With her tiny five-foot-four frame, bright blue eyes, thick strawberry-blond hair, and incredible ability to quote dialogue from Will Ferrell movies, Olivia Lucci is one of those beautiful, funny girls who make everything more fun. Not to mention that she’s smart and nice to boot. There have been points in our friendship when I felt like her pimp, so many guys cornered me in bars to ask me to put in a good word. Despite this, Liv didn’t have the best track record with dating suitable men. I’d only seen Liv in love once, with someone I considered the worst person possible. He would probably come up at some point in this trip, but probably not until we were firmly entrenched in Napa Valley, over a glass of Malbec (or four).
Since that hot mess, Liv had rarely had a steady boyfriend. She would get crushes and go on dates, but she hadn’t fallen for anyone in years, much to the dismay of the collective male population. When I asked her the current status and if there was anything I wasn’t fully updated on, she paused thoughtfully.
“There’s this one guy I haven’t told you much about, the guy I met a couple weeks ago who works at Citi. Did I tell you he’s really tall? Like, notably tall. Everywhere we go people ask him if he plays basketball, which is actually the most unoriginal thing ever to say to a tall person, even though I’m sure I’ve done it myself. Then when he says no, they suggest he should! As if a thirty-six-year-old banker really needs to start hitting the courts on Saturday mornings. But I don’t know, I can’t see myself with a finance guy long term.”
“What about the public defender you met at the Berkeley reunion? He’s probably more up your alley on social stratification issues.”
“He turned out to be bipolar. Which I’m totally okay with, but he also hated brunch. Who hates brunch?” She had a point. “Okay, can we please talk about the wedding now?” Liv said, turning to me with an expectant smile.
“I have a piece of news on that front. Guess who canceled on the rehearsal dinner?” I was eager to get this piece of news out of the way.
“I really hope you’re going to say Sam’s brother, who their family thinks has been teaching English in Costa Rica, but has really been surfing for the past two years.”
“Nope.”
“Oh no.” She paused. “Caroline?”
“You got it.”
“I’m sorry, Em,” Liv said, looking concerned.
“It’s really okay. It’s more annoying than anything else because I have to redo some stuff and explain it to Sam’s parents. I honestly can’t think of why I would really care that much, considering we haven’t had a twenty-line conversation in about a decade.”
“Because you want your mom to be at your rehearsal dinner.”
“Not if she doesn’t want to be there. She said it was a work thing. It’s a good excuse. Probably even true.”
“How did she sound? She was probably really upset that she has to miss it.”
Liv has a much softer spot for my mom than I do, probably because my mother is funny in a dry, clinical way, she has what is considered a cool job, especially in D.C. where liberal political involvement is revered, and in high school she let Liv tell her parents she was at our house when she was really going to third base in Sean Garrett’s basement. Caro, in turn, likes Liv because she finds her interesting and confident. She likes her as an equal, whereas it is my secret belief that my mother and I don’t get along for the simple reason that she doesn’t like my grown-up self very much.
Sure, when I was little I adored her and thought she was the prettiest woman in the world and all that. But things change. Of course, she’s still beautiful, but everything else is different. Things first started to change when she finished grad school and started full time at the anti-tobacco lobby, right before I entered high school. It’s such a cliché, but that was when she started to care more about her career than about being a mother. A lot more. The cynical side of me says she likes working for the lobby so much because it gives her enough credentials to feel smarter than the average do-gooder and enough integrity to feel superior to the Capitol Hill suits. She claims it’s because her beloved father died of lung cancer, inspiring her to work her way through Georgetown, eventually obtaining her master’s degree in political science. I’ve heard the story more times than I can count, and I do mean story. The truth is, she hated her dad, Mickey Rigazi, a lifetime member of the lesser-known AA, Alcoholic Assholes.
Caro Moon, née Rigazi, grew up in a family of northern Italian blonds, which made them one of the strangest families on a very homogenous block, or in their case the Marconi Plaza in South Philly, my ancestors’ choice of enclave. They stood out even more because of their constantly drunk dad, whose stumbling figure wasn’t that outrageous a sight in their part of town, but whose tendency to carry a knife while inebriated set him apart from his peers. Growing up in South Philly, the oldest in a family of five, with a father who made frequent weekend “business trips” to the drunk tank couldn’t have been easy, which probably has a lot to do with how my mother is today—cold, aloof, and instantly disgusted by the smell of gin.
Once we were thankfully off the topic of my mother, Liv and I spent the next hour talking about how lululemon’s pants actually changed the shape of your butt, gossiping about our mutual friends—namely, which Berkeley grads had hooked up lately and which high school friends were newly engaged—and conducting an intense debate about what to wear that evening. I wanted to save our cuteness for the vacation, while Liv insisted that she was already on hers. But the whole time we debated whether it would be annoying if we both wore hats, I felt a sense of anxious expectation lurking in the back of my mind, threatening to take over the second I let down my guard. I was pretty sure that Liv could smell it on me—something was off. A few times I caught her looking at me closely in the mirror as she restraightened her hair and I attempted to tame my locks with something that promised “beachy waves,” but delivered something that was more seaweedlike.
“My hair is out of control. I look like someone’s crazy shut-in aunt.”
“No, you don’t.” Liv laughed. “It’s sticking up a bit in the back but I can fix that.”
As she untangled my hair, I could tell Liv wanted to ask me what was going on, her best-friend senses working overtime. I felt the words on the tip of my tongue a couple times, but physically stopped them from rolling out. Besides, what would I say? I’m scared to marry Sam. What’s up with you?
To be fair, marriage as a concept itself was a bit lost on me. When I got engaged I felt a bit like I was entering an anthropological study. I felt like saying to my single friends, I know, it seems crazy to me, too, but I’ll infiltrate the natives and report back. It’s not that I thought I was above the institution, or that it was antiquated or too sexist—although my Feminist Legal Theory professor could probably make a proper argument that it was, involving terms like espousal rights framework that I pretended to understand all semester. It was more about the fact that I’d never really pictured it happening to me. I couldn’t imagine myself in the cupcake dress, shyly smiling as I walked down the aisle, or, God forbid, throwing the bouquet, carefully aimed to hit my most pathetic single friend. At my age I’d been that friend more times than I could count, which was only made more tragic by my lack of eye-hand coordination. This inevitably caused me to miss and the crowd to muse: No wonder she’s not married, she can’t even catch.
It took me a while to pick up that I was the odd man out on this. But after seeing enough romcoms featuring girls asking a Ouija board the name of their husband, and attending countless sleepovers planning my girlfriends’ weddings down to the name of the golden retriever who would carry the ring down the aisle—a detail that seemed particularly uncritical at the age of twelve—I figured out I was for the most part alone on this one. It was kind of like when everyone was obsessed with the Backstreet Boys. I thought we were all kidding, a joke that all of America was in on. But when their song came on at the eighth grade
dance and everyone screamed bloody murder I realized, alarmingly, that Backstreet was back, all right.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with Sam, it was more that I was skeptical of the idea of forever. Marriage had always seemed a little like a sham to me, and those who believed in it slightly delusional. Part of me felt like the only reason people were able to get married at all was because the reality of one person for the rest of your life is so difficult to picture, they couldn’t grasp how truly ridiculous, and nearly impossible, the concept actually is.
I even tried to bring it up with my intended once, but it hadn’t gone very well.
“Sam,” I asked tentatively one night, while we were eating straight from the Whole Foods take-out boxes, him skimming film blogs and me distractedly watching The Bachelor, “how do you know I’m the one?”
“Is this a Bachelor-related question? ’Cause I don’t really understand anything about that show except they bang in the fantasy suite.”
“No.” I laughed, encouraged by his banter to go on, although I probably should have shut the hell up. “I mean, aren’t you ever scared? Being with me for the rest of your life? Staying together? Forever?” I looked at him for a response but his face was blank. He was probably suspicious that this was a Girl Trick, so I tried to reassure him. “I’m serious. Doesn’t it ever feel like there’s a noose around your neck and the second you walk down the aisle, there goes the slipknot?” I sensed that this conversation wasn’t going very well, so I tried to turn it into a joke to loosen the tension (so to speak). To say that I’d misjudged the situation was an understatement.
“Nope, I don’t,” Sam said, shutting his computer and abandoning our couch nest of blankets and brown recyclable containers. “Night, Emma. I’m going to bed.” As he walked by me, I tried to pull him back down to the couch to give him a hug.
“Buddy, are you upset?” I said, hanging on his arm. “It’s not you, it’s marriage in general. I love you. You know that. I thought maybe you felt the same way and wanted to talk about it.”
He gave me a look that accurately noted this was bullshit. “It’s okay, Em. I’m tired.”
He was quiet for a couple days after that, and I engaged in the typical monkey dance of trying to make your mate less mad at you without actually addressing what’s wrong. Eventually everything smoothed over and we went back to normal, but I still felt bad every time I thought about it.
The uncertain feeling still hadn’t gone away. It wasn’t about Sam, exactly. It was more about me, and the decision to commit my life to one direction, closing off all the others. And even more than that, Sam’s decision to choose me. What if he changed his mind as soon as I got used to the idea? I found it utterly terrifying. Which led me back to marriage in general. How was it possible to ensure that such an unlikely plan would succeed?
Still, I wasn’t ready to talk about any of it. Once I told Liv, it would be real. We would have to talk about it. And what if, after we analyzed it, I didn’t feel better? Then what? No, all I wanted out of tonight was tapas, sangria, and some hilarious pickup lines from Dante that Liv and I would quote for years to come. That, at least, was foreseeable.
CHAPTER 4
“Emma Moon!” Dante jumped up from his seat and wrapped me in a bear hug as Liv and I entered the bar. “One week until you’re my best-friend-in-law.”
Dante was always incredibly sweet to me, most likely because we never had and never would have the opportunity to hook up.
“And of course, the gorgeous Olivia, in from the big city, I presume. How are you, darling? What can I get you two to drink?” Turning to Liv and giving her a kiss on both cheeks that each lasted a split second too long, he was instantly back in player mode.
After hugging Sam hello, Liv and I made our way around the high-top table and sat on bar stools in the crowded restaurant, Gjelina, hers next to Dante and mine next to Sam. The place was packed. It was the best restaurant in Venice, which meant long waits, incredible food, and frighteningly attractive hostesses. I loved it. I’d been going there for years, since I first moved to town and Val, one of Sam’s producers, took me there.
I pushed her from my mind as soon as she entered it. After Sam sold his movie and introduced us, Val became my first friend in L.A., before she’d casually dismissed me from her life, quit her job, and moved to San Francisco to work as an executive at Gilt City without even telling me, presumably suffering the same Emma Moon disillusionment my mother had.
I brought myself back to the present and tried to adjust my skirt to hide the hideous pancake my thighs became when met with a tall chair with no footrest. Sam, however, didn’t seem to notice. He was focused on my face, leaning in for a kiss, his adorable half smile just a few inches away. I leaned in and felt the same jolt of electricity I did every time his lips touched mine.
Sam looked the same now as he did on the softball field the day we met four years ago, happy to see me, relaxed, and ready to make me smile. He radiated an aura of comfort in his skin that made those around him feel comfort in theirs. I think they call that zen. Yet, as he reached out to pull me in for one more hug, I felt jittery, a passive guest in my own body, watching myself tumble down a path of uncertainty.
Sam gave me a funny look and cocked his head to the side. I shook my head to indicate that everything was fine and rejoined the conversation, which had moved to Liv’s new apartment in New York, accompanied by an amusing rant from Dante about rent control in Los Angeles. Sam ordered a bottle of Sangiovese and some small plates for us to share, the arrival of which calmed me. If I relaxed and breathed, I told myself, everything was going to be okay.
“How goes the moviemaking, Dante?” Liv asked. Dante was a producer, primarily of Italian comedies that never made it to the United States, but it allowed him to live a life of leisure and work five months out of the year.
“Wonderful. I’m off to Europe for a few weeks to raise money for a new film,” Dante answered smoothly, but genuinely. His life really was that fabulous.
“How does that work exactly, you just kind of stroll down the cobblestone streets asking for donations?” Liv teased.
“Pretty much,” Dante said, smiling at her. “Last stop is Croatia, which I’ve heard is incredible. How can it be that I’ve never been?” Liv looked at me for direction, but I couldn’t tell what the answer should be, so I gave a sort of noncommittal nod. This appeared to be the correct response because Dante continued. “Then I’ll be back here looking for somewhere to live now that Sam’s finally moving out.”
“You can’t keep your house?”
“Nah. What’s the point? I’m only in town for half of the year, and, like this guy, I’m thirty-two years old. I’m getting to the age where I should probably have my own place anyway.” I knew that, like me, Liv was fighting her inclination to vehemently agree, so we stayed quiet while Dante looked around poetically and his hybrid accent deepened. “It’s the end of an era, though. Sam and I have lived together since uni.”
“Wow, how many decades is that now?” We loved to make fun of Dante and Sam for being older than us even though in reality it was only by a few years.
“Ha. I’m a mere spring chicken, my dear. It has been almost ten years living together, though. Can’t believe I’m losing my flatmate.”
“Don’t think of it that way. You’re not losing a roommate, you’re gaining a sofa to crash on,” I said, a quarter meaning it. This was an extremely dangerous statement. When traveling, Dante was notorious for choosing to shack up at friends’ houses for months rather than take the time to find a proper Craigslist sublet.
“I don’t know about that,” Sam chimed in.
“Emma and I will talk about it.” Dante winked, probably automatically, while the waitress set down a few artisan pizzas.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Dante like a brother. His only problem is that he consistently dates nineteen-year-old models whose pe
rsonalities he doesn’t like, and then gets confused when he doesn’t like them. My twenty-seventh birthday was spent with Sam, Liv, Dante, and Lila, a nineteen-year-old model/actress who showed up halfway through a day of beers and burgers on the grill. One minute Dante was holding the spatula and carefully adding slices of cheddar, and the next his arm was draped across a shockingly thin brunette, who was eyeing the burgers suspiciously and referring to herself in the third person. “Lila doesn’t eat dairy,” she said. Which would have been fine, if any of us had any idea who the fuck Lila was.
Sam and Dante were funny together, like most best friends who’ve known each other since they were kids. Sam was the chill, funny one, and objectively (if not subjectively) Dante was the gorgeous one. But despite his ridiculous success with the ladies, Dante looked up to Sam as if he were still his new sixth grade lab partner, a cool American with an endless supply of Yankees gear.
“Is the honeymoon all set, Sam?” Liv asked.
“It sure is,” Sam answered casually, while simultaneously stealing a crust from my plate. “Tickets have been purchased; rooms are booked. We’re good to go.”
“Really?” I said, somewhat surprised.
“Of course, Em. It’s in a week.” Sam laughed.
“Sorry.” I squeezed him apologetically. “So, where are we going? Tell me.”
My attempts at cajoling were fruitless as Sam turned back to Liv’s questions.
“And how’s the writing going, Sam?” she asked.
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