LITMIR.BIZ

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made use of, Michelle, who’d grown up three blocks away from me in Marine Park, had gotten a husband, a house and a diamond the size of New Jersey.

      “You know the scenario,” she continued. “You struggle for a good while trying to open a jar and the lid won’t budge. But sure enough, the next person you hand that jar to pops the lid off, no problem. I mean, you don’t really think Jennifer Aniston, cute haircut aside, would have landed Brad Pitt without the Gwyneth factor, do you? Then there’s me and Frankie, of course,” she continued, referring to her husband of seven years, whom she had snagged soon after his devastating breakup with Rosanna Cuzio, the prom queen of our high school.

      I couldn’t deny the pattern, once Michelle had laid it out so neatly before me. Clearly I had been instrumental in warming Josh, Randy and Vincent up for the next girl to come along and slap with a wedding vow. Gosh, I should have at least been maid of honor for my efforts.

      Instead, I was nothing but the ex-girlfriend who might or might not get invited to the wedding, depending on how secure the bride felt about her future husband.

      Suddenly I looked at Kirk, my current boyfriend, with new eyes. We had been together a year and eight months, by far the record for me since my three-year stint with Randy. We had become quite a cozy little couple, Kirk and I. I even got party invitations addressed to both of us—that’s how serious everyone thought we were. The question was: Would Kirk be inviting me to his wedding someday or…?

      “Kirk…sweetie,” I said, as we lay in bed together that night, a flickering blue screen before us and the prospect of sex lingering like an unasked question in the air.

      “Uh-huh,” he said, not removing his gaze from the cop show that apparently had him enraptured.

      “Your last girlfriend…Susan?”

      “Yeah?” he said, glancing at me with trepidation. Clearly he saw in the making one of those “relationship talks” men dread.

      “You guys went out a long time, right? What was it, two years?”

      “Three and a half,” he said with a shudder that made me swallow with fear. Apparently I was heading for rough waters.

      Still I plunged on. “And you guys never talked, um, about…marriage?”

      He laughed. “Are you kidding me? That’s what broke us up. She gave me the old ultimatum—we get married or we’re through.” He snorted. “Needless to say, I chose door number two.”

      Aha. Relief filled me and I snuggled closer to Kirk, allowing him to sink back into his vegetative state as the cops on TV slapped cuffs on some unsuspecting first offender.

      If Susan was the lid loosener, that could mean only one thing: I could pop this guy wide open. Hell, I could be married within the year.

      The next day, I met my best friend, Grace, for a celebratory lunch, which was always an event as Grace, with her high-powered career and high-maintenance boyfriend, barely had time to get together at all anymore. As a concession to her hectic lifestyle, we met at a restaurant two blocks from her office on E. 54th Street and Park Avenue. Of course, Grace didn’t know I was celebrating until I clinked my water glass into hers and said, “Congratulate me. I’m getting married.”

      “What?” Grace said, her blue-gray eyes bulging in disbelief. Her gaze immediately fell to the ring finger of my left hand, which, naturally, was bare.

      “Not now. But someday.”

      She rolled her eyes, sniffed and said with her usual irony, “Congratulations.”

      Leave it to Grace to laugh in the face of being thirty-three without a wedding band on her finger. She is the strongest, most independent person I know. Not only does she always manage to keep a killer boyfriend on hand, she has a killer job as a product manager for Roxanne Dubrow Cosmetics. Yes, that Roxanne Dubrow. The one you have to hike all the way to Saks Fifth Avenue for. Grace briefly dated my brother Sonny when we were in junior high, but we didn’t really bond until she saved my life on the playground of Marine Park Junior High. I was about to get my head slammed into the concrete by some giant bully of a girl named Nancy, who seemed determined to hurt me just because I was a good fifty pounds lighter than she was. Grace stepped in, tall and blond and strong, and told Nancy to take a hike. Everyone, even Nancy, was afraid of Grace. I was in awe of her. Even more so when she adopted me as her new best friend, despite the fact that I was in eighth grade and she in ninth. Her posse of ninth-grade girlfriends was not happy to have me tagging along. But Grace wouldn’t have it otherwise.

      And here we were, still friends. The only two from the old neighborhood who had escaped unscathed, without marrying some thick-necked thug named Sal and popping out babies on an annual basis. Of course, Grace’s parents had dragged her away from the neighborhood to Long Island when she turned sixteen, hoping suburbia would save her from the cigarettes and boys and bad behavior to which she had taken and in which I couldn’t wait to indulge, myself. But we still spent our summers together. In fact, I felt a bit like a Fresh Air Fund kid, the way my parents shipped me off come June. Then Grace moved into the city right after college, and I followed a year later. She was the sister I’d never had, and my mother had even dubbed her an honorary member of our family.

      “Don’t you ever worry, Grace? That you’ll wind up alone?” I asked now, searching her face for some sign of vulnerability.

      She shrugged. “A woman in this city can have everything she wants. If she plays her cards right.”

      Easy for Grace to say. Tall, voluptuous, with chin-length, tousled blond hair and perfectly sculpted features, she was beautiful. While I…I had always been “little Angie DiFranco”—and still was—five foot four with a head of wavy black hair that defied all styling products, and thighs that threatened to turn into my mother’s any day now. I sighed. It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn’t marry Kirk, I didn’t know what would become of me.

      “What about you and Drew?” I asked now, wondering if Grace had been contemplating her current beau as a future husband. “Do you ever think about…you know?”

      “Of course,” Grace said. “Every girl thinks about it.”

      I felt relieved. At least I wasn’t the only thirtysomething unmarried hysteric. And Grace and Drew had been dating barely a year—at least eight months less than Kirk and I.

      “But it’s not everything,” she said with a shrug.

      Grace was right, I realized the next day as I headed for work. Marriage wasn’t everything. I had so much going on right now, it was practically a nonissue. I was an actor, and at the moment a working actor, which was really something. Granted my steady gig was Rise and Shine, a children’s exercise program on cable access, but it was good experience in front of a camera, at least according to an agent I had spoken to, who refused to take me on until I had experience outside of the numerous off-off Broadway shows I’d done.

      But as I slid into the yellow leotard and baby-blue tights that were my lot as the show’s co-host, I wondered, for about the hundredth time, what, exactly, my résumé would say about me, now that I had spent six months leaping and stretching with a group of six-year-olds.

      “Hey, Colin,” I called out to my co-host once I entered the studio, cup of coffee firmly in grasp. One downside of this job was that it meant getting up at five in the morning to make the show’s six o’clock taping. Apparently, it was the only time the station had allotted studio space for the program, which had a solid, albeit small, audience of upper-middle-class parents and the children they hoped to mold, literally.

      Colin looked up from the book he was reading, startled, before he broke out in his usual smile. Colin was the only person I knew who could smile at six in the morning. It was his nature to be cheerful, which was why he was such a fabulous host for Rise and Shine. The kids loved him, and in the six months that I had gotten to know him, I loved him, too. He was warm, generous, loving, good with children. Not to mention gorgeous, with softly chiseled features, blue eyes surrounded by thick lashes and short dark hair always cut in the most up-to-date style. Everything

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