The Singles
A PLUME BOOK
THE SINGLES
MEREDITH GOLDSTEIN covers entertainment and writes the advice column “Love Letters” for the Boston Globe. She was born in New Jersey, raised in Maryland, went to Syracuse University, and now lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts, with a carnival-size cotton candy machine that she bought for herself when she turned thirty.
The
Singles
A NOVEL
Meredith Goldstein
A PLUME BOOK
PLUME
Published by Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, May 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Meredith Goldstein, 2012
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Goldstein, Meredith.
The singles : a novel / Meredith Goldstein.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58052-3
1. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.O4848S56 2012
813′.6—dc23
2011046770
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Goudy Old Style Std • Designed by Eve L. Kirch
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Lorraine Goldstein, the bookworm
The Singles
Table of Contents
Hannah
Vicki
Rob
Nancy Phil
Joe
Hannah
Joe
Phil
Rob
Hannah
Phil
Rob
Vicki
Hannah
Joe
Vicki
Phil
Vicki
Joe
Phil
Vicki
Joe
Rob
Joe
Rob
Hannah
Phil
Hannah
Acknowledgments
Twenty-nine-year-old bride-to-be Beth Eleanor Evans, a slender, freckled, strawberry blonde whom people called Bee because of her initials, stood in front of the whiteboard she’d purchased that day at the Target off Route 103.
The board was the type of accessory one might find in a university lecture hall or on the wall of an executive meeting room at the Hampton Inn. But at her parents’ house on this steamy late-September Thursday in historic Ellicott City, Maryland, Bee used the dry-erase board to put the finishing touches on the plans for her wedding, the most expensive celebration the Tower Gardens Country Club would host this fall.
Bee had spent more than an hour decorating the board’s surface with an array of circles, squares, names, and numbers. The result of her work looked like a football play or a math equation left for Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting. But the design represented a seating chart, Bee’s last remaining task before her extended family would arrive for her wedding, which was now less than forty-eight hours away.
Bee tucked a loose curl behind her right ear and leaned forward anxiously. The board showed thirty circles, each containing a number. Extending from each circle like spokes on a wheel were blue lines that held the names of coupled guests.
“Cousin Wesley and wife Katie,” said one blue spoke. “Mr. Barocas from Dad’s work with wife, Yvonne,” read another. “Jimmy Fee and date.” “Mr. and Mrs. Rodman (neighbors).” “Ed and Elaine Ryan (accountants).” “Dr. Weihong Zheng and husband (pediatrician).”
In the top right-hand corner of the board was a list of names written in bright red ink and all-capital letters: “HANNAH MARTIN, ROB NUTLEY, NANCY MACGOWAN, VICKI CLIFFORD, JOE EVANS.”
Above the names, in the same crimson print, Bee had written the word “SINGLES.”
They were the only guests to RSVP for Bee’s nuptials without using their plus-one invites, and now they were the only names Bee hadn’t yet placed on her seating chart.
It would have been acceptable in a recession for Bee to invite singles to the wedding alone, but Bee wanted every guest to have the option of bringing a companion. Still the singles had chosen to come alone, and Bee just couldn’t understand it.
When she was single, Bee resented brides who didn’t give her a plus-one invite simply because she didn’t have a serious boyfriend. Bee vowed that when she got married, she’d send plus-ones to everyone. No one would have to be alone.
Almost everyone on the invite list had taken Bee up on her offer. Except for the singles, who, in Bee’s opinion, were adrift not only on her dry-erase board but also in life.
Two of the singles were conflict prone. Another two had a history of embarrassing Bee in public. Another was a woman Bee didn’t know at all, a friend of the groom’s family who had a reputation as a shut-in.
Bee’s wedding planner, who had become famous for planning the extravagant wedding of an ex-president’s daughter, had told Bee after examining her invite list, “No matter who you invite, there will be singles.
“You must expect an odd number,” the planner had said during their first meeting. “No matter what you plan to do, the singles always skew.”
Bee smoothed her eyebrows with the back of her right hand, her favorite nervous habit, and studied the circles and spokes, which reminded her of the puzzles she decoded on the LSATs years ago. There were five unseated guests, each of whom needed to be placed at a table. But each guest had a specific set of requirements, making it impossible to seat them at most tables. For instance, one single couldn’t be seated anywhere near her ex-boyfriend. Another single was often offensive and couldn’t be trusted around uptight adults—including Bee’s own family.
As Bee began scrambling the names and tables in her mind, she heard her mother enter the room behind her.
“Still with those five?” Bee’s mother, Donna Evans, said, letting out a dramatic sigh as she joined Bee at the dining-room table.
Donna wore a gray tank top that said “breathe” across the chest, the lowercase b and final e falling in line with her protruding nipples. Her matching yoga pants were cropped just below the knee. Donna’s artificially blonde curls, highlighted to the exact shade of her daughter’s, were pulled back into a tight bun.
“Just write them into the empty seats and be done with it,” Donna said, as Bee stared at her helplessly, her hands limp at her waist. “Honey, these people are going to spend half the night on the dance floor anyway.”
Donna let out a frustrated harrumph, and then pushed past her daughter so she could get a better look at the list of singles.
After squinting at the names for less than a minute, Donna grabbed a marker off the table and began to scribble on the board. She wrote Vicki Clifford’s and Rob Nutley’s names on the empty spoke next to the groom’s brothers and cousins. Next she printed Hannah Martin’s name in tiny letters above the circle representing the table occupied by Bee’s law-school friends and their spouses.
“We’ll add an extra chair,” Donna said, before Bee could protest that the table was already full. “The caterers can fit nine seats at a table for eight.”
Then, moving to the other side of the board, Donna wrote the names of the last two singles, Joe Evans and Nancy MacGowan, at the table with Bee’s father’s law partners and their wives.
Bee’s dad, Richard Evans, bellowed from next room. “I swear—if you’re both standing in front of that board in another five minutes, I’m going to take it outside and put it in the Dumpster and everyone at this wedding will seat themselves.”
Bee turned away from the dry-erase board in defeat.
“Fine,” she said to her mother, who had already returned the marker and about-faced, her sneakers squeaking on the hardwood floor as she made her way to the kitchen.
“Mom,” Bee called after her.
“What?”
“I’m hungry,” Bee said almost too quietly for her mother to hear.
“Have something light,” Donna responded sharply from the next room. “No sodium. That dress has absolutely no give, honey.”
Bee turned around and took one last look at the names at the top of the whiteboard, glad that she had Matt and would never again find herself without a date. She wondered, briefly and hopefully, if her singles would ever change their circumstances—if Hannah, Rob, Nancy, Vicki, and Joe would ever become easy-to-place spokes on a seating-chart wheel.
Bee scowled as her thoughts returned to swallowing another salt-free meal. She reached forward and firmly wiped the singles list clean.
Hannah
“Can I be honest with you?” Dawn asked Hannah in a loud whisper with a cigarette close to its ashy death in her right hand, a pack of bobby pins in her left.
Hannah knew by now that this wasn’t a real question.
After spending several consecutive days with Bee’s precocious matron of honor, Hannah had learned that Dawn began most of her sentences by asking theatrically, in an almost-shouted whisper, “Can I be honest with you?”
Rarely did the question correspond to the sentence that followed. Rarely did Dawn have any interest in honesty.
“It’s nothing bad,” Dawn continued, taking in Hannah’s cautious eyes and drawing out the word “bad” as if it had two syllables. “It’s just that I think you might want to consider putting on some more makeup before everything gets going today. All the other girls and I wear liner.” Dawn opened her eyes wide to illustrate. “I notice that you don’t wear any eyeliner. I don’t know if you can tell, but the rest of us—our eyes just pop. They pop in pictures. You have beautiful blue eyes, honey. I just don’t want you to get lost in the photos.”
Hannah’s nose was at least two feet from Dawn’s mouth, but she was still overcome by Dawn’s potent breath, which smelled of nicotine and Caesar salad. Hannah winced as Dawn released another puff, a nauseating blend of Parmesan and Parliaments.
Hannah wasn’t used to people smoking in her presence. Most of her friends had quit years ago when New York City approved its smoking ban. She knew a few summer smokers, friends who lit up on Brooklyn roof decks and patios, but it was too uncomfortable to smoke outside in the city after November.
Quality time with so many southerners during Bee’s wedding weekend reminded Hannah how lucky she was to live in a city that had chosen to ostracize smokers in just about every way possible. All of Bee’s soon-to-be in-laws from Raleigh and Durham were shameless chain smokers. Some of them even worked for Philip Morris.
Hannah was somewhat surprised that a perfectionist such as Dawn wasn’t worried that her dress might end up smelling of smoke. But, Hannah supposed, if everything smelled like nicotine, it didn’t really matter. It was a universal perfume, and only Hannah seemed to be bothered by its scent.
Dawn took a last drag from her depleted cigarette, prompting Hannah to lean back in anticipation of the smoky aftermath. Even in this expansive tower, with its high ceiling, Dawn’s fumes seemed omnipresent, revealing themselves in the form of baby clouds under the bright ceiling lights.
There were two large, connected rooms on the top floor of the country club tower where Hannah, Dawn, and the rest of Bee’s bridal party were readying themselves before the main event. The ceremony would take place outdoors, on the lawn, beside a white tent that was already set up for the reception. There was a plan B, in case of rain—a shorter ceremony in the club’s dining room—but it wouldn’t be necessary. It was a beautiful September day—still warm enough to go without a jacket.
The historic, brown-brick castle where the bridal party now primped was the oldest part of the country club, a members-only Annapolis institution that sat alongside the Chesapeake Bay, on more than one hundred acres of open space for golfing, skeet shooting, and whatever else wealthy people like to do on weekends. To Hannah, the neo-Gothic tower from which the Tower Gardens Country Club took its name looked as if it had been transported straight out of a fairy tale. Its tall cylindrical shape, sterile exterior, stained glass windows, and the view of the well-trimmed green below, where guests would soon be milling about, made Hannah feel like Rapunzel, which was appropriate, she thought to herself, because she was just as trapped. If this were a movie, Hannah thought, unable to shut off her casting-director’s brain, the locked-up bridesmaid version of her would be played by an imperfect yet likeable up-and-comer. Or better yet, an A-lister, but someone known for a good scowl. “Kristen Stewart,” Hannah had whispered to herself when she first peered out the window from her tower prison. Emily Blunt, she’d then decided, acknowledging that at twenty-nine she was probably too old to be played by anyone in a Twilight movie.
Dawn, as matron of honor, would be played by Reese Witherspoon. That was a no-brainer. Dawn’s cherubic face was framed by a bouncy blonde bob. She had a southern accent and sounded especially shrill when giving orders. Hannah wondered for a moment whether Reese Witherspoon would be open to smoking on screen.
Casting with an imaginary budget was Hannah’s favorite addiction. In real life she only had experience with indie films that paid the leads less than two hundred thousand dollars. The conservative budgets forced Hannah to get creative and to hunt for new talent, but she longed for the chance to cast a film that allowed her to hire the celebrities she’d developed crushes on over the years.