Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  I hope you find these terms satisfactory. If so, I’d like to get started right away. Not only do I look forward to living in the finished structure for the rest of my life, but I also think this might be one building project where I will enjoy the work itself.

  Chapter Ten

  The Grenade in the Kitchen

  I am a singer of show tunes, not a keeper of secrets. Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret, but I don’t keep my own. Generally my life goal is to lead the sort of drama-free existence that doesn’t require anyone to hush up. Like any of us, I lead a life that is both public and private, but unlike many people, my work depends on people trusting me with their anonymous stories (which I then—it needs to be said—share with the world through my advice column). Unlike discretion, which involves thought, judgment, and choices, secret-keeping is a dangerous business, especially for someone like me, whose poker “tell” is otherwise called “my face.”

  My propensity to live my own life as a fairly uninteresting open book was seriously tested when I fell in love. Suddenly my personal life seemed very compelling and high octane. Very Kim and Kanye, but with a red pickup truck.

  Bruno and I stood on a snowy sidewalk in New York City and exchanged a promise to marry. We made a second promise to keep our news completely private for three months. I wanted to have more time to get to know each other before involving other people. I also found it somewhat embarrassing after almost two decades of being single to so suddenly pivot toward marriage. It had been only ten weeks since Bruno had turned down my renovation project, and now I was in for a wholesale life reconstruction—one that involved five children.

  I didn’t want an engagement ring. My previous experience with a ring, the one I had purchased for myself and seldom worn, had soured me on the whole concept. It seemed an antiquated idea and somehow unseemly for a middle-aged woman. Sparkly engagement rings are a young woman’s game. I couldn’t imagine my own left hand, gnarled from gardening and knuckles swollen with arthritis, sporting anything blingy. I’d always put rings in the same category as hats: fine for some women but silly-looking on me.

  “No engagement ring, okay?” I said to Bruno. I assumed that in addition to stating my own preference, I was also letting him off the hook, ring-wise.

  Bruno looked surprised and a little wounded. “Amy, I’m getting you a ring. I want it to be a giant ring, and I want you to wear it.”

  Instantly, I changed my mind. I recognized this as part of his campaign to do everything differently. He wanted to be declarative. He wanted to lock this thing down. And I understood, because I felt that way, too. I realized that I’d never before been in a relationship that didn’t involve at least a little coercion, where two people manipulated each other into a compromise. I had also never been in a relationship where everything felt so easy.

  I did, however, stay firm on the idea of keeping our plans completely secret until Dairy Day. I told Bruno I didn’t want to discuss a wedding or do any planning or even think about a wedding until the second weekend in June.

  I started driving over to Bruno’s house most evenings and having dinner with him and Michaela, Angela, and Avila. They made a place for me at the table, and we exchanged small talk about their school assignments or weekend plans. Sometimes I would share a tricky question I’d received from one of my readers and ask their advice about how to answer it. I got to know some of their friends. Occasionally I still found myself pulling out my puppets, trying to amuse or entertain or win over the girls, but they didn’t seem to require (or want) that. They knew that their father and I were a couple and seemed to accept me being tangentially in their lives. (Although Bruno told me that during this period one of his girls asked him, “Dad, why does Amy keep showing up at dinnertime?”)

  The winter snows stopped swirling, and the snowdrops and crocus emerged in dots of color. Once spring was really blooming, in addition to showing up in the evenings, I also started driving the five miles to their house (which we now laughingly referred to as Pemberley) very early in the morning, bearing donut holes from Dunkin’ Donuts and coffee for Bruno. I sat on the front porch in the sunshine watching the sheep in the pasture across from the house, drinking coffee and working on my laptop while the family woke up. The girls would come downstairs in the morning, wearing “You again?” looks on their faces. With Emily at college, my own house was feeling quiet and lonely, and also I simply wanted to be with Bruno at the beginning and the end of each day.

  Bruno found an antique ring made in the 1920s—not a giant ring, but a simple band with diamonds clustered in a circle that looked like a blossom. The ring, we were told, came from an estate sale in Beverly Hills. I invented a backstory for it that involved a silent movie star who, like me, was also involved in a secret engagement but who had to sell her ring when her career hit a rough patch during the transition to talkies. It seemed very Myrna Loy. I loved my beautiful blossom ring and kept it by my bedside. I wore it to bed and whenever I thought I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. I slipped it off during my Wednesday breakfasts at the Queen Diner with my sister, mother, and aunts, but as I chatted with them, I could feel it in there, burning a hole through my pocket.

  As it turns out, I can keep a secret, especially one I am convinced will have a joyful resolution. In fact, I relished holding our relationship close. Our choice locked us into intimacy, while also forcing us to be discreet and careful. Being careful is an underappreciated quality in relationships. So is being reliable. And in this one, there were no surprise letdowns, waiting for phone calls, or waiting at the bar for my date to arrive. We each did what we said we would do.

  Bruno and I used the time of our secret engagement well. We reveled in our relationship, without dwelling too much on the details of our future. We continued to tell each other our stories (in middle age, there’s a lot of ground to cover); we talked about our children, our work habits, our religious beliefs, and political points of view. There were many areas where we did not see eye to eye, and we learned how we behaved when we disagreed—sometimes sloppily and tearfully but rarely loudly. More important than our disagreements was our ability to fight and forgive. One night we had an argument about global warming that, years later, I could still diagram (where he was standing, where I was standing, what I was wearing) because it got so heated (so to speak). It wound up with my tearful declaration, “I DON’T THINK I CAN MARRY A GLOBAL WARMING DENIER!!!”

  I left Bruno’s house that night wondering if I could actually marry a man who held what I considered to be an obnoxious view on the topic of global warming. I know, the heating of the earth is a pretty big thing. Okay—it’s the biggest thing there is. But my list of nonnegotiables was actually pretty short and mainly involved being mean to people or animals. Bruno’s political views forced me to reconsider some of my own assumptions. We could agree to disagree, which concerning certain topics was what we did.

  In general, I avoid personal discord (I’m a little tougher professionally). I’m more a “flight” than “fight” type and thus didn’t have much experience with how to recover when a disagreement turned into something more. As someone who had been dumped, first by my father and then by my first husband, all I knew at the time about how to manage unhappiness involved either me or the other party leaving. I was like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day: “Stay? I can’t even make a collie stay!” But Bruno did stay. I saw that his bullheadedness was matched by his loyalty. Plus, he is a world-class apologizer. A real look-you-in-the-eye, “I’m very sorry, will you please forgive me” kind of guy.

  We continued not discussing the wedding, aside from agreeing to have one at some point over the summer. The courting also continued. Bruno occasionally stopped at my mother’s house in the afternoons while I was with her; he seemed like such a big man perched on her little chairs. He drank coffee with us and tried to talk politics with my mother (she demurred). He looked around the old house and found things to fix. Jane had never had anyone around who could fix things
and had become accustomed to hiring someone or doing without. It was a major turning point when she asked Bruno to do something. She also asked me, “Do you think Bruno could take a look at…” (whatever part of her old house needed duct-taping together). That made me feel good.

  In mid-May, Emily returned to Freeville from her freshman year in college. Memorial Day weekend was coming up. Bruno expressed his opinion that my Dairy Day declaration plan was sort of dumb (I agreed), and we decided to finally exit the snow globe and start telling our families about our decision to get married.

  We chose a day to announce our intentions in late May. We decided to tell our children first and then go to our mothers with the news. We would tell our children separately. I would tell Emily, and he would tell Clare, Angela, Michaela, and Avila on his own. Because our children were wonderful and loved us, and because they knew we were happy together, we felt completely confident that they would accept, even welcome, this news.

  Announcement day was cold and dank. Sporadically through the day the heavens opened and rain pelted down. I warmed Emily up for the big news by taking her to a matinee. Going to the movies together had always been one of our favorite pastimes, and in some ways I saw this as the symbolic last “date” of our mother-daughter dating relationship. We saw Iron Man at the mall. We had each already seen it once—she while at school, and me with my mother—but we hadn’t seen it together, so our previous viewings didn’t count.

  After Iron Man, I drove home and pulled into our driveway. Although the windshield wipers were on high, they were unable to keep up with the rain, which was coming down so hard that the front door of the house looked like a waterlogged mirage through the windshield. My peony bush—just starting to bloom in the front garden—was being flattened into a crop circle. Emily and I were chitchatting about the movie, when I said, “I have something to tell you…”

  She turned toward me. “What, Mommy?”

  “Bruno and I have decided to get married. He’s telling his girls now, and I’m telling you because we want you to be the first to know.” Emily was silent. I saw the irises of her beautiful dark brown eyes start to turn black. My daughter is overall a calm, low-tension, “easy” person, but since early childhood she has had the ability to shoot lightning bolts from her eyes. Lightning bolt eye-shooting happens to be one of her superpowers. I saw the telltale storm gathering. I tried to fill in the ominous silence: “It’s going to be fine, honey. You’ll see.”

  Emily burst into heaving sobs, threw open the door, ran out of the car through the rain, entered the house, and slammed the door behind her.

  Meanwhile, five miles away at Pemberley, Bruno had assembled Michaela, Angela, and Avila in the kitchen. “Girls, I have something to tell you…”

  Michaela stood up and yelled at her father and left the room, slamming the door. Then Angela stood up, yelled at him, and marched off in a different direction. Having been abandoned by her two older sisters, little Avila burst into tears, yelled at him, and stomped off, slamming yet another door. Bruno stood in the now-empty kitchen and called me on my cell phone. I was still sitting in my car, afraid to enter the house, fearful of the daughter-monster stomping around within.

  One aspect of adolescence that parents sometimes overlook is the central question that children hold close: What about me? We parents don’t like to dwell on this—or even acknowledge it—because it inconveniently discounts our belief in our godlike power to take any choice we make and spin it into something that will benefit them. But our children are more worried about themselves than they are about us. We tell ourselves (and sometimes even say it out loud) that if we are happy, they will be happy. This is what we say to our kids when we are leaving them with a sitter because we want to go out or when we are moving them away from their friends and family for a work opportunity. But our personal happiness does not guarantee our kids’ happiness, and deep down, we know it.

  I well remember the time my very wise friend Gay schooled me on the subject of older adolescents. At the time, I was sitting in her kitchen, bemoaning some now-forgotten issue with my fifth grader. I believed that separations were tough for Emily, but Gay—who has observed countless parent–child interactions in her forty-five years of teaching children—begged to differ. She rightly pointed out that separations were actually hard for me. Gay gave me a piece of wisdom I’ve never forgotten. It was so simple and so true that I have quoted it in my column, as well as let it influence my own parenting choices. “For our children, their job is to eventually leave us,” she reminded me, “and our job as parents is to let them.”

  Parenting is a drawn-out and occasionally terrifying process of letting go. I had let Emily go her own way, running her own college application process and making choices about her major, her job during college, her grades, and where she wanted to spend her time when she wasn’t in school. But now she was having to let me go, and she wasn’t ready.

  Like any parent, I do not like to disappoint my offspring. But because of the nineteen years we had spent raising each other, Emily and I had a somewhat unusual closeness that felt like a deep and fulfilling friendship. I could think of only a handful of times I had ever had to say no to her or knowingly disappoint her, and those times were preceded and followed by a lot of discussion and persuasion—and some puppetry. I wasn’t the kind of parent to bring the hammer down. Some of that is due to my nature, but I also have to cop to being occasionally afraid—afraid of being the agent responsible for a loved one’s disappointment. Overall, my parenting style involved moving toward easy things and avoiding hard things. In Emily’s life, I could think of only one time when I had presented her with a rock-solid nonnegotiable, and that was when we moved to Chicago before she entered ninth grade. Emily’s eyes went coal-black on that occasion, too, but she worked hard to adjust, and eventually she did.

  This time, however, I was so utterly convinced that things would work out that I didn’t get overly caught up in Emily’s reaction. I had told her that things would be okay, and I felt they would be. This was one time when I needed to cash in my chips on a lifetime of being boringly reliable.

  My phone call with Bruno went like this: “That went well…” He told me about his grenade toss and his daughters’ reactions. I was hiding in my car; he was standing alone in his kitchen. All of our daughters were sobbing, and while this was a surprising and unexpected development, he and I remained relatively unconcerned.

  I left Emily to cool down and bravely drove over to Bruno’s house to face the reality of what we had done. None of the girls would emerge from their lairs. He and I shared a cup of coffee and ruefully compared notes about how badly our happy news had landed. But aside from being hit by some emotional shrapnel, we were not mortally wounded.

  After about an hour, I returned to my house. Emily was gone. I assumed she was commiserating with her cousins down the street. Wearily I climbed the stairs to my little bedroom. There on my bed was Emily’s DVD of Roman Holiday. This was her unspoken offering. Emily had heard me bellyaching about how I didn’t think Bruno’s girls had seen enough classic movies. She had placed it there for me to share with these daughters—her future stepsisters.

  Chapter Eleven

  Paying the Piper

  Getting married is in some ways very good preparation for being married. There are planning and paperwork, arguing and making up, and endless conversations about money, clothes, food, friends, and music—with a final emphasis on cake. Every marital challenge should somehow end in cake.

  My first wedding was beautiful. I’m not just saying that; it really was. Decades after the marriage failed, I still remember the wedding as magical, despite some unexpected bumps.

  My former husband and I chose to get married in September on an island that was socked in with fog for several days before our wedding weekend.

  When I think back on that weekend—now so long ago—I remember waking up on my wedding day and fighting with my future husband about the fog. Who has the energy to fig
ht about the weather? Only people who are getting married that day. By the morning of our wedding, things were already off course because my unfortunate future in-laws’ charter plane couldn’t land in the fog. Several times on the day before, Andy and I had raced to Block Island’s tiny airstrip because his family’s plane had left MacArthur Airport and was on its way. Each time we stood listening to the plane circle, unseen above the fog bank, before the pilot gave up and headed back to Long Island.

  Andy’s stylish mother and stepfather and brother and sister-in-law finally arrived on the island from their home in the Hamptons just hours before the ceremony, dressed to the nines and riding in the prow of a small whale-watching boat, looking like yachters who had somehow wandered onto the set of Jaws.

  I also remember an unfortunate encounter with the manager of the inn where the wedding was being held and where we and all of our guests were staying. Half of our guests had been inconvenienced or delayed by the weather. I walked through the inn’s dining room on the day of our ceremony and saw pearl-gray tablecloths on the tables that were a little wrinkled and (I thought) sort of shabby-looking—in addition to being the “wrong” color. I brought this to the attention of the manager, who was also a police officer on the island. This man was also my former boss from several years before when I had lived on the island, working in a bicycle rental shop and singing at night in the hotel during summers and after college. Like most people who live on islands, he held at least three jobs. I’m assuming he was pretty tired and that I was being pretty tiresome.

  He pulled out a chair and motioned for me to sit. I felt so disappointed. The fog had lifted and the sun was streaming through a cloud in cinematic beams of light, but the flowers were wrong, the tablecloths were wrong; so much was wrong. I smoothed out some wrinkles on the tablecloth as I sat. I was so distracted I could hardly pay attention to him. I wish I could remember the exact words he said to me that day, but it boiled down to this: “Knock it off. You’re getting married today. If you continue to obsess about this stuff, you’ll miss everything meaningful.” I remember him also suggesting that I might want to lie down for a little while and take a nap. This is what you say to a kindergartner having a tantrum, of course. This fact was not lost on me.