because everyone we know
watched me do it
!”
“First of all,” Georgia replied, looking down at me, “I need you to breathe.”
She had a point. I took a deep breath and relaxed my spine into my chair.
“If you don’t want to go to a stupid Halloween party, then you shouldn’t go,” Georgia said. “Nobody would blame you if you wanted to hide away somewhere and lick your wounds, letting Nate, Helen, and everyone else realize exactly how much all of this is hurting you.”
“Okay, good-bye. Reverse psychology is the last thing I need right now.” I debated telling her what Nate had said about things being better this way, because he couldn’t be who I wanted him to be. But I was still mulling it over, and just waved my hand in her direction. “Go to court.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Are you wearing fake eyelashes?” The best defense was a good offense. “To the
courtroom
?”
“There’s no reason not to accentuate the positive.” Georgia smiled serenely, batting those fake eyelashes at me so I could better appreciate their length. “Cosmetics are just shrewd marketing.”
“You sound like your mother,” I accused her. Fighting words. Georgia winced.
“That serves me right for talking about your wounds,” she said. Then shook her head. “Do you know, the woman called me on my cell phone while I was on my way to trial to let me know that she’d had a dream. And do you know what she dreamed?”
“Grandchildren?” I guessed. With Georgia’s mother it always came down to grandchildren, one way or another.
“That I died alone and unloved, because I was too picky,” Georgia said. “This is what she says to me, five seconds before a trial. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Date a nice guy for a change?” I suggested, and laughed when Georgia just made a face. Because she and I both knew that Georgia’s fatal weakness was for hot guys with commitment issues, the younger and more feckless the better. If they were actively mean to her, well, hell! She’d fall in love.
“I can hardly stomach the dates I have,” she muttered. “I’m going to be late—I’ll see you later.”
I watched her haul open the heavy Museum door and stride back out into the cold, congratulating myself on avoiding further talk of the Halloween party. And also for being lucky enough not to have a mother who called me to ask when I was getting married, as Georgia’s did several times a day.
Georgia’s mother was Greek and had very clear ideas about the kind of man she envisioned her only child with: a Greek. Everything else was subject to interpretation but the Greek part was ironclad. Georgia wasn’t permitted the luxury of choosing, say, a big American mutt of indeterminate ethnic origin like her own father. Georgia had been enthusiastic about her destiny until the dark day she discovered George Michael’s true sexuality—having somehow believed he was heterosexual for most of the eighties.
These days Georgia’s mother had subsided into a sort of dull hysteria that she expressed via dramatic voice mails. You didn’t have to speak Greek to get the gist of them:
hurry up and give me my grandchildren before I die.
My mother, happily, wasn’t prone to the
my daughter is about to cross over into her thirties and is thus about to be a spinster
panic. Though she didn’t necessarily
get
me, she never overtly interfered, which I figured was the better deal. Because Georgia’s mother was just
scary.
The moment that cemented my lifelong fear of the woman came while we were still in college. We’d all been out to dinner with Georgia’s parents and were sitting in the car outside our dorm. In the throes of my collegiate self-absorption, I’d chosen to whine about how I would obviously never find love because I was twenty or some such unbelievably young age, which of course I thought was old as the hills, and blah blah blah. This, naturally, led to a withering self-analysis in which I concluded