For Better Or Worse Read Online Free Page A

thousand a year and he has no life, no time, and no significant other to spend it on.
    Peter, Julie’s older brother and darling of the McHugh household, is a surgeon who got his pre-med undergrad degree from Harvard and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins. This guy doesn’t just _have _ brains, he actually operates on them. You know how people say things like
    ‘this isn’t brain surgery’? Well Peter doesn’t find that saying funny at all. To him, everything is brain surgery. Including marriage. He very carefully dissected the dating scene, tossed aside prospective wives like he was selecting a tie, and finally plucked from the bowels of the female race a frighteningly perfect woman. Perfect
looking
, that is; the woman is a mannequin. After seeing a picture of her I had to ask Julie if she was actually smiling or if the perpetually stretched corners of her mouth were some kind of face-lift gone bad.
    As for Julie, well, her mother had expected her to go to college, find a nice boy (preferably Catholic) who was majoring in business or medicine or law, and marry him. Then she was supposed to have a few kids named after various family members and maybe a Mercedes and a summer house in Palm Beach.
    Instead of Norman Rockwell, Kathleen got Gloria Steinem. Julie shacked up with a woman who (even worse) was a bartender, and instead of being a rich man’s wife she followed her life long dream and became a schoolteacher. Her mother had such heart failure when Julie told her I was a bartender that Julie wasn’t able to get to the part about me being a woman in the same conversation. Julie sat on that for another two weeks until her mother’s Xanax had taken very, very firm hold.
    I suppose that all of that sounds funny in retrospect, but at the time it sent Julie into quite a tailspin. She had moved fifteen hundred miles away from her family because she felt that she would never be able to be who she needed to be, a lesbian and a school teacher, if she remained in the shadow of the McHugh estate. So that phone call, the one that sent her mother crying hysterically to a psychiatrist about how wronged she was and how she wanted to kill herself, was the most difficult moment of Julie’s life.
    For a solid week she and I argued about whether or not I should just back off. I’d never seen Julie so emotional.
    “Don’t make any fucking self-righteous sacrifices on my account!” Julie shouted at me when I suggested that maybe we should slow down a little.
    “Baby, I just don’t want to make things harder on you.”
    “So you think walking out on me is going to make me feel better?!”
    The tears were running down Julie’s face in
sheets
. I hadn’t ever seen anyone cry like that.
    Angry, hurt, confused tears that made me want to run to her and run away at the same time. I’d never had anyone put that kind of emotion on me, and here was Julie, saying here I am, for better or worse, and _this _ is the ‘worse’ part so you better damn well fucking be there for me.
    Right.
    I tried, I really did. I think, looking back on it now, that Julie knew I was trying, but I was such a wreck about it. I’m just not equipped for tears and all the emotional drama. I’d only had a couple of girlfriends that I had dated for any length of time before Julie, and everyone else had been either weekend flings or pick-ups. And the fact is that, at the time, I had no respect for her family. I didn’t like their politics, I didn’t like their snobbery and I really did not like their money. So consoling Julie about her mother’s narrow-mindedness wasn’t easy. I’d say things like ‘Fuck your mother, who needs her?’ and, of course, Julie would cry. I’d say ‘I love you’ and she’d cry even more. I even tried ‘Would it make you feel better to hit me?’ which was also met with tears, although she punched me in the arm for good measure.
    What made it all even more difficult was that we couldn’t even have sex after a couple of