Calm, Cool, and Adjusted (17 page)

“What wedding stress? You think this is more stressful than my father going to jail? And almost taking me down with him?” she asks. “It’s planning a party. I did that every week of my life. I could do this in my sleep.”

“It’s not like I still have any girth,” Lilly comments on her oh-so-meager size.

Their sense of calm bugs me.
I’m the calm one. Don’t they know that?
I’m telling you, the world has turned upside down.

“Fine, I’ll take the bed.” I toss my bag on the bed while Lilly opens the balcony doors and lets the smell of sulfur into our room from the steaming redwood hot tub below.

“You don’t
have
to take the bed,” Lilly yells over her shoulder. “We were trying to be nice. What’s with you? Since when are you wound so tight?”

“Since you’ve both been trying so desperately to get me a date to the wedding. Since you think I need to move back home and fix some unknown issue. Since you’re just not being honest with me and you suddenly think I can be fixed with the right clothes.”

They both sigh like two balloons flying across the room.

“I’ve always thought you could be fixed with the right clothes,” Lilly says with a shrug.

“So what, is this like an intervention?”

Morgan and Lilly look to one another and then back at me. “It’s just that the running, the exercising, the natural food intake—it’s all become a little overwhelming over the last year. You used to be the most caring person I knew, Poppy,” Morgan says, with a hint of a tear in her eye. “Now, it’s like you’re so obsessed with the health stuff. I miss the crazy Poppy who made me laugh and didn’t care what people thought. Now, it’s become—well, it’s almost become your religion and you’re trying to convert everyone.”

“I’ve got news for you,” Lilly says. “Doritos aren’t going away. They’ll be like cockroaches, around long after us. Face it: preservatives taste good.”

“I still don’t care what people think.” I unzip my duffle, pulling out my running gear. “And I haven’t changed.”

Lilly says. “You’re different now. It used to be cute how you bucked the norm and danced to your own tune, but now it’s sort of a defiance. Not sweet and appealing like it used to be.”

“Maybe I’m just getting older. Maybe I’m just not sweet and cute anymore. Maybe I’m entering middle age and bitter. Did you think of that?”

The two of them laugh out loud and Lilly shoves me on the bed. “Thirty is not middle-aged, especially with 15-percent body fat.”

“Fourteen,” I correct her.

“See, that’s what I mean. Do I walk around telling everyone my weight? Where did that come from, Poppy? You didn’t have a prideful bone in your body, and all of a sudden we’re getting regular updates on your body-fat ratio. What if the girl with the most hair was fabulous?” Lilly asks. “What if I came to you and told you what my head count was on a daily basis? Little strange?”

“So my body fat is the reason you want to set me up for the wedding?”

“No, that would be the intestinal talk,” Morgan clarifies. “When Lilly wanted to date Colin Whatshisname in college, didn’t you fix that?”

“You helped,” I say. “He was only after one thing.”

Morgan continues, “When my father was not acting in my best interest, didn’t you scout me out and find me? I believe you even went to my church and my gym and interrogated people. Double-O Poppy, I called you.”

“You were being an idiot,” I remind her.

“So we’re returning the favor, Poppy. When friends don’t see things clearly, their best friends tell them the truth. We’re telling you the truth, even though you don’t want to hear it.”

“Meaning what?”

“That you’re getting a little odd. We think you’ve been inhaling too many herbs. We just want you to know up front that your fat ratio and people’s organs are not wedding conversation,” Morgan purrs with an up-voice at the end, as though she hasn’t just been completely rude.

“And you’re going to dress in the gown I’ve designed for you. If you stay at that weight, it’s going to fit perfectly. So quit running, or eat some chocolate. I did thirty-two measurements, if you’ll remember, and I don’t want to do them again!”

“You’re like a fashion Hitler, Lilly.”

Okay, so I’m a weirdo. I’d like to say this acknowledgment bothers me, but it really doesn’t. I’ve always been a weirdo, meaning different from the norm. My parents taught me to embrace it, and I do. But for my best friends who’ve seen me through the worst of life, I can keep it at bay. For one weekend, anyway.

“All right. You want me to fall in, I will.”

I’m having the yin-yang balancing facial this weekend, just because I liked the sound of it. It lacks conventional wisdom, and if my friends won’t let me be my true weird self, my aesthetician will. For a price.

“Very good,” Morgan says. “That’s all we ask. We want our friend back.”

I take out my energy bar, and unwrap it, holding it up. “Want some?”

Judging by their looks, no.

I will be the perfect friend at this wedding. I will be Molly Ringwald in
Pretty in Pink
. This weekend, I want to enjoy a massage and a clear head. I’m going to try and not run every time I get nervous, and I’m going to forget there’s a small exercise room downstairs. This weekend is to reconnect with my friends and God. I brought my Bible, and I’m going to forget the urge to fix everyone else’s life for the next two days. This weekend is mine. I will be a selfish pig, just like any good hedonist should be at a spa. With a dash of Christian on top.

I can’t stop Americans from downing Big Gulps, brimming with excess sugar the body can’t tolerate or create enough insulin for. The pancreas! Oh, my agony for the pancreases of America. I can’t keep people from clogging their arteries with processed foods containing hydrogenated oils. I can’t even stop Lilly from sneaking Diet Pepsi and truffles into the hotel room. (She gave up pickles when she got married and pregnant. For that, I suppose I should be thankful. With all that salt, her ankles would have been the size of tree trunks. Even her emaciated, little ankles.)

“Morgan told me you had a nice aubergine-colored skirt you wore on your date,” Lilly says, starting a new conversation.

“It wasn’t really a date,” I clarify. “My next-door business neighbor was hoping I’d be moving my practice.”

“Well, your business meeting, then. My point is why is
that
skirt back here?” Lilly looks at what I’m wearing—one of my mother’s skirts—and wrinkles her nose. “You know, they make soft cotton clothes that are available in one color. Why is it you have to wear them all at the same time? You’re like a Persian rug over there.”

I cross my arms at her. “Why do you two care so much what I wear?”

“Because we all wish we had your body, Poppy, and you waste it. Why run like that if you’re not going to take advantage of it?”

“I’m modest. That’s a good thing. You want me hanging out of my shirt like Kayla Havens?” I ask, referring to a college coed who, we believe, spent more time in the men’s dorm than classes.

“The Bible says nothing about modesty including ugly,” Lilly says. “We don’t want to tempt men, but must we completely discourage them? I mean, grab a burka, Poppy. You do want to get married someday, don’t you?”

I set my chin forward. “The man I marry will have no problem with my fashion choices. I don’t want to marry a man who cares what I wear. That’s the first step. Next thing, you’re in Dr. Jeff’s plastic surgery office getting a nip here and a tuck there.”

“All women say they want that kind of man, but you know you don’t have to completely put them to the test, do you? Even God says not to put Him to the test.”

“Except in the arena of tithes. He says He’ll open the floodgates of heaven for that,” Morgan says.

“Thank you, Billy Graham. You know what I’d like to see,” Lilly continues. “I’d like to see the man who would make you buy Prada.”

“I would never buy Prada. Unlike you, I don’t care if something is stitched well and I could probably feed Mongolia for the price of a purse.”

“Well obviously Prada was too big of a step,” Lilly says. “But you could spend a little. Buy something, perhaps, without the word
vintage
in front of it.”

“People barely wear stuff in the Valley, Lilly. You can get a lot of great stuff at the secondhand store.”

Lilly holds up a palm. “No, I’m not going there. Your issue isn’t money; those running pants you wear cost a fortune, and you buy them at Nordstrom’s. I’ve seen the tags.”

“You are so nosy, Lilly,” Morgan says.

“Like you wouldn’t have looked, Morgan. Look, it’s expensive to go to Hawaii and exercise, Poppy,” Lilly adds. “You spend money on some things. We’re not saying you need designer gear. We’re just saying get rid of your mother’s skirts and stop trying to make the statement you’re a weirdo. You’re not and you know it; you’re just trying to avoid dating.”

“Hawaii is a triathlon, not just a trip,” I explain. “It’s pushing myself to my very limits and coming out victorious on the other side. It’s that high of accomplishing what I’ve strived so long for. There’s nothing else like it.”

“There’s lying on the beach. Same great taste, half the effort.” Lilly unclips a barrette and lets her wild hair shake loose.

“Then she wouldn’t have that body, though,” Morgan says.

“True, but she’d still have that red hair and those blue eyes. When we went to your fancy gym, Morgan, she was like a man magnet. She was dressed in that skirt, with moccasin boots no less. I’m telling you, she doesn’t want to get married. Men look at her like she’s a piece of art in the Louvre, and does she care? No, she’s like Mona Lisa wrapped in gauze. Nobody get too close.”

“Hello, I’m right here,” I announce.

“So prove to us you want to have a relationship,” Lilly says. “Besides with your trainer.”

“How would I do that? Should I get engaged to the next man who walks through the spa?”

Morgan looks down over the sulfur-laden hot tub under our balcony and snickers. We join her to see a portly, bald man looking up at us.

“He probably wouldn’t care about the skirt.” Lilly shrugs.

I cross my arms and whisper at the two of them. “So rude. He could be to the soul what Brad Pitt is to the eyes.”

“Was that on your SAT?” Morgan asks before looking over the balcony again and giggling. “Break out the truffles, Lilly. Poppy has a date in the hot tub.”

“You used to at least sneak the garbage when I was getting my spa treatment. Now you’re just flaunting bad behavior in front of me.”

“I’m pregnant, Poppy. If I don’t eat fattening now, what’s the point?” Lilly asks with her lanky hundred-pound frame with the small bump in the front.

“It’s not about the fat. It’s your body-fat ratio. Your skinny little self could be 30 percent fat and that’s not healthy.”

Lilly stares at me with her mouth open for a moment before popping a truffle inside. Whole.

“There’s nothing wrong with dark chocolate,” I say over crossed arms. “Magnesium is great for the digestive system— a natural laxative, actually.”

“Eww!” Morgan says. “Do you have to talk about such things, Poppy? It’s so unfeminine. You manage to make chocolate unpalatable. How do you do that?”

“I’m just saying if she thinks that’s entirely unhealthy, it’s not.”

“Yeah, well, don’t say,” Lilly says, spitting out the chewed-up truffle into a napkin. “You take the fun out of everything.”

The accusation hits me hard, because right now, it feels really truthful and I can’t help myself. There’s this little voice in my head that tells me how to do health right, and I can’t shut it down. But I think I
need
to shut it down. Just like a true Trekkie has to shut it down after age thirty to get a date.

“So what of it—do you want to be single forever?” Lilly asks.

“I never said that.” I unpack my bag into the plastic dresser painted to look like wood. “Look, Morgan, I’ve done a lot of prep work for your wedding and my run. After that, you all can worry about getting me a date, all right? It’s not like I’m going to dry up in the next month.”

I came for this last, blissful weekend with my gals, and they’re putting me on the battlefield. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t been avoiding serious dating for ten years. Why the fuss all of a sudden?

“Then what gives, Poppy? You’ve had more guys ask you out than I think Morgan or I had in a lifetime, and yet you’re the only one who’s never had a long-term boyfriend. Why is that?”

“I guess I just get a feeling on that first date, and I haven’t been interested enough to follow through. I’m not avoiding relationships. Quit acting like I need to be diagnosed. I’m just single, that’s all. I don’t want to marry just anybody.”

“So that means Dr. Jeff is a
why bother
?”

Is he ever.
“I have no respect for that man or what he does. How desperate do you think I am? Jeff Curran is about as mainstream as a person can go. And besides, I think he might go to church to get business. My mother would be horrified that I even spent time with a plastic surgeon. I feel guilty still. And I even dressed up for the occasion.”

“See, I think you and Dr. Jeff do have a lot in common and you don’t want to admit it. You both think you’re the answer to everyone’s problems. He cares about his patients and their perfection just like you do. The only difference is he obsesses on the outside, and you go for the inside. And you were going to be a medical doctor until . . . well, you know.”

“There’s a reason I didn’t become an MD, and therefore dating one has the same problem for me. Look, I know you both want to find me romance, but trust me on this, Dr. Jeff is not it.”

“Okay, so no go on Dr. Jeff; we’re good with that. What about one of these guys?” Morgan hands me a folder. “I printed out a bunch of men from the Yahoo! Personals that I thought sounded a lot like you. Look, this one is a runner and a swimmer and he’s pretty hot.”

“Online dating?” I push the folder back at her.
It hasn’t come to that, has it? Now they want me to become so Silicon Valley that the only way I can meet a guy is through the computer?

“Hey, the good news is that the guys over the Internet can’t see the skirt,” Lilly quips.