Matchmaking for Beginners(28)

My mom opens her eyes and says to me, “Honey, let’s not drink too much now, before we have dinner. You and I didn’t have much lunch today, remember.”

“I’m not—”

My dad comes to the sliding glass door right then to say that the hamburgers are done, and my mother flaps her hands the way she does when events are happening too fast for her, and she starts gathering up the paper plates and the plastic utensils. I reach for the salad bowl, but she says I’m the guest of honor and shouldn’t have to do any work, so I tell her that’s ridiculous, carrying a salad bowl isn’t work, and also I don’t need to be the guest of honor.

“Oh, you!” she says. “We’re just trying to take care of you, sweetie. I just want to make you feel at home here again. And oh my goodness, you two got me so distracted I forgot about boiling your vegetables.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “I’ll just put them on the grill.”

“Can we just have the salad, please? Will you humor me on this for God’s sake!” says my mom as she marches out the door. Natalie gives me her what-are-you-gonna-do face.

Outside, the heat hits me like a furnace. The late afternoon sun is still beaming right down on us, and the air is thick with humidity, like something you could roll around in. Brian adjusts the patio umbrella so that my mother will be in the shade while she eats, and my sister sets out the citronella candles while my dad lights the no-bug torches. It’s like a dance they all perform, everyone knowing their roles.

“Sit here by me,” says Natalie, and she pats my arm. And Brian hands me the hamburger platter saying I should get first dibs. My father grins at me across the table, holds up his glass like he’s going to give a toast.

He stands up, looking formal and overcome by emotion. I feel a little pulse of alarm as he clears his throat. “To our sweet little Marnie, the survivor! I just want to say, Ducky, you’ve been hit with some hard blows, but I knew you were going to be all right the moment you opened that door to your apartment in Burlingame, and I saw you were baking. Baking! Isn’t that what we said, Millie? This girl is going to take care of herself. She just needed to be back among family and old friends!”

There’s the clink of glasses as they toast, and then we pass around all the food—the salad and the overcooked hamburgers (my father has a fear of medium rare that rivals what people feel about circus clowns and rattlesnakes)—and for a moment we’re all busy with our plates, and I wonder what would happen if I were to suddenly burst into tears.

Maybe it’s the fuzziness from the wine mingling with the excessive humidity and the argument about vegetables and olive oil (olive oil!) and also the tension from the sky, which I now see is gathering itself for its late afternoon performance event—a violent thunderstorm. But also there’s something else, some huge hurting thing taking shape within me, what it means to be here with these two couples who know each other so well that even their squabbles—the ones that bring me up short and make my heart start palpitating—are simply routine for them. They fuss and argue and kiss and somehow just keep plowing along through life, racking up grievances and then forgiving themselves and each other again and again. No one is going to stand up and say, “You know what? I can’t do this anymore.”

And I am an outsider, and yet these people around me are my tribe, the people who have the right by birth and DNA and blood type to have opinions about my life.

“Are you okay?” Natalie whispers, and I wish I could stand up and tell them the truth, which is that my mother has no right to have a Noah Knot! A Noah Knot! That means that they have been discussing him and me so much that Natalie knows just where the knot is and how to cheer my mother up out of it. And just look, I’d say to her—just look at our father, who is so shrunken next to Brian, like he’s already abdicating ever so slightly his own place as head of the family. Brian will soon be managing his portfolio and his lawn maintenance plan, will be scheduling the tuning of the furnace, and eventually suggesting nursing homes.

And I—I am just a damaged object they’re all trying to patch up and haul back onto the sales floor. They love me and they will sit with me while I find the necessary prerequisites for their estimation of a happy life: a new job, a new man, a new car, and later on, furniture, a house, some babies. I need endless help, apparently.

In the meantime, they say, here’s the story we’re giving you: California was a mistake. Your life up to now has all been a big, blurry mistake, but luckily you’re moving on. We caught you just in time.

My California life, my adulthood, quietly folds itself up like a map and tiptoes away. Nobody but me even sees it go.





ELEVEN





MARNIE


One night, I pass the door of my parents’ room, and I can hear them arguing. It’s nearly midnight, and she is saying, “. . . needs more time, she’s recovering. Don’t you see that?”

So of course I stop in my tracks and sit down on the floor outside their room.

He says, “She’s got to get back out there. She needs to get back on the horse. Something bad happened to her, sure, but she can’t let it get her down. Can’t let it stop her in her tracks.”

“Ted, that was not just ‘something bad’ that happened to her,” my mother says. “Those were two big blows she suffered. Losing her husband and her job.”