Multiple Listings by Tracy McMillan

Author:Tracy McMillan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

15

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NICKI

There’s only one thing I love as much as real estate listings: the New York Times wedding announcements. When you think of it, the two things ­aren’t so different. With the announcements, you click from couple to couple, checking out the pictures. Except instead of bedrooms, bathrooms, and square footage, the copy is all about alma maters, high-profile jobs, and prominent parents. With each one, I imagine what it would be like to be those two people, to be living their lives. I scrutinize their engagement photos, noting the micro-gestures in their faces, predicting where the marriage is going to run into trouble. Sometimes it’s obvious. The girl will have a slight sneer, or the guy will have a cheating look in his eyes. It really makes you wonder—why would people put a picture in the New York Times (of all places) that reveals everything about them for the whole world to see? I guess they don’t know we can see it.

By résumé alone, though, every couple in there is some form of perfect: high achieving, from good schools and good families. They fascinate me not just because they seem to have it all together—no accidental pregnancies here, folks—but also because if you look deeply you see a lot of patterns. Like: how many women marry a guy who has the same career as their dad. Like: how many men in their late twenties are willing to commit to women they met in their early twenties. Like: how many really pretty women marry guys who aren’t even all that good-looking, but feel lucky as shit to be with such a beautiful girl from such a great family.

I can’t help but think those are the really smart girls—they’re going to be valued for the rest of their lives. I marvel at such women. The ones with the bouncy hair and nice teeth who grow up in Greenwich or Chappaqua and whose mothers are on the board of the gardening society and whose dads have a private otolaryngology practice in Manhattan. Is it any wonder a girl like that is getting married? No, it is not. She believes she is worth committing to, and not surprisingly, so does everyone else. And if you try to tell me that half of these couples will be divorced in ten years, I will cite you a story published elsewhere in the Times that says the divorce rate among the college educated is something like 11 percent. Eleven percent! Messed-up relationships are just one more indignity of being born to the wrong kind of people. Like me.

Anyway, I can and do kill one hour of my life every seven days reading about these people. I have a special love for the outliers: older couples, interracial couples, the couples who’ve obviously made (at some level) an arrangement—­because don’t try to tell me that the only person that Korean or Indian or Nigerian girl ever fell in love with was also Korean or Indian or Nigerian. I’m fascinated that these girls were able or willing to put the family first, the culture first.

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