Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  That not all problems are actual problems, at least not to the people inside the relationship.

  At that moment, the phone buzzes again, and we both stare at my mother’s name on the caller ID. “I can’t take one more person being angry at me today,” I tell him, and he takes the phone from me, clearing his throat before he answers.

  I can hear my mother launch into a laundry list of problems from the fact that she still can’t find a dress and we’re weeks away from the ceremony, to that we forgot to invite one of her cousins. Adam listens patiently, rubbing my knee through the blanket as he “uh-huhs” until my mother asks him to put me on.

  “Nedra, Rachel’s having a hard day, and I was actually just about to make dinner for her. Why don’t you give me your cousin’s phone number, and I’ll call him tonight and apologize for the missing invitation. I’m not going to be much help on the dress front, but we can ask Arianna. At the very least, she’ll know some stores that you may not have looked in yet. And I’ll have Rachel call you back later?”

  My mother stammers a reply, and Adam gently closes the phone after writing down the phone number. I feel so good hearing that he’s about to take care of everything that I almost forget why I’m upset in the first place, though that floods back to me when Adam stares at me inquisitively, waiting for me to unleash my thoughts. I lean back against the pillows melodramatically.

  “I had a huge fight with Arianna and Ethan today,” I begin, “not to mention your sister.”

  “Lisbeth?” he questions.

  Before I can answer, the phone buzzes again, almost as if there is a queue of people waiting to yell at me, and the next name has been called to the front. It’s a strange number, but I recognize Oona’s daughter’s name and look up at Adam.

  “I have to take this,” I tell him.

  “You seem to be supremely popular tonight. Why don’t I go shuffle through the carryout menus, and we’ll call in dinner from somewhere.”

  I nod and sit up straighter, clicking the button to connect the call. Rebeccah’s voice comes in tired and emotional, like someone who has existed on nothing but coffee and stolen bites of food for the last few days. I bite my lip, waiting for her to say what I already know.

  “You asked me to keep you updated on my mother. She died last week, and we just finished sitting shiva. The kids went back to college. This was my first moment to sit down and call you.”

  “Rebeccah, I am so sorry,” I say, also grateful that she would use up even a second of her mourning time letting me know and immediately feel guilty for her feeling beholden to me for a phone call.

  “I don’t know if I really expressed it well in the moment, but I’m so grateful for that day you brought my father dinner down at the hospital. My mother had a knack of pulling people close to her; it may have been her liberal distribution of liquor in social situations. But I was still amazed by all the people who came down to support my father. We could not have gotten through the last few weeks without all of you.”

  I imagine a long string of people all shuffling past Xavier and Rebeccah with bags of food and bottles of Oona’s favorite root beer schnapps.

  “How is your father doing?” I ask gently. The long period of thoughtful silence on the other end of the line is enough of an answer.

  “He has lost his best friend. His great love affair. I’m not even sure if he was aware just how deeply in love he was with her until she was gone. I mean, I believe that he was cognizant that he was in love, and that the love he felt was enormous, but I’m not sure he could really comprehend the intensity until he now has to enter these days when he’s living without it. He isn’t eating. He’s not sleeping well. And even stranger, he is spending inordinate amounts of time at my shul, something he has never ever done.”

  I laugh and curl my knees into my chest, turning myself into a small ball. “And how are you doing?” I ask, even though I know I should let her off the telephone. She’s done her job, but there is something so comfortable about talking to Rebeccah after being snarled at all day.

  “How am I doing? That is a loaded question. I am glad my mother is not in pain anymore, so on one hand I’m lighter. And on the other, she is my mother. My mommy. Now that she is gone, I have thought up twenty or so questions I need to ask her. I’ve been going through her recipe box, but there are so many that she never wrote down. I’ll be okay. I’ve been throwing myself into work, into the congregation. I like focusing on other people’s Bar Mitzvahs. Weddings. It’s a good distraction.”

  “Are you looking to do another one?” I ask lightly. “You could always do mine.”

  Rebeccah pauses long enough that I start kicking myself for messing up this too—I can’t even comfort someone properly. “I would actually like that very much. That would be a very nice distraction right now.”

  I’m so stunned to inadvertently have an officiant that I can barely stammer out the important details of the wedding, feeling incredibly guilty that I just knocked another item off my to-do list in the face of Oona’s death. I’d like to think that Oona would be pleased to see life going on, at least, that’s what I convince myself as I hang up.

  Adam has disappeared into the shower, leaving a fan of carryout menus across the counter. I shuffled through them, leaving the one for Hunan Chow on top, and go back to the sofa to leave Jared a message about Oona, and then I check email while I wait for Adam to be done.

  And that is where my day finally kicks me to my knees, making me wonder what the hell I did to the universe to receive such a terrible confluence of arguments and events. I open the email from Arthur at Pâturage with the subject line “urgent,” and discover that it is not about the chef needing a final head count. It is not about the box of centerpieces I shipped off to him despite the cost in order to carry one fewer thing to Tarrytown that weekend. Instead, I learn about the pipe that burst, rendering the catering kitchen unusable, the main hall undanceable, and our wedding unfortunately and officially needing rescheduling.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ADAM TRIES TO convince me that holding off until spring won’t be the end of the world. Pâturage has offered us an open March date, promising that the farm is even lovelier in the spring, though I imagine that the beauty may be in the eye of the beholder. Based on what I know about farms, most turn into mud factories between the winter slush and spring rain.

  But I can’t wait an additional four months.

  Now that I have finally gotten to a space of peace with the wedding, am actually looking forward to saying my vows, it seems intolerable to wait even the two more weeks to the original date much less months. It isn’t even nervousness. It’s just that feeling I get on a smaller scale when I finally commit to making a purchase online. I just want whatever it is to be here instantly.

  Jared calls me back when I have made up my mind to spend the entire day in bed. I had considered turning off my phone and not checking email, but I reason that today cannot be as bad as yesterday—it’s just not possible. So Jared’s call comes through when I’m deep into my third hour of staring at the wall.

  “You sound awful,” Jared tells me. “Are you really taking Oona’s death this hard?”

  “No,” I say, immediately feeling callous. He’s going to think I’m a terrible person when I tell him that my grief about my postponed wedding trumps an elderly lady’s death. “My wedding has to be postponed. There’s a burst pipe at the farm.”

  Jared agrees that this sucks, though he doesn’t offer anything more helpful than that. We invited Jared somewhat for Lisbeth and Emily’s sake, but he really has grown into a friend over the last few months, which is always unusual to find when you reach your mid-to-late thirties. Even with the knowledge that he sometimes dates women, it hypocritically doesn’t feel like I’m overstepping a line in talking to him, though I have made myself promise that I’ll never complain about my love life
to him again. It just feels strange, like putting on someone else’s shoes.

  “Can I ask a stupid question? Why don’t you just move the wedding to a different space? I mean, are you that in love with this farm?”

  “No,” I tell him. “I mean, I like the farm, but there’s nothing particularly special about it except that it’s pretty. Where we get married isn’t really important to me at all. I just want it to happen. But where the hell am I going to find a wedding space in New York a few weeks before the wedding? Especially with all these stupid Volt weddings probably sucking up every available space in the city.”

  “Volt weddings?” Jared questions. “What about a church?”

  “You do know that we’re not Christian, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. So I guess a church is out. What about a firehouse? Don’t people sometimes hold events at the Fire Museum?”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m going to have my wedding at a firehouse?”

  “No, it’s a museum. Dedicated to firefighting memorabilia. You can rent rooms on one of the top floors. I went to a Pride event there last year.”

  “Jared, I’m not having my wedding in a firefighting museum.”

  “I thought the space didn’t matter to you. That you just wanted to get married.”

  “Then I take it back. We have no connection to firefighting in any way. At least with the farm, there’s this connection to food and cooking. Which I know is sort of only about me and not about Adam, but cooking is such a huge part of my life, and it’s tangentially what eventually brought us back together.”

  “Listen, I may be able to call in a favor from someone. Don’t stress about this yet.”

  “About this yet? Jared, I am stressed. I don’t have a wedding space anymore, and I have about seventy-five people expecting a wedding a few weeks from now.”

  “Seventy-five people . . . got it. I’m on this. Let me give you a call later.”

  “No fire museums. And seriously, if you’re thinking of something like The Center in the Village . . .”

  “I promise,” Jared intones. “No LGBT community centers. Or firehouses.”

  EVEN THOUGH I no longer have a wedding location or for that matter, a wedding date, I head over to the loft for the final fitting because I don’t know what else to do. It’s only noon—two hours earlier than when Tabitha is expecting me if she’s expecting me at all—but I hope to catch Arianna before she ducks out to avoid me. It sounds like a small party is underway as I knock on the door.

  Carey, who works in marketing, answers the door with a pen tucked behind his ear. “Rachel!” he exclaims, looking behind him. “Arianna isn’t here.”

  “I’m actually here to meet with Tabitha,” I tell him, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “Any chance Arianna is coming back?”

  “I don’t think so,” Carey says as he leads me over to one of the makeshift cubicles where Tabitha works on the other side of some low Japanese screens. She has a mouthful of pins and a model standing on a small platform, so she raises her eyebrows as a question.

  “I’m early,” I volunteer. “I can come back at the right time.”

  Tabitha moves the final pin from her mouth to the skirt’s hem. “This actually works better for me. I wasn’t really expecting to do this today, so it would be better to squeeze you in now instead of waiting a few hours. I have a meeting at two.”

  Her silence contains all of the obvious unspoken questions: why the hell did Arianna ask her to do this instead of taking care of it herself? Why did Arianna duck out instead of sticking around to help? And what the hell happened between my best friend and myself to have her ask a co-worker to complete the wedding dress alterations?

  I sit down awkwardly on a stool and wait until Tabitha is satisfied with her work on the skirt. She follows the model into their converted closet changing room to help her out of the clothes. Even though I know that it will only make me more disappointed, I can’t help but strain to listen every time the loft’s door opens and closes, bringing someone new inside.

  “It’s a great dress,” Tabitha tells me as she hangs it from a hook on the wall and motions with her head that I should undress. I self-consciously slip down to the one-piece bodysuit I purchased to wear under the dress. Tabitha helps me into the bodice, coaching me to lean forward and then slip my arms through the impossibly delicate tulle straps, finally having me stand straight as she closes the hidden zipper, which is covered with a layer of organza-covered buttons. She ties the sash to complete the outfit and holds my hand as I step up onto the platform.

  Even with my messy ponytail, lack of make-up, and telltale peanut butter smudge in the corner of my mouth courtesy of a spoonful of Jif, I look transformed. A Shoshana Shalom princess in a borrowed gown that has been temporarily altered to my measurements and which now needs to be kept an additional four months beyond the original date. I cringe inwardly as I wonder what will happen if Lisbeth’s friend tells me that I can’t keep it for that long.

  “You look exquisite,” Tabitha tells me, bending down to examine the hem.

  “Thank you. I mean, also for doing all of this work.”

  “I didn’t,” Tabitha says. “I mean, Arianna did all the stitching and then just asked me to do your fitting today. You can thank her.”

  Except that I can’t. I can’t even talk to my best friend anymore. She probably won’t even be at my wedding to see her hard work on my body as I walk down the aisle. I fight back tears by tipping my head toward the ceiling and blinking a few times as I deep breathe.

  “This section is puckering,” Tabitha tells me, running her finger along the back of the dress, near my armpit. “Crap. I need to unstitch this.”

  “I don’t think anyone will notice,” I admit, twisting a bit in front of the mirror to try to catch a glimpse of the puckered section.

  “Of course they’ll notice. This is also a little loose right here.” She digs her fingers into the front of the bodice, intimately waggling her hand against my breast without a second thought. “This is the point of a final fitting. I’ll just fix these things, and then the dress will be ready to be pressed before you wear it.”

  She helps me out of the dress, and I strain my ears as the door to the loft opens and closes once more. But no Arianna, and it makes me feel even more naked, more empty than I did before I ever tried the dress on.

  I DRAG MYSELF to my computer and sit down with a cup of hot chocolate festooned with mini marshmallows. It’s the drink my mother would make us when we came in from playing in the snow, but I always associate it with the winter day when some boys were throwing snowballs at me while I was walking home from school, and my best friend at the time—Julie Rabinowitz—had joined them, chucking a particularly wet and loose one at the ends of my hair so that it dripped onto my puffy coat. The boys had been annoying; the one from Julie had hurt.

  I held in my tears until I got into my kitchen, and then my mother made me hot chocolate after I fell apart, sobbing that I had even lent Julie my favorite Chinese Jax, the black and white one that I had made at a birthday party. My mother must have called her mother after I went to sleep, because the next morning, Julie approached me in school and apologized. We were good friends until middle school when she stole my first boyfriend. But Mark Guberman is not the point.

  I wish all problems could be solved with hot chocolate and a phone call from your mother.

  I’ve been peeking at the comments on and off for the last few days, and they’ve officially switched from being about the engagement to concern for the fact that I’ve stopped posting altogether. I’ve really missed my blog, missed reading other people’s posts or hearing their reactions to my own. When I pull my blog onto the screen, it looks exactly as it did when I left it, no overgrown weeds or condemned property signs. But it feels different, like biting into a peach and finding a tomato i
nside.

  I scroll down to the comments on the top post, determined to read them from beginning to end before I write my post. There are the falsely cheerful ones where the person offers me congratulations with a multitude of exclamation points. And there are the subdued ones that feel honest in their brevity; simple good wishes. There are a few that are outright angry, including one where the person insinuates that I was never divorced in the first place, and this whole blog was a massive scam. And then there are the ones who are angry, not because they’re pissed that I’m getting remarried and they’re not, but because I’ve withheld hope from them in not passing on the news. While they know that the fact that I’ve found love isn’t a guarantee that they’ll find love, it is proof that it happens: that love can happen again. Those are the comments that gut me.

  I’m not sure how I got my fear so wildly wrong that the readers that I have depended on to get me through the darkest days of my divorce, the ones who give me advice and confirm my beliefs and laugh at my admitted foibles and challenge my point-of-view—those people who are both faceless and collectively some of the most important voices in my life—would desert me if I no longer appeared to be the same person I was when I started. I guess I wondered if people would still read Pioneer Woman if she moved to the city and ditched the ranch? Would they still want to hear from Skinnytaste if she peppered her blog with fat-laden, butter drenched recipes in between all the healthy ones?

  Would people still want to read Life from Scratch if I was no longer rebuilding my life as one would a new house but instead was returning to a remodeled home?