Getting Married (15 page)

I
t’s going to take several months for the accountants to do the due diligence work necessary to purchase Ridan. Still, I’m frantically planning marketing strategy and drafting a communications plan, both to communicate the purchase internally and to the public.

At a meeting with Kyle and other executives, Kyle tells me that I have to tell the regional directors around the country the news of this acquisition forcefully.

“We want to make sure everyone is on board with this change in focus,” he says. “I don’t want any dissension. We have to go in and set the mandate that this is the priority. If they had different sales and marketing goals, well, they are going to have to push those aside and revamp their plans. We have to go in and vehemently state that Exploran takes precedence over everything else. We can’t be wishy-washy about this.”

“Kyle, I absolutely see what you’re saying,” I say, choosing my words carefully. When you encounter a wild animal, you need to show no fear and proceed cautiously. That’s the tactic I’m taking here. “Let me just throw out this idea, and you let me know what you think. The deadline you’ve set on sales goals for Exploran is very aggressive, as you know. I think that before we go into the branch offices and dictate the change in focus, what might be helpful would be to get buy-in from our regional directors. What I’m saying is, that our approach could be simply to let them know what an exciting opportunity this is, and how much potential there is for everyone to make money. I think if we went in there and set this down as a mandate from above, there might be some initial resistance. But if we point out what a great opportunity this is, they’ll see that this change is to their benefit.”

Kyle’s brow furrows and his lips purse. My heart stops for a few moments as I wait for him to bite my head off, fire me, or some combination of the above. Instead, he takes a deep breath. “I see what you’re saying. What are you thinking exactly?”

Oh, thank God. I exhale and go on to tell him my plans. It seems to me that Kyle is genuinely grateful to get some management advice, no matter what the source. He wouldn’t thank me directly, but I can see the relief in his expression.

I
routinely put in twelve-hour days working for WP. I’ll work from seven in the morning till six at night, then I’ll take a break to make dinner, then I’ll go back to work for a few hours. While I’m killing myself, Will watches football or plays computer games or plays around on his guitar. It’s not his fault that the WP project is really too big for me to handle on my own, but I can’t help envy his leisure time. I can’t wait until I’m done with this contract. After WP, I’m going to do a better job picking projects with reasonable timelines, so I don’t have to bust my ass to meet the deadlines. I’m so jealous that for Will, after he’s put in an eight-hour work day, that’s it; his time is his own to relax and do with it what he wants. Plus, he gets two full days off every weekend, while I’m working my tail off to plan a wedding. And yet I’m still the one cooking dinner every night and doing the bulk of the housework.

If I ask Will to do the dishes or the laundry, he’ll do them without complaining, but he never, not once, has gone and done a domestic chore on his own volition. One important lesson I have learned in this life is this: Boyfriends and husbands need to be strictly project-managed when it comes to household tasks.

On Saturday morning, I want desperately to spend the day at a spa doing nothing but getting massages and facials and sitting in a hot tub whiling the hours away in leisure. But that fantasy is not to be had. Today I have meetings with two caterers to try to plan a menu.

Before I have to go meet with caterers, I try to clean up around the house. I have very low standards when it comes to housecleaning. Even so, it boggles my mind how much time it takes to maintain even a low standard of cleanliness.

As I scrub the toilet, I call Gabrielle on my cell phone. I always have to be doing eighty thousand things at once. I don’t even know how to live another way anymore.

“How are things going with Cara?” I ask.

“I don’t know. We slept together.”

“Holy shit!” I drop the toilet brush. This new development is worthy of my full attention. “How was it?”

“It was good. It was soft and slow and sensual. But I think I’m going to break up with her.”

“Why?

“It’s her friends I can’t bear. They all smell like patchouli and smoke pot all the time. Is this the price of lesbianism? Having to fraternize with patchouli-smelling pot-smokers?”

“I’m sure there are non-patchouli-smelling lesbians in the world.”

“Maybe. I can’t seem to find one. I can’t seem to find anyone who fits quite right.”

“You’ll find somebody.”

“I know. I’m not going to give up or anything. But I foresee a hell of a lot of miserable dates in my future.”

“But eventually you’ll get lucky.”

“Yeah. I know. I’ve decided something.”

“What?”

“I’m going back to working on my dissertation. I figure since my social life is in the toilet, I may as well spend my evenings and weekends working on something worthwhile. It’s been my goal forever to be a professor.”

“Of course. Why else would you spend ten years in college? I’m happy for you. That’s really great. How long do you think it’ll take?”

“I think if I work really hard, I can get far in the next nine months. Then I was thinking I’d take three months off of work to focus on finishing it up and get ready for my defense. I’d already written big sections of the dissertation before I quit school, so I just need to finish writing it.”

“Gabrielle, I think that’s wonderful. Good for you. Look, I should get going. I have to go interview caterers.”

“You don’t sound exited.”

I worry about that myself. I fear I’m not bridal or blushing enough. I’m finding this whole planning a wedding thing to be more work than fun. “Actually, interviewing caterers isn’t that bad. I get to eat a lot of free food. Honestly, you could save a ton of money on food by just pretending you’re having a wedding and letting them feed you.”

“That’s a good idea. I will be an impoverished grad student again soon, so that could really come in handy.”

“Glad to help, babe.”

T
hat night, Will and I drive to the Denver Tech Center area, where Richard’s brother lives. Richard’s brother and his wife are hosting the white trash party. Will went to Kmart and bought a black Metallica T-shirt and a Nascar baseball cap and flip-flops for his costume. I tease my hair and put on excessive amounts of makeup and wear overalls with one of the straps undone over a white T-shirt.

I don’t know most of the people at the party. Really, I don’t know anyone except Richard. The women are all in the kitchen, and the men are all outside drinking cheap beer and pretending they’re not middle-class yuppies. The music being blared, Will informs me, is Iron Maiden. The music makes my ears bleed.

I attempt to befriend the women. I go into the kitchen to get a beer and approach the table where they’re talking only to discover their conversation is about training for marathons. One woman is talking about how she trained for running a race up a mountain
while she was pregnant
, and how she continued racing while she was breast-feeding. I sit around the table drinking my beer, quite certain I have nothing to add to the conversation, although if anyone asked me what I thought of training for a marathon, I would say, “You’re trying to train yourself to run for several hours
in a row
? Are you mad?” But this is Colorado. Any party you go to in Colorado, you’ll be able to find somebody who’s in training for a marathon. Coloradoans are a sick people as a rule.

At some point, the conversation on marathons stalls, and one of the women asks me which guy is mine. I turn to point him out through the kitchen window, and that’s when I find Will, in his Metallica T-shirt and Nascar baseball cap, playing air guitar to Iron Maiden.

“He’s mine,” I say humbly.

There comes a time in every relationship when you find your man doing something—say, for example, playing air guitar to Iron Maiden—and you think to yourself, just who the fuck
is
this man I’m thinking of marrying?

The women all offer expressions that I think are supposed to mean, “Oh, how lucky you are” when in fact what they mean is, “We’re so sorry.”

A little about me: I’m of the opinion that there is simply no situation that warrants playing air guitar to Iron Maiden, white trash party or no white trash party. Let me repeat: No situation.

I smile stupidly and bid a hasty retreat outside where all the guys are. I tell Will about how I pointed him out at the exact moment he chose to play air guitar to Iron Maiden. He looks suitably chagrined.

I stand around outside drinking beer with the men for the rest of the night because at least I have things in common with Will and Richard.

“So, Richard, no luck with the single ladies tonight, huh?” I say.

“They’re all married. Just my luck. I did go on another blind date, though.”

“That’s great! How did you meet?”

“She plays online games. When you play online, as you go along, you can instant message the other players, and so we flirted via email, and then decided to get together in person. I wanted to make it just a really quick lunch because I’ve been really busy lately. So we meet, and she’s attractive, so I’m thinking, ‘Okay, this is promising.’ And then she starts to talk about her evil ex-husband and her teenage daughter who is addicted to drugs and the child-support battles she’s waging with her ex and how much debt she’s in. She didn’t stop complaining for three hours straight. When it was over I wanted to charge her for the therapy session.”

I snigger. “Poor Richard.” But secretly I sort of enjoy hearing the dating traumas of my friends. It makes me feel even more grateful for having met Will.

“H
ey, stranger,” Rachel says.

“Hey,” I say into my cell phone. I’m on my way to the grocery store, stopped at a red light.

“Have you fallen off the face of the earth? You never come by the store anymore.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m a terrible friend. Between planning the wedding and working on this consulting project, I don’t have time to eat or sleep.”

“Come over this afternoon. Please?”

“I really need to look at wedding dresses today. I just cannot find a dress that I like. I swear I think I’ve tried on every dress in the Denver/Boulder area, and I just don’t like any of them.”

“You just don’t like how you look in them or how the dresses themselves look?”

“A little of both, I guess. I’m sort of thinking I want a really untraditional dress. Something very not-bridal. Like a red dress.”

“Red? That is unusual. Why red?”

“I don’t know. The thing is, I’d always vowed I’d have a nontraditional wedding. Something unique and not like those boring cookie-cutter weddings I’ve gone to all my life. And so far, the only unusual thing I’m doing is walking down the aisle hand-in-hand with Will instead of being given away by Dad, and even that isn’t that unusual. I know lots of brides who go down the aisle with their mom
and
dad or whatever. I vowed I wouldn’t spend too much money, and then the next thing you know, I see this beautiful, overpriced reception hall, and I fork over a chunk of my money to these people as fast as I possibly can. And I hate how everyone is trying to screw me over, you know? Like the way bridal shops charge such ridiculous amounts of money for a dress just because it’s white and called a bridal gown, and then they have the audacity to purposely make sure it won’t fit you so you have to spend another two hundred bucks to have the damn thing altered. So I feel like I have to rebel in some way, hence I’m open to dresses of any hue. Anyway, even though I hate it all, I need a dress. I don’t think it would be good to walk down the aisle naked.”

“That would be different. It would be very nontraditional.”

“True. But I’m afraid it wouldn’t quite set the reverential, serious tone I’m going for. Ugh, I don’t want to think about wedding plans. You know what, I
will
come over this afternoon. I’ll look for some dresses and then I’ll come by.”

“Awesome. Come over around one, okay?”

“See you then.”

I pull into the grocery store parking lot, throw my cell phone into my purse, and walk through the lot to the door. As I walk, I realize just how completely exhausted I am.

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I’ve always had trouble sleeping because I’m a worrier, and between the wedding and work, my anxiety is through the roof.

As I approach the store, a mob of boys dressed in baseball uniforms descend on me like a pack of wolves bearing chocolate bars. They plead with me to help support their baseball team. Every time I come to the grocery store, there are throngs of schoolchildren trying to get me to buy something. When did the entrances to grocery stores become
the
place to attack strangers to buy overpriced candy in the guise of charity? (Well, besides the office place in corporate America where I was always getting hit up for money by parents working as mobsters for the Boy and Girl Scout Cookie and Popcorn Mafias.) I know that my irritation is overblown. All I have to do is smile and say, “No thanks,” but today, it just grates on my nerves. Or maybe I was already irritated and this just gives me something to focus my irritation on.

I buy just a few things and go to pay at the self-checkout line. It seems like everyone in front of me has decided to pay with check or cash, and I have to say, I just don’t get this at all. You can pay with a credit card in ten seconds. Cash or check seems to take eons by comparison. Don’t these people know about cash-back rewards and mileage points? I guess there are people who can’t seem to pay off their credit cards every month, and so they have to avoid using their cards. But can’t these people go to the regular “Ten Items or Less” line and get the hell out of my way? Debit cards anyone? I watch a middle-aged woman write out a check as minutes of my life pass by in staggering, obstinate slowness. And that’s all it is—a few extra minutes—but I’m so impatient I could explode. There are so many ways I could be spending this time in more profitable pursuits.

I think I get my inability to be idle from my father. When my parents were separated and then divorced, Dad would see Sienna and me every other weekend. We’d do stuff like go to the art or history museum or drive to one of the forest preserves in Illinois to hike or go to the Chicago River and canoe. For the entire drive to whatever the event of the day was, Dad would test Sienna and me on things like the state capitals. It would be something of a contest between my sister and me to see who could shout out “Concord!” fastest after Dad said, “New Hampshire!” Then when we would hike through the woods, Dad would point out various plants, trees, and shrubs, giving us their Latin names and a little trivia about how we could identify them in the future, like by the color or shape of the leaves. Or as we strolled through the science museum, he would ask us questions about the exhibits we were reading about to ensure we were truly absorbing all there was to learn. We had to be learning and improving our minds at all times. His dedication to our education worked—Sienna grew up to graduate summa cum laude and I got my MBA—but there are times, like now, when I just wish I had an easier time relaxing. I wish I didn’t constantly feel the need to be productive. I wish I could wait five extra minutes in a grocery store line while the slowest employee on the face of the earth called for a price check and not want to spontaneously combust.

A
fter I get home and put the groceries away, I go to a bridal shop downtown and try dresses on with maniacal determination. I need to get this task out of the way. I have so many other things to do. But it’s no good, I just don’t feel right about anything I try on.

I somehow get stuck at the bridal store until nearly two o’clock, and then it takes me a half hour to drive over to Rachel’s.

Rachel only has two children, but when I get there, it seems like there are about forty kids running around because the place is so loud and chaotic. I do a quick head count. Not forty. Four. Rachel’s kids and two neighbor kids.

“I’m so sorry I’m late, I got stuck trying on dresses.”

“Any luck?”

“No. None. Is this a bad time?” I ask. “I’m sorry. Maybe we should reschedule.”

“No, now’s fine. I have to get the kids ready to go to piano practice, but we don’t have to be there for half an hour. Julia, come here. Let’s get your shoes on.”

Her three year old hands her two tiny gym shoes and climbs up onto her lap.

“Is that a new outfit?” I ask Rachel. She looks adorable today, as always. She knows how to fill out a pair of jeans like nobody I know. I could spend the rest of my life searching and I would never be able to find a pair of jeans that fit that well. On me, jeans are always just a little too saggy in the butt or else they are so tight in the butt my underwear lines play a starring role in my ensemble. She’s wearing a sleeveless top in retro black-and-white stripes. There is a silver hoop above her cleavage and it’s from there that straps hook the front of her top to the back of her top. I will always be jealous of the ways thin, flat-chested women can get away with looks that women who need to wear bras could simply never pull off.

“It’s a new design of mine,” she says. “Do you like it?”

“Very sexy, very stylish. It’s a great look.”

“Thanks. What’s going on with you?” Rachel asks me as she begins prying Julia’s foot into one of the shoes.

“Nothing much. What are you up to?”

“Well,” she says quietly, a conspiratorial smile on her face, “Shane and I have been emailing back and forth. Harmless flirtation you know, but it’s been fun.”

Julia has wriggled her way down so she’s lying on her back on Rachel’s thighs. Julia kicks and flails her legs every which way. Rachel seems not to notice or care and just goes about the business of putting her daughter’s shoes on, even when Julia has slid backward down her legs so Julia is upside down with her head on the floor. Mother and daughter look like World Wrestling contestants.

“Rachel, are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

“It’s fine. I’ve got everything under control. Anyway, it’s really mostly all business. He’s been giving me some ideas on how I can improve operations at my shop.”

“If you need a business consultant, that happens to be what I do for a living.”

“Nothing’s going to happen. Don’t worry.”

But I do.

I hear the door open. It’s Sandy, who’s used her key to come in instead of knocking. Rachel gives me a pointed look that says, “Do you see? Do you see what I have to put up with?”

“Hey, Sandy,” I say.

“Hi, Eva. How’s it going?”

Sandy has always had a sad, wounded look. She’s frighteningly skinny and her skin is so pale it seems translucent.

“I’ve got to take Jim and Becky home,” Rachel says, referring to the neighbor kids, having successfully wrestled her daughter’s feet into a pair of shoes. “I’ll be right back.”

I nod at Rachel, and then to Sandy I say, “Things are good. I got engaged.”

“Let me see the ring.”

I extend my hand.

“Wow, it’s beautiful.”

“Thank you. I think so, too. Life has just been really busy. I’m busy with work and trying to plan a wedding. I’m trying to learn how to cook. There aren’t enough hours in the day, you know?”

“Yeah. I know how it goes. You do look a little tired.”

“I’m exhausted. I can’t get enough sleep and even when I go to bed I can’t rest because I’m too wired.”

“I have something that could help you with that.”

I give her a confused look. “What do you mean?”

“I have something that can help you feel more awake.”

“What is it?”

Sandy digs through her purse and pulls out a tiny bag of white powder.

“Cocaine!” I cry.

“No, no, nothing like that.”

“But I’m supposed to snort it?” I laugh, the idea is so preposterous. “I don’t think so.”

“No, it’s no big deal. It’ll just help you stay alert. Take it. Just try it.”

I
would
like to stay more alert. I look at the baggie Sandy is offering and imagine it must be like a hyped-up version of NoDoz or something. I remember a lot of my college friends taking NoDoz to stay awake and it was hardly a big deal. But still, I tell Sandy “thanks but no thanks.”

“Just take it. If you want to try it, fine, if not, no biggie, right?”’

I take the bag with the idea that I’ll just toss it in a garbage some place after I leave. It seems easier than having to argue with her. I wonder if I should mention to Rachel that her sister-in-law seems to be around drugs again, but I don’t want to create any more stress for Rachel than she already has, so I decide to hold off, at least for now. I put the baggie in my purse nervously.

When Rachel gets back from walking the neighbor kids home, she has to get going to take her own kids to their piano lessons, so I say my good-byes and head home.

I
’m starting on dinner when my mother calls me to grill me on my wedding plans.

“How are things with you?” I ask.

Mom goes off on one of her typical rants on how Frank is being a lazy slob and how work is killing her. When I was growing up, she worked as an administrative assistant. After I moved to Colorado, Mom moved too and got a better job, and then she got promoted, and then she got promoted several more times, and was ultimately offered the high-paying, stress-packed job in California that she has now. The people she works with all have MBAs, and my mom doesn’t even have a college degree. But she’s good at what she does. And she likes her job, most of the time, despite the long hours and frequent travel.

Will comes home from work and I give him a kiss. “Mom,” I mouth to him. He nods.

“What do you think we should do for Christmas?” Mom says. “Have you spoken to Sienna? I’m assuming she and Mark will want to come to Colorado since that’s where Mark’s family is. You wouldn’t mind us staying with you, would you?”

Oh, my God. The holidays. How dare the holidays descend upon me when I have a wedding to plan? Gifts to buy and wrap, a house to decorate, food to make, and, most dire of all, having to share my home with my mother and stepfather and sister for an entire week. I want to pass out just thinking about it.

I think about how much work I have to do for WP and how I still haven’t booked a DJ or a videographer and any number of other tasks my wedding planning book told me I should have gotten done by now but I haven’t.

I think about the stuff that Sandy gave me. I haven’t thrown it away yet. I didn’t want to throw it in just anyone’s trash in case somebody stumbled on it. I didn’t want some poor stranger to get in trouble with the cops or anything.

I realize I could just flush it down the toilet. But there isn’t any rush. Instead, as I wait for our dinner to finish cooking, I take my purse upstairs and take the baggie out of it. I wrap the powder in a pair of my old sweats and stuff the sweats at the back of the bottom drawer of my dresser. It would be sort of nice to have a little more energy, a few more hours in the day…what am I saying, I’m not going to do drugs. I’ll throw it away right after dinner.

I go downstairs and give Will a smile. “Dinner should just about be ready.”