Getting Married (24 page)

T
he first few days after I break things off with Will are horrible, absolutely horrible. He’s devastated and walking around like a zombie. I thought I would feel relief when I called the wedding off, but I still feel anxious and unsure. Worse, I feel awful for making Will so sad.

I make dinner for us and we eat in tense silence. After dinner I say that I rented a movie, and he nods. We go into the living room and I pop
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
into the DVD player. We sit next to each other and watch it, but instead of being entwined around each other, which is how we normally watch TV—with his arm draped behind my shoulder, his other hand on my leg, and me curled up into his chest, my arm around his stomach—we sit several inches apart like polite strangers.

“Have you told anyone?” I ask him. “About how the wedding is off?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m hoping you’ll change your mind. I’m going to keep the ring.”

“We have to tell people who are out of town so they don’t buy plane tickets. We’ll have to tell people eventually. They’ll wonder when they don’t get an invitation.”

He just shrugs.

“I still love you. Very much,” I say.

“I know,” he says quietly.

I begin kissing him. He kisses back stiffly and without passion. I reach my hand down to his pants and he stops me—this is the first time he’s ever turned me down.

“I’m not rejecting you,” I say. “I’m rejecting marriage.”

“I know,” he says. “I’m just not in the mood.”

But you’re never not in the mood,
I think.

I call Sienna and my mother and Gabrielle and Rachel and tell them about how the wedding is off, about how I love Will and want to be with him, but I can’t take the pressure of marriage. Sienna and Gabrielle and to an extent Rachel all understand my fears. Sienna and Gabrielle have conflicted feelings about marriage, so they respect my desire not to get married. Rachel believes in marriage, but knows it’s not for everyone. My mother, though, is absolutely devastated. She cries on the phone, saying she’s so disappointed not to be able to see her daughter get married. She starts lamenting about where she went wrong as a mother and how she blames herself and my father for this, because it was their terrible marriage that soured me on the idea of it. I tell her I don’t blame their divorce for me not wanting to get married. I feel so awful when I get off the phone with her I wish like hell Will and I had never gotten engaged in the first place.

I feel a powerful, overwhelming feeling to call Sandy, but I know that if Will finds out that I’ve used again, he will leave me. That is not what I want. I couldn’t bear that. I love him, without question and without conditions. I manage not to call her. It’s not fun, but I manage.

O
ne of the biggest snowstorms in sixty-two years hits Denver. Will, inexplicably, still has to go into work. He emails me when he finally gets there saying it took him two hours to get to work when it normally takes half an hour and that he thinks the staff at his office will be allowed to go home shortly. I am supposed to meet with the WP execs today, but I feel certain that they’ll cancel the meeting. I call just to confirm that. Kyle tells me the meeting is still on.

“Can I just conference call in on the meeting?” I ask.

“You have the handouts on the figures to give out and the PowerPoint presentation to present.”

“I know, but…” I walk over to the window and look out. It’s a whiteout out there.

“We’re counting on you,” he says gruffly.

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

If the weather were nice, I would have no trouble getting to the WP office with time to spare, but with the weather the way it is, I have to haul ass. I’m snowed in because, since Will left for work, the street plows have dumped a ton of snow at the end of the cul-de-sac where I live, blocking in my driveway. Shit! I don’t own a shovel. I think quickly of what I could use instead of a shovel. A plastic bowl? A dustpan? A salad spinner? Then I see my neighbor across the way shoveling his driveway. He’s finished and going back to his garage to put it away, and he’s no doubt about to take off for work. I have no time to spare! I go rocketing out of my house wearing nothing but sweats and slippers.

It’s impossible trying to race through snowdrifts that are as tall as me. (Can you hear the theme music to
Chariots of Fire
blaring behind me as I plunge forward in my heroic quest?) But eventually, breathless, I beg my neighbor for his shovel and he gives it to me. I run back home where I put on boots, gloves, and a jacket. Thus attired I begin the process of clearing the snowdrift so I can leave my home. After just a very few minutes, I realize that this shoveling is not easy, particularly when you’re an out-of-shape weakling like myself. After twenty minutes of this, I’m sweating and the muscles in my arms and back are screaming, and I’ve barely gotten anywhere.

By the time I clear the driveway, there is no way I can make it to WP on time. I race through a shower and grab all my things and hit the road. The highways are treacherous. The high winds keep threatening to hurl my car into the median, and a thick blanket of snowflakes drifting leisurely from the sky makes it impossible to see. Several times the wind jars my car so badly my heart races with the thunderous fear I felt when I got into a car accident in high school. (I didn’t get hurt, but the experience was terrifying nevertheless.) I’m sitting on edge, my hands holding the steering wheel in a crocodile-death-grip, and I curse stupid Kyle Woodruff for not being leader enough to postpone our meeting to a day that doesn’t coincide with one of the biggest snowstorms in history. The thought flickers briefly through my mind: What if I died today? Wouldn’t he be sorry? Then I realize, no, of course, he wouldn’t be sorry. He doesn’t care about anyone except himself. He wouldn’t even feel responsible for forcing me to drive through this weather.

I get through the meeting despite wanting to strangle Kyle with my bare hands. I have another terrifying and LONG drive back—it takes me three times as long as usual to get home. But once I’m safely in my house, I open the window and look out onto the snow, which is glistening in the moonlight. Now that I’m not in that snow driving a two thousand-pound vehicle, I can appreciate how beautiful the snow is. I get a craving to go sledding, which is something I haven’t done since I was a kid. I could take a day of hooky tomorrow and just go have fun playing in the snow. The one problem is that I don’t know of any hills within walking distance, and I don’t want to drive a car through this mess again, so unless I can be teleported somewhere, I guess it won’t be happening.

I
tell Anne about calling the wedding off. I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but I sense disapproval from her.

“You don’t think I made the right choice?” I ask.

“If you feel you needed to break things off, then it was the right choice.” The room falls silent for a moment, then Anne says, “So, do you feel relieved?”

“I feel sad. Sad about hurting Will. And I feel confused. I thought marriage was what I wanted. Ever since our second date I thought it was what I wanted. My feelings for Will were overwhelming. Are overwhelming.”

“Why did you fall for Will in the first place?”

“The usual stuff. We were attracted to each other, we had fun together, and when I was with him, I felt like I could be myself.”

“That’s interesting because you said once you started dating that you started doubting yourself.”

“But that wasn’t because of him. It was just my own…” My own what? Insanity? Craziness? Lack of self-esteem? “It was just my own thing. I’ve had other boyfriends in the past who have made me feel insecure. Like I dated this guy named Chris once. Chris was a big fitness buff. He ran a jillion miles a day and was always Rollerblading and racing in marathons. He had a great body, really muscular but not in that weight lifter scary way, you know? But he kept telling me that I should lose ten pounds and work out more. I always felt like he tolerated my body but never liked it. I knew it was his own issue. I’m not going to spend my life worrying about being ten pounds skinnier than I am. I want to be healthy, but I have better things to do than worry about every calorie I consume. But the thing was, sometimes when we’d be having sex, when he’d close his eyes, I’d think about if he was closing his eyes because he couldn’t bear the sight of me naked, and that…well, it didn’t make me feel good, that’s for sure. And this other guy, I only went on a couple dates with him. On our second date we were trying to figure out what to do with ourselves, and he suggested that we go bowling. I said I was a terrible bowler. Then he suggested that we play pool. I told him I don’t play pool. He asked what I did for fun, and I said I’d been busy launching my own business and I’d never really had time for hobbies. So he said, ‘Do you cook?’ ‘No.’ ‘Garden?’ ‘No.’ ‘Golf?’ ‘No.’ ‘Ski?’ ‘No.’ Then he says, ‘How do you expect to find a husband?’ I think he was kidding. I think he was one of those guys with a dry sense of humor that can say something they think is funny and you never know if they are joking. But at the time, I was in one of those moods you get into after you go on one bad date after another and you start thinking that maybe the problem really is you, that there’s something wrong with you that you can’t find a guy you’re compatible with. I know it’s ridiculous, to start worrying that I’ll never find love because I can’t bowl well, but that’s how I felt at the time. Will…he’s never made me feel bad about myself. Sometimes he says he wishes I had more time for him, but I wish I had more time for him, too. Anyway, the point is, Will accepts me for who I am, which is why I love him. Somehow I decided that I loved him so much I wanted to be a better person than I was. I wanted to plan a perfect wedding and learn how to cook. Instead I got addicted to an illegal drug…”

Anne studies me for a moment. “Why don’t you like bowling?”

Huh? We’re talking about how I’ve broken off my engagement and am battling an addiction and she wants to talk about bowling?

“Uh…well, I’ve never been a big fan of sticking my feet into hot smelly shoes a million other people have worn. I don’t even like used clothes that have been washed, let alone sticking my feet into what can best be described as a potential fungus farm. And, I don’t know, it’s a silly game. What have you accomplished after you’ve gone bowling?”

“Why do you feel the need to accomplish something?”

I realize I completely set myself up for that. At first, I don’t want to broach the topic of how I have such a hard time relaxing, but then I realize the whole point of therapy is to deal with issues I’d rather not deal with. I give her my theory about how my father taught my sister and me to feel we constantly need to be productive.

“Tell me about your father. What sort of work did he do?”

“Sales. He hated his job. He also made furniture and sold it on the side, but he never made much from that.”

“Was he successful at his job?”

“Do you mean did he make a lot of money?”

“Is that how you define success?”

“When it comes to work, I think being a success means having a job you like or, if you can’t manage that, then, yes, to make money at whatever it is you do. Either way, my father wasn’t a success. He hated his job and he made enough to get by, but he never made a ton. He never got promoted, things like that.”

“Is that why you think he was so hard on you? Because he wanted you to achieve the success that he never had?”

I’d never thought of it that way, but it seems plausible. I nod. “Maybe. He really struggled to keep us in a good neighborhood so we could go to good schools. Money was always an issue. It’s one of the big reasons my parents got divorced. He probably wanted to make sure I didn’t have to struggle like he did. His father died when he was young, so he started working at a young age to bring in money. He and my mom got married when he was just twenty and she was only eighteen because she was pregnant with me.”

“Do you feel guilty about that? About being the reason your parents got married?”

I shake my head. “No. I think my parents would have ended up married to each other even if it weren’t for me. They really just always seemed like they belonged together. There has always been this fire between them. I think that if money hadn’t been such an issue and if they’d had better communication skills, they could have had a good marriage to each other. I do feel bad that my father and mother had had so much responsibility heaped on them at such a young age, but I know that’s not my fault.”

I think about how my mother married zany fun Frank because she was ready to have some fun or how Dad has mellowed out now that he’s done raising kids and has Annabella in his life. He pressed Sienna and me to succeed because that was the only way he knew how to be a father. He was just trying to do his best to raise Sienna and me in a world where men aren’t given the skills they need to communicate their emotions. He didn’t do everything right, but my issues aren’t his fault. And it’s about time I start learning how to relax, so my relationship with Will doesn’t combust like my parents’ relationship did.

“Are you still having cravings?”

I study Anne’s office floor. She has chocolate brown carpeting that has to be at least twenty years old it’s so worn.

Finally, with a sigh, I admit to her, to myself, “Yes. Usually it’s just a quick flash. A thought that comes into my mind that leaves as quickly as it comes. One time I had a craving that was really awful. I was so cranky I felt like I could tear Will’s head off. The next day I got lunch with Rachel and she said that Sandy’s boyfriend is in jail. Sandy is sober again and she promises to stay away from her ex. I felt sort of stupid, you know, that I spent all these hours fantasizing about something I couldn’t have gotten anyway.”

“You probably could have found a way. Sandy’s ex-boyfriend isn’t the only drug dealer in Colorado.”

“But a bigger part of me doesn’t want to use. A much bigger part of me.”

“How is the group you’re going to?”

I shrug. “It’s good. The people in the group with me all used for a much longer period of time than I did. The stuff they did…well, they did things I never want to do. And I know that if I use, I will go down that road. I do not want to go down that road. I have far too much going for me.”