Dress Rehearsal

by Jennifer O'Connell

  “So now what?” I curled up on my side, bringing my knees into my chest to try and shake the morning chill.

  “You want to go skiing?” she suggested, her voice hopeful. Paige’s parents owned a motel near Okemo, and whenever she needed to clear her head, Paige’s first instinct was to hit the mountain. It wasn’t a big deal to take off for a ski weekend when we were in college and the only thing we were skipping was an afternoon drinking milkshakes in Schneider Center, but if Paige was willing to cancel her Saturday showings, she really needed to get away.

  “Today?”

  “Now. I’ll swing by and pick you up. I already told my parents we were coming, I gave my appointments to Sheila and I’m picking up Robin in half an hour.”

  “I don’t know.” I peeked my head out from under the covers and watched the stiff, frozen branches swaying in the wind outside my window. Last night’s unexpected snowfall was still piled up on the windowsill a good three inches.

  “Do you have to go to the boutique? I thought this was an off-Saturday.”

  The boutique was only open two Saturdays a month, mostly to encourage couples to schedule tastings during the week, but also because the kitchen was crazy on Saturdays and the last thing I needed was for clients to hear Maria screaming obscenities at an uncooperative meringue or unruly floral tape – even if our clients weren’t fluent in Italian, it was obvious that Maria wasn’t exactly reciting the Hail Mary. Although I usually went in every Saturday anyway, even when I didn’t actually have anything to do in the kitchen besides get in the way, the truth is, once the cakes were selected, my role in the process was over.

  But it wasn’t work I was thinking about at that moment – it was my toasty bed and the fact that it was barely seven thirty in the morning and the last thing I wanted to do was get up and drive to Vermont in the back seat of Paige’s car. I tried to remember the last time I saw my ski pants, and thought I recalled seeing them somewhere in a Rubbermaid tub in my closet along with my gloves and thermal long johns. As long as I didn’t have to go searching around in my basement storage locker for all my ski gear, I could probably be ready by eight thirty.

  “Okay, I’m in. Come by in an hour, I’ll be out front.” It was the least I could do, given the circumstances.

  Whether out of guilt on our part, or denial on Paige’s, or the fact that we were given explicit instructions upon entering her car not to mention Steve, no one brought up what transpired the night before in Paige’s living room, or why we were currently passing through Contoocook, New Hampshire.

  “Hey, I forgot to tell you that my editor may be calling.” Robin handed me a blueberry muffin from the Dunkin Donuts bag in her lap.

  “What’s she want with me?”

  “Apparently she’s heard of you, or, at least she’s heard of your cakes. She wants to talk with you about an idea for a book.”

  I caught Paige eyeing me in the rearview mirror as I broke off a piece of the muffin, and I quickly scanned the back seat for errant crumbs and my apple juice bottle. Paige always reminded us that in her business, a car was akin to a mobile office and should not be mistaken for a traveling receptacle.

  “What kind of book?” I asked, making sure the apple juice cap was screwed on tight.

  “She said a sort of coffee table book, lots of big glossy photos of your cakes organized by season or something like that.”

  “And this is something she thinks people would buy? A book of cake photographs?”

  “Are you kidding me? People would eat it up.”

  “No pun intended, of course.” Paige rolled her eyes at me in the mirror and when I glanced down at her hands on the steering wheel I noticed a bare finger where her engagement ring once took up residence.

  Robin didn’t seem to notice. “Of course. We all know that Lauren’s cakes are made more for viewing than eating, otherwise people would be ordering their cakes from the Stop & Shop bakery section instead of shelling out big bucks for something that sits on a table and gets stale while guests do the electric slide and the chicken dance.”

  “It’s nice to know you hold my profession in such high regard. And there may be a hustle or two, but I can assure you, there’s never an electric slide or a chicken dance.” I balled up my napkin and tossed it at Robin.

  “Hey, no throwing your garbage around my car,” Paige scolded. “And I have Wet Ones in the glove compartment so you can wipe your hands off, I don’t want your greasy fingerprints on my leather seats.”

  If I felt bad earlier about Steve and Paige, the car ride to Vermont was reminding me why Operation Save Paige took place. I knew for a fact that Steve’s Subaru Outback had a collection of old Burger King wrappers and a few French fries under the back seats, not to mention half a dozen saliva-covered tennis balls from his dog, Clyde.

  “I’m a respected pastry chef,” I reminded Robin.

  “Come on, Lauren. You haven’t been a pastry chef since Maria took over. You’re like a florist and Maria’s like a gardener – she makes things and you make things look beautiful.” Robin turned around to face me. “And I have nothing against florists, in fact I wish I was on their receiving end more often, so don’t get all sensitive on us.”

  Robin turned back and started flipping through the CDs Paige kept in a holder velcro’d to the visor. While she told us about her lawyer’s latest attempts to get the lawsuit dismissed, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Robin said. Maria was a gardener and I was a florist – what the hell did that mean? It didn’t sound like an insult, but then why did Robin’s comment make me feel uncomfortable, like there was something in the comparison that didn’t exactly put me in a favorable light? It was almost as if she knew about the burnt cakes and the egg shells in the batter.

  “So did he, Lauren?” Paige asked, stopping at a red light.

  “Did he what?”

  “Did the divorce lawyer call you back to reschedule your date?”

  There was a message on my machine from Charlie when I got home from Paige’s last night, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate a call from a drunken woman at two o’clock in the morning. Besides, even though I wanted to call him back, I was afraid if he made any sort of offer for a late night booty call, I’d take him up on it.

  “He left a message about getting together tonight, but since I’ll be in a different state, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  “I love it - an independent woman blowing off a guy for a weekend with her girlfriends.” Robin slid a Melissa Etheridge CD into the player. “We’ve come a long way, baby.”

  I wasn’t sure we’d come a long way, but I knew that we were driving three hours to get away from guys we’d be pretending not to think about all weekend. Only it wasn’t just an ex-husband, ex-fiance and a lawyer with ambiguous intent that we’d left behind, it was also an ex-boyfriend who’d picked out the same wedding cake as me.

  “Neil came by the boutique the other day,” I said quietly, testing out the words to see how ridiculous I sounded.

  Paige’s boot immediately fell onto the brake peddle and my forehead slammed into the driver’s seat head rest. “Are you kidding us? What’d he want?”

  “To pick out a cake with his fiancé.”

  Paige promptly stepped on the accelerator and I was thrown back against my seat. “Thank god. I thought you were going to say he came back to reclaim you or something dumb like that.”

  “Why would that be such a bad thing?” I asked, pretending to be fascinated by the tractor trailer out my window. It was an eighteen wheeler, after all.

  Robin twisted around to face me. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Besides, Maria told me that Charlie seemed like a great guy.” Paige nodded at me in the rear view mirror.

  “She did?” I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of Maria discussing my love life with Paige behind my back. But I had to admit, I also found it quite disturbing that Maria seemed to like a guy she glimpsed through the kitchen door better than she liked me.

  �
�Yeah. She said you were all swooning and stuff after he asked you out. Now, I don’t even know the guy, but the fact that Charlie got you all worked up over just one date tells me that he’s your man.”

  I stared raptly at the writing on the side of the trailer, Butch’s Moving & Storage. “But what if Neil did come back to reclaim me? What if I wanted to be reclaimed?”

  Robin smirked at me. “What are you, a mitten in the lost and found?”

  “I just meant that maybe Neil and I were meant to be but I was too young to know it before.”

  “I’m sorry, I have to put a stop to this right now.” Paige flipped on the blinker and pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. She unclasped her seat belt and turned to face me and Robin, the expression on her face was nothing short of exasperated. “Is it possible for us to go even one day without creating upheaval or disarray in our lives? Can we please just go skiing and try to have some semblance of normalcy and order for two lousy days?”

  Robin and I remained quiet and appropriately chastised.

  “Well?” Paige asked again. “Is it?”

  “Just two days, right?” Robin quipped. “Because any more than that and I’ll have to think about it.”

  Paige stuck her tongue out at Robin and fastened her seat belt. The rest of the ride was as normal and orderly as we could manage on six hours of sleep.

  By the time we parked the car and made it to the lodge, it was almost one o’clock. Paige was anxious to get started, so she gave us our marching orders and told us to meet her by the South Ridge Quad in fifteen minutes. Robin and I went to rent skis and Paige set off to buy the lift tickets.

  When Robin and I met up with Paige again, we were awkwardly balancing poles and skis in our arms while we struggled to walk in so many layers we looked like Michelin Men with goggles. Paige, on the other hand, was all business. In her black stretch bibbed ski pants, mirrored wraparound sunglasses, and a red and white microfiber ski jacket that had more strategically placed meshed vents than the space shuttle, Paige was ready to ski the mountain into submission. But with the tempting smell of hamburgers cooking on the lodge’s outdoor grill, the only thing I wanted to submit to was lunch.

  “Ready to go?” Paige asked, stabbing her poles in the snow while Robin and I snapped our boots into our bindings.

  “Just a sec.” I reached for the hat I’d stuffed in my coat’s inside pocket and pulled it on, making sure my ears were completely covered.

  “What the hell is that?” Robin asked, reaching over and flinging a pompom hanging from one of the floppy points on my fleece hat.

  “It was a gift from Maria a few years ago.”

  “You know she was just playing a joke on you. She never expected you to really go out in public looking like a court jester.”

  “Or a motley fool,” Paige threw in.

  “Well, I looked in all my closet bins and couldn’t find any other hat. I wasn’t about to go downstairs into the storage room at eight o’clock in the morning and start rummaging through boxes looking for something worthy of the Kate Spade ski team.”

  Paige shook her head at me. “If you moved into a bigger apartment that actually had closet space, you wouldn’t have to keep half your stuff in a musty old basement along with your neighbor’s taxidermy collection and sixteen pairs of mildewed army boots.”

  I ignored them both, straightening my hat and pulling my goggles down over my eyes so that everything around me took on a muted gold tinge. “Are we going skiing or are we just going to play pick on Lauren all afternoon?”

  Paige worked us hard, dragging our butts all over the mountain and down trails that Robin and I had no business navigating without the assistance of either a burly ski patrol or a beefy Saint Bernard with a keg of brandy tied around its neck. After two hours playing catch-up with Paige, my shins were aching and my thighs were burning. I figured this was Paige’s way of putting us through some perverse form of penance.

  “Doesn’t it make you feel alive?” Paige asked, as the triple chairlift slammed into the back of my knees and forced my ass onto the icy seat.

  As our chair drifted quietly above Timberline trail, Robin reached over the safety bar and struggled to unbuckle her right ski boot. When the clip finally released with a loud pop, she let out a sigh of relief and looked over Paige’s head at me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  I nodded. “Beer.”

  “Oh come on, don’t quit on me yet,” Paige protested.

  As our chair approached the drop off area, I placed my gloved hands inside the pole straps and prepared to unload. “Sorry, Susie Chapstick. You can keep going, but our day on the slopes has come to an end.”

  We watched Paige ski off on her own in the direction of Jackson Gore Peak, and then Robin and I raced down Upper Tomahawk toward the Base Lodge with more energy and enthusiasm than we’d managed to muster all day.

  After parking our skis and poles on the racks outside, Robin and I found a table upstairs in the loft area of Sitting Bull and ordered a pitcher of beer and a plate of Macho Nachos. A grungy looking guy in a poncho was tuning his guitar on the stage below us.

  “How do you think she’s holding up?” Robin asked me before devouring a handful of cheesy chips.

  “She’s acting fine, a little too fine if you ask me. I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet. Maybe she’s in denial.”

  “The ring’s gone.”

  “I know. So is the heart bracelet he got her for Valentine’s day.”

  Robin shrugged. “I think coming here was a good idea. She needed to get away from the city.”

  In college, we were used to Paige dragging us up to Vermont, and we’d usually get in a good six weekends of skiing before the snow gave way to dirty brown patches and hanging out on a campus that was coming back to life was more tempting than a three hour car ride. Back then, ski weekends seemed like more fun, or maybe our expectations were just so low that we didn’t realize guys who took pride in the homemade craftsmanship of their beer bongs and dotted their sentences with dude like grammatical confetti weren’t exactly the cream of the crop. Still, we had a hell of a time lowering our standards. Now the lodge seemed filled with families, with parents trying to wrangle their kids or wiggle them out of ski clothes, or young professionals like us who saw skiing as a two-day respite before returning to reality.

  It seemed as if every year since graduation we ventured to Okemo less and less. Whether it was a growing lack of tolerance for sub-zero temperatures and the skyrocketing price of lift tickets or just the reality that Paige and I had fewer weekends away from work, our ski weekends had become fewer and far between. In fact, this was our first trip all season.

  Eight years ago Neil asked me to move to DC right after we’d spent a weekend at Okemo with Paige, Robin and Mark. From the drive up that Friday night, to the Sunday we got home and Neil told me we had reservations at L’Espalier, I’d sensed that he was up to something. I never suspected anything bad, he wasn’t the kind of guy to sneak around behind my back, but I never thought he was planning a romantic proposal of sorts, either. It wasn’t that Neil didn’t make romantic overtures, but more that his romantic overtures were pretty standard – red roses on Valentine’s day, a special dinner on my birthday, that sort of thing. Asking me to move away with him on a Sunday night after a ski weekend, that wasn’t something I’d thought he had in his repertoire.

  After four hours of skiing and a three hour ride back to Boston, all I wanted was a hot shower, my fuzzy slippers and a made for TV movie. Instead, I changed into a pair of black wool pants, threw on a black turtleneck sweater and caught a cab to the restaurant to meet Neil looking like I was embarking for a funeral instead of a romantic French restaurant.

  Now, you don’t just decide to take someone to L’Espalier on a Sunday night without a degree of forethought and a plan. So, when the maitre d’ showed us to our table I was thinking one of two things. Either Neil was going to ask me to marry him, which after three years was perfectly lo
gical. Or he was going to make some sort of monumental announcement, like that he’d decided to go ahead and apply to business school (the measurement of monumental obviously being in the eye of the beholder).

  During dinner Neil kept the conversation going while I attempted to discern if the odd creases around his blazer pocket were in fact the outline of a small velvet box or just a sign of a poor dry cleaner. When dessert arrived and he still hadn’t told me anything, I almost suspected I’d dip my spoon into my soufflé and emerge with a few Grand Marnier covered carats. But when neither the diamond emerged nor did Neil drop to his knees, I was relieved and started to enjoy the end of our meal. And then he told me about his job offer in DC.

  It’s not like we never talked about going to DC together, so Neil’s announcement didn’t come as a total surprise. I didn’t run from the table screaming in fear at the thought of losing my boyfriend, or stand up and do the happy dance that finally our long-laid plans were coming to fruition. Our conversations about DC had been more of the gee, Georgetown has amazing bars variety than in the league of we need a two bedroom apartment with air conditioning in a decent school district.

  After Neil moved, I felt a kind of survivor’s guilt. After all, when you boiled it down, I hadn’t simply told Neil I didn’t want to move to DC. I’d in essence told him that I didn’t want to be with him anymore, that while he was good enough to date and sleep with when he was a short T ride away, once our relationship required any sort of sacrifice or effort, I was going to take a pass and send him on his way alone. Did I cry in the weeks after he moved? You bet I did.

  Were they tears of loss and a profound realization that my soul mate was hundreds of miles away? Not exactly. They were tears that sprung from the well of failure, or more accurately, my fear of failure. In a perverse form of universal retribution, I was laid off from my job at a small ad agency the week after Neil left. I was living proof that what goes around comes around, but at least I wasn’t heartbroken and alone in a strange city. I knew I’d gotten the better end of the deal - I still had my friends and all the familiar surroundings of Bean Town.