AT THE WEDDING RECEPTION the day I rediscovered you, years after we had left childhood, I don’t think I ever found my table or had a bite to eat. We were at a teahouse in a private garden right on the lake, and the stalks of summer’s plants were brown and frostbitten. In the dusky fog, every dead plant seemed imbued with meaning, which I thought I could decipher if I only concentrated hard enough. We walked in the clammy dark garden, listening to the music and voices from the teahouse, sometimes talking, sometimes not. When dancing started, we came into the bright house and danced, too, my cheek only as high as your shoulder. Your date kicked her shoe at me, and was escorted away by the brother of the groom; the bride chortled and threw her pretty arms around us, squeezing us, telling us she loved us, loved us, loved us. At the end of the night, after the garter, the bouquet, the slow slipping away of the guests, we were the last ones in the teahouse, urged by the tired father of the bride to turn out the lights when we left. We laughed in the wreck of the feast, and sat down on a bench.
There are only a few moments in every life where the world becomes entirely reaclass="underline" that night, the lake, the fog, your face so startlingly near, crystallized in me.
You took my foot and rubbed it. So, you said. Do they have snowmobiles in Boston? Because I’m going where you are.
Oh, that would be a mistake, I said, too quickly. I’d had a thought of my tiny apartment, the marmalade cat I’d taken to help a friend, a nasty squalling beast I hated. I imagined you, hulking and strange, inserting yourself into my solitary life there.
A cloud settled over your face and your hands fell from my foot. In your scowl, I recognized the little neighbor boy, and it felt the way it did when I began to tell that first real story in the banana suit, a good weight, deep within.
You don’t understand, I said. I touched your cheek. I’m staying here, I said.
I WAS THIRTY-TWO then, thirty-three now. I’m a feminist if they’ll still have me, though from the way my friends reacted when I told them that I was staying in my little hometown it seems doubtful I’ll be welcomed back into the fold.
A friend from Boston, a tenured professor in anthropology, said, Good God, Celie. “Stand By Your Man” is only a song — you’re not supposed to take it literally.
A friend from my years in Philadelphia said, But what are you going to do in Podunkville? (I don’t know.) How many people live there? (Twelve hundred.) Do they even have a movie theater? (No.) Aren’t you going to die of boredom? (Possibly.)
A friend from my years in Wisconsin said, suspiciously, I thought you always said you didn’t believe in marriage. Catering to the hegemony, yadda yadda. Wait a second; you can’t be Celie. Who are you?
But my best friend from college was silent for a long time. She, of all of my friends, had seen the parade of sad wrecks through my life, date after bad date after bad boyfriend. She was the one who’d picked up the pieces after the musician, the investment banker, the humanitarian who was humane to everyone but me.
When at last she spoke, she said, Oh, hell.
And, after that: Hallelujah.
I AWOKE IN YOUR APARTMENT over the pizzeria to the sound of eggs cracking on a metal bowl. I called my mother so she wouldn’t worry, and whispered where I was. She let out a whoop and, delighted, said, Nice job, honey! That’s one good-looking boy.
You came back in then, holding an omelet, coffee, toast. When I bit into the omelet later, my teeth would grind against eggshells and the coffee would be harsh and overbrewed. But at that moment, it looked perfect.
I said, Let’s fly to Las Vegas and get hitched.
You deposited the tray on the bed and folded your arms, frowning. No, you said.
Oh, I said. I flushed and looked away, now doubting everything: the night before, the brilliant morning, the man standing before me in the too-small robe.
Oh, no, you said, sitting down. I’m going to build you a house, then we’ll get married. I already have the land ready to go.
You said, without any irony, Every bird needs her nest.
I felt dizzy, spun back to a time when this may have been an appropriate thing for a man to say; I wanted to protest, or at least to scoff a little. But something in me felt like a bubble popping, the fear I’d carried around under my sternum, the ugly balloon that expanded a breath with every passing year, the one in the shape of the word spinster.
So I said, Oh. Well, then, yes. A nest sounds nice.
It was my fault that I didn’t say what I should have: that I wasn’t the bird type, or maybe the nest type. To watch out, to think this over carefully, because it wouldn’t be easy.
EVEN IN THAT FIRST hot flush I knew you were human, flawed. You had false front teeth, an annoying laugh, a streak of stupidity that made you once lose a pinky toe to frostbite and another time vote for Ross Perot. You became belligerent when soused, held half-baked convictions about politics, made messes (of clothes, of facts, of women), adored cooking but cooked inedibly, and from the beginning loved too-proud, too-angry, too-mean me. And that, in the tally of flaws, was one that even your friends tried to talk you out of.
She’s a tough cookie, they warned. She’s used to things we don’t have here.
You nodded gravely, then gave your crooked smile. I’m pretty tough, too, you said. I think I can tackle tough like Celie’s any day.
WE SPENT THAT FIRST WEEK in bed. The whole world was indulgent, and we could hear the smiles in people’s voices when we called to abandon our responsibilities; the snowmobile store could be run by the boys there, my family was fine gathered in the house together without me. Stripped of almost everything, eating crackers and single-serve pudding with our fingers in the sheets, all we had left were our stories.
Mine were elaborate, and when I retold them I always changed them. Yours were simple and neat and didn’t change at all.
This is one of mine: I was out on a sailboat in Lake Tahoe with an old boyfriend. The wind died down, and as we were waiting for it to start up again, he told me that a famous diver, the one on all the documentaries, was hired to film the bottom of the lake. Nobody had ever done this before; it was too deep. The diver went down and came back up sooner than the people on the boat expected. When he hauled himself over the gunwale, he was pale and shaking and wouldn’t speak a word, but when they were at last on shore, he swore them to secrecy, then told them what he’d seen: all the victims of mob hits from the casinos, their feet in buckets of concrete, perfectly preserved by the cold down there. Dozens of them, in a tight space, no more than fifty feet by fifty. Some faces still frightened, frozen in quiet screams. Fat men in business suits, skinny men who looked like jockeys, one woman in a spangled dress, her hair shifting in the current. And this is what scared the diver the most: their hands were floating at breast-level, beseeching.
I told this story to scare you, I think, but instead you laughed. Urban legend, you said, resting your heavy head on my chest.
I believe it, I protested. When the wind rose and the boat was flying again over Lake Tahoe and the water was splashing everywhere, I screamed every time a drop hit me.
That’s your problem, you said. You have way too vivid an imagination. Now, let me tell you a real story.
Oh, goody, I said, a little smug: I was the one, after all, who once made an entire kindergarten class cry fat tears of sorrow for my own little mermaid.