She laughs a little. “So I kept living with my aunt and trying to please her by doing everything she said, and smiling nicely to everybody. And then one day my aunt told me that I was like my father, that I was a loser and I was never going to amount to anything, and for the first time all that anger I’d been pushing down simply erupted out of me. I was livid! Beyond livid. So I scraped together the little bit of money that my father had left to me, and I went to Brooklyn, a place I picked on the map just because it scared the hell out of me. I had no idea what I was doing. I was out of my mind terrified.”
She is quiet for a moment, and I can hear her breathing. “But it turned out to be divine intervention or something that I came here. Because after I arrived, everything changed. I made friends with the fear. I married a scientist I barely knew, and I went with him to Africa and studied bugs—I hated bugs! And I hated heat and snakes and traveling without knowing what to expect—but after that, I went all over the world. I chanted in India; I sailed on schooners that looked like they wouldn’t float for five more minutes; I climbed mountains; I studied different religions. Whenever anything scared the living daylights out of me, that was a sign to me that I needed to throw myself into it. And you know what else? That’s how I’ve lived my whole life, doing whatever scares me.”
I don’t want to tell her that that sounds like the worst possible life I could imagine. So I just say, “I’m always scared.”
“Good! My sweet Marnie, you really should come see me.”
“But I’m working,” I say.
“Ah yes, building up security and employment credits.”
“Well, I have to support myself,” I point out. “No one else is going to do it for me.”
She’s silent for a long time, and I’m sure I’ve insulted her. But then she says very quietly, “I want you to look very carefully around you. Because everything is about to change. Your whole life, all of it. You need to notice it just the way it is right now. Will you do that?”
She says some words I can’t really hear.
“Is that the spell?” I say.
“I’m sending you my best words of power,” she says. “But yes. It’s your spell.”
“I wish you’d come back home,” says Natalie one night on the telephone. She means back to Jacksonville. To live there. “Mom and Dad aren’t getting any younger, you know. And I miss you. The baby misses you.”
“The baby isn’t even born yet.”
“I know, but I tell her about you, how you defected to California, and she’s very upset about it. She wants me to tell you that you’re going to lose out on a lot of family experiences if you insist on remaining there.”
I look out the window at the mountains and the park and the yellow brick library building. I’ve loved living here, walking to the perfect little nursery school where I work, then walking home through the town, window-shopping in all the cool stores I can’t afford. But now this town seems like a place that was never meant for me. Everybody I know here is already a member of a couple. I wave to them in the elevator of my posh little apartment building: smiling at each other, making their evening plans, with no interest in me whatsoever. Noah and I were like that, too, just keeping to ourselves.
It’s the same pang I always feel when I talk to Natalie—she and Brian always have music playing, and they’re always fooling around, laughing like I guess happily married people do, and I wish Noah and I had settled down near my family, like I’d kind of thought we’d do at some point down the road. You know, meet them for dinner sometime, run into each other at the grocery store . . . have a big old extended family right there.
But I don’t want to go back to Florida alone, as the failed sister, the person who never figured out how to make it in the world. Besides, if Noah were to ever come looking for me . . . well, I’m just saying. This is where he would think to look: right here in Burlingame. He liked how upscale it was, said he always wanted to live in the kind of town where the weekly police blotter reports were dominated by stories of residents bothered by squirrels tossing acorns too boisterously.
Natalie reads my mind, which she is good at, having known me and my shenanigans for my whole life. “How is staying there a good idea for you? You need to get over him and move on, not stay at the scene of the crime,” she is saying.
“Costa Rica was the ‘scene of the crime,’ as you call it.”
“Come home, come home, come home,” she says. And then Brian gets close to the phone, and they both start chanting. “Come! Home! Come! Home!”
One morning, after a week in which the Bride Girls have begged for us to put on pretend weddings at the preschool, I wake up with a fantastic idea. Probably the best idea I’ve ever had! I jump out of bed, jiggety jig, and race around the apartment, pack up my wedding dress, the veil, the something blue, the somethings old and new, as well as the corsage and the bouquet, and I put them all in a giant trash bag. But I’m not throwing it all away! I’m not crazy or anything. I’m taking it to school! The most dazzling show-and-tell EVER.
I get there before the sun is even up, and I set out the dress lovingly on the art table. It looks so beautiful laid out like that, so I put the veil across the chair. Noah was supposed to lift it off my face, so lovingly, smiling into my eyes.
But, well, we didn’t get to that part.
I hear myself laugh out loud at the idea that things might have been altogether different if we’d done things the right way, lifting the veil for the kiss, having our first dance, tossing the bouquet, all of it. You can go insane that way—what if Whipple hadn’t been the best man, what if there hadn’t been a trip to Africa waiting, what if Noah hadn’t realized all the stupid, conventional things about me just before he was supposed to say “I do”?
Conventional. That’s what I forgot to tell Blix is my main flaw. I’m not simply ordinary—I’m conventional. Maybe I should call her back. I’ll do that—today! Later.
But first, this.
This.
As soon as the Bride Girls arrive, I lead them over to the art table, where I take the scissors and make a nice, clean, long cut into the skirt of the wedding dress. I cut through the lace and the netting and the satin underpart. All the Bride Girls can have pieces of the dress to wear, I tell them. Their own little slice of the dress!
I hear somebody say, “Marnie?” and it’s the kindest, softest voice I’ve ever heard.
“Thank you,” I say to the voice. It’s the voice of kindness, of the universe ready to apologize to me for what happened.
Only the voice has a person attached to it, and that person turns out to be my boss, Sylvie.
She says, “Marnie, honey, are you cutting up your wedding dress?”
And I try to say to her, “Yes, but it’s okay,” although it comes out crazy because what’s happening is that I’m suddenly crying too hard.
And then she says, “Oh, honey, what’s wrong? What are you doing? Let me get you a tissue. What has happened?”
“We’re going to make wedding dresses for the Bride Girls!” I explain. “Because I don’t need—”
And that’s when I look down and see that I’m wearing my bathrobe and my bedroom slippers, and Sylvie, who is in her work clothes, says something like we should disappear into the back office while Melinda takes the children outside, and she gathers up the wedding dress pieces and the veil, and then she drives me home even though it is still early in the day. We sit in my car outside my apartment, listening to the engine making that clicking noise it does after you turn it off, and after a long time she says, “Marnie, sweetheart, I think you need to get some help.”
“Just because I went to work in my bathrobe?” I say idiotically. “I was in a hurry.” Even I know how stupid this sounds.
Then very quietly Sylvie reaches over and touches my hand and tells me that they’ve all known the whole time. Everybody. They all knew about the honeymoon and the divorce. People tried to talk to me about it, which I do not remember. Everybody has been sad for me. Nobody knew what to say. “That makes all of us!” I tell her, laughing, but she doesn’t laugh.