by Melissa Ford
I don’t know which part stunned me more: that he knew that a white screen would mean ten times more to me than a bouquet of flowers or the fact that he was there on time, exactly when he said he would be. All I know is that these two tiny gestures made me fall back in love with him.
I fell in love with him again as I washed my hair in the shower, realizing that for the first time in years, Adam was waiting for me instead of the other way around. I fell in love with him again when I shyly came out of the bathroom to slip into my bedroom area and saw that he was distracted by taking photos with his cell phone of my salt and pepper shakers against the white screen.
And then I fell in love with him again when he took my hand as we walked down the street, neither of us knowing exactly where we’re going (I mean, yes, in that moment we were headed toward the restaurant, but I mean in the larger sense of the direction of this relationship), but somehow both of us knowing without saying it aloud that we’ll be heading wherever that is together.
I CLICK OPEN the post I wrote several months ago after a particularly good date and re-read it before closing it again, leaving it still unpublished in the drafts folder on my blog. I didn’t publish it at the time because I was worried that Adam would read it and get scared off. How mortifying if I had to endure Adam’s face after reading about our undying love for one another if he furrowed his brow and said, “uh, Rach, I only read the post because I was actually on your blog to leave you a comment about how I didn’t think this was working.”
Now, several months later, things are clearly working. So much so that I’ve moved back in and stacked up my yoga pants in the closet. But now the post feels out-of-date, a little too early-on dreamy to convey exactly how settled and calm I feel now that Adam and I have gotten the chance to get to know one another again, especially learning all the changes we both went through during our time apart.
I obviously need to write a new version of the post, but I pause for the hundredth time in front of a blank screen, watching the cursor blink at me like a rhythmic eye. It feels as if it’s staring at me, incredulous that I still haven’t written yet about Adam. I’ve often called my blog my computer therapist, but that description hits a little too close to home today as my blog stares coolly back at me, silently asking me to delve into the recesses of my mind to figure out why I haven’t told anyone yet about Adam if I am so deeply in love.
I don’t have the energy for a virtual psychotherapy session today. I close my blogging software and head out of the apartment to Arianna’s for a good dose of procrastination.
JULY IN THE city is soupy: a hot, sticky, bubbly mess of taxi cabs, slow-walking tourists pushing enormous strollers, cranky kids, and sun-melted gum. I sidestep someone’s discarded wad of Trident, inadvertently crushing a still-smoldering cigarette with the tip of the sandals Arianna picked up for me from a photo shoot, and dash through the intersection. Adam always strolls casually across the street. If he has the pedestrian crossing sign, he’s going to exercise his right to walk by squeezing every second he can from the anxious cab trying to make a right turn without hitting him. I, on the other hand, dart across the street like an apology. Summer in the city brings out my inner nervousness that I smother under scarves and heavy coats in the winter time.
I slow down once I’m back on the sidewalk and push my way into the upscale deli next door to Arianna’s building, waiting impatiently for a poppy seed bagel with cream cheese and an iced coffee. Mopey Maria, the owner’s daughter and the slowest coffee pourer in the world, is behind the counter. She’s the type who usually forgets to attach the lid properly, splashing half the contents of the cup across the counter as she sets it down. Because the deli is right next to Arianna’s building, I come here often enough that she should recognize me too, but if she does, she doesn’t do anything to indicate it, choosing instead to stare at the cookie display as if madeleines are the most fascinating confection in the world.
“Actually, Maria,” I say, carefully enunciating her name as if this will jog her memory that I’m Rachel Goldman who prefers her to move a little faster, “why don’t you throw in a sprinkle cookie for Beckett.”
“For who?” she asks slowly, taking a square of tissue paper out of the box in the cookie case. Her hand passes over the perfectly round cookie in the back to grab a half-broken one from the middle of the tray.
“My friend Arianna’s son. Beckett. I come down here with him all the time.”
“Oh, yeah,” she finally says, my face clicking into place in her slow-moving mind. “Hey, Rachel.” She hands me the paper bag. And that’s when I first notice that Maria is sporting a tiny diamond ring on her left hand. She follows my gaze to her hand and notes the ring as if she’s seeing one of the various summer flies that buzz around the cash register. She takes my bagel out of the toaster and then stands around for a moment, apparently forgetting the next step in preparing a cream cheese bagel.
“Did you get engaged?” I ask. If my voice doesn’t jolt this woman into movement soon, my bagel will be rock hard by the time it makes its way to my mouth.
“Last week,” she tells me. She sighs and slowly lifts the cream cheese spreader as if she is removing King Arthur’s Excalibur.
“Well, congratulations,” I hurriedly add. “I actually have to get upstairs if that bagel is done.”
“My dad hates him,” Maria sighs.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say as politely as possible, staring at my cooling bagel and trying to move it over to my hand with telekinesis.
“He thinks that I’m making a huge mistake.”
With no one behind me in line, I can see that I’ve been chosen as the giver of Mopey Maria’s free therapy session of the day. If I’m going to have to listen to her bemoan her relationship, the least she can do is pass my coffee over the counter to make it bearable. But without a clear stream of caffeine coming my way, I cut right to the heart of the matter, pointing at the cream cheese spreader at the same time as a reminder.
“My bagel, Maria. What it comes down to is whether you think you’re making a mistake. Do you think you’ll have regrets?” I ask her.
“I don’t think so,” Maria answers slowly. “But I’m not really sure how you know.”
“You just do,” I tell her, tapping my hand on the counter. “You can’t let other people’s opinions invade your relationship. If you’re happy, you should ignore everyone else and follow your bliss. That’s what I would do.”
Maria finally returns the spreader to the tub of cream cheese and starts wrapping my sandwich. “Would you marry someone if your parents hated him?”
I silently think to myself that I wouldn’t date someone if I were literally getting that sort of grief; I wouldn’t let the relationship proceed to the point of marriage. But I also can’t imagine whom my parents would hate with that intensity. Maybe a gun-toting Republican. On the other hand, if Arianna had a problem with Adam, it would have stopped me in my tracks. Her opinion means the world to me, and I often think that she knows me better than I know myself. At the very least, she knows me better than my parents.
“Yes,” I say firmly. “At the end of the day, it’s not going to be your father or anyone else living your life. It’s yours alone. Therefore, you need to do what makes you happy, Maria. What feels right to you. And ignore everyone else who isn’t on board with your plan.”
“But what if my dad is right?”
I can see that Maria needs more therapy than I can give her before the ice in my coffee will melt. I plaster on my best sympathetic face and shrug as she hands me my bagel. “I still need that iced coffee.”
She pours it slightly faster than usual, taking a moment to secure the lid in place. My payment for my free advice. She gives me a tight smile that has the effect of making her look extra miserable. Even five minutes with Maria can bring down a person’s bliss.
I dart
into Arianna’s lobby, past the cruddy sofa across from the front desk that has absorbed every woman’s perfume from the last 100 years, and leap into the recently-vacated elevator before the doors can close. It’s New York choreography—city ballet—to catch the elevator without wasting a hot second, and it makes up for the time wasted at the deli.
Arianna opens the door, scooping Beckett up simultaneously so he can’t toddle out into the hallway. He arches his back and screeches in protest, and Arianna rolls her eyes. “This honeymoon period of working at home has come to an end,” she tells me. Arianna is a finisher for a designer, affixing zippers and doing beadwork, and she usually works out of the apartment, taking freelance seamstress projects on the side.
“What?” I try hard to keep the astonishment out of my voice. I’m sure anyone else would have seen this coming. Having Arianna at home may mean more to me than it does to Beckett. Where will I go for my midday bitch sessions? Who will accompany me on Zabar outings?
“Well, we knew this couldn’t last forever,” Arianna tells me, setting Beckett back on the floor so he can return to pressing the same button on his Fisher Price farm over and over again, filling the apartment with the sound of an electronic cow mooing.
“We did?”
“I did,” Arianna says dryly. “He’s getting into everything at this point. When he naps, I can get a lot done, but all other times, it’s impossible. Sorry, bud, but I’m shipping you off. Mama’s got to pay the rent.”
“Oh,” I sigh, perhaps a bit too loudly because even Arianna looks at me strangely. “He’s going somewhere. You’re going to keep working here.”
“Not exactly. I found a nanny share for Beckett. Two days a week, another little boy and the nanny will be here, and I’ll be taking space at work. Three days a week, they’ll be a few blocks away at the boy’s apartment. I haven’t decided what I’ll do at that point—work here or just stay at the loft. It may just be easier to have everything at the loft. Anyway, now that Ethan has moved in here, there’s just less space. All of his crap has taken over my work space.”
My brother Ethan moved in a few weeks ago, giving up his Brooklyn apartment. A fantastic side effect of my best friend dating my brother is that I can now see both of them at once.
“But what about . . . getting stuff done here? Like the laundry?” I ask.
“Rachel,” Arianna says firmly, “we’ll have lunch.”
I nod my head, trying to get accustomed to this new plan. I’m not the best person when it comes to change. I busy myself with taking out Beckett’s cookie and arranging it on one of his Sesame Street plates. He eyes it suspiciously, as if he’s gearing up for the Mother of All Tantrums if you dare eat a sprinkle cookie on his plate in front of him. But when I place it on the low coffee table and walk away, his body releases the pent-up howl, and he goes to town, peppering the floor with cookie bits.
“I had to give Mopey Maria therapy in order to get my bagel,” I tell Arianna. She nods in agreement.
“About the engagement? Her father hates the guy? We had the same conversation yesterday when I had to run in there with Ethan to pick up dinner.”
“What did you tell her?” I question, taking a bite of my now somewhat cold and definitely hard poppy seed bagel.
“I told her that maybe her father could see something that she couldn’t see. That he obviously had her best interests at heart, and she should reconsider marrying the guy if she’s getting this sort of feedback,” Arianna says, picking up a stray pair of Beckett’s socks.
I stare at her for a moment. “That’s terrible advice. She’s supposed to live her life based on everyone else’s whims?”
“Not everyone else,” Arianna says carefully. “We’re talking about her father; someone who knows her well. Someone who has a broader perspective that comes with age.”
“So if your parents hated Ethan, you would have dropped him?”
“Yes,” Arianna says honestly, which is precisely why I love her, though my loyalty to my brother makes me cranky with her answer. “If they made a strong argument for why we shouldn’t be together, it would have been stupid to ignore them. What? I should only take advice if it confirms what I already want to do?”
“Of course not!” I realize this is all hypothetical since Arianna’s parents—as far as I know—approve of their relationship. I only see her parents when they come to the city for a visit. They’re wholesome, Midwestern types, the sort who support their daughter through any facet of life but would love for her to settle into a traditional marriage that reflects their traditional marriage. As if she mirrored her life to resemble theirs, it would confirm their life choices. I could see them approving of any relationship that looked as if it had the legs to walk itself down the aisle.
Plus, it’s hard to not like Ethan. Being in a relationship with Arianna has aged him, in a good way. He has finally taken a normal job as the photography teacher at a ritzy private school on the Upper East Side, which means he no longer mooches off of our sister, Sarah, or me. He’s even teaching adult education classes during his off-time in the summer months. He’s fantastic with Beckett, falling easily into a parenting role. And he’s retained all of his prior good points such as being easy-going and selfless. Her parents would be crazy not to like him.
“If I ask someone’s opinion, I want to hear what they have to say,” Arianna finishes. “Which is why I rarely ask for anyone’s opinion.”
In that moment, I’m dying to ask if my brother and Arianna are planning to get married. Part of our unspoken agreement is that beyond some surface topics, we never delve deeply into her relationship with Ethan. Until recently, I’ve been grateful to not be privy to the fine details—I mean, who the hell wants to think about their brother in the bedroom? But lately, it also means that there’s a strange distance between us. Arianna has always shared every small detail with me, and I use those facts along with her facial expressions, hand gesticulations, and how much chocolate she’s consuming to gauge where the relationship is heading.
Suddenly, I’m feeling my way through Arianna’s life in the dark, without a sense of where she’ll be six months from now much less six weeks from now. Perhaps that is why her announcement about work threw me for such a loop—because like Ethan moving in, it was stated as if I was following along a story. Except that I’m not. Or it’s as if the book has suddenly changed to Braille—the words still clearly on the page, but non-accessible to my eyes. I would hazard a guess that Mopey Maria even knows more about where Arianna stands on her relationship with Ethan.
This is the side we never considered during those first giddy thoughts about the possibility of becoming actual sisters.
BY 5:30 P.M., I’ve pulled my hair up into a high ponytail, applied a thin layer of lip gloss, and traded my yoga pants for a pair of jeans, tank top, and ballet flats. I spent the afternoon working on a website for the book, leaving space to add reviews in the future once it goes on sale. In a few short months, the book should be in bookstores, a thought that alternately fills me with dread and excitement.
I quickly compose a post about the new site for my blog, embedding a link so people can click over to see the work I’ve done. My blog readership seems to fall into three main camps: those who want to learn how to cook and appreciate my step-by-step instructions, those who are divorced who want the camaraderie and advice of a fellow divorcée, and a small handful of people who don’t cook and aren’t divorced but found me when my readership exploded last year due to a blogging award and stay for the daily life stories that I pepper in between posts about roasting potatoes or confessions of Facebook stalking an ex.
All three camps of readers—even the non-divorced, non-cooking ones—are almost as excited as I am for my book to come out. People are able to preorder it on Amazon, and I have to admit that I spend an unhealthy amount of time looking at the book’s rank. Or scouring the Internet for
mentions on other blogs. Or making lists such as blogs I’d like to review the book when it comes out.
I hit publish on the post, craving a deluge of comments and then turn off the computer as Adam kisses the back of my neck. We’ve had a lot of talks about the blog since getting back together, and he’s more than supportive of it as long as I don’t delve too deeply into our personal life. Though as of late, he’s been teasing me that I don’t need to be this circumspect. I could, for instance, let readers know that I’ve moved back in with him, which I promise to do very soon.
I step out in our hallway, waiting for Adam to lock the door, and I start down the stairwell. “Wait,” Adam calls out, removing his key from the lock. I pause halfway between two stairs until he’s right behind me. “I want to walk with you. I haven’t seen you all day.”
Sometimes I forget that we’re still supposed to be at the courting stage. In some ways, we are. And in other ways, it feels natural to walk ahead of him, to move into perfunctory, practical interactions that all relationships must reach at some point. No one can live in a constant state of giddiness forever, and sometimes you just need to get where you’re going. Adam’s voice slows me down, makes me note the way our footsteps are echoing in the deserted stairwell, the faint smell of cold wetness that seems to always permeate the space regardless of the time of year.
He gently brushes the back of my neck with his lips, and I close my eyes, tuning out the fact that we are in a concrete-walled stairwell. He smells good, like sunshine and hair product and gum, and I lean back slightly into his chest.
“Did you miss me?” I ask.
“I always miss you,” Adam answers. We continue down the stairs together, pass through the fire door, and step outside. It is still bright out, still annoyingly hot. Not exactly the sort of weather that entices you to stand in front of a stove. I hope that we’re making something like gazpacho tonight.
We walk through a small park, pausing to coo over a puppy. It’s not really a secret that Adam is dying to get a puppy, and I’d be fully on board with the idea if puppies didn’t grow so quickly into full-sized dogs. Still, I lean against a nearby bench while he kneels down to lovingly rub his hands over the tiny black lab’s back.
