But because the universe is in the mood to test and toy with me, the bride talk at work increases exponentially. My life becomes a hilarious succession of Bride Stories: the ones I am begged for by the women I work with (Meatloaf for dinner tonight! Noah just loves it! Yes, we eat by candlelight! And then early to bed! You know how it is!)—and the ones the four-year-old girls insist on hearing. They are obsessed with weddings and need to know every detail.
“Were you like a princess that day?” they want to know, their eyes shining. Oh yes, I was! In honor of my wedding, they wear white paper napkins on their heads at snack time, and walk through the reading corner wearing the nap room blankets like long trains.
“We are your Bride Girls,” they tell me solemnly, and I laugh and help them toss bridal bouquets.
It’s only at night that the bitterness comes for me, laying bare all my failures and misfit-itude. The bitterness has been at home all day long, pacing and waiting impatiently for me, and now it sits on the side of the bed filing its nails and smoking cigarettes. Ready now, sweetheart? it says. My turn!
That’s when I see who I really am, when I know that I will never be all right, that the person who said he loved me and wanted to spend his whole life with me came to his senses at the last freaking minute, and then like some kind of idiot, I still made him go through with the charade of a ceremony.
I’m a misfit who can’t pretend any longer. A dandelion in the lawn. An ugly duckling out paddling among the swans, hoping they don’t notice.
Then after one sleepless night during which I think I will lose my mind, I jump out of bed at five in the morning and find myself punching in Blix’s number on my phone. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. She is probably the one person in the world who could get him back for me. It’s 8:00 a.m. in Brooklyn, and I somehow just know she’ll be up. And sure enough, she answers the phone with, “Hi, Marnie, my love. I was waiting for you to call.”
I’m taken aback a little. “You were?”
“Of course. I’ve been thinking about you.”
So I just blurt it out. “Blix, it’s awful. I-I need your help. I know you can do things, and so I want you to bring Noah back to me.”
She’s silent, and it occurs to me that maybe she didn’t get the news from his family that he left me. So I back up, tell her about the honeymoon, the fatal hike, Africa, the fellowship he applied for without telling me, Whipple, all of it—even the online divorce.
She says, “Aw, sweetie. I know this feels awful to you right now, but I need to tell you, honey, that this sounds to me like it could be the start of your big life.”
“My big life? Big life? My life has shrunk! I’m here in Burlingame, where I cannot afford to stay, and I’m working at my job, and I’m going crazy, Blix. I just miss him so much, and I know you have insight and connections somewhere, and so I thought that maybe you could help me get him back.” She doesn’t say anything so I see that I need to keep going, to convince her. “Because I’ve thought about everything you said, and I really do need him! He’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and something went wrong, but I want to fix it. That’s going to be the big life, as you call it.”
“You should come to Brooklyn,” she says.
Brooklyn? “I can’t possibly do that,” I tell her. Frankly, nothing sounds less appealing than going somewhere new, heading across the country to a city I’ve never been to. Being a houseguest. Ugh.
“So then tell me what you need.”
“Can you look at whatever it is you look at and see if he’s coming back to me?” My voice cracks. “Would you do a spell for me? To make me less ordinary, or to make him not mind how ordinary I am?”
“Oh, honey. You don’t want him back! Trust me on this. There’s so much—”
“Please. Give me a spell. How desperate does a man have to be to break up with somebody on their honeymoon? How am I supposed to get over that?”
She’s silent for a moment, and then she says in a quiet voice, “Listen to me, sweet pea. Change is hard. And Noah is a high-level entitled brat who forgot to grow up, and I’m very sorry for the pain he’s put you through. But trust me, there’s something so much better waiting for you. You’ll get through this and move on. It’ll take time, but you will. So much better is waiting for you.”
“No,” I tell her. “It isn’t. We were meant for each other. I know it, just the way I knew that Natalie and Brian were meant for each other. You said yourself that I’m a matchmaker, and I know he’s the one for me.”
“No one can read their own stuff that way,” she says. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have had to go through the cockroach and the dead-on-the-inside man. Think about it. And by the way, you are not ordinary, and you need to come to Brooklyn.”
“I’m ridiculously ordinary. I lose my keys all the damn time, and I am opinionated and I get impatient, and I don’t have any ambition, and I don’t make enough money and I couldn’t care less about it, and—and when I was little, I dressed up cats in costumes and I didn’t care when they got mad about it.”
She sighs and says, “Okay, listen. I have to tell you something. When I was eighteen, my father died, and the family homestead I’d counted on inheriting was given to his sister instead. And that’s when I realized that I could either live under my bed and be passive for my whole life or I could do something that scared me every single day. So, being intelligent, I picked being passive. Which was a great decision. Brilliant, in fact.”
She laughs a little. “So I kept living with my aunt and trying to please her by doing everything she said, and smiling nicely to everybody. And then one day my aunt told me that I was like my father, that I was a loser and I was never going to amount to anything, and for the first time all that anger I’d been pushing down simply erupted out of me. I was livid! Beyond livid. So I scraped together the little bit of money that my father had left to me, and I went to Brooklyn, a place I picked on the map just because it scared the hell out of me. I had no idea what I was doing. I was out of my mind terrified.”
She is quiet for a moment, and I can hear her breathing. “But it turned out to be divine intervention or something that I came here. Because after I arrived, everything changed. I made friends with the fear. I married a scientist I barely knew, and I went with him to Africa and studied bugs—I hated bugs! And I hated heat and snakes and traveling without knowing what to expect—but after that, I went all over the world. I chanted in India; I sailed on schooners that looked like they wouldn’t float for five more minutes; I climbed mountains; I studied different religions. Whenever anything scared the living daylights out of me, that was a sign to me that I needed to throw myself into it. And you know what else? That’s how I’ve lived my whole life, doing whatever scares me.”
I don’t want to tell her that that sounds like the worst possible life I could imagine. So I just say, “I’m always scared.”
“Good! My sweet Marnie, you really should come see me.”
“But I’m working,” I say.
“Ah yes, building up security and employment credits.”
“Well, I have to support myself,” I point out. “No one else is going to do it for me.”
She’s silent for a long time, and I’m sure I’ve insulted her. But then she says very quietly, “I want you to look very carefully around you. Because everything is about to change. Your whole life, all of it. You need to notice it just the way it is right now. Will you do that?”
She says some words I can’t really hear.
“Is that the spell?” I say.
“I’m sending you my best words of power,” she says. “But yes. It’s your spell.”
“I wish you’d come back home,” says Natalie one night on the telephone. She means back to Jacksonville. To live there. “Mom and Dad aren’t getting any younger, you know. And I miss you. The baby misses you.”
“The baby isn’t even born yet.”
“I know, but I tell her about you, how you defected to Ca
lifornia, and she’s very upset about it. She wants me to tell you that you’re going to lose out on a lot of family experiences if you insist on remaining there.”
I look out the window at the mountains and the park and the yellow brick library building. I’ve loved living here, walking to the perfect little nursery school where I work, then walking home through the town, window-shopping in all the cool stores I can’t afford. But now this town seems like a place that was never meant for me. Everybody I know here is already a member of a couple. I wave to them in the elevator of my posh little apartment building: smiling at each other, making their evening plans, with no interest in me whatsoever. Noah and I were like that, too, just keeping to ourselves.
It’s the same pang I always feel when I talk to Natalie—she and Brian always have music playing, and they’re always fooling around, laughing like I guess happily married people do, and I wish Noah and I had settled down near my family, like I’d kind of thought we’d do at some point down the road. You know, meet them for dinner sometime, run into each other at the grocery store . . . have a big old extended family right there.
But I don’t want to go back to Florida alone, as the failed sister, the person who never figured out how to make it in the world. Besides, if Noah were to ever come looking for me . . . well, I’m just saying. This is where he would think to look: right here in Burlingame. He liked how upscale it was, said he always wanted to live in the kind of town where the weekly police blotter reports were dominated by stories of residents bothered by squirrels tossing acorns too boisterously.
Natalie reads my mind, which she is good at, having known me and my shenanigans for my whole life. “How is staying there a good idea for you? You need to get over him and move on, not stay at the scene of the crime,” she is saying.
“Costa Rica was the ‘scene of the crime,’ as you call it.”
“Come home, come home, come home,” she says. And then Brian gets close to the phone, and they both start chanting. “Come! Home! Come! Home!”
One morning, after a week in which the Bride Girls have begged for us to put on pretend weddings at the preschool, I wake up with a fantastic idea. Probably the best idea I’ve ever had! I jump out of bed, jiggety jig, and race around the apartment, pack up my wedding dress, the veil, the something blue, the somethings old and new, as well as the corsage and the bouquet, and I put them all in a giant trash bag. But I’m not throwing it all away! I’m not crazy or anything. I’m taking it to school! The most dazzling show-and-tell EVER.
I get there before the sun is even up, and I set out the dress lovingly on the art table. It looks so beautiful laid out like that, so I put the veil across the chair. Noah was supposed to lift it off my face, so lovingly, smiling into my eyes.
But, well, we didn’t get to that part.
I hear myself laugh out loud at the idea that things might have been altogether different if we’d done things the right way, lifting the veil for the kiss, having our first dance, tossing the bouquet, all of it. You can go insane that way—what if Whipple hadn’t been the best man, what if there hadn’t been a trip to Africa waiting, what if Noah hadn’t realized all the stupid, conventional things about me just before he was supposed to say “I do”?
Conventional. That’s what I forgot to tell Blix is my main flaw. I’m not simply ordinary—I’m conventional. Maybe I should call her back. I’ll do that—today! Later.
But first, this.
This.
As soon as the Bride Girls arrive, I lead them over to the art table, where I take the scissors and make a nice, clean, long cut into the skirt of the wedding dress. I cut through the lace and the netting and the satin underpart. All the Bride Girls can have pieces of the dress to wear, I tell them. Their own little slice of the dress!
I hear somebody say, “Marnie?” and it’s the kindest, softest voice I’ve ever heard.
“Thank you,” I say to the voice. It’s the voice of kindness, of the universe ready to apologize to me for what happened.
Only the voice has a person attached to it, and that person turns out to be my boss, Sylvie.
She says, “Marnie, honey, are you cutting up your wedding dress?”
And I try to say to her, “Yes, but it’s okay,” although it comes out crazy because what’s happening is that I’m suddenly crying too hard.
And then she says, “Oh, honey, what’s wrong? What are you doing? Let me get you a tissue. What has happened?”
“We’re going to make wedding dresses for the Bride Girls!” I explain. “Because I don’t need—”
And that’s when I look down and see that I’m wearing my bathrobe and my bedroom slippers, and Sylvie, who is in her work clothes, says something like we should disappear into the back office while Melinda takes the children outside, and she gathers up the wedding dress pieces and the veil, and then she drives me home even though it is still early in the day. We sit in my car outside my apartment, listening to the engine making that clicking noise it does after you turn it off, and after a long time she says, “Marnie, sweetheart, I think you need to get some help.”
“Just because I went to work in my bathrobe?” I say idiotically. “I was in a hurry.” Even I know how stupid this sounds.
Then very quietly Sylvie reaches over and touches my hand and tells me that they’ve all known the whole time. Everybody. They all knew about the honeymoon and the divorce. People tried to talk to me about it, which I do not remember. Everybody has been sad for me. Nobody knew what to say. “That makes all of us!” I tell her, laughing, but she doesn’t laugh.
Later in the week, there’s a meeting, and the upshot is that I’m not supposed to come back anymore. In the write-up they give me, they say that they’ve “decided to go in a different direction” with the nursery school—by which maybe they mean they’ve decided not to let crazy people teach the children anymore—and they write me a check, which if I cash it, means that I won’t sue them or anything.
My cheeks are numb from trying to smile through the meeting, from trying to insist that I really am okay.
Sylvie walks me out to my car when it’s all over. “This is going to turn out to be a good thing,” she says. “Right now, you’re just in shock. But it’s time for you to move on with your life, and this is the push you needed.”
I hate that so much that I can’t even.
So much for the big life I’m supposed to be getting. So much for the love spell.
And I just wish to hell that people would stop telling me that all my sucky tragedies are going to turn out to be good things.
EIGHT
BLIX
I am going to die very soon, and I want a big Irish wake, even though I am not Irish. And even though you’re supposed to be dead when they hold a wake for you, I say you don’t have to be dead. There aren’t any rules about wakes, not as far as I know. And if there are, there shouldn’t be. I am here to change the rules on wakes.
And anyway, I have so many people I’ve loved, and I yearn to have them all together so I can hug them and kiss them and tell them good-bye. I can give them little presents, and tell them my wishes for them, and we will eat barbecue and big old salads and drink whiskey, and we will talk and laugh and dance and cry. I want paper lanterns and twinkly lights and candles. I want a little séance maybe, and loud music, and Jessica to play her lute, and Sammy to play the drums. We’ll light the fire pit and I’ll burn things I don’t need anymore, the things I want to offer up to the universe.
I want us all to hold each other’s hands and dance in a conga line. It’s been too long since I’ve had a conga line. And when Cassandra has used up the best of me, it’s going to mean so much if I can just remember that conga-line moment, the moment I looked up and saw everyone I love all together—maybe it would make the leaving hurt less.
I’ll try to talk Patrick into coming upstairs, even though he won’t want to. But maybe he’ll come because it’s the end for me and then he’ll see that people are kind, and he’ll cha
nge his life, start to be among the living again. Maybe I can find a way to tell him that there is love coming for him, that I know something surprising and miraculous and magical is lining up in the unseen realm. Maybe I can get him to believe. Before the good can happen for him, he’s got to open himself up just a little, and believing in something like a conga line might be a good start.
I tell Houndy we’ll call it a “Blix Out.” He doesn’t think much of this business of accepting death, but lord, he does love a party. I know him too well: he thinks that if I have a party, it will be such fun that maybe I’ll start answering the letters from the cancer center in which they plead with me to go through with our “treatment plan.”
“Who knows? Maybe they learned something after all those years in medical school and they can cure you,” he says.
Ah, dear, delightful Houndy, with his red, rough face and his white beard and squinty blue eyes, cloudy now from all his years of being in the sun without protecting them. I always tell him he has a poet’s soul. All that sea in him, generations of it. He’s been a lobsterman forever, now transplanted to the city, where he stomps around and acts like the land is a compromise he’s made. Who in their right mind would have thought I’d turn out to be a lobsterman’s woman, going out with him on the boat between the Bronx and Long Island, hauling in nets? But here I am.
“No,” I say. “They’ll cut pieces off of me, and I need all my pieces.”
“You don’t need the pieces with cancer,” he says. “I do not think you need this cancer.”
I just smile because Houndy doesn’t know what I know, that, as stupid as it sounds, sometimes you have to live alongside the things you don’t want, like cancer, and doing that helps you go deeper into life than you’ve ever gone before. If we all lived forever, I tell him, then life really wouldn’t have any meaning. So why not embrace it, prepare for it, love what is?
Matchmaking for Beginners Page 7