My dad goes into another room to watch some sports game on TV.
“Turn it down, George,” my mom calls out from the kitchen. “The baby is sleeping.”
“It’s fine. She’ll wake up every fifteen minutes anyway,” my sistersays, as if she’s quite proud of how difficult this has been on her, how she has had to mold her entire life around someone else.
“Facts,” my sister’s husband says, and then he slinks away to join my dad in the other room for the game.
My sister starts retelling all her grisliest motherhood stories.
“Yes, you’ve already told me about the varicose veins and your twenty-seven-hour labor and that night when you thought the baby was dying but it was just gas,” I tell her.
“You couldpretendto be interested in the fact that I just gave birth to an entire human,” my sister says, all huffy. “Otherwise I’ll ask about your dating life.”
She knows that will provoke me, so I stay nonplussed. “Fine,” I say. “Ask away.”
“Did you see Dylan Flanagan at church today?” my mom interjects, then says what a nice young man he’s turned into and how we should invite him over for pecan pie tomorrow.
“I’m pretty sure Dylan is engaged now,” my sister says, which sets my mom off about how all the good guys are dropping like flies and she just can’t understand what I’m doing, wasting my prime childbearing years.
“Honestly, Emily Jane, you’re almost thirty and still running around like a teenager,” she says.
I could fight back and spell out exactly how I took an oath to never ever get married, or tell them maybe I’ll bring a woman home next year. But I’m not feeling motivated enough to cause a scene, so I just sit there and play my own drinking game where I have to take a swig of wine every time my mom says the phrases “settle down,” “nice guy,” or “almost thirty.”
My phone starts buzzing. It’s Jenni, FaceTiming me. I know right away this can’t be good because she’s aware that I hate FaceTiming. I’d always rather text.
I step out of the kitchen to answer.
“EJ!” Jenni squeals through the screen. “Hang on, let me loop in the others.”
My worst fears jolt awake, the kind of foggy consciousness that says they were never asleep, not really. Then we’re all on the call together, four tiny rectangles on my phone screen. Jenni is wagging something sparkly in our faces, holding it up to the camera so the rock is all we see, abrasive and unfaithful. I brace myself for the blow of the engagement, reminding myself that she was engaged once before and that didn’t last. There’s still time to get her to see the light before she goes through with it.
“We got married!” Jenni shrieks. The phrase circles around a few times, looking for an escape, before it lands and detonates.
Tara and Hal are as silent as I am. We’re all waiting for the punchline that doesn’t come.
Jenni storms ahead, says she and Peter had been talking about getting engaged at Christmas, but she had such bad flashbacks from her last proposal that they decided to skip an engagement altogether and just run down to the courthouse this afternoon, just the two of them. “How modern is that?” she squeals proudly. “And I’m keeping my last name, so I’m not caving to the patriarchy. I know I’ve technically broken the pact, but I’m still going to stay true to the Redstockings my whole life. Don’t worry.”
I glare at the screen because those statements completely contradict each other. She can’t be married and still be loyal to us.
None of us are saying anything and Jenni says she thinks her Wi-Fi is spotty because the screen is frozen and she can’t hear us. Hal says the screen isn’t frozen; we’re all just processing this news.
“Well, can you process faster?” Jenni wants to know. “Because I want you to get on my level. We’re having a party over here.”
Sure enough, there’s champagne popping in the background, probably Dom Pérignon or something just as bad. Peter comes up behind Jenni and they kiss right there on camera. The whole thingis like one of those spiraling nightmares where you keep trying to wake up but your body won’t move; it’s paralyzed.
I hang up, but I doubt Jenni even notices. She’s too high on her own bliss. Hal and Tara both call me, but I banish them to voicemail. I’m not in the mood for talking. I’m not in the mood for anything, so I go outside without a coat and trek through the snowy streets I grew up on, boots dragging like they’re wary of leaving the ground, or just tired from trying.
My parents still live in the same cookie-cutter house in the same cookie-cutter neighborhood where I grew up. All the houses look exactly the same, everyone scared to stand out. I retrace my old path to the bus stop, past the overgrown field where the neighborhood kids would play capture the flag and never invite me because they thought I cheated.
There’s a clenching in my chest, that stupid nostalgia that makes me miss something I hated at the time. It just feels very cruel suddenly, how time races by but gets snagged in the branches, keeping little bits of us in places we don’t want to be.
And it’s cruel too, even crueler actually, how friendships can seem so strong, so sturdy, and then one person can defect just like that and reveal how shaky the foundation is, how the concrete has all these cracks. Maybe it’s not even concrete at all. Maybe it’s sandstone or just mud, caked dry by a drought, ready to return to mush the moment a storm strikes.
Hal and Tara text me, assuring me that they’re still 110 percent in on the Anti-Marriage Pact, that we always knew Jenni was the weakest link, that it doesn’t change anything.
But that’s a lie. It changes everything.
I pass by Mr. Hubert’s green-shuttered house, where I used to go for piano lessons. I hated those piano lessons so much, but my mom still made me go for two whole years because she wanted me to be the docile, domestic, piano-playing daughter of her dreams. She never heard me, she never saw me, and she still doesn’t now.My body seizes up even more. I have to sit down in the snowbank and feel the ice burn my bare hands just to prove I can still feel anything.
