by Sarah Archer
“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 intentions. 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 diagnosi
s 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.
Kelly had always heard legends of the natural opportunities afforded to residents of the San Francisco Bay Area where she had been born and bred. She had always been indoorsy herself, but supposedly there was this thing called the beach? Maybe some mountains? Despite having lived there her entire life, Kelly had to make heavy use of TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, and WebMD to plan a day of outdoor activities in her own hometown. She would be her own judge of this “fresh air” thing.
“I didn’t realize you liked the beach,” Ethan mused as Kelly finally found parking. “Why haven’t we gone more often?”
“You’ll see once I bring out the sunscreen,” she said.
Ethan spent a good ten minutes coating every inch and crevice Kelly didn’t even know she had with an SPF higher than her credit score. Even with a water shirt on to cover his back panel, Ethan attracted some stares from other beachgoers, male and female, as he set up shop, arranging their towels and beach bag, while Kelly rubbed on some high-SPF lip balm, just in case. Then they stared at each other.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“I think we … go in.”
Ethan mimicked her cautious pace as he followed her into the water, an inch at a time. Kelly hadn’t done this in years. The face-numbing cold instantly reminded her why. But her flesh started to unfreeze as she forced herself to stay under, wading around a little. Actually, it was kind of nice.
“Are you having fun?” Ethan asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Are you all right? Do you need more sunscreen? I can go back and get it.” He made as if to return to shore, but she pulled him back.
“Stop, I’m fine. Just stay out here with me.”
Kelly looked out across the stripes of water undulating toward them, one after another, almost musical in their rhythmic succession. But Ethan was looking at her. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Your hair—”
“What? Oh.” She fingered her hair; she could feel its natural waves returning in the sea spray. “I’ll straighten it out again later, it can’t be helped right now.”
“No.” He reached out and stroked it gently. “This is good.”
There was something about being surrounded on all sides by ocean water, supported by it, that made everything else feel impossibly far away. San Jose became Atlantis. The fluorescent-lit offices of AHI were a legend unconfirmed. The orange light of happiness melted all the way to Kelly’s toes. She flicked the water playfully at Ethan and he laughed, splashing her back.
That afternoon they went hiking, or struggle-walking in Kelly’s case, in the rolling foothills near Mount Hamilton. Ethan let her lead the precarious way up a path winding along the side of a steep hill, the air tingling with the smells of clean, fine-grained dirt and silvery desert plants. Kelly was starting to regret this choice—her calves were not used to exercise that didn’t involve getting into or out of a chair—but she pushed forward. They emerged onto an overlook.
Seldom was the sound of traffic so far off—it was more of a hum here, a feeling rather than a noise. A panorama of red hills, spotted with tough shrubs and spiky, geometric growths, stretched from horizon to horizon, the peaks dipping toward and away from each other like waves frozen at their crest. It had been a long time since she had seen something so still.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It is beautiful,” Ethan said. “Thank you for taking me with you here.”
“You don’t need to thank me.” Kelly looked around, letting herself sink into the moment. She looked at Ethan. “Aren’t you happy here?”
He smiled at her. “I am if you are.”
What would her life be like after Ethan? In her first twenty-nine years, she had never found anything close to the intimacy she had with him. He was literally her perfect match. He picked up on her every desire and molded himself after it. But was making someone who became perfect for her the same as finding her perfect person? She thought back to all her hours of research on the health impacts of loneliness—the shorter life span, the dementia, the depression. She knew that finding love was challenging. She knew that she herself was not an easy person to love. She could imagine a version of herself going between her home and office, day in, day out, for years, until she could no longer go anywhere but home, living out her days on her own. Loneliness was a real and heavy threat. But was it enough to be with someone who molded himself after her desires? How could she know if he had any true desires of his own? Was it enough to be with someone if she wasn’t sure if he was … someone?
Kelly tried to shake off the thoughts clogging her brain and just enjoy the moment. She turned from the view to search Ethan’s face. But it was impossible to tell if the happiness on his face was more than a reflection of her own.
As the next week went on, it was easy enough for Kelly to push her decision about Ethan to the side. There were too many other demands on her attention at work, including those from Robbie. But when the weekend came, what should have been a pleasant, freeing emptiness just meant a lack of excuses. And so, on a sunny April Saturday, while Ethan did laundry in the next room, she slid into the computer chair at her home desk, a mug of coffee in hand, and opened a blank document. She needed to get organized, to make a plan. Writing out what she needed to do in logical, discrete steps might make the daunting process seem possible. “Complete step one” was much friendlier than “Kill your fiancé.”
An hour later, she felt much better. She had her plan written out and pinned to the background of her phone. The list was neat, precise, and orderly, and she was right on schedule with Item A: the mother.
She had decided to give the “tell Mom that Ethan is moving away” tactic one more try. She straightened her shoulders within her pressed white button-down and breathed in through her nose before pushing open the boutique’s door—an astringent, cleansing breath.
As soon as she entered her mother’s shop, she felt out of sorts—the place always had that effect. But Kelly would not let that deter her. She was maintaining a clean mind. She was on a mission. Just like that time she had come here determined to tell her mom that Ethan was history and instead ended up with a fiancé. But she shoved the thought away—this time would be different. This time had to be different.
Her mother wasn’t in the front area, but Kelly thought she heard a rustling in the back. She pushed past the pink-flowered curtain and saw Diane, back toward her, in the workshop, a small, square space cluttered with an impossible variety of fabrics, threads, and notions in a veritable rainbow of white.
“Hey, Mom,” she said.
Diane turned, surprised. “Kelly! I didn’t know you were coming over. What a nice surprise! You never just drop in. Is everything okay? You should have warned me.” She edged in front of whatever she had been working on, blocking Kelly’s view, fidgeting a bit.
Kelly focused herself with another cleansing breath and got straight to the point, in accordance with her plan. “There’s something I need to tell you about Ethan,” she began.
But Diane wasn’t listening, still moving nervously, swishing some fabric behind her, which she seemed half determined to hide and half eager to show. “I wish I had known you were coming—it’s really not ready for you to see yet. A lot of it is still just tacked in.”
“What is?”
“Your dress.”
“That’s okay, I don’t need to see it anyway, I need to tell you something.” The last thing Kelly wanted right now was to have to find something nice to say about a dress that looked like a Pomeranian with a growth-inducing gland disorder.