Tired ladies take a stan.., p.1
Tired Ladies Take a Stand, page 1
Praise for the novels of Gretchen Anthony
“[The Book Haters’ Book Club] is the feel-good book of the year. Once again, Anthony has created a cast of lovable characters and set them loose in a propulsive, humorous, and heartwarming story. This is her best novel yet.”
—J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
“This sparkling novel starts with high energy and unique characters that move from one surprise to another all the way to the final pages.”
—Ann Garvin, USA TODAY bestselling author of There’s No Coming Back from This
“Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners hits all the right notes; you’ll double over with laughter, but you’ll also find yourself at times misty-eyed and introspective.”
—Kristin Harmel, #1 internationally bestselling author of The Book of Lost Names
“Sparkling... Anthony includes a slew of real recommendations sourced from her own friends, bookstore employees, and librarians, giving readers a chance to head off on their own paths.”
—Booklist
“The Kids Are Gonna Ask is a touching, wonderful novel about the discoveries we make when the simplest questions spark the most complicated answers.”
—Abbi Waxman, USA TODAY bestselling author of The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
“Anthony’s debut successfully mixes realistic emotional responses to big life events with a sense of humor, preventing any single character from becoming a victim or villain.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“The Kids Are Gonna Ask is a smart, engaging send-up of our modern age wrapped up in a story too delicious to put down.”
—Kelly Harms, USA TODAY bestselling author of The Overdue Life of Amy Byler
Gretchen Anthony is the author of The Book Haters’ Book Club, The Kids Are Gonna Ask and Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Medium, and The Write Life, among others. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.
X: @GrAnthony
Instagram: @GretchenAnthony.Writer
Facebook.com/GretchenAnthony.Writer
Tired Ladies Take a Stand
Gretchen Anthony
To Chad
Thanks for that ride to the airport.
What a trip.
Contents
All Aboard the Yes Train
March
Fern
Andi
Fern
Emma
Carolina
Fern
Andi
Emma
Four Camels and a Thermos of Booze
April
Fern
Emma
Andi
Carolina
Buy Me a Drink BINGO
May
Emma
Carolina
Andi
Fern
Emma
Andi
Emma
Andi
Fitness in the City (and What It Did to Our Feet)
June
Emma
Andi
Fern
If You Like Tiny Little Bubbles, and Getting Caught in the Rain
Carolina
Andi
Carolina
Fern
Carolina
Andi
Emma
900 Brides
July
Emma
Fern
Carolina
Fern
Emma
Fern
Emma
Andi
Fern
Emma
Four Weddings and a Wake-Up Call
August
Emma
Fern
Carolina
Andi
Emma
That Afternoon in the Apartment
September
Fern
Emma
Fern
Carolina
Andi
Emma
Acknowledgments
All Aboard the Yes Train
From Smart Girls Say Yes
by Fern McAllister
The first bed I ever bought myself belonged to a dead person. I don’t know if they died on it. What I do know is that I paid thirty dollars for the mattress and box spring set at an estate sale in Davis, California. The springs groaned, and the quilted cover was purple, except for a faded ghostly patch shaped like a body in the middle.
Convincing myself that was the comfy spot, I stuffed my cash into the estate agent’s hand.
This was fall 1995, and I was a first-year graduate student living on $1,000 a month. My single secretarial-salaried mother believed in the power of education, but she’d already contributed all that she could financially by buying my plane ticket from Milwaukee to Sacramento.
Of my monthly teaching assistant stipend, I paid $350 rent and put $50 toward the interest on my undergraduate loans. I didn’t eat much, since “skeletal” was the ’90s woman’s ideal body shape. But weekends equaled beer, and cheap beer was for undergraduates. We drank craft. When it all added up, I could either snag this “grandma died, let’s sell her stuff” garage sale bargain, or sleep on the floor.
A year later, I began to sleep at my boyfriend’s apartment, where I luxuriated in his warehouse-brand double. I liked him for other things, but the fact that his mattress didn’t screech every time we did the thumpity-bumpit made “your place or mine?” a nonissue. Always his place.
We moved to San Francisco together after graduation and rented what became “our place.” Until two years later when I discovered he didn’t restrict his definition of “ours” to simply “me and you.” There was also “mistake” and “it won’t happen again.” Which is how in 1999 I found myself at the Mattress Train on Market Street with my three closest friends, Andi, Emma, and Carolina.
A week earlier, I’d called Andi, who’d recently signed a new lease after breaking up with her law school boyfriend. I told her about the extra people in my bed.
She said, “Oh, my God, Fern, please come keep me company so neither one of us has to face this alone.”
The apartment was on Filbert Street near Buchanan in the Marina District. I had urged her to avoid the Marina because that’s where all the buildings collapsed during the 1989 earthquake. She promised me she wouldn’t move to the “falling-down part,” and I felt much better when she produced a US Geological map that showed nothing but bedrock beneath her house.
Soon, it was my bedrock, too.
Though the apartment was technically a one-bedroom, we made a second by converting the dining room. We permanently closed off a set of pocket doors and ordered a wire-frame garment rack from the Ikea catalog. This forced us to eat in front of the living room TV, but we ate out most days, anyhow.
As luck would have it, our friends Emma and Carolina soon moved to the Marina together following their own breakups. Their apartment was closer to the falling-down part, though still above Divisadero. Still on bedrock.
What all this bedrock lease-signing meant was that the four of us were single, heading into what would become the summer of “Buy Me a Drink BINGO;” of joining 896 other women running up Grant Street in bridal gowns; that the actions of one man would change the lives of four women.
But those are stories for other chapters.
First, let me tell you about these friends of mine. We met each other via the usual channels—Andi and I in graduate school, Emma and Carolina and I at work. Our origin stories are boring, but these three women are anything but.
Carolina and Emma are planners and doers. The apartment they shared had real furniture and matching towels.
Besides our apartment, Andi and I shared one other thing: our antianxiety prescription. Pot and Kettle had just moved in together. Some nights, there was enough vexation ricocheting through the one-bedroom on Filbert Street to rattle its walls.
But here’s where we differed. Andi suffered from what-if angst, forever expecting the world to bring the worst to bear on her life.
What if her clients lied to her?
What if MUNI derailed and made her late to court?
What if it rained, and she’d forgotten her umbrella and missed the bus, and the flooded sewers released the sprites of hell to terrorize her so thoroughly that she arrived at work looking worse than when she’d woken up?
I, on the other hand, preferred a more self-centered form of worry, an angst of the “I’m not, I can’t, I’ll never” variety.
I’m not as smart as the other people in the room.
I can’t compete with that idea.
I’ll never be as [insert adjective here] as her.
As the Anxiety Twins, Andi and I gravitated to Carolina and Emma. Carolina made us feel protected. She was all planning and action. She knew street names and intersections. Not once did she get into a cab and tell the driver to drop her off “next to that nail salon that gave me a toenail fungus.”
Emma was so empathetic it made you feel ridiculous for worrying. Nothing cures anxiety better than hearing your friend ask, “How did that presentation go? Were you able to remember the acronym for Inter-Departm ental Cyclical Change Dynamics?”
So, back to that day in March 1999. I had a new address, a new neighborhood, and a new roommate. All I lacked was a mattress. And this time, I hoped to buy one dressed in its factory-original plastic.
The Mattress Train is a chain of stores, most of them overgrown warehouses with ivory walls and gray carpet. We were at the location on Market Street, empty that afternoon except for the four of us and a sales guy wearing a pair of polyester dress pants screaming “I’d rather be anywhere but here.”
Whoever did the company’s advertising blanketed local radio with spots featuring a wooden train whistle, the kind you find in toy stores and novelty shops. And they were always having a sale. Today was the “Spring Fling.” Toot! Toot! to savings!
We walked in just before closing.
“If we buy a mattress, will you blow your whistle?” Carolina bounced on the display bed next to mine.
Sales Guy avoided the question by picking up the phone.
She flopped onto her side to pout. “I think he’s faking that call.”
“Can you blame him?” I toed the price tag at my foot. The mattress on which I lounged with my dirty Doc Martens cost $899, though a gold “Spring Fling!” applique shouted at me to Act Now and Save $200!
The thought of putting $699 on my credit card had me suddenly so frightened I wanted to cry. “I make more money than my mom ever did, and I still can’t buy myself a bed.”
Carolina said, “This isn’t like debating whether you need another pair of shoes.”
“Yesterday you told me I need a pair of strappy sandals to wear with my new wrap dress.”
“You do. But you know what I’m saying.”
Beautiful Emma, who was too polite to do anything but stand by quietly while we debated, planted herself next to my feet. “Find something?”
“A hole in my wallet.” The fear tears crept up my throat again.
I’d just turned twenty-nine. I had a master’s degree and a professional job and a corporate credit card but couldn’t buy myself a place to lay my head.
No, scratch that. I could afford the pillow. On layaway.
No matter how strong your friendships are, money panic is not a communal experience, especially when you’re young and single. Everyone comes to a friendship with different financial histories, hang-ups, and hookups. Yet, we tend to assume that the people with whom we laugh, play, and eat can put cash toward all the same things we do. And we make this assumption because it’s only when a friend has the nerve to ask, “Can you afford this?” that the shit goes down.
Carolina said, “Ferny-bear is having a hard time convincing herself that she deserves a decent night’s sleep.”
“That’s not true. I’m just wondering what, exactly, is inside of this thing that costs nine hundred dollars?”
Emma being Emma leaned over to examine the stitches.
Carolina being Carolina catapulted herself to standing. “Let’s see what else they got. Where’s Andi?”
We found her beneath a sign reading Warehouse Buys! And, of course, there was an exclamation point. Everything at the Mattress Train had one.
“Clearance section!” Carolina made for the first available display and belly flopped.
Emma planted herself carefully at the foot of a nearby bed and bounced like Tinker Bell landing on a flower petal.
I looked at Andi’s face for a sign. Salary-wise, she made a lot more money than any of us. But she was also carrying about a hundred thousand in law school loans, which she’d be paying off into her forties.
Andi said, “Okay, count of three, everyone find a decent, mid-price mattress and pitch Fern on why she should buy it.”
Then she looked at me and said, “You’re a grown-up. You have a job. People rely on you. You need a place to sleep.” Because Andi is the sort of woman who recognizes the difference between necessity and indulgence.
The three of them each found a mattress and tried to convince me why it was the toot! toot! toot-able best deal. I chose the one I was already sitting on. Queen-size, far less jiggly than Jell-O, and at an affordable $399.
Andi lay down next to me. “Maybe I should upgrade, too. The mattress I have is the same one I had in high school.”
“That’s old. We’re old.”
“Old enough to buy ourselves our own damn beds.” This was Carolina, who launched herself onto the end. “Oooh, I like the firmness of this one.”
That grabbed Emma’s attention, and she migrated to the corner opposite Carolina, testing the bounce. “Yep, this is it. This one.”
Carolina called toward the front of the store. “Garçon? Some help for the ladies with cash over here?”
Sales Guy wilted with every step in our direction.
Carolina said, “If we buy four of this same mattress here, how much of a discount can you give us?”
“We can’t really do that. It’s sticker-pricing.” The guy wasn’t speaking with exclamation points. Very un–Mattress Train.
“Only, I bet you can,” said Carolina. “Because it’s almost closing time, and you have four guaranteed sales in front of you, and everything is negotiable.”
That made the already uncomfortable looking twenty-something begin to sweat.
She continued, “Three hundred each. Times four. That’s a twelve-hundred-dollar sales day and it’s almost closing time.”
He must have known there was wiggle room in the pricing because he hadn’t walked away.
“Call your manager if you need permission to deal. We’ll wait.”
When he turned, the rest of us let out a collective breath.
Andi said, “You’re a genius.”
Carolina accepted the compliment. “Why shouldn’t we get a deal? Worst-case scenario, he comes back and says no.”
I, however, hoped she remembered that I was currently sleeping on the couch. “What if he does say no?” To which Emma clucked sympathetically, the way she does when there’s nothing particular to say but doesn’t want you to feel alone.
But Carolina remained undeterred. “One step at a time, ladies.”
Sales Guy hung up the phone. “I can do three-seventy-five each.”
My fingertips were about to pop from the anxiety pooled in my clenched fists. Twenty-five dollars was twenty-five dollars. Especially in 1999. I willed Carolina to take it.
“I know your manager said that you can go as low as three-twenty-five.” Carolina started to laugh, and I was about to wee my pants when Sales Guy did the strangest thing I’d ever seen.
He laughed back.
This may be hyperbole, but if memory serves, Carolina was by this point glowing gold she exuded so much confidence. “I’m right, aren’t I? Your manager totally said, ‘Stay as close to sticker price as you can but don’t take anything less than three-and-a-quarter.’”
Sales Guy tried to wipe his face back to serious. “Shit. You know you’re breaking me here.”
“No, I’m not.” She got to her knees, bouncing slightly and making the plastic crinkle. She extended a palm. “I’ll say yes if you say yes.”
And the next thing we knew, all four of us were handing over credit cards.
More than a decade later, that mattress resides in my guest room. No one has died on it, nor do the springs squeak. It remains my favorite spot to nap. Had my friends not surrounded me that afternoon in March, I doubt I’d have had the courage to buy it. Certainly not through negotiation.
But I said yes. Because Carolina said yes and got Sales Guy to say yes and Andi and Emma followed, each of us baptized in the power of unity. Where one could go, so could we all.
I learned several lessons that day. One of them being that grown women with grown-ass jobs need to accept their fate and prioritize bedding over beer. The other was that whether you’re the president of the Menudo fan club or a sales guy at the Mattress Train, you’re just as likely to end up in someone’s book wearing unfortunate pants.
But the most important lesson was this: no journey is undertaken alone.
Onward, friends...
Say “yes” and turn the page.
March
Fern
Fern McAllister’s pocket is vibrating again, so she pulls her phone from her pocket and peeks at it beneath the tablecloth, hoping the move looks as if she’s simply fidgeting with her skirt. She’s ignored the buzzing several times, presuming it’s the doorbell app Mack installed that now shouts at her all day long. Because how could they possibly have survived all these years without the knowledge that the neighbor was walking her dog, or that the middle-school bus had just dropped off the kids it had been dropping off every afternoon at 3:25 p.m. since forever?
