by Sarah Archer
“Um …” Kelly wasn’t sure which answer would be better—or less bad. “The first one?”
But Priya barely stopped for breath. “I still haven’t even had an actual conversation with this guy!” She gestured in large motions with her hands while she began to pace. “I mean, what I’d like to be able to say right now is ‘Oh, Kelly, congratulations! I’m so happy for you!’ But I can’t really be happy for you if I don’t even know if this dude, I don’t know, hates his mother, or does a weird tongue thing when he talks, or—or—”
“Loves his mom, normal tongue.”
“I mean, I found out on Facebook! And it wasn’t even your post!”
“Okay, I’m sorry, it’s not that big of a deal—” Kelly started, but Priya broke in.
“Yes it is! Yes, it is a big fucking deal.” She stopped pacing, turning to Kelly, putting her hands over her chest. “What have I done?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I must have done something. You never want to talk about Ethan. You still haven’t met my boyfriend. You’re always off somewhere else at work when we normally hang out together.” Priya’s face was contorted with frustration and pain. Her words spilled out like they’d been contained for too long. “You’ve obviously been distancing yourself from me for a while, and I know I have this habit of being too blunt and saying the wrong thing and pushing people away, and I must have done it now to you, and okay, whatever, that’s your right to move on and live your own life if that’s what you want, but it’s really freaking frustrating that I’m too dense to even figure out what I’ve done wrong, and I kind of wish you’d just tell me so we can go our separate ways in peace.”
Kelly blurted the next words before she knew what she was saying.
“Ethan’s a robot.”
twenty
“What?” Priya asked incredulously.
Kelly took a deep breath, gripping the metal of the counter, steeling herself. “Ethan is a robot. I built him here when I couldn’t find a wedding date. I’ve been passing him off as my boyfriend the whole time and nobody knows.”
Now it was Priya’s turn to steel herself against the counter. “Okay, um, wow. Number one: What the fuck? Number two: That is hilarious and ridiculous and you should obviously have involved me from the beginning because the opportunity to build a boyfriend on spec is something I need yesterday.”
“I couldn’t—”
But Priya held up a hand, barreling on. “Number three: Clara’s wedding has come and gone, so why is Ethan still around? And now you’re marrying him? I’m so confused. Tell me what I’m missing here.”
“I’m not actually marrying him,” Kelly insisted, eager to say something that felt like a sensible answer. “It was just that my mom was getting on my back again and so the whole engagement thing just sort of made sense in the moment.” She found it a lot harder to justify her actions out loud than she had in her own head.
“Right,” Priya said, considering, pausing. Then—“But did it, though?”
“But Ethan’s wonderful, really,” Kelly pressed. “Making him has honestly been my best engineering accomplishment to date, and I’m learning so much from observing him. And he’s nice, and he’s funny, and he’s sweet …”
A realization dawned on Priya’s face. “You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you? It? Him …” Kelly may have hesitated a second too long. Priya’s eyes were widening. “Are you serious?”
“Just keep it down—”
“Holy shit. You’re in deep. But what if you get caught? Who will I sit with at lunch when you get fired? But no, no, wait—did you give him the vibrating—”
Priya fell silent at the arrival of another engineer in the lab, who seemed to have caught only the last word. Kelly recalled another of her friend’s invented improvements to the human body while the engineer grabbed his supplies and made a speedy exit.
Finally Kelly let out her breath and turned to Priya with a low voice. “I’m not going to get fired because no one’s going to find out,” she said firmly.
“How do you know?”
“I’m not going to get fired!” Kelly insisted again.
Priya paused before talking, which was rare. Kelly sensed that she was treading very, very daintily around their fragile friendship. Priya leaned beside Kelly on the counter and took her hands. “It’s your life, Kelly, and I’m not going to tell you what to do. But I just don’t want you to screw it up. Literally!” Kelly glared at her. “Sorry. But you’re at such an exciting place right now at work. You’re actually leading your own project for the first time. I know how hard you’ve worked for this, I’ve been there for the long nights and the Red Bulls and the tears. I can’t let you just throw this all away. I know I’ve always said I wished you were crazier, but not Girl, Interrupted crazy.”
Kelly knew that she had a point. And if Priya, the outrageous one, the risk-taker, the flew-cross-country-for-a-Tinder-date-and-banged-the-pilot one, was telling her she was acting reckless, this was a red flag bright enough for Kelly to see even through the haze of her confusion. “I just don’t know what to do,” she sighed.
“Get rid of him! Disassemble him!”
The word was clinical, but to Kelly’s ears, it was repulsive. She tried to imagine taking Ethan apart. She forced herself to envision pressing his Off switch, watching all motion go out of him for the last time. Using acetone to detach all his hair at the roots. Slicing his skin from navel to clavicle while his eyes stared woodenly at the ceiling. The thought of it sickened her. Would she do it at home or at the lab? What would she tell him beforehand? Even if she tried not to let on, he would know something was wrong; he was too intelligent, too attentive to her every signal not to. She wondered what he would feel—sadness, fear, betrayal. Logically, Kelly knew that even to attribute emotion to him was questionable. But the anguish she herself felt just thinking about it was undeniable.
“I’ll—I’ll figure it out, Pri,” she said quietly, and slipped away to go back to her desk.
“Urrggghhh,” Kelly groaned when she walked through the door of her apartment that night. Ethan met her with a quick kiss.
“Are you all right?”
“Just a day,” Kelly sighed. “Just a real day.”
She followed Ethan into the kitchen, where he poured them both a glass of wine without even asking. “Is Confibot giving you grief again? Want me to give him a talk, mandroid to mandroid?” he asked.
“Still just the same old there,” Kelly replied, taking a sip. “But everyone at work knows about the engagement now.” She still felt slightly foolish talking about the engagement in front of him. “Priya now knows you’re, well, you, and thinks I’m crazy, and Anita is all ‘Don’t get distracted before the presentation,’ and Robbie was acting weird, I think he might be jealous, which is actually pretty hilarious.”
“Who’s Robbie?”
“Oh, haven’t I mentioned him? Just a coworker.” Kelly felt her cheeks flush, and it was more than the wine. While she had never mentioned Robbie to Ethan simply because she had never thought to, the fact that he had never come up before seemed like an intentional omission now.
Ethan’s brow furrowed. “Why would he be jealous? Does he like you?”
“Ha! I can honestly say I have very little clue what Robbie truly likes. But I mean, we did date a few years back.”
“Like, one date?”
“Like, six months.” Kelly quickly brought her glass to her lips, accidentally clinking her tooth painfully against it in the process. She tried to cover and just gulped down too much wine instead. “It wasn’t serious, though.”
“We haven’t even been together six months and we’re engaged.” Then Ethan backtracked, “Of course, though, it’s not a real engagement.”
Kelly looked at him, but he didn’t meet her eyes. “Are you jealous?” she asked teasingly, prodding him on the arm.
“Should I be?” Ethan looked at her now, and there was no teasing in him, just honesty, a sensiti
vity so close to the surface that Kelly could almost reach out and touch it on his skin.
“No,” she said, wonderingly. “Not at all.”
Day and night, Kelly’s mom pinged her with texts ranging from pictures of place cards to mysterious, unaccompanied questions like “Canapés????” Coworkers she had spoken to maybe once before stopped by her desk at work to offer their congratulations and hear all the details. Kelly was obliged to satisfy them with a sappy improvised proposal story involving her and Ethan’s favorite restaurant and a ring hidden in her dessert. The whole thing was exhausting. By Saturday, she slept in, then fixed herself a little morning mimosa. It had been that kind of week. It had been that kind of year. As she checked her e-mail, she looked idly at her ring. Its glorious opulence now had a hint of judgment to it. “Who do you think you are to wear a ring like this?” it seemed to say to her, as if the spirit of its seller had possessed it. “Do you really think this was wise?” Or maybe that was the mimosa talking.
But what right did her own ring have to judge her? She swiveled back and forth in her chair with growing speed as she became increasingly indignant at the imaginary reprimand playing out in her own head. She was stressed, she was tired, she was fed up. So Kelly was making one reckless decision. Other people led whole reckless lives and got away with it. Priya was the one who was always off banging strangers on a beach or cliff diving in Tasmania, why couldn’t Kelly have her day? In reality, this wedding was demonstrably innocuous. Who else had the right to judge what Kelly and Ethan did with their own lives and bodies? They were hurting no one. Kelly believed that a polar bear had the right to marry a penguin if he so chose. She was a bona fide thirty-year-old adult woman living in the US of A and she could do whatever the heck she wanted. She grabbed a pen off her desk with a flourish and wrote a large check mark on a Post-it note for no reason.
An ad in her e-mail caught Kelly’s fevered eye. Apparently all of her mom’s wedding-related transmissions were setting the all-knowing algorithm to work. In glittering pastels, a picture of a tiered cake encrusted with impossibly delicate sugar flowers dissolved into the words “What will be the flavor of the most memorable day of your life? Call Sugar Land today to schedule your complimentary cake tasting.” Brides get free cake? Kelly squeezed her champagne glass so hard it almost shattered.
Four hours later, she had officially fallen down the internet wedding rabbit hole. She had discovered a whole TV show devoted to women judging each other’s weddings. She had also learned about how to have a Disney princess wedding for a grown-up, been warned against the perils of getting a haircut less than two months before The Date, and read cautionary tales of once ordinary women who evolved into bridezillas, demanding that their best friends have arm fat removal surgery to look decent in their wedding photos; tales traded by brides past and future who spoke of these fallen sisters in matrimony as if they were fellow sailors lost at sea.
There were nice things about being engaged. Total strangers noticed Kelly’s comet-bright ring and offered her their congratulations. She suddenly became magically more interesting to all the females in her life. And also, BRIDES GET FREE CAKE. But what made it hardest, as the days went on, for her to rein herself in from the planning mania was that her mother was just so deliriously happy, so supportive. Sure, a lot of the wedding stuff was more up Diane’s alley than Kelly’s. Kelly had never seen the point of calligraphy and had an almost allergic reaction to lace. But for once in her life, hanging out with her mom was fun. Diane now had more cheerful topics to raise than Kelly having turned the big 3-0 and thus plummeting into the quicksand of time. She was suddenly more forgiving of things like unreturned phone calls: where work had never been an acceptable excuse before, mysterious “bride duties” were now a panacea. She didn’t question Kelly’s relationship with Ethan anymore; Kelly had secured the ultimate prize, the ring, and was now apparently unimpeachable. And where Kelly and Diane’s interests usually had about as much in common as red and green, now they had shared matters to discuss, obsess, and fret over.
And fret Kelly did. It was one thing to watch her mom’s eyes light up as she discussed concepts for signature cocktails, bite bars, and leisuretainment, whatever those things were, it was quite another to hear her start to talk about putting down deposits. While she couldn’t yet bring herself to call off the wedding, maybe she could delay it—keep Diane from getting overinvolved and overinvested, and buy herself some time to figure out what she was going to do about Ethan.
Kelly was reporting the next weekend to the command center, aka her mom’s store, expecting to be blinded by the usual wash of white, but what caught her eye instead was a pop of orange: a very spray-tanned man was perched on the edge of the counter, talking to Diane. It was his signature style—a pocket square and bow tie that were inverses of the same pattern—that Kelly recognized. She couldn’t remember his name, but knew that he was a celebrity wedding planner in Los Angeles with his own TV show. The punchy song of the intro flitted into her head. This guy was big business. She couldn’t imagine what he was doing here. Had Diane won some sort of sweepstakes, like a charity thing for owners of little bridal boutiques?
But the man nudged Diane as Kelly entered. “I should get out of your hair, Di, you’ve got a customer.” Even Kelly’s dad didn’t call her mom “Di.” The man whispered loudly enough that Kelly heard. “This little pigeon looks scared.”
“That’s just Kelly,” Diane assured him, sweeping over to bring Kelly in. “This is my daughter. Guess what she’s here for—I’m planning her wedding!”
“Well, aren’t you just the luckiest little chick in the world, having Di do your wedding!” he gushed. Kelly didn’t know whether to be more confused about the fact that this celebrity planner was on a nickname basis with her mother or the fact that he seemed to think she was some TBD breed of bird.
“Yeah, it’s—hi, I’m Kelly,” she finished in a backward sort of way. “You know my mom?”
“Mick knows far too much about me,” her mother laughed, brushing his elbow playfully. Now Kelly saw his name flash up in the show’s credits in her mind’s eye—Mick Santese.
“Don’t worry, I won’t slip any secrets in front of the baby,” he assured her. “I’m up here in the hinterlands for the day, so of course I had to find out what Diane knows about this new shoe designer who’s buzzing in my bonnet. Nothing good, it sounds like.”
“You didn’t hear it from me.” Diane smiled.
Kelly realized that her mouth was hanging slightly open as she looked between her mom and Mick. It wasn’t her best look. “I didn’t realize you two were friends,” she said finally, making a conscious effort to close her mouth when she was done.
“For a decade. You didn’t know that?” Diane replied. “Mick used one of my designs just last season on his show.”
“Really?” Kelly asked. Maybe it came out sounding more doubtful than she had intended. Diane looked at her sharply.
“Really,” she returned. “I do all right, you know. We can’t all be robot scientists, but it’s good enough for me.” She turned to Mick. “By the way, how is Raif doing?”
Kelly struggled to process while they chatted. She didn’t know much about the wedding industry, but she knew that if Mick Santese was asking her mom’s advice, that must mean that her mom was good at what she did. Not just good, but excellent. She realized that she had never really thought of her mother as a career woman. Maybe because Diane’s career revolved around the home sector, Kelly had failed to see it as a career at all. She had always resented her family’s lack of comprehension of her own hard-won business success. Was it possible that her mother felt exactly the same way?
“Winter.” A sudden proclamation from Mick, aimed in her direction, snapped her out of her thoughts. He was looking at her appraisingly, his eyebrows utterly motionless as he squinted his eyes.
Diane glowed. “Christmas,” she confirmed. She looped an arm through Kelly’s. “We’re already narrowing in on a venue.�
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“Ah.” Mick threw up his hands in mock exasperation. “You’re too good! Too good!”
Kelly pulled her arm out uncomfortably. “I actually wanted to talk to you about that, Mom. Ethan and I just want to take it slowly, have a long engagement, maybe think about, I don’t know, next summer instead …”
Diane and Mick exchanged a look full of the sort of wearied amusement that suggested Kelly had just declared that she wanted to be a fairy princess. “A long engagement—” Diane began.
“—is asking for second thoughts,” Mick finished. “No, no, no, it’s got to be winter. You couldn’t be more of a winter if you rode in here on a snowflake.”
“But—” Kelly tried.
“What are you afraid of, chickie? You’re in good hands. Di will have everything ready in time. This isn’t her first rodeo.” He nudged Diane teasingly.
“Really, dear, don’t you think I know what I’m doing?” Diane asked Kelly. They were both staring at her expectantly. What else could she say?
“Of course. This winter is great.”
Kelly had gotten home early from work and was looking forward to a relaxing evening of watching women cry as their dearest family members told them they looked fat while trying on wedding dresses. But she was only half watching the woman doing the ugly cry onscreen, because as soon as her butt had touched the couch, Gary had called.
“He asked me at our favorite restaurant,” she was saying. Gary had called, but it had really been Bertie, Emma, and Hazel who wanted to talk to her. Ever since Kelly had recounted her “proposal” at family dinner, this particular story seemed to have usurped the mythic place of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty in their imaginations. She was now reciting it for the third time in a row. “He had the waiter hide the ring in my dessert.”
“What dessert? What dessert?” Bertie cried through the phone.
“Strawberry cheesecake. I had to lick all the strawberry sauce off the ring.”