Matchmaking for Beginners

by Dawson, Maddie

  And Brian—tall, handsome, dark-haired Brian, the personification of husbandhood and fatherhood, carrying the banner for good men everywhere—tells me about Natalie’s brave march through pregnancy. “She’s been such a trooper!” he says, smiling at her winningly. “All that morning sickness stuff that some women complain about? Not Nattie. She hiked and swam and worked full-time. I tell you, birth is going to be a breeze.”

  “Well,” says my mother. “Let’s not tempt fate, shall we?”

  My eyes meet Natalie’s, and we smile. If people had themes, this would be my mother’s: don’t anticipate anything good, or it won’t happen.

  “Marnie doesn’t want to hear about all this,” Natalie says quickly. “Let’s talk about how awesome it is that she’s moved back in time to be an on-site auntie.”

  “Of course I want to hear about all of it!” I say. “I’ve missed out on everything. And look at you—he’s right; you look absolutely gorgeous! You make pregnancy look like fun.”

  “Well,” she says. “Pregnancy is sociologically and scientifically the most interesting thing I’ve ever done. When you think about what’s really going on in here! Like, did you know that a woman gets fifty percent more blood supply when she’s pregnant? Fifty percent!”

  “Astonishing,” my mother says, rolling her eyes. “Maybe you should sit down and rest. Take a load off.” She looks at me. “Please don’t get her started on all this. She starts in with talking about mucous plugs and breast engorgement and I don’t know what all else. Gametes—was that what you were talking about last week? Gametes?”

  “That was at the beginning I told you about gametes,” Natalie says cheerfully. “Now we’re at mucous plugs and breast engorgement.”

  My mother throws up her hands. “Not in my kitchen! We will not talk like that before dinner!”

  Natalie says, “It’s life, Mom. Biology.”

  “Biology, shmiology. Not everybody wants to hear about this stuff. It’s like you think you invented having children!”

  “Wait, I thought you did invent having children,” I say to Natalie. “Wasn’t that one of your accomplishments? And I, for one, thank you for it.”

  “Now I have both of you ganging up on me,” says my mother, but she’s smiling. She starts cutting up iceberg lettuce and plunking it into a bowl with carrots and celery. (Noah’s face rises up in front of me, and he says, “Not even red leaf lettuce? Not even romaine?”)

  The men, of course, have headed outside with a platter of hamburgers and their beers. I watch them out by the grill, my father listening to Brian, and then laughing as they clink their beer bottles together.

  “Hey, I’d like to chop up some vegetables to roast,” I say, and my mom says, “No need for that. We’ve got salad and that’s enough.”

  “But I like roasted vegetables,” I tell her.

  Natalie winks at me. She goes to the refrigerator and gets out cauliflower and broccoli and peppers, and hands me a cutting board and knife, all the while telling me about the birth plan that she and Brian have figured out: no epidurals, no fetal monitors, no bright lights. Also, there will be soft alto flute music, and a doula and a midwife. Brian will cut the umbilical cord, which they will then bury. The staff is to speak only in whispers.

  My mother puts her knife down. “Well, I think you just want to make sure to do what they tell you. Although that’s all a good idea in theory, please don’t overlook the possibility of a good epidural if someone comes around offering one.”

  “I’m not having an epidural,” says Natalie.

  “It’s not good, being rigid about these things,” Mom says. “If parenthood teaches you anything, it’s how to be flexible. When you’re a parent, you have no control. None. Might as well start getting used to that now, missy.”

  Natalie turns to me, smiling her high-wattage fake smile. “So! New subject time. How does it feel, being back here?”

  “Fine,” I say, too quickly.

  “Just fine?” my mother says. “Haven’t we been having fun? My God, we’ve done everything!”

  “No! I mean, yes, we’re having fun. It’s been wonderful!”

  Natalie gives me her dazzling this-is-just-meant-for-you smile. Like she knows all about my mixed feelings as I trot along after our mother like I’m a little kid again.

  “Do you have olive oil?” I ask.

  “No, we don’t have olive oil. Use corn oil. It’s fine,” my mother says. “And we do not need those vegetables. I told you there’s a salad.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll just run out and grab some at the store,” I say.

  “The store!” says my mother. “Oh for God’s sake! Honestly! You kids with your olive oil! Corn oil is fine. You’ve been eating it your whole life.”

  “I know, it’s just that it doesn’t have the same taste for the marinade . . .”

  Natalie, elbowing me in the side and hiding a smile, pretends to duck for cover, and sure enough my mother explodes: “For heaven’s sake, what is it with this generation? All of you! There are only certain foods that can pass your delicate systems? Can’t have American cheese—lord, no! Or canned vegetables! Or bread! Good ole ordinary Wonder Bread! A person could die from bread to hear you tell it! And now corn oil—innocent little corn oil—has to be replaced by the eighteen-dollars-a-bottle olive oil.”

  I look over at Natalie, who narrows her eyes at me and cocks one eyebrow.

  See? her eyes say. See what you’ve been missing?

  Brian comes in to get another beer, looks at my mom and grins at me, and goes back outside.

  “Well,” says my mother to me with a big sigh. “Give me the vegetables. I’m going to boil them and put some margarine and salt on them. They’ll be just fine.”

  “Mom, let Marnie make the vegetables the way she wants them, why don’t you?” says Natalie. “You know I’m not going to eat any margarine. It’s bad for the baby.”

  “I am not going to listen to this!” my mother says. “Margarine is not bad for babies!”

  “Mom, will you please just stop? I read a bunch of nutrition blogs, and I know what I’m talking about. So, Marnie, do you ever hear from Noah? Where is he, anyway?” Natalie asks.

  My mother takes in a sharp breath and shakes her head. “Oh, so here we go. For heaven’s sake, we are not going to talk about him! I just want tonight to be pleasant. Here we are, all together for the first time in such a long, long time, and I want us all to have a good time. Discuss fun things. Not Noah!”

  “Fun things like margarine?” Natalie says, and then she walks over and takes my mother’s drink out of her hand and starts massaging her neck. “Ah yes,” she says. “Here’s the place, isn’t it? Oh yeah, I can feel the knot. This is the Noah Knot. I’m getting it.”

  My mother closes her eyes and tilts her head back and forth, and Natalie keeps working away at the spot. I take a sip of my wine so that I won’t say anything—because, really? My mother has a Noah Knot?

  My mom opens her eyes and says to me, “Honey, let’s not drink too much now, before we have dinner. You and I didn’t have much lunch today, remember.”

  “I’m not—”

  My dad comes to the sliding glass door right then to say that the hamburgers are done, and my mother flaps her hands the way she does when events are happening too fast for her, and she starts gathering up the paper plates and the plastic utensils. I reach for the salad bowl, but she says I’m the guest of honor and shouldn’t have to do any work, so I tell her that’s ridiculous, carrying a salad bowl isn’t work, and also I don’t need to be the guest of honor.

  “Oh, you!” she says. “We’re just trying to take care of you, sweetie. I just want to make you feel at home here again. And oh my goodness, you two got me so distracted I forgot about boiling your vegetables.”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I’ll just put them on the grill.”

  “Can we just have the salad, please? Will you humor me on this for God’s sake!” says my mom as she marches out the do
or. Natalie gives me her what-are-you-gonna-do face.

  Outside, the heat hits me like a furnace. The late afternoon sun is still beaming right down on us, and the air is thick with humidity, like something you could roll around in. Brian adjusts the patio umbrella so that my mother will be in the shade while she eats, and my sister sets out the citronella candles while my dad lights the no-bug torches. It’s like a dance they all perform, everyone knowing their roles.

  “Sit here by me,” says Natalie, and she pats my arm. And Brian hands me the hamburger platter saying I should get first dibs. My father grins at me across the table, holds up his glass like he’s going to give a toast.

  He stands up, looking formal and overcome by emotion. I feel a little pulse of alarm as he clears his throat. “To our sweet little Marnie, the survivor! I just want to say, Ducky, you’ve been hit with some hard blows, but I knew you were going to be all right the moment you opened that door to your apartment in Burlingame, and I saw you were baking. Baking! Isn’t that what we said, Millie? This girl is going to take care of herself. She just needed to be back among family and old friends!”

  There’s the clink of glasses as they toast, and then we pass around all the food—the salad and the overcooked hamburgers (my father has a fear of medium rare that rivals what people feel about circus clowns and rattlesnakes)—and for a moment we’re all busy with our plates, and I wonder what would happen if I were to suddenly burst into tears.

  Maybe it’s the fuzziness from the wine mingling with the excessive humidity and the argument about vegetables and olive oil (olive oil!) and also the tension from the sky, which I now see is gathering itself for its late afternoon performance event—a violent thunderstorm. But also there’s something else, some huge hurting thing taking shape within me, what it means to be here with these two couples who know each other so well that even their squabbles—the ones that bring me up short and make my heart start palpitating—are simply routine for them. They fuss and argue and kiss and somehow just keep plowing along through life, racking up grievances and then forgiving themselves and each other again and again. No one is going to stand up and say, “You know what? I can’t do this anymore.”

  And I am an outsider, and yet these people around me are my tribe, the people who have the right by birth and DNA and blood type to have opinions about my life.

  “Are you okay?” Natalie whispers, and I wish I could stand up and tell them the truth, which is that my mother has no right to have a Noah Knot! A Noah Knot! That means that they have been discussing him and me so much that Natalie knows just where the knot is and how to cheer my mother up out of it. And just look, I’d say to her—just look at our father, who is so shrunken next to Brian, like he’s already abdicating ever so slightly his own place as head of the family. Brian will soon be managing his portfolio and his lawn maintenance plan, will be scheduling the tuning of the furnace, and eventually suggesting nursing homes.

  And I—I am just a damaged object they’re all trying to patch up and haul back onto the sales floor. They love me and they will sit with me while I find the necessary prerequisites for their estimation of a happy life: a new job, a new man, a new car, and later on, furniture, a house, some babies. I need endless help, apparently.

  In the meantime, they say, here’s the story we’re giving you: California was a mistake. Your life up to now has all been a big, blurry mistake, but luckily you’re moving on. We caught you just in time.

  My California life, my adulthood, quietly folds itself up like a map and tiptoes away. Nobody but me even sees it go.

  ELEVEN

  MARNIE

  One night, I pass the door of my parents’ room, and I can hear them arguing. It’s nearly midnight, and she is saying, “. . . needs more time, she’s recovering. Don’t you see that?”

  So of course I stop in my tracks and sit down on the floor outside their room.

  He says, “She’s got to get back out there. She needs to get back on the horse. Something bad happened to her, sure, but she can’t let it get her down. Can’t let it stop her in her tracks.”

  “Ted, that was not just ‘something bad’ that happened to her,” my mother says. “Those were two big blows she suffered. Losing her husband and her job.”

  For a moment, it seems simply a fascinating discussion, as though they’re talking about somebody else, or the Theory of Big Blows. I would love to join in. Do I need more emotional rehabilitation or to get back on the horse? What could be the point of either? What does the research say about such things? Fight or flight? Rest or work?

  “You know what she needs,” my mother says in that voice of certainty she uses. “She needs to find a man to go out with.”

  “Millie, for God’s sake, that is the last thing she needs! Why do you always act like that’s going to solve any problems whatsoever? She needs to find herself first! And why am I the only feminist in this conversation? The girl needs a career. Then, if she wants to, she can find a man.”

  “You don’t know anything. She needs love.”

  “Well, fine. Maybe she’ll meet a nice guy at work. But first she has to get a job.”

  “Listen,” my mother says, and I’m surprised by the sudden intensity in her voice. “Don’t you dare take this away from me! Ted, right now we have two daughters in town, and I want to keep it that way! Imagine how nice life would be if both of them could live in the neighborhood permanently and have nice husbands, and then their children could grow up as cousins, and they’ll all be best friends, and they’d all come over on Sunday afternoons, and we could eventually put in a swimming pool—”

  “A swimming pool?” he says.

  “—and a swing set, and we could babysit for the kids, you and I. And I think we can get Marnie to stay here, unless you start pressuring her to get a job! She’ll go off on her own once again, and we’ll just have to worry about her like I did every single night while she was in California. Every single night, Ted, I worried! But—if she meets a guy here, then maybe they’ll both stay.”

  “Oh my lord God in heaven. You are out of your mind.”

  “No! I’m right about this, Ted MacGraw. It’s happened over and over and over again to my friends. If your kids fall in love with a local person, they stick around. It’s love, not work that keeps a person nearby.”

  “And how do you plan to make this happen?”

  “Well, that’s just it. I can’t.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Turn off the light, will you? I’ve got to get up in the morning. Somebody in this house has to work.”

  I am getting to my feet, about to depart for the couch so I can think this over more comfortably, when she says quietly, “I did hear something interesting today.”

  I stop in my tracks.

  “I cannot even imagine what that might have been.”

  “If you’re going to be like that, then I won’t tell you.”

  “It seems I am going to be like this. Please, I’m begging you, turn off the light. You’ve already got my blood pressure so high, I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good night. I hope you have very pleasant dreams.”

  “Thank you. I am certainly going to try.”

  “And when our daughter moves away because you push her to work—”

  “Ah, Millie, you are driving me crazy; do you know that? Go ahead and tell me, so we can both get some sleep.”

  It’s fortunate he says that, because I’m thinking I’m going to have to pound on the door and demand that she tell all of us.

  “Jeremy’s back in town,” she says. She starts talking very, very fast before he can stop her: “He came back six months ago when his mom got sick, and now he’s a physical therapist with a real practice, and he’s living with his mother. And he’s a nice guy, and she liked him a lot, and I think this could be just the answer we’re looking for.”

  “
Who’s looking for?” says my father. “No, really, Millie, who?”

  The couch is calling me. I stand up and tiptoe away before I have to hear my mother explain to my father her very misguided notion of my love life.

  Okay, so Jeremy Sanders was my boyfriend during our senior year of high school, which is the very first year when boyfriends might start to mean something—like they could very well be a real part of your future. My parents certainly thought so, anyway. Even though Jeremy and I didn’t have a whole, huge, madly passionate thing going, we were good together, that kind of good—companionly, sweet, adorable—that parents think is going to be enough for your whole life.

  He was sarcastic and smart, and so was I, and because neither of us fit in with the desirables, we had a great time making fun of everything the popular kids cared about. We made it through high school on our snark alone.

  And then one day, after we’d done nothing more than routine kissing for months and months, he said, “I think we should take our friendship to the next level.”

  I was only moderately cute back then. He was cute, too, in a kind of understated way: he had dark hair and nice eyes and a slight mustache that clearly needed years to grow into something better, and I didn’t understand why he wasn’t embarrassed enough at its scraggliness to shave it off until it could be magnificent. But that’s the way Jeremy was. He shrugged off imperfections. He was kind of too normal, was the truth of it. Besides that inadequate mustache, he had a standard-issue nonathlete boy’s body—a little too plump—and hands that sweated when I held them, oily hair, and pimples on his cheeks. Not that I was so dazzling in the looks department, you understand. I had blonde hair that had a definite greenish cast to it from the chlorine in the pool, and I wore both a dental retainer and glasses. I thought my knees were too sharp and bony, my feet too big.

  All around us, our classmates were fucking like rabbits, and it struck me as crazy that here we were, sitting in his car one afternoon in the school parking lot, and we were talking about sex like you might talk about whether to go to Taco Bell or try something dramatic, like Hardee’s. Should we, or should we not? I was leaning against the window, facing him with my legs curled under me.