Confessions Of An Ex-Girlfriend. Lynda Curnyn

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СКАЧАТЬ daughter—who had an average rate of two years between boyfriends, with one in three of those boyfriends actually being tolerable enough to consider propagating with—pretty much out of the running for motherhood. Despite all of that, I stuck to my faithful reply: “Everything’s fine. Derrick is fine. We’re fine.”

      I don’t know why I lied. Maybe I didn’t want to get into it. I knew I would tell her. Eventually. I just didn’t want to hear how I had failed while my insides were still aching with the loss of him.

      As it turned out, my mother had other things she wanted to talk about anyway.

      After babbling on for a few minutes about her job as office manager at Bilbo, a pharmeceuticals company where she’d worked since I was a kid, she got to the real reason for her call. “I didn’t want to tell you this on the phone, but I don’t know when I’m going to see you again—” This was another point of contention with my mother, who apparently didn’t believe my monthly treks to Long Island to pay homage to her in her cozy Garden City home were quite cutting it.

      “What’s going on?” I asked.

      “Well, Clark and I have decided…that is, we’re going to get married.”

      Now I must admit that upon first hearing, I was ready to completely disregard this statement. After all, this would be husband 3 (almost 4) and another in a long line of men my mother fell hopelessly in love with and considered marrying. Admittedly one could make the argument that my mother always went into marriage with the best intentions. It was the men she chose who always threw a kink into things.

      There was my father, first of all, whom my mother discovered—after twenty years of marriage—to be a raging alcoholic. “He was always such fun at parties,” she once declared, remembering happier times. Then there was Donald—almost husband 2. After a whirlwind courtship that ended in a trip to Las Vegas to tie to knot, Donald was nailed by airport authorities with a warrant for his arrest…on three counts of embezzlement. Then came Warren, whom I would venture to call my mother’s true love…had their marriage lasted long enough to stand the test of time. After an eight-year courtship—my mother wasn’t taking any chances that time—they were wed in a small ceremony in our backyard, with me standing in as maid of honor. Unfortunately, Warren died of a heart attack within weeks of the honeymoon.

      Now there was Clark. Sweet, lovable Clark, an English professor with a lopsided smile and a fondness for quoting from seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, a trait my mother found absolutely charming.

      But there was no shrugging off this announcement, I realized, when she began rattling off the details of the ceremony. “…I’m thinking mid-September…a small cruise ship, just the family. Clark and I, of course. Grandma Zizi. You and Derrick. Shaun and Tiffany…” Shaun is my married brother. Married younger brother, I might add. “Clark’s son and daughter and their kids,” she continued. “We’ll take a short sail through the Caribbean to St. Thomas, where Clark and I will be married with the waves crashing in the background and the family standing by. Kind of like a family vacation and a wedding all tied up into one. Won’t that be fun?”

      Loads.

      Two

      “Don’t knock denial until you’ve tried it.”

      —Name and age withheld

      Confession: My breakup has turned me into a pathological liar.

      T he following Monday at work, I slid into the guest chair of Rebecca’s cubicle. Though Rebecca is mainly an office buddy, we have been known to make excursions out to local bars for happy hours together, to commemorate a good review or gripe over a particularly menacing co-worker. However, these outings have become few and far between, mostly due to the fact that I have been doing the relationship thing, avoiding all friends other than Jade and Alyssa, in favor of takeout and a video rental with Derrick. Though Rebecca had been with her boyfriend, Nash, for about as long as I was with Derrick, she always seemed to make time for friends, and never seemed to mind the occasional late-night crunch to make a special assignment deadline, even if good old Nash had made them dinner reservations. In fact, I think she prides herself on her ability to be both good friend to all and steady girlfriend to one, which makes me suspicious of her, and somewhat jealous, I’ll admit.

      “My mother is getting married again,” I announced, with some exasperation.

      “What fun,” Rebecca replied, peering up at me from a layout she had been reviewing, her eyebrows raised and a bright smile on her face.

      Something about her cheerful reaction to my news made me immediately put up my antennae. One of the things Rebecca and I had always shared, especially during our after-work-cocktail outings, was a healthy disdain for the perky little world of wedding planning that is Bridal Best. How else could we separate ourselves from an office of people who waxed poetic over everything from choosing the right place settings to the proper thickness of paper for invitations, except by mocking them? If I didn’t know Rebecca better, I might have thought she’d been bitten by the Bridal Best marriage zest after all. Because at Bridal Best, every marriage, even your mother’s third, is an event worth getting hysterical over.

      “Yeah, well, it’s hard for me to summon up any sort of enthusiasm for this wedding. I mean, my mother’s track record is a lesson in how not to find everlasting love.”

      Rebecca studied me for a moment, as if I were speaking in a foreign language. “You should be happy for your mother. It’s not every woman who can fall in love again after so many missteps. She has a lot of courage.”

      “Either that or she’s taking enough Prozac for it to not matter.” Ever since she lost Warren, my mother was a firm believer in the kind of happiness that was available in easy-to-swallow caplets.

      “What’s gotten into you? You seem more cynical than usual. Did you fight with Derrick this weekend?”

      Her question caused a minor panic inside me, as if my sudden state of stressful singledom had somehow become glaringly apparent. I stumbled around for a moment or two as I studied her careful blond bob and perfectly plucked brows, the neat way she had lined up her pencils on her desktop. Suddenly I was filled with distrust. Even the shiny eight-by-ten framed photo of Nash she kept in her cubicle seemed to glint evilly at me. There was no way I could tell her the truth.

      “No, no. Nothing happened with Derrick. Everything is fine. Great, in fact.”

      “Terrific,” Rebecca said, turning back to the layout before her. “Then that will give you a clear head to help your mom out with this wedding. Gosh, you could practically plan this thing yourself, if you had to.”

      “Sure, if I had to.” If I didn’t die of heartbreak first.

      Confession: Marriage suddenly seems like a social disease.

      Back at my desk, I was faced with my greatest challenge since The Breakup: attempting to muster enough perkiness to write a short to-do list for the bride-to-be that I had secretly titled, “How to Make Your Wedding Day Happen Without All Hell Breaking Loose.” As I struggled to come up with an opening paragraph, I started to feel some of that anger Alyssa had encouraged in me. What about us non-bride-to-be’s? I wondered. Even my own mother had put me to work in the service of her wedding day by asking me to start looking up cruise ships and “getaway” weddings on my handy little database. Worse, she had gleefully offered to take one of the many vacation days she’d accumulated during her twenty-year career at Bilbo to meet me for lunch the following week to see what СКАЧАТЬ