Queen Of Babble: In The Big City

Chapter 24

“It’s my fault,” I say.

“It’s not your fault,” Shari says.

“No,” I say. “It is. It is. I should have asked him. Back in France, I should have just asked him how he feels about marriage. You know? I could have avoided all of this if I hadn’t played that stupid woodland creature game. For once, if I actually had opened my mouth, I might have spared myself a lot of pain and hardship.”

“Yes,” Shari says. “But you wouldn’t have gotten laid as much.”

“True,” I say with a tearful sigh. “So true.”

“Better?” Shari wants to know as she presses the cool washcloth against my forehead.

I nod. I am stretched out on her girlfriend Pat’s futon couch, in their nice big living room in their Park Slope apartment. On either side of me is a large Labrador retriever. Scooter, on the left, is a black Lab. Jethro, on the right, is a golden.

Even though we’ve only just met, I love them both very, very much.

“Who’s a good boy?” I ask Jethro. “Who?”

I see Pat look uneasily at Shari. Shari says, “Don’t worry. She’ll be all right. She’s just had a bit of a shock.”

“I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’m just going back home tomorrow to visit my family. But I’ll be back. I’m not staying in Ann Arbor. New York didn’t chew me up and spit me out. Not like it did Kathy Pennebaker.”

“Of course you’re coming back,” Shari says. “We’re coming back on the same flight on Sunday. Remember?”

“Right,” I say. “I’ll be back, and I’ll be fine. I’ll land on my feet. Because I always do.”

“Of course you do,” Shari says. “We’re going to go to bed now, all right, Lizzie? You stay out here with Scooter and Jethro. And if you need anything—anything at all—don’t be shy about coming to wake us up. I’ll leave the hall light on, just in case. Okay?”

“Okay,” I murmur as Jethro licks my hand in long, steady strokes. “Good night.”

“Good night,” Shari and Pat call. And turn out the light and leave the room.

I hear Pat whisper to Shari, “Wait… did he really give her a sewing machine ?”

“Yes,” I hear Shari whisper back. “She’d convinced herself he was getting her a ring.”

“Poor thing,” Pat murmurs.

Then I can’t hear them anymore, because they go into their bedroom and close the door.

I lie there, blinking in the semi-darkness. I’d come out of Luke’s mother’s building, hailed a cab, and instructed the driver to take me to Park Slope. I’d had to call Shari to get the exact address. She’d been able to tell by my tone that it was an emergency and had instructed me to come right over without even asking for details. That’s what best friends do for each other, after all.

Pat’s place is very pretty and pleasant, a basement apartment with a lot of wainscoting and sage-colored walls and spider plants hanging in baskets from the ceiling. There are pictures of ducks on the walls. The blanket Pat put over my shoulders when I came, weeping, through the door, had a mallard duck on it.

There is something very comforting about ducks used as an item of decor. I personally wouldn’t want a duck motif in my house, but I am heartened by the fact that someone does.

Maybe, I think, as I lie there between Jethro and Scooter, whose hot, stinky breath I find almost as comforting as the ducks,Shari and Pat will let me move in here with them. Just until I can find a place of my own. That would be nice, three girls against the world. The world of men. Men who aren’t sure they see marriage in their future… or at least, not marriage with a girl like me.

“It’s my fault” was what I’d kept telling Shari, when I first came through the door. “I mean, how can I expect him to know he wants to marry me when he only met me six months ago?”

“Well, even if marriage isn’t important to him,” Pat had said crisply, “he might have realized it’d be important to a girl who earns her living making wedding dresses.”

“I don’t actually earn my living that way,” I’d informed her.

“The guy is a rat fink,” Shari had replied. “Here, drink this.”

The whiskey helped. Hearing Shari call Luke a rat fink didn’t. Because deep down inside, I know he’s not a rat fink. He’s just a guy who, up until a few months ago, didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. Or rather, he knew… he was just afraid to take the risk and try it. Until I came along and encouraged him.

Maybe that’s his problem with marriage. Maybe he’s just afraid to take the risk and admit that there might be a girl out there with whom he could picture spending the rest of his life. Obviously that girl isn’t me. But maybe that’s just because, despite everything I’ve been telling myself for the past six months, Luke and I aren’t right for each other after all. Maybe I haven’t even met my soul mate yet. Or maybe I have, and I missed him.

Or maybe, like Chaz is always saying, you make your own soul mate.

Maybe the truth is that getting married isn’t the be-all and end- all of the universe. Lots of perfectly happy people aren’t married. They don’t sit around crying about it. In fact, they’d probably laugh at the idea of ever getting married. There’s nothing wrong with being single…

… which is what I keep telling my mother and sisters when I get back to Ann Arbor the next day. Because of course they can all tell by my reddened, weepy eyes that something is wrong.

“Luke and I broke up,” I tell them. “He wasn’t ready for a commitment, and I was.”

And Rose and Sarah have a few snarky things to say about it. Rose: “I knew it wouldn’t last. I mean, you met him while you were on vacation. Vacation flings never last.” Sarah: “Guys never want a commitment. That’s why you should have just let yourself get pregnant. Once he knows there’s a bun in the oven, he commits fast enough. I mean, when his mom finds out she’s about to be a grandma, anyway.”

But I don’t want to get my husband the way Rose and Sarah got theirs. Because that’s as dishonest as my whole woodland creature strategy.

And look how that turned out.

Fortunately Shari’s Christmas Eve announcement to her parents about her new girlfriend takes all the attention off me, and is soon the talk of the neighborhood, thanks to Mrs. Dennis’s speed dial. Dr. Dennis, I later learn, responds to the news with a mere tightening of the lips and a trip to his liquor cabinet.

But Mrs. Dennis has soon appointed herself the community spokeswoman for PFLAG. “It stands for Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays,” Shari’s mother proudly tells mine over Christmas Day dinner. “It’s the national organization for promoting the health and well-being of gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons, as well as their families and friends.”

“Well,” Mom says. “How nice.”

“Would you like to join?” Mrs. Dennis asks. “I have a pamphlet right here.”

“Oh,” Mom says, putting down her forkful of Yorkshire pudding. “I’d love to.”

Shari winks at me from across the table.Did he call? she mouths. Because Shari is convinced that, despite what I think, it’s not over between me and Luke, and that he’s going to call me, and we’ll talk things out, and everything will be fine.

Shari lives in a fantasy world. Possibly due to all the ducks.

Christmas Day is always a zoo at the Nichols household, because Mom hosts all of her children and grandchildren, in addition to Grandma and the Dennises and the occasional graduate assistant of my dad’s who can’t afford plane fare home for the holidays, and so comes over with a dish from their native country to share (which is how our holiday meals often consist of beef Wellington with a side dish of malai koftas and a basket of fresh-baked poori).

There is no escape from the shrieking of the under-six set, and the relentless cheer of Mom’s caroling with the Muppets record, and Dad’s grad student’s patient explanation to everyone at the dinner table that the defocusing effect of the radial field gradient is compensated by ridges on the magnet faces which vary the field azimuthally, and Rose’s breakdown because her latest EPT showed two blue lines instead of the one she expected, and Sarah’s fury because she asked for white gold diamond stud earrings, and her husband, Chuck, got her yellow gold instead (“I mean, is he color blind ?”).

And through it all I clutch my cell phone in my hand, occasionally thinking I feel it jump—but it’s only my own heartbeat I feel, I guess, because he doesn’t call, not even to wish me a merry Christmas.

And I don’t call him because—well, how can I?

It’s when I’m seeking some kind of relief from the stream of tears and chatter of the rest of the house that I stumble across Grandma in the basement rec room, perched in front of the television in the La-Z-Boy she demanded my parents buy her, watching It’s a Wonderful Life —the original, not colorized, version.

“Hey, Gran,” I say, sinking down onto the couch. “Jimmy Stewart, huh?”

Grandma grunts. I don’t miss the bottle of Bud in her hand. It’s one of the special ones Angelo, Rose’s bohunk husband, prepared for her, filled with nonalcoholic beer instead of the real thing. Not that it makes any difference. Grandma will act drunk later anyway.

“That’s when they knew how to make real movies,” Grandma says, gesturing toward the screen with her beer bottle. “This one. What’s that other one, with that Rick? Oh, right.Casablanca . Those were real movies. Nothing blowing up. No talking monkeys. Just smart talk. Nobody knows how to do that in movies anymore. It’s like everyone in Hollywood got retarded.”

I think I feel my phone vibrate. But it’s nothing. A second later, I have to bow my head to hide my tears.

“This guy’s good,” Grandma goes on, indicating Jimmy Stewart with her beer bottle. “But I like that Rick, who owned the café in Casablanca. Now, he was the real deal. You remember when he helps the girl’s husband win the money, so she doesn’t have to sleep with that Frenchie to get it? That’s a real man, for you. What does Rick get for going to all the trouble? Not a thing. Except peace of mind. I don’t want that Brad Pitt phony baloney. What’d he ever do, except take his shirt off, and adopt a lot of orphans? Rick never takes his shirt off. He doesn’t need to! We don’t need to see him naked to know he’s a real man! That’s why I’d take Rick over that Brad Pitt any day. Because he’s such a real man, he doesn’t need to take his shirt off to prove it. Hey. What’re you crying for?”

“Oh, Gran,” I choke. “Everything—everything is so awful!”

“What’re you, pregnant?” Grandma wants to know.

“No, Gran, of course not,” I say.

“Don’t of course not me,” she says. “That’s all any of your sisters ever do. Get knocked up right and left. You’d think they’d never heard there’s a population crisis. So what’s the matter with you, if you’re not pregnant?”

“Ev-everything was going so well,” I sob. “In N-New York, I mean. I think I might really be able to make something out of this wedding dress rehab thing. I can figure out which way is First Avenue and which way is First Street. I finally found a place I can afford that does good highlights… and then I had to go and cry when Luke gave me my Christmas present, because I thought I was g-getting an engagement ring, and he g-got me a… sewing machine!”

Grandma takes a meditative sip of her beer. Then she says evenly, “If your grandfather had ever given me a sewing machine for Christmas, I’d have hit him over the head with it.”

“Oh, Gran!” I can barely see, I’m weeping so hard. “Don’t you see? It’s not the gift. It’s that he doesn’t want to get married—ever! He says he can’t look that far into the future. But don’t you think if you love someone, Gran, even if you can’t see where you’ll be or what you’ll be doing twenty years from now, you’d still know you want that person to be there?”

“Well, of course,” Grandma says. “And if he said he didn’t know, well, you were right to give him the old heave-ho.”

“It’s more complicated than that, Gran. I mean, don’t tell Mom, but Luke and I—we’ve been l-living together.”

Grandma snorts at this information. “Even worse. He’s had a taste, and he’s still not sure he likes you well enough to make a permanent go of it someday? Tell him toodleloo. Who does he think he is, anyway—Brad Pitt?”

“But, Gran, maybe some guys really do need longer than six months to know whether or not a girl they like is the one for them.”

“If he’s a Pitt, maybe,” Grandma says with a snort. “But not if he’s a Rick.”

It takes a few seconds for me to digest this. Then I say, “If I move out, I’m going to have to find a whole new place to live. I’ll probably have to pay even more in rent than I am now. Because I got the girlfriend deal on my current place.”

“Which would you rather have,” Grandma asks, “money? Or your dignity?”

“Both,” I say.

“So? Find a way to have both, then. You’re up to the challenge. You’re the one who was always going around, claiming you could fix anything with a glue gun and a needle and thread. Now go open your grandma another beer. And make it a real one this time. I’m tired of this nonalcoholic crap. It’s just empty calories for nothing .”

I get up and take Grandma’s empty beer bottle from her. Her gaze is glued back to the screen. Jimmy Stewart is running down the street, wishing Mr. Potter a merry Christmas.

“Gran,” I say. “How come you like Sully on Dr. Quinn so much, but you hate Brad Pitt? Isn’t Sully always taking his shirt off, too?”

Grandma looks up at me as if I’ve lost my mind. “That’s television ,” she says. “That isn’t movies. That’s completely different.”