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

the Closet than a Boy Under the Bed, which made choosing him as a wedding date a bit of a problem. “I don’t want to be the fat older sister turned fag hag at this affair.”
    â€œYou’re not fat.”
    â€œWell, you never know what could happen by September. I ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough over the weekend. And not even the frozen yogurt version. I went for the gusto—twenty-four grams of fat per serving, four servings per pint.”
    â€œBig deal. Don’t worry, Em, we’ll find you someone. There’s always that model I told you about.”
    â€œYou know how I feel about models.”
    â€œWell, you don’t have to marry him. And consider how good you’ll look together in the wedding pictures.”
    â€œI’ll think about it,” I said, reluctantly.
    â€œNow there’s the Emma I know and love. Don’t worry. Everything will be just fine.”
    Â 
    Confession: I would marry for a below-market one bedroom.
    Â 
    I somehow managed to muddle through the rest of the week without any major emotional disasters. And after making it through a second weekend alone without completely falling apart, I felt almost proud of myself. In fact, as I walked down my tree-lined street on my way home from work on the verge of week three of the Post-Derrick Period, it suddenly occurred to me that being single in the greatest city in the world wouldn’t be all that bad. I even lived on the nicest street, I thought, as I passed the pretty brownstones on West Thirteenth Street.
    Then I reached my building, with its faded facade of peeling paint and row of dented garbage cans and I couldn’t help but sigh with dismay. Why, oh, why, couldn’t Derrick and I have made it as far as shared real estate? He would never have left me if we had landed a below-market one bedroom downtown. No man in his right mind would walk away from that kind of find.
    And no woman, I realized now, hating Derrick more for denying me my real estate dreams. With another sigh, I started up the steps.
    Derrick was fond of calling my twenty-four unit apartment house The Building of the Incurables, because it was filled with tiny studios that housed—other than students struggling through until graduation—old people with ailments either mental or physical, which kept them from moving on to apartments with a living space large enough for an area rug that didn’t say Welcome on it. There was Beatrice on the first floor, for example, who had been hit by a piece of scaffolding on West Thirty-ninth Street sixteen years ago and whose injury required a metal plate in the head that had put her on the permanently disabled list. Now in her fifties, she was collectingsocial security and painting watercolors, which decorated the walls of her tiny cube on the first floor. Then there was Abe, who could have been anywhere from sixty-five to eighty-five and who, every morning, emptied the entire contents of his apartment (except for the furniture, which wasn’t much) into two trash bags, loaded them into a shopping cart, and went off to God knows where for the day.
    Then there was me. Neither student nor psychotic, yet stubbornly holding on to my rent-stabilized studio as if my very life depended on it. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a great address—just a few short blocks from the subway, the Film Forum, the downtown bar scene, the Peacock, NYU and just about anyplace anyone wanted to be in the downtown area. And it was easy enough for me to bear up to my lack of closet and living space for the kind of location that drew looks of envy whenever I spouted my address at parties. Besides, with Derrick in my life, there was always that lingering hope of the one bedroom we would one day share, once Derrick realized the two-bedroom dive on the Lower East Side he shared with a foul-mouthed bartender just wasn’t cutting it. I used to fantasize about our