Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  I pull the phone away from my ear to stare at it for a moment. Lisbeth Goldman having a Four Seasons wedding? It would be like Bjork wearing an understated business suit. An underwater ceremony, a trompe l’oeil painted body art wedding dress blending her into The Pierre’s murals, or having peacocks walking her down the aisle are all classic Lisbeth-like ideas. But a traditional, elegant, normal wedding venue is pretty much the last thing I expected her to say.

  “But that’s exactly the type of wedding she’s trying to get me to have,” I insist. “I am serious. Your mother just dragged me to the Ritz last night for dinner to discuss locations. She had it narrowed down to the Ritz-Carleton and the Four Seasons.”

  “If she wanted to throw us a wedding at the Ritz, why didn’t she invite me along last night?” Lisbeth asks.

  And I don’t have a good answer. Because she’s cruel? Because she’s secretly homophobic? Because she doesn’t want to be rejected again? Because she’s just plain thoughtless? All I know is that I should be the last one spinning in the vortex of the Goldman Family Woes.

  “She probably thought you were busy. Or that it was too soon to start discussing plans,” I fumble.

  “Uh . . . I don’t think so. I think she decided not to have me along because it’s easier to ignore me than to try to know me and understand me.”

  She cuts off my weak protests by asking when we can set up a time to look for dresses. Emily wants to shop for their two dresses separately so they won’t know what the other will look like before the big day. We set up a time to hit a few bridal shops for ideas, and then I hang up, slamming shut the cookbook I was leafing through while we spoke.

  The door buzzer sounds, and I punch the button on the wall. “What?” I growl.

  “It’s me, Rachel,” my brother’s voice comes through the speaker. “Let me in?”

  I buzz him up and leave the door open a crack as I return to the kitchen. It suddenly occurs to me that it has been a while since I’ve seen my brother—with or without Arianna. We’ve exchanged a few emails in the last few weeks, and I spoke on the phone with him one night, but it has been a while since he has dropped in unannounced at my apartment.

  He enters carrying Beckett, who is dressed like a typical New York fashion industry insider’s son. He has on a pair of designer jeans with the cuffs rolled up and an expensive-looking yet distressed T-shirt picturing a retro-looking dump truck. The whole outfit was probably free, regifted from one of her bosses, but still. The child makes me feel infinitely uncool.

  “You’ve brought Beck,” I exclaim, as if my brother somehow wasn’t aware that he had just carried a toddler upstairs. Beckett makes a beeline for our remote control, holding the on-off switch down so that the television crackles to life and extinguishes itself on a cycle.

  “Beckett, look at this toy,” Ethan tells him, trading the remote control for a set of measuring cups. Beckett immediately begins gumming them, and Ethan flips off the Today Show right as Al Roker promises to tell us the weather in our neck of the woods.

  “Why aren’t you in school?” I ask him, taking out celery hearts I was about to chop up for my soup stock.

  “Day off for a conference that I didn’t have to attend because I don’t teach a core class,” Ethan informs me. “Beckett and I are having a city day. Pigeon chasing in Central Park, lunch at a sketchy deli, and aimlessly riding around on the subway as if it were Thomas the Train. Thomas, just a little dirtier.”

  Beckett takes one of my cookbooks and attempts to close a measuring cup between two pages, grunting as he tries to get the cover to lie flat.

  “How is Arianna?” I ask in what I hope is a casual voice. It’s odd to be asking my brother about my best friend.

  “She’s okay. She’s working insane hours. Did she tell you about her friend, Noah, who works at the Nightly? He gave us four tickets to the Thursday night taping. Want to go with us?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, peeling some carrots. “So have you met Noah?”

  “Not yet. Arianna goes out for coffee all the time with him,” Ethan tells me.

  I’m about to ask him if this bothers him when I look away from the sink and have my answer. He’s watching Beckett, but I can tell that he isn’t really seeing him. His eyes look miles away, like he’s doing this conversation on auto pilot.

  “Do you think something is going on with them?” I broach carefully. My brother looks horrified, and I immediately regret asking the question.

  “No, God, no. Absolutely not. They just know all these people in common. You know, working with celebrities. I think she just finds him interesting. Noah isn’t our problem.”

  “There’s a problem?” I question. I try not to make eye contact with him.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. She’s your friend.”

  He slides one of the chunks of celery out of my prep bowl and pops it in his mouth, taking a bag of animal crackers out of his pocket. Beckett looks up at the crinkling of the cellophane bag as if he too is one of Pavlov’s dogs, and he trots over to snap the heads off lions and tigers while scattering crumbs on my kitchen floor.

  “She didn’t tell me anything was wrong,” I admit.

  “Interesting. Maybe nothing is wrong in her world.”

  I pause, knowing that if I’m silent long enough, he’s going to spill. Ethan has never been very good at hiding his feelings nor leaving unpunctuated periods of silence. Sure enough, by the time the fifth cracker is out of the bag, he has given a loud sigh.

  “I want to get married, and Arianna isn’t interested. It’s not me; she wants to still be with me, but she told me that she doesn’t want to get married.”

  This isn’t exactly news. Arianna has never been the type to look longingly at wedding magazines or talk about how much she wants to get married. Though I always thought the lack of desire was because she hadn’t met anyone worth marrying. Ethan is obviously worth the commitment. But Arianna is also known for making grand proclamations, and I rack my brain for one she hasn’t kept. I triumphantly latch onto the time she told me that the Pantone color of the year was vile and then purchased a vintage dress in that very same shade of yellowish mimosa a few days later.

  Of course she’ll change her mind at some point; there’s no reason not to get married to Ethan. She hasn’t been damaged by divorce—either her own or someone else’s. Her parents are still happily married in their little Midwestern town where Arianna grew up, surrounded by hundreds of examples of happily (okay and maybe sometimes not-so-happily) married couples. She once commented that she didn’t have one friend growing up whose parents were divorced. So it can’t be fear turning her off to marriage. She always seems to enjoy attending weddings; she’s not the type to sit in the back of the ceremony muttering about how marriage is a patriarchal institution meant to stifle women. I mean, Arianna Quinn is just about as leg-shaving, eyebrow-plucking, makeup-wearing traditional as they come. Marriage is the next logical step for a person like that. And she works on wedding dresses. Why would someone who is anti-marriage work on wedding dresses? Besides, I’ve already claimed the don’t-want-to-get-married position even if she doesn’t know that. She needs to get her own neuroses.

  “I don’t know, maybe I don’t need marriage. It’s just a ceremony, right?” Ethan mutters, handing the last few cookies to Beckett who fists the lot into his mouth all at once.

  But it’s not just a ceremony. All I have to do is think about Lisbeth and Emily to know that. Same-sex couples wouldn’t be fighting this hard for just a ceremony, nor would they fight this hard for financial incentives or hospital rules. If it were just a ceremony, I wouldn’t think twice about making the commitment again.

  “Come with me,” I tell Ethan. Our sister Sarah, a brain surgeon who lives over the bridge in Park Slope, is off for the afternoon and has invited me to lunch along with her daughter, Penelope. Safety is
always in numbers when I have to spend time with her. “Sarah will buy you a panini, and Penelope will help entertain Beckett.” I had been planning on asking the two of them to stand in the wedding, but that question could be asked when Ethan wasn’t around to rub salt in that wound.

  “Nah,” Ethan says, sliding out of his chair dejectedly and gathering up Beckett’s things. “Becks and I are staying on this side of the bridge today.”

  “No man is an island, or something like that?” I quote hopefully, suddenly attached to the idea of not facing Sarah alone.

  “I couldn’t handle one of her ‘you know what you need to do’ pep talks today,” Ethan admits. “This man is staying on this island. But good luck with it.”

  He picks up Beckett with a sigh and shuffles out of my apartment, his shoulder blades bent forward like broken wings.

  SARAH AND PENELOPE meet me at the top of the stairs leading out of the subway, a welcomed surprise, and perhaps the first time my sister has waited for me instead of vice versa. My sister is a brain surgeon, and while I’m sure she moves meticulously in the operating room while people’s grey matter is exposed, everywhere else in life, she moves as if her minutes are each worth hundreds of dollars. Though, on second thought, they probably are.

  “Hello, Aunt Rachel,” my niece says solemnly, holding out her tiny hand like a mini businesswoman greeting me at the company meeting. Her clothing must be giving my sister a minor heart attack since Sarah cannot stand it when things don’t match, and Penelope has obviously chosen her outfit: purple striped tights, a blue cotton skirt pulled over a pink leotard, with a shearling coat despite the fact that it still feels like summer.

  “How is preschool, Henny Penny? Are you learning your colors? Er . . . numbers?”

  “I already know all the numbers,” Penelope informs me. “I would count to a million, but that would take too much time, so I will count to 100. One. Two. Three . . .”

  “She can’t actually get past 20,” my sister murmurs over her head, and sure enough, by the time she gets to 19, her numbers are starting to go freeform with 36 following on the heels of 22 with a couple of 100s thrown in for good measure.

  We start walking through Park Slope, up the hill past the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner, and I can sadly feel myself getting out of breath from the exertion. My sister, like many Park Slopers, is obsessed with her neighborhood, and she points out businesses she loves and the apartments of people she thinks might impress me. I actually think her neighborhood is oddly depressing, as if the air is saturated with beads of desperation from keeping up with the Joneses. But I would never tell her that because it would make her head explode.

  We turn into a sandwich shop, and Penelope insists that we sit at the tables by the front window with the high bar stools rather than normal sized chairs. I pick her up and set her on her seat, making sure I dig my fingers into her armpits for a tickle. “I’ll order you a turkey sandwich,” my sister tells me, and I nod even though I really want a salad. She goes to the counter to order while I sit with my niece.

  “Penelope,” I intone in my best serious voice, “I have a question I need to ask you. Uncle Adam and I would like to know if you want to be the flower girl at our wedding.”

  “No, thank you,” Penelope says politely, swinging her legs back and forth so that her toes tap against the front window.

  It wasn’t exactly the answer I was expecting, but she delivers it so cheerfully that I don’t really feel like I have any room to argue with her.

  “Um . . . do you want a different job? Bridesmaid helper?”

  “Nope. Did you know that one octopus is called an octopi?”

  “That’s not actually true,” I counter. “Can you tell me why you don’t want to be in the wedding?”

  “It is true,” Penelope insists. “My teacher told me.”

  “Teachers are sometimes wrong,” I explain. “Octopus is one of those nouns that end in ‘us’ that isn’t pluralized with an ‘i’ ending, like virus or platypus. It’s because it’s translated into Latin from Greek.” The look on her face reminds me that I’m arguing with a preschooler. So I backtrack. “You could also use octopi. I mean, some people do.”

  “My teacher is always right, and she has red shoes,” Penelope informs me, as if her footwear proves her superiority when it comes to pointless Jeopardy-like facts.

  “But Henny Penny.” I try to steer the conversation back to the whole flower girl idea that I thought would bring out her inner princess. Doesn’t every little girl have an inner princess hidden somewhere deep below their shearling coat? Seriously, I am struggling enough with the idea of being in my own wedding; Penelope does not get to wiggle out of this. “What about being in my wedding?”

  “Can I be the bride?” Penelope asks as Sarah sets down a sandwich in front of her.

  “No,” I admonish. “I’m going to be the bride. It’s my wedding.”

  “Is that tone really necessary?” my sister asks. “Penelope, you have a bridal gown in your imaginative play box. And please put a napkin on your lap.”

  “Well do you want to be in my wedding?” I sigh loudly, picking the leaf of lettuce out of my turkey sandwich. “Your daughter doesn’t want to be our flower girl.”

  “Penelope, you don’t want to be Aunt Rachel’s flower girl? You’ll get a new dress.”

  “I don’t want a new dress. Dresses are for princesses. I’m an astronaut.”

  “You’re a four-year-old girl,” her mother corrects. “If you want us to be in the wedding, we’ll be in the wedding.”

  “Well, don’t sound too excited,” I mutter, taking a bite of my turkey sandwich. The bread is mushy and starts to fall apart under the weight of the mustard. I set it down on my plate in disgust, as if my mushy sandwich is the neighborhood’s fault.

  “I didn’t realize you were going to do the whole bridesmaids and flower girl thing again. I thought this wedding would be a little more understated. Just a handful of people or something like that.”

  “Actually, it’s going to be a mid-sized wedding, and it’s going to be out at Pâturage in Tarrytown. And yes, there are going to be bridesmaids and flower girls and a wedding cake and flowers . . . and all of that stuff.” I don’t mean to sound this defensive, but there is something about talking to my sister that makes me suddenly embrace things that I was on the fence about moments earlier.

  “You should have the wedding you want,” my sister says in my least favorite voice. It is infuriatingly calm, impossible to tell if she is being sarcastic or serious or humoring. Which means that it’s impossible to know how to respond—do I thank her for supporting me in having the wedding I want, or do I snap at her that as the bride, I am entitled to the wedding I want? I indulge in about ten seconds of daydreaming about throwing the damp turkey sandwich at my sister’s face.

  “I am actually really tired of everyone telling me how I should conduct my second wedding. I know this is an unusual situation, but if I want to throw a lavish wedding or elope in some exotic locale or have my story splattered across the front page of the New York Times wedding section, that is my prerogative.”

  “It is,” my sister concurs, once again in that infuriatingly calm voice so I can’t tell if she’s pacifying me or agreeing with me.

  “Then I’m not sure why everyone is giving me a hard time.”

  “Who is giving you a hard time?” my sister questions over Penelope’s head.

  “You—you just gave me a hard time.”

  “How did I give you a hard time? I agreed with you that you should have the wedding you want. And I even said I’d be in it if that’s what you want. Honestly, Rachel, you’re just too sensitive.”

  Calling someone sensitive is like slipping in a two-way winning disc in Connect Four; regardless of the next person’s move, you win. I glance down at my mushy Park Slope sandwich and
get fired up again. “Could you please sound more unthrilled about being in my wedding? You’ll be in it if ‘that’s what I want.’ That’s like saying you’ll eat Brussels sprouts if you have to.”

  “I love Brussels sprouts,” Penelope announces to no one in particular to remind us that she’s still there.

  “I know you do, sweetheart,” my sister says absentmindedly. “Rachel, I’m going to give you some tough love that will probably sound incredibly familiar to you even if you don’t want in your heart of hearts to admit it. Weddings are for the couple. They’re for the bride and groom. Sometimes they’re for the parents of the bride and groom too, and random guests for whatever reason. But they are mostly for the bride and groom. They are the only ones who remember the centerpieces or think that centerpieces matter. They’re the only ones who stress about their vows, even though no one will remember their vows a half hour after the ceremony ends. Everyone else may enjoy attending a wedding, and they may even be thrilled for the bride and groom as I am for you and Adam. But other wedding guests cannot bring themselves up to the same level of excitement as the bride and groom. It’s just impossible. You’re at a ten, and we’re all down here at a seven . . . tops. And for most people, I attend their wedding at a neutral five. Of course you’re ecstatic to be in your own wedding, but you can’t expect every guest to reach that same level of excitement.”

  I draw in a breath so I can renege on my bridesmaid offer, but at that moment, I look out the plate glass windows and spy Michael walking his dog across the street. He looks like someone who woke up knowing that they wouldn’t be able to drag themselves to work: rumpled khakis, rumpled and untucked white button-down shirt, rumpled expression. The dog appears to be walking Mike instead of the other way around. He looks lost, nothing like the Dalton graduate who came to cooking class. He is clearly miserable, despondency seeping out of his pores.

  He disappears out of view around the corner, and I realize my sister is done making her point. I scowl inwardly because I know she’s right. I know that I have also wondered why someone needs to tell me about their engagement when we’re face-to-face so they can “see my expression” rather than skip the two subway transfers and tell me over the phone. I couldn’t tell you what the first song was at my sister’s wedding to her boring cardiologist husband, Richard. I’ve seen friends stress over wedding details, and I want to tell them that it doesn’t matter which shade of pink they choose—their guests will never look at their ceremony and reception with the same focus. But, of course, when you’re the bride, you don’t want to think about how little it means to everyone else.