From Smart Girls Say Yes
by Fern McAllister
Ella and Carmine married beneath a chuppah overlooking the San Francisco Yacht Club’s million-dollar view of the bay. She was the taller of the two; he had the brighter smile. As research partners, they were poised to take the academic world by storm. As husband and wife, they were two blissful nerds confounding their upwardly mobile parents, together.
It was May, and the burgeoning summer sun on the water foretold a promise that every day forward for the happy couple would be luminous.
“They’re disgustingly happy, but I can’t hate them.” Emma, Andi, Carolina, and I were seated at a table with Ella’s teenage cousins from Los Angeles. They were the closest thing to male companionship that she could rummage up for us, and the boys were intent on getting us to fetch them drinks from the bar. We were intent on getting them to quit showing us the loathsome messages they sent each other on their beepers.
I’d met Ella in my graduate program at UC Davis. Carmine was already deep into his PhD dissertation, and they were deep into each other. Even so, the three of us managed to strike up a friendship, and I introduced them to Andi. Fast-forward, and Ella joined our book club, closing the circle of friends.
And now here we all were, witnessing their great step into the future together.
“I’ll know I’ve met the right guy when he looks at me the way Carmine looks at Ella,” I said. I’d never had that. Smilers, yes. But adorers, definitely not.
“I don’t need to be adored,” Andi said.
“Are you kidding?” said Carolina. “Out of all of us, you need it the most.”
“I do not.”
“Yes, you do. I need someone who’s not going to get in my way. Fern needs a cheerleader. And Emma is the one who does the adoring in her relationships. You, however, need a man who loves you for the hard-ass that you are, but who also admires you for so much more.”
“Like my boobs?”
I laughed. “If you got ’em, you may as well work ’em.”
It was also at Ella and Carmine’s ceremony that Emma said she’d briefly considered having a chuppah at her own wedding.
“You’re a Methodist,” said Andi.
“I know. But it’s just such beautiful symbolism, you know? A representation of the couple’s new home, of communal hospitality. I’m very warm and welcoming. It suits me.”
Andi reiterated. “Again, you’re Methodist. Haven’t the Jews suffered enough without you hijacking their traditions?”
“Well, I think it’s a lovely sentiment, Emma,” I said. “And if it still matters so much when you do get married, I will personally hold a roof over your head for the entire ceremony.”
“Your Methodist ceremony,” added Andi.
Carolina grabbed the beeper from the kid sitting next to her. “That’s it. I’m showing this to your mother.”
Melanie and Patrick got married at home in Ohio but threw a party in San Francisco to celebrate with their west coast friends. They were college sweethearts, a match made at the Ohio State University. She’d been recruited by a burgeoning start-up called eBay. He followed Melanie and the sun hoping to find his purpose. As a couple, they were opposite poles bound by fire.
“I give them a year.” Carolina had met Melanie in a Bay to Breakers training group and fell under the spell of a woman more outgoing than herself. Soon, Melanie and Patrick were joining the group for memorable nights out.
It was during these nights that we witnessed what a truly fiery relationship looked like. Emma said, “Oh, come on. They fight like cats but imagine what it’s like in the bedroom.”
“I bet he’s the one wearing the lingerie,” said Andi. “And not because he has a fetish.”
I recoiled. “Sexist, much? So what if Melanie is the assertive one in the relationship?”
“Assertive is good. But Patrick is just...man goo. Nothing he does is his own idea. It’s like the last thing he heard becomes a long-held belief. Do you know I spent a night at the Moana Loa listening to him argue that the Y2K bug was planted in the government’s computer systems back in the sixties by a disgruntled contractor? He read a pamphlet about it.”
“A pamphlet?” I said. “Maybe we have time-warped back to the sixties.”
“Opposites might attract, but those relationships never work in the long run,” said Carolina. “It’s the whole reason I broke up with Julius. I need a guy who’s as active as I am. Someone who likes to taste the wind in his face. Not a couch potato like Julius.”
Emma frowned. “You said you broke up with Julius because he couldn’t keep a job.”
I chimed in, “No, it was because he spent all his money on pot.”
“I thought you caught him selling pot from your apartment,” said Andi.
“You’ve all just proved my point. There are certain things in a relationship that are nonnegotiable, and for me, being energetic and goal-oriented is one of them.”
“So,” I said, “Carolina wants a sporto. Andi wants a man who’s done evolving out of the primordial goo. What about you, Emma?”
She sighed. “I want to be the kind of woman who doesn’t have to answer that question?”
I asked what that meant, and she told us we talked about men too much. “Aren’t we worthwhile on our own? You don’t even need a man to have a baby anymore.” This, from the woman who’d come closer than any of us to binding herself to another human being for life.
“We’re at a wedding,” said Andi. “Relationships are an obvious topic of discussion.”
“All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t focus so much on the future that we miss the fun that we should be having today. Have we forgotten that we’re supposed to be saying yes, ladies?”
We remembered. And we collectively decided that the first yes of the evening should be between Carolina and the guy in the Dolce & Gabbana tie who’d been checking her out all night.
The next morning, Carolina reported he had been a good kisser. “Until he forgot it’s bad form to mention your girlfriend while making out with another woman.”
Teresa and Ezio stood face-to-face beneath the great dome of the Greek Orthodox church, holding hands while a priest wrapped a silken rope around their wrists, declaring them bound as man and wife for all eternity. She was barely five feet tall and eye level with his naval. He was the fifth Ezio in an unbroken lineage of large Greek men who only answered to E-Z. Together, they looked like that famous gorilla and his pet kitten.
They’d dated ever since high school, classmates of Carolina. She was one of Teresa’s eight bridesmaids. Emma, Andi, and I were there as her dates, because according to Teresa, “The more the merrier at a Greek wedding!”
Sitting in the church made me dream of escaping to Santorini, with its white plaster walls supporting a domed ceiling painted the same color as the sea. Everywhere you looked, flashes of gold dotted my view. And I had plenty of time to gaze upon our surroundings because the ceremony itself seemed to go on forever. In Greek.
I suggested we plan a trip to the Greek Isles, but Emma shushed me.
I commented on E-Z’s resemblance to the kitten-hugging gorilla we’d learned about in my college psychology course, but Andi corrected me. “The gorilla’s name was Koko and she was female.”
When my watch told me we’d been in the church for over an hour, the bored little girl in me took over. Problematic given our environment, because as soon as my brain goes quiet, my mouth likes to pipe up. These were a few of the musings I shared with my pew mates:
How does he keep from splitting her in half when they have sex?
He’s cute when he smiles, but when he frowns, he looks ready to put Teresa on a spit, roast her over a fire, and strip the meat from her bones.
I wonder if the priest has ever been tempted to pocket one of those gold candlesticks when he was short on cash.
Carolina says E-Z is the sweetest man she’s ever met, but also one of the dumbest.
It wasn’t until I heard a woman whisper, “Do you have a tissue?” that I began to see the error of my bored ways. Neither Emma nor Andi needed a Kleenex. Nor had the lady in front of me turned to request one, and the pew behind me was filled with a line of Teresa’s younger cousins. The voice wasn’t nearby; it was coming from somewhere in the church.
Now, if you ever paid attention in school, you learned that some buildings are far superior to others acoustically. Among the very best, the dome. Think of the world’s most famous concert venues—the Hollywood Bowl, Radio City Music Hall, the Sydney Opera House. All renowned for the way their design carries sound, and all domed.
Across the sanctuary, in the front row of E-Z’s side of the aisle, I saw a woman blow her nose and blot her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered when she was done.
I could hear the groom’s family with the clarity of a Bette Midler at the Hollywood Bowl in Beaches. Which meant they could also hear...
“Of course, they heard you!” Carolina was draped head to toe in seafoam taffeta. We hadn’t had to venture far for the reception. It was in the church basement. There was baked chicken, a full bar, and a gaggle of Greek grandfathers mixing the strongest Long Island iced teas any of us had ever tasted. “Mrs. Bratakos will probably skin your hide if she figures out it was you who said all that stuff about her beautiful Ezio.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t sit with us,” said Andi. “We don’t want you to taint our reputation.”
“You guys! How was I supposed to know the sound would carry like that?” I was a full iced tea in and letting the alcohol soothe my bruised soul.
“Math,” said Andi. “Arcs and angles. The Pythagorean theorem.”
I, however, had always hated math and this did nothing to assuage my distaste.
“Sorry to tell you this, Fern.” Emma grabbed my hand. “But you have a habit of saying things you’re not supposed to say out loud.”
Andi piled on as the iced tea floweth. “And of not asking permission. You’re an ‘act now, beg forgiveness later’ kind of gal.”
Isn’t that what we were supposed to do, though? The ’90s rules of business were full of such colloquialisms. Think outside the box. Grab the low-hanging fruit. Push the envelope.
“Someday I’m going to accomplish something great and you’re going to regret ever having given me a hard time tonight.”
That prediction, like the future, has yet to unfold. The only thing we regretted the next morning was just how charming those Greek grandpas were when pushing their teas.
Molly and Wes said their vows with their toes in the sand of Ocean Beach on a chilly day in September. She looked sad. He looked like he hadn’t slept since Tuesday. As husband and wife, they didn’t stand a chance.
“If I look as forlorn as Molly does on my wedding day,” Carolina said, “I want you to throw me into a car and get me the hell out of there.”
“Ditto,” said Andi.
“Deal,” I said. “And ditto.”
“Her face says everything I was feeling while I was engaged,” said Emma. “Carolina’s right. Let’s not ever stay in a relationship that makes us sad.”
It rained as soon as the vows were complete.
Molly and Wes made it less than a year.
Two lives happened to come out of our year of weddings, and the first was a baby named Beau. His mother, Julie, was a friend of Carolina’s from high school and she met a guy named Chris at Teresa and E-Z’s wedding. A couple of Long Island iced teas later, they went back to Chris’s apartment. A couple of months after that, Julie told Carolina she was moving to Florida to be near her mom.
“She’s pregnant,” Carolina reported. “She doesn’t want to have an abortion, but she doesn’t want to get stuck in a relationship with a guy she doesn’t love. Her mom moved to Florida after she retired. Julie wants to be near family while she raises the kid.”
Emma was full of empathy. “That couldn’t have been an easy choice.”
Andi and I were full of piss. “Why the hell does she have to give up her life?” Julie had an MBA from Cal and a great job in Silicon Valley.
Carolina said, “It’s the choice she’s made.”
“Yeah, while this Chris guy gets to go on living his life, carefree as ever.”
There were no answers, of course. Just another glass of wine and the reminder that one can never be too careful. That motherhood was a goal for each of us, but not yet. And when the birth announcement arrived several months later with a picture of baby Beau, Carolina hung it on the refrigerator door where we could all stand and look at it, taking whatever lesson we needed in the moment from that beautiful boy’s face.
And as for that second life I mentioned... Andi met her husband, Dominick, at that sad wedding on the beach, running for shelter from the rain. She made him wait almost a year before accepting a date. First came love, then came marriage, then came baby Abdallah in a baby carriage.
“Deep down, I knew I wasn’t ready to get serious, and yet we never panicked about losing each other. Somewhere during our friendship, I think we spoke this silent agreement to each other—I knew he was the one, and he knew he would wait until I was ready. It gave me a sort of confidence I’d never felt with anyone else. He gave me back myself.”