Princess Charming Read online

  “The Three Blonde Mice,” I had dubbed us that day, and the nickname had stuck.

  We three did, indeed, have blond hair—mine, shoulder-length, blow-dried, and streaked; Jackie’s very short and utilitarian and strawberry; Pat’s wild and frizzy and wheat-colored. And we were about the same age—a year or two on either side of forty-five.

  But there were more differences between us than there were similarities, starting with our sizes. I was extremely tall and thin, Pat was squat and chunky, and Jackie was somewhere in between. Consequently, we could never walk in lockstep and were always bumping into each other and mumbling “Sorry.” Then, there were the differences in our attitudes toward men. Jackie was always lusting after them, Pat was always comparing them to her God-almighty ex-husband, and I was always wondering how I’d been deluded enough to marry one at all. And then, there were the differences in our personalities and life experiences.

  I, for example, was the quintessential neurotic New York City career woman. More specifically, I was an account executive at Pearson & Strulley, the international public relations firm, and except for my annual vacations with Jackie and Pat and my regular visits to New Rochelle to see my mother, my job was my life. I was deeply devoted to burnishing the images of my clients, which included a chain of cappuccino bars, a manufacturer of novelty sunglasses, and an over-the-hill movie actress with an unfortunate habit of breaking the law. I lived in an antiseptically clean, one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment that was guarded by three Medeco locks, two dead bolts, and a lobby filled with a battalion of doormen. I ran four miles a day, rarely allowed high-cholesterol foods to pass my lips, never ventured out in the sun without at least a No. 15 screen, and fearing I might sprout a dowager’s hump in my advancing years, had recently tripled my calcium intake. I was a careful, watchful person—a control freak, my ex-husband used to call me—and the aspect of life about which I was most careful was romance. I shunned it the same way I shunned mayonnaise. In other words, if I wasn’t working late at the office, I was home alone at night, picking at a Healthy Choice entree and then watching one of those interchangeable magazine shows like “Dateline.” Dateline. Who wanted a date? Not me, no sir. Not after the two most important men in my life had proven to be lying, cheating sons of bitches. I was twelve when I found out about the little popsy my father, Fred Zimmerman, was putting away. Fred had a lot of little popsies, it turned out, and one of them, a redhead with large eyes and large breasts, was so diverting that he left my mother and me for her. Needless to say, I haven’t seen his traitorous ass since. My mother got on with her life, marrying Mr. Schecter, our next-door neighbor, a scant seven months after Fred’s defection. I, however, was left not only with a desperate fear of abandonment but with a very sizable chip on my shoulder when it came to men. I vowed that I would never be suckered in by a man, never buy into the whole love-and-romance bullshit, never even read mushy novels or sing along with overwrought ballads. When I was thirty-six, I broke two of those pledges. In a moment of abject weakness, I not only went out and bought a Michael Bolton tape; I decided to marry Eric Zucker, who was thirty-eight and, like me, had never taken the plunge. I wasn’t in love with Eric, but he seemed like a reasonable antidote to my loneliness and a fairly decent catch, all things considered. His family owned several funeral homes in the Tri-State Area, which meant that he was in a business that would never become obsolete and would relieve me of the unpleasantness of ever having to go funeral home shopping, when the need arose. Eric was nice looking in a brown sort of way—brown hair, brown eyes, brown suits—and he was even more compulsively organized than I was. He actually alphabetized the prescription drugs in his medicine cabinet! What’s more, he had the same initials as I did—E.Z.—so there was no need to invest in a new set of monogrammed anything. Best of all, Eric was as uninterested in mawkish emotions and overheated sex as I was—or so I thought. Six months into the marriage, he had an affair with the improbably named Lola, the makeup artist who applied lipstick, eye shadow, and blusher to the embalmed corpses at the family’s funeral parlors. I wanted to kill Eric, but I was not a violent person. My lawyer wanted me to take Eric to the cleaners, but I was not a greedy person. My mother wanted me to sully Eric’s reputation in the press, but I was not a stupid person. “You’re in public relations,” she said. “You know how to plant stories about people. Don’t take him to the cleaners; just air his dirty laundry in all the gossip columns.” I explained to my mother that since Eric was not a celebrity of even minor consequence, the gossip columns would not be receptive to an item about him or Lola. No, I decided to pay Eric Zucker back my way. His company’s most feared competitor was another chain in the area called Copley’s Funeral Homes. So I went after Copley’s business with a vengeance, and after two months of groveling, I convinced them to let Pearson & Strulley handle their PR account. I got such positive media coverage for Copley’s Funeral Homes that Zucker Funeral Homes lost visibility and customers. A lot of customers. They lost so many customers that poor Lola had to be downsized. “You ruined me and my family, you bitch!” Eric shouted at me during his most recent, verbally abusive phone call. “That’s what you get for exchanging bodily fluids with Lola,” I said sweetly, hoping Eric would feel at least some remorse for what he had done to me.

  While I was positively undone by Eric’s betrayal when I first found out about it, Jackie acted remarkably nonchalant when she learned that Peter wanted out of their marriage. After their divorce, it was strictly business as usual between them; she never missed a day at the nursery, went right on working side by side with Peter as if nothing had happened, didn’t even flinch when his new wife, Trish, who taught first grade at the elementary school around the corner, stopped in to pick up precious little flowering plants for her centerpieces. But Jackie was one tough cookie. She and Peter had started the business right after they were married, and she wasn’t about to bow out or buy him out, just because he had suddenly decided he was more attracted to a woman who had polish on her fingernails than dirt underneath them. Peter had liked the tomboy in Jackie once, the short, pixie haircut, the athletic body, the salty language, the hoarse, whiskey voice. But as the years went by, his taste changed, and one day he announced that she just didn’t “do it for him, sexually.” Personally, I thought Peter’s rejection of her as a woman was the reason behind her constant chatter about sex—the reason she flirted and undulated and talked about wanting to get laid. It was all talk, as she, herself, admitted, but it was her way of showing the world she was sexy, no matter what Peter thought. We all have our shtiks, so who was I to judge? She came on to men to ease her hurt; I avoided men to ease mine. Jackie was Jackie, and I’d never met a woman like her. She could shoot pool, throw back shots of tequila like one of the boys, and of course, transform people’s backyards into pieces of paradise. Ironically, the latest wedge between her and Peter was the very thing that had once bonded them: the nursery. Peter had recently revealed that he wanted to expand the business and sell not only trees and shrubs and landscaping services but vegetables and produce and dairy items. “So you want to turn J&P’s into A&P’s, is that it?” Jackie had said sarcastically. She was an expert in rhododendron, not goat cheese. There were plenty of places where the yuppies of Bedford could purchase their baby eggplant. What’s more, J&P’s was doing fine as a nursery. Why tamper with success? Nevertheless, Peter kept telling Jackie that she was holding him back professionally by not going along with his plans. He begged her to let him buy her out of the business, and she told him to go fuck himself. Currently, they were not speaking, except when it was absolutely necessary.

  Rounding out our little trio was Pat, the roundest of the three of us. A full-time and very devoted mother, she and her five children and their aging cocker spaniel lived in a rambling white colonial in Weston, Connecticut—a homey, cheerful place where I spent occasional weekends in the summer. I would go to visit Pat, of course, and to get away from the fetidness of the city in August, but a major attraction of th
e Kovecky household was Lucy, the youngest of Pat’s brood and the only girl. She was a nine-year-old with Pat’s chubbiness and quiet demeanor, and I, who was not the least bit sticky or sentimental where children were concerned, was mad about her, doted on her, felt a powerful kinship with her. After all, I understood what it was like to have your daddy leave you. Oh, the other kids were nice, too. For males. It was a revelation to me how, in this age of children murdering their parents or, at the very least, toting guns to school, the Kovecky children managed to be good kids who were not nerds. Especially since they were products of divorce. Perhaps it was because Pat never uttered an unkind word about their father, never poisoned them against Bill. And it wasn’t as if the children were left destitute. Bill may have turned into a big-shot gastroenterologist who spent more time palpating strangers’ abdomens than he did helping Pat with the dishes, but he wasn’t one of those deadbeat dads. No way. He made Pat a very generous divorce settlement, and grumble though he did to anyone who would listen, he never missed a payment, even though it meant scaling back his own lifestyle. The reason he and Pat didn’t work out was that, somewhere between his first appearance on “Good Morning, America” and the birth of his third child, he decided he wasn’t a mere doctor but a healer, a scientist, a saver of the world’s collective digestive system. The other problem was that Pat was too shy, too constrained, too afraid of offending him to tell him he was being an asshole. Even her clothes were intended not to offend or call attention to themselves. She wore lacy, frilly dresses that made her look like an English milkmaid in one of those Merchant Ivory movies. She was so shy and self-effacing that her idea of a four-letter word was “oops.” She had no self-confidence—at least, until recently. As part of her campaign to win Bill back, she had started seeing a therapist and was adding words such as “empowerment,” “needs,” and “me” to her vocabulary. She could be a little sanctimonious at times, and I often gave myself a laugh by picturing her locked in a room with Howard Stern, but I adored her. Everyone did. Except Bill, I guess. Although, according to Pat, he had telephoned her just the week before, saying he wanted to see her when she got back from the cruise. Jackie and I prayed it was because he had come to his senses and realized what a decent, loving person she was, not that he wanted to tell her he was cutting back her alimony and child support.

  So there the three of us were, bosom buddies in spite of our differences. Three-women friendships can be tough to sustain, given that two are bound to talk behind the third’s back and the third inevitably feels left out. But Jackie, Pat, and I were a team, a triumvirate, the Three Blonde Mice. Nothing could come between us.

  Of course, we’d never been cooped up on a boat together for seven days.

  “All set?” I asked when the Sea Swan ticket agent had returned Pat’s documents to her.

  “All set,” she nodded.

  “Then it’s show time,” Jackie declared.

  “We’re sure we want to do this?” I asked, still feeling curmudgeonly about the cruise. I really would have preferred that Costa Rican inn.

  “We’re sure,” said Jackie, taking me by the shoulders and literally pointing me in the direction of the sign at the other end of the terminal that read “To the Ship.”

  We were walking toward the sign when I suddenly decided to call my answering machine one last time. Yes, it was a Sunday, but public relations disasters could and did happen on Sundays. There was always the chance that one of my clients needed me, that Pearson & Strulley needed me, and that I would be duty bound to heed the call.

  We stopped at a bank of phone booths. I called my answering machine. There were no messages, but I tried not to take it personally.

  As I emerged from the phone booth to join my friends, the man who’d been using the phone next to mine finished his call and spoke to us.

  “Hey! Are you ladies sailing on the Princess Charming today?” he said in a loud voice, made even louder by the echo-chamber-like acoustics in the terminal.

  “Yeah, how about you?” asked Jackie.

  “Sure am,” he said, then introduced himself as Henry Prichard of Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was in his late thirties or early forties, I guessed, but once men hit middle age these days, there’s no way to tell how old they really are. So many of them are having cosmetic work done now—face lifts, collagen injections, chemical peels, you name it. For another thing, they don’t permit themselves to look bald anymore, what with plugs and weaves and baseball caps that cover a multitude of sins. This man wore a Pittsburgh Pirates cap, along with tan shorts, a denim work shirt, and penny loafers. He had a hefty, beefy build and ruddy, chipmunk cheeks. I deduced, from the baseball cap, plus the golf bag and the diving equipment, that he was the athletic type. Jackie liked athletic types. “I won the cruise in the company contest. Best numbers in my district,” he added, clearly proud of his achievement.

  “You’re a salesman?” Jackie asked, as she ran her eyes over him, no doubt assessing his potential in the sex object department. God, this is going to be a long cruise, I thought, worried that Jackie might actually sleep with a man on this trip and that, once her notorious dry spell was over, she’d have nothing else to live for.

  “Yup. I’m with Peterson Chevrolet,” said Henry.

  “Was your prize a trip for two?” Jackie asked, cutting right to the chase.

  “Oh, sure. They would’ve let me take my wife. If I had a wife.” Henry scoffed at the very notion. “But what kind of woman would put up with a jock? A die-hard Pirates fan like me, huh?”

  I looked at Jackie, expecting her to raise her hand, as she was quite a Pirates fan herself, having been born in Pittsburgh. She loved sports, especially baseball, and knew things like batting averages and on-base percentages and which players chewed tobacco and which went for the sunflower seeds. But she restrained herself and said instead, “You must have been in mourning when the Pirates traded Bonds and Bonilla. I know I was.”

  Henry Prichard’s eyes widened and he gazed at Jackie with an almost shimmering respect.

  “I was in mourning,” he said. “But I’m looking ahead to this season. We’ve got a lot of young kids coming up from the minors, and I’m pretty optimistic about the future.”

  “Me too,” said Jackie, and I could tell she wasn’t just talking about the fate of the Pirates. “By the way, I’m Jackie Gault,” she said and shook hands with him. Then, almost as an afterthought, she told him Pat’s name and mine and explained that we were taking our first cruise.

  “Same here,” he said. “Which floor are you ladies on? I mean, which deck?”

  “Deck 8,” Jackie blurted out before I could stop her. Henry Prichard seemed harmless, but you never could tell with people, especially men, many of whom seemed harmless until they landed on the six o’clock news,” in handcuffs.

  “Aw, that’s a darn shame,” he said. “I’m on Deck 7.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll run into each other at dinner,” Jackie said hopefully. “Which seating did you get?”

  Henry checked his ticket, then said, “The one that starts at six-thirty. How about you?”

  “We got the six-thirty too,” I sighed. I’d been crushed when the tickets had arrived in the mail and I saw that we’d been assigned the unspeakable Early Bird Special instead of the more civilized eight-thirty seating our travel agent had assured us she’d arrange. Now we were certain to be stuck at a table with either octogenarians or howling children.

  We chatted with Henry for a few more minutes—I had to admit, he was an affable fellow and I could easily see why he had sold the most Chevrolets in his district—but at some point he cut the conversation short.

  “Gosh, I sure can get to talking once I start, but I really do need to make another phone call,” he said with a touching, gosh-shucks-heck provincialism about him that people from Manhattan simply don’t have. “Why don’t you all go on ahead and I’ll catch up to you later?”

  “Great,” said Jackie. “We’ll look for you on board.”

>   “Oh, I’ll find you,” he smiled. “Don’t you worry.”

  While Henry and Jackie gave each other a final and rather provocative once-over, I stole a glance at Pat, who was staring primly at her shoes.

  Henry went back to the phone booth, while the three of us turned in the opposite direction.

  “He doesn’t look a thing like Rodney Dangerfield,” Jackie said, elbowing me in the ribs.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “I hope you two will be very happy together.”

  “Actually, he looks very much like a cousin of Bill’s,” said Pat with complete seriousness.

  “The hell with Bill,” Jackie announced. “The hell with all our exes. Once we’re on that ship, they can’t touch us.”

  She cast one more glance back at Henry, who was deep in conversation with the person on the other end of the phone. Then she linked her arms through Pat’s and mine.

  “Let’s cruise,” she said, and together we headed for the gangway.

  2

  “Smile, ladies,” said the photographer as we stood at the threshold of the Princess Charming, waiting for the crush of passengers to thin out so we could finally board the ship. Strains of calypso music filtered out to us from inside. Steel drums. Maracas. All day, all night, Mary Ann. If you’ve been on a Caribbean cruise, you know the drill.

  “Come on, smile, ladies,” the photographer coaxed again. I assumed he was Australian, as “ladies” came out “lie-deez.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, waving the guy away. I remembered what the travel agent had told us about ships’ photographers—that they’re like roaches in a New York City kitchen. Every time you turn around, there they are, capturing moment after photogenic moment of your cruise whether you like it or not.

  “It’s only six dollars and you don’t have to pay until you’ve seen how it comes out,” he hondled. “We develop the photographs right away and then display them outside the main dining room every night.”