Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  “You’ll make a wonderful mother,” she agrees, leaning forward to tuck my brown hair behind my ear with a wistful expression on her face. “Sunrise, Sunset” plays somewhere silently in my brain.

  We join the men back in the kitchen, standing awkwardly while they dry the last few dishes. I may cook sprawling meals in my own apartment, but when I’m in my parents’ house, I play by their rules when it comes to housework.

  My father drops us off at the train station, and we catch the two-level New Jersey transit back into the city, choosing the higher tier so we can look down at each station on the people getting in.

  “So, November,” I begin when the train starts moving. “That’s really, really soon. Too soon, Adam.”

  “You can plan a wedding in four months. I promise, my mother will help. It’s not going to all fall to you.”

  “I don’t mean the planning of things,” I say carefully. “It’s just that we’ve only been back together for five months. Why do we have to rush? We could have a long engagement, let things unfold slowly.”

  “I don’t want to wait. I mean, what would we be waiting for? To be sure that you’re the person I want to be with for the rest of my life? I’m already sure of that. We both want kids. We want to travel together and take classes with one another and support each other unconditionally. We’re ready for marriage,” Adam tells me. “Are you getting cold feet, Rach?”

  “Of course not,” I say a shade too forcefully. I cover up my weirdness with a long kiss, and by the time I pull away, I’ve reminded myself that I do love him, that surely I can catch up to where he is with four months between now and the wedding. “You’re right. November it is.”

  Adam takes my hand and rests his head against my shoulder, holding a paperback book fanned open in his left hand, and I read over his lap, just a few paragraphs of Catcher in the Rye.

  With my parents out of the way and my sister on the agenda for tonight, that only leaves telling my in-laws-to-be . . . again.

  Chapter Four

  ADAM’S PARENTS still have an apartment in Manhattan despite the fact that they spend the majority of their time at the beach house in Amagansett. I can count the number of times on one hand that we have actually seen them in the apartment—a cold, museum-like place that has a library as well as a formal sitting room. The first time I saw their place, I wanted to run through it like Little Orphan Annie hunkering down for Christmas with Daddy Warbucks. Even though their Manhattan apartment is a taxi ride away, they almost exclusively make us truck out to the Hamptons, even in summer when the traffic is ghastly regardless of whatever time or day you leave.

  Sometimes we rent a car, but toward the end of my marriage, when I could hardly stand sitting in the same space with Adam much less sit in a hot car in traffic, we took the train. Even when it was crowded, the Cannonball was preferable to inching forward on the Long Island Expressway. Even though I once again enjoy being trapped in a car with Adam, the train remains a habit, and on Friday night, we find ourselves in Penn Station, boarding one of the middle cars on the Montauk train at precisely 3:58 p.m., Adam still dressed in his summer school teaching clothes.

  Adam slips a can of Diet Coke out of his backpack and stows our luggage on the overhead racks. We pack heavier for his parents’ house than we do for any other place we go. We need our beach clothes and our evening wear and casual khakis for when we run out in the morning for coffee and croissants. We always bring books, though we never end up having time to read them because when we’re sitting on the beach, his mother is gossiping about someone from town—we know the ongoing sagas of many an Amagansettite—and when she goes back into the house because she cannot stand the heat, we are always confronted by an old school friend of Adam’s whose parents have also purchased real estate on Long Island. It sometimes seems as if his entire grade school packed up and moved 110 miles eastward to the same town.

  We have a quiet ride out to their house with a single stop in Jamaica to switch trains. I mostly stare out the window, wondering how our announcement is going to go over. Adam doesn’t seem the least bit worried, making his way through a bag of M&Ms and reading a magazine while taking time every few minutes to tap me on the leg lovingly.

  “I forgot to tell you,” Adam says, his eyes still on his magazine. “My sister is coming into town.”

  “Lisbeth?” I ask even though he only has one sibling.

  He places a finger on the page to hold his place. “I called her today on the way to work to tell her our news. She’s really excited and wants to talk to you later.”

  I actually like Lisbeth quite a bit, and she was one of the major losses that came with the divorce. She is six years younger than Adam, angular and dark like a barracuda with enormous eyes. She is a printmaker—a very successful one at that, and her tiny, bony hands usually have black ink in the creases. She has a quick laugh, and I used to enjoy when she’d come to visit, staying up late regaling us with stories about life in Chicago. I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since the divorce except for a few quick moments on the phone where we confided that we missed each other very much as well as a handful of emails. Lisbeth always has good intentions to keep in touch, but she is a bit flighty, taking off at a moment’s notice for an art exhibit that she hears about or to visit a friend in the Peace Corp.

  I also love Lisbeth because no one drives my mother-in-law crazier than her only daughter.

  “When you say she’s coming into town, do you mean that she’ll be at your parents’ house this weekend?” I question.

  Adam shrugs. “You know Lisbeth; who knows what she means. She could show up tomorrow in Amagansett, or she could call us next Wednesday and ask us to pick her up from La Guardia.”

  I am hoping that she comes sooner rather than later, saving me from yet another round of stories about my mother-in-law’s neighbors. If there is one thing Lisbeth is good for, it’s changing the conversation.

  We depart the train at Amagansett station, and his mother sweeps in to give us kisses on each cheek as if she hasn’t seen us in years instead of six weeks ago.

  My ex-mother-in-law (soon to be mother-in-law-again), Anita Goldman, has impeccable taste. Everything is timeless—from her understated diamond solitaire necklace to the simple black and white design she has on her Wedgwood plates—and yet she always appears solidly within the confines of what is currently fashionable. She has confided that the secret is to choose a trendy item as a focus piece for the outfit or a decoration in the room and use it to draw all the attention. Hence, how everyone notices her exquisite shoes, always weeks or months before they start appearing in every magazine, or the ring that she picked up at one of the town’s boutiques, and they don’t pay attention to the fact that the rest of her outfit is simple, barely memorable, and not particularly cutting-edge.

  Tonight, she is dressed in a sweater set and pants that are incongruous with the heat. Anita Goldman never sweats. My eye, though, goes directly to her distraction piece, a filigree butterfly pin so delicate that it looks as if a strong wind could send it fluttering off her cardigan.

  “It’s stunning,” I tell her, knowing full well that she likes it when I notice these sorts of things.

  She smiles and pats me on the arm wanly, a tap that conveys that she wishes I would take up her fashion advice. She would love to play Professor Higgins to my internal Eliza Doolittle. I am not wearing a matching sweater set and filigree pin. My grey T-shirt and cotton skirt look positively mailroom next to her corner office clothes.

  “I got us reservations at Poire,” she tells us as we slip into his father’s car. They took us to Poire the last time we visited them, a tiny, expensive French bistro in Bridgehampton, back in the direction we just came.

  “That sounds fantastic,” Adam tells her, always the dutiful son. He knows how much I didn’t like Poire the first time around nor the idea of driving back twenty
minutes toward the city in order to eat, so he gives me a meaningful look in order to appease both of the women in his life simultaneously. To be fair, I did gush about the first meal to Anita since I know she likes confirmation that she has chosen the best. The best town in the Hamptons, the best jewelry from the boutique, and the best overpriced French bistro meal that money can buy.

  “I love Poire,” I add to be polite.

  “You’ll have enough time to set down your bags and change,” she says as my father-in-law pulls into traffic.

  Edward Goldman is a quiet man who doesn’t seem to hold a lot of opinions. He is sort of like a chameleon in that regard, changing colors depending on whom he’s around. With Anita, he’s the gentleman. With Lisbeth, he’s the inquisitive art critic. With Adam, he’s the lover of used bookstores—at least the ones that carry leather-bound first editions. In this way, he is a perfect match to anybody and everybody, that is, except when he needs to navigate more than one person at a time. In those cases, such as tonight when every seat in the car is occupied, he sort of goes gelatinously clear and silent. Adam looks exactly like him, and staring at my father-in-law is like seeing Adam thirty years down the line, when our own future children are grown and visiting us.

  “Lisbeth told me this morning that she’s coming out to New York,” Adam tells them.

  His mother makes a hand gesture in the air, a wiggling of her fingers as if to say that she is at a loss on understanding her younger child. “And when is she gracing us with her presence?”

  “She didn’t say,” Adam admits. “She just told me that she’s coming out to New York.”

  “Maybe she’ll come for the sandcastle contest,” his father muses. “She wanted to photograph that last year. She said something about making a three-dimensional print with sand embedded in the paper.”

  Anita looks at her husband as if he has switched to speaking Urdu and then bulldozes her way through a plethora of topics including her thoughts about the tourists this year, the price of gasoline, and their neighbors down the street who are building a monstrosity of a guest house. I tune her out as I often do and stare out the window at the houses and swatches of beach that peek out behind buildings. If we didn’t need to navigate my in-laws-to-be-again every time we’re in the Hamptons, I would actually love this escape from the city. As is, it’s more like work than play.

  We pull up to their house, and my father-in-law leaves the car in the gravel driveway since we’ll be going out again soon. The house never ceases to amaze me—the grandness of the white painted wood exterior, the enormous windows, the view of the ocean. It is all in the details—from the tiny crystal starfish with a single light inside that hangs over the door to the wicker basket filled with fluffy folded towels on the screened in porch (all the same calm shade of pale blue).

  The first time we saw them after we started dating again, Anita set up an additional guest room and stated that she thought I’d be more comfortable with my own space. Like a proper, unmarried lady, she implied with her coolly raised eyebrows. Adam intervened and told her that we’d be sharing a room, just as we had for our twelve years of marriage. I was thankful because I couldn’t think of anything lonelier than sleeping by myself after sharing a room with him again.

  This time, she doesn’t even mention it, and we take our bags up to our usual bedroom. It is one of my favorite rooms in the house—crisp white walls and polished wood floors, a circular brightly-colored woven rug next to the bed, and a window that looks out on the ocean. It is currently low tide, and the water looks very far away, a great expanse of beach between ourselves and the waves.

  Adam comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist, resting his head on my back. “How are you?” he asks, always trying to run interference between his parents and my feelings. But I’m strangely calm, even enjoying the idea of a weekend where all that is expected of me is to eat, quietly listen to boring stories, and feign amazement at Anita’s inclusion in one exclusive event or another. Even though we’re here to tell them our news, it’s almost as if we have left our engagement back in the city and taken a momentary vacation from it.

  “I’m fine,” I tell him. “Are you ready to tell your parents?”

  “Are you kidding?” Adam says sarcastically. “I could not be more excited to hear my mother’s commentary.”

  “I’m sure it will mirror the warm reception our impending nuptials got from my mother.”

  These are the moments when I can easily convince myself that I’m making the right decision. When we’re sarcastically speaking about the rest of the world while we carve our own little island—just the two of us. When I can feel his breath coming through the thin fabric of my T-shirt. When I can feel his hands wrapped around my waist. These are the moments when I’m positive that Adam is on my side; and that is important—to have someone fully on your side as you navigate life. As I sense a strange distance from Arianna, I cling to this part of Adam even more. Love is knowing that someone puts you first at the same time as you put them first.

  We change and head back downstairs where Anita has set up a gorgeous spread for cocktail hour. The Goldmans are the only Jewish family I know that has a formal cocktail hour. Random drinks in the middle of the afternoon; of course, every family sometimes does that. But the Goldmans set up crackers and spreads, bowls of berries that they picked up at a roadside stand, and sparkling wine. Anita hands me a glass when I enter the kitchen and smiles at us expectantly.

  “Adam told me that we were going to be toasting something. Did you sell another book?” she asks me, picking up her own drink which is already half finished.

  “The first one hasn’t even come out,” Adam reminds her. For someone who is fairly happily married, my mother-in-law-to-be-again asks constantly about my divorce book. I don’t believe that she’s actually going to read it, therefore, it either means that she’s trying hard to connect with what she thinks is important to me, or she just wants enough details so she can talk about it at her next dinner party without actually putting in the work to turn the pages.

  Adam goes over to the counter and grabs a handful of crackers. He is the only person I know who can eat through a bag of M&Ms on the train, snack on crackers at cocktail hour, and still put away an entire lobster tail at dinner and not gain an ounce. “Rachel and I are getting married.”

  Anita’s face freezes as if it has been suddenly botoxed by an invisible dermatologist. She looks back and forth between us, and I can tell that this is pretty much the last piece of news Anita guessed. Edward hangs back, seemingly gauging his wife’s response, and she recovers, setting down her glass to envelop me in her arms. “Well, that is just wonderful, unexpected news.”

  I can feel both of them sizing up my belly with their eyes, wondering why the rush to the altar for a second time. I pointedly take a sip of wine to answer that unspoken question, and Anita’s brow furrows and then calmly releases as something occurs to her.

  “I have to call Cory at the Times,” Anita says, clicking across the kitchen floor to where she keeps her to-do list. She scrawls something across the top line. “This is just the type of story that the Times eats up. You remember Cory Abramson, Alicia Abramson’s youngest son? He now works for the wedding section. This is just the sort of story that they love for the featured couple. Second time in love.”

  “I don’t think . . .,” Adam says and makes a face. He pauses, as if the rest of the thought doesn’t need to be said.

  “What?” she says innocently. “I thought Rachel would like it.”

  Secretly, I would love it. I mean, a select few get their wedding announcement in the New York Times at all, and even fewer get to be featured as the front page story in Vows. It’s the sort of thing you cut out and frame for future generations to see. The writer in me is in love with the idea of being part of a good story, and no one determines more what is and what is not a good story tha
n the Times. It almost makes me forget how conflicted I am to be getting remarried in the first place.

  But Adam is much more shy about these sorts of things. He’s the exact opposite of his sister. If she would love her future wedding to involve riding atop a parade of elephants, traipsing down Broadway while her bridesmaids walk on stilts tossing rose petals into the crowd, Adam would like a large albeit private cross-section of his friends and family and co-workers all traditionally watching a bride in white walk down the aisle to the groom in a morning suit. Adam is old-school and reserved; I can’t imagine him brandishing about the cover of the Style section while screaming, “Look at meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

  Though as much as I hate to admit it, I would.

  “I have my students to think about,” Adam points out. “And their parents. They read the Times. I don’t need them to think about me in that way—as divorced and remarried.”

  “Sweetheart, this is hardly scandalous. It’s 2011, not 1911. Let me just call Cory and see what he says. He might say no.”

  I smile and shrug my shoulders at Adam. The reality is that Anita will get her way if she decides this is what she wants. I would be shocked if Cory could withstand her charm as she asks for this teensy-weensy favor. I would be equally shocked if she couldn’t convince her son that this is the greatest gift he’ll get at this wedding.

  Certainly, she doesn’t need to convince me. I haven’t announced the engagement yet on the blog since I haven’t even told the readers we’re exclusively dating again, and now, I might have a reason to drag my feet a little longer under the excuse of waiting for the biggest bang. I think about my future blog post, the casual link to the New York Times, the engagement photo, the comment box to collect all the well-wishers. Even if my stomach twists a little thinking about how I’m a complete hypocrite.