12/21 - girls' trip to the gulag
my friend got cheated on so i dragged her down to Brighton Beach
This is a story about infidelity, female friendship, vareniki, and perspective. This is a story about a day in December.
I am a woman of moderate talent. But if there is one thing I take the utmost pride in, it’s my ability to accurately predict the downfall of other people’s relationships. I’m break-up Miss Cleo. I’m your drunk, ruddy uncle mumbling “oh yeah that asshole’s dead” ten minutes into the Sixth Sense, but instead of Bruce Willis I’m talking about a two-year relationship that started in the bathroom line at Bossa Nova Civic Club before it burned down. Within a small margin of error, I can predict when and how it will end. Lipstick on a collar. A reluctantly-agreed request for a threesome or open relationship. An argument over commitment, ambition, sex, money. That famous filthy glass left to rot in the sink from the Matthew Frey Atlantic Article that has torn apart more loving couples than both World Wars combined.
My friend Marnie’s six-year relationship had been imploding for the last year, like one of those poltergeist houses that collapses on itself when the spirits get too riled up. I knew it was over when she suddenly decided to get into the best shape of her life following what I viewed as a garden-variety domestic spat. After that day, the little Mickey Goldmill that lay dormant in the brains of all women woke up and started coaching her for the “big day” when she would be single and, yes, ready to mingle. Last November I looked over at her during a plank during our workout class and noticed the faint outline of lovely abdominal muscles on her bare midriff. “Damn, she looks good,” I thought before my noodle arms gave out. That’s when I knew her relationship had 30 days left, give or take.
It was one of those zombie relationships. Dead for years, both parties just mindlessly going through the motions. No intimacy, no fun, no spontaneity. Just two people existing separately together, not even as roommates because they lived apart. They were both so alone and yet hopelessly codependent, like Didymos and Dimorphos—asteroids gravitationally bound to each other but destined never to collide.
Marnie is one of my newer friends. I met her at the barre studio down the block from my apartment a few years back. People always talk about how difficult it is to make friends later in life, yet I constantly meet people who are searching for friends later in life. These people are everywhere, cockroaches really. People move and want to find friends in their neighborhoods. Women have babies and want to find women with babies of their own. Couples divorce and want to replenish the friends they lost in the friend draft that occurs after every major break-up. People stop partying and want to find people who like to hike instead of snort of lines. Or people still want to snort lines and need to replace their lame friends who are now out hiking and brewing disgusting IPAs all the time. The universe sent Marnie to me after my best neighborhood friend decided to reboot her life in Europe, and for that I am thankful.
Over the years I’ve completely reassessed what same-sex friendship means to me. During my lonely, small-town adolescence films like Ghost World, Thelma & Louise, Heavenly Creatures, Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion plagued me with some romanticized vision of female of friendship. These films led me on an estrogen-fueled quest for a platonic soulmate, some twin flame in a deranged “us against the world” fantasy conjured up by my media-poisoned mind. In my 20s I sought out some mysterious, profound bond and borderline romantic spark with other women. And, when I finally found it, I got all the chaos and drama that naturally came with it. But eventually you realize life isn’t a fucking movie. Now in my 30s, my expectations are tempered. I just want stable, funny women who can always spare the time to grab a beer.
And so, I was drawn to Marnie. Driven, smart, funny, and, most importantly, just fun to piss away the time with. All good things strong enough to overshadow her worst flaws: her unironic use of the word “rizz,” her references to viral tiktok videos that both enrage and confuse me like a dementia grandma, her questionable taste in music, and, of course, her toxic dead-end relationship with “The Boyfriend.”
“The Boyfriend” was fascinating to me. Born to a pair of Soho artists of little acclaim and fading wealth in the 70s, he grew up in a well-heeled bohemian milieu that haunted him. In this scene, he was tortured by his own mediocrity: not lucky enough to be a nepo baby, not talented or driven enough to create the extraordinary life to which he felt so entitled, not enlightened or cool enough to simply embrace his unremarkable existence. With each passing year he watched his peers gain traction as musicians, writers, filmmakers, & artists while others rebelled against their parents and became successful bankers and lawyers—every minor win causing the inky black pool of bitterness and resentment within him to grow and fester. By the time I met him he had declared himself semi-retired from work at his post-production company, claiming that the entertainment industry was too corrupt, too political—a completely valid complaint that could be hurled at virtually any American occupation in the year of our lord 2025.
I’d be remiss if I just shit all over this guy completely. He had several redeeming qualities: he was a man of impeccable taste in literature, film, and music, which made him an excellent conversationalist. He was smart and funny, and took no offense if you called him a snob or a pseud. In fact, he took great joy in it. Most important was his God-given talent for snark—a tragedy he never figured out how to monetize it. I often found myself leaving the bar or restaurant smirking to myself about something he said hours earlier. He had something negative but amusing to say about everything and everyone. But after the amusement faded—and it always did—all I could think was: how unbelievably exhausting it must be to date this man.
His resentment grew commensurate with Marnie’s success. In public conversations, he downplayed her concrete achievements, brushed off her goals as unserious and flighty. The childish aspirations of a woman 15 years his junior who didn’t understand how the big bad world worked. He latched onto her like a lamprey, his jagged little sucker-mouth siphoning out of all of her hope and joy.
In the winter of 2024, The Boyfriend found himself exactly where many unhappy people find themselves when they’re approaching 50: on a quest to “find himself.” It should come as no great surprise that he went looking the first place all men of limited imagination look when they’re on a journey of self-discovery: some random chick’s pussy. “Hello???? Am I in here?” they shout into it. But there is never an answer. Only the void queefing back at them.
Last Thursday I met Marnie for barre class. I found her draped on the studio floor in a stretch that reeked of despair. Her torso folded over her long legs, forehead gently kissing the ground, eyes staring blankly into the carpet. When I asked “you ok?” her head swiveled around like the Jigsaw puppet and she unwound the events of the last 48 hours. Over the last few weeks, The Boyfriend’s correspondence became increasingly distant. He was in LA helping his friends shoot a movie, and suddenly became too busy to text back with any regularity. Her paranoia got the best of her, prompting her to check his GPS location through her phone. It showed him staying at an unknown apartment, one that was definitely not where he told her he had been staying.
“That doesn’t prove anything.” I protested.
“Oh, I logged into his email, too”—something no sane woman readily admits unless she finds some real vindicating shit. She handed me her phone. It was a screenshot of an email order confirmation from www.condommania.com, a website that sells condoms…presumably to people overcome by some sort of sex mania. It was an order for four-packs of ultra thin condoms, delivered to the same mystery address.
“He couldn’t even go to the fucking store like a normal person.” She said. She was right. Somehow the cheating wasn’t the most offensive thing, it was the fact that he pre-emptively dropshipped condoms to the mystery minge house like a goddamn nerd.
“Maybe it was for a joke…for the movie?” I asked. A reasonable inquiry from my point of view.
“No. He doesn’t have the money for joke condoms.” Her response, delivered with sad resignation and without any mitigating humor, made me chuckle and spit water onto the carpet.
The instructor queued the music. The barre class makes me feel like a caricature of a woman. A field of bony pelvises clad in $120 leggings dry humping the air in synchronicity like they’re summoning some demon. Matching crop tops in every color. Branded grippy socks silently signaling status to the betas wearing generic trash. It makes me want to puke. In the grand scheme of this city’s exercise options, barre is undoubtedly one of the worst. An objectively good workout reduced to another aesthetic with a matcha-latte cult following. It all made me (a big hypocrite) yearn for the humble simplicity of an RFK-endorsed labor camp.
We went for a coffee afterwards so she could finish the saga. As I stirred some sugar into my mug, Marnie started to lose it. She apologized for crying in between sobs. “It’s not crying, it’s just performance art.” I said loudly so our neighbors could overhear. “You’re just practicing for your one-woman show, and you’re gonna do great, kid.” She laughed through the tears. I reached over and put my arm around her. “I just need to stay busy,” she said, sucking it all up and swallowing it down.
I asked if she wanted to come with me to run some errands in Brighton Beach this Saturday. The enclave was located far from us, and I expected the entire outing to take around 6 hours. While I had planned to go alone, I couldn’t deny it was a two-woman job. I wanted to buy a lot of exotic groceries and the extra arms would be useful. She needed the company, I needed a mule. She didn’t care. I could have asked her to follow me down to hell and she would have said yes.
I love Brighton Beach in the winter. The dreary seaside neighborhood has the largest Russian-speaking population in the Western Hemisphere, earning it the nickname “Little Odessa.” In the mid-1970s, it became a popular place to settle for the Soviet immigrants, mostly Jews from Russia and Ukraine. It seems less Russian and more Turkish/Uzbeki/Georgian every time I visit. It was the perfect place for a distraction this time of year.
Saturday morning was the first truly cold day of the year. It snowed the night before, and the unobstructed morning sun wasn’t strong enough to break the ice sheets on the sidewalk.
I met Marnie on the train. The woman before me was a far cry from the one who had publicly sobbed 2 full ounces of saline into her cappuccino three days prior. Within the span of 72 hours, she had gotten “over it” entirely, registered for three distinct dating applications, and was already in the process of talking to several new human men. When she spoke of these men, especially those on an application called “Raya,” her eyes widened until there was 2 centimeters of visible sclera in an absolutely mesmerizing real-life Kubrickian stare.
Understandably so, most people are annoying during a break-up. They can’t talk about anything else. They’re utterly consumed by it. And you—the bystander, the narrator, the friend—are obligated to shut up and give them a little grace. During the entire two-hour commute, the conversation shifted exclusively between the affair and dating app dick, the former subject so very tiresome, the latter absolutely fascinating.
She let me swipe through the guys on Raya, an application colloquially known as “The Soho House of dating apps”—I assume because, just like the real Soho House, its male patrons are vapid rich men more interested in exclusivity, cocaine, and models than any type of art whatsoever.
I swiped through the profiles with the morbid curiosity and smugness of a married woman who met her spouse in the most respectable way possible: in the annals of a dank east village dive bar, back when the very idea of Tinder was still incubating in Sean Rad’s balls. I felt conflicted. On one hand, I thank God I was spared from the hell of algorithm-based dating. On the other, 25-year old me would have loved being on the apps—at least for a little while—in some alternate reality where my whore wings had not been clipped prematurely by an unexpected and lasting love.
The closest I’ve ever come to experiencing the specific instant-gratification dopamine rush you get from a dating app was back in 2014, when two girlfriends and I created fake OKCupid profiles for different men and held a contest to see who could get the most unsolicited inbound messages from women. My fake man, an impish-looking Irish immigrant named “Declan,” had dropped out of medical school to become a professional chef. His dream was to open an Irish fusion restaurant that served 20 different kinds of mashed potatoes. It would be called “Angela’s Mashes.” That one was a real panty-dropper and I would have absolutely crushed that contest had I not been stupid enough to steal the pictures of a man who lived in the same zip code where fake Declan lived. The profile was only active for two weeks before it was flagged as fraud, resulting in my becoming IP-banned from OKCupid forever. RIP Declan.
In a previous post, I wrote about how many women of means are inflicted with a debilitating and little-understood disease known as “SameFace.” I’m saddened to report that the affliction has also spread to a large subset of wealthy, educated men. With the exception of a few bold souls, these men blended together into a beige pâté of utterly indistinguishable, generically handsome faces and cleanboy pastel button downs and linen shorts. If one of them assaulted me and the police organized a line-up with all the guys on Raya, I would say “Officer, it was all of them.” And they would all go to prison, which would be fine because, frankly, I’m sure all of these men should go to jail for something. If not an actual legal crime, then for the moral crime of being on this douche app. My general takeaways:
Raya does not have a height filter, which I thought was quite cruel given that I view it as a platform for shallow people. But then I realized it’s really an app for upper-class people and height filters are racist against short rich men (the most dangerous type of rich man).
Not to be outsmarted by a bunch of dwarves, the tall men fought back by unionizing and collectively including their heights in their text biographies without an ounce of shame whatsoever—a statistic all men should tack onto the end of every sentence they speak or type so that women can properly evaluate the statement’s worth. “My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right. 6’4” - Abraham Lincoln.
“Men who don’t include their height in their bio are cooler” — stupid words that came out of my stupid mouth only to be met with instant ridicule.
Nine out of every ten profiles had a boat picture, and I found myself being able to differentiate the boats more easily than the men. The boats had more defining characteristics. The masts and sails were different. One had a very nice looking dinghy trailing behind. In some cases, I was more sexually attracted to the boats than the men (paging Ms. Ducournau for Titane II).
All of the men had suspiciously full heads of hair, causing me to wonder whether some of them were frequent fliers on Turkish Hairlines.
Many men enjoyed posting a childhood picture of themselves, sometimes even as their main profile photo. There was something very Freudian about these men. A 37-year old McKinsey director crying out for a forehead kiss from mommy or, at minimum, a swig from his Filipino nanny’s ever-swollen teat in a ♫ tale as old as time ♫
Many of the men seemed to be in search of Instagram followers instead of romance, but what’s the difference these days. Some of the IG accounts (a prerequisite for Raya admission) were curated to a degree that made my pussy dry up as if it had been lined with all the silica gel packets in the last surviving Payless shoe store.
None of the men had good taste in music except for one dude performatively LARPing as Waylon Jennings so hard it gave me ‘nam flashbacks of the Coinbase “CryptoCowboy” commercial.
All of the men had very good bodies. Credit where credit is due.
A large chunk of men looked like they would fail the mirror test with all the panache of a wild Hamadryas baboon.
The lack of discernable imperfections among the men—extra fat, scrawniness, weak chins, baldness, bad teeth, lazy eyes, thin calves, asymmetrical faces, whatever Sebastian Stan had in “A Different Man” (2024)—made me query whether Raya was simply a government run eugenics experiment sponsored by a boat company to sell more boats while simultaneously ridding society of the undesirables like manatees. Their backs crushed under the hulls, their bellies sliced open by the propellers of a mini-yacht named “Liquid Asset.”
After I had my fill of Raya men, she showed me photos of the other woman The Boyfiend allegedly slept with. “I’m happy she’s so boring looking.” She said. I laughed. Of course what she really meant was ‘I’m secretly relieved she’s uglier than I am.’ “Doesn’t seem like she has much going on either,” she continued. The slight was followed by a flash of this woman’s sparse LinkedIn profile, as if a person and their accomplishments did not exist unless a screen said they did.
I nodded. One of the things about being a woman is that you have to hold your tongue and support your friends through their pettiness when they are Going Thru It.™ Any attempt to redirect them to the moral high ground or chastise them for junior high school mental gymnastics will be met with accusations of being unsupportive or —worse—being a bad friend. I learned this from the alternate ending of S2E12 of Sex in the City where the girls tie all of Samantha’s limbs to different motorcycles and floor it in opposite directions because she point-blank tells Carrie to stop humiliating herself by doing whatever the fuck this is:
As Marnie continued on, I suddenly felt like one of the cartoon bitches in those cheesy mobile games beloved by agoraphobics. I chose my responses wisely. Honesty has cost me friends in the past, albeit none I really regret losing. But still, I am so grateful to the ghosts of those unbearably fragile, thin-skinned girls. Collateral damage that improved my bedside manner for the women in my life I actually wanted to keep.
The train to Brighton Beach takes about an hour and a half from my apartment, two full hours if you ride it with me. I lose track and always miss the stop, never realizing my mistake until I see the outline of the rickety Cyclone Rollercoaster against the grey clouds.
It was 2 p.m. by the time we arrived and we both desperately wanted food.
Skovorodka restaurant has existed for as long as I’ve lived here, and it will certainly exist long after I’m dead. Its tired façade welcoming hungry customers with the infamous chained bear. For years I’ve debated whether the creature itself is chained—a relic of Russia’s problematic history with domesticated bears—or whether the plastic in the shape of a bear is simply tethered to prevent theft of what is, objectively, a very steal-able lawn ornament. This place is frozen in time. Nothing about it ever changes. In a city that dies and is reborn anew once every seven years, there’s something comforting about that.
As soon as we entered, man in his early 60s ushered us to a table directly in front of a big screen TV blaring Russian music videos.
When he returned to take our order, he glared at me when I asked if the Olivier salad could be made without chicken. In a blood-boiling “Who’s on first?”-tier exchange, the man nodded and said “Yes, chicken!” to which I responded “Right, but, what if, hypothetically speaking, it had NO chicken?”—a question he could not comprehend. Not because he spoke limited English, but because the protein was the reason the dish cost $15 instead of $5 and to order without made zero sense in his reality. This exchange continued for 90 seconds until Marnie reached her boiling point and loudly proclaimed “NO OLIVIER” over my giggling.
He shrugged and took the rest of our order: the pickle platter, potato vareniki, mushroom julienne, a lot of black bread, and 3 giant draft Baltikas split between the two of us. Everything was tasty, particularly the pickled grapes and potato vareniki, which was served with a saucière full of rich sour cream. Before we left, he poured the final beer back and forth between our two mugs, dribbling a solid ounce of it over my crotch as he rushed over to another table—retribution for the vegetarian Olivier nonsense I’m sure of it.
We headed back out into the cold. The real reason I came here was to buy a large quantity of cheap caviar for a new year’s party. Prices in the city and online had skyrocketed, like most things. But you can still buy it good and cheap down in Brighton Beach, authentic too. The American caviar industry had become highly regulated since “Operation Malossol,” a covert operation in the early aughts in which a FWS special agent posing as a wealthy caviar buyer staged multiple stings to crack-down on illegal back-room deals and counterfeit eggs. It’s all front-room, boring and proper now.
We headed over to No. 1 Caviar on the recommendation from my Russian coworker. An adorable 10 x 8 foot shop run by the iron fist of a gruff Russian woman in her late fifties. She greeted us in Russian. Her expression soured when I responded "Hello!” like an absolute fucker.
She let us sample the two available caviar selections, both of which were on the middling side of tasty. I asked about the pre-batched stuff under the glass, which exuded an aura of luxury as opposed the stuff in the plastic bins.
“You can’t afford,” she said sharply. “Three thousand dollars.”
I laughed, told her we’d be back. She ignored me entirely and served the man behind me.
We headed across the street to its competitor, Tsar Caviar, a tidy shop located within the National MiniMall. There, the selection was wider and the service friendlier. A young girl doled out generous tastings from the three bins of caviar, heaping spoonfuls of Kaluga, Osetra, and Siberian sturgeon for both of us. I asked for a half pound of the Siberian sturgeon. It was milder in flavor and Marnie liked it best—she was my canary in the coalmine for what the guests would prefer. The salesgirl packed it an insulated bag and sent us on our way.
The next stop was Vanilla Gourmet Specialty Foods, a fantastic store specializing in both Turkish and Russian products. In the window, a showcase of brilliantly-colored Turkish delights. “What are they, like Macarons?” Marnie asked. Fair question—I had never had one either. “Turkish delights. The stuff the little fat boy from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe sold his soul to the White Witch for.” I remembered the confection from the book quite well. I will forever associate it with snow and gluttony. Here, we stocked up on cherry compot (for martinis), nuts, cookies, and Polish Sliwka Naleczowska candied plums, quite possibly the best candy in the world (saying this as a woman who does not enjoy sweets whatsoever).
Our final stop was Varenyky house: a tiny outpost that sells homemade frozen pilmeni and vareniki of all varieties. I loaded Marnie up, three bags of potato and cherry dumpling varietals on each of her arms. Carrying heavy shit would do her good. She could think about the pain of the tight plastic strips slicing into her flesh instead of the bitch that slept with her evil boyfriend for a few minutes. The pretty shopkeeper—whom I presumed the chef and owner—urged us to stay inside and keep warm while we waiting for the uber.
In the warm car, the conversation turned to how to confront The Boyfriend. “I just need closure.” Marnie said. I don’t really believe in closure. Not the type you get from someone else anyway. It’s usually just an excuse for people to indulge in their own misery, to pick a scab as long as they can because they’re addicted to that oddly satisfying type of pleasure-pain. I told her a story I once heard about a woman who discovered her partner’s ongoing infidelity. Instead of confronting him, she simply packed up her things while he was on a business trip, left, and never contacted him again. Marnie mulled the story over for around 10 seconds before professing “I’m not strong enough for that.” She was always pretty self-aware, and I respect that.
I wanted a break from talking. She was in the throes of it, but to me it wasn’t really anything at all. Just a short detour in a long, happy life that I was sure would culminate in, at best, an enduring fairytale romance or, at worst, 1-3 beautiful children that would love her until death.
The low sky was red. I leaned my head against the window so I could feel the potholes in the BQE against my skull. It’s a pleasure to think of nothing on a long car ride, especially one with a view.
My peace was interrupted by Marnie’s phone. It dinged and seized with new matches. Each notification a shot of pure heroin in her veins. She was on a manic quest to compensate for six years of feeling unloved and unwanted. I worry about it. Like those people who survive a bout of extreme starvation only to die of refeeding syndrome because they can’t pace themselves.
She started on about the app men again. My mind drifted. I’m going to invent a shock collar that reads people’s thoughts and zaps you every time someone passes you on the street and thinks “I’d fuck her” or “I’d blow him.” The collar itself is free but the service to unlock the thoughts of passersbys will be $60/month. $120/month to unlock the thoughts of premium people.
Her stop was first—I hugged her, bade her farewell, told her to text or call if she needed to talk. My stop was only minutes later. I rushed inside, stuffed the vareniki in my freezer, pissed, and left again. My husband’s friend was turning sixty and his wife was throwing him a birthday party at a pub crosstown. The turnout was amazing. Four years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The last time I saw him, around six months ago, he didn’t seem ill at all. Tonight was different. His thin body swayed unnaturally, his words trailed together like he was inebriated. But he wasn’t drinking.
He smiled and laughed all night, flitting from one faction to another to say hello, thanks for coming, to catch-up, to trade an old story. The projector flashed photos of him in his 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. A bass guitar in hand from when his band played my wedding. Messy, long wavy hair, and a blazer over a band tee—the uniform of “alternative” men before the word cringe became, quite unfortunately, ingrained in the social lexicon. He’s one of my favorites from my husband’s circle. A modest man with a quiet charisma about him. His wife, a fun but pretentious museum curator, was a well-made match to temper his impenetrable composure.
On the projector: a wedding photo, an anniversary photo in Paris, a photo of him cradling his newborn daughter.
A waitress stumbled through the crowd holding a tray of shots, half tequila and half whiskey: a parting gift to signal that the party was being pushed out to make room for another, some guy’s 25th I heard. An announcement was made that the party would continue downtown at the bar where his band had often performed, back when he was young and could still play a guitar.
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this rules and I am presently seething with jealousy towards your writing talent
OH MY GOD you need to write a novel. Well, you practically did here. Wow. But that doesn’t look like black bread???