I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

"Fuzzball!"

"Sleazebag! How are you?"

Please do not ask me to explain, Gentle Reader, why Sara and I refer to each other by these nicknames. We have done so for fifteen years. We went to university together. We DJ'd at the university radio station together. We slept with the same men. That is to say, man. That is to say, she slept with my boyfriend while he was still my boyfriend, but I didn't find out about it for years and then I didn't care anymore.

We didn't share each other's clothes, for reasons that I hope are selbsverständlich. She has to shop at specialty lingerie stores for bras, whereas I need only pop into the junior miss department at Target for mine.

I may have worn a sweatshirt of hers, once, during the time that we lived together. We were roommates, briefly, after our last year at McGill. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to move back to Toronto, and I had just lost my roommate of three years, Stella.

Not that she died, or anything, she just graduated and moved back to Staten Island.

Sara usually spent her summers on a kibbutz in Israel, kibbutzing with others of her tribe. Getting manicures and whatnot. But this summer she was contemplating the big questions of life: What to do now that she had a bachelor's degree in industrial relations. Whether to try to get her sofa back from the guy in her apartment building she'd lent it to the summer before. How frequently to get her hair straightened.

In the meantime she'd found herself a McJob at Cotton Ginny in the Alexis Nihon plaza in Westmount, and I offered to let her stay in Stella's old room while she decided. She agreed, pending parental approval — her parents were coming for a visit a week or so later, and she wanted them to meet me and see my apartment.

"Do you want to put one of those thing-mies on my door jamb?" I asked her.

"It's called a mezuzah, and no, it's OK, they know you're not Jewish."

"Yeah, but do they know I'm German?"

"Don't worry, I already told them I don't fit in your oven."

* * *
"So how are you?" she insisted upon knowing, now. "How is California?"

"I'm starting to like it here," I told her, "But it doesn't like me so much." And then I elaborated about my quest for a social security number, and how no bank will issue me a credit card because I have no credit history here, and how I feel like I'm twelve years old again. (I actually received a letter of refusal from Visa, giving as their reason that I was underaged.)

"I can't even get a real phone," I whined, finishing the tragic tale. "I only have a pay-as-you-go cell phone. But it's a funny thing — when I called you just now, the system voice announced 'The time available for this call is: UNLIMITED.'"

"What network are you on?" asked Sara.

"Verizon," I replied.

"That's why. I'm on Verizon too. You can call anywhere on their network for free."

"But you're almost 3,000 miles away! It's long distance. You're literally on the other side of the country. How can that be?"

"That's how it works with cell phones," she said, simply.

God, I love this country.

Next, Postmodern Sass makes her New Year's resolutions. Alert the media, and Gavin Newsom's office.