“This is the fanciest lesbian wedding I’ve ever been to,” Nina whispered as we took seats in one of the last rows for the ceremony.
“Come on. Lauren has better taste than you,” I teased her. “And better sense than to wear white to someone else’s wedding.”
“No she doesn’t.” Nina laughed. “Remember how she wore hiking sandals with socks every day for a year. I didn’t think anyone would ever want to muff-dive her. Even someone as butch as Beth. How was that not a deal breaker! It must have been true love if Beth could see past those. I can’t believe they’re only just getting married now. It’s been at least ten years since they first got together.”
Nina was terrible at keeping track of time. It had actually been fourteen years since Beth and Lauren met and twelve since the four of us—Beth, Lauren, Nina, and I—finished our MFAs at Columbia together. I saw Beth and Lauren much more than I saw Nina. They’d both been in my wedding, even though Lauren had been massively pregnant with Colin, their first. Beth and Lauren and Karl and I hung out a lot in those early days when we all still lived in the West Village. But then Beth got tenure at Berkeley and they moved across the country.
Meanwhile, I hadn’t seen Nina since the day we both moved out of our roach-infested one-bedroom on 116th Street above a Korean laundry that was also a brothel, judging from clientele wearing tailored suits and baseball caps pulled low over their brows. I hadn’t expected to see Nina here at all. She’d turned down the invite to my wedding ten years ago, claiming exhaustion after a yearlong tour for her first book. We were all surprised that she would miss the chance to lord it over all of us that she had been the first of our classmates to be published. But no matter how much time had passed, it was easy to fall right back into step with Nina. Her sarcasm and quick wit made anyone feel like they could be her best friend. I realized I missed her. Or maybe it was the feeling of being around her I missed—she always made me feel lighter, freer, like a much cooler version of myself. It was just as seductive now as it had been when I was twenty-six.
“You know how it is when two ladies get together,” I replied. “First you move in together the week after you meet at grad school orientation, then you adopt a cat and then another cat, and soon one of you finds some sperm and gets pregnant, and then the other one gets pregnant, you pick up and leave New York to move to the expensive part of Oakland, and ten years later you finally tie the knot in a gorgeous wedding in Big Sur with a fabulous wedding planner named Hugo.”
“This place was definitely Hugo’s idea.” Nina nodded toward the wedding planner, a petite well-Botoxed man wearing a hemp suit and a bolo tie furiously giving orders into a headset. “If this wedding had happened ten years ago we’d be drinking beers on a roof after a goddess ceremony.”
“People change. We’ve all changed.” I glanced then at Nina and thought about how she hadn’t changed a bit. And then I looked out at the ocean to avoid thinking about how much I’d changed.
The view of the Pacific was postcard perfect. Sheer white cliffs plunging into turquoise waves. The rest of the shoreline disappeared into a grove of coastal redwoods. The air smelled of salt, citrus, and eucalyptus.
“This place must have cost a fortune,” Nina said, raising her eyebrows and pushing a lock of inky hair out of her face. Her hands were smooth, but her nails ragged. Her cheeks had more freckles and a few more wrinkles than the last time I’d seen her, but somehow Nina could still pass for being in her late twenties, while I knew I looked every bit the forty-year-old mother of two. I reflexively and self-consciously reached up to touch the skin near the corners of my lips and cursed myself for not getting fillers before this wedding.
“Beth might be living on a professor’s salary, but Lauren makes good money off her books. Who knew a children’s book series about a homeless dwarf with a lisp could be turned into a blockbuster movie with Tom Hanks?” I said. Then I shushed Nina before she could speak again once the flutist began the first twinkling notes of Pachelbel’s Canon.
“So traditional,” Nina said in a stage whisper.
“Sometimes tradition is nice.”
“Fuck tradition.”
I raised my phone and snapped a picture of Lauren and Beth’s three kids as they tossed tiny crushed nuts from handwoven baskets. An asterisk in the program explained that the brides preferred to feed crushed nuts to the native wildlife than to rip the petals off innocent roses. You can take the girl out of the goddess ceremony, but you can’t take the goddess ceremony out of the girl. Their daughter Anna nervously tugged on the edges of her paisley peasant dress. I waved at her and she waved back, reminding me of how my youngest, Matilda, had recently started indiscriminately waving at anyone on the street. Karl and I agreed it was both adorable and an invitation to pedophiles, so we gently discouraged the behavior in crowded public spaces.
I felt an ache, missing them. This trip was the longest I’d been away from my girls since they were born, even though I’d only been gone less than twelve hours and I was due back out on the red-eye tomorrow night.
“Guess what?” Nina whispered in my ear as the brides walked down the aisle, elbows entwined, genuine happiness lighting up both of their faces. “I have a surprise for you later.”
• • •
After the entrées I snuck away to FaceTime the girls before they got into bed. They were already snuggled into matching pajamas. At four and six they still got a kick out of dressing alike, and I desperately wanted it to last forever. Each time I thought about them getting even a minute older, I considered having another baby and then remembered how hard it was to get pregnant the first two times. I knew plenty of women in our neighborhood who got pregnant after forty. There were doctors in my zip code who specialized exclusively in geriatric IVF, but I wasn’t sure my sanity or marriage could withstand another child.
The girls loved FaceTiming. Isabel insisted on playing me a piece she’d learned during her piano lesson and Matilda wanted to show me the somersaults they did in gymnastics, and they both wanted to see the Pacific Ocean and a picture of the brides. Brides to them were similar to princesses and the fact that this wedding had two of them made it more special.
“Put Daddy on the phone?” I finally asked gently.
“He’s busy.” Izzy rolled her eyes, an affect she clearly learned in the first grade or from an episode of Real Housewives.
“So busy.” Tilly mimicked her older sister. “He’s been in his library like all of the night. Marley made us dinner and is reading us our bedtime stories.”
“I will tell him you called, Ms. Carmichael.” I heard Marley’s disembodied voice, heavy with her thick Irish brogue, come from somewhere in the room.
Thank god for Marley, our au pair, an adorable Irish girl who the other moms on the Upper East Side envied for both her charm with my children and her wide waistline, an asset, they all claimed, in a live-in who you didn’t want screwing your husband. I’d assumed somehow that having an au pair, even one who was part-time since she began taking classes at NYU, would give me more time for myself, but that extra time was immediately siphoned into managing other kid things, family things, Karl things, and even with Marley around I still wanted to be with my daughters as much as humanly possible even when they exhausted me or bored me to tears, which was more often than I cared—or dared—to admit.
“Thank you, Marley.” I kept my voice light and my tone cheerful.
“Mommy, we have to go,” Isabel said. “It’s time to read about the dragons and tacos with Marley.” Her dismissal stung. At six and four they were already too old to miss me.
“OK, sweetie. I love you very, very much. Do you know how much?”
“Very, very much, even more than you love yourself,” Matilda said with confidence, repeating a mangled version of a line from The Giving Tree that I’d whispered to her almost every night since she was born.
“Yes. Very, very much.” I leaned in to kiss my screen.
The dinner and reception were in full swing
by the time I made my way to the large tent in the backyard, with the two hundred guests, including kids and elderly relatives, spilling over the wraparound porch and lawn and dancing wildly to a bluegrass version of “SexyBack.”
As the band switched from JT to Van Morrison I watched a handsome couple, maybe a few years older than Karl and me, glide across the dance floor. His hand gripped the small of her back just above her ass. She threw her head back and laughed before he twirled her out of his embrace and then back to him again. His eyes were fixed firmly on her breasts. The crowd focused their attention on the couple. Someone even clapped.
That should have been us.
I thought about the last time Karl and I had danced to this song. “Crazy Love,” one of my all-time favorites. We’d attended his Yale classmate’s wedding in Montauk just two months after Tilly was born. I was still breast-feeding, and the baby was asleep in the hotel about two dozen yards away. I had worn a maternity dress, since it was the only thing that fit my postpartum stomach, and at least two wedding guests had asked me when I was due. My feet were so swollen I had to put them on top of Karl’s to dance at all. My engorged breasts had just begun to leak and sour milk dripped down my belly. If I closed my eyes now I could still feel Karl’s hot breath on my cheek as he whispered in my ear, “You’re the most beautiful woman here.”
Nina snapped me away from the happy memory. “Beach, now,” she hissed in my ear, a bottle of prosecco in one hand, and a worn leather tote slung over her bare shoulder.
I looked skeptically over the cliff, which plummeted directly down into the sea. “Do you have a rope? How do we get down there? Are we going rock climbing, because I’m not wearing my rock climbing formal wear?”
“There’re stairs. I went there this morning. Come on. It’s low tide.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s one of those things that I know.”
It was as easy to inherently trust Nina’s knowledge of tide charts as it was to trust her familiarity with astrology, Greek mythology, Sufi mysticism, and every lyric to every Rolling Stones song ever written.
The worn wooden stairs leading to the beach were a small-magnitude earthquake away from being swept clear to Asia and I would have turned back if Nina hadn’t raced ahead. As usual I was seized by the urge to mother her, to rescue her from the worst versions of herself. When we lived together for those two years, I was the one to buy the groceries, to pay the utilities on time, to cook dinners of noodles doused in Tabasco sauce and butter eaten while the two of us pecked away at our laptops until dawn. I’d held her hand in the waiting room before an abortion. I’d run her a cool bath when she came down with the flu.
“Hurry up!”
“Will we be washed away?” I was slightly out of breath.
“Maybe. Wouldn’t that be a fun adventure?”
Nina’s life seemed like nothing but a fun adventure. As far as I could tell her bestselling books had given her plenty of money to fuel the circumnavigation of the world and exploratory sexual activities.
“Let me catch my breath.” My feet sunk into the wet sand with a pleasant slurp.
“I thought all you yummy mummies on the Upper East Side did Pilates all the time,” Nina teased. “How can you be out of breath already?”
“It’s actually barre classes now. Pilates is passé and I’m out of shape anyway,” I clarified.
“Do the honors.” Nina handed me the bottle of prosecco. I aimed it toward the sea and let the cork fly into the air. Nina pulled me down next to her on the sand and grabbed the bottle, taking a generous gulp.
“So, ready for your surprise?” I could tell she was grinning even as my eyes adjusted to the dark. She pressed her bony shoulder into mine as she dug into her bag. The water was closer to the cliff face than I expected even at low tide, and I wondered how quickly we could reach the stairs before a rogue wave engulfed us.
She handed me a tiny brownie wrapped in a napkin.
“That’s my surprise? Dessert, from the wedding? You shouldn’t have. I wanted to check out the chocolate fountain on my own.”
“No . . . that’s just a snack to tide you over while I get you the real surprise.”
I popped the entire petite pastry into my mouth in a single bite, savoring the rich, creamy chocolate. I promised myself for the fourth time that night that I’d start the Whole30 next week and book one of those Taryn Toomey classes, the one where you writhe around on the floor and pretend to give birth to tone your core.
Nina banged something hard against my thigh. I squinted down at it. A notebook—thick black Moleskine.
“It’s yours!”
I scratched at the back of my neck on a spot that hadn’t itched a moment earlier.
“Why do you have this?”
“You must have left it at our old apartment and I packed it with all my other shit. I found it in my storage unit last month and figured I could give it to you here.”
There was a time in my life, before Karl and the girls, when these notebooks were my everything. In a week I’d fill one with an entire story, writing everything longhand, always longhand, before committing it to the computer screen.
“Did you read it?”
“Of course not.”
“Liar.”
“I read every word.”
“What’s in it?”
“A short story. It doesn’t have an ending, but then none of your stories ever did. We all thought that was part of your virtuosity, your obsession with pushing the boundaries of literary theory. You were so fucking pretentious.” She nudged me again playfully.
The truth was I never knew how to end anything. Beginnings came naturally to me, the middle always wrote itself, and the end eluded me. “What’s the story about?”
“It’s the one with the truck driver with the dead wife. Every town he stops in he thinks he sees her and then he meets a stranger who tells him something he never knew about her. To be honest it’s very Black Mirror.”
I remembered it. It was a story that broke my heart when I began it twelve years ago. For most of the narrative, the reader believed the trucker’s wife was still alive, only learning toward the end that she was killed in a car accident on the same highway just six months earlier. “I missed my calling. In another life I could have written for streaming television.”
Nina snorted. “You talk like your life is over. You’re barely forty. And the story is great, Katie, even without an ending.”
She could have been right, I just didn’t know. I had no sense of my talent anymore. Was I any good? The truth was I wrote because I loved it, not because I’d ever felt good at it. I’d loved writing those short stories, but I’d always wanted to write a novel. Admitting that now sounded as preposterous as saying I want to become a YouTube star or a celebrity chef. They seemed out of reach and completely absurd. Everyone talks about the incredible things you get out of being a mom—unconditional love, seeing the wonder in a child’s eyes, the gratification of creating a new life—but no one talks about the things you have to give up, the sacrifices you make in the process. I’d sacrificed being a writer. That was all there was to it.
I fingered the cover of the notebook. “Why’d you bring this here?”
“I thought maybe you’d want to finish it.”
Actually, I wanted to toss the book into the sea. I didn’t want to open it, didn’t want the words to become a liability, a reminder of yet another thing I hadn’t accomplished. The heat of anger rose from my stomach to my chest and landed in my throat, where I forced myself to swallow it.
Shame warmed my cheeks. “I don’t have time to finish it, Nina.”
“Oh, give me a break—you have a husband and a nanny and no job. Surely, you have time to write. You’re making excuses.”
Her words, as blunt as ever, stung on so many levels.
“Actually, Nina, you know nothing about my life. You’ve barely been in touch over the last decade.” What a bitch.
“I know you
live in a ten-million-dollar town house on the Upper East Side. I know you’re married to the head of Paradigm, one of the top publishing houses in the country. You have two beautiful daughters and a perfect little life. I bet you have some gorgeous study with floor-to-ceiling books and a grand desk. In fact, I know you have a gorgeous study with a grand desk because I saw it on Zillow and in Architectural Digest.”
There was something sickly satisfying about knowing that Nina, who claimed she shunned social media and most technology, spent the time to google me, to look up where I lived.
I repeated myself, my cheeks still burning. “You don’t know anything about my life.” Karl had the grand study in our house. We shared the master bedroom. The girls shared a room and had a playroom. There was a guest bedroom and a room for Marley, but somehow with all of those rooms I didn’t have a room of my own. Virginia Woolf would be horrified. But whose fault was that? Karl’s? Mine? You can’t blame the children. They’ll never understand what their parents gave up for them until they have kids of their own. Sitting here on the beach, it was Nina’s freedom that felt perfect. Had I made a few different decisions along the way, her life could even have been my life. I could have finished my novel. I could have been the one to win the awards and get the acclaim and travel the world writing things people actually wanted to read. Instead I was just a wife and a mother.
Nina passed me the bottle, lighter now, half-empty, and I took a swig and stared ahead. The sea began to sparkle. Each wave sent a shimmy of light rushing toward us.
“Shit. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Nina wrapped an arm around my shoulder. It felt good, familiar. It had been so long since I had spent any time with anyone I considered a real friend.
“I’m fine. Maybe I’m drunk. You’re right. I do have the perfect life. Blah, blah, blah.”
Nina softened and took my hand, lifting it in front of us and whistling dramatically as she admired my diamond ring shimmering in the moonlight. I yanked my hand away self-consciously.
Marriage Vacation Page 2