Me Vs. Me. Sarah Mlynowski
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doing my business, I sit on the furry orange toilet seat cover, my foot extended and pressed against the door, and try to catch my breath. The entire bathroom is orange. Alice loves orange. And brass. The two-floor split-level home is covered in gleaming brass statues, pots and massive picture frames. Since Richard owns a framing store, everyone is up on the wall. Many times. Many, many times. Everyone except me. But now that I have a ring on my finger, I’m sure to get up there. Many times.
Unfortunately, most of the brass has seen better days. The bathroom faucet is rusty, the toilet seat chipped. The orange carpet is squashed and stained. Alice fancies herself a Martha Stewart apprentice but can’t quite pull it off. It’s the antithesis of the übermodern houses my dad and mom used to favor. They had both been in love with chrome. Personally, I couldn’t care less about design. Whatever bedroom I occupied was usually a mess. It drove my parents—and now Lila—crazy.
I stand up. In the Windex-streaked mirror, there are deep circles under my dark brown eyes. Otherwise, I’m generally a fan of this mirror, since it’s a skinny one. I look at least two sizes smaller than my size-eight frame. Almost lithe. And my skin always has a nice glow to it because of the reflection off the orange wallpaper. My brown hair is tinged red. I hold my breath and push down my shoulders, trying to imagine what I’ll look like in my wedding dress. I try to smile. I’ve always been told I have a great smile. Two dimples, nice lips, naturally white and perfectly sized teeth. It’s my best feature. And it was the best smile of my class, according to my high school yearbook.
I hadn’t really thought about the whole planning-the-wedding part. All those details to work out…bridesmaids, location, ceremony…honeymoon? I’m looking forward to that part. I’d always planned on running off somewhere romantic for my wedding. Like Fiji. No muss, no fuss. Just bliss. Not that Alice would let me get away with that. Blair’s wedding was the biggest event this town had ever seen. And everything, everything, was done by hand. They hand delivered two hundred invitations so they wouldn’t get dented in the mail. Made fortune cookies from scratch with personalized messages for each and every one of her 375 guests.
Is Alice expecting us to do something similar? Do parents save money for this? Is my dad supposed to pay?
Budgets. Registries. Licenses.
Headaches.
Last year I did a story on the wedding industry and met plenty of bridezillas. That can’t be me. I don’t have the time. Actually, I do have the time, since I’m currently unemployed. But I won’t have the time if I’m going to be freelancing. Which I’ll have to do if I can’t get my job back.
Please tell me both my parents won’t have to come to the wedding. After the graduation ceremony from hell, where my parents started screaming at each other in the auditorium and my mother threw a program book at my dad’s head, I was hoping they would never again opt to be in the same city, never mind the same room. My mother is going to ignore him. Or throw a cake at him. It’s going to be horrible. This whole wedding is a mistake. A big, fat—
The door pushes open and I make a grab for it.
“Sorry,” says Blair in her nasal voice, slamming it closed. Okay, I’ll be honest. I don’t love Blair. Of the whole crew, she annoys me the most. She’s so bossy. And opinionated. (“You don’t waste your money and buy your shoes at shoe stores, do you? You should really be buying them at Wal-Mart.”)
“No problem,” I say.
“Is Gabrielle still in there?” I hear Alice say.
Blair: “Yup.”
Alice: “Beautiful ring.”
Blair: “Yes, it’s nice. Pear is the latest style you know. I told Cammy he just had to get it. He was going to buy it at some jeweler in Scottsdale, can you believe it? I turned him right around, and told him to go see Stan in Phoenix.”
Alice: “I told him the same thing! You know he needs a haircut. So does Gabrielle.”
Nag, nag, nag. It’s not hard to see where Blair gets it.
Or Cam.
I lift my thumbnail to my lips and start nibbling. Oh, no. I haven’t bitten since college. I should definitely not be starting again now. I take another nibble. I can’t help it.
“…I don’t know why she won’t let me clean up her split ends for her….” Alice’s voice trails off as she heads back toward the party. I can’t help but study my split ends. Which I will never let Alice touch. My future mother-in-law refuses to see a stylist. She cuts her own hair, in this very bathroom. She cuts Blair’s hair, too. She’s always offering to cut mine, but I keep inventing excuses.
I pull myself together, shoulders down, big smile, and rejoin the party.
The group is already in the process of piling potato salad and tuna wraps onto their orange paper plates.
“There you are,” says Cam, wrapping his arm around me. “Hungry?”
“Definitely.” I love Alice’s tuna wraps. She’s a nag, yes, but a nag who can cook. She is constantly copying recipes for me. As if I could cook. Not.
“So dear, what are you thinking, a May wedding?” asks Alice as she refills the (yes, orange) potato-salad bowl. “I know how much Arizona girls love a May wedding. Perfect weather to get married outdoors.”
Blair got married on May fourth. Alice got married on May thirteenth.
“I’m not really sure yet, Alice.” Um, we’ve been engaged for less than ten hours? Can I have some time to breathe, please?
“I told Cammy that he should have proposed months ago,” she continues. “So we’d have more time to plan, but did he listen to me? Does he ever? No. Now we only have six months to pull it all together.”
“Mom, six months will be plenty,” Cam says.
Hello? Have we picked May? Did that decision happen while I was in the bathroom?
Alice shakes her head from side to side. “Gabrielle, I tried getting in touch with your mom to invite her today. But she didn’t return my call. Is she out of town?”
My mother? Here? Thank God she’s out of town. I don’t know what she’d make of this quasi-Brady bunch, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
“She’s doing some work in Tampa,” I say.
I catch a look between Alice and Blair. They’ve never said anything outright, but I get the feeling that they don’t approve of my mother’s hectic career, her men, her marriages. “Ah, I see,” Alice says. “Well, when she gets back, I’d like the three of us to get together for tea. We should put our heads together and start planning. When will she be back home? Perhaps we can have a girls’ night this week?”
Is she kidding me? My mother? Here? What if she throws one of the brass statues? Even without my father as a target, she’s always throwing something at somebody. I’m not sure how’s she going to react to Alice. I can’t quite picture her hand-making fortune cookies. Throwing the cookies, possibly.
“She’s very busy,” I say. “It’s hard for her to get away.” Which is true. My mother is not in the best place in her life right now. She’s an entrepreneur and is always investing in the next “big” thing. Unfortunately, she loves start-ups, even though they don’t always love her back. Last year, she lost a mint and had to sell her Scottsdale house and move to a small condo in Phoenix. Right now she has her eye on some business opportunity in Tampa. Which is why she didn’t freak out when I told her I was moving to New York. She thinks we both have had enough of the dry heat.
Alice rubs her hands together. “I bet she can’t wait to dig her hands into the planning!”
“Um…I haven’t told her yet.”
Up shoot Alice’s penciled-in eyebrows.
When would I have found time to tell her? This kind of news takes more