The first time I met Bella Mellman, I knew she would become one of my best fictional friends. Bella, much like her creator, Shirley Sacks, is a transplanted South African artist, writer and savvy woman of the world, living a ‘fabliss’ life (according to her 8-year-old granddaughter) in the flats of Beverly Hills.
It has been a very entertaining journey bringing her story to the world. The Fabliss Life of Bella Mellman is to be released on November 17, 2015. Enjoy this sneak peek. (Drawings by Shirley Sacks)
“By the time we learn life’s lessons, there isn’t time to practice.”
“I don’t really want to get married again,” Shelly told Bella.
“That’s progress,” Bella said.
Then Shelly added, “But I do want to meet someone.”
Bella always thought that “someone” was a strange term: It denoted a lack of specificity, as if anyone would do.
In her quest to find a third husband, or that “someone,” Shelly took the contemporary route. She joined Match.com and JDate, hoping that, being Jewish, she’d find more sensible choices. Shelly had – though she didn’t tell Bella until much later – paid three thousand dollars to join a personalized matchmaking service.
“If you told me before you wasted your money,” Bella informed Shelly, “I would have told you that’s a con. There was a woman here, Dotty Marriot, who became a good friend of mine. She was from Dallas and moved here thinking she’d have more fun. So, this very exclusive, personalized matchmaker promised a certain amount of highly compatible contacts. Eventually they came up with just one, and that one wasn’t even a genuine member of the service. He was merely a friend helping out.” Bella added, “I also told Dotty, though she didn’t believe me, that if you want to find a man, Los Angeles is not the place. You’d be better off in Alaska.”
“But I really do want someone, I’m not like you. I’m not happy on my own.”
“You also weren’t happy when you were with someone,” Bella pointed out.
“That’s true,” Shelly conceded.
“Look how lucky you are,” Bella said. “You own your own condo, with hardly any mortgage. Your parents will leave you enough so you don’t have to worry when you’re really old. You have three grown children.”
Shelly added, “Two of them give me nothing but trouble.”
“Yes, and what kind of man wants to deal with that? You’ll also have to deal with his kids, whom you will find as spoiled and indulged as he will find yours. Then, you have to listen – as though it was all interesting – to him and his old friends tell stories over and over again about their misspent youth – which is funny only to them. You will not like his family, nor him yours. And his children will be furious that you might get some of his money, which I can assure you, you won’t.”
Shelly said, as she said so often it became a refrain, “I like the feeling of being married.”
“Have you ever thought that there’s a predicable trajectory to marriage? It’s not simply straightforward for people who have been divorced, as in your case, twice.”
“What do you mean?”
“You date, marry, move into a first apartment, get pregnant, buy your first house, have another child, move again. The kids go to school, they go to college, they get married. You become grandparents. There’s a blueprint for a successful marriage and women like you simply have not followed the plan.”
“You sound like there is no hope.”
“Hope. It’s not about hope. More like a reality check. Take growing old; you do it together. Both of you slowly acclimatize to the ravages of age as they occur, in tiny increments. The breasts and testicles gently fall, the skin stretches, hair thins and greys. The steps become unsteady, the hands less sure. But it’s a whole other thing to be suddenly faced with some man’s old body, or have him face yours. And that’s even if you’re in good shape for your age. God I hate that term, ‘for your age.’ I hate it, and I can’t help using the words myself.”
“Oh Bella, you are just too cynical.”
“I am.” Bella grinned. She took this as a compliment.
There she is – Bella Mellman! Fabliss, funny and real! How could I resist?
-VCW