Together Apart: Change is Never Easy (9 page)

She said, “I don’t like that look.”
 

“Yes, you do. You’re hot for my look.”

“You look like you’re going to kill someone.” Sam squinted, trying to read him.
 

“Let’s do it,” he said.
 

Sam looked around. “Right out here in the open?”
 

“Not that. Let’s get married.”

She laughed.
 

“I’m serious! Not now, of course. We’ve only been together six, seven months? But like in another six or seven … ”
 

Sam laughed again, rolling over to lie on her back.
 

“Why not? You know exactly what you want. And I know exactly what I want, which is to be part of what you want. So, why not get on with it?”
 

Still laughing, Sam said, “For one, we’re 19.”
 

“Almost 20.”
 

“And second, don’t you think it’s a bit shortsighted to hitch your wagon to me?”
 

“Not at all. We get along great. We’re practically living together now, anyway. We hardly ever fight. We want the same things, apparently, right down to the Batmobile.”
 

“You’re an artist with his head in the clouds. I’m a goal-focused, feet-firmly-on-the-ground girl.”
 

“ …
with
the soul of an artist, but we can let that go if you really want to whore your talents as a journalist. We’re both easygoing, neither with particularly opinionated personalities. My parents are still together, and yours are, too, so our programming’s in order. We both didn’t like George W. Bush and both love Thai food. How do you feel about Catholic school for our kids?”
 

“Hate it,” said Sam.
 

Zach raised a hand in an invisible high five. “Me, too. We both love indie music, avoid Walmart and believe in supporting local stores. We both have a signed copy of George Takei’s book, for fuck’s sake. Who has that book? Nobody, that’s who.”
 

“He came to a bookstore once. It seemed dumb not to have him sign something.”
 

“EXACTLY. So, why not?”
 

She felt a nervous smile cross her lips, her eyebrows furrow.
 

“Shit, Sam, not today. I’m not proposing we run off right this minute. But at the same time, why not say that if we’re still this into one another in another six months, we go ahead and do it?”
 

“Just like that?”
 

“Just like that!”
 

“Zach, you have to plan a wedding.”
 

“Bullshit!” Zach sat up, waving his arms with artificial theatricality. “Another thing we have in common: a disregard for convention for the sake of convention. Remember telling me about your cousin’s wedding?”
 

Of course, she did. They’d spent a long evening discussing it. After attending the lavish affair, the reality of her and uncle’s expenditure smacked Sam hard across the face. She’d known from the beginning that it was a $50,000 wedding, but only afterward had she truly felt the icy fact:
It had lasted for 10 hours. Now it was over, and 50K was gone forever.
Wedding culture had people trained like dogs. There seemed to be a belief that if you didn’t throw a large, elaborate wedding, you must not actually love your spouse. Only when you stepped back and really thought about it did the total absurdity make itself clear. A marriage was two people agreeing to love each other forever, nothing more. Even when you added the religious element, that only tacked on the clergy fee. Sam had said the same thing about a wedding ring: She wanted a token. It was almost negligent to blow three months’ worth of income on a shiny rock, thinking it was the best way to show someone you cared, when in reality it was one of the most ridiculous.
 

“Well, sure… ” she began.
 

“So when we get married, are we going to make it all about our parents? Or are we going to make it about us?”
 

“You’re really serious,” Sam said.
 

Zach shrugged. “Just trying to stay one step ahead. Do it early, before they can see it coming and start arranging seating charts.”
 

“Okay,” Sam said, still treating it like the joke it wasn’t. “Talk to me in six months.”
 

The hand on her leg shifted, sliding under her dress and onto her bare leg. Zach’s touch was still innocent, but the memory of his kiss was still on her lips, and the wind’s swish showed her where his hand could go.
 

She pushed Zach’s hand, rolled on top of his body, pinned him down and kissed his neck.
 

“Knock it off,” she said. “I’m an engaged woman.”

But of course he didn’t.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Present Day

Zach stopped at the crosswalk, raised the bouquet to his nose, and inhaled. The flowers’ scent surfaced many sensations, all tied to Sam.
 

Firstly, she’d love the gesture: her man bringing her flowers.

Secondly, although Sam would love the gesture, she’d mock him and pretend she thought it was cheesy (and so typical of Zach).

And thirdly, seeing this particular bouquet would cause a well of pleasant nostalgia to bubble inside her, as it had in him. Zach had bought her a bundle of antiqued hydrangea and Leonidas roses from Pretty in Pink, her favorite shop — the one she’d found their first Sunday in Memphis, then had clung to like a shipwreck’s floating debris. Despite Sam’s protests, they’d both been nervous, out of sorts and a little sad that first week after leaving Portland. Sam had always loved flowers; her father had owned a store when she was younger. Like her father’s store (Fleur de Lys) Pretty in Pink was a bucket shop, designed for shoppers who wanted to buy flowers for themselves, rather than the gift business of weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays that helped most flower shops survive. Sam had gone to Pretty in Pink each day in search of comfort and memory, grateful that the city had a doorway into her past. But as Memphis grew familiar, Sam went less and less. She hadn’t been in months, so seeing something from Pretty in Pink right now, on the cusp of their new start, would be a singular delight.
 

But there was a final thing, too, and that was the box in the bag hanging from Zach’s other hand.
 

He’d detoured after picking up the flowers, heading to the bank to deposit a check. The route from Pretty in Pink to the bank took him past a Godiva chocolatier he’d never noticed before. Zach almost laughed when he saw it; its presence serendipitous like a cosmic joke — not at Zach’s expense so much as his benefit. It was the universe winking, dropping him a sign that everything would, indeed, be all right.
 

There was a Godiva in Portland, near the pizza place where they’d ordered their first stay-in pizza as a dating couple. Sam had pointed it out right away, telling Zach how Godiva reminded her of Gram, because her grandmother had always loved cherry cordials. Zach said that all old ladies liked cherry cordials.
Not like Gram,
Sam had told him.
She was an addict
.
 

So, they’d stopped in and caught the clerk a few seconds before closing, and Zach had bought chocolates despite his paltry income earned working in the student affairs office because a good date bought his girl chocolates. Sam had, of course, said this was ridiculous. Chocolatiers attached romance to chocolate like diamond companies pinned loved and devotion to sparkly rocks.

Sam had told him that Gram had never, ever let her have any of her precious cherry cordials despite their intoxicating scent. Zach said this was a crime. So, they bought a small box, plus one of assorted truffles, the two together costing Zach a small fortune.
 

Their relationship was too new for those first chocolates to lubricate anything terribly sexy, but she’d smelled the flowers and tried the chocolates and had smiled plenty. Zach had lain beside her on the couch, trailing a finger up and down her arm and looking up at her like a lost puppy.
 

They’d been so nervous back then. It was strange to think on it, knowing each other as they did now. He hadn’t asked for her number the night they had met, him puffing a joint outside that obnoxious party and her declining to join him, both laughing so hard that they cried. He’d been too cool, too standoffish — too fucking chicken shit, to tell the truth — to do so. Zach played detective to find her, the mysterious girl with the big, blue eyes who’d shown up at the party. He’d manufactured a way to see her again (although looking back, their friends may have set them up) and only then had he started to call her. She had liked him. It was obvious. But still he had started each phone call with a psych-up routine, and had ended each feeling both giddy and despondent, sure that he’d fucked up.
 

On that first real stay-home date, they’d eaten pizza. She’d sniffed at her flowers, and they’d popped cherry cordials while watching the first half of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
because they both knew people (separately) who swore they should see it. Zach didn’t see what the big deal was, but he stared at the screen, smiling the whole time. Eventually, Sam had said, “This movie is boring” and Zach, relieved, had turned it off. They watched
Three’s Company
on cable after that, and the pizza vanished except for a single slice. The cordials disappeared entirely, after splitting the final contested one. Zach had, of course, insisted she take it. But Sam, of course, insisted on splitting. She’d done it with a knife. That’s how new they were; biting the chocolate in half seemed too familiar.
 

Since that day, cherry cordials — an old lady’s chocolate, and not something that showed up in their lives unless Zach put them there — were a trigger to remember that first night, and those first times spent together. In the first few years of their marriage, he’d occasionally picked them up as a surprise. Each time they would sit together and tell stories from that first night. The couch in Zach’s apartment had been an embarrassment, with a spring protruding from the middle, so they couldn’t sit close unless they were very careful. Why they’d never done the surgery necessary to snip the spring, Zach didn’t know, but eventually they’d put a rag over the pointy spot and learned to lie around it. They had shared many makeout sessions on that couch, then later on a better couch in the questionable apartment they’d moved into after tying the knot. Their neighbors in that apartment were a rather loudly amorous (and constantly drunk) couple on one side and what sounded like an opium den on the other, but it had been home.
 

Whenever they were in need of remembrance, Zach had bought a box of chocolates and they’d gone on their own drug trips, traveling back to the time when touching Sam’s breast through her shirt was something Zach somehow thought he might get slapped for. When the mere thought of touching Sam’s breast
under
her shirt had made his neck prickle with taboo. Even after he’d licked the cordial filling from Sam’s nipples a few times (he thought it was hot; she thought it ridiculous), eating the chocolates took them both to a time when they were strangers to one another — shy, innocent strangers who still had so many firsts ahead of them.
 

It had been a few years since they last had cherry cordials. At first, it had seemed like a cause — as if not picking up the chocolates from time to time was one of the “little things” that fell out of favor and nursed distance between them. But at some point their lack of indulgence flip-flopped and became an effect — something they no longer did
because
of the distance. Cherry cordials slipped into a kind of protective capsule in Zach’s mind, and seemingly in Sam’s. They were sealed off, set on a red satin pillow under a showcase spotlight, displayed in the most special case in their museum of early memories, sacred, not to be touched with their current filthy, distant hands. If Zach had picked up a box during the past year, it wouldn’t have felt like a tip of the hat to their past. It would have felt profane. As if they were sullying their most cherished and special of symbols, like using a childhood teddy bear to wax the car. The sweet, innocent days of cherry cordials and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
were gone, and as the saying went, you could never go home again.
 

Things had changed, and Zach knew he could safely open that old vault and release the best memories from inside. He could feel it, and knew Sam would feel it, too. Things had been rough between them in the six months before and since the move, but none of their fights were cruel. They bloomed from the stupidest things: Zach would leave a full water glass on top of the TV; Sam would lay one of Zach’s books open on its face instead of closing it delicately with a bookmark. Sometimes, they fought about money, but it was always about Zach’s lack of worry versus Sam’s constant anxiety, never about how to earn or spend it. Nothing said was ever vicious, and barely unkind. They had simply grown apart, and both knew it. But that was good, in a way, because it meant that no bridges had been crossed, and certainly none had been burned. They weren’t like two neighbors fighting over the placement of a fence. They were two neighbors who used to invite one another over for dinners on the lawn, but had fallen from the habit. There was, in other words, nothing for Zach and Sam to
repair,
per se. They simply had to look deep inside themselves and rediscover that desire to invite the other in.
 

Zach thought about the baby.
 

He didn’t want to be a parody of himself. He didn’t want them, as a couple, to make the same mistakes as everyone else. Watching some couples was like watching the stupid kids in a slasher movie, heading into the dark basement where the killer waited. Why didn’t those kids get out of the house and run? And why, when faced with an unsalvageable marriage, didn’t both parties get out while they could? They seized on dumb reasons to stay together, twisting the killer’s knife without realizing they were. Babies were one of those. It was almost a cliché:
A baby will bring us together
.