what if I was hungry? It could wait. There were genuinely important people trying to get
things done around here, people who depended on me, and I’d let them down. I dialed my
mailbox.
“Hi, Andy, it’s me.” Alex. “Where are you? I’ve never heard you not answer. Can’t wait
for dinner tonight—we’re still on, right? Anywhere you want, your pick. Call me when
you get this, I’ll be in the faculty lounge anytime after four. Love you.” I immediately felt
guilty, because I’d already decided after the whole lunch debacle that I’d rather
reschedule. My first week had been so crazy that we’d barely seen each other, and we’d
made a special plan to have dinner that night, just the two of us. But I knew I wouldn’t be
any fun if I fell asleep in my wine, and I kind of wanted a night to unwind and be alone.
I’d have to remember to call and see if we could do it the next night.
Emily was standing over me, having already checked her own voice mail. From her
relatively calm face, I guessed that Miranda had not left her any death threats. I shook my
head to indicate that I hadn’t gotten one from her yet.
“Hi, Andrea, it’s Cara.” Miranda’s nanny. “So, Miranda called here a little while ago”—
heart stoppage—“and said she’s tried the office and no one was picking up. I figured
something was going on down there, so I told her that I’d spoken to both you and Emily
just a minute before, but don’t worry about it. She wanted aWomen’s Wear Daily faxed
to her, and I had a copy right here. Already confirmed that she got it, too, so don’t stress.
Just wanted to let you know. Anyway, have a good weekend. I’ll talk to you later. ’Bye.”
Lifesaver. The girl was an absolute saint. It was hard to believe I’d only known her a
week—and not even in person, only over the phone—because I thought I was in love
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
with her. She was the opposite of Emily in every regard: calm, grounded, and entirely
fashion-oblivious. She recognized Miranda’s absurdity but didn’t begrudge her it; she had
that rare, charming quality of being able to laugh at herself and everyone else.
“Nope, not her,” I told Emily, lying sort of but not really, smiling triumphantly. “We’re
in the clear.”
“You’rein the clear, this time,” she said flatly. “Just remember that we’re in this
together, but I am in charge. You’ll cover for me if I want to go out to lunch once in a
while—I’m entitled. This will never happen again, right?”
I bit back the urge to say something nasty. “Right,” I said. “Right.”
We’d managed to finish wrapping the rest of the bottles and get them all to the
messengers by seven that night, and Emily didn’t mention the office-abandonment issue
again. I finally fell into a taxi (just this one time) at eight, and was spread-eagle, still fully
dressed, on top of my covers at ten. And I still hadn’t eaten because I couldn’t bear the
thought of going out in search of food and getting lost again, as I had the past four nights,
in my own neighborhood. I called Lily to complain on my brand-new Bang and Olufsen
phone.
“Hi! I thought you and Alex had a date tonight,” she said.
“Yeah, we did, but I’m dead. He’s fine with doing it tomorrow night, and I think I’ll just
order. Whatever. How was your day?”
“I have one word: screwed up. OK, so that was two. You’ll never imagine what
happened. Well, of course you will, it happens all the—”
“Cut to it, Lil. I’m going to pass out any minute.”
“OK. Cutest guy ever came to my reading today. Sat through the whole thing looking
absolutely fascinated, and waited for me afterward. Asked if he could take me for a drink
and hear all about the thesis I had published at Brown, which he’d already read.”
“Sounds great. What was he?” Lily went out with different guys almost every night after
getting off work, but had yet to complete her fraction. She had founded the Scale of
Fractional Love one night after listening to a few of our guy friends rate the girls they
were dating on their own invention, the Ten-Ten Scale. “She’s a six, eight, B-plus,” Jake
would declare of the advertising assistant he’d been set up with the night before. It was
assumed everyone knew that it was a ten-point scale, with face always being the first
numerical ranking, body the second, and personality coming in last with a slightly more
generalized letter grade. Since there were clearly more factors at work in judging guys,
Lily devised the Fractional Scale, which had a total of ten pieces that each earned a point.
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
The Perfect Guy would obviously have all five of the primary pieces: intelligence, sense
of humor, decent body, cute face, and any sort of job that fell under the generous
umbrella of “normal.” Since it was next to impossible to find The Perfect Guy, someone
could up their fraction by earning points on the secondary five, which included a
definitive lack of psycho ex-girlfriends, psycho parents, or date-rapist roommates, and
any sort of extracurricular interests or hobbies that weren’t sports-or porn-related. So far,
the highest anyone had received was a nine-tenths, but he had broken up with her.
“Well, at first he was going strong at seven-tenths. He was a theater major at Yaleand
he’s straight, and he could discuss Israeli politics so intelligently that he never once
suggested that we ‘just nuke ’em,’ so that was good.”
“Sure sounds good. I can’t wait for the clincher. What was it? Did he talk about his
favorite Nintendo game?”
“Worse.” She sighed.
“Is he thinner than you?”
“Worse.” She sounded defeated.
“What on earth could be worse than that?”
“He lives on Long Island—”
“Lily! So he’s geographically undesirable. That doesn’t make him undateable! You
know better than to—”
“With his parents,” she interrupted.
Oh.
“For the past four years.”
Oh, my.
“And he absolutely loves it. Says he can’t imagine wanting to live alone in such a big
city when his mom and dad are such great company.”
“Whoa! Say no more. I don’t think we’ve ever had a seven-tenths fall all the way to a
zero after the first date. Your guy set a new record. Congratulations. Your day was
officially worse than mine.” I leaned over to kick my bedroom door closed when I heard
Shanti and Kendra come home from work. I heard a guy’s voice with them and wondered
if either of my roommates had boyfriends. I’d seen them a combined total of only ten
minutes in the last week and a half, because they seemed to work longer hours than I did.
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
“That bad? How could your day be bad? You work infashion, ” she said.
There was a quiet knocking on the door.
“Hold on a sec, someone’s here. Come in!” I called to the door, much too loud for the
tiny space. I waited for one of my quiet roommates to timidly ask if I’d remembered to
call the landlord to put my name on the lease (no) or bought more paper plates (no) or
had taken down any phone messages (no), but Alex appeared.
“Hey, can I call you back? Alex just showed up.” I was thrilled to see him, so excited
that he’d surprised me, but a small part of me had been looking forward to just taking a
shower and crawling into bed.
“Sure. Tell him I say hi. And remember what a lucky girl you are for having completed
the fraction with him, Andy. He’s great. Hold on to that one.”
“Don’t I know it. The kid’s a goddamn saint.” I smiled in his direction.
“’Bye.”
“Hi!” I willed myself to first sit up, then stand up and walk over to him. “What a great
surprise!” I went to hug him but he backed away, keeping his arms behind his back.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all. I know you’ve had such a long week, and, knowing you, I figured you
hadn’t bothered to eat yet, so I brought the food to you.” He pulled a huge brown paper
bag from behind his back, one of the old-school grocery style ones, and it already had
some delicious-smelling grease stains on it. All of a sudden, I was starving.
“You did not! How’d you know that I was sitting here this very second, wondering how I
was going to motivate to find food? I was just about to give up.”
“So come here and eat!” He looked pleased and pulled open the bag, but we both
couldn’t fit on the floor of my bedroom together. I thought about eating in the living
room since there was no kitchen, but Kendra and Shanti had both collapsed in front of the
TV together, their untouched takeout salads open in front of them. I thought they were
waiting until theReal World episode they were watching was over, but then I noticed that
they’d both already fallen asleep. Sweet lives we all had.
“Hold on, I have an idea,” he said and tiptoed to the kitchen. He came back with two
oversize garbage bags and spread them out over my blue comforter. He dug into the
greasy bag and brought out two giant burgers with everything and one extra-large order
of fries. He’d remembered ketchup packets and tons of salt for me, and even the napkins.
I clapped I was so excited, although a quick visual of the imagined disappointment on
Miranda’s face appeared, one that said,You? You’re eating a burger?
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
“I’m not done yet. Here, check it out.” And out of his backpack came a fistful of tiny
vanilla tea lights, a bottle of screw-top red wine, and two waxy paper cups.
“You’re kidding,” I said softly, still not believing that he’d put all this together after I’d
canceled our date.
He handed me a cup of wine and tapped it with his. “No, I’m not. You think I was going
to miss hearing about the first week of the rest of your life? To my best girl.”
“Thank you.” I said, slowly taking a sip. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
6
“Ohmigod, is it the fashion editor herself?” Jill mock-shrieked when she opened the
front door. “Come on over here and let your big sister genuflect a li’l.”
“Fashion editor?” I snorted. “Hardly. Try fashion mishap. Welcome back to
civilization.” I hugged her for what felt like ten minutes and didn’t want to let go. It was
hard when she’d started at Stanford and left me all alone with our parents when I was a
mere nine years old, but it was even harder when she’d followed her boyfriend—now
husband—to Houston. Houston! The whole placed seemed drenched in humidity and
infested with mosquitoes to the point of unbearability, and if that wasn’t bad enough, my
sister—my sophisticated, beautiful big sister who loved neoclassical art and made your
heart melt when she recited poetry—had developed a southern accent. And not just a
slight accent with a subtle, charming southern lilt, but an all-out, unmistakable, like-a
drill-through-the-eardrum redneck drawl. I’d yet to forgive Kyle for dragging her to that
wretched place, even if he was a pretty decent brother-in-law, and it didn’t help when he
opened his mouth.
“Hey there, Andy darlin’, you’re looking more beautiful every time I see you.”Yer
lookin’ more beeyootiful avery time I see ya . “What are they feeding y’all atRunway,
huh?”
I wanted to stick a tennis ball in his mouth to keep him from talking anymore, but he
smiled at me and I walked over and hugged him. He might sound like a hick and grin a
little too openly and often, but he tried really hard and he clearly adored my sister. I
vowed to make a sincere effort not to visibly cringe when he spoke. “It’s not really what
I’d call a feeding-friendly kind of place, if you know what I mean. Whatever it is, it’s
definitely in the water and not the food. But never mind. Kyle, you look great yourself.
Keeping my sister busy in the city of misery, I hope?”
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
“Andy, just come and visit, sweetie. Bring Alex along and y’all can make it a li’l
vacation. It’s not that bad, you’ll see.” He smiled first at me and then at Jill, who smiled
back and brushed the back of her hand across his cheek. They were disgustingly in love.
“Really, Andy, it’s a culture-rich place with a whole lot to do. We both wish you’d come
visit us more often. It’s just not right that the only time we see each other is in this
house,” she said, waving expansively around our parents’ living room. “I mean, if you
can stand Avon, you can certainly stand Houston.”
“Andy, you’re here! Jay, the big New York City career girl is here, come say hi,” my
mom called as she rounded the corner coming from the kitchen. “I thought you were
going to call when you got to the train station.”
“Mrs. Myers was picking Erika up from the same train, so she just dropped me off.
When are we eating? I’m starving.”
“Now. Do you want to clean up? We can wait. You look a little ragged from the train.
You know, it’s fine if—”
“Mother!” I shot her a warning look.
“Andy! You look dynamite. Come here and give your old man a hug.” My dad, tall and
still very handsome in his midfifties, smiled from the hallway. He was holding a Scrabble
box behind his back that he only let me see by flashing it quickly by the side of his leg.
He waited until everyone looked away from him and pointed to the box and mouthed,
“I’ll kick your ass. Consider yourself warned.”
I smiled and nodded my head. Contrary to all common sense, I found myself looking
forward to the next forty-eight hours with my family more than I had in the four years
since I’d left home. Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, and this year I was set to
enjoy it more than ever.
We gathered in the dining room and dug into the massive meal that my mother had
expertly ordered, her traditional Jewish version of a night-before-Thanksgiving feast.
Bagels and lox and cream cheese and whitefish and latkes all professionally arranged on
rigid disposable serving platters, waiting to be transferred to paper plates and consumed
with plastic forks and knives. My mother smiled lovingly as her brood dug in, with a look
of pride on her face as if she’d been cooking for a week to sustain and nurture her babies.
I told them all about the new job, tried as best as I could to describe a job that I didn’t yet
fully understand myself. Briefly I wondered if it sounded ridiculous to tell them how the
