“I don’t know.” She thinks it over. “Shopping? Like, yoga maybe.”
And if a guy is into anime, she might be more into . . . “Friends reruns,” she finishes.
It is gold. With that ten-minute tossed-off tutorial Steve has taught me what my writing—and maybe even what my life—has been missing: focus. I learn so much from that one editing session. You don’t try to write the entire encyclopedia. You write the one entry that makes your heart sing. And if you’re lucky, you do the same thing with the people in your life.
Later that day, at the copy machine, I meet a girl who is fretting over some papers related to her impending divorce.
“Oh my God,” I tell her when she explains what she is doing. “I just got divorced!”
I say it like I have just found out she is my long-lost identical twin sister. Can you believe this luck? How many more of us could there be?
Then, before she has a chance to say much more, I pull out of my pocket a prayer I copied down a few weeks prior when I was staying at my great-aunt’s in Ohio, during my cross-country trip to New York.
“Here,” I say, shoving the prayer into her hands. “Take this. It really helps. I have another copy, don’t worry.”
She laughs and smiles at me.
“I’m Mackenzie,” she says, introducing herself—and I realize she is Mackenzie Dawson, whose hilarious stuff I have been reading in the paper lately. Then she looks down and reads the prayer.
Do not fear what may happen tomorrow;
The same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you today and every day.
He will either shield you from suffering or will give you unfailing strength to bear it.
Be at peace and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations.
—St. Francis de Sales
“Thank you,” Mackenzie says. “I really like this.”
“Let’s be friends,” I say.
And we are.
I HAVE ONLY been at the Post a month before I decide to get out of town.
It takes only that small amount of time for me to see precisely why and how dating in New York truly sucks. Mackenzie, Katherine, and I bond frequently over this fact.
Anyone who’s ever watched an episode of Sex and the City knows this fact already, but when you experience it yourself, it’s a whole different ball game. Single, not-entirely-awful men in New York act like chicks. They are that rare and precious commodity, seeking to be wooed and convinced and courted, and they know it.
“So it’s not just me?” I ask Katherine and Mackenzie over coffee as we sit together in the mint-green third-floor lounge. We are surrounded by both wizened old newscasters bemoaning the liberal media’s so-called War on Christmas along with young up-and-comers like Julia Allison, who shimmers and laughs, conducting a flirtatious preinterview before making rounds as an expert on Fox.
“It’s definitely not just you,” they agree.
So I say yes to the chance to celebrate the end of 2005 on a fancy vacation with Scott, who bought me a ticket to celebrate the Fiesta Bowl with him in Tempe, Arizona.
I have just one rule for myself: I am not going to drink.
“Welcome to Phoenix, New York girl.” Scott greets me with open arms when I get off the plane. I smile and kiss him.
“Thanks,” I say, down now to 139 pounds and so proud of how prepared I am to play the part of the trophy girl with the eating disorder you fly out to see a bowl game.
When we settle back into his hotel suite, one of Scott’s friends instantly offers, “Let me get you something to drink. You look thirsty!”
“No, no, I’m good right now,” I say, just as I have practiced.
I hold out a long two days in Phoenix—even at the Fiesta Bowl itself, where Scott wins one bill on the over-under—until, halfway through a boring night at dinner, I absentmindedly finger Scott’s martini glass and wonder aloud, “Maybe I should get a . . .”
Before the full sentence has even come out of my mouth, Scott signals the waiter.
“Can we get another martini over here?”
If there is one universal truth it is this: Everyone loves when a girl drinks.
A giggling drunk girl to a group of jocks and frat bros is as American as blue jeans, baseball, and apple pie. Because saying it’s as American as slurred non sequiturs, bad sex, and the morning-after pill just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
The next morning, my head pounding, Scott and his friends turn on ESPN and excitedly realize it is the national spelling bee championship.
“Every time it’s on, I watch it,” Scott says. “Every time.”
His friends all join in the fun to roast the dorky girl on-screen. She’s from some highlight reel they are playing—ticky, squirmy, uncomfortable, and unabashedly joyful in her spelling out of “E-U-O-N-Y-M.”
Everyone is rolling laughing, imitating her unselfconscious, unfiltered existence.
“Holy shit, that girl is rough.”
“Good thing she has spelling, because she is single for life.”
“E-U-O . . . what a spaz.”
I feel like I am going to be sick.
It hits me right then. I can drink a million martinis, shape-shift into another person for extended stretches of time, I can even weigh under 140 pounds—but I can never really assimilate. These are not my people.
“I’m going to go lie down for a while,” I say quietly.
Scott enters our room and sits down beside me.
“What’s going on?” he asks, placing his hand on my side.
“I just kind of wonder,” I say, tracing the seam of the comforter on the bed, “about the casual misogyny of society, you know?”
He looks at me with his big handsome brown doe eyes, a placid smile on his face and speaks with total sincerity.
“What does ‘misogyny’ mean?”
I glare at him.
“You’re kidding, right?”
He is not. Scott drops me off at the airport at the end of the trip, lends me his copy of FHM for the plane (so much for the “misogyny”
