For Better or For Worse

by Robin Palmer

  I turned to him. “I don’t know why you would automatically think I was the one who was eating chocolate-covered pretzels in the living room.”

  “What?” he asked confused.

  “Nothing. You were saying?”

  “Wait, wait,” Wendi said. “Nikko, get the camera ready.” Once he did, she looked into the lens. “People, at this moment—the day that Alan Moses and Rebecca Parker are to unite their two families—we’re on a pre-wedding quality-time stroll with Alan and his soon-to-be stepdaughter, Lucy Parker—”

  “Lucy B. Parker,” everyone corrected.

  “Lucy B. Parker,” she repeated. “Okay, you can go back to bonding now.”

  He reached out and took my hand. “Lucy, you have no idea how lucky I feel that Laurel and I found you and your mom—”

  “Are you getting this?!” Wendi asked Nikko.

  “Yes, I’m getting it,” he sighed.

  Uh-oh. I could see Alan’s eyes getting all watery. “I know. It’s okay,” I said, hoping to stop him from going on. For some reason it made me uncomfortable when grown men did what Mom called “getting in touch with their feelings.” Especially when there was a video camera around. She said I’d appreciate it when I got older, but all it did now was make my neck itch.

  “Laurel’s never been happier in her life,” he went on. “I tried the best I could to help her have a normal childhood, but it wasn’t until you came around that she really learned how to have fun.” He swiped at his eyes. “Lucy, you’re very lucky that you have your dad. He’s a wonderful person and I know I could never replace him, but I just hope…well, I hope that you know how much I love you.” His eyes got all teary again. “I couldn’t love you more if you were my own.”

  Now I was crying. “Thanks, Alan,” I said, wiping at my own eyes. “I’m really glad Mom’s marrying you. “’Cause even though she was always saying she was happy after she and Dad got divorced, I think she was lying sometimes. Because with you, she’s really happy.” I smiled. “And I am, too.”

  Due to the fact that she was so not into beauty stuff, Mom with makeup and nice hair didn’t look all that different than Mom without makeup and nice hair. That being said, because she didn’t want to run the risk of messing it up, for our IBS she didn’t want to take a walk. Instead, she came up with what had to be the single most horrible idea I could think of.

  “Me trying on bras is not my idea of a fun IBS!” I cried as she dumped out a Walmart bag full of them.

  “Well, honey, if you stopped growing so quickly, we wouldn’t have to do this,” she said, as if I had any control over the issue.

  “When did you even get these?”

  “When you and Laurel were posing with the Dairy Queen in front of the store,” she said. “They were on sale.”

  The day before, after running out of things to do at the inn, we had taken a field trip to the local Walmart. (In Vermont, “local” meant forty-five minutes away.) It turned out that Laurel wasn’t the only celebrity there—that year’s Dairy Queen winner (dairy as in moo, cow, rather than ice cream) was, as well. Which, according to Martha from Walmart, meant the picture would be on the front page of the weekly paper for sure.

  I sighed. I had enough experience to know that me trying to get myself out of this bra thing was not happening. At least it was just us. The first time I had gotten a bra it was at Barbara’s Bra World in the Holyoke Mall, and Barbara had touched what she insisted on calling my boobies. The whole thing still gave me nightmares.

  “Okay, off with it,” Mom said, pointing to my sweater.

  I shook my head as I grabbed a bunch of the bras. “I’ll just take them into the bathroom.”

  “Oh,” Mom said. “Oh.”

  I stopped and turned. “Oh what?”

  “Nothing,” she said, her lip quivering.

  Did all families cry this much or just mine?

  “It’s just…” A few tears dripped out of her eyes, kind of like our leaky kitchen faucet back in Northampton. “You’re just…” Then, as if someone had turned on the one in our kitchen in New York—the one with the awesome water pressure—the tears came full force. “…getting so grown up!” she wailed. “And I’m not talking about your breasts!”

  So much for her makeup. Even though there was no one else in the room, I still wanted to crawl under the bed and hide. I was glad that Wendi was off filming Laurel and Alan browsing through the most recent Container Store catalog, because I did not need all of America hearing about my breasts.

  “I’m not that grown up,” I said, in hopes of getting her to stop crying. “I haven’t even gotten my period yet.”

  She reached for a tissue. “I’m talking about your attitude,” she sniffled before she honked into it. “To watch how you’ve dealt with so much change this year, and how, even when you’ve been scared—like when you had to change schools, or when you were running for class president—you’ve just walked through it.” She honked again. “Lucy, I don’t think you know how brave you are.”

  “But I don’t feel so brave sometimes,” I admitted. “Sometimes I feel very…not brave. Like with this whole Change thing.”

  “What’s The Change?” Mom asked.

  It made me feel a little better than there was someone on the planet who didn’t know what it was. “Apparently it’s this thing that happens when people get remarried,” I explained. “And suddenly everything changes and no one’s on their best behavior anymore and the kids who aren’t loved as much as the other ones get sent away to boarding school.”

  “Is that what you think is going to happen to you?” Mom asked. “That we’re going to send you away?”

  “No,” I said defensively. “Okay, fine, yes,” I admitted. “Maybe sometimes I worry about that.”

  She came over and pulled me toward her. “Lucy, no one’s going anywhere. We’re a family, okay? Sometimes families fight, and sometimes they get annoyed with each other, but, like it or not, family is forever.”

  Just then my phone—which I had put in the corner near the door along with everyone else’s, because we had figured out that that was the only place in the entire place where you got service—beeped with a text. I walked over and grabbed it. “It’s from Alice,” I said nervously. She was feeding Miss Piggy and Dr. Maude while we were gone. And making sure Miss Piggy didn’t kill Dr. Maude. Thought u’d want to see this, it said underneath a photo. I clicked on it. “I can’t believe it,” I gasped. Instead of being a photo of something out of a horror movie, it looked like a page from one of those cute animal calendars. A sleeping Miss Piggy and Dr. Maude, curled together like some sort of giant fluff ball.

  Mom looked at it and laughed. “Well, there you go. Sometimes it takes a while for some of the members to come around, but they do. Eventually.”

  I don’t know if there are a lot of wedding videos where the ceremony has to be stopped so one of the maids of honor (me) can take hold of a crying baby (Ziggy) because she’s the only one with baby-whispering powers. But this one—with a title card that read “A film by Blair Lerner-Moskovitz”—had that. It also had a ponytailed wedding officiant (Dad) who used to be married to the bride (Mom) who cried through a long-bordering-on-too-long speech about the beauty of being able to watch your ex-wife find new love while his new baby mama (Sarah) cried along with him.

  Laurel leaned over. “Is it just me or is all of this just a little weird?” she whispered.

  “It’s not a little weird,” I whispered back. “It’s a lot weird.”

  As Dad went on and on comparing life to flower petals before shushing Marissa, who wouldn’t stop whispering to a glum-looking Beatrice, I looked longingly at the tray of turkey and apple roll-ups that Lois had prepared as little pre-wedding hors d’oeuvres, and wondered if it would be considered really rude if I walked over and took some. For the last hour I had had hunger pains—a whole new experience for me because I never actually let myself get hungry. I had always heard they were sharp, but these were more constant and m
ade me feel like I was going to throw up. And not just because a few times when I had glanced over at Blair I had caught him looking at me first.

  And then it happened.

  I was trying to pay attention to Dad’s story about Buddha, who lived a gazillion years ago, and how that tied in with modern-day families, but when the dripping feeling started, I got a little sidetracked. I felt the bottom of Ziggy’s diaper, but it was dry. So what was going on? I had purposely avoided drinking anything for an hour before the ceremony so that I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom in the middle of it, but that didn’t seem to matter. While my baby brother was able to hold his bladder, apparently I—his older sister—could not.

  I tried to casually cross one leg in front of the other in an effort to stop the dripping, but casually was not something I had a lot of experience with, which explained why I bumped into Laurel.

  Laurel gave me a look. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I hissed.

  “Can’t you just wait until the ceremony’s over?”

  More dripping. Like a lot.

  Um, no. I couldn’t just sneak out; there were only a few people here. So I raised my hand. “Excuse me. I hate to do this, but I really have to go to the bathroom,” I announced.

  “But I was just about to read a poem by a seventeenth- century Sufi mystic,” Dad said.

  “You can e-mail it me,” I yelled over my shoulder as I ran toward the bathroom.

  I had thought I was done with Incidents-with-capital-I’s. First the Straightening Iron one, then the Hat one, and now the Peeing-in-My-Pants-During-My-Parents’-Wedding one. That one was so long I was going to have to abbreviate it to PIMPDMPW.

  But as I looked at my underwear I realized I was wrong. This would not go down in history as the PIMPDMPW Incident.

  Yes, this was my parents’ wedding day. But just as importantly, it would go down in history as the day that the Period Incident occurred.

  I looked at my watch. November 4, 2:17 p.m. Finally—FINALLY—I had something to enter in the “Official Period Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning.”

  Armed with two Advil (they were period cramps—not hunger pains!) and a maxipad topped by a minipad, I made my way back to the ceremony.

  “Is everything okay?” Alan asked anxiously.

  “Yup,” I said.

  “You’re sure?” Mom asked.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, trying to keep a straight face when what I really wanted to do, if I hadn’t been tone deaf, was break into song. “So, uh, where are we?”

  Laurel looked at me. “Oh. My. God,” she gasped.

  I couldn’t believe she knew what had happened. Actually, I could. It was a frister thing. I broke into a huge grin. “Uh-huh.”

  “What?” Marissa demanded. “What is it? What’s ‘Oh my God’?” She turned to Beatrice. “Do you know what they’re talking about? What did we miss?”

  Beatrice’s eyes were glazed over, as if she had left her body like twenty minutes earlier.

  “Nothing,” Laurel and I said at the same time.

  “So where are we?” I asked.

  “We’re just about to do the vows,” Dad said. He turned to Mom and me. “Rebecca and Lucy, do you two take Alan and Laurel to be your lawfully wedded husband, daughter, father, and sister?”

  She turned to me. “What do you think, Lucy?”

  I smiled. “Okay.” I balled my hands into fists in an attempt to stop myself from adjusting my maxipad. You’d think with all the time I had spent practicing with them it wouldn’t feel so weird but it did.

  Dad turned to Alan and Laurel. “Alan and Laurel, what about you guys? Do you two take Rebecca and Lucy to be your lawfully wedded wife, daughter, mother, and sister?”

  “We do,” Laurel answered.

  Maybe it was hormones, but I couldn’t help myself—I started to cry. And I didn’t care that I was being filmed not just by a TV crew but by my local crush.

  “Well, then, there you have it—I now pronounce you a family. You can…all hug!”

  And we did. For a very long time.

  For the rest of the day, whenever I did something, I couldn’t help but think: This is the first fill-in-the-blank I’ve had/done since I got my period.

  This is the first apple pig in a blanket I’ve had since I got my period.

  This is the first time I’ve suffered through Marissa rambling since I got my period.

  This is the first toast I’ve given at a wedding since I got my period. (Actually, it was the first toast I had given at a wedding ever.)

  This is the first time I’ve danced with a boy who is not my frather since I got my period.

  And, in that case, that was the first time I had danced with a boy, period.

  “They sure eat a lot of apples up here, huh?” Blair asked after dinner as we picked at our apple pie à la mode (with apple ice cream, natch).

  “Yeah. I guess.” That was the first time I said, “Yeah. I guess,” after getting my period, I thought to myself.

  After flipping through Bill and Lois’s limited CD collection, Alan pulled one out. “Ooh—I love this one!” he cried. “And I know just what song to put on.” As he put it in the boom box, the sounds of some guy singing about not being able to smile without someone filled the living room.

  “What is this?” I asked warily. The last time Alan had chosen the music, at the mock dance he had put together for me and him on the night of the Sadie Hawkins one, he had chosen Neil Diamond doing a sad duet with some lady named Barbra Streisand about how they didn’t bring each other flowers anymore.

  “It’s Barry Manilow,” he replied. “‘Can’t Smile Without You.’”

  Blair looked at me. “Never heard of the guy.”

  “Me, neither,” I replied.

  As we sat there, Mom and Alan began to dance, followed by Laurel and Austin and then Dad and Sarah and then Pete and Rose. Even Bill and Lois got into it. Beatrice and Marissa were off in the other room watching Antique Roadshow on PBS. (“Anything to drown out her talking,” Beatrice had said.)

  “So, uh, you want to?” Blair asked, staring at the ground.

  “Do I want to what?” I replied.

  He gave a long sigh. “Dance!” he said, all upset.

  “Jeez. You don’t have to get all huffy,” I said, just as upset.

  “Well, do you?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  We stood up and made our way to the dance floor, which was really just a sliver of space near the coffee table.

  “So how do we do this?” Blair asked.

  I looked around at everyone else. “I think you take your hands and put them on my hips, and I take mine and put them on your shoulders.”

  He looked doubtful. “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t know! It’s not like I’ve ever done this before. I mean, with someone who wasn’t an almost-parent.”

  He reached out and put his hands near my hips without exactly touching them. They just kind of…hovered there.

  “Are we going to do this or not?” I asked. “Because we don’t have to, you know. We could just—”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, grabbing them so tight I’m surprised he didn’t squeeze the maxipad off of me.

  “Ow.”

  Once he loosened up on them, I reached up and put my hands on his shoulders. Or, rather, near his shoulders.

  “I shouldn’t be the only one who’s doing this, you know,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said, holding on to them as little as possible. Once we had bodily contact on both ends, we both relaxed a bit and began to…well, it wasn’t exactly dancing. It was more like we moved from side to side, sometimes in rhythm, but mostly not. With a lot of stepping on each other’s toes.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but is this supposed to be fun?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I think so. But you want to stop and go through my snack supply?”

  “Yes,” he sai
d as he quickly let go of me and headed for the stairs.

  Okay, so maybe I couldn’t say I had danced with a boy for the first time. But still, it was something. At least I was on my way. And at least I had had my period when it happened.

  As I got to the stairs I stopped and turned around.

  There they were—my family. Some who had given birth to me; some I lived with now; and some who weren’t actually related to me but whom I still loved as if they were. To other people, it may have sounded confusing when I tried to explain how we all fit together, but to me?

  It made perfect sense.

  Dear Dr. Maude,

  I don’t know if you remember me. I’m the girl who lives upstairs and used to write you e-mails. You know—the ones that you never replied to? I know—it’s been, like, six months since I’ve written to you. (Can you believe it’s already April and I’ve been living in New York City for a year?! I can’t.) Sorry about that. It’s just that (a) after the wedding my life got really, REALLY busy, and (b) I guess now that I’m so much wiser—you know, seeing that I now GET MY PERIOD AND ALL—I realized that the chances of you writing back to me are about as great as me waking up with my hair down to my butt. (Not that that won’t happen at some point, but it’ll probably take at least four years.)

  Anyway, if for whatever reason you do read these e-mails and just don’t respond to them because, I don’t know, you just don’t, but the fact that they’re no longer appearing in your in-box makes you sad, then I’m sorry. But like I said, things have just been crazy.

  First of all, other than everyone eating a lot of apples over the weekend, the wedding went very smoothly. When Blair Lerner-Moskovitz showed up, I didn’t think it would, but it did. We even kind-of, sort-of danced together for a second. Since then we’ve been hanging out. Not really in a boyfriend/girlfriend way (I’m not even exactly sure what that would mean, but I just intuitively know—probably because I AM NOW A GIRL WHO GETS HER PERIOD and therefore has excellent intuition—that that’s not what it is. Maybe because there’s no kissing involved.)