Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched

by Kim Barnouin

  “I’ll take a pic of you in the dress—send it to your parents. Maybe they’ll offer to buy it as your wedding gift.”

  “Ha. My mother keeps e-mailing me links to dresses with turtlenecks. Strapless ain’t her thing.” Sara stared at herself in the mirror. “You must think I’m out of my mind. Princess dress. Wanting some big wedding with a cheesy band.”

  “You’re allowed to want what you want. Let’s go have lunch. On me.”

  Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in Turning Japanese with our tofu shuumai and Samurai beer.

  “I’m so jealous of you, Clem,” Sara said, scanning the menu. “You’re going to have the big fancy wedding I want and it’s the last thing you want.”

  “Ha—fancy on the fifty acre vegetable farm. I’m sure Dominique will fight for black tie anyway. I wish Zach and I could elope just to avoid the arguments about three-thousand foot tents. But I do like the idea of getting hitched with friends and family around us.”

  “My mom is really pushing for us to have the wedding in her marshy, mosquito backyard in Louisiana. Although she did say she’d only host the wedding if Joe promised not to curse during the ceremony.”

  I laughed, but she looked miserable. “Sara? You okay?”

  “My parents can’t stand Joe. I hate that. I mean, my parents are . . . my parents are stuck in the early eighties. But I still don’t want them to hate my fiancé. Then again, even my best friend hates my fiancé.”

  “I do not hate Joe. I love that he adores you.”

  “But you don’t like him.”

  “We had a crazy start on his show, that’s all.” Had I not beat Joe “Steak” Johansson on Eat Me’s live cook-off over whose eggplant Parmesan was better, I would not have won the $25,000 that had enabled me to open Clementine’s No Crap Café. Then I would have hated him for sure. But a tiny part of me owed the guy.

  “I thought about Jocelyn’s list all night,” she said. “It took me forever to fall asleep. I don’t know if I can check off half the stuff on that list.”

  “Maybe we should skip ahead to the one about listing what we love and don’t love about our fiancés. Maybe that’ll help clarify something.”

  “I wish I was as sure as you. Zach is so annoyingly perfect.”

  “He’s not perfect, but he’s definitely perfect for me. And like you said, considering that he’s a meat-eating, chemical-using environmental disaster, that’s saying something.”

  The waiter came over and took our orders. We picked at the rest of the shuumai.

  “Do you think I rushed into saying yes to Joe?” Sara asked.

  I wanted to scream, Yes. But I wasn’t sure. I did believe that part of Sara did truly love Joe “Steak” Johansson. “Can’t answer that. Only you can.”

  She turned over her paper place mat and got a pen from her bag. She wrote Love on one side, drew a dividing line vertically down the center, and wrote Don’t Love on the other side.

  “In the Love category: he’s six-four, two hundred fifty pounds, and makes me feel petite. He calls me babe and sweet mama and hot stuff all the time. He looks at me like I’m a Victoria’s Secret model.” She leaned closer and whispered, “When we’re in bed, he looks into my eyes and tells me I’m beautiful over and over. I do love that.”

  “Me too.”

  “He treats his black Lab, whose name is Meatloaf, by the way, like a prince. He makes me crack up. He’s fearless and doesn’t care what anyone thinks, even the cable network.” She took a sip of her beer. “Although, let’s add our first entry into the Don’t Love category: he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He can be a real jerk—seventy-five percent of the time. Not necessarily to me, but to everyone else. Sometimes he’s a jerk to me but in a clueless way, you know? He just doesn’t get it, doesn’t see it.” She mock pulled out both sides of her hair. “Jocelyn’s list is making me crazy. Well, not the list. The stinkin’ truth.”

  “Zach’s mother told me I should rip up the list, that it’s crapola and asking for trouble. But what could be bad about figuring out how you really feel?”

  “Figuring out how I really feel.” Sara laughed. “I’m not sure I want to know. I want to get married in that freaky ball gown.”

  Did she just want the wedding and the gown and not this particular husband? Did she just want to get married . . . because her BFF was and her boyfriend asked? I didn’t know. “Maybe we should skip ahead to the one about us and not them. Adventure with a girlfriend who tells you the truth—whether you like it or not. That would be you. There are some things I need to think about too. Expectations about married life, for one.”

  “Ugh, who wants to hear the truth?”

  I smiled at her. “It’s settled, then. Road trip to the desert. We’ll take the pesky list with us but not necessarily go over it unless we feel like it.”

  Sara clinked my glass with her own. “I won’t feel like it. Which is why we should tape it to my forehead.”

  15

  Since we were leaving for the desert on Monday morning for a two-day trip, Zach invited Sara and Joe over for dinner Sunday night at his house—our house, he kept reminding me. Not that it felt like our house since he kept coming up with excuses about why we couldn’t get together, or why I shouldn’t come over after I closed up the restaurant.

  I wanted to talk to him again, ferret out what was up with him, but with Joe and Sara coming over any minute, I could forget that. He’d issued the invitation, which was something. At first I hadn’t wanted to take off a night from the restaurant, but Alanna, who’d been back on track like her usual kick-ass self, was only too happy to take over as chef in my absence.

  As Zach cooked—a huge plus on the What I Love about Him side—porcini ravioli, he was quiet.

  “Smells good,” I said, snaking my arms around him at the stove.

  He froze for a split second. What the fuckety-fuck?

  How many times was I was supposed to ask what was going on with him without sounding like some shrewish nag? And how many times was he supposed to say the same thing—everything’s fine—when it obviously wasn’t?

  Maybe he was asking himself a bunch of questions too—without even having a list in front of him. Like Do I really want to do this? Is she it?

  Blast this needy crap. Zach loved me. I knew that.

  And just because I loved him didn’t mean there weren’t some things I didn’t love. Jocelyn’s sixty-four-year-old list made that timelessly, classically clear. I couldn’t remember which number it was, but I did remember what Jocelyn had written: Make a list of all the things you love about him and all the things you don’t. Figure out how you’ll deal with what you don’t love. (Don’t put this off by waiting to cross the bridge when you come to it.)

  What I didn’t love: this sudden distance. The pulling away. The not telling me what was wrong. Was this how he was when he got stressed? Was he stressed? No clue. And I had no clue because he wouldn’t talk to me about it.

  Didn’t love: that he didn’t open up to me with what was bothering him.

  Didn’t love: that I asked and asked and asked and he still wouldn’t tell me.

  Didn’t love: how he’d shut down my idea for the Outpost without seeing a business plan. Not that I had one yet. But I would in the next couple of weeks. If he didn’t think something was a good idea, he eighty-sixed it without a second thought.

  Which brought me back to number seven on Jocelyn’s list: Ask him why he loves you and then jot the reasons down on paper. Reread when you’re arguing.

  Hadn’t he told me how smart, driven, and passionate I was about what I did? Maybe I had to remind him of that. To trust me. To say, If you think it could work, I support you.

  What was that one on Jocelyn’s list about expectations? About what I expected married life to be like. I expected Zach to support me, even if he disagreed with me.

  Right, so how was I going to deal with this . . . distance? Zach had never acted like this before. But maybe when he got stressed, he needed
space or shut down or something.

  Whatever was going on with him had nothing to do with me. Was he not cooking dinner for me and my friend and her train wreck of a fiancé? Did I not just catch him staring at me, in my skinny jeans and flowy top, with the kind of smile that always made me melt, as he walked to the door to let in Sara and Joe?

  “Jesus H. Christ, this place is sick,” came Joe’s booming voice. He wore an Eat Me T-shirt, complete with a picture of him chowing down on a huge slab of meat. And I guessed those were the jeans Sara had mentioned he wore a month without washing, since a mustardlike stain was on the thigh. As Zach gave him the grand tour, I heard him say that same thing: “Jesus H. Christ, this place is sick,” or some variation, at least ten times. To his credit, the house was sick.

  We sat outside on the deck, the wine poured, the salad eaten, the bread broken. “The vegan’s influence, I see,” Joe said with an exaggerated grimace after a bite of ravioli, upping his chin at me.

  “I end up eating vegan most of the time when I’m with Clementine,” Zach said. “No complaints. But nothing beats a good steak.”

  That got a good eye roll from me.

  “Damned straight,” Joe said. “The other day, on the live cook-off, we had this loser vegetarian on. I’m telling you, this dork’s complexion was so pasty I offered him five hundred bucks to eat one meatball just to get some iron into him. Seriously, I thought he was going to pass out from lifting the cast iron pan.” Joe let out one of his trademark snort-laughs.

  “I’ll bet he won, though,” I said.

  “Yeah right, Vegan Girl. I crushed him in the taste-off vote. The dipshit didn’t get one vote for his vegetarian chili. I swear he started crying. His own mother was in the audience and started yelling at me for humiliating her son. Like I told him to get up on national TV and make an idiot of himself?”

  Sara was covering her face with one hand from sheer embarrassment at the story. “I tried to help the guy out, but the audience had turned on him early on in the show. Once the mother starting yelling, the audience began chanting, ‘Mama’s boy! Mama’s boy!’ It was awful. He ran out after the next commercial break.”

  Zach’s eyebrow went up. “I guess you have to come on strong, take it from him and dish it back, like Clem and Sara did when they were on the cook-off.”

  “Exactly,” Joe said. “That’s why I’m marrying this fiery chick. She tells me off all the time. I love it.”

  As Joe went on and on about another contestant he’d tried to destroy on TV, a soldier recently back from Afghanistan who’d been calm and cool while working on the barbecue-chicken cook-off until he slammed a left hook into Joe’s gut and then walked off set, I watched Sara cringe.

  She didn’t look like a woman in love. She didn’t look like a glowing bride-to-be. She looked as if she wanted to run off the set of her life.

  But every time I saw her slightly shaking her head, her gaze would go to her ring, and then she’d try to redirect Joe to normal conversation about a movie they’d seen.

  Maybe I would tape Jocelyn’s list to Sara’s forehead. That way I could see it.

  Sara and I were so sick of talking wedding, guys, and lists that we banned all mention for the road trip to Palm Springs. We blasted the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sang at the top of our lungs, and two hours later pulled into the drive of our swanky hotel, right on Palm Canyon Drive, which was lined with twenty-foot-tall palm trees, boutiques, art galleries, nightclubs, and restaurants.

  We were an hour early to check in, so we left our bags in the car and headed out to the hotel’s back deck for their all-day happy hour in the glorious sunshine. Since it was only two o’clock, we practically had the place to ourselves, except for a couple who held hands across the table, leaned across to nuzzle noses, and didn’t look away from each other’s eyes once.

  “Okay, normally that couple would make me stick my finger down my throat,” Sara said. “But you know what? Joe and I kinda get like that. I don’t mean just staring at each other with googly eyes, but we get caught up in talking so much and laughing our asses off that we never even notice who’s around us.”

  Huh. Zach and I were like that too—usually.

  “Hey, I can cross that one off Jocelyn’s list,” she said. “About what my expectations of marriage are. That’s what I expect—talking, laughing, hanging out. Like us. But with the bonus of great sex.”

  My grandmother once said to me and my sister, Let me tell you something right now, girls. Don’t expect a husband to be like a girlfriend. That’s how a marriage lasts. We’d been in the kitchen at my parents’ farm, working on a vegetable soup from produce from the back garden, and our grandmother Lucille was shaking her head and muttering every few minutes about her daughter-in-law, my cousin Harry’s mother, who’d moved into the finished basement at Lucille’s farm because her husband ignored her, even when she busted out the sexy lingerie. Elizabeth and I kept saying, “TMI, Grandma! TMI!” but she’d kept on muttering about how Harry’s mom expected to be treated like some kind of a queen.

  “Why the hell shouldn’t she?” Elizabeth had said as she’d peeled her millionth potato for the soup.

  Grandma Lucille seemed to realize suddenly she’d been letting loose to her daughter-in-law’s two teenaged nieces, and she’d said, “Well, she should and she shouldn’t. But for God’s sake, let me tell you something right now. Don’t expect a husband to be like a girlfriend. That’s why we have girlfriends.”

  “I’m going to expect the f-ing world,” Elizabeth had said. And judging from how incredibly satisfied she was with her life and six-week-old marriage, I’d say she’d gotten it.

  Every now and then over the years, Harry would mention that his mother had packed a suitcase and moved downstairs. Last I heard, she was back upstairs.

  I didn’t expect Zach to act like a girlfriend. But I did expect support—especially based on what he knew to be true of me: that I could run a restaurant and make it a success. That I would put 1,000 percent of myself into it—without letting anything slide at Clementine’s. Did I not have a strong staff at the restaurant? I could count on Alanna and Gunnar to hold the fort while I was at the Outpost. I could make it work.

  But did that mean he was supposed to yes me to death even if he disagreed? Hellz no. But shut me down? Also hellz no. Shut me out? No.

  Just as I was about to tell Sara about Grandma Lucille’s pronouncement to see what she thought, a waiter came over with a bowl of edamame, which I always appreciated, and took our orders of two appletinis. Then a group of people, eight or ten of them, suddenly appeared on the grass on the other side of the fence separating the deck from the open space. They all stood with their eyes closed and one hand touching the bark of a tree.

  Sara’s right eyebrow shot up. “Are they communing with nature? They look like morons.”

  “Do men in suits commune with nature?” I asked, gesturing at the uptight-looking dude in a striped tie. Next to him, with her arms practically wrapped around the tree, was a woman in three-inch heels.

  What the hell were they doing?

  A tiny redhead dressed all in white walked up and down the grass. “Don’t open your eyes,” she said in a loud yet soothing voice. “Just visualize.”

  As she neared our table, her hands clasped behind her back as she observed her whatevers, Sara said, “Can I ask what you guys are doing?”

  The redhead smiled at us. “This is my Visualize Your Future seminar. You see yourself doing what you want most of all and it helps ground you.”

  “What’s the tree about?” Sara asked.

  The woman stretched her arms over her head and then brought them down slowly to her sides. “Just helps steady you, something decades old and rooted in the ground. Would you like to try it?”

  “Go ahead,” I said, shooting Sara an evil smile as our waiter set down our drinks.

  Sara, game for anything, stood up, took a bracing sip of her appletini, and headed over to one of the trees. She stood near the woma
n in the three-inch heels and stuck her hand on the bark, grinning at me.

  “Close your eyes and visualize yourself doing what you want most,” the redhead said. “What that truly is.”

  Sara closed her eyes. She kept her hand on the tree, and I saw her shoulders relax.

  A minute later, the leader clapped her hands. “All right, everyone open your eyes. You are forever changed. You’re a person who knows what he or she wants, and now you’re going to list the steps to make it happen. Let’s head inside.”

  Sara called a thank-you over to the group leader and sat back down. “You know what I visualized?” Sara said to me. “Myself with a regular role on a sitcom. The funny sidekick. The hilarious BFF. Maybe even the star. Same thing I’ve been dreaming about since I moved to LA five years ago. What else is new?”

  This was great. She hadn’t visualized herself walking down the aisle in a princess ball gown to Joe dropping F-bombs at the other end of her parents’ backyard. She saw herself fulfilling her longtime dream.

  “What’s new is that I haven’t heard you talk about that in forever. You’ve been working on Eat Me for six months, and before that, you were focusing on commercials as a way into the business.”

  “The sitcom just wasn’t happening, though. But can’t you totally see me as the hilarious, inappropriate best friend next door?”

  “Yup. I can also see you as the star.”

  “Well, at least I’m on TV, right? Even if it’s not exactly what I’d planned.”

  “So do the next part and list the steps.”

  She took another sip of her drink. “Wasn’t it cheesy enough to think deeply while touching a tree?”

  I pulled out my little notebook that I used to jot down recipes and shopping lists. “Here. Write down three ways to get yourself on a sitcom.”