“No way!” the girl insisted. “You look great.”
“Thanks.” My eyes trailed the back of her body as she turned from me to open up her locker. She had a long, narrow torso offset by wide hips and an expansive, flat ass. I couldn’t decide which was worse—going gentle into that mom-jeans-wearing night, or fighting it, Botoxed and hungry, every step of the way.
I slogged home, my feet dragging along the West Side Highway. It took me twenty-five minutes to run two miles, which, even factoring in the stops I had to make to wait at lights so as not get run over by a car, was pathetic.
“Hey, babe.” Luke didn’t bother to look up from the iPad on his lap. When Luke and I first started dating, my stomach used to latch on to the word “babe,” hold it like those claw games in an arcade would a little stuffed animal, a miracle they came up with anything because everyone knows they’re rigged. It was all I ever wanted in high school and college, some broad-shouldered lacrosse player jogging up behind me and slinging his arm over my shoulder, “Hey, babe.”
“How was your workout?”
“Eh.” I peeled off my sweaty top, shivered when the wet hair stuck to the nape of my bare neck, no longer barricaded by the Lululemon. I went to the cabinet, located a jar of organic peanut butter, and dipped a spoon into it.
“What time are you meeting them again?”
I glanced at the clock. “One. I have to get going.”
I allowed myself a single spoonful of peanut butter and a glass of water before getting into the shower. It took me an hour to get ready, much more than I spend primping for dinner with Luke. There were so many women I was dressing for. The tourists on the street (this is how it’s done), the salesgirl who would kiss my ass only when she noticed the Miu Miu label nestled in the leather quilts of my bag. Most important today, the one bridesmaid, premed, who at twenty-three years old had boldly declared that if she didn’t have kids by the time she was thirty, she was freezing her eggs. “Advanced maternal age is directly correlated with autism.” She sucked on her vodka soda so hard it spat a bubble into the air. “All these women having kids in their thirties. It’s so selfish. If you can’t lock it down before then, adopt.” Of course, Monica “Moni” Dalton was sure she’d lock it down before she was stuck with a three handle. She hasn’t eaten a processed carb since the Sex and the City finale, and her stomach looks like it’s been Photoshopped.
Except, three months from now, Moni will be the first of us to turn twenty-nine, and there will be no man next to her in bed to rouse her with birthday sex. Her panic smells chemical.
Moni also happens to be the most fun to dress for. I love catching her studying the delicate ankle straps on my sandals, the way her eye travels in unison with my emerald. She’s no stranger to Barneys herself, but that bill goes to her parents. Not cool once you’re on the wrong side of twenty-five. At that point, the only acceptable person to foot your bills is your man or yourself. For the record, I do foot my own shopping bills (everything but the jewelry). But I’d never be able to do that if not for Luke. If not for him taking care of everything else.
“You look nice.” Luke planted a kiss on the back of my head on the way to the kitchen.
“Thanks.” I tugged at the sleeves of my white blazer. I could never roll the cuffs fashion-blog right.
“You guys are getting brunch after?”
“Yeah.” I stuffed my bag with makeup, sunglasses, New York magazine—which I’d purposely leave sticking half out of the bag so everyone would know I’m reading New York magazine—gum, and a rough version of the wedding invitation our timid stationer had drawn up.
“Hey, so this week—one of my clients really wants us to go out to dinner with him and his wife.”
“Who?” I unrolled the cuffs of my blazer and rolled them up again.
“This guy, Andrew. From Goldman.”
“Maybe Nell knows him.” I grinned.
“Oh God.” Luke puffed out his cheeks, concerned. “I hope not.” Nell makes Luke nervous.
I smiled. Kissed him on the lips. Tasted stale coffee on his breath. Tried not to shudder. Tried to remember the first time I saw him, the real first time: at a party when I was a freshman in college, everyone else in Seven jeans, me smothered by the waistband of my khakis. Luke was a senior at Hamilton, but his best friend from boarding school went to Wesleyan. They visited each other frequently over the years, but because I was only a freshman, that party fall semester was the first time I’d ever seen him. Luke wanted Nell then, before he knew what a ballbuster (his word) she could be. Fortunately or unfortunately, Nell was hooking up with Luke’s best friend, so it wasn’t happening. When I got home that night, smarting from Luke’s perfunctory “Hello,” I strategized. The guy I wanted wanted Nell, so I watched Nell closely. I ate the way she ate, leaving almost three quarters of food on the plate (she had a stockpile of blue pills to induce indifference to even the most devastating of carbs) and made Mom buy me the clothes Nell wore when I came home for Thanksgiving break. Nell taught me that I’d been playing it all wrong: Pretty girls had to appear as though they weren’t trying to be pretty, which I had made the fatal mistake of doing at Bradley. There were times Nell went out in her father’s polo, nasty old Uggs, and sweatpants, no makeup, just to prove her loyalty resided with her own gender. Pretty girls also had to have a self-deprecating sense of humor and point out when they had a blistering pimple and talk about their explosive diarrhea to assure other girls that they weren’t interested in the role of man-eating minx. Because if the others sensed any level of deliberate prowess, they’d end you, and you could forget about the guy you wanted. The snarling force of a pack of girls could wither the most screaming boner.
By the end of freshman year I could pull those same khakis on and off without ever even unbuttoning them. I still wasn’t thin thin, wouldn’t lose another ten pounds until after college, but college standards were less rigid than New York ones. Sometime in March, a teasingly warm day, I was walking to class in a trashy tank top. The sun was like a hot hand christening my head as I passed Matt Cody, an ice hockey player who’d humped Nell’s thigh so hard his penis had left a red welt on her skin that clung on, ripening in shades of purple and blue and green, for nearly a week. He stopped dead in his tracks, marveled at the way the light exploded in my hair and eyes, and actually gasped, “Wow.”
But I had to be careful. College was my first go at reinvention, and I couldn’t compromise it by getting a reputation again. Nell told me I was the sluttiest tease she ever met; I made out a lot, got topless a lot, but that was as far as I’d go unless the guy was my boyfriend. And I even learned how to make that happen thanks to Nell and what she called her Hemingway theory. Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage. When you like a guy, Nell reasoned, you need to immediately find another guy, the guy you always catch staring at you in Modern American Classics maybe, the one with too much gel in his hair, bad jeans. Smile at him finally, let him ask you out, drink weak whiskey in his dorm room while he waxes poetic about Dave Eggers, Phoenix whining in the background. Dodge his kiss or don’t, and keep doing it until the guy you really like gets a whiff of him—that other guy sniffing around you. He’ll smell it on you, his pupils dilating like a shark inhaling a tendril of blood in the water.
After I graduated, I came across Luke again, at another party in the city. The timing couldn’t have been more serendipitous because I had a boyfriend, and, Christ, that asshole’s scent could saturate a football stadium. He was this immensely polarizing descendant of a Mayflower family, whom I kept around because he was the only guy who wasn’t afraid to do to me what I asked him to do to me in bed. Slap me across the face? “Just let me know if this isn’t hard enough,” he’d whispered, before winding up and backhanding me so hard the nerves in my skull crackled neon and the dark blurred and twisted, a black blanket wringing abov
e my eyes, over and over, until I came with a grotesque groan. Luke would have been appalled if I ever asked him to do something like that to me, but I was willing to trade that pulsating need to be savaged, whether a result of nature or one of nurture I could never figure out, for a last name like his, one I’d kill to put a Mrs. in front of. When I finally broke up with my boyfriend “for” Luke, the sudden freedom allotted us—to go out to dinner together and go home together like a real couple—was intoxicating. Carried us fast and far like a riptide, and we moved in together after a year. Luke knows I went to Wesleyan, obviously. Always comments on how funny it is that we never crossed paths all those times he came to visit.
“This is the Emile, in rose water.” The salesgirl pulled the dress off the hanger and swung it around in front of her body, holding up the skirt and pinching the material between her thumb and index finger. “You can see it has a little bit of a sheen.”
I glanced at Nell. Nell, still “a head-turner” (Mom’s word) even after all these years. She’ll never need to get married to feel good about herself, the way the rest of us have to. She used to work in finance, was one of two girls on the floor, the guys swiveling in their seats to catch a glimpse of Banker Barbie as she strode past. At the Christmas party two years ago, one of her meathead co-workers—married, with children, of course—picked her up, threw her over his shoulder so that her dress flipped up and exposed her elegant ass, then ran around the room making monkey noises while everyone whooped and hollered.
“Why monkey noises?” I’d asked.
“I guess that was his impression of Tarzan?” Nell’s shoulders poked up into her ears. “He wasn’t the smartest.”
She sued the company for an undisclosed sum, and now she sleeps until 9:00 every morning, follows up a spin class with yoga, and snatches the brunch bill off the table before any of us can get to it.
One side of Nell’s mouth pinched. “I’m going to look naked in that color.”
“We’ll have spray tans,” Moni reminded her. The light streaming in from the window pointed at a monstrous pimple on her cheek, smothered in too-pink concealer. She was really stressed over this whole me-getting-married-before-her thing.
“Midnight is a very flattering shade.” A Cartier Love bracelet slid loose from the salesgirl’s sleeve as she returned the rose water to the rack and presented its navy cousin with a flourish. She was a natural blonde, probably made blonder by a mere one or two trips to Marie Robinson a year.
“Do people ever mix colors?” I asked.
“All the time.” She went in for the clincher. “Georgina Bloomberg was in here the other week for a friend, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.” She pulled a third option, a hideous shade of eggplant, and added, “It can be very chic when done right. How many bridesmaids are you having again?”
There were seven. All from Wesleyan and all of them living in New York but the two who went the DC route. Nine groomsmen for Luke, all of them Hamilton grads with the exception of his older brother, Garret, who graduated magna cum laude from Duke. All of them in the city too. I once commented to Luke how sad it was that we both came here so thoroughly insulated with friends that we never really got to experience New York. All the weirdos roaming here, all the wild, mythical nights waiting for us, we didn’t need them, so we never sought them out. Luke told me it’s amazing how I always find a way to turn a positive into a negative.
Nell and Moni went into the back room to show me just how chic rose water and midnight can look together, and I dug around in my purse for my phone. I held it out in front of me at chin height while I scrolled through my Twitter and Instagram feeds. Our beauty director had recently filmed a segment for the Today show to warn viewers about the real dangers of smart phone addiction: Breakouts in the Cell Phone Zone, and Early Onset Turkey Neck, from all that looking down to see who had just gotten her butt kicked and her soul cleansed @SoulCycle.
Spencer had followed me on Instagram after we met. I didn’t recognize any of the people in the filtered haze of her pictures, but I did notice a comment, asking if she would be attending the Friends of the Five event, taking place in a sad pub located next to a Starbucks in Villanova, PA. A part of me fantasized about what it would be like to go: to show up in simple cashmere, that emerald cockroach attached to my finger, Luke at my side, emanating so much unabashed confidence that through some sort of osmosis, I’d bear it too. The place I had worked so hard to fit into that was now beneath me. All those losers who never left the Main Line, who lived in apartments that probably had carpeting. God. There would be a whisper through the crowd, half of them outraged, half of them impressed, their “Did you see who is here? She’s got balls” meaning a different thing to each of them. Maybe there would be the guy who still believed I owed him a fuck, after all these years. The event was months away. If I hit my goal weight by then, maybe.
I switched from Instagram to e-mail right as Nell glided out of the dressing room, rose water draped over her picnic bench of a body, the exposed back revealing nothing but skin and spine.
“Wow,” Love Bracelet breathed, and it wasn’t just to get the sale.
Nell pressed her stubby hands against her chest, flat as the thin-crust pizzas we used to order for breakfast in college. I had to look away. Nell chews on her appendages for sport, and the jagged edges of her fingertips, the raw and bloodied flaps of skin, they remind me too much of how easily the seams of the body fall apart. “If a rapist breaks into your apartment,” I’d once hypothesized in the middle of a Law & Order episode, “how are you going to claw his eyes out with those nubs?”
“I guess I should get a gun then.” Halfway through that statement Nell’s blue eyes had lit up with alarm. Too late, neurons had lit a match to the thought and fired the sentence out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Sorry,” she’d added, clumsily.
“Don’t be.” I’d pointed the controller at the TV and turned up the volume. “Sarcasm doesn’t have to die for the Five.”
“Ani, I look like I’m wearing a flesh dress.” It may have been spoken like a complaint, but Nell was admiring the smooth expanse of her back in the mirror, the way the color blended seamlessly into the skin just above her ass worth an undisclosed sum, so that you couldn’t tell where the dress ended and Nell began.
“Are you really going to make me stand next to her?” Moni whined, sweeping open the curtain to the dressing room. Moni will never be done trying to make Nell her best friend. She just doesn’t get it. Nell doesn’t want her ass kissed. She doesn’t need it.
“That’s a great color on you, Moni,” I said slyly, when Nell pretended not to hear her. I’ll never be done with rubbing it in Moni’s pouty little face that Nell chose me, the guido, over her, the Darien princess.
Moni fussed, “I can’t wear a bra though.” Love Bracelet scurried over to Moni—saggy boobs would not cost a sale, not on her watch!—and began rearranging the jersey strands of the dress. “It’s convertible, see? Flattering for all body types.” She ultimately tied what looked like a sling for a uniboob. Moni hoisted the sides of the dress in the mirror, her breasts rippling beneath the fabric like an underwater bomb had gone off, thousands of feet below.
“You think the other girls will look good in this?” Moni pressed. The rest of the group couldn’t make the appointment today, graciously leaving the decision in the hands of Moni and Nell. Luke had three single groomsmen—Garret, who wore polarized Ray-Bans and put his hand on your back when he spoke to you, was one of them. No one would dare jeopardize her place in the wedding party, her shot at Garret as her escort, by being combative about the dresses.
“I love it,” Nell announced. It was all she had to say, and halfheartedly at that.
“It is kind of cool,” Moni agreed, scowling at her body from different angles.
I went back to my phone, checking e-mail this time, forgetting all about Early Onset Turkey Neck when I came across a subject line that roiled the lone tablespoon of peanut butter in my neglect
ed belly: FRND OF 5 SCHDL UPDATE, it read, an urgent red flag waving by its side.
“Goddamnit.” I tapped on the message to open it.
“What?” Nell was holding the hemline of the dress above her knee, seeing how it looked short.
I groaned. “They want to move filming to the beginning of September.”
“What was it before?”
“The end of September.”
“So what’s the problem?” Nell’s brow would have furrowed if not for Botox (“Preventative,” she’d said, defensively).
“The problem is that I’ve been eating like a beast. I have to go ano now if I want to be ready by September fourth.”
“Ani.” Hands on thirty-two-inch hips, Nell said, “Stop. You are so tiny right now.” Nell would kill herself if she was ever this “tiny.”
“You should do the Dukan diet,” Moni chimed in. “My sister did it before her wedding.” She snapped her fingers. “Dropped eight pounds in three weeks, and she was already a two.”
“That’s the diet Kate Middleton used,” Love Bracelet said, and we all acknowledged the Duchess of Cambridge with a moment of silence. Kate Middleton looked so hungry on her wedding day it had to be commended.
“Let’s go to brunch,” I sighed. This conversation was making me wish I was alone in my kitchen, deepest night, with a stocked fridge and hours to myself to defile it. I loved the evenings Luke had clients to entertain. I’d come home with two plastic bags filled with the neighborhood bodega’s finest carbs, devour every last starchy crumb, and toss the evidence down the garbage chute, Luke none the wiser. After I fed, I’d watch hours of porn clips, the kind where the men shouted at the women to bark like dogs or they would stop fucking them. I’d come again and again. It didn’t take me long. Then I’d collapse into bed, telling myself that I wouldn’t want to marry someone who would be willing to do that to me anyway.
Luckiest Girl Alive: A Novel Page 5