Carbon Dating : Part 3

Ditched by Dr. Right: And Other Distress Signals from the Edge of Polite Society
by Elizabeth Warner

(Page 3 of 6)

Junk mail is one of civilization's great gifts. It's a necessary evil for a number of reasons. One, it allows people to live reasonably comfortably in antiseptic midtown-Manhattan co-ops. Two, it saves companies millions, because when they only want to reach, say, five or six million people but they don't want to reach an additional eleven million people (who'd never buy their product anyway), they simply send out direct mail. It's perfect. A genuinely targeted way to spend only what they need, to wind up in exactly the right mailboxes.

At lunch with literate, moral types I say I'm in publishing. At cocktail parties, I just go ahead and admit I'm in advertising. And thus, when I met and fell for Clark R. M. Wheeler, M.D., I have to say I kind of knew what I was getting into. I had a pretty good rent-stabilized Glass House myself.

Plus, things with Clark had been coming along kind of swimmingly. We'd met at an auction (my first and last, his 546th) to benefit either Russian dissidents or glaucoma or Kurdish unity, and we had both gotten terribly drunk. Clark lit my cigarette but announced rather boldly that he didn't want me to think he was one of those guys who went around lighting people's cigarettes. Not that I cared. He smiled a lot after he said things, as if startled by his own ability to speak, and then he'd look at you like you'd shared some inside joke about his newfound skill. Which I thought was a huge connection for us.

After about three weeks of rather formal courtship, Clark and I entered into an emotional lease agreement. After another three months we were perceived as dull and sweatered.

Until sixteen months later, when he announced that he could no longer deny the woman who had touched his soul. And it turned out, she and I were not the same woman. In fact, she was my very own cousin, a feral, oppressively blond homemaker with a penchant for Joyce Carol Oates, olestra, and Kansas - the band.

And with that, Clark said, he wanted to explore other avenues. Just breezily, like people say they want to reduce their carb intake. And despite the fact that I hoped they'd be avenues teeming with late, machete-wielding bike messengers, I said nothing. I simply affixed both eyes upon him (easier said than done, since I have a bad wandering eye - the left one is frequently at a ninety-degree angle to my nose). I just glared. Silently. Before shedding one tiny, Lifetime Cable-ready tear. Whereupon I began to clean. And then he was gone.

Twenty-eight minutes later I called my psychotherapist, an Andie MacDowell/Nurse Ratched hybrid. I left a whining message on her machine, and she left me one two hours later, saying she'd love to see me, but the Jitney to Quogue was boarding in three minutes - and maybe I should go back home to Philadelphia for a stint, "because you always feel better when you do." And then she said also not to forget to love myself a little, and also not to forget that I still owed her for January.

So, convinced that this woman might just have a point, and equally convinced that my entire body had atrophied from too much peanut butter directly out of the jar, I decided to get some exercise. So I went for a drive. In a taxi. To Penn Station. And I boarded Amtrak's Yankee Clipper to Philadelphia. To my mother's home. Where she, a forthright woman in her seventies - who very definitely still likes Ike - would assure me that this was fleeting. And that somehow all would be well. There would likely be a bubbly tub involved. And I would be offered Shake 'n Bake and other cholesterol-infused Gentile Home Remedy products.

Once back inside suburban Philadelphia's Main Line, I knew I would be subjected to the gentle ridicule, wishful thinking, and abject criticism that doubles for parental love in so many of these families. I think.

"Mom," I whined as I walked inside. It smelled of cedar and wet dogs. "Mommm, he left me."

"Who? That wooden Indian?" She hugged me and I was suddenly, tearily petite.

"Claaarrk. He . . . he - "

"Sweet thing," she cooed, squeezing me for a long time. "There," she said. "Not to worry, Lovebug. You know you're much better off without that Clark. Reading all that Philip Roth nonsense. Hmm. Is your hair lighter? What's with those little tendrils?"

"He just up and . . . he didn't even . . . I mean, nothing," I wailed, again hurling myself like an unwanted medicine ball into her lanky, aproned torso. "This is awful. An affair? That's the last thing he'd . . . what'm I going to . . . I don't know what to do!"

"I do."

"What? What, Mom? What can you possibly - "

"We'll get supper. And you're going to feel much better, Miss Pink." She patted me and strolled over to get a better glimpse of the kitchen's thirteen-inch TV set.

I continued to blurt interrogatives and demi-expletives, but she'd stopped listening. See, Entertainment Tonight was profiling the leisure activities of pop superstars. Which prompted her to turn back to me and observe:

"And another thing, Lambchop. Say what you will, but that Céline Dion's got the most beautiful golf swing I think I've ever seen."

I was home. That which Anglo-Saxons call "healing" had begun.

Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Warner.

About the Author

Elizabeth Warner is a writer and actress whose one-woman show, The Wandering Eye, premiered at HBO's Aspen Comedy Festival. She has read her work on NPR and written for several network game shows, and particularly keen viewers can spot her in a few films. Elizabeth lives in Los Angeles but, no fool, maintains a home in New York as well.