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  MARRIAGE ACCORDING TO RETT

  The average age American women got married was twenty-five. I was twenty-seven. I had seen the men that women over thirty had the opportunity to date, and it wasn’t pretty. If I didn’t get married soon, I would probably never get married.

  I hadn’t been looking for a husband, but when Greg came along I knew we’d get married. I just had this quiet feeling; our relationship felt so right. Is that the feeling that people who marry their high school sweethearts have? It must be. But I don’t think I could have appreciated how right things felt with Greg if I hadn’t had the close-but-not-quite experiences with Alex and Ryan.

  I don’t believe that we each have only one soul mate, but I do think finding someone who is as attracted to you as you are to him, who you can laugh with and still have something to talk about years down the road, is as rare as a four-leaf clover, and if you manage to find him, you should count yourself very lucky. That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments when I’d like to push Greg down a long flight of stairs. Happily, these moments are infrequent, and most of the time I consider myself fortunate indeed.

  Plus, after seeing Jen and my girlfriends date one self-absorbed loser after another, I really appreciated how good Greg was to me. He was so sweet. He wasn’t into football or porn or getting wasted with his buddies. He didn’t spend all his money on beer and electronic equipment. I wasn’t about to let such a good guy get away.

  But why hadn’t we had the forethought to elope?

  And why were wedding dresses made to make our asses look like the hindquarters of a wildebeest?

  Books by Theresa Alan

  WHO YOU KNOW

  SPUR OF THE MOMENT

  THE GIRLS’ GLOBAL GUIDE TO GUYS

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Who You Know

  Theresa Alan

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  MARRIAGE ACCORDING TO RETT

  Books by Theresa Alan

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  RETTE - The Cruel, Self-Esteem Crushing Job Search

  AVERY - Dancinfool

  JEN - Office Romance: How to Royally Screw Over Your Career

  RETTE - The Interview

  AVERY - Possibility

  JEN - Wallowing 101

  RETTE - The Itinerary

  AVERY - The Hug Club

  JEN - Catastrophes

  RETTE - Hindquarters of a Wildebeest

  AVERY - Romance and Other Marketing Ploys

  JEN - As You Climb the Ladder of Success, Only Let the Right Boys Look Up Your Dress

  RETTE - The Cruel, Self-Esteem Crushing Job Search, Revisited

  AVERY - The Party

  JEN - Kitty’s Discontent

  RETTE - Welcome to My Eating Disorder

  AVERY - Ben, Entertainer of Anorexics

  JEN - Dating: More Fun Than a Root Canal (Barely)

  RETTE - Eau d’Asshole

  AVERY - Often, Sometimes, Never

  JEN - Porno Pyrotechnics

  RETTE - Ties That Bind

  AVERY - Get-togethers

  JEN - Surviving a Weekend with Your Parents: How to Self-Medicate with Alcohol

  RETTE - The Funeral

  AVERY - The Power of the Few

  JEN - Meetings: How to Utterly Squander Precious Hours of Your Short, Sad Life

  RETTE - Letting Go

  AVERY - The Vortex

  JEN - Girls’ Night In

  RETTE - Lessons in Doing Absolutely Everything Wrong

  AVERY - Behind the Digital Armor

  JEN - The Plan

  RETTE - Pellets and Punishments

  AVERY - Widows and Orphans

  JEN - How to Make a Total Ass of Yourself and Destroy Your Career at the Same Time

  RETTE - ’Tis the Season

  AVERY - The Bullshit Hits the Fan

  JEN - I’ll Drink to That

  RETTE - Christmas. Ugh.

  AVERY - Surprises

  JEN - Reflections

  RETTE - Rediscovery

  AVERY - Shift F7

  JEN - Unhappy Hour

  RETTE - Maybe Someday

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  For my mother and father,

  Evelyn and Don,

  and for Sara.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to my agent, Alison Picard, and editor, John Scognamiglio, whose suggestions helped improve this book considerably. To my sister, Sara Jade, who was the first person to read the manuscript and has been my personal cheerleader for years. To Mom, Dad, Heather Frank, and James Ritter, for their support. To Jenny Atchley, for encouraging me to submit the manuscript, and to Susan Arndt, Rob Allen, Dixie Darr, John Gress, and Jen Daumler, for keeping me in good food, good wine, and good spirits.

  RETTE

  The Cruel, Self-Esteem Crushing Job Search

  Going into the job market armed with nothing more than a degree in English is like trying to fight a five-alarm fire when you’re soaked with lighter fluid—you’re just not going to get very far.

  It had taken four months and forty-two résumés, but at long last I’d gotten called for an interview. Four months is a long, long time when your fiancé is busy with graduate school and all you have to entertain yourself with is daytime television and a massage wand, AKA the Magic Wand. (I’d had to invest in the Magic Wand despite our tight budget—it’s difficult to explain developing carpal tunnel while unemployed.) The sound of drills, blenders, and electric shavers now produced a distressingly carnal reaction in me.

  The interview was an hour away, and every synapse in my body was twitching with nervous energy. I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. I got up from the table, paced, sat down again. I flipped through a Victoria’s Secret catalog. Wonder-bras. This is not something I understood. Maybe when I lost the thirty-five pounds that snuck up on me in high school and college, I’d get it. But right now, the idea of purposely making a part of your body look bigger? Incomprehensible.

  I reached up to grab the cordless phone off the wall and dialed Avery’s number.

  “Explain the concept of thong underwear to me,” I said when Avery answered. I made a face at the annoying Victoria’s Secret model who looked so pleased with herself.

  “Rette, I’m afraid thong underwear is one of the great mysteries of the world.”

  “I spend a good portion of my life trying to keep my underwear from nesting between my buttcheeks, and here’s a product whose sole purpose is to wedge its way between the fleshiest parts of my body.” I was dying for some coffee, but my nervous stomach couldn’t handle caffeine’s caustic effect. The months of unemployment had proved corrosive to both my ego and my digestive system, and I did not want to go to my interview with the gases in my stomach doing a miasmic tango. “Guess what? McKenna Marketing called yesterday. I have an interview today.” I padded across the wood floor to the sink to rinse out my cup. The floorboards creaked mournfully, straining beneath my weight. Greg’s cereal bowl was in the sink, unsoaked of course. How hard was it for him to rinse it out and put it in the dishwasher? Why did he not realize that after a few hours corn flakes and milk could produce a bond stronger than love?

  I turned on the faucet and the ancient water pipes groaned with exertion. Our apartment was old and ill-tempered, and I absolutely loved it.

  “An interview? That’s great. I had friends who looked for a job for six months before getting an interview.”

  This was why I loved Avery. Unlike, for example, my family, Avery could always make me feel like slightly less o
f a loser. My younger sister, Jen, had majored in marketing, and even though she got execrable grades and her résumé was overflowing with grammatical errors, she managed to get a job two weeks after she got her diploma. She and my parents were astounded by my lack of progress in my job hunt.

  “Are you nervous?”

  “That’s an understatement. I’ve sent out forty-two résumés and this is the only place that called. Why did I quit teaching?”

  “Because you hated it.”

  “Oh yeah.” I walked back over to the table, collapsed into the chair, and started looking through the Victoria’s Secret again.

  “You need to visualize yourself acing the interview and getting the job. I’m serious. You should look in the mirror and tell yourself you’re smart, you’re talented, and you’re going to get this job. You need to say it like you mean it.”

  “Yeah, Ave, that’s pretty much just not going to happen.”

  “I know it sounds corny, but it’s the power of positive visualization. It works.”

  “Yokay.” This was short for “yeah OK,” which was short for “yeah right, not in this lifetime, nice try though.”

  “I’m going to be late for work, I’d better get going,” Avery said. “You’re going to do great. Stop by my office when it’s over and give me all the details.”

  “Will do. Talk to you later.”

  Avery and I sometimes called each other six times a day to say absolutely nothing. I had begun to look forward to reporting my day’s events to her or, more likely, the nonevents—random thoughts I’d had, new ideas for the wedding I wanted to get her opinion on, new ideas about what I wanted from a career and from my life. Meeting Avery was the only good thing that had happened since the move.

  When Greg asked me what I thought about moving to Colorado so he could get his master’s degree in engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I was torn. On the one hand, I liked Colorado and had been looking for an excuse to get away from Minnesota and its entirely inhuman winters. On the other hand, Jen had moved to Colorado three years ago to follow her ski-bum boyfriend, and I preferred my little sister when she was thousands of miles away, not a mere few blocks across town. It had a little something to do with her astonishing beauty, staggering self-centeredness, and the fact that any time I was around her I felt like the fat, frumpy older sister that I was. But I’d said yes, and we moved, and I’d spent the last four months marinating in feelings of failure and rabid self-contempt.

  Things with Jen hadn’t been as bad as I had worried they might be. She was the one who introduced me to Avery, for one thing, and I was grateful to her for that. I can honestly say Avery is the only tall, skinny blonde I don’t despise. Avery was the kind of person who did everything spectacularly well, but somehow you didn’t hate her for it. Her meals, for example, looked like something that should be photographed for a gourmet cooking magazine. Can you imagine, taking the time to lovingly arrange a sprig of decorative parsley atop the entrée before gorging yourself silly?

  Avery knew about stuff that was completely alien to me. She’s a vegetarian and cooked food I couldn’t even spell: Seitan, kreplach, kasha, avial, kabocha, aspic—these were not foods found at your neighborhood Denny’s or Village Inns back in Minnesota, I can assure you.

  Avery was the one who told us that the apartment above her was for rent, which is how we found this place. Avery was also the one who let me know about the job opening at the company where she and Jen worked.

  Which just goes to show you that the saying is true: Getting ahead in this world is all about who you know. But like an idiot, instead of spending my years in college networking and brown-nosing, I’d worked my butt off to get good grades, routinely pulling all-nighters to finish epic essays and making myself sick with stress every time exams rolled around. What had all my hard work gotten me? A career that paid about half the salary of the average construction worker.

  Being a copy editor for a marketing company wasn’t my dream job, but right now I was willing to launch a career as a llama wrangler, a ticket taker at a movie theater, or one of those people who stands in the bathroom handing out towels (which begs the question: Is this really a needed service? Is it harder to reach an extra three inches to grab a towel yourself? I think not), anything to get my butt off the couch and some money in my pocket.

  It would be cool to see Avery every day, but Jen? Every time I looked at her, I could feel my few remaining shreds of self-esteem wither. We looked like a set of before and after pictures: We had the same long, thick red hair and brown eyes, but she was two inches taller and at least thirty pounds lighter. It wasn’t Jen’s fault she was stunning, but she had a way of igniting my insecurities as no one else could.

  Jen and I would never be good friends; we were just too different. I consumed books with the same voraciousness I attacked fattening foods, while she never read anything more substantial than a greeting card and was on a perpetual diet. Plus, there was the fact that Mom adored Jen, while I never measured up. Mom didn’t give a hoot about good grades (she’d never done well in school and found it odd that I could be content to sit still with a book for hours on end), and she was constantly giving me admonishing glances, explaining to me that I might fare better with the boys if I put on a little lipstick and maybe didn’t read quite so many books. Pardon my blistering resentment.

  I mean I don’t want you to get the idea that Jen and I hated each other or anything. Jen’s beauty and sparkling personality were as intoxicating to me as they were to everyone else. It was a love/hate thing with myself, a fiery internal battle of jealousy, curdled self-esteem, and a burning wish to be a lot more like the person I aspired to be, a person with my kindness and intelligence but Jen’s looks and perfect figure (incidentally, my ideal self also had a dazzling fashion sense that would make my mother glow with pride rather than shake her head and roll her eyes and give me the kind of withering looks that made me want to promptly hurtle myself off the nearest cliff).

  But if nothing else, Jen and I were good drinking buddies, and sometimes in a new town, all you need is someone who can help distract you from your loneliness.

  AVERY

  Dancinfool

  I believe there is a certain order to the universe, an organized plan; I believe that from the chaos comes meaning. Just as the unruly spattering of notes of music on a page are transformed into a symphony when you interpret it and put it all together, there is a method behind the madness.

  What the method to this current madness was, however, unclear. My horoscope this morning had provided no warning this was coming.

  It was all the fault of my caffeine addiction. If it weren’t for my dependence on coffee, I would have been safe in my office right now and not standing here waiting for the coffee to brew and listening to Jim from the sales department tell me he was bringing over a bride from the Philippines. What was the proper response to such a statement? What was I supposed to say?

  What I did say was “Well, that’s great, Jim.” I nodded and smiled and willed the coffee to brew faster while he went on about how beautiful she was and how they had such similar philosophies about life.

  I watched the coffee dripping slowly, a caffeine udder. I couldn’t exactly leave now with an empty cup. Why did I ever get hooked on coffee in the first place?

  I never would have poisoned my body with such a toxin like caffeine in my dancing days, but now that I worked in an office, coffee gave me that artificial jolt of energy I needed to make it through the day.

  I looked at Jim, letting his figure blur. His aura was orangy red, a good sign. Maybe he really was happy. Maybe this would all work out after all.

  When the coffee was ready at last, I poured myself a cup, told Jim I needed to get back to work, and bolted back to my office, feeling better than usual about being single.

  If I let myself think about this poor woman who was going to marry Jim, I’d start crying. I couldn’t let myself think about it; I couldn’t let the toxic th
oughts consume me. Everything happens for a reason, everything happens for a reason, I reminded myself.

  Even though the whole thing was sad, I couldn’t wait to tell Jen, my officemate, about Jim’s overseas bridal shipment.

  It was always rewarding to share gossip with Jen. She’d been cracking me up since our cubicle days when she’d hurl paper airplanes made out of pictures downloaded from bestiality Web sites across the walls of our cubicles. Several times a day she would wedge her way into my cube and whisper scandalous tidbits about coworkers: “Avery, I have such dirt to dish, you would not believe.”

  Jen and I had recently been promoted from peons to low-level grunts at McKenna Marketing, and our promotions had been marked with a move from cubicles to a cramped, windowless, bathroom stall-size office we shared, making it easier than ever to share the latest rumors.

  At 8:30, only half an hour late—unusually early for her—Jen came rushing into our office holding a liter of bottled water in one hand and her briefcase in the other. Jen always made a big show of taking work home with her. She didn’t do any work while at work, so I found her pretense of being a slave to her job hilarious.

  “My day is ruined before it’s even begun,” she announced, dumping her briefcase onto her desk. She collapsed into her chair and swiveled theatrically around to face me. “I got trapped into having a conversation with Lydia in the hallway. I saw her coming, but I had no place to hide, and I had to hold an entire conversation with her.”

  “How is our fertile co-worker?”

  “Glowing as usual. You’ll be happy to know that the little fetus is an absolute Rockette. Lydia’s latest craving is for apple butter on melba toast. And the nursery is almost done, and it is just perfect, absolutely just so adorable.”

  Lydia was a nice woman, but she was hopelessly superficial. Talking to her was like holding a conversation with a Pop Tart—there just wasn’t a lot of substance.

  Jen turned on her computer. She stared at the screen contemptuously as the computer booted up. “It’s only eight-thirty in the morning, and I’m bored and ready to go home. Please tell me you have gossip. How is Art?”