Me Vs. Me

“Is Gabrielle still in there?” I hear Alice say.

Blair: “Yup.”

Alice: “Beautiful ring.”

Blair: “Yes, it’s nice. Pear is the latest style you know. I told Cammy he just had to get it. He was going to buy it at some jeweler in Scottsdale, can you believe it? I turned him right around, and told him to go see Stan in Phoenix.”

Alice: “I told him the same thing! You know he needs a haircut. So does Gabrielle.”

Nag, nag, nag. It’s not hard to see where Blair gets it.

Or Cam.

I lift my thumbnail to my lips and start nibbling. Oh, no. I haven’t bitten since college. I should definitely not be starting again now. I take another nibble. I can’t help it.

“…I don’t know why she won’t let me clean up her split ends for her….” Alice’s voice trails off as she heads back toward the party. I can’t help but study my split ends. Which I will never let Alice touch. My future mother-in-law refuses to see a stylist. She cuts her own hair, in this very bathroom. She cuts Blair’s hair, too. She’s always offering to cut mine, but I keep inventing excuses.

I pull myself together, shoulders down, big smile, and rejoin the party.

The group is already in the process of piling potato salad and tuna wraps onto their orange paper plates.

“There you are,” says Cam, wrapping his arm around me. “Hungry?”

“Definitely.” I love Alice’s tuna wraps. She’s a nag, yes, but a nag who can cook. She is constantly copying recipes for me. As if I could cook. Not.

“So dear, what are you thinking, a May wedding?” asks Alice as she refills the (yes, orange) potato-salad bowl. “I know how much Arizona girls love a May wedding. Perfect weather to get married outdoors.”

Blair got married on May fourth. Alice got married on May thirteenth.

“I’m not really sure yet, Alice.” Um, we’ve been engaged for less than ten hours? Can I have some time to breathe, please?

“I told Cammy that he should have proposed months ago,” she continues. “So we’d have more time to plan, but did he listen to me? Does he ever? No. Now we only have six months to pull it all together.”

“Mom, six months will be plenty,” Cam says.

Hello? Have we picked May? Did that decision happen while I was in the bathroom?

Alice shakes her head from side to side. “Gabrielle, I tried getting in touch with your mom to invite her today. But she didn’t return my call. Is she out of town?”

My mother? Here? Thank God she’s out of town. I don’t know what she’d make of this quasi-Brady bunch, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

“She’s doing some work in Tampa,” I say.

I catch a look between Alice and Blair. They’ve never said anything outright, but I get the feeling that they don’t approve of my mother’s hectic career, her men, her marriages. “Ah, I see,” Alice says. “Well, when she gets back, I’d like the three of us to get together for tea. We should put our heads together and start planning. When will she be back home? Perhaps we can have a girls’ night this week?”

Is she kidding me? My mother? Here? What if she throws one of the brass statues? Even without my father as a target, she’s always throwing something at somebody. I’m not sure how’s she going to react to Alice. I can’t quite picture her hand-making fortune cookies. Throwing the cookies, possibly.

“She’s very busy,” I say. “It’s hard for her to get away.” Which is true. My mother is not in the best place in her life right now. She’s an entrepreneur and is always investing in the next “big” thing. Unfortunately, she loves start-ups, even though they don’t always love her back. Last year, she lost a mint and had to sell her Scottsdale house and move to a small condo in Phoenix. Right now she has her eye on some business opportunity in Tampa. Which is why she didn’t freak out when I told her I was moving to New York. She thinks we both have had enough of the dry heat.

Alice rubs her hands together. “I bet she can’t wait to dig her hands into the planning!”

“Um…I haven’t told her yet.”

Up shoot Alice’s penciled-in eyebrows.

When would I have found time to tell her? This kind of news takes more than the two seconds I had to myself while I was in the bathroom.

Alice fidgets with her hair. “Talk to her soon, please. We need to get cracking. I’ve already spoken to the church and told them to hold May sixth.”

Dread sets in. My mom and I declared ourselves agnostics, but we still fast every Yom Kippur. Just in case. I’m not religious, but I absolutely can’t get married in a church. And what about those wafers? Do they come in kosher? Do people actually eat wafers, or is that just in the movies? Are they carb-free? My mom is always on a diet. Oh God, my mom is going to throw the wafer.

Cam sees the panic on my face and quickly adds, “Mom, we haven’t decided on St. George’s. I told you that.”

“Calm down, Cammy. You don’t have to make a decision this second. But it is a family tradition, and it would make me very happy.”

For someone not of the tribe, she sure has the Jewish guilt thing down pat. She could put my mom to shame.

“And May six is the perfect weekend,” she declares. “Not that I’m pressuring, I don’t want to pressure, but Aunt Zoey and Uncle Dean bought tickets in from Salt Lake for the whole family.”

But no pressure.

Cam looks exasperated. “Why would she already buy her ticket?”

Alice shrugs and stares at her plate. “American Airlines was having a sale.”

I don’t believe this. The relatives bought their plane tickets before I even knew we were getting married. Is this normal? This is not normal. I know my own family history makes it difficult for me to understand normalcy, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. I should tell her to back off. Step back, missy.

The words are at the tip of my tongue, but they don’t come out.

“Anyway,” Alice says, “let’s talk about colors for the wedding. I think orange would be beautiful—”

“Let me just get something to drink,” I say backing away. Vodka, perhaps. In one of Alice’s orange-tinted tumblers.

“You know I’m not converting, right?”

“You don’t have to convert to get married at St. George’s,” Cam says. We’re lying in his king-size bed, wrapped in his sheets.

“I don’t even know if I want a big wedding. I always pictured myself getting hitched somewhere cool. Like barefoot on a beach in Fiji. Or at a campsite in Kenya. Or a mountain in Nepal.”

“My family can’t afford to go to Nepal.”

Bingo. “Who says our families have to come? I’ve always wanted to elope. So romantic.”

“Watching me get married will be a huge joy for them. I can’t take that away. This is the moment they’ve been looking forward to their whole lives.”

They could probably use a hobby. I lean up on my elbow and place my hand firmly on a patch of blond fuzzy chest hair. “Is this about them or us?”

“You know what I mean. I’m sure your family would be devastated if they weren’t there. Don’t you want your dad to walk you down the aisle?”