From Smart Girls Say Yes
by Fern McAllister
Emma had us at “Federal Withholdings.”
Carolina and I met sitting side by side in a conference room while filling out new-hire paperwork—a merry-go-round of letters and numbers from W-4 to the 401(k). Emma was our guide.
Our employer was a global consulting mega-firm whose logo faintly resembled a giant penis pointing skyward. All men wore dark suits. Women, skirts and pantyhose. Every seat was full, and in a room full of Young Republicans, there were only two people I wanted to meet: the gal on my right with the wild curly hair and an ankle tattoo of the sun peeking through her nylons, and the one standing at the front of the room in a white-bibbed blouse and brown Mary Janes looking like a lost librarian.
“You can always change your withholdings later,” she said, walking us through the W-4. “Nothing in life is permanent, folks. Not your rent, not your pant size, and not your taxes.”
Afterward, I asked Wild Curls about her tattoo. “Oh, that? It’s a somewhat regrettable spring break decision. I never liked it much until the executive who offered me this job strongly recommended that I cover it with a Band-Aid. I told him, ‘You want me to squeeze myself into pantyhose and wrap my ankle? Forget it.’”
When you meet a woman that confident, you make her your best friend.
Two years prior, Andi and I fell in bestie love in line at a coffee cart on campus at the University of California, Davis. When she got to the window and asked for a can of “pop,” I knew we’d spend the rest of our lives together.
“You must be from the Midwest,” I said.
“Minneapolis,” she answered.
“Milwaukee for me. Technically, most people there say ‘soda,’ but my mom was a transplant.”
It’s scintillating topics like this one that earn Midwesterners a reputation for being boring. We’re not. We simply appreciate clarity.
I soon learned that Andi was in her second year of law school. When not in class, she studied. When not studying, she helped her law-student boyfriend study.
“You’re probably thinking I need a social life but when would I squeeze it in?”
From that day on, stealing Andi away from the books became my favorite hobby.
Not that I had much time for such tomfoolery. I was in the first year of my master’s program and I taught three times a week. My department, however, offered slim pickings by way of interesting colleagues. The only woman who showed any social potential at all did so by inviting me to a place called Apple Hill to “fart around for the day.”
The Midwesterner in me balked, the invitation appealing neither in its ambiguity nor its clarity.
Fast-forward two years, and Andi and I both landed in San Francisco, ready to grab our slice of the silicon pie. Several months later, over drinks, Andi said, “I thought after law school I’d finally get a life. But now all I do is go to work and then come home and study for the bar.”
I wasn’t faring much better. Only, my pattern was work, minor anxiety attack, crawl under the covers, try again tomorrow. The obvious solution to our social woes was to start a book club. And that is how the four of us—Andi, Carolina, Emma, and Fern—became a We.
As a founding mother, I chose the first book, a memoir about a woefully unprepared twenty-something woman who rode camels across the Australian outback. For what reason, none of us could figure out, and when each of us hated the story with colorful abandon, I knew there was no stopping this new venture of ours.
Emma, God bless her, selected the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood next and showed up to the meeting wearing a thermos full of cosmopolitans.
“I was on BART last weekend, and I saw a group of girlfriends pouring cocktails out of a thermos. It looked so fun I had to buy my own.” Hers was pink plaid and hung from her shoulder on a pink leather strap.
The Ya-Yas were fierce in every way our little group longed to be—in their pursuit of fun, in their cocktails, and in their devotion to each other. Perhaps we didn’t recognize it at the time, but we were four women desperate to love and be loved. None of us were getting it from the men in our lives. And none of the men in our lives deserved the love we surrendered to them.
Andi’s law school, now-attorney boyfriend seemed to get needier by the hour. Couldn’t press a shirt but refused to pay for dry cleaning. Pouted when she went out but lay on the couch when she stayed home. He was a man with a bright future, if only he’d bother to stand up and turn on the light.
Carolina’s boyfriend at the time was a head-scratcher of a love interest. Where she was driven, he couldn’t keep a job. He agreed to pay half the rent on their Japantown apartment, but half the time he borrowed his share from her. She was never home, and he never left. Later, she’d admit, “He was a little bit dense. I took advantage of the fact that it never occurred to him to wonder about where I went and who I was with.”
And Emma, the bright, cheerful young woman with the playful heart we’d grown to love, was busy planning her wedding to a perpetually grouchy financial analyst. By the time he asked for her hand, she had her sights set on a home in Marin and private school for the two daughters they’d have two years apart. Their thermoses would hold ice-cold organic milk.
And what was I up to? I was dating the emotionally clogged cheater I met in graduate school. He was just charming and persuasive enough that I decided every problem in our relationship must be due to my shortcomings. If I only exercised more, I wouldn’t hate my body in the bikinis he loved. If I could just relax, I wouldn’t nag him to talk when he wanted to be left alone. I’d fallen in love because he made me feel as if I could accomplish anything. But somewhere, gradually, I’d lost my magic.
By the afternoon we four friends lay atop the merchandise at the Mattress Train daring each other to say “yes!”, the self-confident girls inside us were primed to claw back the years, tears, and fears we’d wasted on such unfortunate boys. Andi caught her boyfriend trying to cheat on the bar exam. Carolina was out of money and out of love. Emma broke off the engagement when her fiancé broke into her underwear drawer. And I forced myself to admit that the woman who routinely called our apartment late at night did not have the wrong number.
Shortly after our breakups, someone suggested we read Jon Krakauer’s account of the disastrous Mount Everest expedition that claimed five lives, Into Thin Air. I don’t recall the evening’s cocktail, but I do remember looking around the room at Emma, Carolina, and Andi knowing that they’d never leave me in the midst of my trauma. Not one of them would step over my decaying oxygen-deprived body in pursuit of their own ambitions. We were in this thing called life all the way to the top.
Because when we finally reach the summit, none of us wants to reach it alone. Who would we celebrate with when we got there?