by Gigi Blume
Super.
She didn’t speak for an indeterminable length of time. It could have been a few seconds. It could have been an hour. It felt like an eternity in Hades. I let the words hang there without an apology or an explanation. It was a character flaw. I never could back down from a fight. Even when I knew I was wrong.
At length, she straightened her posture, lifted her chin, and softly whispered, “I understand now why you named your dog Lady. It’s because you don’t know how to be a gentleman to deserve one.”
She closed the length between us in tentative steps and stopped in front of me, kissing the top of Lady’s little head.
“There’s a strict no pet policy in my rental agreement, so…”
She extended her arms toward me and placed Lady in my embrace. And with a nod, brushed past me and returned downstairs.
Real smooth, Will. It takes a real tough guy to make a girl cry. Especially a girl as spirited as Elizabeth Bennet. I could sense Lady giving me the side eye. Even my dog was silently judging me. Happy Holidays.
15
He Ran Into My Knife Ten Times
Beth
I had three words to describe Will Darcy. Stink. Stank. Stunk. Okay, maybe I was just listening to too many Christmas songs, but I really did think he was a triple-decker toadstool sandwich.
After the confrontation from hell, I checked my appearance in the bathroom mirror before emerging to the scrutiny of my fellow cast members. Hold your head up high. Don’t let them see you down. Who said I couldn’t act? I almost fooled myself. Not that anybody was paying attention.
By the time I went in for my fitting, my eyes were dry as a California riverbed. Ari had created a bundle of gorgeous Victorian dresses, accented in pastel trim and satin ribbons. It was so incredibly perfect, I looked as if I’d stepped right out of a painting. The only adjustments she needed to make were a few inches off the hem.
Short in stature. Yeah, so what? I preferred to use the term petite. But one thing Will didn’t realize—I was small but mighty. I wouldn’t let his asinine remarks get me down.
“Are you all right?” Ari looked at me over her glasses with an introspective glare. “You’re somewhere else, and it doesn’t look like a fun place to be.”
The word eclectic wasn’t dynamic enough to describe Ari. She reminded me of equal parts Professor Trelawney, Audrey Hepburn, and a fairy godmother secretly into 90s grunge bands. Corduroy was her material of choice in bootleg pants, and she often sported red Doc Martins. Today, she’d tossed her hair in a messy bun and slapped a scarf around her forehead. And she hardly ever wore makeup. She didn’t need it. She was a natural beauty, but I could tell she’d be a knockout if she ever got dressed up.
I laughed, attempting to put on the mask I wore hiding from scrutiny, but mostly hiding from myself. I was also retrospectively coming up with several witty comebacks I should have jabbed at Will. Why did I always come up with the good stuff when it’s too late?
“I’m just worried about a friend,” I said dismissively. It was a half-truth. I was preoccupied about Jane, but the whole Bing debacle encroached on my mental faculties. I wondered if roommate problems were cause enough to plead temporary insanity. How much time would I have to serve if I got all Cell Block Tango on Will?
“You probably have no drama in your life,” I said.
It was more of a question, but she struck me as a no-nonsense type of gal. Like she’d been there, done that, and now she was a working professional with a picket fence and a beautiful garden.
She shrugged. “I’ve had my share of drama.”
“Are you married?”
Her features shifted, eyes darkening like a car’s headlights shifting from high beams to low.
“No.”
That was it. Just one word. No.
There was no way I would head down that tell me about your mother rabbit hole. So I left it at that, thinking if Ari ever wanted to have a girl talk bonding over costume fitting, I’d do my best to be a good listener. For now, I’d have to listen to my own annoying thoughts.
Everything that came out of Will’s mouth put me in the mood for sparring with sharp objects, but one thing in particular stuck with me—even more so than his unfounded overacting comment. He said I was a nobody. A nobody doomed to wait tables in questionable establishments all my life with no one to share it with. In truth, I wouldn’t mind the spinster life. It’s kind of like the thug life but with more baguettes. I even resigned myself to the idea I might not have a career in acting. I knew it was a pipe dream. Many people didn’t make it. I couldn’t say I blamed Will. If my dad were Hollywood royalty, I’d ride his coattails too. If everything he said to me were true, it wouldn’t bother me. But a nobody? I didn’t do that.
I arrived at Lucas Lodge a little early since my dinner comprised of quick and dirty drive-thru Mexican food. Pro tip: use the extra drink holder in your car for the nacho cheese cup. French fries fit nicely in there as well. I’d mastered the art of driving while eating burritos, thus affording me lots of extra time before my shift started to do stuff to actively avoid adulting. Things like pouring the best years of my life into my smartphone. Honestly, my world had turned into such a crazy town, even my waitress job was a welcome distraction.
Charlotte was at the bar as usual, but when she saw me enter, her features stiffened. I laughed because she seemed shocked I’d arrived early rather than my usual ten minutes late, but then, I caught sight of the true source of her deer in the headlights expression. Colin leaned into the bar, drinking his Shirley Temple with extra cherries and a cocktail umbrella. What on earth did this guy want now?
I was still considering the scenario whereby I tiptoed backwards to the parking lot, undetected by Colin when he turned his head in my direction. Oh, lucky day. I was stuck. My options were to smile and jog past the bar, avoid eye contact and hope he disappeared, or suddenly come down with pink eye and go home sick. Interacting with Colin wasn’t on the schedule. We all knew what happened last time, and I wasn’t in the mood to get fired again. But I didn’t have to do any of those things. Colin stood, sipped the last of his drink, and reached for his man bag. But what happened next almost did give me pink eye—if one could get eye diseases from seeing things that shouldn’t be seen. Like your best friend kissing the guy who only recently declared his unwavering love to you. They weren’t making out, so that was a relief. In fact, the kiss was so brief, I thought I might have imagined it. But Colin had the most stupid grin as he parted from her. I think he whispered something to the effect of, “I’ll see you on the morrow, my lamb.” He made for the exit with a bounce in his step, pausing briefly to bid me a good evening, and rode off into the sunset—or at least to Sunset Blvd.
My day had officially reached level one million on the crazy meter. Charlotte and Colin? No, no, no, no, no. Where were the hidden cameras? If this was some sort of messed up reality show, I wanted to be voted off yesterday.
“Pizza!”
I closed the distance, sliding behind the bar so there would be no barrier between us. She wrinkled her nose and narrowed her eyes.
“We only have pizza on Fridays,” she said innocently.
“Our code word, remember? When one of us is making a horrible dating mistake, the other is supposed to say pizza. Colin? Really? You can’t be serious.”
I was mentally face palming. What’s the point in a code word if you have to explain it every time?
She blushed. “Actually, he’s kind of nice.”
“Kind of nice? Kittens are kind of nice. Hot tea on a rainy day is kind of nice. Colin is ridiculous.”
She shrugged and smiled within herself while mindlessly wiping the bar with a towel.
“Fries before guys, Charlotte. Remember when we were going to get that on a tattoo?”
She laughed. “I’m glad we chickened out.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “But it’s still our girl pact.”
She paused her busy nothings to look at me squarely in the ey
e.
“You know what, Beth? I’m not like you. I don’t need to go out with the hottest guys in the world. I’m practical. Like Jessica Rabbit. I want somebody who makes me laugh.”
I snorted. The kind of snort that would spew milk from my nose if I were drinking milk.
“He’s laughable. That’s for sure.”
Charlotte’s daydreamy grin turned into a fiery scowl.
“I suppose nobody else has a valid opinion on that because you’ve stamped your authority on it?”
“It doesn’t bother you how he jumps from one woman to the other in the bat of an eye?” (A heavily mascara-caked eye.) “He was just in here last week making a scene.”
“If I recall, you were the one making the scene. Or was it Colin spilling yams all over the customers?”
“Okay. I own that. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“No. Don’t give me that. You just can’t stand the fact every man you turn down isn’t wallowing in sorrow. You can’t wrap your head around the idea of someone else liking him just because you don’t, that he could find a date even though he wasn’t successful with you, or that he’s not crying into a bottle of gin just because Elizabeth Bennet turned him down.”
I had no idea where this was coming from. She painted me to like some sort of maneater.
She threw her towel down and stormed off somewhere in the back of the house. What was going on? I didn’t even recognize her. I didn’t recognize any of my friends anymore. Jane was, thank goodness, past the grief stage but was now in a scary denial phase. She wore a perpetual plastic smile and was always too busy with Pinterest-worthy tasks like an over-achiever Barbie. Whenever I would ask how she was doing, her eyes would glaze over, and she’d say something like, “I’m great. Couldn’t be better.” Then she’d go off and organize her Kanban board and throw out most of her possessions.
Newsflash: I was a minimalist’s second-worst roommate. First prize was reserved for Lydia. I would find things under the couch and in the bathroom, I wish I could unsee. I’d never met anyone quite as messy as Lydia. She perfected a particular kind of messy. She was the Jackson Pollock of messy. That in itself didn’t surprise me in her behavior. As long as I’d known her, she’d washed her car a total of two times. One of those times because the rain water ran in muddy streaks across her windshield, rendering it unsafe to drive. She actually got a ticket for it. The other time was because she was submitting her car, so she could drive for Uber. That didn't work out so well.
But lately, Lydia had been uncharacteristically distant from me. Her nightly partying was nothing new, and I really didn’t want to be invited to go out with her and the girls to pick up random idiots in bars. But she would usually chat my ear off about what they drank and who got asked to dance and who got so plastered they had to be carried home. Sound familiar? Now when I asked how her night was, she’d give me the old one-word blow off. “Fine.” Then I’d be ignored in favor of baby goats in sweaters on YouTube.
My life had suddenly turned into a demented Lifetime movie. I was at that point in the story where the protagonist was in a series of montages set to inspirational music and discovered something profound about herself by the end of the song. The best I could do to recreate that was take a drive after work with the radio blasting. My old Volvo didn’t even have a CD player. I had to plug my phone into a cassette tape auxiliary adapter to listen to my playlist. It made a strange squeaking sound—like a dying chipmunk. The buzzing in the speakers and commercial interruptions weren’t exactly helping the makeshift movie soundtrack of my life either. The montage sequence wasn’t any better, unless you consider a string of liquor stores, taco shops, and homeless encampments incredibly enlightening.
But that’s LA for you. And so after deciding that hitting every all-night donut shop in greater Los Angeles was a bad idea, I ended up at my parents’ house.
“What’s wrong? What happened now?”
My mother patted me down, making sure I wasn’t what? Bloody? Had missing limbs? I didn’t even realize how late it was until Dad came out of his study wearing his smoking coat and carrying his brandy snifter. It was his nightly ritual right after the eleven o'clock news. A classic novel, usually Dickens or Tolstoy, a dram of brandy, and a cigar. He’d abandoned the cigar a few years ago—doctor’s orders—but replaced it with a monthly subscription to See’s candy. Who knew that was a thing? I could see the chocolate on the side of his mouth. When Mom confronted him about it, he’d protested it was healthy for him because it was dark chocolate. Another thing about his nightly routine was that he wasn’t to be disturbed unless it was an emergency. I supposed my mother's hysterics were enough cause for alarm because he ran into the living room upon my arrival.
“Nothing happened, Mom.” I shooed her hands away. “Can’t I come visit my family?”
“At midnight?” Dad said.
“Sorry. I didn’t realize it was so late. Go back to War and Peace, and I’ll make myself a sandwich.”
“You really shouldn’t eat this late, dear,” said my mother. “It will make you fat.”
Dad narrowed his eyes and shook his head.
“Let’s go in the kitchen together, Lizzie. I’ve been craving that Italian salami ever since your mother brought it home from Costco.”
Score! Mom made a Costco run. That meant there were giant value packs of toilet paper, bottled water, instant mac and cheese, and all sorts of snacks in the garage pantry. I’d have to raid their stash before I left for home.
As I followed Dad into the kitchen, Mom hollered after us, “Don’t eat the kettle chips. Those are for Mary’s lunches.”
The salami was glorious. Dad pulled out the sourdough, provolone, and brown mustard and made each of us a deli masterpiece. Then he opened two ice-cold glass bottles of Coke, and we ate in heavenly silence for five minutes, just enjoying the midnight snack. I may have moaned with pleasure when the bread hit my lips. Sometimes it’s the simplest things that taste the best.
I let out a breath I’d been holding the entire day and exhaled into the afterglow of meat, bread, and liquid sugar. The bubbles from the Coke sat in my chest, threatening to release the sting of carbonation through my nose from drinking it too fast.
Dad wagged his brows. “Fancy some kettle chips?”
“Heck yeah!”
He reached into the cupboard while I retrieved two more bottles of Coke. Mexicans made the best Coke, but it was too expensive in the supermarkets. God bless Costco.
“So,” Dad began as he tore open the bag of kettle chips. I immediately snatched a handful and bit into the crunchy goodness.
“So?” I shrugged.
Dad likewise gathered a handful of chips in his hand, popping two at a time in his mouth.
“You just happened to be in the neighborhood?”
I wasn’t there for any particular reason. I didn’t need to go running home every time something upset me. I just didn’t feel like going back to the apartment. So I told him just that.
“Why not?” he asked, taking a long swig of his drink.
“My roommates. They’re driving me crazy.”
His chin folded back into his neck, and he blinked. “Even Jane? She strikes me as the easiest person in the world to live with.”
“She is usually. But she broke up with her boyfriend and—”
“Jane broke up with Bing?” My little sister was at the kitchen door, standing dumbstruck in her long flannel nightgown. “Why?”
“Mary, what are you doing up at this hour?” Dad wasn’t one to reprimand either one of us, so his question came off as more of an “Oh, you silly girl,” sort of remark, so she didn’t consider it necessary to answer.
“Bing was perfect for her,” she cried. “Why would she do that?”
“He’s the one who broke it off, not her.”
This information changed her expression from confused to enraged in a matter of seconds. “What? Why?”
I did my best at the twitter version of th
e story, trying to keep the particulars at 280 characters or less. Subsequently, I left out a lot, but they still got the gist of it.
“Well,” said my father, “Good for her.”
“How so?’
“Oh, everybody needs a little heartbreak at least once in their lives. It provides a small distinction apart from their peers and gives them something to talk about. Good she got it out of the way now.”
“Daddy!”
“When are you going to let some man come along and break your heart, Lizzie? You can’t let Jane have the all the fun.”
“Very funny, but I have no such plans.”
“What about that young man you brought over for dinner?”
“Jorge,” Mary offered.
“Yes, Jorge,” he said with a grin. “He’d jilt you credibly.”
“I don’t think he’s capable of that,” I said. “He’s been jilted enough himself.”
My father and Mary’s interest in the subject piqued. I knew Dad was joking, but he did seem to like Jorge. And if I didn’t know Mary better, I’d believe the little blushes on her face the few times he spoke directly to her were indications of a little crush. Of course Mary, with her nose constantly in Tony Robbins books, rarely took notice of anything else.
I didn’t know how much of Jorge’s story I wanted to tell my family. If he were to visit again, how comfortable would he feel if they knew so much. Still, I could give them another twitter version. In the end, the only thing I’d left out was the particulars about his mom. I figured that was sensitive material.
At length, my father sat back in his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s an incredible story if it’s true.”
“Why wouldn’t it be true?”
“Have you heard both sides of the story?”
“You sound like Jane.”
“She might have a point there.”
“Well, if you knew Will Darcy, you wouldn’t doubt it. He’s the most arrogant, vain, prideful man I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing.”