Lovesick

by Alex Wellen

  Finding consensus on the guest list is the most formidable challenge we’ve faced to date. Paige and I are in agreement that both of our families have their share of fruits, but in deciding who receives an invite and who doesn’t, how do you compare his apples to her oranges?

  Because Paige has more friends and extended family than I do, I surrendered up front. I told her that she could invite three oranges for every two of my apples. I thought that was pretty generous—and it did provide her with a temporary sense of relief until she realized we could only afford to invite half as many guests as we thought, or a total of fifty. Paige’s own list was three times that. That’s when Paige went underground for twenty-four hours. Behind closed doors, she managed to whittle down her list, but to this day, she is consumed with guilt.

  Given this agreed-upon ratio, I still needed to figure out exactly how many guests I could invite so my total number of attendees would add up to twenty. According to Wikipedia, approximately three out of four people accept a wedding invitation. From there, it was simple algebra: solve for apples.

  I can safely invite 26.67 people, and if I do, 20 will attend. Not only that, but by assigning probabilities to each of my guests, I can figure out which 6.67 guests will likely decline and which 20 will accept (assuming a margin of error of +/−2 percent).

  I tried to explain all this to Paige; I told her that she could use this same basic formula to solve all of her invitation problems, too, but she wouldn’t listen.

  “I’m still confused on how you invite 67 percent of a person,” Paige says.

  “I’ll show you,” I tell her, sitting at my computer. I pull Paige onto my lap and begin kissing her neck. “I like this body part,” I say, moving down the center of her chest. “And these. These body parts would definitely receive invitations.”

  Once we figured out whom to invite, there was still the matter of how to invite them. Invites needed to contain invitations—that much we agreed upon. But how did I really feel about inner envelopes? Paige wondered. “Redundant” and “expensive” was my thinking. In the end, “elegant” and “negligible” prevailed.

  Maybe we should get rain cards, Paige suggested as we flipped through the sample book at Mindy’s Stationery Shop. No rain cards, I demanded. Yes, we were risking it all by having this wedding outside, but if it rains, people don’t need a card to tell them to go inside. No rain cards, I repeated. Paige relented. It was only days later—when Cookie told me that nobody gets rain cards—that I realized I’d been hustled.

  Next came the response cards. I agreed we needed them, but seeing as the vast majority of our guests would end up delivering the response cards to us in person, did we really have to spring for prepaid postage? I never had a chance.

  Lara has spent the last week drilling it into Paige’s head that wedding invitations need to be hand-addressed. “Anything less is frowned upon as too impersonal,” Lara told her poor sister. Frowned upon by whom? By the people we actually invite?

  Thankfully, cool heads, cost, and the Lucida Calligraphy typeface won out. I eventually convinced Paige that I could create attractive invitations using our word processor and printer, and that despite her sister’s strenuous objections, most of our virtually blind, computer-illiterate guests would never know the difference. We are now on Emily Post’s shit list.

  Paige keyed in all the names and addresses, and I agreed to print all the addresses on the outer envelopes. Nothing could have prepared me for the man-versus-machine tug-of-war that ensued. I thought I was doing myself a favor by using the new inkjet printer at the pharmacy. Words cannot describe the profound frustration that comes with clawing at a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 1310 as it swallows a four-dollar outer envelope, but “god,” “damn,” and “fucking printer” are a good start.

  Despite dozens of test print runs, envelopes jammed, addresses printed crooked, corners creased, and ink smudged. That’s how Mindy’s Stationery Shop gets you—they give you three measly extra outer envelopes, and I blew through those in ten minutes flat. It’s probably a good thing Paige insisted we buy those inner envelopes. She has no clue how many “innies” I ended up using as “outies.”

  The hall is booked, the invites are out, and this wedding is happening in t-minus five weeks, three days.

  Not everything has been a chore. Belinda’s mother, Marylyn, was a pleasant surprise. She used to run her own catering business and offered to prepare all of our wedding appetizers and buffet entrées for free. But no good deed goes unpunished. It was only after we accepted Marylyn’s generous offer that we read the fine print in the Lawrence Hall contract: “Lessees who elect to use anyone other than the preferred caterer (listed below) will be subject to a $500 penalty fee.” We’ve decided to pay the penalty—it will still cost us less to buy our own food wholesale and hire a few of Belinda’s friends as servers than it will to hire one of the hall’s hoity-toity caterers.

  Then there’s Principal Martin. He is a “magnum member” at The Wine Basement on Port Street. With his discount, Harvey Mar tin says he can get us reasonable wine at cheap prices, and not the other way around. There’s something poetic about having your former high school principal purchase your alcohol. With a little notice and cash, Principal Martin thinks personalized wine labels may even be in the cards. Paige and I both love that idea.

  As it turns out, my pharmacy school friend Stinky Stanley has far more to offer than his human beatbox rhythms. Known better as “Slick 6” to the Wednesday night crew at a local San Francisco club, I’m told Stinky Stanley’s deejay skills are sublime. Lucky for us, his wedding collection is also extensive, he’s available, and in our price range: free. Slick 6 only has two, nonnegotiable rules: no chicken dance and no polkas. “I don’t play Satan’s music,” he informed me, placing bended fingers over his head like horns.

  There are three of us planning this wedding, and living with the Day sisters, the differences between Lara and Paige couldn’t be starker. Lara Day is the type of person who enjoys preparing detailed dossiers on frail, poverty-stricken senior citizens, while Paige Day, much like her father, prefers scribbling down to-do list items on tiny scraps of paper, haphazardly leaving them lying everywhere.

  With Paige at the helm, it feels, most days, like we’re arbitrarily completing wedding tasks as she thinks of them. We have a pharmacy full of office supplies—I bring home a different organizational tool every day—and yet nothing works. Paige is all over the place. Between the wedding vows, marriage license, music choices, guestbook, seating chart, wedding rings, dance lessons, and cake, something important is going to fall through the cracks. I just know it.

  That’s why I made her this gift.

  It took me twenty minutes to figure out how to print Unicode character 61441, known better by its nickname, “D.” No self-respecting wedding list would neglect to include check boxes. After scouring the house for three hours, I managed to find all of Paige’s cryptic notes; decipher, compile, condense, and categorize them into one master list; and print the whole shebang. For every pending item on the four-page list, I designated a lead person, a target deadline, and an actual completion date.

  The things men do for love.

  TOMORROW morning Paige and Lara are headed to the wholesale market to price flowers for bridal bouquets and centerpieces. But tonight we register for gifts. If I don’t go with her, it could be a week before Paige and I spend some quality time together. Now that we live together, we see much less of each other. Paige is the only one around here earning a steady income, and with the living expenses adding up, she’s been picking up as many shifts at the television station as possible.

  I’d prefer to undergo dental surgery than register for gifts, but the ways things have been going lately—who knows—maybe I have deep-rooted feelings about china patterns.

  I haven’t been back to San Francisco since picking up Paige’s engagement ring from Igor Petrov. Less than two months ago, the pharmacy was open; I was blissfully ignorant of the Day Co-Pay p
rogram; Lara was happily toiling away in Los Angeles; Paige and I were dating; and Gregory was alive.

  Summer nights in San Francisco, the high hits sixty degrees, if you’re lucky. A cable car rattles its bell through Union Square. Misguided tourists stand out like sore thumbs in shorts and T-shirts. Sunday shoppers flood the sidewalks. I take a seat on the park ledge facing Macy’s.

  The Day sisters are easy to spot in the crowd. Lara and Paige maneuver down the sidewalk, chatting, laughing, and oblivious to my existence. They’ve never looked livelier, happier, or more alike. Brightly colored shopping bags hang from their fingertips. Worrisome. They were supposed to keep the spending down and find Paige wedding gown material for her dress.

  The two of them are absolutely giddy. I wave them over. Paige waves back, but not Lara. Typical.

  “How’d it go?” I ask.

  “Good … Fine,” Paige corrects herself as our cool lips touch again.

  “Then you found what you were looking for?”

  “Wait until you see me. You’re going to be thinking: ‘Va-va-va-voom. I can’t believe that’s my bride!’”

  Her face lights up when she speaks. Her eyes sparkle with pure joy.

  “I’m excited,” I tell her.

  “You ready to do this?” she asks, presenting Macy’s to me with both hands.

  “Not so excited.”

  “Come on, it’ll be fun, I promise, and if you’re good, I’ll buy you a cookie.”

  “More like you’ll buy you a cookie,” I say. “Now I know why you decided to register here—the food court.”

  “I’ll buy us both a cookie,” she admits.

  “We don’t need to register. Between my apartment, and your house, we have everything we’ll ever need. Not to mention that our guest list includes some of the biggest cheapskates north of Oakland.”

  “We’re about to exploit the greatest wedding registry loophole ever!” she whispers. “Mildred tells me that if we register for something during the Macy’s Fourth of July Sale, and Macy’s sells out of that item, we get the equal or higher end product at the same price.”

  “But we don’t even need the equal or the higher end product,” I say.

  “You’ll thank me later,” she says all serious. “You do not want the likes of Cookie Brewster buying us a wedding gift all by herself. Register now or regret it later. You decide.”

  Lara walks gingerly across the lawn in high heels.

  “I still think we should do my idea,” I suggest.

  “What idea is that?” Lara asks curiously.

  “Andy thinks we should register at Bank of the West,” Paige says flatly.

  Lara raises an eyebrow. “He’s joking, right?”

  “Of course he is.”

  “Think about it,” I try. “Guests could choose from any number of denominations of cash, bonds, and CDs. Looks like Paige and Andy still need a hundred bucks in cash and that high yield money market fund. Let’s splurge, Martha, and get ’em both.”

  Lara gives the idea some consideration. Paige doesn’t.

  I hand Paige her four-page to-do gift. She takes it with a sigh, flipping back and forth between the pages, occasionally holding it up to the light so she can read.

  Lara drops her bags and gives her sister the “gimme” sign. Before I can stop her, Paige hands over the computerized wedding list.

  While Lara examines it, Paige tells me, “It’s very nice.”

  “It should help,” I assure her.

  “Help whom? I assume you made this list for you.”

  “For me? Why would I need a list?”

  “Why wouldn’t you need a list? You love lists. You live for lists. But not me. I’m going to pass,” Paige says. “Where are all my original notes?”

  “That’s just my point!” I counter. Now’s not the time to reveal that I’ve incinerated Paige’s chicken scratch. “Your notes are everywhere. It took me forever to find yours and compile this. This is everything.”

  “Not everything,” Paige says.

  “Give me one example.”

  “I’ll give you two: Where’s the caterer? Where are the invitations?”

  “She’s right,” Lara pipes up, tapping the paper. “They’re not on here.”

  “Yeah, I know they’re not on there,” I snap. “This is a ‘to-do’ list, not a ‘to-done’ list.”

  “But I need to cross items off,” Paige insists.

  “You’re mad at me because I’m making you use checkmarks? Do you have any idea how hard it was to find that little box on our word processor?”

  “I’m not mad,” she says gathering her thoughts. “You don’t get it. I like to cross things off. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. That way I can always look back and see everything that I’ve completed. But I can’t do that with this list. You’ve gone and deleted all the finished items.”

  “So you want me to add everything back?”

  “This conversation is getting dumber by the minute,” Lara interjects, gathering up her shopping bags. “I’d stay, but I have plans to do absolutely anything else but stand here. I’m going to let you two lovebirds do your thing.”

  From inside her purse, Paige’s cell phone begins vibrating. Two seconds later we learn it’s the news station. Thirty seconds later we know there’s breaking news—a loft apartment complex south of Market has caught on fire.

  “I have to go,” Hurl Girl says, closing her phone and zipping up her purse.

  Paige hands her sister her two shopping bags.

  “This is my chance to cover some real breaking news even if it is just a two-alarm fire. Reed’s got the flu. Andrea’s pregnant. None of our reporters are available and I happen to be twenty blocks away. It’s kismet. Don’t be mad,” she begs us.

  If I listen carefully, I can make out the sound of fire engine sirens.

  “I’ll take you,” I volunteer quickly.

  “That’s okay, honey, I’ll take a cab. It’ll be quicker,” she says, scurrying down the lawn to the ledge of the park. “Just tell me how it goes.”

  “Tell you how what goes?” I yell.

  “Registering. Lara knows what I like. I showed her earlier. I promise, it won’t take long. Then you can check it off that nifty list of yours.”

  Lara and I exchange looks. In that split second, Paige hails a cab.

  “Let’s just do this another time,” I yell, running after her downhill and jumping onto the sidewalk. “What’s the rush? The wedding’s a month away.”

  Paige is halfway in the cab. She kisses me softly on the cheek.

  “Come on, you’re the logical one. You might as well just do it now. You’re already here,” Paige says. Then she looks me right in the eyes and speaks from the heart: “You want to do something nice for me? Don’t make me lists; spend some quality time with my sister. I know you two work together, but you hardly speak. You’re an only child, Andy. Haven’t you ever wanted a sister?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you’re about to get one, and she’s getting a brother, like it or not.”

  Paige slams the cab door shut, sticks her head out of the window, and points, first at Lara and then at me.

  “And afterward, buy him a cookie,” Paige demands as the taxi takes off.

  LARA does not buy me a cookie and I wouldn’t take one from her if she did.

  We find Ms. Johnson on the third floor in a cubby office underneath a heavy white wooden sign that says WEDDING & GIFT REGISTRY. Her desk is cluttered with pictures of grandchildren. Ms. Johnson is a nice enough woman in her late fifties, with Brillo short brown hair and deep creases around the corners of her mouth from smiling too much. From her nametag to the way she introduces herself, it is abundantly clear Ms. Johnson wishes to be addressed as “Ms. Johnson.” Lara and I comply, seeing as she is about to school us in the art of registering.

  “We have an exceptional team of experts dedicated to helping you create the registry of your dreams,” she tells us as if she’s readi
ng off a teleprompter.

  I doze off somewhere between “experts” and “dreams.”

  Ms. Johnson hands me a clipboard and Lara politely listens to the rest of her spiel while I take a few minutes to fill out the necessary paperwork. Why Macy’s needs my Social Security number so other people can buy us a hotplate is beyond me, but I comply.

  “He is so good to come with you,” Ms. Johnson adulates, checking over the forms. “So few grooms take an interest now, but complain later.”

  “I just want to make Paige happy,” I say, slapping Lara’s back gently.

  Lara can go either way here.

  “My Andrew is certainly one of a kind,” Lara says with a big, fake grin.

  “I want a big family, Ms. Johnson,” I announce, likening us to her family portraits. “Trust me, this woman is going to be a regular baby maker.”

  “What do you say we take this one baby at a time,” Lara suggests.

  Ms. Johnson is delighted. You can read her mind. Lara and I are a solid, long-term investment. Can you say “baby registry”?

  Ms. Johnson hands Lara a detailed map of the store and then unhooks one of the UPC scan guns from the wall and presents it to me like a samurai sword. It’s the oldest trick in the registry playbook: shape the purchasing device like a weapon and hand it to the man. It’s not even Lara’s wedding, but she’s green with envy. Lara needs that gun.

  “Point and shoot,” Ms. Johnson kindly instructs me.

  She walks around her desk to show me how.

  Tipping the gun down toward the floor, Ms. Johnson points to the LED display: “Then confirm ‘yes’ on the keypad.”