Meg Cabot - Queen Of Babble: In The Big City

This wipes the smiles off their faces.

“Oh, Lizzie,” Madame Henri begins.

But I hold up a single finger.

“No,” I say. “Not a word. You’re going to listen to me. First off, I want thirty thousand a year plus commissions. I want two weeks’ paid vacation, full medical and dental. I want at least one sick day per month plus two personal days per year. And I want the upstairs apartment, rent free, all utilities paid for by the shop.”

The couple continue to stare at me, openmouthed in surprise. Monsieur Henri is the first one to recover.

“Lizzie,” he says, sounding wounded. “What you ask, of course, you deserve. No one is suggesting otherwise. But I don’t see how you can ask us to—”

But Madame Henri silences him with a“Tais-toi!”

While her husband looks at her with surprise, she says to me, clearly and concisely,“No dental.”

I practically feel my knees give beneath me, I’m so relieved.

But I don’t let on. Instead, I say, with all the dignity I can muster, “Done.”

And then I accept their invitation to join them for café au lait and madeleines. Because when your heart is broken, carbs don’t count.

Aaahhhh! You’re home from the honeymoon! Time to start enjoying wedded bliss, right?

WRONG. You have work to do. Get out your stationery—maybe you’ve sprung for the thank-you cards that match your invitations; maybe you’re merely using your new monogrammed note cards—and your favorite pen, and start writing .

If you were smart, you didn’t wait until after the honeymoon to begin the thank-you process, but started writing and sending out thank-you cards as you received each gift . If, however, for some horrible reason you chose to wait, you have your work cut out for you now. At the very least, you ought to have been saving each gift tag, with a note scribbled on the back as to what the gift actually was. If this is the case, you have it easy: just jot a thoughtful note—MENTIONING THE GIFT RECEIVED BY NAME—to each giver, signing it cordially with both spouses’ names.

If you have not kept track of who gave you what, start doing some investigating. Because you can bet that even if you haven’t been paying attention, someone has. And that someone—usually a mother or mother-in-law—can tell you exactly what you received from whom.

The reason you must mention the name of the gift received in your thank-you note is so that the giver knows for certain that you received their gift, and that it was acknowledged in some thoughtful way. Writing “Thank you so much for the gift” is neither polite nor satisfying to the giver… and in general will guarantee that when the baby shower comes around, you will not be receiving anything from that person.^{1}

Yes, you must handwrite each card. No, you may not send a photocopied or even printed letter of thanks to your guests.

LIZZIENICHOLSDESIGNS™

“Wait,” Chaz says. “So he said he couldn’t picture a future with you in it?”

I’m carting the second-to-last armload of clothes up the narrow staircase to my new apartment. Chaz, behind me, has the last one.

“No,” I say. “He said he couldn’t picture the future, period. Because it’s too far away. Or something. You know what? The truth is, I don’t even remember anymore. Which is fine, because it doesn’t matter.”

I reach the top of the stairs, turn left, and I’m in my new apartment. MY apartment. And no one else’s. Clean, furnished in shabby chic, and featuring faded pink wall-to-wall carpeting and cream-colored wallpaper with pink roses in every room save the bathroom, which is tiled in plain beige, it features floors that slope even worse than the ones in Chaz’s place; only four windows—two that look out onto East Seventy-eighth Street from the living room and two that look out into a dark courtyard from the bedroom; a kitchen so tiny only one person can enter it at a time.

But it also boasts a full-size tub in the bathroom, with a scorchingly hot shower, and two tiny, but highly decorative, fireplaces—one of which by some miracle actually works.

And I love every inch of it. Including the queen-size, lumpy bed, in which I’ve no doubt many unspeakable acts have been committed by the younger two Henris, but which a proper airing and a fresh set of sheets from Kmart ought to cure, and the tiny black-and-white television with rabbit ears, that I intend to replace with a color set as soon as I have enough money saved.

“That sounds like Luke, though,” Chaz says, coming into the bedroom where we’ve assembled the hanging rack along one wall. “You know. That whole follow-through thing we were talking about.”

“Yeah,” I say. It’s been a little over a week since Luke and I broke up—if, indeed, that is what happened that night in the hallway of his mother’s apartment building. I haven’t heard a word from him.

And the pain is still too raw for me to talk about it very much.

But Chaz seems to be unable to speak of anything else. It’s a small price to pay, I suppose, for his helping me to move—he borrowed a car from his parents and everything. He seems to feel it’s the least he can do, considering his best friend is responsible for my broken heart and his father’s company for my current state of pennilessness.

But I’ve pointed out that the latter, at least, has turned out to work to my advantage, since it galvanized me into finally demanding the compensation I deserved from my “real” employers. Even Shari was stunned by what she called my “sudden development of cojones .”

“Free rent and a salary? Good job, Nichols,” was what she said over the phone, when I called to tell her the news.

Although, if you think about it, all of this really is Shari’s fault. She’s the one who went out with Chaz, who was the one who invited us all to Luke’s château last summer. In fact, the whole thing could be construed as Chaz’s fault. Chaz is the one—as he pointed out on the stairs a little while ago—who told Luke how much I love diet Coke, thus prompting Luke to buy me diet Coke that day in the village, and making me fall in love with him, because of his thoughtfulness.

And Chaz is the one who got me the job at Pendergast, Loughlin, and Flynn that I later lost.

Of course, if he hadn’t invited us to France, I’d never have met Luke. And if he hadn’t told Luke about my loving diet Coke, I’d have never fallen in love with Luke. And if I hadn’t fallen in love with Luke, I probably wouldn’t have moved to New York. And if I hadn’t moved to New York, I wouldn’t have gotten the job at Chaz’s dad’s firm, and then I never would have met Jill, and thus made my dream of being a certified wedding-gown refurbisher a reality.

So. Everything really is all Chaz’s fault.

Which is why it’s only fitting he help me move.

“Well,” Chaz says, as I take the last dress from him, and slip it onto the hanging rack. “That’s it. You sure that’s everything?”

Even if it’s not, I can’t go back now. I left the key to Luke’s mother’s apartment with the doorman, along with a note—brief but cordial—thanking Luke for the use of the place, and asking that he get in touch with me about any outstanding bills or issues concerning the place.

There is no way I can ever go to the Met again. I’ll be too nervous about running into him. Though I’m going to miss poor Mrs. Erickson, for whom I’d also left a good-bye note, since she’s spending the holidays in Cancún, and doesn’t even know I’ve moved out. I even stood in front of the Renoir girl, and wished her a fond farewell. I hope Luke’s next girlfriend—whoever she is—appreciates her.

“I’m sure,” I say to Chaz.

“Well, then I guess I better run the car back,” he says. “I don’t want to deal with holiday parking and all that.”

“Oh, right,” I say. I’d almost forgotten that it’s New Year’s Eve. I’ve got Jill’s wedding to go to in a few hours. Which reminds me. “What are you doing tonight, anyway? I mean, with Luke still out of town, and Shari—well, with Pat. Do you have any plans?”

“They’re having a party at Honey’s,” Chaz says with a shrug. “I figured I’d hang out there.”

“You’re going to spend New Year’s Eve in a karaoke bar with strangers?” I can’t keep the incredulity from my voice.

“They aren’t strangers,” Chaz says, sounding wounded. “The dwarf with the bow staff? That bartender who’s always yelling at her boyfriend? Those people are like family to me. Whatever their names are.”

And suddenly I’m taking his arm.

“Chaz,” I say. “Do you own a tux?”

Which is how, nine hours later, I find myself standing beside Chaz in the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel (now the Plaza Luxury Condominiums), a glass of champagne in one hand, and the clutch that matches my 1950s pink silk Jacques Fath evening gown in the other, as Jill Higgins, now MacDowell, standing on top of the ballroom’s grand piano, prepares to throw her bouquet.

“Here,” Chaz says. “Give me that stuff. You better get up there.”

“Oh,” I say. Despite my reservations—once I’d made sure that Jill’s dress looked perfect (which it did) and that her mother-in-law’s eyes bulged out when she saw her in it (they did), I’d been reluctant to stay long at the reception. It’s weird to be at a wedding where the only people you know are the bride and groom, who certainly don’t have much time to spend with anyone but family on the big day—I was having a pretty good time. Chaz declared that there was no way he was going home before twelve (“I’m not getting into a monkey suit just to change into jeans before the ball drops”), and the truth was, he was right. Jill’s friends from the zoo were hysterically funny, and as out of their element as I was. And John’s friends weren’t anywhere near as snooty as I’d expected—the opposite, in fact. Just about the only person, in fact, who didn’t seem to be having that good a time was John’s mother, and that, apparently, had to do with the fact that someone overheard Anna Wintour say that Jill’s gown was “cunning.”