by Sarah Archer
She pressed herself back down into the pillow, chewing her lip. More time, for one thing. She just needed more time and then she would be ready to let him go. She had promised herself she would get rid of Ethan after the wedding. But one could argue that “the wedding” left some space for negotiation. After all, which wedding was not specified, she reasoned. She wasn’t so much breaking the rule as bending it, right? Rule yoga.
She exed out the calendar appointment on her phone and sat up. She had an idea.
Kelly went to her mother’s bridal shop having steeled herself with a good, stiff herbal tea. She had slipped out of the apartment, avoiding saying good-bye to Ethan. She was going to tell Diane that Ethan was moving away for work, that she and he were breaking up. Then there would be no going back—she’d be forced to get rid of him. Besides, it made beautifully symmetrical sense to use her mother to catalyze the end of everything.
Kelly felt all sorts of twinges as she stepped into her mother’s bridal shop that were probably half nerves, half sore ligaments. But then, she never felt comfortable here. The whole place was just so Diane. Various wedding trinkets cluttered ivory-painted tables throughout the space: tiaras, silk flower arrangements, planning notebooks and magazines, a rack of dangling earrings that jiggled and clinked whenever somebody walked past. But the real business of the store was the dresses, their folds of rich satin and ice-blue jewels arrayed on carefully placed racks and glinting out from lit alcoves around the walls. Kelly found the atmosphere claustrophobic, indulgent, and oppressively pretty. But based on the delighted squeals whenever brides-to-be entered the shop, she supposed her mother was doing something right.
While Diane ordered most of her gowns from designers, every year she put her knowledge as a seamstress to use by designing and crafting one dress from scratch. Aside from creating a centerpiece and talking point for the showroom and selling customers on her alteration skills, Kelly suspected that the real reason Diane made these dresses was to bring to life the gown that she herself had always wanted and never gotten to wear. Invariably, she made a princess-type ballgown, and every year that Kelly could remember, the dresses seemed to have gotten bigger and bigger. This year’s featured a silver-crystal-covered bodice that looked ludicrously small atop a skirt made of a Costco-sized, nay, a Walmart-sized, nay, a Walmart Supercenter–sized quantity of tulle.
Kelly squeezed past this tulle now to find her mother behind the register. “Kelly!” Diane cried before Kelly could open her mouth. “I’m so glad you’re here, did you see Clara’s Instagram? The picture of her and Jonathan getting on the plane for the honeymoon? Just so absolutely adorable, they were holding hands, you have to see, oh, where is it?”
“You don’t have to—”
“No, no, I just had it,” Diane said, tapping away at her phone. Kelly was anxious just to get this over with. The more she delayed, the more she felt herself losing her nerve, becoming all flight, no fight. “Oh here—no, wait, that’s not it, that’s a recipe for meatloaf. I’m thinking of trying pudding mix as a thickener instead of breadcrumbs. The Food Network had this whole thing about sweet and savory.” Diane went back to scrolling.
“I don’t have a ton of time, Mom, I just came here to talk about Ethan.”
“Oh no.” Diane looked up at Kelly with an expression somewhere between horror and resignation, setting down her phone. “He dumped you.”
“He—no, why is that the first thing you assume?”
“Is he cheating on you? Did you fight last night? You looked so cute together yesterday. Kelly, Kelly,” Diane groaned, the rings on her fingers clinking together as she wrung her hands. “You had such a good thing. Who knows when a man like Ethan will come around again? You’re thirty now, thirty!”
“That’s not even that old! Do you know how few of the people my age I know are married yet?”
“My dear, society changes all the time, it doesn’t change biology.”
“It allows us to not be ruled by it.” Getting fired up, Kelly had momentarily forgotten her mission. “I’m not going to structure my life choices around some antiquated time line. I’m still figuring things out.”
Diane’s hands transferred to her hips. “Well, you better figure fast. Say you go out there tomorrow and start dating again. Say within a year, you meet Mr. Right. You date for another year before getting engaged. You’re engaged for a year before getting married. Then, of course, you want to spend some time together, just the two of you, before you throw kids into the mix and never look at each other again unless it’s over a diaper pail or a pack of cigarettes fished out of the back of a sixteen-year-old’s closet, so you take a couple years. Then you start trying to have children, but you can’t count on it happening right away, after all, it took your Grandma Rose six years and you got her nose and who knows what else, and you want two kids, naturally, loners turn into sociopaths, so a year for each pregnancy and a year in between, and by this point you’re nearly fifty and the only two eggs you have left give you a choice of Down syndrome or a one-legger, so you spend your retirement years caring for an invalid and die of old age when he’s only eighteen, thrusting him on the mercies of a merciless society. And that’s the best-case scenario time line.”
Kelly reeled, not least from her mom describing her future grandchild as a “one-legger.” In spite of all the risible points of her mother’s argument, and the liberal nature of her math, there was an undeniable truth at the core of her words. Kelly didn’t even know for sure yet if she ever did want to get married, or have kids of her own, and she disliked the feeling of society forcing her hand in those choices. But if she did want those things, that was probably a decision that she needed to start thinking about, like, yesterday. She anxiously flicked a silvery “bride” key chain dangling at the register. The feeling of being behind the curve, of being negligent, did not sit well with her.
“Well, thanks for assuming that I fouled things up, but Ethan’s actually quite happy with me,” Kelly bristled.
“Well, all right then, that’s wonderful,” Diane replied. “That’s very nice. I’m glad you two are happy together.”
“We are.”
“All right then.”
“All right.”
Her mom’s expression was wholly unconvinced. “And what was it you came to tell me?” she asked.
Kelly opened her mouth, but stalled. The words “He’s leaving” couldn’t quite make it past her lips now. Her mother’s warnings looped through her mind. She’d always been a girl who spent more time fantasizing about going to the moon or having a robot dog as a pet than about wearing a fluffy wedding gown. But after yesterday, seeing Clara and Jonathan together, seeing Ethan with her family, feeling the warm solidity of his arm under her hand as they walked down the aisle together at the end of the ceremony—maybe she could see a place in her life for marriage. And try as she might, she couldn’t see her life without a place for Ethan.
Her eyes darted around the room. They landed on a bridal magazine displayed at the register beside the rack of key chains. A hefty engagement ring loomed out from the front cover, underlined by the headline “The Ultimate Bond.” Kelly spoke before she thought.
“We’re getting married,” she said.
Years ago, for Diane and Carl’s fifteenth anniversary, they took the family out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, meaning it had cloth napkins and no photographs of the food on the menu. It may seem a little odd that they brought their three kids along on a romantic anniversary date, but they did so every year, so Kelly thought nothing of it. If she had thought about it, and had been older than ten at the time, she may have realized that for her mom and dad, asking them to share a table alone together for an hour and concoct an adult conversation would have been like asking them to build a shuttle and pilot it to Mars. As it was, all Kelly was thinking of at the time was when the crab dip was going to arrive and how she could consume all of it before everyone else at the table noticed it was gone.
The family was l
aughing, regaled by Clara’s enthusiastic impression of the rabbit her class was raising. Diane stretched slightly out of her chair, eyes sparkling. “Well, is it time for presents, then?”
“What’s taking so long on the crab dip?” Carl asked.
“Carl, you go first! I want mine to be last.”
“All right, all right.” Carl lifted a poinsettia-adorned, Christmas-themed gift bag from beside him on the booth, passing it across to his wife. Diane eagerly tore through the wrapping and lifted out two economy-sized pump bottles of Kirkland’s own shampoo and conditioner.
Her smile faltered for just a moment. “Oh my,” she said, “that’s a lot of shampoo.”
“Now you won’t have to buy it for years,” Carl confirmed.
“Ooh, Freesia Memory,” she read off the bottle. “I’m going to smell lovely with this.” She patted Carl’s thigh, a bit of her twinkle returning. “Someone wants to get up close and personal.”
“Best value they had,” Carl replied. “And I know you like the pump top.”
“Let me smell, Mommy.” Their mom passed the bottles over to Clara and pulled a legal-sized envelope from her purse. The front had been decorated with swirling pink hearts and stickers of flowers. She held it protectively to her, as if trying to keep it from Carl’s nonexistent eager grasp. Carl calmly sipped his beer.
“Now, this year I wanted to do something really special, seeing as it is The Big Fifteen. I splurged a bit, but it’s an investment, a long-term one—well, you don’t even know how long term! Go ahead, you’ll see.” She released the envelope into Carl’s hand and watched as he laboriously unwound the thread of the clasp—around, and around, and around. When he finally got inside, he pulled out a sheaf of paper—white on top, yellow carbon copy on the back. He fished his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and squinted at the page. “West Lawn Memorial Cemetery?”
“I got us a joint plot!” Diane exclaimed. “They’re not easy to come by, but I thought it was worth it. You have to wait for another couple to disintegrate or something.” She reached across and took his hand. “After fifteen wonderful years, I wanted to make sure we’ll be together forever.”
“Creepy …” Gary whispered, eyes rounded in awe.
“How much did this cost?” Carl frowned.
Diane’s eyes flickered to the children. “Oh, come on, we don’t have to talk about that stuff now. It’s our anniversary dinner, we should be celebrating!”
“What, the fact that even in death, we can’t escape each other?”
“Don’t joke like that, Carl,” Diane said lightly. She pulled a pen from her purse. “Here. They need both our signatures, so you just have to add yours and we’ll be good to go. It’s a beautiful spot; I can’t wait to show you. There’s the sweetest little statue of a cherub nearby—”
“I’m not signing.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to sign this.” Carl slid the contract back into the envelope and set it down beside the breadbasket. “Can we just have dinner in peace? Apparently, it’s the only peace I’ll get in this life or the next.”
For once, Diane said nothing. She took the envelope and put it quietly back in her purse, looking down. But just then the waitress arrived, sliding the crab dip onto the table with a pot holder. She nodded at the gift wrap. “What are we celebrating?”
Diane looked up, her face suddenly a brilliant smile. “Our fifteenth anniversary.” She rested her hand over Carl’s on the table.
“Wow, congratulations! Fifteen years, what’s the secret?”
“Just love,” Diane said simply. Carl looked carefully down at his silverware.
The entire rest of that evening—all through dinner, even the ride home—the whole family was silent. Even accounting for Diane eating, this was the most Kelly had ever seen her mom keep her mouth closed. And even Carl, who normally hunted down pockets of silence like a hound after a fox, seemed uncomfortable. As for herself, Kelly found the much-anticipated dip hard to swallow.
As they rode home in the family’s Suburban, the kids lined up in the back, eyes down, afraid to even look at one another, Kelly had a stark realization: her parents were going to fight tonight. They both wanted to scream at each other, to say awful things, but they were holding it in all evening to protect her and her siblings. They couldn’t say anything without yelling, so they wouldn’t say anything at all.
Kelly brushed her teeth quickly that night and scuttled back to her and Clara’s room. She wanted the shelter of her own space, but more than that, she wanted to hear. A masochistic fascination, a dread mingled with enthusiasm, led her to not want to miss a word of her parents’ explosive argument. And Clara clearly felt the same way: the girls exchanged one glance, then piled together on Clara’s bed, which shared a wall with their parents’ room. From there, they would hear everything.
But they waited and waited and … nothing. They knew their mother and father were in there, and they knew that even a conversation at normal volume would be audible through the wall. But there was only quiet. Their parents weren’t fighting at all; they were taking their silence to bed with them. And that was so much worse. Even as a gawky, naïve ten-year-old who lived in a world of Isaac Asimov and Judy Blume, Kelly knew that people who couldn’t be bothered to fight just didn’t care.
For the most part, she had always been able to ignore the unhappiness in her parents’ marriage because they ignored it first. But while young Kelly didn’t often think about her parents’ marriage—after all, it was stable, if not blissful, so there were few peaks or valleys to call her attention even to its existence—she was an intelligent, sensitive girl, and she was not oblivious. She felt the heaviness in her home, and she resented it, even if she didn’t fully understand it. And she vowed subconsciously to never put herself in that same situation. The older she got, the more she threw up walls to shield herself from the same unhappiness that seeped into her childhood. Romantic relationships, familial relationships, friendships—get close to anyone, and you were opening a drawer of knives. Better to pull out at the first sign of imperfection before getting hurt.
For thirty years now, Kelly had followed this same basic MO, and for thirty years, it had worked quite nicely, thank you very much. Sure, it had meant that relationships of any heft were few and far between in her life. But it had also kept her safe. Her heart had never been broken. Now, for some reason, she had veered wildly off track in the most outlandish way possible. She was lying to everyone in her life. She was breaking the rules at work, not to mention neglecting her duties during the most crucial juncture yet in her career. And now she had just blithely signed herself up to plan a wedding that was destined never to happen. But she just couldn’t get herself to pull the plug on her mechanical man. Normally she had her finger over the trigger when it came to ending relationships. Yet against all logic, she couldn’t end this one.
When cautious Kelly took the massive, a-meteor’s-about-to-hit-so-all-bets-are-off-size risk of building herself a robotic boyfriend in the first place, she had preserved a foothold in her own sanity by creating a rule for herself: she would get rid of Ethan as soon as he had served his purpose. Now that she had broken that rule, she was officially through the looking glass. Kelly was ill at ease about this turn in her life, but she was also kind of having fun. She had never before been so unshackled. She was free-falling, and didn’t her arms feel nice and funny and light on the way down?
Which is how she found herself leaving work at the unusually early hour of five p.m. that week to drive to a jewelry store in downtown. Of course one of her mom’s first questions, once she recovered herself enough to stop crying drippily into a thousand-dollar veil over her daughter’s whirlwind romance, had been where the ring was. Kelly had explained that it was getting resized, and that she had wanted to keep quiet on an official announcement of the engagement anyway until after Clara’s wedding, but she had assured her mother that the ring was just beautiful. The likelihood of an adjunct professor
being able to afford a bling behemoth was not on Diane’s radar: she was only interested in the fantasy, which was a good thing, because Kelly was fresh out of reality.
It wasn’t until she got to the jewelry shop that she realized she could have, and maybe should have, brought Ethan. What would they think about a woman showing up alone to buy herself an engagement ring? Kelly knew she was weird, but eccentric was never a look she had worn well. But at the same time, she didn’t want Ethan to be here. The thought of him finding out she had just fake-engaged herself to him made her feel undeniably embarrassed. It felt demeaning, and even more, like a step backward, like the real feeling that had developed in their relationship had been cast overboard for a lie.
The proprietor of the boutique was a middle-aged woman with strong, hooked features and fabulous hair. As soon as Kelly entered the store, she could feel the woman sizing her up for a probably accurate impression of her interests, tastes, and, most important, assets. This lady was no clueless shop girl. She was a pro.
“What can I help you with?” the woman asked.
“I’m looking for a ring.”
“Wonderful, and who is it for?”
“Uh, my mother,” Kelly blurted out, not even recognizing that her excuse was true.
“How lovely. We have some perfect options here.” The lady glided over to a case showcasing jewels in clear pastel tones: peridot, tanzanite, pink sapphire.
“Hmm,” Kelly said, pretending to peruse the offered rings. She could glimpse the case of engagement rings out of the corner of her eye. “These are nice, but I was thinking maybe something more like this.” She moved over to the engagement case, a dazzle of silvery white.
“These are engagement rings, dear,” the woman said. Her tone made it clear that such a faux pas had lowered Kelly even further in her estimation.