Marrying Up. Jackie Rose
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“Are you joking? I can’t tell…”
“Well, you obviously can’t keep your hands off each other. I suppose you have chemistry or something. What’s so terrible about that? It’s…nice. Embrace it.”
The girl was obviously insane. Served me right, answering an ad for a roommate from the bulletin board in my therapist’s waiting room.
“I don’t want your pity.” I put my head down on the table and closed my eyes.
“There, there,” she said, and began stroking my hair.
But Boyfriend would not be deterred. “I think Holly’s hot-hot for Jean-Jean!”
Brilliant.
“Yeah, I think maybe she is,” Jill agreed.
Walking in to work late was definitely better than this. “I think one of you’s extremely jealous and incredibly hot for Jean-Jean, and the other one’s crazy. And I think Jill’s the one who’s crazy.”
“I suppose that makes me jealous,” he deduced.
“Among other things.” I got up and headed for the door. “And if you don’t mind, keep your nose out of my business.”
“She must be on the rag,” he said loudly to Jill, who rolled her eyes and looked at me as if to say, “I know he can be a little insensitive, but at least he’s got a pulse.”
The beauty of my job is that I know, better than almost anyone, how even the most pathetic of existences usually reveal at least some merit when you simmer them down to a mere two hundred and fifty words. Vacuous socialites, crooked politicians, celebrity pornographers and yes, even old maids—all leave their mark in one way or another. Sometimes you just have to read between the lines.
Take the life of John Michael Whitney. Local boy, beloved son and brother, star of his high-school football team—that part was easy. Unfortunately for Johnny, though, his True Defining Moment—most every life has one, subtle or not, and the best obituarists can nose them out like blood-hounds—came a bit later on, when he ran over and killed the mayor of a small town on the Texas-Arkansas border while fleeing the scene of a botched liquor-store robbery in the mid-’80s.
Of course, poor Mrs. Whitney loved her son dearly despite his many vices, and requested that we gloss over the incident in his obituary. “He was so good at football,” she told me plaintively over the phone, “and crafts, too.” Turns out the guy was the Martha Stewart of Death Row, finding solace among his beeswax candles and Christmas wreaths, which he sold to the guards’ wives for cigarette money. But the state wasn’t nearly as impressed, and in the end, not even his God-given talent for macramé was enough to save him from Old Sparky. But I made sure to include it in his final tribute.
It may sound overly forgiving—what of the poor mayor (a bigot and a drunk!) and his grieving widow? (a two-timing tramp!)—but that’s just part of what we obituarists sometimes have to do: rewrite people’s less-than-stellar lives into pleasant little blurbs to help friends and relatives feel all warm and fuzzy about them. It’s the ultimate final makeover, and I believe everyone deserves at least that.
Everyone except me, it seems.
There is nothing warm and fuzzy about my life lately, unless you count the chenille throw I’d taken to huddling beneath on the sofa, emerging only for work and a few hours of drunken weekend abandon, with the occasional booty call from an idiotic bicycle messenger thrown into the mix. If there is merit in there somewhere, damned if I can see it.
The upside of such a mundane existence is that I am left with plenty of time to wonder about the meaning of it all. Where is my life going? Will I ever have a real boyfriend? Do I have a destiny? And if I do, and it turns out to be a shitty one, will it be possible to change it?
Answering these questions has recently become Number One on my priority list, relegating to Number Two for the first time in three years my plan to save up enough money for a set of large but not huge breast implants. The tasteful kind.
As the waves of existential angst wash over me day after day, week after week, month after month, much as they had in high school (minus the haunting Bauhaus soundtrack), it has begun to dawn on me that there might be more to it all than an okay job and a rundown two-bedroom flat over Marg’s Olde-Tyme Medieval Shoppe.
Which brings me back to why I really spent the better part of this morning writing my own obituary and cursing the cats I didn’t have. It’s not as morbid as it seems, actually. Plenty of obituarists while away the hours in between jobs perfecting their own final tributes, as well as those of friends and loved ones, or even, if the mood for vengeance strikes, those of enemies, bosses, ex-lovers and so on.
Of course, I usually while away those very same hours taking classified ads for free puppies and used cars, since I wear many different hats at the Bugle. Many ugly, unflattering hats, including one Get-Me-A-Coffee-Will-Ya-Holly fedora, ungraciously bestowed upon me most mornings by the Life & Style Editor, Virginia Holt. Not that I even work for her, but what can I say—no? I don’t think so. Not if I want her to accept one of my story pitches before the end of time. One day, I hope she and her enormous crocodile Hermès Birkin bag—which I would bet a year’s salary was the only one in the entire city—will be kissing my arse, but until then, my lips are glued to hers.
Anyway, maybe it’s because I’m superstitious, but I have never been able to shake the feeling that if I wrote my own obit, there would suddenly be occasion to use it, like the second I left the building a giant anvil would fall on my head and pound me into the pavement à la Wile E. Coyote. The same reasoning prevents me from signing the organ-donor spot on the back of my driver’s license, something which I believe is tantamount to suicide. It’s like saying, “Hey! Whoever’s up there—I’m ready! Take me now and feel free to use my parts!”
I explained all this to Dr. Martindale last week after he suggested the exercise as a way to pinpoint the source of my growing anxiety, but he wasn’t buying it.
“Nope. It’s a bad idea,” I told him. “Definitely a bad idea. Hits too close to home.”
“What are you afraid of?” he asked.
“Ummm, dying?”
“That’s original.”
“I’m in no position to be taunting the gods, Doctor M. No way.”
“It’ll help you learn a little bit about yourself. Writing one’s own obituary is a fantastic impetus for action. I recommend all my patients do it—even the ones who don’t happen to write them for a living.”
“Ha, ha. But seriously…I can’t do it.”
“Sure you can.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
I thought for a moment. “Maybe I don’t want to confront my own mortality?”
That sounded good.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But maybe…just maybe…you’re afraid of confronting your own vitality.” He pronounced the last word slowly, as if I needed help figuring out how very witty he was. Utterly spent, he leaned back in his big leather chair and folded his hands triumphantly over his belly.
I squirmed on the couch. “Are you going to put that in your next book?” I asked. “It’s pretty cheesy, if you don’t mind me saying so. Oh, but that reminds me—I’ve been meaning to tell you this—since it doesn’t look like I’ll be writing my book any time soon, I thought maybe you could immortalize me by using me as one of your case studies. Whaddya think?”
“I think you’re using humor to avoid a difficult topic.”
“…maybe something like, ‘Holly H., moderately insane twenty-eight-year-old brunette with flat hair and obsessive-compulsive tendencies including but not limited to a fear of free-falling