Getting Married Read online

  Now, the only thing standing between me and happily-ever-after is, well, me. I wish I could stop obsessing, but I hate that he loved his first wife and doesn’t regret marrying her. He never says anything disparaging about her. It’s so annoying. It’s really his worst quality.

  I inspect my face in the bathroom mirror, decide I look passably decent, and go downstairs where I join Will at the table.

  “Is everything okay, babe?” he asks.

  “Yeah. I was just writing down some thoughts for my meeting with Woodruff Pharmaceuticals. That’s why I took so long.”

  He smiles and together we watch the band play.

  I take a sip of my beer and try to shake my feelings of self-doubt, attempting to enjoy the music. Then a flurry of activity to my right catches my eye and I turn to look at what’s going on. The older couple who had been sitting there is leaving, and three young women are snapping up the table. The women are wearing tight, cropped shirts that fall off the shoulders and are loosely draped on, held in place by a couple well-placed knots. I suspect that one overly enthusiastic laugh would cause the blouses to disintegrate. The girls are very pretty: Their hair, their smiles, their laughs, the confident way they move. They are decidedly alluring. I look over at Will. His eyes are resolutely focused on the band, straight ahead.

  X. It’s X’s doing. X trained him not to look at pretty, half-dressed women making a ruckus getting to their table. Men stare shamelessly at women until their girlfriends or wives train them through negative reinforcement that if they stare at other women while in her company, they do so at their peril, setting themselves up for hours-long tirades in the vein of, “What, you think she’s prettier than me? You want to fuck her?” Then comes the hours-long protest that no, no, of course he isn’t attracted to the twenty-two-year-old brunette with enormous breasts.

  A fresh wave of hate for X washes over me. Yes, she’d also trained him to put the toilet seat down and put the cap back on the toothpaste and having him house-trained is undeniably convenient, but the fact that she taught him not to look at other women meant she’d also had jealous feelings about him, and I do not want any more common bonds with this woman than I already have.

  Will squeezes my hand, then drapes the arm closest to me across my shoulders. I love how snuggly he is, always holding my hand and giving me hugs.

  There’s a lot more I like about him, naturally. Sixteen years of dating the wrong guys makes me appreciate all the good things about Will. He’s nothing, for example, like my ex, Rick. Rick and I were together nearly three years. Rick was painfully tightfisted with money, so even though at the time we were together he made a great salary and I made no money since I was in school getting my MBA, he made us split everything fifty-fifty. He would gripe endlessly every time he had to spend money on anything—the unfairness of having to spend twelve dollars to get a haircut, the price of gas, the cost of cereal. He was an obsessive bargain-hunter, constantly talking about things like how we could save eleven cents or something ridiculous by switching phone plans. Personally, I’ll gladly fork over a few extra bucks if it means not constantly doing research and paperwork on phone plans and rebates and comparing one can of soup to another. My time is more important to me than money.

  Will, unlike Rick, is incredibly generous. He tips well, he purchases things based on quality and not whether he can save six cents, and he’ll take me out to a nice meal without telling me the entire time how it’s wrecking his budget to do so. Early on in our relationship we were at a bar with friends and the waitress brought our check and he reached for his wallet. “But you got dinner and drinks last time,” I said.

  “Eva, no one’s keeping track.”

  I felt so freed when he said that. A cloud lifting and all that. Instantly I felt I could exhale and relax. After constantly having to pay attention to who had paid for dinner last time and who got the movie tickets last, it was absolutely liberating not to have to keep score.

  Also, Will is thoughtful. I’m allergic to nuts, and whenever we go out to eat, he asks if the dish is prepared with any nuts in it. He tells his friends who invite us over for dinner to cook something without nuts and to be careful of the sneaky places nuts can pop up, such as in things like salad dressing and snack foods and even root beer. I love how he looks out for me.

  Thinking about how lucky I am to have found Will puts a smile on my face again, temporarily averting my earlier self-esteem crisis. I look into his eyes and we exchange one of those dopey smiling-deliriously sort of gazes that people who are in the first stages of love are wont to do.

  We just can’t help ourselves.

  Chapter 2

  T he next morning I head over to see my friend Rachel at her shop. Rachel owns her own secondhand clothing store in Highlands, a cute neighborhood in northern Denver. Her shop, Recycled Chic, is in the downtown area, sandwiched in between restaurants, coffee shops, a bakery, a couple of pubs, a bookstore, and some artsy shops selling the work of local artists and jewelry makers.

  I really love Rach. We met two years ago at a meeting of the Denver branch of Women Entrepreneurs Incorporated. We were sitting next to each other at a table, waiting for the keynote speaker to go on, and I asked her about how she got started with her business.

  Rachel told me that she was the mother of two kids and she launched her store because she had wanted a job where she could be more in control of her hours. She’d worked as a freelance seamstress, but she didn’t get enough work to make a decent living.

  “My husband works in sales, so some months he makes enough money to get by, but other months are a little rough,” she said. “I wanted something steady. I heard about this organization that gives loans to women who want to start their own businesses. I figured a recycled clothing store would be pretty inexpensive to start up since at first I’d just get donations of clothes from friends and stuff, so there would be low overhead. I also sell some original clothes I design myself.”

  She showed me pictures of some of her designs that she had in the portfolio she’d brought. The clothes were things like funky polka-dot skirts with faux fur trim; dresses whose hems fell at an angle, shorter on the right side and longer on left; denim bustiers with short lace sleeves. I loved her original designs, though they were all a little too risqué for me to feel comfortable pulling off. I tend toward conservative business suits in classic cuts. Rachel always looks cool and hip, though. She is unequivocally pretty. She’s thin but with curves in all the right places. She has dark hair, pale blue eyes, and a small diamond nose ring. She doesn’t look old enough to be a mom. She reminds me a lot of my own mother, who’d also had kids young and was ridiculously pretty. My mother and Rachel could be described as Hot Moms. They may have children scampering around their ankles, but they are still unequivocal babes.

  That day we first met, I asked Rachel about her kids. When she told me how old they were, I nearly fell off my chair.

  “You look much too young to have an eight year old.”

  “That’s what happens when you’re eighteen and you get wasted and have sex. You have an eight year old when you’re twenty-six.”

  I laughed out loud at how honest and down-to-earth she was. She was such a change of pace from the fake people I’d worked with at the office before I left my corporate job and went out on my own. How could I not love her? And the more I got to know her, the more I grew to respect her. She’s both a mother and a successful businesswoman. (She’s not rolling in money, but she makes a decent living and has a job she enjoys.) She can cook, and sew, and do all manner of craftsy domestic things that I don’t stand a chance at.

  Though I love Rachel, I never buy any of the used clothes. There is something I find disconcerting about the whole idea of putting my ass in a pair of jeans that once housed someone else’s ass. And because I’m pretty conservative clothingwise, I never buy any of her original designs either, a fact she thankfully doesn’t hold against me.

  I hang out with Rachel at her shop whenever I
can. She even set up a barstool for me next to hers behind the counter, so that she and I can dish when things are quiet. As with everything she does in her life, Rachel decorated her store in a way that is both funky and classy. Her shop is small but welcoming. She has headless mannequins adorning the place, wearing whatever outfits Rachel wants to highlight that week. Her storefront windows have mannequins modeling the clothes as well, and the window background changes whenever the mood strikes her. This week she has those hula-dancing dolls you suction-cup to your dashboard all over the place—on the ground, taped to the wall, dangling from the ceiling—plus colorful leis draped all around. The headless mannequins are modeling summer clothes, both clothes Rachel designed and sewed herself and preowned items that customers brought in exchange for a few bucks in cash.

  Right now, there is only one customer in the place, a teenage girl sitting on the floor with a pile of T-shirts around her. She picks one up, inspects it, then puts it down and picks up another one. She’s wearing a consternated expression, as if picking out which five dollar T-shirt she wants to buy is the most important decision she’ll make this year.

  “Hey, Eva,” Rachel says.

  “Hey.” I slide onto my stool behind the counter. Rachel assumes her usual position beside me.

  “So, how are you?” she asks.

  “More in love than ever.”

  “Ugh, shut up, I can’t take anymore of your bliss.”

  “Although, there has been one little dark spot in our relationship.”

  She looks hopeful. Drama is so much more interesting than happiness.

  “I had a little breakdown at this bar last night. There was this graffiti that said, ‘You are not the first, and you are definitely not the last. And probably, you are not the best.’ I just couldn’t stop thinking about Will’s ex-wife. I hate that he vowed to love her until the end of time. I hate thinking about him having sex with her. Or with anyone else, for that matter.”

  “Y-e-a-h,” she says in this drawn out, you’re-a-fucking-retard way, “you’re just going to have to get over that.”

  “I know. I know. It’s just…I’ve dated lots of guys before Will. Chris was even divorced, and I didn’t give a shit about his ex-wife. What’s going on? Why am I being so psycho about this?”

  “You weren’t in love with Chris. You love Will. That’s why this is eating you up. So you must still be serious about him. Still think he might be the guy who can get you over your fear of marriage?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Other times I start freaking myself out, thinking about all the stuff that can go wrong.”

  The girl who had been looking at T-shirts has finally made her selection and approaches us wide-eyed, like she’s frightened of how this whole buying and selling stuff works. There is no question in my mind that she lives in Boulder, a city forty minutes northwest of Denver. She just has the Boulder look—with that messy hair like she just got out of bed or just took off her ski cap. No matter what time of year it is, a staggering number of Boulderites’ hair look like it has just been freed from a knit hat. I want to stand out on street corners handing out hairbrushes and explaining as you would to someone who has suffered a head injury, “IT’S CALLED A HAIRRRRBRRRRUSHHHH.”

  “That’ll be five dollars,” Rachel says.

  The girl hands over a crumpled five, and Rachel rings it up in her old-fashioned cash register, which spits out a receipt the width and length of a human tongue.

  “Thank you so much,” Rachel says.

  The girl nods hurriedly and makes her escape.

  “What were we talking about?” Rachel asks. “Oh yeah, how you were freaking yourself out thinking of what could go wrong. Why does that not surprise me?”

  Rachel thinks I have a tendency to overthink things. She’s right, of course.

  Sometimes I think it would have been so much easier if I’d done what Rachel had done and run off to get married on a deadline—six months to tie the knot before the kid gets here!—and there was no time to think about what it all meant. I should have gotten hitched back when I was still young and hadn’t had my heart broken or gone on zillions of disappointing dates that wore my spirit down. When I hadn’t yet been hit on by several married men, proving in no uncertain terms that men were scum.

  “I don’t want to be the second wife. It just seems so seedy. You know, like how in a harem there were like the second, third, and fourth wives, and it was a total step-down from first wife. Being a second wife is less special.”

  “Look at your mom. She’s much happier now with Frank. Same thing with my mom. Some people learn from their mistakes the first time and then they are better able to get it right the second time around.”

  “ It would be different if I’d been married once before, too. Then we’d both be equally sullied. But it’s more than that. I feel like there are these shoes I have to fill. I’m the replacement Darren on ‘Bewitched’; I’m the new oldest daughter on ‘Roseanne’.”

  “You make no sense at all. What are you talking about?”

  “Like I know Will’s ex is the kind of woman who can pull off things like garters. He said he likes garters, finds them sexy, and I just can’t get the picture out of my head of him having sex with her when she’s wearing a garter.” I moan at this, the image just makes me ill. A few weary sighs and I recover enough to speak again. “I could never pull off such impractical underwear. I’d look preposterous.”

  “You would not. Look, at least you don’t have to buy your boobs at the Gap—”

  Padded bras? I never knew Rachel had faux cleavage! I feel a little like when Mom told me the truth about Santa Claus….

  “You’d look great in ridiculous underwear,” she continues. “And as fetishes go, his is pretty damn tame. At least he doesn’t want to have sex with you and some random other woman or a sheep or something.”

  “I know all that. I just wish I could get his ex out of my head.”

  “I get what you are saying. I guess I don’t know what to tell you to make you feel better, except that obsessing about this is not going to help.”

  I love this about Rachel. I think it’s the mother in her. She can stay calm while things go nuts all around her—in this case me. Still, I ignore her completely and go right on obsessing. “And then, when I think about things like this, I worry that if we get married, our sex life will get dull because I have all these confused feelings about what is really sexy and what our culture says is sexy to sell products like…I don’t know…lingerie, liposuction, fake boobs, whatever. I’ve never dated a man for more than two or three years. What do you do when you’ve been together for…how long have you been with Jon?”

  “Ten years, almost eleven. I’ll be honest. It does get boring sometimes. A lot of times we have sex because we think we should, like, well it’s been two weeks so we probably should get it on. Sometimes, honestly, it feels like another chore, like cleaning the bathtub or something. It’s really hard when you have kids. You only have fifteen minutes to have sex, and even if the kids are over at Grandma’s, the screaming and the moaning comes out all weird because you’re so out of practice.”

  I nod, absorbing this information.

  “Is sex with Will dull now?” she asks me.

  “No, it’s great now. I’m just worried it’ll get dull someday. Like say, six years from now.”

  “You’re worried about something that may or may not happen six years from now?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you think that’s a good use of your emotional energy?”

  “No. But on the other hand, it’s the whole Boy Scout thing about how you should always be prepared. If you anticipate what things might go wrong, you can take steps to avoid it.”

  “You have to stop worrying. Worrying gives you the false impression you have control over things. You don’t. You don’t know what the future brings. Anything could happen.”

  Worrying gives you the false impression you have control over things. You don’t. She’s right,
but it’s not easy to shut off my desire to predict the future. “Seriously, you and Jon have been married for ten years. You must have tips for keeping things interesting?”

  “Well, every now and then Jon and I do surprise each other.”

  “Yeah?”

  “For our seventh anniversary he brought home a little…toy.”

  “Really? I want details.”

  “It was called the Clit Blaster 2000.”

  “It fucking was not.”

  “Oh, but it was.”

  “Verdict?”

  “Well, the clit-blasting portion of it was delightful. However, it had certain…appendages that seemed bound and determined to venture into places that I would prefer weren’t ventured. I think I need a tattoo on my ass that says, ‘No entry. Exit only.’”

  I burst out laughing. “Aaah!” I say, burying my head in my hands. “I’ll never be old enough to hear this stuff.” We chuckle for a minute or so. “So tell me honestly, do you think I should buy a garter and see how it goes?”

  “It’s just a costume. It’s not a big deal.”

  “I know.” I think a moment. “I don’t mind costumes at Halloween, I mean, then it’s kind of fun, but in bed, I don’t know, I don’t want to feel like I’m putting on a performance. I’m totally comfortable with my body naked in front of Will, I’m not hiding under the covers with the lights out or anything, but I don’t want to have to pretend to be somebody I’m not, you know?”

  “Then don’t wear it. Those kind of things come off in about ten seconds anyway, it’s not worth the sixty bucks. Anyway, they encourage guys to come even faster than they already do, so I say, where’s our motivation?”

  I smile. She’s right, where’s my motivation?

  Feeling better about my lingerie inhibitions, I radically switch conversational gears. “How have things been going with the family?”

  “Good. I mean, well, busy. I’ve got to get the kids in daycare and figure that all out. The house is a mess. I’ve got to get the dog spayed. Jon has been kind of…depressed lately…so that’s really been a drag. I just want to throttle him.”