“So, tell me about you,” I say in a rush. “Are you doing everything you want as an unmarried person before you hook your life up to this guy’s life?”
She raises her eyebrows slightly. “Well, yes, I have a good job, and I’ve . . . done stuff. Gone places. You know. I’m nearly thirty, so it’s time I got ready to be a real adult. Somebody who is settled down.”
“Settled down. That sounds god-awful, doesn’t it?”
“I think it sounds . . . rather nice. I mean, if you’re in love with the person, then it’s a good thing that you get to stop all the running around and make a home together.” She looks around the room, probably searching for anything else we could talk about, and then her eyes land back on me. “By the way, I love what you’re wearing tonight.”
What I’m wearing is a purple velvet vintage evening gown that I bought at a thrift shop in Brooklyn. It has little glass beads sewn in circles all over it, and it shows actual, certifiable, measurable cleavage. Not that my cleavage is anything great; truthfully, it looks like a sack of peach pits.
“It’s my showstopper dress,” I tell her, and then I lean over and whisper, “I am ridiculously proud of the girls tonight. The fact is, I had to tie them up in this wired-up bra to get them to stand up enough for this, but I figure they could give me a last hurrah. After this—no more bras ever. I promised them.”
“I love the colors. I didn’t know what to wear, so I put on this gray shirt that I thought would go with anything, but it looks so boring compared to everybody else.” She leans over and laughs. “I do not think I’ve ever seen so many red sweaters in one room.”
“It’s the Christmas uniform here in Fairlane, Virginia. I’m surprised they didn’t issue you one at the town line.”
Just then a high school student bearing a tray of drinks comes by, and Marnie and I both select a red concoction. It’s my fourth, but who’s counting? I clink my glass into hers, and she smiles. I can’t stop looking at her eyes, which seem so much like my own that it’s disconcerting. My hairline is tingling just a little.
“So,” I say, “when you get married, do you think you’ll get to keep on being your wonderful free-spirit self?”
Her eyes widen. “My free-spirit self?” she says and laughs. “No, no, no. You’ve got me all wrong. I’m actually looking forward to settling down. Buying a house, having kids.” She smiles. “I think a person needs to have a life plan.”
I take a moment, sigh a bit, and reach into my neckline to give the girls a gentle readjustment. “Maybe that’s where I went wrong. I don’t think I ever followed a life plan for even one minute. Tell me this: Is it worth giving up your own free spirit for?”
“A life plan is just security. Commitment.”
“Ah,” I say. “That stuff. Now I see why I didn’t go in for it. Anytime anybody mentions security like it’s a good thing, I get the willies. And commitment. Ugh!”
“Huh. Well, did you ever get married?”
“Oh God yes. Twice. Almost three times, actually. First time was to a professor with the illustrious name of Wallace Elderberry, if you please.” I bend over closer to Marnie and put my hand on hers and smile. “He spent his one wild, precious life on Earth researching the life cycle of a certain kind of green-headed insect, and we traveled to Africa and collected specimens of hard-shelled things so bizarre you wouldn’t even want to think about them for longer than twenty seconds. Can you imagine? And when we got home, I realized I’d had enough of bugs to last me my whole life.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “And, if you want to know the truth of it, Wallace Elderberry himself was starting to look like a big cockroach to me. So we got a divorce.”
“Wow. Husband turned into a cockroach. Sounds like Kafka.”
“God, don’t you just love it when people manage to bring up Kafka in a routine post-Christmas conversation?”
“Well, you started it,” she says. “What happened to the second husband? What did he turn into?”
“The second time I got married against my better judgment—which you should never, ever do, by the way, just in case you’re contemplating it—”
“I’m not,” she says.
“Of course you’re not, but it’s an easy mistake a lot of people make. Anyway, that marriage was to Rufus Halloran, a legal aid lawyer, and we set up shop in Brooklyn in a little storefront office in the 1970s. Brooklyn was a mess then. So we did a lot of work for runaways and homeless people. That sort of thing.”
“And what happened? Did he turn into a cockroach, too?”
“No. He didn’t have the imagination to turn into anything, I’m afraid. He turned out to be a horribly boring human who only saw the dark side of everything. I’d look over at him, and it was as though there was a gray haze around him that I couldn’t penetrate. All the well-meaningness in the world, but nothing coming off him. No genuine pleasure. Just walls of boring, long-winded words. So—divorce. Had to happen.”
“Seriously?” She tilts her head, smiling, as she considers this. “You divorced a man because he was boring? I didn’t know that was legal grounds.”
“I had to. It was killing me how boring he was. It was like he had died before his life ended, and he was going to take me down with him.”
“Yeah, but life can’t be fascinating all the time.”
“Oh, honey. Mine is. If it gets boring for longer than two weeks, I make adjustments.” I smile right into her eyes. “And it’s paid off because now I live with Houndy, who is a lobsterman, and the thing about him is that he could talk to me for four days straight without stopping about lobsters and their shells and the different tides and the sky, and nothing he ever said would bore me because the language that Houndy is really speaking in is all about love and life and death and appreciation and gratitude and funny moments.”
Her eyes flicker, and I see in her face that she knows exactly what I mean.
“I feel like that when I’m at work,” she says softly. “I work in a nursery school, so I get to spend my days sitting on the floor with three- and four-year-olds, talking. People think it must be the most boring thing in the world, but oh my God! They tell me about the most astonishing things. They get into philosophical discussions about their boo-boos and about how worms on the sidewalk get their feelings hurt sometimes, and why the yellow crayon is the meanest one but the purple one is nice. Can you believe it? They know the personalities of crayons.”
She laughs and sticks her legs out in front of her. “I was telling my dad about this the other day, and he didn’t understand it at all. Of course he thinks I should be doing something a little bit more . . . grown up. He’d really like it if I was interested in business.” She stops, looks embarrassed, and then adds, “My dad is actually very nice, but he paid for me to go to a really expensive college, you see, and all I’ve done is become a teacher’s aide. My sister—now she did him proud. Became a research chemist. But me—meh. So I told him: ‘Look, Dad, you have one amazing daughter and one ordinary daughter, and one out of two isn’t that bad.’”
“Listen,” I say. I’ve been swept off my feet by all this. “Come outside with me. I want to get out of here. Do you see how all the negative energy is pooling over there by the piano? See? The air is darker over there. I think we need to go outside and get some real air.”
She looks uncertain. “Maybe I should find Noah. Where is he?”
We both are suddenly aware of the party going on around us, the little knots of people talking to each other, Wendy holding court in the dining room, laughing her brayish laugh.
Noah’s gone off somewhere with his friend Whipple, I tell her. They’re inseparable. She might as well know that about him right now.
“Oh, yes. I’ve heard a lot about Whipple,” she says. “Maybe I should go talk to them. Reassure Whipple that I’m not going to be the kind of wife who, you know, keeps dude friends away.”
“I say you should come outside with me. Whipple can wait. Of course you’re the guest of honor here, so we’ll h
ave to time our exit just right so nobody decides to stop us. Are you good at sneaking? Just follow me, and for God’s sake, don’t make eye contact with anyone.” I grab her hand, and we set off, heads down, scurrying along the back hallway and out through the kitchen.
The maids are washing some of the trays, and one of them—Mavis, who I noticed is in love with the UPS guy who came today—calls to me, “It’s cold out there, Ms. Holliday,” and I say we’ll come back in for tea soon.
And then finally we’ve made it outside, and the night air is so cold and sharp that we have to take deep breaths. It’s wonderful here, in the vast expanse of the backyard, a yard that stretches out as far as a golf course, with hedges and a rose garden down to the pond. The yellow light from the party spills out onto the patio, and the garden is lit by dozens of luminaries—white paper bags glowing with electronic candles.
The night is so perfect that I’m not surprised when it starts to snow very lightly, as if someone had turned on a switch for our benefit.
“Oh my goodness!” Marnie says, holding out her hands. “Look at this! I never get to see snow! It’s wonderful!”
“The first snow of the year,” I say. “Always a crowd-pleaser.”
“Noah told me you grew up here. Do you ever miss it?”
“No,” I say. “Not when I have Brooklyn.”
I tell her then about my crazy house and my crazy little community of people—a hodgepodge of kids and parents and old people, everybody coming in and out of each other’s apartments and telling their stories and giving each other advice and bossing everybody around. I tell her about Lola, my best friend next door who lost her husband twenty years ago, and about Jessica and her sweet, quirky boy, and how it is with all of them needing love so much, and yet how fearful they are whenever love comes anywhere close—and then, because Marnie needs to know this, I explain that I’ve got this whole matchmaking thing going on with them, simply because I can’t help but see who they need to belong with. I think I will tell her about Patrick, too, but then I stop because her eyes have widened and she says, “You do matchmaking?”
And bingo! Here we are, right where I needed us to land.
“Yes. I’ve got this little spidey-sense thing going when I see people who need to be together. You have it, too, don’t you?”
She stares at me. “How did you know? I’ve gone around my whole life thinking about this stuff. I’ll see two people, and I just know they have to be together, but I don’t know how I know. I just . . . know it.”
“Yes, it’s the same for me.”
I’m silent, willing her to talk.
“My best thing ever was when I found my sister a husband,” she says at last. “He was my roommate’s brother, and I met him when he came to pick up my roommate for Christmas break, and at that very moment, I knew he was going to be right for Natalie. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was like my heart hurt until I could introduce them. And then, sure enough—when they met—fireworks. They fell for each other almost immediately. I don’t know how I knew, but I did.”
“Of course you did,” I say softly.
I look out at the gardens and the trees, so shadowy against the white, snowy sky, and I want to fall down in gratitude. Here I am; I’m at the end of my life, and the universe has sent her to me. At last.
“You have many gifts,” I say when I can speak again.
“You think that’s a gift? The way I see it is that I’m just this person who sits around and thinks, ‘Wow, my coworker Melinda might want to hang out with the guy who teaches soccer in the after-school program, because they kind of match each other.’ Meanwhile, my sister is inventing things that are going to save the world, and what’s taking up space in my brain most days is who in my vicinity looks like they could fall in love. Big deal.”
I feel my heart pounding so loudly I have to squeeze my fingers to ground myself. “Please,” I say. “The subversive truth about love is that it really is the big deal everyone makes it out to be, and it’s not some form of security or an insurance policy against loneliness. It’s everything, love is. It runs the whole universe!”
“Well. It’s not more important than the work of curing cancer,” she says.
“Yes. It is. It’s the life force. It’s all there is, in fact.”
She hugs herself, and I watch her as snowflakes land gently on her arms.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I see colors around people. And little lights. My family would be horrified if they knew. They’d see it as some kind of neurological condition, I think. But I see—little showers of sparks coming from nowhere.”
“I know. It’s just thought energy,” I tell her. And then I bite my lip and decide to plunge right in. “Do you ever use thoughts to make things happen? Just for fun?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, watch. Turn around and let’s look in the window there. See—um, let’s choose the woman in the red sweater.”
She laughs. “Which one? They all have red sweaters.”
“The one with the red hair. Let’s just beam some thoughts over to her. Send her some white light. Go ahead, and watch what happens.”
We’re both silent. I bathe the woman in a glow with white light, the way I do. And sure enough, after about thirty seconds, she puts down her drink and looks around the room, as though she’s heard her name being called. Marnie laughs in delight.
“See? We did that! We sent her a little hit of something good, and she got it,” I say.
“Wait a minute. That’s energy? Does it always work?”
“Not always. Sometimes you get resistance. I only do it for fun. The matchmaking stuff—that seems to come from somewhere else. It’s like I get shown which people should be together.”
She looks at me with interest. The red spots on her cheeks are glowing brighter. “So did you figure out a way to make a living by being a matchmaker, then? That’s maybe what I need to figure out.”
“Ah, honey. I make a living being me. What I’ve learned is that the same intuition that lets me know which people need to be together also leads me to exactly what I need. Ever since I made up my mind to live the way I wanted to live, I’ve been provided for.”
“Wow,” she says and laughs. “I’m picturing myself trying to explain that to my dad.” Then she grabs my hand. “Hey! Will you come to our wedding? I really, really want you to be there.”
“Of course I will,” I tell her. If I’m still around. If I can.
And that’s when the universe evidently decides that enough is enough, and Noah appears, coming out of the back door and striding toward us. Like a man on a slightly annoying mission.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he says. “Oh my God, it’s snowing out here! And you guys don’t even have coats on.”
“I don’t need one. It’s wonderful,” says Marnie. “Look how it sparkles in the light. I had no idea it did that.”
“It’s just flurries,” he says and comes over and puts his arm across her shoulders. He’s such a handsome man, I think, with his dark hair and eyes, but it’s so sad how he carries around him an aura of cloudy beige. Marnie turns a bright, lovely pink and she looks at him so fondly, it’s like there’s a spray of stars all around her.
“I’ve just been having the most delightful conversation with your fiancée,” I tell him.
“Well, that’s great, but we’ve got to get going,” he says without looking at me. “Good to see you, Aunt Blix, and I’m sorry it’s so short, but we’ve got another party to get to.”
I’m sure he doesn’t remember that he once adored me, that we used to walk in the woods together and stomp in puddles in our rain boots or bare feet, and that one summer we caught fireflies and minnows and then blessed them and let them go. But that was a long time ago, and sometime along the way, he seems to have adopted his mother’s position that I am not worth bothering about.
I’m over it—really I am. I’d hoped for so much more, but now I’m so used to my family
’s indifference that I don’t even mind the way they roll their eyes when they think I don’t notice, and how they’re always saying, “Oh, Blix!”
Marnie links her arm in Noah’s and kisses him on the cheek, and tells me, in case I didn’t know, that he’s the best third-grade teacher there is, and that all the kids in his class and their mothers just love him to death. I look at him and smile.
Noah shifts uncomfortably. “Marnie, I’m afraid we really have to go. Traffic is building as we speak.”
“Of course you do,” I say. “I’d get out of this party, too, if I could think of a plausible excuse.”
His expression stays the same, but she turns and grins at me. “So . . . ,” he says to her. “I’ll go get your coat for you. Is it in the den?”
“I’ll get it,” she says, but I touch her arm and when she looks at me, I shake my head just slightly. Let him go. And as soon as he’s gone, I say, “Listen, I’ve got to tell you this. You’re amazing and powerful, and you’re in line for a big, big life. There are lots of surprises in store for you. The universe is going to take you to such heights.”
She laughs. “Uh-oh. I don’t think I really like surprises.”
“These will be good ones, I’m sure,” I say. “This is the important thing. Don’t settle for anything you don’t want. That’s the main thing.”
I close my eyes. I want to tell her that she is all golden and Noah is all beige, and that there’s an unfortunate muddiness in the air when he looks at her—and if I could, if I didn’t know that she’d decide I was crazy, I’d tell her that she and I are linked somehow, that I’ve been looking for her.
But now Noah’s back with the coat and the purse and the instruction that she needs to go inside and tell his family good-bye.
She turns to him. “Your Aunt Blix says she’ll come to the wedding, isn’t that great?”
He helps her on with her coat, saying, “Yeah, well, tell my mom to add her to the list,” and then he pecks me on the cheek. “Take care of yourself,” he says.
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