With This Ring, I'm Confused

by Kristin Billerbeck

  “Like your father gave us on this ugly house? Those kinds of options? Where you really have none. Someone else lays out the path of your life, and you just follow it. Those kinds of options?”

  “My father’s gift has nothing to do with this. We can rent it out. Hire a real wedding coordinator. Will that make you happy? To have my family completely pushed out of the way?”

  Hire a coordinator? Is it just me, or did that sound decidedly like Elaine Novak? “I can’t hire a coordinator.”

  “Why not?”

  Deep breath. “I’m broke, actually. When I bought half the house from Kay, I wasn’t aware of the tax bills that come twice a year. Outrageous, disgusting, California real-estate tax bills! Then I loaned someone some money that I probably won’t see again. I put money down for the photographer and for the swing band before you changed your mind, and a deposit for the catering, and well, it turns out that I’m broke, Kevin. The dress fairy dropped my gown out of nowhere at the wedding shop, or I wouldn’t even have a dress to get married in. Doesn’t all that sound like some kind of omen to you?”

  “It sounds like small bumps in the highway. Typical for what any Christian marriage might have to go through. Do you want to get married or not?” Kevin’s normally calm voice is sounding agitated.

  “I thought I did. But being married doesn’t just mean being married anymore. Now it means giving up everything I know to be married.”

  “I’ll be home tomorrow. Don’t do anything rash. You tend to react, and we’re in no position for you to react.”

  “Kevin, your mother doesn’t like me.” And I’m not necessarily fond of her either. “Your sister was basically trying to sabotage our wedding by turning me into a modern-day Scarlett O’Hara, and where have you been through all this? Okay, saving babies is a good excuse, but is this a battle I’ll have alone my entire life? I’m not sure I’m up for that.”

  “Can’t you just put these meal decisions off until I get home? I haven’t had time to think about any of that.”

  “This isn’t about a meal. Or even a house, Kevin. This is about your family and their very strong opinions about things that are our business. Is this my future?”

  “If my mother’s objections were about your character or your faith, I might listen. But there’s history here. She just wants to make sure she’s respected for what she does well. And she plans parties well. You must understand, my mother and father have set up a life for themselves that works. They basically see themselves as perfect and all others as inferior. Everything they do is to prove their superiority.”

  And we are supposed to support them in this? So not soothing me.

  “Okay, so if I was a psychologist, I’d have a great case study. But I’m a patent attorney, and I don’t want to play these games for the rest of my life. You’re not answering my question, and it’s a legitimate question. Is this woman going to rule my future?”

  “You’re a Christian. Act like it, Ashley. Suppress your anger, and learn to get along. I’ll see you tomorrow, and this will all blow over. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  I gasp again. “You think standing up for myself is not being a Christian? Why don’t you just stamp ‘Welcome’ across my forehead for the doormat y’all seem to want me to be. Don’t you see your whole family has insinuated themselves into our plans?”

  “So would you rather live with Kay the rest of your days and see your Tupperware numbered? Where a big Saturday night is playing Xbox with other engineers in another dateless soiree? Is that what you want? To end this?”

  No, I want you, I think to myself, as much as I hate to admit it at this moment. But if I don’t measure up to your family, what then?

  “Do you love me, Ashley?” His gravelly voice, always tired and stressed, has such emotional depth. I’m drawn in, unable to withstand the pull.

  “I do love you, Kevin. So much. But this is really hard.” I’m so confused. Is love enough? With Christ, I can do all things, but Kevin’s family! That’s asking me to stretch a little far, isn’t it Lord? I’m not made of elastic.

  “The chief of surgery is waiting for me.”

  “You always have to go. Every time I have to deal with some wed ding crisis, or life crisis, you’re off to a call.” I feel guilty immediately. He’s saving babies. I’m fighting with his mother over portobello mushrooms.

  “I’ll be home tomorrow,” he repeats.

  “I’ll finish the flowers tomorrow with your sister before you get here. But I won’t like it.” One more day. I can handle one more day of meowing and keeping my claws bared. “We’ll talk when you get home.”

  “You’re my fiancée still?” Kevin asks.

  “I love you, Kevin. If they lock us up, let’s be in the same padded cell.” After I get off the phone, I scream a good scream. Worthy of any mental health ward.

  28

  I trudge into my house after 11:00 p.m. on this endless day, and Rhett greets me at the door. He’s all slobber and love. “Hey, Rhett, I wish everyone felt that way about me today,” I say as I toss my keys on the designated “landing spot.”

  “Where have you been?” Kay comes out of the kitchen like an angry housewife. Why is she even still up? A pot or pan out of place?Down, Ashley.

  “At work.” There’s a tinge of duh! in my voice. But my patience is up and gone by now.

  “Kevin called here. Did he find you?”

  “I talked to him. So are you still mad at me too?”

  “I just don’t know why you need to be in everybody’s business.” She wipes her hands on a towel and folds it. “If I want to see Matt, I will. If I want to hold a grudge against Simon, it’s my choice. It seems to me you have enough trouble of your own to worry about.”

  “Did you have to come out of the kitchen for this?”

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind.” Kay takes a swig of a disgusting green concoction she’s made.

  “I just think living with this secret for twenty years has to be harder than saying it out loud.” I pat Rhett’s head. “I was wrong. Sue me. I don’t even want to know anymore. I don’t have the bandwidth.”

  “No, I’ve decided to tell you, because I know you’ll watch television just to find out what it is.”

  K. She’s got me there.

  “Do I need to sit for this? Because I have had enough of sit-down-type conversations for the day. If it’s deep, can we skim the waters?”

  Then, without warning, she launches into confession-speak. Apparently I look like Maury Povich tonight, and she’s ready for the DNA test. They say confession is good for the soul, but mine can’t take any more today. Jesus’ shoulders are so much bigger than mine. I pick up her conversation at “Then, when I turned nine—”

  “Chapter one. I am born,” I say, quoting Dickens and, of course, Gone with the Wind.

  “Ashley, do you want to hear this or not?”

  “At the moment, no.” I bury my head in my hands. “I’m sorry, Kay. Consider me a terrible friend, but it’s been such a day.” I want to break into my own sob story about inheriting a promotion I don’t want, ticking off my would-be-mother-in-law from the dark side, getting the ugliest house alive as a gift in a state I don’t want to live in, and of course, hearing that my ex-boyfriend is marrying his damsel in distress. But I keep quiet.

  “It’s always a day for you, Ashley. Sit down. I’m telling you my story,” Kay announces.

  I plunk down on the couch and put on my best Oprah listening expression. Rhett hops on the sofa next to me, and we prepare for the story that has held Kay captive in her controlled world for years. Just by her strained look, I can tell even reciting the story is difficult for her. I just don’t get Kay. She could plan a singles retreat for three hundred people without so much as an anxious moment, but this issue that might hold the reason for her carefully planned world can’t be spoken.

  “So after my mother’s third marriage, when I was fourteen, we moved to Louisiana. There was a store owner there who gav
e me a lagniappe when my mother bought a drying rack for dishes. I think he could tell we were dirt-poor, because my shoes were too small, and I was walking on the heels because my feet didn’t fit into them anymore.” She laughs at this memory. “The lagniappe was worth more than the rack. I do remember that.”

  “Wait a minute, stop the story. What did he give you?”

  “A lagniappe, it’s a gift-with-purchase, sort of. Like you get when you buy all that makeup at Bloomingdale’s.”

  “Gotcha. Go on.”

  “On this gift was the name of a church. My mother took us there, thinking they might be able to find us another single-parent family to live with. When we got to the church, Simon was the pastor. It was a grimy church in the midst of squalor off the French Quarter. There were boxes everywhere because it was a church that fed people and took donations from the community. So there were boxes of rice and beans, things people could take home and feed their families.”

  “Okay, I’m trying to mentally picture you in the French Quarter, and it’s just not a visual that’s coming up for me. I would have thought you were raised at Yale or something.”

  “Just listen, will you?” Kay stares at me hard. “So my mom ends up working at the church, boxing the food into groupings that make sense. You know, rice here, so add a protein and a can of vegetables, that kind of thing.”

  “Where’d you sleep?”

  “We got paid in room and board, and we slept in the church attic. It was dirty. I did my best, but to this day I still feel crawly thinking about the dust.” Out of nowhere, Kay sneezes.

  “I can’t imagine you in an attic, let alone a dirty one. Wow, Kay!” That explains a lot of the cleanliness fetish.

  “So anyway, Simon lived in a great little house with his wife, but they never had kids. We were living in the attic for about three weeks when my mother met some guy who came to get red beans for his family. They took off together.”

  “Who took off?”

  “My mom and this guy.”

  “I thought he was there for his family.”

  “Would you let me finish? So Simon didn’t know what to do with me because my mom hadn’t said if she was coming back. I was too young to live in the attic by myself, and it wasn’t the best neighborhood. So he and his wife brought me home with them for a time. Home to this perfect, clean little house on the right side of town.” Kay sighs wistfully.

  “Your mom left you there? With people she didn’t know?”

  “My mom always thought Prince Charming was right around the corner. She left me a note that she’d found her soul mate, and off they went. She couldn’t help it, Ashley. That was just her genetic makeup, to look for the man who completed her. Simon and Ruth were all in a tizzy because they were scheduled to leave on a mission trip to Slovenia, and now they had me.”

  “So what did Simon do?” I’ll admit; I’m expecting the worst. I clasp my eyes shut tightly for the tale of woe that is sure to come.

  “He and Ruth put me in foster care so they could go on the trip.”

  “Then what happened?” I open my eyes.

  “My mom came back after about a year and got me out of foster care.”

  Maybe I’ve read too many child abuse books, but this isn’t sounding all that damaging to the average psyche. “Were you abused in foster care?”

  “No, I stayed with a really nice family. Clean house, organized kitchen—”

  “So what does Simon think you’re going to do to his TV ministry? It was then that you encountered your first clean house?”

  “He doesn’t want me to talk about my abandonment and put him in a bad light. Remember, he left for Slovenia and tossed me over to the authorities.”

  “The abandonment by your mother, you mean?”

  “No, by them. They abandoned me.”

  “They weren’t your mother! How could people who knew you for three weeks abandon you?”

  “My mother left me in their care.”

  “Without asking!”

  “The point is she left me in Christian hands.”

  I am hearing Twilight Zone music again. Kay’s mother abandons her. Leaves her to live in squalor over a mission church, and she’s mad at the pastor. For twenty years! This is a bad Montel Williams show.

  “Kay, if this anger you have toward Simon seems justified to you, I have one word for you: therapy. You’ve been mad at the wrong person for twenty years! I’ll admit that wasn’t the most Christian thing they could have done, but, Kay, your mother left you with people she didn’t know. For a guy!”

  “My mother did the best she could!”

  “Uh, no, she didn’t! The best she could do would have been to stay with her child.”

  “Can you imagine what it’s like for me to see Pastor Simon up on that stage talking about his life in missions work when he abandoned the mission?”

  I’m dumbfounded. Kay seems to think she’s been keeping righteous anger where it belonged. “And forgiveness? Where does this factor in for you? The Bible does say to forgive.”

  “Forgiveness is one thing. Protecting others is my duty.”

  “Kay, I’ve seen the guy. He looks like Santa Claus after a night’s work. You cannot possibly believe he’s dangerous for going on a mission to Slovenia.”

  “I had nowhere to live!”

  “That was your mother’s fault.”

  Kay stomps down the hallway and slams her bedroom door with the strength of a javelin thrower.

  I just look up at my ceiling. “Lord, help me out here, will Ya?” You just never know what moves people, do you? I mean, there are children who survive the worst abusers and become prominent members of society, driven by their survival instinct. Then there are seemingly tough people like Kay who live their entire lives around one moment, feeling that someone else’s actions are responsible. Go figure. I can hear Kay in her bedroom. I’m sure she’s frantically searching for something to organize, but I’ll admit I just don’t have it in me to finish this tonight.

  I enter my own room with Rhett hot on my heels. I swear he’s giving me doggie guilt, but I give him the expression that says I’ll fix it later with Kay. I listen to the message that has the red light blinking. “Hey, Ash, it’s me, Mei Ling. Good news on your dress! I wonder where it came from! But mine would have been prettier than Vera Wang’s. I’m calling about your shower, to tell you that everything is set. Your mother and sister-in-law are coming. They were at your mother’s house tonight. So I’ll talk with you soon. Oh, and I tried to tell the aunties no lingerie, but be prepared just in case.” Beep.

  I look at the pictures of me in the gown, taped up on my mirror. The thrill of having Kevin as my husband rushes through my stomach. Maybe I’ve been trying too hard with his family. Maybe I just need to relax. The wedding is one day of my life. I’ll have Kevin for a lifetime. I can live with a buffet. Right?

  29

  It’s 8:00 a.m., and Emily is frantically ringing my doorbell. Again and again, like a kid asking to play on Saturday morning. I’ll admit, I take my sweet time getting to the door, especially after seeing the Coach portfolio now wiped clean of pork stains. Rhett is barking ferociously like he’s a starved, rabid pit bull. Reluctantly, I tell him to stop and open the metal peep door. Rhett stops, but Emily and Mrs. Novak are lost in their own conversation.

  “She can’t control that dog either,” Mrs. Novak says to Emily on the other side of the door. Um, hello, people, see me through this little grate here? I can hear you.

  “Mama, we have to do something,” Emily repeats.

  Mama, we have to do something? Wasn’t Emily just telling me about how she wanted to get back at her mother? This doesn’t sound like maternal revenge to me. This sounds like they’re pretty much on the same team. Maybe I’m just getting paranoid. I mean, what’s not to like about me? I’m educated, well dressed, gainfully employed. Granted, I can’t cook, but I can hire people who can. Besides, I love Kevin. Doesn’t that count for anything? I wish he were here right now and
I could block his mother’s image from my mind. I finger the expensive earrings he gave me, and while they’re fabulous, I don’t want a gift every time as a substitute for his presence. Although that would make for a lot of presents!

  I open the door, and their conversation halts. “Good morning,” I say with a strained smile on my face. “Listen, I’m sorry about yesterday. I’m just getting a tad stressed over all the details, and with Kevin being gone, I just want to get things right for him.”

  “Does that mean you’re willing to go with me on the buffet? I think you’ll be so much happier with the variety you can provide your guests, rather than a simplistic serving situation,” Elaine says.

  Grrr.

  “A buffet sounds peachy.”

  “Will your mother be joinin’ us today?” Emily asks.

  “No. She’s allergic to most flowers. Asked me to get her something without a scent for her corsage.” I watch as Mrs. Novak rolls her eyes, and Emily shakes her head in agreement. I don’t know if these women think I’m deaf, dumb, and stupid. Or if they really just don’t care what I think. I’m right here!

  At this most inopportune moment, Kay comes out, stomping down the hallway. She looks at me, her arms crossed, but she says nothing and stalks off to the kitchen. Lucky for me, Emily thinks it’s about her. “The date stealer is angry?”

  “Let’s go.” I push them out of the house and push Rhett’s snout back in the house as I shut the door.

  I have decided that men are so much easier to deal with. Rhett’s the perfect example. Even my brother, Dave. When he was going to mess with you, you knew it. You prepared for the onslaught. You didn’t question his motives. Or what his current mood was, because it was simply to get the better of you. With guys, and my brother in particular, it’s all about the attack. With Dave, you got the wedgie, or the backwashed drink, and you knew the game was over when he laughed.

  In contrast, with Emily and Elaine I feel locked into a continual game of Risk, where the motives of the attacker are not always apparent, and their moves are underhanded and sly. These women won’t be happy until their red flags are all over my game board and I have submitted to complete powerlessness in my wedding, and perhaps my entire future. Therefore, defeat is not an option here. As we near the car, they turn to face me.