Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend Read Online Free PDF Page A

exasperation.
    â€œWhat fun,” Rebecca replied, peering up at me from a layout she had been reviewing, her eyebrows raised and a bright smile on her face.
    Something about her cheerful reaction to my news made me immediately put up my antennae. One of the things Rebecca and I had always shared, especially during our after-work-cocktail outings, was a healthy disdain for the perky little world of wedding planning that is Bridal Best. How else could we separate ourselves from an office of people who waxed poetic over everything from choosing the right place settings to the proper thickness of paper for invitations, except by mocking them? If I didn’t know Rebecca better, I might have thought she’d been bitten by the Bridal Best marriage zest after all. Because at Bridal Best, every marriage, even your mother’s third, is an event worth getting hysterical over.
    â€œYeah, well, it’s hard for me to summon up any sort of enthusiasm for this wedding. I mean, my mother’s track record is a lesson in how not to find everlasting love.”
    Rebecca studied me for a moment, as if I were speaking in a foreign language. “You should be happy for your mother. It’s not every woman who can fall in love again after so many missteps. She has a lot of courage.”
    â€œEither that or she’s taking enough Prozac for it to not matter.” Ever since she lost Warren, my mother was a firm believer in the kind of happiness that was available in easy-to-swallow caplets.
    â€œWhat’s gotten into you? You seem more cynical than usual. Did you fight with Derrick this weekend?”
    Her question caused a minor panic inside me, as if my sudden state of stressful singledom had somehow become glaringly apparent. I stumbled around for a moment or two as I studied her careful blond bob and perfectly plucked brows, the neat way she had lined up her pencils on her desktop. Suddenly I was filled with distrust. Even the shiny eight-by-ten framed photo of Nash she kept in her cubicle seemed to glint evilly at me. There was no way I could tell her the truth.
    â€œNo, no. Nothing happened with Derrick. Everything is fine. Great, in fact.”
    â€œTerrific,” Rebecca said, turning back to the layout before her. “Then that will give you a clear head to help your mom out with this wedding. Gosh, you could practically plan this thing yourself, if you had to.”
    â€œSure, if I had to.” If I didn’t die of heartbreak first.
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    Confession: Marriage suddenly seems like a social disease.
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    Back at my desk, I was faced with my greatest challenge since The Breakup: attempting to muster enough perkiness to write a short to-do list for the bride-to-be that I had secretly titled, “How to Make Your Wedding Day Happen Without All Hell Breaking Loose.” As I struggled to come up with an opening paragraph, I started to feel some of that anger Alyssa had encouraged in me. What about us non-bride-to-be’s? I wondered. Even my own mother had put me to work in the service of her wedding day by asking me to start looking up cruise ships and “getaway” weddings on my handy little database. Worse, she had gleefully offered to take one of the many vacation days she’d accumulated during her twenty-year career at Bilbo to meet me for lunch the following week to see what I had come up with.
    Why was my job so convenient for everyone else? Why was it that everyone else had a burning need to pick my brain for suggestions on everything from romantic-honeymoons-that-don’t-require-a-tan to effortless-and-elegant hor d’oeuvres? Working in the warped little world of wedding planning had led me to one conclusion: If you don’t get married in this world, you get nothing. Once, in an editorial meeting, I jokingly suggested that a woman should get a bridal shower when she turns thirty, wedding or not. Everyone looked at me as if I were some kind of nut. I am thirty-one