LITMIR.BIZ

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don’t know, miss.”

      George is utterly confounded. “What should I do?” she asks me.

      I shrug.

      “How about I just bring you a nice green salad?” The waitress suggests.

      “Okay,” George smiles, relieved. “Oh, and a Diet Coke. With a wedge of lime.”

      The waitress shakes her head and shuffles off in her sensible orthopedic shoes.

      “Dressing on the side!” George calls after her. “God. That was close. Which do you think are worse—carbs or saturated fats?”

      “Are you kidding? I have no idea,” I say impatiently, motioning for her to keep on reading. In the meantime, I snack on my fingernails.

      As soon as she finishes, she reads it again, then ponders for a minute or two. “I think you’re nuts. Why did you write this? Didn’t you say you’d never do your own?”

      “Yeah, but Doctor M. said it would help me see where my life is going, give a voice to my hidden fears and then identify new goals for myself.”

      “And the problem is…what exactly? You’re afraid you’ll never have a cat? ’Cause if that’s it, we can get you a cat. I think there might even be a sign up at the store. Black kittens or something…”

      “Ha, ha,” I manage weakly.

      “Look, Holly. If you’re for real about this…”

      “I am. I so am. Help me.”

      George nods seriously. “Okay. Where to begin? Well, I guess everyone’s afraid of dying…”

      “I’m not afraid of dying,” I tell her. “I’m afraid of dying alone. I’m afraid my life will have meant nothing to anybody.”

      “I get it, I get it.” She thinks about it for a second, then adds, “Look. It’s okay to want to change your life, to write a book or whatever. It’s okay to want a better job. Work on that. Fine. But you’re afraid of being single? Come on. That’s so…mundane.”

      “I know. But all of a sudden I can’t help it. I just never thought my life would turn out like that. And looking back over my eighty-five years—what did I really contribute? Nothing! God, what a waste! And I had so much love to give…so much love to give…!”

      My throat tightens and my ears begin to ache. I flash back to Dr. Pink, a self-styled “lacrimal therapist” from a few years back whose clinical methodology involved systematically reducing her patients to tears. She believed that public crying was not a sign of weakness and emotional instability, but rather a healthy purging of inner turmoil and a sacred statement of communal trust to be celebrated by anyone fortunate enough to witness it. But I hated crying—here, there, anywhere. No wonder Pink only lasted three sessions.

      I gulp back the tears, but George is unimpressed. “Okay, first of all, Holly, you’re still alive. All right? You didn’t die single. You didn’t even die. For God’s sake, you’re only twenty-eight. So it’s not like you can say your life ‘turned out’ like anything, because you haven’t even lived it yet.”

      “Exactly,” I whimper.

      “Huh?”

      “I’ve got to do something, G. Before it’s too late.”

      “So do something. Take action, girl!”

      “But what? That’s the problem.”

      “Why don’t you just try to write something?”

      Just what I need to hear. “You write,” I snap, a little too cruelly. It’s a sore point for her. George has been working on the same Star Trek screenplay since our second year at Erie. By the time she gets around to finishing it, the actors who play the characters will all have boldly gone into retirement.

      She twirls a dark and frizzy curl around her finger and stares down at the table.

      “I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re absolutely right. I should try. I really should. But…but you know how hard it can be. It’s like, I work all day, and I finally get home and the last thing I want to do is stare all night at another screen.”

      She snorts.

      “TV doesn’t count.” Just try and come between me and my set.

      The waitress delivers our meals and leaves before I can complain.

      “This is wrong,” I whisper, knowing George will forgive me if I can make her laugh. “Didn’t I ask for chocolate? What’s the point of vanilla? Who would want a vanilla shake? It’s the complete antithesis of chocolate—it’s the absence of flavor!”

      The waitress glances over at me from the cash with a dour look.

      “You want me to get her back?” George giggles as she wrings every last drop of flavor from the lime wedge into her Diet Coke.

      “Don’t you dare!” She knows I am deathly afraid of incurring the wrath of food-service persons. They have so much power. Complain one too many times and God only knows what might find its way into your tuna-salad sandwich.

      “You’ve seen too many Datelines,” she informs me as I sullenly drink my shake.

      “Hidden cameras will be America’s new conscience in the twenty-first century,” I say between slurps. Vanilla isn’t so bad, really.

      “Now there’s a topic worth exploring….”

      I’ve spent the past five years trying to come up with a great idea for my book, and George is always trying to help.

      “Naw, it’s already been done.”

      Since September 11th, countless writers have taken fear and ignorance to the bank, but I feel that people are ready for happier thoughts, instead of just another paranoid title like The Osama Next Door, or Nine Legal Ways to Watch Your Nanny, or Why Vegetables Cause Cancer. Unfortunately, though, thoughtful critiques of consumer-health alerts and diatribes decrying the end of privacy have also been done to death. But what if I incorporated those themes into a novel? Hmmm… It just might be crazy enough to work.

      “Holly?”

      …a sort of Bridget Jones’s Diary meets 1984 meets Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution…

      “Holly? Hello?” George snaps her fingers.

      “Sorry,” I mumble, and promptly lose my train of thought. Ideas for my book are so exquisitely rare and delicate that the mere act of remembering them crushes their goodness into oblivion. I’ve all but resigned myself to the impossibility of writing a single word.

      “You just need a little inspiration.”

      “How can I get inspired when all I do is work, come home, watch TV and boink the bike messenger?”

      Oops.

      “Aw, tell me you’re kidding! You didn’t! Not again! Ew!”

      “I did,” I reluctantly admit.

      “But he’s so…he’s so…”

      “Gross? It’s okay. You can say it. I know he is.”

      “I knew I should have come over last night. You’re not to be trusted. How many times do I have to tell you? Holly Hastings good. Bicycle boy bad.”

      “I was working late, and he was there picking something up….”

      “Mmm-hmm…”

      “Look, I finally finished the piece about that new parking lot on Broadway and I wanted to celebrate! Is that so wrong?” Very occasionally, when they tired of my constant begging for assignments or felt a hint of guilt after turning down yet another one of my story proposals, one of the editors will ask me to fill a few very unimportant inches, usually sandwiched on some back page between the calls to tender and

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