But now, Judd and I were going to tackle the problem head-on. Action! We did our old Pemberton High handshake to seal the deal.
“And,” he said, “I think we’re going to have to do online dating. And spreadsheets. No going out with people from work either! Or blind dates. We’re going to be organized about this! We are going to rock this thing! We’ll have a system in place! We’ll report to each other! Dissect-A-Date, we’ll call it.”
Judd has never found a situation in life that couldn’t be improved by launching a planned attack, especially if it involves a spreadsheet.
Overnight, we turned into each other’s dating concierges and post-date consolers. Dissect-A-Date provides everything from fashion advice to profile consultations and postmortems. We also give tips on getting along with the opposite sex when necessary.
“Women like to feel you really see them,” I instructed him. “You have to listen without interrupting. And then ask questions. Also noticing her shoes will go a long way. And it should go without saying, no burping.”
“Okay. And I need to tell you that men don’t love it when women are extra picky about ordering food in a restaurant,” he said to me. “Only allow yourself to badger the waiter about the origins of one ingredient per date. You do not need to see the late chicken’s vision board.”
Our dating experiment did not start out well. There were lots of duds.
One night, three months in, when we were at my apartment watching Friday Night Lights and eating popcorn, I told him that maybe, instead of finding somebody and getting married, I would just write books, take a succession of lovers, and perhaps learn to do interesting things with scarves and shawls.
“It’s possible,” I said, “that the short, stunted little marriage I already had was it for me in the matrimony department.”
“Come on. That’s ridiculous. You’ll meet somebody else. You just got to put yourself out there. It’s a numbers game.”
“But here’s the problem. I don’t remember how to fall in love,” I told him. “I sit across the table from all these perfectly presentable men, and I simply can’t remember what switch gets flipped to make me care about any one of them.”
“Seriously? Listen to me,” he said at last. “This is the writer in you, isn’t it? You’re always overthinking things. The way I see it: love is a decision, not a feeling. That’s what you may be forgetting.”
“I used to be so good at it,” I told him. “Then the other day I actually found myself asking Google, ‘How do you fall in love?’”
He shook his head. “Yeah? And what wisdom did the Google have to offer?”
I shrugged. “Google said you can’t force it. That’s why it’s called falling.”
The diner is hopping. Alphonse, our favorite waiter, greets us when we come in: “Phronsiejudd! At last the night can begin!” And then he rushes over with our favorite beers—me a Blue Moon and Judd a Sam Adams.
Alphonse and Judd have to take a few minutes to discuss the Jets (as usual), which are disappointing (as usual). Alphonse, jolly, gregarious, is grinning and snapping his towel as he talks, but I’m watching Judd. There’s something weird about him tonight, the way he’s fidgeting and smiling too hard. He keeps cracking his knuckles. As soon as another party comes in—five loud, dressed-up people, all smiling—Alphonse glides away to seat them, and I turn to him.
“So what’s this great epiphany you had?” I say.
He turns to look at me, and his eyes are bright and kind of crazy. He leans forward and takes my hands. Very uncharacteristic of him, taking my hands. “Look at me. Look at my face. Do I look different to you? Because I think I might have gone two notches up on the maturity scale. I suddenly know what I want in life.”
“Wait. Did this come from being on a date you hated?”
“I think maybe it did. That horrible woman with her hair tossing propelled me into maturity.”
“And what do you want?” I release my hands from his and take a sip of my beer.
He leans even closer, and now his eyes are practically boring into mine. “I want to get married.”
I study him silently, uncomprehending.
“To you,” he says. “I want to marry you.”
I laugh. It’s so ridiculous. Ludicrous, even, this idea, sailing in from out of the blue. Trust me; there has been nothing—nothing—in the thirty-one years of our friendship that has this making any kind of sense.
“You do not want to marry me, and you know it,” I tell him firmly. “I know what this is. You’re having your annual going-home-for-Thanksgiving angst. This is a Tandy’s crisis, plain and simple. And marriage to me won’t solve it.”
He laughs. “No,” he says. “This is way bigger than Tandy’s.”
Okay. Let me stop here and tell you about Tandy’s. Tandy’s is a bar and grill in our hometown. And every year, when Judd and I go back home to Pemberton for Thanksgiving, it’s become a tradition for all our old high school friends to meet there every night, once we’ve gotten through with our family responsibilities and put our parents to bed, that is. Everybody shows up.
At first Tandy’s nights used to be all about everybody knocking back some beers and complaining about their parents. Then the diamond rings started showing up on the fingers of the Early Marriage Adopters, as Judd calls them—and after that came a sprinkling of infants. (That was fine; we could still cope.) But now that we’re all in our midthirties, not only has every other person in our high school class acquired a spouse, they now also have kids. Real kids. And not just babies anymore; they have middle-sized children. And mortgages! The dreaded minivans! Orthodontist bills!
And what do we have?
By Tandy’s standards, we have zilch. (My heartbreaker of a marriage didn’t even last long enough for me to show my husband off to the Tandy’s crowd.)
I’m not going to lie—our trip back on the train has been known to turn into a Greek tragedy—complete with some gnashing of teeth, spilling of regrets, rending of garments, you name it. Mostly by Judd, if you want to know the truth. He’s often saying he feels pathetic, which is so crazy, because Judd is doing great. Both of us are. We just don’t have any spouses and kids. We’re behind in that department.
What our classmates don’t realize is that Judd has his own gym and was written up in the New York Post for the way he gets little old ladies to bench press. He has groupies! (And so what that they’re senior citizens?)
As for me, nobody at home quite gets it that I’m working for a New York publisher, and that I got to meet Anne Tyler one time. And that I own ten black leggings and fourteen black turtlenecks, and I go to book launches and corporate cocktail parties. And that Judd and I see celebrities all the time, get takeout at three a.m., and know the ins and outs of the New York subway system, even the mystifying weekend schedule. We understand rent stabilization, for pity’s sake.
Also, I’m writing an actual novel. I’m on page 135 of it, which is decent progress, considering I work all the time and only have evenings and Saturday mornings at Starbucks to work on it.
But no—we don’t have babies and two-car garages and picket fences. And more times than I like to admit, frankly, I’m eating dinner out of a Styrofoam takeout carton, standing over the sink, having just run in from work even though it’s almost bedtime.