Fiction

Note: This story deals with the subject of pregnancy loss.

While written in Great-Grandmother Miller’s wobbly cursive and slightly blurry (from years of wayward vanilla extract splatter) blue ink, the instructions were thankfully easy to follow. Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add oil. Add eggs. Add vanilla. Flour, salt, baking soda. Mix. Bake. Clear. Systematic. In the end, you have a springy, moist, yellow cake. That’s what Caroline liked about baking, and it’s why she fell in love with science — if you follow the instructions, anyone will get one reliably consistent, reproducible result.

 Caroline picked up an egg out of its carton. She’d forgotten to let it sit at room temperature, and its pebbled shell was startlingly cold on her fingertips. She cradled the egg, hoping the warmth of her hand was enough to raise its temperature enough to emulsify correctly with the other ingredients, then rolled it back and forth a few times, noticing the weight of the yolk directing the shell to its next location in her palm. As the egg traveled the length of the lifeline on her palm, Caroline remembered reading that it’s physically impossible to crush an egg in your palm. Her fingers clenched around it, and she was unsure if they were going to test the theory or simply hold the egg as it warmed. Her grip tightened. 

Women in her family had been making this cake for generations to mark births. Each year of surviving the world and its travails was celebrated with sugar roses, or sometimes plastic balloons, and always candles, the latter accumulating each year until the celebrant’s years lived surpassed the quantity that came in a pack of multi-colored, twisted, wax-striped birthday candles. Each time, the dominant-trait Miller nose leaned over the cake to blow out candles, reminiscent of the other faces that had done so over in the years and generations prior.

 Caroline carefully measured out the cake flour, first sifting and then scooping it into a measuring cup, using the backside of a knife to level it, just as her mother had taught her. Precision is essential in baking, but not to the extent that she needed to measure it out in grams the way Michelin-starred pastry chefs advise. Caroline had hidden her food scale from herself when she got pregnant and had to resign herself to accepting weight gain. As a teenager, Caroline had struggled with body image and only in her late twenties, after graduate school, had she acknowledged her earlier preoccupation with weight and diet culture.  Still, she sometimes fell back into old habits of calorie counting (and could still recite that there are seventy-eight calories in a hard-boiled egg and two hundred and thirty-four in an avocado). “Pregnancy brain” helped her forget where she’d put the food scale, but when she lost the fetus fourteen weeks in, she lost her appetite, too, and no longer cared to recover it.

A pinch of salt was easy, that was just measured in the valley of her hand when she cupped it, the lifeline of her palm creating a crevasse in which to hold it. Caroline tossed it into the mixing bowl of dry goods. Stirring was mindless and relaxing. If you do it long enough, everything finds a way to sit together, neatly and homogeneously, and most importantly, irretrievably. 

At their wedding ceremony, the minister had instructed Caroline and Aaron to pour a different color of sand into a jar to represent the blending of their lives. “No person, no matter how OCD, could ever possibly separate all those grains of sand now that you two have combined them,” he said. He was right in so many ways. Their lives were irreversibly enmeshed, even when she was going through something so emotionally taxing but ultimately so unique to becoming a mother. Except that she wasn’t a mother. She had no blossoming stomach, no Caesarian section scar, no leaking breasts, no playdates, no Cheerio-strewn car seats. 

She knew all these things to be the hallmarks of motherhood because her identical twin sister Julia had them. Growing up, Caroline and Julia had lived the same life: matching school dresses, lunch boxes, bedspreads, even the same set of friends, until high school when their tastes in extracurricular activities diverged. Caroline was interested in science and tennis; Julia was interested in sculpture, body piercings, and boys. At least to Caroline, Julia seemed to be the last person who would wind up living in suburban San Jose, California, with three kids. Yet, before she was twenty-eight, Julia seemed to happily and effortlessly acquire three children with an unlikely-to-go-bald husband and a mortgage. Caroline could accept their differences in personality and interests, but late at night, she sometimes awoke and lay next to Aaron in silence, wishing she were getting up for a baby’s midnight feeding instead of due to existential dread. How could Julia have it so easy — the first baby was a mistake! — and Caroline could have such a difficult time when, genetically, they had the same bodies. Of course, Aaron and Julia’s husband Andrew were factors, but on those dark nights, sometimes in bed and once, doubled over on the bath mat and cold black-and-white bathroom floor tile as she waited for her uncooperative uterus to empty, Caroline allowed emotion, instead of logic and science, to take over her thoughts. She would think about her beloved nieces and nephew and wonder what half of what her own DNA might have done, given the right set of circumstances. If only she could figure out what the right circumstances were. 

***

Caroline’s and Julia’s mother had not grown up with the idea that motherhood was her raison d’être. Uncharacteristic for women of her 1950s upbringing, Sylvia was an artist in both her vocation and nature. As a young girl, she rebelled against the gender-conforming dress code at her private, all-girls’ school in Texas, wearing long pants instead of skirts, refusing to wear shoes, and always wearing her long, wavy hair down. The summer after high school, when she had saved up enough of her waitressing money for a train ticket, she fled from Houston to Santa Cruz, California, eager for the salty air and sunshine to inspire her art. 

Her dream was to open her own gallery, featuring both her own art and the works of other female artists who didn’t come from families with connections in the art world. Before she would be able to run her own gallery, she would have to work in several already-established galleries, which was how she met Sam. He was ten years older than Sylvia and had just reached a point in his luxury car sales career where he could afford to spend money on original art for his newly purchased condominium in Aptos. 

One evening, he spotted a tall plaster sculpture of a mermaid in the front window of the downtown gallery where she was working. He decided, spontaneously, to walk into the gallery, and he began a conversation with Sylvia about his time in the Navy and the long history of sailors and their mermaid lore. Sam returned the following evening to chat again, and then on the third night, he asked Sylvia out to dinner at a small, family-owned Italian restaurant where she ordered “noodles with red sauce” because she was too nervous to attempt to pronounce anything on the menu. She had agreed to go out with him more for the free meal than for any real interest in a date, but two weeks later, Sam purchased the mermaid sculpture, and six weeks after that, he purchased a heart-shaped diamond ring, which he presented to her during a walk along the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Sylvia never thought she would get married and definitely never thought she would wear a diamond, but she accepted his proposal on the condition that they return the diamond ring, and together they exchanged it for a simple turquoise and silver one that she wore on her right hand. “My Silver Sylvia,” he called her, and she moved into his condo with two suitcases of clothes and seven boxes of art supplies. Sam planned a surprise honeymoon to Italy for a month so that Sylvia could see the Great Masters’ works of art. He asked a Canadian tourist to snap a photo of them on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Sam in a brown suit and Sylvia holding a cone of pink gelato, still unaware that she was newly pregnant with the twins, wearing her long hair parted down the middle and striped orange bell-bottoms. The photo would hang in their bedroom for forty years. Sometimes she would catch Caroline and Julia looking at it when they were little, wondering who these glamorous world travelers were, and Sylvia would tell them to follow their dreams before they got married. “I always wanted to have an art gallery,” she said. “Instead, I have snapshots on my walls and crayon scribbles on my Frigidaire.”

***

As she stood in the kitchen, Caroline stirred and mixed and blended, letting her mind wander. She didn’t allow herself to do this very often; she usually tried to control her thoughts using mindfulness techniques, directing and guiding her thoughts away from painful ones, and focusing on more palatable ones. Each time she thought of her most recently lost pregnancy, she told herself to stop, sometimes even saying the word out loud if she was alone, and shoved long-undisturbed memories like Hamlet’s “To Be, Or Not to Be” soliloquy that she memorized for high school English class, all of her first cousins’ middle names, the US states and capitals, names of her childhood pets, anything at all, to the forefront of her brain to move her mind away from the thing that was the most painful.

Mixing the wet and dry ingredients came next. Caroline tried to choose a bowl big enough to hold both, but in her compulsion to make this cake, she simply grabbed the first bowl she could lay her hands on. The messy batter barely fit in the bowl and glopped out onto the counter when she stirred too vigorously, but she wasn’t deterred. After a few minutes, she had a yellow-tinted batter that she poured into two identical nine-inch, round, non-stick cake pans and slid them into the preheated oven.

Sitting and waiting was never Caroline’s strong suit. She balanced herself on the barstool at the kitchen counter while she waited for the cake to bake, taking sips of decaf and scrolling through Instagram, Twitter, an infertility subreddit, which was too depressing, and then, out of habit, Instagram again. She couldn’t bear to look at Facebook, filled with old high school classmates and posing pictures of their matched set families that made her heart ache with loss and longing. She scrolled for what she thought was a few moments, but turned out to be eighteen minutes, noted when the timer went off. The cake passed the “toothpick test,” an old trick from her mother, to ensure that the cake was correctly baked and could begin to cool. She cleaned up the mixer from the cake batter and began to make the frosting.

Powdered sugar billowed up into the air and Caroline laughed at herself for hoping, just for a moment, that this infusion of sugar would sweeten her home. For the past year, a dark cloud had settled over their life together. The air was fraught with tension more days than not. Just once, Aaron had suggested that raging hormones could be part of the reason why they were short with each other. Of course she assumed he meant her hormones, but he didn’t say that.

“Raging hormones? Like I’m some horny, acne-riddled teenager?” she said.

“No, no, I’m not saying that. It’s just very taxing on the body to have all those hormones surging like this.”

“Yes, I’m aware of the effects the hormones can have, thank you. It’s also the disappointment, pain and death that’s rough. Maybe that’s what’s making me cranky.”

Fights between them were new and had an unrehearsed quality to them. Before trying to conceive, she and Aaron had usually gotten along well. Caroline assumed from conversations with her girlfriends that she and Aaron fought less than other couples and she rarely took issue with the small irritations that crop up in every marriage, like his leaving socks on the floor or the toilet seat up. But it wasn’t just the lack of fighting that Caroline felt was a sign their relationship could withstand the stress of infertility. They both knew and respected the intensity that each of their jobs required, dealt with death and loss sometimes in their respective work, and genuinely got joy out of doing simple things as a couple, like hiking in Muir Woods. When Caroline went shopping at the Marin Country Mart, Aaron often liked to go along just to be with her, although he would publicly claim he liked to listen to the jazz band that played on Tuesday nights.

Since they started trying to conceive, their biologically driven paths had caused them to converge, except, of course, for the actual act of coming together trying to make a baby. He was able to move on — literally move with his body and with his life after each potential pregnancy or loss. He could walk away from a conversation about it physically unchanged, but Caroline’s body had wounds to remind her of the trauma (or failure, depending on the moment’s mood). 

Caroline and Aaron had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant for over a year until they finally got a positive test. At first, Aaron liked to joke with friends that he was intentionally delaying the process so they could get more practice, but that joke quickly wore on Caroline’s nerves, and she asked him to stop telling it. Month after month, she’d get her period and feel disappointment, sadness, and as the months wore on, although she knew she shouldn’t, she began to feel shame. When Caroline’s period resumed after her first miscarriage, early on in their fertility struggle, she was curled up on the sofa, mindlessly watching The Great British Bake Off on tv with a heating pad across her hips, when Aaron sat down next to her. 

“What if we just aren’t meant to have kids?” he said.

Her chin quivered as she tried to hold back tears. “What are you trying to say? That this is my fault?”

“No, no, no, nothing like that. I’m just saying, what if we choose not to have kids?”

“Infertility isn’t a choice, Aaron. Besides, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be a mother. I’ve been dreaming of this my entire life.”

Aaron grabbed the remote and paused the tv. “What if,” he said gently, “we dream a new dream.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what would our life look like if we leaned into not having kids? We could travel, we could buy a boat —”

“When have we ever said we wanted a boat? We’re not boat people,” she said.

“I’m just saying. There are a lot of things out there, it doesn’t have to be a boat per se. We could travel, stay up late to see the Northern Lights, eat pizza in Milan, walk on the Great Wall of China. Sleep in one of those little huts in Tahiti over the water. You can’t do that with a kid. What I’m trying to say is that a life without babies doesn’t have to be meaningless.”

Even years after this conversation, Caroline continued to be jealous of Aaron’s ability to redirect his life’s vision so easily. Maybe it wasn’t easy for him. Perhaps he felt that he had to be strong for her, but she resented it anyway. When they had first met and fallen in love, their relationship was wholly centered on each other; now, since trying to get pregnant, her uterus had taken center stage.

Both Aaron and she were scientists; he was a primary care doctor, and she was a cancer researcher, primarily focusing on the disproportionate rates of breast cancer for women in Marin County, where they lived. They had each fallen in love with science during their respective childhoods. Aaron had first loved taking care of garden-variety bugs in his childhood terrarium. Caroline had won a junior scientist competition at the Santa Cruz County Fair when she was in fifth grade, testing what kind of packing material was most effective when dropping a bag that held a single raw egg. She had loved how she changed one single thing and the outcome varied wildly — styrofoam peanuts kept the egg intact, whereas crumpled newspaper left nothing but a drippy, viscous mess. Once she learned exactly which materials worked, she could replicate it and get the same successful result. With her fertility, however, Caroline had to resign herself to accepting there was so much she couldn’t control. As a scientist studying women’s health, she knew an especially in-depth amount of medical information and was considered an expert on postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy’s relationship to breast cancer, but none of that was relevant enough to help her get and stay pregnant. She knew the recipe for it, but, for the first time in her life, couldn’t get the results she felt were inherently promised.

The mixer whirred around in circles when she added the butter, and the combined ingredients reliably emulsified to become fluffy, sugary frosting. Nested steel bowls sat stacked at attention like dutiful soldiers, ready to receive their food color droplets and march into whatever color Caroline had given them orders to be. This was going to be a sailor themed birthday cake, which called for red and blue frosting. It was dark now, and with the kitchen only lit by a few dimmed, recessed spotlights. She was careful not to spill any frosting on the expensive, cold Carrara marble countertops she’d fallen in love with when they first toured this house with the realtor. Although it was small on square footage, they’d both loved the Craftsman style and tucked-away-among-the-trees aesthetic that seemed so unique to this Mill Valley neighborhood. When they bought the house, Caroline had fantasized about filling it with children and their endless parades of toys, stuffed animals, sporting equipment, and clothes of varying sizes. Picturing children’s clutter seemed optimistic and joyful, like they could afford to provide for (and occasionally spoil) their children. But to Caroline, adult clutter, at least the kind procured by two high-earning, childless adults, looked wasteful and indulgent. Without children’s belongings, their tiny home, stuffed to the gills with adult pursuits like baking appliances and dust-covered at-home gym equipment, felt painfully empty. (Like the meat-grinder attachment for the mixer? When they’d put it on their wedding registry, had they been envisioning a life where they slayed their own livestock and stuffed their own sausages? Honestly, who grinds their own meat? She felt embarrassed that they had ever conveyed to their wedding guests expectations for such a ridiculously abundant life that they could impose artisanal challenges on themselves.) 

 After a few minutes of stirring each bowl, she had the colors ready. The cake had cooled, and Caroline began to decorate it. Her mother had taught her how to ensure an even consistency by spinning the cake plate so that she could hold the frosting-filled offset spatula with one hand and guide the cake in its rotation with the other. Caroline lost count of how many times she spun the cake around, mindlessly adding and smoothing, adding and smoothing, until she had completely covered the cake. She moved on to the decorative trim, which she carefully piped on the top and bottom and added the tiny plastic balloons. Finally, she placed a single candle in the middle. She struck a match and held it to the wick, hoping that it would catch.

A light switch flipped on behind her, and she spun around to see Aaron, sleepy-eyed and confused, standing in just his pajama pants in the doorway. “Babe,” he said. “It’s the middle of the night. What are you—” His eyes landed on the cake. “Hun, why are you baking a whole cake? I thought you were supposed to bake cupcakes or something easy for everyone to eat on the sailboat tomorrow.”

 Caroline’s face flushed with shame while she waited for Aaron to figure out the date’s significance. The little boy’s birthday theme and a single candle.

“Oh, honey,” he said.

“Yes, but...I …I just need to do this.”

“But is this really —”

“I just need to do this.”

“He’s gone, honey. He never had a birthday. He never had a birth.”

“I know that, Aaron!” She snapped at him and did not feel badly about it. “Don’t you think I would have noticed that?”

Aaron’s face sunk. “I’m sorry.”

Caroline chose her words deliberately and slowly. “I just need to be alone right now. Today was his due date, and I couldn’t pretend that it’s not. He was supposed to be here today. Please. Can you please let me just have this?” Aaron approached his wife’s back and tenderly placed his hands on her shoulders. He kissed the top of her head. “Okay,” he said, backing away and returning the lights to their previously dimmed state.

Alone again, Caroline stared down at the cake and its solitary candle. Although she wasn’t particularly religious, she thought about those candles you sometimes see at the back of Catholic churches in Europe, where people light votives for dead relatives... or was it for dead saints? Either way, maybe this was like that. She was lighting a birthday candle for her baby, although, since he had never been born, had he ever really died, either? When she found out she was pregnant with a boy, she’d imagined a whole life for him — admittedly, a stereotypical depiction of a man’s life, but what else did she know about this little fetus to base it off of? — baseball games, Cub Scout meetings, pinning a corsage on his high school prom date, college and then maybe medical school like Aaron, or earning a Ph.D. like her. A Technicolor-quality movie reel had been playing in her mind since the moment she found out she was pregnant with this little boy, from imagining his entrance into the world and its perfect adherence to her detailed birth plan, all the way to his peaceful passing as an old man in his bed, surrounded by his children and grandchildren as he fell asleep with one last satisfied sigh under an heirloom quilt. In a sense, he had lived, if only in her imagination. “Happy birthday, Little Boy,” she said quietly. “I love you.” 

Tomorrow, she would make sailing-themed cupcakes out of a Betty Crocker boxed mix, which she would decorate with gloppy spoonfuls of unnaturally colored store-bought frosting, and stick little shark fins toppers in a few for her nephew and some mermaid tails for her nieces. She and Julia would share, like so many things in their lives, a bottle of sauvignon blanc, and the two families would enjoy the sunshine when it broke through the fog and the sparkling city views on the chilly San Francisco Bay. But not tonight. Tonight was just for her and the son she would never hold. She closed her eyes, made a wish, blew out the candle, and went back to bed. 

Fiction.

Margot’s coworker Shelley was nervous about being left in charge of the annual Families Fighting Cancer Together charity fundraiser. It was one of the biggest, and certainly one of the fanciest, benefits that Margot’s event planning company put on every year, and this year was the first time Margot wasn’t going to be there to manage it.

“I’m only going to be in Tahoe, Shelley,” Margot said. “It’s not like I’m going somewhere that you can’t reach me. Plus, you’re ready for this! You can totally handle it. I would never have left my wedding planning trip on one of the biggest weekends of the year if I didn’t think you could do it.”

“You got it, Boss,” Shelley said. “I know your wedding planning trip is important, too. I can’t believe your wedding is coming up so soon, with so much left to figure out. You don’t have any time to waste! June will be here before you know it.”

It was uncharacteristic of Margot to have left parts of her wedding planning to the last minute. If she had been planning a June wedding for a client, she would have had nearly everything taken care of by March. But as Margot drove away from her office, she breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that Shelley would do a fine job, and knowing that she had completed every task on her list for the charity event. It happened to be her favorite client, FFCT, a large charity supporting families enduring pediatric cancer treatment. Their annual benefit was to take place that weekend at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, in the famous Penthouse Suite, where she knew Prince Charles and Princess Diana had once stayed. They held it there every year, and Margot loved the chance to go and see the fabulous view of the San Francisco Bay — the same one Charles and Lady Di must’ve seen — but this weekend, she had to miss it for the sake of making sure that her own wedding in Lake Tahoe went according to plan.

Margot was likely the only person in Lake Tahoe who was not excited about the recent snowfall, as she did not care about skiing. Her fiancé, Brian, was not much of a skier, either, but he was not coming with her on this trip. Even though it was mid-March, snow was still blanketing Lake Tahoe, much to the delight of the local skiers. “Miracle March,” they called it, especially after a disappointing winter season. A few hundred miles west in San Francisco, spring was beginning to blossom, which made the Tahoe snow that much more enticing to skiers eager to get a few final runs in the season. Brian had put tire chains in the trunk of her car just in case the snowstorm got worse. 

Margot mentally reviewed her wedding to-do list. She had to visit the venue to talk with the catering staff, find the salon where she would do her trial hair and makeup, and, the thing she was most looking forward to, taste the cake. Brian wouldn’t have minded cake tasting but told Margot that other than that, he didn’t really care about the wedding planning. He had decided to stay in Sacramento for work, where he was an advisor to the governor’s office, instead of driving to Tahoe to make the wedding arrangements together. 

“Honestly, do whatever — I mean, whatever’s in the budget, and I won’t complain, I promise. I’ll be fine with it,” he had said, seemingly unaware of the dismissiveness in his last sentence. Margot convinced herself she was happy with this arrangement. At her bridal shower, she had told her friends that she loved having the freedom to do whatever she wanted for their wedding and that she didn’t have to compromise, which prompted her Matron of Honor Vanessa to say, “Well, enjoy it, that’s the last time that’ll happen!”

Undeterred, Margot knew exactly what she needed to do. She pulled up to the bed-and-breakfast she’d found online. It was high up in the tree-dotted mountainside of South Lake Tahoe. The hotel where they were going to have the wedding, The Edgewood, was both booked up and prohibitively expensive for her to stay during this trip, as it essentially amounted to running errands. The black SUV parked in the bed-and-breakfast’s driveway was already covered with snow. She opened the door and was greeted by the proprietor, a cheerful woman in her mid-60s, in a knitted sweater that looked sweetly worn from years of washing machine tumbles and sticky children’s hugs. 

“Hello!” she said. “Are you Margot? We’re so excited you’re here.” She began talking excitedly, the way anyone who goes into the hospitality industry seems naturally inclined to do. “There’s one other guest here this weekend. He’s here to ski, but not you…. you’re here about wedding planning!” She clasped her hands together. “My son got married at the Edgewood a few years back, and it was beautiful, just beautiful. He and his wife did such a wonderful job planning it, and they said everyone at Edgewood was great to work with. I’m sure you and your fiancé will be so happy.” Suddenly Margot felt self-conscious that Brian wasn’t with her and felt the awkward sensation of wanting to assure this woman whose name she couldn’t remember that her relationship was fine. 

“I’m sorry, I’m horrible with names. I can’t remember yours,” Margot said.

“Oh, it’s Susan!” she said. “Margot, right? I’m the one you’ve been emailing with. Now, let me take you to your room.” She bent down and grabbed Margot’s suitcase, and they began heading down the pink rose wallpaper-covered hallway. “Do you need a wake-up call in the morning?”

Although she indulged for a moment in the idea of a motherly woman like Susan sweetly calling her at 6:30 to wish her a good morning — what would surely be a gentle stirring and not at all the harsh beeping intrusion of her usual alarm, she passed in favor of her iPhone to be less of an imposition on Susan so early in the morning. “Ok, well,” Susan said. “Don’t hesitate to let me know if you need anything!” She turned to walk back towards the main entrance, and as she did, a door across the hallway opened and a 30-something man in a faded flannel shirt stepped out. “Oh, well hello there, Jake!” Susan said. “How’s your stay so far?” 

As if drawing curtains on a window with a great view, his cheeks pulled back to reveal a toothpaste commercial-worthy smile. “It’s great!” he said. “I’m heading out to the slopes now. Have a good one,” he said. He paused for a moment, looked at them both and added, “I’ll see you later.” Margot couldn’t shake the sense that for a moment, he was talking to her, making a promise to see her again, and then had an unexpected twinge of excitement. But of course, he wasn’t talking to her — why would a total stranger promise, “See you later,” as if they had ever exchanged even a single word before? — but the idea rooted itself in her head, the way intrusive thoughts do, like when she was holding her cousin’s baby last Christmas and couldn’t stop herself from thinking, what if I just dropped this baby right now? even though she had a perfectly solid grip on it. She tried to push the disruptive thought aside. She deliberately pictured Brian’s face. Imaginary Brian looked up from his imaginary laptop and smiled at her. 

Jake walked far enough down the hallway where he was out of earshot, and Susan turned to Margot with a conspiratorial wink. “He’s a cutie. I can’t understand why he’s here all alone. Maybe he’s recovering from a breakup,” she said. “Well, what about you, dear? What happened to your fiancé?” 

“We’re not broken up,” Margot said defensively and then realized that’s not exactly what Susan meant. Susan was asking slightly more intrusive questions than Margot was used to hearing. Still, Susan managed to do so with the finesse of a hairdresser who gathers up other people’s gossip all day then promptly forgets what she’s heard at the end of her shift, so that her questions, while more prodding than most people’s, came across as genuine interest rather than meddling. Margot laughed to cover her embarrassment. Imaginary Brian looked up from his laptop long enough to frown. “He just stayed back in the city to finish up some work. We kind of talked and realized wedding planning was a little bit more my thing than his. I have more opinions on it than he does, I guess. It’s totally fine. It’s not like he needs a hair and makeup trial.” She laughed. “He’s bald,” she added, and Susan laughed politely. Imaginary Brian frowned again.

“Well, I won’t keep you any longer,” she said. “It sounds like you have your hands full. Let me know if you need anything. I’m just down the hall. Stay warm!” She smiled and went back to the main room.

Margot sat down on her bed in the tiny room. “Charming” is the word the website had used, and Margot knew what that meant, and she was right — there was barely enough space for her to unzip a suitcase on the floor. But the close quarters did add to the coziness of the place, and she wasn’t planning on spending very much time in it, anyway. She had a whole weekend of errands planned.

***

Margot settled into the hairdresser’s chair as the hairdresser, Audrey, slipped the shiny black cape around her neck. Margot was still holding her iPhone and opened it to the wedding hair Pinterest board. 

“I really love this style,” she said, scrolling through twenty-six different celebrities and models all wearing the same romantic half-up, half-down hairstyle. Audrey leaned in for a closer look. 

“Oh yeah, I love that. We can definitely do that,” she said, picking up a spray bottle with one hand and pinning up Margot’s hair in the other. Her confident tone and smooth handling of multiple tools put Margot at ease. “So,” Audrey said. “Tell me about your wedding!”

Margot began the same, now-rehearsed speech about the location (the Edgewood), the flowers (peonies and anemones), the bridesmaids’ dresses (varying shades of pink, but all dusty pinks, not fuchsia) that she had perfected at cocktail parties, showers, and at work. 

“That sounds beautiful. But now I want to hear about your fiancé. What made Brian ‘the one?’” Audrey asked. It wasn’t until she asked about Brian, with that intimacy that only a hairdresser she would probably only see again one time could, that Margot was shoved out of conversational auto-pilot. She felt like a Chatty Cathy doll who had all the right things to say previously recorded, but now found herself without an appropriate response queued up for this question.

Margot paused. “Well, he is a great guy,” she started. Leaving out all of their relationship’s intimate aspects, she scrounged for things to relay to Audrey. “He loves animals, politics, and wine,” she said, as if these were particularly unique traits that set him as a clear front-runner for husband material. Audrey nodded politely, with an array of bobby pins in her mouth. Margot studied Audrey’s face for a moment, noticing her furrowed brow and wondering if that was attributable to her mouthful of bobby pins or her judgement of Margot’s answer.

Margot would later look back on this moment and be grateful for it, but she felt resentment while she was living through it. It wasn’t the first time she felt the stress of having to justify her relationship (or for that matter, her life choices) to a stranger, but it was the first time that she realized she couldn’t convincingly do it. Audrey had been able to ask the question in such a way that others hadn’t; girlfriends at happy hour and coworkers had never asked the question so pointedly and without a graceful exit. Margot hadn’t known Audrey longer than a few minutes and two prior emails to set up the appointment, but she was able to cut to the core of Margot’s mental inner workings. 

Audrey continued to do Margot’s hair as requested, happily chatting about other wedding details and her personal life for filler, admittedly bragging about her older daughter’s snowboarding prowess, her baby daughter’s first words, and her family’s home renovation project. Margot nodded along and once they were finished with her hair, sat quietly with her eyes closed while Audrey created a smokey eye and neutral lip for her makeup. At the end of the appointment, the two women hugged and Margot thanked Audrey warmly, handing her a pre-planned and sealed envelope with a cash tip, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Audrey’s questioning had dislodged something deeply unsettling.

Driving down the snow-plowed mountain road from the hair salon to the bed-and-breakfast, Margot caught a glimpse of her wedding-ready hair and photo-ready makeup in the rearview window. Her normally loose-flowing brunette ringlets were pinned up around her face, and she was wearing much more blush, eyeshadow, and eyeliner than she was used to seeing on her face. Among the skiers and hikers inhabiting Lake Tahoe, she knew she looked out of place, as if her head had somehow escaped from an off-Broadway play and attached itself to a plainclothes body. 

It was just as she was pulling into the driveway that she got an emergency notification on her phone. It came in the form of a loud buzzing sound and a bright yellow pop-up alert — a government-issued safety order. She put the car in park, raised the emergency brake, and read it. “!HEAVY SNOWFALL ALERT! CalTrans requires residents and visitors of Lake Tahoe to remain off the roads beginning at midnight, tonight.” Margot got out of the car, completely forgetting about her fancy hair and makeup, and ran into the bed-and-breakfast.

“Susan! Did you see this? We’re snowed in,” she said.

“Yes, I did. Please feel free to make yourself as comfortable as possible,” she said. After an awkward beat she added, “you might be here a while. Of course, don’t worry about that cost; we’ll figure that out. And, honey, let me know if you need anything. Anything at all. You might want to settle in with some wine. Help yourself, the opener’s right there.” She pointed to a wine rack perched on a cabinet. “This might be a while.” Margot felt an amicable agreement on the first “might be here a while,” but upon Susan’s second use of the phrase, Margot started to feel its gravity in a decidedly non-amicable way. A resentful way. I get it, she thought, with an unreasonable projection of irritation on Susan.

Margot sat down in the parlor to absorb the news. She turned her iPhone towards herself and in doing so, saw her overly made-up face once again reflected at her, this time appearing comically absurd in its readiness to go out, during a time when that was about to be expressly prohibited. The California Transportation Authority just announced that the roads were closed and everyone was stuck where they were, and here she was, dressed ready for her wedding from the neck up. Suddenly, her reflection was obscured by a calendar notification that her cake tasting appointment was starting in thirty minutes. Since the closed road order didn’t technically begin until midnight, she really wanted to squeeze in this errand. And cake felt like a much-needed and deserved indulgence.

The front door swung open, and Jake appeared. “Wow, did you just hear?” he said, looking at Margot. The snowstorm was clearly the topic he was referring to — it felt immediately apparent that this was the topic on everyone’s mind. She nodded and stood for a moment to grab her purse. 

“This is weird,” she said. “But I actually have to go somewhere. That’s gotta still be allowed, right?” 

“I guess so,” he said. He looked at Margot again. “It probably depends on what you have to do. But you look like you’re pretty ready to go. Do you mind if I ask where you’re going?”

“Cake tasting!” she said.

“Wait, that’s a thing?” he laughed. “How do I add that to my to-do list?”

Margot stopped herself from volunteering the information that she was doing this particular errand for her upcoming wedding. She wasn’t hiding it, exactly, but she definitely wasn’t going to lead with it. She settled on: “I have an appointment at a bakery in like, thirty minutes.”

“You’re dressed like that to go cake tasting?” His particular inflection on the word “that” left no doubt in Margot’s mind that he was flirting.

“It’s not really how I’m dressed, exactly.” She heard the tone of her own voice confirm that she was flirting, too. “Technically, it’s just my hair and makeup. But yes.” Although she hadn’t meant to, she realized now that withholding the reason for looking the way she did was now coming across to Jake as being coy. Coy, and flirtatious, but not unfaithful, she reasoned. Not by a long shot.

“Well, that sounds like some fun.” Then, as though after an inner debate, he added, “want some company? There’s nothing for me to do here. They’re shutting everything down on the mountain.” 

She agreed, and was grateful to have both the company and someone with experience driving in bad weather. Jake drove while she navigated, and Margot knew that the people in the other cars reasonably assumed that they were together, if they noticed them at all, which of course, in all likelihood, they did not. Jake reached for the dashboard, and Margot assumed it was to turn up the radio, but instead, he turned the music off, and turned to look at her a little longer than she would have liked a person driving to take his eyes off the road. “So Margot. What is your favorite meal?” he said.

This question caught her off guard. She thought for a moment. “Maybe seared salmon, asparagus, and quinoa,” she said finally.

“Wow, that’s impressive. Very healthy. I’m more of a meat-and-potatoes guy, but I wish I were like you,” he said. “My trainer wishes I were, too. Can I guess that you’re a pinot noir drinker?”

She smiled. “I do love my pinot noir. In whites, I’m a sauv blanc person.”

“Very popular choice!” he said. “That goes well with goat cheese and asparagus. I tend to find.” After a beat, he added, “I pair wines with food for a living.”

“At a restaurant?” she asked.

“At a winery.” He pulled off the highway and into the driveway in front a log-cabin styled row of buildings nestled among pine trees. “Looks like we’re here! ‘Cake Tahoe,’ that’s funny,” he said, pointing at the sign.

When they walked into the bakery, Jake held the door for Margot like they were old friends with this particular choreography as a habit. Margot introduced herself to the bakery’s owner, a petite woman named Joanna who was around Margot’s age, wearing a pink polka dot apron and her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. 

“I’m so glad you could make it here today, with everything going on,” Joanna said. “But don’t worry. I’m assuming that things will calm down soon and everything will be fine. Our suppliers aren’t in the affected areas, and we’re stocking up on supplies, anyway. So! When’s your wedding again?” she said. Margot blushed as she looked quickly at Jake. Now he knew why they were there.

“June,” said Margot. “June sixth. And actually, it’s uh, just my wedding. Well, my and my fiancé’s, of course. Brian. Brian’s not here; he’s back home. This is Jake though!” she blurted out in a too-loud, awkward burst. 

“Yes, her wedding,” he said, and Margot was relieved to hear him play along, instead of feeling betrayed by her lie of omission.

“Hello Jake,” Joanna said. She happily chatted as she brought out cake slices for them to try. “I’ve prepped the flavors we discussed on the phone. Here’s carrot cake, red velvet, a classic vanilla, vanilla chocolate swirl, and lemon.” Five tiny matching sets of cake slices lined up in front of them like little sets of dollhouse-sized bookends. “And then, of course, we have our frostings: vanilla buttercream, chocolate buttercream, chocolate ganache, coffee buttercream, and, my personal favorite, champagne buttercream. You can mix and match to see what flavor combinations you like for your wedding cake. Ok, take your time, and enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions!” Joanna set out the frosting in tiny paper cups and left Jake and Margot for a few moments, attending to the beeping coming from the kitchen behind her. 

Margot reached out first for the red velvet cake, politely assuming its niche factor would make it Jake’s least likely inclination. He reached for the vanilla. “So,” he said, mid-bite. “Sorry.” He laughed at his mistake of talking with food in his mouth and chewed quickly. “My grandmother would kill me if she saw me talking with food in my mouth. Anyway, so tell me, what are you guys planning for this wedding? A fancy affair? Or something more low key and intimate?”

“Really? You want to hear about this?”

“Yeah! I’m all ears. I love weddings, actually. We do some of them at the winery, it’s always a ton of fun. I love seeing people happy together, whether it’s just the couple, or them with their friends and family. That’s kind of what it’s all about, for me. I know that’s corny, although I guess a bride is a good audience for that.” He paused. “Why didn’t you tell me this was for your wedding?” 

Even though she could have expected it, Margot didn’t know how to answer this question. “I guess I thought it didn’t affect the cake tasting. It could still be fun. It seemed kind of...weird to mention it.”

“So tell me about it,” said Jake. He dipped the chocolate cake into the champagne buttercream and his face lit up. “Oh my dod,” he said, mouth stuffed too full to enunciate. “You mogga dry dis.”

“About the wedding? It’s in June, so the weather up here should be quite nice by then. It’s at the Edgewood Hotel, do you know that place? The ceremony will be outdoors, in between the lake and the golf course —”

“Yah, I know it. It’s absolutely gorgeous right there on the seventh green. Is your fiancé really into golf?”

“No, actually...he doesn't really have hobbies. He just works mostly. I think he gets most of his enjoyment from working, which is good when you have to log such crazy hours.”

“He doesn’t have hobbies? What do you guys have in common?”

Margot now felt that she had to dig deeper for a good answer than she had tried before her jarring conversation with Audrey. “We both like wine, I guess. And art. We met at a wine bar, as cliche as that is, and he works for the governor’s office. I usually like to come to Tahoe in the summer, and sometimes we rent a place on the lake, so we wanted to get married here. But since he’s so busy with work right now, he figured I’d know what I wanted. The one thing he wanted to do was taste the cake, but….” she shrugged as she dipped the chocolate cake into the champagne buttercream as Jake had suggested. “Wow,” she said. “You’re right. This is quite good.”

Margot’s phone rang and she recognized the caller ID as Shelley, the woman she’d left to cover her at the FFCT event back in San Francisco. “I’m so sorry, I have to take this,” she said to Jake.

“Margot! Thank God you answered! I’m so sorry to bother you on vacation.”

“It’s fine, Shelley, I’m not on vacation. What’s up?”

“I’m freaking out right now. None of the wine we ordered has arrived and the party starts in twenty minutes. We don’t have enough time to chill it even if it magically dropped out of the sky right now. We cannot have this event if there’s no wine.”

“Did you ask the Fairmont catering staff if they had any wine we could buy?” she asked.

“Yes, and they said there is another event tonight and they don’t have any to sell us. This is an absolute nightmare. I can’t possibly go to Traders Joe’s or Safeway right now, I’m in a ball gown, my hair’s not done, how would I even get it all here...”

“Hey,” Jake said, motioning to get her attention. “I think I have an idea.” He had been texting on his phone and in the course of doing so, his initial look of concern became a plotting grin.

“Shelley, let me call you back,” Margot said, hanging up the phone. Then turning to Jake, she asked, “What’s your idea?”

“One of my business partners owns a wine shop on Fillmore Street. They can send a shipment of our wine to the Fairmont right now, if that helps. It’s ten cases, and it’s only reds and whites. There’s no champagne, but that’s gotta help a little bit at least, right?”

“Oh my God, I -” she stopped short of saying I love you, in the exaggerated way she would have to any female friend who might have saved her party (and reputation) like that. “I cannot thank you enough,” she said finally.

“It’s my pleasure,” he said.

 After Margot called Shelley back and arranged the details for the wine delivery, she looked at Jake and the cake slices in front of her. “You are an absolute life saver. I actually forgot for a second what we were doing here. We are choosing my cake!” She took a bite of the carrot cake that had been untouched and shuddered. “Oh no, it has to be the chocolate one, you were right.”

“Well then,” he said. “I think you found your cake.” His toothpaste-perfect smile appeared again, endearing him to Margot with a tiny chocolate crumb stuck to Jake’s lip.

“Does Brian like chocolate?” 

“Who? Oh God, Brian! Yes. Yeah, I think so. I mean, who doesn’t, right?”

“And he missed out on this for work?”

“It’s just cake,” she said, knowing that she sounded defensive and that she felt betrayed by her own argument in Brian’s favor. 

“No,” said Jake. “I mean….this.” He gestured to the air between them.

Margot stared at him, feeling her attraction to Jake and realizing, for the first time, that it was reciprocated and also not a figment of her imagination. She sat in the tension for a moment, totally forgetting the reason they were tasting cakes. When Imaginary Brian’s face appeared in her mind’s eye, she snapped back to reality.

“Well! I guess we better find Joanna and tell her what we picked!” she said, quickly getting up and walking away from Jake.

***

Jake drove down the hill with the cautious confidence of a seasoned bad-weather driver. He reached for the radio station buttons and stopped at a song by a twangy, popular hipster band that Margot recognized, which was comprised of one woman with wavy, bright red hair and a troupe of banjo-playing men who, in their suspenders and beards, resembled Civil War reenactors. “I love these guys,” Jake said, singing the chorus under his breath for a few lyrics. “We actually got them to play at the winery right before they blew up. It was on my birthday, which was pretty cool.”

“Wait!” said Margot. “I almost booked them for one of the biggest events of my career. Where was that….hold on a sec. Do you work at Golden Moon Winery?”

“Yeah, you were there, too?” Jake laughed. “Good old Gold Moon Wine Room. We call it that as a joke. That’s so funny. I’ve worked there for like, seven years now I think.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“August fourth.”

“I cannot believe this.”

“It’s a small world,” Jake said. “That’s such a cliche but it’s true, especially in the wine industry.”

“No, I wasn’t there....I mean...I can’t believe this. I tried to book The Neon Wanderers for this huge charity event, and it would have been amazing for my career. I thought I had everything confirmed and set to go, but then they pulled out at the last second for some gig at a winery! And it definitely was that day. I remember that because it was summertime. I cannot believe that was you!” 

The snow was falling harder and Jake began driving slightly faster as if he could outrun it. After a few moments of silence and staring out at the snow, Margot said, “I hope you had a happy birthday.”

“Aw, don’t say it if you don’t mean it,” said Jake. “It wasn’t for my birthday exactly, it was just on my birthday. I can assure you that they did not tell us that they skipped out on a charity event. But, it seems like you did okay without the Neon Wanderers. You seem to be….” Margot felt a fervent curiosity to know what adjective Jake was going to use when he finished with the word “fine.”

“It was very difficult to explain that one to my boss,” she said. “And just so you know, I am okay without them. But,” she sighed dramatically, looking wistfully out the car window, “Who knows whatever happened to the sick orphans at Holy Mary Mother of God Orphanage…”

“There is no way that was a fundraiser for sick orphans. Definitely not from an orphanage called that,” he said.

“You got me,” she laughed. “It was for like, Women in Fintech if I remember correctly.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I would not have been cool with the Neon Wanderers bailing on the Women in Fintech, had I known,” Jake said. “Seriously, though. I have a thing about sticking to your word. If you say you’re going to do something, you’d better do it. My grandma was kind of a stickler about that, she drilled that into my head when I was growing up. It sucks they did that to you.” He turned off the highway and onto the road toward the bed-and-breakfast. Then under his breath, but loudly enough for Margot to be able to hear, he added slyly, “It was a pretty sick birthday party, though.”

“You said it wasn’t for your birthday!” Margot said.

“It wasn’t! It was a marketing event for the winery, I promise. But I still made it a good time. I always make it a good time.”

And under her breath, but loudly enough for him to be able to hear, she said, “Yes, yes you do.”

***

Susan greeted them in the parlor of the bed-and-breakfast, where a small fire was growing in the fireplace. “Margot!” she said, turning around. “You have a message from your very special someone!”

Margot’s mind rummaged through reasons why anyone would have sent her a message there instead of texting her directly. “My what?” she asked.

“From Brian!” Susan said, handing Margot a vase of daffodils. “I’m sorry, I read the card. I found these on the porch earlier and didn’t want them to freeze, but had to find out who they belonged to.”

“It’s okay,” she said, opening up the card to read.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Jake said, turning to walk back to his room.

Suddenly Margot was embarrassed to be holding the flowers, embarrassed to be holding Brian’s words in her hands, while just a few moments ago, having held a possibility that something could happen between her and Jake. 

Brian’s note, which Margot imagined him typing into the website where he’d ordered the flowers, read: 

Hope your having fun. 

Thx 4 all you do!!! Brian

Upon reading this, Margo felt conflicted: she privately wished that he had said something sweeter, more substantial, more reassuring that he was indeed the right choice for her to marry; at the same time, she also felt some slight relief at Brian’s note not having been overly emotional — was she really going to marry a man who wouldn’t write the word “love” on the card? 

Later that night, Margo went to her bathroom and took a long look at herself in the mirror. She took some selfies and contorted her arm at an unnatural angle to get a good look at the back of her head. For a moment, she briefly considered knocking on Jake’s door and asking him to help. But then she realized that would introduce the possibility of him coming into her room — that was a firm no, she was not going to do that — and that it might, in a very awkward but real sense, be insensitive to ask him for help with her wedding tasks. If Brian had been with her, he probably would have quickly snapped a few shots without putting much thought into it and without checking with Margot to see that he’d done it the way she wanted, then gone back to his work. She texted the best two shots to her bridesmaids’ group chat and washed her face. When she finished, she checked her phone to see that the group chat loved it, so she texted Audrey right away to confirm that Audrey was hired for the wedding day. Secure in having her cake, hair, and makeup all confirmed for her wedding (as well as the big things like the venue, dress, and date), Margot laid down in bed and fell asleep quickly.

She was awoken the next morning by a phone call from Brian. “Hey babe, did you get my flowers?”

Still groggy with sleep and not having had any coffee yet, she was slow to answer. “Yeah, I got them last night, thank you. I meant to call you but I was exhausted. It was a long day yesterday, but I got a lot done. How are you?”

“Good!” he said. “Really good, actually. I have some great news. My boss wants me to lead the team for one of the June special election ballot initiatives! You know how I’ve been wanting to do this kind of thing for years, and yesterday he took me out to lunch and formally asked me to do it!”

“That’s so exciting, honey. But the June election? Isn’t that just three days after our wedding? We’re supposed to be in Tahiti by then.”

“Yah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to grease the wheels with the flowers and tell you...we have to move the wedding.”

***

An hour later, Margot sat in the kitchen nook, despondently staring into her coffee mug. She reached for a pen and piece of paper on the table nearby and started totaling up the deposits she had placed for various vendors confirming her June sixth wedding date. On the phone with Brian, she’d roughly estimated a loss of twenty-two thousand dollars if they canceled the wedding now. But probably because he’d wanted this opportunity so badly and for so long, Brian said that was “not ideal, but certainly doable.” After all the work she’d put into planning this wedding, she was nauseated at the idea of canceling or even moving the wedding date. If she were doing this for someone else as an event planner, she would have charged thousands of dollars for her time, and now she considered that wasted money, too. She was too nervous to text her bridesmaids or her mother, lest any of them set off a panic, but she needed to discuss this with someone who was not Brian. 

As if conjured up by sheer will, Jake walked into the kitchen and started making himself a cup of coffee. He saw Margot sitting at the table, and not standing too closely, said “Mind if I sit down?”

“No, not at all. Mind if I get your opinion on something?”

“Sure,” he said. “Go for it.”

She took a deep breath and told Jake everything, from her lost-deposit math, to the conversation with the hairdresser, to her wasted time and undoubtedly disappointed friends. Jake listened patiently and when she finally came to a stop he asked, “I’m a little unclear. Are you talking about canceling entirely? Or are you talking about moving it out a few months?”

“Honestly, I do not think moving it out a few months is an option. Any good venues are already booked, and all the vendors and the weather would be so much different…”

“It’s interesting,” Jake said. “That through this whole conversation, I have only heard you talk about logistics and other people’s expectations.”

“I’m an event planner. That’s how I think,” she said.

“You’re also a bride,” he said. “And I haven’t heard you say anything about how you feel in all of this.”

Margot was stunned by this realization. Since her phone call with Brian, she hadn’t even once checked in with herself about how she was feeling — the thought of doing so made her stomach ache and her heart race. 

“I wish you could see the look on your face right now,” Jake said. “You look like the actor in a movie trailer who just saw the big bad monster, and the audience is waiting to find out what you’re seeing. And if you don’t know what you’re thinking, or how you feel at the idea of not getting married, well, I think that at least answers part of the question.”

“I look awful,” Margot said, looking down at her crumpled robe. She looked back at her notes. “Oh God. Does this mean I have to call off the wedding?”

“I can’t tell you what to do. But no, you don’t. You don’t look awful,” he said, grabbing his coffee mug and heading towards the door. “You look beautiful.”

***

After spending the rest of the day in bed tossing and turning, that evening, with both hands shaking, Margot dialed Brian’s number. Only once in her career had she ever helped a bride cancel a wedding. Margot had been nervous for that bride and couldn’t ever imagine herself in the same position. She prayed that Brian wouldn’t answer and she could somehow avoid this conversation for another day. He did answer the phone, and Margot tearfully agreed to cancel the wedding. “It’s for the best,” she said, trying not to sound like she had rehearsed this message in her head all day.

 “Where do we go from here?” Brian asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I do know you’re going to nail it at the ballot box in June. I’ll be rooting for you.”

“Thanks, Margorita,” he said. “Okay, well. I guess this is goodbye.”

She hung up the phone and immediately got up and knocked on Jake’s door.

“It’s over,” she said. 

“I’m proud of you for doing what you needed to do,” he said. “At least the hard part’s over.”

“I do still have some really difficult conversations to have. I have to call my parents, and my bridesmaids, and all my vendors. Oh man,” she sighed. “I don’t even want to think about that right now.”

“Well, don’t cancel them all,” Jake said.

“What? What do you mean?” she said.

“Can I ask you a favor? Don’t cancel one,” said. “Just leave the order for the cake.”

“What? What on earth am I going to do with a wedding cake? A wedding cake for 125 people and no wedding?”

“Okay, we can scale it back a bit. But I just think about Joanna and how nice she was, and you know I hate to break a commitment. What would my grandmother say?”

Margot, for the first time all day, laughed. “She’d say that’s too much cake for…”

“For us,” Jake said. He reached out to hug Margot. “But before we get to that, you know what we need to do?”

“What do we need to do?”

“We need….to go out on a date. I know a great little winery I’d love to take you to, maybe we can see if the Neon Wanderers are playing there. I hear they put on a great show.”

“I wouldn’t know!” she laughed. “But I can’t wait to find out.”

Fiction

Los Angeles, California, 2004.

The hot, dry winds blew in from the Mojave desert, following the path of the fabled Route 66 and picking up the scent of orange blossoms and night-blooming jasmine on their way to the coast, bringing with them static electricity, chapped lips, and double overhead sized waves. Mary Ann could hear the winds swirl dramatically around her as they arrived at their final destination in Malibu. Not in fancy, beach house Malibu — rather, the oft-forgotten trailer park version of Malibu, primarily populated by graduate students at nearby Pepperdine University. To the passengers of any jumbo jets in the flight path directly above, the trailer park must have looked like a sandbox, filled with tin cans kicked over on their sides. 

 Mary Ann stood in the trailer’s little kitchen, staring out the window at the ocean as thoughts about her future — her job, her marriage, her home — raced through her mind. She and her husband, August, were the stars of a successful reality tv show called The Palace at Calabasas, which premiered in the fall of 2003. They were spending the summer of 2004 on hiatus from filming the show, living in a tiny silver Airstream trailer while their house was undergoing renovations. During this summer hiatus, Mary Ann and August were waiting to hear if the show was going to get renewed, and although the house’s renovations were moving forward, the show’s renewal for filming in the fall wasn’t guaranteed. 

The show’s future was uncertain primarily because the network was concerned about bad publicity. They knew from viewer emails that the everyday people who watched their show considered Mary Ann and August to be self-absorbed and unaware of real people’s problems, especially considering the severe drought that had ravaged California. Everywhere they turned — billboards, television commercials, bus stops — residents were barraged with messages asking them to conserve water. Forgo a green lawn in the spring! Let your cars stay dirty! Take fewer and shorter showers! In theory, all Californians were asked to save water, but in practice, wealthy people, with their large lawns, swimming pools, and multiple cars, contributed to the problem more than the solution, and they certainly contributed to the problem more than the poor and working class did. Mary Ann and August were among those rich people who continued to live their lives as if there weren’t a drought, and, thanks to the tabloids, they knew that many viewers were either jealous of this or resented them for it.

August was primarily to blame for the way they reacted to the drought. Growing up the son of the mayor in Malibu, he’d been in the elite position of not having to be aware of the plight of everyday Americans.  His father’s former constituents were now most often concerned about highly privileged things like the tax for excessive water usage on their expansive lawns or sound ordinances for late-night parties.   The show’s viewership, however, had a sizable base in middle America and the South, where the perspective was different. Even though those states didn’t suffer from the drought, people there undoubtedly knew about it and could clearly see how August and Mary Ann were flouting the guidelines.

***

The largest, and most criticized example, the one that caused a shift in viewers’ perspective on them, was the dolphin tank. Looking back on the day they filmed the episode, Mary Ann should have guessed something unusual was going on by the way the crew was acting. There was an air of anticipation that she had never seen in some of the men she’d come to know over the course of the show filming twenty hours per week in her home. A large fence had been erected on the back half of their property, but because the crew needed space for craft services and meetings, she assumed whatever was behind the fence would stay off-camera. In order to show the most realistic reaction, the producers forbade anyone from telling Mary Ann what was being built, although much to her chagrin, August was heavily involved. The morning that the episode was filmed, August awoke with an uncharacteristic giddiness. 

“This is going to be amazing, babe. This is like, bucket-list level stuff that we’re going to do today,” he said when they were changing into their costumes for the first scene. It always struck Mary Ann as odd that the clothes they were supposed to casually choose to put on (as they would have in real life) were chosen by the producers and, more so, that this fact wasn’t disguised by calling them something other than “costumes.”

When it was finally time to shoot the scene, Mary Ann was blindfolded, so August led her to the back yard. They walked for what she thought was an astonishingly long time, long enough that it occurred to her that they were living on far more acreage than she had realized, and then, suddenly, the blindfold was off. The source of the fishy stench that she couldn’t quite place while the blindfold was on became apparent — August had arranged for a giant (one-and-a-half million gallons worth) water tank to be installed so that he could realize his dream of swimming with dolphins. Shocked, she turned around to see that he was in a full-body wetsuit, ready to dive in.

“Isn’t this insane?” he asked, his eyes lit up with enthusiasm.

Mary Ann was, by this point, acutely aware of the cameras and skilled enough to know that she had to pretend not to be aware of them or honest about her reaction. She was horrified at the excessive expense, the wasted water, and never mind the fact that the Pacific Ocean, filled with dolphins at no additional cost, was a mere nine miles away. 

“Oh my God, it’s amazing!” she said. “Haven’t you always wanted to do this?” And then, because she didn’t know what else she should say upon finding a giant dolphin tank in her backyard, she added, “No one I know has anything like this in Australia.” Later, an intense and petite producer named Jen would cite this moment, non-ironically, as an example of a character arc she could play up, referring to her as “a fish out of water.”

While most of the nightly news coming out of California was about its drought, August had failed to recognize how this would appear. The show producers thought it would be good content, so they let him do it, even going so far as to order the plexiglass tank from the same supplier that Seaworld used. The episode was broadly panned in the tabloids. “Ratings tank!” was a favorite headline of August’s, while Frank, their agent — a loud, enthusiastic, but intense man with a generally good sense of humor — did not find any of them funny, despite his involvement with arranging the water tank.

***

August had always drawn attention to himself, even as a young boy. He had boundless energy, a good sense of humor, and an enthusiastically curious nature, which made him a fun kid to be around. When he was in high school, his father was elected mayor of Malibu and he inherited a halo of fame. Many of the other kids in his school were far more famous themselves or had parents who were, and August’s natural charm and tanned good looks had always allowed him to fit in with a flashy set of friends.

 The day the reality show was pitched to him, August was at an Opening Ceremonies watch party for the 2002 Winter Olympics. The party was held in the Ritz Carlton’s bar in Downtown LA. August and Mary Ann had been invited to tag along by August’s childhood friend Ned, whose college roommate was a sports agent and had connections to fancy parties. After the table had ordered five bottles of Grey Goose vodka and three magnums of champagne, the American delegation of athletes, who as the host nation was the last to enter the stadium, finally appeared onscreen. August kicked off his shoes in excitement, climbed onto the bar, and led the crowd in a poorly sung but very heartfelt rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. Mary Ann begged him to get down, tugging on his socks, but even the bar staff let him go until the song’s conclusion. To assuage her irritation, he attempted to serenade her with “Waltzing Matilda,” but neither he nor the bar’s patrons knew the song well enough to sing it. When it was clear his moment in the spotlight was over, he jumped down, and three people ran over to introduce themselves.

“You are so damn funny!” said a short man in a navy blue pinstripe suit. “Are you in the business?”

“No, dude, I’m not in the business,” August laughed.

The man reached into his navy blue suit for a business card. “I’m Frank Peruzzo. I’d love to represent you. We’re working on an idea and I think you’d be perfect for it.”

“Oh, I’m not an actor,” August said.

“I know, but that’s perfect!” You’ve got such presence, such charisma. We’re not looking for actors. Is that your wife?” he said, pointing at Mary Ann and not waiting for an answer. “Congratulations, she’s a real beauty. Is she an Aussie? We’re looking for real people to star in a new show. You don’t have to act, all you have to do is be yourself. It’s for reality tv. I think it’s really going to be a huge deal. Let’s meet for a drink next week, I’d love to talk you into it.” Frank smiled and pressed his card firmly in August’s hand.

***

A month after the first season of the show wrapped, Mary Ann had gotten a phone call from Jen about the show’s future.

“Mary Ann? We have to talk. Everyone loves the show — loves it, loves you, loves August, loves it all — but some of the advertisers…well, they’re starting to say that they’re…concerned.”

“What do you mean ‘concerned’?” Mary Ann asked.

“So, for example, the water tank thing was bad. This drought is so severe that people can’t wash their cars and have to do laundry on a schedule by zip code, and no one’s seen a green shrub along the 405 in months, but then August has to use all that perfectly good water so he can swim with a dolphin? C’mon Mary Ann, people are angry. Angry and thirsty. You can’t even get a damn drink in this town.”

“That’s not true. I just had a really nice apple martini at Nic’s on Cañon the other day.”

“I meant water, Mary Ann!”

“I prefer champagne. Can’t they drink that?” 

“Do you hear yourself? That cutesy bimbo schtick works great on camera, I mean, definitely keep that up, but for God’s sake I’m telling you, you’re at risk of losing it all — the show, the fame, house, everything.”

Until this point, Mary Ann had not realized that the situation was so dire. She certainly would not have performed the television version of herself if she had, and felt embarrassed that Jen had to be the person to tell her. She corrected her approach and lowered the tone of her voice back to its natural state. “I had no idea, honestly. Why didn’t anyone tell me it was this bad? What are we supposed to do?”

“To be honest at this point, since we’re on hiatus, I don’t think there’s much you can do. We just have to wait for the advertisers to decide and the network to order new episodes. Just try not to get photographed by paparazzi — especially not like washing your car or anything stupid like that. Just be aware.”

 Their agent Frank, however, had been worried about their public perception for months. The week after the water tank episode aired, Frank called Mary Ann to tell her about the bad press, but because she wasn’t ready to hear it, his approach had failed to convey the gravity of the situation. 

“People feel that August, and by association, you, Mary Ann, are…how do I say this gently…grossly out of touch with reality. PETA is picketing outside the goddamn studio! I don’t need those damn PETA people on my ass. I can’t get red paint on my BMW.”

“You’re fine. They only do that to people wearing fur,” she said. “And what do you mean, ‘out of touch with reality?’ It’s a reality show!”

“It doesn’t work like that, sweetheart. Do you know the average annual income of your audience? Do you know how many of them could afford a million gallon lobster tank?!”

“Dolphin tank,” she corrected.

It had been Frank, of course, who’d encouraged August’s dolphin tank idea, one of the many people who had not considered the optics of using over a million of gallons of water for something as indulgent and ridiculous as one’s own personal dolphin pool during a severe drought. 

“Don’t act like that was all my husband’s idea,” she said. “I seem to remember you were very involved with the water tank. Didn’t you say you thought it would be good for ratings?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Mary Ann,” Frank said. “Sometimes, you gotta try things out first and then see what works. Not every idea works, you know? This is a risky business sometimes. You just can’t make any more fuck ups like that, okay? I’m doing everything I can to sweet talk the network, trust me. Remember, I don’t get paid until you get paid.”

***

The show’s renewal was critical to maintaining the lifestyle she and August had grown accustomed to. Although August’s family was wealthy, he and Mary Ann couldn’t have been able to afford the giant house in Calabasas without the show, nor would they have chosen, necessarily, to live in that particular town. Calabasas, a city in Southern California just northwest of LA, with its expansive home lots, luxury car dealerships, wide streets that served as branches of the 101 freeway, and a high per-capita-celebrity count, was the perfect spot to buy a house for a reality show. The real irony of the place was that the hedges and gated communities were intended to keep residents and their lives private. In reality, they facilitated easy access to the very camera crews and tv productions that opened up the residents’ lives and broadcasted their secrets.

On the days that they were filming, cameras followed the couple around their expansive home and around Calabasas, broadcasting their daily lives on a celebrity-centric cable channel. When the show hit the air, despite the fact that Mary Ann and August had not been famous before, viewers quickly grew to love them and loved watching them interact as newlyweds. Each episode tended to have a theme, whether it was for a particular outing or a theme the producers had created for the week. They had an episode dedicated to their attempt at picking out a mattress, where August embarrassed Mary Ann by jumping on the mattresses in the store and then talking a salesclerk into hiding a pea under a stack of five mattresses and trying to make Mary Ann see if she could feel it beneath her. They filmed an episode that showed them cooking a vegan dinner together, which ignited a debate online over whether honey counted as vegan since using honey didn’t disturb the bees who produced it. (This was a moot point though, because they weren’t vegan; the only reason they were cooking this meal was because the episode was sponsored by a vegan burger manufacturer. Mary Ann wondered if viewers would notice those commercials when the episode aired, as this was a blatant deviation from any concept of their actual reality to anyone who cared to look closely enough.)

There was an early episode that showed Mary Ann trying (and failing, twice) to get her California driver’s license, in which she befriended several teenage girls in line at the DMV. In retrospect, she would realize this marked the point when the producers began portraying her as childlike, and a bit dumb — failing both the written and behind-the-wheel tests didn’t help, but they also told her that she should have fun with the behind-the-wheel test and that taking it too seriously would be boring on camera. On her own terms, she would never have thoughtlessly knocked over a traffic cone and laughed in such a circumstance, but the producers were continually egging her on to do things that would play well to the cameras. She began to notice that all the silly comments she would make throughout filming would end up in the final cut, but none of the informed and rational counterpoints to August’s arguments (like when he said that any kind of animal product was unhealthy to use) ever made it into the show.

When the show first aired, they would host viewing parties for friends and family, but as months passed and her portrayal changed, she became embarrassed at how she was depicted, and then embarrassment subsided to acceptance, made easier (although she felt ashamed to admit this), by the increasing paychecks. She started coming up with her own ideas of ways to be silly on camera and ad-libbing her own dumb blonde jokes. By the end of the season, she had fully morphed herself into the blonde ditz that the producers had envisioned.

August’s and Mary Ann’s relationship had changed over the course of the filming, too. When the show was first pitched to them, they were relatively unknown and living in a cute beach cottage in Malibu, while Mary Ann adjusted to life in America. She still had quite a thick Australian accent, which she would learn to tone down for the show. She felt free to use the colorful Aussie slang and curse words that she would eventually have to stop using once she was on network television. August was curious about how her life had been in Sydney and asked the kinds of deeply intimate questions that, while they were dating, had demonstrated to her that he had a genuine interest in getting to know all about her as a person. Once the cameras were in their lives, August was primarily concerned with making good tv and ratings. He picked a fight on camera with her about Britney Spears’ and Madonna’s make-out moment on the MTV awards, and although she didn’t really have an opinion on the matter, his needling finally prompted her to say that she thought Britney was “a little trashy,” which caused an uproar on a nation-wide radio morning show. She tried to think of a time in their relationship before their reality show when August would have instigated a pointless fight like that. Not until the show. 

***

 Mary Ann would have paced in the trailer if there had been room. Instead, she decided to lie down on the king-sized bed to think. The bed was ludicrously small in the trailer; it touched both sides of the walls and reminded her slightly of a padded cell in a mental hospital. 

She didn’t have any career plans to fall back on if the show got canceled.  Since she was married to August, she could legally stay in the United States, but she didn’t have much to do beyond redecorating the house. Money wasn’t her biggest concern, she knew August’s family would never let them starve, but the show brought her a sense of purpose, connection to her adopted homeland, and of course, fame. She knew from the abundance of washed-up former stars in Calabasas and in Malibu — middle-aged people with obvious plastic surgery (breast implants on the women, facelifts on the men, nose jobs on all of them) wearing flashy jewelry and, for some reason, always rhinestone-emblazoned jeans — that fame was the most fleeting of all the things she stood to lose. And the most humiliating. 

In between filming, or as it’s called in the industry, on hiatus, the network wanted to do more renovations to the house. There were plans to expand the closets to make them big enough for a cameraman, a producer, a lighting engineer, and a boom operator to fit comfortably. Mary Ann’s closets were already filled with the show’s wardrobe, and the clothes were placed there by the stylist to look like Mary Ann had chosen them. If only the people watching in their homes knew that on her own accord, she would never have lined up the Juicy tracksuits by color, all the hoodies facing the same way. Growing up, Mary Ann had never heard of Louis Vuitton, but now, in her closet, were 4 different prints of the same bag — two traditional versions, one with graffiti and one with little cherry prints on them. 

Funding for the show, and by extension, Mary Ann and August’s life, was entirely contingent on the network’s decision to order another season of episodes. For the first few months of filming, Mary Ann wasn’t at all concerned about the possibility of not getting renewed. The show was getting excellent ratings. They were frequently in US Weekly, most often under the “Stars! They’re just like us!” spread of the magazine, featuring shots of Mary Ann coming out of Starbucks with a cake pop or jogging along the beach.  When Mary Ann wore something trendy or different, like pairing a very-LA denim mini skirt with her beloved Australian Ugg boots, the look became a trend. She and August spent their date nights at Malibu Country Mart’s hottest sushi restaurant, Nobu, which nearly doubled the restaurant’s business.  

She had never been very fashion conscious growing up on the beaches outside Sydney, but living in front of cameras changed the way she viewed herself as well as the way she dressed. If she wore a trendy graphic tee shirt on a shopping trip, not only would the shirt be seen in tabloids, but she would be seen as someone who influenced what people bought. It was powerful. It was intoxicating.

***

The house in Calabasas was a two-story McMansion with a double-set staircase in the foyer. A wrap-around driveway with a fountain at its center greeted visitors and set the stage for the over-the-top opulence throughout the house. The kitchen had double sets of ovens and dishwashers — not that they were used often enough to warrant having even a single set of them — and the hallway that led to their dining room was top-to-bottom beveled glass mirrors. There was a Rococo chandelier over the king-sized master bed and, even though it was never on camera, one over the antique clawfoot bathtub, too. “That looks like a deathtrap,” August said when it was installed. “It’s an accident waiting to happen.” Practicality was not what led the team to install the chandelier there; like so many aspects of reality tv, all that mattered was how it looked.

The show’s producers and set designers provided the majority of the design input — Mary Ann wanted marble countertops, but they insisted on travertine because it looks “just as rich on camera at half the price” — but she enjoyed the process of furnishing the house nonetheless.  She chose thick velvet draperies and dining chairs in a distressed, eighteenth-century French style popularized by Laurel & Oak, an upscale furniture store. When she saw a picture of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck in People Magazine coming out of Laurel & Oak with handfuls of fabric swatches, she felt like her choice in home design aesthetic was vindicated.

During the renovation, the front and back gardens were supposed to be drought-friendly because California was always under water conservation alerts, but the producers loved the wide-angle shot of the lawn in the opening sequence of the show, so they decided to keep them. In came the rose bushes, birch trees, Kentucky bluegrass (even though the existing grass had been perfectly fine), and bougainvillea hedges to block off the view of the estate from as much of the street as possible. Mary Ann watched the renovation with a detached curiosity; she didn’t feel true ownership over the house or the decisions being made because whenever she offered an opinion, some producer or assistant, eager to make their mark on such a successful show, would talk over her and argue passionately for some arbitrary element like a planter. She was overruled about the kind of toilet that would be installed in the master bathroom — she wanted a bidet-equipped toilet with a heated seat installed and because it would never be seen on camera, the extra expense wasn’t approved. She felt utterly defeated and stopped trying to have any influence on the house at all. Plus, she knew she’d see the renovations later when the episodes aired anyway. 

The trailer they were living in during the renovation was supposed to be a “luxury trailer,” which struck Mary Ann as a contradiction of terms. The absurdly small living areas, particularly the bathroom, served to remind her how unnecessarily large things were at her Calabasas house. Though she had to admit, this trailer was fancier than the beige, square-shaped ones used by middle-class, middle-aged retired couples on cross-country vacations. The outside was shiny and reminiscent of the 1950s, but the inside was thoroughly modern. There was a flat-screen tv, stainless steel (albeit tiny) appliances, and as if it apologized for the rest of the minuscule, scaled-down aspects of the place, the king-sized bed. Mary Ann spent most of her time in the trailer because she feared being seen by either fans of the show or paparazzi. When the show wasn’t filming or airing, the producers expected her to keep a low profile, as they did not want her to be seen living in a tiny trailer instead of her palatial estate. 

Mary Ann and August were naïve when they agreed to participate in the show and didn’t realize that it would have the power to transform them into celebrities, even by LA standards.  Reality tv was not yet dominating the primetime lineup. According to the network’s focus group research, the audience said that each glimpse into their lives felt salacious and fleeting, despite the show being on every Wednesday night for nearly an hour.

August had grown up used to having influence over people — he had grown up as both the mayor’s son and big man on campus at a small private college. Mary Ann, however, had not. She had grown up in a small town in Australia, a lover of horses, the outdoors, and not much else. School had never been her forte, and after graduation, she hopped from waitressing job to waitressing job. When she met August surfing Bondi Beach one summer, he plucked her out of obscurity and set her on a path to celebrity she never imagined for herself. 

Mary Ann wasn’t used to the type of excess that August had known as a wealthy mayor’s only son, but she knew even August was aware that the dolphin tank stunt was going too far. When you have cameras on you all the time, the pressure to entertain becomes stronger and stronger, particularly when you don’t have talent. Without many discernible skills other than surfing, which offered very little dialogue and wore thin quickly for a drama-hungry audience, August had to resort to stunts like the dolphin tank and, on a special Las Vegas episode, trying to swim in the fountains at the Bellagio Hotel.

When the first, and potentially last, season of the show wrapped, Mary Ann felt relief at not having to perform for the cameras while she was living her daily life. The dumb blonde persona got tiring quickly. Although she kept it up whenever dealing with Jen, Frank, and anyone else associated with the show, it was exhausting to constantly be performing a character that was not her authentic self. 

Returning to her perch in front of the kitchen window, she thought about her life on the show. She had continued her ditzy persona into their marriage, even when the cameras were turned off. In the two years that they had been filming the show, she realized that their marriage had become a plotline instead of an actual relationship. August played the role of her costar, not her husband. She didn’t like who either of them had become.

The tiny door of the trailer opened; August’s large body filled the frame entirely. 

“You know, they’re talking about canceling,” he said, stepping inside. 

“I know.” 

“This can’t be all because of the dolphin tank! The network was totally okay with that! Don’t they test that shit?”

“I don’t know,” said Mary Ann.

“What are we going to do if we lose the show?”

“I didn’t ask for this,” Mary Ann said. Even as she said the words, she was unclear what she was referring to. The energy shift was palpable. August looked startled. 

“I didn’t ask to come here.” She wasn’t sure if she meant the trailer park or California.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“I didn’t ask to have all this influence. Is it my fault if something you decide to do doesn’t sit well with the viewers? Why does anyone care what I wear to Starbucks? Why am I getting yelled at by Jen and Frank? Was I supposed to be a spokeswoman for water conservation?”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t know you were this unhappy. I thought you liked all of it — the house, the attention, the fame, the money… you can’t separate those things from the feedback. It may not be what you wanted, but it’s what you got.”

It was in this moment — that glib little statement short enough to be a clip on a show break, the segment before cutting to commercial — that Mary Ann saw how August’s behavior was just a performance. Even without the cameras around, which were surprisingly easy to forget about, especially with them almost ever-present in their home, he was acting as though conversation, this intimate and personal conversation about their life together, was going to be filmed, broadcast, and dissected. She wondered what she really knew about him — most of their relationship before the show had been when they were dating. The show started a few weeks after she moved to LA, and for the first time, she realized she didn’t know what life was like with August without the cameras.

“Nice line,” she said.

“It’s not a line; it’s just how I feel.” 

As if planned by the producers, Mary Ann’s phone rang. It was both Jen and Frank calling on speakerphone. 

“Mary Ann? Are you with August?” Jen asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay, well, we have some news for you. We just got off the phone with the network. We basically got our heads chopped off, but we have some news.”

Mary Ann and August looked at each other, each trying to read the expression on the other’s face in anticipation of the news in the last seconds before the fate of the show was made known. 

“Wait!” said August. “Can we call you back?” Without waiting for an answer, his hand reached up and clasped itself around Mary Ann’s phone. He snapped it shut like a startled clamshell, ending the call.

“I have to know how you feel about this before they actually tell us. What do you want to happen?” he asked.

Mary Ann looked at August and then back at the phone. “I think,” she said slowly, “that I want us to have our own life. A real life together, not on camera, not in front of the whole world to see. We’ve never done that.”

“You want it canceled?”

“I want it canceled.” She said this slowly and with a quiet confidence she didn’t know she had until she heard the words come out of her mouth.

“Well, I don’t,” he said.

The phone, still in August’s hand, rang. He opened the phone and turned on the speakerphone function.

Frank’s voice chirped through the phone immediately. “We did it! We basically got our heads chopped off, but we did it! We’re back, baby, we’re back! This next season is gonna be the best one. We’ve already got ideas. We’re bringing in some major PR pros. We had to promise a lot, we pitched it all to the network. We’ll go over all of it with you, but the show is still on, the renovation is still on. Let's do this! Get the hell outta that little trailer park and come up to the house — we’re going to open up some champagne! The French stuff, the good stuff, only the best for you!” Frank’s enthusiasm was still perceptible through the phone even after the words were unintelligible, and his voice faded away as Mary Ann closed the phone.

August and Mary Ann looked at each other. She took a deep breath.

“You win,” she said.

The drive to Calabasas was uncomfortably silent. As they drove up the freeway, Mary Ann looked around at the wheat-colored grasses on the side of the road. Parched and brittle, the landscape looked as dry as a tinderbox ready to ignite. She licked her chapped lips as they pulled into their wraparound driveway.

Frank and Jen were already at the house by then, and they all gathered in the dining room, in front of the wall of mirrors, as Frank opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Mary Ann reached into her purse for her lip balm. She applied it to her mouth, more carefully than necessary for a colorless balm, and studied her face in the mirror for a moment. Carefully, slowly, and deliberately, her face formed a reality tv-perfect smile, ready to take on another season.

Fiction

I finally confronted my junior high school’s biggest bully in a lawyer’s office when I was thirty-six years old. I didn't seek him out for revenge or even closure; in truth, I hadn’t thought of Corey at all since high school. We ran into each other by accident. I was at the lawyer’s office to get a prenuptial agreement. Because my fiancé and I were getting a prenup primarily to please our parents and didn’t seriously consider ever needing it, the errand felt perfunctory and slightly dull. To pass the time in traffic during the long drive from my apartment in Orange County to Downtown LA, I allowed myself to imagine that I was a wrongfully accused person going to meet with my high-powered attorney, preferably one with a long list of previously righteously vindicated clients. I’d be charged with something serious and high stakes that I couldn’t possibly have committed, like murder or bank robbery. It wasn’t that I felt that was somehow romantic or didn’t respect that this does indeed happen to far too many people; instead, it appealed to my innate sense of justice and my need to correct egregious wrongs. 

My fiancé, Alex, liked to point out this irritating habit. About a year into our relationship, we went to an adorable mom-and-pop-owned 1950s-style diner called Wally’s Drugstore & Soda Shoppe for a casual Friday night dinner. In Anaheim, theme restaurants get quite tiresome, but this particular one struck me as charming in its wholesomeness, oddly devoid of crass commercialism you’d expect at a theme restaurant, and the food was actually quite good for a diner. Moments after polishing off both my own and Alex’s pile of seasoned curly fries, I’d noticed a group of teenagers whose heads were furtively checking around, seemingly to look for the waitstaff. When I observed the teenagers for a few moments, half-heartedly listening to Alex’s story about his grandfather’s ride-on tractor —the kids peeling off, one after the other — it became apparent that they were trying to “dine ’n’ dash,” or leave the restaurant without paying. I might not have cared quite so much if this were a large chain restaurant, a Denny’s, perhaps, but the idea of these kids skipping out on a bill at the expense of the small business owners irked me, especially for the servers, mostly also teenagers themselves, who would surely bear the brunt of the theft by not receiving any tips, and also maybe get scolded for negligence in not stopping the little criminals. As one of the last kids was making his way to the restaurant’s side door and against what I know Alex would have advised, I got up and ran over to the door, blocking his exit. “Hey,” I said. “Don’t do that. It’s stealing. Did you know that?” The boy pushed past me, not in an aggressive way, but with a shrug that indicated we both knew how little influence I had on the situation. 

“Why do you have to involve yourself like that, Mary Ruth?” Alex had asked me. “You have this insane need to be on the moral high ground and make sure that it’s all fair and even. It’s not ever going to be that way, you know. You just can’t seem to let that stuff go.” I did know that, but I also knew that I had a long history of this behavior, and it wasn’t going to change any time soon. Of course, Alex knew this too, though he was probably only starting to figure it out at that early point in our relationship. 

By the time we were engaged, we’d been living together for three years, so he knew many of my character flaws, like the fact that I am always running at least fifteen to twenty minutes late and that I am a terrible procrastinator. He adjusted to my running late by telling me that any appointments we had started thirty minutes earlier than they actually did, and though I figured it out quickly, he adjusted the programmable clocks on our oven and microwave to run early, too. He always seemed to work around my shortcomings, and because of that, I never felt like I had to present myself as anything other than I truly am in order for him to accept me.

 In turn, I knew about his faults, like his tendency to buy every new tech gadget that hits the market regardless of whether or not his previous model was still working, his tendency to forget birthdays and anniversaries, and his secret Monday-night addiction, watching The Bachelor. I found that I enjoyed having access to the latest tech items, which was something I never would have sought out for myself, and while the birthday and anniversary issue bothered me (how do you forget that kind of thing in the era of Facebook?), I learned to love the Bachelor, too. 

 Before Alex, I’d had several serious (but never live-in) boyfriends, and I had casually dated several men that I knew, even at the time, were utterly wrong for me. There was one pseudo-boyfriend, James, whose actions (but never his words) were quite clear about the fact that he was using me to make his ex-girlfriend jealous. Another boyfriend, whose name now thankfully escapes me, was court-ordered to wear an alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelet after crashing his car into a tree while being two times over the legal limit.

With Alex, though, I had found a partner who was a responsible, high-functioning adult, which he claims sounds like a subtle insult whenever I say it, but I mean it as a compliment. The first time we had sex, on maybe our fifth or sixth date, he brought up the issue of birth control, kindly assuming, I think, that after having presented myself to him thus far as a life-long Catholic, I might be hesitant to initiate that conversation. “We’re definitely using something, right?” he’d said early enough in the evening that we hadn’t taken our clothes off yet, but late enough when it was clear he would be spending the night at my apartment. “I can run to the drugstore if you don’t have anything.”

“Yes. I mean, I’m on the pill, so we’re good there. But...I don’t really know how to put this delicately, so I’m just gonna say it...have you been tested recently? You know what I mean. STIs.”

“Yeah, actually, I have. Not to be presumptuous, but I did a couple weeks ago. Just to make sure,” he said.

“Okay, me too.” I laughed. “I did the same thing.” This was the first instance of a pattern that would develop in our relationship. We’d often have the same, unspoken thoughts (in this case, that we liked each other enough to have sex on this night for the first time) and then act on them separately. As our relationship grew over the years, I’d occasionally think about this as an example of our inherent similarities and compatibility and confirm that I was right in choosing Alex as a partner.

“What do you think the Pope would say?” I asked.

“I’d rather not think about the Pope right now,” he said.

“Fair enough. But, honestly I think it’s fine. The Church has really started to loosen up and modernize. I don’t feel bad about it — the premarital sex part or the birth control part. I go to Mass most Sundays,” I said.

“Mary Ruth. You don’t have to atone on Sunday morning for the things you did on Saturday night, you know.” Alex and I still butt heads on this point, but now it’s often in a joking way and, in that obnoxious, cozy-couple kind of way, it is an inside joke that refers back to this moment. Sometime he’ll sing the Jimmy Buffett line to me, “There’s a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning,” and although these days, I’m not as though I’m doing something sinful every Saturday night, it still makes me laugh.

 Even early on in our dating, he was unequivocal that he liked me and was, in his words, “in it for the long haul.” His calm and consistent presence in my life, whether he was meeting me for coffee in our shared office space to help me rehearse my quarterly results presentation or listening to me complain about my period cramps without getting grossed out, allowed me to be myself with a boyfriend for the first time in my life. I realized that for almost the entirety of my life, perhaps starting in junior high school, I could stop trying to present myself as “a cool girl.”

***

In the spring of 1996, I was a shy seventh-grader at Midvale Junior High. In a cruel accident of fate, the administration somehow assigned me a locker located in a cluster of popular kids. While I wasn’t a total outcast, I certainly knew that I wasn’t popular enough to blend in among Cindy Gilinski, Brittany Taylor, Kyle Anderson, and Corey Bryce. Although I knew this, and I assumed it was also apparent to anyone else who paid even the slightest bit of attention to the school’s pecking order, each time I had to stand in front of my locker a moment longer than necessary (to shove in an ill-fitting book maybe, or to read a note one of my friends had dropped in), I had the sense that the whole school was judging me for using that time to pretend I belonged in the popular kids’ Pantheon when I so clearly did not.

It wasn’t as though I was a loner, I had my group of friends, but we were all fairly unremarkable in terms of popularity. Jessica Highsmith and Melissa Wilkerson were the only ones in my group of seven girlfriends who were nominated to the Homecoming Court, but neither of them made it past the second round of voting. Some of the girls in my group of friends occasionally had boys that were interested in them, but those boys tended to be of the nerdier variety, ones we couldn’t possibly view in a romantic way, and of course, we all had crushes on the popular boys who, in turn, didn’t know we existed. It was a food chain in reverse, the smaller fish always setting their sights on the bigger fish, and my group was right in the middle of the ecosystem. I desperately wanted any of the top three cutest boys at Midvale — all eighth-graders, Jeff, Jack, and Caleb — to notice me, but in my immaturity and paralyzing fear of boys, I didn’t do anything to get their attention. I existed in a purgatory of sorts, wanting desperately to be seen as pretty, the most important of all commodities for a seventh-grade girl as far as I was concerned at the time, but not wanting to be required to do any of the things that boys wanted pretty girls to do, like kissing. I’d feel the same way later, in my twenties, wanting to be asked to be a bridesmaid but not wanting to follow through with the associated responsibilities, like buying the floor-length gowns I couldn’t afford and weighing in on seating chart decisions. 

Corey Bryce was one of the seventh-grade boys who was in line to inherit the thrones left by graduating eighth-graders Jeff, Jack, and Caleb. We all knew this; the chain of command was clear. The eighth-grade boys sometimes included Corey in their hacky sack contests, and Caleb knew Corey well from their church, and because of our collective expectation and understanding of his social inheritance, he carried himself with absurd confidence. Outwardly, though, he was not conventionally attractive. Corey was beginning to have acne, but like most seventh-grade boys, he hadn’t realized he needed to implement a hygiene regimen beyond teeth brushing to manage it. He had red hair and lots of freckles, which I knew had made him an early target of bullies, and in turn, he had used that as a training ground to become a bully himself. 

Even as young as second grade, Corey got in trouble for forcing a first grader to pick a poppy that was growing outside the chain-link fence surrounding the schoolyard. The first-grader, a small, chubby-cheeked boy named Jose, was found by his teacher, holding the flower, wilted and missing several petals, sobbing that the policemen were going to arrest him because Corey made him pick the poppy. Corey had indeed announced to all the surrounding kids at the time, including me, that he was going to call the police and have Jose arrested for picking the California state flower, laughing all the while. But because elementary and junior high social structures aren’t meritocracies, his continuing meanness was overlooked, and he was accepted, broadly and without question, as popular.

Corey’s mother and my mother were in the same book club, so I’d seen small glimpses of him outside the context of his well-crafted school persona. This was why, although he and I were definitely not friends, I knew where he lived and had occasionally been inside his house while our moms dropped off books or took turns hosting. I’d never stayed inside the Bryces’ house for long, knowing I didn’t belong there, and always felt like an international traveler whose visa was moments from expiring. The Christmas we were in seventh grade, Corey’s mother, a talented pastry chef, brought a tray of impeccably decorated sugar cookies to our house for their December meeting, and Corey came with her in the car to help deliver them. Mrs. Bryce handed Corey the platter to carry, telling him to hold it flat and be careful. As he climbed out of the car, the cookies scattered out onto our asphalt driveway. My mother ran over to help scoop them up and try to salvage any, but nearly all of them had landed frosting-side down, and my mother picked them up to reveal that the pretty glittered snowflakes and sprinkles-covered trees now had asphalt chunks embedded in them. It seemed to me to be an honest mistake, but Mrs. Bryce admonished him, yelling, “Corey! You are such a klutz! Why didn’t you hold it flat like I told you!? Now, the Murphys’ driveway is a mess, and we don’t have any cookies! Do you know how long I worked on those? Get down there and help Mrs. Murphy clean this mess up!” Corey shrunk back in shame, and seeing him like this, someone whom I’d assumed was always the giver of insults, never the recipient, made me feel a twinge of sympathy for him. My inner justice seeker wanted to tell his mother that it was an accident, but even as a child, I knew better than to inject myself into their family dynamics. 

“Why did Mrs. Bryce yell at him like that?” I’d asked my mom.

“I don’t know, honey. I guess she was frustrated after spending all that time making them. I know she had to make quite a few for church too, so I’m sure she was tired.”

“Church? I’ve never seen them at Holy Trinity.” More specifically, I’d never seen her cookies there.

“No, they don’t go to Holy Trinity. They go to that LDS church on Fourth street.” I would later understand that this was why Corey, Caleb, and a few other kids often shared stories about trips to Utah — what on Earth is in Utah? I’d wondered, as someone whose family had never once mentioned it as a potential vacation spot — and why in classroom holiday parties he made a point about drinking 7-Up instead of Coke.

Corey knew that I was watching when his mother yelled at him, and afterward, we had a sort of secret, unspoken understanding. I was allowed to know that he was a kid whose parents sometimes scolded him; a kid whose seemingly unrestricted dominance at school did, indeed, have its limits at home. I never told anyone at school about the cookies, so I was rewarded by being spared from his bullying. When we returned to school from Christmas break, I wondered how Corey would treat me if we ran into each other. Here he mostly ignored me, which was my preference, but one afternoon that April, he caught me by surprise. 

I’d quickly stepped out of my algebra class to find my TI-83 calculator, which must’ve fallen out of my backpack when I’d stuffed it in my locker before gym class. Corey happened to be standing at his locker, too, even though this was during class time and no one was supposed to be loitering in the hall. For years afterward, I’d wonder what he was doing there that afternoon. As I approached, he heard my footsteps and looked up at me. “Mary Ruth!” The tone of his voice was as warm, friendly, and inviting as if I’d appeared unexpectedly on his doorstep holding a home-baked apple pie. He held his arms out to me like he was offering a hug, and although I knew, even as my body was moving toward him, that this felt like a trap, I kept going. It was a kind of morbid curiosity — was he going to thank me for never mentioning his mother’s rebuke that day in the driveway? No, of course not; his goal was to pretend it hadn’t happened, and mentioning it would explicitly violate that. My arms levitated to meet his, and just as I reached the point where we could have embraced, he dropped his arms and pushed me a few feet back. 

“As if anyone would ever want to hug you,” he spat out. “You’re sooo not pretty enough.” Startled, I looked around to see if anyone else noticed this inexplicable switch of tone, anyone to whom I could say, this is crazy, right? But no one else was in the hallway, not a janitor or a teacher, who at the very least could have reprimanded him for pushing me. Corey laughed and walked off, seemingly pleased with himself and his ability to successfully deploy cruelty on any desired target with remarkable precision. With my jaw dropped, I watched him walk down the hall for a few steps, and then because I didn’t know what else to do, I unlocked my locker and retrieved my calculator. I considered going straight to the administration office and telling them he’d pushed me, but I hadn’t fallen down and wasn’t physically injured, so what evidence of wrongdoing was there? Experience had taught me that his harmful words would go unpunished and generally unaddressed. I couldn’t fathom what his motivation had been to hurt me, and it struck me as even more sadistic that he’d done so without the payoff of an audience. It wasn’t to make himself look powerful in front of anyone, except possibly me, and what did he care what I thought?

Finally, I decided that, if nothing else, God must have seen it. At least He would know what’d happened, and hopefully, forgive me when I would scowl at Corey in the future. Corey had violated an agreement that I thought allowed me to escape his cruelty, but I should have known better than to make a deal, however subtle, with someone like that. I went into the girls’ bathroom and splashed water on my face, and with the water dripping down my cheeks as a decoy, I allowed myself to cry. The thing I couldn’t grasp, the thing that truly shocked me in its cruelty, was how he’d known exactly what words to say to me that would cut deepest. 

You’re sooo not pretty enough. 

What did stupid Corey Bryce know about prettiness, anyway? 

As if anyone would ever want to hug you.

Certainly not Caleb, Jack, or Jeff. None of the boys at Midvale wanted to hug me. I knew this because we’d had two dances, and not a single boy invited me to either one. The Sadie Hawkins dance was coming up, and not that I’d had anyone special in mind, but now I was definitely not going to ask anyone. Corey Bryce knew what boys thought, and I didn’t; he knew the things they talked about, and if he said that no one would ever want to hug me, if he said that I wasn’t pretty enough, who was I to argue?

*** 

Melissa Wilkerson’s law office lobby was decorated in a restrained, Danish modern style, with several tasteful cognac-colored leather chairs and a flat, low coffee table in the center. I sipped water from a miniature San Pellegrino bottle while I waited for her secretary to escort me back to her private office. It felt a little silly to think of Melissa Wilkerson as “my lawyer.” In fact, I’d grown up with Melissa; she was in my First Communion class, as well as going to Midvale with me. Melissa was known in our school as being the kind of girl you wanted in your group project. Like me, she’d call out the kids not pulling their weight, assign duties fairly, and ultimately make sure all the work got done. When I saw on Facebook that she’d become a family law attorney, it made perfect sense to hire her to do my prenup.

I was sitting in her fancy chairs, scrolling through social media on my phone, when the elevator doors dinged again and I looked up. His red hair now had some grey streaks, but there he was — it was unmistakably Corey Bryce. His face was red and blotchy, which made me think he must have been crying in the car. He looked distraught and clearly upset, but also disheveled and like he’d picked up a drinking problem in college. 

“Corey?” I heard myself say. “Corey Bryce?” I didn’t especially want to have a conversation with him, but it would have been far too awkward to sit in a confined space and pretend that we didn’t know each other.

He looked at me, confused at first, and then I watched a flash of recognition cross his face. “Mary Ruth, right? Melissa’s friend.” He rubbed his long sleeve over his face, seemingly trying to mop up any tears. As he did so, I saw a small, thin gold band on his left hand. Because this was a lawyer’s office, I wondered what he was doing here but assumed that, like a therapist’s office, there was no way of really asking. You were probably not even supposed to acknowledge seeing someone you knew. Or used to know.

“How’ve you been?” I said.

“I’m okay. Are you meeting Melissa for lunch or something?” he asked.

“No. I’m here....in a professional capacity, technically, I suppose,” I said.

“Oh. You’re getting divorced, too. Got it.”

I decided not to correct him. 

“Divorce sucks, doesn't it?” he said, sitting down a few chairs away from me. “Melissa’s supposed to be really good, you know? Hopefully, she’ll help me keep my kids. That’s all I want, honestly.”

He was reminiscent of a wounded lion or deposed leader on trial, someone I used to fear but now, disarmed, just looked pathetic and vulnerable. He looked almost exactly as he had the day he dropped the cookie tray, but with the strain that fifteen years of hard drinking will add to your face. We sat in silence for a moment after his comment — what was I supposed to say to that? His almost immediate outpouring of emotion was jarring. He continued.

“My family’s not really supportive of this. We’re Mormon, and Mormons don’t really do divorce. You’re Catholic, right?”

“Yes.” Was I really making small talk with the Corey Bryce?

“Yeah, so you know what I mean.” We both stared at our hands, sitting in silence again, while I considered how good, how smug it might feel to tell Corey that no, I was not getting divorced, that I was happily engaged, and that, for all he knew, Melissa and I were still good friends and she was taking me wedding dress shopping on her lunch break. Mentioning the prenup, the possibility that I might befall his same sad fate, seemed a little too vulnerable for the revenge fantasy I was hastily plotting.

“Nice that you and Melissa stayed friends,” he said.

That wasn’t exactly true, we hadn’t really stayed in touch much after graduation, but again, I didn’t correct him. “She’s a good person,” I said. “Super smart, too. I’m sure you’re in good hands.”

“All you girls in that group were,” he said. Maybe because of this unexpected compliment, a long-delayed vindication of what I’d always assumed Corey thought of us, I decided to take a risk.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Sure.”

“That day in the hallway, that day that no one else was around, you were just standing there and started to give me a hug. What were you doing there?”

“What are you talking about? I think we had lockers near each other one year. Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Sort of,” I said. “There was that one day you went to hug me.”

“I went to hug you? And then what?” he looked confused, his face still tear-stained, but now his brow furrowed in confusion. “Sorry, what are you talking about? I don’t remember.”

I’d been thinking about that moment for years, those words echoing in my head: Who would ever want to hug you? You’re soooo not pretty enough. I’d missed the Sadie Hawkins dance that year because of those words. Although I certainly couldn’t blame him for my own choices as an adult, it would be dishonest to say that I’d never stayed too long in relationships I knew weren’t working so that I didn’t have to be alone and acquiesce to his appraisal of me as fundamentally undesirable. For those months between Christmas and the locker incident, I’d believed I was exempt from his cruelty, and then when he finally decided to deploy it on me, it felt like a détente had been revoked. Now to find out it wasn’t deliberate or intentional — it wasn’t even an afterthought! — made it feel more like needless suffering. I decided to hide my righteous indignation.

“Oh nothing, maybe it wasn’t you then,” I lied. “Don’t worry about it.” And then, to change the topic, I asked, “how many kids do you have?”

“Three boys,” he said. “Aiden, Jaxon, and Kyler. Kyler’s the littlest one. He’s eighteen months old. He’s so cute, and he can say little sentences now. You can kinda start to see his little personality coming out, you know?” Corey teared up. “I just...I just really want to stay in their lives and see them grow up.”

Again, I was shocked that Corey was so expressive with me, like a dump truck of feelings, unloading its contents in front of me.

Because I didn’t know what else to say; because it’s odd to have a shared history with someone that they don’t remember; because complimenting their children is the easiest, and frankly, laziest form of conversation to have with someone who is a parent, I said, “Your kids sound really cute.”

“Yeah, they are. They’re literally the most important thing in my life. I can’t….” he stopped talking, I assumed, to prevent himself from breaking down in tears.

“Corey?” I asked. “I hope you don’t think this is weird, but….do you want a hug?”

I wish I could say I did this because I’d matured into a kind, caring person who could leave the past behind us, or as my priest would likely advise me to be, someone who forgave others. But as it turns out, Alex was right; I couldn’t let it go. As Corey walked over to me, I stood up and extended my arms, and as I embraced him, for just a moment, I reveled in the fact that I finally proved him wrong.

Fiction

Emily wandered the San Francisco Ferry Building farmers’ market stalls, her straw tote bag in one hand and a bouquet of flowers (her weekly treat) in the other. She noticed a sign delicately propped up against a stack of artichokes that read: “Gilroy Artichokes, two for three dollars!” She loved artichokes, but not how the world catered to pairs of people. It seemed like a waste to go through the hassle of cooking artichokes for herself. There was the delicate clipping of the thorny leaves, the steaming, the creation of gluttonously butter-based dipping sauces, and the richness of the artichoke itself. That was the kind of food that needed a co-conspirator or at least a witness. 

 As she began to pick up a cauliflower, a hand appeared in front of her, and she looked up to see its owner — a tall, good-looking man she’d never seen before. 

“Sorry!” she said. 

“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bump into you.” They looked at each other a moment longer than necessary, and Emily felt a spark of attraction. He was cute, appropriately apologetic, and, according to his ring-free left hand reaching in front of her, single.

“These are pretty cool,” he said, grasping the romanesco cauliflower with one large hand, like a basketball. “I’m always trying to find the Fibonacci sequence in nature.” He pointed to the chartreuse spirals. “I guess I got a little excited.” 

His sweet, dorky oversharing betrayed his decidedly non-dorky look (dark-wash jeans and a soft-looking, faded cotton shirt, casually unbuttoned at the top), and Emily took this as a cue that he was either trying to impress her.

“You can have that one.” She drew her hand back from the table. “I prefer men to cauliflower.” When he laughed in response, she recognized it as a knowing laugh, one that assured her that he understood the reference to Virginia Woolf, and that he was the kind of person who had read and remembered such a quote and didn’t think she was weird for saying something so niche, unprompted, to a stranger.

“I’m Ben.” He stuck out his hand, and she fumbled to rearrange her basket and bouquet to shake it. When their palms touched, it reaffirmed her initial attraction to him. Ben’s hands were slightly calloused, in contrast to her last boyfriend, a software engineer named Mike, whose hands were almost girlishly soft. Emily felt a spark of optimism that she had met a cute guy with romantical potential who might remedy at least some of the traits she found unattractive in Mike.

Over lattes at a nearby coffee shop, Emily and Ben discovered a mutual love of Indian food, a non-ironic appreciation of ‘90s slow jams and — because nothing bonds people quite like a shared disdain — a loathing for people who talk ad nauseam about gluten. 

“I’m so glad you don’t have a thing about gluten,” he said. She teasingly scolded him to keep his voice down; they were in a coffee shop that offered three kinds of vegan milk, and she guessed that poking fun at food sensitivities wouldn’t be appreciated by anyone who could hear them. Ben feigned being hurt at her shushing, but then he winked at her, and it felt like this was all part of an inside joke between them, and suddenly it didn’t matter who else was around or what they could hear.

Two hours of effortless, volleying conversation had passed when Ben said, “I’d love to take you to this place that makes the best sourdough.” Emily was delighted to hear him suggest that they would do something together in the future. Most of the guys she had dated recently were hesitant to suggest any kind of plans so soon after a first meeting. So far, he didn’t seem to exhibit any of the pitfalls she had recently experienced with other men.

Ben asked for her phone number and texted her almost immediately after they parted ways. Several days of back-and-forth texting ensued, each little blue bubble a stepping stone in getting to know each other. He sent her obscure literary quotes peppered with nonsensical GIFs, which made her laugh, even though she wasn’t always clear how the messages were connected. She didn’t want to step out of the coziness of their exchanges to clarify what he meant, so she played along in an effort not to lose some of the momentum she was hoping to build.

On the fourth day of texting, Ben invited Emily to a food truck fair the following weekend. She was thrilled to accept the invitation, and that Sunday, Emily found him on the giant lawn (at a prime spot with a postcard-quality view of the Golden Gate Bridge) where the food truck fair was happening, spreading out a large red picnic blanket. They both chose to try the first food truck they saw because it featured elote, Mexican-style street corn on a stick. Emily was wondering if there was an elegant way to eat it when she realized Ben was watching her with a sympathetic smile, likely wondering how she was going to approach it.

“These things are so awkward to eat,” he said. “Anything on a stick is, really. My old roommate is an artist and did an exhibit a few years ago that showed pictures of like, forty years’ worth of failed presidential candidates eating corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair. Here they are, these politicians, so serious and everything, talking about public health policy and taxes and defense spending budgets or whatever, but trying to figure out how to eat a corn dog on a stick while everyone’s staring at them. I went to his exhibit. It was hilarious.”

“Wait, the failed candidates?” she asked. “Why only the ones who lost?”

He shrugged. “It’s funnier that way. It was like, Bob Dole and Al Gore and I think maybe even Ross Perot….hmm, who else…?” he trailed off in thought.

“Please do not say Hillary Clinton was in there,” she said.

“Nah, this was before that. Why though? Are you not a fan, or...is it the fact that eating a corn dog on a stick is sort of suggestively...um, phallic, and it seems kinda misogynistic to play it for a laugh when it’s a photo of a powerful woman doing it?”

The fact that Ben knew this, that she didn’t have to tread the delicate waters of trying to seem attractive and appealing to avoid the stereotype of the man-hating feminist while still asserting her views, or worry that she might have to defend her stance and then listen to him contradict her with his own loud, straight white male take on it, made her appreciate him almost more than anything else she had learned about him so far. She noticed, for a moment, how low the bar was set for her expectations that on a date, she relished the joy of not being with a mansplainer. 

“The best part of the exhibit was that they had corn dogs there for the appetizers. So you had to stand there in front of those pictures and do the same thing. After a while, you couldn’t really tell if you were laughing at those politicians or yourself cause you were doing it, too,” he said. “And of course by ‘you,’ I mean ‘me.’ I didn’t care though, I ate a lot of those suckers. So now, I can’t help but crack up every time I try to eat not only corn dogs but also ice cream cones, popsicles…and I guess, elote. So feel free to laugh at me too,” he said, taking a bite.

“How about a truce? I won’t laugh at you if you don’t laugh at me,” she said. “Cause this looks amazing, and I really want to try it.”

“I wouldn’t laugh at you, Emily,” he said. 

She smiled, tilted her head, and bit into the salty, cheese-laden corn-on-a-stick. When she got home that night, she Googled “Iowa State Fair Hillary Clinton” and found only pictures of the former Secretary of State wearing a striped tunic, cooling herself off with a paper fan, sipping a lemonade. Then, for good measure, she replaced the names of several recent male candidates in the Google search — Bernie Sanders, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Andrew Yang — and found that if you didn’t think about the phallic aspect of them, the photos were kind of funny.

***

On a Friday night when she and Ben didn’t have plans, Emily organized a girls’ night out dinner with some of her girlfriends at a tapas bar in the Mission District of San Francisco. She had chosen the restaurant partially because of its central location in the city, but also because it was an opportunity to order the restaurant’s famous garlic and chili prawns. This was something Emily would never let herself eat on a date with Ben (or anyone else, for that matter) because she would have worried too much about having garlic breath to enjoy herself. With her friends, though, she took the opportunity to eat and say whatever she wanted.

 “I think I really like him,” she announced before they had ordered appetizers.

“Let me see his profile,” her friend Amanda said, reaching for Emily’s phone.

“We actually met in real life, if you can believe it. I didn’t think that happened any more,” she said.

Natasha, her friend from work who had been married for nine years, said, “I feel like I missed out on the apps. It’s not like I’m unhappy with Greg, but I always kind of wonder what that would have been like. All those single guys right at your fingertips to choose from, like human baseball cards, available to talk or go out whenever you want.”

“You’re really not missing anything, Natasha. Let me put it to you this way,” Emily said. “Meeting someone through an app is like getting drunk on beer. You probably won’t enjoy it right away, but if you stick with it long enough, it might get you where you want to go. Meeting someone in real life, though, is like getting high off a joint: you have fun instantly.”

“So are you having fun with him all the time? I mean like, it’s still in the exciting, lusty, butterflies stage, right? Like you can’t keep your hands off each other?” Natasha said.

“Well, we haven’t had sex yet, but I would definitely say I’m having fun. We text all the time. The thing is, I can’t tell if I should hold back a bit, you know? Make him wait a little bit before I respond, so he can miss me. I feel like that’s how you're supposed to do it, but obviously, I’m not great at the game playing,” Emily said.

“But you really like this guy?” Natasha said.

“Yeah, I think I do,” she said.

“Then quit the game playing. You’ve been dating long enough that you know what you want. If you want to be in a relationship with Ben, act like it.” Natasha was very matter-of-fact. The others nodded.

After Emily and her last boyfriend Mike had broken up, the thought of learning how to use the latest apps and sitting through cheap meals with boring strangers making bad small talk had filled her with dread. But since she had met Ben, she was finally excited about dating again, which she considered personal growth, although she frequently had to remind herself not to get too invested or let her mind wander too far into the future. She had used dating apps in the past, and before the advent of those, dating websites, but none of the men she met were able to shake off their “internet stranger danger” dust. But with Ben, somehow she felt that his real-world, organic arrival into her life supercharged her attraction to him.

She thought about Ben when she was stuck in traffic, and in work meetings, and whenever her phone lit up because she was hoping it was a message from him. He started sending her “Good morning!” texts, usually while she was drinking her first cup of coffee before work, and they settled into a comfortable texting routine. But when he would text her in the evenings, it was a little more sporadic and usually more flirty, and she would remind herself of Natasha’s advice and not to wait too long before responding. She wondered if Ben had a rule of thumb to guide how quickly he texted back, but after re-reading through two weeks’ worth of texts and carefully assessing his response timing, she suspected that he did not. His behavior never seemed to be quite as deliberate as hers was.

***

Towards the end of their fifth date, Ben invited Emily back to his apartment to “come up for coffee.” This was a mutually accepted euphemism for sex, and Emily had prepared herself for earlier in the day just in case this might happen, choosing a pretty matching black lace bra and panty set and shaving her legs.

Perched on the arm of a leather sofa, she surveyed Ben’s apartment while he rooted around his kitchen for wine glasses. He had an absurdly large TV, which she had found to be typical for single men his age in San Francisco, and she teased him that it could double as a drive-in movie theater. He owned several bookshelves, one of which, rather endearingly, housed a boxed set of the Harry Potter books. She liked that aspect of dating where you are invited into a person’s home for the first time, and sometimes into their bedroom. There was so much to read into their life that you couldn’t get from a dating profile or text messages. There was a framed photo of Ben with his arms around two older adults, likely his grandparents, and Emily found it reassuring and safe to think of him as a beloved grandson. There was a KitchenAid stand mixer on the kitchen counter, which struck her as slightly unusual for a bachelor. Did he like to bake? Or use the pasta maker attachment? Or maybe neither and he had won that in a breakup and division of assets with an ex-girlfriend? Was he the kind of person to be that vindictive? 

Ben approached her with a short tumbler of wine.  “I don’t have any real wine glasses,” he said sheepishly. Emily pictured an ex-girlfriend in an apartment somewhere nearby, sitting high atop a stack of their formerly shared wine glasses. 

“That’s okay. I think they serve it like that in authentic Italian restaurants.”  She regretted saying this as soon as the words came out — what a pointless thing to say — but suddenly, she was imagining the two of them sitting across from each other at a candle-lit table, years from now, with Ben holding up a tumbler of wine. “Oh look, just like we have at home!” she imagined him saying in a joking tone, a sweetly nostalgic reference to this moment early in their relationship. Her heart swelled with affection for this imaginary version of him, and she cautioned herself to slow down.  

She took a sip. It was a good wine, as far as she could tell, and this must have registered on her face.

“Got it from a client.” He shrugged. “I’m not a huge wine guy. I’m more of a beer drinker.”

“I like it.” She made sure her voice was in a low tone when she said this so that she didn’t sound patronizing. She was always doing this — monitoring and editing every aspect of her responses to the men she dated, terrified of making a bad impression. Her therapist called it “fear of negative evaluation,” and although she was aware of it as a concept, that didn’t stop her brain from doing it.

He sat down next to her and took a sip from his glass. He turned his face toward hers and put his hand on her knee. “So,” he said. 

“So,” she responded, trying to think of anything to say to avoid awkwardness. She wanted this evening to be entirely pleasant and worried that any inkling of unpleasantness could immediately and irretrievably sour it, and by extension, their whole relationship.

 “I like your place,” she said. They talked about apartments and layouts and neighborhoods, dancing around the fact that what they really wanted to do was kiss. They kept sipping wine and became progressively tipsy, as if that were a mandatory precursor to making out.

Emily’s eyes scanned Ben’s eyes back and forth, and then she let her gaze slide down to his lips.  Ben correctly took this as an invitation and leaned in, cupping her jaws in his hands. Kissing one guy was not necessarily very different than kissing any other guy; they all had the same set of lips and gummy tongue and, thanks to the popularity of Invisalign for adults working in tech jobs, identical rows of straightened teeth. She liked kissing Ben, though; it felt natural and good and reactionary, moving in smooth, reflexive motions instead of an ad-hoc choreographed dance as it had been with boys when she was much younger, where she tried nervously to remember the steps she’d read in teen magazines.

Dancing a routine that had played out across millions of apartments and thousands of years, their bodies moved in tandem from sitting side-by-side, to facing each other, to Emily straddling Ben on the sofa, and finally to his bed, in varying stages of undress. 

Two thin, unforgiving, and stiff pillows lay flopped on top of a flat blue sheet, which was bare on the mattress without the benefit of a mattress pad.  The familiar scent of Downy Spring Rain wafted up from the fitted sheet — the only thing in the immediate surroundings that struck her as recently cleaned. Was he expecting to bring her home? She debated whether she thought that considerate or presumptuous. Maybe both. Then, she considered that she had done the same thing by wearing a matching underwear set.

Emily lay her chest on Ben’s, shifting a few times before settling in, careful to distribute her weight in such a way that would be comfortable for him. She rested her forehead on the bed, then turned to look at him. His pleasantly masculine five o’clock shadow barely concealed a scar on his neck. She delicately touched the raised, pink flesh with her fingertip. 

“What’s this from?” she asked. 

“Oh, that. Well.” He cleared his throat. Emily wondered if she had stepped too far into his private life, a notion that seemed silly to entertain while resting her naked body atop his. “In high school — a long time ago, obviously — my buddy was driving, and he, we, got into an accident. A piece of glass cut me there, but I’m fine. It was a long time ago.” He stopped, and she waited, curious to see what he would volunteer to fill in the silence. 

“He was drinking, so obviously, I shouldn’t have let him drive. I mean, I was too…anyway, it was bad. He didn’t make it, and I just walked away with some broken bones and this cut. I always think of him when I see that scar. Sometimes I grow a beard so I don’t have to see it or think about it. I felt guilty for a long time, and I ended up drinking more, ironically, ‘cause I couldn’t deal with it. But my mom made me talk to the school counselor or whatever, and that helped. I’m not an alcoholic or anything. I just didn’t have any other way of not feeling like shit all the time after the accident, you know…after Ryan died.” His voice cracked and he warbled as he spoke.

She wanted to say “I love you,” even though she knew that would be ludicrous. She wanted to say, “I’m flattered that you’re telling me this; thank you for trusting me with this; I don’t think less of you; I want to take away this pain from you; you are the kind of person I think I could love.” Instead, all she said was, “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes and kissed his cheek. She lay her head down on his chest again, and he continued talking.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s actually kind of nice to talk about him again. There was a little card about the classmates who died since graduation at the ten-year high school reunion, but Ryan’s name wasn’t on there, since he technically didn’t die after graduation. It feels like they just forgot about him. I still go to his parents’ house sometimes when I’m back home and play basketball with his little brother. He’s not so little anymore. He looks like Ryan probably would have. The last time I was home, we had a couple of beers, which actually wasn’t weird, you know, considering …what happened…” He trailed off, seemingly lost in memories. “I hope you don’t think I’m still like that…out of control or immature or whatever,” he said quietly. 

In truth, she didn’t really know what he was like. She had affectionate feelings towards him, but if she was honest with herself, they mostly came from projection, hope, and imagination. She knew a decent amount of biographical information from conversations that had happened over coffee and cocktails and texts. She knew that he went to Princeton, which made her assume he was ambitious — that he could be a dependable provider, if it ever got to that point — and that he was intellectually curious and most likely a feminist, though in reality, she hadn’t tested any of these theories. 

“No, of course not. High school was a long time ago. I like to think we’ve all changed a lot since then.” His revelation felt weighty, and she felt a surprising twinge of regret that she didn’t have a similarly revealing story to share. But she liked his vulnerability, and it invited her to be a bit daring with her emotions. “Besides,” she said, looking up at him and gathering her courage. “Don’t worry. I like you.” This admission felt even more risky than the fact that she was naked.

He grinned, and she chose to take that as a confirmation of his returned feelings, rather than a convenient way to dodge answering whether or not he reciprocated. She debated what to say next. He had opened up to her, and it was clear he hadn’t talked about this in a while — she sensed that this wasn’t a rehearsed bit to get sympathy or appear vulnerable — she could hear that his heart was racing. She took a deep breath, and they lay like that for a few minutes. Emily wrapped the comforter around them, cocooning them in the safety and cozy warmth of the bed. 

Ben reached his large arm up to push the comforter back. “Oh no, no you don’t,” he teased, as he peeled the comforter back to reveal her bare bottom. “Don’t hide under there!” Ben raised himself up and in doing so, gently flipped both Emily’s naked body and the sad energy that hung heavy between them. She laughed, even though nothing particularly funny had happened, but she hoped that in doing so, she could signal to Ben that she understood that the melancholic part of the night was over; that she wasn’t going to dig up his emotional landmines; that their intimacy for the rest of the night would be sexual, rather than sorrowful.

When they were having sex — no one would have called it “making love;” they were definitely not in love, that much she knew for sure — they explored and moved and whispered. Emily realized that because she had never slept with Ben before, they didn’t have a shared vocabulary for sex. In past relationships, she’d always had a conversation to establish one because, for her, the anatomical terms were too cold and distant (breasts); colloquial names too childish (boobies); but there was a range of terms that allowed a reasonable selection of personal preference. Emily preferred “boobs” over “tits” but wasn’t tied to it with any serious conviction.  She had a guy friend who used the irksome “titties,” and somehow, the addition of that affix made that word ridiculous to her and anyone who used it unserious.  She wondered if Ben referred to his “dick” or his “cock,” the only two reasonable choices, as far as she could tell.

She was about to raise the question of word choice when it dawned on Emily that although this particular sex wasn’t out of the ordinary, it would be utterly absurd if Ben were hitting any other part of her body with this same force and repetition (or any other part of his body, for that matter). This thought struck her as so odd that she actually let a small laugh escape her mouth. 

“What?” Ben said, tensing up. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.” She smiled. 

“Why were you laughing?” Ben said, as if he didn’t believe her and couldn’t relax until he was reassured.

“Nothing, I’m just…happy,” she said lamely.

“Ok. Can you do me a favor?”

“Of course. What do you want me to do?”

“Don’t laugh while I have my pants off.” This request triggered an involuntary guffaw in her, but it seemed to bring them together again in a shared and intentional joke.

“Deal,” she said, flipping herself on top of him, taking the upper hand.

When Ben finally reached the evening’s inevitable conclusion, Emily looked up at his face.  It was jarring to see him so unguarded, vulnerable and reveling in pleasure, especially considering how confident and in control he usually appeared. She wondered how many other people had ever seen him like this. Emily added herself to a group of women, which she hoped was reasonably small, who could recognize this version of him. He kissed her forehead and flopped down next to her. She appreciated that he didn’t seem in any hurry to get up and walk away from her. 

Emily fell into a restless and unsatisfying sleep. She wanted to toss and turn as she normally would if she were alone, but she didn’t want to wake up Ben or disturb his sleep. She had known that these pillows would be entirely inadequate, and she thought of the expensive, fluffy down pillows that were obediently lined up on her bed at that moment, seven blocks away. She drifted in and out of dreams, at one point running away from sewer alligators, before finally deciding to turn over. As she did, Ben reached out — still asleep, she assumed — and cuddled her so that they were spooning. Was this a leftover habit from a long-term relationship? Who, exactly, did he think he was cuddling? She pushed the self-doubt and sabotage out of her mind. She tried to relax her body into his arms and her thoughts into something nicer than sewer alligators and ex-girlfriends. When she woke up in the morning, they were both lying on their backs, no longer spooning, but holding hands. Because hand-holding brought a sense of comfort and familiarity, it felt this was the millionth time they’d woken up holding hands instead of the first, and she was overcome with fondness for him, and she immediately disregarded the discomfort she’d felt while he slept.

When Ben opened his eyes, he looked over at Emily and smiled weakly. 

“How did you sleep?” he asked. 

“Fine,” she said. There was no point in complaining about how unfamiliar she had felt while trying to sleep. And wasn’t some discomfort part of the nature of sleeping with someone new? Not just having sex with them, but actually sleeping next to them? Hearing them snore. Seeing them drool. Lying on a mattress that doesn’t have your particular body imprinted on it. That momentary panic upon waking in a foreign room when your brain cannot yet place your location and wonders where you are and how you got there. She also didn’t want to talk too much because she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet and would be mortified for Ben to notice her morning breath. Neither one of them had brushed their teeth the night before. This lack of hygiene would be unthinkable in any other circumstance but was okay in this case because they’d been too busy having sex, which was pretty much the most enviable excuse for anything. 

“Good,” he said, sitting up. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat for a moment leaning forward, collecting himself. Emily was a little disappointed he didn’t want to cuddle, but maybe he was worried about morning breath, too. In one swift motion, he used his flexed foot to scoop his boxer shorts off the ground as he walked into the bathroom. 

She heard the doorknob click behind him and deliberately tried not to hear anything else, out of deference to his privacy and wanting to maintain her attraction to him. She didn’t need to hear him peeing, or God forbid, anything else. She’d heard friends describe the moment their boyfriends or husbands stopped closing the bathroom door as “the death of intimacy,” and swore she would never let that happen to her relationships. 

He came out of the bathroom a moment later, a toothbrush poking out of the corner of his mouth. “What’re you up to today?” he asked in a garbled voice usually only heard at the dentist’s office. She took a deep breath. Within that question hung so much. Was he asking how available she was to hang out with him? Should she play it cool and say she already had plans? Or be honest and say she wanted to spend the afternoon together, and if that went well, the next few months? 

“I’m not sure. I’ve got some stuff to do, but nothing totally firmed up,” she said in a tone that was as non-committal as possible, picturing her heart as a delicate little red balloon, floating up full of hope. “What about you?” 

“Oh, I have to meet up with some people,” he called out, now back in the bathroom. He spit into the sink. Her balloon heart deflated. “I have to be somewhere by ten, actually. I gotta go. What time is it?” He wiped his mouth on a towel and walked over to the bed where Emily was still sitting, clutching the top sheet in her hand to cover her bare chest. She wasn’t doing it for modesty, that would be silly, Ben had just seen her naked body, but she felt the need to protect herself somehow. Even if only holding on by a thin bed sheet, she was still clinging to the time when she was welcome there, where he wasn’t clearly letting her know she needed to leave. He didn’t seem aloof or cold, exactly, which frustrated her, because if he had, she could have called him on it and demanded an explanation without seeming overly sensitive. Instead, he seemed casual, friendly but not overly so, and simply moving on to the next part of his day. She decided to adopt the same approach. 

She pulled her knees toward her chest, hugging them tightly, and then tilted her head down and to the side, striking a coquettish pose with a shy smile. “Are your friends going to be mad at me if you’re late?” she asked.

“Nope! They don’t even know I’m with a girl,” he said, cluelessly breezing past the informational bomb he had just dropped. Immediately, she thought of all the time she had spent foolishly reviewing and assessing so many moments of this relationship, if you could call it that now, with her friends; meanwhile, his friends didn’t even know she was in his life at all.

“This was really fun,” he said, leaning over to kiss the top of her head, seemingly oblivious to her disappointment.

***

“Are you dating anyone?” Emily’s Aunt Barbara asked her when she called one Saturday afternoon from St. Louis. “Yes, I think so,” Emily said slowly, mentally running through a recap reel of her relationship thus far with Ben as she spoke. 

“You think so?” Aunt Barbara asked. “What does that mean?” Aunt Barbara had very traditional ideas of what she semi-jokingly called “courtship” and hadn’t been on a proper date since Uncle Steve took her to the King Tut exhibit in 1979. 

 “I just mean that we’ve gone out a few times.” She left out the bedroom details, as was undoubtedly the preference for all parties involved. “But he’s not my boyfriend or anything…yet. I haven’t met his friends.” She stopped talking and wondered why she’d included that last detail. “He’s a nice guy,” she added, lest Aunt Barbara think she was getting strung along. 

“Well, I hope so. You deserve a guy who will plan dates at least a week in advance. That’s how we did it when I was young, way, way back in the sixties and seventies. You know, asking for a date one week in advance, holding open all the doors, and he should bring you flowers, too,” Barbara said. Ben did none of those things.

Emily was glad to have a sympathetic ear in Aunt Barbara and grateful for her willingness to listen, but by the time she hung up the phone, she was feeling a little resentful of Ben. She hated the extra explaining that came along with her uneasiness about the relationship, that she couldn’t simply say, “Things are going great! Moving right along as expected!” Talking about her relationships always required some measure of reassuring her listener that it would all be okay.

***

In the two weeks after they slept together, they only went on one date. Emily had invited Ben to a movie, and she chose one that was part of a superhero franchise Ben had mentioned wanting to see. In the theater, they sat in total silence, and because she wasn’t interested in the plot, Emily spent most of the film subtly observing Ben’s body language when the flashes of light on-screen illuminated it. His legs pointed toward her, which she interpreted as a good sign, but he never fully shifted his weight toward her, never put his arm around her, never held her hand. She bought a large bag of popcorn thinking it would be romantic to share, but he told her he wasn’t hungry and watched with a look of disdain when she dispensed two pumpfuls of liquid butter onto the bag. The theater was chilly and she yearned for some comfort, but when Emily briefly placed her head on Ben’s shoulder, it was cold to the touch.

The frequency of their text messages dwindled to a stop. Emily badly wanted to reach out with a cute GIF or just to say that she was thinking about him, but that would have begun an agonizing countdown waiting for a response. She decided that the agony of not knowing what had happened was worse.

“Hey,” she typed. “Is everything okay?” As she hit the send button, she felt slightly embarrassed, like she was setting herself up to be rejected. She knew that is a question which, by virtue of needing to ask it, is an answer to itself. 

Moments later, the typing bubbles appeared. Then the bubbles vanished. 

“Hey.”

More bubbles. 

“Yah I know I haven’t been around too much. Sorry about that. Been so busy.” His response was unmistakably icy. Her face flushed hot with anger: anger at Ben for treating her that way, anger at herself for overblowing this relationship in her mind, disappointment, rejection, embarrassment, and an irrational hatred of whoever designed those tortuous damn typing bubbles.

She sent back, “can we talk? In person?”

They agreed to meet later that week at the hipster coffee shop with three kinds of vegan milk, cement floors, and Edison bulbs dangling from the ceiling. When she arrived, Ben was already there, sitting at a bistro table.

“Hey!” He closed his laptop. “How’ve you been?”

Rather than delay the conversation with niceties, she dove in immediately. “Well…confused, honestly.” A look of guilt and anguish spread across Ben’s face. “I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “I thought things were going well between us.” 

“If you wanted this to be serious, if you wanted commitment, or whatever…I don’t think I can give you that right now, honestly,” he said. “That’s just really fast for me.” She respected him at least for not feigning ignorance that she was disappointed in how things had turned out.

“I wasn’t asking you to buy me a ring or anything.” Instantly she wished she’d said something more ridiculous, like pick out a china pattern, or even burial plots, to illustrate the point, instead of an example that she didn’t want him to think might have been secretly true. 

“You just went so quiet…and so…cold. I just thought...we had something good between us. I thought maybe this was going somewhere.” Words fought their way to her mouth, but she choked them back, unable to release them out loud and, in doing so, confess their truth. She wondered if the people around them were listening and found her inarticulate. The idea that eavesdropping strangers were judging her on verbal skills was embarrassing enough, so she didn’t mention that his distancing felt particularly harsh after sleeping together.

He opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. His eyes darted back and forth, seemingly evaluating his approach. He paused and then finally offered, “I’m sorry. I really am.” And as if it were going to be a satisfying answer, he added, “I’m just…I’m just not that kind of person.” The vagueness and distance of this answer felt like a withdrawal of the intimacy he’d shared that night in bed, as though she had been offered admission once into his emotional life and then was ushered out immediately after the tour was over and return tickets were no longer available.

“Okay,” she smiled, blinking back tears. She surrendered to the idea that she wasn’t going to get closure. There was no way she was going to beg him to change his mind, or worse, to ask him what she had done wrong. She walked to the counter to order a cup of coffee. Obtaining a cup of coffee seemed particularly important now, as if she were there expressly for that purpose, and certainly not to talk to Ben. She would begin erasing his effect on her life immediately.

“I’ll have a large latte with no foam, please,” she said to the barista.

“For here or to go?” he asked, his tattooed finger poised over the button to charge an extra ten cents for a paper cup.

“To go.”

“What size?”

“Large.” She desperately wanted to get out of there.

“Large no-foam latte.”

“Yes, please.”

  “Will that be all?” 

Emily turned to see Ben out of the corner of her eye.  He was intently reading his laptop screen, his scruffy hair drooping in front of his eyes and headphones holding back the rest of it.  He had let his five o’clock shadow grow into a proper beard, concealing his scar. The beard seemed to illustrate how long it had been since they’d seen each other, the way the rapidly changing heights of her nieces made clear how much time had passed since she last went home. He reached out his right hand for his coffee cup and took a sip, never breaking eye contact with his screen, unaware of anything going on around him and closed off to the world.  Only a few weeks ago, he had been naked with her – stripped down and honest – and now here he sat, wearing an impenetrable leather jacket and cool façade. Just another face lit up by a computer screen’s glow in a coffee shop. He set the cup back down with a definitive thud. 

“Yes,” she responded slowly, turning her attention back to the barista.  “Yes. That’s all.” 

Of course, she would wake up holding someone’s hand again one day, but it would never again be Ben’s. The man who would one day send her “good morning” texts and flowers, open doors, and plan dates in advance was, in that moment, still a stranger to her. Just as Ben had once was, and for all purposes, now would be again. She swiped her credit card, signed the receipt, and stepped aside for the next person.

Welcome to Half Your Beauties Are Untold by me, Katherine Leleu, a writer living in the Bay Area.

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