by Julie Wright
“Deal,” he said. He was serious about not liking my smell because he insisted on waiting while I showered quickly and dressed in clothes that hadn’t been on my body for the last week and a half straight.
While cleaning up, I realized how much of this book belonged to Anders. So many of the words I’d written were fragmented pieces of things he’d said to me over the time we’d lived as neighbors in the same apartment building. One could probably go as far as to call it the book of Anders.
The work in progress was my first nonfiction experience. Before that, my writing had consisted entirely of fairy tales, fractured fables that twisted into stories that would matter today if any publisher would ever just say yes to me. I was a great believer in fairy tales, in writing things the way you wanted them to be. Why would anyone want to write about real life? Wasn’t living it enough? I had certainly never wanted to venture into things that actually were. Until now. And, certainly, an author could hardly write nonfiction without pulling from her very own reality. Anders was a huge part of my reality; so of course he’d ended up in this book. Thinking and talking things over with Anders would probably help me get over my stumble.
But our walk wasn’t really about me. He had said he’d needed me. The walk was about him. Once I was finished getting dressed and we were off, I peppered him with questions to keep us on topic.
Anders displayed more than a willingness to talk. He had forced me out into the fresh air because he was having girl trouble.
“She wants to get married.” He blurted this out as if it had been building up inside of him like floodwaters slamming up against a dam before it breaks.
It took my mind several moments to process the words he’d used. She. I could only assume that she meant his girlfriend Chloe. Wants to get married. I could only assume that the person she wanted to marry was him. Once my brain had finally taken all of those words apart, sorted through them, and then put them back together, I stopped walking and looked Anders directly in the eye. “You’re getting married?”
Why did it feel like he’d slapped me across the face? Why did it feel like he’d punched me in the gut? Why did it feel like he’d stomped on my foot and then asked me to dance only to laugh at me, stomp on my foot again, and walk away, leaving me broken on the dance floor? Why did it feel like I had just lost my best friend?
Anders swallowed hard. His rather sharp Adam’s apple bobbed with emotion. I didn’t think I had ever seen Anders swallow like that before. Anders was not one of those nervous types that swallowed the words he was going to say before replacing them with new, different, untrue words. Anders was the guy who said what he thought. He never had to take that extra moment to reassess, replan, swallow words back down.
And that was when I became afraid. If Anders had to rethink what he planned to say to me, then it must be serious. It must be true. He was going to get married. The news shouldn’t have bothered me. It’s not like I had any claim to Anders beyond that of downstairs neighbor and friend, but it did bother me. Hadn’t he, just a few short weeks ago, told me that he wasn’t sure how he felt about her? Wasn’t he the one who’d said he didn’t want to take her home to meet Grandpa yet? For Anders, taking a girl home to meet Grandpa meant buying her an airplane ticket. That was a serious step. Was he taking that step?
And suddenly, the idea of Anders taking Chloe to Sweden with him made me hope with all my heart that all of those Swedish legends and fairy tales were true. I hoped the trolls would kidnap her while she was there and take her away to the troll lands and no one would ever see her again. I gave myself a small shake, realizing that this kind of fantasy smacked dangerously of jealousy.
Was I jealous?
No.
It’s not like I wanted to get married. Anders did. It was one of those “we-are-so-not-compatible; it’s-a-good-thing-we’re-not-a-thing” things we laughed about. How could I be jealous when I didn’t want what was happening to him to happen to me?
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Anders said, his voice a pleading keen.
He’d been talking. And I’d missed most of what he’d actually said because I had been so caught up in the racing thoughts in my head.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “How did all of this happen? Tell me exactly what was said, where you were, and what the end result was.”
Anders smoothed his hands over his jeans and licked his lips. “I hardly know where it started. One day we were just dating and doing what we did: going out, having dinner, seeing plays or a movie every now and again, and then the next day we were talking about how many kids she wants and do I like dogs.”
“Kids, huh? How many kids do you want?” I asked, genuinely curious, since this was something that had never come up in any of our conversations.
Anders shrugged. “I don’t know. Three? Three always sounded good to me. You know I like the rule of thirds.” As a photographer, it was one of his favorite things.
“How many does she want?” Why was I asking these ridiculous questions? Why wasn’t I grabbing him by the shoulders, shaking him hard, and telling him that he couldn’t get married because he already had a job as my best friend and neighbor? The husband job would be way too time-consuming to possibly fit in with his already-stated duties.
“She wants one. One. It seems awfully singular doesn’t it?” How he managed to frown while keeping his eyes open wide in confusion was a mystery to me.
“One is awfully singular,” I repeated. And didn’t I know? No matter how many fairy-tale characters I’d read about and had considered to be my friends, I had still grown up singular for the bulk of my life.
“Does she like dogs?” I already knew that he did. Anders loved dogs regardless of breed, color, or fur length. If it barked and had a wagging tail, he fell in love. But did she? Did Chloe love dogs like Anders loved them?
Anders was already shaking his head. “No. She actually hates them. She’s more of a cat person.”
“But you’re allergic to cats.” A frown formed on my own face as I trailed my fingers along the cold, black rails of a wrought iron fence next to the sidewalk we were on.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why she said she didn’t mind if we didn’t have any pets at all.”
I imagined the offspring of Anders and his not-troll-kidnapped bride and decided such offspring would likely end up having to daydream of being kidnapped by trolls because that would be far superior and far more interesting than growing up as an only child with no pets.
“Poor kid.” I hadn’t meant to voice that out loud. Sure. Probably tons of kids grew up like that and were fine. But I hadn’t been one of those kids. I grew up like that and wasn’t fine.
It wasn’t fair for me to think that way. Just because my childhood had been a harsh, glaring reality with no frills or perks didn’t mean all sibling-less, pet-less kids were like that. And I had ended up with a sibling when my mom remarried. I actually even loved my stepsister—in spite of what the fairy tales said I should feel about her.
Besides, any kid of Anders would be insanely lucky because Anders was fun to spend time with. Who needed siblings or dogs when Anders was around? But the woman in question? She was packaging, not person. It had never occurred to me to not like her until I realized at that moment how much like my own mother she was. And, of course, that realization hadn’t come until she threatened to steal my best friend. How shallow did that make me? I’d been fine with her before. I’d even goaded Anders about marrying her back when the possibility of such a thing seemed so incredibly unlikely.
“She did say that we could probably do goldfish or maybe a pet canary or something as long as it didn’t smell bad.” Anders gave me a smile that looked as thin as a prisoner in a king’s dungeon.
“That’s nice.” I had to say that. What else could I say? I was his friend, wasn’t I? Friends support each other even when bad decisions are in fashion.
&n
bsp; But really? A goldfish? A goldfish isn’t a pet; it’s an emergency snack during the apocalypse.
“Yeah,” he said. “Nice. Nice. Goldfish are nice.” But he didn’t sound convinced of that.
It was his lack of conviction that gave me the courage to ask the hard question, the one question I had to have an answer to. “Are you actually engaged, Anders?”
He didn’t answer right away, which honestly freaked me out a lot. What was the silent answer? I understood that a yes answer might mean that I had to readjust the way I thought about Anders. I wouldn’t be able to look at him as my best friend anymore because being married to someone required you to be the best friend to whomever you married. I knew that a no answer also meant that I had to rethink the way I viewed Anders. The fact that I flared with jealousy at the idea of him being engaged to someone else made me realize that I was more emotionally involved in this friendship than I had previously thought.
But the answer of silence? What did that mean for me? What did that mean for him? What did that mean for us?
Since he chose not to speak, and the silence was becoming unbearable, I filled that silence with more questions. “So did you tell her that you’re agreeable with the idea of marriage? Or did you tell her you’re thinking about it? Or maybe did you tell her that you aren’t ready yet?”
Door number three, Anders. Pick door number three.
He finally opened his mouth, but only a choking sound that could have been a cough, maybe a laugh, or maybe he was actually choking—it was hard to tell—came out.
“I . . . I’m not really sure.”
I deserved an award for not rolling my eyes at such a statement. What was I’m not really sure supposed to mean? Was this the same thing as he wasn’t really sure about her but he was going to keep dating her anyway instead of letting her off the hook the way I’d told him to? Which would kind of make him a punk because, honestly, any guy who’s not sure about a relationship has no business talking about marriage in that relationship.
“What exactly aren’t you sure about?” I asked, feeling my patience wear out. My tone must have been frosty because the people we happened to be walking past cast me a look that said they thought I was a monster and Anders a look that said they pitied him for being stuck with such a monster.
Anders wasn’t paying attention to the people passing us, so he didn’t realize that he was, in fact, dealing with a monster because the look he gave me was filled with something else entirely. Fear, uncertainty, and something I didn’t recognize. “I like Chloe. I even can honestly say I love Chloe. But I just don’t know about Chloe with me on a permanent type of basis. And honestly, Lettie, I don’t know if she’s in love with me so much or if she’s in love with the idea of playing house. I get the feeling that marriage is kind of one of those bucket list items for her, and she’s just standing over her list and impatiently tapping her permanent-ink Sharpie ready to check it off.”
He’d hesitated, but he’d said the word. Even with his doubt, he’d said the word. There was so much strength to be found in the word love. To have used that word to describe his feelings for her meant he had to mean it. Which meant this was not a good time for me to say, hey, I think I might be interested in you because I’m feeling jealousy, and that’s a new feeling for me. Because that would make me a jerk friend. And the last thing I wanted to be was a jerk friend, not when he walked next to me with his face so open and vulnerable and in need of confirmation and confidence all at the same time.
I hunched deeper into my coat. “You did say you loved her. And you have been together for an awfully long time. And you refused to break up with her even when I told you to a few weeks ago when you weren’t sure about how to proceed with her.”
He licked his lips, which was going to dry them out. I would need to make sure I bought him some lip balm if he was going to keep that habit up for very long. “Right. I did say I loved her. And I do.” He rushed to tack on that little bit of insistence as if needing to prove it to both of us. “So maybe getting married isn’t a bad idea at all? Right?”
I almost felt sorry for Chloe. I wouldn’t want to be dating somebody as uncertain and insecure about his feelings for me as Anders was for her. Which meant I had to be a good friend in all directions and weigh all options for him, since he was clearly unwilling to do it for himself. “But marriage is a big step. You’re not that old. I mean, come on, you’re what . . . twenty-eight?”
He nodded. “You’re right. Twenty-eight is really young, isn’t it?” His circular reasoning and feelings were making me crazy. I finally stopped in the middle of the path, turned to face him directly, and demanded to know the end result of his conversation with his girlfriend. “Anders, are you or are you not engaged to be married to this woman?”
“I think I am.”
Chapter Three
“Beware the woods, for it is there that you will not meet up with dragons, trolls, or wolves. It is there that you will meet yourself, which can be the most terrifying thing of all.”
—Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction
(The “Know Yourself” Chapter)
“You think?” I’d playfully hit or punched Anders a gazillion times during the time that we had lived as neighbors. But never before had I actually wanted to slap him full on, hand opened, across the face, in a way that would maybe make him need to be checked for a concussion. How could a man not know whether or not he was engaged?
Rather than continue to seethe over the fact that my dear friend who was smart and clever and witty could be so stupid, I decided to ask him out loud why he was so stupid.
“It’s not like I had time to figure it out, Lettie.”
“How did you not have time? Were you beamed up into a spaceship or something in the middle of the conversation?”
“Sort of. I got called into work. She was in the middle of explaining how she’d been thinking about this for a while and she wanted to know if I ever thought about it, but then she never gave me a moment to answer what I thought about it because she kept talking, and then my pager went off. She was kind of ticked, but I told her I had to go because my not going would put somebody’s life on the line.”
Right. His job. Of course. How many conversations and movies had his job interrupted for the two of us? Plenty.
“Did everything turn out okay?” Even being mad at him, I had to ask because Anders saw things in his job every day that weren’t great. Sometimes people died in his arms, and if that had happened, the emotions he felt regarding that would trump his confusion over a maybe engagement. Being his friend meant understanding that.
“Everything turned out okay. He wasn’t responsive at first, but he came to. It was an allergic reaction to a new prescription.”
I was glad the call had been fine. There was one time when he’d answered a call for a woman whose baby had stopped breathing. The woman met him in the driveway before they could even get the ambulance to a stop. As he jumped from the vehicle, the woman thrust the child into his arms and demanded he save it. The baby didn’t live. Anders was a mute for several days as he tried to process what he might have done differently, before he finally understood there was nothing he could have done differently.
Once I felt Anders was sufficiently stable mentally, I asked the question again. “So how do you not know if you’re engaged or not? Has she said something? What has your conversation been since then?”
He let out a long breath, long enough it was hard to believe he could hold that much oxygen in his lungs. “That’s the thing,” he said. “We didn’t shake hands or anything, but she seems to think we’ve come to an agreement.”
“And are you okay with the agreement she thinks you’ve made?”
He scrubbed his hand over his head and let out an exasperated noise. “I don’t know! That’s why I had to get you out here to come talk to me.”
“What do you want
me to do? I can’t tell you if you’re engaged or not.”
“What would you do?” he asked, his voice a higher pitch than it had ever been during the course of our friendship. We’d crossed the Muddy River and made it to the James Kelleher Rose Garden entrance. Without asking if Anders wanted to go in or not, I pushed the wooden gate open. Anders went in, and I followed him, letting the gate swing shut behind me. We walked the graveled path and breathed in the scent of cold, wet earth from the evening’s previous rainfall. My mind wandered to the oddity of it not having snowed for the last few weeks. I considered how the rain and the warmth felt more like spring than the end of winter. My mind pondered the weather while it also formed an answer to his question. What would I do?
I would have cut the guy loose way before it got to this level of emergency. But my commitment issues weren’t in the playbook for Anders. My issues came from years of watching the married people in my life living in misery. My parents were divorced. Both sets of natural grandparents were divorced, and my aunts and uncles were all divorced. Sure, some of the second marriages were doing okay, but not all of them. I wrote about happily ever afters in my fairy tales. But life had taught me not to believe in them.
“You know I’m the wrong person to ask, Anders,” I finally said. “I don’t think I believe in marriage.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. We neared the fountain surrounded by creepy cherubic statues. Anders stopped walking and turned to face me. “I hate it when you say that. It’s like when a person says they don’t believe in fairies and a fairy drops down dead somewhere.”
I laughed. “What? You think every time I say I don’t believe in marriage, a married couple drops down dead?”
“Okay. So maybe you don’t believe marriage always works, but don’t you think it could? What if you found someone who completely understood you and couldn’t live without you? And who you couldn’t live without? What about then? What about for yourself?”
“You’ve clearly never met any of my past boyfriends, or you wouldn’t ever ask me such a thing. Definitely not for myself. And I’m not saying no one should ever get married. Just because I don’t think it’s for me doesn’t mean other people can’t do what they want.”
