Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

“We’re all checked in. Want to take a quick look around the place? We could walk through what’s left of the garden.” He handed Peggy a brochure.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

  Peggy drew the hood of her coat lower over her forehead. In a first, she’d come properly prepared for cold country weather, and she needn’t have. The day had turned summery warm; the other hotel guests strolling the grounds wore shirts and light sweaters. The zero-degree attire was for disguise only, in case Ernestine was still around. The alternative was being upstairs with Jeremy in a room dominated by a canopied, down-quilted bed so seductive that she couldn’t look at it. She’d be expected to make use of that bed in a few hours and wasn’t ready. As Jeremy had settled in, she’d decided to go for a walk to clear her head, promising to be back in half an hour. “No problem,” he’d replied, and plugged in his computer.

  The brochure had shown the garden maze in its summer glory, a circular layout of immaculately sculpted boxwoods and groomed gravel paths. But most of the surrounding plants had gone dormant for winter, and the hedges were bleak and tatty. Safely outside, Peggy took her phone from her pocket and dialed the Sedgwick House. The sound of Luke’s voice, when he answered, was like deliverance.

  “How are you?” she asked. Do you miss me, even a little?

  “The flashing around the northwest chimney is shot,” he said. “It all needs to be ripped out, and the mortar, too.”

  “Maybe we can do that next weekend.” Peggy didn’t have the slightest idea what flashing was.

  He laughed curtly. “It’s a job for a professional.”

  She waited, but he didn’t elaborate. Above her, migrating geese crossed the sky in a moving V.

  “If anyone asks,” Peggy said finally, “you and I had lunch today at the Colonial Inn.”

  “Who’s going to ask that?”

  “Someone might.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just please don’t forget.”

  She hung up and took a few steps into the maze, contemplating whether Luke had ever been here with that redhead, made love to her upstairs in one of those giant beds. Behind Peggy’s dark glasses, tears sprang to her eyes. She brushed them away, angry at herself. She had to stop thinking of Luke as anything but a husband in name only. He wasn’t hers. His heart belonged to another. When their year was up, she’d never see him again.

  She walked deeper into the maze, trying to summon every piece of advice she’d ever gotten. Would Jonah, her acupuncturist, diagnose her as afraid of moving ahead with her life? Would Orsolya, her Hungarian facialist, call this thoroughly unrequited fixation on Luke more proof that Peggy only fell for the wrong men? Or was Peggy just creating fantasies in her head to keep from dealing with this more pressing concern: that Jeremy wasn’t right for her?

  Because he wasn’t. Jeremy was likable, treated her well, wanted to be with her—and she wasn’t attracted to him in the slightest. She looked around for a bench, desperate to rest her workout-weary legs. The realization felt unbearable. If she couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm for this man, who was everything she’d thought she wanted, there was no man on earth for her at all. She’d be alone for eternity, while everyone else around her—Bex and Josh, her friends from college, Tiffany and Tom, Liddy and Kyle, Luke and the redhead—every last human being but her paired off. Even Miss Abigail, tragic as her story was, had had a taste of true love. Peggy had no one, not even a memory.

  With nobody around to see, she took off her sunglasses and buried her face in her hands as tears spilled over her cheeks.

  “Peggy!”

  The sound of her own name grew closer and louder, an intrusion into the peace of the inn gardens, accompanied by the rhythmic crunch of running footsteps over the gravel paths. She was just able to dry her eyes before Jeremy burst through an opening in the hedges. She didn’t want him to see her crying.

  It wasn’t Jeremy.

  “Peggy!” Her pursuer was rasping, breathless. “I need to talk to you!”

  SIXTEEN

  The sight of Brock Clovis at the Colonial Inn in Litchfield County, Connecticut, was so exotic that for several seconds Peggy just took it in. Yes, it was Brock all right, his face shiny with exertion, a massive bouquet of roses in his equally massive hand.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you. I called the store, and they said you were staying at this place, so I drove up and…” He leaned forward at the waist, trying to get his breath back. How strange that a person who appeared as fit as Brock did could be winded from running around a garden maze. Peggy opened her mouth, ready to suggest he spend more gym time on cardio and less on weights.

  Brock was now breathing more normally. “I want to set some stuff straight.”

  “Why aren’t you working?” It hadn’t yet occurred to Peggy to wonder why he was here, just how.

  “I took a day off. I didn’t appreciate you enough when I had you, and now I realize—big mistake. You’re a sweet girl, Pegs. There aren’t a lot of girls as sweet as you. I shouldn’t’ve messed with what we had.”

  “Thanks. That’s nice.” What if Ernestine Riga was watching and recognized her parka? What if Jeremy happened to look out the window of their room and saw her here? Jeremy might not be Mr. Right, but she dreaded hurting his feelings any more than necessary.

  “I brought you a present.”

  Peggy’s eyes went straight to the roses Brock was holding. The words tumbled from her mouth. “I don’t want to be mean, and it was nice of you to drive all this way and go to this kind of trouble to apologize, but I’m not here alone, and so you can see why it would be impolite of me to show up back in my room with flowers—”

  Brock wasn’t listening.

  What he was doing was producing a box—a small blue box—and getting down on one knee in the gravel, surprisingly graceful for such a big man, like a circus elephant she’d once seen as a child balancing delicately on one massive, columnar foot.

  As if in a dream, she took the box and, with fingers suddenly twice their normal thickness, tugged at the ribbon—back on Fifth Avenue, she imagined, a mischievous salesgirl was laughing at how tightly she’d tied this bow—and removed a smaller inner box just like the one that had held her promise ring. “He couldn’t give you the real deal?” Bex had asked when Peggy had come into the shop wearing it.

  This wasn’t a pre-engagement ring. This wasn’t a fake wedding ring. This was, in fact, the real deal.

  Brock struggled to his feet, less nimble than he’d been while sinking to his knees, to help Peggy shove the ring over her unaccountably swollen knuckle. He took her hand in his and held it out as if displaying it to her.

  “What do you think, Pegs?”

  Luke didn’t hang up when Peggy did. He held the dead receiver in his hand absently, mulling over their brief exchange, attempting in vain to decipher why Peggy had brought up the Colonial Inn, until the phone made its insistent, earsplitting off-the-hook signal. He replaced the receiver and went out to Charity’s Porch. Through the screen, he watched Abigail walking in the back garden and tried to picture what Peggy was doing in New York this weekend and whether she was doing it with her prefiancé, and the solution to his problems materialized with such immediacy, Luke couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. Peggy wasn’t taken, not really. She wasn’t engaged. She was merely engaged to be engaged. Which means she’s fair game, he thought. There’s no reason I can’t pursue her myself.

  And there wasn’t. There was no reason at all. He resolved to put some effort into making Peggy Sedgwick his own. She was his wife, after all.

  The roses lay abandoned in the gravel. Peggy was sure they had no fragrance but pitied them all the same. She steered her mind back to the matter at hand. She again had the sensation of watching herself: Peggy Adams mulling over a marriage proposal. Only—was this a proposal? Had Brock asked her to marry him?

  Footsteps crunched from a few feet away, and Jeremy appeared through the hedges—half man, half cyborg.
“Peggy, are you in here—” He stopped short.

  Brock was still holding her hand. She pried his fingers off hers.

  “Who the hell is this?” Jeremy put his hand on his waist-tethered gadget. He looked for all the world about to unsheathe it for a digital duel.

  “This is, uh, my ex-boyfriend, Brock. Brock, this is…” Peggy didn’t know how to introduce Jeremy. Or why she felt compelled to introduce these two at all.

  Brock nodded wordlessly at Jeremy and said to Peggy, “So how about we go for it? Let’s get married, Pegs.”

  “But I just made dinner reservations,” Jeremy said.

  Brock looked apologetic. “Oh, man. Sorry.”

  Here was Peggy’s choice made flesh: dating men like Jeremy, telling her life story over and over, breaking up or being broken up with, or marriage. An eternal, fruitless quest for an as-yet-unmet Mr. Perfect…or the opportunity to stop searching. At no moment had her life been as black and white. Brock or nobody? Quit looking or keep trying?

  But what about Luke?

  She was an idiot for thinking it. Hadn’t she just realized Luke wasn’t a choice? And what did he have to do with anything? Whatever she felt for him wasn’t real. People didn’t form relationships with men they met during drunken blackouts. Here was Brock, whom she’d loved for seven years, who had clearly changed, whom she would surely grow to love again, who was asking her to be his forever.

  Forever.

  She was ready for forever.

  “What do you say, Pegs?” Brock’s question floated through the air.

  She’d imagined this moment differently. She would be wearing a dress, not a down parka. She wouldn’t have brought a date along. She wouldn’t be petrified of being caught by Ernestine Riga. She wondered, amazed, why she wasn’t crying. She’d always assumed she would cry.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go for it.”

  After reimbursing Jeremy for his expenses, Brock wanted to stay at the inn, but Peggy was intent upon getting home. She barely remembered the drive back, what she and Brock had talked about, whether they’d talked much at all. Her dazed mind raced through a long list of quandaries: How profusely apologetic she should be with Jeremy. Whether he’d prefer the apology to be in person, over the phone, by e-mail, or via text message. How to break the news to Bex. How to tell Luke about Brock; whether to tell Luke about Brock. How to tell Brock about Luke. And the wedding date, which Brock was already pressing her to set.

  “End of January.” He maneuvered the car in front of her building, munching on the remains of an extra-large order of fries from a drive-through just across the New York State line. “After playoffs, before the Super Bowl.”

  Already, the logistical problems were piling up. “As in eight weeks from now?”

  “Yeah, why not? If we wait past that, we’re getting into February and I’ll be leaving to do the surf documentary, and then by the time I’m back it’s summer and baseball season, and then it’s August and football, and by the time that’s over we’re talking January a year from now. Who needs an engagement that long?” He offered her some fry crumbs.

  Peggy shook her head. Who needed a long engagement? She did, to be sure her other marriage was annulled first. This was the ideal time to tell Brock about Luke. But that would spoil the moment, wouldn’t it? “Let’s not set a date just yet—mmmmf,” she answered as he kissed her, familiar and salty, until a taxi behind them honked its horn and Peggy moved away.

  He reeled her back. “Go pack a suitcase and come stay at our place.”

  “I’d better take a rain check.” She gave him a quick hug. “I should tell Bex the news first.”

  But not tonight. In the stairwell, she slipped Brock’s diamond ring into her handbag. In the span of a couple of months, she’d gone from a woman without a ring to a woman with one ring too many.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Holidays

  Peggy had changed. She wasn’t being sullen or hostile, just distant. Luke found it maddening. How could he win her over when she wouldn’t speak two sentences to him? He tried inquiring about her health, her work. “Fine, thank you,” she’d answer, no matter the question. He’d been able to pull out of her that Bex was indeed going to have a baby. He’d asked Peggy to pass along his congratulations. “Okay, yes, sure,” she’d replied distractedly.

  He began to test her, asking her opinion just to take the opposing view. When Abigail inquired which vegetable they would prefer with dinner, Luke would wait until Peggy said peas, and then he would say carrots, but she wouldn’t argue. One Saturday afternoon, passing the picketers on the way back from a trip to Seymour’s, he asked which side she was on.

  “Theirs. I think development is ruining the character of the town.”

  “If you lived here and had to drive forty-five minutes to the beauty parlor, you might think differently.” It was juvenile, he knew.

  She only laughed. “Salon, Luke.”

  He suggested every long, involved chore he could think of. They recaulked the bathtubs, spread a blue tarp over the leaky roof and around the northwest chimney; there was no money to have the roof properly repaired. They spent hours shuffling across the floor of each of the house’s twenty-one rooms, listening for squeaks, hunching over to nail down the loose boards. The work was repetitious and dull; talking would have passed the time. Still, Peggy barely spoke. Her mind, he could see, was elsewhere.

  Nicki called every so often, a cell phone siren trying to lure him back onto the rocks. If he answered his phone at all, he kept the talk light. More often, he ignored it. Late one week-night, lonely, he drove halfway to Nicki’s place in South Norwalk, turned around, and came home. She wasn’t the one he wanted.

  New Nineveh prepared for Christmas. Colored lights appeared on the pine tree on the green, the volunteer fire department trimmed its station with a wreath, and the brokers at the real estate offices set dishes of red and green Hershey’s kisses on their desks. But this year, most of the local shoppers had flocked to Pilgrim Plaza, and the town center was sad and deserted. The only steady sign of life came from the small huddle of Saturday picketers who marched across the still snowless green.

  But when Peggy returned on the weekends, which were filled with more social invitations than he’d ever received without her—and left him little time alone with her—Luke’s dolor deepened. Whether they were drinking hot chocolate at Liddy Hubbard’s Christmas cookie party or passing under the mistletoe—mistletoe! there to torment him!—on the way into the Rigas’ holiday open house, Luke scowled at Peggy’s ring. His plan to court her was getting nowhere.

  On the morning before Christmas Eve, Luke was untangling the cords of Miss Abigail’s decorative electric candles, setting one onto the sill of each window as he had every December 23 as far back as he could remember, when an oversize pickup truck towing an outsize trailer pulled up in front of the house as if sidling up to a dock. A man and woman climbed out and walked toward the front gate. From his window in the gentlemen’s parlor, Luke could make out their astonishment as they gazed at the house’s facade. He continued working—it was not unusual to have tourists stop to ogle the house—but in another few moments the door knocker sounded, and he reluctantly went to answer it.

  “Is this the Silas Sedgwick House?” The woman had faded blond hair pulled back from a worry-lined forehead.

  Luke said it was, patiently pointing out the plaque.

  “Wow.” The woman’s eyes were wide. “Really, wow.”

  Luke waited for more questions and hoped the two wouldn’t ask to come inside for a tour. It was remarkable how many did.

  The husband was balding and bearded, with a souvenir New Mexico sweatshirt and a pair of shorts. It was a mystery to Luke why tourists wore shorts in the winter. Perhaps handling that big pickup was more strenuous than it appeared. “If this is the Sedgwick House, then you must be Luke,” the man said, and before Luke could answer, he was caught in a bear hug; and the wife, too, was exclaiming how thrilled they were to
meet him, and it dawned on him who these people were.

  “We know we’re a day early.” The man answered Luke’s next question before he could think it. “We made great time through Maryland and Delaware, and we were going to stop there awhile, but then we decided, why wait? Why not drive straight through to Connecticut?”

  “Absolutely.” Luke took the first opportunity he could to retreat to a safer distance. Yankees did not hug and kiss total strangers, even their new in-laws. Holy hell, he thought, I have in-laws.

  “Who’s at the door?” Abigail called.

  “If you’re not ready for us, we can camp out in the rig.” The woman took her eyes off the house for a moment to flutter a nervous hand toward the trailer.

  “We wouldn’t think of it. I’ll get a room ready for you on the second floor. Come in, Mrs. Adams, Mr. Adams.”

  “Please.” Peggy’s father rested his hands comfortably on his round, solid belly. “Call us Mom and Dad.”

  “But that can’t be,” Peggy said into the phone. She was at the shop and made an effort not to shout. “They’re not supposed to get there until tomorrow!”

  “Then right now, two strangers who arrived towing something called a Kustom Koach are drinking eggnog with my great-aunt in the library.”

  “What do I do?” Peggy pressed her back against the storage closet door. On the other side, the store buzzed with activity and Bing Crosby carols; there was a line at the register, and Padma was frantically wrapping gifts. “I can’t leave the store. It’s crunch time and Bex is at the doctor.”

  “Don’t worry. I can handle your parents. You come up tomorrow night, as planned.”

  “That’s very sweet, Luke. You can’t handle them. My mom will worry about everything, and my dad will wander around the house in cutoffs.”

  “He already is. Cutoffs and bedroom slippers. And he gave Abby a big kiss on the lips.” Luke had to admire Peggy’s father. Unlike his daughter, he didn’t seem the slightest bit self-conscious.