Last night I had dinner with friends to celebrate Kim's 30th birthday. Kim is an artist and jewelry designer (Plug: Go buy her stuff. It's fantastic.
http://www.kimquinn.com/home.html) who I have known since she was sixteen and wearing Doc Martens with pajama pants.
I hosted her 18th birthday party when we had to have a friend of mine in college buy the booze because we were underage. I hosted her 24th birthday party during which another friend and I spent hours creating a door-sized vagina with tissue paper. It was so anatomically correct that Kim blushed when she walked through it to get into the room and got mad at her boyfriend for touching it. I am tempted to upload an image of it, but I am afraid that you'd all want one for your own doorway.
Four of us met for dinner at a restaurant in Atlanta owned by Kim's boyfriend. We brought flowers and balloons and, my contribution: a jar of beer bottle caps I'd been saving for a recycled art project she is working on, and we started catching up, the way women do when they are thirty: Bosses are a drag. Men are a drag, but when will any of us ever get married, or in my case, stay that way? Did you notice my new wrinkle? I found a gray hair. Holly, you must drink a lot of beer. No, I have a friend who is a bartender and she's been saving the caps for me. Yeah, right. No, really.
Seven buffalo tofu tacos, two fried calamari tacos, one barbecue pork taco, and a slice of creme brulee cheesecake later, we were ordering another round of drinks, because when we're together, we aren't thirty-ish anymore. We're eighteen again and drinking Boone's Farm and spiking cherry Kool Aid with vodka swiped from someone's parent's liquor cabinet. We are leaving our purses at the table and sneaking outside the patio to smoke cigarettes. We're fighting over the attention of our 22 year old waiter who had curly brown hair that fell all over his face.
Someone mentioned a wedding shower we are all invited to, and said we should go together. So, I had to let the cat out of the bag. It would have been easier to tell them that I really had consumed 200 bottles of beer in two weeks and not just fifty.
"I won't be here." I said.
"What?" one of them said. She leaned over the table and lit a cigarette. By this time, we were the last people at the restaurant and stopped caring that we weren't supposed to smoke. No one asked where. Or why.
Before I could say it, another one said solemnly, "she has to go. It's just for a month."
"I have, like, a plane ticket and everything." I said.
"I thought this was just a...pipe dream!" and then she started laughing. We all started laughing.
And then I knew that they would back me.
"You're not coming back," said the one who thought it was a pipe dream. I ordered another round. The 22 year old waiter gave his number to the only other single girl at the table. She laughed and said, "he is 22! I am old!" We reminded her that if the genders were reversed, it would be a conquest.
Kim's boyfriend asked if we would come inside and finish at the bar. So flowers, balloons, bottle caps, pipe dreams and all, we marched in line to the bar and sat down.
The bartender came over and said, "Kim, this is your what...35th?" We gasped, horrified. Then realized thirty-five isn't that far away. And maybe isn't so old after all, which just makes us older. One day, we'll be eating cheesecake at the kitchen table where we all live together in Florida, insisting that at sixty, we're in our prime. The illusion of adolescence we create when the four of us get together is a womb, and with that one comment, it was gone. It looked anatomically correct, but it was just made of tissue paper.
We grabbed our keys and started mumbling things about it getting late. A dog needed to be walked. Someone had a meeting in the morning.
So one of us did the only thing she could do. She pulled the 22 year old waiter over to the corner and kissed him. Then, they sneaked outside where they made-out by the dumpster. We rushed to the window to spy on them.
We regrouped in the parking lot, giggling.
"He asked me to come home with him!" she said.
"What did you say?" we asked her.
"Hell no! Who does he think I am? Some twenty-two year old?"
"That's what they do now. They meet boys and go home with them the same night." Kim said seriously.
"That's disgusting. They need to grow up," someone said, rolling her eyes.
"Really," we agreed.
Four girls each walked to her car. None of us is twenty-two and none of us is thirty-five. Had we imagined, though, at twenty-two, this 30th birthday, we might have envisioned baby strollers, husbands, mortgages, and kitchens that needed remodeling.
None of us could have known then that we'd have something better. A bunch of white hydrangeas, a flower that keeps its bloom from early spring until late autumn, without showing age. Three balloons tied to the railing, but still blowing in the wind. A jar of bottle caps that will be remodeled as art. And four girls who still believe, even at their age, in making a wish before you blow out a birthday candle, in staying up just a little longer in order to have more time, putting off sleep for a pipe dream.
* My friend, Meleah Whitmoyer, is writing a song with this title. I thought she was rather brilliant for it, and she asked that I write a piece using it. So, I did. But, I gotta give her credit.
P.S. She is also the bartender in this story and can vouch that I didn't drink all those beers.