The Sleeping Beauty Proposal by Sarah Strohmeyer

actually prevents you from resolving it, because it deceives your mind into thinking that you’re doing something when really you’re not. Not only that, but worrying is super bad for your skin. Yes, I refuse to worry from here on out.
    Take this latest crisis over Hugh. Naturally, I could wring my hands over him. I could stay up all night and call my friends and drown my woes in mint chip ice cream as I privately hash and rehash that line about him not being attracted to me sexually. (It still stabs me to the core. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover.)
    But I’ve done the ice-cream-and-whining routine with other breakups in the past and nothing changed. The guy who dumped me did not come back begging for forgiveness. He did not see the folly of his ways and prostrate himself at my feet. Instead, the sun set and rose again, day after day, the wounds healed, and eventually the man who had previously been the sunshine of my existence faded into a dim and dusty memory.
    This is the gift of thirtysomething heartbreak, I think. It’s not so life and death, unlike when I was twenty-two and I went to pieces because the man I’d slept with on Saturday hadn’t called me by Sunday night. Back then I had to cook up all sorts of justifications for his silence (or, rather, rudeness): Work had piled up, his dog had died, his phone had been disconnected. Okay, so that last one made him sound a bit slack-jawed. Still, it could happen. Phones get disconnected every day for the oddest of reasons.
    With Hugh, it’s different. Already, I have put him behind me like a childhood best friend from summer camp or a freshman roommate. I’m even having trouble remembering what he looks like or what we did together for four years.
    Though, I have to admit, I am kind of curious why he hasn’t at least e-mailed, especially with my parents calling Pippa and all.
    Not that I miss him. I don’t. It’s just that I would think he’d want to check how I was, at least to see if I’d recovered from the breakup. Or to inquire about Jorge and what I’ve done with the small collection of Hugh’s winter clothes I stored under my bed in a zipper bag and if I still have his great-grandfather’s gold cuff links in my bedside drawer.
    Certainly, he must have been alarmed to find that my parents were calling his parents to congratulate them on our upcoming nuptials.
    â€œQuite startling, really,” is something I can imagine Susanna Spencer saying about Mom. “Such a brazen woman, claiming her daughter was marrying you, Hugh. Do you suppose she was just completely blotto?”
    If I’d been in his shoes, I’d have been on the phone tout de suite.
    Then again, these are Hugh’s parents we’re talking about and they are—let’s see, how to put this— completely bizarre.
    Who sends a six-year-old miles away to boarding school in Scotland? If your answer is the British, you’d be correct. But not all British. Certain types of British, like Susanna and Trevor Spencer. People who “hunt” in tweed clothing nice enough for church, people who travel to estates for weekend-long parties and ski on Alps that are French. I don’t even think Trevor works. He does have an office in London, but from what I’ve been able to discern, it’s more like a base station for tête-à-têtes in Knightsbridge.
    It always broke my heart to think of little Hugh in his little navy short pants and little beanie waving, “Good-bye, Mummie,” as his nanny—yes, his nanny—led him to the train.
    â€œIt was all very jolly,” he explained to me one night. “Rather good for the fortification of one’s upper lip.” Here’s a tip: No six-year -old should need a stiff upper lip.
    Then he told the story of how, suffering from chicken pox at age seven and slightly delirious, he lay in the boarding school infirmary and tried to think pleasant