The Whitney Chronicles

Not one moment to myself today. My bladder is feeling flabby from being stretched to the max. Had most of a pot of coffee for breakfast and didn’t get to the ladies’ room until noon. Oh, the pain.

I leave the hotel tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. No time to see either Matt or Eric again. It’s probably for the best. I can’t face either one quite yet, since I have no idea what’s going on in their minds—or in my own.

October 10

Up at 3:30 a.m., in the air at seven, into the office by eleven, manic by lunchtime. No one could accuse me of not jumping right into an office frame-of-mind upon my return.

Mitzi gave me a dirty look as I entered, as if I’d been on vacation instead of working 24/7. Betty peered at me through those half-glasses middle-aged people who insist they don’t really need glasses use and told me in an accusing tone that I’d let mail stack up on my desk. And the cruelest cut of all, Bryan, sadist that he is, produced a large, heavy bond envelope addressed to me in calligraphy scrolls and embellished with a wax seal and one of those “Love” stamps that sell by the millions around Valentine’s Day and during the bridal season.

“Wipe that smirk off your face, Bryan,” I ordered, immediately out-of-sorts, “or I’m going to ask you to be my escort to this wedding. Then you’ll be the one having to dance with Whitney dressed as a human omelette in egg-yolk yellow satin and dyable shoes straight from the Marquis de Sade collection.”

Fear flickered on his face and he tried to retrieve the wedding invitation, but it was too late. He’d already made my shortlist of potential escorts.

Why couldn’t my friend Leah Carlson, who’d worked with the rest of us in this office until she’d earned parole, have had her bridesmaids wear something black and slinky? Wasn’t that the fashion now? Of course, Leah had an insecure streak, and in order to make sure that, as the bride, she was not outshone by anyone else, she’d made sure the rest of us looked utterly ridiculous, with puffy sleeves and large straw hats laden with silk flowers, ribbons and probably a resident parakeet. The only thing that cheered me about this designer fiasco was that Kim was also in the wedding, and she insisted that she looked even worse in yellow than I did. Misery does love company. So do women who are forced to look like chubs of butter rolling down an aisle.

“Need to get out for lunch?” Kim smiled knowingly at the invitation in my hand and tipped her head toward the door. “I’ll buy.”

“One lettuce leaf, one stalk of celery, one cherry tomato and water with a slice of lemon so thin as to be transparent, please.”

“I thought you were going to cut back. Doesn’t a cherry tomato have a calorie or two? Have you considered what it will do to your thighs?”

“Har, har, so not funny.” We went into the little luncheonette two doors down from our office building and I ordered “the usual” without opening my menu. Sad, isn’t it, when every waitress on every shift knows my “usual.” Of course, it’s not that hard to remember a house salad and a slice of dry toast.

“Other than the dress, are you excited about the wedding?” Kim, ever the optimist, assumed such a thing was possible.

“My mother has offered to make me a queen-size quilt of all the bridesmaids’ dresses I’ve ever worn. I’m sad to say she already has enough fabric to do the quilt and shams. This wedding will provide enough ugly fabric for the bed skirt.”

Kim leaned down to sip her Coke from the straw and looked up at me through her long, dark eyelashes. “This is not totally about the dress, you know.”

“I do know. It’s those torture implements they call shoes. They’ll dye them yellow, I’ll wear them until my eyes water and my feet blister and turn color. Then I’ll kick them off, destroy my nylons and have my toe broken by Leah’s four-hundred-pound uncle at the reception. And she wants us to put our hair up. Kim, I’ll look like Marie Antoinette!”

“It really bugs you that she’s getting married and you haven’t got a glimmer, doesn’t it?”

I hate it when she does that. Am I that transparent?

“I didn’t think so, but between this wedding and my mother’s fixation on marrying me off, I guess I’m a little sensitive right now.” The waitress came by with my house salad with a side of dry toast. “It’s crazy, too, because I’ve had more male attention in the past week than in the past four months.”

Kim listened with rapt attention as I told her my Eric/Matthew experiences in Las Vegas.

“What do you make of it?” she probed.

“Absolutely nothing. I can’t figure out what’s going on.”

“Because one man likes you, you’ve become more interesting to all the others—at least until you commit to one and take yourself out of the market.”

I really do believe that someday God will send a man into my life. I just hope that when he arrives, I won’t be too old to recognize him.

October 15

Mitzi must go. Away. Far, far away. Soon.

Annoying, maddening, irritating, infuriating, exasperating, trying, aggravating, frustrating, irksome, grating, galling, vexing. It’s so hard to decide which word describes her best. She is the burr under the saddle of my life, the twist in my undies, the mosquito trapped in my bedroom that won’t let me sleep.

She’s always most exasperating the week she receives her women’s-magazine subscriptions. That’s when she brushes up on what’s new, cool and trendy in the world and distills it into a Cliff’s Notes kind of report meant to either a) shame us into getting with the program or b) just shame us. She’s a pop-psychology junkie and living breathing proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. She has very little knowledge, all of it dangerous.

This morning she greeted me with the words, “You can’t have it all, you know.”

“I don’t want it all. I just want my coffee, black.”

“You know what I mean. You’ll have to give up something in life in order to devote time and energy to what is most important to you. Obviously you’ve given up meaningful, loving relationships with the opposite sex and the chance at a family in order to stay at this midlevel schlepping job.”

Now try that one on before you’ve had coffee!

“You’ve said ‘yes’ to being a lonely, pathetic single woman with a job that cannot fulfill you completely and ‘no’ to having the love of a man and the joy of children in your life.”

Really? I had no idea. I thought it was “yes” to earning a living and “no” to jumping into bad relationships just so I could have a man on my arm.

“Which magazines came yesterday, Mitzi? Depression Digest? Deadbook? Failures Illustrated and Family Triangle?”

“Don’t mock me, Whitney. You could learn a great deal from keeping up on the latest trends and polls. Why, do you even know that carbohydrates are out again?” She gave me the once-over. “Obviously not.”

“What’s this leading up to, Mitzi? You’ve got something on your mind.” I could see Bryan making his way to the rest room and Betty Nobel sitting a little straighter, her nose twitching with interest.

Mitzi pushed a photocopied page from a magazine across the desk toward me. The headline blared at me like a demented trumpet: Are You Doomed To Be A Spinster? Under it was a quiz, dolled up in graphics of cartwheeling brides and one forlorn damsel sitting on an upturned briefcase. That, no doubt, was me.

“Thanks, Mitzi, but no thanks. I’m not even sure why you’re more upset about my being single than I am.”

She shook her head at me as if to say, “Poor, deluded darling,” and pushed on the quiz until I picked it up.

Mission accomplished, Mitzi turned back to her computer and brought up the diet program on the Web into which she fed her list of foods consumed yesterday. With a few clicks, she had the calorie count, fat grams, fiber content and a tally of which vitamins and minerals she was low on that day. Come to think of it, I can’t really remember the last time I’ve seen Mitzi do anything that resembled work. But apparently she types a million words a minute, because Harry keeps her around.

I stuffed the quiz in my pocket, poured myself a cup of coffee, watered my plants, checked my e-mail and then went to knock on the men’s bathroom door. Bryan must have fallen asleep in there, or he would have heard that Mitzi and I had avoided a confrontation. I was right. When he stumbled out, there was a flat pink spot on his cheek where he’d laid his head against the side of the stall. I gave him a list of things I needed done and turned my attention to touching base with potential customers I’d collected at the trade show.

For a long time, I ignored the hole being burned in my pocket before I furtively took out the ridiculous survey on single women. By spreading it out on my desk with a half-dozen other magazine articles on Innova software, it seemed to blend right in. One by one, I read the questions:

WILL YOU MARRY OR ARE YOU SINGLE FOR LIFE?

Which is more important to you?

an IRA

PMS

MSG

(Depends on whether I’m in a Chinese restaurant or not.)

What is your most important undergarment?