Getting Married

by Theresa Alan

  After dinner, I go to put on one of Will’s T-shirts to lounge around in. I’m wearing just my bra and underwear when Will comes into the room. “Can I wear this one?” I ask, pulling a T-shirt off its hanger in the closet.

  “Sure. Anything you want.”

  I snap off my bra and before I can put the T-shirt on, Will is kissing me, and his instant erection is pressing into my thigh. I abandon thoughts of putting the shirt on and instead shimmy out of my underwear and pull Will on to the bed with me.

  Will drives me wild with kisses along my inner thigh and his fingers do magical things to my clitoris. (I did mention that Will is a guitar player, right? The boy knows how to use his fingers, that’s all I’m saying.) Finally he enters me, and it feels so exquisite that I can’t suppress a moan. As I hear myself, I think, I bet she screamed louder, bucked more wildly, moaned with more enthusiasm. And once X is in my mind, I can’t get her out. I’ve seen pictures of her (I asked to see them, because as I mentioned earlier, I’m a masochist.) and she was pretty. Not gorgeous, thank God, but definitely pretty. I keep thinking of Will going down on her, and the image is grotesque to me, but I can’t shake it. With X being foremost in my thoughts, an orgasm is out of the question, so I just moan encouragingly (I don’t want him to think his effort is for naught), and the sound works as I’d hoped, putting him over the edge. He comes with an explosive groan that I find sexy as hell, and then he collapses on top of me.

  We lie in each other’s arms for a long time. I hear my cell phone ring, but I let voicemail take it.

  When Will and I finally muster the energy to get out of bed, I check my messages.

  “Oh shit! Oh shit!” I cry.

  “What?” Will asks when I hang up.

  “My dad. He’s coming for a visit. The weekend after this weekend. That is so like him. He just buys the tickets and then tells me he’s coming. He knows I travel all the time for work. And the worst thing is, I’ll be in town next weekend, so I’ll have no excuse not to see him.”

  “You don’t like your dad?”

  “No, I love him, I just…my dad kind of makes me nervous. When I’m around him I feel like I can’t do anything right. Anyway, it’s the principle of the thing. Once he planned a trip and had to spend nearly twice what he paid for the ticket to change it around once he bothered to find out that I wasn’t going to be here when he’d planned to come.”

  “Why does he do that?”

  “He gets these whims and he’ll go online and goes right ahead and buys the tickets if he finds a good deal and then remembers he needs to tell me he’s coming. Not that he’d call to check if it was a convenient time for him to come, just to let me know he’ll be here. Shit.”

  “Well, I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

  “I guess it will be good for the two of you to meet. We’ll meet his new girlfriend, too.”

  “It sounds like fun.”

  Will, my love, you couldn’t be more wrong.

  W hen darkness comes, Will falls asleep in moments. I, however, lie in bed, fretting. Fretting about something new for a change, but fretting all the same: Dad. I’m not looking forward to him visiting.

  Dad’s parenting skills wax and wane. Sometimes he’s super-dad, being thoughtful, calling just to chat, sending presents just because. Other times it’s like he forgets he has children. Mom waited several years before remarrying. Dad waited about four minutes once the divorce was official. Granted, that was a full three years after he and Mom separated. He dated a lot of cool women in those three years. But he married Deanne.

  I didn’t like Deanne from the beginning, and not just because she had three kids from three different marriages, or because she wasn’t smart, wasn’t interesting, and decorated her house with things I would give away as white elephant gifts. I stood up at his wedding, though, as if I approved of the whole thing.

  Dad and Deanne wrote their own vows. They gushed about how meaningful this would be, but with four failed marriages between them, it would be more honest if they said something like: “I’ll be beside you whenever you need me, as long as you don’t get fat/go bald, your kids don’t drive me up a wall, and we don’t argue about money too often.”

  It’s not that I didn’t want Dad to get married again. I wanted him to be happy. Which was why he should not have married Deanne. Basically, she told him she was thirty-eight years old and did not have time to waste in a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere (i.e., to an altar, and quick), so he had to propose or get lost. My dad doesn’t do well with loneliness; I understand that. But marrying someone like Deanne to combat loneliness is like drinking too much at a party because you feel a little uncomfortable making small talk, and then you end up puking into the centerpiece before passing out and wetting your pants. The short-term solution makes things much, much worse in the end.

  At Dad and Deanne’s wedding, they had the poem on their invitation about how some people come into your life, leave footprints on your heart, and you are never, ever the same. What they should have written was that some people come into your life, poison your heart and mind with their toxic bullshit, and you are never, ever the same.

  Deanne seemed relatively benign at first. She did little things that, by themselves, seemed harmless enough.

  Like how she started to infiltrate Dad’s wardrobe. I was home from college for Christmas when I first discovered Dad’s newly errant fashion ways. Dad and Deanne weren’t married yet—the threat of impending nuptials hadn’t even been mentioned, but already Deanne was imposing her will.

  At the time, Dad was taking me and Sienna to the mall to finish our Christmas shopping. Sienna was fifteen then, and still skinny as ever. She’d developed some curves while I was gone, though she did her best to hide them, shrouding her figure in enormous sweatshirts and baggy jeans.

  It was cold out, and we were all wearing coats, which is why I didn’t see the shirt at first. Dad was talking about how he and Randy tried to get an armoire Dad had built into this old lady’s palatial-size house. Randy is Dad’s wildly unambitious younger brother, who spent his days getting high and his nights bartending and getting drunk. Dad sometimes tried to give him work that he had to do sober, so when Dad needed a hand with the furniture he built, he’d give Randy a call. Sienna leaned forward from the backseat to hear what we were saying.

  “Randy was, as usual, not paying attention. We had to get this enormous armoire up dozens and dozens of stairs that curved around up to second floor. That wasn’t even the hardest part. The hardest part was trying to get it through the narrow door into the bedroom. Randy kept knocking into the side of the door. Each time he was surprised that it kept crashing into the doorframe and didn’t go through.” Dad affected Randy’s perpetually confused expression. Maybe there’s something just intrinsically funny about your father pretending to be high, maybe it was just our dad’s ability to make comical facial expressions, but Sienna and I cracked up. “Googe, googe,” Dad continued, imitating the sound of the armoire slamming into the side of the door. “Fortunately, the old lady was deaf, and didn’t hear that we were smashing her extremely expensive new furniture into her door.” Dad would never let a piece of his crash into anything even once, but he always exaggerated to make his stories funnier.

  As he talked, I finally noticed the top of his shirt peeking out from where the zipper on his jacket stopped.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked when he was done telling his story.

  “What?”

  “That shirt.”

  Dad laughed. “Deanne. She thinks I need more color in my wardrobe.”

  Dad had always had decent taste in clothes. He wore subdued, high-quality shirts in greens and blues that looked good with his hazel eyes and brown-blond hair. Except that day he was wearing an atrocious shirt with vertical stripes in red, orange, white, and brown. It’s not that I would have ever accused Deanne of having good taste. She had from-a-box blond hair that she hairsprayed until it was crispy and encircled her head i
n an ironic nimbus and she wore bright blue eyeshadow with her blue eyes. Still, this shirt of Dad’s was unconscionable.

  Sienna peered at the shirt in question. “Jesus, Dad,” she said, shaking her head. “What was she thinking?”

  Dad chuckled. “You should have seen the pants she got me. Light blue corduroys with inch-thick ribbing. I told her I’d wear this shirt if she returned those pants to the store, and I never had to lay my eyes on them again.”

  We had a fun day with Dad, joking around and catching up on things.

  All the fun faded as soon as we got home to Deanne and her brood. I didn’t like any of them. I didn’t even like their dog, and usually I love dogs. He just seemed dumb and contrary and without a shred of personality, just like the family who’d raised him.

  Deb was Deanne’s oldest at thirteen. She was probably about twenty-five or thirty pounds overweight for her height and already wore a C-cup. Like her mother, she had faux blond hair that was white in places and yellow in others. She wore skintight jeans and cropped sweaters that hugged her prodigious chest and revealed the ring of fat that hung over her jeans.

  Trevor, eight, and Dillon, four, were strange-looking, with dark, sunken eyes, sullen expressions, and too-large heads. They looked dim-witted, as if they’d been dropped on their heads as babies.

  Dad had dated some cool women since the separation, and Deanne wasn’t smart enough, witty enough, or classy enough for him. I just couldn’t take her seriously. I thought Dad would surely come to his senses soon.

  My friends thought that I wouldn’t like Dad to fall for anyone who wasn’t my mom, but that wasn’t true. I’d spent too many years listening to my parents endlessly bicker about money and mortgage payments and credit card bills to think they could possibly be any good for each other anymore. I wanted him to find somebody. Somebody who wasn’t Deanne.

  I did my best to be polite when I was around Deanne and her kids, but it was a relief to go back to school so I could stop the charade.

  The next time I came for a visit was late in March, over spring break. I stayed with Mom and Sienna again—the house Dad was renting was small and every available inch of space was taken up with power tools and carpentry supplies. On my second night home, Dad took me to a fancy restaurant. He joked around over appetizers and salads, but as the entrees were being served, his expression became serious.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I proposed to Deanne a few days ago and she accepted.”

  “What? I had no idea you were even thinking about marriage.”

  “Deanne’s very eager to get married. She pointed out that at her age, she can’t afford to waste her time in a relationship that’s not going anywhere.”

  “So basically, she bullied you into proposing.”

  “I’ve just come to see that this is the best thing.”

  The best thing, like having a hysterectomy was better than having cancer or saving one cojoined twin was better than letting them both die. Like he wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t see what else he could do.

  I sat there for a moment in stunned silence. “But you’re still married,” was all I could manage.

  “Your mom and I met yesterday, and we got the last details agreed on. It’s been three years. Three bitter years. We’re ready to be done with it. The divorce should be final by the end of the month.”

  “So when is the wedding?”

  “August. We’d like you and Sienna to be bridesmaids.”

  I agreed, but after I returned to school, an uneasiness settled into my stomach that wouldn’t go away.

  I stayed in town at school that summer, waitressing at a Mexican restaurant known as the place in town for margaritas. I told Mom and Dad that I was staying in town because I didn’t want to lose my job, but that was only partly true. I didn’t come home because I didn’t think I could handle it. Sienna made it sound like she was living on a set of a soap opera. Every day was filled with overblown theatrics and hysteria. Mom was crying daily over the fact that Dad was moving on so quickly while she was still reeling from the demise of her marriage. Dad was going through life mechanically, doing what Deanne told him to do.

  Sienna and I talked often that summer. Whenever our conversation came around to Deanne, our words began flooding out, tumbling over each other’s. We didn’t care that we interrupted each other and essentially had the same conversation a thousand times. We just wanted to talk, to get all the tangled emotions out.

  “Dad dated so many cool, intelligent women since the separation,” I said, for the twentieth time that summer. “Women who were funny and had a shred of personality. I thought he’d get bored of Deanne, find someone worthy of him. Instead, she’s the one he’s marrying.”

  “I was staying over at their new house last weekend—can you believe they got a new house already?” Sienna said. “A month after the divorced is finalized they’re moving into this enormous place. It’s got five bedrooms and a swimming pool. She works as an assistant to a tax attorney. She’s like an administrative assistant or something, so I’m sure she can’t help out that much financially. I don’t know how the hell they could afford the place. Anyway, I woke up and came downstairs and nobody was around. There were fresh-baked muffins on the counter. I assumed they were for breakfast, so I had one. When Deanne came in from the garage, she started screaming at me about how those were for Trevor’s Sunday school class, and now she had to bake a whole new batch because now she was one short and how I was so selfish, doing whatever I wanted without thinking about anyone but myself. She started throwing pots and pans around, I mean, it was scary. She just lost it. I know she wouldn’t have gone off at me like that—”

  “And over something so stupid…”

  “—If Dad had been around. It was like her eyes rolled into her head and her head spun around a few times and she just revealed the monster inside that’s been lurking under the surface all along.”

  “I can’t believe she called you selfish. You’re the nicest, least selfish person I know.”

  “It gets better,” Sienna continued. “Have you gotten the bridesmaid pattern in the mail yet?”

  “No.”

  “She’s sending you the pattern and the material, and you have to go find someone to make it. She’s talking about how nice it is of her to buy the material so all we have to pay for is the seamstress. It’s like, hello, it’s Dad’s money. Anyway, the material is pastel flowers…”

  “It is not.”

  “Oh, yes, it is, big ones. The pattern calls for a bow on the butt…”

  “No!”

  “Yes. I mean it’s not huge. It’s this kind of country look. Country bumpkin really. And it has these puffy half-sleeves on the arms. The skirt billows out so it makes your butt look enormous.”

  “How could she?” Not that it was actually a surprise, or at least, shouldn’t have been. But still, I was not happy.

  I came home a few weeks before the wedding to help get things ready. Even though Sienna had told me about the house, I was blown away by how luxurious it was. Sienna and I had grown up in a modest two-bedroom. I couldn’t imagine how they could afford this.

  It was so strange staying with Deanne. I didn’t know if I was imagining it, but every time Deanne looked at me, she did so with venom in her eyes. One night when Dad had to work late at the office, Deanne made dinner just for her and her kids. She didn’t even offer me any. It was the weirdest thing. I said, “Well, I guess I’ll make some mac and cheese,” expecting her to say I could have some of the casserole with them, but she didn’t say anything. I felt like such an outcast. I didn’t feel I belonged at all.

  Over and over I was reminded this is not my home by little things, like the fact the paper towels were kept under the sink instead of on the counter like they were when I was growing up, or how the brand of cereal she bought was something my family would never buy. In the weeks before the wedding, in my eagerness to do away with
the awkward rift between us, I logged countless hours doing little things for the wedding, like assembling dozens of little bags of candy-covered almonds (which took forever), getting everything ready to get to the reception site, and running around doing other little last-minute stuff. She never thanked me for anything, and, in fact, she did her best not to talk to me. Even when I worked across the kitchen table from Deanne preparing a hundred bottles of bubbles for the guests to blow as Dad and Deanne exited the church, we worked in silence. And she never once said thank you. At that point, I was officially pissed off at how this woman was treating me, so I said, sarcastically, “You’re welcome for the help.”

  “What do you want me to do, give you a medal? I think your father paying for your ridiculously expensive education should be reward enough.”

  Her comment took me aback. I started thinking defensive thoughts like, Dad only helps pay for school. I’ve won scholarships…I work twenty-five hours a week…plus, I’ve taken out enough student loans to keep me in serious debt until well into my thirties…

  I told myself it was stupid to get defensive, but I couldn’t help it. You don’t grow up in a family where money ignited arguments daily and not know about the tension and quiet bitterness money can create.

  I felt so acutely lonely after just a couple weeks there. It was very clear that Deanne thought of my sister and me as mooches siphoning money away that she thought should be hers.

  It was an outdoor wedding. I followed Deb, Sienna, and Deanne’s sisters down the aisle—step together, step together. We stood flanking the altar beneath the searing hot sun. In minutes, my makeup was melting, my hair was shellacked with sweat to my forehead and neck. I ran my tongue across the salty perspiration of my upper lip and looked over the expansive lawn at guests I didn’t know, watching Dad in his plastered-on smile marrying a stranger, marrying a woman he didn’t particularly seem to like.