Slightly Engaged. Wendy Markham

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      “Are you okay?” Brenda asks as Latisha pats my arm and Yvonne’s eyes take on the deadly gleam reserved for bosses who ask her to start payment reqs at five to five on Friday afternoons and eligible bachelors who refuse to marry their live-in girlfriends.

      “Yes,” I say, inhaling my filtered menthol. “I’m okay.”

      When met with dubious silence, I add, “Sort of.”

      “Are you sure?” Brenda asks.

      “Of course she’s not okay,” Yvonne barks. “Her boyfriend refuses to marry her. She feels like shit. Who wouldn’t?”

      Maybe somebody who hasn’t been told that she should feel like shit, I can’t help thinking. I mean, if my friends weren’t here to validate my irritation with Jack, I might be able to convince myself that it’s just a typical guy thing; that I should just bear with him a while longer.

      After all, Jack isn’t downright commitmentphobic like my ex-boyfriend, Will, whom I dated for years without his even entertaining the notion of cohabitation.

      No, Jack asked me to move in with him practically the second we met.

      Then again…

      Don’t you think that’s a little suspicious?

      Yeah, me too. But only lately. For the first year of our relationship, I was blissfully happy and oblivious to the idea of ulterior motives.

      But that was back when I assumed that Engagement, Marriage and Baby Carriage would be the logical progression of our relationship. That’s how it seems to work for everyone else I know, though Latisha swapped the order of Marriage and Baby Carriage, and I seriously doubt there’s a Baby Carriage in Yvonne’s immediate future.

      Meanwhile, now that Jack and I are stalled at phase one, Living Together, I can’t help wondering why he wanted to do that in the first place.

      Was he merely desperate to get away from Mike’s eternal chipperness? Dianne’s eternal wenchiness? Brooklyn?

      Obviously, he could never have afforded a Manhattan apartment with a roommate, because half the rent on a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment is way beyond a media supervisor’s salary.

      Half the rent on a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment is just barely within Jack’s budget, and mine. So if we weren’t living together, he’d still be in a borough and I’d still be in my dingy downtown studio.

      Or maybe I’d have given up on New York City by now and moved back to my hometown way upstate. That’s what everyone back home always expected me to do sooner or later. The residents of Brookside know that one doesn’t leave home without someday regretting it…or, at the very least, paying a terrible price.

      I still remember the neighbor’s son who notoriously turned his back on his home, his family, his legacy.

      In other words, he moved to Cleveland. When he was run over by a snowplow in a freak accident, my parents said he’d gotten what was coming to him.

      Yes, I’m serious.

      I’m the first person in my family to move more than a few blocks away from my parents. They’ll never forgive me for moving four hundred miles away, and I’m sure they’re assuming I’ll eventually get what’s coming to me. That would explain why my mother’s always offering up novenas in my name.

      Forgiveness doesn’t come easily in the Spadolini family. My parents still haven’t forgiven me for daring to say that I don’t like the abundant fennel seeds in Uncle Cosmo’s homemade sausage, for missing Cousin Joanie’s first communion, for forgetting to call my grandmother on her birthday.

      I sent her flowers.

      But I didn’t call.

      In my family, you call.

      You can send somebody three dozen roses, imported Perugina Baci and front-row tickets to see Connie Francis, but if you don’t call, you’re out.

      So yeah, I’m out.

      Especially now that I’m living in sin.

      In my family, living in sin is one step away from killing somebody.

      Actually, it’s probably worse than killing somebody, considering my parents’ pride in our Sicilian roots, and how they’ve alluded to the fact that our ancestors weren’t exactly antigun lobbyists and didn’t take any crap from anybody.

      My father likes to share a colorful anecdote about his father’s compare Fat Naso, and what may or may not have happened to Scully, the neighbor who called Fat Naso’s mother something so heinous it can’t be repeated at Sunday dinner.

      Never mind that Fat Naso’s mother callously dubbed her own son Fat Naso because of his weight problem and prominent beak. Back then in Sicily, it was okay to insult somebody as long as you gave birth to them. Conversely, it was never okay to stand by while somebody else insulted the person who gave birth to you.

      Pop never comes right out and says what Fat Naso did, but I do know that he didn’t just stand by, and that Scully was never seen again. Pop is real proud of that.

      But he definitely isn’t proud of me, his daughter, the puttana.

      Okay, he’s never actually come right out and called me a puttana. But I know that to him and the rest of my family, a woman who blatantly sleeps with a man who isn’t her husband is a whore.

      The thing is, I don’t feel like a whore. Should I?

      I ask my friends just that.

      “You? A ho? Get outta here,” is Latisha’s response.

      “A whore is somebody who turns tricks for money, Tracey,” Yvonne informs me, in case I didn’t know the Webster’s definition.

      But Brenda, who grew up in an Italian-American Catholic family like mine, gets it. “My parents would have killed me if I lived with Paulie before we got married. They’d have called me a puttana and worse.”

      “What could be worse than puttana?” I ask her, and she shrugs.

      So do I. Then I say, “I wonder if it’s even worth it.”

      “If what’s worth what?” Yvonne asks, releasing a smoke ring that wafts into my face. Funny how my own smoke—the smoke I’m inhaling directly into my lungs—doesn’t bother me, but secondhand smoke does.

      Mental note: Stop for patch on way home. Time to quit.

      This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of that. Jack has been after me to quit smoking for a while now. He even promised me a weekend trip to a fancy spa outside Providence if I can go for an entire month without a cigarette.

      So far, I’ve made it through an entire morning. Several times.

      It’s the afternoon lull that’s a deal-breaker for me. I can never seem to get past the postlunch hump without lighting up. But I swear I will, sooner or later. I’ll do it for Jack. I’d do anything for Jack.

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