I Now Pronounce You Someone Else (4 page)

My mother began coloring my unforgivably brown hair blonde when I was thirteen. It was my birthday present that year. We “Made a Day of It,” as Mother said, shopping and clicking and tapping throughout the day.

Well, she did. I’m more a marcher.

We went to lunch.

Click, click.

We had our hair done.

Tap, tap.

And she said with relief to my new, blonde reflection at the salon, “Finally, I see a resemblance.”

See? I knew she knew I wasn’t really hers.

And then she said, “You look beautiful.”

That was the first time she ever said it, so it was kind of a present.

Except I asked for a kitten.

I wasn’t entirely sure I liked being blonde but, by eleventh grade, I had been blonde so long it seemed both silly and difficult to stop. It even said blonde on my
driver’s license, although I felt like I was lying when I checked that box.

So after Memorial Day, we were fine, all fine, by which I mean normal, by which I mean fine. Back to discussing current events at breakfast and global crises at dinner.

And
isn’t it about time to touch up those roots
, Mother wondered. And, yes, by golly, it was.

Time to Make Another Day of It—to plaster a smile on my face and feign enthusiasm for shopping and blonde hair and talking about nothing, absolutely nothing that counted as something, at lunch. She loved it and clicked and tapped the whole day long.

And, okay, I’ll admit it. I loved seeing her that gorgeously happy.

I just wished she could be happy about kittens and brown hair, instead.

Jared and I started talking every day—about
real
things: school, college, final exams,
East Vision
, friends, the beach, and other exigencies of life.

I called him first when it was announced on Friday that I had been named editor of
East Vision
, and he cheered—
whoo-hoo
—into the phone.

“All right. This calls for a celebration,” he said. “Come to my house for dinner tomorrow.”

“You’re cooking?”

“No. My mother is. She’s a terrific cook, and we’ll have a whole Sondervan Family Celebratory Dinner in your honor.”

“Jared,” I said, embarrassed. “No.”

“Ah, it’s okay. I just made that up. There’s actually no discernable difference between a regular Sondervan Family Dinner and a Sondervan Family Celebratory Dinner. Pretty much, we’re the Sondervans, and we’re going to have dinner.”

“I see.”

“So I’ll pick you up at six.”

“I can just drive over. Or walk even.”

“Nope. I’ll pick you up.”

“Really. I don’t mind,” I said.

“I do. If I pick you up, I have to drop you off. And that way I’ll know you got home safely.”

“That—” I had to inhale. “—is so incredibly sweet.”

“That’s me,” he hooted. “Sweet Jared Sondervan. If I ever become a famous jazz guitarist, that’ll be my stage name.”

“You play guitar?”

“Couldn’t pluck a string to save my life.”

“I couldn’t pluck a chicken to save mine.”

“Aw, and here I thought you were going to help my mom in the kitchen.”

“Couldn’t I just make the salad?”

“All right. Salad it is. Make it a Caesar. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and just in case he was serious, I spent part of that evening searching recipes on the Web for a Caesar dressing that looked like something I could possibly produce.

And stomach.

At breakfast Saturday, I remembered to tell Mother and Whitt the news that I had been named the next year’s editor of
East Vision.

“Well, that’s wonderful, Bronwen,” Whitt said. “Congratulations.”

“Yes, congratulations, honey,” Mother said, loosely hugging me from behind as I poured—and spilled—milk on granola and the counter.

“That’s such an accomplishment,” she said. “You should be very proud of yourself.”

“Thank you.”

“And we are,” she added. “Very proud of you.”

Proud, twice in one week, and I didn’t even have to ask for this one
, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

“It’s just so curious to me,” she went on, as I cleaned up the little mess, “this interest you have in journalism.”
Here it comes.
“I just don’t know where you get it.”

She says the same thing about my teeth, which are large and unlike anyone else’s in the family.

I nodded at her and smiled as much as I could to be polite, to let her know I heard her, and
please, please, please stop talking.

She didn’t.

She stood by the sink, her hands on her hips, her head tilted upward, searching the heavens, no doubt, for glimpses of distant forebears wearing hats with
Scoop
written on them.

“No,” she said, dragging the word out and looking back at the living. “I just don’t know.”

“Maybe your uncle Sid,” Whitt suggested.

What?!

“That must be it,” Mother said, relieved. “Yes, it’s got to be Uncle Sid.”

Uncle Sid was my great-uncle Sid Onderdonk, my seventy-three-year-old grandfather’s seventy-six-year-old brother.

He was a proctologist, so he referred to himself as a “butt doctor” to anyone under fifty.

When he was around forty, he wrote a book called
The Onderdonk Reliable Method for Preventing Most Diseases of the Rectum.
He gives copies of the selfpublished tome at Christmas to everyone he meets throughout the year. He gave me one on my fifteenth birthday and inscribed it
To My Darling Bronwen, Hope life’s a gas. Your favorite uncle, Sid.

Yeah. I got my interest in journalism from him.

Jared rang the front doorbell at five thirty, and before I could answer it, Whitt stopped me.

“I’ll get this. Why don’t you go back upstairs a minute,” he said.

“Upstairs?”

“A lady should always keep a young man waiting,” he said and smiled when he added, “We find it mysterious.”

“Are you serious?”

“Very. How do you think your mother snagged me? If I remember correctly, you opened the door on our first date and entertained me while your mother pretended she wasn’t quite ready yet.”

You do remember correctly
, I said by way of a nod and started back up the stairs.

Whitt and Mother’s first date was about eighteen months after my dad died. They had dated in high school, but their romance did not survive their college separation. Their friendship did, though.

Whitt attended my parents’ wedding.

Also my dad’s funeral.

For years, my memory of Whitt’s arrival at our house for their first date was entirely affected by all the fantasies of the seven-year-old I was then. I imagined I opened the door to a handsome prince dressed in white silk riding clothes, holding a bouquet of lilies and smiling at me. Behind him shone a dazzling light from an unknown source—possibly God—pointed solely at our front door, and, on the front lawn, munching grass, stood his white horse, Lightning.

Then I grew up, and he became real, and I remembered him in his navy suit coat with his blue BMW parked in the driveway, and the setting sun warmed the whole neighborhood, not just our house. He did carry a bouquet of white lilies and handed me one, saying, “I asked the florist to include this one especially for you.”

“This is my most favorite flower in the whole world,” I said.

It could have been hogweed, and I would have said the same thing, but it was a white lily, so white lilies topped my list. And from then on—well, from then until I was fourteen—Whitt nicknamed me Little Miss Lilywhite.

I waited upstairs for five minutes while Mother and Whitt talked with Jared. I don’t know how much mystery
I created, but I just couldn’t wait a second longer to see him and practically dashed downstairs.

The first thing Mother said to me when I entered the den was, “Well, there you are. We were beginning to think you forgot you had plans tonight.”

Whitt winked at me. Jared and I just kind of smiled and nodded at each other since our relationship did not, at present, include kissing—not even little hello pecks. But the minute I sat next to him on the sofa, he rested one hand on my knee, and I seemingly ignored it but hoped he’d never move it.

Whitt asked, “Jared, what’s keeping you busy this summer?”

Jared was a Computer Science major—actually a genius with the things—and this summer he was interning with a top company downtown called MenuLogic. He explained the kinds of things he’d be doing there, “including—” He laughed. “—emptying trash cans.” But mostly he talked about the company and its emphasis on creating interesting content that would keep customers coming back to a website.

“I understood the emptying trash cans part,” Whitt said, laughing.

“You know, Peter’s very good with computers,” Mother said, which was true. Computer Science was one of the many majors he tried but chucked.

“Is that right?” Jared asked.

“You’ll have to come over the next time he’s in town,” Mother said.

“Sure. That’d be great,” Jared said, then turned to me. “You know, we should get going.”

In the car, he started laughing before he pulled out of the driveway.

“I had to get out of there,” he said. “I have memorized your brother’s name as Jesus, and I thought, before I slipped, we just need to go.”

“I don’t think Mother would have even noticed.”

“Probably, but, hey, your stepdad seems pretty cool.”

“Yeah, he’s a good stepdad,” I said.

“I can see why he and my dad are friends. They’re a lot alike. You’ll see.”

The Sondervans greeted me with handshakes and hugs. I’d known them since I was eight but hadn’t seen them since one of Mother and Whitt’s parties about a year ago. Mr. Sondervan told me I’d blossomed, and Mrs. Sondervan playfully slapped his arm before I could die of embarrassment, but not before I turned ninety-two shades of red.

“Oh!” Mr. Sondervan hooted. “We’ve got a blusher here.”

That wasn’t helping, except it made me smile.

Mr. Sondervan took my elbow and said close in my ear, “It’s charming.” He looked at Jared’s mom. “Am I allowed to say charming?”

“Charming, yes,” she said. “Blossomed—”
Please stop saying it.
“—no.”

“Well, my dear,” he said to me. “I think you look beautiful. Oh, oh. There’s that blush again. Look. Your ears even turn pink.”

“Is it too late to leave?” I asked.

“Much too late. I’ve got you now,” Jared said, hooking his arm through mine and leading me down a hallway—walls covered with a pictorial history of the Sondervan family—to the kitchen.

“Wow, you were right about the photos,” I said.

“This is nothing,” he said and promptly gave me a tour, which Mr. and Mrs. Sondervan popped in and out of with a story or two about certain pictures. Then they’d excuse themselves back to the kitchen to check on dinner or to wait for Lauren and her fiancé, who was notoriously, Jared complained, late.

“If you say you’re going to be somewhere at a particular time, then be there. It’s not tough,” he said.

On the tour, I saw—or glanced at; there were too many pictures to truly study—every month, it seemed, of Jared’s life and Lauren’s and much of the Sondervans’ early years. Odd haircuts. Odder clothes. All of it sunshine and smiles.

Upstairs, Jared showed me—by means of pointing through open doors—their five bedrooms, saving his for last. We stood in the doorway, and I peeked into the spotless space—black carpet, stone-colored walls, a glass-top desk and black dresser, and a queen-sized bed with a chestnut brown spread and pillowcases.

“Does your room at school look anything like this?” I asked.

“No. Are you kidding? This kind of stuff is too good for school. You don’t want anything you can’t throw in the washer, and you can’t care if it gets wrecked.”

“Sheets get wrecked?”

“Yeah. You drop food on them. Someone spills a drink. You mix them in with blue or red shirts or something and they come out purple.”

“I couldn’t live with purple sheets.”

“You learn to live with a lot of things in a dorm that you didn’t think you could.”

“Like what?” I practically begged. I couldn’t wait to know more—to know everything—about college life, and I had given up asking Peter, who just kept saying
it’s pretty cool
about the whole experience.

“Mostly you learn to live with different types of people,” Jared said. “Especially your first roommate.”

“I can’t wait for that. I think it’s going to be so exciting.”

“It actually is. But you know, there’s a secret to it, to getting the right roommate.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hmm. And it’s cleverly hidden in the Roommate Questionnaire.”

“What is it?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, “but only if you tell me where your second-favorite place on earth is.”

“Oh,” I groaned. “No fair.”

“It just shows you how much I want to know. So come on. We’ll trade secrets.”

I practically heard a ticking clock as Jared grinned at me.

Seconds passed.

“I can’t,” I finally said. “I can’t be sure it’s an even trade.”

“All right,” he said. “But don’t blame me if you end up with a roommate who collects garden gnomes and has to be tucked into bed each night.”

“With the gnomes?”

“Of course.”

“I’m completely fascinated.”

Jared smiled at me. Waited a second or two. Then said, “Yeah. So am I. With you.”

My ears felt warm.

“You realize you’re blushing again,” he said, and I turned quickly and announced, “I’m going to go help your mother with the salad.”

In the kitchen, I asked Mrs. Sondervan for an apron before I offered to help, and, to my relief, she didn’t bother with the fuss of pretending to turn down free labor.

“How are you at plucking chickens?” she asked.

“I’m better at shredding lettuce,” I said, shooting Jared a quick I-can’t-believe-you’ve-been-talking-to-your-parents-about-me look.

It was totally shammed. I wanted to do the
Yes!
dance again.

So Mrs. Sondervan handed me a head of lettuce and one of those salad spinner things, which she called the Twirler-Whirler, and I said, “I brought a couple of Caesar dressing recipes with me, but I’ll need a blender.”