by Liz Astrof
I got dressed slowly. I knew that what awaited me on the other side of that curtain was the punishment of a lifetime. Because of the nature of my crime, there would also be forced exercise. Which would most likely involve a humiliating jog around the neighborhood alongside our car, a room-ransacking for contraband, and a verbal whipping like no other. I glanced at the tiny broken window in the dressing room. I thought of making an escape, but it looked even smaller than the dress, and I didn’t want to be cut out of a dress and a window in one day.
I knew what I had to do. I had no choice. I needed to take the spotlight off of me. It was time to play my only card.
I stepped over the pink chiffon carcass on the floor and left the dressing room. Back in the store I took a deep breath.
“Cathy still smokes!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
Silence followed. I looked around. No one was there. Had they driven off without me? Could I just grow up in this store with Berta? I’d take it. Sheila kept a candy dish by the register.
I heard my dad’s condescending singsong tone coming from somewhere. “The question is—what now?”
“Okay, just a moment, Mr. Astrof—”
I followed the voices to a back room and poked my head in quietly. Sheila’s office was cluttered with more dresses. She was at her desk, hunched over some book, her glasses on the end of her nose, the gold chain keeping them around her neck, draped over her ears, the long red nail of her pointer finger moving along the margins. My father stood behind her, watching over her shoulder, rocking back and forth in his designer loafers. Cathy paced in the few feet of clear floor space, nervously spinning her giant engagement ring around on her bony finger with her thumb. She was having a hard time keeping weight on with the stress of the Bat Mitzvah. Oh, to have been her biological daughter!
Sheila put her hand over her mouth, let out a closed-mouth squeal and shook her head, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but then she nodded. She took her hand away and put it on her hip; she stood up straight and scrunched up her face, her lips disappearing.
She sharply inhaled; this was difficult for her. “Actually, it was our mistake,” she said. “We made a children’s size twelve, but really she’s a teen size twelve.” Another squeal.
They’d made the wrong size. It wasn’t my fault. Something wasn’t my fault.
OH, THE RELIEF!
I wanted to kiss Sheila right on the lips. Wherever they were.
Only now, I entered the office tentatively. Cathy and my dad, still taking this in, turned and looked at me. Based on their faces, I was pretty certain “Cathy still smokes” hadn’t gotten through, so my hold card was still deep in my deck.
Sheila looked at me apologetically, though not apologetically enough for that nightmare bestowed on a thirteen-year-old, and promised they’d have a new dress to us by Thursday.
We left the store, Dad and Cathy discussing how deeply disappointed they were in Little Royalty. Unlike Shari and her mother, the three of us walked far apart from each other, but I was striding to Cathy’s car—almost weightless. Almost light.
In the end, I stuck with the cheeseburger deluxe, which did not disappoint. And as we left Delta Diner, while no one was looking, I pocketed a black and white cookie with a stealth that would have impressed my mother.
Rubin liked black and white cookies.
The Typhoid Mary of Playa Blanca
* * *
My father called it “a new beginning.”
We were in his Cadillac on the way to JFK, and I was hopeful he was right—after all, Club Med’s slogan was “The Way Life Should Be,” wasn’t it? With my suitcase loaded up with a new J.Crew wardrobe on which I’d maxed out my credit cards, a month’s back issues of People, and a week’s supply of Circus Peanuts and Jujyfruits, I set out for Mexico and my “new beginning.”
I was going with my friend Kara, whom I’d first met working at a stock photography company. We sat side by side hunched over a light box, sifting through slides of toned happy couples frolicking on the beach, trying to find the perfect one for an STD medication or life insurance ad.
“I want to be a couple on the beach,” I’d say wistfully, my eye way too close to the light box. “Even one with Chlamydia.”
Kara would scoff and point to the visible sweat stains on the models’ bathing suits, the yellow teeth, strained smiles, and obviously fake sunsets. Kara obviously had a great eye for flaws and eventually moved on to a prestigious editorial photo agency as a result, while I stayed on at the generic stock shop, mining for pictures of everything from broccoli to Mt. Kilimanjaro to couples on the beach.
But we remained close. She was the one who suggested the trip after my longtime relationship with my ex, Andy, came to a crashing end. After years of on-again-off-again mind fuckery on his part, a breakup on my part, and, after a brief stalking period that resulted in his realization that he was gay, I’d concluded I was, in fact, unlovable.
At that point, Kara had swooped in and decided that what we both needed was a trip to Club Med Playa Blanca, The Way Life Should Be.
Since I was living in Manhattan, Dad and Cathy had sold my car, a 1988 Buick Skyhawk. They got $2,000 for it, which was a lot given that the engine blew up on the Long Island Expressway a week later. (Admittedly, I probably should have disclosed the fact that the car tended to “smoke” and . . . weave a lot on long drives.) Dad and Cathy generously gave me that money for my trip in the hopes that it would get me over Andy—in other words, that I would meet a (straight) guy who would take care of my loser ass. My father—possibly the only person more surprised than I had been about my former future-husband—even offered to drive me to the airport.
“You can do better,” he said, pulling up to the terminal.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Actually, Liz . . . I don’t think you can.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, as he pulled away, calling into the swarms of travelers and the entire taxi line, “Don’t be picky! And SMILE!”
Almost immediately, I had the feeling my father was right—at least in the short term. There were pretty slim pickins on the guy side of the flight from New York. The men were all either eighteen or sixty and mostly shorter than me—and I’m not tall. I was at the gate only five minutes before two particularly hirsute gentlemen gave me the once over and made a mutual no, thanks noise to each other—the same kind of noise that would eventually lead to my refusing to attend any more JDate events.
We all boarded the plane. Kara took the window seat, leaving me to get whacked by the Louis Vuitton carry-on of a bottle-blond woman in her late forties clad in a teeny tube top that revealed a way-too-tan chest for the start rather than the end of a beach vacation.
“Oh my gawd—I’m sawrry!” she said, her Long Island accent so thick that the uninitiated would need a phrase book. I was relieved when she ended up sitting diagonally behind me.
Alysse had all the hallmarks of a seasoned Club Med goer. As I looked at the other hopeful New Yorkers filing past our seats, I asked her if maybe there was a Club Med plane taking off from LaGuardia with all the “good” New Yorkers on it.
“Nah, these’re allda New Yawk guys,” she said. “I assed the Club Med represennive guy—who’d be cute by the way, but he’s like twelve.”
“Whatevah.” Dale was Alysse’s friend—also in her forties, also from Long Island, but sporting dark, very curly (temperamental) hair. She was wearing a modest black sundress and carrying a book. “We’re going there to relax.”
Hearing that, Kara looked up from her camera’s instruction manual. “Amen,” she said.
Alysse gasped, standing up. “Oh, my gawd—you look exactly like Julia Robbits!! Dale—look! Ammiright?”
Julia Roberts?! Kara?! Was I missing something?!
“Ya totally do,” Dale agreed.
“Stop, stop.” Kara waved them off modestly but was also trying desperately to catch her reflection in the in-flight magazine to confirm.
Alysse t
hen looked at me, a little critical. “Ya know who you look like?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Who?” I asked, hopeful that it was someone who hangs out with Julia Roberts . . . on the cover of Vanity Fair.
There was a long silence.
“Nah,” Alysse said, sitting back down. “Nevah moind—I’m not gonna say it.”
So began my week at Club Med, the Way Life Should Be, on a withholding note. I settled back into my seat next to Julia Roberts and closed my eyes.
Up until our third or maybe even fourth breakup, I’d held out hope that my first resort vacation would be with Andy. He thought I was pretty—or at least my looks had grown on him. And I thought he was handsome—or at least pretty.
He was Italian with thick black hair, brown eyes, and he definitely had a look. He was fit, but with a slight build that weirdly seemed to accentuate his high-pitched voice. We’d started to date the summer after he graduated law school when we were both waiting tables at the Jones Beach Boardwalk Restaurant. We were just friends, but then one day I showed up for my shift with my hair cut in a short bob. Apparently, it was a major transformation because it wasn’t until I set my plastic fingernail on fire lighting the votive on a table that Andy recognized me.
“Liz!” he’d said, surprised. “I saw you from behind and actually had the thought, ‘That girl is attractive.’ ”
My heart melted at his words, as did the silicone manicure wrap on my finger. That night, both smelling faintly of coleslaw and mozzarella sticks, we had our first kiss under the flickering sodium lights of the Jones Beach parking lot.
It wasn’t until he asked me for fifty dollars, though, that I considered us an actual couple. Which says a lot. I gave him the money—despite my really not being able to spare it—and our relationship grew. Like a weed.
He loved all the things I loved—reading, long conversations about other people, reading. He loved to work out—which we did together often because he was intensely competitive with me about weight. He made me a better person. Well, he tried to. He would criticize everything about me—which at least felt familiar. From my not drinking enough water to my driving too fast, to the way I ordered salad dressing, all were cause for derision.
Our shared world mostly centered around his migraines. They were a misery for him and, by association, me. We were constantly having to leave movies and parties and dinners only to spend hours in ERs, where doctors would present his cluster symptoms to residents, who would oooh and ahhh and run fingers over Andy’s drooping eye and the pulsating vein popping out of his forehead while he writhed in pain. And while the migraines weren’t his fault, they ruined a lot of Saturday nights.
Not that our Saturday nights were filled with passion the rest of the time. Far from it. He never wanted to have sex, even when he woke up with a boner. He’d just hop out of bed and get the day started, including those days when we’d go away on what were (at least in theory) “romantic” weekends at bed-and-breakfasts—another passion of his that I didn’t share. Sorry, but I’ve never understood the quaintness people feel about sleeping where some kid died of polio in the 1800s and now lives in an attic as an angry ghost. But Andy loved B&Bs, so we went.
Over two and a half years, he dumped me five times. There was never any really good reason to set the ball rolling; it was always something trivial. But his final indictment against me was always the same: “I can’t be with you, and no man ever could.”
That’s what he would say, but before he did, he would always hand me a check for the money he’d owed me. That’s how I knew we were breaking up—he’d break out his checkbook. He’d casually, even cavalierly, sign his name with a scribble, rip the check from the book, and hand it to me.
By the third time, we both knew the drill. I’d ball up my fists and refuse to take the check. He’d try to shove it into my pockets, and I’d shove him away—not too hard because, like I said, he was smaller than me. I’d sob and beg and plead for another chance, for him to not give me back the fifty dollars—money I desperately needed, but not as much as I needed to not be without him. I’d try to sell myself back to him, like a used vacuum cleaner. I was sturdy, I was reliable. His family and friends loved me. He wouldn’t have to get used to someone new. He could take me anywhere. I knew where the wiper fluid went in cars and he didn’t.
I was never able to persuade Andy that I was worthy of his love, however, and he would leave me for a few days until he was ready to take me back, during which time I’d cry, listen to REM’s “Everybody Hurts” and Elton John’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” chain-smoke Marlboro Ultra-Lights, and live on a diet of pure cane sugar in my postage stamp–sized apartment, my friends at work all trying to lift my spirits by reminding me what an asshole Andy was.
It was mostly Kara who kept me going when Andy wrote out his fifty-dollar check for the last time and told me we were through. She was a rock for me as the subsequent days turned into weeks and Thanksgiving turned into Hanukkah, then Christmas, and finally New Year’s Eve, when I realized Andy was never coming back.
My brother Jeff, albeit a long-distance one, was my other rock. He’d moved to LA by this time and would suggest when I called him in tears that, like him, I should pursue a career in comedy. He even offered to get me started by paying for a sketch comedy writing class at Chicago City Limits, which was in midtown near my office. I considered it but declined, telling him what I believed was true—that the most I could aspire to comedy-wise was maybe the third funniest person in stock photography.
Jeff knew I was better than that and never stopped making the offer—not even in February, when Andy returned out of nowhere, wanting to get back together. He’d made a mistake, he said, and he told me I looked thinner. I wondered if he needed money, and how much thinner? Mostly, I was thrilled.
But I’d come a long way, I believed (or wanted to). So, buoyed by the strength Kara and Jeff and my other friends had instilled in me, and with a glimmer of a “fuck you,” I told Andy we were done.
This made Andy want me that much more, and he started to stalk me. It was 1997—a “pre-stalking” era, so it was an unusual thing to happen unless you were famous.
For weeks I’d have a giant dude from my office walk me to the street past my diminutive ex, who waited outside the building every night, after which Andy would follow me for blocks—pleading with me to take him back. The next morning, I’d find him waiting inside my subway station, all the way across town from his place on the West Side.
I stayed strong, though, and grew increasingly turned off by him. At least, that’s what I convinced myself. Truth was, I was only pretending to be terrified and tormented by this man who I could almost certainly kick the shit out of. I didn’t fully grasp the depths of my delusion, however, until one evening when he suddenly wasn’t outside my office. He wasn’t at my subway station the next day, either—and I let two trains go by, just in case he was running late.
When he failed to show up that night, I called him to make sure he was okay (again, early stalking days—no one knew what they were doing).
He answered his phone. I told him I noticed he wasn’t following me and asked if everything was okay.
“Yeah,” he said, “I just decided I don’t want to be with you.”
I was stunned. “So, you’re breaking up with me again?”
“Guess so,” he told me.
In a sudden panic, I realized that this gave me no satisfaction—which it should have were I actually over him. On the contrary, I felt tears welling as I heard myself asking this asshole what I had done wrong to no longer be worth stalking.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just realized I can’t be with you, and no man ever could.”
Once again, I had become unlovable. Only this time I wasn’t even lovable from a hundred feet away. I could have called it and should have. But there was something worse than being led on by Andy. This time, I’d strung myself along. My humiliation was complete.
Or so I t
hought. A few months later, Kara and I went to see John Irving, a favorite author of Andy’s and mine, read from A Widow for One Year at Barnes and Noble. Outside the reading, I ran into Andy for the first time since our breakup. He was on a date. With his new boyfriend, named Andrew. Because, of course.
“I don’t get headaches anymore!” he told me cheerily, in a newly more relaxed voice that oddly suited his higher pitch.
Everything made sense in that moment, actually. Andy had always vocally hated gay men—no doubt because they knew what he didn’t know himself, or did know and didn’t want them to know, or didn’t want to know himself. Gay men used to hit on him in my presence—after all, how could a girl he was with possibly be his girlfriend? Those men knew: Andy was clearly gay. And, when he said he couldn’t be with me and no man ever could, what he meant was, no gay man ever could. God, I hope that’s what he meant.
• • •
I’D WASTED ALL those years. He’d wasted all those headaches. Irrationally, even though maintaining a physical attraction between us was obviously impossible, I wished I could have done it. Plus, I was jealous that he’d met someone already.
Jeff tried to boost my spirits, telling me it was all “great material” and I should “use” it for my career in comedy. I wanted him to “use” a hammer to break his own legs. He was obsessed with me having a fulfilling career. It was getting annoying.
Kara took a different approach, which was how I found myself sitting on a packed meat-plane next to Julia Roberts in search of my “new beginning.”
• • •
SINCE WE WERE pretty much still pre–reality TV (aside from MTV’s Real World), I didn’t have an accurate picture of what life at a Mexican resort filled with single people would be like. I just imagined getting there and falling in love with someone who would find the “breakup bangs” I’d given myself adorable, a guy who would be hot but also successful, and never once ask me for fifty dollars, and if he did, have the decency to never pay me back. And also, he would be straight. We would spend the better part of the week together, a couple on the beach, making everyone sick. Only interested in each other, we’d huddle together in our private cabana and in corners. I’d think nothing of doing overly familiar things, like, putting sunscreen on his back and picking a hard-to-get piece of lettuce out of his teeth. We’d have private jokes and have nicknames for each other by day three. We’d drink from each other’s glasses without wiping the straw off before taking a sip. I’d get his cold. He’d think my sniffling was the cutest. We’d share a cab back to the city when we got home, I’d start spending so many nights at his two-bedroom apartment in a doorman building that it would make no sense to keep my own place, which was basically a fire escape with a bathroom. Many years later, we’d regale our grandchildren with the story of how we met at Club Med. The Way Life Should Be. Adorable. Take that, Andy and Andrew.