Milkrun Read Free Page B

strangling her with different types of punctuation. I imagine wrapping a nice, fat em dash around Jeremy’s throat.
    Jerk. Jerk, jerk, jerk.

2
No, I’m Not a Hooker But I Sometimes Like to Look Like One
    â€œH ELLO ? S AM ?”
    Yay! No one’s home. I love nothing more than walking into an empty apartment. It wasn’t always this way. When I went to Penn and lived with Wendy, there was nothing I loved more than coming home to see my best friend flopped upside down on the couch watching TV, her legs thrown over the red and pink flowery pillows her grandmother had given us. “Yay! You’re home,” Wendy would say, and we’d make French Vanilla coffee (two Sweet’N Lows for me and one spoon of sugar for her), and describe our days in excruciating detail:
    â€œAnd then I walked to the cafeteria and saw Crystal Werner and Mike Davis.”
    â€œThey’re still together?”
    â€œYeah, after he cheated on her. Can you imagine?”
    I think it was kind of selfish of her to go off to New York and leave me all alone like this.
    A red light on my phone is flashing, signaling I have messages. “You have three new messages,” the voice in the receiver says.
    I will not think that maybe one is Jeremy. I will not hope that he has changed his mind and that as soon as I press play, I will hear, “Hi, it’s me, I really miss you” in his radio-talk-show, native–New Yorker voice. I know there will be a message from him only when I least expect it. That’s the sick way the world works. I can see the picture clearly: I will absentmindedly hit the play button, his name not popping into my mind even once, and “Hi, it’s me, I really miss you” will hit me like the ice-water showers I have to take every morning because Sam uses up all the hot water with her forty-five-minute marathons.
    Look at that! I have messages! La-la-la. Whoever can they be? I’ll just casually listen and not really care about who it might be.
    â€œHi, Sam, it’s your mother. Call me back.” Beep.
    â€œJackie! Jackie, where are you? I called you at work and you didn’t answer. I’m going out now, but I need to talk to you. I’m having an emotional crisis. Matthew told Mandy that he likes me and I don’t like him, so what do I do? Call me as soon as you get home. But I’m going out. So leave a message.” Beep. Iris is always having an emotional crisis. Who’s Matthew?
    â€œHello, Jacquelyn. It’s Janie. Just calling to say hello. Call me back when you have a chance.” Beep.
    Damn.
    Janie is my mother. When I was four, she insisted I call her by her first name. This ban had something to do with the label “mother” being part of a bourgeois ideological conspiracy to maintain the power and position of the ruling class—the parents. But by the time I was five, my father was promoted from manager of the ladies’ innerwear department to the director of ladies’ outerwear, and my mother began to shed some of her Marxist philosophies, discovering her inner material-girl self. But by then it was too late for me to start calling her Mom again. The imprinting was complete. I love Janie dearly, don’t get me wrong, but she’s a wee bit flaky.
    Â 
    Fern Jacquelyn Norris is my official name. I never use the name Fern. I hate the name Fern. I’m still not sure why my parents gave me such a god-awful name. I think Janie must have named me while on some kind of mind-altering drug during the seventies. I’ve convinced Janie to call me by my middle name, but my dad seems to have a learning disability on the subject.
    Once upon a time I lived with Janie and my father in a house on a street called Lazar in Danbury, Connecticut, and my best friend was a my-size pigtailed girl named Wendy. Today Wendy is a lot taller, still my best friend, and gone are her pigtails (they reappeared for a short stint in the 90s to