Her unsatisfactory answer to that query is that she’s always thought of herself as a solver of problems. She just isn’t clear on how to make this a career. Anyway, there never seems to be time to think about what she’s going to do, because she’s so busy doing it. Because there’s no noun for what she’s doing now, she tries to steer the conversation away from it. There’s no noun, not really, for what Huck does, but he does so much. This is the family business, these things that Sarah does, the connecting of dots, the solving of problems, though she’s aware that not everyone understands this, and she envies that friends like Fiona and Lauren can explain in one word what their business is.
At the moment her business is this wedding. Sarah doesn’t mind it and doesn’t expect Dan to be any more helpful than he is already: It’s her responsibility, she gets that. It’s not sexist, simply a measure of which of the two of them has the bandwidth to think about things like flowers and cake. It’s not some kind of betrayal of a deeply held feminist conviction, that she has to now think about this shit—it’s a reflection of the kind of relationship they have, the kind they want to have, one in which they take turns helping each other. She knows that if she complained, Dan would slip away on his lunch break to sample wedges of cake.
The truth is that she cares fuck all about cake. She’d have gone to the courthouse. But it’s too late now. This is how they’re getting married, and she’s got to take it seriously, give the people what they expect, what they want: to put on a tie or a not-too-pretty dress, to eat lukewarm salmon, to tap a champagne flute with a dessert spoon, to take pictures, to dance, to say hello to the older relatives, to see friends from college and high school, to eat warm doughnuts from sticky boxes as the clock strikes midnight. She’ll get through this, and make it perfect, too. She will not disappoint.
Chapter 9
There’s Halloween candy on display in the drugstore across the street from the office, the one that’s more like a grocery store, or a boutique, that sells nail polish but also cantaloupe or a sweatshirt. It’s a confusing but seemingly successful business model. Lauren had gone to get a yogurt, a midafternoon snack, that Greek yogurt with a little compartment of strawberry jam you can squeeze into the cup and mix up so it’s like dessert. She’s hungrier lately; the body responding to the calendar, presumably.
She’s been looking forward to dinner, because of that hunger, if at the same time dreading it, because of Sarah. Not that she doesn’t want to see her, not exactly. She’s uncertain, actually, why she’s reluctant.
Sarah’s chosen a restaurant downtown, she always does, because, Lauren thinks, of a tirade she once went on, about how restaurants uptown are all terrible. Lauren stands by it, but at the time wasn’t talking about Sarah at all, was relaying an anecdote about a party for one of her books, held in a too-bright spot in the West Seventies, where the air-conditioning was powerful and the food charmless. But she’s fairly certain that Sarah made a note of it. She knows how her mind works.