24
My sister’s living room has successfully completed its transmogrification into an issue of Modern Bride. Suzanne is holding forth in italicized verse while flinging yards of net around the room—the yards of net I have labored over to create a bridal-fantasy dream come true for her.
“Impossible for me to get married without a goddamn veil. This isn’t what I wanted or drew. I want froufrou without looking complicated or too…too…I’m getting married in two days and I’m not even going to have a veil.” My sister sputters to a stop, her harangue and arms winding down.
“Suzanne, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll fix it and it’ll look great, I promise.”
The veil she is holding is exactly what she drew, or as close to it as I could get. Not to mention that she already saw the damn thing, just a little less finished. I fight the urge to snatch it out of her hands, throw it on the ground, and stomp on it, screaming, “How do you like it now?” This fantasy allows my breathing to luxuriate in a long, slow exhale, as my body has tired itself out from my imagined tantrum.
Suzanne is staring at me. I have a wild worry that she can read my thoughts, but realize she is just waiting for me to continue reassuring her. “Your new and improved veil will be at the church on Saturday whenever you want.”
“Three o’clock.”
“Okay, I’ll be there, veil in tow.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. So.”
The child bride’s dress is hanging over the back of an upholstered chair, the whites of each fabric blending together into a blinding cloud. “This one’s nice,” I say, lifting the lace-covered frock.
“Coffee?” Suzanne is already leaving the room.
With cyanide for you preferably, but okay.
As I replace the child bride’s gown on the chair, I notice my maid-of-honor dress hanging on the wall, like some horrible floral flag. “Well, you cheer me up immensely,” I say out loud. I am glad that Suzanne insisted on keeping it here until today. Its proclamation of maidenhood in my apartment all these weeks would have done me in; the veil was depressing enough to have around.
Suzanne and the silver coffee service glide in like the figurehead on a ship.
“So is anyone coming?” I move our mother’s prayer book off the coffee table and sit down next to it on the couch, taking small comfort in Momma’s presence by proxy.
“Of course anyone is coming.” My sister is pouring the coffee we drank growing up; she has bags of it airmailed to her each month. The aroma of all our relatives’ kitchens every morning and most afternoons is now wafting toward me in Suzanne’s living room so far away on the West Coast. She and I were weaned on this coffee in the form of coffee-milk, which was milk heated on the stove just to the point where the whiteness of it gets really bright, then poured at the same time as the coffee into a cup already waiting with three full spoons of sugar in it. Pouring it was the trick. The milk came out of the open pot faster than the coffee did through the spout, so more milk went in, leaving a beverage that was a beautiful soft ivoried dark. Suzanne and I would sit with our coffee-milk at our relatives’ breakfast tables, listening to family news, and watching facial expressions that said everything about who was getting along with whom, while the adults drank their coffee black. It was heresy for the adults to put in sugar, much less milk. But one uncle, who had scandalized the family by moving North, sometimes returned and would tease our grandmother, his momma, by putting a broken spoon handle in his cup, stirring it a few times, then lifting it out, saying, “See, Momma, I told you, the coffee down here just eats spoons right up.” Even though it had been many years since I had to drink mine as coffee-milk, I still like the taste of sugar in it.
“Three hundred anyones are coming to the wedding. About a hundred of Matt’s relatives from San Francisco, practically his entire firm—”
“No, I meant from home is anyone coming.”
“Oh. No. They’re not.” Suzanne hands me my cup. She has put the sugar cubes in first, the way we were taught growing up so that the heat of the coffee liquefies them, thereby making a spoon unnecessary although it was still used for decorum.
“Aunt Cecile already gave us that engagement party down there, and we decided to go visit in the fall when everyone is back in town, so, no. No one’s coming out here for it.”
“Oh.”
“What?” Suzanne sounds the way she did as a child after she explained the rules of a game she made up that she worried I might not play.
The china cup I am holding has the same delicately balanced weight of hundreds of cups I have held sitting with countless family members in many living rooms as we participate in being flesh and blood. “Is this y’all’s pattern?”
My sister nods.
“It’s nice.” I can imagine her selecting the autumnal floral china, the juxtaposition of blossoms in a season near death—it is very Suzanne to have avoided the exuberance of a spring palette. Beauty with restraint. I have always liked that about her.
“No, it’s just…” I put my coffee cup down carefully, hoping the action will force me to also be delicate with the fragility I am feeling. “I mean, we have how many first and second and removed and twice-removed cousins, but honest to God, sometimes I feel completely untethered, like a wayward party balloon.”
Suzanne stirs her coffee. She must have forgotten that I am probably the only person in L.A. who knows she doesn’t need to.
“Would you like some more?” My sister reaches for the pot, my answer decided by her already.
“Not really.”
As I drive home from my sister’s house, the thought of having to redo her veil by Saturday afternoon (it’s Thursday!) makes me want to scream right now. I try to in my truck, but I feel stupid, self-conscious. For the first time, I am grateful to my subconscious for creating my scream dream, allowing me that nocturnal release. And maybe I have finally done it enough for it to end.
I turn my radio on to a station on the far right of the dial that plays classical. One of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos has just begun. That’d be nice to play at my wedding.
What?
Oh, God, no. Do not have thoughts like that. The last thing I need is some unfulfilled bridal fantasy following me around. I will make this veil for Suzanne, be in her wedding, and then consign the entire frightening social institution to the far back regions of my mind where it belongs.
I have my jewelry to think about, like remembering to call Roxanne when I get home to see if she is happy with the order I delivered three days ago, and how could I ever have a husband when Michael won’t even spend the night? Of course, Andrew made me leave his bed, too, the jerk. Jesus, I never thought I’d say that he and Michael were alike. Okay, Michael has had to leave those nights because of work, and that could change. Yeah, like him changing the format of his station to conservative talk radio. I suddenly realize that the many messages coming from him—committed, not, maybe, too-soon-to-tell—are all the same, just like the different shows he broadcasts, supposedly unique in themselves, but really it’s only Michael’s voice getting through. All Michael all the time without ever really knowing him.
I wonder if one reason I haven’t been tons more upset about Michael leaving in the middle of most nights is that I have breakfast with Reggie every morning. Maybe that “nature abhors a vacuum” thing isn’t working for me romancewise because a big part of my intimate/love area is taken up with my male best friend. That’s worrisome. I wonder if he has ever thought that.
Reggie calls as I am three hours into reconfiguring Suzanne’s veil. The message I left for him after I called Roxanne when I got home has elicited an unusually fast response.
“She’s a bride, honey, i.e., nuts,” Reggie says, after I regale him with my terrible redo-the-veil tale. “Plus, I think most people go a little crazy when they can be demanding in an obscurely specific way. They think they’re being creative, meanwhile, they act like a child.”
“I guess I’ve been lucky so far with my commissions, not having to deal with this. Jesus, Reggie, if this is what you go through with your clients, I think I’d throw myself off a bridge.”
“It’s a little easier to take when they’re paying you a lot. All you’re getting out of this is—”
“Freedom from sisterly guilt. A small thing.”
“No pressure there. Honey, it’s going to be beautiful; everything you do is. And if she can’t get past her hysteria to appreciate it, there’s nothing you can do.”
“Thanks, I just don’t want her perpetually hating me because I ruined her wedding.”
“You’re not that powerful, Yvette, even if you’re making the veil. Everyone’s responsible for their own life—your big sister included.”
Reggie always knows exactly what I need to hear. He is able to talk me down off the emotional ledges I climb up on better and faster than anyone else.
“Is Michael going with you?” I am shocked that he asked and can hear in his voice that it is a kind of reconciliation. I know his face looks sweet right now, the way it does when he is about to give me a hug and sing one of his funny made-up songs.
“Yeah, he is.”
“You’re going to have a great time and the veil’s going to be perfect.” Reggie sounds so confident of this that I feel renewed energy to tackle Suzanne’s headpiece. “Breakfast ma?ana?”
Mana?a is now just a few hours away. I have labored though the night: filling in, taking out, starting over, and covering up, but the headpiece has decided not to work. I have encountered this before when I was doing sculptures with certain metals and various found objects, this refusal to become something else, but none of those had a bride waiting for them who also happens to be my sister. I know that inanimate objects are not alive, but they do, like us, have mass and weight comprised of atoms with space, and they can be pliable or irrefutably static, completely resistant to change. Like us. Or me sometimes, actually. Not changing myself, or refusing to see that something—like this damn headpiece—or someone isn’t going to, either. Like Michael, let’s be honest.
Anyway. No matter how hard I tried to fix the headpiece, I have finally gotten the message that it was never meant for my sister to wear in her wedding. It was a trial run, practice scales, an opportunity for me to get the kinks out before my efforts really count and become part of something that lasts. I wonder if that describes Michael, as well.
I get into bed to catch a few hours’ sleep before Reggie’s breakfast phone call will wake me. I know I’ll have to make a trip downtown to get new materials, and then will have long hours of work ahead of me on the new headpiece, but I feel clear and clean, like the air after a January storm. As I begin to slip down into sleep, it occurs to me that there is a certain happiness in this relinquishing of the unable-to-do and being ready to embark on the new. Maybe I can have this in other areas of my life, too.
My earthly mother has guided me. I should have turned to her before, but no use crying over spilled milk-colored seed pearls. When I got home from downtown, as I was walking into my apartment, a picture on the living room wall caught my eye. I see it so much that it has become part of the scenery, like the tree you don’t notice until it is gone and its protective shade no longer cools you. It is a black-and-white photograph of Momma and Daddy on their wedding day, cutting the tall, proud castle of a wedding cake. My father’s hand is gently guiding hers while my mother’s face looks young and expectant, as if each layer they are slicing through will provide answers to how her life with my father will go. The picture is slightly blurred. It is just a snapshot, taken by a forgotten family member, but it is the only photograph I have ever seen of my parents’ wedding. I know that Suzanne has a copy of it, too.
Momma never spoke about her wedding, nor about a future one that might one day be mine. I wish I had asked her about hers. Maybe brought it up on one of their anniversaries before my father left when that date in the year became like a frozen lake, maintaining its true nature underneath, but with a surface of ice covering it that allowed us to skate over it on top.
The new veil that I have created for my sister appears slightly blurred, just like the one in the wedding photograph of Momma. I finally understood what Suzanne meant about glimmering but not jeweled. I have sewn a layer of white chiffon over the headpiece, muting the tiny seed pearls and sprinkles of jewels underneath, the bridal equivalent of wearing a long strand of pearls inside the deep V-neck of a cocktail dress. A glimpse. Present, but not for show. Suzanne’s taste exactly. And just like the photo. I have been giddy since yesterday creating this for her and have an adrenaline rush from working through the night, and from having everything come out right. I can’t wait to see the veil on her head.
It is quarter to two on Suzanne’s wedding day, and I am all ready to go, though it is much earlier than I need to leave. I decide to forgo a nap—I couldn’t fall asleep right now, but if I did, I might not wake up—and clean up the wisps of fine netting, white threads, and minuscule pearls that are scattered everywhere. It feels better to get rid of the nuptial debris than try to put a dent in all the sleep I have missed. Besides, I’m too excited about having Suzanne see her veil.
As I put together a small bag of veil-crisis remedies—knowing that Betsy in her professional bride-soothing role will have everything, but wanting to be prepared just in case—I dial Michael’s phone number, and am surprised to get his machine.
“Hey, it’s me,” I say, while slipping into my shoes. “Well, maybe you’re in the shower. I was thinking you might want to go early with me instead of meeting me at the church like we planned, but…umm, okay, I think I’m just gonna come by your place, and if you’re ready and wanna come with me, I’d love that, and if not, then at least I can see you real quick before I get swallowed up with maid-of-honor duties. And maybe we can swallow each other up first. Okay, I’m on my way, see you soon.”
I am driving in my truck with Suzanne’s veil pinned to a hanger that is suspended from the clothes hook in front of the passenger window. It’s like riding with the ghost of all brides, but a benevolent one, a sort of phantom fairy godmother. I am wearing my maid-of-honor dress. I considered doing the normal thing and wearing something else to the church, then changing there, and I know I will hear a chorus from the bridesmaids: “You didn’t wear something comfortable before you have to change into that!” and “Aren’t you afraid you’ll ruin it before the pictures and ceremony!” But considering that the dress trails around me like an unused parachute and is a jumbled profusion of floral madness, nothing could be more comfortable or less able to show wrinkles or spots. For the first time, I commend my sister’s choice, though I suspect Michael might be shocked when he sees me since I wear only solid colors and form-fitting clothes. But that’s assuming he’ll notice.
It takes three rings of his doorbell before I hear footsteps approach. I know Michael is home because his BMW is parked out front, its great-on-the-outside/a-total-mess-within appearance on full view in the day’s bright sunlight.
Finally Michael opens the front door. All he is wearing is cutoff jeans, an unshaved beard, and a peculiar grin on his face. Groovy music that sounds like it was recorded outside is playing inside. He takes a long step backward without saying anything, and as I follow him into the living room’s dim light, I see Ivan, a blond dreadlocked deejay from the station, sprawled on the couch. Ivan appears peculiarly specifically cheerful, as well.
“What are y’all—” But my words are suddenly interrupted by Michael’s hand touching my mouth.
“The most perfect flower,” he says, staring at me. “Your dress and lips and mouth and dress.” His fingers are tracing my lips, at first soft, then hard, then gentle, but all annoying, and Ivan is now staring to boot.
“That is so sweet,” I say as I try to bat his hand away. “But, um, Michael, shouldn’t you be getting ready now?”
Michael’s hand is on overdrive. It is grabbing my lips, which can be pulled out much farther than I thought they could, then his hand starts contorting and shaping them with his strong fingers.
“Bloom and die and bloom and die,” he chants like the underlying theme of a nursery rhyme.
My attempt to ask what the hell he is doing comes out in gibberish thanks to his hand still having its way with my lips. As I manage to pry his fingers loose, Michael immediately trains his detail-obsessed attention onto my dress, and the general grooviness of his behavior and the scene finally sinks in.
“Oh, God, no. Michael, are you tripping on the day of my sister’s wedding?” He is now trying to pick the flowers off my dress, grabbing at the fabric—and ergo, my legs—relentlessly. “Yes, you are. Okay, can I just die now please?”
Michael’s face crumples like a punctured balloon. “No, we’re going to the Phish concert today.”
“Yeah, clearly—you’re in great shape for that.”
“Wow,” he says, eyes blinking hard and fast. “Okay, I really can’t handle your dress right now.” Michael sits down on the couch and covers his face with his hands.
“Hey, man, don’t harsh out his trip.” Ivan has moved his feet to the coffee table, and is lying stretched out.
“Oh, no, God forbid I harsh out the Phishing trip.”
Michael is now playing some pseudo peekaboo game with himself, his hands flapping open and shut rhythmically over his face.
“Hey, man, seeing as how you’re vertical,” Ivan says. “Could you hand me the nose-blowing paper?”
“The what?” I suddenly wonder if this is some newfangled acid. And I thought stamps were all kids had to worry about.
“The nose-blowing paper, man.” Ivan sounds agitated, and is pointing at a box of tissues, his finger jabbing the air. “I got to blow my nose.”
My dress billows around me, a storm of flowers raining in the air, as I pick up the desired object and hand it to him. “Here. Blow away.”
A long expanse of white net floats by, then is stopped like a sail catching the wind as Betsy and I place the veil on Suzanne. The three of us stare at the nuptial angel reflected in the full-length mirror of the church’s dressing room.
“It’s breathtaking,” Betsy sighs.
“It’s Momma’s!” Suzanne ecstatically cries.
“Well, I figured it would definitely match with the prayer book and the music and all.”
Betsy squeals with delight.
God is happy with this home. The cathedral my sister is getting married in is gold and ornate, but tasteful in its excess. Baroque music is playing at full steam, filling the air like a teapot about to explode. I am standing at the altar waiting for Suzanne-the-bride to come forth. Six bridesmaids are in a line at my right with Mandy closest to me. Even in her conservative bridesmaid dress, she manages to look like she just posed for a Cosmo cover, like some Freudian reminder of what this ceremony is really about.
There is a pause of silence, a crash of chords, then three hundred congregants rise as the wedding march begins and Suzanne effulgently floats down the aisle. Tears immediately start streaming down my face, keeping pace with her steps. My sister is stunningly beautiful as immense joy exudes from her, blinding each row as she walks by.
As I sit in the front pew between Betsy and Mandy during the nuptial mass, my small but audible sobs accompany the vocalist who is glorifying the cathedral with “Ave Maria.” The almost-married couple is kneeling at the altar while music swirls around them like fairy dust gracing their union. Betsy looks completely blissed out, not unlike Michael before I harshed out his trip. Without removing her eyes from the bride, she reaches into her voluminous bag and puts a box of tissues on my lap. I blow my nose under cover of “Ave Maria’s” final crescendo.
At the reception afterward, I decide the cathedral won the contest for most ornate, but it was close. The hotel ballroom is decorated like a Renaissance court, with two gigantic food-laden tables lining the walls and round white-covered tables festooned with pale soft flowers spread throughout around the dance floor and band.
Guests are making their way through the receiving line, which is missing its customary first greeter, the mother of the bride. I suddenly imagine a spotlight to commemorate her empty spot at the beginning of the line. The place where our father should have stood, between Matt’s mother and the bridal couple, is also vacant and therefore closed up, their bodies moved together to where he should stand, as if he never registered in Suzanne’s existence. I am next to Suzanne, commencing the attendant portion of the line. Tears are still flowing down my face—they haven’t stopped since they started the minute Suzanne walked down the aisle—but I am resigned to them now, like some really bad lipstick I’ve been forced to wear. I’m not even sure what they are from—happiness, sadness, both at once. Or maybe they are special tears from a reservoir that is marked just for nuptial events—tears to accompany a cacophony of emotion, too loud and jumbled and filled up to be quickly understood. If the guests I am greeting notice my quiet crying, they don’t seem to care, or at least no one mentions it, like my neighbors and my screaming at night.
My voice and Suzanne’s overlap, singing a roundelay with each other, the repeated phrases and similar angled nods of our heads becoming a sibling social duet.
Suzanne’s refrain is, “Thank you so much. Well, simple is what we wanted because it’s all about who’s here, but once you see the possibilities…”
My chorus is a constant underscore of “Hi, so nice to meet you. I’m Yvette, Suzanne’s sister. Yes, there is a resemblance. Thank you for being here. Hi, so nice…”
A divine intervention must have occurred because my weeping has finally stopped. The band is playing Frank Sinatra covers; the food tables have been ravished, and everyone is dancing. Even people who look like they have not danced in years are caught up in the wedding-love mood. I alone am sitting at one of the round tables, daydreaming about the nice long sleep I could have on the carpet. The child bridal couple darts past, playing hide-and-seek among the empty chairs. Her white lace dress is in tatters, his clip-on bow tie attached to the edge of her sleeve. I suddenly imagine Michael chasing me as persistently as this little groom with his play bride, but that’s really a dream.
“Fly me to the moon, and let me sleep among the stars…” I like this version I am singing to myself better, a wedding lullaby for the romantically impaired and sleep deprived.
Just as my eyes are starting to nod shut, Suzanne materializes before me, her white silhouette blocking out all other stimuli, like a vision in a dream.
“There you are,” she says. I look around at the other empty tables and chairs surrounding the full dance floor, wondering how she possibly could not have seen me. “Where’s Michael? Didn’t he come?”
It feels like weeks since this afternoon when Michael stood me up or rather grooved out on me, and I had forgotten that my sister doesn’t know he never arrived. “No, he went on an unexpected trip.”
“Oh, honey, that’s too bad. Well, I need you to help me change.”
“I mastered that skill at three; haven’t you gotten it yet?”
The band has switched to “We Are Family,” and the roiling throng is responding with whoops and flailing arms.
“Come on, I need to put on my traveling suit before everyone leaves.”
“For what? You and Matt are staying here tonight until your plane leaves tomorrow morning—why are you changing out of your dress?”
“Will you just come help me? God, you are so stubborn sometimes.”
Following my sister out the reception hall, I concede that she has a point.
The honeymoon suite where Suzanne and Matt will first slumber as husband and wife is a luxurious peach dream. My sister’s empty wedding dress is lying in the middle of the floor like a circus tent dropped at the end, no longer needed to create magic in. I am zipping up Suzanne’s cream-colored sheath as she holds her hair out of the way.
“And no one does receiving lines anymore, either, but my God, if I don’t get to enjoy all the traditions and costumes that come with a wedding, what’s the point.” She slips into the matching jacket and examines the result in the mirror.
“Well, I’ve always considered elevators travel.”
Suzanne catches my eye and we laugh ourselves into giggles. I suddenly want to put on our childhood matching nightgowns and play princesses in the backyard among the glowing fireflies that we pretended were fairies until long after dark.
I smooth down the collar of her jacket, letting her hair fall back onto her shoulders. “You look great.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m really happy for you.”
“Thanks, honey.”
Suzanne turns around and goes to the dresser, then begins rooting around in our grandmother’s burgundy leather traveling valise that she uses as a jewelry case, pulling out pearl studs and a necklace.
“So, how long is y’all’s honeymoon again? Bali’s going to be great.”
Suzanne walks back over to me, holding something in her hand.
“This is yours,” she says, and places into my hand our mother’s prayer book. The ivory leather is cool and soft on my skin like Momma’s cheek was when I’d kiss her good night as a child. “I could tell she wanted you to have it when I asked her for it.”
“Oh, Suzanne, I can’t.”
“Yes, I want you to have it. Now it’s from both of us.”
A splash of wetness falls from my eye onto the book. I worry what the moisture will do to the leather, but realize mine are not the first tears to be caught and absorbed by the prayers held inside.
“Okay, but…” My words are interrupted by more tears emerging from my throat, lungs, and heart. They are fresh and solid, as if they are the first of their kind, not the thousandth that day, but I know that these are from a different place than the others. “I may not be able to use it for what y’all did.”
“Hush. You don’t know that.” Suzanne puts her arms around me and hugs me in a true embrace as my dress gathers in folds between the clinch of our bodies. I feel my sister’s arms around me and, through them, every member of our family reaching forward and back through our line.
“So I guess your migration into Matt’s family is complete now.”
Suzanne pulls back and looks at me. “Is that what you think? Honey, there is family and there’s family, but—”
I look into my sister’s eyes, eyes the color of Momma’s green one while my eyes are the color of Momma’s brown one. We are one piece of tourmaline, two colors in the same gem, but split and refracting the light differently.
“You’re my only sister. Nothing changes that.”
I hug her again, drinking in the safety of our relationship.
“There you two are.” Matt’s voice enters the room before I see him. “There’s a big crowd of people downstairs holding bags of birdseed and staring at me. I feel like I stumbled into the The Lottery.”
“It’s confetti, honey, Betsy doesn’t allow—”
“I don’t care what it is; are you gonna do this with me?”
Suzanne turns to me one last time. “I’m ready, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, you are.”
“Come on,” my brother-in-law says to me. “You’re part of this, too.”
Monday morning at 7:02 is not a tranquil time at a radio station. Everything here seems extremely, extremely urgent, so maybe the outgoing message on Michael’s cell phone isn’t out of line after all.
“What time do you think he’ll be done?”
Michael’s assistant is like a Doberman pinscher, but one who is perky, blond, and able to look great at this ungodly hour. I, on the other hand, have barely slept. The eleven hours I slept after Matt and Suzanne’s wedding brought me straight into Sunday afternoon, and either my sleeping schedule was so screwed up from that or it was the deciding/knowing what I need to do about Michael that kept me up all last night. Whichever it was, I gave in at six A.M. Got out of bed—at least no scream dreams happen on nights without sleep—made coffee, got dressed, jumped in my truck, and now here I am. And Michael was right—the freeway traffic was a bitch.
“It all depends on how long he stays in. It could be—”
Michael charges through the door. “Winter, get me the press clips on that—”
He sees me standing beside her and breaks into a surprised smile. It is the first time that his usual way of greeting me is correct.
“Yvette, hi. What are you doing here? This is great. Did you hear the show? I think we’re definitely—”
The look on my face stops him.
“No, forget it, right.” Michael takes my hand, and leading me into his office, turns to his assistant. “Winter, buzz Graham, tell him I’ll be in a little later, and get the—”
Withdrawing my hand, I enter Michael’s office without him.
“Forget it, Winter, I’ll give you the rest later.”
“You want carrot juice, Michael, or a latte?” Winter says as Michael walks in, but he shuts the door as his answer.
I am half sitting, half leaning on the conference table, figuring the largest object in the room will lend me support.
Michael moves in front of me and straddles me like a chair. “How’d you get so fuckable this early in the day?”
“Michael.” I can’t help but laugh.
“What? I mean it.” He is pressing on me, kissing my mouth and neck and ears. My back becomes diagonal to the table.
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”
Michael straightens up and starts to withdraw his arms, then must realize how that would look, so he keeps them there, arms still around me, but his face so near that it feels uncomfortable considering what I just said. I wonder if he thinks continued physical contact will eradicate it somehow.
“I just think we do a lot better when we’re friends.”
He drops his arms completely and steps back a little bit. “Uh-huh.”
“Don’t you, really? I mean, if we could stay friends and still somehow also have sex, but we can’t, or I can’t, it seems to me.”
Winter sticks her face in the door. I always think “rain forest” when I see her; I am certain she spent her junior year abroad there. “Graham said he can wait, and that press clip you wanted—”
“In a minute, thanks.”
She looks crushed by Michael’s words, then a smile appears on her face, as if she has picked up on the tension in the room and couldn’t be happier.
We are quiet as we wait for her to leave, and I suddenly feel we are like divorcing parents with a pet that neither of them liked.
“Do you want to hear about it from my perspective?”
I am almost shocked that he has one about us.
“You know, you’ve done this before, and it just seems to me like things are going along great when suddenly you have to change it. We hang out, have a good time, isn’t that enough? Does everything have to mean something serious?”
“No, everything doesn’t, but I don’t think this is ever going to mean anything at all, frankly, and maybe it never really has. Not that we don’t care about each other, but you know what I mean.”
Michael is watching me in a way he hasn’t before. Quietly and listening. For the first time, I feel like a complete person to him, not just a response that he needs. It confirms what I am doing even more.
“So let’s stop seeing each other now while we’re still friends. A lot of it was good; we’re just not the One for each other.”
“I don’t know if the One really exists.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t either, but I want to find out.”
Sounds of the radio station start filtering in. I can hear the cadence of the morning news, and it gives me the same certain yet uneasy feeling I always felt sitting on my parents’ bed before kindergarten watching my father prepare for work. As if something big and different were about to happen that would change my life, but I was only just now finding out about it.
“So I guess this means we can’t have sex anymore?” Michael says it like he’s kidding, but I know him too well.
“Yeah, I think we should finally really not.”
He gives me a hug and quick kiss. For the first time, I don’t try to feel more from it than is really there.
“Okay, well. I’d better get in gear if I’m gonna make my meeting. Hey, do you wanna stick around, watch the deejay? I can have breakfast with you in a little bit.”
“That’s okay, thanks. I need to go.”
Winter blows in. I have a feeling she was just outside the door, listening the whole time and waiting to make her entrance.
“Bye, Michael.” I pass Winter in the doorway. As I walk away, I can feel his attention shift from me to her to his radio station. A national news program ends and a local one begins as I exit the building and enter the bright, white day.