met him. In a laminated pink notebook, with sketches and prices. All the songs, all the special readings by Kahlil Gibran. All she had to add were the initials on the napkins, the name on the cake.
So easy, so few decisions for him to make. He lucked out on a girl like that, I told him.
MY MOTHER called me at my soon-to-be-old apartment the day that Johnny and I were moving in together across town. “The phone’ll be disconnected at any minute,” I told her, kicking a wad of crumpled-up newspaper against the cabinet door. It bounced back to my toe, and I did it again.
“Don’t do it, don’t do it.” She was crying. “Don’t do it.”
“We already signed the lease. There’s a big orange moving truck outside. Johnny sprained his groin trying to lift the couch with the Hide-A-Bed.”
“But what will he think of you? What will he think of me?”
“Mom, he doesn’t even know you.”
“Put him on the phone.”
I argued, but she was silent until I handed the phone to Johnny, who was sweating, holding an empty canary cage.
“Yes, I understand. Yes … No … No … Yes.”
He handed the phone back, and I asked my mother, “Okay, what did you say?”
“None of your beeswax.”
After we hung up, I asked Johnny what she had said. He said, “I couldn’t begin to tell you.” But he put his sweaty arm around my shoulder, and told me that he would pack the rest of the truck himself. That I should sit alone for a while and contemplate. That if I had any doubts, to tell him today. Because after today, it was all over.
ALCOHOL WAS served, champagne wreathed with cool white cloth napkins, although this bride was a Seventh-Day Adventist. We knew her through Johnny’s job. The day was cold and misty, but heat blowers had been installed in the tents. As I walked too close past one of them, it melted my stockings in one hot blow. I looked down at the strings of mesh, fused together in thin snakes. Johnny laughed and offered me his pants.
A young couple stood at the cake table, drinking nonalcoholic champagne. The woman, who had glasses and a frumpy haircut, smiled a lot. She wore a long angora sweater dress with a matching cardigan draped over her shoulders. Hey, I thought, you’re my age. You can’t do that.
She said, “I don’t know. This champagne doesn’t taste nonalcoholic. It’s just a little too convincing.”
“I don’t care,” her husband said. “It is what it says it is.”
I concentrated on standing upright on the wet earth. But my spike heels sank into the mud, and my shoes kept getting stuck.
“Our wedding had no champagne,” the wife said. “So you couldn’t get them mixed up, nonalcoholic and alcoholic champagne. There just wasn’t any. Just coffee, tea, like that.”
“Are you an alcoholic?” I asked.
“Certainly not,” she said.
I was thinking about the word “certainly” and how I rarely heard it in conversation anymore. Then I realized that they probably couldn’t drink because of their religion. I slapped my forehead with my palm, while my heels dove into the ground again.
“Mosquito?” the husband asked politely.
She was a marketing manager, and he was an accountant. They worked for the same company and had been married since they were both nineteen.
“And you?” they asked.
“Oh, not much. Part-time sometimes, temporary other times.”
“Who are you here with?”
I pointed to Johnny with the bottom of my champagne glass. At that moment he was showing a woman how he could click his heels together in the air. The woman laughed and applauded. Some mud splattered on her shin from the heels of his shoes.
I said, “Johnny there. I live with him.”
“Ah,” the husband said. “You’re married to Johnny.”
“No. I live with him.”
They nodded. The wife said, “Well, then,” and brushed her husband’s shoulder. Her long nails made scraping noises on the tightly woven cloth. They moved together toward a couple under a dripping tree. “Oh, Seth, Marie,” the wife said.
I stood alone again, holding my glass in my hand. After all, I was what I said I was.
JOHNNY AND I were underdressed for Sam’s wedding. Johnny wore a big white shirt and no tie, and I wore a kimono. Nobody talked to us, but a big band was playing, so we drank a lot of wine and headed toward the floor. First we tried a polka, then a jitterbug, then a tango. Johnny pushed me into a bridesmaid’s bare back, and I stepped backward, detaching her foot from its satin pump. “I’m sorry,” I told her, then whispered to Johnny, “Why can’t you lead worth a damn?”
I walked outside. Standing in front of me was a statue of Hiawatha with Minnehaha in his arms. Her dress hung in strips, and his biceps barely bulged under her weight.
I heard Johnny walk up behind me. “See that?” I pointed to the statue. “Is that how it’s supposed to be?” I turned around, but it wasn’t Johnny, it was Sam, the groom.
“Yeah,” he said, “but you take what you can get.” We looked through the window at the wedding guests, and at Johnny dancing with the bride. They were beautiful together, the whites blurring together, the bride ringing on his arm like a giant bell. They could have been any two people that you had seen once and forgotten.
“BUT IT wouldn’t feel like a wedding if we drove to Vegas and got married by an Elvis impersonator,” I said, holding a spatula. “We could act like it didn’t mean anything.” In the pan, the eggs chugged like a motor.
“Do you really want to get married in Las Vegas?” Johnny asked, next to the stove.
“No,” I said, confused. “No, I don’t really want to get married.”
“Good. Me neither. After Sally, I promised myself never again.”
“What if you think about wanting to marry me and I think about wanting to marry you? And we’ll both know that we won’t do it—that we’ll promise not to do it.”
“But I don’t want to.”
“Even with me?”
“What are you talking about? You hate all this. What is it that you want? The wedding part?”
“No. I couldn’t stand to be around my family for a whole day.”
“Do you want to be married?”
“No. Everyone would expect me to take your last name. Get fat.”
“Everyone who?”
“Just everyone.”
I had meanwhile flipped the eggs for the second time, so the yolks were faceup and coated with a doughy white film. Johnny turned the burner knob to OFF.
I looked around the yellow kitchen, with the yellow linoleum peeling at the edges.
“I hate yellow,” I said.
“Well, that’s what you get when you rent,” Johnny said. “Listen, honey. I love you. I don’t know what you’re asking me for.”
“I want to be that important.”
“To whom?”
I started crying, sliding the eggs from the pan and onto a plate. They had sat too long in the hot pan and were now rigid, even the yolks.
“I want you to want me like that. I want you to love me that much. As much as you loved Sally.”
Johnny ran his fingers through his