by Devan Sipher
“Take the shovel.”
“You take the shovel,” he said, embracing his inner toddler.
My grandmother flinched but didn’t say anything.
“Will one of you please take it?” I begged.
“He’s not my father,” was my father’s response.
“He’s not my father either,” my mother volleyed, eliciting another convulsion from my grandmother.
“Then why’s there five pounds of smoked salmon in our refrigerator?”
My mother grabbed the shovel. I’m guessing her intention was to force it into my father’s hands. I’m guessing, because I can only assume she had a lucid goal in mind when she thrust it toward him. Unfortunately, he chose that precise moment to sneeze. As he bent over, she whacked his forehead, drawing blood.
“Jesus Christ!” he yelped.
The rabbi’s eyes bugged out.
Laurel was right. I lived in mortal fear of becoming my parents. All my protestations about wanting to get married were lies. Marriage terrified me. When I thought of marriage, I thought of two people bickering for eternity and walloping each other with oversized garden tools. Marriage was just legal permission to torture someone with impunity.
I seized the shovel. “I’ll take care of it,” I said.
“I need a Band-Aid,” my father muttered, and a dozen purses zipped open in unison, as if bandages could solve his problems.
Why hadn’t someone stopped my parents from mating? Someone should have pointed out that liking the same radio station and brand of ginger ale made them compatible bowling teammates, not life partners. They should never have fallen in love. The fact that they did proved that love was not only blind but heartless. Not to be trusted. Of course I was afraid of marriage. I’d been imprinted from infancy to seek out a long-term dysfunctional relationship with someone who would make me miserable. It was like being a genetic carrier of a disfiguring disease—one that I could potentially pass on to another generation.
I attacked the fresh mound of dirt with ferocity, flicking a shovelful into the open grave. I heard the soft thud of impassive soil hitting wood and skidding scattershot across the coffin. It made me horribly conscious of what I was doing.
I was burying a man beneath the earth, dispatching him to the jurisdiction of invertebrates. Polonius had it wrong; we are all both borrowers and lenders. I was returning Bernie for final payment. Or was I hiding him? We bury what we want to forget, and I desperately wanted to forget seeing him in his casket. I pictured him lying there now. Worse, I pictured myself in his place. A body in a box in a hole. Alone. It all became too much. The heat and the dirt. The shovel and the blood. Laurel and Melinda. I dropped to my knees, sobbing.
My grandmother leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Bernie loved you too.”
The guests, mercifully, dispersed quickly. My parents, having regained higher brain function, escorted my grandmother to their car, where condolences could be offered with air-conditioning. I lingered beside Gary, while Leslie waited in their rental car, also air-conditioned.
“That was intense,” Gary said. “I didn’t know you felt so deeply about Bernie.”
I filled him in about Laurel’s accusation. “Standing at the graveside, I realized there’s something worse than ending up like Mom and Dad, and that’s ending up alone.” It seemed so obvious, yet I had chosen precisely that. To be alone, and, worse, I hadn’t even admitted to myself that I was making the choice.
“I know,” Gary said, placing his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
“You have?” I wasn’t alone. I had Gary. I would always have Gary. I almost welled up again.
“I proposed to Leslie last night.”
I knew how my father felt getting ambushed by a family member.
“We were waiting until after the funeral to tell everyone.” Gary hugged me. “Congratulate me. I’m getting married.”
Chapter Twenty-six
No Day but Today
“I know I shouldn’t be calling you,” I said while standing in the floor-to-ceiling lavender guest bathroom of my parents’ home. I took a deep breath, hoping I didn’t sound like an obscene caller. There was so much I wanted to say to Melinda. None of it appropriate for the particular time and place, as bladder-challenged guests jiggled the locked door.
I had snuck away from my assigned duty of greeting the parade of bereaved friends bearing brisket. I could hear my mother’s muffled voice calling my name. It was only a matter of minutes before she’d be knocking on the door, demanding I come out or confess to intestinal distress from eating too much smoked salmon.
I was in distress, but it had nothing to do with kippered seafood.
I’d been thinking about calling Melinda ever since the funeral ended. Strike that. I’d been thinking about it since the moment she ran away from me. It had been nonstop since the funeral.
I’d been afraid of her reaction. I didn’t want to cause her more pain. And I didn’t want to be rejected again. But if Laurel was right, that was all just an excuse.
The phone felt heavy in my hand as I weighed my words. I wanted to apologize. To let her know that I never meant to hurt her. But mostly to tell her I was hopelessly and helplessly in love with her and to find out if there was any chance my feelings could be reciprocated. Of course, I didn’t think that was the kind of thing to say on voice mail. So I just asked her to please return my call.
Then I tried to remember why I thought calling would make me feel better.
“Why are you still single?” Matt Lauer asked me with the discretion of a demolition wrecking ball.
It wasn’t an interview. It was an interrogation. I thought I’d be sharing amusing anecdotes about bridezillas, not defending my extended bachelorhood on national television.
“Doesn’t it bother you going to weddings week after week and not being married?”
For the past several days I’d harbored a secret fantasy of being offered a job as a cohost of the Today Show. I imagined Matt and me bonding instantly, one Jewish reporter to another (yes, he’s only half-Jewish, but it’s a genetic thing). I pictured him telling me (and America) that I’d missed my calling, and asking me to join the Today team. Then, for good measure, he’d invite me to the Vanity Fair Oscar party.
Okay, I knew Matt Lauer wasn’t really Santa Claus and Graydon Carter rolled into one, but if Elisabeth Hasselbeck could be a morning-show host, why not me?
“Do you want to get married?” Matt asked with no hint of Semitic kinship.
Of course I wanted to get married. Did being thirty-seven and single make me some kind of freak? “Yes,” I answered, sweating under the hot studio lights and regretting, well, everything about my life.
“Why?” he asked.
I smiled blankly.
“Why do you want to get married?”
No one had ever asked me that before. My eyelids swung up and down. My jaw dropped open. It shouldn’t have been such a hard question to answer.
I wanted to get married so I’d have someone to watch The Daily Show with. I wanted someone to ride with me on an overnight train through the Canadian Rockies and on a hot-air balloon in the Hudson Valley. I wanted to hold someone in my arms and make her feel protected. I wanted to put someone’s happiness before my own.
“I want to get married so I don’t have to shave my back.”
The audience standing outside the Today show erupted with laughter. I had no idea why the words of Mike Russo’s best man were still occupying cranial real estate, let alone how they had tumbled out of my mouth.
“Well, Gavin,’ Matt said, “different strokes for different folks.”
The audience laughed again. There was an eighth circle of hell reserved for mortals who dared to fly too close to the klieg lights.
“Coming up,” Matt said, looking into the camera, “taking the ‘maid’ out of ‘bridesmaid.’ After the break.”
There was a flurry of activity as the show went to commercial
. A production assistant seemed to crawl up from under me as he removed my microphone. Matt gave me a brisk handshake and a consoling pat on the back. His expression said, “Sorry, dude, but you’re going to be seeing that clip on YouTube for the rest of your life.”
Another assistant with a goatee and headset escorted me back to the green room to gather my belongings and the shreds of my pride. But pride be damned. When I had pictured the woman I wanted to love and protect, it was Melinda, and my top priority was checking my voice mail to see if she had called.
I had left her a half dozen messages and received none in return. Standing in a corner of the waiting room, amid the oversized photos of overexuberant NBC stars, I felt like a junkie getting my fix as I stabbed at my cell phone. If I had refrained from contacting her, the possibility of doing so would have remained an option. Instead, I was left without prerogatives beyond compulsively calling my voice mail.
I had no messages. The morning was a smorgasbord of disappointment.
Roxanne hurtled into the room, looking grim and clearly regretting having booked me on the show. She was accompanied by a tall, wiry guy with a mop of dark hair. They both eyed me like anthropologists examining a specimen from the species Homo uncommiticus.
“You really have a way with words,” Roxanne said. Translation: It’s obvious why you’re still single. “This is Liam O’Neill, one of our segment producers.”
“You’re one funny dude,” he said with a distracted glance my direction.
I wasn’t sure if he meant “funny” as in “ha-ha” or as in “scary.”
“We usually don’t comment on a guest’s ‘performance.’” Roxanne displayed air quotes like she was Richard Nixon with Tourette’s. “However, we try hard to maintain the quality level of the Today brand, so we felt obligated to say something to you.”
The last thing I needed was a reprimanding. I picked up my shoulder bag and grabbed a bagel for the road. There was nothing they could say I had any interest in hearing.
Liam cracked a smile. “I have a job proposition for you.”
Except that.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The Wedding Beat
“No, no, no, no, no!” squawked the exasperated bride-to-be.
I was back to being a wedding reporter, but this time I had a partner in crime. Liam had a video camera slung over the back of his shoulder and a Today Show ID hanging round his neck as we stood in the rear of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a neo-Gothic landmark in Harlem. A gospel choir was practicing thick, joyful harmonies in the amphitheater-shaped sanctuary, and accompanying, or, rather, overriding them were the yawps of Wanda Robinson, a spitfire of a woman in her fifties with café au lait skin and long, painted fingernails that were a miracle of modern cosmetology.
“Do those choir robes look pink to you?” she challenged her wedding coordinator, whose weary expression suggested it had been a long night.
“Honey, if they were any pinker, they’d be illegal south of the Mason-Dixon Line.”
“I want pink,” said Wanda, her snug green suit creeping up her ample bosom. “Not hot pink. I’ve got a hundred and fifty people coming next Saturday, and they’re not expecting a Victoria’s Secret runway show.”
“Just because they’re not expecting it don’t mean they wouldn’t enjoy it,” said a bemused man with a gray buzz cut, sitting in the last pew.
Wanda turned to us. “You can take him away any time you like.”
The “him” in question stood up and extended his hand. He was also in his fifties, with a lineman’s build, dark skin and a gentle handshake. “Duane Mackenzie. Everyone calls me Big Mac.”
“They most certainly do not,” was the immediate, high-pitched rejoinder.
“Everyone but Wanda,” he said.
“He’s not a cheeseburger,” she said with an emphatic shake of her head. “He’s a grown man, and occasionally he acts like one.”
“I’d do a whole lot more than acting if you wore one of those hot pink robes.”
Liam chuckled.
My problem was that there was only one wedding I was interested in, and that one was taking place in a little less than twenty-four hours at a synagogue four miles south. I hadn’t heard a word from Melinda, but I kept calling anyway. Listening to her voice on her outgoing message seemed to be as close as I was going to get to her. I knew I should give up, and told myself that every time I checked my voice mail.
“You have a hot date tonight?” asked Liam as he caught me looking at my phone for the umpteenth time.
Bad move. This assignment was my audition. Liam had been amused by what he called my “unpretentious” on-air style and pitched his executive producer the idea of doing a video version of my wedding column. If I aced this trial run, I’d get a staff position at three times my previous salary. If I flubbed, I’d be back on unemployment.
“No date,” I assured him. “I’m all yours.” We were setting up in the balcony while Wanda held court below. Actually, Liam was setting up. I was fidgeting with my phone and trying to look as if I knew what I was doing.
“So, you’re on the wedding beat?” Duane asked me while Liam finished attaching his camera to a tripod.
“That’s what they call it,” I said.
“I dig it,” he said, sounding every bit the jazz musician that he was.
Just my luck. I finally got a musician to interview, and I’d been instructed to stick to questions about why it took him thirty years to marry his college sweetheart.
“Oh, can’t say I know the answer to that,” he drawled. Never a promising start.
Liam grimaced behind the camera. I prodded Duane. “What was Wanda like in the seventies?”
“Same as she is today. We picked up right where we left off. Of course, she sometimes treats me like one of her fifth-grade students, but I sometimes act like one.”
That would make a lovely quote for their twentieth anniversary video, but it was doing bupkes for me.
“Duane …”
“You can call me Big Mac.” I could, but I’d feel like I was interviewing the Hamburglar.
“Guys don’t usually let the woman they love marry someone else.” Or maybe they did. I peeked at my phone while he ruminated.
“After college, she made it very clear she wanted a ring,” he said.
“What about you?”
“I wanted a new horn.” His eyes crinkled as he shot me a sheepish grin. Then he became contemplative again. “You know, it is kind of like a beat.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“The wedding beat. It’s like a drumbeat. A bass drum. Steady and slow. Getting louder and heavier as more and more people join. On bongos and tom-toms. But not everyone hears it. No, that’s not true. Everyone hears it, but some ignore it. Some people think they got a different beat inside them. They want to move to their own rhythm. And if they’re lucky, they will. They’ll find a groove that’s theirs and theirs alone, but one day they’ll look up and realize there’s no one else ever gonna dance along to that beat.”
The wedding beat.
It had been booming in my head for the last five years. Amplified week after week in couple after couple. A thunderous sound, pounding and pulsating. Incessantly. Beating me into admission that I was a failure at love. A failure at finding it. A failure at sharing it.
My phone rang. Melinda’s number flashed on the screen. I answered without thinking.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you!”
The angry male voice was jarring.
“Stop calling her,” Alexander commanded. “Stop calling her, or I promise you’ll regret it.” That’s all he said before clicking off.
I was too shocked to be upset. And I couldn’t really blame Alexander for being angry. He wouldn’t have called me if he hadn’t felt threatened. And he wouldn’t have felt threatened unless …
I was already running toward the stairs before I registered the bewildered look on Liam’s face or the inquisitive one on Duane’s. “I�
��m sorry,” I proffered midstride. “I have to go. Wedding emergency.”
I raced down 138th Street. I was endangering a job I couldn’t afford to lose. I needed to go back, apologize to Liam, and pull myself together, which was precisely what I was instructing myself to do as I hailed a taxi and recited Melinda’s address to the driver.
The cab zipped through the night streets, yet it seemed to be taking forever to reach Melinda’s block, which gave me more time to think about what I was doing and the wisdom of doing it. And that was my biggest problem: thinking too much. Every choice was a monumental task for me, because I never wanted to make a decision without having all the facts. What was considered an admirable trait in my work had become a debilitating one in the rest of my life.
I needed to let go. I needed to be the bee.
No, that was too simplistic. I was parroting other people’s advice, when I didn’t need any advice to know what I wanted. I wanted Melinda. From the moment I met her. Yet I had hesitated, waiting as always to analyze the facts. But there were no facts. There was only a feeling. And I hadn’t appreciated what an extraordinarily rare feeling it was until it was too late.
But it wasn’t too late. Not yet.
My hands were shaking as I paid the fare. I tried to do deep breathing, counting slowly from one to ten, but I kept losing tally after three. A vivid splash of colored flowers caught my eye at the corner deli, and I quickly bought a bouquet of lilacs along with a roll of mints.
I could see a light in Melinda’s window. The last steps to the front door of her building were the hardest. I was gambling everything on a Hail Mary, and if it didn’t work, there was no fallback position. I reached for her buzzer.
Then I stopped. If she wouldn’t pick up my phone calls, there was no reason to assume she would let me in. It would be easy for her to ignore my buzzing, and she wouldn’t have to risk looking at me or listening to me. I had a much better chance of wearing down her resistance if I was standing outside her actual apartment and pleading my case with only a door separating us.
