Slim Chance. Jackie Rose
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the first thing I remembered was that it was finally Saturday. Thank God, no work. Maybe I’ll just go back to sleep for a bit. Then later I’ll go into the city. Yeah. There’s that Clinique Gift With Purchase thing on now at Saks…and I need some new pants for work. But I refuse to buy a size 14. Okay, so no clothes shopping till I’ve dropped 15 pounds, till I’m a 10. Serves me right, after what I ate this week, and last night, that pizza…wait a minute…the pizza…ohmygod…Bruce….
And it all came flooding back. I turned over and looked at him. He lay on his back, still asleep, his chest rising and falling. Bruce always seems different without his glasses on, like I don’t really know him. Still cute, though. He was whistling softly through his nose. Did I really say yes? Did yesterday really happen? Am I actually going to marry this guy? My heart began to pound as I replayed the scene at work in my head about 37 times. God, I can’t believe I actually threw up. With a psychic snort, Bruce turned over and faced the wall.
Just to make sure it was all real, I pulled my left hand out from under the pillow. The room was dark, but there it was, plain as day—The Ring. Turns out it was his grandmother’s. Mr. Fulbright had kept it for Bruce since she died, like, twenty years ago. Last night was nice, come to think of it. Bruce told me all about how he’d been planning to propose, and how his dad had been in on the whole thing.
“My grandfather gave her this ring in 1939, the night before he left to fight in the war,” Bruce explained as he held my hand. “Six months later, he came back and married her. And nine months after that, my father was born in an air raid shelter during the Blitz.” Over the years, the Fulbright Nativity Story has evolved into an epic tale, complete with evil Nazis and valiant R.A.F. pilots fighting to the death in the Battle of Britain, including Bruce’s grandfather, shot down three months before little Bruce Jr. came into the world.
I already knew the story, minus the ring detail. Bruce’s dad, whose name is also Bruce (Bruce Jr., actually—yes, that makes my Bruce, Bruce Fulbright III. God, that better not make me Mrs. Bruce Fulbright III), loves talking about the night he was born. The only time he’s ever animated about anything seems to be when he’s telling stories about the war and his parents and the horror of butter rations and all that. It was as if being born was the only thing Bruce Sr. had ever done with any style, and it’s been all downhill from there.
Poor Mr. Fulbright. With the exception of Bruce, the only respect his family ever shows him is when he’s telling his stories, now only once or twice a year, usually on his birthday. His perpetually self-involved daughters know better than to dismiss him on this, and even Bertie tries her hardest to refrain from seeming bored. And while Bruce doesn’t quite hang on his dad’s every word like he probably did when he was a kid, now he listens intently. I’m sure trying to memorize every word so that one day he can tell his own kids. Make that our kids, I guess.
“An insane woman tried to steal the ring—this very ring—off her finger while she was in labor,” Bruce continued, almost in a whisper. This was a new twist. Sounds like ole Bruce Jr. was getting a bit carried away.
“Oh, come on,” I said, incredulous.
Bruce raised his eyebrows and cocked his head to one side. “I’m just telling you what he told me when he gave it to me.”
I looked down at The Ring, imagining a stoic, placenta-splattered Granny Fulbright fending off crazies in the bomb shelter as she simultaneously struggled to birth a child and hang on to the only thing she had left of her dead war-hero husband.
It made me think about my mom and what she must have gone through having me all alone, especially since her parents had disowned her because my dad wasn’t Italian, or even Catholic for that matter. But then I wondered if Granny Fulbright would have cruelly refused to let her child go to school in California, even though she’d scored over 1300 on her SATs and had a partial scholarship to UCLA… Oh, no wait…that was my mother. And I was the one stuck at NYU, pissing distance from the house I grew up in. No, there would be no great collegiate adventure for me. But that’s where I met Bruce, so I suppose it had all worked out for the best. If you consider marrying your first real boyfriend the best.
So last night was pretty good. We talked a ton about the wedding, what we wanted and all that. And we really laid our cards on the table. Bruce is as far from a commitmentphobe as is humanly possible in this city (Glamour, April: “Is Your Man Afraid To Commit? Take This Test and Find Out!”), so the usual male worry of only being able to have sex with one person for the rest of his life doesn’t really seem to concern him. “Evie, I would have asked you two years ago if I thought you were ready,” he’d said while massaging my feet.
“How can you ever really be ready for something like this,” I mused, but he just looked at me, not understanding at all how marriage isn’t the most comfortable or logical step for some people.
No, Bruce’s marital stress comes from more of a mama’s boy place. He was worried, and rightly so, that his mother was going to give him a hard time about it, especially since his dad didn’t even tell her he’d given Bruce his mother’s ring.
“Especially since she hates me, you mean,” I said.
“She doesn’t hate you. She’s just a negative person sometimes. And she’ll think my dad went behind her back. I think she wanted to give the ring to Brooke, ’cuz she’s the eldest daughter or something I guess.”
“Oh great. Now Brooke will hate me, too.”
“Oh, Evie, don’t say that. She won’t.”
“Yeah right. Then it’ll be my fault when she loses it and has another one of her ‘spells.’” His sister is a frail, skittish girl with four full-blown nervous breakdowns under her belt and she’s barely twenty-four. “She’ll probably cry as soon as she sees the ring on my finger.”
And that’s a scene I can look forward to witnessing in person tomorrow night when we “stop by” to break the good news. Bruce’s dad was so excited about the whole thing that he made Bruce promise we’d come as soon as possible.
“I doubt it,” Bruce said.
“You just watch—she’ll be back in the looney bin by the end of the week,” I said, then instantly regretted it. Sometimes, I can go a little too far. It’s not that I don’t mean what I say, it’s just that I know that some thoughts are better left unsaid, especially when it comes to things like people’s families or haircuts. I think I get my big mouth from Claire, my grandmother. Only she gets away with murder because she’s old, and people seem happy to confuse her brutal honesty with quaint eccentricity.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“It was a relaxation facility, not a looney bin,” Bruce said, peeved. “They didn’t strap her down or anything.” He knows I know that—he’s only told me like a thousand times—but he can’t control himself either, sometimes.
Despite my occasional overstepping of boundaries, it’s this sort of honest interchange about important things like family that convinces me that Bruce and I may actually have a chance. And in my own defense, there is an upside: There’s no point in letting the little things fester into giant, repressed issues when a bit of well-directed hostility can bring stuff out into the open right away. And so we make a point of being very open with each other about everything, although it’s not a natural thing for Bruce to be like that. He’s much more reserved when it comes to saying what’s on his mind, especially if it involves hurting someone’s feelings, but I’ve been helping him to try and get over that a little bit.
It was in this spirit of openness that I admitted to Bruce later in the conversation that the idea of marriage makes me a bit crazy.
“It does? I thought the puking and crying meant you were calm and rational about the whole thing,” he laughed.
“I’m glad you can laugh about it already,” I told him. “That’s a good sign, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, well, I hope so. But I think we’ll leave that part out when we’re telling our grandkids the story.”
“Seriously,