“A life plan is just security. Commitment.”
“Ah,” I say. “That stuff. Now I see why I didn’t go in for it. Anytime anybody mentions security like it’s a good thing, I get the willies. And commitment. Ugh!”
“Huh. Well, did you ever get married?”
“Oh God yes. Twice. Almost three times, actually. First time was to a professor with the illustrious name of Wallace Elderberry, if you please.” I bend over closer to Marnie and put my hand on hers and smile. “He spent his one wild, precious life on Earth researching the life cycle of a certain kind of green-headed insect, and we traveled to Africa and collected specimens of hard-shelled things so bizarre you wouldn’t even want to think about them for longer than twenty seconds. Can you imagine? And when we got home, I realized I’d had enough of bugs to last me my whole life.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “And, if you want to know the truth of it, Wallace Elderberry himself was starting to look like a big cockroach to me. So we got a divorce.”
“Wow. Husband turned into a cockroach. Sounds like Kafka.”
“God, don’t you just love it when people manage to bring up Kafka in a routine post-Christmas conversation?”
“Well, you started it,” she says. “What happened to the second husband? What did he turn into?”
“The second time I got married against my better judgment—which you should never, ever do, by the way, just in case you’re contemplating it—”
“I’m not,” she says.
“Of course you’re not, but it’s an easy mistake a lot of people make. Anyway, that marriage was to Rufus Halloran, a legal aid lawyer, and we set up shop in Brooklyn in a little storefront office in the 1970s. Brooklyn was a mess then. So we did a lot of work for runaways and homeless people. That sort of thing.”
“And what happened? Did he turn into a cockroach, too?”
“No. He didn’t have the imagination to turn into anything, I’m afraid. He turned out to be a horribly boring human who only saw the dark side of everything. I’d look over at him, and it was as though there was a gray haze around him that I couldn’t penetrate. All the well-meaningness in the world, but nothing coming off him. No genuine pleasure. Just walls of boring, long-winded words. So—divorce. Had to happen.”
“Seriously?” She tilts her head, smiling, as she considers this. “You divorced a man because he was boring? I didn’t know that was legal grounds.”
“I had to. It was killing me how boring he was. It was like he had died before his life ended, and he was going to take me down with him.”
“Yeah, but life can’t be fascinating all the time.”
“Oh, honey. Mine is. If it gets boring for longer than two weeks, I make adjustments.” I smile right into her eyes. “And it’s paid off because now I live with Houndy, who is a lobsterman, and the thing about him is that he could talk to me for four days straight without stopping about lobsters and their shells and the different tides and the sky, and nothing he ever said would bore me because the language that Houndy is really speaking in is all about love and life and death and appreciation and gratitude and funny moments.”
Her eyes flicker, and I see in her face that she knows exactly what I mean.
“I feel like that when I’m at work,” she says softly. “I work in a nursery school, so I get to spend my days sitting on the floor with three-and four-year-olds, talking. People think it must be the most boring thing in the world, but oh my God! They tell me about the most astonishing things. They get into philosophical discussions about their boo-boos and about how worms on the sidewalk get their feelings hurt sometimes, and why the yellow crayon is the meanest one but the purple one is nice. Can you believe it? They know the personalities of crayons.”
She laughs and sticks her legs out in front of her. “I was telling my dad about this the other day, and he didn’t understand it at all. Of course he thinks I should be doing something a little bit more . . . grown up. He’d really like it if I was interested in business.” She stops, looks embarrassed, and then adds, “My dad is actually very nice, but he paid for me to go to a really expensive college, you see, and all I’ve done is become a teacher’s aide. My sister—now she did him proud. Became a research chemist. But me—meh. So I told him: ‘Look, Dad, you have one amazing daughter and one ordinary daughter, and one out of two isn’t that bad.’”
“Listen,” I say. I’ve been swept off my feet by all this. “Come outside with me. I want to get out of here. Do you see how all the negative energy is pooling over there by the piano? See? The air is darker over there. I think we need to go outside and get some real air.”
She looks uncertain. “Maybe I should find Noah. Where is he?”
We both are suddenly aware of the party going on around us, the little knots of people talking to each other, Wendy holding court in the dining room, laughing her brayish laugh.
Noah’s gone off somewhere with his friend Whipple, I tell her. They’re inseparable. She might as well know that about him right now.
“Oh, yes. I’ve heard a lot about Whipple,” she says. “Maybe I should go talk to them. Reassure Whipple that I’m not going to be the kind of wife who, you know, keeps dude friends away.”
“I say you should come outside with me. Whipple can wait. Of course you’re the guest of honor here, so we’ll have to time our exit just right so nobody decides to stop us. Are you good at sneaking? Just follow me, and for God’s sake, don’t make eye contact with anyone.” I grab her hand, and we set off, heads down, scurrying along the back hallway and out through the kitchen.
The maids are washing some of the trays, and one of them—Mavis, who I noticed is in love with the UPS guy who came today—calls to me, “It’s cold out there, Ms. Holliday,” and I say we’ll come back in for tea soon.
And then finally we’ve made it outside, and the night air is so cold and sharp that we have to take deep breaths. It’s wonderful here, in the vast expanse of the backyard, a yard that stretches out as far as a golf course, with hedges and a rose garden down to the pond. The yellow light from the party spills out onto the patio, and the garden is lit by dozens of luminaries—white paper bags glowing with electronic candles.
The night is so perfect that I’m not surprised when it starts to snow very lightly, as if someone had turned on a switch for our benefit.
“Oh my goodness!” Marnie says, holding out her hands. “Look at this! I never get to see snow! It’s wonderful!”
“The first snow of the year,” I say. “Always a crowd-pleaser.”
“Noah told me you grew up here. Do you ever miss it?”
“No,” I say. “Not when I have Brooklyn.”
I tell her then about my crazy house and my crazy little community of people—a hodgepodge of kids and parents and old people, everybody coming in and out of each other’s apartments and telling their stories and giving each other advice and bossing everybody around. I tell her about Lola, my best friend next door who lost her husband twenty years ago, and about Jessica and her sweet, quirky boy, and how it is with all of them needing love so much, and yet how fearful they are whenever love comes anywhere close—and then, because Marnie needs to know this, I explain that I’ve got this whole matchmaking thing going on with them, simply because I can’t help but see who they need to belong with. I think I will tell her about Patrick, too, but then I stop because her eyes have widened and she says, “You do matchmaking?”
And bingo! Here we are, right where I needed us to land.
“Yes. I’ve got this little spidey-sense thing going when I see people who need to be together. You have it, too, don’t you?”
She stares at me. “How did you know? I’ve gone around my whole life thinking about this stuff. I’ll see two people, and I just know they have to be together, but I don’t know how I know. I just . . . know it.”
“Yes, it’s the same for me.”