“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”
“You should feel the same way I do! What she’s done with you and Patrick!”
“Well,” I say. “But it’s not going to work with me and Patrick.”
But she waves her hands over her head like she’s trying to bat away a bunch of gnats, and then she goes inside.
I head back in, too. The sun is beaming through the windows, making patches of light on the oak floors. I love the bay windows, the brick fireplace, Patrick’s graceful sculpture on the mantel. I’m overcome suddenly with the feel of this room, and the high ceilings, the staircase up to the kitchen. The little decorative touches, the wainscoting in the kitchen. The way the stove leans just a bit. The soapstone sink that stopped me in my tracks that very first afternoon, when Noah was showing me around, before he knew.
And, may I just say, I love the turquoise hand-painted refrigerator. It speaks to me, this refrigerator.
Ah, this house is a sly one, piling up the memories—Blix’s and mine. The scarred table with the star carved into it. The little plants on the windowsill. The view of the park and the busy street below.
The dust motes drift down, ready to coat everything as they always have. The light continues to pour in, making shifting patterns on the floor as the breeze moves the gingko tree outside, shedding the last of its four leaves, pretending we belong together.
Marnie, it’s okay to love him.
No, he won’t let me.
It’s okay to love him.
“Well, my friend, I think we struck out.”
I’m at Best Buds the next day, and I look up from deadheading the chrysanthemums, hearing a familiar voice. Sure enough, William Sullivan is standing there smiling and jingling the change in his pocket.
“If we struck out, then what are you doing here?” I ask him. Which isn’t the most polite way I’ve ever spoken to a customer, I admit. But really—he drives up from New Jersey to tell me how Lola turned him down? Has the world gone barking mad?
“Well, I’m here because we’ve got to try again,” he says, his eyes lit up. “I thought I’d visit her this weekend, our usual Saturday outing, and I thought you and I could think up something new. For me to say to her.”
“Wait a second. She turned you down, and she was furious at both of us, and yet you still think she’s going to be open to your usual Saturday?”
“Yep.” He smiles at me. “Well, I hope so, at least. I’m going to give it the old college try.”
I want to say, What is wrong with you, William Sullivan? What is it about a woman turning down your proposal of marriage that makes you think she’ll be willing to go on an outing with you forty-eight hours later? Instead I say, wearily but with a fascination at the obtuseness of the human spirit, “So you see this plan involving flowers, do you?”
“Well, sure, involving flowers. You’re a flower shop, aren’t you?”
“All right,” I say. “I have to say, though, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to change her mind. She’s pretty convinced she doesn’t want anything interesting to happen for the rest of her life.”
“Ah, I know. That’s how she feels now. She’s pretty fierce.” He chuckles. “She was something else on Thanksgiving, wasn’t she?”
“Well, yeah. She was pretty upset.”
He wanders around the shop, whistling something. And then he comes over to me at the counter. “What did you say your favorite flowers were?”
What had I said? “Gerbera daisies?”
“Oh, yes. Okay, I’d like a bouquet of those. And while you’re fixing them up, I want to tell you my plan. Because I have cooked up a great one. And I am very optimistic that this is really going to work.”
I shake my head. “William, I’d sort of forgotten that people can even be optimistic sometimes.”
“Oh, I’m frightfully optimistic,” he says. “Frightfully. Okay, let me tell you what I’ve realized. I was a basketball coach in my old life, and what happened here is that I misjudged the layup. Simple problem. I thought this was going to be a slam dunk because Lola and I were such good friends from before, and we were both lonely, and we had all this history—good, good history—but no! I hadn’t prepared for no. I hadn’t thought it all through.” He grins.
“Well, that can happen.”
“So you were right—I sprung it on her. So I’m going to baaaack up and take it sloooow, approach her another way. Today, if she’ll have me, I’m going to take her somewhere neutral. No big talks, no heavy scenes. Not even going to hold her hand. And that’s my plan. Just keep seeing her. Do what she wants. Never ask for more. No pushing. I’m going to wait it out. Woo her until she’s not scared anymore. Not make any big moves. No proposals.”
“Well, good luck to you. I wish you the best.”
“Yep. That’s the right thing. I’m launching a plan—I call it A Year of One Hundred Dates with Lola. We’ll go slow, drink a lot of coffee, see some shows, then maybe visit my house, to see my friends. Maybe we’ll take a little jaunt up to New Hampshire. Stay in separate hotel rooms, drinks by the fire, go dancing. That sort of thing. Whatever she wants, and at a pace she’s comfortable with. My goal is to give her something she can’t have in her house all by herself. Laughter. Companionship. Admiration.”
“What she says, though, is that she doesn’t want to be disloyal to Walter’s memory. That’s what you’re up against.” Uh-oh—here I go, being disloyal again. Working behind the scenes. Only somehow I can’t help myself. I love this old guy with his optimism!
He smiles widely. “But you know? I knew Walter, too, and I think he would have been glad for us. He’d like that she’s got someone to love her and look after her. We don’t have to shut down his memory.”
“Well,” I say. “Wow. This is amazing. I wish you the best of luck. I’m rooting for you hard. So you want the flowers to take to her, or do you want them delivered?”
He smiles. “The flowers are for you. Because of the first-rate magic you did.”
I stare at him. “The magic? You knew about the magic?”
“Lola told me that you and Blix are matchmakers, and that you work with magic to bring people together.”
“But the magic didn’t work. It was an epic fail.” So much so that I’m giving up on magic altogether.
“What? That’s what you think? Marnie. It’s still working. Don’t you see? It’s taking a new route, that’s all. When you’re as old as I am, you learn a couple of things about love. And one of the main things is that you can’t give up on people you love. When you really believe.”
I look into his rheumy old blue eyes, so lit up that they’re practically shooting sparks. “But what can you do if the other person has given up?” I say. It’s hard to talk through the lump in my throat.
He says, “Well, you just gotta keep trying. That’s what you do.”
“But what if you’re running out of time?”
“Honey, we’re all running out of time. And”—he lowers his voice like this is going to be momentous—“we also have all the time in the world.”
“Um, that doesn’t really make any sense.”
He laughs. “I know; it doesn’t. I thought I could make some wise pronouncement here, but I got nothing. Well, okay, except this. Here’s my bit of old-man wisdom for you: You gotta have faith in something, don’t you? And when you pick what that thing is going to be, you don’t give up on it. Just don’t. It fails, you try another way and then another.”
And he takes my hand and kisses it, like a courtly gentleman, and heads out of the store. Then he remembers something and comes back in and pays for the flowers. Once more I think if I ran over to the window, I’d see William Sullivan doing himself a little dance down the street, laughing and snapping his fingers, although nine people out of ten would know that he’s got no shot at his plan.
But what do nine out of ten people know?
You know what I miss?
I miss seeing those little sparkles,
the ones that meant something good was about to happen. That there was love around. I don’t know why, but they’ve somehow vanished.
That’s all. I just miss that.
Natalie texts me the next day while I’m in the kitchen, washing down the turquoise refrigerator in preparation for painting it. The Internet says that a person can actually buy special appliance paint that makes old fridges look like they just came from the showroom. This one could look new again, according to some of the more gung-ho commenters.
And then this text sails in. Which I’ve been expecting. The big sister weighing in on the disaster that is my life. She Who Knows Best.
I dont trust myself 2 speak w/you. Trying 2 B on ur side, but WTF? U BROKE HIS HEART AGAIN?
I broke his heart again. Yes.
AND U R LIVING WITH YOUR EX-FREAKING-HUSBAND?
No, and stop yelling.
I AM NOT GOING TO STOP YELLING UNTIL U EXPLAIN WHAT U R DOING.
Here’s what I am doing: I am right now painting a fridge. Bye.
I CAN’T EVEN.
Then please don’t.
You know what I can’t even?
I can’t paint the refrigerator some cool, professional white. I walk to the hardware store and look at the special white paint, and I even go stand in the checkout line with a can of it, but then something happens in my brain. I try to picture Blix’s kitchen with a refrigerator trying to pass itself off as a normal fridge, and I can’t.
Anybody who wouldn’t buy Blix’s house because they have no feeling for her refrigerator—well, they simply shouldn’t be allowed to have it, that’s all.
I put it back on the shelf and leave.
Things that can’t be ordinary:
Me.
Patrick.
The refrigerator.
William Sullivan.
Sorry, that’s just how it is.
Sorry/not sorry.
And where are the sparkles?
FORTY-THREE
MARNIE
Monday morning is a regular school day, and Jessica and Sammy come banging against the door early, the way they always do. I’m sort of caught off guard, because in my own little mind, everything has changed completely, and nobody but Bedford and William Sullivan—and okay, Patrick—really likes me anymore, and Patrick doesn’t count because he’s leaving and I won’t ever see him again.
But there are the two of them: Sammy with his scooter, and Jessica all harried as usual with her bag over her shoulder and her coffee cup in her hand. As soon as I open the door, she gives me a big smile and starts apologizing for not checking in on me over the weekend.
“Here you had a head injury and everything, and I’m off sorting out my own little life, not even making sure you weren’t in the hospital or something,” she says. Then she laughs. “Well, I knew you weren’t in the hospital because that real estate lady on Friday said you were perfectly fine. And also I came to check on you in the middle of the night on Thursday, and found out you were with Patrick.” She narrows her eyes a little bit when she says his name, the girlfriend body language for so what was that about, and I shrug in reply, the body language of it wasn’t anything, believe me.
Sammy seems distracted, playing with the handle of his scooter and squirming around under his backpack. Every now and then he looks up at me like there’s something he wants to say. No doubt he has opinions about how badly our magic project turned out.
Join the club, my boy. Stand in line.
All of a sudden Jessica says, “Listen! I don’t really have to be in until noon today. I was just going to go get a haircut, but what if you and I got a little breakfast first? Maybe not at Yolk, of course.” She laughs and ruffles Sammy’s hair, and he does a comedic googly-eyed look right at me and mouths the word “Yikes” where she can’t see.
Marital situations can be so confusing for the little ones. Especially the ones who’ve tried to mastermind adult lives and found it horrifyingly difficult.
“Sure,” I tell her. “Breakfast it is!”
I’d forgotten the main thing about being with Jessica: how much fun it is to have a girlfriend who is also living some version of a possibly chaotic life. Most of the time, I have to say, I seem to be the person who can’t get it together, the one being left at the altar and then cutting up her wedding dress in the preschool, the one setting out for a strange city and failing at reinventing herself even there.
And yet here is Jessica, linking arms with me, walking down the street, and she’s actually laughing about the whole Thanksgiving catastrophe. She said she and Andrew keep referring to it as Fucksgiving. “Like, one thing went wrong, and then it just set off a whole cascade until absolutely everything was shit. Was that basically your take on it, too?”
“From what I can remember. I had a convenient head injury, remember.”
“Oh, yes. Although you coped masterfully even after that. As I recall, you took care of pretty much everyone, even through the yelling and screaming. And you solved two of your most pressing romantic problems—both Noah and Jeremy. It was actually kind of epic.”
“One of the only Thanksgivings I’ve had in which nobody ate any turkey.”
“Or clam chowder either. Or lobsters. Hence, Fucksgiving.”
She smiles at me. By now she’s steered us into a little breakfast place, far, far away from Yolk. A waiter has brought us menus and coffees, asking if we want almond milk, soy milk, cream, half-and-half, skim, or regular milk. And after that question is answered, he’d like to know which kind of sweeteners to haul over: pink packets, blue ones, yellow, stevia, Truvia, regular sugar, regular raw sugar, or sugar syrup.
“I’m going to miss this about Brooklyn,” I tell her when we’ve sorted out our order. “It’s a place you can’t be indecisive. Even about coffee. In Jacksonville, it’s so not this way.”
She runs her fingers through her long hair, shakes out her waves, and stares off into space, her mouth a closed, straight line. She has the kind of hair that should ensure its owner’s perfect lifetime happiness. Too bad her hair is not in charge of negotiating her love life, because then nothing would ever go wrong.
“So, tell me where things stand,” I say. “Andrew’s out of the picture, I take it. Relegated back to divorced dad status, but I just want to say—”
“Well, no, actually,” she says, but I don’t take it in because I’m talking at the same time, and what I’m saying is, “want to say that I think that was really a stupid move, for the waitress, that woman to speak up like that, right in front of everyone, to say she was, you know, the one.”
Jessica is looking at me with her wide blue eyes. “I know, I know, but you know what else? It made me realize how I am not remotely well enough to love Andrew completely. Which I was in such denial about. I was all like, ‘Oh, our kid is so cute, writing that little poem, and he needs us, and why don’t we just forget the past and get back together?’ when that was not even realistic. First fight, and we’re done again. Right?”
“I guess . . .”
She leans forward. “So bad as this was, it got us to talking. Which was painful and excruciating, and I’m surprised you didn’t hear us. On Friday we took Sammy over to my mother’s house just so we could fight and yell and scream and get it all out. I don’t normally approve of yelling and screaming, but Andrew said we had to air everything, and if voices were raised—then that showed we cared enough to risk it. Or something. Anyway, we did. And at the end of it, hours and hours of talking and pacing and yelling, he said he wanted to keep trying. And I said I did, too. And so we are.”
“Wow.”
“Because what I realized is that I had something to do with the marriage falling apart, too. Here I was blaming him and everything, but I was really the one who checked out of the marriage first. I was bored and frustrated at my job, and I started criticizing him for everything, and getting so annoyed with him, and ignoring him and doing stuff elsewhere—and he just felt pushed out. Plain and simple. And then she was there—an
d nobody’s saying it was right—but I can see how somebody fun and interesting might be appealing when your wife is going to bed at eight o’clock just so she won’t have to talk to you.”
The waiter comes over with our eggs, and we make room at the table for our gigantic plates, filled with eggs and potatoes and whole-grain toast.
“So the bottom line is that we’ve decided we need to be in a different house, not his, not mine, which is convenient because mine is getting sold—”
“But not yet!” I protest. “You can stay. I’d like it if you stayed, in fact.”
She shakes her head sadly. “Nope. No can do. We need a fresh start, symbolically if not for anything else. We’ll stay in Brooklyn so that Sammy can continue to go to a school where kids are allowed to write poems about breakfast foods to embarrass their parents. I want to start my own business at some point, and Andrew wants us to spend every summer at his parents’ cabin in the Berkshires, now that they’re getting old. So . . . big changes.”
On the way home, I fill her in as best as I can on Noah taking Blix’s stuff so his parents can challenge the will, and William Sullivan not giving up on Lola. And Jeremy getting furious with me and believing that I’d somehow known all along I didn’t want to marry him.
She wrinkles her nose. “Well, I have to say that I’ve never been quite convinced of your supposed love for this guy.”
“My family is probably never going to speak to me again. They’re all so sure he’s the guy I’m supposed to be with.”
“Sorry. Nope, nope, nope. You couldn’t have settled for him. I wouldn’t have allowed it. And now—I don’t care what your family says—you’ve got other people looking out for you. We’re your posse now.”
“I have a posse?”
“Yes. And as a spokeswoman for the posse, I say you shouldn’t go back to Florida. There’s nothing for you there. You may have to face the fact that, despite all your best efforts, you actually do belong to Brooklyn.”
“But it’s dirty here, and cold, and there’s trash in the streets, and the subways don’t run on time, and you have to go grocery shopping every single day because nobody has a car . . .”
Matchmaking for Beginners Page 32
