Frenemies(6)
“First of all,” Georgia replied, looking down at me, “I need you to breathe.”
She had a point. I took a deep breath and relaxed my spine into my chair.
“If you don’t want to go to a stupid Halloween party, then you shouldn’t go,” Georgia said. “Nobody would blame you if you wanted to hide away somewhere and lick your wounds, letting Nate, Helen, and everyone else realize exactly how much all of this is hurting you.”
“Okay, good-bye. Reverse psychology is the last thing I need right now.” I debated telling her what Nate had said about things being better this way, because he couldn’t be who I wanted him to be. But I was still mulling it over, and just waved my hand in her direction. “Go to court.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Are you wearing fake eyelashes?” The best defense was a good offense. “To the courtroom?”
“There’s no reason not to accentuate the positive.” Georgia smiled serenely, batting those fake eyelashes at me so I could better appreciate their length. “Cosmetics are just shrewd marketing.”
“You sound like your mother,” I accused her. Fighting words. Georgia winced.
“That serves me right for talking about your wounds,” she said. Then shook her head. “Do you know, the woman called me on my cell phone while I was on my way to trial to let me know that she’d had a dream. And do you know what she dreamed?”
“Grandchildren?” I guessed. With Georgia’s mother it always came down to grandchildren, one way or another.
“That I died alone and unloved, because I was too picky,” Georgia said. “This is what she says to me, five seconds before a trial. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Date a nice guy for a change?” I suggested, and laughed when Georgia just made a face. Because she and I both knew that Georgia’s fatal weakness was for hot guys with commitment issues, the younger and more feckless the better. If they were actively mean to her, well, hell! She’d fall in love.
“I can hardly stomach the dates I have,” she muttered. “I’m going to be late—I’ll see you later.”
I watched her haul open the heavy Museum door and stride back out into the cold, congratulating myself on avoiding further talk of the Halloween party. And also for being lucky enough not to have a mother who called me to ask when I was getting married, as Georgia’s did several times a day.
Georgia’s mother was Greek and had very clear ideas about the kind of man she envisioned her only child with: a Greek. Everything else was subject to interpretation but the Greek part was ironclad. Georgia wasn’t permitted the luxury of choosing, say, a big American mutt of indeterminate ethnic origin like her own father. Georgia had been enthusiastic about her destiny until the dark day she discovered George Michael’s true sexuality—having somehow believed he was heterosexual for most of the eighties.
These days Georgia’s mother had subsided into a sort of dull hysteria that she expressed via dramatic voice mails. You didn’t have to speak Greek to get the gist of them: hurry up and give me my grandchildren before I die.
My mother, happily, wasn’t prone to the my daughter is about to cross over into her thirties and is thus about to be a spinster panic. Though she didn’t necessarily get me, she never overtly interfered, which I figured was the better deal. Because Georgia’s mother was just scary.
The moment that cemented my lifelong fear of the woman came while we were still in college. We’d all been out to dinner with Georgia’s parents and were sitting in the car outside our dorm. In the throes of my collegiate self-absorption, I’d chosen to whine about how I would obviously never find love because I was twenty or some such unbelievably young age, which of course I thought was old as the hills, and blah blah blah. This, naturally, led to a withering self-analysis in which I concluded that I didn’t actually deserve love because of the width of my thighs. Georgia’s mother reached over and grabbed me high on the leg, startling me so much I actually jumped.
“You listen to me, Augusta,” she said, startling me with her invocation of the name as well as her weird, creepy voice. “You will breed strong children with these thighs.”
Needless to say, that ended the conversation. I slunk off into the dorm, embraced the post-traumatic stress along with my friends’ hysterics, and contemplated my thighs with horror ever after. Not enough, then, that they were the first part of me to register the ingestion of chocolate. Not enough that my ass, at twenty-nine, now covered more parts of my upper thighs than I had ever imagined possible when I was sixteen. No, my thighs were breeding thighs. How delightful. How enticing and sexy. Perhaps I should trot that one out on the off chance I ever dated again, which seemed unlikely unless the gentleman in question had an unusual affinity for interpretive classic rock—
“And have you noticed my thighs?” I could say brightly, between the appetizer and the musical number. “A Greek woman assures me I’ll breed strong children with them, you know. Very Oracle of Delphi, it’s true. Just FYI.”
When I got home from work that night, I was exhausted. It had been a long day of sending falsely cheerful e-mails around to my extended group of friends, as a form of damage control that of course fooled no one, all the while swearing to my inner circle that I was never leaving my small one-bedroom apartment again.