Milkrun

Almost three million people live in Boston: 1,324,994 men, 1,450,376 women. Damn. Bad ratio.

Okay, age range…eighteen to twenty. Too young.

Twenty-one to twenty-four. Still too young.

Twenty-four to forty-four. To forty-four? That’s quite a range. My dad is practically forty-four. Actually, my dad’s fifty…fiftysomething. I don’t remember. I can’t be expected to remember every detail. Hmm. At least forty-year-old men are established. There are 210,732 people between the ages of twenty-four and forty-four. That makes about 100,000 men. I wish Wendy were here to draw me a graph.

One hundred thousand. And all I’m looking for is one. One man who is attractive, intelligent, still has hair (and doesn’t part it on the side to cover where he doesn’t have it), has an exciting and promising career (I wouldn’t mind an equally exciting and promising car), never wears turtlenecks (straight men shouldn’t wear turtlenecks), doesn’t have back acne (aka backne), wears a nice cologne (preferably something musky), is nice to his mother (not a mama’s boy), and is sensitive…no, strong…no, sensitive…definitely sensitive…but not too sensitive…would he be able to cry in front of me? He has to be able to cry…but not often…sometimes…

You have mail. Would you like to read it now?

Maybe Jeremy has realized that he is actually completely in love with me, can’t live without me, and is bored with the hot Dutch bimbo.

Attn: True Love copy editors. The emergency semicolon meeting will take place in the production boardroom in exactly five minutes. Please be on time.

Helen

Damn.

I will have to listen to Helen ramble for an hour, and I am entirely to blame. I imagine strangling her with different types of punctuation. I imagine wrapping a nice, fat em dash around Jeremy’s throat.

Jerk. Jerk, jerk, jerk.

2

No, I’m Not a Hooker But I Sometimes Like to Look Like One

“HELLO? SAM?”

Yay! No one’s home. I love nothing more than walking into an empty apartment. It wasn’t always this way. When I went to Penn and lived with Wendy, there was nothing I loved more than coming home to see my best friend flopped upside down on the couch watching TV, her legs thrown over the red and pink flowery pillows her grandmother had given us. “Yay! You’re home,” Wendy would say, and we’d make French Vanilla coffee (two Sweet’N Lows for me and one spoon of sugar for her), and describe our days in excruciating detail:

“And then I walked to the cafeteria and saw Crystal Werner and Mike Davis.”

“They’re still together?”

“Yeah, after he cheated on her. Can you imagine?”

I think it was kind of selfish of her to go off to New York and leave me all alone like this.

A red light on my phone is flashing, signaling I have messages. “You have three new messages,” the voice in the receiver says.

I will not think that maybe one is Jeremy. I will not hope that he has changed his mind and that as soon as I press play, I will hear, “Hi, it’s me, I really miss you” in his radio-talk-show, native–New Yorker voice. I know there will be a message from him only when I least expect it. That’s the sick way the world works. I can see the picture clearly: I will absentmindedly hit the play button, his name not popping into my mind even once, and “Hi, it’s me, I really miss you” will hit me like the ice-water showers I have to take every morning because Sam uses up all the hot water with her forty-five-minute marathons.

Look at that! I have messages! La-la-la. Whoever can they be? I’ll just casually listen and not really care about who it might be.

“Hi, Sam, it’s your mother. Call me back.” Beep.

“Jackie! Jackie, where are you? I called you at work and you didn’t answer. I’m going out now, but I need to talk to you. I’m having an emotional crisis. Matthew told Mandy that he likes me and I don’t like him, so what do I do? Call me as soon as you get home. But I’m going out. So leave a message.” Beep. Iris is always having an emotional crisis. Who’s Matthew?

“Hello, Jacquelyn. It’s Janie. Just calling to say hello. Call me back when you have a chance.” Beep.

Damn.

Janie is my mother. When I was four, she insisted I call her by her first name. This ban had something to do with the label “mother” being part of a bourgeois ideological conspiracy to maintain the power and position of the ruling class—the parents. But by the time I was five, my father was promoted from manager of the ladies’ innerwear department to the director of ladies’ outerwear, and my mother began to shed some of her Marxist philosophies, discovering her inner material-girl self. But by then it was too late for me to start calling her Mom again. The imprinting was complete. I love Janie dearly, don’t get me wrong, but she’s a wee bit flaky.

Fern Jacquelyn Norris is my official name. I never use the name Fern. I hate the name Fern. I’m still not sure why my parents gave me such a god-awful name. I think Janie must have named me while on some kind of mind-altering drug during the seventies. I’ve convinced Janie to call me by my middle name, but my dad seems to have a learning disability on the subject.

Once upon a time I lived with Janie and my father in a house on a street called Lazar in Danbury, Connecticut, and my best friend was a my-size pigtailed girl named Wendy. Today Wendy is a lot taller, still my best friend, and gone are her pigtails (they reappeared for a short stint in the 90s to capture that “cute” look). My dad—named Tim, but I was allowed to call him Dad—as I mentioned, made women’s clothes while Janie made bracelets. She made thousands of these, some with rhinestones, some with little silver moons and stars. She sold a couple to the local boutiques, but stored most of them in old shoeboxes that she stacked like building blocks beside the bookshelf. It’s a good thing that by this time she was into fashion and was buying many pairs of shoes.

When I was six, I found out that my parents, who I believed belonged to a wonderful marriage, did not like each other. This makes perfect sense to me now. Everything is always so clear when you look back—the right answer on the exam, the guy who liked you but who you thought was only so-so until the popular cheerleader started dating him, the blind spot you definitely should have checked before you made that sudden turn and lost your side mirror—but at the time, I found their sudden change of heart horrifying. Dad moved into a bachelor pad, and Janie and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment across town.

A few months later, Dad married Bev, a part-time travel agent, and they moved into a house on Dufferin. A few months after that, Janie married Bernie, a sales guy, and we moved into his two-bedroom apartment, which was only slightly larger than our old one, on Carleton Avenue. Then when I was eight, Janie got pregnant with Iris, and the three and a half of us moved into a three-bedroom on Finch. (Iris, by the way, was encouraged to call Janie “Mom.”) When Iris was four, Janie decided she was sick of hearing neighbors on top of her, sick of feeling as if she lived under a bowling alley, sick of not being able to blast her Beatles CDs without the police coming and telling her to turn it down (yes, that actually happened), and that we were moving into our own house.

We moved to Kelsey Avenue, and stayed there until Janie decided she’d had enough of not being able to happily wear her Birkenstocks without fear of deer ticks and that we were moving to Boston. Thankfully, we didn’t include me. That’s when I went to Penn. They lived in Newton for four years until Janie decided to move to Virginia because “everyone should be able to walk for less than fifteen minutes and dip her toes in the ocean.”

In my twenty-four years on this planet I have had, to date, fourteen different bedrooms. To reach this number, I have to include university residence, my first apartment at Penn with Wendy, my second apartment at Penn with Wendy, and my own apartment at Penn after Wendy got her investment banking job in New York. I stayed, in principle to do my M.A., but really to be with Jeremy. This list also includes the apartment my parents lived in when Janie was pregnant with me.

I don’t feel like calling Janie back just yet. I prefer to lie on my couch and watch some mind-numbing television. Click. Click, click. Nothing on but boring news.

I decide to admire the black leather knee-high boots I purchased on Newbury Street on my way home from work today. Every newly single girl needs new boots. It is step one in the recovery process.

There are actually five steps to recovery. Wendy and I wrote them up in college after she broke up with…what was his name? The economics major who cheated on her with the green-braces girl…oh, yeah, Putzhead.

I find the list in my stuff-drawer, between a Valentine’s Day mix tape featuring classics like “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” “Lost in Love,” and “Glory of Love” and two New Kids on the Block concert ticket stubs. I think we were planning on sending it into Cosmo or something. The list, written in purple ink, smells like stale Marlboros. It was during our wannabe-smokers days.

How to Recover from a Breakup

1. Buy knee-high black leather boots.

2. Get a new haircut. Find an extremely outrageous hair salon, where coffee is brought to you and gay men tell you that you have the most gorgeous hair they have ever seen.

3. Call a female friend so that you can talk about how much you miss your ex, and the friend can remind you of all the times he pissed you off, admitting that she never thought he was nice or attractive, that you could do much better, that he was cheap, that he had a strange smell, et cetera. This step is best accomplished with a mediocre friend as opposed to a best friend, in case of boyfriend reconciliation.

4. Call male friends so that you can be reminded of how desirable you are. Do not actually fool around with these friends. You’ll need them around or several months following your breakup.

5. Buy chocolate chip cookie dough and/or a box of tremendously expensive chocolates filled with different types of pastel-colored creams, and eat the entire box.

Amazing! Five years later and the steps are still (almost) valid:

1. Boots. Check.

2. Hair. I need to do some careful research before attempting this step. Nothing is worse than number two ending with tears and me having to wear that Red Sox baseball hat Jeremy bought me so that I would look like a native.

3. Friend phone call. Check. Well, kind of check. Considering Jeremy and I have broken up five times in three years, I have already lost all my mediocre friends, and I refuse to take chances with the ones I have left.

4. Male friend phone call. This one is a bit of a problem due to my lack of maintaining or acquiring male friends since Jeremy and I started dating.

4.a. Make male friends.

4.b. Call male friends.

5. Chocolate. Check. Having emergency cookie dough in your freezer is as crucial as having an emergency twenty in your wallet. Not that I can ever save the twenty in my wallet. I have recently modified Step 5. Eat chocolates while watching Sex and the City or Ally McBeal to remind me that there are other attractive, successful single women out there, and that they, unlike me, are over thirty.

Steps one through five should be repeated freely until girl is over breakup. Steps one and two should be slightly altered with each revisit, by the use of sexy sandals, leather pants, a backless tanktop, highlights, perm, layers…You get the idea.

Tonight, however, there is no time for cookie dough.

I shower, in hot water for a change (I even use the yummy-smelling soap sample I was saving for Jer’s return. See? I’m practically over him already), blow-dry my hair straight (it takes forever and I keep burning my fingers, but I don’t care because it makes me look very chic), put on my black knee-length skirt that has a slutty slit right up the thigh, a relatively new slinky red tank top and my new boots that right now feel so worth the 150 I can’t afford.

Yup. I’m pretty hot.

I find the smoky eye shadow page in Cosmo and try to follow the directions without poking my pupil. I will dazzle men with my hazel eyes, I will use lip liner to show off my smile, and I will smile to show off my dimples.

I am even wearing a thong for good luck.

I’m tired of waiting for things to happen to me. Time to get out there and grab life by the…well, you know. I am twenty-four, I am young, I refuse to sit around watching my butt get bigger while Jeremy runs around enjoying himself. Women are always waiting for men to come over to them, for men to ask them out, for men to kiss them.

Wait, wait, wait! The first time I waited for a kiss was when I was in middle school. It seemed as if everyone else in the world had already been French kissed (I imagined French women all walking around licking everyone), including Wendy, who had played spin-the-bottle at her cousin’s birthday party. Ted and I had already been going out for two days, and we were sitting at a picnic table outside at a school dance, talking about nothing (warm out, isn’t it?), experiencing that sweaty-palmed, irregularly palpitating-heart, what-happens-if-I-pass-out-I-think-we’re-about-to-kiss feeling. Finally, his face just kind of fell on top of mine, and there we were, kissing. Well, not exactly kissing, since our mouths were closed and our lips just kind of bumping as if we were two people in a crowded subway who just happen to be sharing the same pole. Then suddenly we were kissing. Wendy’s instructions surfaced in my mind: just keep your mouth open and move your tongue around. His tongue was mushy and I could taste Clorets at the back of his mouth.

Waiting never gets easier. After the first kiss, girls have to wait for their first love, and then they have to wait to lose their virginity. Or, if you’re tired of searching for your endless love, you can sleep with Rick the Deadhead, who called (and probably still calls) everyone “dude” and wore (and probably still wears) tie-dye. Yup, you can screw waiting, like I did.

You know what I hate about TV and movies? People never just fool around. They either kiss or they have sex. A guy starts unbuttoning a girl’s jeans and the girl says, “I’m not ready to have sex with you,” and the guy says okay, and her pants stay on, and it just ends there. You never hear about any of the bases that everyone I knew went through before the idea of actually doing it even occurred to them. Well, I’m sure it occurred to them.

I didn’t sleep with Rick right away. We went around all the bases, around and around and around, until the end of my first year at college when I finally got tired of the idea just occurring to me and decided that I wanted to do it already.

Our first time was on a Sunday night, on his cramped dorm bed, with Skeletons from the Closet playing on the stereo. By the time we got to “Truckin’,” the second track, it was all over. My body felt as if it had been clawed open, as we sat on his bed smoking cigarettes. My hands smelled like rubber elastic and I remember thinking, That’s it?

With Jeremy everything was suddenly…different. He would run his hand along my lower back and I would lose all ability to focus on anything but his fingers. He had perfect guy hands. About twice the size of mine, they never got sweaty and they smelled like burning leaves. In a good way. He wasn’t into holding hands, but he always had his arm around my shoulder, or on my back, or on my knee.

Enough of that. Change the channel in my head.

JulieAndrewsJulieAndrewsJulieAndrews.

Chocolate Easter bunnies.

Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee.

Well, not quite Sandra Dee. I’m waiting in full slut-attire for Natalie, when I hear Sam and Marc approaching the front door. Giggling. They’re always giggling. They’re also one of those couples who are always touching each other, making everyone around them uncomfortable.

I didn’t realize when I signed the lease that I would have two roommates instead of one.

Okay fine, the truth is that I hardly ever see Marc. Sam has a TV and a bathroom in her room, and they hardly ever come out. They just have sex. A lot. And they watch Law and Order, which for some reason seems to be on about six times a day.

What really bugs me about Sam is her why-can’t-you-cleanup-cuz-your-mess-is-really-annoying look. Like when she finds my socks on the coffee table. Or when she asks why I always leave the remnants of things in the fridge, like a milk container, a pizza box of only crusts, the pitcher of iced tea that has a rim of brown gel on the bottom but no tea. Once, she told me as she tossed my moldy half-leftover cheese sandwich in the trash can, that next time I didn’t have to save her any. No, no sarcasm there.

Here’s the thing: finishing something usually involves cleaning up or throwing something out, which probably also involves replacing an already full garbage bag with an empty one and then having to bring the filled one to the garbage chute—which all together spells too much work.

I have the same issues with filtered water. I never finish the pitcher. I hate having to fill it up.

I guess I haven’t as yet discovered the joys of closure.

Sam gets annoyed that I make everything her responsibility. Like collecting the rent, paying the bills, watering the plants, feeding the cat…I always assume she’ll take care of it because I take care of the other stuff, right? Don’t ask me to define the other stuff; right now, I’m into the intangible (Jer, Jer, Jer). Luckily, Sam always ends up doing everything, because otherwise we’d have an eviction notice, brown plants, and a dead kitty.

I’m kidding about the cat. I’d remember to feed a cat. We don’t even have a cat, I swear.

Sam opens the door. She and her attachment are each holding a bag of groceries.

“Look at you! Sexy stuff! What are you up to tonight?”

“I’m going to Orgasm.”

Marc laughs. “Lucky you.”

Sam giggles again, drops her bag of groceries, and grabs Marc around the waist. “The bar Orgasm, silly.”

“I know. I was just teasing, Sessy Bear.”

Marc calls Sam “Sessy Bear.” I don’t know why. I don’t even know what it means.

“I know, Biggy Bear.”

Sam calls Marc “Biggy Bear.” I don’t know why. I don’t want to know why.

“Who are you going with?” Sam asks.

“Nat. We’re going to get very drunk and meet men. You two wanna come?” Please say no.

“Sounds like fun,” Marc says. “But we’re going to watch ‘L and O.’”

Thank God.

Sam giggles. “Is that the new name? Like SNL and KFC?”

“It’s all about acronyms now, you know,” Marc says. “If you’re nice, Sessy Bear, maybe afterwards we’ll get an ice cream from DQ.”

“Is it normal that someone could be such a geek?” Sam asks me, playfully patting Biggy Bear on his behind.

“You’re the geek,” says her attachment.

For the second time today, I think I’m going to throw up.

After they disappear behind a thankfully closed door, I decide to prepare the instruments of our intoxication while I wait for Nat.

I take out the vodka and two shot glasses. She’ll be here any second. I might as well pour while I wait.

Yay! I’m going out tonight! Although I’ve never been to Orgasm, I’ve heard many detailed descriptions from Natalie. “It’s the place to be seen,” she once explained after I had lied about having too much work to do to go. As if I ever brought work home. They certainly aren’t paying me enough for that. Paying me enough, period.

“Anyone who’s anyone goes there,” she said. I was slightly surprised that people besides the prom queen on TV movies actually used that expression.

Whatever. Tonight I’ll be seen. If Natalie ever gets to my house, that is. Nat, where are you?

Jeremy, where are you? Long, Dutch legs come to mind.

I might as well get started and have mine. Drink, that is. Not long legs. All fantasy should be based on some degree of truth; what’s the use of yearning for something that can absolutely never happen?

Ouch. That burns. The drink, that is, not the truth (although that, too, can jolt a girl if she lets it).

Damn slut and her damn Dutch navel ring.

Now Nat’s shot is just sitting there, all alone, like the last lonely chocolate chip cookie in the box.

So I down it just as the downstairs buzzer rings. “I found something to wear,” Nat’s voice flows up through the intercom. “Come downstairs.”

See? If I hadn’t had those shots, they would have gone to waste.

3

Orgasming

“HI, HON! SHALL WE WALK?” Natalie asks, slinging her arm through mine.

“Of course we should. It’ll only take us eight minutes.”

“Which way is it?”

Silly Natalie. It’s not that I’m a walking compass or anything, but I pass the bar at least twice a day. So does Natalie. True, Boston’s not the easiest city to navigate; streets tend to inexplicably change names from Court to State, from Winter to Summer, and then disappear altogether. I’m no stranger to getting lost-induced panic attacks (I will never find my way home, I will end up in a bad neighborhood, I will get robbed and killed and no one will notice until months later when they find my decomposed body still strapped to my ten-year-old Toyota in the river—for the love of God, why don’t I have a cell phone like everyone else?), but Back Bay is pretty much a grid.

“Tonight I can have three shots,” she says.

Sobriety is not Nat’s concern. She is a self-admitted obsessive calorie counter. She carries a yellow spiral notebook with a picture of grapes on the cover, a purple felt pen, and a highlighter everywhere she goes. She writes down everything she eats. She even highlights her “boo-boos” (her word choice, not mine).

“You know,” she continues, “one shot of vodka has sixty-two calories.”

No, I don’t know. Or care. This week, anyway. One hundred and twenty-four calories down. Six zillion to go.

Today, Natalie does not in fact look fat. She looks exactly the same as she always does—very, very skinny and very, very tall. Well, not very, very tall, but tall compared to me (everyone is tall compared to me, since I measure about three inches over five feet). Natalie is probably only five foot six, but standing next to me I tend to think of Michael Jordan.

Actually, she looks more like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except that Nat has brown hair. Though she’d never admit it, according to Sam, Natalie paid a visit to Dr. Harvey Gold, one of Boston’s top nose-job specialists, as a combined high school graduation/birthday present from her parents (Nat, that is, not Buffy). The first time I was at her house in Beacon Hill, I examined every photograph, searching for a before-picture. Of the thirty-five frames prominently featured throughout the huge house, not one featured her before the age of eighteen. Suspicious?

And she dresses just like Buffy (sort of). Her Dolce and Gabbana black tube top and tight red pants must have cost more than my month’s rent. Luckily, she’s the type of person who can pull that outfit off—financially and aesthetically. As for myself, I tend to camouflage instead of highlight.

Nat volunteers at various mental-health clinics. One day she plans on doing her master’s degree in psych. One day mentally disturbed people might go to her for help. Scary. Even the remote possibility that she actually gets in to one of these programs terrifies me.

Eight minutes later, as promised, we arrive to find twenty fidgeting people lined up by the door, huddled under the metallic silhouette of a woman’s head thrown back in complete orgasmic abandon.

Natalie walks to the front. “George!” she squeals to the intimidating six-foot, very bald bouncer whose wraparound sunglasses remind me of the Terminator.

“Hey, sexy,” he says. Kiss, kiss. Kiss, kiss.

“George, I want you to meet Jackie. She’s one of my best friends.”

“Hi,” I say meekly, and into the bar we walk.