It’s time to go. He strides away in that manly, impatient way, motioning for her to follow.
“Here! Take this! Some color for you.” I pull off my scarf, my favorite one with the blue silk burnouts and the straggly fringe, and I put it around her neck, and she smiles and blows me a kiss.
As they go inside, I see her tilt her face up to his, pink and gold and scarlet with love, a shower of sparks.
Once they’re gone, the air slowly settles down around me. The sparks quiet themselves and burn away, like those Fourth of July sparklers once they’ve used up their fuel and are about to turn back into sharp metal sticks.
I close my eyes, feeling suddenly drained and tired. And then I know something I didn’t know before, a truth as insistent as anything I’ve ever felt: Marnie MacGraw and Noah are not going to marry.
In fact, it’s already over.
TWO
MARNIE
“Oh my God, that was an epic fail,” says Noah in the car. “Epic! And Whipple, you freak, could you possibly drive like you’re even slightly sober? Like you’re not trying to get a DUI? We’re hoping to stay alive back here.”
Whipple’s car—a brand-new BMW convertible—does seem to be taking the corners on two wheels, I swear, and he appears to have perfected the art of driving with two fingers of his left hand as he holds a cocktail glass in his right hand. A glass that keeps sloshing red alcohol onto the seats and into the center console.
I had automatically gotten into the backseat, and then, to my surprise, Noah had jumped in beside me, leaving Whipple alone in the front, which means he has to crane his neck around backward so he can keep up with the conversation. And every time he moves his head, the car swerves off course, and he mashes his foot even harder on the gas pedal.
Oh, so much of tonight has been a disappointment. I do not want to start off married life with mother-in-law problems. My boss, Sylvie, says that’s just the worst thing you can do. And now that I’m in the car, I can also hear my mother’s voice in my ear: “That was so rude of you, to sit there all night talking to one old lady! You should have gone and mingled with all the other guests! That’s what that party was for, for you to meet your fiancé’s family and friends.”
And now this, the biggest disappointment of all—the great Simon Whipple, whom I have heard such fantastic things about, turns out to be nothing more than your standard-issue, red-faced, laughing, overgrown frat boy. And in his presence, Noah seems to be regressing more by the minute.
Apparently we’re heading to the home of one of their other friends that Noah says I’ve got to meet. It’s the Hometown Tour, Noah told me. Meet the freaks. He pulls me over to him, roughly, and starts sucking on my neck like he’s going to give me a hickey. Like he thinks we’re in high school just because we’re in the backseat. “Holy shit, I am so, so sorry for what I did to you back there,” he says in my ear, way too loudly. “Leaving you in the clutches of my Aunt Blix.”
“You owe her big-time,” says Whipple.
“Right? She’s like the old woman in the forest who eats children.”
“That’s because she’s a witch,” says Whipple. “Marnie, you’re lucky there’s anything left of you. I told him, ‘Dude, you gotta go get your girlfriend, man. Between your mom and your great-aunt, she’s gonna run for the hills.’”
“Not this one,” says Noah. “I’ve got this one in the bag.”
I pull away from him. His beard is scratching me, and his breath smells like a brewery. I finger the scarf she gave me. It’s amazing, with lots of shades of blue, and holes that look like they were burned out on purpose. “For real she’s a witch?” I say, and that makes them both laugh. “No, no, tell me. Does she, like, practice witchcraft? Is she in a coven or something?”
“I don’t know about a coven,” says Whipple, “but she totally does spells, doesn’t she, dude?”
“Spells and potions and all that shit,” says Noah. “She’s got the whole thing down. It’s all over-the-top drama, if you ask me.”
“She seems really nice,” I say. “I liked her.”
Noah leans forward between the seats and takes the drink out of Whipple’s right hand and gulps down the rest of it.
Whipple laughs. “Hey! That was mine. I earned that, dude.”
“I need it more, man, and besides, you’re driving.”
“Tell me,” I say. “What has she done? I can’t believe you really think she’s a witch.”
But they have moved on by this time, talking about whether or not some girls they knew in high school are going to be at the party we’re all going to. Somebody named Layla is going to shit when she finds out that Noah is engaged without checking with her.
I look out the window at all the passing houses—big mansion-type things with huge lawns decorated with white twinkly lights wrapped around the tree trunks, and Christmas trees illuminating the windows. Boughs of holly, fa la la la la. So genteel, so rich.
I wonder if I’ll ever really fit in here.
Funny, I think later, how you can meet a random handsome guy in California at a party, and he tells you he once wrote movie scripts and one almost got accepted but then didn’t, and he tells you that he’s now teaching school, and he loves kids and he loves to go snowboarding in the mountains in the winter and later, in bed, after he’s managed to do amazing things to you, he tells you just how much he wants to help people in the world, and you can’t believe how moved you are at the way his eyes change when he tells you that, how much depth he has, and you find yourself falling in love with these pieces of him that he shows you—and then later, much later, after he’s moved in with you and bought you a deluxe garlic press and a pair of amazing turquoise boots and has written a song for you that he plays on his guitar, you go back to his hometown with him and find out that, oh my God, he’s the somewhat spoiled son of rich people who let him get away with murder and who don’t seem to automatically care about you, except for one ancient aunt no one else seems to like.
You see that he contains so many contradictions. And that you will have to make peace—and you will—with these people who are going to be your in-laws, and you will learn to please them. But you also know that after that night, you will look at him completely differently, and that one of the new things you’ll know about him is that it’s a miracle he survived his childhood and arrived intact at your heart.
And yet you still love him to pieces.
But in the days that follow your return home, you wonder why he won’t answer your questions about his Aunt Blix without rolling his eyes, and why he’s slightly disgruntled that you invited her to the wedding without checking with his mom first. He changes the subject, and you change it back, and he sighs and says, “Oh, she didn’t get the money she wanted, and so she moved up north, and got weird. She looks at everybody like she can see straight through them, down to all the layers of bad stuff.”
And you say something about how she maybe admires the so-called bad stuff (you make air quotes for this), and he wonders why you’re so obsessed with his Aunt Blix, and you say that you’re not obsessed. And you’re not.
But you do wonder why in your spare time, when you’re not thinking of anything else, you’re having a conversation with Blix in your head. You’re wondering if she’s right that love is the true expression of everything in the universe, and if the sparkles you see are real. You’re telling her that she’s wrong about you—that you’re not up for a big life and surprises; you just want ordinary love and happiness with her grandnephew. A house in the suburbs and three children.
And somehow, in a way you can’t explain, you know she’s not convinced in the least. And that just by knowing her, you’re walking into something that’s bigger than you are, that might even turn out to be some kind of mystical crazy thing you’re never going to be able to explain to anyone. Like the time you went to the planetarium show and looking up at the stars that represented billions of light-years, you felt like a little point of pulsating light, a flicker
in the universe, but something that was meant to exist.
And maybe that’s why I have a headache.
THREE
MARNIE
Five months later—after weeks and weeks of wedding preparations, dress buying, invitation writing, venue selecting, all of it mostly orchestrated by my mom and okayed by me via telephone and Skype—I sit in the little room off the side of my parents’ hometown church in Jacksonville, Florida, the room where in the normal universe the beautiful bride is to wait with her happy attendants, and I watch while everything in my life falls apart in slow motion.
Noah has not shown up for the wedding.
He is now forty-seven and a half minutes late, which, as I keep explaining to anyone who will listen, is still going to be okay. He will come strolling in. He will.
He could even send a text message that says something like Hey! I’m at the Episcopal church! Where is everyone? And then I’ll say, Ha ha ha! Wait! Not the Episcopal church! We’re getting married at the Methodist church a block away! And we’ll both type in a smiley emoji, then he’ll speed over, and it will all be fine.
But so far nothing like that has happened.
So far what is happening is that I am sweating my head off in this torture chamber with my sister, Natalie, and my two childhood friends, Ellen and Sophronia, and I am wearing a dress my mother picked out for me, a dress that I now see makes me look like a gigantic white upholstered chair, and my tongue has become this dried-out, fat piece of meat sitting in my mouth, and my hair is pulled so tightly back in a bun that it actually hurts my forehead, and my feet are swelling to twice their normal size, and it is approximately ninety-seven thousand degrees in this windowless room, and my sister and my two attendants will mercifully not look at me because they are so embarrassed for me that all they can think to do is stare into their phones until the world ends.
From the sanctuary, I hear the organist playing the same three chords over and over again. I wonder how many hours she would go on playing those chords, and how she’ll know when to stop. Whose job is it to call off the wedding anyway? Maybe it’s like a death, and the minister and my father—and probably me—will all look at our watches and one of us will say, “Well, this is it. I’m calling it. Four thirty-four. Wedding’s not going to happen, folks.”
Ohgodohgodohgodohgod. Noah is never late to anything unless an airline is involved, and so this means that he’s either dead, or else he and Whipple are now on their way to some fabulous adventure that girls can’t be part of. In which case I will have to hunt down my supposed-to-be husband and kill him.
What if he’s dead? What if any moment now a police officer shows up and leads me down to the hospital, and I have to stand there in my wedding dress, hysterically weeping, while I identify his body?
I unpin the veil and start clawing my pulled-back hair out of its restraints.
“No,” says Natalie. “Don’t do that.” She comes over and sits next to me, her eyes damp and luminous. She is six months pregnant, and maybe because she’s carrying the future in her body, she is lately a bit hyperconcerned that the world might not turn out to be a predictable, rational place. She always looks like she’s about to cry. Two days ago she picked me up from the airport when I came in from California for the wedding, and when a Prince song came on the radio, honest to God, she had to pull the car over because she was crying too hard to see. All because Prince shouldn’t have had to die, she said.
“There’s going to turn out to be a reasonable explanation for this,” she says now in a high, wavery voice. “Maybe the bridge is out. Or maybe the tux shop was closed. Text him again.”
I laugh. “Seriously, Nat? The bridge? The tux shop? Seriously?”
“Text him again.”
So I do.
Hi my luv monkey . . . how’s it going?
Nothing.
Can’t wait to see U! #marriedtoday!!!!!
Crickets. Five minutes later, I write: You up? LOL!
Unbeknownst to Natalie, I make a deal with the universe: if I put down my phone and don’t look at it while I count to one thousand, then when I pick it up again, he will be typing. The three little dots will be blinking at me, and he’ll say he was on his way, but he just had to save somebody’s life, or there was a hurt dog in the street and he had to find the owner, and he is so, so sorry, but who could leave a dog who was hurt?
I count to eight hundred and forty-eight, and then I say, “Forget this,” and I write in rapid succession:
WTF?? R U OK?
Noah Spinnaker, if you don’t get here soon, I am going to FREAK OUT AND PROBABLY DIE!!!!!!!!
Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.
Just please.
My father, all dolled up in his father-of-the-bride tuxedo, peeks in the door.
“How are you holding up, Ducky?” he asks. He hasn’t called me that since I was ten and begged him to stop, so I know he is losing it.
“She’s coping, okay?” says Natalie. “Maybe somebody needs to go and look for this son of a bitch and bring him here.”
We’re all stunned into silence.
I can see my dad thinking, Uh-oh, pregnancy hormones, and then he looks at me and says, “Um, Noah’s great-aunt is out here, and she wants to know if she can have a word with you.”
“Sure, send her in,” I say, swallowing.
And then there’s Blix, striding in, looking like she got dressed from the bargain bin at a 1970s clothing consignment shop, but in a good, fun way. She’s wearing a long pink tulle skirt and some kind of silvery, shimmery shirt with a bunch of lacy scarves all tied up in loopy knots, long turquoise earrings, and about a hundred beaded bracelets. Nothing goes together, and yet somehow she makes it look like an art project. Her crazy white Einstein hair is moussed up into little points, and she’s wearing bright red lipstick, and her eyes are extra beady and sharp today—X-ray eyes, Noah calls them, the better to see deep into your soul.
I have to admit I feel a little flicker of hope that maybe she really is a witch. Maybe she’s like the fairy godmother in Cinderella and she’ll say, Bibbity bobbity boo and conjure Noah up right in front of me—and then my life, which seems to have curled up into the fetal position, will somehow stand up and stretch and crank itself back up into normalcy.
Yes. I am precisely that far gone.
Ellen, Sophronia, and Natalie look shocked. I raise my hand in a listless wave.
“Well, what the actual hell?” Blix says, and we all laugh weakly. “The life force is running out of this room! I’ve been at funerals that had better vibrations than this.” She puts her hands on her hips and looks around at us, taking in our wedding finery, and for a moment I think she might be about to dispense some fashion advice. Perhaps we need more of something. That’s what’s gone wrong: not even one floaty scarf among the four of us.
But instead, she comes over and takes my damp hands in her cool, bony ones, and says, dryly, her eyes shining with trouble and mischief: “I’m not here to make you feel worse, but I just want to tell you that I hope we don’t have to kill him today. But if we do, we do. I want you to know I’m up for it. You girls with me?”
I see Natalie start to blink very rapidly.
“I don’t think we’ll have to kill him,” I say quietly, although I had, of course, been thinking the same thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blix knows that.
“Yeah, well, he’s pushing his luck,” she says and pulls up a chair like somebody who’s settling in for the duration. “But we’ve got to take care of you. The important thing is: Are you breathing consciously? You’re not, are you?”
I try to breathe, to make her happy.
“You know, what we need here is to raise the vibe. We need the Breath of Joy. It’s a yoga thing. I’ll show you how to do it.” And to my surprise, she stands up and throws her arms up over her head and then swings them down fast by her sides while she bends her knees and collapses her middle. When her head is almost down to her knees, she lets out a loud “ARRRRRRRGH!”
She rights herself and looks at us. “Five times! Fast! Come on, ladies. Yell it out. Arrrgh! Arrrrgh!”
We all do it, except for Natalie. The rest of us are scared not to.
Blix claps her hands when we’re finished. “Excellent, excellent! Oh my God. You young women are so beautiful, you know that? And men are—well, I like men just fine, but if we’re honest, we have to admit that most of them are just smelly, sweaty, grunting ball scratchers. Somehow we’re supposed to love ’em anyway.” She shakes her head. “Gotta love it. Nature’s joke. Can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.”
And with that, she leans over and plants a soft, dry kiss on my cheek and stares into my eyes. She smells like powder and chai tea and something herbal, possibly marijuana. “I like you,” she says. “Take it from me. He’s my grandnephew, but like so many men out there, particularly the ones from my family, I’m sorry to say, he’s not worth a poot. I think now’s as good a time as any to ask yourself if you really do want him after all. Because, I’m just saying, we could all leave now and go to the beach. Skinny-dip or something.”
She stands back upright and laughs again. “You’re welcome,” she says, “for that image I just put in your heads of me skinny-dipping.”
Then she reaches into her massive bra and whips out some bottle of essential-oil that she says I need to inhale because it will calm me down, bring on the positive vibes, center my aura. She puts it under my nose. It smells like roses and lavender. She’s chanting something I can’t quite hear, closing her eyes, and she presses her forehead up against mine in a mind meld and says, “For the good of all and the free will of all, so mote it be,” and then she opens her eyes and looks around at us. “Look, sweetie, I’ve got to get back to the family. The natives are getting restless out there. Trying to figure out what’s come over the prodigal son, figure out if this is all their fault. Raising him so entitled and all.” She wrinkles her nose. “I’m sorry he’s putting you through this. I really do think there might be something wrong with that boy.”
Matchmaking for Beginners Page 3