rumors

“I heard a rumor that you and Ted might be moving in together.”

I was on the train out of the city with Ted’s cousin when I realized that the only thing more exhausting than a family might be two families.

We went to Princeton for his family’s Seder, and after the meal I could hear Ted’s dad from the other end of the table. Palms flat on the table, he was explaining to Ted’s old cousins:

“Well, Ted’s lease is up in June, but Beatrix’s isn’t up until the end of the year. . . .”

So, you know, I guess it was a thing. A thing about which my parents should probably be informed.

My mom had a hard time explaining how she felt. Which I understood:

“You sound exactly like we do when we talk about it.”

She told me:

“I think it will be fine. I think it makes sense for you.”

I never expected glowing excitement over the living-in-sin thing. So, I’ll take it.


~beatrix

the synopsis:

One meal blended into the next and we ate until we couldn’t eat any more, then we had dessert.

I came from early-morning shopping with my mom to find my brother and Ted at a breakfast table covered with cereal boxes, laptops, and newspaper, laughing and watching ESPN. I decided we might be on to something.

My dad took us for a drive, we stopped at a sporting goods store, and while Ted and I looked at elliptical machines, my dad bought a shotgun. Seriously. A shotgun.

Welcome home.

~b

maybe because it's easier to imagine bad things than good ones

I gripped his wrist. I had a vision: wind ripping a wing off, the plane falling out of the sky in the tight spiral of a pinecone seed. We were hours late, and the ride was too bumpy for anyone to even bring us drinks.

I should have been terrified.

We were going to visit my family. Ted was going to meet my dad and my brother for the first time.

It might already be springtime there.

At Christmas my brother and I get out of bed while it is still dark and go climb in our parents’ bed to wake them up. We have three-hour breakfasts that sometimes include performances and end with clean-up dance parties. Clockwise, we sit: dad, sister, mom, brother. Unless we are in the car: dad, mom, brother, sister. We’ve spent decades just the four of us, and in this system of inside jokes and assigned seats, I’ve never been able to imagine how someone new will fit.

I should be terrified. I should be at least anxious.

“Remind me not to let you drink coffee at the airport,” he’d told me when I just could not stop talking.

But I was excited and I am excited and I’m pretty sure everything will be fine as long as this plane can land wheels first.

~beatrix

a big thing, but not with capital letters

My dad was slightly concerned that we were coming to visit because of a Big Thing.

But my mom assured him that the two of us had cooked up this plan and Ted didn’t even know anything about it yet.

We-- my mom and I-- decided it was time, and I told Ted to free up a weekend. He’s going to Georgia.

I realized later that I’d sprung it on him rather suddenly, but I’m too excited to care. And anyway, he deserves it.


~beatrix

when you know

Julianna’s parents knew they were going to be together two weeks after they met. Her mom was seventeen, her dad only slightly older. They know they are lucky.

Ted’s parents dated for six weeks, were engaged for six months, and have been married for more than thirty years.

Jules and I realized that virtually all our friends have still-married parents.

My own parents have the opposite of a love-at-first-sight story. They met at school when they were five; my mom says my dad didn’t invite her to his birthday party. They went to school together and had a lot of the same friends and ran into each other in the parking lot at Disney World when they were twelve. My dad went on FFA trips with my mom’s brothers; my mom dated all my dad’s friends.

When my dad asked my mom to marry him in the driveway of her parents’ house, no one inside cared because the United States had just beat the USSR at hockey. And they already knew what it had taken my mom and dad fifteen years to figure out.

~beatrix

so. . . here we are

Nothing makes me feel old and boring like when he gets out of bed and goes to the living room to read on the couch.

I feel like. . . my parents.

~beatrix

one fine day

My cousin got married on a Thursday afternoon at the courthouse, and my parents decided that they should help throw a party for the newlyweds the next weekend.

It was last-minute and bit thrown-together, and I wasn’t able to go.

“It wasn’t perfect,” my mom told me.
“It wasn’t exactly what we had in mind,” my dad said.

These are my parents. They’ve been planning my wedding for 27 years. I’m sure they thought idly about the party they’d get to have one day as their only daughter, dressed in floufy dresses and ruffle socks, scattered silk petals down aisles or passed around countless rice bags, but it’s reached a new intensity in the past five years or so. These days, at every wedding they attend, they compile a list of to-dos and not-to-dos.

“At Beatrix’s wedding, I want people to walk around with the food,” my dad will say, filling a plate with appetizers from a buffet.
“Yes, but I do like the bridesmaids’ bouquets,” my mom will answer, carefully examining a centerpiece.

I’m surprised they haven’t started taking notes. On the way home, they analyze the favors before launching into the age-old band-versus-deejay debate.

Sometimes it comes completely out of the blue.

“I was thinking that at Beatrix’s wedding, we’ll have fried quail,” my mom will say over dinner (of something that is not fried quail).
“I thought about that, but it makes your hands smell funny,” says dad.
“Oh, I guess it does. . . .”
“Maybe we could have some kind of towels. . . .”

At the beach, our next-door neighbors were having a wedding, a casual weeknight party on the sand. We watched from our deck.

“Yes, you have to wear a shirt,” my mom told my brother, as she dragged a living room chair outside.
“Yeah. Is nothing sacred?” I asked, craning a bit to see the guests arriving and taking a sip of a daiquiri from a red plastic cup.
“I want y’all to have real weddings, not at the beach,” my dad told us. “I don’t look good in these kind of clothes. I look best in a suit, don’t you think?”

At least they haven’t given up hope altogether.

And one day, maybe, I hope they get to throw the wedding of their dreams.


~beatrix