Damn You, Make Me Babies.Com!

So, the other day I was on Facebook, and over in my news feed an odd little picture popped up, and what it was was this: it was a picture of a baby that had been generated when my friend's picture had been combined with another friend's picture.

As soon as I saw that, I knew I had to have my own composite baby. Which meant I followed the link on that picture to the website that made it. Which meant I spent a good chunk of time uploading pictures of all the guys I know so I could plug those pictures in with mine.

In my defense, this was in the name of science. I wanted to know which of my friends (or exes or imaginary lovers) would produce the best looking child. Here are some of the results:

Reaction:Fair enough. I was wrong. If Ryan Miller and I do ever manage to fall in love--which we so should--our offspring wouldn't look as hideously long-faced as previously thought. I think I'd finally be able to tell Keith to suck it; after all, he was the person who said that if Ryan Miller and I ever had a baby, it would come out looking like the Scream mask.

Reaction: Sad. You can totally tell this girl is going to grow up to have a uni-brow. My genes and Ryan's genes should just never meet.

Reaction: Apparently New Boy and I (remember him? Oh, who could forget?) would have very rosy-cheeked babies. Rosy-cheeked babies that look like they might grow up to become Jonathan Tucker. I'm not against that.)

Reaction: Hey, look at that. If I'd ever had a baby with the Boy From Work, she would've been cute. And a fan of daisies, apparently.

Reaction: I have the feeling that Josh would never allow one of his children to dress up as a duck. I'm fairly certain that when Josh does have kids, he'll dress them up for Halloween as members of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

Reaction: See that baby right there? That baby's got the look of a very precocious literary superstar. That's what happens when you combine the genes of a fiction writer and a poet.

Reaction: This one freaks me out. It is eerie in its accuracy. If someone else had combined these pictures and then shown me the result without telling me who the parents were, I'd be able to take one look at that and say, "Holy God, that's the Wily Republican's baby, isn't it? That's what the baby would look like if he and I had had kids?" That kid looks so much like him it's ridiculous.

Reaction: I saved the best (funniest? most disturbing?) for last. Keith and I? Yeah, Keith and I would've had fat, fat babies.

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.

How to Dress to Meet The Woman Your Ex-Boyfriend Knocked Up and Also--Surprise!--the Baby Who Was Born Two Weeks Early

Beyond eating a fish fry and shopping for SPF that I wouldn't end up using while I was vomitting garden vegetable soup into the a Miami hotel tub, there was one more thing I needed to do while I was in Buffalo for that short time over spring break, and that thing was this: I needed to go over to Keith's and meet the girl I'd been hearing about for a long time. Keith had gotten this girl in the family way before he got her in the wedded way, and since I live six hundred miles away, I'd never had the opportunity to meet her before the engagement or before the birth of their son.

But when the baby came, I informed him that was all going to change. "You better believe I'm coming over to meet her," I said. "And the baby, too."

And so it was arranged. The day after I arrived in Buffalo and a day before I would leave for the ill-fated Miami trip, I drove over to the place Keith shares with his girlfriend and her son from her first marriage.

I parked, adjusted my lipstick, and straightened my clothes. I hoped I looked right. I hoped I'd achieved just the right look: I didn't want to look snooty, prissy, or fussy. I wanted to look low-key and nonthreatening. It's not that I have delusions that women are intimidated by me; it's that I spent a few years being openly attacked by The Big Head--Keith's last girlfriend, a girl with angry eyebrows, a girl who never knew when to shut up. She didn't like me, and she didn't like it when I was at the bar the same time she and Keith were at the bar. But it was all bluster, all cover, all overcompensation. She didn't like that Keith and I were so close, that we were best friends? Well, she ended up leaving Keith for her best friend, who'd been hanging around, dangling on her elbow for years.

It would have given me great pleasure to throw darts at her big head.

And so I was hoping that I could come off as mild and unobtrusive as possible. Mousy, even. Bookish. Sweet and harmless. Just a normal girl who liked her ex-boyfriend enough to keep on being his friend. Just a girl who hadn't even thought about him in a naked way for a good five or six years. I didn't want to spark an argument. I didn't want to be banned. The Big Head had always wanted me banned.

So I walked up the steps to Keith's house wearing dark jeans and a white cardigan. I had silver hoops in my ears. I felt confident this was the right look. And so I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again.

Nodda.

I knocked one more time and then stood on my tip-toes to peer in the decorative window paneling at the top of the door. There, through the half-moon window, I saw Keith's girl and the baby, and she was busy rocking him back and forth. Keith was farther off, in the kitchen, hastily throwing things into a trash and tying the bag into a knot.

"COME IN!" he yelled.

"I'm sorry," I said as I pushed through the door. "I'm early."

"No, no," he said. "It's fine. You're okay."

His girl--who, at nine years his senior, is technically not a girl but, as he likes to remind everyone, a cougar--smiled the prettiest smile I'd ever seen. It seemed possible she had extra teeth in her perfect little mouth. She looked younger than me. She looked like a seventeen year old cheerleader--small, petite, peppy. She looked like she might at any minute vault off the couch, toss the baby to me in one small movement, and break into a rock 'em-sock 'em chant before completing her routine with a split across the carpet.

I loved her instantly.

"Hi!" she said brightly.

Keith did a formal but half-assed introduction--he was still tangling with the garbage bag, and I had already asked if I could help him with that three times because I was afraid it was going to leak onto the floor--and then he told me to go right ahead and sit down.

When I was finally seated, that's when I snuck my first real look at the baby. It was sort of an awkward moment. After all, here I was meeting The Cougar for the first time, and she was a few days out of the hospital. She and Keith were tired, flustered, and woozy. And I couldn't stop staring at her--or, more precisely, the baby in her arms.

That baby was gorgeous.

"Oh my God!" I said. "He's too cute!"

"Do you want to hold him?" The Cougar asked, and she raised the baby up, like she was going to pass him off to me.

I panicked. I couldn't imagine handing my baby off to a complete stranger less than three minutes after meeting her, and I couldn't imagine that The Cougar--as sweet as she seemed--was really comfortable doing that either, so I said no, no, thanks, but maybe later.

Of course, I wasn't comfortable either. I suck with babies. I'm a mess. I haven't had much experience with them, so I don't really know how to hold them, how to pass them to someone else. I don't know what they need, what they want, what it means when they make this face or that noise. I've never even changed a diaper. It's just that I feel like I'm a big brute when I'm around a baby. I feel like I will inevitably break or ruin it and then the parents will end up hating me forever.

And I think babies know this. They sense it.

Keith's baby, though, seemed okay with my general presence. First of all, he was sleeping. And when he wasn't sleeping he was fluttering his eyes open, assessing the room, and curling back into another mini-nap.

So we all sat--Keith on the love seat, me in a chair, The Cougar and the baby on the couch--and we talked and occasionally commented on whatever was on the television. And what was on the television was the Game Show Network, which Keith and The Cougar found soothing. They liked the obscure game shows, the old episodes of classic games. They liked the call of buzzers, the drone of announcers, the squeals of excited contestants. It was the perfect background noise for new parents.

Keith gave me a tour of the house and the nursery, which he'd done up with frog decals and frog wallpaper and frog linens. We went back into the living room and talked about The Cougar's son, about becoming a mother again nine years after the last time, about giving birth, about the engagement ring Keith had given her, about shopping for the engagement ring Keith had given her, and about the show Whammy!

"No whammies! No whammies! No whammies!" the contestants were yelling in the background.

"What the hell is this?" I asked.

"Oh come on!" Keith said. "You've never seen Whammy?"

"Oh, it's good," The Cougar said.

"No whammies! No whammies! No whammies!" Keith chanted, pounding his fist in the air. On the screen, the contestant got a whammy, and an animated creature darted across the screen, gobbling up his score.

"Wow," I said.

"This is what we do now," Keith said.

And it was after this--after the talk of whammies, after Keith and The Cougar developed a sophisticated breakdown of how the show worked and why it was genius--that's when I decided that I'd worked up the nerve, that I'd gathered enough courage, that I'd been inspired by the whammies. I was ready. The Cougar had told me that all I had to do was say the word, all I had to do was just mention I was ready to hold the baby, and she'd hand him right over.

"Okay," I said. "Do you think I could hold him now, just for a minute?"

"Of course!" she said.

"Go sterilize yourself," Keith said, and he walked me to the kitchen to help me find something to dry off with--they were low on towels; laundry had suddenly been placed on the back burner--and after he tore me off a square of paper towel, we went back into the living room and The Cougar came over and settled the baby into my arms.

"How do I do this?" I asked. I was afraid of his neck snapping, his head cracking clean off and falling to the floor.

"Just like that," she said, and she went back over to her couch. She stretched. She stretched some more. I wondered how long she'd been sitting on that couch, staring at her sleeping son's face.

Then it was just me and the baby. And what can I say? I was a fool. I was a dope. I looked at that baby's tiny face and fluttery eyelashes and button nose, and I was done for. I opened my mouth, thinking I'd have something sweet and meaningful and comforting to say to the baby, but all that came out was this: "Oh baby-baby-baby! Baby-baby-baby!" I rocked him so gently he might not have even sensed it. His curled-up legs unfurled and pressed against my arms. He took a deep breath and then sighed. He opened his eyes--big eyes, pretty eyes--and looked up at me for a second.

I braced myself. This could be it. This could be the moment when he realized something was wrong, that his mother--the woman who'd been cooing lovey-loves! lovey-loves! into his ear minutes before--was no longer holding him. This would be when the screaming started.

But it didn't. That baby just wiggled his body deeper into the cup of my arms and closed his eyes again.

"See?" Keith said. "He's goooood."

Oh, and he was. He was the cutest, sweetest baby I'd ever held. I couldn't stop looking at him. I couldn't even hear the contestants yelling about whammies anymore. All I could hear was his breath, and all I could see was the rise and fall of his chest. All I could do was keep on saying, "Oh, hi baby! Baby-baby-baby! Oh yes, baby-baby-baby!"

All of it made me very happy. The house, the frog nursery, the towel-less kitchen. The Cougar, her Tina Fey glasses, her tight pony-tail. The baby, his booties, his onesie.

Before I left, before I got in my car and drove to my father's house, a place that wasn't stacked with gifts--diaper cakes, Pack-n-Plays, bassinets, formula, tiny sets of embroidered socks--I asked Keith and The Cougar if they needed anything, if there was anything I could do for them, if there was anything I could run out and get them so they didn't have to worry about it. But they said no. No, there wasn't a single thing they could think of that they needed now.

Back in the Days When He Drank A Lot and Passed out on Staircases I Never Dreamed He'd Be Saying These Things

Keith: What are you doing?

Me: Watching America's Next Top Model and grading papers. What are you doing?

Keith: Driving to Swiss Chalet to pick up chicken.

Me: Did the baby finally roll over and say, "I'm sick of the boob. Go get me some chicken!"

Keith: Noooo. He doesn't get the boob.

Me: Oh. Yes. Right.

Keith: (thoughtfully) Although the other day he did try to get at mine while we were sitting on the couch. I mean, not the nipple exactly, but the general boob area. He was definitely trying to get my general boob area.

It's Been a Big Week for the Babies

1. Tuesday

At 2:40 PM, after they had filled out evaluation forms in which they undoubtedly trashed me and the English language and everything I attempted to teach them about writing over our half-semester course, my class of auto students walked out the door. They threw their portfolios into a sloppy stack and breezed past me with barely a word.

I had no words for them either. Usually I make a speech on the last day--something about how it's been my pleasure, my good fortune to have these students in my class--but I'm not a liar, so I didn't say anything to them but goodbye.


2. Wednesday

At 10:35 AM, the phone call came in. It was Ex-Keith.

"Hello!" he said.

"Hello!" I said.

"Did you get the picture?" he asked.

I did not get any picture, and I told him so. Then it occurred to me what he might be sending me pictures of. "HOLY GOD!" I shrieked in a tone that was certain to carry through my office, past all my tacked-up news articles about Ryan Miller and pictures of Katy with her nose chalked blue, out into the hallway, and into surrounding classrooms. "DID YOU GUYS HAVE THE BABY?!"

"Last night!" Keith said. "I've got pictures."

His son was born at 10:30 PM, two weeks early, weighing seven pounds exactly.

"He's not a crier," Keith said. "He doesn't cry."

"He's no sissy," I said.

"He knows my voice," Keith said. "I talked to him a lot during the pregnancy. Now anytime he hears my voice in the room, he twists around to find me."

"You have a very distinct voice."

"He cries when I leave the room," Keith said.

"He's already smart enough to miss you," I said.

"He's a talker. He makes all of these great little sounds. Mee! Mee!"

"And are you going to let me hold him?" I asked. "I'm coming home in a few days. Can I hold him?"

After Keith and I started talking again, after I called to end our annual fight, I told him I was sort of hoping the baby came just a smidge early. If the baby came early--like, say, when I was home for spring break, I'd be able to come see him. The timeline of events definitely worked out in my favor.

"Yeah, you can hold him," Keith said. Then he sighed. He sounded tired, sounded beat, sounded absolutely over the moon. "Everyone's so happy," he said. "It couldn't be better."

We Really Dodged the Bullet on That One

Today is an anniversary for me. If Keith and I had ever managed to get it together and keep it together, this would've been our tenth year of togetherness.

Here's how that makes me feel:

Old. Nostalgic. Irritated.

The first two are self-explanatory, I think. The irritated sneaks into the equation because right now, right this very second, Keith and I are in the middle of our annual We're Not Talking to Each Other Because One of Us Said Something Stupid or Insensitive About the Other One phase. It happens like clockwork--every year, generally in the winter, generally near the holidays when we've both been driven into the red zone by the more bickering, nasty, or crazy of our relatives.

This year it happened approximately one week after Christmas, at 7:00 PM, as I was driving home from my mother's house. He called on his way home from work. He was stressed. He was tense. He was snippy. He was scared. He is, after all, on his way to being a father and a husband--in which order is anyone's guess. Both events are looming.

In the middle of our conversation, there was a moment where it became evident that Keith sensed he could elbow his way into an argument by pressing a certain line of conversation, and what he wanted more than anything right then was to argue with someone. He wanted to yell. He wanted to be yelled at.

It was clear that he was angry, frustrated, pissy, and that he wanted someone to listen to that edge in his voice, wanted someone to feel everything he was feeling. He was tired of being tired. He was sick of his job. He was afraid of becoming a father. He was overtaxed by his girlfriend's hard pregnancy. He was nervous about the birth.

After he started baiting me, after he tried to drag me into an argument--which was starting to work--I took a deep breath and--very calmly, very slowly--said, "Well, I think you better change the subject in the next three seconds or else I am hanging up this phone because I'm already bored with this conversation."

And he said, "Oh yeah? See ya." And then the phone went dead. We'd been on the phone for a little over three minutes, and each of those had pretty much sucked.

That was the last time I spoke to Keith. Both of us are just about as stubborn as stubborn can get, so I imagine this trend of not speaking could go on pretty long--we once went an entire eight months not speaking after a fight--but I'm not going to let it. It is tradition for me to call him up on the seventh day of February and remind him that once, so many years ago, he was sitting on his mother's couch with me, and he was nervous, he was twitching, he was breathing funny. He told me the last few weeks had been fun, a lot of fun, and that he really liked me and he was wondering if maybe I wanted to make it official, if I wanted to become his girlfriend. And when I said yes, he smiled and exhaled and brought a bouquet of flowers out from behind the couch.

And today I am going to call him up and remind him of that again. I'm going to see how the baby preparation is going, how the wedding preparation is going. I'm going to listen to all the news and gossip I missed out over the last month. I'm going to let everything go back to normal--not because I'm over being angry (I'm not)--but because we're getting old, and exciting things are starting to happen, and he's one of my oldest and best friends and I want to be around when he becomes a father, when he has got some major bragging to do.

So, in celebration of our whole bumpy-ugly-stupidly-charming past, here are pictures of the two of us on the night he executed the greatest caper of all time: The Great Abraham Lincoln Theft of 2006.

If he thinks he's getting the bust of Abe Lincoln for a wedding present, he can just forget it.

Visitors, Round Two

Today marks the arrival of my next visiting couple, Jason and Amanda. Ex-Keith and I are the entirely responsible for bringing those two together, forcing them on each other, and making them like each other. You better believe we got a special mention at the wedding.

And what a wedding it was. The night before, at the rehearsal dinner, Amanda announced that if any of us even thought about going out after rehearsal, and if any of us got so stinking drunk that we showed up to the wedding bleary-eyed and hungover, she was going to leave Jason at the altar. Just like that. See you later, Jason. She made this announcement in a stern, no-nonsense voice, a voice I imagine she uses with the high school students to whom she teaches geometry proofs. And as much as that voice might work on a bunch of sweaty, pimply high schoolers, it doesn't so much work on a wedding party that had dealt with her bride wrath for the last month. Afterward, as she was saying goodbye to her family, the wedding party scuttled outside to the parking lot and said, "So, where's the closest bar?"

Ex-Keith was the best man, so he rallied the troops and got us to a bar immediately after the crowd broke up. The last thing I remember is squealing out of the parking lot, leaving Amanda in the dust. She wagged a finger at us and screamed, "I WILL LEAVE HIM AT THE ALTAR, KEITH! I AM SERIOUS!"

The next day even the wedding photographer would make fun of the groomsmen, who'd been instructed if they brought so much as a flask of liquor to the pre-ceremony goings-ons, they would all die long, painful deaths. Instead of putting on their tuxes while having a beer--as, I guess, is customary for groomsmen--they carried giant beer steins of Pepsi.

And even if we seemed behaved that day, I can assure you we did not behave the night before. In fact, Amy drank so much she puked all night long (yet still looked refreshed and rested when she slid into her Maid of Honor gown). I drank so much I made perverse phone calls to the MFA boys all night long as I was supposed to be sleeping on Amy and Becky's living room floor. And while still at the bar, Amy and Keith had a contest to see who could blow the highest BAC on the bar's built-in tester.



Half of that video is sideways because I was so full of vodka I had no idea what was going on. It was a fabulous night. A fabulous night that led to a long wedding, a reception where no one danced (except the ring bearer and the members of the wedding party who milked the open bar), and a party that ended at ten o'clock, which left us in the parking lot, drinking three bottles of champagne Amanda wouldn't let us open when we were getting our hair done ("This," she told me, "is a solemn occasion. I don't want any liquor around."). And sometime during those hours, the wedding photographer--who really thought us bridesmaids were quite the little pips--took my favorite, favorite, favorite picture:



In that picture, it completely looks like Amanda is saying, You fuck this up, Jason, and I will tear the claws out of each of your dogs.

Here's hoping I don't see that look this week, and here's hoping the ban of liquor has been permanently lifted.

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.

Twelve Really White Girls, One Tan One

All over the country, high school girls are going ga-ga over the idea of prom. At the first hint of spring everything inside them goes all gooey at the thought of crinoline and taffeta, of boys in tuxes and wing-tips, of limos and a DJ who blasts classic slow songs.

I know this because I went ga-ga and gooey myself when I was a senior. That was the year I had the good fortune of having a boyfriend, which meant my fate was much different than the year before. While the rest of our grade was partying it up at our junior prom, my two best friends--Patty and Amy--were sitting with me in my living room. We were busy feeling sorry for ourselves. No boys loved us. We didn't have pretty dresses. No one had even thought to ask us to go to prom with them as friends. We weren't even good enough for the friend-date.

My mother, feeling sorry for us, arrived at home after work with three pints of Ben & Jerry's. She handed them to us, and we padded back into the living room and put in the one thing that was capable of making us happy in that moment: Footloose. While we were knee-deep in Ben & Jerry's (passed around in a circle whenever one of us called Switch!) and Baptist repression, my mother rounded the corner with one more treat: three flutes of champagne. She handed them to us with a look that said, Here you go. You earned them. Oh, we earned them alright. We were positively beautiful in our misery.

But what a difference a year can make. The next year I had Keith, and even though he was a college drop-out by this point (somewhere in between funneling beer and sleeping it off, he'd managed to rack up a 1.98 GPA before being ejected from school as a freshman), I told him he needed to get used to the fact that he was going back to do some high school stuff. He was going to do prom. He was going to do the tux and limo and corsage and awkward fast-dancing. He said sure, sure, he would do it. This amused his mother and sister so much, and they even made the trip out to my house on the night of prom to take pictures and heckle Keith. They thought it was hilarious that he put on a tux and was ready to do his white-boy shuffle on the dance floor next to all his girlfriend's friends, who hated him. And their hatred was serious. Serious enough that it would make the night uncomfortable. Had he and I both known he would eventually win them over--well, eight years later--then maybe the night would've been less stressful for both of us. I was afraid to leave him alone, and he was afraid to be left alone. Still, even though it was stacked with the potential for failure, it didn't turn out to be half bad.

And I started thinking about prom and all of that today as I looked through a CD of pictures my father had recently found and scanned for me. This CD held all kinds of gems. There were pictures of me at all ages, but the ones that really caught my eye were the prom pictures--especially the one that showed our group of friends all crammed together.



There are so many things I'm in love with in that photograph. First, I've got to admire the photographer's complete lack of regard for the composition of the picture. You can totally tell she was already sick of the gig, that she wanted to score a plate of mashed potatoes from the buffet, that she was ready to go to the bar and drown in a large glass of gin. She could have cared less about lining us up in a fashion that made sense. She could have cared less that our bodies spilled out of the glittering streamer background. She could have cared less that she made some of us (including me--a tall girl) kneel in front of some of the shortest girls.

I'm also crazy about how none of us seem to be wearing lipstick (except for Becky, whose older sisters had probably slipped a tube for touch-ups into her purse before she waltzed out the door with the man she would eventually marry). I don't know what came over me with the lipstick. I'm sure I was wearing some at some point. I sure hope I was. Because--and let's not lie--I look sort of dead. And tired. And uncomfortable. My dress is too big on me, too. I look like a girl who doesn't know anything about her body or what suits her best. The color is sort of rubbish on me. Like I need anything to play up how pale I am.

But you know what? None of that matters. I look at that picture and I see the things that are wrong with it, sure, but I also see just how cute we all were. I mean, my God. We look so bright and happy and hopeful. We are sure things are going to go our way. We are sure that our dreams are going to come our way. We are sure we are going to be friends forever. We are ready to start the rest of our lives. We are so, so ready we are almost out of our skins with anticipation.

It makes me want to do it all over again.

Bye Bye, Big Head

"I've got a question," Keith says when he calls. "It's a tough one, okay?"

Keith is my ex-boyfriend. I've been fielding tough questions from him since I was seventeen years old, since our second date, where we sat in his truck at the bottom of the ski slopes at Kissing Bridge, watching the last runs of the evening come down the lighted hill.

"Okay," I say.

"What would a girl see in me?" he asks.

"Oh, please," I say. Except for his snoring--which is homicide-inspiring--I can't think of one thing a girl could ever say she hated about him. Keith is a nice guy. He is smart, funny, witty, and handy with a deck of cards. He is generous and sweet. In a certain mood, he'll even write poetry--silly, frivolous, rhyming things that start like this: My girl is a writer/she likes when I bite her. He is also a good drunk: the kind that will get up on a table, sing a song, do a hokey dance that is all elbows and awkward angles.

Sometimes he doesn't know when to quit, and sometimes he can be the world's biggest pain in the ass, but I only get that side of him now, years after our relationship ended. When we were together, he was attentive and sweet in his own casual, playful way. I imagine he's a different sort of boyfriend now--like I am a different sort of girlfriend--but I have known him for almost ten years, and I know he is a fundamentally good guy--one I have no problem endorsing to any girl who's thinking of taking a run at him.

So I tell him this.

"Okay," he says, but he doesn't sound convinced.

"What's your problem?" I ask.

He sighs. "There's this girl at work."

Ever since Keith started his new job, there have been plenty of reasons to talk about the girls at work. The girls at this place love him. They love that he will pass snarky notes with them during training sessions, that he will go to karaoke with them, that he will choose to sing Baby Got Back and let them push their butts up against him while he raps the words my Anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns, hun!

Keith is friends with every girl at work. And some of them have been giving him some good, hard looks, maybe considering him for themselves or for a friend of theirs. He's already been out with a friend of a girl at work because this work friend loved Keith, thought he could solve all her friend's problems.

All of this is good for Keith. Over the summer, in the midst of my being oh so subtly courted by the Boy From Work, Keith was being broken up with. He'd been with his girlfriend--the Big Head--for years, and they'd spent the months prior to the breakup scouring local jewelry stores for engagement rings. But suddenly the Big Head was no longer interested in an engagement ring. She told Keith he could hold off, it could wait. She said there was no rush, that they didn't need to be engaged right that second.

Keith was relieved. All that wedding talk had made him itchy, and he was more than happy to tap the breaks and slow things down. They were living together, after all. What was the big rush?

Still, that whole escapade made me suspicious. I didn't trust the Big Head's motivations or reasons, and I felt like maybe there was something else going on. After all, what kind of girl spearheads the search for her engagement ring--a search that takes months--and then decides to nix it completely?

I didn't trust the Big Head as far as I could throw her--and with a head as big as hers, I wouldn't have been able to give her an ample toss. In fact, I hadn't trusted or liked her for a long time. My feelings for her were similar to the feelings Keith had developed for the Wily Republican during my stay in Minnesota. Keith thought the Wily was no good for me. He thought the Wily was slowly sucking all the hope and goodness out of me, that he was going to stomp on my heart until I was just a broken girl gasping for air and reason. I felt similar things for the Big Head. I thought she was sly, tricky, mean. I thought she would smile and say sweet things to your face and then turn around and tell the whole world what a horrible human being you were.

The Big Head never liked me, and I never liked her. We met the first summer I came home from graduate school. I had taken up with the Wily that spring semester, which had upset Keith because there was a small arc of time where he hoped we would get back together. But that summer, after he'd seen how I was so, so lost in the Wily's world, he sort of gave up. That didn't stop us from running around together while I was home for a quick stay. During that stay he took me to the bar his step-mother and her friends liked to haunt. It was a crusty, stale bar populated with old men. It smelled a little like urine. There were peanuts in bowls, Genny on tap, and horse races on the television. Most importantly, there were bar-top video games in the corner.

That's where Keith and I ended up. We played round after round after round of Naked Lady Picture Find (traditionally known as Erotic Photo Hunt)--a game I'd gotten remarkably good at, thanks to my studies at grad school--and we laughed and told old stories.

The whole time we were doing this, I could feel a pair of eyes burning into my back. Those eyes belonged to the Big Head. She was the daughter of a friend of her father's, and she had a thing for Keith. He didn't know it back then, and I guess I didn't either, but I did know something wasn't right. She was suspicious about me, that much was clear. She kept an eye trained on me at all times. A few months later, Keith and the Big Head got together and that past summer night and the prickly heat of her glare made complete sense.

I think the Big Head disliked me because of that night. I think she saw us having fun and thought, Well, that could be trouble. But she didn't understand that the time for me and Keith to be trouble together was long past. We'd given it our go. We'd even dragged it through the muck after he left me for another girl and then came back. We had almost a two-year run, and then a second two-year run before I left for grad school. We exhausted all possibilities of it ever working.

But the damage was done, and the Big Head decided I was no good. And for the next few years, whenever we happened to be in the same room the Big Head took care to cut me down whenever she could. She made fun of me, of how I looked or what I said. She even made fun of my friends and their boyfriends. She went so far as to tell me that one of my friend's boyfriend was just so clearly unfaithful, that he was going to cheat and break her heart, that he was a no-good bastard--and she knew this in the first ten seconds after she met him. The Big Head did not know her place. The Big Head did not know when to shut up. On the nights when she talked like that, I wanted to pour beer on her or tell her she had ridiculous eyebrows--anything that would make her stop talking.

I liked her even less after the breakup. Turns out she was the one who was a cheat, the kind of girl who broke hearts, a no-good bitch. She'd suddenly decided she wanted to give it a go with her best friend, a guy who'd been sniffing around for years. She told Keith to pack up his things and get out of her house. Immediately.

I liked her even less after Keith told me what she was really like behind closed doors. She yelled. She screamed. She called him a pig, a fat loser. She told him he was never going to amount to anything. She told him he was a waste of space.

I'm glad I didn't find this out until after she was far removed from his life. I don't think I would've been able to hold myself back. I would have wanted to storm her house, rip through her rooms, destroy all the things she loved the best. I would have made her take it all back. And then I would have yanked out all the hair on her big, big head. No one talks like that about my friends. No one.

But the Big Head is now safely behind us. They had a few busy months disentangling their lives and sorting through all the things they shared (a gym membership, season tickets for the Bills), but all of that is over.

And now there is a girl at Keith's work, and that girl has been giving him The Eye. And that girl's friend has been telling Keith that the girl likes him and wishes he'd get on with it and ask her out.

And apparently that girl is quite attractive.

"Smokin' body," Keith says. "She's got a ridiculous body." Telling me this brings him around to his main point, his real reason for calling. He is concerned. He is nervous. He is unsure.

"About what?" I say. "It seems like she's giving you the green light."

"Well, that's the thing," Keith says. "I've never dated someone that hot."

I sigh. "Thanks," I say.

Keith realizes his mistake. "Come on now," he says. "I'm serious. SHE IS FUCKING HOT. What can she possibly see in me? I don't get it."

And so I go through it all again. I list his good qualities. I neglect to mention his snoring. I keep it positive.

"I don't know," he says. "I just don't know about any of this."

But I do. I know he will do well. I know he will smile and tell his stories, and she will tell hers, and the two of them will go just like they should, just like we all do during the first steps of something new. It pleases me to think that he will be stumbling into something fresh and good. Just as it pleases me to know that with every step he will be walking farther away from the Big Head and all the hurt she tried to press into him. If I ran into her on the street tomorrow, I wouldn't hesitate to tell her how she made all of our dreams come true when she told Keith to get out--because now he can get back to being the boy he is, the boy he was always meant to be. I would be delighted to say those things, to finally even the score, finally erase some of the hateful things she said about Keith, about me, about our friends. I would be delighted. It would be my pleasure to finally tell her the truth.

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?