Never Change
3.5/5
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About this ebook
A self-anointed spinster at fifty-one, Myra Lipinsky has endured the isolation of her middle life by doting on her dog, Frank, and immersing herself in her career as a visiting nurse. Myra considers herself reasonably content, telling herself, It's enough, work and Frank. And it has been enough -- until Chip Reardon, the too-good-to-be-true golden boy she adored from afar, is assigned to be her new patient. Choosing to forgo invasive treatment for an incurable illness, Chip has returned from Manhattan to the New England home of his childhood to spend what time he has left. Now, Myra and Chip find themselves engaged in a poingnant redefinition of roles, and a complicated dance of memory, ambivalence, and longing.
From the author whose work The New Yorker calls "strong" and "timeless" comes a wry and beautifully distilled portrait of one woman's resilience in the face of loneliness, and of a union that transcends life's most unexpected and challenging circumstances. With effortless warmth, and loving respect for characters that defies easy sentiment, Never Change melds the emotional depth and gentle intensity of poetry with the rich satisfactions of finely wrought fiction.
Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg is the award-winning author of more than twenty-five books, including the New York Times bestsellers True to Form, Never Change, Open House, The Story of Arthur Truluv, Night of Miracles, and The Confession Club. She lives outside of Chicago. Find out more at Elizabeth-Berg.net.
Read more from Elizabeth Berg
Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5True To Form Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Say When: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beat This! Cookbook: Absolutely Unbeatable Knock-'em-Dead Recipes for the Very Best Dishes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Never Change
291 ratings18 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/53.5 starsMyra is a nurse and does home care. She has never been a particularly social person and always found it hard to make friends. When she has to start seeing a new patient, she recognizes the name immediately: Chip Reardon was the guy in high school who all the girls had a crush on, including Myra. He is dying from brain cancer. It was good. I was able to identify a bit with Myra. I also thought Berg did a really good job with some of the different characters. The book was short and very fast to read, so it might have been nice to get to know some of the other characters even better, but for it being so short, I thought it was well done.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5At 51, Myra Lipinski considers herself a spinster. She immerses herself in her work as a home health care nurse, and dotes on her dog Frank. She considers herself reasonably content, and tells herself that work and Frank are enough; and it has been enough, until she is assigned to her newest patient, Chip Reardon. Chip was the "golden boy" that everyone in high school worshiped, and Myra,a self described ugly duckling and a loner, had a secret crush on him.Now Chip is dying from terminal cancer, and he has returned home to his parents in New England to spend what little time he has left. Chip's mother is upset that he is refusing further treatment, and she keeps pushing him to reconsider. Meanwhile, Chip bonds with Myra, feeling that she is the only one who truly understands.I really enjoyed this story. It's refreshing for a change to have main characters that are 50-something, especially since I just turned 50 myself. It seems like in most fiction I read, the main characters are much younger, and if they are older, then it's the story of them looking back on their lives during their younger years. I could also relate to the way Myra felt in high school; I too was an ugly duckling and a loner. I've also never been married or had kids, but unlike Myra, I never yearned for that. I do however, dote on my two cats who I consider my "babies".Living with cancer and going through treatment, I can also understand Chip's reasons for wanting to die peacefully. There are some sad moments in this book, but it's also a story of hope, and there is humor sprinkled throughout, especially in the stories of the patients Myra visits and befriends.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Reading Elizabeth Berg is the equivalent of eating comfort food - a guilty pleasure - almost, but not quite, junk food. I enjoyed this book as much as I have enjoyed all of her books. As always, it's about relationships; the basic ups and downs of every day life; the differences and, more importantly, the similarities between the have's and have-nots, the lucky and the unlucky in love, the beautiful and the not so beautiful. It's easy to write her books off as trite fairy tales - but in fact, her strength is that she makes us believe that fairy tales can and will come true, if only we'll open our hearts to the possibilities.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Elizabeth Berg captures the essence of the human need for companionship in this novel. A rather heartbreaking tale of a spinster who is given a second chance to find love.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I find all of Elizabeth Berg's books enjoyable. Being a nurse myself, I enjoy reading stories that involve them. This book was a geat read, the characters were enjoyable, and I suggest this book to anyone who adores Mrs. Berg.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was my first Berg book.and it won't be my last. It was funny, quirky, sad, and tragic all at the same time. I would start crying on one page and by the next I was laughing again. Berg has become one of my all time favorite authors.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tearjerker. The grownup equivalent of Barbara Conklin's young adult classic [book: P.S. I Love You].
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5i did cry a few times reading "Never Change". I loved Myra, a woman of few words but always the right ones. She was the high school wallflower. She had no idea how special she was. She is a nurse who does home visits and we get to know some delightful characters through these visits. Rose, who is a sweet elderly lady with an odd way of dressing. Ethel and Murray who love to hate each other, Grace a 15 year old mom learning to look after her newborn son, Dewitt with a gunshot womb and a lot of attitude but the heart of gold underneath... I know cliche. But the book is not sentimental nor is it chiche.Then Myra gets a new patient Chip the high school hero now dying of cancer. The resulting relationship between them and Diann, his high school love, and his parent, unfolds with a lovely reflection on people's ability to cope with a terminal disease. As Chip says "Dying teaches you a lot about how to live".
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book. Still pondering what to say in a review.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I liked that Myra was not the beauty that is so often the heroine in love stories. I really liked the characters, so many quirky ones. And you would have to be very cold-hearted not to care about Myra and Chip.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Myra Lipinski has spent her life looking out at everyone else living their lives. Working as a visiting nurse, she cares with tender efficiency for patients who need the kind of nursing care she can provide. She also feels genuine affection for them, bolsters their spirits and helps them outside of her official duties. But she has to remain professionally detached. Fortunately this comes easy for her. At fifty-one, she knows she will always live alone – except for her dog Frank. After all, she’s always been unattractive – the girl who sits outside the school cafeteria selling prom tickets, but never attends the dance. But her assumptions are tested when her old high school crush, Chip Reardon, returns to town. He is dying and he needs a nurse.
What I love about Berg’s novels is that she gives us something to think about, but also lets the reader feel with the characters. I felt Myra’s loneliness, exhilaration, peace, fear, anger, and pride. I found myself thinking about what constitutes quality of life, why certain people are attracted to one another, or how a chance encounter can really change the course of one’s life. I like that Berg’s characters are – for the most part – fully fleshed out. Even minor characters show both strengths and weaknesses. Pay attention to the prologue, and after you finish the epilogue go back and re-read the prologue. I love how Berg bookends Myra’s story with these two sections, calling attention to the wonder of normal everyday things. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a sweet and sad story of the perpetual third wheel, the smart girl who is a great "friend" but never has a date. Myra Lipinski is 51 now, has never been pretty, never been married, never had children, but is a wonderful nurse and has a huge heart. She is resigned to a life of loneliness until she gets a new patient who turns out to be her high-school crush; popular, handsome, athletic Chip. They become friends and more, everything Myra ever dreamed of. The stumbling block? Chip is dying of cancer. Heart-breaking but also an uplifting story about living in the moment.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A slow, sweet, sad novel about dying that turns out to be more about how to live.Myra is a visiting nurse who is assigned to care for Chip, the boy she longed for in high school. Chip and Myra have both reached the age of 51, essentially alone. It takes the reality of death (Chip's late stage brain cancer) to force them to confront the fears that have kept them isolated for so long. Berg's usual lyrical writing, humor, and a memorable cast of supporting characters add to a fine story to make for a lovely read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book will take you on a journey through the final stage of someone's life. I think that I need to be a bit more selective when I choose these types of books, because although this was a good story, it may have been a little too soon after losing my sister to read something with this type of content. Myra has lived her whole life alone, not really reaching out or expecting much from others as she didn't seem to think that people would enjoy her as a friend. She is a nurse that assists people with their needs in their homes and may have several clients in a day. Getting the chance to know Myra's clients was kind of a fun and lighter part of the book. One morning Myra realizes that Chip Reardon has been added to her client list and high school memories of her longing for Chip flood her mind. But Myra is a professional and she should be able to handle caring for Chip and whatever needs arise as he prepares for his final stage of life because of a brain tumor.Chip is thankful to see a friendly face that he knows when Myra shows up at his door. You can tell that he is getting tired of being treated like a patient and hopes that Myra will start to spend time with him as a friend. They do become much closer and Myra is happy to get to know Chip on such a personal level, but quickly becomes discouraged when Chip's girlfriend Diane shows up on her doorstep. Since Diane is from out of town, Myra offers her spare bedroom to Diane for as long as she needs it.During the time that the ladies are staying together you can tell that Myra never really had close, female friendships. She actually was shocked when Diane suggested that Myra never allowed people to get close to her back in high school. When Chip later brings to her attention that she is a wonderful person but just needs to let people into her life, it all comes together.Myra has been with people as they are dying before and she is not afraid to be around them. She finds it soothing in a way because these people are true and honest with themselves. You can see the appreciation of life in the eyes of terminally ill people that most individuals just can't comprehend. From personal experience this is such a special time and I will always have fond memories of the last days I had with my sister. Of course it is heartbreaking, but I also have the memories of us laughing and enjoying each other's company during that time.In a way Chip helped Myra as much as she helped him, by helping her find a piece of herself that she didn't know existed. He helped to bring her out of her shell and realize that she is just as worthy of being loved as anyone. She was a wonderful individual with so much to offer. Myra just wasn't sure how she would be able to live without Chip by her side in the future.I enjoyed this story with it's themes of love, dying, grief, and acceptance. I have only read a couple of Elizabeth Berg's books, but I feel that she really developed the characters well in this novel. I do recommend this as an audiobook, but not too soon after losing a loved one.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Another great work of realistic fiction by Elizabeth Berg!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nurse Myra's employment agency asks her to take a terminal cancer patient--who just happens to be her secret high school heart throb. Grabbed my heart, but there were no quotes I wanted to save so I couldn't quite mark it 4 star. When I was a nurse, it was completely forbidden to accept gifts from patients--yet part of the action depends on Myra doing just that. Perhaps hospice nursing has different rules--I also can't imagine bringing a personal pet along on home visits.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The plot moves decisively and the entanglements with the main character, Myra, the nurse, areunpredictable and revealing as Chip and Myra discover each other.The problem is that even toward the book's end, Myra still chooses to be an emotional pushover,allowing the man she loves to sleep with his old girlfriend in her own house. Geez.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5powerful - sensitive everything you have ever thought about and wondered if you could do it.
Book preview
Never Change - Elizabeth Berg
PROLOGUE
The Tuesday before it happened was a perfect summer day. Driving through town on my way home, I saw two young girls holding hands as they tried to cross a street against the light. They would start to cross, then stop; start again, stop. Finally, all the traffic sighed and halted; and the girls bolted to the other side of the street and began to laugh and push each other, exhilarated by their survival.
Next I saw an old woman sitting at a bus stop, eating an ice cream cone with the neat precision of a cat. She wore a yellow print house-dress and white, orthopedic-style sandals, and her purse sat on the bench a slight distance from her, as though it were her companion. One leg was crossed over the other, and her foot swung rhythmically. She stared straight ahead, seemingly lost in memories.
I passed a very small child walking delicately along a stone wall, holding onto her mother’s hand. It was a graceful pas de deux; love lay strung along the length of their joined extremities, love and pleasure. And heartbreaking certainty.
I drove by two boys about eleven years old, riding the hell out of their bicycles as young boys do, their real manhood still so frustratingly far off. You could see their sweet toughness in the straining cords of their necks. Each kept passing the other, shouting roughly, shouting insults; but each always looked back to make sure the other was coming.
Two blocks from home, I went past the library and I knew I could go into the children’s room and sit in a chair and watch, enjoying every damp curl, every dimpled elbow, every throaty question, every pair of eyes turned upward toward a parent—the wholeness of that trust! I could press my own hands over the children’s small prints on the walls of the hamster cage, trying to see what they saw, as they saw it. I could turn the pages of a book that one of them had looked at, then left behind. The question: Why was this not taken?
Yes, and I could stay for pajama story hour, as I often had, and watch the children who gathered on the carpet with their matted, sleep-scented stuffed animals. I could enjoy the children’s unashamed eagerness—yanking their thumbs out of their mouths and rising up on their knees to see the pictures, resting their hands unselfconsciously on those ahead of them so that they would not lose their balance.
I suppose I might then have gone upstairs to the reference room, pulled down a weighty text, and searched for some wondrous fact I had never known. I might once again have sat at a wooden table, my own purse on the chair beside me, waiting for words to offer their touchless embrace.
I did not do these things. I headed home, toward what I had come to believe was my destiny.
You know people like me. I’m the one who sat on a folding chair out in the hall with a cigar box on my lap, selling tickets to the prom, but never going—even though in the late sixties only nerds went to proms. But I would have gone. I would have happily gone; I would have been so happy. I wanted the phone call with the rough voice asking Would you …?
I wanted to finger row after row of pastel dresses in silks and chiffons—their sweetheart necks, their wide ribbon ties. I wanted to have some shoes dyed; I thought it was a miracle they could do it. I wanted to put a wrist corsage in my refrigerator, lock the bathroom door, and bathe in perfumed water with rollers in my hair and the transistor at the edge of the sink blaring Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.
I wanted to allow an hour for the application of all my new Maybelline, suffer the flash-bulbs of my parents’ eager camera, stay out all night, and eat breakfast before I came home, bleary-eyed and in the know.
I didn’t get asked. I never once got asked. Not to proms, not to lesser dances, not to movies, not to parties, not for shopping with the girls.
I would get talked to, though. I mean beyond the Hi!
s in the hall, beyond the preoccupied chatter in the lunchroom. I got talked to a lot. They would call me on the phone, the pretty girls. They would call and talk to me about things that were serious: their parents’ alcoholism. Their hidden scoliosis. Their possible pregnancies. They talked to me because I knew how to listen, and I gave good advice. I didn’t have a lot of personal experience, but I knew things, because I read and I watched. That is what there was for me. Those girls talked to me—and a boy, once, too—because they knew I would never betray them. Of course they betrayed me constantly. But they didn’t really mean to. Probably they didn’t know. They didn’t think about it that much.
I’m the one everybody liked, Myra Lipinski, oh yeah, Myra, she’s nice, the one that everybody liked and no one wanted to be with. The odd shape. The socks, those socks—well, her parents had accents. The face, unfortunate, with its too small eyes, its too wide mouth. The hair mousy brown, too thin and straight, greasy after half a day, no matter what. Even as a five-year-old: the aunt and uncle who once came to visit, sitting with my mother at the kitchen table, chatting quietly in Polish, and smiling over at me. What are they saying?
I asked my mother, coming over to stretch myself out across her lap and shyly smiling back at them. What are they saying about me?
And my mother finally breaking into English to tell me, "They say you look like … your father. And now we are not anymore talking about you." I lay still in her lap, contemplating the yellow-and-orange pattern of her apron and forbidding myself my thumb, until she crossed her legs and dislodged me.
So. I sold the tickets and I decorated the gym and I helped win the volleyball games and I sang a good alto in the choir and I lent my notes to anyone who asked; and if people wanted to copy from my test paper, I let them do that, too. I did not become bitter. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t think I had the right.
After graduation, I stayed here in Ashton, venturing no further than the twenty-two miles necessary to get to Boston College, where I earned my BSN. I went to nursing school because I knew it would be a way for people to love me. And for me to love them, too. This happens in illness. The sad plates of armor separate; the light comes in.
At first, I worked in the intensive care unit. I wanted the challenge and the prestige of working in the hardest place. You’re eating lunch in the cafeteria, wearing your scrubs, your high-tech stethoscope around your neck, a hemostat clipped onto you somewhere, tourniquets tied onto it. You know a long list of lab values cold; you could intubate if you had to; you can rate heart murmurs and evaluate lung status and draw blood and start IVs better than most of the attending physicians. You see a burst of ventricular tachycardia race across a monitor screen and you save the patient and let the doctor know about it when you get around to it. You can give a lot of drugs that nurses on other floors can’t. You can decide when to get certain kinds of tests performed. When you call down to any other department in the hospital and say, This is ICU,
they pay attention. You come first. When you say stat, it gets done stat.
So you’re eating lunch and a code is called over the loudspeaker, and you get up and run back to the unit. It’s likely you’ll be needed, no matter where in the hospital the arrest occurred. The other people in the cafeteria watch you leave your bowl of soup sitting there, and they nod at you as you pass by. In the army of nurses, you wear four stars.
The pay is pretty good, too, especially for a single woman with no obligations—only child with no children, parents dead. I bought a little two-bedroom house a couple of blocks from the center of town. I bought a Porsche Carrera 911, too. Black, tan leather interior. Incredible sound system. The boys look when I pull up next to them; then look away. I beat them off the line, every time.
The problem with intensive care is that the patients usually can’t speak. They’re on respirators. Or they’re unconscious. Or they have such messed up chemistry that they’re confused. Or they stay just until they’re stabilized, and then they’re out of there and another train wreck comes in. That’s what the bad cases are called: train wrecks. It doesn’t mean what it sounds like. What it means is: right now, I can’t get close to you, you’re halfway to death. And anyway, I don’t have time.
So there’s no opportunity, in the unit, to sit at the side of the bed and shoot the breeze with patients. To get to know them. To admire pictures of their children, to style their hair, to slowly help them eat. Not that many of them eat. Tubes. I know a nurse who works in the unit precisely because the patients don’t eat. I didn’t go to four years of nursing school to load mashed potatoes onto a fork,
she says. But I like feeding people. It doesn’t feel demeaning. It feels like high privilege.
The best day I had in the unit came when we had a boarder, someone who couldn’t get put onto the floor where she belonged; it was full. She ate. She sat up in a chair. She was oriented to time, place, and person. She dug in her purse for lipstick after her bath. The unit was light that day; she was my only patient. She told me she had a crush on her doctor—no surprise, everyone had a crush on Dr. LaGuardia, with his dark, South American looks—so I told her I’d curl her hair, and she’d look beautiful when he came to visit her. We used 4 × 4 gauze pads to make rag rollers, and she did look beautiful when he came. I stopped him outside her cubicle, told him to be sure he noticed her hairdo. He’s a good guy, Dr. LaGuardia. He walked in the room and stopped dead in his tracks. Where was the beauty contest?
he asked, in the accent you could feel in your knees. Where’s the trophy?
Then he told her she could transfer to her floor now, there was a bed available; and twenty minutes later I was taking care of a gray-faced man with multisystem failure.
I stayed working in the unit for a long time. I mixed drugs, counted drops, monitored machines, resuscitated people who arrested, then resuscitated them again when they arrested half an hour later. I rarely had enough time to talk to their distraught family members. I had to walk away from their sad, worried clusters; I had to go and milk chest tubes while they wept and talked in church-quiet voices.
Oftentimes, I worked in my dreams. I heard the beep-beep of the IV telling me the infusion was completed, the rhythmic sighs of the ventilator, the dull bong of the alarm on the heart monitor. I changed dressings in my sleep, emptied urine and bile and drainage from wounds into toilets, sent polyps and kidney stones and spinal fluid to the pathology lab. I tested feces for blood, tested urine for blood, tested vomit for blood, kept track of each ounce that went into a patient and each ounce that came out, monitored levels of consciousness, listened to lungs, to hearts, to various levels of activity in the four quadrants of the abdomen. I awakened after those nights feeling exhausted, feeling like I’d just put in eight hours at the hospital after having just put in eight hours at the hospital. Or nine. Or sixteen.
These days I work for a Boston agency called Protemp, as a visiting nurse. When I was hired, I asked for easy patients; I was tired of high acuity levels. Now that I’ve been there for ten years, I don’t think I could hear a heart murmur if it were as loud as sandpaper on sandpaper. But I’m happy. And when I sleep now, I am back to dreaming only gauzy mysteries.
I have some clients I see daily: Rose Banovitz, who lives in a seedy area on Commonwealth Avenue and needs her morning dose of insulin, and who often sings to me in her high, quivery voice. Fitz Walters lives in Chinatown and needs me to check his blood pressure and his wildly erratic heartbeat in order to determine his dose of Nitropaste. He goes to strip clubs every night, Fitz, though he is blind. The Schwartzes live in the heart of Brookline and need weekly visits to supervise their medications and to keep them from killing each other. Another once-a-weeker, a black woman in Dorchester appropriately named Marvelous, I will keep on seeing even after I’m no longer paid to help her with her colostomy. I also see one DeWitt Washington, because nobody else will put up with the combination of his personality and his neighborhood in Roxbury. I have to go every afternoon and change the dressing on his gunshot wound.
I give eyedrops daily to a rich woman in Back Bay, Ann Peters, who can’t see to do it herself and whose family can’t be bothered. And since last week, I’ve been going to Allston to see a fifteen-year-old girl named Grace to help her with the baby she just had. I gave her my home number, and she leaves me messages at least once a day. Things like, Okay. His shit looks exactly like scrambled eggs. No way is this normal. All I do is fuck up, and he don’t even cry. Can you call me? Sorry for the swears, can you please call?
You know the boy who once called me in high school? That was Chip Reardon. He called because he knew I had been talking to his girlfriend, Diann Briedenbach. They were having trouble. He wanted advice, some inside information. He felt comfortable asking me—we’d had a lot of classes together and he knew how carefully I observed things. Once, in fact, after an essay of mine had been read aloud in English, he stopped me after class to compliment me on my perceptiveness. I treasured that small event, carried the memory of it home from school like a wrapped gift. I even decided, foolishly, that had the bell not rung, that conversation might have led to something more. I remember getting home and looking at myself in my parents’ full-length mirror, wondering if I’d finally worn something right, something that would make a boy like him really see a girl like me. I’d worn the same outfit a week later, down to the same color tie to hold my hair back, but of course nothing happened.
Anyway, when he called that night I told him only that he shouldn’t worry, Diann loved him, I knew that for certain. He thanked me, though it seemed to me that his relief was not so great. But then I decided I was only making that up, trying to make him less invested in her than he really was. After we hung up, I put my fingers to the place his voice had come from.
As there is one of me in every high school, there is one of Chip Reardon, too. Other end of the spectrum. Every girl’s dream boy. The handsome star athlete with a good head on his shoulders, too. And a genuinely nice guy. Everyone fighting over him for college.
He went west. That’s what he said, to keep from bragging about Stanford—nobody from Ashton High had ever gotten in there. But now he’s back here. I know because I got a message from my agency, asking if I could possibly fit in another client. A man called Chip Reardon. Fifty-one years old. Brain tumor, end stage, apparently; not too much to do. Probably home to die—he’d only need comfort measures.
I called my agency back. I said, yes, I could take another patient. They told me it would be daily visits at first, starting tomorrow. Then they told me where his parents, with whom he would be staying, lived. It was in the south part of town, a newer, wealthy area that is in marked contrast to the rest of this mostly blue-collar area. It’s too far to walk to the hardware store from there, to the library or the bakery or the common; but it is close to open areas of farm lands, with their lovely stone walls, their rolling hills and peaceful populations of sheep and cows. I wrote down his nice address and his terrible diagnosis, entered it next to the 2:00 P.M. slot for Wednesday. And you know something bad? You know something bad about me? When I wrote that, I felt happy. I thought only one thing. I thought, Good. Now I can have him.
• • •
Not that you should think I haven’t had my moments. I have had my moments. Some. Moments. You know, the blind date with the guy whose face at first turns in on itself when he sees what he got. But particularly after age forty-five, one can make do. One adult female can offer a certain kind of comfort to one adult male. And although they didn’t usually stay the night—only two ever stayed the night—I was glad for that. After my rare interludes, I actually prefer a sandwich alone at my own kitchen table. I know I’m better off sitting under the fluorescent light in my bathrobe, alternating bites of pickle with my ham and cheese, turning the pages of the Chambers catalog and finding the one thing I’ll let myself order—that’s much better than the smiley conversations I endure when they stay. The awkward partings in the morning, the indignity of picking the guy’s hair from my sink when I know I’ll never see him again. Better to eat the sandwich and then look to see if any Mary Tyler Moores are on where Mary still lives in the old apartment. The only thing wrong with that show is that they acted like Rhoda was unattractive.
People think women like me should settle. That we should not aspire to certain things. Well, I had a crush on Chip Reardon, too, just like all the other girls. I had a full-time longing that went beyond the brief fantasy I enjoyed that day after English class. I saw him kissing me. I was not a different person when I imagined this; I saw