Eight Hundred Grapes (2 page)

I shut the ignition and stared out the car window at my parents’ house. Every room was dark but their bedroom. It worried me that they were still awake, but more likely than not it was just my mother who was awake, reading in bed. She wouldn’t hear me come in. She wouldn’t be listening for it.

I stepped out of the car and headed for the front door, grabbing the spare key from the flowerpot. I let myself in. If I was going to wake them, if they were going to hear me, this was the moment. The red door squeaked when it opened. It was a lesson every child of the Ford family had learned the hard way the first time they attempted to sneak into the house after curfew.

I closed the door. And the house remained silent.

I smiled, standing there in the dark foyer, a small victory. It was the first still moment of the day, and I took it in, surrounded by the familiar smells: a mix of freesia and lemon—what my mother cleaned with—and the night jasmine from the windows my mother always left open, letting in a nice breeze. It was the kind of breeze that you couldn’t find anywhere in Los Angeles. Which made Los Angeles feel a million blessed miles away.

I walked into the kitchen, leaving all of the lights off, running my hand along the wooden countertop and along the farm table. The remnants of dinner—plates, two glasses, and a bottle of wine—were waiting by the sink.

I decided to make myself useful and started gathering up dishes when I saw it through the window. It was next to the hot tub—taking up the patio and the yard. A large tent. Sailcloth white. It was the tent I was getting married under in eight days. Since it was after midnight, did it count as seven days? Los Angeles came screaming back.

Literally. My cell phone rang, piercing the darkness.

I picked up, on reflex, not wanting the phone to wake my sleeping parents, not wanting to scare them.

“Don’t hang up,” he said.

It was Ben. His voice through the phone line shook me.

“Then stop calling.”

“I cannot.”

I loved how Ben spoke. It was an opening statement about who he was: calm, sincere. British. I was a sucker for an accent, which was why I always listed the other qualities first. It was a way to keep my credibility. We had spoken on the phone for over a month before we ever laid eyes on each other. Ben, an architect, had lived in New York at the time. I was a real estate lawyer, my firm working on one of his projects in Los Angeles, a modern office building downtown. That was how we fell in love, on the phone, talking about the least sexy things in the world. Permits. And billing. And then, everything that mattered.

“You need to let me walk you through this, Georgia,” he said. “I’m not saying there is a good explanation. I’m saying it’s not what you think.”

“No, thanks.”

“This is madness. I love you. You know I love you. I’m not involved with Michelle, not since before I knew you. But Maddie . . .”

I hung up the phone.

Hearing the name Maddie was too real. She had a name. Ten hours before this phone call, she hadn’t existed. Now she had a name.

Ten hours before this phone call, I’d been happy. I’d been late, but happy. I ran into Stella’s Bridal Shop in Silver Lake twenty minutes late for my final dress fitting. It was a fitting for my wedding dress, which Stella had made entirely in her five-hundred-square-foot shop: a trumpet dress made with silky white Chantilly lace, draped Spanish tulle, soft sleeves.

I loved the dress—the way it hugged my hips, mermaid-style, the way it softened my shoulders—and I found myself smiling when Stella (after forgiving me for being twenty minutes late) asked me to shimmy across the floor in my satin heels and find my way to the pedestal, so she could do the hem.

I went to the pedestal by the window, striking a bit of a pose. Stella smiled, and egged me on.
Put your hands on your hips
, she said, enjoying the happy stares we were getting from people walking down the street.

Then I saw my fiancé walking down the street.

Ben was walking down the street with a woman I didn’t know. And not just any woman. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, with long red hair, a stunning smile. A matching version of the woman—redheaded and tiny, four or five years old—was by the woman’s side. But the woman outside the bridal shop window was the one who caught my eye.

I recognized her from somewhere, but it would take me a minute to place the where. Stella would actually place her for me. My fiancé was the side note.

And that wasn’t the biggest problem.

The biggest problem was what happened when I knocked on the window, failing to get Ben’s attention.

I was excited for him to turn around. I was excited to see Ben’s face—his strong jaw and cheekbones, a dimple that made no sense. I figured there was a reasonable explanation for what he was doing there with the woman. We’d spent that morning in bed together, in our home together, eating peach French toast. Laughing, getting naked. We were getting married in eight days. We were madly in love.

But Ben didn’t hear me. He kept walking, toward Sunset Junction. The woman was happily walking by his side, her mini-me by hers.

The woman leaned into him, into my fiancé, putting her hand on the small of his back, like it belonged there. And it jerked me forward, and out onto the street, wearing my un-hemmed wedding dress.

I gripped the lace in my hands, making sure the un-hemmed part didn’t hit the dirty street. Stella ran out into the street after me.

“Ben!” I called his name.

Ben turned around. As did the woman. And her little girl.

And then I knew how I recognized the woman, holding her daughter’s hand, as Stella said her name. Michelle Carter. The famous British actress. On the cover of so many American magazines. Close up she was light and lean, like a leaf. Like a pickle.

Ben looked at me. The woman looked at me. The little girl looked at Ben.

“Daddy,” she said.

Let me stop there.

With what Maddie said.

To Ben.

Let me stop there before Stella bent down and bustled as much of the lace as she could—my eyes holding on the little girl, the beautiful little girl, her eyes holding on mine. People stopping on the street, staring at Michelle, pointing.

Ben was moving toward me, completely panicked. Three words coming out of his mouth, but maybe not the words you’d think. Not:
I am sorry.
Not:
It isn’t true.
Not:
I can explain.

Just this. As though it was all he could see. And if it was, does that count for anything?

“You look beautiful,” he said.

Ten hours later, I took off my satin heels and headed up the stairs, holding my dress so I wouldn’t slip, moving quickly to the safety of my room.

My phone rang again, vibrating through the house.

“Don’t hang up,” Ben said.

“Didn’t we just do this?”

“You answered, didn’t you? A part of you wants to hear what I have to say.”

He wasn’t wrong. There was a way to turn off the phone. I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t been able to. Part of me wanted Ben to tell me a story that would make this all okay, that would make him familiar again.

I sat down on the staircase, my dress billowing out to the sides.

“You need to understand, I didn’t even know about Maddie until a couple of months ago . . .” he said.

“Your daughter?”

He paused. “Yes. My daughter.”

“How old is she, Ben?”

“Maddie is four and a
half
.”

He emphasized the half and I knew why. We had been together for five years. The half meant she was conceived before me, before us.

“I obviously wasn’t going to keep this a secret forever, but it’s complicated with Michelle,” he said. “And I wanted to smooth that part of this out before I dragged you into it.”

“Complicated how?”

He paused. “That’s complicated.”

I stood up again. I’d had enough—enough of Ben’s non-explanation, enough of my heart pounding in my throat.

“Look, I just don’t want you to do anything rash. We’re getting married in a week.”

“I’m not so sure about that, at the moment.”

He got quiet. “That’s what I mean by rash,” he said.

He sounded devastated. And the problem was that it reminded me of the first time I’d spoken to him. My law firm had just signed Ben as a client and I called to introduce myself shortly after his bike was stolen. I didn’t know this about him yet, but Ben had owned that bike for ten years. It was less his preferred mode of transportation and more . . . an appendage. And still, by the end of our conversation, he was joking, happy. His bike, and his sorrow, a thing of the past. Because of me, he said. And, even now, there was a huge part of me that wanted to make him feel that good again.

“Where are you?” he said. “Let me come talk to you in person.”

I was at the top of the stairs. Maybe because Ben asked where I was, I looked around. My bedroom was to the left—the door wide open. My parents’ bedroom was to the right.

And coming out of my parents’ bedroom was a large man. Two hundred and fifty pounds large. With hair and skin I didn’t recognize. In a towel.

My mother, in a matching towel, stood close to him.

This man, who was not my father.

I dropped the phone. “Oh my God!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

“Oh my God!” my mother screamed back.

The man moved away, backward, toward my parents’ bedroom, which he apparently knew all too well.

Then, as if thinking better of it, he reached out his hand. “Henry,” he said.

I was stuck in place, right at the top of the stairs. I reached, as though it made sense, for this man’s hand.

My mother covered her mouth in abject horror. I thought it was her disgrace at being caught. But then she reached for me, touching my cheek with the front of her hand, then with the back.

“What did you do to your wedding dress?” she asked.

Regarding Henry

I
f I were keeping count—and who was keeping count?—it wasn’t shaping up to be the best day of my life.

I sat in the dining room with my mother, the two of us dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, my dress hanging on the door, the silence between us aggressive.

Henry was gone. My mother had said good-bye to him on the front steps while I waited for him to walk away. It was like what my mother had done to me my senior year of high school, when I was dating tattooed and mean Lou Emmett. But in a gross reverse.

My mother poured herself a cup of coffee, avoiding my eyes. I wasn’t going to be the first to speak. Normally, I’d reach across the table, make this conversation easier for her, but I couldn’t do that this time. My mother was going to have to do that—she’d have to figure out herself how she was going to explain this.

Instead, I stared at the wall above her head, lined with photographs, all the photographs that made up my parents’ life together—beginning when they were young, at this vineyard, and even before that. One of my favorite photographs was of my mother, still a cellist with the New York Philharmonic, smiling at the camera, her cello resting against her long black dress. The woman sitting here now looking remarkably like the photograph of herself then. She had the same long curls, wide cheeks, a nose that didn’t quite fit. She was still not wearing a drop of makeup, still not needing any.

Next to that photograph of her was one of me playing softball. I’d been a complete tomboy growing up (care of trying to keep up with Bobby and Finn). I’d pretty much lived in a T-shirt and sneakers, my hair perpetually in a ponytail. But there was no denying how similar we used to look: my curls the darker version of her curls, my nose tilted like her nose, my eyes dark green like my father’s but shaped like hers.

My mother used to say that I was the spitting image of her, cloaked in my father’s coloring. That was until I moved to Los Angeles and transformed in the way Los Angeles seems to transform people: a little bit at a time until you don’t recognize yourself anymore. With all the gorgeous women strolling through yoga class and into parties, I found myself paying attention to all sorts of things that I hadn’t historically.

Maybe it would have been the same thing if I’d left Sebastopol for New York or Chicago, but for me, at eighteen, it was Los Angeles that I left for, so it was Los Angeles where I learned some fundamental lessons that growing up in a house full of men and farmers had forgotten to teach me about how to look and feel sexy.

You could see the transformation on the wall. My mother joked that I’d morphed from the darker version of her into the glam, movie star version—which, I assured her, a walk down Abbot Kinney among the real movie stars would prove untrue. Though, in truth, I did look different and I took a certain amount of pride in that.

The Southern California sun had lightened my hair, I’d slipped off ten pounds, and I’d started to dress as though I had
some
idea of how to. Under my friend Suzannah’s supervision (and insistence), I’d spent more money on a pair of shoes than on a month’s rent. I tried to return them the next day—in guilt and nausea—but the store had a strict no-return policy. So I’d kept them. And loved them. In fairness to myself, these had been magic shoes: slinky stiletto heels that made your legs look endless. In further fairness, the shoes had outlasted that apartment and all the ones that had come since.

Whenever I’d come home for a visit, my mother would always say how stylish I looked. But I knew she judged my evolution from ponytails to pencil skirts. My mother thought style should be effortless and easy. She took to touching my straightened hair, saying, “Shiny.” She com
mented on new items of clothing with a whistle and a shifty grin: “Look at that Los Angeles armor.”

And it was always first thing in the morning—when I was freshly awake and racing downstairs for her walnut and cherry waffles, the same way I’d done as a child—that she would touch my skin and say, “Gorgeous.”

The disjunct left me feeling somewhat alone in navigating my two homes. Sonoma County was blue jeans and fleece pullovers and practical field boots. Los Angeles was slingbacks and blue jeans distressed to the tune of $275. I wavered between the two worlds, neither feeling like it fit exactly right. I was self-conscious about my lifestyle in Los Angeles—a lifestyle on which I felt I had a tenuous hold at best. And when I came home, the put-together version of me who seemed to have it all together felt myself judging, in a way I never used to, how unrefined and rural local life was. I didn’t like being judgmental in that way, but I was having trouble stopping myself. I was still trying to find the balance.