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“She has no idea, does she?” I said.
“Meryl?” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
I didn’t know what to say then. It all felt too crazy. I was supposed to be Meryl’s maid of honor on Sunday. I had a long blue sheath dress with thin straps. I had a pearl necklace I never would wear otherwise. I had white lily hairpins. Josh had encouraged all of this.
“You want pizza?” Josh said. “I want to get a slice of pizza before we leave. And another soda.”
“You think the snack bar’s even open still?”
“I think it could be.”
Then he stood up. I shielded my eyes against the night sky, staring up at him. I had a million questions to ask, but none that I was particularly ready to hear the answers to.
“What, Emmy?” he said, looking down at me.
“I just want to know how you can be so sure,” I said. “That Meryl doesn’t know? I mean, how can you know that?”
“Didn’t we just cover this?” he said.
There was an edge to his voice. He wasn’t good at disappointing people, which I could already guess was at least part of the reason that he was in the position he was in now. He couldn’t seem to tell anyone no, even when that was exactly what was needed.
“I’m just trying to understand,” I said, as he sat back down.
“Which part?”
“How you got here,” I said.
He didn’t say anything, but lay all the way back on the grass, covering his eyes with his arm.
I swatted at him. “Come on. Go get your pizza before the thing closes.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want it anymore.”
“You don’t want it anymore?”
“No,” he said.
“What do you want, Josh?”
“Something else,” he said.
Who once said that, in any family, there was one child who was better at things, even if exactly how much better was never spoken? There was the one who got the better grades and did better at sports, who things just came easier for. It seemed to me that, usually, it was the older one who would tread the straighter path, whose initial accomplishments would run deeper. Could it be just a coincidence that so many of the great sufferers—those who would eventually take to art and writing and music and dance—were younger or youngest siblings? Joyce and Twain and Austen and Baryshnikov. Were they always feeling like they were just in a game of catch-up they had already lost?
I never had any illusion of ever being able to catch up. In our family, at least, Josh was always quicker than I was. He was the one that made all the all-star teams and got straight A’s, the one who knew who he wanted to be. His goals might have changed a little over the years, but only in the most assured and boring way: pediatrician, brain surgeon, pediatrician again. He never had any inappropriate ideas like joining the circus or moving to Alaska. At fifteen, Josh was already taking a psychology class at the community college, looking into seven-year medical programs, telling our parents’ dinner guests coyly about his plans. And he was certainly always the one who was better at relationships. He had been with Meryl for the better part of the decade, and it appeared to be fairly smooth sailing for the two of them: maintenance during the end of college, all through Josh’s medical school and residency, well into their current cohabitation in Los Angeles.
My own relationship history was a little messier, more dramatic, which—whether or not it’s the nicest thing to say about myself—was also a fairly accurate way to describe the behavior that landed me in the second-place position. While Josh was navigating the straight and possible, I spent most of my younger years conjuring up situations for myself that could never be: becoming a dancer in Brazil (I was relegated to the back row in after-school ballet class), marrying a rock star (cigarette smoke at concerts made my eyes swell closed), running a cruise ship (tendency to get seasick in port).
But Josh and Meryl—they had always made sense. Even how they met was such a nice story, so in want of a happy ending. It was the night of Halloween during their senior year of college. Meryl was having a party at her house off-campus, and Josh went dressed as a frog (my idea: kiss the frog and he’ll turn into a prince). He had gone to the party because he liked one of Meryl’s roommates. Would you believe me if I told you she was dressed like a princess? Meryl, not the roommate. From the very beginning then, Josh would later say, he wasn’t sure he deserved her. But Meryl’s boyfriend—who was away at medical school—didn’t make it back for the party even though he had promised to. So she found herself sad in the bathroom, having broken up with him earlier that day or the day before. They’d argue over the actual moment—don’t you think I’d know, he was my boyfriend?—as if that was the interesting part. The interesting part, if you ask me, was that they spent the whole night in the bathroom, frog and sad princess, while someone in desperation was throwing up outside, trying to open the door. That part’s not interesting, Josh liked to say. That’s disgusting.
Here’s the only part of them, of my brother and Meryl, that I found myself questioning during those years after they graduated from school: Why were they waiting so long—through year after year of close friends tying the knot—to get married themselves? They lived together out in Los Angeles, already existing in a fairly married state. But Josh said that neither of them was really i
n a rush to “make it official.” His words, not mine. One of the main reasons he offered for this non-rush was that Meryl took wedding pictures for a living, which seemed to considerably lower her threshold for thinking in any detail about her own big day.
This seemed like a plausible explanation, especially because, even once Meryl started planning her wedding, she made it very clear that she wanted to keep the wedding low-key: family, a few friends, a small tent in my parents’ backyard. In my parents’ backyard. She was most adamant about this part. Maybe this was partially due to the fact that her own family situation was a little complicated. Her parents—Bess and Michael, the parents who raised her—lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a duplex that wrapped around two city blocks. Her birth parents, on the other hand, were sociology professors at a small college in the Ozark Mountains. As far as anyone could tell—until Meryl had found them a few years before—they hadn’t spent any time to speak of away from the Ozark Mountains. But now they too were en route to this weekend’s wedding. An entire wedding weekend.
