Engaging Men

Fortunately, I had a quick and easy call from a woman who thought the new boat-neck tee looked so clean and comfortable on the blond goddess who modeled it on page 74 that she deemed it necessary to order it in every color. Once I had inputted all the information into my computer, thanked her for her order and hit the call end button on my phone set, I swiveled around to face my cube-mates once more.

“So listen to this,” I said, as Roberta and Michelle fixed their gazes on me and Doreen rushed her customer off the phone.

“Kirk is going home to see his parents this weekend,” I continued, studying the expressions of all three women expectantly, “without me.”

“Have you ever met his parents before?” Michelle asked.

“No,” I replied, noting that Roberta’s brow had furrowed at my response.

“Break up with him,” Doreen said succinctly. I glanced toward Roberta frantically, but she had already launched into a call.

“Don’t listen to her,” Michelle said, waving a hand in Doreen’s direction dismissively before focusing her dark brown eyes on me. “Let me ask you something, Angie. How long have you two been together?”

“A year and eight months.”

“That long, huh? Hmm…” Michelle’s well-penciled eyes grew pensive and her glossy lips pursed.

“You don’t want to marry this guy. Or any guy, for that matter, trust me on this,” Doreen chimed in again. I glanced once again over at Roberta, but she was still on her phone call and would be for some time, judging by the way she was typing furiously into her keyboard. “A man like that will never give you anything you need,” Doreen continued.

“Well, that all depends on what Angie wants,” Michelle said, her face brightening as she looked at me hopefully. “What do you want from him, Angie?”

For some reason, her question filled me with a flutter of confusion. What did I want from Kirk? Looking into her face, I saw all the hopes and dreams the Comfortably Marrieds of the world felt for the Anxiously Single. Then I remembered that wedding gown—and my amazing climax. Clearly, marriage was something I had been craving. And why wouldn’t I want it? I loved the idea of coming home to someone night after night, someone I knew would be there for me during the rough patches. I wanted to share my life with a man, not just some two-to-four-year interval we would later laugh about over drinks, as I often found myself doing with Josh and even Randy.

And as my eyes roamed over Michelle’s well-groomed coif and expensive jeans, I realized I wanted something else: a dual income. Could you blame me? Living in New York City was no cakewalk on the measly salary I gleaned from a part-time job and my illustrious role at Rise and Shine. This is not to say I didn’t love Kirk. I did. All the more reason for us to combine incomes, phone bills and, even more important, rent, I thought, remembering the sofa-laden flat I shared with Justin.

“I want to marry him, of course,” I said, as if the answer were self-evident.

And to Michelle, who had, from age eighteen, plotted and planned her wedding to Frankie Delgrosso, co-owner (with his dad, course) of Kings County Cadillac in Brooklyn, this was not only self-evident but cause for celebration. “Angela is getting married!” she practically shouted before moving seamlessly into “Thank you for calling Lee and Laurie Catalog, where casual comes easy….”

“Married?” Roberta said, now done with her call and swiveling to confront me. “To Kirk?”

“Of course to Kirk!” I replied with a laugh. “Who else?” Beep. “Thank you for calling Lee and Laurie Catalog, where casual comes easy. This is Angela. How may I help you today?”

Turning away from Roberta’s somewhat confused expression, I attempted to focus on the customer’s question, which had to do with sizing on the slim-cut trousers we’d just debuted in our fall collection. But as I tried to guide the poor woman toward pants that would accommodate the somewhat peculiar proportions she described, I couldn’t help but wonder what had struck Roberta as so odd about the notion of Kirk and me getting married. Frustrated after a solid four minutes of flipping through catalog pages while the customer rejected my every recommendation, I barked somewhat irritably into the phone, “Have you ever considered something with an adjustable waist?” The woman made some equally irritated reply and huffed off the phone. With a quick prayer that no one in the quality assurance department was monitoring that call, I turned to Roberta once more.

“What’s wrong with Kirk?” I asked, studying Roberta’s expression. After all, she had gotten to know Kirk somewhat during his brief time servicing Lee and Laurie. She had witnessed the flirtation between us, had seen the first fluttering of romance as we began dating, watched as we eased into coupledom. If she had an issue, I needed to know.

“Nothing’s wrong with Kirk,” she said. “In fact, I like Kirk very much.”

“So?”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all. I didn’t think you two were moving in that direction.”

“That’s just the problem,” I said. “Kirk isn’t moving in that direction.”

“Some men need a little nudge,” Michelle said, turning to face us once more. “A little lid loosening,” she continued, reminding me of her tight-lid theory. “You know, Frankie wasn’t even thinking marriage when I started leading him into jewelry stores to look at rings. I think he had his credit card out before he even knew what hit him,” she added with a gleeful little giggle.

“Oh, brother,” Doreen said, with a roll of the eyes.

“What’s got you moving in that direction?” Roberta asked now.

Her question filled my face with heat. I couldn’t even confess my wedding-fantasy orgasm to Grace, much less to these women. “I’m thirty-one years old—shouldn’t I at least be thinking about it?”

“Ah,” Roberta said with a knowing smile. “It’s the old biological clock, isn’t it? I guess that makes sense. When I turned thirty, all I could think about was having my first child.”

Oh, God. Who said anything about kids? I mean, they’re cute and all, but one thing at a time…. “It’s not that, really. I just want to be taken seriously,” I said, realizing that Roberta wasn’t listening as she launched into a story she’d already told us countless times, about her struggle to potty-train her daughter, who had just now turned thirteen and I’m sure wouldn’t appreciate the fact that her mother still dwelled on this part of her history. Fortunately, another call came in just before Roberta got into the particulars. Clearly she was going to be no help, I realized, as Michelle clicked off her call and faced me once more.

“You want to be taken seriously?” she asked. “I’ll tell you how.” Then she leaned in low, and whispered, “Go on break.”

“I just got here. I can’t go on break,” I whispered back.

“The call volume is pretty slow,” Michelle said. “Go on break.” Then she leaned back in her chair. “Gee, Roberta, all that time you spend in the can is putting ideas in my head. Now I have to go to the bathroom.” She put her phone on standby and took off her headset, giving me a meaningful look.

I clicked my phone onto standby mode. “I have to go, too,” I said, sliding off my own handset.

“You can’t both go on break!” Doreen began to protest before her cries were cut off by her own rather curt “Thank you for calling Lee and Laurie Catalog…”

Though I felt guilty leaving Doreen and Roberta to juggle all the calls that came into the phone cue for our unit, I was desperate for help. And I was sure Michelle was going to be able to provide it, judging by the confident sway of her Calvin Kleins as she headed through the office, out the double doors which closed off customer service from the rest of the world that was Lee and Laurie Catalog and to the elevator bank.

“Let’s go outside a minute. So I can smoke a butt.”

I sighed. Clearly I was at Michelle’s mercy now, I thought, feeling even more guilty as we got on the elevator and headed down eleven floors and outside into the cloying summer heat.

The moment we stepped onto the concrete out in front of the building, Michelle had already lit up a Virginia Slims and was puffing steadily. “Want one?” she asked, holding out the pack with one well-manicured hand.

“All right,” I said, taking a cigarette though I had given up the habit, for the most part, shortly after my father died from cancer four years ago. Some things, however, still required nicotine.

After she had lit me up and I had taken one heady drag, Michelle started in. “Getting married is a game. You want to do it, you gotta play the fucking game.”

“Game?” I said, grimacing at the all-too-frequent swear-words that flew out of Michelle’s mouth, especially when she was on her favorite subject: men.

“You know, getting the lid loose. It doesn’t happen overnight—”

“This tight-lid theory is bullshit,” I said, taking another acrid puff of the cigarette before I dropped it to the ground.

“Bullshit? I’ll give you bullshit. You remember who Frankie was dating before I hooked up with him, don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah. Rosanna Cuzio. But that was high school. No one marries their high school sweetheart anymore—”

“But Rosanna Cuzio was the prom queen. The fucking prom queen, Angie. She and Frankie went out for four fucking years. Then, just about the time she’s picking out china patterns, he dumps her. Dumps her!” Her eyebrows shot up and she took another drag of her cigarette. “So a few months later, Frankie and I start going out. Within two years, whammo,” she said, holding up her left hand, which was covered in gold rings, one of which sported a one-and-a-half carat emerald-cut.

I have to say, the sight of that ring was about to convert me once more. Until I remembered Susan, Kirk’s ex. No, she wasn’t the prom queen, but with a degree in engineering from MIT, she was a pretty strong contender for a lid-loosener of the very best kind. “Kirk’s last girlfriend gave him the old ultimatum. But I don’t see him shopping for rings with me anytime soon. He didn’t even invite me to meet his parents, for chrissakes. Does that indicate a man who is about to pop the question?”

Michelle shook her head, blowing out another blast of smoke. “You’re not fucking getting it,” she said. “The lid is loose, but it’s not off. You have to apply a little pressure. You have to play the game. In fact, it’s really only a matter of three steps.”

“Steps?”

“Yeah, to get him to pop the fucking question. The first one is deprivation.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “And what, exactly, does that entail?”

“Just don’t be so available. When he calls up to make plans, tell him you’re busy.”

Maybe that was what I was doing wrong, I thought, remembering the look of pure longing I’d seen in Justin’s eyes at the thought of Lauren coming home after three months. Hmm…

“And whatever you do, do not have sex with him.”

“What?” This particular step would be a lot harder on me. After all, sex was one of the best things in Kirk’s and my relationship.

“I know it sounds crazy, but all that shit about getting the milk for free is true,” she said, blowing out a last puff of smoke and crushing the butt beneath one three-inch heel.

“I don’t know, Michelle, it sounds kind of…manipulative.” I wanted a proposal that was genuine—that came from Kirk and Kirk alone. “That’s just not me,” I continued. “I’m not a game player.”

“Okay,” she said, waving that weighty engagement ring in the air as she pulled open the door and headed inside once more. “But, remember, you got to be in it to win it.”

3

Welcome to Brooklyn. Population: Married

“I don’t like that, Angela,” my mother said, standing over a sizzling pan of eggplant on the stove. It was Sunday, and after an utterly uneventful weekend spent mostly alone (Justin and Lauren had disappeared to the Hamptons on Saturday, thank God, to celebrate their happy reunion), I had gone to my mother’s house early, ostensibly to help her cook, and was now being subjected to the third degree while chopping garlic. It was my own fault, really, for admitting that Kirk had gone home to see his parents. And for saying it with a less-than-cheerful expression.

“How many times has he been here?” Ma said now, flipping the eggplants with barely contained indignation. “It’s not right.”

For once I had to agree with her. She was from the old school, where a man treated a woman with the utmost deference. My father was one of those men. It seemed when I was growing up, there was never a moment when he didn’t put my mother’s concerns above his own. Even up until the moment he died, as he lay on his sickbed, where my mother had permanently stationed herself, he begged her to go to sleep, knowing he would be up and in pain for the rest of the night. Of course, my mother didn’t dare close her eyes during those last few days. In fact, she still blames herself for succumbing to exhaustion the night he passed away. “I closed my eyes for one minute, and he was gone!” she laments, as if the fact that she couldn’t stay awake had ultimately done him in. Even four years later, she still wore mourning clothes, and judging from the way her knit skirt was starting to fray around the edges, they were the same ones she’d bought in her first year as a widow.

“Ma, how come you never wear the dress I bought you?” I said now, hoping to get her off the subject of Kirk. “What did you do, throw it out?”

“I have it. It’s in the closet.”

I bet it was. Along with sheet sets she had gotten on sale and never used and the tablecloths from Italy she was saving for a “special occasion” that never seemed to come. Hence the one flaw in the Old World ways: You never enjoyed anything while it was fresh and new. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for,” I said.

“Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself,” she said, starting to pull the eggplants out of the pan and placing them on a plate.

“Who’s worried about Angela?” Nonnie said, coming through the kitchen door from her apartment downstairs.

“Hey, Nonnie,” I said, jumping up to enfold her in my arms. I breathed in her flowery scent and leaned back to gaze at her soft, smiling features with relief. Cheerfully attired in a bright red blouse and a pair of polyester capris—like most of her peers in the eighty and over set, she couldn’t resist synthetic fabrics—my grandmother was a breath of fresh air in the gloom that permeated my mother whenever she thought one of her children was in danger of unhappiness. Since I was the one who usually fell into that category, I had come to rely on Nonnie to keep things on an even keel.

“You gonna cook in that?” my mother said, turning from the sauce she stirred momentarily to take in my grandmother’s festive outfit and made-up face.

“I sure am,” Nonnie said, then defiantly grabbed a bowl of chopped meat off the counter. After dumping in the garlic I had just finished dicing along with breadcrumbs and myriad other ingredients so secret she claimed she was taking their names to her grave, Nonnie reached into the bowl of red meat and spices and, rings and all, began to mix the ingredients by hand.

“So what’s your mother worried about now?” Nonnie asked, addressing me as if Ma weren’t standing two feet behind her at the stove.

“Oh, you know. The usual. Me and Kirk.”

“Hey, that’s right,” my grandmother said, as if it just occurred to her I was without my other half. “Where is the Skinny Guinea?” she asked, using her nickname for Kirk. It was Nonnie’s way of accepting Kirk as a permanent fixture in my life despite the fact that he had no relatives whatsoever who hailed from the boot of Europe. She believed that all the meals he had eaten in our home qualified him as an honorary Italian, albeit a thin one. “I don’t know where he puts it!” she would say after he cleaned a plate heaping with pasta and red meat.

“He went home,” I admitted now, watching her face carefully as she grabbed up a clump of meat and began rolling it into a meatball.

“Oh, yeah?” she said, plopping the meatball into the pan my mother had laid out on the table and grabbing up another clump of meat. “Too bad. He loves your mother’s eggplant. He’s gonna miss out, huh?” she said with a wink as she finished up another meatball.

I smiled. Leave it to Nonnie to turn things around and make it seem as if Kirk were the one missing out on something. Reaching into the bowl before her, I started to roll meatballs right along with her.

“You don’t think that’s wrong?” my mother chimed in, giving the sauce one last stir before she joined us at the table. “He’s been to this house I don’t know how many times, and he doesn’t invite Angela into his own home? To meet his parents?”

Nonnie shrugged, grabbed up some more chopped meat, rolled. “Don’t his parents live in, whatsit—Massachusetts?” she said. The way she said Massachusetts made it clear that this wasn’t as desirable a location as, say, Brooklyn. Because in Nonnie’s world, there really weren’t too many places outside of Brooklyn she felt it necessary to be. Her own mother had moved here from Naples as a teen, and Nonnie had grown up right on Delancey, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. In all these years, she’d never really seen any reason to go anywhere else. According to her, Brooklyn had everything a person could need: Al’s Butcher had the best Italian sausage, and there really wasn’t a better bagel to be had anywhere in New York than at Brooklyn Bagelry, never mind the rest of the country. And with Kings Plaza a short walk away and packed to the brim with shops that kept her in polyester and high-heeled Cubby Cobblers, what more did a woman need?

“He’s not serious about her. And I don’t like that,” my mother said, putting up the water for the pasta.

“Serious. Who needs serious? There’s plenty of time for that,” Nonnie said with a wave of one ringed hand.

She was right, I realized. Why was I in such a hurry, anyway? Kirk and I hadn’t even been together two years yet. Getting all worked up about marriage seemed a bit…premature. Didn’t it?

Returning to the table and grabbing a hunk of chopped meat, my mother eyed me and Nonnie with a shake of the head. “Did you bring up the sausage from your freezer?” she asked my grandmother.

“No, I didn’t have any,” Nonnie said lightly. “But don’t worry. I asked Artie to bring it.”

“Artie?” my mother said, “Gloria Matarrazzo’s husband?”

“Gloria’s dead,” Nonnie said, rolling the meat between her hands. “Has been for a good year now, God rest her soul. You should know that, Maria. You went to the funeral.”

“So why’s he coming here?” Ma asked.

“I invited him,” Nonnie replied, as if this should come as no surprise to anyone.

“You what?” my mother said, pausing midroll.

“What?” my grandmother replied, eyes wide with innocence. “We’re friends. We’ve been playing poker together on Friday nights for fifteen years now. I can’t invite the man to my home for dinner?”

But as Nonnie turned her attention to the meat once more, I could swear her cheeks were slightly flushed.

“What are you up to?” Ma demanded, putting words to the suspicion that lurked in my own mind.

But before she got her answer, the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” my grandmother announced, rushing to the sink to rinse her hands. Then, checking her reflection in the microwave door, she gave her curls a quick pat and headed to the living room and the front door, leaving my mother and me staring after her in surprise.

“Artie! Glad you could make it,” we heard her exclaim from the next room. And within moments, she was leading Artie Matarrazzo into our kitchen. “Look who’s here!” Nonnie announced, gripping his hand. “You remember my daughter, Maria, and my granddaughter, Angela?” she said to Artie, who looked somewhat unsure how he had wound up in our kitchen, much less by my grandmother’s side. I might even have thought he’d stumbled to our house by accident, judging by his somewhat rumpled attire and bewildered brown eyes beneath bushy gray brows, if it weren’t for the sausage he pulled out of the shopping bag he carried.

“Oh, Artie, you remembered,” Nonnie gushed, gazing at the package as if it were a dozen roses, and leaning over to kiss his fleshy cheek.

Oh, my, I thought, exchanging a look with my mother.

Nonnie had a beau. And if the size of that sausage he was sporting was any indication, it was serious.

No less than an hour later, my brother Sonny arrived, with his wife, Vanessa. Of course, dinner was pretty much done by this point, and even the table had been set, leaving Sonny and Vanessa with nothing more to do than stand in the middle of the living room, while both my mother and my grandmother oohed and aahed over Vanessa. Or more specifically, Vanessa’s abdomen, which was round and bursting with her and Sonny’s first child. My mother’s first grandchild. “First grandchild from birth,” my mother would always clarify. My brother Joey had fraternal twins that came with his fiancée, Miranda, and once my mother had accepted the fact that her oldest son was not likely to give her any grandkids unless he married Miranda, she embraced little Tracy and Timmy as her own.

“There is nothing like it when your own son is having a baby,” she declared now, as she often exclaimed when Joey and Miranda weren’t around.

Vanessa, of course, ate it up. Standing before my mother, she ran one well-ringed hand over her abdomen, pressing the fabric of the pink maternity top against the swell, as if to show it off, as she said, “I can’t believe how big I am—and I’m only in my fifth month!”

It was true that Vanessa was huge, but I don’t think it was all baby. At five-nine, with a mane of blond hair sprayed so high it practically hit the woodwork on the way in the door, she still wore her trademark four-inch heels. Huge hunks of gold jewelry dangled from her ears, neck and arms, which somehow added to her girth in an oddly glamorous way. Her overwhelming size made her pregnant state seem all the more glorious. When Vanessa was in the room, she literally took it over. You couldn’t not talk about her.

“How are you feeling? Still getting that morning sickness?” Ma asked. Then, “You really should sit down. Especially in this heat. Summer’s barely begun and already the humidity is unbearable. Angela, get Vanessa one of those nice armchairs from the dining room.”

There really was no escaping Vanessa’s reign over a room, I thought, heading to the dining room for an extra chair as I heard Sonny begin to regale Nonnie and my mother with story of Vanessa’s latest sonogram. “I saw something on that screen. I swear it’s gonna be a boy….”

There was only one thing that could dispel the Vanessa obsession. Well, actually two things. Tracy and Timmy, the Twin Terrors, who had just now exploded through the front door and into the living room, practically barreling Vanessa down in their six-year-old exuberance.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Joey called out in admonishment, as he came through the door, his hand firmly around Miranda’s tiny waist.

It still amazed me to see Joey in “dad mode,” as he’d taken on the role rather abruptly when he met Miranda a year earlier. Up till then, he had devoted all his time and energy to running the auto-parts empire my father had left to him. And whatever spare time he’d had was spent waxing and detailing the ’67 Cadillac that was his pride and joy. Now, suddenly, Tracy and Timmy were his pride and joy. Miranda, his raison d’être.

My mother should have been satisfied with this turn of events. For years, she worried Joey wouldn’t lift his head up from the Caddy long enough to settle down and give her the grandkids she craved. But somehow she couldn’t swallow down the idea of Miranda. It was as if she saw Miranda only as some destitute single mother scheming to get her hands on the dough from our family’s business.

Fortunately, Miranda didn’t notice—or at least acted as if she didn’t. “Hi, Mrs. Di,” she said, leaning in to embrace my mother. I saw my mother’s arms go around Miranda’s petite frame, though I could tell she refrained from her requisite squeeze until she moved on to Joey, whom she not only hugged but gave a firm swat on the butt. “He gets better looking every time I see him!” she said to Nonnie, a wistfulness in her voice that indicated to the more astute observer, like myself, that she felt all that magnificence was somehow being wasted on Miranda.