Good in Bed

by Jennifer Weiner

  The park was almost empty. Just a pair of golden retrievers sniffing at the bushes, and a haughty cocker spaniel in the corner. I unleashed my dog, who promptly and without provocation made a beeline for the cocker spaniel, barking frantically.

  “Nifkin!” I hollered, knowing that as soon as he got within a foot or two of the other dog he’d stop, give a deep, disdainful sniff, perhaps bark a few more times, and then leave the other dog alone. I knew that, Nifkin knew that, and it was more than likely that the cocker spaniel knew it, too (it’s been my experience that other dogs mostly ignore the Nif when he goes into his attack mode, probably because he’s very small and not all that menacing, even when he’s trying). But the dog’s owner looked alarmed as he saw a spotted, sneering rat terrier missile streaking toward his pet.

  “Nifkin!” I called again, and my dog for once listened to me, stopping dead in his tracks. I hurried over, trying to look dignified, and scooped Nifkin into my arms, holding him by his scruff, looking into his eyes and saying, “No,” and “Bad,” the way I’d learned in Remedial Obedience. Nifkin whined and looked disgruntled at having his fun interrupted. The cocker spaniel wagged his tail hesitantly.

  The cocker spaniel guy was looking amused.

  “Nifkin?” he asked. I could see he was getting ready to pop the question. I wondered if he’d have the nerve. I made myself a bet that he would.

  “Do you know what a nifkin is?” he asked. Score 1, Cannie. A nifkin, according to my brother’s fraternity friends, is the area between a guy’s balls and his ass. The sportswriters had named him.

  I put on my best puzzled look. “Huh? It’s his name. Does it mean something?”

  The guy blushed. “Uh, yeah. It’s, um… it’s kind of a slang term.”

  “For what?” I asked, trying to look innocent. The guy shuffled his feet. I looked at him expectantly. So did Nifkin.

  “Um,” said the guy, and stopped. I decided to have mercy.

  “Yes, I know what a nifkin is,” I said. “He’s a secondhand dog.” I gave him the abbreviated version of the sportswriter story. “And by the time I figured out what a nifkin was, it was too late. I tried calling him Nifty… and Napkin… and Ripken… and, like, everything else I could think of. But he won’t respond to anything but Nifkin.”

  “That is rough,” said the guy, laughing. “I’m Steve,” he said.

  “I’m Cannie. What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Sunny,” he said. Nifkin and Sunny sniffed each other tentatively as Steve and I shook hands.

  “I just moved here, from New York,” he said. “I’m an engineer”

  “Family in town?”

  “Nope. The single guy.” He had nice legs. Tanned, slightly furry. And those dumb Velcro-strapped sandals that everyone was wearing that summer. Khaki shorts, a gray T-shirt. Cute.

  “Would you like to have a beer maybe sometime?” he asked.

  Cute, and evidently not averse to the sweaty, queen-size woman.

  “Sure. That’d be great.”

  He smiled at me from under his baseball cap. I gave him my number, trying not to get my hopes up, but feeling pleased with myself nonetheless.

  Back home, I gave Nifkin a cup of Small Bites kibble, ate my Special K, then gargled, flossed, and took deep, calming breaths, preparing for my interview with Jane Sloan, lady director extraordi-naire who I’d be profiling for next Sunday’s paper. In deference to her fame, and because we’d be lunching at the très chic Four Seasons, I took extra care with my clothes, struggling into both a panty girdle and control-top pantyhose. Once my midsection was secured, I pulled on my ice-blue skirt, ice-blue jacket with funky star-shaped buttons, the requisite chunky black loafers, uniform shoe of twentysomething would-be hipsters. I prayed for strength and composure, and for Bruce’s fingers to be broken in some bizarre industrial accident guaranteeing that he’d never write again. Then I called a cab, grabbed my notebook, and headed to the Four Seasons for lunch.

  I cover Hollywood for the Philadelphia Examiner. This is not as easy as you’d think, because Hollywood is in California, and I, alas, am not.

  Still, I persist. I write about trends, about gossip, the mating habits of stars and starlets. I do reviews, and even the occasional interview with the handful of celebrities who deign to stop by the East Coast on their promotional juggernauts.

  I wandered into journalism after graduating from college with an English degree and no real plans. I wanted to write. Newspapers were one of the few places I could locate that would pay me to do it. So, the September after graduation, I was hired at a very small newspaper in central Pennsylvania. The average age of a reporter was twenty-two. Our combined years of professional experience were less than two years, and boy, did it show.

  At the Central Valley Times, I covered five school districts, plus assorted fires, car crashes, and whatever features I could find time to churn out. For this I was paid the princely sum of $300 a week – enough to live on, just barely, if nothing went wrong. And of course, something was always going wrong.

  Then there were the wedding announcements. The CVT was one of the last newspapers in the country that still ran, free of charge, lengthy descriptions of weddings – and, woe to me, of wedding dresses. Princess seams, alençon lace, French embroidery, illusion veils, beaded headpieces, gathered bustles… all of these were terms I found myself typing so often that I put them on a save-get key. Just one keystroke, and out would pop complete phrases: freshwater pearl embroidery, or ivory taffeta pouf.

  One day I was wearily typing the wedding announcements and musing on the injustice of it all when I came across a word I couldn’t read. Many of our brides filled their forms in by hand. This particular bride had written in looping cursive, in purple ink, a word that looked like CFORM.

  I carried the form over to Raji, another cub reporter. “What’s this say?”

  He squinted at the purple. “C-FORM,” he read slowly. “Like MDOS, or something.”

  “For a dress, though?”

  Raji shrugged. He’d grown up in New York City, then attended Columbia Journalism School. The ways of Central Pennsylvanians were strange to him. I headed back to my desk; Raji went back to his dread chore, typing in a week’s worth of school lunch menus. “Tater Tot,” I heard him sigh. “Always, the Tater Tot.”

  Which left me with C-FORM. Under “contact for questions” the bride had scribbled her home phone number. I picked up the phone, and dialed.

  “Hello?” answered a cheerful-sounding woman.

  “Hello,” I said, “this is Candace Shapiro calling from the Valley Times. I’m trying to reach Sandra Garry”

  “This is Sandy,” chirped the woman.

  “Hi, Sandy. Listen, I do the wedding announcements here, and I’m reading your form and there’s a word… C-FORM?”

  “Seafoam,” she answered promptly. In the background I could hear a kid screaming, “Ma!” and what sounded like a soap opera on TV. “That’s the color of my dress.”

  “Oh,” I said, “well, that’s what I needed to know, so thanks”

  “Except, well, maybe… I mean, do you think people will know what seafoam is? Like, what do you think of when you think of seafoam?”

  “Green?” I ventured. I really wanted to get off the phone. I had three baskets of laundry reposing in the trunk of my car. I wanted to get out of the office, go to the gym, wash my clothes, buy some milk. “Like a pale green, I guess.”

  Sandy sighed. “See, that’s not it,” she said. “It’s really more blue, I think. The girl at the Bridal Barn said the color’s called seafoam, but that’s really more of a green-sounding thing, I think.”

  “We could say blue,” I said. Another sigh from Sandy. “Light blue?” I essayed.

  “See, but it’s not really blue,” she said. “You say blue, and people think, you know, blue like the sky, or navy blue, and it’s not, like, dark or anything…”

  “Pale blue?” I offered, running through my bridal announcement-gleaned gamut of syno
nyms. “Ice blue? Robin’s egg blue?”

  “I just don’t think any of those are quite right,” Sandy said primly.

  “Hmm,” I said. “Well, if you want to think about it and call me back…”

  Which was when Sandy started to cry. I could hear her sobbing on the other end of the phone as the soap opera droned in the background and the child, who I imagined, had sticky cheeks and possibly a stubbed toe, continued to whine, “Ma!”

  “I want it to be right,” she said between her sobs. “You know, I waited so long for this day… I want everything to be perfect… and I can’t even say what color my dress is”

  “Oh, now,” I said, feeling ridiculously ineffectual. “Oh, listen, it’s not that bad”

  “Maybe you could come here,” she said, still crying. “You’re a reporter, right? Maybe you could look at the dress and say what’s right.”

  I thought of my laundry, my plans for the night.

  “Please?” asked Sandy, in a tiny, pleading voice.

  I sighed. The laundry could wait, I supposed. And now I was curious. Who was this woman, and how did someone who couldn’t spell seafoam find love?

  I asked her for directions, mentally cursed myself for being such a softie, and told her I’d be there in an hour.

  To be perfectly honest, I was expecting a trailer park. Central Pennsylvania has plenty of those. But Sandy lived in an actual house, a small white Cape Cod with black shutters and the proverbial picket fence out front. The backyard boasted a plastic orange SuperSoaker, an abandoned Big Wheel, a new-looking swingset. There was a shiny black truck parked in the driveway, and Sandy stood at the door – thirtyish, tired-looking around her eyes, but with a tremulous species of hope there, too. Her hair was pale blond, fine as spun sugar, and she had the tiny snub nose and wide cornflower-blue eyes of a painted figurine.

  I got out of the car with my notebook in my hand. Sandy smiled through the screen door. I could see two small hands clutching her thigh, a child’s face peeping around her leg, then vanishing behind it.

  The house was cheaply furnished, but neat and clean, with stacks of magazines on the pine-veneer coffee table: Guns amp; Ammo, Road amp; Track, Sport amp; Field. The ampersand collection, I thought to myself. Powder-blue wall-to-wall carpet lined the living room floor; fresh white linoleum – the kind you roll down in a single sheet, with patterns stamped on it to make it look like separate tiles – covered the kitchen. “Do you want a soda? I was just about to have one myself,” she said shyly.

  I didn’t want soda. I wanted to see the dress, come up with an adjective, hit the road, and be good amp; gone by the time Melrose Place was on. But she seemed desperate, and I was thirsty, so I sat down at her kitchen table under the stitched sampler that read “Bless This Home,” with my notebook at my side.

  Sandy took a gulp of her drink, burped gently against the back of her hand, closed her eyes, and shook her head. “Excuse me, please.”

  “Are you nervous about the wedding?” I asked.

  “Nervous,” she repeated, and laughed a little. “Honey, I’m terri-fied!”

  “Is it…” I wanted to tread carefully here, “have you done the whole wedding thing before?”

  Sandy shook her head. “Not like this. My first time I eloped. That was when I found out I was pregnant with Trevor. Justice of the peace over in Bald Eagle,” she said. “I wore my prom dress to that one.”

  “Oh,” said I.

  “Second time,” she continued, “there never was a wedding at all. That was Dylan’s daddy, who I guess you could call my common-law husband. We were together seven years.”

  “Dylan, that’s me!” piped up a little voice from underneath the table. A small, sleek blond head peeked out. “My daddy’s in the army.”

  “That’s right, honey,” said Sandy, absently tousling Dylan’s hair with one hand. She raised her eyebrows significantly toward me, shook her head, and whispered, “J-a-i-l.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  “For stealing cars,” she whispered. “Not anything, you know, too bad. I actually met Bryan, my fiancé, when I went visiting Dylan’s dad,” she said.

  “So Bryan’s…” I was just starting to learn how the long pause could sometimes be a reporter’s best friend.

  “Going to be paroled tomorrow,” Sandy said. “He was in for fraud.”

  Which, I guessed from the pride in her voice, was a step up even from grand theft auto.

  “So you met him in prison?”

  “We were actually corresponding for some time before then,” Sandy said. “He put an ad in the classified section… here, I saved it!” She hopped up, causing our soda glasses to rattle, and came up with a laminated piece of paper no bigger than a postage stamp. “Christian gentleman, tall, athletic build, Leo, seeks sensitive pen-pal for letters and maybe more,” it read.

  “He got twelve responses,” Sandy said, beaming. “He said he liked my letter the best.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I was real honest,” she said. “I explained my situation. How I was a single mother. How I wanted a role model for my boys.”

  “And you think…”

  “He’ll be a good daddy,” she said. She sat down again, staring into her glass like it contained the mysteries of the ages instead of flat generic cola. “I believe in love,” she said, her voice strong and clear.

  “Did your parents…” I began. She waved one hand in the air, as if to shoo away the very idea.

  “My father left when I was four, I think,” she said. “Then it was just my mom and one boyfriend after another. Daddy Rick, Daddy Sam, Daddy Aaron. I swore it wasn’t gonna go that way for me. And it’s not,” she said. “I think… I know… that this time I got it right.”

  “Mom?” Dylan was back, his lips dyed Kool-Aid red, holding his brother’s hand. Where Dylan was small and fine-boned and blond, this boy – Trevor, I guessed – was darker and sturdier, with a thoughtful look on his face.

  Sandy stood up and shot me a tentative smile. “You wait right here,” she said. “Boys, you come with me. Let’s show the reporter lady momma’s pretty dress!”

  After all of that – the prison, the husbands, the Christian classified ad – I was prepared for something dreadful, some off-the-rack horror show of a dress. The Bridal Barn specialized in those.

  But Sandy’s dress was beautiful. Tightly fitted on top, a fairytale princess boned bodice spangled with snowflake-sized crystals that caught the light, a deeply scooped neckline that showed off the creamy skin of her chest, swelling into a wave of tulle that swished around her feet. Her cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes sparkled. She looked like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, like Glinda the good witch. Trevor held her hand solemnly as she made her way into the kitchen, humming “Here Comes the Bride.” Dylan had appropriated her veil and popped it on his own head.

  Sandy stood under the kitchen light and twirled. The edge of her skirt whispered along the floor. Dylan laughed and clapped his hands, and Trevor stared up at his mother, how her bare arms and shoulders rose out of the dress, how her hair fell against her skin. She twirled and twirled and her sons stared at her as if they were under a spell, until finally she stopped. “What do you think?” she asked. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was breathing hard. I could see each breath make her bosom swell against the tight-fitted scalloped edges of the bodice. She turned once more, and I could see tiny cloth rosebuds stitched all down the back, tight as a baby’s pursed lips. “Is it blue? Green?”

  I looked at her for a long moment, her pink cheeks and milky skin, and her sons’ delighted eyes.

  “I’m actually not sure,” I said. “But I’ll figure something out.”

  I missed the deadline, of course. The city editor was long gone by the time I made it back to the newsroom, after Sandy had shown me her pictures of Bryan, and told me all about their honeymoon plans, after I’d watched her read her sons Where the Wild Things Are, and kiss their foreheads and their cheeks, and add a fing
er’s worth of bourbon to her soda, and half as much to mine. “He’s a good man,” she’d said dreamily. Her lit cigarette moved through the room like a firefly.

  I had three inches to fill, and I had to write to fit, write only enough to fill the allotted space beneath the blurry picture of Sandy’s smiling face. I sat at my computer, my head spinning a little, and keyed up my fill-in-the-blank marriage form, the one with spaces: bride’s name, groom’s name, attendants’ names, description of dress. Then I pressed the “escape” key, cleared the screen, took a deep breath, and wrote:

  Tomorrow Sandra Louise Garry will marry Bryan Perreault in Our Lady of Mercy Church on Old College Road. She will walk down the aisle with antique rhinestone combs in her hair and will promise to love and to honor and cherish Bryan, whose letters she keeps folded beneath her pillow, each one read so many times it’s worn thin as a butterfly’s wing.

  “I believe in love,” she says, even though a cynic might say there’s every indication that she shouldn’t. Her first husband left her, her second is in jail – the same jail where she met Bryan, whose parole begins two days before the wedding. In his letters, he calls her his little dove, his perfect angel. In her kitchen, the last of the three cigarettes she allows herself each night burning between her fingers, she says he is a prince.

  Her sons, Dylan and Trevor, will attend the bride. Her dress is a color called seafoam, a color perfectly balanced between the palest blue and the palest green. It isn’t white, a color for a virgin, a teenager with her head full of sugar-spun romances, or ivory, which is white tinged with resignation. Her dress is the color of dreams.

  Well. A little florid, a little overwritten and overwrought. A dress the color of dreams? The whole thing had “Recent Graduate of College Creative Writing Workshop” stamped on every syllable. The next morning I came to work and there was a copy of the page splayed over my keyboard, the offending passage circled in red copy-editor’s grease-paint pencil. “SEE ME,” said the two-word message scrawled in the margin, in the unmistakable hand of Chris, the executive editor, an easily distractible Southerner who’d been lured to Pennsylvania with the promise of moving on to a bigger, better paper in the chain (that, plus unparalleled trout fishing). I knocked timidly at his office door. He beckoned me inside. A second copy of my story was opened on his desk.