“Sure. It’s an old expression. You know, now that Hugh’s proposed to you, you’re supposed to be over the moon with joy and the days only get happier.You are over the moon with joy, aren’t you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, you better start pretending, because brides-to-be are supposed to be over the moon with joy.”
This raises a serious question. How can I pull off this charade if I cannot even fake being over the moon with joy in my own kitchen?
The coffeemaker orgasms and I pour us two cups, load both with milk and sugar, and head to the living-room side of my apartment. Patty follows me, along with Jorge, in case there might be food.
My apartment is in a brick walk-up designed for two units, divided into four. This means my kitchen is half its normal size and so is the bathroom. (My “back neighbor,” as I call her, got the bathtub. I got a kitchen sink with a window.) Half of the original living room was turned into my bedroom, as was a walk-in closet where Patty slept last night.The dining room does double duty as a TV room and a place to eat. It’s like living in the Soviet Union circa 1972.
Patty and I sit on the couch and look at Aunt Jean’s plant.
"I went too far last night,” I say. "With my mother.”
“No, you didn’t. Except for that part about claiming Hugh was related to Princess Diana.That might have been a bit much.”
“I never claimed he was related. Mom asked and I said it was a possibility.”
“You shouldn’t encourage her. It’s dishonest.”
I give her a look.
“All I’m saying is you better disabuse your mother of that erroneous family trivia as I do not think the royal family is going to appreciate a call from Nancy Michaels of Belmont, Massachusetts, suggesting that they lend you Diana’s sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring ‘for the nonce.’ ”
That reminds me. “What am I going to do about a ring? People won’t believe I’m engaged unless I’m wearing one.”
I inspect my left hand with its inelegant short nails. I bet Hugh’s fiancée has long fingers and a French manicure that perfectly sets off her fabulous diamond.
Gack! I hadn’t thought about that before, them choosing the ring. Please, God, don’t let it be Tiffany. Immediately a vision of an Audrey Hepburn look-alike springs to mind. She is holding a robin’s egg blue box and smiling up at Hugh. There is a gap between her teeth, a sign that she’s a sexual dynamo like Lauren Hutton. Or the Wife of Bath.
Patty takes my hand in hers. Unlike me, she has always kept her nails long and painted in a tasteful pale pink. “You could splurge for once and buy yourself a diamond. I’ve often thought of doing that. Right-hand rings they call them, to celebrate being single.You know, your left hand’s for love.Your right hand’s for ... I forget.”
“Delivering an uppercut?”
“That’s it.”
I try to picture a diamond ring on either hand.“I dunno. Buying yourself an engagement ring is so Britney Spears.”
“Hey. K-Fed wasn’t going to step up to the plate.Then again, K-Fed did strike out looking.”
There is pounding on the steps outside my door and a rapid knocking.
“I’m gonna clobber that FTD man,” Patty says as I shuffle to answer.
Sure enough, more foliage. Only this time the flowers are being delivered by Todd, my older brother, a six-foot-three giant in running shorts and a sweat-soaked T-shirt. He could have changed after his run (he lives right around the corner), but he probably saw Patty’s Porsche and decided to stop by my apartment to flex something.That’s the way it is with him.
Todd’s real name is Thaddeus. My real name is Eugenia and our baby sister’s name is Lucinda. Todd, Genie, and Lucy. Thaddeus, Eugenia, and Lucinda. My parents, apparently, had no clue the nineteenth century had ended.
“I understand congratulations are in order,” Todd says dryly, producing the bouquet of flowers. “Don’t think this means you won the bet, Sister Eugenia.”
In addition to the flowers, he is carrying something even better—a white box with its trademark owl. Gesine’s pastry. I love Gesine’s.
“Ah, ah, ah,” he taunts, holding the box out of my reach. “No sticky bun for you, not if you want to fit into your slinky wedding dress this September.”
“September?”
“Yeah,” says Patty from the couch. "Remember? Your mother picked your date. September fifteenth. It’s Grammy Michaels’s anniversary or something.”
“But that’s three months away!”
Patty shrugs and says, “What do you care?”
Oh, right. I keep forgetting that I’m not really getting married.
"Long night?” Todd walks in and nods to Patty’s legs, bare and tan and smooth.
“Kind of.”
“Most women I know get dressed after their one-night stands.”
“Most women you know are paid for their one-night stands.”
"I give that a C minus, but it’ll do.” He holds open the box for her, displaying two gooey cinnamon rolls. “Care to ingest two thousand calories?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Patty, who has never counted a calorie, helps herself.
“You know, eat that and you’re more than halfway to gaining yet another pound.”
Patty gives him a dirty look. “Tell you what. I’ll worry about my weight and you worry about when knuckle dragging’s going to be back in fashion.”
If I have any wish in the world (aside from being invited to spend a weekend with George Clooney on Lake Como), it’s that my best friend and my brother would reach common ground. When they’re together, all they do is snipe, snipe, snipe.
Personally, I blame Todd’s insecurity. He’s intimidated by Patty being a lawyer while he works in construction. Not that there’s anything wrong with working in construction.There’s not. It’s just the way Todd was raised.
In my father’s opinion, you’re not really a manly income provider unless you’re spending most of your life on the fifteenth floor of the Hancock building pushing paper around under fluorescent lights. I guess ripping out walls and building new ones is emasculating in the playbook of Donald Howard Michaels III.
The other theory has to do with Mom. She forever refers to Patty as “that horrid” Patty Pugliese. There is nothing about Patty my mother likes. She doesn’t like that Patty’s a lawyer who has made a career out of suing white-collar criminals, especially bankers like my father. She doesn’t like that Patty knows what to do with an item you can buy online called the Fuzzy Teaser. She doesn’t like that Patty’s Irish and Sicilian and that half her relatives are under some sort of federal protection.
But mostly my mother doesn’t like that Patty’s so loud.
“You bring coffee for us?” Patty shouts. “Because your sister’s stuff is shit.”
Todd takes a sip from his own white paper cup and closes his eyes in exaggerated ecstasy. “Mmm. Mocha caffe latte. Delicioso. Too bad you can’t have any.”
“Be a hunk and get me one, would you?”
He shakes his head. “I know you’re used to men waiting on you, darlin’, but I’m not your errand boy.”
“All in good time, my pretty. All in good time.”
I take in the two of them munching on their cinnamon rolls and licking their fingers, both oblivious to the anxiety tearing at my soul, to my newfound failing as a sexual washout. Both oblivious to the fact that all they’ve left me are crumbs and cinnamon goo.
Snatching up the empty box, I shove it into the garbage loudly so they’ll feel guilty, though they don’t. “How’d you hear about Hugh’s proposal so soon, anyway?”
“How could I not? Mom called on my cell when I was out last night to give me the lowdown and then Lucy called to talk about what Mom talked about.” Todd wipes off his hands and swigs more coffee. “Trust me.There’s nothing I don’t know.”
Patty says, "Wanna bet?”
Ever so slightly, I shake my head at her. Under no circumstances must Todd know I a
m lying. To do so would be to hand him an easy victory, one that could cost me beaucoup bucks.
The “Will Hugh Marry Genie” wager began years ago, the day after I’d carefully arranged a casual meeting with Todd at the Inman Square club Coco Joe’s. He was there to hear my friend Steve Taylor play in his very loud, very bad “funkabilly” band called the Wily Coyotes, and Hugh and I were next door to sample some cuisine de Portugal. Hugh’s not exactly a club type, but I managed to twist his arm with the bribe that Coco Joe’s had lots of local color when really all it had of interest was my brother. (No offense to Steve.)
Here was my private hope: that Todd might find Hugh inspiring and that Hugh would find Todd interesting and that, together, we’d be the bestest of friends. I mean, even though my brother lives in the town where he grew up, he has led a fascinating life. He went to Harvard and then dropped out to see the world, traveling for two years in Asia, hiking mountains in Nepal, and even volunteering at Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta (where he picked white maggots out of a villager’s wound for days. Seriously).
And then there’s the interesting side note that for a while there Todd was a practicing Sikh, which meant he believed we all have within us a spark that is covered by layers of greed and want and ego that need to be peeled away so that we can, finally, merge with the divine. Kind of like dermabrasion for the soul. Surely, Hugh would find that intriguing, no?
No.
Forget any talk of Sikhism or Mother Teresa; the men couldn’t get past their differences in fashion taste.Todd wore a flannel shirt and jeans. Hugh wore khakis and a white, pressed, pinpoint oxford-cloth shirt.Todd pronounced Steve’s band “kick-ass.” Hugh opined that the Wily Coyotes needed its “ass kicked.” Hugh worried out loud about hearing damage, to which Todd, an inveterate concertgoer, kept asking, “What?”
At the bar, I tried to explain to Todd that he needed to like Hugh because I was pretty sure he was “the one.”
Todd was incredulous. “That wimp? Get out. There’s not a genuine bone in that guy’s body. Listen to his accent.Totally bogus. It’s John Cleese clapping coconuts together and you know it.”
I was rightly offended and told Todd what to do with his coconuts—insert them into a nether region of his anatomy. He said he was only trying to protect me from getting hurt. I told him promptly to fuck off.
The next day, after a fitful night of sleep, I showed up at Todd’s apartment with two hundred dollars—the most I could get out of the ATM—and a bet that Hugh would someday ask me to marry him. Todd found two hundred dollars of his own and doubled it. So began the Will Hugh Marry Genie wager.
It has been four years of riveting tension ever since.
The closest Todd ever got to conceding that perhaps Hugh wasn’t so bad happened last Thanksgiving when, in front of cousins, aunts, and even my Grammy Michaels, my father asked him why he couldn’t be more like Hugh. The implied question being: Why can’t you be more like Hugh, who had the stamina to graduate from Oxford, instead of being a Harvard dropout like you, loser?
To Hugh’s credit, he quickly interjected, “Like me? Do you mean someone who can’t change a lightbulb or hold a hammer? Why in the world would Todd want to be a half-man like me?”
I absolutely loved Hugh for that. Loved him.
And, though Todd would never have admitted it in a million years, I think he liked him for that, too. In fact, I think Todd likes Hugh a lot.
This morning, however, he’s back to being grouchy and sour, claiming that Hugh and I haven’t been dating long enough (four years!) to get married and worrying out loud that Hugh will have me “dressing in a ratty brown cardigan and typing out his manuscripts” for the rest of my life.
“What’s your problem?” Patty says. “Why can’t you be happy for your sister? Are you afraid of being knocked off her big brother pedestal?”
“Right. Like any man could. It’s not that. It’s not even what I think about Hugh. The reason why I’m not happier for Genie is because of the institution of marriage itself. It’s anti-women.”
Patty raises an eyebrow. "Oh, really? And when did you become the feminist?”
“I’m not a feminist. I’m observant. Marriage for men is great, aside from that annoying clause about forsaking all others. But marriage for women is slavery.They have to take care of the kids, fill the refrigerator, keep the house in order, and, in most cases, hold a job. And, may I add, keep themselves sexually enticing.”
Ouch!
He sips his coffee while Patty glares at him so fiercely I fear flames may pop out of his forehead.
“Where have you been for the past thirty years?” she practically screams. “This is the twenty-first century. Men and women can share equally. Men get paternity leave now. Hell, more women than ever out-earn their spouses. There’s no reason men should bear the financial brunt while women are saddled with domestic duties. It can be a beautiful partnership.”
Patty as the defender of matrimony.Todd the feminist. Clearly, the Earth has tilted too far on its axis.
“Yeah? If it’s so great,”Todd says, “then how come you’re not the one getting married?”
“Maybe I haven’t met the right guy.”
We know this is an out-and-out lie as Patty has openly stated she dates in volume, not in quality, because she’s looking for fun, not a lifetime commitment.
“You seem to have worked your way through Boston’s Top Ten Singles list. I don’t think it’s a matter of not meeting your life mate. I think you don’t want to get married for the reasons I said. Admit it.”
She glances up at me doubtfully. “Not exactly.” Though I know that’s exactly why she doesn’t want to get married—because of the Four D s: Diapers. Day care. Dinner. Depression. She’s been there, done that, as oldest sister of the Pugliese brood.
Todd waves a red coffee stirrer. “Your problem is you’re still suffering from ingrained sexism.You won’t admit I’m right because you’re afraid of being called selfish, whereas if I tell people—as I often explain to the women I date—that I have no intention of marrying, suddenly I’m the guy to catch.”
Wait. I have to think about this.A woman who says she doesn’t want to marry is a selfish shrew, whereas a man espousing the same philosophy is hot stuff.
Patty says, "You must have the biggest ego on Earth.”
“That’s not the only thing I got that’s big, honey.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Toothpicks do not yardsticks make,Todd.”
Uh-oh. Patty’s revving up. If I don’t get them to change the subject soon, our Sunday morning coffee klatch could very well end with a nasty pantsing incident.
“Lookit, you two, I’ve got to take a shower and start my day, so unless you’re here on a specific mission, Todd, I’m going to have to kick you out.”
This does the trick because Todd says, "Yeah, I’m on a mission. I want you to stop by the Peabody Road house.”
“What for?”
“To buy it.” Todd says this matter-of-factly, as if he’s talking about a flat of geraniums instead of the prime piece of real estate he’s been renovating for thousands and thousands of dollars.
“Buy it? Me?”
“Now that you’re engaged, you and Hugh should buy a house—and this is the perfect place for you two.”
That’s impossible. The duplex Todd’s been working on for six months is wayyyy out of my price range. A huge two-family Victorian in Watertown abutting a country club golf course in a working-class neighborhood recently gone absurdly upscale.
Not to mention that there is no Hugh to buy it with. Minor detail.
“I can’t buy a house,” I say, watching Todd watching Patty leave the room to get changed. “Especially not that house you’ve been working on. I mean, what’s the asking price? Four hundred thousand?”
“Try half a million, and it’s a bargain at that.The kitchen’s not finished and the bathroom doesn’t have a bathtub. Cecily Blake, the own
er, told me she’s running out of money for renovations and she wants to move to California and get the damned thing off her hands. I’m telling you, those are ideal conditions for a steal.”
“I can’t afford it. Not on my salary.”
Todd gets up, thoughtlessly leaving his coffee cup on my table. “Sure you can. Hugh’s a bestselling author raking in the dough.”
"And he would rather be homeless than live in a two-family,” I add quickly. "He hates neighbors, especially ones right upstairs.”
“So buy it for the investment potential. Meanwhile, you two can settle down in some mansion out in Concord. Or, you could be frugal, learn to deal with the upstairs noise, and move in. By renting the top apartment, the place will end up paying for itself.”
Patty comes out of my so-called guest room pulling a shirt over her bra and flashing her flat abs, an act that does not go unnoticed by my brother. “Todd’s right. Anything under six hundred on Peabody Road is a find. You and Hugh should at least consider it.”
Me and Hugh? Is she on crack?
“Won’t last long, Genie,” Todd says.“I guarantee that once this goes on the market, it’ll be snapped up in a day.” He snaps his fingers to emphasize the snapping potential.“The difference is, those buyers don’t have the advantage you and Hugh do—namely me, the inside contact.You could make Cecily an offer today before a Realtor ever gets her grubby hands on it.”
Shoot. If only Hugh and I really were engaged, this situation would be unbelievably ideal. A gift dropped from heaven. I swear, my life is a seesaw.When one end is up, the other is down.This is why I need an equal partner.
"Okay. Let’s say Hugh and I”—I fire a warning look at Patty— “do want to buy a house and this one’s a total find. Hugh won’t be seeing royalties on Hopeful, Kansas for months, maybe a year. Either way, we’re screwed.”
“Simple. Mom and Dad.”
“I can’t ask them to buy me a half-million-dollar house.”
“Why not? They bought a half-million-dollar house for Lucy and Jason.”
It shouldn’t irk me but it does—when Lucy and Jason got married Mom and Dad put the down payment on their monstrosity in New Hampshire, a huge colonial with a fireplace and media room and four bedrooms.
The Sleeping Beauty Proposal Page 4