“No, I’m not coming. You go on ahead.”
A group of young, rowdy American tourists ran past me then, shouting and pretending to be gladiators fighting one another. I tried to muffle the sound of their shouts through the phone, but it was no use. Freddie heard them.
“Georgie, where are you?”
“Oh, well actually…”
I glanced around me, trying to conjure up the name of a street back home in London. I’d lived there my whole life but my brain wasn’t cooperating.
“Georgie.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I’ve gone to Italy.”
A massive moment of silence hung between us before he flipped out.
“Italy?! Since when?”
“Just yesterday. I meant to tell you.”
“Georgie, have you gone insane?”
I smiled. “No, brother. All is well.”
“Then why on Earth are you in Italy?”
“To find love, of course.”
…
I found myself in Italy the way I find myself in most places: by chance. The week before, I’d been sitting in a restaurant in London, partaking in another miserable blind date set up by my mother. The man sitting across from me was chewing with his mouth open. His massive chompers were spewing steak at a rate that concerned me—and the diners sitting within a five-yard radius.
In a moment of panic (I was particularly worried I’d become a new statistic taught to medical students: the first case of mad cow disease transmitted by sirloin to the eye), I realized I couldn’t allow my mum to control my love life any longer. She was concerned for me, laboring under the outdated perception that if I were to remain single past twenty-six, I’d be branded a hopeless spinster, destined to spend my days scouring the streets for love.
Unbeknownst to him, Chompers served as a perfect example of why I needed to take my love life into my own hands. He was nearing forty in both years of life and strands of hair. His job was something like “insurance for insurance” and though he tried to explain it to me while chewing, after thirty minutes, I still didn’t quite understand any of it.
It really wasn’t fair to poor Chompers. He hadn’t chosen to be the latest in the long string of terrible blind dates my mother had forced upon me, but in that role, he suddenly had to bear the cumulative weight of disappointment of all those who’d come before him. There was Mitch—the gouty muppet who had the personality of a dull housefly, Thom—my brother’s naff friend who smelled perpetually of tuna fish, and Celso—a Spaniard who, despite looking fairly tidy, wouldn’t let go of my hand through the entire dinner. I made it through the appetizers all right, but when I’d tried to cut my chicken one-handed, I only succeeded in flinging it off my plate and onto his lap.
The real problem lay in the fact that my brother—the golden child of our family—had found love and married years ago. He and his wife, Andie, had three chubby-cheeked children, and thus my mother was able to focus the full power of her matrimonial death beam onto me.
“You’re in your prime, Georgie!”
As if this was the seventeenth century.
“You’re getting older every day!”
She’d said this to me at my twentieth birthday party, just before gifting me an actual antique hourglass, making sure to emphasize the symbolism by flipping it upside down in my hands.
“You really ought to loosen your standards. That man who comes round your house every now and then is so handsome and in quite good shape.”
She’d been referring to the postman.
A few years ago, fearing that my status as single was a permanent problem, my mum had started enlisting the help of her friends and their “eligible” sons. I’d been a good sport about it, going on dates with men from nearly every county in England, but in the years since then, the novelty had lost its luster. Though I was no closer to marrying, I had developed a very clear list of requirements in a future husband. For instance, he must chew with his mouth closed. He must wash a few times a week and be taller than he is round. I used to think a sense of a humor would have been nice. I wasn’t asking for a Russell Brand or a Ricky Gervais, just a man who wasn’t a complete bump on a log. But those days were coming to a close—if my mother had her way, I would settle down with a well-meaning bump on a very average log.
After my date with Chompers, I’d left him on the curbside after dodging—you guessed it—an open-mouthed kiss. I took the long way home, puzzling over my problem. I wanted to find love as much as my mother wanted it for me. At twenty-six, I obviously wasn’t a spinster, but I was becoming a bit lonely. I hadn’t ever experienced a gut-clenching, obsessive, swoony kind of romance.
Obviously, it was time for a change.
But the need for change wasn’t new. After each of these bad dates, I’d head home, working out how I’d break the news to my mother: no more dates. No more matchmaking. A week or two would pass, she’d bat her eyelashes, and I’d cave. I always caved, but not this time.
I knew if I was really going to make a change, I had to get out of London. My mother, bless her, would never leave me alone as long as I stayed within her reach.
So I’d done what any rational girl would have.
I spun a globe in our estate’s library and promised myself I’d travel to whichever country my finger landed on. The globe’s colors had blended together in a mess of blue and green and then I’d dropped my finger, abruptly stopping its rotation.