I'm So Happy for You Read Online Free PDF Page A

apparently involve
     eating. Wendy had never seen her consume anything more than a handful of nuts off the bar. The few times she’d invited Maura
     out to dinner, Maura always claimed to have dined at home. So Wendy had learned to ask her out only for drinks, though she
     sometimes refused those, too. How was it possible that the most unstable person Wendy knew (again, with the exception of Daphne)
     was also the only one ever to have been released by her therapist in less than a decade, Maura’s therapist reputedly having
     told Maura that they had “nothing more to discuss” and that their “work [was] complete”? Wendy’s hypothesis was that Maura’s
     therapist had simply lost patience and/or decided that Maura was too far gone to be helped.
    Wendy wrote back:
    Dear “Professor McLane,”
    Bummed you can’t make it tonight! But very exciting that you can finally see the finish line. (Keep up the good work.) And
     don’t worry about tonight. I’m pretty beat, anyway. Up late last night dealing with Daphne. (Don’t ask.) Let’s talk next week?
    Luv, W
     
    Caffeine, Wendy thought. She strode the necessary twenty steps to
Barricade’
s decrepit kitchenette, where she ran into Lois Smith, the magazine’s octogenarian receptionist, dressed in a purple muumuu
     and brown suede Birkenstocks in which her unaccountably bare and shockingly bulbous toes shone a frightening shade of deep
     purple. Lois had been a major player in the Adlai Stevenson campaign in 1956. She was also senile and often forgot whom she
     was putting calls through to. She sometimes forgot their names, as well. “Hello, Wilma,” she greeted Wendy.
    “Hi, Lois,” said Wendy, lacking the energy to correct her (and also fearful that Lois might be offended if reminded of the
     fact that she’d essentially lost her mind). “How are you?”
    “Troubled, my dear,” said Lois, pressing down on her cane as she made her way to the sink with an ancient-looking Tupperware
     vat that bore the traces of a surfeit of mayonnaise. “America shouldn’t be fighting France’s colonial wars.”
    “Very true,” said Wendy, nodding.
    Returning to her cubicle with a lukewarm cup of Lipton—the coffee machine had been broken for two months and the office manager
     laid off—Wendy was amazed and alarmed to discover that it was already three thirty. Was it possible that she was still on
     page two of Leslie Fletcher’s Medicare editorial? Guilt-ridden, she turned off her Internet connection.
    At four thirty, feeling cut off from the world, she turned it back on. She had no new email. Yet again, she called Daphne.
     Both lines still rang straight to voice mail. She checked the headlines. Then she checked a Web site devoted to celebrity
     baby making, where she learned that Gwyneth Paltrow was pregnant with a second child. Though Wendy’s life bore as much resemblance
     to Gwyneth’s as a chimpanzee’s did, her mood quickly soured. In search of a distraction from her distraction, she called up
     the secondhand furniture listings on Craigslist, where she conducted a search for a new (old) dining room table, preferably
     with built-in leaves. Wendy and Adam’s apartment didn’t have a separate dining room, but she figured they could always push
     a larger table against the wall of the living room when it wasn’t in use. Moreover, although Wendy was a horrible cook and
     rarely entertained, her self-image rested in no small measure on seeing herself as the kind of person who threw raucous dinner
     parties complete with meaty stews in giant Le Creuset pots and bawdy banter about what ever happened to Monica Lewinsky and
     her blue dress.…
    Somehow, it had become six o’clock. Wendy checked her email a final time. A freelance war zone journalist currently residing
     in Iraq had written to propose an article on the epidemic of “plastic bags caught in trees” along the streets of Baghdad.
     Wendy figured the guy was drunk. That or he was suffering from