The Ring: Draft 2, Day 2

NOTE INSERTED AFTER I WAS DONE WITH DRAFT 2: I had an idea where I wanted THE RING to go, but now my girl wants what she wants--not what I want. She's stronger than I first imagined, and she has motives that I didn't know she had while I wrote Draft 1. "Ian" is now "Glen" because it fits his personality better. Can't you just see a "Glen" being allergic to snow? I can't imagine that with an Ian, who's out in the snow shoveling for three hours and then having the energy for a spirited romp afterward.

Metal pots and lids crashed behind me, but I stayed where I was. One day a week, I didn't need to set the table, make a meal, or clean up. I wasn't about to throw away my one day off by being helpful.

"I'm okay!" Glen yelled.

"Good to know!" I called back. I didn't lose my place in the US Weekly I had brought with me as I took another sip from the skinny hazelnut latte glued to my hand. When Glen cooked, I knew to bring sustenance so that I wouldn't look at his gray microsuede cushions like they were petite fours. I also knew to bring my own entertainment. Glen wasn't a TV guy, and his only reading material was The Economist and James Joyce.

"Are you wanting red or white tonight?"

Milk. Chocolate milk. "White whine sounds good," I called out instead. He liked it, and I was trying to give it a try. In this relationship, there were a lot of things I was trying to give a try. In a city where the girls outnumbered the guys two to one, I had to be.

Outside, bells jingled. I looked out one of the long, narrow windows in the long, narrow living room. A horse-drawn carriage trotted outside, a red blanket over its passengers, red leather harnesses adorned with gold bells over its horses. I touched the glass, tracing the outline of the family with smiles and hot chocolate. I wanted to be those people, but Glen had a slight allergy to the cold, and would be beet red in less than five minutes.

"Dinner is served!" Glen walked out, an overlarge white plate in his hands. His white skin against the white dish, white chicken breast on top of white rice, reminded me of the white snow I was missing out on. A girl from Maine misses snow, even when she curses it.

"It looks great," I lied. His mother's chicken was as dry as the rice it nested on. The green beans had the opposite problem: as mushy as a jar of toddler green beans.

We sat at the stone counter that attached the kitchen to the dining room. It was the only place to sit in the 400-square foot apartment. And for $4,200 a month, Glen had the privilege of living in a shoebox overlooking Central Park. But it had views that would make any real estate agent climax. "I was thinking about Christmas."

"Yeah?" I asked around a mouthful of yuck.

"I was thinking we could spend it together."

We'd been going out for two months. Holidays weren't part of the relationship equation yet.

"What are you thinking," I asked, trying to buy time.

"I was thinking here. You, me, some Burl Ives on some vinyl."

So far, it wasn't a no.

"Maybe Mom's chicken."

And there was the no.

I drank some wine to get the chicken out of my throat. "I'll have to see how the next few days pan out with Jeannette."

"When are you going to just quit?"

"When I want to go back to Maine and work in a bookstore for the rest of my life." I had Plan B all mapped out. Bookstore, colonial house on a cul-de-sac, two kids born 18-months apart. But between Plan A and Plan B, I'd have to kill myself first.

NOTE: Still looking for an ending. We'll see where Draft #3 takes me!

--WHAT'S BEEN CUT WITH NO PLACE TO GO RIGHT NOW--

It was only a few days until Christmas, but I wasn't going to be with family this year. Jeannette needed me to get the last of her gifts messengered to the appropriate New York designers, PR people, and celebrities that had ever graced or thought about gracing the pages of Glance magazine.

I hadn't seen family for two years. When you were the assistant to the assistant to the editor in chief of a major women's magazine, you didn't leave the island too much. Unless it was to deliver a present to a private plane in New Jersey.

It had been a week. Jeannette had yelled at me in the elevator four of the five days. She'd made me re-make her coffee at least eight times for each one I attempted. I'd gotten to shop for her godsons' Christmas gifts. Toy stores are not happy, magical places the week before Christmas. They are what the Dungeons of Hell must be like.

I flipped through his latest version of The Economist with one hand, my other hand cupped around the skinny hazelnut latte I'd grabbed on the way over. I wasn't an Economist sort of girl. I was a People or Us Weekly girl. But he didn't like talking about celebrities, and so I had learned to talk about the one or two stories in this magazine that didn't make me yawn.

We'd been together for two years, two years of Sunday night dinners where I sat and flipped and yawned and he made his mother's chicken and green beans. I hated green beans, but I ate them. I was thirty-seven. At this stage of the game, I ate green beans. I read The Economist. I wore my hair long when I knew I looked better with short. Because it made him happy, which made me happy.

Two years of compromise and lip biting, but they were two years well spent. A woman who was thirty-seven and still wanted, at minimum, three children, couldn't hold out for Fabio. Not someone who looked like him, but someone who acted like the character he played in all those romance novels he'd been on: strong, kind, passionate, loyal, and just jealous enough to be romantic.