CHAPTER THREE

Life is Full of Little Surprises

I arrived at the restaurant exactly on time, to find my other best friend lurking in the entryway, ready to provide moral support. “Ready to be surprised?” Nick said as he handed me a glass of Sangiovese and a small box wrapped in a page from the Voice.

“By the party or your gift?” I teased. Nick’s gifts were legend among our friends.

He smiled. “Both, of course.” His gaze flickered to the back room where Emily waited to shout surprise and give me a mild heart attack. “Go ahead and open it here. You may need it in there.”

Need it?…I didn’t want to ask. I handed him back the wine and quickly opened the box. “A pen on a chain. Just what an editor needs. I wonder where I should attach it?”

He grinned, handing me back the wine and plucking the gift from my hand before I could examine it well. There was always a twist with a present from Nick. As a proverbial starving artist, he tended to make his gifts from things he scrounged from the trash. “It’s a necklace. Turn around.”

I stood still as he fastened the pen necklace around my neck. Fortified with a gulp of wine, I asked, “Exactly why am I going to need a pen at my surprise birthday party?”

He finished locking the clasp and squeezed my shoulders once, quickly, before he herded me toward the back of the restaurant. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

It wasn’t hard to put on my I-had-no-idea-face when I walked in the private room Emily had reserved and was greeted with a wave of fairly coordinated shouts of “Surprise! Happy birthday Diana!” And the release of a roomful of pink and purple helium balloons.

Emily can’t keep surprises, but that doesn’t mean she can’t leave me speechless on a semi-weekly basis. The party looks nothing like the one in The Plan. It’s not just that Emily is not a man, not my husband, or not wearing Armani. No, The fluttery sea blue lace of her dress suits her fairy princess nature as she embraces me. Like Nick, Emily is different. I seem to be a magnet for different—in friends, in roommates, in parents. No matter how much I adore her, I can’t help but be relieved that I’m not greeted with a mail-order husband and a quickie wedding. Emily knows how seriously I take my goals—although she doesn’t always approve.

So, I had to celebrate my thirtieth without the husband, the career, the discreet champagne-colored balloons my imaginary husband would have chosen. So what? I have friends, and … I looked around the room … sort-of-friends to help me celebrate, despite the sickeningly cheerful pink and purples balloons floating above the table. At least no balloons could destroy the taste of good food — and the party had been arranged at Martelli’s, my favorite Italian restaurant.

Just to be sure, I had left a menu, marked with my favorites, stuck to the fridge door. It disappeared two weeks ago. Hint taken right on schedule. Now if only I could have been left alone with a lovely plate of spaghetti Bolognese and a bottle of Sangiovese, I‘d have been happy.

Unfortunately, Emily, knowing how much I dislike missing a milestone on The Plan, was determined to make me enjoy the evening. “Sangiovese?” She looked at the glass in my hand, and then the one in hers.

“Nick,” I explained with a nod to the coward, who had seated himself as far from the pink and purple draped birthday throne as he could. No doubt he had thought the pen would be useful for popping balloons. A very tempting thought.

Emily’s expression cleared. “Of course. Here.” She extended the glass and poured the wine in her glass into the one I held. “Happy birthday.”

“Are you really surprised?”

I looked at the balloons. “Stunned.”

“Just wait. There’s more.” She smiled. The crazed smile of a Kindergarten teacher in the last minutes of the last day of school. And then she trundled out a cart from behind the discreet little curtain in our private dining room and my mood plummeted to dungeon depths. Mold. Damp. Spiders and worse skittering through the dark recesses of my imagination. I definitely did not leave any hints that would require her laptop. Or the projector ominously attached to it by a coiled white cable.

Nick gave me an encouraging lift of his beer from across the table. No rescue from that quarter. A square of bright light flickered and resolved against the whitewashed cinderblock wall. The horror of me, at five, one huge pink frill with a smile that stretched from ear to ear revealing gums and tongue and missing tooth, roots me to my chair.

My boss turned to me with an upraised eyebrow—I am certain she practices the expression in the mirror she does it so perfectly every time. Her glance caught on a bit of lint resting on the shoulder of her black suit jacket and she brushed it off with one elegant flick of her hand. “Your fondness for pink runs deep, doesn’t it Diana?” Everyone laughed but me. I pasted on a frozen smile, as I always do when my boss reveals her utter lack of appreciation.

Frantic, I sent eyebrow S.O.S. signals of distress to Emily. Psychic messages: No. Stop. No. No, no, no, no…no….

Apparently Emily mistook my horror for humor, because she hit a key on her laptop and sent the movie of me splashing into action against the white wall of the restaurant. Part of the painfully young me was obscured by a potted palm. Not enough.

How did she manage to keep this secret from me? Am I slipping? Can’t meet a major life goal or two in a timely manner, and now suddenly I can’t ferret a secret out of an open book like Emily?

“Once upon a time there lived a Long Island girl named Diana. The little girl had a plan. In fact, she called it The Plan.” Everyone laughed and I had to see why, even though I knew I‘d regret it.

The pink frill had disappeared to be replaced by me in a purple toga, with a pink plastic bow slung over my shoulder. The toga was purple because from age four to age eight I would only wear shades of pink or purple. As I watched, the little me leapt about shouting, “I want to be a princess.”

With my life passing before my eyes, I wanted to leave the restaurant. But I was stuck, because Emily was pleased with herself and I would rather sit through the humiliation than publicly crush her. My mother could be heard from behind the camera saying, “A goddess is better than a princess, Diana,” before I send an arrow straight into the eye of the video camera lens.

As if the arrow had the power to collapse time, I appeared at age six, in pink this time, with a big gap where I‘d lost my top two front teeth. Apparently I‘d given up the idea of being a princess for the more appealing goal of sticking my tongue as far as possible through the hole in my smile. And then I’m a shiny pink mushroom in the school play, shakily reciting my one line--”Under a tree I sit, waiting for a friend to visit.” Everyone laughed again.

Three quarters of a bottle of wine later, after a spectacle that included a curveless 12 year old me in my first (red, not pink or purple) bikini, I wave goodbye to my mother and father as I drive away in my used blue Jetta, vanity license plate reading The Plan. I had thought I was so clever — setting The Plan in motion.

A curly THE END…or is it? … metamorphosed from pink to purple to the wine color of my favorite suit as the expose of my life came to a close.

The End. Thank God. Time at last began to move naturally again, and the sound of the blood moving through my veins quieted. “Diana, what I didn’t know about you.” Allie, a former roommate twirled a pin between her fingertips. She was talking to me, but her eye was on the nearest man, as usual.

“I am a woman of mystery.” I have definitely had too much wine. Allie is the roommate who stayed for six weeks and then went off with my then-current boyfriend, Alejandro, and my peach angora sweater. She left a note saying that we were better off just friends. I’m not completely certain whether she meant she and I, or Alejandro and I, but I forgave them both, even though I still miss the sweater. I’m used to losing roommates and boyfriends, but I usually manage to hang on to my favorite clothes.

I make my living in relationships. A good living, but not a great one--yet. I put together a section for The Female Eye on how to get a man, how to keep him, how to talk to him, how to get him to listen, even how to dump him when you decide you don’t want him. The irony of my job has not escaped me through the years, but never seemed so sharp as it did when I was surrounded by friends and co-workers in celebration of my birthday. My thirtieth birthday. 3-0. I’m not the only one without a date. But then, no one else at this table makes a living trying to create-maintain-tweak the perfect relationship.

Emily snapped her laptop shut. “Don’t be a snot, Allie. Diana needs our help. She missed a step on The Plan. A big one. Unless…” She looked at me. “You didn’t get married since this morning did you?” Everyone laughed. Again.

I glared at her. “No.” If I were in charge of the world, I would have sensitive friends, who would reassure me that thirty is not old and that the soul mate I deserve is just around the corner.

“Well then. I think we should all help Diana find her Mr. Right.” Emily looked around the room. “After all, she has done her best to help all of us when we needed it. Right?”

“And when we didn’t need it,” said one of my many previous roommates whose name had slipped my mind, but whose fascination for serving sauerkraut with everything he ate had not.

I looked at Nick, pleading with him to stop this. He kept his eyes on Emily. Probably with the same fascination as happens when you see an accident about to occur and there’s no way to stop it.

Allie, always one to look for the short cut, asked the obvious question, “Are you even dating?”

“No.” Just the the bare word, no elaboration.

My boss, aka Dragon Lady, aka Olivia Wallace, raised her barely touched wine glass for the first toast of the evening. “To Diana, who has become the arbiter of the Perfect Man, without having to maintain one of her own.” She sipped the wine politely, but then washed it down with a belt from her ever present glass of scotch, neat.

Why did Emily have to out me to my boss? Business is a bitch to a woman who dares to age. I’ve been pitching high concept article ideas for an under thirty audience. Had my chance to write passed me by? Worse, would I soon be put to pasture editing the how to survive divorce and middle age articles? Is there the equivalent of Bo-Tox for careers?

A man with a paunch and a sparse brush of gray hair is still a lion. But a woman with a wrinkle--opportunities are not us. The little laugh lines around my eyes that hadn’t bothered me yesterday, suddenly seemed like burgeoning Grand Canyons. Thank God the restaurant went in for muted light and artful truth.

I could feel the chance to earn a Pulitzer slipping away, which was not helped when Emily rose from the table and lifted her glass in my direction. “To Diana, queen of the single lifestyle section. May she meet her Mr. Right and get The Plan back so we can all do this again at her wedding.”

“May she reign long,” my boss added with a wave of her scotch glass. Who can tell if she means it? She might, of course. I don’t flatter myself that she loves my work--a suburbanite with an SUV and a TV that plays “Sex and the City” reruns non-stop could do my job. No. She simply hates change. The employees who stay are the ones who realize that her cries of “I want new! I want fresh!” really meant “I want the same thing packaged as something different.”

Even though she hasn’t given me one of the writing assignments I asked for weekly, she loves my ideas, she says. And I believe her, because she always assigns them to another writer—usually Tandy Baker, a woman with the depth of skim ice on a winter river. I even dared to ask her why, once. Can’t achieve your goals if you’re too timid to push for them. “You just need to find the perfect idea,” she told me. “One that only you could write,”…as if there is such a thing. Perfect man, perfect idea, my life is apparently off track because I can’t seem to find either one.

Glasses raised to a general murmur of “Queen Diana.” One of my friends far down the table lifted her glass and laughed, “Queen of the List you mean.”

Paolo, another former roommate, snickers. “Surely you should retire those things, now that you are a decrepit old woman.” Paolo is handsome, a struggling actor who says he’s twenty-six. I realize I never considered dating him. Probably because he never considered paying the rent after he moved in. I finally made him a calendar with the date the rent was due circled. He moved out the next day.

Nick—a man who has become a friend without a way station at either boyfriend or roommate--laughed and raised his glass. “To burning the list at last.” Et tu, Nick? I forgive him though. He had drunk too much, as he tended to do when forced into a large crowd of mostly women.

“Here here.” Even Emily joined the enthusiastic toast. Traitor.

“My lists keep my life organized and focused--unlike some of yours.” I didn’t want to be defensive, but it was my birthday. My thirtieth birthday. You would think someone would be kind. Of course, they had now all seen me in a purple toga and a bikini without a curve in sight. “Paolo — who helped you get that walk-on part on off-off-off Broadway? You would have missed that call-back if I hadn’t made you a list and a map.”

He bowed. “I concede, Diana, Queen of Lists. If I can be of service, I shall.”

“Sit, Paolo. Let me talk.” Emily dismissed him with a flip of her hand and turned back to me. Not content with humiliating me visually, Emily outed my deepest secret. “I understand grocery lists, to do lists and--” she smiles at Phil. Have I mentioned Emily is married? Happily too. Five years. Phil is not only a great guy, but so far he has been a great husband, too. She didn’t even have a goal, just fell into it as easily as wiggling into spandex.

Oblivious to the black currents of jealousy stirring in me, she continued. “--honey do lists. I even understand keeping a little black book of current lovers. But I draw the line at keeping a list of every past boyfriend along with how they measured up against your Ten Commandments of Love and Marriage.”

I confess, for a moment I considered taking revenge by dragging her husband into the ladies’ room and sharing a passionate kiss. But it wouldn’t have worked. He’s not my type. Or, more precisely, he’s too exactly my type. Emily, when she is exasperated with his need for precision and order, often swears that he and I could be identical twins separated at birth if only we weren’t opposite sexes.

Everyone laughed at the idea of my detailed boyfriend rating list, except Olivia, who hadn’t heard whispers of my infamous black book. Okay, if so many people have heard of it, it can’t really be classified as a secret, but I wish it was. At least, from my boss. “You keep a list of the old boyfriends?” She was focusing extra carefully and licking her lips, a sure sign that she was well on the way to forgetting everything that happened at the party.

I wish I could have said the same. Sometimes I blink and I see the absurdity of my life, and then it disappears in the next blink and everything seems normal and right. For example, many of the guests at my birthday party were former roommates of mine. In the five years since Emily moved out to get married, I have had many roommates. This means many people who have seen me in my sweats with no makeup, but don’t like me enough to live with me for longer than a few months at a time. I’d live alone, if I could afford it. I almost can. Fortunately, since I am once again looking for a roommate. Looking for a new roommate is almost as bad as having to White-out a missed goal.

“What else would a good Queen of Lists do? After all, they have to meet her standards don’t they? No lying, cheating, stealing. Seems reasonable. But what else does she want a guy to do? Leap over tall buildings? Outrun locomotives?” Nick. Again. Et tu too, Nick?

“You forgot the commandment against stabbing me in the back.” Despite my intention to be light and breezy, my voice sounded tight. He sat back a bit sheepishly, while everyone else sat forward just a touch.

Emily pointed to the small stack of presents and said somewhat over brightly, “Never mind the past, let’s get to the presents.”

I could not help but whisper a silent thanks that Emily was the one roommate who stuck with me through college and right up until her marriage--even though at that particular moment I wanted to strangle her with my pantyhose.

“First,” I stood up, not surprised to find the room spinning. After all, the evening had been a roller coaster ride, complete with lots and lots of wine. “The Queen needs to visit the ladies’ room.”

Emily, finally aware that I was not enjoying this as much as she thought I would, popped up. “Good idea. Just one more thing.”

“You must embrace your inner pink one more time, and then let go,“ she said, handing me a ruby crusted hatpin of my grandmother’s. I recognized it from my mother’s jewelry box. The gesture touched me. Emily is not the planner I am, but she must have begged the hatpin from my mother before the big safari.

“Inner pink?”

“For girlhood,” she explained. “It’s symbolic.”

“Kindergarten teacher,” I countered, before I chose the balloon closest to me, which just happened to be next to Olivia’s ear. Serendipity indeed. “This is for you, Emily.” I pushed the pin into the pink latex and the balloon popped. Loudly.

Olivia jumped a little, but her drink did not spill. Before she said a word, Emily shouted, “Everyone, now! Free your pink and purple!”

For a moment there was a whirl of arms and elbows and an ebb and flow of laughter punctuated by pops as the other guests used the pins by their plates to pop balloons. Emily’s eyes met mine and she grinned as she handed the last balloon to Olivia to pop and everyone settled speechless in their seats.

In the satisfying silence, as bits of pink and purple latex confetti floated to the floor, the tablecloth, onto the guests, I did not regret that some of the things on my to do list missed the big 3-0 deadline. Life can throw curves. I can adapt. Thirty-two sounds like a good age to be married. And the Ten Commandments of Love and Marriage were still a sound set of principles to use to help me find the right guy.

No one noticed when I slipped away to the ladies’ room.