Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  “I couldn’t.” Luke’s easy tone seethed with warning. “You gave me no choice.”

  The men broke out in catcalls. Kyle squeezed Peggy harder. “Now recite one of your poems, Sedgwick.”

  “Oh, do! We’ve never heard a single one!” Liddy seemed undisturbed that her husband had Peggy in a choke hold. Was it, too, a “Yankee thing”—an arcane prep school hazing ritual? If so, there was no sense in struggling. She tried to relax in Kyle’s clutches as the circle pressed Luke to recite.

  “Peggy, you make him,” Carrie Eaton called out.

  In an instant, Peggy was in the crosshairs of eight expectant stares and a ninth, enigmatic one—Luke’s. She was already sorry for teasing him and sure he would rather not be the center of attention, sure that these people hadn’t seen his poetry because Luke hadn’t wanted them to. Perhaps he thought his poems weren’t good enough. She should be a good pretend wife and bolster his confidence, the way a real wife would. “Why not read the one about the sunveined southern winds? It’s really nice—” She stopped herself, too late.

  “You mean,” Luke said, “the one on my desk, upstairs, in my study?”

  Hubbard chose this moment to release Peggy, and she stumbled forward and felt one of her heels grind into Luke’s foot.

  Luke stepped back. “That poem isn’t finished,” he said.

  Tiffany called, “Make one up!”

  Peggy felt as if she’d just thrown Luke to the lions. These were Luke’s friends, weren’t they? Couldn’t they see he was miserable? She wanted to tell them to stop it and leave him alone, that she’d made a terrible mistake, that she hadn’t meant to go through his papers.

  But Luke seemed to have recovered. “Good idea,” he said. “I’ll make one up. A poem for you, Peggy.”

  All had been forgiven, it seemed. Peggy thought, with a little thrill, that Luke might say something beautiful to her. After all, he had been there for the look they’d just exchanged.

  Luke gazed off at a point in the distance, started to speak, then frowned, paused for a slug of his drink, and began again:

  Single men, I have something to say

  Don’t you make my mistake, or you’ll pay:

  At the bar, stop and think,

  Just say no to that drink

  Lest you wake with a wife the next day.

  He bowed, and the crowd applauded, the men slapping Luke on the back and the women crowding around him with cries of, “Bravo!” and, “How did you do that?” Peggy stood back, stunned.

  When the ruckus died away, Luke spoke up. “You people didn’t understand a single word I just said, did you?”

  The crowd burst into laughter, and Peggy knew Luke was right: His limerick had gone over everyone’s head but hers, as had been his intention. He knew Peggy understood: She was nothing but a drunken mistake, and any attraction between the two of them was a figment of Peggy’s poor, foolish imagination.

  EIGHT

  November

  Dr. Kaplan had pronounced it “a textbook stim.” Bex’s retrieval procedure had yielded eleven mature eggs, which had been whisked away to the lab overnight with what Josh was euphemistically calling his donation. This morning, the doctor had called to report that three eggs had fertilized. Assuming they stayed healthy, they would be ready to be placed in Bex’s uterus in another three to five days. But standing in Josh’s apartment, pointing at the sofa, Bex radiated joy, her olive skin glowing as if she were already pregnant.

  “Start with that. Torch it, drive a stake through its heart, whatever you have to do.” Behind Bex, the men-with-a-van Peggy had hired to bring over her things seemed puzzled. “I mean, get rid of it.” Bex eyed Josh’s coffee table. “You’re next,” she told it.

  “But Josh won’t have any living room furniture,” Peggy pointed out as the two movers lifted Josh’s frat-house couch, a herd of dust balls underneath flying to the four corners of the earth, and hefted it sideways out the door. Peggy could hear them stumping down all five flights of stairs.

  “We’ll buy a new one.” Bex stared at the empty space where the couch had been. “I can still sense its evil spirit.” She stood on one foot, resting the other on the doomed coffee table. “You know what we should sell at the store? Ritual products. Like candles that smudge away the demonic traces left behind by ugly furniture. One-Night-Stand-Erasing Linen Water. Bad-Neighbor-Begone Body Lotion with Garlic and Citronella.”

  Peggy laughed. “A home fragrance called Exorcism. Which I’d be the first to buy for the Sedgwick House.”

  “You don’t really think it’s haunted.”

  “Not literally.”

  Still, it had been two weekends since the wedding reception, two weekends of pervasive malaise in the house, four mornings in the kitchen drinking Miss Abigail’s burned coffee while Luke hid behind the newspaper, hours of waiting in vain for him to apologize for treating her so shabbily at the party. The longer he’d kept silent, the more she’d begun to fume. She’d spent most of her time on the third floor, opening and cataloging an endless flow of wedding gifts, then carefully repacking each vase, candlestick, and teapot into its tissue-lined box, which she moved to the empty room next to Luke’s. When the year and their marriage were over, she and Luke would have to return each gift to its giver. She wrote thank-you notes on stationery Luke’s great-aunt unearthed for her in the house—the very same stationery, Miss Abigail said, that Luke’s mother had used when she was a new bride. Peggy felt more a fraud with every word she put down on the cream-colored paper. “Dear Liddy, thank you for the lovely sterling cocktail shaker. Luke and I look forward to having you and Kyle over for drinks soon.”

  This past Sunday, just to get away from Luke and thank-you notes, she’d brought an alarm clock and woke in time to go to church with Miss Abigail—the meeting house, Luke’s great-aunt called it—but it wasn’t much of a respite. Peggy had worn a pious-seeming black dress but still had felt conspicuous as she followed Miss Abigail to the first-row Sedgwick pew and when, at the beginning of the service, a worshipper Peggy didn’t recognize stood up, said he had an announcement to make, and welcomed Mrs. Peggy Sedgwick to the congregation. At the coffee hour afterward, Peggy had smiled woodenly as cheery townsfolk shook her hand, congratulated her, and then looked around for Luke.

  “You know my great-nephew. Not one for church. But”—Miss Abigail would lean in toward Peggy and the stranger, as if conspiring—“I’m counting on his wife to talk sense into him.” And the anxiety would rub itself, catlike, against the inside of Peggy’s lungs. Even if Luke had cared to address her in anything besides monosyllables, she was the last person to get him back to the First Congregational Church of New Nineveh. Beyond a few weddings and funerals, Peggy had no experience with organized religion. Her father, an athiest, raised Jewish, hadn’t set foot in a temple since his thirteenth birthday; her mother was vaguely Christian. Peggy had a passing familiarity with Abraham and Isaac and Jonah and the whale but had felt like an impostor stumbling her way through the hymns, reciting from her program what everybody else knew by heart: “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” After she’d drunk the communion grape juice (not the wine she’d expected), she’d accidentally dropped her thimble-size glass. It hadn’t broken, but it had bounced on the meeting house’s wooden floor with a sharp clackety-clack. At least she hadn’t had to sip from a shared cup. She rubbed her nose, which tickled at the thought of catching a stranger’s cold.

  “Tell me about it. The man hasn’t dusted in years.” Bex walked to her husband’s window, which faced the building across the street. “And you wonder why I don’t let him move in.”

  Josh’s phone rang, and Bex skipped over to it. “Hi, Mom!

  Can you believe it? I’m trying not to get excited, but I’m excited!”

  “I’ll go get us lunch.” Peggy walked two doors down to 5J, Bex’s apartment, the one Peggy had once shared and would officially begin sharing again today, after having slept he
re for the past three weeks on nights Brock wasn’t traveling.

  Nicki took a drag on what had to be the day’s twentieth cigarette and blew smoke sideways out the cracked-open car window. She tapped a column of ash into Luke’s empty travel mug, which she held steady between her thighs. With her left hand, she caressed the gearshift.

  “I drink out of that cup.” Luke punched the radio buttons from a Crazy Carl Kirkendall carpet commercial to a staticky country song to WNPR National Public Radio. He glanced at the sun-cracked dashboard, noting that the Volvo, twenty-five years old and inherited from his father, had long passed two hundred thousand miles. It also had less than a quarter tank of gas.

  Nicki let the smoke curl provocatively from her nostrils. She looked exactly as she had the first time he’d met her—the hair, the lips, the suggestive fingertips. When she spoke, her words trailed the smoke out into the curiously warm afternoon. “Are you staying over?”

  A mint-condition Big Healey convertible roared past in the left lane. As the car flashed by, Luke caught a glimpse of the driver: silver-haired, arm draped across the back of an empty passenger seat. A man enjoying his freedom; a man who, unlike Luke, hadn’t spent half the day driving his girlfriend to a particular yarn store in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to pick up a certain type of special yarn that looked like any other yarn, nothing worth crossing the state line for.

  Nicki was still teasing the gearshift, stroking her index finger lightly up, over the top, and down again. It was doing nothing for him. But then, none of Nicki’s old tricks was working these days. “I can’t stay over,” he told her. They were on the interstate, ten miles from Nicki’s place in South Norwalk. It would take him an hour to get back home, and he had a volatile market to contend with, storm windows to put up, half a dozen unfinished poems languishing on his desk, and the inexorable sense of time passing—not just the afternoon, but the earth itself cooling at the core while the surface melted; the universe stretching to its limits and preparing to fold back in on itself. He thought of the look he’d exchanged with Peggy at his great-aunt’s party, how time had come to a standstill, until he’d let his temper get the better of him in such uncharacteristic and unseemly fashion.

  “I’m out of Merits.” Nicki stubbed out her cigarette and dropped it in his cup.

  Luke wondered how he’d tolerated her smoking habit for so many years. He took the next off-ramp, drove into a Hess station, and got out to pump the gas. He knew full well Nicki assumed he’d go inside for her, but he played oblivious until she gave up hope and climbed out.

  He probably wouldn’t have called Peggy, but the sign at the pump forbidding the use of cell phones seemed, contrarily, like an invitation. Luke took his from his pocket and dialed Peggy at the shop. After four rings, a woman he recognized only as the wrong one answered. Nicki came back outside, taking a cigarette from the new pack. Luke hastily pressed the “End” button.

  “Who are you calling?”

  Damn. “Abby.” He didn’t know why he’d wanted to speak to Peggy, only that suddenly she had seemed a soothing antidote to Nicki’s hard, glittering toughness. He shouldn’t have attacked Peggy like that at the reception. Nicki would have given Luke the finger, told him to fuck off, but Peggy was sensitive. He opened the passenger door, holding his palm above Nicki’s fiery head in case she got too close to the door frame. He climbed in and shut his own door. The Volvo smelled of gasoline.

  Luke eased the car back onto the highway and drove for several miles without saying anything, listening to a current-affairs show out of Hartford, smoke swirling around his head. He passed the bloody carcass of a deer, twisted and broken at the edge of the road.

  Luke turned off the radio. “This isn’t working.”

  Nicki coughed. “What’s not working?”

  “We. Us. This.” He didn’t want to look at her. If the Medusa head weren’t already there, it would be after he said his piece. “You’ve meant a lot to me, and we’ve had our good times, but—”

  She laughed. “We just got back together.” She flicked more ash. “We have a good two months till our next falling-out.”

  “No.” As if in punctuation, something—a pebble, probably—struck the front windshield with a small, sharp crack.

  “I give you three weeks before you come knocking on my door,” Nicki said.

  The pebble had left a pock in the windshield just big enough to make the glass vulnerable to cracking in the coming winter cold. Yet another thing to fix. “Not this time, Nicki.”

  There it was—the Medusa face. Luke stopped being preoccupied with the windshield ding long enough to see the amusement drain from Nicki’s eyes and fury flush her cheeks. He hadn’t planned to have this talk right this minute, here in the car, but it might well be the ideal location: private, contained, and completely within his control. Just in case she got the urge to throw it, though, he casually took the travel cup and slid it underneath his seat.

  “It’s her,” Nicki hissed. “You’re—what? In love? All torn up inside about cheating on your wife? Starting to take this marriage a little too seriously?”

  He had been about to say his decision had nothing to do with Peggy; that the simple fact was, he and Nicki were incompatible everywhere but in bed, had been incompatible almost from the day they’d met; that they had stayed together far too long, and both of them knew it. But he wondered if there might be a grain of truth in what she was saying.

  Before he could form his thoughts into a coherent sentence, he heard a small sniffle, and when he saw tears in Nicki’s eyes, he was stunned. Nicki didn’t cry. Not when they’d broken up in the past. Not during her sister Heather’s breast cancer scare. Not at Field of Dreams on cable.

  “You never asked me to marry you,” she said in a pathetic, watery whimper that made it clear he was a monster.

  “But you knew the rules!” He made a conscious effort to dial back the defensiveness in his voice. “You knew I didn’t want to get married,” he began again. “Not to anyone. I was honest from the start. And you didn’t want to get married, either. You’ve insisted ever since our first date.” He was doubting himself, second-guessing what he had or hadn’t said; whether in five years he’d unintentionally led Nicki to believe he’d felt anything he didn’t. Gentlemanly behavior was as much encoded in his DNA as were the Sedgwick nose and the Sedgwick propensity toward heart afflictions, and it upset Luke to think he might have made a misstep along the line.

  Nicki had turned toward the window, her shoulders shaking. He stopped in front of her building and cut the ignition.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  She stiffened, still facing the window.

  “I can get an annulment in ninety days.” He felt as if he were choking, as if Nicki’s yarn were unspooling in the backseat and twining around his throat. “We’ll elope and move to New York or Paris, in time, and I’ll write poetry and you can work on your art.”

  She turned back around, tears suspended on her face, tiny pale crescents underneath her flared nostrils, her eyebrows furrowed in…Luke couldn’t tell. Not grief. Definitely not happiness.

  He had no desire to marry Nicole Pappas. But if she says yes, I’ll do it. I’ll do it because it’s the right thing to do.

  Nicki opened her mouth, shut it, and blinked away her tears. Luke realized what she looked like—as if she’d been caught in a lie. The same look he would have had on his face when he was sixteen and his great-aunt had nailed him to the wall on the flower boxes. Then a greater truth dawned. She doesn’t want to marry me. I’ve put her on the spot.

  Nicki worked a cigarette out from her pack.

  “Don’t light that in my car,” he said.

  The spell was broken.

  Nicki gathered her special yarn from the backseat. “So long, Luke. It’s been fun.” She swung her long legs onto the pavement. “Have a nice life.” She stepped out onto the sidewalk, not bothering to close the car door behind her.

  Luke watched her strut away, her body t
o lust after, her auburn hair dazzling in the sun. He reached down under his seat for the ash-filled travel mug. He leaned across to shut the door and turned the car back toward New Nineveh.

  Peggy walked to West Seventy-ninth and Amsterdam and bought avocado-and-cheese sandwiches for herself and Bex at their favorite organic lunch place. Here in New York, the change in seasons was just beginning, and there were still days—today was one—where it was warm enough to sit outside without a coat. Suddenly too hungry to wait, Peggy decided to eat her lunch in the little park behind the Museum of Natural History. She made herself comfortable on an empty bench and unwrapped her sandwich, swinging her feet. On summer weekends, this place was full of museum-goers, but on a weekday afternoon in fall, things were quiet. A nanny and two children walked by. A homeless woman slept on another bench; her dog, curled on top of a pile of rags and trinkets, raised its head as a man in an untucked shirt and jeans went past, chattering animatedly to an invisible companion. Peggy observed this man with mild interest until it became clear he was talking not to himself, but into an electronic device hooked, cyborglike, over his ear.

  The cyborg stopped in front of her bench. “Well, look who’s here!”

  Midbite, Peggy looked him over. It appeared he was trying to communicate with her face-to-face.

  “The watch, remember?” He held out his wrist, and Peggy recognized him as the man she’d met three weeks ago at Brat-tie’s. He had a beard—not a beard, exactly, more a precision-trimmed dark stubble. On his belt, a blue electronic light blinked from inside a leather case. He said, “I’m Jeremy.”

  Peggy swallowed and introduced herself, shielding her mouth with her hand in case she had alfalfa sprouts in her teeth. She made room for him on the bench. He seemed to be expecting her to.