Matchmaking for Beginners(10)

“Maybe he just overslept,” I say. “Or maybe the bridge is stuck in the up position and he can’t get across. Or maybe he misplaced part of his tux, and he didn’t realize which tux shop my dad was using so he’s lost, and his phone isn’t charged.”

Blix laughs. “Yeah, and maybe Mercury is in retrograde, too, or he’s got jet lag or there are sunspots. Who knows? But you are going to be fine. Big life. Remember that. I told you that. A big, big life for you.”

She blows kisses to all of us and sashays out. And that’s when I hear it: the roar of Whipple’s BMW out in the parking lot. They’re here. Fifty-eight minutes late, but they’re here, and oxygen flows back into the room like somebody turned on the valve once again.

I stand up, still shaking.

We hear pounding footsteps, and then the door bursts open, and there is Noah, standing there looking more like he’s arriving to film a battle scene than to get married. His hair is sticking up all over the place, and he didn’t shave, and his eyes are like little black dots in a sea of bloodshot white space—and—and—oh my God, he is wearing his tuxedo shirt with his pair of blue jeans.

I put my hand over my mouth. I may be making a little sound. Something a pigeon would say.

“Marnie,” he says. “Marnie, I have to talk to you.”

He leads me outside. Outside outside—not to the parking lot, or the little sidewalk area in front where all the nice people gather after church to talk. No, he takes me by the hand to the meadow off to the side of the church, where the church school holds picnics. Where I got my first kiss when I was in seventh grade. Steve Peacock. His parents are right now in that church waiting to watch me get married.

“Marnie,” he says, and his mouth is so dry it makes a clacking sound when he talks. I want him to stop saying my name. I want him to look normal and happy and groom-like, but none of that is going to happen. “Marnie,” he says, “baby, I am so, so sorry, but I’m afraid there is no way I can do this.”

And the world—the big, vast, beautiful world—vanishes, shrinking down to a little point right in front of me. The only thing left is the blood roaring through my ears, and some deep feeling that nothing—nothing—is ever going to make sense again.





FOUR





MARNIE


This kind of thing has actually happened to me before.

In third grade, I was chosen to be Mary in the Christmas Eve pageant. I was to wear my mother’s blue filmy bathrobe, and I made a foil halo that tied to my plastic headband. Being Mary was the high point of my life up to that time—a life in which I was already realizing that my older sister, Natalie, was going to walk away with all the best prizes, things she didn’t even seem to strive for: good grades, teachers’ admiration, boyfriends, the plastic diamond ring in the Cracker Jack box.

But Natalie couldn’t be Mary because she had already been Mary two years ago, and so she had to be a shepherd. It was all me, and I would be propped up there by the manger, holding the Smiths’ eight-week-old baby, who was playing the part of Baby Jesus. Mrs. Smith had taught me how to support the baby’s head and everything.

But when we went to the church for the pageant, it turned out there was a terrible mix-up; according to the rules, Janie Hopkins, a fourth grader, was really the next in line to be Mary. There was a list, you see. And even though Janie hadn’t been to Sunday school in months, now she was here, and besides, she was going to move away in the spring and was sad about it, so the Sunday school director knelt down to my level, and looking at me with her eyes all full of feeling, she told me she hoped I’d understand but we really did have to be Christian about it and let Janie be Mary. My throat closed up but I managed to say of course, fine. I took off the halo and the bathrobe, and I sat in the audience because by then there wasn’t even a shepherd costume for me.

And then in ninth grade, Todd Yellin called the house, and when I answered the phone he asked me to go to the movies with him, and I said yes, and the next day at school when I went over to him at lunchtime, it turned out that he had thought he was talking to Natalie instead of me, and that’s who he wanted to take. Natalie! She wasn’t even in his grade. I was. And then in twelfth grade, the worst thing of all happened: my boyfriend, Brad Whitaker, the coolest guy in the whole senior class, somehow forgot we were boyfriend and girlfriend and asked someone else to the prom.

And here I am, the same old Marnie, only now it’s so much worse because it’s my wedding day, damn it, the day I get to have it be about me and the man who said he loved me, only the light is too bright, the bees too loud, and Noah’s hands are shoved in his jeans pockets, and he is walking in circles, looking down at the ground.

And it’s all so unfair because he loved me first, damn it. He was the one who thought it was time we moved in together, a guy who is so adventurous and amazing that he proposed to me on an ultralight plane he’d rented just for that purpose—not realizing it would be so loud up there that he’d have to shout, and that the gusting wind was going to send the engagement ring sailing into the sky and that he’d have to buy a new one.

Also, he wrote an actual song to sing at the wedding, a song about our love. And he tells me he loves me all the time. He brings me a bag of chocolate almonds every Friday afternoon. He polishes my toenails, and . . . and he lights candles around the bathtub for me. And whenever I start feeling low about missing my family, he declares we’re having a Play Hooky Day, and we stay in the house in our pajamas, eating ice cream out of the carton and drinking beer.