The Engagements Read online

  Kate had long feared that she possessed the same ability to harm that her mother did. When Dan came along, she saw him for what he was at once, and vowed not to mess it up. Dan was a straight-up good, midwestern guy, with the right politics and a big heart. The kind of guy who would turn a tails-side-up penny over on the sidewalk for the next person to find.

  Her family grew hopeful when they met him.

  “Do you think you’ll get married?” May asked after they had been dating a few months.

  “I think he’ll be the father of my children,” Kate said. It felt right, and enormous. She expected her sister to hug her.

  But May responded hotly, “If you’re not picturing yourself in a wedding gown, that’s a bad sign.”

  Leaving marriage aside, there was the issue of weddings. These two wildly different concepts were forever entwined in her sister’s brain—if you were in love, May reasoned, you would have thoughts of butter-cream icing and swing bands and bridesmaid dresses skipping through your head at all times, and this was no different than thoughts of spending your entire life with someone. None of it appealed to Kate. She knew that a woman was supposed to want to be married, but everything about weddings made her skin crawl, nothing more so than the brides who wanted to be different somehow—“I’m not like other brides!” all her friends had declared, before promptly acting like every other bride in the history of brides. She had been to the six-figure Hamptons wedding, the Brooklyn food-truck wedding, the laid-back Kentucky hoedown wedding, the Irish castle wedding. They were all the same.

  Kate went along to each of them with a smile. She brought a good gift, and danced and toasted the happy couple. She didn’t mean to be a curmudgeon. She wished she could feel more live-and-let-live about it all. But deep down, she hated other people’s wedding photos. She hated the way a bride would raise up her bouquet in victory after saying “I do,” as if she had just accomplished something. She hated that even normal-sized women dieted for their weddings until they looked like bobble-head versions of themselves. She hated all the money thrown into some dark hole, when it could have been put to good use in a million other ways. Every one of her friends got so overwhelmed by the event, as if they were planning the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Now there were even blogs for the stressed-out bride, the reluctant bride, the indie bride. But no one she knew, other than her, had stepped back and asked themselves, Why be a bride at all?

  The outside pressure to be married was intense. This had surprised her a decade ago, but now she thought she understood. People wanted you to validate their choices by doing the same thing they had done. She was blessed—or cursed, depending on how you looked at it—to be the kind of person who really didn’t care what other people thought, as long as she believed it was right. She and Dan had never had a single conversation about whether they ought to get married just to please their parents or get everyone off their backs. But even so, Kate sometimes felt frustrated that her relationship wasn’t taken as seriously because it wasn’t a marriage. She had been with Dan longer than some of her married friends had even known their husbands.

  Some women confided in her that they wished they had been brave enough to buck tradition the way she did, but then they’d gone ahead and done the expected thing to make everyone else happy. Others couldn’t believe this was what she really wanted. When she and Dan had been together two years, they were out with a coworker of Dan’s and his fiancée one night. “Are you two close to getting engaged?” the woman asked her. “No,” Kate said. The woman patted her hand and whispered, “You probably just haven’t cried enough yet.”

  Dan joked that they should tell everyone they were both divorced, since if you’d done it once, people usually left you alone. It explained something that was otherwise unfathomable: the reason why two people in love did not want to marry.

  For a while, Dan had told anyone who asked that they were boycotting marriage until their gay friends could take part. It was mostly a lie, but it tended to shut people up. The real reasons were too complicated, and anyway, no one ever believed them. You could spend hours telling someone in great detail about how you didn’t think the state had any business playing a role in your most intimate relationship, how you were wary of the Wedding Industrial Complex, and they’d still come away thinking, So basically you’re afraid of commitment.

  But now their gay friends could get married. Kate remembered the evening Jeff and Toby had told them they were engaged. They had come up from the city for the weekend, and they were all sitting on the deck, watching the sun set.

  “Do you hate me?” Jeff asked after he broke the news.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m going to be a Bridezilla, you know that, right?”

  She groaned. “This is gonna be even more painful than May’s, isn’t it?”

  “More painful, but less tacky,” he said. “The good news for you is we won’t be doing a real bridal party—we’re a bit old for all that, right? Though we want Ava to be the flower girl. If I can’t wear a pouffy white dress, by God, she’ll have to wear one for me. And we want to do it out here in the country. So you’ll have to help me find a caterer and a florist and all that. We’ve already got the venue booked.”

  “Where?” Dan asked.

  “The Fairmount,” they said, and then joined hands.

  “Oh God. They’ve gone over to the dark side. They’re even speaking in unison now,” Dan said. He got up from his chair. “I think we might have a bottle of champagne left over from New Year’s. I’ll be right back.”

  As Dan walked inside, Jeff went on, “We booked the garden for a sunset ceremony and cocktails. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views of the mountains and the Hudson.”

  Toby beamed. “It’s stunning, Kate. As long as it doesn’t rain, we’ll be fine.”

  “Mother Nature best not be messing around that day, let me tell you,” Jeff said. “I’ve waited ten years for this.”

  Kate smiled. “I’m sure she wouldn’t dare cross you.”

  “Now the actual dinner will be in the Riverview Ballroom. Getting that room on a Saturday in April is nothing short of a miracle, but we did it,” Jeff said. He sounded more proud than he had when he passed the bar exam, or won his first major case. “Picture this: Floor-to-ceiling windows. A neutral color palette of cream, mushroom, and sage that looks flawless with any wedding decor you choose.”

  Dan returned then with the champagne and four glasses. Kate grabbed hold of the edge of his shirt as if to keep herself from falling, even though she was sitting down.

  “Honey, stop. We’re scaring her,” Toby said.

  “No, no!” Kate said. “Go on. The views sound amazing. And whatever you said about mushrooms. That sounded good, too.”

  She wanted to be happy for them. They were her best friends. She and Jeffrey had always been close, the two black sheep of the family. He was gay and she was Kate, and that was all there was to it. But now he wanted to be just like the rest of them. He wanted to be married. Kate couldn’t figure out why.

  Late that night, she stood beside her cousin, looking out over the mountains in the distance.

  “You’re being a trouper,” Jeff said. “Even though I know you don’t get it.”

  Other than Dan, he was the one person she had always talked to about these things, the only one who ever seemed to understand why she never wanted to be married. And, though she knew it wasn’t about her, the whole thing felt like a small betrayal.

  “There are so many countries in the world where people don’t even care about marriage anymore,” she said.

  “But not America,” he said.

  “No. Not America.”

  “Where’d you come from, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I think May must have depleted our mother’s womb of some nutrient that causes a child to be normal.”

  “That sounds about right. What was it Fran Lebowitz said?” Jeffrey asked. “Why do gay people want to get married and be in the military, whi
ch are the two worst things about being straight? Something like that. We just want our relationship to be accepted and acknowledged as much as anyone else’s. It might sound dumb, but it’s really that simple. We want to be the same.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to be married,” she said. “Because I don’t feel that what I have with Dan is the same as what May and Josh have, or any of our friends, or, God forbid, my parents. I don’t think any two relationships are really the same, so why rubber-stamp them all like that?”

  “That’s not what I mean when I say the same,” he said. “I mean equal.”

  “I know.”

  “In my heart we’ve always been married. But now we’ll have the same basic rights as straight people. Insurance and inheritance and all that. You know we want to adopt someday. I’ve been afraid forever that if something happened to Toby and we weren’t married, his crazy parents would try to take the kid away from me.”

  She put an arm around him, and as much as she could, Kate understood.

  Since then, she had been a good sport. A few weeks later, the guys came upstate again one weekend. She prepared a feast; pumpkin bread and blueberry muffins, short ribs and potatoes au gratin, green beans and apple crisp, and buckets of red wine. For two days, they sat around her kitchen table, stacked high with wedding magazines and their laptops, and planned. Dan called it the War Room.

  In the mix of magazines was a new publication called Wedding Pride. If Kate had assumed it would be harder for the wedding industry to monetize marriages between two men, she was mistaken: here were the ads for tooth whitening, Botox, laser eye surgery, because God forbid you should wear glasses to your wedding. Jeff got annoyed by an article entitled “My Big Fat Gay Honeymoon: Ten Gay-Friendly Locales Around the Globe.”

  “Please,” he said. “I’ll have my honeymoon where I damn well want to.”

  Toby glanced at the page. “It’s a practical concern,” he said. “There are a lot of places we wouldn’t feel comfortable. Places where people would be hostile. You’re an East Coaster, you have no idea.”

  “Hey! I studied abroad in Madrid,” Jeff said, which prompted an eye roll from his fiancé.

  Jeff held a book in his lap and made notes.

  “What is that?” Kate asked after a while.

  “It’s my bride book,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Emily Post’s Wedding Planner.”

  She looked at Toby, who just shrugged.

  “Give me that,” she said. She flipped through the pastel pages, and with each new task her anxiety level doubled: There were flowers to think about, and a wedding website, a band for the reception and music for the ceremony, place cards, forks and linens. Invitations and favors for all your guests. Something called tablescapes.

  “This thing makes me feel like I’m going to have a panic attack, and it’s not even my wedding,” she said. She pointed at a page: “You’re supposed to have an emergency contact for each of your bridesmaids, and document their height and weight, and exactly when their dress fittings will take place?”

  “But we’re not having bridesmaids so we can ignore that,” Jeffrey said.

  “Okay.” She flipped to another page. “You’re supposed to create personalized gift bags for every guest’s hotel room and tell them about fun things to do in the area?”

  “Well, of course.”

  On Sunday, they drove around and checked out Jeffrey’s top five favorite venues, just to make sure he was certain about the one he had already booked. They did a tasting with a caterer whose specialty seemed to be stuffing foods into other foods—tomatoes stuffed with shiso and wasabi, figs stuffed with gorgonzola, red pepper stuffed with chicken and rice. All the stuffing felt a little violent to Kate, but she didn’t mention it to Jeff, only Toby, who said, “Maybe marriage makes her angry.”

  She knew that weddings had become big business: every time she turned on the television, there was another show about choosing the perfect dress, the perfect theme, the perfect cake. But still, she was flabbergasted by the expense: An empty barn strung up with fairy lights and nothing else cost six grand for the day. A country inn charged two hundred dollars a head for dinner.

  When she worked at a nonprofit in New York, it had often been her job to create press releases that could express need in dollars and cents. People were more likely to donate if they could imagine exactly where their money might go. Now she had a bad habit of extrapolating this out in real life. For the price of two people’s dinners at this wedding, they could buy a deep-well pump that would provide clean water to an entire community, or fund a year’s education for sixty students at a refugee camp in Kenya. For the price of the flowers, they could buy a thousand mosquito bed nets that would protect five thousand Cambodian children from malaria. On a research trip, Kate had met a mother of nine who had already lost her husband and two oldest sons, ages fourteen and twelve, to the disease. The family had only one net, big enough to protect five bodies, so each night the woman had to choose two of her surviving children to sleep outside of it, in addition to herself. Five dollars was all it would take to save their lives. They weren’t supposed to, but Kate had emptied her pockets to this woman and her neighbors. When she saw their joy at receiving such a small sum, she felt ashamed of American excess. Now she pictured the eighteen gorgeous centerpieces Jeff was planning—roses, peonies, hydrangeas, and scented geraniums, all of which would be in the trash by the next morning. She felt ill.

  Kate realized people didn’t think about money in this way. Jeffrey and Toby were generous; when asked to give, they gave. So no one would begrudge them for spending seventy thousand dollars on a wedding for two hundred. It was simply what one did.

  They had wanted a more intimate affair, maybe eighty people. But the second her aunt and uncle heard about the engagement, they drew up a list of a hundred guests.

  “Would you ever in a million years have thought that my parents would be clamoring to invite people to their son’s gay wedding?” Jeff said. “My dad’s already joined Weight Watchers. He wants to lose twenty-five pounds. And my mom is up in arms that we’re not having our reception in New Jersey. She told me it’s tradition to have the wedding in the bride’s hometown and people will think it’s strange that we’re doing it here. I told her we don’t exactly have a bride.”

  Toby raised an eyebrow. “Oh, don’t we?”

  After that weekend, a mania took Jeffrey over, as it did all of them, all the brides she had ever known. When she spoke to him about anything other than the wedding, she could tell that she didn’t have his focus. He told her that he lay awake in the middle of the night thinking about whether to have the caterer serve scallops as an hors d’oeuvre during cocktail hour, or whether he ought to jump to the next price level and go with mini lobster rolls. Were they perfectly whimsical or just goofy, and out of place so far from the ocean? He could spend hours consulting old weather charts and the Farmers’ Almanac online to try and deduce whether there would be rain. Once, in the middle of a phone call about their sick great-aunt, he had said, “Mason jars are huge right now. Have you noticed?”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “People use them for everything at weddings; candles, cocktails, centerpieces. I have to admit I like them. But are they overdone?”

  He was stressed all the time. He told her his hair had started falling out, that he woke up some mornings covered in hives. He’d go to his office, but instead of doing any work, he’d find himself manically Googling the wedding photos of strangers, so that he could steal ideas about flowers and lighting. Entire days were lost to TheKnot.com. He became obsessed with Pinterest, which was basically online wedding porn: pictures of gorgeous tents and tables, golden retrievers in bow ties, freckled ring bearers out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

  Jeff obsessively read a blog called Near Mrs., about women who had broken off their engagements. He showed her a site called Wedding-Whine—he had started looking there for tips ab
out vendors, but got sucked into a rabbit hole of postings between strangers. The would-be brides had their own language, full of acronyms: BM (Bridesmaid), FH (Future Husband), DOC (Day-of Coordinator), BSC (Batshit Crazy), STD (Save the Date.)

  They had profile names like The Future Mrs. Johnson and under this on the screen it might say something like “Only X days to go until I marry my love,” the words floating over a line of dancing hearts. (Or worse, a pink tape measure, flowing like a ribbon, with pounds lost and left to lose before the big day.)

  “It’s so tragic when it says zero days. It reminds you that at some point the wedding will just be over and done,” Jeff said, and she knew he was a goner.

  Kate started looking at the sites herself. Mixed in with questions about the best officiants or calligraphers, they wrote about discovering that their fiancés were meeting other women online for sex, or admitted to feeling the spark go out of the marriage two weeks after the wedding. Once they started sharing, they couldn’t stop—some had been married for years and now just chronicled their fertility issues, The Future Mrs. Johnson changing her name to Layla’s Mommy.

  There was something fascinating about the juxtaposition of their obsession with perfection—Will it rain? Which dress should I pick?! How will the food taste?—with their darkest concerns about love and life, and how easily it could all unravel. Kate wondered if this was the reason weddings had gotten so out of control. Were they meant to distract you from your fear and uncertainty?

  “Be sweet to Jeff,” her sister instructed over the phone one night. “This is one of the most stressful things a person goes through in life. They say it’s on par with losing a parent.”

  Kate tried to be sympathetic, but it irritated her. How did one go from normal person to Zombie Bride just like that? What made otherwise sane human beings care so much about a five-hour party? Some small, dark, curious part of her—the same part that wondered what it might be like to try heroin or scream out in a crowded theater—wished she could experience the sensation just for a moment, so that she might understand.