The door slammed, and that’s when I started to cry. Because while he might have been cruel, he might also have been right. Just the day before, we’d nursed cocktails with Meg and Tyler and toasted our fortune and circumstance, and now, this—yes, I could see how to Jack it did seem out of nowhere.
But no longer, I think, drowning a giant sip of the mojito. Now I’m here, in this restaurant that my old suburban self wouldn’t have thought worthy of going to, in a dress that my old suburban self couldn’t have squeezed into, and with a man who my old suburban self never quite laid to rest.
I shake myself out of the memory, just as our waiter arrives to
take our order. This is the here and now. This is the moment, I think. This is the time of my life.
LATER, WITH MY STOMACH happily dancing with mahimahi and crusty sourdough bread and rich molten chocolate cake and one mojito too many, Jack pays the check and takes my hand.
“I chose this place because they have the most incredible roof deck,” he says. “Come on, let’s go.”
He pulls back my chair for me and guides me, arm around my waist, to the elevator. (Take that, Marie Claire! Chivalry is not dead!)
The doors ding open when we reach the top, and we step onto a mutedly lit terrace, with tiny white lights, like the fireflies of my childhood, dotting the stucco walls, and soaring potted palm trees looming from corners and crevasses. A jazz trio plays on an elevated stage to our right, and just ahead, I can see the ocean, its waves sweeping in, then out, then in again. Slim, crisp patrons mill about and the air smells of salt, just washed in from the sea.
We amble over to the ledge and stare out at the endless tide, its roar still detectable below the buzz of conversation, and then Jack turns to me.
“Jill, you know that I love you, right?”
“I do,” I say, returning my gaze to the water. I’m mesmerized by its rhythm, how even when you think another wave won’t come along, even when you think the beat won’t hold steady, another crest rides up and there it is—the pulse of the ocean all over again.
“Look at me, baby. I’m saying something important here.” His palm guides my cheek back to him. Jack inhales. “I know that as a writer, I’m supposed to have a way with words and all of that, but I’ve thought about this over and over again, and I just don’t have the right words for this moment.”
It hits me, suddenly and viscerally, what is happening.
“And so,” he continues and lowers himself onto one knee, “all I can say is, Jill, I love you more than anything, and I’d be honored if you’d marry me.” He bats a curl of blond hair off his forehead, then reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a box.
I can feel all my pores reopen, sweat marching forward, like an angry army, and my eyes are frozen wide, unable to blink. Blood rushes through me, and my mouth turns arid. I still haven’t spoken when he slides the ring on my finger.
“So you will?” he says, rising to kiss me. I must nod my head or give some slight indication that, indeed, I will, though I can’t remember giving such an acknowledgment, because the next thing I hear is raucous applause from the partygoers around us who have stopped sipping their martinis for just a moment to notice our passing flicker of a life moment. Jack swings me around in a bear hug and screams some sort of victory cry, reminding me of an ancient warrior who just slayed a beast, and the roar crescendos, then softens, just like the waves below.
Jack kisses my ear, biting just enough to tingle, then heads to the bar for celebratory drinks. On the house, cooed the cocktail waitress after making her way over to congratulate us.
I lean against the cool ledge and hold my left hand out for a view. The ring sings out—it is shining and round and big and hopeful—and by any standard, I should be bursting, I am bursting, to have it. I hug my arms in tight, wrapping my hands around my back, to ward off a cool breeze that strikes out of nowhere. The wind passes, and I release myself, staring down at my finger once again.
This was perfect, I think. It wasn’t intimate like Henry’s proposal, and so what if his words weren’t quite poetic, weren’t quite what I’d imagined when someone asked me to swear myself to him for life. It was pretty close to perfect. Perfect enough.
I run my thumb over the ring, trying to swivel it back and forth the way that I’d grown accustomed to with Henry’s, and it’s only then that I notice that the band is nearly choking my finger. That it’s wrapped around so tight that the better half of my ring finger looks like an overstuffed sausage. I pull my hand closer and hold it up to the light. It’s hard to see at first, but then, I can feel the throb: There, just to the right of my knuckle, is a tiny gash, no bigger than a gnat-sized paper cut. Jack must have nicked it when he pushed the ring on.
I raise my hand to my mouth and suck the pulsing joint, the unmistakable taste of blood spreading across my tongue, and after a minute, the pain subsides. I examine my knuckle again, turning back and forth and back again under the dull glare of the tiny white lights, and best I can tell, the cut is gone.
I catch Jack’s eye from the bar and smile.
And yet, if I listened to my wiser self, my suburban self who still clanged around in my brain when I let her, she would have told me that though the wound was now invisible, it was never really gone.
KATIE
By the time Katie was seven months old, many of my prebaby fantasies had come to fruition: Baby powder did indeed fill the air and her smile warmed me to my toes, but other things lingered, too—my fear of damaging her, which manifested itself in overprotectiveness; Henry’s new promotion at work, which sucked away at the little time we had together outside of Katie; the stale conversation between us, which circled mostly (and only) about Katie herself.
“Katie pooped five times today!” I said, as we sat down to a dinner of grilled salmon I’d painstakingly marinated the night before (Cooking Light!). “Can you believe it? Five times!”
“Should you call the doctor?” Henry asked, slightly disengaged.
“It seems like normal poop,” I reply. “Nothing runny or anything.”
“Well, I guess she likes to eat.”
“Like her daddy,” I said, smiling. “Poops and eats like her daddy.”
Henry grinned and dug his fork into his fish, as I searched for something else with which to update him.
In real life, most marriages don’t come undone with one big explosion. Unlike in the movies, most wives don’t stumble upon lipstick on a collar or discover a hotel receipt in a blazer pocket. Most wives don’t uncover hidden gambling problems or latent addictions or experience out-of-nowhere abuse that pops up one day and destroys everything. Some do, but most, no, not most. Most marriages unravel slowly, slipping drop by drop, like water ebbing through a curled palm, until one day, you look down and notice that it, your hand, is entirely empty. That’s how most marriages dissolve and run dry. And, in retrospect, it’s how mine came undone exactly.
“Oh!” I said with surprise that night at dinner. “And I can’t believe I forgot to tell you! She’s almost crawling! In fact, she’s crawling backward . . . I saw her do it twice today. Ainsley says that Alex did the same thing one week before he did it the right way.”
“She’s practically ready for Harvard,” Henry said, raising his glass for a mock toast.
“Speaking of which, we should talk about preschool,” I answered.
And so it went. Two people who had spun concentric circles around the lives they’d created with each other, and now, the only thing that anchored us down, that anchored us together, was our daughter. So round and round we went. On the road to nowhere.
Chapter Eighteen
The time has come, I realize in late October, to annihilate my closet. Every morning, I’m lost in a sea of mismatched, crumpled clothes, unmoored shoes, and discarded coats and scarves and handbags. Declutter your space, declutter your mind, I tell myself on a soggy Saturday afternoon (Woman’s Day!).
Since our return from Miami two weeks earlier, we’ve
been thrown into a tornado of wedding planning, courtesy, primarily, of Vivian.
2:00 P.M., Thursday, just as I’m heading into a crucial meeting on the winter Coke campaign: “Jillian dear, just when are you going to set a date? Tick tock! If we don’t nail down the country club now, we’ll never get it! How does April 9 sound?”
8:47 A.M., Monday, just as I’m stepping off the subway to head to the office: “Darling, it’s me, Vivian. If we’re going to do a spring wedding, I’m thinking that we should do coral roses and white lilies. It will be just lovely!”
9:29 P.M., Friday, just as I’m finally leaving work and meeting Megan and some college friends for a girls’-night-out much-needed drink: “Yoo-hoo, dear, it’s imperative that we book a gown appointment ASAP! We’re pushing this a bit too close already, and you absolutely need six months to get your dress before the big day!”
After Henry and I got engaged, we called my father and shared the news, then phoned Henry’s parents to do the same. And then we both agreed that we wanted the event to be as intimate and non-frenzied as possible.
“Less of a circus, more of a celebration,” he said at the time, and I nodded my head concurring. So I casually flipped through Brides and I conferred with him on simple flower choices, and I asked Ainsley and Megan along to try on gowns, but mostly, I let my father and Linda, his girlfriend, work out the fine print. It all seemed so unnecessary—stephanotis versus baby’s breath, butter cream versus fondant, chicken versus steak. Did anyone ever look back at a wedding and say, “Thank God we opted for the cherry swirl in the middle of the cake because without it, it would have been a disastrous evening for all involved!” No. At least, that’s what I told myself at the time, and with Henry’s rational, always rational, opinion sounding in the background, it was easy enough to believe.
Now, maybe it did matter, I think, as I’m knee-deep in sweatpants that I hadn’t seen since college graduation. Maybe the enthusiasm that you put out for the planning trickles over into your early days of marriage, and maybe if I’d seemed a little more game, a little more intoxicated with love for Henry, our relationship wouldn’t have backfired so roundly. Besides, years of reading Martha Stewart and InStyle Weddings had led to near untoppable vats of knowledge: For an unhappily married woman trapped in suburbia with no hope of throwing a wedding anytime soon, I knew more than I’d earned the right to know about nuptial planning. So, after vetting Vivian’s relentless calls, I agreed to meet her later this month to discuss details with the planner she’s hired.
How did I live like this? I say to myself, spinning around the wreckage of my walk-in. How did opening the closet door each morning not make you lose your mind?
I stand on my tiptoes and reach for some partially folded sweaters, their arms hanging loose like a dead man’s, which I hadn’t worn since the year that Jack and I met. Tugging on the only one I can reach, I’m suddenly pelted with raining objects. The entire wire shelf comes careening down, and I jump back from the onslaught.
“You okay?” Jack calls from the living room where he’s attempting to revive his manuscript.
“Alive,” I say back.
“Almost done? I have a surprise for you.”
“A few more minutes,” I sigh. Way more than a few more minutes. Where was my Real Simple, complete with the perfect organizing tips, when I needed it?
I kick a pair of Levi’s that I’d donned for my twenty-third birthday and crouch down among the debris. Piles of merino wool turtlenecks, musty from years of nonuse; my high-school yearbook with curled pages due to water damage from the apartment above; pashmina scarves that I’d bought in Chinatown when one in every color wasn’t enough; mix tapes for boyfriends whose last names I could barely remember.
But then, peeking out of an old Yellow Pages (I saved Yellow Pages??), a corner of a photo catches my eye. I cock my head to make sure that I’m seeing it correctly, but it’s unmistakable. Adrenaline races through me, and my fingers shake almost on cue. I pluck it from the dusty urine-colored pages and sink to the floor, rapt and sickened all at once.
Though I had wiped clean every image, every reminder, of my mother, I’d been unable to release her entirely, and so, as I trekked from my childhood home to my dorms, from my dorms to my adult apartments, I’d always held on to one black-and-white picture, the way that a reformed binger might a piece of chocolate. Always there, just in case you need it. When Jack and I broke up the last time around, I’d moved out, and when packing up my things, I’d stumbled upon the photo. Still burning over my mother’s note and unwelcome reentry into my life, I heaved the photo into the garbage bag, just as I had her letter. Gone and nearly forgotten.
But now, here it was all over again, like Groundhog Day for the emotionally impaired.
The shot was taken that same summer that my mother and I had lazed around the yard at dusk and chased fireflies until we were wasted. She and I are in her garden, her temple, as she liked to call it. Long after she’d showered and rubbed herself down in Charlie body lotion, she always smelled slightly of soil, and even today, I am reminded of her whenever the scent of dirt wafts through the air. We are perched between her tomato vines and her rows of basil and green beans, and she, with a bandanna in her hair and just a smudge of dirt on her left cheek, is wrapped around me from behind. I’m smiling straight into the camera, but rather than looking at the lens, she is casting down at me, a warm grin on her face, but one filled with sentimentality, not necessarily ebullience. She would leave us only five weeks later.
I stare at the photo with new eyes, eyes now of a mother, and it’s as if I’m looking at it for the first time. In years past, hardened by fury, I’d always seen the photo as literal proof of her betrayal: that she could pretend to love me so vigorously but when the time came, she could disentangle her embrace and forget it entirely. But now I can see it as so much more: that perhaps, what she was doing that day in the garden wasn’t so much as holding me with no love behind the embrace; rather, she was clutching me, as if I were a buoy and the only thing that might save her from drowning. Looking at it again, I can’t believe that I’d never seen this clearly.
Jack pops his head into the closet, snapping me from my trance.
“You ready to head out?”
“A picture of my mother,” I answer, holding it up for him.
He grasps it and pulls it closer, startled. “Jesus, you look just like her.”
I shrug, then tuck the picture into my sock drawer and wade out from the mess, literal and not.
“Your surprise, m’lady,” Jack says, ushering me to the front door.
I force a smile and follow, trying to erase the photo from my mind. Because what’s most haunting isn’t how closely I resemble my mother or even how clearly I can remember that day in the garden. No, what racks me most is how now, years later, I inherently recognize my mother’s loving yet chagrined and weary expression because it’s the same one that I wore like a mask since the very day that Katie was born.
JACK’S SURPRISE, lo and behold, is a new couch. Which on paper, I understand, isn’t particularly romantic or anything really to swoon over, but for him, it’s a concession, and thus, for me, it is indeed something.
“My engagement gift to you,” he says, as we’re ensconced on the second floor of ABC Home. His arm sweeps around. “Have at it. Any one you choose.”
My eyebrows dart down. “Where is my boyfriend and what did you do with him?”
“Fiancé,” he corrects.
“Where is my fiancé and what did you do with him?” I peck him on the lips. I’m still not quite used to saying that.
“Well, you know, now that we’re getting married, I do recognize that the couch of my bachelorhood should maybe take a hike.”
I look at him with suspicion.
“Okay.” He laughs. “And Leigh might have made a comment or two about how disgusting it was when she saw it last month.”
Of course, I think, though say nothing.
I head over to a supp
le leather love seat and sink in. Jack opens his mouth to voice an opinion but I hold up a finger, and he snaps it shut with a smile.
“My choice this time!” I say, and he wordlessly plunks down next to me, like an obedient dog. If I’d gotten good at anything during my marriage to Henry, it was mastering the art of tasteful decorating.
A sand-hued, pebbled leather three seater on the other side of the floor looks exactly like what we need to spice up the living room, so I grab Jack’s hand and weave through the sofas and couches and reclining chairs toward it. Just as we’re about to park ourselves smack in the middle, a familiar stride wanders in front of me. The lanky torso, the sloping walk, I’d know it anywhere.
“Henry?” I say, then immediately regret it. My matted hair is tucked into a baseball cap, and my zip-up sweatshirt reeks of closet dust.
“Jill!” he says, his face ebbing into joyfulness when he sees me. He glances at Jack and extends his hand. “Jack, isn’t it?”
“Uh, it is,” Jack responds, reciprocating the shake but clearly having no recollection of their brief introduction at the Coke gala. Before I can explain the connection, a petite redhead slides over to Henry and slips her hand into his back pocket.
“Hey you,” she says, as if we’re not standing there, as if she’s not slipping her hand into my fucking husband’s back pocket!
“Er, hey. Celeste, this is Jill. A friend whom I know from around.” Henry swipes his bangs and attempts to tuck them behind his ear. “And this is her boyfriend, Jack.”
“Fiancé, actually,” Jack interjects. “Just happened a few weeks ago!”
“Congratulations, you two!” Celeste squeals, like she’s known us for decades. “How exciting! When is the big day?”
“Um, it’s not set yet,” I mutter. Henry freezes his face into a smile that he’d later reserve for horrid dinner parties that have lingered hours too long; at the first sign of it, I’d take it as our cue to start saying our good-byes. His “I’d rather be riding shotgun to the gates of hell than be here now” smile is exactly how we once classified it, after we’d rushed out of an evening at the Hollands’, who were each screwing coworkers and who had made not-so-veiled references to their mutual antipathy the night through, and after we cried with laughter in the car as we drove home.
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