I turn over onto my other side, and suddenly I’m staring straight into Maeve’s wide eyes. Like a little owl.Hoo, hoo.She must have climbed into bed while Mary was guiding me in. “Hello, Mama,” she says, barely visible.
“Hello, Maeve,” I mumble back. I’ve never felt weaker in my life.
“Sorry for your boo-boo.”
“Thank you, Maeve.”
We lie like that for a long time. My breathing becomes hoarse and ragged. My teeth begin to chatter. I wonder if I will die tonight. “Maeve,” I say softly, “where are we,really?”
“Home,” she whispers back. “Home, home, home.”
Pointless. This is pointless. Like slipping quarters into an empty gumball machine. “Is there another word for home? What do youcallhome, Maevie?”
“Oh,” she says, as I drift slowly away from her. “Yesteryear, Mama! That’s what we call home.”
10
There were four hundred peopleat our wedding, which was hosted at Caleb’s parents’ estate in California the summer after my first year of college. I wore a strapless gown with a pearl necklace. Caleb wore a navy suit. We stood beneath the shade of an olive tree as the pastor said the magic words I’d been waiting to hear my whole life:I now declare you man and wife.The audience rose to their feet in a breathtaking ovation. The pastor’s final words, his prophecy of our future, disappeared beneath the waves of applause. Caleb grabbed me and twirled me and dipped me low, so my hair was brushing the ground. Then he whispered in my ear, “I can’t wait to taste you.”
At the reception, a twelve-person band was playing a famous song by Cher, and I was sitting in one of the chairs at the main dining table, drinking a glass of water, enjoying a moment alone after so many rounds of small talk with balding, Botoxed billionaire donors—VoteMills!—when my sister dropped into the chair next to me and said, “I think I might be pregnant.”
She was twenty-one years old that night, wearing an emerald chiffon bridesmaid dress that Amelia had picked out. The dress had looked beautiful in the catalog but had the unfortunate effect of making my sister—who was generally understood to be the prettier of the two of us—look like an unappreciated vegetable. She and Bryce had married several months earlier, with a backyard reception at his parents’ house. She had cried all day long, insisting they were tears of happiness. Bryce had passed out shirtless on the lawn well before nightfall.
She amended her statement now: “I took two tests, and they’re both positive. So I’m most likely pregnant.”
“Well.” I set my empty glass down. “I’m so happy for you.”
She sighed. “I just wish Bryce wasn’t so drunk right now.”
I tried to channel the patience of my mother. “Isn’t Bryce always drunk?”
She didn’t reply, just looked longingly out at the dance floor, where Bryce was headbanging wildly, his tie fashioned like a hippie headband on his forehead. He mimed an electric guitar, then dropped to his knees and licked the length of the invisible neck. “He’s been so temperamental lately.”
Temperamental, I thought, was a particularly dignified way to describe a man who had, earlier that day, screamingly accused the concierge of the four-star hotel where they were staying (courtesy of the Mills family) of rifling through his varsity football high school duffel bag to steal the Visa gift card from his wallet.
“Go tell him,” I said, suddenly desperate for both of them to be gone. “Tell him you’re pregnant right now!”
“You’re right. That’d make him so happy, don’t you think?”
“Of course it would! A child is always a gift.”
Then my husband—myhusband!—walked up in his immaculately tailored suit, and all the bad feelings fell away.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Caleb began, but I had already jumped up and taken his hand.
It was midnight when we left the reception. We were staying in the carriage house on the opposite side of the estate. In one moment, we were stumbling through the open door, kissing and pulling at buttons, and the next moment, we were naked on the bed, frozen in Grecian poses of despair.
Both of us were virgins. I could see now that Caleb’s comment to me earlier at the altar had not been, as I originally thought, anindication of pure erotic instinct, but rather an act of deep courage, a last-ditch Hail Mary effort to summon his own sexual prowess into the world before he faced the most intimidating vision of his life: his wife’s naked body.
Caleb’s hand hovered over my breast, then pressed firmly, hands spread wide like a catcher’s mitt. Both of us let out a noise, a pairing of grunts. He’d never seen an adult woman’s body, he told me that night. (I would later learn this was technically a lie—that his mother had a tendency to take baths with her sons well into their early adolescence; that he’d gone to third base with a second cousin at a family reunion.)
In an effort for momentum, I reached down and wrapped my hand around his penis. So this was what it felt like. Soft, like lamb’s skin, but—honestly? About 50 percent less inflated than I expected. Caleb let out another grunt and rocked his hips against me. I was equal parts nauseated and aroused. I could feel his heartbeat pulsing in my grip. Caleb’s eyes were closed, his mouth parted in a grim expression of pleasure. “Maybe,” he muttered, “you could, you know …”
A thread of irritation stitched itself in my chest. “No, Caleb, I don’t know.”
“Well, you could spit into your hand, or maybe, kinda use your mouth, you know, to—”
“Nope!” I cried out. “No thank you. Let’s just do it the normal way, please.”
