And I couldn’t tell him, “But she thinks you’re going to leave me, and she’s already taking your side in the divorce.” So I just frowned at him.
Then on Sunday, my mom called again, and it was like we had never argued. She wanted me to take her to the mall, and she insisted on buying me a red sweater at Sears, which I’ll probably end up paying for the next time she can’t make her Sears card payment.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> Is that the sweater you’re wearing today? You got that at Sears? It’s really cute.
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Don’t distract me. (Thank you. Isn’t it though?)
<<Beth to Jennifer>> Your mom’s a nut. Your marriage is nothing like hers. Your life is nothing like hers. She was already married and divorced with a 10-year-old by the time she was your age.
<<Jennifer to Beth>> I know, but my mother has a way of spinning those facts into a bad thing.
Her take is that I’m just a late bloomer—that I’m taking forever to ruin my life, and she’s running out of patience.
I remember getting past 18, the age she was when she had me, and thinking, “Whew, I did it. I made it to 19 without getting pregnant.” As if getting pregnant was even an issue. At 19, I hadn’t even kissed a guy yet.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> Really? How old were you when you had your first kiss?
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Twenty. It’s pathetic. Guys don’t want to kiss fat girls.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> Not true. There are all those guys on Jerry Springer, and there’s President Clinton …
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Make that: no one I ever wanted to kiss wanted to kiss a fat girl.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> I’ll bet you never gave anyone a chance. Mitch says you practically beat him away with a stick.
<<Jennifer to Beth>> I was trying to spare him.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> How did he win you over?
<<Jennifer to Beth>> He just wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept sitting behind me in our poetry- writing class and asking me if I had plans for lunch. Like I wanted this muscle-bound blond guy to watch me eat.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> I can just see him. A farm boy with sexy sousaphone shoulders …wearing one of those hats they give out free at the grain co-op and a pair of tight Wranglers. Do you remember those bumper stickers people used to have in college, “Girls go nuts for Wrangler butts”?
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Yes. And it’s the sort of memory that makes me wish I’d gone to college out of state. Someplace in Philadelphia. Or New Jersey.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> You know, if you had gone to school in New Jersey, you never would have met Mitch. You wouldn’t have taken a job here. You never would have met me.
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Mitch says he was destined to meet me. He says I could go back and do my whole life over, and I’d still end up marrying him.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> See? He’s nothing like your dad. He’s wonderful. I wish you and I had been friends in college. Why weren’t we friends?
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Probably because I was fat.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> Don’t be stupid. Probably because I was too busy being Chris’s girlfriend to make friends.
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Probably because I was too busy working at the Daily. I never met any non- journalism majors until I started hanging out with Mitch’s marching-band friends.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> But I was a journalism major. That’s another thing I never did because I was so busy being in love: I never worked at the school newspaper.
<<Jennifer to Beth>> You didn’t miss anything, trust me. It was a viper pit. A drunken viper pit.
You know …here we are talking about college, I don’t have any stories to edit, you’re basking in the glow of a brilliant front-page scoop …
This would be a great time to complete The Romancing of Beth.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> It was more like The Romancing of Chris.
<<Jennifer to Beth>> The Romancing of Headphone Boy.
There he was, yellow sweatshirt, paperback. There you were, impure thoughts …
<<Beth to Jennifer>> Ahem. Well. There we were. In the Student union . He always sat in the corner. And I always sat one row across from him, three seats down. I took to leaving my 9:30 class early so I could primp and be in my spot looking casual by the time he sauntered in.
He never looked at me—or anyone else, to my relief—and he never took off his headphones. I used to fantasize about what song he might be listening to …and whether it would be the first dance at our wedding …and whether we’d go with traditional wedding photography or black and white …Probably black and white, magazine style. There’d be lots of slightly out-of-focus, candid shots of us embracing with a romantic, faraway look in our eyes.