Lissa put her bare feet on the coffee table in her tiny living room, dug her spoon deeper into the ice cream and watched Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman gaze into each other’s eyes on the DVD. She had the sound muted. Who needed sound when you knew all the dialogue by heart and you could say it along with Ingrid and Bogey?
“But what about us?” Ingrid/Lissa said, and reached for another truffle.
Bogey’s mouth did that funny little twitchy thing it often did.
“We’ll always have Paris,” Bogey/Lissa said.
Ingrid wept. Lissa shoveled in more Cherry Garcia.
Bogey lifted Ingrid’s chin and they did another round of eye-gazing.
“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,” Bogey/Lissa said.
Last line, blah blah, then fade to black. Lissa reached for a paper napkin, thoughtfully provided by Pirelli’s Pizza, the takeout place that had also thoughtfully provided the nutritious main course for her birthday dinner.
She wiped a tear from her eye and a streak of chocolate from her lip.
Stupid, to cry over a movie that was decades older than she was, to cry over a movie at all, because she knew damn well it had nothing to do with life, but maybe that was the point. Maybe what happened in movies or books or TV shows was the only way anybody could ever even come close to experiencing real, true break-your-heart love.
Not that she was stupid enough to want her heart broken.
Lissa dumped the tissue on the table, swapped the spoon for the remote, clicked the TV off and swapped the remote for the spoon.
It was just the principle of the thing. Feeling down, watching Ingrid fly off with the wrong guy, but then they were all wrong guys, when you came down to it.
Feeling weepy certainly didn’t have anything to do with spending her birthday alone.
Another hit of Cherry Garcia. Some of it dribbled on her What’s Cookin’? T-shirt. So what? That was another benefit of being alone. Yoga pants with a hole in one knee. A stained T-shirt. No makeup. No hairstyle unless dragging. her not-blond-not-brown-who-cares-what-color-it-is hair into a ponytail was a style.
She was alone. And happy.
“I am Alone,” she said. “And I am Happy.”
Lissa burped.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done the people-and-party thing in the past. She had. The Family Birthday, definitely in caps, at El Sueño, the family ranch, all her brothers, brother-in-law and almost-brother-in-law in attendance, all her sisters and sisters-in-law fussing over her. She’d done the semi-friends and co-workers version, too, where you had the crap embarrassed straight out of you when the who-gives-a-damn staff warbled a painfully loud and generally off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday” over a slab of cake they probably kept in the back for these occasion, because surely nobody was ever dumb enough to actually eat that cake.
And, of course, she’
d done the BFBE. The Boyfriend Birthday extravaganza. Fancy restaurants where she’d tried not to think about the fact that if she were the chef, she’d have cooked a better meal or done a better presentation. And then, after the meal, the gift-giving ritual—an expensive but schlocky piece of jewelry that had actually been selected by the BF’s PA—Jesus, the world was loaded with initials—or if the BF had bought it himself, maybe a frothy bit of lingerie that would have better suited a hooker than a girlfriend.
Lissa reached for another truffle.
Not that she’d been anyone’s girlfriend for a while.
Catholics gave up stuff for Lent, but you didn’t have to be Catholic and it didn’t have to be Lent for an intelligent woman to give up men for the duration.
“And more power to you, kid,” she said, lisping her way through another bad Bogart imitation.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like men. She did, as a concept. Men could be fun. They could be charming. Some were amazingly easy on the eyes. They were handy for emptying the occasional mousetrap, fine at holding an umbrella high enough over your head that you didn’t get wet running from your door to a taxi or to a car.
And, generally speaking, they were OK in bed.
Mostly, though, they weren’t worth the trouble they caused.
They became proprietorial. They became possessive.
Another mouthful of ice cream, and who was she trying to fool?