Jackie Rose - Slim Chance

“I doubt it,” Bruce said.

“You just watch—she’ll be back in the looney bin by the end of the week,” I said, then instantly regretted it. Sometimes, I can go a little too far. It’s not that I don’t mean what I say, it’s just that I know that some thoughts are better left unsaid, especially when it comes to things like people’s families or haircuts. I think I get my big mouth from Claire, my grandmother. Only she gets away with murder because she’s old, and people seem happy to confuse her brutal honesty with quaint eccentricity.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“It was a relaxation facility, not a looney bin,” Bruce said, peeved. “They didn’t strap her down or anything.” He knows I know that—he’s only told me like a thousand times—but he can’t control himself either, sometimes.

Despite my occasional overstepping of boundaries, it’s this sort of honest interchange about important things like family that convinces me that Bruce and I may actually have a chance. And in my own defense, there is an upside: There’s no point in letting the little things fester into giant, repressed issues when a bit of well-directed hostility can bring stuff out into the open right away. And so we make a point of being very open with each other about everything, although it’s not a natural thing for Bruce to be like that. He’s much more reserved when it comes to saying what’s on his mind, especially if it involves hurting someone’s feelings, but I’ve been helping him to try and get over that a little bit.

It was in this spirit of openness that I admitted to Bruce later in the conversation that the idea of marriage makes me a bit crazy.

“It does? I thought the puking and crying meant you were calm and rational about the whole thing,” he laughed.

“I’m glad you can laugh about it already,” I told him. “That’s a good sign, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, well, I hope so. But I think we’ll leave that part out when we’re telling our grandkids the story.”

“Seriously, Bruce. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Don’t worry. Have another piece of pizza. And don’t be so hard on yourself.”

I wanted to tell him that I knew that getting married was the next logical step in our relationship, and that it was definitely the right thing for us. Because we love each other and that’s what’s important. And not to worry about me—that I was ecstatic and sure and positive and all that sort of thing. But I don’t think he wanted to talk about it anymore.

But there I was the next morning, lying in bed in a full sweat, feeling an awful lot like I had the day before in the bathroom. It was almost twenty minutes before my heart stopped thumping and I had psyched myself into a “Marriage is Good” place again.

After mentally planning my nuptial dietary strategy for a good half hour—wavering back and forth between invoking the Member for Life clause in the Weight Watchers contract and developing a simple starvation plan on my own—I was firmly back in the camp of, “I’m getting married and I’m gonna look like a million bucks!” Trying not to ruin Bruce’s first attempt at sleeping in in years, I snuck out of the bedroom and into the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on. There were so many people who had no idea what had happened, and it was too cruel to keep them in the dark any longer.

First things first. I had to call Morgan—it was outrageous that I’d been engaged for almost 24 hours and she didn’t know.

In high school, Morgan Russell and I were the quintessential loser odd couple—she, tall and freckly and skinny; me, dumpy and short and dark. By the time she came back from Berkeley, though, she was a bombshell. I, on the other hand, have remained vaguely potato-shaped over the years, although my skin has cleared up some. But Morgan is the kind of person who makes you not hate beautiful people. She’s just like that—smart, bitchy, funny, but still with enough hang-ups that it just gives you faith. She’s definitely no fun to shop with, though, not just because everything looks good on her, but because she hates it. She lets salesgirls dress her, and says things like, “Just give me what that mannequin in the window is wearing, in a size four.”

“Hello?” her husky voice whispered on the other end.

“Morgan? Wake up. It’s me.”

“What time is it? Did I oversleep?”

“No, no. It’s almost eleven. I just wanted to talk to you,” I said. “What did you do last night?” I asked, not really caring.

“I’m going back to sleep,” she said, and hung up.

I called her back.

“What do you want, Evie? I didn’t get to bed till seven.”

“You’re already up, or else you wouldn’t have answered the phone.”

“Your logic astounds me,” she said. I could hear her lighting a cigarette.

“So what did you do?”

“I went out with Billy, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Did you have fun?” Billy is Morgan’s latest fling—thirty-seven years old, an architect, Ivy League, the whole deal. I get the sense that he’s a bit less uptight than her usual assortment of asshole Wall-Street types. She met him a few months ago at Lemon Bar, which to me sounds more like a dessert than a suitable place to meet men, but Morgan isn’t interested in finding Mr. Right. She gave up on that urban legend a long time ago.

“We met up with some of his college friends. Dreadful bunch. They’ve all got debating trophies stuck up their asses. It makes you wonder, you know? How a person you like can like people you hate?”

“I thought you didn’t like Billy, either,” I reminded her. Because of her bad instincts, Morgan had sworn off dating anyone she liked. After college, she had a string of bad luck with men she all thought were The One. The first guy, Tom, turned out to be gay, and was only dating her, he eventually realized, because something about her reminded him of Joan Crawford. Morgan didn’t find out her next boyfriend, Ryan, was married until after they’d been together for six months, and Matthew, the last guy, whom she was with for almost three years, was the most damaging of all of them—emotionally unavailable. After him, she decided it was best to stick with guys she was sure weren’t The One.

“I don’t like Billy. Not really, I guess. I mean, he’s okay. More fun than his friends, anyway. I think it’s because he’s from Detroit.”

“Detroit? How can being from Detroit make somebody fun?”

“He sort of has that sexy working man thing going on,” she said sulkily.

“Morgan, he’s not exactly blue-collar, he’s an architect for chrissake,” I said. “You’re talking like he wears overalls to work.”

“He actually did work at GM one summer,” she added.

“Oh, well there you go—you don’t like his personality or his friends, but he worked on an assembly line for one month and that makes him somehow more noble than the spoiled overachievers you usually date.”

“Now you get it!” she laughed. “Evie, it’s not that I don’t like him, I do—he’s just not someone I plan to get all crazy about.”

“Just because his friends aren’t your thing doesn’t mean he’s not a nice guy,” I said, trying to get back to the point. “I hate Bruce’s friends, and look at us.”

“I know, but I don’t really give a shit about Billy’s friends anyway. Come to think of it, I don’t really care if he’s a nice guy or not. If he can get me to forget about work and take me out for a few drinks and a good meal, and then not want to spend the whole night cuddling, that’s all I want. I don’t give a good goddamn about anything else right now.”

“Are we still talking about Billy?” I asked. “He’d want to cuddle with you if you had leprosy.” The guy is so bloody crazy about her that he turned down a better job in Philadelphia to wait around for her scraps of affection. And he is a nice guy, no matter how hard she tries to pretend he isn’t. I suddenly realized how much fun it would be if Morgan and I were engaged at the same time. If I could get her to see what a good idea marriage is, and if Billy didn’t scare her off too soon…