Slightly Engaged

  “I’m just trying to help you, Tracey.”

  “With…?”

  “With…you know. Your diet.”

  “I’m not on a diet,” I inform her.

  The look she gives me in return makes it clear that I am not the only one who’s noticed the poundage that’s crept back on these last few weeks.

  I stop watching for the waiter out of the corner of my eye and look my salad directly in the grape tomato.

  I can eat this salad. Just this salad. Of course I can do it. In the past few years, I’ve learned to be satisfied with just salad.

  My stomach rumbles.

  That’s the problem, I realize.

  I want more than just salad.

  I want penne.

  Penne, and bread, and a great body. An engagement ring, too.

  I want it all.

  Now.

  I want it now!

  So intense is my little Veruca Salt moment that it takes me a moment to realize that I actually have more in common with Charlie Bucket, who has nothing.

  Nothing, I recall, but a golden ticket that will bring something fabulous if he clings to his integrity and believes in Willy Wonka.

  Okay, so what does that mean? Is Jack my Willie Wonka? Does he hold the key to my future?

  What the hell happened to if Jack wants to marry me, great, if not…well, not great. But not the end of the world, either?

  Isn’t that what I decided just weeks ago?

  And now I’m right back to wallowing in self-pity?

  I shake my head vehemently.

  “Okay, so you’re not on a diet,” says Kate, who is watching me with utter resignation. She shoves the plate of pasta across the table. “Here. Knock yourself out. I’m getting full anyway.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking about,” I tell her, even as I acknowledge that it is now.

  I grab a fork and dig in.

  Ah. Bliss.

  Kate asks, “What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking that I’m sick of this whole will-he-or-won’t-he thing. Why am I letting Jack call all the shots?”

  Kate opens her mouth to answer, but I’m on a roll. And anyway, I’m not asking her. I’m asking myself.

  “Why is my future his decision?”

  “Because, Tracey, that’s how it is,” drawls our sweet Melanie, shaking her head at headstrong Scarlett’s newfangled notion that she, and not Rhett, might be in charge of her destiny.

  “Why? Why should I sit around waiting for him to ask me to marry him?”

  Which is exactly what I’ve been doing, BTW. For the past two and a half months.

  In case you haven’t noticed.

  “Because the man does the proposing.”

  My fork is whirling spaghetti faster than a bride and groom in a horah. I shove it into my mouth.

  Yummy. Well worth the guilt—and tight waistline—I’m bound to suffer as an immediate consequence.

  Then I tell Kate, “Think about it. Why does being engaged matter so much?”

  “Because you want to get married.”

  “Do I really?” I ask, shoving in more pasta. Mmm-mmm-mmm. “Or do I just think I do because everybody else is getting married? Isn’t sharing my life with somebody I love all that really counts?”

  “Yes…that’s why you need to get married.” Kate is rapidly losing her patience.

  “Maybe we don’t need to get married.” I’m speaking for myself and Jack, though I can’t help but hope that maybe he does feel at least a smidge of need.

  “But if you’re not married, he can walk away.”

  “So can I,” I shoot back. “And anyway, he can walk away whether we’re married or not.”

  Exhibit A: Vinnie the Cheat, my soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law.

  Kate shrugs. “Being married makes it harder.”

  This is pathetic, I think, even as I acknowledge that she’s right. Vinnie would have left Mary Beth years ago if it weren’t for their wedding vows—or, more likely, if it weren’t for the specter of alimony.

  Still…

  “I can take care of myself,” I inform her. “I’ve been doing it for years now. I don’t need an engagement ring.”

  “I thought you wanted one.”

  “I did. I do. But if it doesn’t happen I won’t curl up and die.”

  I shove Kate’s ravaged plate away, sated.

  Ah do declare, Miss Mellie, Ah feel better already.

  Chapter 10

  On Thanksgiving Day, the alarm goes off in the pitch-black chill of 5:30 a.m.

  Not because we have to put a turkey in the oven, or catch an early flight.

  No, the alarm goes off at five-thirty (an hour that in June might be sun-splashed and tranquil, but in November is always downright depressing) because I am determined to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live and in person. After a lifetime of watching it on television, I’ve finally got the chance to be there, and I’m going, with or without Jack.

  Without Jack, Raphael and I will be forced to mingle with the great unwashed as we vie for a sidewalk viewing spot somewhere between the Dakota and Herald Square.

  With Jack, however, we will be cordially invited to sit in the VIP viewing stands set up on Central Park West for NBC and its guests.

  Network guests tend to include celebrities, families of program staffers and advertising-agency media drones like Jack. It’s just another corporate perk in lieu of actually getting paid a decent salary.

  Ask any media planner, and I bet he’ll tell you that he’d prefer a beefed-up paycheck to rubbing shoulders with the former cast of Blossom beneath a canopy of oversize, inflated cartoon characters that have been known to topple lampposts and maim onlookers.

  But me, I love a parade.

  As does Raphael.

  Or so he claims.

  Personally, I wonder if he just wants to keep an eye on Donatello, who’s been moonlighting as a so-called “spray model” at Macy’s to earn money for their planned African Safari honeymoon. A “spray model” is an attractive being who is paid incredibly well to troll the cosmetics floor assaulting passersby with the latest scents.

  Anyway, it seems that Donatello, who is marching today as an official Balloon Handler, is a notorious flirt. I suspect Raphael wants to make sure he isn’t cruising the other Balloon Handlers while tethered to the helium-bloated underside of the Honey-Nut Cheerios Bee, because, well, we all know what a turn-on that can be.

  So yes, Raphael is definitely coming with me. We’re scheduled to meet on the subway platform at Grand Central in twenty minutes.

  Jack still isn’t sure he wants to go, even now that he’s showered, shaved and dressed in jeans and a nice gray sweater. He dawdles around by the table, rearranging piles of stuff: newspapers, magazines, the game boxes containing Scattergories and Clue, which we played last night when Buckley and Sonja came over with a bottle of wine.

  The board games were my idea. Not that I didn’t want to sit around and chat about their upcoming nuptials or anything. I just happen to like board games. Really.

  Buckley and Sonja could barely get a word in edgewise between dice rolls and ticking timers, but they did manage to mention that they’re getting married a year from next summer. Now that she knows Buckley isn’t going anywhere, Sonja wants time to plan “the perfect wedding.” Which will be in Boston, but hopefully without the Red Sox theme she keeps joking about.

  At least, I assume she’s joking.

  The best part about the Sonja-Buckley nuptials being put off for a year and a half is that Jack and I might actually beat them to the altar.

  Not that it’s a race, or anything.

  But if it were, we wouldn’t lose…unless, of course, Jack continues to take his sweet time proposing.

  Speaking of Jack taking his sweet time…

  “Are you coming, or not?” I finally ask him as he drifts aimlessly away from the door again, coming to rest beside the table that holds my Chia Pet. We moved it closer to the windo
w when it developed a severe case of mildew, hoping the sun would cure it. Now it sits there sadly, day after day, growing smelly spores in the gray light. I want to throw it away, but I’m afraid it would hurt Jack’s feelings.

  “Wouldn’t you rather just watch the parade here, on TV?” Jack gazes out the window at the shred of blustery November sky that’s visible between the other buildings. “I mean, it’s so lousy out.”

  Today’s forecast: rain, sleet, wind, cold. Same as yesterday, same as tomorrow. Ah, November.

  “I’ve watched this parade on TV every year,” I say firmly. “I want to see it in person for a change.”

  For a minute, Jack doesn’t say anything.

  Then, “Okay.”

  “You’ll go?” I ask, pleasantly surprised.

  “I’ll go,” he confirms with the enthusiasm of one who has just landed a last minute root canal appointment.

  He reaches for his jacket, which is, of course, close at hand, draped over the nearest chair where it’s been since he took it off Monday night.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” He sighs heavily.

  Maybe it’s just me, but he doesn’t sound that into it.

  “Come on, Jack,” I say, all Rah-Rah, Sis-Boom-Bah, “this is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade!”

  “I know.”

  “It’s going to be so great!”

  Goooooooooooooo, Macy’s!

  “Yeah,” Jack says, all Eeyore-ish.

  Okay, whatever. At least he’s going. VIP viewing stand, here I come!

  I shove my feet into my sneakers without untying them, then tug the squashed backs up over my heels. I know it drives Jack crazy when I do that, but it drives me crazy when he acts unenthused about festive holiday events, so we’re even.

  “I wish you could be more excited about this parade,” I tell him.

  “I was, the first five times I saw it.” He pulls on his leather jacket. Then he brightens, like he’s just seen the light.

  “Hey, what are we having for breakfast?” he asks.

  Okay, food is so not the light. Food is darkness. Food is evil.

  Because remember that five pounds that crept up on me after I quit smoking?

  It’s still here, plus two more. Here, there, everywhere: my hips, my thighs, my gut, even my arms. It’s as though everything that was once lean and taut—more or less—is now lightly padded in flab.

  I’m sure it’s nothing that a couple of weeks on Atkins—or a few months at Alderson Federal Prison Camp—won’t cure. But it’s hard not to feel discouraged, especially when I open my closet each morning and realize the only thing that fits comfortably is my terry-cloth robe.

  Today, in addition to sneakers and three unflattering layers of thermal shirts for warmth and camouflage, I’ve got on my biggest pair of “skinny” jeans, as opposed to my skinniest pair of “fat” jeans, which are tucked away in the top of my closet. I have kept them around strictly as a souvenir of the bad old days, not because I ever in a million years thought I might need to wear them again.

  At this rate, though, don’t be surprised if you see me in them at the office Christmas party because they’re all I can fit into.

  God, that’s so depressing.

  Depressing enough to make me think no freaking way.

  If I’ve got the willpower to quit smoking, I’ve got the willpower to quit eating. Gaining all that weight back again would be a fate worse than…

  Well, I really can’t think of a fate worse than that. Realistically, anyway. Because what are the chances that I’m going to be taken hostage by a band of militants or terrorists? It goes without saying that that would be a worse fate.

  But regaining forty pounds is about as bad as it gets in my world.

  “Want to stop off for a couple of ham-egg-and-cheeses at the deli?” Jack asks with callous disregard to my plight.

  I bitch slap him across the face.

  Okay, not really.

  But I do scowl.

  “What?” he asks, oblivious. “You love ham-egg-and-cheese.”

  The thing is…I really don’t. I can easily live without ham-egg-and-cheese. Just as I have more or less easily lived without most of the foods I’ve given up these last couple of years. But that was back when I had cigarettes to take away the hunger pains. Nothing like lighting up and breathing in a lungful of toxic smoke to diminish the old appetite.

  Without smoking to fall back on, I have found myself mindlessly munching stuff I never would have dreamed of eating. Mostly Man Food, because I’m usually with Jack when I fall victim to temptation. Burgers, sandwiches, sausage…bulky fill-’er-up food that leaves you feeling bloated and lethargic.

  But if I’m going to gain another ounce of weight from here on in—and believe me, I don’t intend to—it’s going to be accomplished with things I really like. Eggplant parmesan, raspberry pie, piña coladas.

  Yum, yum and yum.

  “Too fattening,” I tell Jack, vis-à-vis ham-egg-and-cheeses.

  “Okay, so I’ll get a ham-egg-and-cheese,” Jack says reasonably, jangling his keys. “Ready to go?”

  “You’re going to just eat in front of me?”

  “You can get a bran muffin or something.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “What?” he asks with vacant-eyed man-cluelessness.

  “Didn’t you know that bran muffins have way more fat and calories than, like, six Big Macs?”

  “They do?”

  I don’t know…do they? Inner Tracey asks, ridden with uncertainty.

  “Yeah,” Outer Tracey says firmly, because I’m sure I read that somewhere, and anyway, who’s in the mood to quibble with Jack over fat and calories, and what does he know from bran muffins?

  “Besides,” I add, “it’s Thanksgiving.”

  “Right.” Jack nods. Then asks, “What are you talking about?”

  “You know…why would you want to eat a big breakfast on Thanksgiving?”

  “Isn’t the whole point of Thanksgiving that it’s a feast day?”

  We head for the door. Jack holds it open for me.

  “Exactly,” I say. “Why ruin our appetites now?”

  “Because we’re hungry?”

  I shrug. “If I’m going to eat today, it’s going to be once. And it’s going to be good. I’m having everything I want later, when we get to your mother’s house.”

  “So you’re saying, no deli?” he asks as we head toward the elevator.

  “We can get coffee, but that’s it.”

  “Yeah, the thing is…I’m not the one on a diet here. Not that you should be either because you look great—” Ch-ching, ch-ching, ch-ching, boyfriend points adding up rapidly “—but why do I have to save my appetite? It’ll be back in an hour either way. By the time we get up to Westchester I’ll be starved.”

  “You know what? Go ahead,” I say with a shrug and a martyred expression guaranteed to wring every bit of enjoyment out of future ham-egg-and-cheeses.

  “I can’t eat in front of you.”

  “Well, I can’t eat, period.”

  And you know, I can’t help thinking that it wouldn’t kill him to show some solidarity here.

  Especially since, if it weren’t for him, I’d be puffing away on my Salem Slim Lights and skinny as ever by now.

  I only quit smoking because he wanted me to.

  Okay, I originally quit because I also wanted to, but I got over that fast.

  Now I’m a nonsmoker because Jack apparently wants me to live forever.

  Why, I don’t know, since he isn’t yet willing to guarantee that my immortality will be spent with him.

  Regardless of his commitment issues, he doesn’t want me to die of lung cancer, so here I am, healthy and fat, and here he is, insensitively going on and on about ham-egg-and-cheeses.

  “Okay,” he says reluctantly. “I’ll skip breakfast. But we still need coffee.”

  “Coffee’s fine.”

  We get two large ones at t
he deli on the corner as Jack looks longingly at the cold-cut display case.

  “Two coffees…that it?” asks our friendly neighborhood deli man, who knows us well enough to always ask, when one of us is solo, where the other is. Who says New York City isn’t a friendly place?

  “Two coffees…that’s it,” I say firmly, tearing my longing gaze away from the Funyuns display. Yes, I know they’re chock-full of salt, fat and calories. But I love them. And as soon as I lose a few pounds, I’m going to treat myself to some.

  I dump a Splenda packet into my coffee and take two sips from my cup as Jack pays for them both.

  “You probably shouldn’t have gotten a large,” he tells me.

  “It’s the same amount of calories as a small. Coffee isn’t fattening.”

  “No, I mean, what if you have to go to the bathroom?”

  Oh.

  I look at Friendly Neighborhood Deli Man. “Do you have a ladies’ room?”

  He glances around like a spy about to open his trench coat and deliver the goods, then says in a conspiratorial whisper, “Shh, that way.”

  He points to an unmarked door beside the Fritos display. “Just for you. Okay? You keep it quiet.”

  “Thank you!” I say with fervent relief, and hand my coffee to Jack. “I’ll be right back.”

  “You have to go already?”

  “No, but…there’s a bathroom, so I should.”

  Which makes perfect sense, because New York isn’t like other cities. Most public places here don’t have rest rooms. I’ve been a Manhattanite long enough to have scouted out a few that I can rely on—in Grand Central Station, in the Barnes & Noble in the Citicorp Building, in the basement of Trump Tower—but for the most part, preemptive measures are necessary.

  The bathroom is surprisingly dirty.

  Maybe not surprisingly. This is, after all, New York, where cockroaches stroll the walls of the nicest establishments.

  Mental note: in future, find new establishment from which to purchase prepared food.

  I try to pee, but of course, I can’t. Not when I’m half crouched so as not to let my butt cheeks make contact with a toilet seat that’s covered in stains and pockmarks.

  How does a toilet seat get all beat up like that? I mean, what goes on in here?