The Ring: Draft 4, Day 4

Metal pots and lids fell and rang against tile. I didn't look up as I turned another page. This story was about an actress who ate only pink foods and was now 79 pounds. I studied the picture and wondered if a gallon of strawberry ice cream would fit on her plan.

"I'm okay!" Glen yelled.

"Good to know!" I called back. I sipped my skinny hazelnut latte and grimaced at the foam. I hated foam. I should've gone to the Starbucks on 52nd. They weren't foam whores like the girls on 57th.

"Do you want bread tonight?"

I looked at the actress with the seventeen inch waist. "No."

"Potatoes?"

The woman's collarbone looked as if the skin was just a tight bag keeping the bones in place. "Uh uh."

"Are you wanting red or white tonight?"

What I wanted was to get back to Glance. I had to organize the photo room so I wouldn't leave Jeannette waiting for an hour again, trying to find a shot of Julia Roberts taken in a Donna Karan dress in July 1998. "Black. I'm subsisting on coffee tonight."

"You got it!"

Glen was good to me. Not for me, though. He wasn't a guy I saw buying me my denture cream when I was laid up with a broken hip and complaining how the kids didn't call us anymore.

Outside, the cherry jingle of bells reminded me it was almost Christmas. Glen's white box of an apartment didn't give the smallest hint that Santa was coming in two days.

"Dinner is served!"

I put my coffee cup on the glass and chrome coffee table and shoved my tired mouth muscles into a smile. Glen held a white platter, his white skin against the white dish, white chicken breast on top of white rice. All of it in a white room.

We sat and he ate. I pushed food on the plate and checked my Yahoo account. Then my Gmail account. Then Facebook.

"I think the chicken could use a little more tarragon," he said.

"Sure." I set down the phone and adjusted where my blouse, a fuchsia silk, gaped between two buttons, a turquoise bra peeking out.

"I was thinking we could do the Christmas thing this year."

Some of the tired in me didn't feel so heavy. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." He stabbed another bite and forked it in. "I'm thinking we could meet up here, order a gut-busting amount of Chinese, maybe watch something on IFC. What do you say, Val? It's a date?"

"Sounds tempting." I picked up the white coffee cup holding the dregs of Colombian Roast. I wiped at the brown ring it left behind on the glass tabletop. I grimaced, preparing myself for the last, grainy swig.

I grew up in Maine, where the winters were long and cold and dark, but Christmas was celebrated with white lights, evergreen wreaths, and trees you cut down yourself. Chinese food was for days you didn't want to cook, not days that should've been filled with cooking, laughter, and the possibility of sleigh bells.

"So you're with me? Hole up here and boycott Christmas?"

The inside of my mouth needed to be washed out. I went to the coffee table, picked up my foam drink, and drank the last of it. It was cold and had too many bubbles, but it did the trick. A light tan ring marred the table. I left it.

"Glen, I'm so not with you."


NOTE INSERTED AFTER I WAS DONE WITH DRAFT #4: Draft #4 had me looking to find the realism--and the "why am I writing this?"--as I revised. I had My Girl (we now know her name's Val) a little too mean to be realistic, so I cut back on the meanness. And through what was being said, what WASN'T being said, and what was being noticed, I started to figure out how to create subtext. The end is currently a placeholder, but the sentiment is what I'm going for.

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

Nothing. Nothing seems precious anymore or fits with where I'm going.