Momfriends (36 page)

I looked down into my lap. This was way worse than I expected.

“We all make mistakes, Claudia,” Deanna said after a minute. I looked up at her and she smiled. “This is life. These bad parts make us more grateful for the good, don’t they? This stuff happens, you know. I’ve done stupid things in the past. You live. You learn. I wasn’t going to lose you over this. I reminded the top brass about how crucial you are to this operation. I believe you’ve saved us millions over the years. To me, your job was worth going to the mat for.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Just don’t make me regret it,” she said. I realized that Deanna hadn’t really done this for me because of my personality. She didn’t actually see me as a person. I understood that because up until recently I put everyone into categories. People were either cogs in the wheel of helping me complete my tasks or obstacles preventing me from getting there.

“I won’t,” I said. I hesitated and then— What the hell?—She had gone to bat for me. It was high time I loosened up. “Thank you, D.”

And that was it. I was back to work. I was keeping my job because of my own merits and because the right person believed in them. All that overachieving had saved me in this case. But maybe I could do things differently this time. Maybe not all of those uptight parts of me were bad. There had to be a way to reconcile all of it. I owed myself something. Maybe a little pride. Perhaps the me I was and the newish me could somehow combine and be a super me a better me. Or maybe that was still too much pressure. Maybe I could lay off the hyper achievement and simply try to be one of the best mes ever.

So in the end, I guess it was me who saved me. And though I was still worried about a lot of things, maybe I did learn a little something from the grasshoppers.

But I was still sort of proud to be an ant.

Chapter 19

Kirsten Becomes an Honest Woman

I wasn’t the one wearing the long white dress. That was an honor reserved for Julissa and Sage. Jules said she knew all about brides, and somewhere along the way, she began to think she was the bride and this was all about her and then she roped Sage in and so they were both the brides. And not being the bride was fine with me. But I was really happy to be getting married in a bread shop that wasn’t fully finished.

This ceremony was only for our families and some old friends that came from far away. There were new friends too, like Claudia and Ruth.

Kim was also there. Once I thought she was my rival, and now I realized she was a quite nice person. I was happy that David was in business with her because she seemed honest and ethical. And I was more than a little relieved when she came with her partner . . . a woman.

The wedding had been typical of our style, spur of the moment without much thought about logistics. We planned to have it in David’s parents’ backyard. We called our guests a week and a half before and couldn’t believe that everyone we spoke to wanted to come. Apparently every one in our lives thought they would never see the day we married and wanted to be there to witness it for real.

What we thought was going to be a small wedding of maybe thirty soon grew into a wedding of sixty-five. It was too large to have at David’s parents’ house, so David decided we should have it at the green market. The next thing I knew he totally dove into making the plans. A few of the guys he worked with were in a mariachi band, and he got them to play. He also started working with a florist who was going to have a shop in the farmers’ market and he got Kim to let us have access to two of the vacant sales apartments in the building so our guests could have bathrooms to use and I would have a place to get ready.

A place to get ready? I didn’t think I needed all that. I would have been fine with a legal ceremony, but David was way into this. So I guess I needed a dress. But wearing white seemed to be a big joke after three children and years of living in sin. I could make do with a summer dress I had in my closet.

“But you need a wedding dress. Even if it isn’t lily-white,” Ruth said over drinks at Claudia’s new apartment, a small one bedroom in the South Slope. They kept calling it my bachelorette party. They had purchased feather boas and various penis-shaped propaganda. They were way more into it than I was. Though every once in awhile I found myself getting a little caught up in it all and I wanted to let my voice get a few octaves higher and scream, “I’m getting married!” But I didn’t.

“Why do I need a wedding dress?” I asked Ruth when Claudia was in the kitchen mixing more mojitos.

Claudia and her husband were separating, but they were doing something different. Instead of making the children shuttle from place to place, they were going to trade off nights here and the new apartment. Claudia explained their elaborate system of rules and regulations and computer-application calendars so as not to infringe on each other’s privacy. It all started to confuse me after a while, but I believed it was going to work for them.

“Because you’re getting married,” Claudia said, coming back into the living room.

“I have quite a few summer dresses that should do fine,” I argued. Claudia and Ruth exchanged the kind of look that David and I exchanged when one of our children was doing something completely unbelievable and we weren’t sure how to respond or who should react first. Claudia poured mojitos into glasses she had chilled.

“Aren’t you happy to be getting married?” she asked.

“Of course. I never thought much about it, but I am happy to be getting married. I don’t really know if I need a whole”—I raised my fingers into quotes—“’wedding’. You know, I don’t know that we need all the bells and whistles.”

Again the look. This time Ruth had the floor.

“Well, this wedding seems kind of important to David, no?”

It was important. And though I never would have guessed he would be so into it, he was. And it was time I started adjusting to everything, to change. I always thought back on things that had happened in our relationship and who we were instead of what was to come and who we could be. Maybe it was time to set aside my own needs and obsessions with who we were in the past and look forward and think about him.

“You know, you’re right, it is.” I looked back and forth between them. “And if it’s important to him, it needs to be important to me. I guess I don’t know anything about weddings. I have no idea how to plan a wedding. Maybe I need a little help from someone who knows how to organize things.”

Both Ruth and I looked at Claudia.

“Wow, this is exciting,” she said. Her cat-that-ate-the-canary expression scared me a little. Like the guest list, I sensed this was going to get out of my control before I could stop it.

“I mean obviously, I still want it to be me,” I said quickly. Ruth laughed.

“She means she still wants it to be
artsy
,” Ruth said, referencing Claudia’s night of drink spilling. This was Ruth’s way of ribbing the both of us. It was hard to believe that three of us had any kind of inside joke. But we did. These women who were way more mainstream than I was were becoming my closest friends. I valued all their opinions and perspectives.

“Of course, I wouldn’t expect you to have a formal black-tie affair. A wedding should represent the personality of the couple,” she said as if she was quoting Martha Stewart. This reassured me. She knew I wasn’t about being a fairy-tale bride. “There are several things that I think make a wedding.”

“What? What are the things?” I asked, leaning closer. Ruth laughed at my enthusiasm. “C’mon, if I am going to do this, I need to know the secret.”

“Well, the food, for one.”

“David and his dad are taking care of that. They have a lot of relationships with caterers.”

“The cake.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that one. David mentioned that those were really pricey and specialized and he didn’t want to call in a favor for that. We were thinking we could get some cupcakes. Or maybe a cake would be nice. I wonder if I would have time to make a sheet cake or something and decorate it.”

“How are you going to have time for that? Keep it simple. I had cupcakes at my wedding,” Ruth said. She looked at Claudia. “You’re not into that, are you?”

“No, cupcakes are cute, but I was actually thinking I could make you a cake.”

“You? You could?”

“Yeah, you won’t have time to do it. And your wedding falls on my off day. Peter will have the kids that day and night because it’s the third Saturday and even though usually that is my time he needed to switch for another Saturday, for a big presentation . . .” Claudia went on explaining how come she didn’t have her kids on the day of my wedding in great detail, and I kind of tuned out until she mentioned the three words all mothers universally understand. “I miss them.”

She was sad, even though she put on a brave face. I never thought of her as being that emotional, but she was. In a way, I think this separation was putting a lot of things in perspective for her. She was gaining gratitude for all she had instead of constantly wanting more.

“I mean, you’d think I would love having all this free time, but I do kind of wonder what they are up to when they aren’t around.” She looked up at us and then she realized that she had gone off on a long tangent and distracted herself. Some things hadn’t changed.

“But anyway,” she continued. “Making the cake would give me a little focus for my day off. It will be a challenge. It will be fun.”

“But wait, have you ever made a wedding cake?” Ruth asked. I was glad she did.

“No, but I’m more than sure I can.” She was confident, I would grant her that. And I wasn’t even supposed to care about this to begin with. So I agreed.

“What kind of cake do you and David eat?”

“Um, I like lemon and David likes chocolate. I guess I would eat chocolate if we have to choose one.”

“No need. I can make one of the tiers lemon and one chocolate.”

“Tiers?” I asked. “Isn’t that a little ambitious?”

“I’m not worried,” Claudia said. “Piece of cake. Ha-ha.”

She laughed really hard. She’d been doing more of that lately too. She looked at Ruth for approval. Ruth said. “You made a funny.”

“Is there anything else I need other than food and cake,” I asked. “I mean, anything I should do.”

Again Ruth and Claudia exchanged the look and looked back at me. This time Ruth spoke. “You aren’t going to like it.”

And so we went dress shopping the next day. I couldn’t remember the last time I did that. I rarely bought adult clothes anymore. I occasionally knit sweaters for myself or sewed a quick skirt. Every once in a while I dashed into a store to buy a T-shirt if I had a moment when the kids were cooperative. But to actually go shopping with other women? That was amazing.

I expected them to kind of do their own thing and then we would meet at the register and grab a coffee or something. But that wasn’t how it was going to be. Ruth and Claudia had already been shopping together for work clothes. They were apparently shopped out. This was all about me.

It was kind of fun. They parked themselves outside the fitting room and demanded I show them everything I tried on. As they waited, they talked about Ruth’s new nanny. Her name was Suze and Ruth was in love with her.

“She reminds me of me when I was twenty-four, except way more responsible.”

“But don’t you think you should see more candidates?” Claudia asked.

“But it all works perfectly. She is getting her master’s in early-childhood education, so she can work only three days a week, which at first was a con, but now my mother-in-law Pam will come on one of the days and I am going to be home on Fridays, so it works out.”

“That sounds cool,” I shouted from the dressing room. Lately, I had been thinking I might want to recruit David’s mom for a half day or so each week and start giving Amanda more hours. Sometimes I think I was so caught up in doing everything that I didn’t want to miss anything. But it was ok to rely on other people if I could and if that meant I could do more for me.

From outside the dressing room, Claudia still wasn’t convinced that Ruth should be going with this nanny. “But she is the only person you saw.”

“Well, I talked to a bunch of women on the phone and I got the best feeling from her right off. Claudia, it took me the longest time to conceive a child. I delivered four weeks early in anything but ideal circumstances and I definitely had a rough go of it, as you know, at the beginning of Abe’s existence.”

“I know,” Claudia said. She was backpedaling a little.

“I mean, I love a story as much as the next girl, but if I get to have one aspect of parenthood that doesn’t involve a story, that just goes smoothly, I’m going to accept this. Maybe I am getting lucky for once.”

It seemed like a good time to distract them, so I opened the door and stepped out to show them my latest dress.

“OMG,” Ruth said.

“Wow,” said Claudia.

“I know,” I said. “It’s a little low cut, right?”

“If you got it, flaunt it,” Ruth said. “You look amazing.”

“I think I might cry. I really do love weddings,” Claudia said.

“Wow,” I said and then just for the hell of it, maybe for them, my new friends, maybe a little for me, I let my voice get really high and I shouted, “I’m getting married!”

And so here I stood in my sexy, sleeveless, slate-blue dress. I stood next to my new husband in his new bakery in the center of a circle of people who formed around, clapping and projecting love. It really was a tangible feeling of joy that I had, surrounded by so many, surrounded by my beautiful children. It was almost too much.

In the corner was a four-tiered wedding cake with trim that perfectly matched the colors in my dress.

We had vowed to each other things we were going to try to live. Among other things, I vowed to be accepting of anything that came our way. I vowed to support him no matter what. And David vowed to be honest with me and grow back his beard. (That got a cheer from Ruth and Claudia in their sexy new sundresses.)

My children were excellent for the occasion. Naomi let herself be passed around loving arms without too much fuss. Sage and Julissa ran around, happily holding up their white skirts. I didn’t spend the entire time worried about what people were going to say or how they were going to react to Sage.