and putting on powders and eye shadows and all sorts of cool things that came in sleek plastic containers with fun names written in crazy fonts.
“We’re not allowed to use it here,” Holly said, sounding kind of glad that she didn’t have to try. “We’d get in trouble.”
Nicola rolled her eyes. “Like Brittany’s going to notice anything besides Danny Parish.”
“She hasn’t seemed to notice Emily Delaney attached at his hip.” Holly sighed and leaned back. “By the way, I’m not going tonight. I can’t.”
“What?” There was a dance tonight with the boys from Echo Lake, and Nicola had changed her clothes three times so far, trying to look just right in hopes that Steve Grudberg would be there again this year. “You have to go. I can’t go by myself!”
“My stomach hurts.”
“If it does, it’s because you haven’t eaten all week.” That was another thing Brittany—the world’s worst camp counselor—hadn’t noticed: Holly was on some sort of starvation diet. Nicola was actually getting a little worried about Holly until finally Holly broke down and had three Ho Hos this afternoon.
“That’s not true—I eat!”
“No kidding!” Sylvia chirped from below, and she, Lexi, and Tami giggled and got back to their makeup and gossip.
Nicola noticed Holly’s face turn a deep, hot red.
“Okay, whatever,” she said quickly to try to erase Holly’s embarrassment. “The thing is, I’ve been really looking forward to this because of, you know”—she lowered her voice—“Steve Grudberg. And I’ll look stupid standing there all by myself, hoping for him to notice me.”
“Then ask him to dance.”
“Right.”
“I’m serious.” Holly dropped her fake-stomachache voice. “If he says no, it’s not like you’ll ever see him again if you don’t want to.”
Nicola shook her head. “If I ask him and he says no, he will probably end up moving in next door to me.”
Holly laughed—making it now totally obvious that she wasn’t really sick and that she didn’t want to go because she was self-conscious—and said
, “Look, you want to be an actress, right?”
“Yeah . . . but what does that have to do with anything?”
“So tonight just act like the most confident person in the world. Pretend you’re already Steve’s girlfriend and that he’s dying to see you. When you get there, pretend he’s thrilled to see you.”
Like you’re pretending you’re sick? Nicola thought but didn’t say. She felt let down that Holly wasn’t going to be there for her, but she knew her well enough to know that once she decided something—like that she wasn’t going to the dance tonight—there was no changing her mind. “That’s stupid.”
“It is not. I heard that’s Diane Keaton’s secret. She pretends she’s already in the situation so when she acts it out on-screen, it’s like it’s already real.”
Nicola really admired Diane Keaton. She’d watched the old movie Annie Hall multiple times, even though Woody Allen was creepy. “Okay, I’ll try it,” she agreed, only half convincing herself.
“Good.”
A few minutes passed with only the sound of the other girls’ prattling and the buzz of a fly trying to get out through the ripped screen in the window.
“So,” Nicola tried again, “are you sure you don’t want to go?”
Holly made a clearly self-conscious effort to wince. “No. I really don’t feel good.”
The dumb fly continued to bump into the screen.
Holly must have thought Nicola was as stupid as that fly if she thought she’d believe this story.
If it were Nicola, she would have gone to help her friend, even if she didn’t want to.
She was hurt that Holly wasn’t willing to do the same for her.
“Then you should probably go to the infirmary,” Nicola challenged, knowing it was obnoxious yet hoping it might change Holly’s mind. “Maybe it’s something serious.”
Holly shrugged. “It’s probably something I ate.”
“But you’ve barely eaten anything.” Nicola saw the chance to drive home her point and hone her acting skills. She arranged her features into an expression of serious concern. “If you’d had breakfast or lunch, then, yeah, maybe I’d think it was just something you ate, but . . .” She shrugged and let her implication drop like a tennis ball into Holly’s court. “If you’re too sick to go to the dance . . .”
Thin, Rich, Pretty Page 3