Ex and the Single Girl Read online

  Ex And The Single Girl

  Lani Diane Rich

  Copyright © Lani Diane Rich 2005, 2012

  All Rights Reserved

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, events, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Second Edition: July 2012

  www.LaniDianeRich.com

  Chapter One

  Fat white flakes clustered around the edges of my living room window as another Syracuse winter flipped late March the bird. I sat with my feet curled under me on the cheap futon in my tiny one-bedroom, lit by the flickering colors of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, which I was watching for what was probably around the eighteenth time. My hand was draped casually over a bag of Cheetos, which I planned on trading in for the chilled chardonnay in my fridge as soon as I could locate the motivation to get up.

  “...allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

  I sighed. I couldn’t help myself. Nobody knows how to do lovers in a snit like Austen. Darcy paced, lecturing to Elizabeth all the reasons she was unworthy of him. Her eyes widened, then narrowed.

  Things were just about to get good.

  Ring.

  Damnit. I exhaled heavily, shooting my bangs up off my forehead, and glared at the phone, which hung at a defiant angle on my kitchen wall. Almost three years I’d been living here, and I’d never drummed up the wherewithal to straighten it.

  “In such cases as these, I believe the established mode is to express a sense of obligation.” Elizabeth’s eyes lifted and met Darcy’s. They were cold. “But I cannot.”

  Ring.

  “Shit, piss, and corruption,” I grumbled, searching around for the remote control, even though I hadn’t seen the thing in weeks. “I sat through three hours of parties and pianofortes for this scene.”

  Beep. My voice crackled through my garage-sale answering machine, creaking with the cold I’d had when I recorded the outgoing message in February. “Not here. Do your thing.”

  I’m a big fan of brevity. My mother, however, is not.

  “Portia, darlin’!” Mags’s voice was like honey, sweet and slow to move. I never noticed her accent until I moved to upstate New York, where words that start out as one syllable tend to stay that way. I shed my own drawl on the train ride out of town, although I’m told it comes out when I’ve been drinking.

  “Are you there, baby? You should answer the phone. It’s not right to sit and listen to people talking and not answer the phone. Vera says that sort of thing absolutely ruins your karma.”

  “Vera thinks hairspray ruins your karma,” I muttered, hopping off the futon and sweeping my arm underneath the mammoth cushion for the twentieth time that week, as though repetition of the ritual would make the damn remote magically reappear.

  Mags released a stage sigh, the kind regular people only hear during plays by Tennessee Williams. “I guess I can assume you’re not there. Well, please, baby, call me the second you get this message. It’s urgent.”

  Urgent. The word didn’t have the same meaning for Mags as it did for most people. Urgent could have meant that she had misplaced her unholy red pumps and needed me to talk her through the search. It could have meant that one of her favorite movie stars from the forties had died, and the entire family needed to lift a glass in unison to the Great One’s memory. One urgent call resulted in my losing two hours of my life to gossip about Felicia Callahan getting fired from the Catoosa County Chamber of Commerce for stealing four staplers and thirty-eight dollars in petty cash.

  “I need you to call me tonight, baby, the very moment you get home.”

  I tossed the futon cushion back down and got up to hit the PAUSE button on my tiny TV/VCR. On an average day, I spent more time looking for the stupid remote than it’d take for me to get up and walk over to the TV, but it was the principle of the thing. It had disappeared around the same time Peter left, and having it at large meant Peter might find it in his things and return it. The very thought of him showing up on the doorstep with nothing to say but “Here’s your remote” was the stuff of which nightmares are made.

  The machine beeped again, and I released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I wandered into the kitchen, curling the top of the bag of Cheetos and tossing it onto the counter where it began its determined work of uncurling. I didn’t care. I’d done my part. I grabbed the corkscrew with one hand as I opened the fridge with the other.

  Tick tock. Darcy’s waiting.

  Freeze frame.

  This is the pre-epiphany moment, the mental snapshot of myself that I revisit on occasion, mystified at how much I failed to notice. There I was, wearing the oldest flannel robe in existence, my unwashed hair sticking up in all directions out of a lazy ponytail, my glasses smudged and crooked, a bottle of wine in hand with little splotches of Cheeto residue on the neck, and I had no earthly idea that anything was wrong.

  It hadn’t been that bad when Peter’d been around. I’d been clean, lively, happy. I smelled good. I flossed. But then one day—Valentine’s Day, if you can stand the irony—I came home to a half-emptied apartment and a half-assed good-bye note scribbled in the title page of a book. And not just any book. Peter’s book. The one he’d written during two years of late nights and early mornings while I encouraged him, making coffee and providing sexual diversions. The one that had hit the shelves and stayed there, neglected, while Steels and Koontzes flew from either side. The one that I read over and over, gushing over his talent every time.

  I’d found it lying on the bed, the front cover held open with my itty bitty booklight, the title page etched with his deliberate handwriting.

  I’m sorry. I wish you all the best. Love, Peter.

  A simple note, vague as hell, fodder for hours and hours of painful dissection. What did it mean? Why would he sign a “Later, Babe” note with Love, Peter? Isn’t love pretty much a moot point when one is being dumped? And where had he gone? Had he run off with another woman? Another man? Had he simply decided that he would rather be alone than with me? Which was worse?

  For six weeks, these were the questions that haunted me as I plummeted into a cavern of self-pity. In six short weeks, I’d mutated from a normal individual pursuing a Ph.D. and a reasonable future to a wild-haired social phobic, rationalizing my obsession with Pride and Prejudice by linking it with my dissertation topic, “The Retelling of Austen in Post-Feminist Women’s Literature.” Forget that I hadn’t written a word since the day Peter left. Forget that I’d left the house only to teach my classes and to grab Cheetos and chardonnay at Wegmans. Forget that I had just earlier that very day briefly considered getting a cat. If nothing else, I should have been tipped off by the fact that when Peter and I were together, I’d more than once caught myself fantasizing about coming home one day to an empty apartment, leaving me blameless and beatified. And free. Now that my dream had come true, it begged the question: what, exactly, was I mourning?

  Continue action.

  I carried the bottle of wine and the glass with me to the living room, kicking a path through the notebooks and pens on the floor as I settled back on the futon. The tape had stopped, and a blond sitcom star from the seventies was hawking diet pills. I debated internally on whether the energy would be better spent getting up and hitting the PLAY button or continuing my futile search for the remote when the phone rang.

  Again.

  Two calls in the span of fifteen minutes greatly increased the probability that whatever she was calling about was actually urgent
. I pulled myself up off the futon and headed into the kitchen, flicking on the light and grabbing the receiver off its crooked base. “Yeah?”

  “Portia, darlin’, I knew you were home.”

  “In the shower.” I took a sip of my wine. “I heard the phone ring. Was that you?”

  “Yes, baby,” she said. Her voice sounded tired. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. I rifled through the junk drawer in the kitchen. Remotes have turned up in stranger places.

  “Baby, I need your help. My back has gone out on me, and every moment is acute pain and torture. Doctor Bobby says I need to stay in bed for a few months.”

  Only in Truly, Georgia, would a grown man who’d earned a medical degree allow himself to be referred to as “Doctor Bobby.” I stood up straight and slammed the drawer shut with my hip. “A few months? Jesus, Mags. What did you do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, distress raising her voice an easy octave. “But Doctor Bobby has given me strict orders. Which puts us in a bit of a spot. Vera can’t run the store alone, and Bev needs to be slowing down at this time in her life. So, I’ve been thinking...”

  I raised my glass of wine to my lips, knowing exactly what was coming. “Thinking? What about?”

  “Well, we had a family meeting, and we thought you might come home for a while. To help out.”

  I knew it. “How long a while?”

  “Oh, not too long, I’m sure. If you could come home for the summer, that should be fine.”

  I choked on a sharp gulp of wine. “The summer?”

  “I’m sure I’ll be up and around by August. September at the latest.”

  “The whole summer?” I glanced around the apartment, my mind whirling in a desperate search for reasons why I could not leave. My dissertation. My shot at getting the assistant professor position opening up next spring. My life…

  My eyes grazed over the window, then zoomed back. A chunk of ice formed in my throat. I squinted at my reflection in the glass.

  Epiphany.

  “Oh, my god,” I said, and walked closer to the window, touching my face, straightening my glasses, running my hand over the bird’s nest ponytail hanging off my head at a tilt.

  “Portia?” I heard Mags’s voice come through the line, tinged with concern. I walked over to the mirror by the front door and took a good look. Pale skin. Bags under the eyes. I practically had a neon sign over my head, flashing the same empty message over and over.

  Alone.

  I swallowed and the ice shifted to the back of my neck. I blinked and looked around my apartment, seeing fresh the mass of empty junk food wrappers and dirty coffee mugs. My chest tightened.

  “Darlin’?” Mags’s voice was muffled; I’d let the phone drop against my chest, where it vibrated to the beat of my frantic heart as the neon sign flashed in my imagination.

  Alone. Afraid.

  Oh, my god, I thought. I’m four cats and a Reader’s Digest subscription away from being totally irredeemable.

  “Portia? You still there, baby?”

  I shook my head, got control of my breathing. The ice receded. I pulled the phone up to my ear. “Yeah. I’m here.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, apparently missing the panic in my voice. “I thought I’d lost you there for a minute. So, when can we expect you here? You know our busy season starts around mid-May...”

  “Hold on for a minute, okay, Mags?” I put the phone to my chest again. I breathed deep, turning my back to the mirror, raising my eyes to the ceiling, which was the only place in my apartment showing no evidence of the fact that I’d driven my life into one hell of a ditch.

  Use logic. Make a choice. Stay here and recite Austen movies with the actors and never write another word of your dissertation and morph insidiously into the Crazy Cat Lady in the attic apartment...

  My heart started to pump erratically again. I took another deep breath.

  ...or, spend a summer in the clutches of the Mizzes. Lesser of two evils. Make a choice, Portia.

  “Portia?”

  “Just a minute, Mags.” I grabbed a quarter off the floor and flipped it in the air. Heads, Syracuse. Tails, Truly.

  I caught the quarter in the air and slapped it on the back of my hand.

  Tails.

  Best two out of three.

  “Portia? Honey?”

  I flipped again, then sighed and tossed the quarter back on the floor. I rolled my head on my shoulders. My breathing stabilized. My heart fell into a reasonable rhythm. I squinted at the calendar.

  “My last class is May nineteenth,” I said, feeling the words stick in my throat as I croaked them out. “I can settle things here and be there by the twenty-second or so. Assuming I can find someone to sublet my apartment. If I can’t find someone…”

  Mags squealed and giggled. I’d have pictured her jumping up and down if it weren’t for the acute pain and torture in her back. “Oh, darlin’, that’s just perfect! I knew you’d come through for us. I just knew it!”

  I grabbed a red marker, took the cap off with my teeth, and spit it onto the kitchen counter as I flipped up the pages to August. The panic subsided as resignation flowed in. “I’ll have to be back by...” I ran a finger over the days. “August twenty-second.”

  I circled it in red, then put two stars on either side. August 22. Three months. Thirteen weeks. Was it really going to kill me?

  Chances were fair to middlin’ that it would. But the dismal state of my life had been recognized, and it had to be dealt with. Even though my response was to run far, far away, at least I was doing something. At least I wasn’t floating around town with open cans of Fancy Feast, trolling for strays. That was good. Wasn’t it?

  I muddled through a few more niceties and finally shrugged Mags off the phone. I scuffed through the living room, reaching down to flick off the television set as I headed toward the closet, grabbing the last clean towel and revealing the remote, sitting there on the naked shelf.

  I stared. All this time, it had been sitting there, waiting for me to hit rock bottom, to get to the place where I’d whittled the laundry down to the last pair of clean underwear, the last clean towel. I raised my fingers to its bumpy, worn surface, then rolled my eyes at myself as my vision started to blur under the tears.

  Peter would not be coming back.

  I tossed the stupid thing down the hallway, where it skidded to a stop on the living room rug. I longed for a warm, furry kitten snuggling up against my ankles, justifying my existence by needing me. Maybe if I got just one, it would be okay. You have to have more than one to be the Crazy Cat Lady. I tossed the towel over my shoulder and decided to think about it on August 23.

  ***

  I drove the fourteen hours home for two reasons. One, it allowed for the possibility of changing my mind and turning back, something that’s much harder to do on a plane. Two, it gave me a fourteen-hour reprieve from my immersion into the collective bosom of my mother, aunt, and grandmother, known throughout Truly as the Miz Fallons. The nickname stems from the fact that our family has been suspiciously lacking Mr. Fallons. None of us has ever been married, and when we get knocked up, we have girls.

  “Men just don’t stick to Miz Fallons,” Mags had often said throughout my childhood, as though it was simply a fact of life to be accepted and moved past, like having freckles or being color-blind. I hadn’t accepted it as fact, but so far, I had to admit the phenomenon was consistent. I’ve termed it the Penis Teflon Effect. Patent pending.

  When I pulled my rattling Mazda sedan past the town limits of Truly, Georgia, population 6,618, I had fourteen hours of self-talk under my belt. I would be gracious. I would be pleasant. I would ignore any quirks, insensitivities, and unintentional offenses. I would enjoy my time with the Mizzes. I might even wear makeup and dresses if it made them happy. After all, how much did it really matter? It was one summer, and I’d be going back to Syracuse at the end of it. I could be gracious for one summer.

  I rolled down my window and drew in th
e clean air, watching the sun set behind the purpling Northwest Georgia Mountains. I was overwhelmed by contentment, even a little nostalgia, as I traded Battlefield Parkway for Truly’s Main Street. As I drove past, my eyes clung to the old-fashioned wooden sign that hung over the family bookstore, the Printed Page. I was surprised by the ache I felt, the longing to see once again the shelves of books and random knickknacks, drink the brew from our little coffee bar, inhale the musty wood and pulp.

  “God,” I said to myself as I waited at Truly’s only stoplight and stared at the Page’s storefront. “I had no idea how much I missed you.”

  “Why, Portia Fallon!”

  I turned my head to see a large woman in a blue dress waving from the front stoop outside of Whitfield’s Pharmacy. I fluttered my fingers at her and laughed.

  “Hi, Marge!” I called through the open window, surprised at how quickly shed recognized me. With the exception of the occasional low-profile holiday visit, I’d been gone twelve years. I didn’t know whether to be glad or disturbed that I’d changed so little.

  “Good to have you home, baby!” she called as the light turned green and I moved on. It was a short six blocks from the center of town to our old two-story colonial, but I took it slow, remembering every oak tree I’d ever fallen out of, every friend’s house I’d ever ducked behind to try on lipstick or smoke a cigarette. They were all there, every last one. How was it possible that a place could be exactly the same after twelve years? Had I been raised in Brigadoon and never even noticed?

  By the time I pulled into our driveway, I was feeling pretty good. I chuckled to myself as I stepped out of the car, wondering what all my dread had been about. It was just Truly, and Truly wasn’t so bad. It was a place where kids played safely in the streets and neighbors all knew each other, and there were definitely worse things than spending a summer drinking iced tea in pine-scented mountain breezes. The Mizzes would behave themselves, certainly. Hell, Mags would be in bed most of the time. Everything was going to be just fine.