Girls In White Dresses (8 page)

“What?” she asked.

“I’m not getting married.” Abby made no move to take off her jacket or move farther into the room.

“All right, then,” she said. “Why don’t you come on in, and we’ll talk about it?” She put the book down on the couch and stood up. “Would you like some tea?” she asked. Abby nodded.

Abby’s mom didn’t even look surprised to see her. She’d driven all the way from New York, walked into the house unannounced, and her mom acted like she’d been expecting her. Abby had never been able to shock her mom. Once, in college, Isabella had said, “Can you imagine if you had to tell your mom that you were pregnant?” She shuddered after she asked this and Abby made a sympathetic noise, but she couldn’t really relate. Abby could have told her mom that she’d been arrested for heroin possession while carrying on a lesbian affair, and she would have taken it in and then suggested that they talk about it.

“So, will we still have the party then?” her mom asked. They were sitting at the kitchen table with their tea, and it took Abby a minute to realize that she meant the wedding. She and Abby’s father were never officially married, of course, so maybe she thought they just decided to skip the legal part and live together forever.

“No, Mom,” Abby said. “No party, no wedding.”

“So you and Matt are …”

“Done. We broke up.” She nodded and blew on her tea.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “That’s a shame.”

Abby wanted her to scream or cry or jump on the table. Tears of frustration came to her eyes, and she shut them tightly.

“Oh, sweet pea. Oh, Abby,” she said. “Come here.” Abby let her mother pull her onto her lap like she was a little girl. She cried for about two minutes and then felt like an idiot sitting on her mom’s lap, and so she got up and went back to her seat.

“I’m fine,” Abby said. “It was for the best.”

“Then this is the right thing to do,” she said.

“Mom, I don’t think we’ll be able to get much money back,” Abby said. “It’s only three weeks away. I don’t know what they’ll do.”

Her mom was already waving her hands at her. “That is not for you to worry about. Money is just money.” Abby wondered, not for the first time in her life, if her mom would still think that money was just money if she didn’t have so much of it.

“I have to stay here for a couple of days while Matt moves his stuff out of the apartment,” Abby said.

“Of course,” she said. “Do you need help with anything else?”

“Not now,” Abby said. “But I have to start calling people soon, I guess, to tell them that the wedding is off. I guess that’s what I should do.”

“I can do that,” her mom said. “These things happen all the time. No big whoop. We’ll get it all straightened out.”

“Thanks,” Abby said. “Can I have a real drink?”

“Sure, honey. Wine or vodka?”

“Vodka,” Abby said. “I think this calls for vodka.”

The next morning, Abby walked downstairs to find her dad making eggs in the kitchen. He saw her and gave her a hug. “Your mom told me what happened, kiddo. I’m really sorry about that,” he said.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Do you want some eggs? Sunny side up or scrambled?”

“Sure,” she said. “Scrambled, I guess.”

Her dad nodded and turned back to the stove. He whistled while he cracked the eggs and beat them with a fork. “If you like, you can help me feed the birds when you’re done,” he said as he put the plate in front of her.

“Sure, Dad,” she said. She waited until he walked out of the kitchen, and then got up and scraped the eggs into the garbage.

Abby put on rubber boots that were by the back door, and borrowed her mom’s winter jacket. Still in her pajamas, she slogged through the snow to the chicken coop. She thought about brushing her hair, but there was really no need to. She pushed open the door to the coop and smelled the coop smell of poo and bird dirt.

“Dad?” she called.

“Back here, kiddo.”

She walked past the cages, wrinkling her nose at the dirty birds. Abby’s parents had started raising birds when she was twelve. “We eat so much poultry,” her mom explained. “And people are starting to talk about the way these birds are raised. This is much more humane, Abby. We know that the birds are fed right, and treated right.”

Her parents didn’t kill the birds themselves. They had someone come in and do it for them and prep the meat. Abby had never seen it happen, but less than a year after they built the coop, she stopped eating meat.

“Abby, don’t be ridiculous!” her mother would say. “This is good for you. This is delicious meat!”

“It makes me sick!” she’d say. And it did. The thought of chewing chicken in her mouth made her want to gag. When she tried to eat it, it refused to go down her throat. Once, she got a bite halfway down and then promptly threw up on her plate. “Fine,” her mom said after that. “You don’t have to eat chicken anymore.”

Abby’s dad was pouring seed from a bag into a trough. “Want to start feeding them?” he asked. She took a plastic pitcher they kept there and filled it with the feed. She poured the right amount into each of the birds’ feed bins. Every time a bird came clucking up to her, she stuck her tongue out at it.

Thea called that afternoon. “I heard what happened,” she said. “Mom called and left a message. That’s rough.”

“Yeah,” Abby said. “I guess you get out of your maid of honor duties, though.”

“I guess.” Abby could hear her light a cigarette and take a drag.

“Mom and Dad are being really calm,” Abby told her. “It’s like nothing happened.”

“You know how they are,” she said, exhaling the smoke and choking just a little bit. “Plus, they never really liked Matt.”

“Yes, they did.” Abby felt wounded to hear this.

“Oh, Abby. I don’t mean that they hated him. But you know. He wasn’t their type.”

“Why? Because he showered and wore clean clothes?”

“No, because he always thought he knew everything. You could sense it about him. Not that I minded him. He had a really interesting energy.”

“Right.”

“Do you want to say hi to your niece? She’s right here.”

“Sure, put her on the phone.”

Abby heard rustling and then she heard Thea say, “Say hi to your aunt Abby. Tell her hello!”

“Your mother is a moron,” Abby said into the phone, and then she hung up.

“We should go snowshoeing,” her mother said on the third day she was home. “It will do you good to get out in the fresh air.”

“Okay,” Abby said.

“You’re so young,” her mom said as they trekked across the snow. “You’ll see that this is for the best.”

“I’m twenty-five,” Abby said. “When you were my age, you already had Thea.”

“Well, I wasn’t married.”

“So you think I should get pregnant?”

“Oh, Abby,” she said. “I hate to see you so sad.”

“Thea called,” Abby said. “She told me that you and Dad never liked Matt.”

“That’s not true. We like anyone that you bring home. Anyone you like, we like.”

“But that’s not the same thing. Did you really like him? Are you happy we’re not getting married?”

Her mom sighed. “Abby,” she said. “You have always known what you wanted. I never doubted you. But things happen for a reason, and if there was trouble, then yes, I am glad that you aren’t getting married.”

“I didn’t say there was trouble.”

“People don’t call off weddings if everything is hunky-dory.” Her mom’s nose was dripping, and she wiped it with her glove. Abby looked down at the snow and pressed her weight forward on her snowshoes. “Come on,” her mom said. “We should get back. Your father will be worried.”

Abby watched her mom pat her arm, but she couldn’t feel it through all the layers of clothes. She watched her go
pat, pat, pat
on her sleeve. Then her mom turned and started off ahead of her, stomping in the fresh snow. Abby waited until she was about ten steps in front of her, and then she followed.

Before Abby left New York to come home, she sent an e-mail to all of her friends that said: “The wedding is off. No one reason, just lots of little ones. I’ll explain more later. Abby.”

She was sure her friends had been calling and e-mailing, but she didn’t get any cell service at her parents’ house. For once, she was relieved. Usually it drove her crazy, and she would stand on chairs and hold the phone up in the air to try to get some sort of signal. “Come on!” she would say to the phone. “Give me something.”

This time, Abby hadn’t even taken her phone out of her bag. She knew she’d eventually have to go back to New York and face it. She would have to see her friends and drink vodka and listen to them tell her that it was for the best, that she’d be happier in the long run. She would exhaust herself, going out almost every night, deconstructing every part of her relationship with Matt until it wasn’t hers anymore. She would do it, but just not yet.

“We can still live together,” Matt said, after he told her about the wedding.

“No,” Abby said. “No, we can’t.”

Abby’s parents didn’t have cable, so she watched old movies until she thought she could fall asleep. She read the books that were left in her room:
Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, A Day No Pigs Would Die
, and
Bridge to Terabithia
. She didn’t remember them being so sad. They were all so sad.

Abby didn’t want her mind to be free for even a second. Because when it was, she heard Matt saying, “Abby, I don’t know about the wedding.”

“What don’t you know?” she asked him.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he said. He didn’t even sound mean when he said it. Actually, he sounded nice and a little apologetic. Like he was sorry for what he was doing. Like he was sorry for ruining her life.

When she didn’t feel like reading anymore, she wrote. She made lists of things to do when she got back to the city. A list of things to buy for the apartment now that Matt was gone. A list of shows that she could watch now that he wasn’t there. She wrote down names of people who had been through worse things than this: her aunt Eda, the war widow; her friend Crystal, whose parents were killed in a car crash; Helen Keller; Baby Jessica.

When she tried to go to sleep, her head was filled with the weird things people had said to her. She lay and listened to them, and then finally she got up to write them down. She thought maybe if she got them on paper, they would stop bothering her. She got out a pad of paper.
The neighbors are neglecting their exotic birds
, she wrote. Then,
I won’t drink the Kool-Aid
. Then,
It’s a more humane way to kill birds
. Then,
We can still live together
. Then,
I’m not getting married
. She read these over again and again, until the sentences didn’t mean anything. Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

Abby woke up to the sound of a child screaming and sat up in bed with her heart pounding. She’d been having a nightmare, but she couldn’t remember what it was about. She walked downstairs, and found her mom peering out the kitchen window.

“It’s the peacock,” she said, without turning around. “He’s been getting noisier. One of the peahens is sick, and we think he’s upset.”

The peacock bleated and bobbed around the pen, and the peahens followed. One of the peahens was slower than the other one, and she limped as she tried to keep up.

“Why is she following him like that?” Abby asked. “Why doesn’t she just take care of herself?” It made her angry, that stupid fucking bird, using all of her strength to waddle after him.

Her mom shrugged. “If we knew that,” she said, “we could solve all the mysteries in the world.”

Abby watched the peacock raise his feathers, and they were beautiful. The peahens raised their feathers too, but they were shorter and not nearly as magnificent, which seemed unfair. The peahens waddled around, following the peacock wherever he went. He couldn’t see in the night, so he wandered aimlessly in the pen.
Go the other way
, she wanted to scream at the gimpy peahen.
Stop worrying about where he’s going and just rest
.

It seemed to Abby that the peacock was strutting, showing off his feathers to an invisible audience in the night. It didn’t look like he was worried about the peahen. He looked selfish and self-absorbed, like he knew he was beautiful. Abby watched his feathers blow in the wind, and she watched as the peahens followed with all of their strength. They followed because it was all they had ever done; they followed because it was all they knew how to do.

W
hen Isabella waitressed in college, she saw customers come in for blind dates all the time. “Has a man named Stuart come in yet?” they would ask. Or “Is there someone here who’s waiting for a Jessica?” When Isabella would shake her head, they would look around nervously. “I’m meeting someone,” they would explain, and she would nod. “Someone,” Isabella would think. “Someone that you don’t know.”

Isabella always felt bad for these people, wandering into a restaurant, looking for something but not knowing what it was. “How sad,” she always thought to herself. “How sad and a little pathetic.” She remembered this as she agreed to go on her first blind date. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said to Lauren.

“You promised,” Lauren said. “You have to.”

It was the summer of yes—that’s what Isabella and Lauren decided. “We’re going to say yes to every invitation that comes our way,” they told each other. “We’re going to be positive, and put positive energy out there, and then we will meet someone.”

Mary decided that she would be a spectator for the summer of yes. She was studying for the bar exam and made it clear that she couldn’t say yes to anything. “I’m going to have to pass,” she said. “But I totally support you guys.”

“You think we’re crazy, don’t you?” Lauren asked.

“Maybe a little,” Mary said. “But it can’t hurt to say yes, can it? Plus, if you get Isabella to go on a date, then it will all be worth it.”

“That’s what I was thinking!” Lauren said.

“You guys, I’m right here,” Isabella said.

“Yeah,” they said, “we know.”

Isabella hadn’t dated anyone since Ben moved out. “Get back out there!” her friends kept saying. Isabella didn’t want to.