THREE
An unfamiliar man wearing a huge white apron was filling the
doorway of the billiards room.
‘Lizzie?’ chirped the man.
‘That’s not my name.’
‘Aren’t you the wedding girl?’
‘Yes, but I’m Beth, not Lizzie.’
That was too brusque for Mr Chef’s liking. He stepped backwards, his double chin shaking like jelly. ‘Look, luv, your wedding cake’s arrived. What say you come and check it’s the right one?’
‘Why wouldn’t it be the right one?’
‘Well, you never know. It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘Okay, but I need to make a phone call first.’ I got up and headed towards the window. I waited for the chef to disappear before nervously dialling Jordan’s number again.
A gruff male voice answered this time. I didn’t know what to think. I hesitated then asked for Jordan. ‘You must’ve rung the wrong number.’
‘What number is this?’ I replied.
‘What number do you want?’ he flicked my question back.
I recited Jordan’s number and he confirmed my error. I dialed again, but no-one picked up. I let the phone ring for about five minutes. If Jordan was in the shower, or Angus outside in the dunny, they would eventually come to my aid.
In the future we’ll have those portable phones they’re using in America now, I thought. We would be able to keep tabs on each other in a crisis like this. In the meantime, Jordan was out of reach and there was nothing I could do about it. I still had nearly a whole day to break it off with him. Our ceremony wasn’t scheduled to start until five-thirty and it was now ten forty-five. What should I do with myself? Maybe go check on the cake? No, I should probably steer clear of the hotel staff while my stay here was provisional. Avoid any future embarrassing moments. So I sat back down on the couch and started rehearsing what I was going to say to Jordan when we finally did speak.
‘On my way out the door last night, Cherie handed me some mail. There was a letter from Tracy … Yes, Tracy Breeze. Who else? What did she say? Well, I’ll give you three guesses.’
My immediate response after reading Tracy’s letter was to blame myself. I knew we shouldn’t have invited Tracy to our wedding. She must have been insulted by the invitation and this was her retaliation. I should have stood firm when Jordan said, ‘She’ll hear about the wedding, Beth. She’ll expect an invitation.’
Not that I was worried about Tracy getting even with me for marrying Jordan back when we posted the invites. I had other misgivings six weeks ago. My own jockeying for centre stage was the issue; inviting Tracy to our wedding would be like inviting the sun along to a Halloween party. She was the golden girl at secondary school. She succeeded where I fell short.
‘This sounds silly, but I don’t want to have to compete with Tracy on my wedding day.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ Jordan hissed. ‘Don’t you know she’s engaged to a prissy theologian?’
Really? So Tracy was going to beat me to the altar.
‘Where did you hear that?’ I asked.
‘Usual source.’
‘Okay, so you mean Binny.’
Tracy could have her invitation then. I wrote Tracy and friend on the card and we sent the envelope care of Tracy’s parents in Sorrento, even though Jordan’s ex-girlfriend, now an engineering graduate, hadn’t lived at home for five years.
As it eventuated, Tracy took so long to reply that we struck her off our guest list. But no, she had delayed to exert maximum surprise so I couldn’t help but be thinking about her on my wedding day. Some people were just born to eclipse others.
Knowing that the pleasure of being with Jordan was intermingled with my feelings for Tracy, and that my relationship with him afforded me the potential to extract some intimate titbits about his old girlfriend – who was also my former best friend – I had been careful to avoid any probing along the lines of, ‘Tell me, what it was like to sleep with Tracy Breeze?’ That would have been way too coarse.
Jordan stayed tight-lipped, though he did tell me some less than salacious things about his ex. One thing I learned was that Tracy loved octopuses, and she had visited numerous aquariums to admire them.
‘She must have got to like them after primary school,’ I said possessively.
‘She has loved octopuses since she was a small child,’ Jordan told me. ‘Her favourite bedtime story had an octopus in it.’
‘You don’t say,’ I replied.
We two girls had a long history. Tracy and I had always been at the same school, usually in the same class. She was the sole person I’d had that kind of continuous bond with, even though she’d only been my treasured best friend in the early years of primary school. To be honest, we barely rated as friends through much of secondary school. Not that we had ever had a falling-out. But there was a point of no return with Tracy. And that point of no return happened in Grade Six when she didn’t ask me to her twelfth birthday party. Longstanding loyalty had always seen Tracy pop an invitation in my schoolbag, followed by a nudge and a glance to alert me to the concealed surprise. She didn’t want to offend those not invited by handing out envelopes in public. This time it was my turn to wait and hope and search my schoolbag in vain.
Tracy could safely exclude me because she believed she would be going to her new school, Mornington Grammar, alone. Follow-up embarrassment could thus be avoided.
‘I was only allowed to invite five people to Picnic at Hanging Rock,’ she later explained. Tracy would have invited me if she hadn’t had such an expensive film and restaurant party. The old stay-at-home parties with hundreds and thousands on the buttered bread and games of pass the parcel had been superseded.
‘That’s okay, Trace,’ I said. I even gave her some speckled nail varnish on her actual birthday, which falls on 12 December.
Contrary to expectation, due to a whim of my mother’s, I was to follow Tracy to her sporty upmarket private school. For when Tracy’s mother correctly assumed I wasn’t going there, my mother decided I was going there, for better or worse. ‘Noone’s going to underrate my daughter Beth!’
Tracy Breeze was her normal infectious self when we met at the Sorrento bus stop for our first day of secondary school.
‘Are your shoes squeaky, Beth? Listen to mine.’ She danced along the metal seat in the bus shelter, making her new shoes mutter a kind of tune. Back and forth she frolicked, as nimbletoed as Sammy Davis Jr.
‘Do you think we’ll be in the same class this year?’ she asked, star-jumping down and sitting beside me.
‘There’s a one in four chance,’ I said, remembering Cherie’s reply to the same question when I’d put it to her, then adding Mum’s qualification, ‘but they may keep primary school friends together.’ (My mother knew a lot about schools because she was a teacher at one herself.)
‘They might,’ Tracy reluctantly agreed. Her fingers ran over the imprint of the school crest on her vinyl bag.
‘Beth, I need to make some new friends first up at Mornington … and Mum says I’ll have a better chance if I’m seen not to be taken.’
I nodded quickly to make her think I was fine about that.
Tracy looked vaguely troubled. She swept back her floppy fringe, as though to brush away what she’d just said.
It would never have been Tracy’s idea. And if Mrs Breeze had advised her daughter to form new attachments while they were going begging at secondary school, she also saw the value of us looking out for each other on the bus. Although dismayed, I began to make the best of Tracy’s blunt rejection. There would be some advantage in moving away from Tracy’s charisma and the bar of athletic achievement that was always set so high. As our bus cruised north along Point Nepean Road, the water of the bay spun gold and silver trinkets in the early morning light, and freedom beckoned. Oh yes, let us be assigned to different classes for once.
The school decided otherwise. On arrival we joined a group of diffident First Formers peering at the class lists and found ourselves in the same class yet again. Tracy shrugged nonchalantly and I almost flattened myself against the noticeboards to persuade her of my independence. At the bell, we lifted our book-filled bags onto our shoulders and went in search of our home room. The corridors pulsed with absurdly grown-up-looking students. Bosomy girls were no longer the exception and some of the boys were intimidatingly tall. ‘Where did all the little kids go?’ Tracy asked wryly.
Here was a classroom of smaller children. It was our home room. The teacher told us to ‘Sit wherever you like’ but at first glance the room was full up. Two dozen eager beavers had arrived before us. We spotted a couple of spare seats and claimed them. Sitting down, we rested our elbows on the flimsy one-person tables. They were quite pathetic, these rickety desks. Where were the double-person cubby holes with tough wooden flaps that lifted to reveal storeplaces for our books and pencils? That was what we were used to in primary school. Our teacher was briskly dispensing timetables and allocating locker keys. Eventually she ticked off our names and sent us outside to claim our lockers and put away our books and bags.
At the end of this information session our teacher disappeared. When I looked up from my engrossing timetable, a bunch of older students were taking possession of the room. I hurried after my classmates, but the ones I caught up with told me they were on their way to French, which was no help because I had chosen to study German.
A short time later I stood in an empty corridor, fighting back tears. A grey-haired lady approached and led me to the right classroom. The male teacher at the whiteboard said, ‘Guten Tag,’ and held up a German textbook inquiringly.
‘Yes, I got it. But it’s in my locker,’ I explained.
It was incumbent on us to carry the appropriate books from class to class, but enrolling so late I’d missed the orientation sessions so I didn’t know I had to do this. The teacher told me to forget my textbook for today. ‘Who will share with … um, what’s your name again? Oh yes, who will share with Beth?’
One girl’s hand went up as rapidly as a train signal. Following the teacher’s suggestion, we pushed our tables together and practised saying ‘Ich bin die Judy’, ‘Mein Name ist Beth’, ‘Wie geht’s?’, ‘Es geht mir gut’ until we knew these phrases off by heart.
I was relieved Tracy was taking French and hadn’t seen me arriving late under vice-principal escort. In the weeks to come I would feel a certain unruffled acceptance sitting alongside Judy, which I had never felt when I was sitting beside Tracy and admiring her deft little person.
Judy had pale, freckled skin and a generous-sized mouth that she didn’t particularly like. Back in First Form she still wore her hair in two plaits. She frequently tugged on and flicked these plaits about, either for personal comfort or simply to pass the time. Judy radiated bustling health, but then we probably all did back then. I guessed Judy was a squad swimmer before she told me, because she smelt of chlorine and she had those ringed indentations around her eyes from too much goggle use. In the second week of February there was a heatwave and Judy invited me to her local pool to cool off after school. After three visits Judy put the hard word on me: she was insistent that I join her swimming club. But I needed a fair amount of persuading. It took me at least a month to sign up. Even though I had passed my intermediate star, competitive swimming wasn’t really my thing.
Staying back after school in Mornington had its disadvantages. I wanted to get home quickly, change my clothes and bake a cake from a White Wings packet before Cherie got home from work. I loved feeling myself expanding and floating into every room in our single-fronted Victorian cottage. I loved being accountable to no-one. While the cake was cooking I would drag my bike from the shed and ride round the asphalt yard of my old school. Sometimes a lone teacher would be hanging around and they would give me a friendly wave. ‘Hello, Beth. How’s high school going?’ They remembered me!
Every day I experienced a pang of regret that I’d left my small ragamuffin primary school behind. I could still ride around the playground after school, but I could never enter that red-brick building and sit inside those big-windowed, chalky rooms crammed with solid desks ever again. The realm of protected governance was fading quickly. A younger batch of Sorrento children had already taken our vacated places and my only way back would be to repeat Grade Six.
Still, a new friend had been acquired: an unstinting twelve-year-old called Judy Tucker. And there were plenty of other likeable characters I had my eye on. I had no problem staying out of Tracy’s hair, but to satisfy our parents we continued to sit together on the bus, at least in the mornings. Tracy may have found this a bit of a chore, because when the bus filled up she would relinquish her seat and work her way down the aisle saying ‘Hi’ to her new friends from school. From what I overheard, these girls were TV fanatics who loved gossiping about the latest episodes of Number 96 or adjudicating the talent pool on New Faces. They were very small girls, as was Tracy herself in First Form. And they shared a childish habit of sitting cross-legged in their seats, the skirts of their frocks stretched tight from knee to knee. Judging by the way they sat, often exposing the crotches of their underpants, they hadn’t started menstruating and had no fear of doing so soon.
Yet, feigning sophistication, these girls would sometimes discuss boys they claimed familiarity with. My ears pricked up when I heard the phrases ‘pashing for hours’ and ‘he had a good feel and she nearly came’. In hindsight I’d say they’d learned such intimate burble off their older sisters. I doubt they would have had these experiences themselves, though at the time I took them at their word.
Judy nicknamed this bunch of girls ‘the pixie clan’ because of their diminutive stature. She was never as impressed by people as I was, and most of her nicknames were kind of putdowns. The odd thing about the pixies was that they looked really young, but because they watched so much adult TV they sounded sophisticated. Personally, I would have given anything to retain my compact Grade Fiver’s body for a few more years. Initially I rated the pixies highly but I soon learned to be wary of them. They had a nasty habit of running their hands down the back of your dress to see if they could feel a bra strap. If they felt one, they’d look at you smugly and make you feel ashamed for advancing to puberty ahead of them. I was an easy victim for them, having experienced my body’s recent changes as an affliction.
We had begun to read The Diary of Anne Frank in English class. I remember being surprised that Anne felt proud and womanly when she got her first period. It hardly seemed a cause for rejoicing.
‘It’s a real bother,’ Judy confided, tampons falling out of her bag. ‘Have you got yours yet?’
‘No, not yet,’ I lied, and kept it pretty much a secret from her until I was fifteen.
I don’t believe for one minute that the pixies were envious of girls like Judy and me. They didn’t want to be us. That cliché in books and movies is totally misplaced. The foxy pixies flaunted their nubile bodies, cunningly aware they could still do things we girls with swelling, excreting bodies couldn’t. They revelled in the twilight of childhood in the way that young men revel in the discovery of their late-adolescent strength. The comparison is not directly equivalent, of course, but it is apt. Despite advancing to the new order of secondary school, the pixies remained who they’d always been. Their sexual curiosity sprouted inside children’s bodies that hadn’t as yet caused them grief or let them down.
Tracy’s friendship with the tricksy pixies flourished in First Form and made her a TV addict, but during Second Form it began to wane. By then she had got to know the sporty trio of Binny, Pen and Mish. Those three already knew each other from the Little Athletics circuit around Mornington. I may be wrong, but I don’t think the sporty girls would have ever stooped to pinging bra straps or using psychological warfare. Whereas the pixies expended their energy on frivolous pursuits, the budding athletes harnessed theirs to a particular end: the winning of races and ribbons. The pixies were self-assured but aimless; the Little Aths girls were already focused and ambitious.
When questioned about her change of allegiance, Tracy told me, ‘I’ve got no time for gas-bagging now I’m in five school teams.’ Perhaps to avoid any awkwardness with the pixies on the bus, Tracy migrated up the back to sit with a boy from Peninsula College she’d taken a fancy to. I remember this boy’s pinstriped blazer announcing itself with cymbals of red and blue whenever he walked down the aisle.
On the last day of the May holidays, Tracy rang me up and asked me to bring my mother’s curly black wig to school. She refused to tell me what it was for, but when I arrived at the bus stop I wangled it out of her.
‘It’s a disguise, that’s all. I don’t want Travis recognising me.’
‘Did something go wrong with him?’
‘Not exactly.’
She wasn’t going to say any more, but I pointed to the wig and she fessed up. Apparently she’d seen a lot of the blazer boy during the holidays. They’d mucked around in the boy’s family beach box, one of those small shacks built on the sand just metres from the water.
The blazer boy had kissed Tracy in the privacy of the beach box, and he’d asked her if she wanted to go ‘all the way’ with him. For this purpose he’d stolen one of his father’s condoms. The boy had shown Tracy the condom but he hadn’t opened the wrapper.
Tracy had been surprised. ‘Does your dad use those things?’
The boy had responded, ‘Yeah, he uses two a week. I’ve been counting.’
I could tell from Tracy’s pinched expression that the story was going to end badly. She said she didn’t like Travis anymore because he’d given her a bruise on her neck without her realising. Tracy loosened her tie, undid her shirt buttons and showed me the bright red abrasion just above her collarbone.
‘How’d he do that? Did he hit you?’
She shook her head. ‘No, he was just sucking hard, like a vampire.’
Tracy didn’t pretend to have found his action pleasurable.
‘Why don’t you drop him, then?’
‘Have you ever dropped anyone, Beth?’
‘Nope.’
‘Well, I haven’t either. Penny says it’s best to avoid him
until he gets the message.’
I helped Tracy put on her disguise, which included sunglasses and a smelly suede coat of her dad’s. When the bus arrived she sat with her head in a Mad comic all the way to school.
No-one recognised her, except for the blazer boy. And unfortunately, he didn’t get the message. He stopped to chat, saying agreeably, ‘Why are you wearing that kooky outfit?’
‘Just because …’ Tracy flushed and looked out the window.
In my brief conversation with Travis I explained that Tracy was trying out for a part in a school play. I wasn’t accustomed to fibbing but I was happy to copy Tracy that day. What was okay for her was okay for me.
At school I raced off to find Judy. She would die when she heard what the blazer boy did to Tracy’s neck. Nothing so risqué had ever happened to us.
‘My God, Beth, you’re talking about a lovebite.’
‘So that’s what it was. I wonder if Tracy knows.’
Judy laughed. ‘Well, she wasn’t born yesterday. Did she use the condom or not?’
‘I couldn’t bring myself to ask.’
‘Useless stooge you are, then.’
So now Tracy had had her first boyfriend, and she was already on the lookout for someone less rough-and-ready. Judy and I lapped up Tracy’s experiences, assigned the blazer boy to the scrap heap, and went to the school library to borrow a copy of Fifteen, the novel by Beverly Cleary.
Some of our classmates had been reading this teen romance with furtive smiles on their faces. When we couldn’t find it on the shelves the librarian produced a copy she kept in a locked drawer to save it from being stolen. She handed it over with gluey eyes, and we guessed that she really dug the story too. Judy read it overnight then passed it on to me. A shy girl called Jane fancies this cool guy Stan. Against the odds, Stan rings Jane up and asks her out on a date. This is all the more thrilling (both for Jane and her young readers) because he has met Jane only once and briefly when he was delivering pet food to the house where Jane happened to be babysitting.
Fifteen is a pretty facile novel but I found it immensely stimulating when I was thirteen. The climax of the story, when Stan kisses Jane, really turned me on. This is pathetic, but I have to admit it’s the only book I read with any passion during secondary school. It was the kind of stealthy read that lubricated our latent desires in the same way Playboy centrefolds aroused and entertained the boys in our class.
Why did our generation of kids soak up all this corny American stuff set in the 1950s? While Judy and I got drunk on that novel, Tracy and her sporty coterie were watching Happy Days on the idiot box most nights of the week. As we sat around in our home room waiting for morning rollcall, Tracy would lower her voice and do impersonations of Fonzie to pass the time. She’d sidle up to Penny and say, ‘Why don’t you throw down your pencil, hustle over to my place and be cool for the rest of your life!’ In spite of being a C-grade French student, Tracy could do a convincing American accent. ‘What’re you waiting for, huh?’
Penny knew the required response. She’d imitate a shiver and rise gracefully out of her seat. ‘Oh la Fonz! A nice lady like me is sure going to do that for you.’
Penny would smirk and aim her pencil for the bin, throwing with perfect accuracy.
Intrigued by the girls’ flirty Happy Days skit, some of the boys would coyly approach the pair. ‘Ask us, Tracy. Go on. Ask us.’
When the teacher appeared, Tracy would rush to her seat as if she was playing musical chairs and the music had abruptly stopped. She’d turn her full attention to our teacher as though Miss Unremarkable was the most remarkable person in the world. Not far into the lesson, though, her alert posture slumped and her doodling began. Tracy only came alive again when we went outside for recess or lunchtime sport.
I wouldn’t say that Tracy snubbed me in class. She tolerated me as long as I retained a respectful distance. She didn’t appreciate it when I let it slip to our classmates that I knew her much better than it otherwise appeared. Once I was blathering on to Judy about a zip-up jumpsuit with purple stripes that Tracy had worn to a Sunday school picnic when we were ten. Tracy came up behind me and clamped her hand across my mouth.
‘Shut your gob, Beth. I don’t want everyone to know I was a child model for Buckley and Nunn.’
Tracy was never any such thing. She’d invented that model story so she wouldn’t be teased about her once snazzy, now daggy, pre-teen wardrobe. Later on Tracy bailed me up in private. ‘Do that again, Beth, and I’ll tell them about your Ken doll. Do you want me to do that?’
But when she needed something from me, Tracy would revert to being the chummy friend I used to love in primary school. Standing next to my desk she would brush back her floppy fringe, flash her entrancing blue eyes and cordially request: ‘Have you got a pencil sharpener on you by any chance, Beth? Greylead’s stuck in mine,’ or ‘Can I bot one of your cough lollies, Lisbeth?’
Yes, that was Tracy. She has always been a go-getter on the surface and rather gentle underneath.
And the aid worked both ways, for when I was crying out for assistance Tracy came to the rescue. For days after the vaccinations I had been complaining, ‘I might as well have had tuberculosis, my arm’s that infected.’ The giant blister, presumably created by an adverse reaction to the vaccine, exploded while I was bouncing on a school trampoline. As the huge blob of pink gunk began to slither down my arm, I leapt off the jumping mat and headed straight over to our PE teacher.
‘Heavens, you’re another with a bad reaction,’ Mr Connor said in a flurry.
Soon he was marvelling at the kindness of hanky-dispensing Tracy. Oddly, I can still see the handkerchief she parted with. It was a thin kiddie hanky with a ladybird pattern on it, which had been ironed and folded in quarters by her mother. I never got to return it because I think the school nurse threw it in the bin shortly after I acquired it.
Pushing my purse back in my satchel in the billiards room, I noticed the corner of Tracy’s envelope protruding from the side of my wedding notes. How could my old schoolfriend have done this to me? No, I was reading it all wrong. In posting her letter on the cusp of our wedding, Tracy’s intent could only have been good. Or at least justified by sincerity. It would have been worse for her to say nothing. Tracy, being an astute person, would have known that the letter would hurt me very much. Yet it had to be said. Either she intended good, or she was not the sender. And with this acceptance of the letter as well-meaning, some of the doom hovering over my wedding day began to dissipate.
As a matter of fact, I can never stay gloomy for long, having grown up with Cherie’s compulsive cheerfulness. Or compulsory cheeriness, I should say. If either of us was in a bad mood, we’d go see a romantic comedy to snap out of it. Judy says that when I’m in my worst mood I seem to be in my best mood, which drives her bats. She can feel the sad blue dragging beneath my frivolous yellow exhuberance and she’ll complain: ‘Why aren’t you more upset, you moron? You just failed your driving test.’
‘I’m trying to even things out,’ I’d explain, ‘because Beth Shaw will pass her test in three months’ time.’
After years of being as remote as the moon, Tracy had come back to offer some tough support. She was actually saying: ‘Beth, listen up before it’s too late.’ A hangdog smile hovered on my lips. I could almost regard Tracy as a messenger of salvation, then. Friendlier and friendlier we became. After scuttling my wedding day plans and ditching Jordan, Tracy and I would meet at the Brighton sea baths and natter in the shallows about reprobate lover boy. ‘So he did that to you too, did he? What a nerve!’
Jordan had delivered and Jordan had failed. I was on a par with Tracy Breeze at long last.
But wait a minute. Tracy didn’t think of us as on a par. She had one-upped me in her letter. If I had said yes then you wouldn’t be the lucky girl. Her ironic taunt of ‘lucky girl’ had cut me to the quick. It was definitely beneath the dignity of the Tracy I knew to portray me that way. It made me think again that someone must have written the letter on her behalf. Or perhaps even without her knowledge.
I had been counting my lucky stars to be marrying Jordan when I had no right to do it. But there was no point blaming Jordan when I was equally reponsible for this fiasco. At the start of our relationship I had boasted to him of knowing and loving Tracy long before he had ever set eyes on her. I put this on the table cunningly, thinking it would create some highpowered voltage between us.
Alas, in touching me, Jordan had always – through a series of loose affiliations – been touching Tracy Breeze.
His post-Tracy girlfriends had all been Mornington Grammar girls. Creepier still, each girlfriend had been plucked from our very own year level. This was not a coincidence. It was an incestuous selection process whereby the girls who turned Jordan on had walked the same turf, worn the same uniform and sat in the same classrooms as Tracy (and I) had done for six indentured years. Maybe Jordan liked the security of the past; maybe he was a non-experimental sort of guy, dull as that sounded. After all he had worked as a trainee accountant. For whatever reason, I was Jordan’s post-Tracy type. Ha ha. There was a bit of Tracy in all of us. Admittedly, I wasn’t sporty, but Jordan had given me honorary membership of an associated club, often sprinkling me with blandishments: ‘You’ve got a sporty brain, Beth,’ or ‘Whoah, you’re a sporty girl in bed.’
Looking back and piecing together the puzzle from my current vantage point, I could see that my entire relationship with Jordan was a kind of infantile regression of dubious value. But what could I do about it now? I still wanted Jordan to marry me today, even if our guests saw him standing on the wedding dais and holding one hand behind his back with two fingers crossed. I wanted us to stay together for as long as Tracy and Jordan had been together. Otherwise I wasn’t much chop, was I?
I leant forward on the couch in the billiards room as if I was going to be sick. My head was hurting so much it was cramping my guts. The headache had fixated in one jabbing point that I tried to alleviate by pressing both palms hard against the spot near my temple. Can you see the forest for the trees this time, Beth? Smarten up. Jordan felt no more desire for you than your other small-time boyfriends did. Worse still, he kept his ebbing feelings under wraps because he enjoyed the nullity of making do with you while playing footsie under the table with other girls.
You deserved better. But you got what you wanted, didn’t you? You got to be a glamour girl for a short little while. Hee hee! Being Tracy Breeze. There you go, Beth. That could have been the caption on all your wedding invitations.