by Sarah Archer
“It was all right, how was yours?” He grabbed the food and began setting out plates.
“Hellacious. What did you do all day?”
“What do you mean, ‘hellacious’?” Ethan set down the napkins he was holding, looking at her with concern.
Kelly waved a hand. “It’s nothing, just a rough day. So what did you do?”
“Kelly, you have to tell me what happened. Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” That came out roughly. She backtracked. “I appreciate the offer, but it’s work stuff; there’s nothing you can do. I want to forget about it. Tell me something new.”
Ethan looked up a few degrees, searching through his brain. “Well, today in Syria, the rebels . . .”
Kelly poured herself a very full glass of wine, listening as he dutifully read her the news. She shouldn’t have snapped at Ethan, she knew. This was her time to put work behind her and finally enjoy a few peaceful hours at home. Time to just have a normal night in. She emptied half her glass in one gulp.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket like a hovering wasp: a demand from Robbie for an eyeball, shade 009. Kelly knew without even logging into the database that their lab had only created one set of irises in this shade because it was such a rare, crystal blue. And that set was currently on the other side of the kitchen, looking through the silverware drawer for a set of forks.
Kelly squeezed her own eyes shut, steadying herself. She was so tired. To build a new eye from scratch would take hours, and the last thing she wanted to do tonight was to drive back to the office and fire up the 3-D printer. In fact, at the moment she was feeling like she never wanted to go back to the office again. She wondered if anyone would hire her to sit at home and eat takeout for the next sixty-odd years.
“Do you want soy sauce?” Ethan turned and looked at her with those eyes—those eyes that she could so easily take out and use if she just powered him down temporarily. Immediately she cursed herself for even entertaining such a barbaric thought.
“Um, yeah,” she answered, a second too late.
Kelly couldn’t kid herself. This wasn’t just a normal night in. If it were, she wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. Priya had been clear today about what she thought Kelly should do, and anyone else looking in on the situation would say the same thing, anyone with a shred of rationality. The only thing that made sense was to get rid of Ethan. She could do it tonight. Her stresses over Robbie would dissipate—he would never be able to prove anything with her creation disassembled. The wedding would be called off, the growing difficulty of restraining her mom from planning too much would disappear, the tensions with her sister would dissolve. She could focus her energies where they were truly needed, on Confibot and her family and Priya. She could get a solid night’s sleep at some point before her exhausted brain rebelled and abandoned her for good.
As Ethan opened the refrigerator to pull out the filtered water pitcher, a flash of blue caught her eye from the fridge door. “What’s that?” She walked closer to take a look. There, tacked to the front of the fridge, was the blue ribbon she had won at her sixth-grade science fair, the one neither parent had attended.
Ethan smiled shyly. “I was wondering when you’d notice. I found it in an old box when I was straightening up the closet. I thought we should celebrate your achievement, Madame Scientist.” He circled his hand in front of him in a mock bow.
Here he was, pinning her ribbon to the fridge like a proud parent. Kelly wanted so badly to thank him, to throw her arms around his neck and kiss his sweet, smiling face. But instead she froze. She knew that this all had to stop, that every thoughtful gesture he made and every moment where she allowed herself to sink into his warm affection was a step down a ladder into a dark well. How foolish had she been to let things get this far? She couldn’t allow herself to enjoy this moment and tell him how happy he’d made her. Yet she couldn’t—she just couldn’t—get rid of him. She was trapped in the middle.
“I actually forgot something at the office. I have to head back,” she said, forcing herself to be cold, though the words felt like vomiting a knife.
Ethan’s happy face fell into confusion. “Oh, sure, no problem.” He hastily snatched the ribbon down, looking embarrassed. “I can keep dinner warm and wait up.”
“Don’t worry about it, I’m not hungry.” She hurried to the door to get her purse and shoes so she could leave without looking at him, before she could change her mind.
* * *
• • •
On Saturday, Kelly was so sleep-deprived from the extra hours she was now devoting to Robbie’s demands on top of Confibot that she woke in a fog so deep she briefly wondered if this was the afterlife. Now, as much as she longed to lounge at home all day in her favorite yoga pants, in which she had never actually done yoga, she pulled herself from bed. It was time for her and Priya’s appointment at the shop. She had barely set foot in her mom’s boutique when an armload of fabric swatches marched toward her, succeeded by Diane.
“All right, now,” Diane said, clipped and professional. She was in her element, a bridal business blizzard, ready to Get. It. Done. “If we’re talking December, I’m thinking winter whites. Now, I know what you’re thinking: white is for the bride. And you are absolutely correct. But I saw this spread in I Do where the bridesmaids all wore white, but accessorized in an accent color. You know, sashes, statement necklaces, heels, all of that. It looked so cute and they did not take away from the bride at all, trust me, you’re just going to be gorgeous and it’s really all about how you pose people in pictures anyway, speaking of which, I’ve been talking to the photographer who shot the new McRib campaign. What do you think?”
As Diane thrust three virtually identical fabric samples into her face at that moment, Kelly wasn’t sure whether her mother wanted a verdict on the swatches or the McRib photographer, but she had mixed feelings on both. She blinked hard, trying to force herself to be fully awake, and asked if her mom had any coffee. She was going to need it.
Twenty minutes and five thousand shades of winter white later, Kelly checked her watch for the third time. Still no Priya. Pulling out her phone, she saw that she had a missed call. “And we must not lose sight of the fact that Kate Middleton served a fruitcake,” her mom was declaring.
“I’ve got to call Priya,” Kelly interrupted, “find out where she is.”
“All right, all right, and tell her to hurry. I need time to take close-ups of her complexion to integrate them into my vision board.”
Kelly dialed as she stepped outside. “Where are you? I’ve been watching my mom go through fabric samples for twenty minutes. She has more shades of white than Congress.”
“Don’t hate me, Kelly.” Priya’s voice came through tentatively. “But I’m not coming.”
“What? Did something happen?”
“No, I’m fine, it’s just that I thought about it last night, and I can’t do this. I can’t participate in this wedding.”
“We already talked about this, you said you’d help me out. You said you’d be here.”
“Well, I shouldn’t have. I can’t just go along with this and act like everything’s great and it’s some normal, happy wedding. It’s not. You’re in way over your head, Kelly, and I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt. I’ve tried telling you to end it and you haven’t. I’m doing this for you, I promise, I’m trying to help.”
Kelly could feel the blood racing to her cheeks. “Oh, really? Standing me up and humiliating me in front of my mother, that’s how you’re going to help? Remind me never to ask you for a favor again.”
Priya exploded. “I shouldn’t have to keep telling you to not fuck up your own life! You’re smarter than this. I’m the one who gets to fuck up, not you.”
Kelly’s thoughts began to take shape from her red haze of emotion. Priya was saying that she had good intention
s. And someone else looking in might say that she really was helping Kelly. But all of Kelly’s past data, collected over thirty years of relationship experiences, told her that it was wisest, safest, to assume the worst: that Priya was really embarrassed that she’d gotten mixed up in this “abnormal” wedding, was embarrassed of Kelly. For months now, the trajectory of their friendship had been increasingly southward. Option A, reconciliation, would inevitably end in more betrayal. Option B, a swift termination of the whole entanglement, would, in the long run, reduce the sum of pain for them both. And so for the second time in a week, she forced herself to be cold.
“Exactly,” Kelly said into the phone. “You’re the one who fucks up, so who are you to judge me?”
Priya laughed, a sour, ragged laugh Kelly had never heard before. “Right. At least I had a real boyfriend. I didn’t have to build one.”
A hollow stillness followed—Priya had hung up. Kelly could almost feel her ear pulsing with the strength of the blood pounding through it, the pressure from where she had pushed the phone painfully close. She dragged herself back into the shop to face her mother.
“Is she close?” Diane demanded. “I don’t have all day.”
“Just forget about the bridesmaid dresses for now, okay?” Kelly replied wearily. “I don’t need bridesmaids.” After all, aside from her sister, Priya had been her only one.
twenty-three
• • • • • •
Kelly was prepared to leave her mother’s shop, but Diane sighed noisily through her nose, pulling a measuring tape and clipboard from behind the counter. “Well, come here, then.”
“What for?”
“I have to get your measurements, of course.” When Kelly still stared at her blankly, she went on as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “For your dress. Did you think Priya would be the only one wearing clothing to the wedding?”
“You want to make my dress?” As soon as she asked the question, Kelly realized she probably should have seen this coming. After all, her mother had made Clara’s wedding dress and was managing every other aspect of the wedding. The type of dress she usually saw unspool from her mother’s hands was so not her that she had occluded the entire possibility of wearing such a dress from her mind. But now here it was in front of her, obvious, unavoidable.
“Of course I’m making it.” Diane was eyeing Kelly’s body strategically. She unspooled the measuring tape and went in for the bust, but Kelly backed away.
“I appreciate it, but you don’t need to do that. It’s way too much work.”
Diane smiled. “Too much work was when I spent eleven hours squeezing your grapefruit-size head out of my vagina. After that, I just gave in. I was already in too deep.”
She moved forward with the tape measure and Kelly backed away again until she nearly bumped against a display table.
Diane raised an eyebrow. “Do you not want me to make your dress?”
“No, that’s not it—”
“Do you not trust me to do a good job? Do you not realize that this is my life’s work and that brides drive in for miles for my custom creations? That you’re getting the culmination of my years of talent and experience for free?”
“I know you’re good at what you do, it’s just—”
“My own daughter. I’m a professional wedding gown designer, and my own daughter doesn’t want me to make her gown.” On a dime, Diane switched from rage to teary-voiced piteousness. “I guess you don’t need me.”
She started to retract the tape, managing to infuse the small gesture with drama, like a sad French clown, but Kelly sighed and lifted her arms. “Go ahead.”
Instantly cheered, Diane went to work, looping and stretching and penciling notes on her clipboard. “What a week. Work’s been piling up at the store, and I’ve been trying this new face mask, they call it a ‘skin tar’ and I have no clue what that means but it’s sixty dollars so it must do something, and oh goodness, speaking of, maybe you could use some, you’re not looking so great, Kelly.” Diane took the opportunity of proximity to peer intently into Kelly’s weary face.
“I’m fine, it’s just, you know, wedding stress.”
“Yes, but where’s the wedding radiance? That should mask the stress.”
This from a woman putting sixty-dollar tar on her face, Kelly thought. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nobody knows what that is.”
Diane pulled back in astonishment. “Of course they do! All brides feel it—that excitement, that little tingle every time you think about the wedding, or about the man you’re marrying. Don’t you feel that?”
Kelly hesitated. What she felt when she thought about the wedding was more akin to the sensation that comes about twenty minutes after eating a hot dog from a gas station.
“You don’t have to do it, you know.”
Kelly was confused by her mom’s words. “What?”
“The wedding. If you don’t feel right about it, don’t do it. I’ve always told you to be less picky with men, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to your gut.” Did Kelly’s mom really just say that? The wedding queen? Maybe it was just a veiled insult about her gut. Diane rambled on casually as she measured and calculated. “Of course, I would love to have Ethan as a son-in-law, he seems like just a doll, and he’s about the best-looking man I’ve ever seen. He looks like Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid. Remember when you girls took a picture with Eric at Disneyland and he just insisted on taking a picture with me too? So cheeky . . . but the point is, what I want most is for you to be happy.”
“Oh. Wow, um, thanks,” Kelly said.
“You don’t have to sound so surprised. I’m your mother, after all.” Diane hesitated and looked up, meeting Kelly’s eyes. “This is important, you know. Maybe the most important decision you’ll ever make.” Of course, Kelly thought now, nothing could ever define her more than the man she was with. “You want to be sure. Calling off a wedding is hard, but living with decades of regret is harder.”
Kelly felt a swift and inexplicable jolt of emotion, coming from something she couldn’t name and that she hadn’t even known was there. It wasn’t hard to see that her parents’ marriage was disappointing. But her mom had always seemed oblivious. She celebrated her marriage, baking heart-shaped Valentine’s cakes, selecting flowery return address labels that pronounced her “Mrs. Carl Suttle.” She gossiped about her divorcing friends with an air of high charity, as if grateful that such troubles never rippled her pond. But perhaps she insisted so loudly on the success of her own marriage not because she truly believed in it, but because it was too painful to think otherwise.
Kelly had always found it a little pathetic that her mom spouted “happily ever after” nonsense all day to gullible young brides, then went home to a life of rigid cohabitation. But to still believe in the dream, in spite of everything—there was something brave in that. In a flash, it struck her that both she and Diane were women who buried themselves in work, who had found success in business but much less so in relationships. It was her worst fear realized: that she was not so different from her own mom. But the dark diagnosis had a layer of comfort. Diane’s relentless pressure for Kelly to get matched up had long been a source of irritation and self-doubt. But to insist, even in the loudest, the most grating, the most repetitive of voices, that her daughter have better than she had—that was a form of love.
“But of course, it’s probably just nerves,” Diane continued, lassoing Kelly around the hips with the tape. “You always did let your nerves get in the way of your enjoyment. Ooh, I’m getting such good ideas for this dress. I’ll have to order more fabric than I had anticipated. I may be overdoing myself. But I can’t wait!” She gave an excited squeal.
That brought Kelly right back down. She was going to have to try on something that looked like the shearings of a whole dog show’s worth of white poodles. At least that sort
of thing always seemed to sell well in her mother’s shop. She consoled herself that once she revealed she didn’t need it, her mom would find some other female who actually loved it, and the labor wouldn’t have been for naught.
After receiving Diane’s strict instructions to do something about those dark circles, Kelly drove north on the freeway to home. She had slowed to a crawl, sandwiched between a beat-up purple Volvo with ironic bumper stickers and a Bugatti. Last year she had tried some self-enrichment app that promised to “free the fighter within.” The app had included an exercise in which the user attempted to make decisions by scrutinizing his own physical reactions to an idea. She had gotten frustrated with it at the time, branding it as silly and turning it off. But now she tried the technique again on her own. What did she feel when she thought about her mom making her dress? A twisting in her stomach, a twitch at the corners of her mouth that could be excitement or could be frustration. What did she feel when she thought about the wedding? The twist moved up to her heart, sharpening her breath, accelerating her heartbeat toward panic—best not to linger on that one while she was driving. What did she feel when she thought about Ethan? And there it was—that tingle. She pulled up Waze on her phone to check how many minutes it was until she got home.
* * *
• • •
Kelly knew that she should spend the rest of that weekend doing something productive, like putting in extra work on Confibot, or finally organizing that pile of old paperwork that had been sitting in the corner of her bedroom for so long its bottom layers were a different color than the top. Or getting rid of Ethan. She should be distancing herself from him, not spending more time with him. But after a week that was basically “brought to you by the creators of your own nightmares,” she just wanted to have a nice day. No pressure, no work, no wedding talk. Just the two of them and the world.