The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (15 page)

THURSDAY

B
ack during my one-month-stand years, Valentine’s Day had been awkward territory. It always felt weird, having to go out to a big dinner with a guy I had only known for a short while or would be dumping in a few days. I usually didn’t bother with presents, and last year I had even dumped the guy ahead of time, so that I could hang out with Risa after her annual Valentine’s blow up with The One. Every year since 2008, when gay marriage became legal for a short time in California, Risa had made a big impassioned plea to The One to marry her on Valentine’s Day, even after the law had gotten reversed. And every year Risa got shot down.

“You’ve got to give up and move on,” I told her last year.

“I wish I could,” Risa said, pouring herself a third glass of straight vodka behind the bar. Even though it wasn’t a great idea to get completely wasted on one of her bar’s busiest days of the year, this is what Risa had proceeded to do after every one of her Valentine’s Day rejections. Risa did Risa and that’s all she knew how to do. And the only reason she hadn’t gotten fired for this stunt was that I had been there to keep on serving customers drinks when she no longer could, to lock up the bar at two a.m., to pour her into my car, and to deposit her safely at home to sleep off her copious vodka consumption.

But this year, I had Caleb. I would have asked Sharita to take over Risa duty, but we hadn’t spoken since she’d called me at the last minute the month before to say that she wouldn’t be attending my birthday party because Marcus had shown up and they “needed to talk.”

There were four types of Smithies in this world: Those who had chosen to go to Smith College because it was an institution with a reputation for graduating strong women and, as young feminists, we believed that it was in our best interest to attend a school with like-minded women—that was
me. Those who had known in high school that they were lesbians and wanted to go to a school where they would feel comfortable—that was Risa. Those whose female relatives had been going to Smith for generations upon generations, also known as legacies—that was none of us. And those who went to Smith simply because the prestigious women’s college had given them the biggest scholarship—and that would be Sharita.

The problem with the latter two kinds of Smithies was that they thought of putting women first as an option as opposed to a “should.” And they somehow managed to graduate from Smith having learned few of the tenants of feminism, or even how to treat their female friends with a modicum of respect.

So in many ways it felt like I was repeating a basic lesson to a particularly slow child when I said, “Sharita, I’m your best friend. I’m the one who will still be here when Marcus goes crazy on you. Again. And it’s my thirtieth birthday party.”

“Tammy and Risa are going to be there, right?”

“That’s beside the point.”

“And you guys always complain that I don’t socialize enough at parties.”

“We only complain when you sit in the corner on your BlackBerry and don’t even try to talk to people,” I said.

“People I don’t even know,” Sharita said, as if her contempt for socializing with people she hadn’t met yet was all my fault. “You’ll have more fun without me. You know you will.”

True, but … “That’s beside the point. You promised you’d come.”

“Me not coming to your party isn’t the end of the world. You know that, I know that. I wish you would just grow up and admit it,” Sharita said.

I had simply been annoyed when Sharita had first called, but after she said this, I went from mildly unamused to livid. So I hung up on her. It occurred to me afterwards that turning thirty may have rendered me too old for childish moves like hanging up on people, but whatever.

Since that night, I hadn’t answered any of Sharita’s calls or returned any of her texts. I hadn’t even responded to her brunch invite, which had been proffered on a weekend that Marcus would be out of town visiting his family in Atlanta. Sharita had once again revealed her true (and thoroughly ridiculous) colors, but this time something shifted within me upon seeing them. My love for her gave way to distaste. And it almost didn’t hurt to lose her as a friend. Almost.

Unfortunately, the memories got in the way of a good, clean break. I’d be rehashing in my head all the times Sharita had stood me up, but then a little voice would remind me that she’d been the one who had arranged it so that she and Risa could come up to Connecticut to be with me after my mother died. She’d been the one who had called in a separate Town Car for us when I had said that I didn’t want to ride in the limo with my father. And she’d also been the one who had taken the train with me to JFK and put me on a plane back to China to finish out the semester.

After that, Sharita had e-mailed me little affirmations and a piece of scripture every day, even though she knew that I didn’t deal well with either scripture or cheesiness. But those e-mails had been the best and brightest parts of my days in the dark months that followed my mother’s death, and they didn’t stop coming until I was back on the Smith College campus. By then, Risa had dropped out and moved to Los Angeles. But Sharita greeted me on the porch of Capen House, where I would be living for the rest of the school year. She’d given me the best hug, tight and fierce, before taking one of my suitcases and helping me move back into the house.

So, yeah, remembering stuff like that made it hard to stay mad at Sharita. Really hard. But how long could I continue to give her credit for things she’d done ten years ago? The problem with becoming friends at an all-women’s college was that there was no way of knowing who the people you swore would be your friends for life will become once boys are put into play. I’d thought back then that Sharita was true blue. But putting up with her crap in
L.A. made me wonder if she’d been such a good friend back then simply because there hadn’t been any boys in the picture to distract her.

Still, my fingers itched to call her and make sure that one of us would be there for Risa that night. I ended up calling Caleb instead. I explained to him that we were going to have a wonderful dinner and afterwards we could go back to my place and have even better sex … but then I had to go attend to Risa in Silver Lake.

“Romantic,” he said.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. It’s like this universal rule that in order to be no-drama, you have to have a high-drama friend.” This statement set off a tiny ping of guilt in my brain, because while I had certainly been as low-drama as possible for Caleb all of these months, I wasn’t exactly no-drama, especially on the inside.

“You’re a good friend,” he said. “I love that about you.”

I hadn’t yet told him about my falling out with Sharita, but I accepted the compliment anyway. “Thanks,” I said, dwelling on the fact that he had used “I love” and “you” in the same sentence. I wondered how long it would be before he got rid of the “that” and the “about.”

RISA

I
s Thursday not talking to me?” Sharita asked me halfway through lunch at the Daily Grill. And by “lunch” I mean I was drinking coffee while she was eating a huge cheeseburger, so I guessed she’d thrown up the deuces on that New Year’s diet already.

By the way, I was starting to fiend for a cigarette when she brought this shit up.

“How are you just now figuring that out?” I asked her. “She hasn’t been talking to you since you skipped her birthday party for that boy.”

“His name is Marcus. We’re not at Smith anymore. You don’t have to keep on calling grown men boys just because a few of them call us girls.”

I answered this reasonable argument in the same manner that I answered all reasonable arguments—with a rock-star shrug. “Whatevs—boy or man, she’s still hella-mad at you for standing her up.”

Sharita frowned and tapped her fingers on the table, and I knew the next words out of her mouth would be something about how ungrateful Thursday was.

“You see, this is what I don’t like about Thursday. Every time I don’t show up to something, she acts like I’m the worst person in the world and forgets all the stuff I’ve done for her in the past like loaning her money to come to L.A., and calling in a favor to get her that job at MTS Systems, and …”

Sharita stopped there, leaving the rest unsaid. Helping Thursday get through the death of her mom was a big fucking deal, but lumping it in with all the other favors wouldn’t have been right. Even Sharita, who could come up with a thousand arguments for why she shouldn’t get blamed for something she did or for why people shouldn’t be asking her to do something she just plain didn’t want to do in the first place, wouldn’t go there.

I shrugged again, staying out of it. The truth was that Sharita needed to accept that if she promised to do something and then she didn’t do it, then people were going to get mad at her ass. And Thursday needed to accept that Sharita was a fucking idiot when it came to men. It was like a disease, and Thursday couldn’t hold it against her if she wanted to stay friends with Sharita.

“Can you talk to her?” Sharita asked.

“Hell, no,” I answered almost before the words were out her mouth.

“Seriously, Risa, somebody’s got to talk some sense into her. She’s so hardheaded.”

“Somebody doesn’t have to be me,” I answered.

“Why not you?” Sharita asked.

I waved her question away, like “shoo fly, don’t bother me.” She acted like any of this shit really mattered. Here was how I knew our lives would be going down: Thursday would marry her white boy, because Caleb was the complete opposite of Rick T and exactly what Thursday wanted. So she was going to do whatever it took to get a ring off of him and literally make her dreams come true.

Sharita, on the other hand, would continue to be single for the rest of her life, not because she wasn’t desirable, but because she couldn’t see straight when it came to men and the best she could hope for was somebody who would agree to move in with her so that he could sponge off of her like a parasite—and even then he probably still wouldn’t ask her to marry him.

Either way, at the end of the story, this close friendship that the three of us had built since we met at Smith College was reaching its twilight. Soon, neither Thursday nor Sharita would have time to do anything with anyone who didn’t either live or have sex with them.

They’d both go away, and if Tammy gave in to her family and found some rich guy to settle down with, then I was going to be left alone with nothing but my career.

And maybe that was why I was so intent on making it happen this year, so that I could finally be the rock star I needed to be for The One to come back to me. Straight talk: my future happiness depended on what I could get done in 2011.

So I shook my head when Sharita tried to wheedle me into calling Thursday and said, “I’m not doing your dirty work. Just keep calling her until she picks up.”

Sharita crossed her arms over her chest. “Why is it always on me to make up with her? Why doesn’t she ever call me when we get in fights?”

“Are you seriously going to whine all through lunch? Because I got up early for this.” I pulled out my iPhone, to show her I was beyond bored with this conversation.

Sharita switched the subject with a coy head tilt and grin. “Guess what I’m making Marcus tonight for Valentine’s Day dinner?” she said.

Jesus H. Christ, I needed to find some new friends. There were a ton of single women and men in their thirties in L.A. I didn’t have to stick with Sharita just because she was awesome when she wasn’t in a relationship, which was most of the time since she never went out and guys pretty much had to stumble upon her in her office like Marcus did, or run into her at Blockbuster like the last boyfriend back in early 2009.

I imagined myself with a set of shiny new friends. Friends who liked electronic rock, friends who didn’t mind going out late on weeknights, friends who didn’t always want to meet at restaurants, where I’d be tempted to eat. My fantasy of my anti-Sharita friends distracted me for a pretty minute, or I would have noticed the black box that appeared on my iPhone screen sooner.

It was a text message from Tammy, and it said, “S.O.S. I need your help. On bad date at Kate Mantilini. Please save me. Serious 911.”

Saved by the urgent text message. I threw back the rest of my cold coffee and said to Sharita, “It’s an emergency. I’ve got to go. Call Thursday and apologize for being you on her voicemail. She’ll forgive you eventually.”

“I’ve already called her enough. It’s time for her to call me.”

“Okay, whatever,” I said, then I left, not bothering to put down money for the bill. I only had a coffee and Sharita could afford to pick up my tab.

Tammy’s biggest problem could easily be summed up in five words: she was too fucking nice. I knew this because she never stood up to her older sister, Veronica, who kept coming up with increasingly audacious schemes to get Tammy into a relationship with someone other than Mike Barker. Tammy had put up with strange (but successful) men calling her out of the blue because her sister gave them her number, and she often made excuses for why she couldn’t go out to dinner with her sister because she suspected Veronica would spring a date on her.