Her roommate was a delicate and angry girl named Ariel, who had grown up in Berkeley and was horrified when eventually she figured out who Sarah’s father was. There was a damning assertion about Huck—an assertion, Sarah wasn’t sure, she never investigated—in a documentary that was much talked about at the time, something about U.S. involvement in domestic politics in Latin American countries. Latin America was, for some reason, a pet cause of Ariel’s—all of it, the whole continent. She read Marquez for pleasure and overly enunciated her Spanish words. After two months, Ariel requested to have her room reassigned. The authority overseeing this kind of thing was not pleased—the very idea of having a roommate, in college, was to further your experience of the world, to meet, and engage, and learn to live, in a very literal sense, with people different from you. Ariel was not buying this. Sarah wanted peace, prevailed on Lauren to swap, and for the next four years was wholly ignored by Ariel.
There’s a great florist in the Sixties, so Sarah will end there, so the flowers don’t get bruised and beaten on her other errands. Her to-do list isn’t so long. Maybe she’ll walk, she thinks. It’ll be a nice alternative to going to the gym, which though she has time to do she doesn’t have the will, just isn’t in the mood. You go, you run, you sweat, you listen to music or watch the television, then you shower and it’s hours later and you feel nothing in particular, or not different enough anyway, just a little smug, very hungry. Walking is good exercise.
She’s always enjoyed this kind of time, the dead time in which her body is engaged in a pursuit for which her mind isn’t required. Showering, walking somewhere, driving that familiar path from the garage to the house in Connecticut. In these moments, she makes her mental list, orders and reorders it. The list is, as ever, a hydra. For every matter that’s settled—the house, of course it’s the house—a new concern arises. She wants to tell Lauren about it, strategize on how to cram the cast of thousands her parents are evidently planning on inviting. Lauren knows the place, she’ll have ideas. She should call her, adds that to her list. Not tonight: Tonight is book club. Lauren is not a book club friend; book club is something else: Meredith, who loves it—in fact, she organized it; Iris, a coworker of Meredith’s; Valerie, an old friend of Iris’s but also a friend of Meredith’s; Simone, the wife of one of Dan’s workers, who mentioned to Sarah once, at a party, that she wanted to join a book club. It’s not Lauren’s crowd. Not tomorrow: Sarah’s supposed to go to Carol’s for a working dinner, Chinese takeout and grants and details. Not Friday: work, then in the afternoon, a tasting at a caterer’s; in the evening, dinner with Dan’s coworker Steven and his wife, Amy. Not Saturday: Lulu’s birthday is coming and she’s going to get her a present—what she’s yet to determine—and then meet Dan when he’s off work—he always goes into the office Saturday afternoons, while she shops or reads or whatever. Not Sunday, sacrosanct, reserved for just the two of them, first at home, then dinner with her parents. But soon. And then she can tell Lauren about how they’ll be having the wedding at the house, and how Lulu mentioned that maybe she’d like to sing a song at the reception, and how Lulu has started asking questions about what it’s appropriate for the mother of the bride to wear. Basically everything that’s happened around the wedding, Sarah’s first thought has been to tell Lauren about it.
She’s tired of this preoccupation with the circumstances of her own life. It seems petty, all this wedding talk. A night last week, dinner with Michael and Bethany, Dan’s coworkers, and their spouses, Andrea and Elias. Lovely people, with the same palpable affection for Dan as everyone who knows him, and now, by some transitive principle, for Sarah, too, since they’re getting married. A ring still means something. And that ring, what it symbolized, the conversation kept turning back to it—talk about work, then talk about the wedding, talk about real estate then reminiscences of their own weddings, then swapped details about honeymoons in Namibia, the necessity of providing guests some late-night snack (doughnuts, it happens; both couples had served doughnuts, this before they even knew one another), the perils of the registry and the importance of writing thank-you notes.
The wedding hasn’t even happened yet and she’s exhausted being the center of attention. Being a bride is apparently a solo effort. For example, she’s not heard anyone ask Dan any specific questions about what he’ll be wearing or what the guests will be eating. In a way, it’s an improvement over the general tendency to only talk about what people do for a living—the first thing everyone asks someone they’ve just met, isn’t it?