“Like, if it were my wedding, I’d be way more into it.”
“I just feel like the wedding stuff is stupid. I just want to get going, live my life.”
She plopped onto the sand, reminding me of how gangly she was as a toddler, always tumbling down, scraping her knees, skinning her palms. Maybe it’s no surprise that she’s a nurse now, just like my mom was.
“Do you think Mom and Dad were happy?” She craned her neck toward me.
I was startled by the question, felt a hiccup in my heart.
“Dad was a drunk,” I said. “I don’t know how you live with that.”
She shook her head. “Before that. Like, now, when they were just about to get married, like you. She must have loved him as much as you love Ben, right?”
I scanned the ocean, the waves riotous and angry. I didn’t want to think about how my marriage could be like my parents’ or how Ben could be like my dad. Not that he was. Not that they were anything close.
“I don’t know, Pipes. I guess. Maybe.”
“I think every marriage must start off hopeful, right? You know she forgave him for everything at the end.” Her voice caught. “You know he was back home with her, I mean, with us, by then.”
What she meant was:We all forgave him, can’t you?Or maybe what she meant was:Everyone screws up, in marriage too.
It felt important to Piper that I believed my parents were happy, so I said: “They must have loved each other as much as they thought they could. I guess that’s all you can know, right? I can’t measure my love for Ben against Mom’s love for Dad because it’s not like you can quantify these things. It’s not like I can pour them into a cup and see which one measures more.”
“Remember all those snow globes you and Mom collected?”
“Of course,” I said.
“It feels like marriage should be like that: trapped inside but in a good way. With sparkles raining down and protecting you.”
“I don’t think that marriage is really anything like that.”
She sighed. “It would be nice if it could be, though. Just all that time together, knowing each other inside and out.”
I wanted to say:I don’t know that you can ever know somebody inside and out, and I certainly don’t want Ben to know all of my ugly insides.Nearly all of them, yes, but every last ugliness? Probably not. Would he love me enough then? Would I love him? He tells me:You don’t have to be a roleorStop pretendingwhen he catches me slipping into someone who I’m not, and I do. Or at least I try to. Because Ben wants toseeme, the whole of me, and when he does, he still loves me. But it’s not like there isn’t still wiggle room to fall into a cloudier place wearing my masks, not like old habits can be shed in a single moment.
I said to Piper: “Sure, that does sound nice.”
I’m quiet on the drive up to Santa Barbara. Ben and Piper play I Spy, even though no one has played it since we were children, but they are silly and bored, and we hit a bad patch of traffic that grates on my nerves but doesn’t faze Ben, because he’s not mired in the questionDoes he love me enough?I know I do him. And inherently, I know that he does me too: he doesn’t string me along like Eddie from college, who constantly dumped me for his girlfriend back home and then offered vague platitudes that made me forgive him; doesn’t invalidate my sexuality or feelings like Aaron in high school, who stripped me of my virginity. He is respectful, he is kind, he is loving, he is smart, he is everything I could have envisioned for myself and more. But what if, like my own parents, something changes, we change? Then, will he still love me enough?
The car creeps forward in the traffic, and Piper’s voice grates on me, as if I am physically bristling at her for even planting this notion, this seed of insecurity in me. Will he love me forever? Love me like he does now, when he thinks he sees everything about me, but maybe he hasn’t?
I see you,he says to me all the time. What he means is:I love you.But what happens when it gets uglier? Will I still look the same, my insides, my outsides?
“I spy with my little eye a fiancée who is looking like she sucked on a lemon,” I hear Ben say, and Piper’s piercing laughter rings out from the back seat. He brings me to, brings me back, like only he can.
I turn and roll my eyes at him.
“Sometimes my mom used to call her ‘Deflatum Tatum,’” Piper laughs. “Because her mood would just go ... poof.”
“‘Deflatum Tatum!’” Ben howls.
“Excuse me,” I say. “It is this ability to tap into all sorts of emotions that will one day win me an Oscar.”
“Now,thatI believe,” Ben says, still grinning. He eases his hand off the wheel and squeezes my thigh. “But no bad moods allowed in this car.”
“It’s the traffic.”
“You live in LA now, baby!” He says this in his slickest, slimiest producer voice, and I descend into my own fit of laughter. He glances from the road toward me and winks.I see you.I exhale. Of course we love each other enough. How could I even doubt that for a moment? We are not my parents. There isn’t a measuring cup for our love.
