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How had that happened? How had Meryl’s plans for an intimate family-only wedding turned into a full-blown extended celebration? No one was exactly sure, but it had something to do with her decision to let Bess take over the majority of the planning. Bess turned the reception into a three-hundred-person affair at the Essex House in New York City, complete with a ten-piece band and a cocktail hour and a very expensive pineapple cake.
Then my mother—in an attempt to give Meryl and Josh what they had originally wanted—decided to host a fifty-person rehearsal dinner in our backyard, which was now taking place tomorrow night.
And tonight, post-fireworks, I had helped organize a small late-night bachelor party at a local bar for Josh. The bachelor party was my apology, in a way, for being so absent over the course of the wedding planning. Josh and Meryl had been so far away out in California—me, just a few hours from New York City by car. I could have stepped in and tried to negotiate things with Bess, tried to shrink the massive party planning. But I hadn’t. Not that Josh had complained once about this. Meryl wouldn’t let him. She understood that I couldn’t really come back to New York, not yet. She understood that even after Josh thought it was time I did. Even after everyone else in my life thought it was time I did too. I felt myself starting to panic and turned to Josh. I needed to talk him through this. I needed to hear him talk.
“Josh,” I said. “What are you going to do?”
He didn’t answer me. He didn’t even move. I tried to think of what I really wanted to say to him. Already, I’d made him feel alone in this. I didn’t want to make it worse. But, still, it didn’t make much sense to me. This was him. This was Meryl and him. For a decade now. For forever now. That first day the three of us had come to this pool together, I forgot to put on sunblock and severely burned the tops of my feet and toes. Meryl had made a pail for me of vinegar and oatmeal. She told me that it would take the sting out. She sat there until the red went down.
“I mean, I’m on your side. Of course I’m on your side. I just hope you’re considering everything that needs to be considered, you know? People get scared to get married. They get really scared. How many movies start with someone running the wrong way down the aisle?”
I looked down at him, waiting for a response. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even move his arm off his eyes. And upon closer inspection, I realized that his chest was moving up and down a little too steadily, his eyes closed tightly beneath his bent arm.
I poked him hard in the ribs.
He shot up, startled. “What?” he said. “What’s the matter?”
It made me mad. I was here contemplating his future, and he was sleeping. This was what he did, though—this was how he did things. Sleeping was his main defense mechanism, like running away, for someone else, or pretending not to understand. Or maybe I was giving him too much credit. Maybe he was just that uninvolved.
“You asked me a question,” I said. “You asked if I was ready to go home.”
“Are you?” he said, confused.
I handed him his flip-flops.
“Very,” I said.
It was hard for me to think about Josh and Meryl without also thinking about Matt and me. Beyond the arguably analogous situation Josh had managed to find himself in now, my brother’s situation with Meryl had often, in other ways, mirrored my situation with Matt. Or, maybe I should say, our situation matched theirs. For one thing, it was exactly a year to the day after Josh met Meryl that I first met Matt. The reason I remember this for certain is that we, too, met the night of Halloween—the Halloween following their first meeting, actually—a coincidence that I found a little bizarre at the time. But over the years since, I kept meeting people who had a Halloween either at the beginning or the end of their relationship.
And I started to think that maybe it wasn’t bizarre at all—maybe it just made a certain kind of sense that it would be easier for people to act most like themselves when they were pretending to be someone else. This could also begin to explain why so many old-school wedding superstitions were wrapped up in All Hallows’ Eve. Young brides-to-be used to stand around a fire holding stringed apples over the flames. Legend went that the young woman whose apple fell would marry first and have the longest and happiest union. The one whose apple fell last would have the toughest time. Young grooms, meanwhile, would crawl under a blackberry bush in their costumes. And when they reached the other side, they would receive instructions on whether their union was fated for bliss or destruction. Forever now, apparently, relationships coming together or falling apart based on what ghosts said.
The Halloween that Matt and I met, I was in my last year of high school and already planning way past my hometown. I’d only applied to schools on the other side of the country, imagining sunshine, California convertible tops, people who would think New York sounded both exotic and absolutely unappealing. People that would lead me to my new life.
But there I was—still in my hometown—standing at the Scarsdale train station wearing jeans and a ponytail and a short sweater. I had wandered off from the party down the street to get some liters of soda and was using the pay phone, calling over there for someone to come and bring me back. This was when I saw him. He was in the train station entryway smoking a cigarette, wearing a pair of army pants and a paint-splattered white T-shirt. Blue streaks were covering both cheeks. He kept his eyes down, his long eyelashes steady. He was, without a doubt, my favorite thing I’d ever seen.
I put the phone down. “What are you supposed to be over there?” I asked. “A painter?”
This was my great pickup line.
He looked up at me, caught my eyes, started to smile, his cheek-to-cheek, once-in-a-blue-moon smile. And then he stopped. “What are you supposed to be over there?” he asked back. “A high school prep?”
As it turned out, Matt wasn’t dressed up either. His parents had just moved to Scarsdale—his mom had just had another kid, a little boy—and he had come out for the day from the city, from NYU, where he was just starting his sophomore year. Where he had just declared a major in architecture. A minor in still drawing. He had spent the day helping his dad paint their new basement. The only reason he accepted my invite to come back with me to my friend’s party was that he had missed his train back to the city and had an hour to kill until the next one. Later, he’d tell me this, not to be mean, but because he found it amazing how far we’d come. Even by the end of that first night. I didn’t care about any of that anyway. All I knew was that he reached for the soda.
“I’m coming with you,” he said slowly. “Just show me where it is you want to go.”
By the time Josh and I made it out of the front parking lot—past the Welcome to the Municipal Pool sign—it was almost a half hour later. All the happy energy of the fireworks was left somewhere behind: everyone honking at each other and squeezing each other in. One SUV that was holding about seven kids broke down in the parking lot’s main intersection, all of them crying hysterically as the people yelled at them to get out of the way.
Josh was driving my car. When he finally took the left out of the parking lot, we were less than ten minutes from my parents’ house—Mamaroneck Road opening up all around us: the soccer fields on our right, houses banking up on the left, long silvery driveways locked down behind bushes and gates.
Things looked so different to me, being back there. They seemed so different than they’d been in the years since I’d left—everything brighter, shinier. More gates. It definitely seemed closer to the Scarsdale that you hear about on television or in the movies than the Scarsdale that I remembered. When I was growing up here, there seemed to be more money problems, more people dressing down. Maybe that wasn’t accurate, or I just wasn’t paying attention then in the way I could now that I lived on the other side of it. And still, I didn’t like seeing the newly minted cars, fluorescent mailboxes. I didn’t remember the professional dog walkers. Like anywhere, I guess, there were so many great things about growing up in my hometown, and some less than great things. I wasn’t a great athlete, to put it mildly, and a lot of the childhood wars in Scarsdale seemed to be fought and won on soccer fields and basketball courts. Even though I participated, I couldn’t get too revved up about it. I couldn’t, for a long time, get too revved up about anything, convinced as I was that my life, in whatever capacity it would one day exist, wouldn’t truly start until sometime after Scarsdale was behind me.
Maybe what I could say about my hometown, without much hesitation, was that it was more chock-full of signs than any other place I’d ever seen. Don’t walk, Dangerous Cu
rve, Duck Crossing, No Parking Around Corner, Stop Sign Ahead, Yield 100 ft. Every block, every half a block. More instructions on how you are—and aren’t—allowed to live.
Josh took a left onto our parents’ street, not pulling the wheel tightly enough so that the left blinker stopped its persistent blinking. It was still making its loud clucking noises, happily flashing away.
“Have you noticed,” he said, “that this place has gotten flashier in the last few years? All these families, do you think they got together and decided that putting terra-cotta sculptures in their front yards was a good idea?”
