Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin [67]
"Not one boy out there?" my mom asks, as my dad searches for the ideal slice of cheese. Her eyes are wide, hopeful. The probe might seem insensitive, except she truly believes I have my choice of dozens, that the only thing keeping me from her grandchildren is my own neurosis. She doesn't understand that the simple, straightforward, reciprocated love she has for my father is not so easy to come by.
"No," I say, lowering my eyes. "I'm telling you, it's harder to find a good guy in New York than anywhere." It is the cliche of single life in Manhattan, but only because it's true.
"I can see that," my dad says, nodding earnestly. "Too many people caught up in that rat race. Maybe you should come home. At least move to Chicago. Much cleaner city. It's because Chicago has alleys, you know." Every time my dad visits New York, he harps on the lack of alleys; why would they make a city without alleys?
My mom shakes her head. "Everybody is married with babies in the suburbs. She can't do that."
"She can if she wants to," my dad says with a mouthful of cracker.
"Well, she doesn't want to," my mom says. "Do you, Rachel?"
"No," I say apologetically. "I like New York for now."
My dad frowns as if to say, well, then there is no solution.
Silence fills the kitchen. My parents exchange a doleful glance.
"Well. There is sort of someone…" I blurt out, just to cheer them up a bit.
They brighten, stand up straighter.
"Really? I knew it!" My mom claps giddily.
"Yeah, he's a very nice guy. Very smart."
"And I'm sure he's handsome too," she says.
"What does he do?" my dad interrupts. "The boy's looks are beside the point."
"He's in marketing. Finance," I say. I'm not sure if I am telling them about Marcus or Dex. "But. .
"But what?" my mom asks.
"But he just got out of a relationship, so the timing may be… imperfect."
"Nothing is ever perfect," my mom says. "It is what you make of it."
I nod earnestly, thinking that she should cross-stitch that nugget of wisdom and hang it over my twin bed upstairs.
"On a scale of one to ten, how much do you dread this baby shower?" Darcy asks me the next day as we drive to Annalise's shower in my mom's '86 Camry, the car I learned to drive in. "Ten is total, total doomsday kind of dread. One is I can't wait, this thing will be really fun."
"Six," I say.
Darcy makes an acknowledging sound and then flips open her compact to check her lipstick. "Actually," she says, "I thought it'd be higher."
"Why? How much do you dread it?"
She closes her compact, examines her two-point-three-carat ring, and says, "Mmmm… I don't know… Four and a half."
Ohhh, I get it, I think. I have more reason to dread it. I am the one going into a room full of married and pregnant women—many of whom are fellow high school classmates—without so much as a boyfriend. Only one of us is thirty and totally alone, a tragic combination in any suburb. That is what Darcy is thinking. But I make her say it, ask her why she supposes that I dread the shower by a full point and a half more.
Shamelessly and without hesitation to consider a tactful wording, she answers me. "Be-cause. You're single."
I keep my eyes on the road, but can feel her stare.
"Are you mad? Did I say something wrong?"
I shake my head, turn on the radio. Lionel Richie is wailing away on one of my mother's preselected radio stations.
Darcy turns the volume down. "I didn't mean that that was a bad thing. I mean, you know that I totally value being single. I never wanted to marry before thirty-three. I mean, I'm talking about them. They are so narrow, you know what I mean?"
She has just made it worse by telling me that she didn't even want this whole crazy engagement. She would have preferred another three-plus years of bachelorettehood. And lo and behold, it all just fell in her lap. What's a girl to do?
"They're so narrow that they don't even know they're narrow," she continues.
Of course she is right about this. This group of girls, of which Annalise has been