The Friend Issue

Last week when Katy and I were on the phone, she got a little angry, a little worked up. I’d just told her about Ex-Keith, about how we’d seen him, The Cougar, and their baby at the fireworks, that Amy and I had walked over to hang out with them for a few minutes.

“I’m sorry,” Katy said, “but that’s just weird.”

“What’s weird?” I asked.

“You. Him. Being friends. It’s unnatural.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this, and it’s not the last time I’ll hear it. Some people get fired up when they hear that I am friends with some (most) of my ex-boyfriends. It’s usually girls who have this kind of reaction to the situation. I think they put themselves in The Cougar’s position and think, If I were her, I’d be really pissed that he still spoke to his ex-girlfriend.

And while The Cougar might have gotten bent out of shape by another of Keith’s ex-girlfriends—mainly because Keith had forgotten to change the ring tone he’d given her from “Let’s Get Drunk and Screw,” and when she called one day The Cougar was horrified to hear Jimmy Buffet howling about drunk sex—but I don’t have a special ring tone.

When I call, I just show up normally, no special designation, just this he met when he was twenty-one years-old. Keith is going to be thirty-two next month. We’ve known each other a long time, and while we sometimes have our issues, we are actually pretty good for one another. We’d be even better if we actually listened to the advice we dispense for each other—Keith told me to run, run, RUN away from the Wily Republican; I told him The Big Head had bad eyebrows and an evil soul—but even if we end up saying, “Jesus, why didn’t I BELIEVE YOU?” at least we aren’t surprised by what’s happened because we are uniquely in-tune with what type of person the other person should be with. Because a lot of people don’t stay friends with their exes, I think this is something they don’t know: it’s awfully nice to be friends with someone who knows what kind of person you are in a romantic relationship. They know what you’re good at, what you’re rotten at. Your friends can guess what you’re like in a relationship because they’ve known you for years, but it’s not the same as actually knowing how you communicate in the moment, in the situation, when it’s just you and the other person.

I was ready to tell Katy all this last week, but I didn’t get that far.

“We’re friends,” I said. “That’s all. There’s nothing romantic or sleazy about it. We don’t call each other late at night and breathe into the phone and dirty talk each other. We’re just friends.”

“WHY DOES A PERSON NEED THAT MANY FRIENDS?!” she said. “You don’t need to add him to the mix!”

Later that night I was flipping through the channels and thinking about how worked up Katy had gotten over Keith when I found an episode of Sex and the City and got sucked in. The girls were at brunch, and they were discussing Miranda’s recent interaction with her ex. She’d seen him on the street and, instead of stopping to say hi like an adult, she grabbed Carrie and tore off in the other direction, knocking over flowers and pushing aside old women who were tottering toward the corner store. At brunch the next morning, Carrie wanted to know just exactly what happens to people when they break up. Suddenly two people who were as intimate as can be couldn’t even stand to speak to each other for one single minute. “When you break up,” she said, “where does the love go?”

I guess I’ve still got it, but it’s in a different form. I don’t look at Keith and wistfully think, There’s the one that got away. I don’t sigh and wish he was sleeping next to me at night. I just look at him and think, God, that guy is such an ass. The way I feel when I look at Keith is remarkably similar to the way I feel when I look at my brother, who, just this week, revealed that he and his girlfriend have grand dreams of someday getting a small apartment in their dream city, the place they love more than anything, their heaven on earth: Erie, Pennsylvania. When I am around my brother, my brain is always close to leaking out my ear because he’s just so odd. And in my mind, Keith and Adam are similar asinine but lovable boys who will be tangled up in my life forever.

But some people have trouble understanding that the romantic, sexual side of the relationship is so gone. Last night Josh, who was taking shots of the extra sauce that came with his plate of wings, leaned over and narrowed his eyes at me, like he was suspicious of me. I’d been telling him about the day before, when the girls and I had been at the Italian Fest, and I mentioned that we’d run into Keith and The Cougar and The Baby.

“Keith, huh?” he said. “Tell me the truth. Do you sometimes kind of still want to bone him?”

“No!” I said.

“Not even a little bit?” he asked. “Not even a little uh-uh-uh?” He rolled his eyes up in his head and made a few filthy noises.

“Gross!” I said.

This will sound odd, but I know the exact moment I stopped thinking about Keith in that way. It was the summer before I moved to Minnesota for grad school, and we’d been wearing ourselves out for the last two years trying to make it work again. One night I was over at his house and we were sitting out in the driveway, and we were kissing, and it was doing nothing for me. I kept kissing him back, but I was thinking, I don’t want to do this anymore. This will be the last time I kiss Keith. And it was.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this—exes as friends—lately not only because I occasionally get badgered about it, but also because I am so angry at the Boy From Work. We gave up trying to get back together last month after he called one day to tell me—surprise!—he decided he didn’t ever want to move away from Buffalo and that—super surprise!—he’d spent the weekend making out with some girl he knew from work.

I’m not angry-angry about the girl—we were trying to get it back together, sure, but technically he was single and could do whatever he wanted to do—but I am angry about his sudden resistance to moving. It was one of the reasons we broke up last fall. He kept promising that eventually he’d come out, that he’d move to Maine and get a job so we could have something other than a long distance relationship, but then he told me no, he didn’t want to, he couldn’t, he wasn’t sure if he ever would be able to. But this winter he told me he was over all that. He told me he had plans, a timetable. He was ready. But then all of that changed again and he was kissing new girls.

Last week I saw him for the first time since he had revealed all of this to me. We were at the same restaurant—I was with Josh and his girlfriend; the BFW was with his own friends—and when it was time for me to go, the BFW walked me out to my car.

“This is hard,” he said to me. We were both standing next to my car. I couldn’t figure out where to put my hands or how to stand without looking like an idiot. “I still have feelings for you,” he said.

“Well, you should probably get over that,” I said. “You have a new girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he said.

“Well, she will be.”

“Maybe.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “What did the two you do this weekend?” I asked.

He looked down at the gravel. “She spent the weekend and camped out with me.”

This week the BFW wanted to have lunch with me, and originally I’d said I would go but as the day came closer I realized I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I’m not ready to be friends with him because I feel a little betrayed, a little unable to hear him say he’s sorry, he still has feelings for me, he’s just so sorry. And I don’t know how this one is going to work out—will I be able to be friends with him like I’m friends with Keith?—but right now I can’t imagine it, can’t see how it’s all going to end up, and right now I’m trying to figure out where the love went because I am so angry it’s hard to remember when I wasn’t mad at him.

I'm Moving to Owl's Head. Don't Try to Stop Me.

God, I love Maine. I mean, I really love Maine. And this past week only enhanced my love for the state. The Boy From Work was here for a spring vacation, and we used our day to go up and down the coast, seeing and eating the best things along the way. We ate lobster in Cape Elizabeth and fried clams in Freeport. We ate chowder in Rockland and Boothbay Harbor. We saw three lighthouses and explored some of the sweetest, quaintest towns in the whole state.

But none were as sweet and as quaint as Owl's Head. It's a tiny town near Rockland, and one I probably would've never realized I needed to go to if it wasn't for the Food Network's 50 States, 50 Burgers project that named the best burger in each state. Maine's burger--the 7 Napkin Burger--sounded fabulous. Juicy. Drippy. Cheesy. Everything good in the world. And the fact that you could get those burgers to go and take them down the road to tiny Owl's Head Lighthouse for a picnic sounded even better.

And the BFW, who is always ready to go on a trip just to eat something delicious, was up for it. So we headed off for a day trip to Owl's Head and Rockland. We were going to eat lunch in Owl's Head, tour the lighthouse, then head back to Rockland for a trip out to the breakwater lighthouse and shopping in the sweet galleries and stores that line Main Street.

The 7 Napkin Burger is the brainchild of the owners of the Owl's Head General store--a place where you can get homemade burgers and chowders, cookies and whoopie pies. In the warm summer months, there are ice cream novelties to be scooped up. And if you just ran out of ketchup or toilet paper and don't want to travel back to Rockland to grocery shop, you can pop into the General Store for the necessities, which are arranged in the back of the shop, right behind the small eating area.

And that eating area was the cutest thing I'd ever seen. Big and small tables were covered with patterned vinyl table cloths and stocked with plenty of napkins--which you definitely need when eating the burgers. There were a few friends gathered at two of the tables next to ours, and it was clear that this was routine. This was what they did. They came to the store every day for coffee and a snack or a full lunch. When someone came through the door, they were greeted by name. The girls behind the grill--two nineteen year-olds in gym shorts--knew what to serve up for them. They settled in at their table to talk about the weather, to local school, their neighbors. It was so friendly and charming it made me want to lock my legs around my chair and stay there forever, even through the coldest months, when the town's residents would no doubt come through the door stomping off boots and rubbing feeling back into their hands before settling into their chairs for hot chocolate and a slice of crumb cake. I wanted to be one of those regulars worse than anything. Especially after the girls delivered our burgers, which oozed with ketchup and mustard and pickles and cheese. If someone had come into the store at that moment and announced they had a charming apartment for rent--one with a seaside view--I would've been on the phone with the movers, telling them to go on over to my apartment and pack everything up and move it on up the coast.

Of course, Owl's Head wasn't the only amazing place we visited while the BFW was in state. Here are some of the highlights:

This picture was taken at Owl's Head light, which is right up the stairs behind us. As you can see, it was a windy, windy day. When you are planning on going anywhere near the ocean, you have to dress expecting it to be substantially colder than it is inland, especially in the spring. The wind comes in off the Atlantic and rips right through you. We chose a ridiculous day to tour lighthouses--especially one that is a mile into the ocean. Yeah, that's right. We traipsed along the Rockland Breakwater Light in those winds and almost had our ears torn off.

When preparing for a visit to Maine, it's best to fast for a week before your arrival. After all, you're going to eat a lot of seafood. A lot. Here's Ross with one of the chowders we ate over the week. It was good, but it wasn't nearly as good as the best chowder I ever had, which was served up at a tiny cafe in Damariscotta.

This shot was taken at Southport, which is a small island in the waters outside Boothbay Harbor. There is a tiny beach on the island, and we took off our shoes and walked across it, pausing to examine the millions of shells that were scattered across it. The BFW was very impressed with the purple mussel shells. (I'm pretty impressed with them, too. The insides are pearlescent and beautiful. I've got a bunch of them on my desk at school.) In fact, the BFW was so impressed that he took a closed one away from the beach with us. He wanted to see what it would look like it it opened. We both got a littl squirmy about that, though, when the mussel, which cracked open a bit while we were strolling through Boothbay, sucked back shut when the BFW tried to open it further to investigate. We left that thing in the parking lot. I didn't want anything oozing out of its shell on my car floor.

This right here is me in my moment of glory. On our way from Boothbay Harbor to Damariscotta, where we were going to eat dinner at the place with the best crab cakes in the world, the BFW and I made a pitstop to play mini-golf. I got a hole-in-one on a really hard hole. Because I am awesome.

If you look in the background, you can see Hendrick's Head Light, which is in Southport. The gray areas in the photo? All shells. Beautiful, tiny little spiral shells I scooped into my hand and brought back with me. (Mine didn't have anything ooze-y living in them.)

I could write poetry about The Lobster Shack in Cape Elizabeth. The poem would start by describing the beauty of the shack's location--on a granite cliff just above the waves of the Atlantic--and then move into the beauty of the shack's food, where lobster rules the menu. The Lobster Shack's lobster roll is my favorite in the state. But that's not the only thing that's good there. Clams, crab, mussels, whoopie pies--all delicious. But their strawberry-rhubarb pie? It's perfection.

Vacation!

Vacationland is going on vacation for a little bit. The Boy From Work, who is continuing his process of woo, is coming into town to spend a week running up and down the coast with me. While I'm gone, here are some slideshows to keep you busy. These are all the places we're planning on being in the next few days.

Ogunquit:




Portland, specifically the Old Port:




Cape Elizabeth, for the first lobster roll of the season:




Popham Beach:




Owl's Head:




See you soon! I'm off to eat my weight in lobster and crab!

Music for Bachelors

When I was home for spring break, I had a little slice of time to spare before I jetted off to Miami. In that little slice of time, the Boy From Work decided to steal me away for a day and take me on an adventure. He drove me around tiny no-name towns and we stopped at sweet, small antique stores, places he passes every day on his way to work. He was--is--trying to woo me, and he knows that opening the door to a store stocked with musty old doilies and crooked furniture is the surest way to my heart. I love antiquing. I love rooting around in piles of other people's things, wondering what kinds of lives the items had before they came here, to some store in the middle of nowhere. The potential to find really bizarre or wonderful things is remarkable.

And during those stops I did find some wonderful things, but none as wonderful as the record I found tucked into the back of a milk crate in some forgotten corner of a store in Franklinville, the town we used to ride to in the back of my best friend's sister's car, on the way to the teen dance club where we would raise our arms when the smoke machine hissed out its maple syrup-smelling mist, where we would cram into the corner booths and curl into the boys we loved, who were boys we had absolutely no business loving.

So I was nostalgic as we drove past that little teen dance club, which still sat next to the town skating rink, but nostalgia would soon be replaced by an overwhelming sense of awesome! as I pulled that record out of the milk crate. On its front there was a sassy lady sporting big hair and a thin robe. She was on the phone. She was looking over her shoulder. Her gaze said, Hiya, Big Boy. The record was titled Music for Bachelors.

I squealed and clutched it to my chest. It was mine, mine, mine. I wanted to hang it up in my office. I thought if ever I was having a bad time of things, if ever I couldn't turn a pretty phrase to save my life, all I would have to do is look up at that framed record and think of bachelors from the 1960s picking through racks at the record store before settling on this particular selection, which they would take home and play while patting cologne on their cheeks, while mixing martinis, while walking a date out to the terrace to see the stars. It was all very Down with Love. And that would make me feel better.

So I bought the record for a dollar, and then I proceeded to leave it in the back of the BFW's car.

Today, though, the BFW called me up and said, "Check your e-mail, okay?" and I did. And in that e-mail I found that he, too, had been transfixed by the album's cover, that he hadn't been able to squelch the urge to whip out the Music for Bachelors and get cozy with its rhythms and patron saint, the thin nightgowned woman. He produced a lovely little photo essay to prove to me that my record was in good hands, that Music for Bachelors wasn't going to waste. It was safe, and it will stay safe until I frame it and put it on my office wall.

It's like she's got tractor beam eyes. The BFW can't get away. And how could he? That girl's got tractor beam eyes. It's enough to make anyone want to listen to The Girl from Ipanema, which is--of course, of course!--the first song on the record.

Infinitely Better Than the Gun Raffle

Over last Thanksgiving break, the Boy From Work dragged me to a gun and meat raffle. Of course, dragged is a bit of an exaggeration. I'd heard him talking about gun raffles for months, and I was curious. I knew enough about meat raffles--Ex-Keith's mother haunted meat raffles like nobody's business and often came home loaded down with turkeys and hams bound for the freezer--but I didn't have any experience with gun raffles.

The way I pictured it, there was a fire hall filled to the brim with antsy rednecks who were jostling each other to get a better look at the stage. And on that stage stood the event host, holding rifles and pistols up under the lights before calling out the winner's name. Everyone waited with bated breath for their name to be called, and if it was, the winners would let out a mighty woop! before descending on the stage to claim their prize, fill out paperwork, and tote it home.

To me, that sounded at least mildly interesting. Plus, I was told there was a whole bunch of food at gun raffles, and, as we all know, I am a fan of food. So I let the BFW pick me up a ticket and drive me to the small-town fire hall. When we got there, I was filled with a sudden panic. The parking lot was frighteningly crammed, and a line of broad-shouldered men trudged toward the door, cases of beer crooked from their fingers.

"You can bring your own beer?" I asked.

The BFW looked at me like I was crazy. "Well, yeah," he said.

"To a raffle where guns are being distributed? You can just waltz in with booze?"

He nodded, grabbed my mittened hand, and tugged me toward the door. When we pushed through those doors, it was a surreal experience. First of all, there was no stage. There was no discernible front of the room, no hub, no center of the action. Instead, there was a giant hall filled with collapsible tables and chairs. Almost all the tables were full. Some people--the unlucky ones, the ones who had come late and hadn't had friends save them spots--were wandering through the aisles, pitifully looking for a place to sit.

People had coolers cracked open next to them, showcasing beers of all varieties. Men wearing confederate flag T-shirts were playing poker and slowly erecting giant pyramids of beer cans. Women with teased hair and big bangs were shouting at kids or rubbing beer bottles against their lips or shrieking at their friends.

Near the back of the room, volunteers from the fire department were setting up a buffet line filled with sliced deli meats, bratwurst, macaroni salad, Limburger cheese, baked beans, pickles, sauerkraut, and condiments.

There was no display of the guns that were being raffled off. There was no auctioneer calling out their names, statistics, or finer qualities. There was only a pair of tables covered with thick tablecloth, and those were the tables that housed the meat. Steaks, turkeys, hams, thick-sliced bacon, and roasters were spread out for display and scrutiny.

As can be expected, I did not exactly "fit in" at the gun raffle. It wasn't anything like I'd hoped. It was less like an auction and more like a social event, like an indoor picnic, like some giant family reunion--except less cooler than any reunion my family might have had; at those, there is at least a dessert cook-off. Here, instead of the tables filled with Best Chocolate Cookie or Best Brownie or Best Pie submissions, there were only tables of bloody meat. And no guns. Zero guns, which is exactly what I thought we were gathered to celebrate.

Today, though, I got to attend an auction--my first--and that was a much more satisfying experience. It was sort of what I was hoping the gun raffle would turn out to be. And at this auction, actual guns were lofted into the air for the general public to ogle before they flashed their bid cards into the air for a chance to make them theirs.

Before today, I had approximately zero experience with auctions, aside from what I've seen on television. The word auction made me think of the following things: artwork, mothball-smelling old ladies, and fast-talking men. When one of my colleagues suggested we go auctioning this weekend, I conjured up the stereotypical scene in my head--shouting! paddles in the air! fabulous items being carted to and from the stage!--and I thought, Yes. We SHOULD go auctioning this weekend. After all, I wanted to see how right I'd been in my head.

And, well, I was sort of right. There were an awful lot of mothball-smelling old ladies who sat in the front row--reserved seats--and bid on the lots of costume jewelry, rosaries, and plant stands. There was a fast-talking man who went straight through 600 lots without taking a break. And there was artwork, although it was less "fabulous" and more "icky" and "musty." Of course, that's not to say there weren't some deals. One of the people I went with picked up a great vintage photograph of a man bending over a book and looking very scholarly. "This," she said, "is going into my TV room." She'd floated her bid card into the air and--poof!--it was hers, and they marched it right over to her. The instant gratification was intoxifying.

Still, this was no New York City auction, where mink coats and grandmother's pearls and famous paintings were wheeled onto the stage. This was an auction where there were at least ten different lots of antique planers, chipped china, and moldy boat building manuals. But it was fantastic. It was exactly the experience I wanted in return for waking up at 6:30 AM on a Sunday so that we could drive to the sweet coastal town where the auction house sat flanked by two bear statues wearing Santa hats.

I wanted the smell of old wood and antique silver. I wanted the shouting. I wanted the bustle. I wanted the food table with its big vats of chowder, its buckets of oyster crackers. I wanted to throw my bid card into the air for a mahogany "pie crust" table (what would I use it for?) and a lot of small glass pitchers (why would I need that many?) and a lot of rose-printed teacups (how quickly do I want to become my grandmother?). And then I wanted to go eat lunch with a man who bought a lot of comic books in hopes that he could sell them on eBay and a woman who buckled her vintage photograph into the backseat of her car so it didn't get jostled on the way home. And then I wanted to go and stand on the marshy winter edges of my co-worker's home town--Southport, Maine (which looks like this in summer, but trust me when I tell you it's just as spectacular in newly fallen snow)--and I wanted to wish for the hundredth time that I could live on the water, so close to everything good in the world: beach, ocean, seafood, and a place where I could get a six piece wicker patio set for $25. (No lie.)

One Tragedy Away From a Country Song

Today I found out that all my landlord's properties--including the old and beautiful house that contains my giant apartment, which is filled with charming nooks and crannies, built-in bookcases and china cabinets, and tall, tall windows--are being foreclosed upon. The bank is going to regain ownership on the properties in a very short amount of time, which means I am on the verge of being homeless.

I cried when I heard this. I had a breakdown. I had to restrain myself when the landlord called to tell me the news. After all, I'm sure he's not going to feel any better about the situation if one of his tenants dissolves into a weepy mess on the telephone. He's the one, after all, who's losing everything.

Of course, I've lost things, too. This has not been a good week for me. The Boy From Work and I have broken up. It was my doing, but I didn't want to do it. Some things, I guess, just have to happen. Things between us had been difficult ever since I came back from Buffalo at the beginning of August. Maybe it's that the long distance finally took its toll, maybe it's the age gap--there are five years between us--that finally proved problematic, maybe it's just that we're at two very different periods in our lives. Maybe it's all of those things at once. But we just weren't in sync the way we'd been before. I got sad. I cried a lot. The BFW had trouble understanding why.

Why. Why? I think because of this: he wants to move out here, he's not going to move out here; he wants to go to culinary school, he doesn't want to go to culinary school; he's absolutely going to be there for my birthday, he's not going to be there for my birthday; he's going to go into the military; he's not sure if he's going to go into the military. All of a sudden our world was floating on all these nebulous I don't knows.

I felt like maybe I was holding him back. Maybe I confounded the problem by taking up so much of his time, by being a cumbersome piece to the puzzle of his life and career. There was just suddenly so much disappointment, so much indecision. I felt like the best thing I could do was step back and let him find his own way, without having to worry about me.

I realize I'm one of the lucky minority. I've always known what I wanted to do and be. I've never had that oh Jesus oh God oh holy shit what am I going to do with my life kind of moment, but I'm not silly enough to think everyone has had it that easy. And what I understand most of all is that I would hate to be the reason that the BFW did not get to go out and do what he really felt like he wanted to do. So if he has one less variable to think about, maybe it will be just a little bit easier to do the right thing.

And I needed to do the right thing by me, too. All the crying, all the waking up disappointed because we hadn't managed to find time to talk to each other again--it was making me crazy.

I'm not saying I wake up feeling any better these days--in fact, this morning I almost did not get out of bed to go to my dentist appointment because I felt that awful about everything--but I am hoping that this separation will prove to be the best thing for both of us.

And until I can see how this is all going to shake out, I guess what I have is the memory of the BFW in my favorite times--last Christmas break, for example, when he would come over to my house after a long night of work, and when he would step through the door into the living room that was tropically warm thanks to the wood stove, the BFW would bring with him the chill of the western New York winter, and he would press his cold face against my neck, and I would be so warm and so different from him that I would shriek and pretend to squirm away, but, really, that was one of my favorite things in the world: to have a boy step out of the cold and into my warm arms.

1.

Today is what the Boy From Work and I are calling our anniversary. As of today, I will have dated this boy for one whole year:

There's no real way for me to know exactly what day we--okay, I--finally admitted that what we were doing was dating, but I do know I have a diary entry from July 10th that says:

We were in the back kitchen with Erica. She was forming hamburger patties. BFW had his arm around my waist.

Erica said, "So, what's the deal with you two anyway? Are you officially dating?"

And we looked at each other. I'm sure he was quiet because he wanted to know what I would say. After all, I've been the one saying we're going with the flow, we're taking it easy, we're going to see how things shake out. But I figured it would be silly to say no when, really, that's exactly what we're doing.

"Yes," I said.

"Yes," he said.

And then Erica awwwwed.

Later, when we were laying on my bed and half-sleeping, I said, "Am I your girlfriiiiend?"

And he said, "Yes. Am I your boyfriend?"

And I said, "Yes."

I think it happened on a Sunday night. We would've worked together that night, with that cook. And it makes sense that I didn't write about it for a few days because that's how my life worked back then. I could never seem to capture things in the moment. Everything was moving so fast. We would work, we would come home from work, we would kiss until four or five AM, he would go, I would sleep, I would wake up and shower, I would go to work, he would go to work, and the whole thing started all over again.

It was the best way to start things with the best possible boy. A boy who--just this week--had asked me to set the alarm an entire hour early a few days in a row, and when that alarm rang each day, I would reach over and turn it off and wait for him to get out of bed and trudge off to the bathroom to start his day. He never got up. He let me turn the alarm off, and then he tangled me back up in his limbs. After a few days of that--of the useless alarm--I said, "How come you ask me to set the alarm but you never get up when it goes off?"

The Boy From Work burrowed into my neck and said, "Because that's cuddle time. I think it's important to have."

The boy was waking up an hour early every morning just so he could be fully conscious, fully aware as he held me tight. If that's not reason enough to sign up for a billion more years, I don't know what is.

Finally, Finally, Finally

About a million years ago, when I was dating Keith, I wanted nothing more than to get him up to Canada, to the places where my family and I have been going for years and years and years. I told Keith these spots--Port Dover and Long Point, both in nestled on the Ontario side of Lake Erie--were stunning, relaxing, fun. I told him there was good food, plenty of beer, and all the ice cream a person could crave. I said, "Let's go. Seriously, let's just go." But he would never go. No matter what, he always found a way to stay home while the rest of us packed up and took off for the bay.

This always made me sad. We argued about it, and I cried over it. He told me he had no real interest in going. He said there was nothing there that caught his interest. I tried to tell him just how wrong he was--how there's something in those places that catches everyone's interest--but he just shook his head and continued to tell me no way, no how. All I wanted to do was share that place with him, but he was having none of it.

Years later, when Keith had moved on to his relationship with the very sour, very bitchy Big Head, he started going up to Long Point because--surprise, surprise!--his stepmother had property up there and finally talked him into going. And--again, surprise, surprise!--he loved it. He couldn't say enough about it. He loved the little cottage on the beach. He loved the beach. He loved drinking on the beach. He looked forward to long weekends up on the curve of the lake, and when he told me this, I could've reached through the phone and strangled him with my bare hands.

Still, there's no reason for me to be bitter about that anymore. After all, I've now successfully sweet-talked a boy into going, even if we could only make it a day trip. A few days ago, the Boy From Work and I packed a beach bag and headed off to eat hot dogs at the Arbor, buttery perch at Knechtel's; to dash into the ice cold water of Lake Erie, to scuff through the groomed sand at Port Dover. We wandered and relaxed. We watched windsurfers throw their kites into the air and cut across the waves out into deep water. We read. We sampled Ontario-grown peanuts. We bought a stockpile of Crush Cream Soda, so I'll have a little Canadian flavor to take back to Maine. We watched boats come in and out. We watched old men fishing off the Port Dover pier. We watched fog hang low over the point.

It was the best day, and I'm glad the BFW was the boy I finally got up there. I'm glad it was him snuggled up next to me on the beach. I'm glad it was him holding my hand as we stood underneath the lighthouse and looked out into the dusk and all its pinks and oranges reflecting in the water below. It couldn't have been any more perfect.

This Is What My Life Would've Been Like If I Hadn't Gone to College

Yesterday morning I got up early and packed my car and drove to Buffalo a day earlier than I'd originally planned. I wanted to surprise the Boy From Work, who was working until nine o'clock. When I got into town, I drove up to the restaurant, circled the lot once, and sent him a message.

Would you do me a favor? the message said.

Usually the BFW is bored at work during his long Sunday shift--and the lot, which was mostly empty--seemed to support my idea that he'd be bored at that very moment and be able to text me back and say, What?

And then I was going to say, Come outside and give me a kiss.

So I waited and waited and waited, and the BFW did not respond. So I shut my car off, fixed my makeup, and went into the restaurant. The bar was empty, except for two snarly-looking guys who were drinking beer and trading stories about girls. I sat at the other end of the bar and waited for the bartender to come back from wherever she was. When she came in a few seconds later, she smiled, asked me what I wanted to drink, asked me how I was. Then, as she was pouring me a potent vodka-cran, she said, "Do you want me to get the BFW for you?"

"Sure," I said, "but this is a surprise. He doesn't know I drove in. I was supposed to come tomorrow."

"Oh," she said, raising her eyebrows, looking impressed. "Well, in that case, let me just go back there and tell him there's someone at the bar who really needs to talk to him."

"Sounds great," I said, and a few seconds later, a sweaty and shorn BFW--who just recently cut off all his hair--was standing in front of me, not looking all that surprised.

"I knew you were coming!" he said. "I just knew it!"

All I wanted to do was pet the boy's head. He looked so cute. And I would've rubbed his buzzed head all night if he let me, but he had to get back into the kitchen and get some things done before he was able to get out of there for the night, so he snuggled me close to his drenched, french-fry smelling body, introduced me to the two guys at the bar, and left me to my own devices.

So it was just me, the bartender, and the snarly guys. Before he'd left, the BFW had instructed me that if one of the guys gave me any trouble, all I needed to do was kick him in the balls.

Now one of them was slanting a smile my way. "I like to cause trouble," he informed me. "If you think you want to cause any trouble, you just come sit down here at this end with me."

"I'll consider it," I said. I drained my vodka-cran. Down at that end of the bar was my favorite thing in the world: the bar-top console that had Naked Lady Picture Find on it. "I do love the erotic photo hunt," I said.

"It's broken," the guy said. He gestured to the game, which was unplugged from the wall. "We don't know what's wrong with it."

"Sad," I said. "That's the one thing in the world that I'm good at."

And suddenly the guy lifted up from his seat and came down to my end, his beer caught between two fingers. "I think I'm going to sit down here and cause trouble with you," he said.

"Okay," I said.

For a while, we discussed women. We talked about how they're trouble, rotten, just plain no good. We talked about how sometimes they can redeem themselves--if they come home from the bar and do what they are asked and then, in the morning, disappear.

"I just had a girl," the guy told me, "who left a note that said she had a real good time, and that if I wanted to have more good sex with no strings attached, I should give her a call."

"Wow," I said. "Now there's a hell of a girl."

"Yeah," he said. "Now there's a hell of a girl."

This kind of talk required backup, so I called the only person I knew who would delight in sitting at the bar and listening to stories about the local skanks: I texted my favorite waitress--let's call her Bianca--and told her to get her ass down to the bar immediately.

Her message back said, Okay, but I'm broke.

I told her she and I could share a giant plate of loaded fries--which the BFW would dot with melted bleu cheese before bringing them out to us--and whatever else she wanted.

She was there in five minutes. Before she arrived, I'd informed my new friend that we were about to be joined by someone more uniquely suited for this kind of talk. "You'll like her," I said. "She's young and blond and dirty."

"She sounds like my type of girl," the guy said, and of course she was. When she sat on the stool next to me, it was suddenly a whirl of stories of the type that would delight any guy who enjoyed drunk girls--and this guy really, really, really enjoyed drunk girls.

"You know," Bianca said, "I got rocks in my underwear once. How about that?"

"How did you get rocks in your underwear?" he asked.

She'd gotten rocks in her underwear after a night of binge drinking in the town where I went to college. She'd let strange boys buy her shot after shot after shot and then she let her friends pile her back into a car. When they were on their way to somewhere else, Bianca realized she had to pee. Badly. And right that second. Her friends let her out of the car and she--instead of waiting until they got her to the bathroom--pulled down her pants, sat down on the road like it was a toilet seat, and went. The next morning she woke up with pebbles pressed into her butt, scattered in her panties.

"And there's this," she said, flipping open her phone and showing us a picture of her squatting over a sink. "My friend was on the toilet, and I couldn't wait anymore," she said.

The snarly guy loved her. If she hadn't been four years older than his oldest son, I'm sure he might've tried to take her back to his place. But before proclamations of love could be made, Bianca got a message from her best friend, who was at the town park--specifically the hockey rink--and Bianca's boyfriend, whom she'd been fighting with all day--was there, too. He was playing hockey. This was news to Bianca. Earlier that day, they'd gotten in a fight because she'd left her house without informing him of where she was going and what she was doing, so she found it interesting that now he was off doing something he hadn't informed her about.

"Oh, that's it," she said. "He's so fucking dead. I'm going to go down there and tell him he's so fucking dead." She looked at me. "Let's go. Want to ride with me?"

I did. After all, it sounded interesting. It sounded like an intriguing way to kill an hour while I waited for the BFW to get off of work. And so we said goodbye to the snarly guy and told the BFW we'd be right back, that we had to go take care of something, and we were off.

On the way there, Bianca rolled down the window and smoked a cigarette, frowning every time she put it to her mouth. It was a warm night, so people were roaming across the town. There were girls wearing too-short shorts, guys with long hair and goth clothes. Bianca knew them all. She told me who was whose boyfriend or girlfriend, who was a bitch or a slut or a fucking idiot. She told me which ones she was related to, which ones she used to date. When we passed a cop, she said, "Oh, that's the one who's friends with my ex. He likes to follow me around town and try to intimidate me." She flicked her cigarette. "He's pretty hot. I'd fuck him."

When we got to the park, there was a bunch of boys playing basketball on one of the courts. Bianca's cousin was among them. "Hey," she yelled. "Don't let the hood rats get in my car, okay?" Then she turned to me and lowered her voice. "See the one in the teal?"

"Yeah," I said. "He's cute."

"I used to date him," she said. "He's really bad in bed."

By then we were stalking toward the hockey rink. We could see her boyfriend, who was sprinting from one end to the other, yelling things like, Hey! Fuck! Hey! Hey! Hey! Over here! Come on! FUCK!

"Does he see me?" she asked. "Oh, he sees me. He totally sees me. He's dead. Look! He knows he's fucking dead!"

"What exactly are we going to do?" I asked. It seemed unlikely that he was going to pause the game so he could come over and work things out with Bianca.

"We're going to stare at him," she said. She crossed her arms and stared.

I stared, too. I tried to look tough. Pissed.

She flipped open her phone and typed. Don't think I'm here for you, she said. If he asked, she was going to tell him she was there to see her friends, who were over by the basketball court.

And then, right in the middle of the game, her boyfriend took his phone from his pocket, read it, and typed, Did I say you were? before running back down the rink and swatting at the puck.

"Well," I said. "Okay."

"He's so fucking dead!" she said. "Okay, we're done. Let's go. I'm not speaking to him ever again."

On our walk back to the car, she pushed her already-pouty lips out to an impressive frown. "How often do you do this?" I asked.

"What?"

"Fight like this," I said.

"Oh," she said, "every day."

And then she started telling me about the guys on the basketball court--which ones she liked, which ones she didn't, which ones had babies, which ones had been arrested, which ones had babies and had been arrested because they were selling drugs out of their apartment while the baby slept, which ones were retarded, which ones were fuckers.

"You know," I said, "you're all very incestuous, even if you did go to that big high school."

She turned and glared back at the hockey rink one more time.

"Okay," I said, tugging on her shirt. "Let's go. I want a hot fudge sundae. Let me buy you some ice cream."

Reasons Why I Should Probably Be Arrested

A conversation with the Boy From Work, 1:30 AM, Wednesday:


Me: What was your first girlfriend's last name?

BFW: Hewitt.

Me: Oh yeah. Like my elementary school gym teacher. That's right.

BFW: She had a brother named Joshua. They went to your school.

Me: They did? I always forget that.

BFW: Yeah, Josh is, what, maybe twenty-four years old now?

Me: Maybe that's why his name sounds familiar. He was in the high school the same time I was. I'll go grab my yearbook and look him up. (I grab the yearbook, look him up.) No, no... he wasn't in the high school when I was. He was in eighth grade when I was a senior.

BFW: Oh. He's a year older than me? Wait. What grade was I in that year?

Me: I don't know.

BFW: What grade was your brother in?

Me: Seventh. Oh, gross! YOU WERE IN SEVENTH GRADE WHEN I WAS GRADUATING AND GOING OFF TO COLLEGE!

BFW: (laughs)

Me: That's not funny! That's gross! Oh, and let's see--how old was your future girlfriend? (I flip to the page where her school picture is located.) Oh yes, that's right--she was in FIFTH GRADE! She was making dioramas of the solar system and I was studying 2oth Century Southern Literature! Disgusting!

Muy Bien, Part Two

And here are more of my favorite pictures from Mexico:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Muy Bien, Part One

I have so many stories to tell from our trip to Mexico, but before I get around to that, here are some of my favorite pictures from our heavenly week in salty, sun-soaked Puerto Vallarta:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Continuing Evidence That Demonstrates How Well I Get Along with Aries

In June, I was equal parts I don't know and can't we just have a fling? but the Boy From Work was pretty well decided on what he wanted. He'd been decided since the first night we worked together. We went out for drinks that night and the next, too. Somehow he and the guy who worked the ice cream counter at work convinced me to go to Canada with them that second night.

At first I wasn't quite sure what was going on. I wasn't sure who was trying to hit on me. When the boys had come to pick me up, the Boy From Work made the other one sit in the back, so I could sit up front with him. We rode the whole way to Canada with the BFW's hand twitching next to my bare arm. Every now and again he would pinch and poke my skin and pick-pick-pick at me. I thought, Oh. Aha. I see. But then when we got to Canada, the ice cream boy was laying it on pretty thick, too. It seemed like maybe the two of them had been abused and starved by the other girls at the diner, that they'd tried all their best tricks on them and gotten pretty much nowhere. The diner was full of pretty young things--girls with perky ponytails and low-cut tank tops and impeccable makeup. I had no idea what the boys were doing with me, a decidedly older girl with decidedly better grammar than everyone else who worked there and said things to their customers like, "Your son don't like that, do he?"

But mid-way through the night it became evident who was coming after me, and with precision and determination. The Boy From Work couldn't keep his hands off me. He tickled me up and down Clifton Hill, in and out of bars, over crosswalks and into alleys. And after I'd excused myself to go to the bathroom in the same bar where, six years prior, I'd spent my nineteenth birthday kissing a strangely tall boy from Pennsylvania after fifty fuzzy navels, the Boy From Work pushed me up against the wall and asked if he could kiss me. And I thought, Oh, what the hell? and said, "Okay."

Things moved along quickly after that.

In the beginning, the Boy From Work liked to bring me flowers. The tradition started one afternoon when a lady with a bucket of flower bouquets came in, trying to offload some of them on the staff at the diner. All the girls smiled at her and said no thanks, but the Boy From Work said he'd take some. One of the waitresses I was working with during that shift opened her big mouth and said, "Oh Jesus! They're for Jess! He's got a crush on Jess! He loves Jess!" Then she turned to me and lowered her voice. "You know, they all think you're really something." She rolled her eyes and stuck her hands deep in the pocket of her apron. "Whatever," she said.

I was not sad when she lost her job for stealing money from the cash register a month later. Still, in that moment, after she told the whole restaurant that the BFW had a crush on me, that he was buying me flowers, I thought it was incredibly important to say no, that wasn't true. He didn't have a crush on me and he wasn't buying me flowers. The BFW quickly agreed. He said the flowers were for the head waitress who was coming in for the night shift. Later, when I went out to my car to go home for the day, the bouquet of flowers was tucked under my wipers.

At first, I tried to keep the BFW at a distance. Some nights I told him that I couldn't go to the bar with him, that I couldn't come over and watch movies. Of course I could have, but I'd made a promise to myself at the beginning of summer. It was going to be the Summer of Writing! I was going to be productive! I was going to finish my book! I was going to send a ton of stuff out for publication! I was going to be a dutiful recent grad of my MFA program! There was no way I was going to let a boy ruin my plans. Besides, I had an interview coming up at a small school in Maine, and who knew where that was going to lead? But after a certain point in time all of that just dried up. I wasn't writing anyway. I'd come home from work thinking I had a ton of things to say, only to find that everything had leaked out of my head on the ten minute drive from the diner to my house. And then I'd sit in my computer chair and stare out the window, listening to the frogs and thinking about how much better it would be kissing someone than staring into the face of writer's block.

And so I stopped telling the BFW that I couldn't come out because I was going home to write. I started telling the BFW to come over to my house, that I'd fix him a meatball sandwich and a peach vodka-gingerale and we'd sit outside on the swing and listen to the night.

He was a small-town boy with a recently-shaved head and a straggly goatee. He looked like he could've been cast as Vaguely Mexican Inmate #2 in one of those gritty prison dramas on HBO or Showtime. I wasn't expecting to be taken with him. He was nice, sure, and sweet, and he really liked my company, but he was an awful lot younger than me and he had plans of his own. I just thought what we were doing was a way to pass the summer. Sometimes when we were driving the back roads in the middle of the night, the Boy from Work doing 80 or 90 until I would grip the seat and shriek, I felt like I was living in my very own Bruce Springsteen video. It wasn't a bad way to spend a few months.

Everyone knew what was happening before I did, before I could admit it. One night after we closed the restaurant, the Boy From Work and I were in the back corner tearing the tables away from the booths. Someone had seen ants, so we were trying to determine the source and what to do about it. The BFW and I were discussing the finer points of emptying a bottle of Raid onto the molding at the bottom of the booths when one of the waitresses took one look at us and shrieked, "OH MY GOD. YOU TWO ARE DATING, AREN'T YOU?!" I had a spray bottle pointed at the floor. The BFW was eyeing a small scurry of ants with a critical eye. What about that situation screamed BUDDING ROMANCE I will never know, but something in the way we were together alerted pretty much everyone else to the fact that we were headed toward something inevitable, even if I thought I was dead set against it. I kept telling the BFW that we needed to keep things loose because I wasn't sure where I was going to be come fall, but he kept on and on and on. The BFW is one of the most persistent people I've ever known in my life. And he broke me down. He broke me down good.

After a certain point, it was hard to deny what was going on. It was hard to say no to a boy with freckles like the BFW's. He's covered in them. He's got freckles on his nose, on his chin, on his forehead. He's got freckles behind his ears. He's got freckles in his scalp. And anytime I would give those freckles some serious thought, I would get all melty inside, and the thought of not seeing those freckles anymore struck me as very wrong. And I'd started realizing something else, too--it was more than just the freckles. Hadn't I been complaining for pretty much my whole life about how no good, nice, kind boys liked me? And all of a sudden here was a good, nice, kind boy who liked me and wanted nothing more than to spend his days doing things that pleased me. Sure, there were some things about the BFW that gave me pause--his car smelled like foot and black death; he had a disturbing love for barbecue sauce and Riviera dressing; he was of the "let's clean things up later--much later" mindset; his head knew only two extremes: bald or hippie--but all of those things could be overlooked. When we fell asleep at night, he held me like he really wanted to, like it was the only thing he wanted. He was everything I'd been asking for, and I'd been foolish not to realize it. But I was lucky, and he stuck with me until I did realize it.

Today the Boy From Work turns one year older, and I just want to tell him that ours is my favorite story of all time, and there is never a day I wake up not wanting to tell people about it. I want to tell him that there were so many nights when I cried myself to sleep thinking there must be more to life than loving someone who would never love you back the way you needed to be loved, and now I know I was right.

Happy birthday, BFW. You were a surprise.

I love surprises.

The Bad Girlfriend

After my parents got divorced, my mother took to delivering sage advice. She'd made mistakes in her life, and she didn't want me to make the same ones. That's why she told me to avoid getting married. Or, if there was no way I could avoid the institution and all its sticky trappings, then I should fend it off for as long as possible. She told me to get out, live my life, be on my own. She told me to keep it that way for a long, long time.

This wasn't exactly what an eighteen year-old girl wanted to hear. My parents' divorce had already completely freaked me out. After all, I knew plenty of girls my age who had parents that were a whole lot worse off than mine. Their parents were crazy or mean or drunk or some combination of all three, but they were still together. There had been no talk of divorce or separation or new apartments or visiting times. I never saw my parents fight. I never even heard them fight. I'd seen tension and a lot of ugly, thick silence the year before they split, but when they broke the news it was still a surprise. A big one. One that made think, Oh, Christ. There's no hope for me now.

If things had seemed mostly okay and still broke apart at the seams, I figured there was no way I was going to be able to make a marriage work. All I knew about relationships was what I'd seen from them. They had been kind, sweet, and hard-working. They'd been good parents. But none of that had been enough. That terrified me, and from that point on I wandered in and out of relationships just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Maybe that's even why there was a short period of time where I felt like it was a good idea--despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary--for me and the Wily Republican to take up with each other. There was never a time in my WR-soaked grad school existence that I believed I could stay married to him for a lifetime. I could work out the fantasy in my head--wedding, house, backyard, and kids--but the fantasy always ended in divorce. I constantly told him and anyone who would listen that I knew it wasn't good and it wasn't going to work, but I still wanted to try--but maybe that was just me taking the easy way out. If I was convinced I was going to end up divorced and sad and alone, he was a one-way ticket to that destiny.

And so that--the fear that I was going to foul up a relationship no matter what, the fear that I was destined for divorce--was one type of baggage I lugged away from my parents' divorce. The other came from my mother. When she told me to be by myself for as long as possible, to be strong and independent and not go off with a boy when I was so, so young, I internalized that. I promised myself I would listen. I wouldn't make the same mistakes my mother made. I would live my life and then go to a boy ready to settle down, ready to put aside my old world, my old habits. My mother meant her advice to be educational and helpful, but I might have taken that education and perverted it a bit. I might have let her words settle in my veins and take up residence there so that with every moment, with every rush of breath and blood, I remember how important it is to be my own person--a strong, independent girl who won't bend and change until she's ready.

I think I've done that over the years. When I was a senior in college and faced with the possibility of graduate school, I didn't let Keith--who was suddenly putting up a new fight to keep me in state, with him--dictate what I did or where I went. I applied to writing programs across the nation, made my decision, had a good cry, and left Buffalo. I lived in Minnesota for three years, got my second degree, and started working on getting a college teaching job. I think I've done exactly what my mother had in mind. After all, here I am, living on my own and doing the best I can.

But in all this time that I've been by myself, I've developed some bad, bad habits. I am big enough to admit it: I am a control freak. I like things done my way--which, yes, I often think is the best way--and I get antsy if they don't get done in that fashion.

This makes me afraid for the Boy From Work. Eventually, I would like to share an apartment with him and his suddenly moppy hockey hair. This is not going to be an easy task, and I already feel like I need to make amends for it. All these years alone will have made me a tough one to live with, I'm sure. I like my kitchen sparkling, my bed always made, and the floor clean. I like order. I like to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it. I like my music loud. I just haven't had anyone around to tell me that no, I can't have it that way right now.

So I know I will get angry when there are piles of dirty clothes. I know I will get angry when the dishes aren't stacked just-so. I know I will get angry if I hear one more whistle from a sports game being broadcast in the apartment.

I also know this is unreasonable. And unfair. And bad, bad, bad. It's what I'm afraid of most--that I won't be able to change enough or in an appropriate frame of time to make a relationship really work. And there it is again: I'm already waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But maybe because I'm so conscious of it and maybe because I am already predicting what will happen, I will somehow be able to skirt it, fix it, work it until I can manage to be everything I need to be: a good girlfriend, a milder control freak, a writer, a teacher.

This past week with the Boy From Work has made me think about all these things. I won't lie--I had a minor meltdown while he was here. I had worried myself into a state of teary hysteria that made me so embarrassed for myself the next morning. But it also filled me with resolve. Having the BFW here with me was the highlight of my month, and I can't tell you the last time I slept as soundly as I did when he was next to me in bed. All I want is to keep on going with him, and I don't think there are enough words to explain to him how he makes me want to be better, how he makes me want to try to change all my bad habits, all the parts of me that are bad and stubborn and foolish. It will be hard, it will be ugly, but I want to do it for him. And I want to do it without constantly thinking about that other shoe and how close it is to crushing me under its heel.

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

Vacation highlights included:

1. A goofy photo shoot at my former place of employment
2. Playing darts with Josh and some townie women at a bar that boasted a pretty impressive wall mural (not to mention a complimentary coffee and gambling room)
3. Watching Anne's boyfriend run on the treadmill during our cosmopolitan-laden Pink Torpedo party
4. Attending my cousin's baby shower (and watching her open a breast pump)
5. Dipping cheesecake, pound cake, brownies, marshmallows, strawberries, and graham crackers into chocolate fondue at The Melting Pot
6. Watching the Boy From Work snuggle his niece at his family's Christmas party
7. Sitting in an ice rink with Amy and watching Rob, the BFW, and the BFW's friends play hockey
8. Brunch at The Roycroft Inn
9. Witnessing Becky's fondling of two avacados
10. Watching my brother grimace when I showed him a certain Christmas gift of mine

A Look Back

Before getting to the New Year's resolutions--most of which occurred to me only after I arrived back in western New York for my Christmas vacation--I felt it was appropriate to take a look back at the last year and how exactly I got from one place to the next. So here it is, a look back at 2007, in the style of DJJ, who did it first this time:


January

Days before the break of 2007 Jess reads that certain Latin cultures believe that wearing red underwear on New Year's Eve helps you secure luck in love in the coming year. Jess wears red underwear to the New Year's Eve party.

Jess gets drunk a lot with her cousins.

Jess considers joining Match.com.

Jess's brother decides to inform her his favorite spot for masturbation is on their mother's couch.


February

Jess goes on a double date with a boy her uncle swears she will just love. The boy, while nice, wears glasses that hang from his neck on that type of string-and-clip-combo favored by old ladies and librarians. After hearing about this date, Diana says, "You need a little wild. He doesn't sound wild."

Jess realizes the only man she is truly ready to be in a relationship with is the Buffalo Sabres' goalie Ryan Miller, even if it means they will breed children with freakishly long heads and vaguely crazy eyes.

Jess's date to the Valentine's Day dinner party she throws is a miniature bust of Abe Lincoln.

Jess faces the possibility that she will never, ever, ever get over the Wily Republican.


March

Jess gets a really badass haircut. She now has bangs. The World's Best Bangs.

Jess goes on Spring Break. Vacation spot of choice? Minnesota. While enjoying the frigid flatness of the Midwest, Jess makes out with a long-haired boy who tells her he is going to write poetry about her. To her knowledge, that poetry was never written.

Jess stalks Ryan Miller. She sits behind him at the taping of a local sports show. She prays he will look at her and instantly fall in love.

Ryan Miller does not notice Jess.


April

Jess realizes she is in love with at least fifteen of her students at the giant state university where she is teaching. They have followed her from English 101 to English 201, and they love her right back. She considers proposing they all move into her father's basement so she can go downstairs and hang out with them whenever she wants.

Jess's grandfather suffers a stroke. She drives from the small country hospital where he was initially admitted to the city hospital that specializes in stroke patient care. She sits up all night with her family and her grandfather. She doesn't feel much of anything, which seems inappropriate for the situation. She realizes she doesn't like herself very much for that.

The Sabres enter the playoffs. There is much rejoicing and foot-stomping and screaming of the phrase, I want to have your babies, Ryan Miller!

Jess's brother gives her helpful hints about what Canadian strip club to go to for Becky's bachelorette party.

Jess realizes that in a month's time, she is going to need to have a summer job. She starts to cry. She cries a lot.


May

Jess starts having nightmares about waitressing. She knows what's coming. She spends too many minutes feeling sorry for herself. I have a master's degree! she thinks. I should NOT have to go back to waitressing! Then she hates herself for being so snobby.

Jess bakes and assembles a giant penis-shaped cake. She carts it to a suite overlooking the cataract in Niagara Falls. She gets drunk and celebrates the fact that Becky is the first Pink Torpedo to be headed down the aisle.

Jess says goodbye to the best bunch of students she's had in a long, long time. She bakes them dozens and dozens and dozens of cookies and cries as she drives out of the parking lot.

Jess also says goodbye to the students she's been teaching as a side-gig at the big community college in town. She has never been happier to be rid of a group of students. The class had started with 25 students, had been whittled down to eight who occasionally attended, and only four of those passed.

Jess fills out an application at a tiny 50's diner in her hometown. A waiter brings her an application and hangs around the counter while she fills in her school and employment history. He keeps asking if she wants anything--food, a pop, a glass of water, anything--but she declines.

Jess sits in the cramped and dirty office of the tiny 50's diner in her hometown and gets hired as a waitress.


June

On her first day of work, Jess is trained in by the same waiter who handed her the application. He is the only waiter at the restaurant. He is bald. He has a long beard. He looks sort of like a man Hollywood producers would cast in a prison-break movie. He would be the vaguely Mexican inmate with murder in his eyes.

On that first day a woman at the restaurant says to Jess, "Are you single?" Jess says she is. The woman asks the vaguely Mexican prison inmate waiter if he is single. He says he is. "Well," the woman says, "you two would be really great together."

The next night Jess is talked into going to Canada to drink with some people from work. The vaguely Mexican prison inmate waiter corners her near a bar bathroom and kisses her. "Is this alright?" he asks. She thinks, Oh, why not? and says yes.

Jess gets an interview at a small college in Maine.

Jess realizes everyone she works with is either a sex addict, a drug addict, or just really, really weird. Jess also realizes she really, really likes these strange people.

Becky walks down the aisle. Jess declares it the best wedding and reception she's ever been to. She gets so drunk she walks back to the hotel shoving leftover wedding cake into her mouth while her best girls from high school trade shoes and giggle, giggle, giggle.


July

Jess makes out with that boy from work all the time. He leaves flowers on her car almost every day. After a particularly bad day at the restaurant--a day where Jess considers quitting because it was just that horrible--the boy later shows up at the bar with two surprises: more flowers and a clean-shaven face. He has a butt chin. Jess thinks it's the cutest chin she's ever seen.

When one of the cooks asks Jess and the boy from work if they are dating, the boy looks at Jess expectantly and Jess--who, up until that moment had been saying, Let's just keep things loose, okay?--says, "Yes." Plain and simple.

Jess gets a second interview with a small college in Maine. She drives ten hours, does the interview, tools around Portland and thinks, Yes, please.

Jess is offered the job in Maine. When she tells the boy from work this, it looks like his heart is actually going to fall out of his chest. She panics about what is going to happen next.

Jess tries to hook her brother up with one of her waitress friends. This waitress has a box full of sex toys and the tendency to show her breasts to anyone with eyes. Jess figures they will be great together. They see each other a few times, but a relationships never gets off the ground.

Jess drives to West Virginia and to attend the wedding of one of her best boys from grad school. For two whole days she is just a drunk girl in a cute dress. It is a nice vacation.


August

Jess drives to Maine with her mother. They apartment-hunt. Due to an unfortunate mix-up in scheduling, they have no hotel room, and the entire state of Maine is flashing NO VACANCY. Jess and her mother sleep in a car for the first time in their lives.

Jess quits her waitressing job.

Jess loads her car with her most important possessions, including that boy from work, and drives to Maine. She and the boy spend a stressful week shopping for furniture and trying to get her apartment ready before school starts.

Jess eats her first whole lobster. She eats it on the coast, right above wave-washed rocks, right under the body of a lighthouse. She is in love.


September

School starts. Jess teaches five classes, all different, all with new textbooks.

Jess turns twenty-six.

Jess drinks a lot of Vernors-and-Absolut Peach. She sits in her new furniture and looks out her window, missing, missing, missing things.

Jess is amused by her students--especially the automotive-types, who are sly, witty boys she is fairly certain she would have been friends with if she'd been enrolled in her own class.


October

Jess's body falls apart. She cannot move her neck. She goes to get a massage and is told she is clogged with toxins. Her massage makes her feel worse.

Jess thinks there's a possibility she might have meningitis.

Jess does not have meningitis.

One of Jess's classes--a half-semester affair--is over, and she can finally breathe easier.

That boy from work arrives for a week. He makes her dinner, takes her apple-picking. He hangs onto her tightly in the middle of the night. He says he loves her. She says she loves him back.


November

Jess can't believe her luck. It's been a lot of work, but her first semester has gone pretty well, and she sort of loves everything and everyone involved.

A particularly bad case of plagiarism challenges those thoughts, but Jess gets over it. Fast.


December

Jess drives home for Christmas break. She sings carols all the way home. She sings them very, very loudly. She looks forward to her first Christmas not made miserable by the Wily Republican. She thinks a lot of her grandmother and how she wishes Christmas could be the way it used to be--special, magic--and she vows that she will do her best to make it so.

Jess's Christmas is pretty special, pretty magical. After all, she receives The Pop-Up Book of Sex as a gift from Diana. It is the gift that keeps of giving.

After the reservations for the Frank Sinatra-soaked New Year's celebration they were going to attend are canceled without warning from the restaurant where they were headed, Jess and her friends go downtown to ring in 2008 at a bar far from the frat boys who are puking into bushes and running down Chippewa without their pants. She counts her blessings for this and the many other beautiful accidents she stumbled her way into over the past year.

Merry Christmas from the Mad Bomber

And so, just like that, the Christmas season is over. The Boy From Work and I have passed through our first Christmas together, and I thought we did it in fine fashion. I wrapped his presents, made up a stocking (crammed with random things like disposable heat pads, beef jerky, iced tea, chocolate, and magazine subscriptions--this is just how we do things in my house), and asked him to do the traditional pose-by-the-tree holiday shot. We survived. We did fine.

And I think I did particularly fine. Sure, the BFW might not be what you'd call 100% thrilled with some of the clothes I bought because I thought he'd look good in them, but he is 100% thrilled with one of his presents, which, really, was the crowning glory of all my Christmas shopping: the fur-lined bomber hat.

When the BFW visited me back in October, we took a ride to Freeport and visited the LL Bean flagship store (which is, interestingly enough, open 24 hours a day every single day of the year). Once there, the BFW took to a giant wall display that boasted lots of fur-lined bomber hats in every color and fabric imaginable. He told me he used to have a hat like that, that he loved that hat like nothing else, and he lost it. He was sad about that. He was really, really fond of the hat.

I, however, was not fond of the bomber hats. I mean, a fur-lined, ear-flapped hat doesn't scream SEXY!, SOPHISTICATED!, or DEBONAIR! in any language. And I could see by the gleam in the BFW's eyes that once he put that hat on his head, it was going to be a real fight to get it off. That made me nervous.

But still, that gleam in his eyes haunted me for the entire Christmas shopping season until finally, when I realized I was going to have to go to LL Bean to get the LED head lamp my father wanted (more on that hilarity later), I broke down and decided to buy the hat for the BFW. He was just so thrilled when that warm hat was clamped down on his head, and I knew I couldn't deprive him of a winter full of that thrill.

So I didn't.

And It Begins

I haven't had a boyfriend for a long time, and because of this it's been a while since I practiced the nuanced and fine art of gift-giving-for-boys. My father and brother barely count. My brother is easily placated by gifts that involve booze or cash, and my father kicks off each gift-giving season by presenting his children with a two or three item list from which to choose, and we do, and he has the good humor to shine on some surprise when he peels back the paper to find exactly what he asked for. Those two don't require any sleuth, and this year I think I need some sleuth.

I'm out of shape in this matter. The last time I did a big Christmas gift-buying extravaganza for a boy was the last Christmas I was with Keith, which is five years ago now. During the years directly after Keith and I parted ways, I was in grad school and batting my eyes every which way at the Wily Republican, and I never bought the WR a single, single thing for Christmas or even his birthday. I was smart enough to know that to go out and spend money would be fruitless. I wouldn't be getting anything from him, and he was probably just going to end up making me extra sad around the holidays by either spending a giant chunk of change on something sparkly for that girl he swore he was going to end up with if only he could convince her that she loved him or by calling me up on the day I decorated my Christmas tree to announce that it was quite possible that that same girl was pregnant, which would then cause me to sit for hours on the couch with a pint of ice cream and a bottle of vodka. At least I knew enough to keep myself from spending money on a boy who was making me that crazy.

So it's been years. Years.

When Keith and I were together back in the day, Christmas was really, really something--mainly because Keith is a gift-giving pro. The first year he showered me with clothes, with rings, with necklaces, with kitchen appliances, with perfume, with every girly thing you could ever wish for.

I tried my best, too. I bought him an eclectic mix of stuff that included a quesadilla maker and several joke gifts: a low-budget and foul-sounding porn DVD and red-white-and-blue striped novelty condoms that billed themselves as for only the most passionate of patriots. Besides those and other small items, I went all out on clothes. I bought boxers and socks and t-shirts and sweaters and hoodies. When I was finished with him, Keith was the poster boy for the 1999 Old Navy men's collection.

I feel like I might be on the verge of doing something similar this year, but maybe with a more sophisticated twist. And I don't think my boyfriend is too thrilled about my plans.

If I had it my way, the BFW would be whipped into the poster boy for J. Crew:



This would be quite the change for the BFW, who wrinkles his nose every time I say the word argyle. If he had it his way, he would live in a world where hoodies and this hat were considered haute couture.

But, oh, how I want it, want it, want it. And it's not just him I want it for either. It's me. I want to make myself over into a poster girl for J. Crew. I want to wear tweeds and kicky little shrugs and wide-legged pants. I want to be so preppy it hurts.



I want us to be some sort of houndstooth-clad power couple. This, I'm sure, makes the BFW very, very nervous, and I'm sensitive to that hesitance and fear. Still, some switch in me has been thrown since moving to Maine. There's just something about the state that necessitates these types of clothes, even though the general level of fashion here is definitely what I'd classify as "lacking." I've even seen fanny-packs. On teachers.

But there are certain warm spots where the streets are populated with fresh-faced, tousled-haired preppy people who glide around thinking about the next time they'll get to load up the kayak and cut through the cool bay water. I want those people's clothes, and I also want those people's kayaks. It's clear that I've got some work to do before I transform into a full-fledged Mainer.

But the question remains: what exactly am I going to throw down for Christmas this year, and how irritated will my boyfriend get at my attempts? Will he ultimately melt and let me have my way, or am I going to have to deal with a winter of flaps and fur?

It Was Not What You'd Call an "Awesome Moment"

Last weekend when I was home for a few days, I had to do something that no girl should ever have to do. I had to break down and ask my father if he minded terribly if the Boy From Work spent the night.

The BFW had spent the night before, of course. In fact, he'd done it almost every single night from July 10th until I left for Maine, but I'd been careful and considerate back then. I'd had the decency to keep my bedroom door wide open all night, which gave the impression that maybe the BFW and I had just happened into my bedroom and were hit with such an unexpected wave of tiredness that we took a quick nap. The BFW and I kept most of our clothes on, which I hoped would signal to my father, God forbid he ever had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and saw us together on my bed, that there was no funny business going on. If there's one thing my father hates more than anything else, it's his daughter engaging in any sort of funny business.

I set my alarm every night for some ridiculously early time--usually right around 5:30 AM--so I could sneak the BFW out the front door before my father's own alarm went off. That way it seemed like nothing had happened at all. There was no boy in my bed, and there was no record of any business being done, funny or otherwise.

Did my father know this was going on? Possibly. Probably. Did we ever speak of it? Absolutely not. There are just some things I feel ill-equipped to deal with, and one of those things is trying to explain to my father why I, a twenty-six year old girl, might want to spend the night with a boy in my bed.

But now it all just seems so silly. I'm on the backslide to thirty, and I'm fairly certain I have earned the right to spend the night in a bed with my boyfriend with the door shut and no alarm set to jar us awake at an ungodly hour.

Before I drove home, I asked the BFW if he knew what this meant. It meant I was going to have to admit to my father that there was a part of me that wanted to sleep in the same bed as a boy, which, in my father's brain, might have been translated as, I am a giant nymphomaniac, and I'd like to have lots of premarital sex in a bed under your roof.

I didn't know if my real argument would be good enough for him, or if it would even make it into his brain unmolested by the translation. My real argument was this: the thought of being in the same state as my boyfriend--and, in fact, being within a ten mile radius of my him--and not sleeping in the same bed he was sleeping in seemed cruel and inhumane. What would we do? Talk on the phone until 3:30 AM, me painting my toe nails and munching on popcorn, him surfing through the various ESPNs and having a staring contest with one of his cats? That was what I did when I was sixteen and infatuated with my cousin's boyfriend. We used to talk on the phone late into the night, until he fell asleep and started snoring. If there's going to be a boy snoring into my ear nowadays, he better be curled up next to me and not on the other end of a phone.

(The BFW, it should be noted, does not have a snoring problem. If there's an occasional snuffle, it can be remedied with a quick poke, and I am extremely thankful for that. Going to bed with this boy is a dream compared to the bedtimes I used to have with Ex-Keith, who was--probably is--a notorious snorer. There were times I definitely fantasized about smothering him with my pillow because I could not sleep, no matter how I rolled him or how many times I jabbed him in the side with my elbow. When he rolled out of bed the next morning--fresh-faced and cheery--I wanted to kill him.)

The BFW, however, was not concerned about the potential conversation I would have to have with my father. "Your father likes me," he said. "He'll be okay with it."

Later, when we were talking about the situation in front of Amy, the BFW repeated the sentiment again. "Her father likes me," he told Amy. "He's going to be okay with it."

"Ha," Amy said.

"Thank you!" I said, gesturing wildly at my best friend, who, because she's been around me for the last eight billion years, is well versed in the ways of my family, especially my father. "See? Someone will back me up on this!"

The BFW was convinced I was overreacting, that the conversation wouldn't be awkward, that the idea wouldn't bother my father, not at all.

"Ha," Amy said. "Good luck."

Of course, it wasn't the BFW who needed the luck. It was me. I was the one who was going to be having the conversation, and I was almost certain it wasn't going to go smoothly or elegantly. Somehow, I would foul it up because that's what I am good at.

I was able to delay the conversation until I arrived at my house on Sunday night. When I got there, I found my father stretched out on the couch watching Extreme Makeover, which I settled down to watch, too. On a commercial break, my father turned to me and inquired about the BFW.

"And will the BFW be joining us tonight?" he asked.

"He's working until midnight," I said. I felt a cringe settling into my shoulders. I could already tell where this was going. This moment was going to be my chance, my opening, my way to broach the subject. "He'll be over later."

"After work? Around midnight? Kind of late, huh?" my father asked.

"Well, yeah," I said. I swallowed around a lump in my throat. "Uhm, actually, Dad, I was wondering how you felt about him spending the night."

My father's response was immediate. "On the couch?" he asked. "In your brother's room?"

He'd assumed when I said spend the night I meant in a room that does not in any way contain me or my pajama-ed body.

"Uhm, well, no. In my room," I said, and there it was: those words, the words I knew would sink into the soft gray matter of my father's brain and cause a mini electrical storm that fired back an immediate gut reaction: No! No! No! No!

To his credit, my father kept that gut reaction vaguely concealed. He did not shriek No! No! No! No! into my face, but he didn't really say anything. In fact, he said nothing. He said nothing for a very heavy and uncomfortable set of seconds.

I felt I needed to fill the space. "Well, okay, alright, I mean, it's clear you're uncomfortable with it. I shouldn't have asked."

My father sighed.

I couldn't look at him. I thought back to times before when I'd been faced with similar uncomfortable moments that were brought to light because of a boy and my father's idea of what could happen with that boy if he didn't somehow control the situation. And controlling the situation usually meant telling me what I couldn't do with that boy. I couldn't see him. I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't be in an room with him if that room did not contain at least one parent.

I wanted to turn around and plant myself, face down, in the couch cushions.

"You mean in your little twin bed?" my father asked.

Then I did something really, really stupid, but--if you look at it the right way--really brave.

"Keith and I slept in my twin bed all through college," I said. Immediately, I regretted my quick decision to throw that snippet of information in my father's direction. On one hand, I wanted him to realize that this wasn't a new thing, that I'd been having sleepovers since I was eighteen years old. But on the other hand, what I did was pretty stupid. After all, I didn't want my father to reach back in his memory and think about all the boys I'd possibly shared a bed with. He didn't need to go down memory lane like that, because I was almost sure it would do nothing for my case. Therefore, to cut the mood and the air--which now felt like it weighed at least a hundred pounds--I tried to be funny.

"And Keith got really fat near the end of college, but we still managed," I said.

My father sighed again.

"It's okay," I said. "Forget it. No big deal. You don't like the idea."

"No, no," my father said. He scrubbed a hand across his face, a gesture that admitted defeat. "You're twenty-six years old. I guess it's alright."

I was so thrilled that I almost went on and said things that didn't need to be said. I was so thankful I almost said, We won't even touch each other, I swear! or I'll wear really ugly pajamas to bed, so you don't have to worry about anyone giving anyone else the eye!

But I clamped my teeth down on my tongue and remained silent. It was enough that we made it through that moment without one of us slowly disintegrating into nothing or else exploding into a million bits of buzzing red matter. I would take it, and I would be good. I would climb back into my tiny twin bed with my boy in the late hours of the night, and I would whisper in his ear, This feels just like summer, doesn't it? And the next morning I would be so, so careful about making an exit from my bedroom without the BFW, so my father, when I arrived in the kitchen, would be able to fool himself for a glorious few moments, trick himself into believing I was the only other one in the house and there wasn't a freckled boy tucked under the covers just a few steps down the hall.