The Guy Not Taken

by Jennifer Weiner

  Marlie dropped the wallet and grabbed her friend’s hands. “Help me. Help me, please,” she said, her voice beseeching. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  Bob stepped through the door, looking impatient. “There you are,” he said, edging past Gwen. He took Marlie by the hand and led her past the dripping sink and the broken paper towel dispenser, back out into the party, as Gwen shot one last troubled look over her shoulder and left, Marlie hoped, to get the laptop that would be her salvation and send her home.

  • • •

  This is a mistake, Marlie thought, smiling mechanically as she hugged Bob’s aunt Phyllis, who smelled of the Altoids she chewed compulsively to mask the scent of the cigarettes she thought nobody knew she smoked.

  I’ve got to get out of here, she thought as Randall congratulated her again, allowing his hands to drift from her waist to the curve of her ass. Here own mother kissed her cheek and whispered, “Good luck.” Marlie swallowed hard, almost crying, remembering how her mother had said, “I’m so happy for you” the night before she’d married Drew. The night unfolded in a parade of ribald toasts and congratulations, and finally Marlie decided that if she couldn’t wake up and she couldn’t get home, she could at least enjoy one pleasure denied to breast-feeding mothers and get really, really drunk.

  She started with a beer, then moved to her old single-girl standard, rum and Diet Coke. The jukebox blared “Mustang Sally,” and Bob’s Frisbee friends clustered around a television set at one end of the bar. Marlie set down her third sweating glass on a tray full of empty plates and dirty napkins and made her way to the bar for a refill. While she waited, another way to fix things surfaced, slowly, in her rum-sodden brain. Sleeping Beauty, she thought. Heel-clicking and head-bashing hadn’t worked. Maybe all she really needed to do was get Karen to give Bob a kiss.

  It was, she decided, worth a try. She collected her drink, smoothed her hair, and sidled over to Karen Kravitz, who was standing in a corner with a wistful look on her face.

  “Hey,” Marlie said, and burped.

  The other woman gave her a weak smile.

  “So listen,” Marlie said. “Do you, um, like Bob?”

  “Sure,” Karen said. Her tone was neutral. “He’s very nice. You’re very lucky.”

  “I mean, do you like him,” Marlie said, and gave Karen’s forearm an encouraging little squeeze. The other woman’s eyes widened.

  “What are you saying?” she stammered.

  Marlie hiccupped, and silently cursed her decision to go with a carbonated alcohol delivery device. “Nothing. Never mind. Do you like art?” she asked. “Y’know, Bob’s quite the artist.”

  “I know,” Karen said warily. “He does a comic strip about the office.”

  “Does he?” Okay, this was good. This was something. “Are you in it?”

  The other woman smiled. “Sometimes. It’s more about Bob and his father.” Her smile widened. “In the comic strip, Bob gets superpowers after a freak accident where lightning hits one of the vending machines in the snack room.”

  “Lightning,” Marlie marveled. “Snack room. Wow. I’ll bet the drawings are really good.”

  Karen’s eyes narrowed. “He’s never shown it to you?”

  Marlie ignored the question. “He used to be a painter. In college, and after. That was what he really wanted, but it’s hard, you know.” Okay, she thought. Bring it on home. “I think,” she blared. Oops. Too loud. She lowered her voice. “I think it’s so important for women to be nurturing and encouraging. To be, you know, the power behind the throne. Or the easel.”

  Karen gave her a strange look. “Excuse me,” she said, and disappeared into the crowd. Marlie sighed and slumped down at a table for two. When she looked up, the other woman was standing there with a steaming mug of coffee in her hands. “Here you go,” she said, not unkindly. “It was nice to meet you. See you Sunday.”

  “Bob’s a really good kisser!” Marlie called helplessly toward Karen’s departing back. No answer. No surprise. Marlie hiccupped again, realizing miserably that her theoretical husband’s actual fiancée might very well have thought she was proposing a prenuptial threesome.

  She sighed, catching sight of Bob’s familiar figure, the line of his shoulders and his worn plaid shirt, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with three of his cousins at the bar. She remembered something she’d forgotten in the excitement—the obsession, really—of stumbling across the news of Bob’s nuptials. Four months before they’d broken up, she and Bob had a fight at her grandmother’s eightieth birthday party. Marlie’s grandmother always had something to say about Marlie’s job prospects, or her appearance, and Marlie was delighted that for once she’d have a supportive boyfriend by her side.

  Bob, however, had other ideas, and Jets tickets. He finally agreed to skip the game and go to the party, but he’d sulked for the entire ride up to Rhinebeck, and he’d ducked out of the living room after two beers and twenty minutes, leaving Marlie to parry her grandmother’s increasingly pointed questions about whether she and her young man had made any plans.

  She found Bob in his car, slouched behind the wheel with the radio tuned to the game, a third and fourth beer in the cupholders and a truculent look on his face.

  “Hey. Little help in there,” she said.

  Bob reached down and turned up the volume without looking at her.

  “When did you decide to hate me so much?” she asked him. She’d started the question lightly, as if she were teasing, but by the end of it she wasn’t kidding at all. Bob gave her a hostile shrug. Marlie was pierced with the knowledge of how far apart they’d drifted. He didn’t want to be in her grandmother’s house with her, and she didn’t want to be in the stadium with him. He might have cared for her, might have even loved her, but he didn’t—or couldn’t—take care of her. And she, fed up with the joblessness and the aimlessness, the Frisbee games and the parental handouts and the half-finished paintings, was increasingly disinclined to take care of him.

  The relationship didn’t officially end for months, but she knew that that was the real moment when it had died.

  • • •

  She and Bob walked home from the bar in silence. “Are you okay?” he asked, tossing his keys onto the rickety table by the door, seeming not to notice as they bounced off the surface and slid to the floor. She nodded woodenly. When the nurse had handed Zeke to her for the first time in the hospital, she’d said, “Here you go, Mom,” and Marlie had actually turned to look over her shoulder to see if her own mother was there. “I’m not sure I can do this,” she’d told Drew, and he’d leaned down, eyes tender, and kissed her forehead, and said, “I know you can.” She remembered the three of them in the taxi home, the brand-new car seat painstakingly strapped between them and one of Zeke’s hands gripping her index finger. And she thought of Drew in the equipment shop as he’d zipped up her wetsuit and adjusted her grip on the paddle, telling her not to worry, because he was pretty sure the rapids looked worse than they were.

  Late into that sleepless night, in the white cotton nightgown she’d lost in the move out of their old apartment and thought she’d never see again, she lay beside a man who wasn’t her husband—at least not yet and, with any luck, not ever—and thought about Drew and her baby. She conjured their faces until she could practically touch them, could practically reach out and kiss them. She could see Zeke’s fingers fanning open and shut as he nursed, the way Drew’s hair curled over his collar when he went too long between haircuts.

  This is what you wanted, Gwen had said. Marlie opened her eyes and looked down into Bob Morrison’s slack, sleeping face. Then she touched his arm. Bob woke up with a start, eyes wide, face flushed.

  “Huh?”

  She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He squinted at her in the darkness. “Why, what’d you do?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You just have to forgive me.” Because you work for your father instead of painti
ng, she thought. Because you’re supposed to be Karen’s husband, not mine.

  “Fine. I forgive you. Can I go back to sleep?”

  She nodded, and she kissed his cheek. He ruffled her hair and rolled over. A minute later he was snoring again.

  She counted to a hundred once, then again. And when the world was dark and still outside and the city streets were quiet, she tiptoed back to Bob’s computer and logged on to Wedding-Wishes.com.

  Her hands trembled as she clicked over to CHANGE GROOM’S INFORMATION, erased Bob and typed in Drew. UPDATE? the screen inquired.

  Her fingers paused, curled over the keys. Now, she thought. Now I’m going to type ZEKE IS THE HAPPIEST BABY EVER BORN AND HE SLEEPS FOURTEEN HOURS EVERY NIGHT AND NEVER CRIES. Or DREW DAVIDOW IS HOME FROM WORK BY SIX O’CLOCK.

  But she didn’t type anything else. She hit Enter and closed her eyes and crossed her fingers. Nothing happened for a minute. Then the words Thank you, Marlie floated onto the screen.

  She went back to bed and lay down next to Bob, with his easy smile and warm hands and his smell of fresh-cut grass, for the last time, knowing in her heart that she’d wake up where she was supposed to be, curled on the couch with her son safe in his crib and her C-section scar and eighteen extra pounds back where they were supposed to be, and her husband would be coming through the door smiling his tired smile, lifting her to her feet and leading her back toward the bed they shared, telling her, “Go to sleep. I’ve got this.”

  THE

  MOTHER’S HOUR

  Blue, Alice thought. The September-to-January semester of the Mother’s Hour had started fifteen minutes ago, on a brilliant fall morning where the gold leaves stood out sharply against the skies, and the wind held a hint of the winter to come. Alice had been trying not to stare at the pierced, tattooed, pale-skinned teenager splayed beside the radiator on the playroom’s carpeted floor, but the few quick peeks she’d taken left her convinced that the girl, who’d come to Mother’s Hour in a sleeveless Sex Pistols T-shirt and low-slung black jeans, had dark-blue streaks in her tire-black hair, and a few magenta strands, too.

  Alice’s daughter, Maisy, wriggled in her arms. Maisy had been clinging to her like a spider monkey since they’d arrived at the community center in Society Hill. “Mommy, I’m a little shyness,” she’d said. So Alice had stood in the corner for twenty minutes, next to the toddler-size table with a plastic tea set and the boxes of dress-up clothes, with her lower back throbbing and Maisy’s face buried in her neck. “Down, Mommy, down!” Maisy finally demanded. Alice set her down gently. “Be careful,” she called, as Maisy ignored the other children and went trundling over to the wooden slide with her toes-in, elbows-out walk that made her look like an indignant penguin.

  Lynn, the group leader, a short, brisk woman with a silvery-blond bob, clapped her hands. “Moms, caregivers,” she called. “Let’s gather in a circle.” The blue-haired teenager rose languidly from the floor and scooped up an adorable little girl dressed in overalls and pink high-topped sneakers, with black ringlets gathered into pigtails. “Belly kiss!” she called, and planted a dozen kisses on the little girl’s convex tummy. The child shrieked in delight, dimples flashing in her cheeks.

  Alice steeled herself and walked over to the slide, where Maisy crouched, scowling.

  “Come on, Maisy, time to sit in a circle.”

  Maisy shook her head.

  “We’ll play later,” she said, scooping her daughter into her arms.

  “No! No! Noey noey No! Play now, Mommy!” Maisy shrieked, and kicked Alice sharply in the left breast. Alice gasped. Her eyes filled with tears, but she struggled to keep her voice calm as she carried Maisy over to the circle.

  “Maisy, we do not kick. Feet are not for kicking.”

  “Want . . . to go . . . down! Now!” Maisy screamed, writhing in her mother’s arms. Alice winced, imagining she could feel the other women’s stares.

  “You can go down the slide later, but right now we need to sit down,” she said in the firm-but-patient tone she’d been practicing, to little avail, for weeks.

  “Well!” said Lynn, giving the eight women and their charges a smile and trying her hardest to ignore Maisy, who’d ramped up into a full-on tantrum and was shrieking and pounding her fists on the floor. Lynn raised her voice above the little girl’s wails. “Let’s go around the circle and say our names and our child’s name.”

  Mom One was Lisa and her daughter, a porcelain-skinned redhead contentedly sucking her thumb, was Annie. Mom Two was Stacy, and her little boy, vrooming his firetruck over the carpet, was Taylor. Alice patted Maisy’s back ineffectually and caught a name here and there. Pam . . . Tate . . . Manda . . . Morgan. The mothers, like Alice, appeared to be in their thirties, with expensively highlighted hair and dark circles under their eyes masked with sixty-dollar concealer. Any one of the diamonds on their left hands could have been swapped for a small used car.

  With one mother left, Maisy finally stopped crying. “I don’t like you,” she said, glaring at Alice, who felt her heart contract helplessly, as if she’d been kicked there, too. “Not one wittle bit.” Maisy hooked her thumb into her mouth. Her cheeks were blotchy, and her fine blond hair, which had been neatly combed and secured with pink bunny barrettes that morning, stood up around her head in a frizzy, tangled corona.

  The blue-haired babysitter lifted an eyebrow and resettled the dimpled, pigtailed girl in her lap. “I’m Victoria, and this is Ellie. She’s two and a half exactly.” The other mothers nodded, murmuring hellos.

  “And she’s potty-trained, I see!” exclaimed Lynn the leader. The sitter gave a modest shrug. Alice grimaced. She’d been unsuccessful at getting Maisy to do anything with the potty except occasionally wear it on her head. Then it was her turn.

  “I’m Alice, and this is Maisy. She’ll be two and a half next month.” She pulled a tissue out of her diaper bag and tried to wipe her daughter’s face.

  “Go away from me!” Maisy whined, slapping at Alice’s hands. Pick your battles, Alice reminded herself, putting the tissue back in her pocket and starting a mental tally of Victoria’s piercings. There was one silver ring through her lip, a diamond twinkling in her nostril, and a silver barbell run through her eyebrow, in addition to black rubber plugs that stretched quarter-size holes in her earlobes. Alice thought she couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

  “Free play time!” said Lynn, clapping her hands again. The other mothers, the ones with the expensive suede moccasins and diamond-and-platinum rings, gravitated toward the crafts table. Victoria resumed her slouch next to the radiator, idly twisting a studded leather cuff around one wrist as Ellie happily glued cotton balls to construction paper. Alice shepherded Maisy back to the slide and sat down next to blue-haired Victoria. She wondered what kind of mother would entrust her child to a sitter dressed like this. Probably a very hip mother, a downtown girl. Alice and her husband had recently relocated to suburban Haddonfield, where only the little old ladies had blue hair.

  “How long have you been taking care of Ellie?” she asked.

  Victoria raised her pierced eyebrow. “Excuse me?” Then she shot Alice a quicksilver grin. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not the nanny. I’m her mom.”

  • • •

  “How was your day, ladies?” Mark asked that night, trying not to sound harried as he hung up his overcoat and suit jacket and came to the kitchen to help Alice wrestle Maisy into her booster seat.

  “Fine!” Alice shouted back. One of Maisy’s sneakered feet caught her in the bicep as Mark finally pulled the straps around his daughter. Alice grabbed the plastic Disney princess plate and Maisy’s preferred orange sippy cup from the counter. “We went to playgroup. It was fun!”

  “It was not,” said Maisy, abruptly going limp and sliding bonelessly underneath her straps, out of her booster seat, and down to the floor. She paused for a moment, as startled as both of her parents were at this new development, before opening her mouth and starting to scream. Mark sco
oped her back into the seat and tightened the straps, while Alice retrieved a steaming bowl from the microwave. Maisy’s wails stopped abruptly. “Chicken noodle! My fav’rit!”

  Mark frowned, loosening his tie. “Noodle soup again? Didn’t she have that last night?”

  “She had it for lunch today.” And breakfast, Alice didn’t add. “She won’t eat anything else,” she said, collapsing into her own chair.

  “Noodles! Yommmy!” said Maisy, slurping wetly. There was clump of glue stuck in her hair, a remnant of her stint at the crafts table that morning.

  “You like those noodles, kiddo?” asked Mark in the bluff, too-loud tone he always used with his daughter, the tone that, just lately, made Alice want to slap him.

  Maisy ignored him, slurping away. Alice set their dinner on the table: rotisserie chicken fresh from the supermarket, a salad she’d recently dumped out of a plastic bag, and a reheated container of mashed sweet potatoes with a candied-pecan crust that she’d purchased for the unbelievable price of $9.99 a pound. For that much money, she’d thought, steering a screaming Maisy through the checkout line and ignoring her daughter’s wails for lollipops, she could have bought five pounds of sweet potatoes, not to mention the butter and brown sugar and pecans, and whipped up enough mashed sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner for twelve. But when? That was the question. With what time?

  Mark filled his plate, then turned to his daughter. “Want to try some sweet potatoes?” he wheedled, holding out a bite on his fork.

  Maisy scowled at him. “No sweepatoes! Not eating that! I will not!”

  “Honey . . .” Alice began.

  “Well, she can’t just eat noodle soup for the rest of her life!” Mark said.

  Maisy snatched the fork loaded with sweet potatoes and flung it toward the living room, where it probably landed on the Oriental rug—the one nice thing Alice had brought from her single-girl apartment into her married-lady home. The dog whimpered. Ever since Maisy had gotten mobile, Charlie, their sweet shelter dog, had lived in mortal terror of the little girl Alice privately called—just in her own thoughts, never out loud, never to Mark—the bad seed.