Getting Married (18 page)

Rachel’s store is only a ten-minute walk away. I wait as long as I can, then I tell my family I want to get some fresh air and walk off a few of the holiday calories I’ve been packing in these last few days.

“I’ll come with you,” Mom says.

“Um, no, if it’s okay, I’d like a little alone time.”

“Oh, sure.” She looks a little hurt, but the concept of alone time is a popular one in our family.

As I wait in the cold for Sandy to show, there is a part of me that thinks about my family back home and how I’m buying drugs on a street corner like some common addict, but I quickly push the thought from my head. I can’t think about that right now. I just need to get through the holiday—I just needed a little help.

I also realize that I have no idea how much Sandy charges for this. I have a stack of twenties in my wallet. If what she’s asking is too unreasonable, I’ll tell her never mind.

Sandy arrives only a few minutes late, but in those few minutes I’ve managed to go from mildly impatient, to irritated, to about to explode with anger—doesn’t she know my entire family is going to wonder where I am? But then she shows up and I simmer down. She asks what seems to me to be a reasonable price, although truth be told, I have no idea what the going rate for this sort of thing is. I can afford it anyway.

“Thanks, Sandy. Thanks a lot.”

I
have two more days of having my family here. On the day after Christmas, Mom and Frank get together with some friends of theirs and Mark spends the day with his family. Will has to go back to work, so I have Sienna all to myself.

Sienna is a huge fitness buff. She’s thin and is extremely disciplined about what she eats. In her line of work, it’s important to look good. She’s dedicated to working out, and she asks me if I’ll join her at the 24-Hour Fitness gym, so I do. I’ve been a member of the gym for years. It only costs me fourteen dollars a month, but since I work out so infrequently, I figure this one trip to the gym is costing me about three hundred bucks or so. We exercise for about an hour, and it feels good, but I know my out-of-shape muscles will punish me tomorrow. After our workout, we go into the Jacuzzi. I pray the healing waters will stave off the worst of the soreness that is sure to hit me. We have the Jacuzzi to ourselves.

“Are you dieting?” Sienna asks me as we ooze into the hot bubbles up to our shoulders, the tips of our hair getting wet.

“No.”

“You’ve lost weight. You look good.”

“I don’t have time to eat. That’s all,” I say. “How are things going?”

“What do you mean?’

“I mean how is your life? How are things with Mark?”

She sinks down into the water, down to her chin. She stays there for a moment. “Things are good, mostly. On Christmas Eve, when we were at his family’s house, I’m pretty sure every last member of his family asked us when we were getting married.”

“Yeah? So when are you?”

“I don’t know. I think he might ask me this year.”

“Really?”

She smiles. “Maybe.”

“What kind of wedding are you going to have? God, your wedding is going to be full of comedians. It’s going to be way more fun than mine.”

“It will be a lot of fun, for sure.”

She talks about the sort of wedding she envisions. Since she is an artist, she’s got friends who are photographers, filmmakers (for the wedding video), and perform in a band. She’ll just have to pay for the wine, food, and a place to have it, and her friends will do everything else pro bono. She’s even got a friend who’s a comedian who is certified (or whatever you call it) to perform the ceremony itself.

“But, of course, he has to actually ask me first,” she says.

“How do you think he’ll do it?”

Since both Sienna and Mark are performers, I imagine it will be some hopelessly romantic and creative way. Sienna and Mark are the rarest kind of couple that actually write each other love poems talking about how their love for each other grows more and more each day, that kind of thing. It’s really disgusting.

“I don’t know. I told him I don’t want him to ask me in public.”

“Why not?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess because so much of our lives are spent up on stage entertaining the public, I just don’t want it to be another show.”

“Well, your wedding will be a blast. You’ll have it in Colorado, right?”

She nods.

“I think Mark is perfect for you. I’m glad things are going so well for you guys.” Her face flinches, just a little, but there is something about her facial expression that gives me pause. “Things are going well for you guys, aren’t they?”

She pauses. “Yeah. It’s just hard, you know. We work all day and then we go to these bars and then after we perform we stay out late drinking and talking and…it’s exhausting. And he can spend his entire weekend playing video games while I’m working out at the health club or working on new material, and there’s this part of me…I don’t know, I guess I resent it.”

“I know! I work six days a week, twelve hours a day, and then on the seventh day, instead of resting, I bust my butt planning a wedding, and he can spend hours,
hours
, playing computer games. It boggles my mind. But I think there is something wrong with me and you. I think we need to learn how to be able to relax and do nothing.”

“We’re American. It’s the American way to be working all the time.”

“I think it was the ethic Dad taught us. That you always have to be doing something productive.”

“Yeah, he did believe that, definitely. Even when we were doing so-called ‘leisure’ activities, we always had to be learning and improving ourselves.”

“We’re relaxing right now,” I point out.

“But I’m thinking of a billion people I should call while I’m here in Colorado and trying to figure out how I can schedule seeing all my friends before I leave again.”

“And I’m thinking of all the work I have to do and all the wedding plans I still have to take care of. Are we hopeless?”

“I hope not.”

I try very hard to push all the thoughts of other things I should be doing out of my head and just relax. The hot water and pulsing jets do feel good.

Neither of us says anything for a moment. In the silence of the whirling bubbles, I flash on a memory of my father. He was at work in his workshop, and I wanted some attention. I went into his workshop even though it was strictly off-limits.

“Hi, Dad. Guess what? I got an A-plus on my English assignment.”

“What are you doing in here? You’re not supposed to be in here. Shoo, shoo.”

He made this hand gesture, this dismissive wave of his hand telling me to get lost. I remember thinking how much it hurt my feelings to be shooed away by my father like I was a gnat or a flea or something. Even my A-plus wasn’t enough to impress him.

All through high school and college, I killed myself to get good grades to impress him. I stopped sleeping. I began getting sick all the time, and I started this terrible habit of tearing the skin around my fingernails to shreds. My hands were literally a bloody mess, but I couldn’t stop ripping away at the skin, a nervous habit. One night before a final exam, I had the flu, but I was studying anyway. My mind was fuzzy from illness and exhaustion, and I actually passed out walking from my bedroom to the bathroom, just fainted on the hallway floor like a Hollywood starlet. The last words I thought before keeling over were, “If I’m not perfect, he won’t love me. If I’m not perfect, he won’t love me.”

A
fter the Jacuzzi, Sienna and I go out for a light lunch of sushi. I’m so happy to be hanging out with her. I didn’t always like my younger sister. When I was three and she was a brand spanking new baby, I decided I’d had quite enough of the little crying marauder and I marched into the kitchen, put my hands on my hips, and told Mom I wanted her to return Sienna to the hospital. At the time, Sienna seemed like a broken appliance: She wasn’t doing a damn bit of good and she was taking up a bunch of space. I was extremely disheartened to learn that you can’t return a baby sister like a dress that doesn’t fit or a pair of pants you decide you don’t like after all. But it worked out because a few years later, not only did I start to like the cutie, we became best friends. The two of us were each other’s life support during our parents’ rocky marriage. There was many a night when we were kids that our parents’ screaming would wake us from sleep. Sienna and I would meet in the bathroom, both of us needing tissue because we’d been bawling our eyes out. Our faces would be red and soaked with tears; snot puddled above our upper lips. We’d hug each other, clinging together for reassurance as the world we knew raged in turbulent seas of accusations and recriminations around us.

Sienna started to get the performing bug in high school. She was in just about every school play there was. She also made the sketch comedy team for the yearly variety show. Before her first performance, I had been so nervous that she would stink. I actually worried about having to lie after the show about how good her performance had been. Then she got on stage, playing the lead role as only a sophomore, and she rocked my world. I actually cried with pride, thinking,
Jesus Christ, that’s my little sister up there!
Then, when she went to college, she heard about a contest for the USA network that was taking comedians from colleges around the country. The contest was Friday, and she heard about it on that Monday. She’d never done stand-up before, but she cranked out a five-minute routine in just the few remaining days, got up on stage that Friday night, and won. She was flown to New York and performed and actually appeared on TV—the very first time she tried her hand at stand-up. When she moved out to Colorado, she regularly performed at the amateur nights at Comedy Works. Sometimes she bombed, but most of the time she killed, and by the time she was ready to leave for New York, she’d built a loyal following and was the opening act for bigger name performers. I couldn’t believe she was brave enough to get up on stage to try to make people laugh. But then she’d always been fearless, even as a little kid. We couldn’t have been more different in that way. I was scared of everything. I couldn’t watch scary movies; Sienna loved them. I was too afraid of getting hurt to ski; she was an extreme sports junkie. I’d always taken the predictable path in life, getting good grades and going to college like I was supposed to; Sienna abruptly quit a stable life and took off for New York to pursue an impossibly tough career. You’d think that her talent and ambition would be enough for her to succeed, but it wasn’t. She also needed luck, timing, and the relentless persistence to keep going despite the challenge of working a full-time job and staying up late several nights a week to perform.

As we’re waiting for our meals to arrive, I ask Sienna about what material she’s working on for her stand-up routine.

“Well, remember how when I first moved to New York I used to temp for magazines like
Glamour, Vogue,
and
GQ
? I start out my new bit talking about that, then I say: I liked working for the magazines; it was pretty exciting to see into the world of high-fashion publishing
.
For instance, when I worked at
Glamour
, it was indeed very glamorous and everyone who worked there was also glamorous, as if in order to work at the magazine, you also had to be able to model in it…just in case! At
Vogue
, they made very important phone calls all day long, like the one I overheard regarding a photo of one of the models: ‘Hillary! We can’t use it! Her nipple is HUGE!’
Click!”
Sienna pantomimes hanging up the phone. “When I worked at
GQ
it opened up a new world of career options I never knew about before. For instance, I answered phones for the ‘Director of Grooming and Fragrance,’ and the ‘Director of Wine and Spirits.’ These options were never listed at my high school Career Day. I like wine! I like spirits! What degree was I supposed to get for this position?”

Sienna keeps going over bits of her act until I’m snorting with laughter.

W
hen Sienna and I get home, my mother and her husband are bickering. Mom is downstairs in the living room and Frank is upstairs in the guest room. This is how the conversation goes:
Mom
: “Can you hear me?” Long pause.
Frank
: “What?” “I said, have you finished packing?” Long pause. “What?” “You said you’d be done packing. Are you done packing? Why do I always have to watch your every move? Why?” Long pause. “What?”

This goes on for several minutes, until any relaxed feelings I got by working out and sitting in the Jacuzzi are long gone.

My family leaves the next day. I love my family very much, more than anything, but all I can say is,
Thank God they’re going home!

A
t a happy hour after Christmas, Will and I meet up with Richard, James, Abby, and Jerry at Mickie’s Pub.

“Eva, you are looking so skinny these days,” Abby says to me as we join them at the table. “You’re not dieting for the wedding, are you?”

“No. I’ve just been too busy to eat.”

“Well, you’re looking good, but don’t lose any more weight, okay? Anything more and you’ll get to that creepy skinny level.”

Abby is extremely slender herself, but she has a completely different build than me. I’m all curves, while she’s all angles. She’s right, I am losing too much weight, and I’m not even trying. I just can’t always remember to eat these days.

“So, how were all of your Christmases?” I ask.

“Well, Clarice and I went to her parents for the holiday,” James says. Clarice is James’ wife, the medical student. I’ve met her a couple times so I know she’s not a fabrication of James’ imagination, but for all the hours she puts in at the hospital, she may as well be.

“How was it?”

“Let’s put it this way. You know that I’m something of a wine snob, right?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Well, Clarice’s parents are wine-from-a-box kind of people.”

“Really? Ick. Well, I guess somebody has to buy that stuff,” Abby says.

“So not only is all they’re serving wine-from-a-box, all they’re serving from the box is pink Zinfandel,” James continues.

“Gross,” says Will.

“Yeah, apparently they thought they were serving twenty-two-year-old women and not thirty-five-year-old men. At first, I was too much of a snob to drink the stuff…and then the fighting began. Clarice’s mother started fighting with Clarice, and Clarice was fighting with her sister Margaret, and Margaret was fighting with her husband and her father…and soon I was basically just drinking from the tap of that box of Zin the entire weekend.” He pantomimes lifting the spout to the box of wine and just drinking straight from the tap, making glug-glug-glug noises. “It was awful, but it was the only alcohol available to me, so I sucked it down like water.”

“How about you, Rich? How was visiting with your family in Albany?” I ask.

“I was there for an entire week with my parents, my brother and his wife, their two loud kids, and my grandmother. I stayed intoxicated for seven days straight.”

“Did you get any good gifts?” I ask.

“My favorite was from my grandmother. Apparently my grandmother thinks I’m a ten-year-old girl,” Richard says.

“How do you figure?”

“She got me a doll for Christmas.”

“A doll? What kind of doll?”

“A boy-doll with overalls and a backward baseball cap.”

“What are you going to do with a doll?”

“Bring it home and put it in my bedroom to ensure I never, ever get laid again. What do you think? I gave it to my niece.”

I laugh, appreciating just how much I need these weekly happy hours. For one thing, much of the time I’m working home alone and I don’t have any contact with the outside world, and for another thing, it lets me forget my stresses and worries, at least for a little while. The problem with destressing is that you can re-stress about ten minutes later.

It’s a never-ending battle.