“Don’t you think people ought to love each other before they get married?” Meda said.
I was halfway down the front stairs, and I turned to look at her holding Annadore at the top of the stairs. Not two minutes before, she’d been prepared to go to the courthouse to get our marriage license. I’d expected some last minute hesitation, so bowing to that, I came back up enough steps to bring us eye to eye.
“I do love you,” I said.
“No, you don’t. You’re just saying it because you think you need to for us to get married.”
“No wonder you thought I was crazy when I asked you to marry me. I never said it before, because I knew you’d run in the opposite direction.”
“Oh, that’s bullshit.” She put Annadore down. It wasn’t going to be a simple conversation.
“Do you think I’d go through with this if I didn’t love you? Think about how easy it would be for me to write you a check and say, ‘Good luck with the baby. Call me if you need more money.’“
“Doesn’t it worry you even a little that maybe I don’t love you?” she said.
“My own mother doesn’t love me. It would hardly be a shocking development if my wife didn’t."
It didn’t sound as funny as I’d intended it. I thought Meda might yell at me, but I didn’t expect her to slap me, which she did.
“Don’t you say that! Don’t say that!” She nearly punched me then, so I had to defend myself by catching her hands in mine.
“Not in front of Annadore,” I said.
The color went out of Meda’s face, and she put her hands up to cover her eyes.
“How could you say that? You could have just asked me. A normal person, a normal person would have just said, ‘Well, do you love me?’“ It was all she could say. She couldn’t even look at me.
After a couple of minutes, I picked up Annadore. I settled her in her room with a variety of toys, and put the baby gate in place. Then I came back to get Meda off the stairs. She’d calmed down some, but there was no way we were going to the courthouse.
What a Normal Person Would Have Said
Meda
“It was a joke,” Bernie said.
“Don’t try to pretend you were joking, because you weren’t.”
Right then I saw how his craziness could grow on me, like my mother’s. I saw how it would be if I got used to being with someone who didn’t care at all about anything, who didn’t even care about something like that. He never even complained about my slapping him and there was the mark on his cheek.
“Maybe I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer,” he said.
“Why in the world would you want to marry me if you didn’t think I loved you?”
“Well, do you?”
“Yes.” It needed to be said. I did love him. I didn’t know if I loved him enough.
In spite of all that, he smiled at me and said, “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I didn’t deserve for him to be so nice to me, but he walked me back upstairs and sat me down on his bed. He held out his closed hands. “Old or new?”
“New?” I wondered what I was committing to. He opened his hand and offered me a jewelry box.
“It’s just a ring. Don’t be afraid, Baby Girl Amos,” he said.
I picked the one on the left. The rock was so big it almost blinded me.
“I hope this is a joke.” I felt like such a bitch. “It’s not that I don’t like it, but it’s huge. Do I get to see the other one or am I stuck with what I picked?” The other one was pretty, and also smaller.
“It was my grandmother’s engagement ring. But I didn’t want you to think you were just going to get stuck with her old stuff, so I thought I’d give you a choice. If you want a new one, but you don’t like the one I picked out, you can have whatever kind of ring you want.”
That scared me. I could have as big a diamond as I wanted. I remembered how he’d said he could give me twenty million dollars and never miss it. It was the sort of thing that made it hard to sleep at night.
“Why don’t you keep them both for now and you can think about it.” He gave me both ring boxes. When he kissed me I was mostly relieved, because I thought if I sidetracked him with sex, we’d never end up at the courthouse.
Pride
“Loren said you wouldn’t marry me. That you refused to marry Travis, even though you loved him,” I said.
Meda tensed up all along me, her hands clenched into fists against my chest.
“When you’re in bed with a girl, it’s not polite to talk about her ex-boyfriend.”
“Come on, Meda. You always made it seem like Travis was the one who didn’t want to get married, but Loren said you were against it. I was wondering if there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“You’re the one with all the secrets.” I thought that was all she planned to say, but when I started kissing her again, she pushed me away.
“I was willing to marry him the first dozen times he suggested it. But after he changed his mind so many times, I—I had to have a little pride. He kept breaking it off and crawling back and breaking it off. So I did the one thing I could do and the next time, I said no. That’s what Loren remembers. She doesn’t remember all the times I said yes. She thinks it was my fault, but would you want to marry someone who changed his mind ten times? Oh, hell, it was more like twenty or thirty times. It was so many times I don’t remember.”
“You don’t have to defend yourself to me.”
“Yes, I do,” Meda said with vehemence.
We got all of fifteen minutes, before we were interrupted by the sound of Annadore crying. Meda got up, resplendently naked, and went to check on Annadore. She came back and stood in the doorway, looking like a nature goddess with her child on her hip.
“What did you mean when you said you doubted your mother would come?” Meda said. “You think your mother won’t come to your wedding?”
“She isn’t coming. She called me yesterday and said it wasn’t possible on such short notice.”
“That’s fucked up.” She glanced at Annadore and blushed.
“Don’t take it personally. It’s not because of you. It’s me.”
“That’s what makes it so messed up.”
“But it’s how things are. I can’t change my mother and I don’t think it’s fair to blame me for my relationship with her. I try. I really do,” I said, gritting my teeth.
“I wasn’t blaming you.”
I couldn’t get Meda’s acquiescence in so many words, but it was in her look.
Unknown
Meda
The clerk in the marriage license office was about Loren’s age and she immediately started in asking all kinds of questions: the bride’s full name, birthday, birthplace, the bride’s mother’s name and birthplace, the bride’s father’s name and birthplace. Bernie answered most of the questions for me, but he cleared his throat when she asked that, so I just said, “Unknown.”
The clerk thought about that one for a while. Then she started over: groom’s full name, birthday, birthplace, groom’s mother’s name and birthplace, groom’s father’s name and birthplace, and that was when I realized I couldn’t breathe.
I heard Bernie say, “Meda, are you okay? Why don’t you sit down here? Meda?”
“Is she a little nervous? You know sometimes people have panic attacks,” the clerk said.
I’d never had a panic attack before, so I didn’t know if that’s what it was. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would mean to be married, how I’d be tangled up with Bernie and he would be tangled up with me, and how I still didn’t know half of what I needed to know about him, and how much I wasn’t like his kind of people. I was never going to be like his mother or his aunt, and all the money in the world wasn’t going to make me like them. I was always going to be this person who barely graduated high school and got a job at a motel and got pregnant and had a baby with some loser, and had a crazy mother, and was never going to be the kind of wife that would make him hap
py and fit in with the people he knew, and it would be so easy for him to start hating me. It scared me so much I couldn’t feel my hands and feet and then I guess I fainted.
CHAPTER NINE
COLD FEET
I told myself that Meda just had cold feet, but Meda’s cold feet would have caused frostbite on a lesser woman. She was completely silent on the drive back from the courthouse. Our copy of the marriage license application lay on the seat between us, but in three days we would have an actual license. We’d left Annadore with Miss Amos for the day, so we had to go back to her house. If it had been up to Meda, I don’t think she would have let me into the house when we got there, but she simply didn’t know how to get rid of me. I helped her off with her coat and followed her into the kitchen. I knew she was rattled, because she didn’t even make tea. She made a mug of hot water and left the tea bag on the counter. What word described my mental state I didn’t know. Witnessing the scope of Meda’s terror had a sobering effect on me. Until then, I hadn’t really considered how little Meda might want to be chained to me for life.
“I don’t think I can do this,” she said. It wasn’t an argument. It wasn’t part of any argument we’d had. There was no counterargument for it. “I’m not ready to do this. I can’t marry you, not now, maybe not ever. I have to think and I can’t do it with you waiting. Can you leave me alone and let me think?”
I went home and tried to work, but everything Celeste said got on my nerves and I wasn’t sure how long I could maintain a façade of politeness. I gave it up after a while and, claiming a headache, went to bed at two o’clock in the afternoon. When the alarm went off the next morning, I hadn’t even fallen asleep. I’d lain there for close to eighteen hours, staring up at the ceiling. The world was thoughtlessly white and loud all day, so that twice I snapped at Celeste to be quiet and she looked at me like I was an ogre. I felt like an ogre, shouting, “Would you shut up for ten minutes?” Thankfully, she did.
When I heard Meda’s voice in the foyer I thought I was imagining it, but when I got up and looked out the study door, she was standing at the foot of the stairs talking to her aunt. Mrs. Trentam turned away while Meda shook her head at me.
“Please, don’t, Bernie,” she said.
She came to work the next day and the day after, and although I saw her, heard her, and could have spoken to her, she told me with a look that I was forbidden. It was worse than her actual absence, like living with a ghost. Once I encountered the fading smell of her shampoo in the foyer outside the study, and knew she must have passed there a moment or two before me. The situation was not one of ludicrous absolutes. When FedEx delivered a bundle of documents, Meda brought it into the study and asked where I wanted it. I took it from her and thanked her.
At night, I drove to avoid sleep. I drove by Meda’s house a lot, taking comfort from the light slipping out through gaps in the curtains.
Celeste and I did what needed to be done for the creation of the foundation, and waded through the innumerable legal mysteries that had piled up in my grandfather’s eighty-odd years. I found excuses to ask Meda about things around the house. Occasionally I butted my head against the wall and asked her about getting married, always with similar results: “I can’t talk about that. Please don’t ask me that. If you have to have an answer right now it’s no.” Or some permutation of those responses. If I had to guess, I would say she was so firm in refusing to give an answer because of her experience with Travis. She didn’t want to say yes and go back on it. Or she just didn’t know. I was out of the business of trying to guess what she was thinking. It was straight to Hell and no scenic route.
The Joys of Motherhood
Aunt Ginny
I offered Bernie a drink, some tea I thought, but he came back from the kitchen with an old bottle of Alan’s bourbon and a glass with ice. He’d come from some big, important meeting in the city, about a commercial, he said.
“For Raleigh Industries?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Are you going to be in it?”
“Yeah. If you see my spine lying around somewhere, would you let me know?”
“What does that mean?” I supposed it meant he hadn’t stood up for himself.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
By my count, Bernie had three large drinks in less than an hour. He was wearing a suit when he arrived, but over the course of the hour, he shed his jacket, his tie and his dress shirt, so that he cut quite a picture of dissolution in his undershirt and suit pants with his drink balanced on his knee. I wanted to bring it to his attention, but I decided to ask first about Meda and his cancelled wedding. He didn’t want to talk about that, either.
“Sweetie, what am I supposed to think? A month ago you were getting married, and then last week, you tell me you’re not. I think you should tell me something.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It can’t be that complicated. I’m rather sharp for an old lady.” I said it to tease him, but he wouldn’t even smile.
“I’m not smart enough to figure it out.” He poured himself another drink.
“Now, Bernie. Ask yourself if you’re doing the best thing to solve this problem. Meda deserves better than you sitting there getting drunk.”
He sat up straight and put his glass on the table, so that for a moment I thought we might get somewhere. All I accomplished, however, was to make him cry. The poor dear put his head in his hands and cried, as one rarely sees a grown man cry. It was in surprising contrast to my memory of him only five years before, sitting in that same spot after Alan’s funeral. I wouldn’t have called him a grown man then. As terrible as I’d been to him, he let me put my arms around him and comfort him.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here,” he said.
“You did exactly the right thing in coming to me. You’ve had a bit too much to drink and need a rest.”
He ended up sleeping on my divan and I fetched a pillow and a quilt to make him comfortable. I was quite surprised at myself. I had always assumed the things I was missing most in motherhood were the happy moments.
Good Luck with the Baby
Meda
All those weeks, I was waiting for some kind of romance novel revelation, where I’d go, “God, I can’t live without him,” but it wasn’t happening. If it didn’t happen, was marrying Bernie the wrong thing to do?
Part of me couldn’t help wondering what it would be like not having to worry about money anymore, and that made me feel guilty. Marrying him because of the money seemed as bad as getting an abortion without ever telling him I was pregnant. Then there was what the money had done to him. It was like he’d been t-boned. He was driving along, being a librarian, with his own life, and then there was the money. I didn’t want that to happen to me. Hell, I didn’t have half a clue what I was going to do with my life, but I couldn’t see how I was going to get one if I woke up and had a pile of money.
There were a lot of nice things about Bernie, but he was like quicksand. He had all these things going on inside of him, and he was different people sometimes. I felt like I didn’t know anything about him, especially after seeing him come home at ten in the morning, looking and smelling hung-over. I guess it was better than him lying in bed all day being depressed. I worried he would do that again. I worried he would do something worse. I kept thinking about what he’d done when he was younger, taking all those pills. I worried, but Bernie kept getting up and doing his work. He kept being too thin and a little near-sighted, and growling at Celeste, and slumping off to meetings in his two different suits, and giving me his sad dog smile. Thinking about all of that, I almost didn’t answer the door when I looked out and saw the Cadillac parked on Gramma’s front yard. I didn’t want to, but I let him in and took him to the kitchen, so we could talk in private.
“I’m not here to harass you, but I wanted to make sure everything was okay,” he said.
“Everything’s fine.” I wanted to keep his visit short.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do whatever you think about doing here in the next ten seconds. Please.” He reached into his coat pocket and took out an envelope and put it on the kitchen table in front of me. I guessed what it was before I opened it, but I didn’t guess how much it would be. It was about half an inch thick and it was all hundreds.
“I don’t need this kind of money.”
“Well, you have doctor visits to pay for and you need other things. I mean I don’t know what you need, but I want to take care of it.”
“Is this the part where you say, ‘Good luck with the baby. Call me if you need more money’?” He frowned at me, so I said, “I’m not, I’m not.”
“You don’t seem to want anything else from me, so good luck with the baby.”
“Can I ask why it’s cash, a lot of cash?” I saw I wasn’t going to be able not to accept it.
“It’s easy to tear up a check or never deposit it. You might actually spend the cash on things you need.”
“There’s something I want to give you, too,” I said.
I went into my bedroom and brought back the box with his grandmother’s necklace and earrings in it. He shook his head and wouldn’t take it.
“That was a gift.”
“It was a crazy gift. It must be worth a lot.”
“I’d have to ask the insurance company to be sure, but I guess a couple hundred thousand,” he said, like it was a couple hundred dollars.
“It can’t be safe in my underwear drawer.”
I swear he put his hand on the box then, knowing it had been next to my panties. He opened the box and the necklace shot out all these sparks of light around his hands. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to be responsible for. That was what I told him.
“It’s yours now.” He turned it around and pushed it across the table to me. I just wanted it out of my house, I thought, except that it was so beautiful. I hadn’t looked at it in a month and I’d forgotten how incredible it was. “I never met a woman who didn’t like jewelry. Almost every girl I’ve ever dated would have traded her right arm for that.”