Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?

by Melissa Senate

  Natasha Nutley might have been a glam celebrity (she’d written a bestselling memoir about her love affair with a famous actor and had a small role on All My Children as a nurse), but soon after she became a weekly member of the Flirt Night Round Table two years ago, our group’s name could easily have been changed to the Frump Night Round Table. The Frump Afternoon Round Table (we rarely met at night anymore, unless Natasha could get a baby-sitter). Two years ago, Jane had gotten hot and heavy with boyfriend-now-fiancé Ethan Miles, Amanda had gotten engaged to now-husband Jeff Jorgensen, Natasha had been pregnant and recuperating from way too much heartache and I’d given up flirting and nicotine for long walks and then met Noah.

  Flirting, dating, sex—all the juicy talk had been replaced by relationship talk. Wedding talk. Baby talk. I knew just about every detail of Ethan’s and Jeff’s and baby Summer’s lives. Ethan’s favorite food. Jeff’s least favorite sexual position. Summer’s frequency of bowel movements. What Ethan’s childhood had been. How long Jeff’s penis was. The size of Summer’s skull. How Ethan liked his eggs. And my friends knew that Noah was amazing in bed. But had the World’s Most Annoying Mother. And whispered “I love you” in my ear every night before he drifted off to sleep. And, because I’d changed Summer’s diaper at least a hundred times during baby-sitting duty, I even knew the color and consistency of her poop. If I weren’t a diaper changer, I’d know anyway from our Frump Afternoon Round Tables.

  Did it sound boring? It wasn’t. The new focus of the Flirt Night Round Table was everything we didn’t even know we wanted, baby poop included. Until I met Noah, I’d been a serial dater. I’d been famous for meeting guys everywhere—ATM machines, bars, the frozen-food aisle of supermarkets, newspaper kiosks, work, blind dates (Amanda’s hubby had way too many available-for-a-reason friends, which Jane could attest to, pre-Ethan), red lights, vending machines, museums. Once, I’d even met a guy while sunbathing on my fire escape. He was on his fire escape, across the street, and he held up a giant sketch pad that said: Got Suntan Lotion? We dated for a month before he ditched me for a woman with a summer share in the Hamptons.

  I’d also been famous for dating all kinds of men, nationalities, colors, sizes, shapes, personalities. There’d been interesting so-so-looking guys. Dull hunks. Raging activists. I’d been to every kind of religious dinner with various relatives. Seders. Greek Orthodox Easter dinners. Kwanza celebrations.

  I hadn’t always been a serial dater. There was Lee in high school, the love of my young life and the breakup of all breakups until Michael in college, who had surpassed Lee as both the love of my young life and the breakup of all breakups. And then there was the dating. A lot of dating. Two and a half years ago there was the mini-engagement for three weeks with Serge, a very sweet guy I’d dated for four months. But between college at twenty-one and Noah at thirty-two, I’d been the dating queen of the eastern seaboard. After a thousand dates and a thousand stories to tell my friends over brunch or at Flirt Night Round Table get-togethers, I started itching for something else, something more.

  Something truly fun, like love.

  And then I met Noah. Noah, with his silky dark hair, hazel-green eyes, dimple in left cheek, and collection of ties with tiny cartoon animals. It was Snoopy when I met him. And little Lucys. Snoopy, spinning around doing the Snoopy dance; Lucy glaring at him, hands on hips.

  It seemed unthinkable that a guy wearing such a tie could scare the hell out of me. But he had. I’m not talking your average butterfly. I’m talking I Just Met the Man I Could Imagine Marrying But Can’t Because I’m Too In Love With Him.

  Ack. I met Noah and his Snoopy tie at a prepublication party for Natasha’s memoir, The Stopped Starlet. Posh Publishing had gone all out and invited every magazine, newspaper and television show for three hours of high-end drinks, hors d’oeuvres and advance-reading copies of the tell-all memoir. A great many people had shown up, including one Noah Benjamin, a reporter for Hot News, a Times-meets-People weekly magazine. I wasn’t a book person; I was a graphic designer, and at the time an unemployed book-cover designer, so while Jane (Natasha’s editor), introduced Ethan to her co-workers and schmoozed with the press, and Amanda and Jeff ogled a few celebrities, I stood in a corner popping cheddar-cheese cubes into my mouth.

  “Excuse me, I’m a reporter for Hot News, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Mouth full of cheese, I turned around to find one of the cutest guys I’d ever seen, wearing that red tie with tiny dancing Snoopys and glaring Lucys.

  “Um, I’m not anyone,” I said like an idiot. “I mean, I’m just a friend of the editor.”

  He whipped out a tiny notebook and pen. “Name?”

  “Eloise Manfred.”

  He jotted that down. “Favorite food?”

  “Um, Mexican.”

  He jotted that down too. “Favorite type of movie?”

  “Romantic comedy.”

  He tapped his little notebook with his pen. “I’ll need your phone number to verify these facts and officially ask you out to a Mexican dinner and a romantic comedy.”

  Go away. Even the sight of you is giving me heart palpitations.

  “I’m on a hiatus from dating,” I told him.

  “It wouldn’t be a date,” he said. “It would be an investigation…of our compatibility.”

  Who could resist? Between the dimple and the tie and the pen tapping on the notebook and that face—that intelligent, sweet, delicious face—I was a goner.

  During date one, over black-bean enchiladas, two mango margaritas and an Adam Sandler comedy, I’d fallen in serious like. His cell phone rang six times and he was beeped four times by Hot News about a groundbreaking development—a minor celebrity had been spotted walking down Third Avenue on the Upper East Side, shopping in the Gap and Banana Republic and daring to peruse the sale racks. Scandal! We’d spent a fun hour trailing the actress, who yakked on her cell phone the entire time—while walking, trying on clothes, even paying. In Nine West, as she finally put down the phone to try on intricately laced boots, Noah introduced himself as a Hot News reporter and asked if he could interview her about her shopping habits. She put on sunglasses and fled with an “Absolutely not!”

  There was date two. Three. Four. Seeing each other. A relationship. Casual-serious. An unspoken exclusivity. Living together. But no talk of marriage. Never any talk of marriage.

  Until he proposed five days ago.

  I’d said yes without hesitation. Three hours later, I was popping Tums in my bathroom. Chewing my cuticles. Having mini-breakdowns in Starbucks with my friends. My ambivalence made no sense. I’d been fantasizing about his asking me to marry him since date number three.

  “Yeah, because on date number two, he announced he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship,” Jane had said when I called to ask if she had any Tums the morning after I’d gotten engaged. “As long as he was noncommittal, you felt safe. He’s committed now, and so you’re scared to death.”

  Why? How could I go from wanting to marry Noah more than anything in the world to suddenly wanting things to go back to the way they were before?

  Which was wanting him to propose.

  Tums, anyone?

  “Anyone have a Tums?”

  Jane, Amanda and Natasha, sitting next to me on the rim of the sandbox in the Carl Schurz Park playground, dug into their purses, pockets and tote bags. It was unusually warm for early January, almost fifty degrees, and the playground was packed with children in puffy down jackets. Summer was in the sandbox, making Elmo pies from a plastic mold of the Sesame Street character, surrounded by toddlers wielding brightly colored shovels and pails and dump trucks. One little girl was filling her doll’s hollow head with sand.

  Jane tossed me a bottle of tropical fruit-flavored antacids. I chomped on two as fast I could.

  “Me want!” Summer demanded, sticking out her hand at me.

  “Sweetie, this isn’t yummy. It’s yucky!” I grimaced. “Ewwww!”

  “E
www!” Summer repeated. She grabbed a fistful of sand and teased her mother by bringing her hand to her mouth. “Ewww!”

  Natasha wagged her finger. “No eating sand. No, no, no.”

  Summer laughed. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  Yes. Yes. Yes. That was exactly what I’d said to Noah when he proposed.

  I said yes—three times. So I must have meant yes.

  And very soon I was expected to write a five-hundred word article for Wow Weddings about why I said yes. Why I Said Yes! was a regular monthly feature in the magazine, another of Astrid’s brainstorms for increasing readership. The articles were written sometimes by celebrities but often by ordinary people about why they fell in love and said yes to their marriage proposals. Astrid wanted articles by both Philippa and me to accompany our feature.

  Why I Said Yes! by Eloise Manfred.

  Blank page. Blinking cursor.

  I said yes because…

  Blank page. Blinking cursor.

  Part of Philippa’s job was to weed through the thousands of Why I Said Yes! submissions that came in to Wow every month, choose three and submit them to the articles editor, who’d select the best one or scrawl a no on all three and send Philippa back to the mail sack. Part of my job was to read the approved column, design a cute graphic to accompany it and choose an interesting quote to bold for a sidebar. Soon after I started at Wow, Philippa received a submission from a bride-to-be in Texas named Laura R. (Wow was big on initials only for last names.) Laura R. had been seeing her boyfriend for a year when he was called to service for the army and sent off somewhere awful to fight. He proposed to her in a letter on her birthday, and she wrote back one word: YES! He’d sent her a makeshift ring, a piece of scrap metal he’d fashioned to contain a pretty pebble. He never came home from the awful place, and his parents had given her back the YES! letter with the diary he’d been keeping, which described how happy he was that she’d said yes, how he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there to come home to Texas and marry her and start a family.

  I’d sobbed through her entire article. That evening, I’d spent hours at home creating a graphic worthy enough to accompany her column. And then Astrid had decided to reject Laura R.’s submission. “It’s too depressing,” she’d insisted. “Wow’s readers want happy endings. They’re anticipating happy endings for themselves. Not war and death.”

  Astrid also nixed Yes! columns by pregnant brides, overweight brides, gay brides, unattractive brides and blue-collar brides (unless they were marrying up).

  “Wow’s mission is to preserve the fairy tale,” Astrid scrawled in red atop the nixed columns. “Fairy tales are about dreams. Not reality. Wow Weddings magazine is about dreams.”

  I dream you disappear! I prayed with closed eyes during editorial meetings or whenever I heard her heels clicking down the hallways of the Wow offices. But then I would open my eyes and she’d still be there. Therefore proving herself wrong. Wow Weddings was really about reality.

  Why I Said Yes! by Eloise Manfred.

  Twice in the past week I’ve said yes, yes, yes without a moment’s hesitation when I meant I don’t know, I’m not sure, let me get back to you:

  When my boyfriend, Noah, proposed marriage.

  When my boss, editor in chief of this very loser magazine, offered me a free dream wedding in exchange for selling my soul as Star Trek Bride.

  “Just call me Uhura,” I moaned to my friends. “I can’t wait to see the futuristic gown I’ll be walking down the aisle in to a guy I’m not even sure I should be marrying. Lord knows what he’ll be wearing. A space suit, maybe.”

  “Ura,” Summer repeated. “Ura. Ura.”

  She made a new Elmo pie; a little boy, a toddler around her age, came over to inspect it.

  I held up my left hand and wiggled my fingers, staring at the beautiful ring I’d thought I wanted so badly. Now all I thought I wanted was to give it back. Why, why, why?

  “Eloise, you’re just going through the adjustment of living with a guy,” Jane had said the morning after Noah popped the question. “And you’ve got a bad case of commitment jitters. I think you really do love Noah, but he’s committed now, and so you’re scared. It’s the opposite of what happened with Serge and that little proposal fiasco.”

  She was referring to two and a half years ago, when the very nice guy I’d been dating suddenly proposed and I’d said yes because I wanted It so badly—to be loved, to feel safe in the world. But I didn’t love Serge and I’d known it. My friends had known it. If I’d told my grandmother about the engagement, she would have plucked the ring off my finger and mailed it back to him.

  I was afraid of commitment? Huh?

  “Eloise,” Jane said, sifting sand through her fingers, “I really think you did mean yes. To both Noah and the free wedding. I think it’s your fear of commitment creating your cold feet, and not your real feelings. I said this before, but I’ll repeat it—I think you said yes to the free wedding so that you couldn’t easily take that ring off.”

  But…

  “You know what else I think?” Jane said as Summer jumped on her Elmo pie. “I think your sudden Tums addiction has more to do with your family than with Noah.”

  “How about those Mets!” I responded.

  “Me out!” Summer said, heading for the shallow steps. She stopped as a man placed a toddler next to her in the sandbox. The little boy put up his arms and said, “Da-da. Da-da.”

  Summer put up her arms, too, and said, “Da-da.”

  The man smiled uncomfortably, as every man did when Summer called him Da-da, which she did to every man, everywhere. In elevators, on the street, in restaurants. Every man was Da-da.

  “Where Da-da?” Summer asked Natasha, her green eyes curious.

  No matter how many times Summer asked Natasha that question, the same strain tightened Natasha’s beautiful features. “Your daddy’s in California,” Natasha replied, as she did every time. And satisfied, as she was every time, Summer continued playing. She climbed out of the sandbox and ran smiling to the slide.

  Natasha waited at the end of the slide to catch Summer. “At least I think he is,” she whispered to us. “He’s not i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-e-d,” she spelled out. She shook her head, then smiled up at Summer. “Come down to Mama!”

  The father of Natasha’s baby had broken up with her when she told him she was pregnant. His name was Sam and he lived in California, and for reasons I would never understand, he wasn’t interested in knowing his child.

  How was that possible?

  This was a question people had tried to answer in my own life. Your father was never the settling-down sort. Your father’s creative. Your father’s this. Your father’s that.

  Your father is a piece of shit.

  No one ever said that, but a long time ago, I’d begun to think that was the reason Theo Manfred had walked out on his family, never to be seen or heard from again.

  The problem with that line of thinking was that you didn’t want to think of your father as a piece of shit. You wanted to think of him as a hero.

  As Summer ran around the jungle gym and back up to the top of the slide with a “Me do! Me do!” and tried to make her way down alone, I wondered what she’d say when people asked where her father was.

  Summer, where’s your dad?

  He’s in California.

  When’s he coming back?

  Never.

  Why?

  He’s not i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-e-d.

  Eloise, where’s your dad?

  I don’t know.

  Why don’t you know?

  I never had an answer to that, so in elementary school I started making things up. He’s in Alaska, working on the pipeline. He’s climbing Mount Everest (that one was my favorite). He’s in China, Switzerland, France, California on business.

  The two things I never said was that he was dead or that he took off. I didn’t want either to be true.

  I picked up a fistful of sand and clenched it. “I haven’t seen my f
ather since I was five and I haven’t spoken to my brother in over a year,” I blurted out.

  Three pairs of eyes were staring at me.

  “Oh, honey,” Amanda said, sitting down next to me on the rim of the sandbox. “I didn’t know about your father. You never talk about him.”

  “Now we understand why,” Jane said, squeezing my hand. “I’m so sorry, El.”

  I shrugged, not knowing what to say, how to respond. It wasn’t as though I could say, It’s okay. Something like that wasn’t okay and never would be. Not when it happened and not now.

  I haven’t seen my father since I was five, but it’s okay.

  Could you imagine a more ridiculous statement?

  “I just don’t understand it,” Natasha said, her eyes on Summer. “I’ll never understand it. How does someone leave his own child?”

  I shrugged again. “It’s too bad the two people who could explain it are MIA.”

  “I doubt Summer’s dad or yours could explain it either,” Jane said. “What answer is there for that question? It’s not about not loving the child.”

  How did she know? Maybe it was.

  “I love you, Elly-Belly,” my father had said often.

  So was he lying, or is there no answer for why fathers are able to leave their children and never see them again?

  “Your father loves you, Eloise,” my mother had said many times. “I’m sure he’ll always love you. But he’s not the sticking-around kind. It isn’t about you or your brother or even me. It’s about him. Something in him.”

  “Yeah, it’s called not loving me or Emmett.”

  “No, Eloise. Something might be lacking in him, but it isn’t loving you or your brother. I know it’s hard to understand now, but it’ll get easier when you’ve been through some stuff yourself.”

  Well, I’d been through some stuff myself. And understanding why my father left—left as though he’d never known us at all—hadn’t gotten easier.