“Oh, Maggie!” says Tenaj.
“You’re really doing it?” I say. It’s hard to breathe just now.
“Whatever it is that’s gone wrong,” says Tenaj, “we know it’s not a failure of his wanting to be with you.”
I think for a moment that Maggie would be justified in saying, What do you know about it? But she doesn’t. She takes a deep breath and smiles at Tenaj. “Thank you for that.”
“Who am I to know, but if I squint real hard, I see you and Robert hanging in until the very end because some miracle will come,” says Tenaj, and I just want to reach over and shush her.
“Well, maybe, but I think it’s not going to work out,” says Maggie with a cheerful-sounding finality that surprises me. “I look at my life—what I gave up, what I do every day—and then I look at a day like today, that has about twenty-seven impossible parts to it and yet makes me laugh. And so many strangers! More strangers than I talk to in a year in New Hampshire. Like that little baby, going off with us just because his mama said it was okay. And his mama trusted us to take him and keep him while she goes and tries to fulfill some dream and get herself out of a dress shop where everything she sells is about two hundred years old . . . and then . . . the bridge . . . this place . . . I just don’t want to live like I do anymore, with a man who won’t go for help. Goes to therapy and then just sits there like a lump when the counselor tries to help him.”
“But he goes?” I say.
Maggie nods. “He goes, but he won’t open up. And listen. Don’t worry. We’re not separating until after your wedding. We’re going to hold it together until then.”
“Maggie, I’m not worried about the wedding. I’m just thinking of you—and Dad.”
Tenaj closes her hand over Maggie’s. “I can feel his soul, and I see him letting all the joy go out of his life. Thinking he doesn’t deserve all the abundance he has. All the love and respect he has. You know what? We’ve gotta love him back into health again. This is what we have to do! Come on, concentrate.” She closes her eyes. “Maggie, you’re going to love on him up close, hit him with all the energy and love you can muster, and . . . and Phronsie and I are going to beam love on him from afar. And he’s going to be so flooded with all this energetic love that he’s . . . he’s going to go to therapy that works for him, and he’s going to get himself all fixed up for the next third of his life. Which he will not want to waste.
“And you, Phronsie—” She turns to me, her eyes now wide and luminous. “You need to celebrate yourself the way you are right now, and, sweetie, you need someone who celebrates all of you, too, who doesn’t just feel comfortable and inevitable. You think you’re out of time, but, honey, you aren’t. And I think when you’re with the right person, it feels effortless. Not perfect maybe, but worlds apart from anything else you’ve ever known. So fall in love with your life, and you’ll know the right thing to do, just like you knew the right dress to buy today.”
Then she says she has to go because she has a class to teach tonight, this unicorn of love, but before she leaves, she takes Maggie’s hands and looks into her eyes and says to her, “Everything always works out in the end. And if it didn’t work out yet, then it isn’t the end.”
The next day—Maggie’s last in New York—Maggie comes to her senses. We eat breakfast in the morning and then she insists we go back to Talia’s friend’s wedding shop, where, without fanfare, she buys me a traditional white wedding dress, with lace and sequins and seed pearls, as well as a fingertip-length veil. One of the ones I tried on yesterday. It’s nice.
It’s just the way things have to be, she says.
“I somehow think that other dress—and it is beautiful, make no mistake—just isn’t you. I’m not really sure you won’t have some regrets. I was awake all last night, tossing and turning, and I think it was the dress that had me going. It doesn’t say Phronsie to me.”
I don’t protest. I see how she was just being generous all day yesterday, accepting my mother’s eccentricities.
Later, while we’re in the cab on the way to Penn Station, she says, “Your mother, oh my heavens!” She laughs this deeply fake laugh I recognize from nearly every evening of my childhood. “Interesting, interesting person, that one. But I’m going to tell you something: you live a whole life with a man, you know him a lot better than his weekend-turned-into-two-years fling.”
“You were very nice to put up with all that,” I say quietly.
“Well, she meant well. But I’m sorry, dear. Whether I stay or go from my husband is going to be based on a lot more than my husband’s witchy ex-wife’s hunches.” She shakes her head and looks out the car window, like she’s seeing New York back the way she always saw it before: dirty, noisy, scary, and filled with nuts.
“And as for her opinions about your upcoming marriage, let me just say that Judd is a lovely man. I noticed that she turned up her nose when we said he was comfortable. You and I know that’s the goal of life: to marry somebody who gives you enough space and trust that your heart isn’t being put through the wringer every damn day.”
She lets out a big sigh. “Well. At least we found you a good dress,” she says. “And you now have two to pick from.”
That night, I’m lying next to Judd on my couch, and we’re eating popcorn out of the bowl, and I try to tell him everything that happened. Which, of course, is impossible. I have to severely edit the entire day. Still, I make it into enough of a story that he laughs in all the right places. He’s dutifully amazed at Tenaj being in the city, and then showing up at the bridal shop. I tell him about the trip to Brooklyn in the cab, the cell phone catastrophe, the walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Did I come up at all?” he says.
“Oh, yes. Actually you did. She wanted to know what you were like, and Maggie said that you are comfortable.”
He smiles. “I take it that Madame Tenaj DeFontaine didn’t think that was such high praise.”
“Ah, but we supplemented with your other charms. The way you can listen to me all night without fighting with me, and how you know instinctively just how much butter should go on popcorn, and you don’t mind if Mr. Swanky sleeps on the bed, and you always want to be the one to do the dishes, unlike any other man who ever lived. And also you protect our old age by making us walk up the stairs, and we laugh together, and you have never cheated on anyone in your whole life, except for at Thanksgiving when you kissed Karla Kristensen. But I explained that was okay.”
“Because you kissed someone, too,” he says.
“Yes. Because I kissed someone, too.”
“Holy God,” he says. “Did you actually say that stuff?”
“No,” I say. “Not a word of it. But it’s all true.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Three months later, I am making dinner one night—pot roast with gravy—when Judd calls and says he’s meeting some friends instead of coming home to eat.
“But I made gravy!” I say happily. “And guess what! I actually found a gravy boat in one of those little boutiquey kitchen shops today when I was on my lunch hour, and I went and bought it for us! And I don’t think we should keep it high up in the cabinet no one can reach above the refrigerator either. It’s going to stay with the regular dishes. Okay?”
I am ridiculously excited about this, in such an over-the-top way I know he’ll relate to. It would have taken ten years to get across the hidden meaning of that one little symbol of home to a new partner. And that is the chief advantage of marrying your best and oldest friend. Steve Hanover never even heard me mention those words. Or Adam either, for that matter. Surprisingly, we didn’t get to Symbols of Childhood Traditions in our one day in the snow. How a gravy boat signifies that you won’t be alone.
“Wow, that’s great,” Judd says after a moment. “So listen, I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll sleep at my place tonight so I won’t wake you up.”
“Okayyyy, but it’ll be leftover gravy by then,” I tell him in a singsong voice.
&nbs
p; “So it’ll be leftover gravy. Can we heat it up, do you think? Or is this magical, once-in-a-lifetime gravy?”
I come back into my right mind. “Of course we can heat it up,” I tell him.
He’s silent.
“Have a nice time tonight,” I say.
He says he will, and I should, too. And his voice is clipped a little bit, which only means there are probably five things going on in front of him, and I’m his friend as well as his fiancée so I understand, but suddenly I also remember that he hasn’t wanted to go to the diner in a very long time, and then I remember how we don’t often have time for those long, analyzing conversations now that we don’t have Dissect-A-Date to talk about. Which is crazy because Dissect-A-Date was about other people we were seeing romantically. But now I see that it was really about our friendship. We were having experiences so we could tell each other about them—it was all for the story.
And now we don’t have those stories.
What we have instead is that we’re together together. And we’re too tired for the everyday stories, or like me, we leave stuff out. I’m always trying to fit into a role with him. The confusing role of fiancée and good-friend-not-in-love.
Then, because I’ve gotten on some long train of thought that I can’t get off, I realize that he sleeps on the far side of the bed most of the time, not curled around me like I want, and he says it’s because I’m like sleeping next to a furnace and so he has to move over where the sheet is cooler, and then there are lots of times he jokes that he needs to go see his first-best pillow, but why doesn’t he bring his first-best pillow down here, which is supposedly home now. And he says well, then, because his second-best pillow would be the one he has upstairs, and then he’d miss that one, wouldn’t he?
But what he means is that this isn’t home.
I go sit on the couch and watch some stupid, nondescript romantic comedy that I can’t even remember the name of. And at the end, when the man is running through an airport to beg the woman not to get on the plane and leave him, the whole scene looks so implausible and ridiculous and stupid that I think these kinds of movies should come with a warning label on them.
NOT. REAL. LIFE.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Real life is that we are getting married.
Yes, we are.
I know this because it is now June, and we are at the beach house in Wellfleet for what is turning out to be Wedding Week, my father and Maggie in one bedroom, me in another, and Hendrix and Ariel down the hall. Their boys are sleeping in sleeping bags on the sunporch. The dining room of the beach house is filled with stacks of linen napkins and candlesticks and tea lights and china plates and a whole bunch of wedding presents, all in piles on the floor because this is a legitimate, real wedding, the kind you’d see in a movie or something. Planned and executed under the able and eager hand of Maggie Linnelle, rookie wedding planner extraordinaire.
Everybody is acting exactly like themselves. Judd is staying in a different house with his parents, and they all come over and sweetly ask if there is anything they can do. And Maggie, bless her, allows Daisy Kovac to sort the silverware, which has been sorted a thousand times.
And my father and Hendrix and Judd mow the grass and trim stuff, and Ariel sets out flowerpots everywhere. Makes sun tea in a big pitcher and puts it out on the porch. The boys rake the beach. There will be a rehearsal dinner clambake.
My chest hurts. I watch Judd laughing with my father and brother. And I notice that he doesn’t come over and sit with me on the porch, doesn’t drink iced tea with me. Doesn’t even look over and give me one of those fond, we’re-about-to-get-married looks I was expecting.
My heart is hurting so much that I may have a fatal disease, and that will be so sad if I don’t make it to my own wedding, I think. Maybe everyone will stay and have my memorial service on the beach instead.
Maggie, in her glory, is rushing around planning and executing things, calling this Wedding Central. Making phone calls, talking to relatives and friends who are in for the weekend, arranging brunches and hair appointments, manicures.
My father is trying very hard. Maybe he’s just happy that a man he likes has agreed to take me on. Or maybe he knows that I’m really dying, and he doesn’t want our last days to be spiteful. He comes and talks to me. He asks me bland questions about Mr. Swanky and about my job and about where Judd and I will live. He smiles more.
Maggie had told me that they are seeing a marriage counselor now. His idea. He wasn’t getting much out of individual therapy. It’s better for them to be working on things together. Again, his idea. He takes her out to breakfast on Saturday mornings now, and he remembers to ask her how she’s doing. He doesn’t get so mad when he hears the construction vehicles anymore. They sit on the porch together in the evenings, holding hands.
So that’s something. It’s huge, in fact.
Over and over I say to myself: “Everything is okay. I am fine.” I have heard that if you smile, it activates actual muscles in your face that improve your mood. Or something like that. Anyway, you should smile. Especially when you’re getting married.
The other day, I was rummaging through my purse for my checkbook so I could write a check for the flowers I’d ordered—and who should fall out onto my foot but little Gnomeo. I think he jumped out, if you want to know the truth.
I packed him in my suitcase to bring to the Cape. After the wedding, I should probably mail him back to Adam in the inter-office mail. I’ll seal him up and send him back.
I’ll write: “Misses Juliet.”
Finally, on Thursday, my friends arrive and move into their hotel rooms, and that night we go out joyriding to the beach, and then we walk along the sand, and I tell them that I am so crazy, and they say that everyone feels crazy in the forty-eight hours leading up to getting married. And I say no, this is not that, this is a different kind of crazy, this is a what-am-I-doing kind of crazy, and they say what kind of crazy did you think we were talking about, of course it’s the same crazy.
But no one understands.
I think the problem is the two wedding dresses, if you want to know the truth.
My two wedding dresses, which are hanging in the closet of my room. One for the Phronsie who belongs to Tenaj, and the other for the Phronsie who belongs to Maggie. But maybe that’s too simple. And ridiculous, because both of them are the same Phronsie. And both of them are me. And I have now had four months since buying those dresses to figure out which one I am wearing to the ceremony.
I have also had four months to write my vows for Judd, and I haven’t been able to do that either.
Finally I tell him we should just stick to the ceremony that the justice of the peace will read, and he reminds me that there isn’t really a justice of the peace; it’s going to be Russell, who got a special certificate or something from some kind of fake holy order church, and now he can do weddings. Which of course I already knew. I can’t concentrate on all the details. But anyway, it will be Russell marrying us. Russell with the great hair. And Russell, as Judd points out, is a musician and doesn’t know what to say, so we have to tell him.
Maybe he could just sing us a song. Sing us into our marriage, I say to Judd. Why not? Work some vows into a song format, and we’ll answer, like a call-and-response, and then we’ll be married. Signed, sealed, and delivered.
And Judd looks at me and then he purses his lips and goes out for a run, which is the way he deals with me lately. I don’t blame him. I wish I could go out for a run to get away from myself, too.
And then—in what feels like a flash—it’s Saturday. It’s a bright blue day, with a breeze and a string of clouds trailing in the sky, looking like fine little feathers. The marsh grasses are blowing back and forth. The kind of day people would love to have for a wedding day.
Maggie is at my bedroom door, telling me that Russell is downstairs, wanting copies of the vows. I go downstairs to the too-bright kitchen, wearing my kimono, and I break the news to him, tha
t I couldn’t write anything. I tried, I say. Couldn’t do it. Sorry.
“Maybe you could . . . write something now?” he says. He runs his hands through his glossy, beautiful hair, which is just how worried he is, because messing his hair up is a real sacrifice for him.
“Aren’t there some standard lines you can say?” I ask him.
“Well, Phronsie, there may well be, but you see, I’m not really a minister, so they didn’t let me in on the words they say in their special ceremonies,” he says. “And somehow I missed the memo that I was going to have to infiltrate their ranks, and now it appears that whoops, I’m all out of time.” He turns his palms up, empty-handed.
“Well, what did they say when you and Sarah got married?”
“Oh, who the fuck knows?” he says. He leans against the doorjamb and sighs. “You seriously don’t know what you want to say to Judd?”
“That is correct. I seriously do not know what I want to say to Judd.”
Maggie comes in, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “Russell,” she says. “Why don’t you come in here and let me know what you think of this fruit compote I just made? And we’ll give Phronsie some coffee and send her upstairs, and maybe she can come up with some words you can use.”
She is being so kind, Maggie is. I gratefully accept the coffee, and then I go back upstairs. She calls up after me, “Dear, the ceremony is at four thirty. So maybe put a tiny bit of a rush on it, if you can. Amber is coming by to do your hair at eleven thirty and it’s ten forty now.” I hear her say to Russell, “I don’t see how she’s going to do this if she hasn’t done it already. Let’s look on the internet. See if there’s something we could borrow.”
I have no idea who this Amber is, or what is supposed to happen to my hair. Maggie knows all this. By the time Amber comes, I have written these words: “Hi, Judd. You and I have known each other for practically our whole lives.”
But then what? I could talk about the great moments in our history together—the burping during circle time in kindergarten, the time I drove him to Canada when Karla Kristensen dumped him, and just listened to him blubber about her. When he drove me to the bus station the time I went to live with Tenaj. And the Dissect-A-Date moments. The diner. The eggplant fries.
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