Matchmaking for Beginners

by Maddie Dawson

  Jessica shows up first, at nine o’clock, bringing two pumpkin pies, coleslaw, four pounds of clams, and an apple crisp.

  How stunningly random and un-Thanksgiving-like. “What are we going to do with these clams?” I ask, a little nervous.

  “Clam chowder, of course! I know, I know; clams and coleslaw aren’t the first things you think of when you’re imagining Thanksgiving,” she says, “but I thought it would be fun. And I feel that Thanksgiving should be about giving thanks for everything you like, not just the turkey. Which, by the way, smells fantastic!”

  Lola, somewhat more of a traditionalist, comes in at ten with a squash casserole, some homemade dinner rolls, and two pumpkin pies.

  After an hour, I baste the turkey like any expert would. Paco runs over with slabs of roast beef, a beet salad, a vat of onion soup, and some Grey Poupon mustard. And three more pumpkin pies. The waitress from Yolk shows up with her boyfriend, and they get busy playing with the dog, and also with another dog, who has come along with one of Blix’s dog walker friends apparently.

  Andrew and Sammy come downstairs and start making a pot of clam chowder that could feed the entire borough. This reminds Lola to mention that she’s invited Harry, just as he arrives with enough lobsters to feed the Eastern Seaboard.

  “You are Blix’s favorite niece,” he tells me, and when I correct him, he says, “Okay, okay. Great-niece-in-law, have it your way!” and I feel silly for bringing it up.

  I also have no idea how we’re going to cook these things—it seems every burner is being taken up, and there are dishes still waiting for their turn at the stove. Two of my Best Buds customers—the lesbian moms, Leila and Amanda, who were writing to the sperm donor—come and bring rolls and a pumpkin pie.

  We are now full up on pumpkin pies, I notice.

  Leila starts asking questions about when I’m selling the place and leaving, and I tell her all the problems, blah blah blah, and it turns out that she knows a real estate agent who would be happy to come and look at it and give me some advice. She whips out her phone and makes a call and then she yells over to me, “Tomorrow morning okay? Elevenish?”

  “Sure,” I call back to her.

  Jessica comes over right then and taps me on the arm and whispers. “Um, just so you know, Noah seems to be here. He’s in the living room, chatting with people and acting like he’s the host.”

  “Noah?”

  She smiles. “And also—I should tell you, there seems to be something going on with Lola. She’s on the stoop with the New Jersey man, and things do not seem to be going well.”

  “Oh my God. I think he’s proposing to her.”

  “Proposing? To Lola?”

  “Are there flowers involved?” I yell to Jessica over a sudden din involving pots and pans, and she says there seem to be.

  “I’ll report back,” she tells me.

  The kitchen is starting to resemble a restaurant warehouse—except, you know, way more random. In the corner, Harry and the waitress’s boyfriend are talking politics. Leila and Amanda are trying to set up tray tables in the living room, but the legs of one are broken so Andrew says he’ll get a screwdriver and asks me where one might be kept, then it turns out that Bedford is happily chewing on it behind the couch.

  The Yolk waitress says she’ll set all the tables, but then she needs help locating the serving spoons and then the tablecloths and the water glasses.

  And then she stops and says, “Andrew? Andrew? Oh my God, you’re here! Are you with your wife? And son?”

  I can’t. I just can’t.

  Andrew, his face having gone white, is looking around the room, searching for Jessica, probably, and I hear him say, “Please—if you could just not—”

  “Not mention that you dumped me? Of course I won’t,” I hear her say, and he takes her by the elbow and steers her into another corner of the kitchen. He’s saying, “I mean, I’ve told her about you,” as they go past. “It’s just that we’re so newly back together . . .”

  Harry stops yelling about Republicans long enough to ask me sweetly if I think the lobsters are ever going to get their chance with the burners. And do I know where Houndy’s lobster pots are?

  “Where are the serving spoons, again?” someone wants to know.

  “Who made the squash casserole? Does it need oven space?”

  There are a million conversations going on around me, and I’m basting the turkey one more time, and juggling the piece of aluminum foil I’m holding and the turkey baster, when suddenly I’m aware that Noah is talking to me.

  “Ta-dah!” he’s saying. “Marnie, look who’s here! What a surprise!”

  At first I think he means himself, and I am ready to glare at him and tell him he shouldn’t be here, not after what he’s done—I never invited him anyway—but when I turn my head, oh my God, it is Jeremy’s face that fills the room.

  Jeremy. It takes such a long time for his face to make sense to me—why in God’s name is Jeremy’s face here in Brooklyn, standing here at Thanksgiving, with Noah, of all people, standing beside him, smiling at me with a shit-eating grin that could light up the whole freaking world?

  And as I turn my head, my hand in the oven mitt goes with it somehow, and then the turkey—Tom, the pan, the juices, the stuffing, all of it—slides in slow motion to the floor, and I go down with it, hard onto the floor, banging my head on the table in the process, and in the screaming that follows, all I can think is that this is when it would be so good to be the sort of person who faints.

  But no such luck. I am conscious for everything that comes next.

  FORTY

  MARNIE

  This can’t be happening. Of course it can’t. In a minute I’ll wake up and this will have been a dream, and I’ll get out of bed and life will be normal.

  But no.

  Noah’s arm is still slung over Jeremy’s shoulders, and Jeremy looks blank eyed with shock while Noah is smiling this horrible grin, and oh my God, if so many things didn’t hurt me at once, and if I wasn’t stuck in this puddle of turkey fat, I’d get to my feet and I’d figure out something to say or do that would smooth things over, except that even in all the confusion and chaos and din of voices, it’s dawning on me that there isn’t going to be anything I can say or do. That this will never be smooth.

  “Why?” I manage to say to Jeremy, which is, of course, the question he should be asking me. But I mean why are you standing here in this kitchen, and why didn’t I know you were coming. He doesn’t answer me, and somebody is trying to help me up, then she slips, too, and goes smack down in the turkey fat with me. And I want to laugh because it’s possible that this one turkey is going to take out the entire party. We’ll all be slipping and sliding here trying to save ourselves and each other in the very worst Thanksgiving party ever.

  Jeremy’s face is saying: You are the worst person in the whole world.

  And then he is gone.

  “Wait!” I say, or maybe I didn’t actually get that word out in the din and pain and craziness. Two more people are sliding in the grease, and someone is tracking it across the kitchen, and Bedford is drinking the turkey drippings. I can hear Jessica and Andrew arguing by the kitchen table.

  I get myself up, and head for the hallway. It hurts like hell to walk, and then Bedford dashes by me, holding the turkey carcass, with people chasing him, but I don’t care. I limp into the entryway and there is Jeremy heading for the front door, and I say to him, “Please. Could we go somewhere and talk?”

  “Is there anything to say?” he asks. “I think I’ve got the whole picture.”

  “Let’s go outside,” I tell him, and we go out on the stoop, where the rain is still listlessly falling, winding down to a gray, depressing, end-of-the-world drizzle. I don’t care. I’m covered in grease and turkey bits, even in my hair, and my hip is killing me, and I think my head might be growing some kind of huge lump where I banged it.

  But all that is nothing compared to Jeremy, whose eyes look like black
holes in the middle of his face, and I can see that his wide, capable, physical-therapy hands are actually shaking.

  I have broken this man.

  Again.

  “Talk to me,” I say. “Go ahead. Say it. Say it all.”

  He shakes his head. I can’t bear to look at him. “There’s nothing . . . I’m in shock,” he says.

  “No. Please. Say it.”

  He exhales and looks around. I can see him taking in the whole rainy, desolate street scene. And then his eyes come back to me and he says in a low voice, “I’ve talked to you fifty times since you’ve been here, and you didn’t even once think it might be good to mention that your ex-husband was here? Not even once?”

  “Well? I didn’t think you’d understand.”

  “What part of it wouldn’t I understand?”

  “How two people who were married to each other can stay in the same house.”

  “I can understand that. I trust you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Try me. Please,” he says. “Just tell me you weren’t having sex with him, and I’ll believe you. I’m not a suspicious person.”

  That’s when it hits me that he really doesn’t know. I look down at my shoes.

  “Oh my God,” he says. “Oh my fucking God. Marnie! I can’t believe this! You’ve done this to me again! How could you do this?”

  “I didn’t plan this.”

  “What does that even mean? You didn’t set out to crush me, is that it? But why did you do it?”

  “Oh, God, I am really and truly very sorry. Jeremy, listen. I didn’t know when I came here that he was here. And then when he was, I was thinking it was still okay and that I’d come back home next month and you and I would get married, and—”

  “That’s bullshit. You’ve been lying to me! Talking to me almost every day and never telling me anything near the truth. I-I’m speechless.”

  He stares out again at the dismal, dreary street, littered with leaves, and then he turns back to me. “This place sucks. You know that? This is what you’re picking, instead of the life we had talked about? This?”

  “It doesn’t look so good right now,” I admit. “But it’s really kind of beautiful in its way. You’re not seeing it at its best. And under the circumstances . . .”

  He looks at me a long time, and then he shakes his head. “I’ve got to get out of here. I don’t think I can take any more.”

  “Before you go, can I ask you one thing? Did Noah set you up for this? Did he get you to come?”

  “Wow. You really are delusional, aren’t you? I came here because I missed you, you idiot, because I thought it would be fun to surprise you since I felt bad that you were away for the holidays. Your whole family and I thought this up. That’s why nobody’s talked to you on the phone for the past week, because we were all so excited and worried that we’d spoil the surprise.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Well. This may sound beside the point, but I’ve always said that I hate surprises. Now I know why.”

  He gives me an incredulous look. “You suck, you know that?” And then he shakes his head and walks down the steps and turns down the sidewalk.

  “Want me to call you a cab?” I call down to him. But he doesn’t even grace that offer with a backward glance, which is fine. I don’t deserve anything from him. Nothing at all.

  “I’m sorry!” I yell. “I’m really, really so very sorry!”

  He doesn’t turn around for that either.

  FORTY-ONE

  MARNIE

  “I have never heard so much yelling associated with Thanksgiving,” Patrick tells me. He’s walking from the kitchen to the living room with a cup of tea, which he hands me, and a teapot. “Well, maybe the very first Thanksgiving had that level of tension. Possibly Myles Standish caused this much trouble with the Native Americans—he was a bit of a brute, from what I’ve heard. But I’m not even sure about that.”

  He looks over at me, sitting on his couch with my foot propped up and ice that’s supposedly going to help with the bump on my head. He may have forgotten that he’s mad at me for the crime of trying to kiss him. At least he let me come here. Even came upstairs and got me. Fixed the ice pack. Gave me drinks of water. And now herbal tea. Put aside his deadline about colon cancer, he said.

  “Doesn’t matter in the least,” he told me. “People are digesting their turkey dinner, and they should be giving thanks and not rushing to read about colon cancer. Any symptoms they’re having tonight are just that they ate too much.”

  “Yet another thing I’m responsible for today.”

  “Oh, you, stop with the self-pity. It’s all going to be fine. For the rest of your life, you’re going to have the most exciting Thanksgiving dinner story anyone’s ever heard.”

  Yes. After the madness died down—after I’d gone back inside and screamed at Noah, and pulled Bedford away from the turkey drippings, then cleaned up the puke when he didn’t stop licking up the drippings; after I’d cried with Lola, who told me I was a traitor, and after I’d tried to persuade Jessica not to break up with Andrew once again; after I’d packed Harry off with his bag of wiggling lobsters that never did get cooked, and sent the waitress limping off with her new boyfriend—well, Patrick came upstairs and retrieved me and gave me a place to hide. He checked out the bump on my head, peered in my eyes, asked me some arithmetic questions, and declared that I don’t have a concussion.

  Things may not be fine fine—there was way too much crying for that—but maybe it’s livable. That’s the best I can do right now. Patrick walked Lola home. I think he comforted Sammy. I think he may even have cleaned up most of the mess while I was dealing with all the fallout. He tied a piece of gauzy cotton around my head where it might have been bleeding a bit.

  I feel bad about so many things. Maybe one of the worst things is Lola, who told me in no uncertain terms that she was furious that I’d been conspiring, as she put it, behind her back to get her married off to William Sullivan. Aiding and abetting the enemy behind the front lines! How dare I! Helping him write that letter! Encouraging him! Giving him hope, even though I knew—I knew—her position!

  Which I did know. She’s absolutely right.

  “How could you not have told me you were talking to him!” she said. “Is there nothing that you matchmakers won’t do?”

  But the magic, I wanted to tell her. The sparkles.

  And then there was Jessica—well, she was just devastated, plain and simple. Not so mad at me, thank goodness, because how could I have known that the Yolk waitress happened to be the woman who Andrew had cheated with? Jessica says it’s simply humiliating (her word) that all this time, she and I had been friendly with that waitress, and in fact we’d exchanged little tidbits of our lives with her—not even knowing who she was! (And excuse me, not for nothing, but who knew that Brooklyn was such a small town after all? That’s what amazed me—that with all the millions of people milling around this place, how our waitress at Yolk could possibly be the woman who had enticed Andrew away from his marriage vows!)

  This might as well be Smalltown, America, I tell Patrick.

  He smiles.

  “Don’t,” I say and hold up one finger. “Too soon for smiling.”

  “You look sort of jaunty with that bandage on your head,” he says. “Rather like a drunken sailor.”

  “Did I tell you that after Bedford had dragged the turkey carcass into the living room, and I went by there on my way to talk to Jeremy, Noah was taking the opportunity to remove things from the walls and put them in a box—presumably to send to his parents?”

  “Classy Noah move.”

  “Probably just to make me mad.”

  He is sitting at the other end of his couch, as far away from me as he can get, I notice. And he’s grinning happily.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I’ll tell you. But first, in exchange for all the excellent care and rescue, I need you to tell me every single detail. One by one. And start with what h
appened with Jeremy,” he says. “That poor guy.”

  “Yes. God, I’m the worst. And of all the things that happened today, the fact that Jeremy came here without telling me, and got my whole family to keep it a secret as well—I still can’t believe it.”

  “You had no clue?” Patrick says. “None?”

  “Well, he’d vaguely said a time or two that it was too bad we couldn’t be together, and he’d offered to come and help me sell the place . . .”

  “But nothing like, ‘See you at Thanksgiving, my plane gets in at eleven’?”

  “Nothing. In fact, I hadn’t even talked to him for a week or so, because I was so busy worrying about Noah and the Blix stuff.” I put my head in my hands. “I can’t believe I’ve done this to him. That look on his face.”

  “So . . . did he yell and scream? How did you guys leave it?”

  “He was monumentally disappointed and sad. And yes, he yelled. Quite out of character for him. I believe we left it that I suck. Which I do.”

  Patrick now actually laughs. “Stop it. Who do you think you’re talking to? You weren’t ever going to end up with him. The first thing you told me about him is that he is the most god-awful boring man you’d ever met. I believe those were your exact words.”

  “But boring is not a crime. And anyway I led him on. And betrayed him.”

  “First of all, you weren’t leading him on. You were deciding about him. And I happen to believe that your betrayal, as you call it, was part of the deciding. Also, for the record, I think Blix considered being boring a crime,” he says. “Which it is. I agree.”

  “You’re right. She did. She was married to that boring legal aid person, or was it the boring bug guy? And I told her she couldn’t just leave somebody because he was boring, and she said of course she could! She had to, she said. So she did.”

  He reaches over and pours me some more tea from the teapot. “So anyway, we’re all agreed that you weren’t going to end up with him. And even though this was a shock for him, we have to acknowledge that he bears some responsibility for finding out the way he did. When you set up a surprise, you have to figure that you’re the one that might get surprised. Right?”