Eight Hundred Grapes: a perfect summer escape to a sun-drenched vineyard

Ten hours later, I took off my satin heels and headed up the stairs, holding my dress so I wouldn’t slip, moving quickly to the safety of my room.

My phone rang again, vibrating through the house.

“Don’t hang up,” Ben said.

“Didn’t we just do this?”

“You answered, didn’t you? A part of you wants to hear what I have to say.”

He wasn’t wrong. There was a way to turn off the phone. I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t been able to. Part of me wanted Ben to tell me a story that would make this all okay, that would make him familiar again.

I sat down on the staircase, my dress billowing out to the sides.

“You need to understand, I didn’t even know about Maddie until a couple of months ago …” he said.

“Your daughter?”

He paused. “Yes. My daughter.”

“How old is she, Ben?”

“Maddie is four and a half.”

He emphasized the half and I knew why. We had been together for five years. The half meant she was conceived before me, before us.

“I obviously wasn’t going to keep this a secret forever, but it’s complicated with Michelle,” he said. “And I wanted to smooth that part of this out before I dragged you into it.”

“Complicated how?”

He paused. “That’s complicated.”

I stood up again. I’d had enough—enough of Ben’s non-explanation, enough of my heart pounding in my throat.

“Look, I just don’t want you to do anything rash. We’re getting married in a week.”

“I’m not so sure about that, at the moment.”

He got quiet. “That’s what I mean by rash,” he said.

He sounded devastated. And the problem was that it reminded me of the first time I’d spoken to him. My law firm had just signed Ben as a client and I called to introduce myself shortly after his bike was stolen. I didn’t know this about him yet, but Ben had owned that bike for ten years. It was less his preferred mode of transportation and more … an appendage. And still, by the end of our conversation, he was joking, happy. His bike, and his sorrow, a thing of the past. Because of me, he said. And, even now, there was a huge part of me that wanted to make him feel that good again.

“Where are you?” he said. “Let me come talk to you in person.”

I was at the top of the stairs. Maybe because Ben asked where I was, I looked around. My bedroom was to the left—the door wide open. My parents’ bedroom was to the right.

And coming out of my parents’ bedroom was a large man. Two hundred and fifty pounds large. With hair and skin I didn’t recognize. In a towel.

My mother, in a matching towel, stood close to him.

This man, who was not my father.

I dropped the phone. “Oh my God!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

“Oh my God!” my mother screamed back.

The man moved away, backward, toward my parents’ bedroom, which he apparently knew all too well.

Then, as if thinking better of it, he reached out his hand. “Henry,” he said.

I was stuck in place, right at the top of the stairs. I reached, as though it made sense, for this man’s hand.

My mother covered her mouth in abject horror. I thought it was her disgrace at being caught. But then she reached for me, touching my cheek with the front of her hand, then with the back.

“What did you do to your wedding dress?” she asked.

Regarding Henry (#ulink_919aefec-85fb-5f5b-96ff-7e74a8f9437b)

If I were keeping count—and who was keeping count?—it wasn’t shaping up to be the best day of my life.

I sat in the dining room with my mother, the two of us dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, my dress hanging on the door, the silence between us aggressive.

Henry was gone. My mother had said good-bye to him on the front steps while I waited for him to walk away. It was like what my mother had done to me my senior year of high school, when I was dating tattooed and mean Lou Emmett. But in a gross reverse.

My mother poured herself a cup of coffee, avoiding my eyes. I wasn’t going to be the first to speak. Normally, I’d reach across the table, make this conversation easier for her, but I couldn’t do that this time. My mother was going to have to do that—she’d have to figure out herself how she was going to explain this.

Instead, I stared at the wall above her head, lined with photographs, all the photographs that made up my parents’ life together—beginning when they were young, at this vineyard, and even before that. One of my favorite photographs was of my mother, still a cellist with the New York Philharmonic, smiling at the camera, her cello resting against her long black dress. The woman sitting here now looking remarkably like the photograph of herself then. She had the same long curls, wide cheeks, a nose that didn’t quite fit. She was still not wearing a drop of makeup, still not needing any.

Next to that photograph of her was one of me playing softball. I’d been a complete tomboy growing up (care of trying to keep up with Bobby and Finn). I’d pretty much lived in a T-shirt and sneakers, my hair perpetually in a ponytail. But there was no denying how similar we used to look: my curls the darker version of her curls, my nose tilted like her nose, my eyes dark green like my father’s but shaped like hers.

My mother used to say that I was the spitting image of her, cloaked in my father’s coloring. That was until I moved to Los Angeles and transformed in the way Los Angeles seems to transform people: a little bit at a time until you don’t recognize yourself anymore. With all the gorgeous women strolling through yoga class and into parties, I found myself paying attention to all sorts of things that I hadn’t historically.

Maybe it would have been the same thing if I’d left Sebastopol for New York or Chicago, but for me, at eighteen, it was Los Angeles that I left for, so it was Los Angeles where I learned some fundamental lessons that growing up in a house full of men and farmers had forgotten to teach me about how to look and feel sexy.

You could see the transformation on the wall. My mother joked that I’d morphed from the darker version of her into the glam, movie star version—which, I assured her, a walk down Abbot Kinney among the real movie stars would prove untrue. Though, in truth, I did look different and I took a certain amount of pride in that.

The Southern California sun had lightened my hair, I’d slipped off ten pounds, and I’d started to dress as though I had some idea of how to. Under my friend Suzannah’s supervision (and insistence), I’d spent more money on a pair of shoes than on a month’s rent. I tried to return them the next day—in guilt and nausea—but the store had a strict no-return policy. So I’d kept them. And loved them. In fairness to myself, these had been magic shoes: slinky stiletto heels that made your legs look endless. In further fairness, the shoes had outlasted that apartment and all the ones that had come since.

Whenever I’d come home for a visit, my mother would always say how stylish I looked. But I knew she judged my evolution from ponytails to pencil skirts. My mother thought style should be effortless and easy. She took to touching my straightened hair, saying, “Shiny.” She commented on new items of clothing with a whistle and a shifty grin: “Look at that Los Angeles armor.”

And it was always first thing in the morning—when I was freshly awake and racing downstairs for her walnut and cherry waffles, the same way I’d done as a child—that she would touch my skin and say, “Gorgeous.”

The disjunct left me feeling somewhat alone in navigating my two homes. Sonoma County was blue jeans and fleece pullovers and practical field boots. Los Angeles was slingbacks and blue jeans distressed to the tune of $275. I wavered between the two worlds, neither feeling like it fit exactly right. I was self-conscious about my lifestyle in Los Angeles—a lifestyle on which I felt I had a tenuous hold at best. And when I came home, the put-together version of me who seemed to have it all together felt myself judging, in a way I never used to, how unrefined and rural local life was. I didn’t like being judgmental in that way, but I was having trouble stopping myself. I was still trying to find the balance.

I lowered my gaze from the photographs, looked down. My mother caught my eyes, held them. Then she crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t stand there in judgment of me,” she said.

It didn’t seem wise to tell her I was sitting in judgment.

“There was a naked man coming out of your bedroom, Mom,” I said. “Who wasn’t Dad.”