Lizzy opened her mouth to speak just as the bathroom door flew open again and two more women entered, laughing to each other drunkenly as they started for the mirror, but they stopped abruptly when they saw the four women already there.
“Her boyfriend wants to get married, and she doesn’t know if she wants to,” Emma said, answering their unspoken questions.
“Ohhhh,” they said in unison, as if that was all the background information they needed.
“It’s fine,” Eliza said, wiping the last of her tears away and giving the women an apologetic smile. “I just don’t know how to tell him. I don’t want to hurt—”
“Oh, please.” The taller of the two women who had just entered rolled her eyes as she pulled a lipstick from her bag andreapplied the cherry red. “Never set yourself on fire so someone else can stay warm.”
“That’s a good one,” Anne said, eyes wide.
The woman winked. “Thanks.”
“But what if that’s not what he wants?” Eliza asked. “What if that’s enough to make him walk away?”
“Then you’ll know,” Lizzy said with a shrug.
“It’s like my mom always said,” the tall woman’s companion said, her words slightly slurred as she tried to straighten her very crooked skirt. “?‘It takes a mighty good man to be better than no man at all.’?”
The door opened again, and more women came in. Within a few minutes there was a crowd of women surrounding the bathroom counter, all sharing their insights and advice while Anne used the towelettes to fix Eliza’s makeup.
“Whether you get married or not, always make sure you keep your own checking account, just in case!” a woman said over the din of the hand dryer.
“Never second-guess your gut, sweetie!” a man in a mesh shirt called out from the hallway, where he held open the door.
“Don’t work so hard to get chosen when you’re the one who chooses, m’kay?” another woman said as she stood in front of the sink, dabbing a mojito off her shirt.
“You don’t owe anyone anything!” someone yelled from a stall.
It should have felt overwhelming. The idea of not knowing what she wanted, of telling Ben, of choosing her own future for what felt like the first time in her life? It was terrifying. Except it didn’t feel terrifying. In that moment, it felt electric. The gates open, her soul free, with the weight of expectation and life and history dissolved.
Or maybe this was history. These women all carrying their own different threads, passed down from the women before them, bound together for a moment in that mustard-colored bathroom in a dive bar somewhere between East Hampton and Montauk, to make something so much stronger than they were on their own.
Maybe this was what her birth mother had wanted for her all along, she thought as Emma fixed her mascara, and Lizzy offered her some gloss. Sisterhood. Support. But most of all, the opportunity to have a choice. One she never had.
Eliza didn’t know how much time passed, but by the time she left the bathroom, she had twenty new best friends and, inexplicably, a half-finished Long Island iced tea in her hand.
She found Ben at the edge of the dance floor. He was bobbing his head to the music, and when he saw her, his expression lit up.
“Hey, you,” he yelled over the band’s thumping rendition of “Fernando,” hooking his arm around her waist. “I was about to call a search party.”
She took another sip of her drink for liquid courage.Here we go.
“I need to tell you something,” she yelled back.
He waited, his attention wholly on her.
“I don’t think I want to get married,” she said.
He blinked. A small grin turned up the corners of his mouth again. “Okay.”
“And I don’t know if I want kids.”
“Okay.”
“Or a dog. I might not even want my job—I don’t know,” she continued. She was on a roll now. “I’m not sure what I want at all, but I want to figure it out.”
His grin turned into a broad smile. “Okay.”
