Matchmaking for Beginners

by Dawson, Maddie

  “I am. I mean, I think he’s great. The only thing is, I just—well, I’m not nervous and scared around him. You know what I mean? I don’t feel . . . all fluttery. It’s just comfortable. So is that what love is?”

  She looks at me like she knows something very wise that I haven’t figured out yet. “Of course it is. It’s such a relief to be with a guy who loves you more than you love him, isn’t it?”

  And oh my God, I think, she’s exactly spot-on. That’s what this is: he does love me more than I love him. In fact, he’s kind of like a little puppy dog around me, always wanting to please me. So that’s what my teeny tiny little sense of hesitation is: he adores me, and although I can make a list of all his wonderful qualities and I know that he’s perfect for me, I am not suffering the way I usually do when I’m in love.

  She’s talking away. “That’s the way it is with mature love, you goose. And it’s wonderful! You’ll see. It’s one less thing you have to worry about. He’s not thinking about somebody else or about to realize he doesn’t really love you after all.” She picks up Amelia, who kicks her fat little legs and flaps her arms. She’s so adorable that it’s all I can do to keep myself from going over and whisking her right out of Natalie’s arms.

  “Wow,” I say. “You’re right.”

  “Just one thing: How’s the sex? That tells you what you need to know, I always say.”

  “Wellllll, his mother—”

  “Oh, right. You’ve got that prim mom of his in the next room, don’t you? Okay, so he’s got to get his own place. And then everything will be perfect. And to tell you the truth, sex falls off as the most important thing in the whole world. You’ll see.”

  I look over at my sister, who is possibly the luckiest person in the whole world, managing to celebrate the daily mundanity of marriage without having one iota of regret. She’s shown me the texts she and Brian send back and forth, and they’re all about who’ll pick up the milk and should they have tacos for dinner, and did she take the car in. Not even one pronouncement about undying love.

  When we go into the living room, she puts Amelia in her windup swing and we sit on the couch and drink Diet Cokes while the baby falls asleep to the soft whirring of the swing. The air conditioner is a soft hum in the distance, and the refrigerator motor comes on. Adult life seems to be full of the sounds of motors. Even lawn mowers. Outside there is the glistening blue jewel that is their swimming pool; inside, I watch as a shaft of sunlight flickers across Natalie’s thick beige carpet.

  “Look at her,” Natalie whispers, and I turn to the baby, slumped over in the swing, looking like a sack of rice. We both laugh softly, and then I say, “I want one of those. I want to do this, too.”

  “You know what would be like the greatest thing in the whole world? If you had a baby, too, and we could raise them together and it would be just like when we were little girls playing house, only now there are real guys here, too. Husbands.”

  “That would be the coolest thing,” I say.

  We both start talking about how Jeremy and I could buy a house in this neighborhood once we’re married—it’s totally not too soon, Natalie says—and then when it feels right, we could start having kids, and blah blah blah, something about the guys playing tennis and Natalie and I being together all the time, having barbecue nights, and growing old, and I can barely hear her because my blood is pounding in my ears and maybe I am so excited at belonging somewhere. And soon I get up and go take a dip in her pool, and I lie on my back in the crisp, cool water gazing up at the blue, blue sky with little white clouds that look just like a child painted them.

  And this, I think—no, I know—is exactly what happiness feels like.

  SEVENTEEN

  BLIX

  I am still me. I am still me. I am dying, but I am still who I am.

  I think I see my mother, feel her hand on my forehead. But then it’s not my mother at all; it’s Lola here with me.

  And so is Patrick. I feel his hand holding mine.

  “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens,” I say to him. “Rumi said that.”

  Houndy, from somewhere, tells me that Patrick’s heart has already broken more than any heart can stand.

  “Sssh,” I say. “So much light is left for you, Patrick.”

  I hear him say, “Blix, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you want some more ice chips?” and I do not.

  “Love,” I say to him. “That is what I’m talking about.”

  Ah! The moon is here again. And the sea. Our blood and the sea have the same pH.

  Does Noah know that? I’ll bet Patrick knows.

  Lola has gone away again. She says it won’t be long.

  He knows so little, poor beautiful Noah. Wants me to have professional people here instead of my friends. Doesn’t want to know from death. How it can be part of a well-lived life. He sits on my bed next to Patrick and plays the guitar, his hair falling over his gorgeous face, but I don’t really hear the music as much as feel it. It’s as though my bones are making the noise. Plink, plink, plink.

  I feel myself say, “Houndy.”

  And Noah laughs and says, “Houndy?” so I know I must have said it aloud. Funny how some sounds exist but don’t come into your ears.

  I love to hear him say that name.

  Lobsters, I think.

  “Yes, I remember. Houndy brought us all lobsters that time I was here.” He sings that to the tune of something I almost remember.

  Patrick says that Houndy was a good man. He wants to know if I can see Houndy right now, and Noah says death doesn’t work that way.

  The light circles around me, and I am outside the old elementary school in my own hometown, and a girl named Barbara Anne is offering me a chocolate, and I smile at her and reach over to take it, and my arm hits something. A person. Houndy? No, Patrick.

  “I’m here,” he says.

  Solid, warm. And I’m walking on the cliff looking at the stars. I might be a star. I used to think we became stars when we died. From stardust to stardust, someone told me.

  When I told Houndy that, he said, “Nope. Not stars. I want to become a potato chip.”

  His eyes fill up my whole head. His laughing eyes. Are you coming, my love? Do I have to keep waiting for you?

  All is love. Just love.

  Don’t be scared. Don’t clutch. It’s like yoga, those hard poses, where if you resist, it hurts.

  It doesn’t hurt just to let go. That’s Houndy talking now in my head.

  I can’t think of how. What do you drop, what makes letting go happen? The blackness comes over me, but still I don’t let go. There’s something else I have to do.

  “What do I do . . . after?” Noah says.

  You call the coroner, bunion head. This guy really knows nothing, does he? Houndy again. What does he think you’re supposed to do?

  Patrick says he knows what to do.

  “I called my mother,” Noah says close to my ear. How much later is it? His voice is too close; it tickles me. “She says I have to call the doctor for you. She insists on it. You need medical care fast.”

  No. No. NO.

  Patrick, tell him.

  Patrick says no.

  Oh God. Is this going to be my last thought? My last thought on earth is going to be NO? I want to think of something peaceful, not how Wendy is directing me from Virginia, how my family thinks my death should go. Why can’t they let me die the way I want to die? I need to go NOW. How do I make myself die?

  Patrick and Noah are arguing. Noah says maybe there’s something else they can do. To buy more time. I can’t hear what Patrick is saying, but I hear his tone of voice—low, loving, gentle.

  Patrick knows I don’t want more time. Not unless I can have eons of it.

  Marnie. That’s it, that’s what I will think about. I wrap her in love and light. I send her a message: Love is the only thing that matters. I want to stop the men from talking; I want to tell Patrick about her, but something says not
to, that Noah would hear. What a funny business love is, and these two men sitting here, one the past and one the possible future.

  There was so much I still wanted to do.

  And then I’m up on the ceiling, looking down at myself, a perfect little wrecked body there in the bed, beautiful and strange. That body of mine, so useful and brave, wrapped now in a white gown. The gown I’d picked out and made Noah help me get into. Patrick is there on the bed, too, looking down at me. I feel it when he notices that I’m not there anymore. He reaches over and touches my hand, curls my fingers in his own large hand, the hand that was burned.

  Thank you, I say. And now it’s time. So much left undone. So much I still want to feel and know.

  But I’ve already let go.

  EIGHTEEN

  MARNIE

  I wake up in the middle of the night, startled into sitting upright in bed, noticing my heart hurts.

  The air feels sharp in the room, as though it has an unfamiliar smell. Like a candle has burned down somewhere. I want to awaken Jeremy, just for company. It’s so nice turning over at night to find somebody next to me in the bed again.

  Yet I don’t wake him up. I lie there, longing for something I can’t quite name.

  What woke me up?

  Happiness. Happiness woke me up, but there’s something else. Something about life feeling so fragile. Something about love being the only thing that matters.

  I go to the window and look out at the blackness of the night. There’s a shooting star and I watch it, unsure whether it’s really the trail of an airplane. But no, it’s a star. Blazing out, probably from millions of years ago. Isn’t that what they say? That when we look at the stars, we are seeing the past.

  NINETEEN

  MARNIE

  The envelope is from the law firm of Brockman, Wyatt, and Sanford, and by the time it arrives at my parents’ house, it looks like it has been through the worst that the postal system has to offer.

  I pick it up by its halfway torn and blackened corner and take it inside with the rest of the mail. It’s about a million degrees outside, and I’m excited because tonight Jeremy and I are going to talk about taking a vacation together, just the two of us. He says we should rent a red convertible and drive up the coast through Georgia, go to Savannah and up to Charleston.

  And—well, there is some indication that Jeremy might propose. That’s what Natalie thinks, and just talking about it makes her so happy that I go along with it, even though I told her that it seems crazy somehow, even trashy, to have two marriage proposals in one year from two different men.

  She said, “It’s not trashy if it means you’re getting your life on the right track. And anyway, it’s a great story you can tell the grandchildren when you and Jeremy are celebrating your golden wedding anniversary. The year you married two men. I think that’ll be a wonderful story.”

  I walk into the kitchen, ripping open the envelope as I go, and then I hold the letter in one hand while I open the refrigerator to get the pitcher of iced tea and then get a glass out of the cupboard. The birds are chirping madly at the feeder—probably complaining about the heat—and I stop to watch them while I’m sipping my tea.

  When I look down, Blix’s name jumps out at me.

  “Dear Ms. MacGraw . . . I am writing to you because our law firm is representing the estate of Blix Marlene Holliday . . .”

  Estate?

  Blix is dead?

  Oh my God. Blix is dead.

  I sink down onto one of my mother’s kitchen chairs. I put the letter on the table and close my eyes for a moment, remembering the night of the wedding when she said that she was at the end of life, and I didn’t make her tell me what she meant. So long ago.

  I have meant to keep in touch with her—honestly I have meant to—to tell her about Jeremy and that I’m living in Jacksonville now and that I’m going to be okay and to thank her for all the good wishes about the big life and all that . . . but, well, I’ve been terrible. So much has happened to me in such a short time, and I didn’t keep her filled in about any of it. But, really, why would I? She was Noah’s great-aunt, and yes, she was kind to me, but she belonged to him. And even as I’m saying this to myself, I know it’s just an excuse I’m making up because I feel so guilty. All this new life in Florida: Had she somehow known this would be where I would end up? And damn it, I never even knew that she was sick.

  And now she is dead.

  Shit.

  I pick up the letter again and scan it quickly.

  “Our client, Blix Holliday, recently deceased, has named you in her last will and testament as the owner of a property belonging to her, a house on Berkeley Place in Brooklyn, New York . . .”

  I drop the letter.

  Of course this is a mistake. It has to be. Surely Blix left it to Noah, and the post office forwarded it on to me because he’s in some forsaken place in Africa with no forwarding address . . . or maybe she left it to the two of us during the twenty minutes or so that we were husband and wife, and she never got around to changing her will and taking my name off.

  But nope. I pick up the letter and read further. I am the sole owner of the house, according to Mr. Sanford.

  Me, Ms. Marnie MacGraw.

  Mr. Sanford urges me to come to Brooklyn as soon as I can. Right away would be nice since there are decisions I need to make.

  Decisions.

  He ends the letter with, “I know this may come as a surprise to you, Ms. MacGraw, which was exactly what my client wished. She spoke to me many times of her great hope that you would live in Brooklyn and take care of the house. Most recently, right before she died, she urged me to impress upon you the urgency of coming to Brooklyn immediately to review the terms of the will and to participate in the pending decisions that must be made. And she asked that I assure you that your expenses would be paid in full. She wishes for you to stay in the house while you are here making arrangements. Also, I am to tell you that there are tenants living in the house who are anxious to meet you. And if you knew Blix, who was a dear personal friend, you also know that she liked to do things a certain way, and have her wishes respected. Sincerely yours, Charles F. Sanford, Esq.”

  Holy cow. I put the letter down and rub my head. Blix is summoning me. That time she invited me and I turned her down—now she’s insisting that I come, now that it’s too late. Too late to see her, that is.

  But why? What does she want with me?

  I can almost hear her voice: This is your adventure. Take it.

  Is that it? An adventure right when I’m in no need of one? I look out the window. A dragonfly is dancing past the glass.

  That evening, I hand the letter to Jeremy, who reads it once and then starts over and reads it again. He’s about to embark on a third reading when I take it out of his hands. He has such a disapproving expression on his face that I feel I should tuck Blix back into the safety of my purse, nestled up between my sunglasses and the little bag that holds my art supplies.

  “So I take it you’re planning to go to Brooklyn for this,” he says in the flattest voice anybody ever used. Of course. He’s a practical person, and this makes no sense to anybody who didn’t know Blix.

  “Well, yes. I’ve made a reservation for Friday.”

  “Friday!”

  He sighs. I know what he’s thinking: here we are, in our favorite diner, on an evening when we’re supposed to be talking convertibles and beaches and islands—and now we have to deal with this. Decisions that have nothing to do with us. A house that we also never thought about. And a trip. Tenants. Brooklyn. Freaking New York. Who cares about any of it? And . . . worst of all for him, I imagine, is the fact that the great-aunt of my ex-husband, a man whose name I am apparently not even allowed to say in front of Jeremy, has somehow stepped back into my life, even indirectly. It must feel to him as if Noah himself has just tossed a hand grenade into our relationship.

  “But how do we know this isn’t a scam?” he says. “Maybe there are going to be legal p
roblems. Complications. I mean, what are you really walking into? You didn’t know her.”

  I stir my glass of iced tea. “It’s not a scam. And I did know her.”

  “She didn’t even have your new address,” he points out. “How close could you have been?”

  “That’s more my fault than hers. I haven’t kept in touch. I didn’t know she was actively dying or I would’ve. She left me this building as a good thing. A nice gesture. It’s not a punishment.”

  He’s smiling. “Okay. Maybe I’m missing something, but I still don’t see why she wouldn’t leave her property to her family. Isn’t that what people do? No offense, but why give it to her grandnephew’s ex-wife?”

  “Well, I think—well, I think she liked me.” I shrug.

  He eats more of his hamburger and then pushes his plate away. “Also, we were planning such a fun trip. I thought you wanted to drive up the coast with me.”

  “I do,” I say. “And we will when I get back. But first I have to go to Brooklyn and see about the building.” I finish off two of his French fries.

  At the booth across from us, a man and woman are on a first date, and without even paying attention to what they’re saying, I almost feel the need to go over and tell them that they are perfect together. The air around their booth shimmers a little. I’m startled to realize that this is the first time in so long that I’ve noticed anybody falling in love, that I’ve seen sparkles.

  “You’re not going to want to live in Brooklyn, are you? Because I do not see myself as a city guy, and I didn’t think you wanted that either.” He laughs a short little laugh.

  “Jeremy. Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody’s talking about moving to Brooklyn. I’m going to look at the building, most likely put it on the market, and come right back. You know . . .” I lean forward and lower my voice. “This could be really good for me. I could sell it and get some money and that could give me a fresh start here. Some money for a house here. You know?”

  “Okay,” he says. His face softens a little, goes back to its nonparanoid state. “Well. So listen.” He swallows. “Along those same lines. I’ve been thinking about this, and I really didn’t prepare any speech or anything. But . . .” He reaches for my hand across the table, nearly knocking over the ketchup bottle. “But, well, when you come back and everything, what would you think about us getting engaged? I know it’s soon and all—” His face is so full of fear and trepidation that it stops my heart.