Dear Dr. Maude,
Maybe you’ve already been to Vermont. But if you haven’t, all I can say is that while Vermont may be really pretty, unless you like skiing, there’s nothing to do. Especially when you’re staying somewhere without cable or Internet. (Have you ever heard of this thing called dial-up? That’s what Bill and Lois have. According to Alan, it’s how people used to have to connect to the web in the old days, through a phone line. It’s VERY slow.)
Because there’s nothing to do, we were able to spend an entire day full of family quality time together yesterday. Well, family and TV crew quality time. (Ask Wendi to tell you about how she screamed at her assistant Charles during Charades.) (Actually, don’t ask her, because she’d probably be embarrassed about that.)
Luckily, now it’s Friday, which means everyone will be here for the wedding in a little while. I’m a little nervous about having Beatrice and Marissa in the same room together. As I’ve mentioned, Marissa is REALLY annoying. And while I can handle her because I’m just used to her by now, Beatrice, because she’s a born-and-bred New Yorker, isn’t all that patient with people who are annoying on a Marissa-like level.
Hopefully, it’ll be okay. It kind of has to be because it’s not like they can be split up and go stay in another hotel, like, say, a Hilton Garden Inn with an indoor pool and room service.
This might be weird to say, but now that the wedding is no longer just family, I wish you could be here, too. I know we haven’t met yet, but I still feel very close to you.
yours truly,
Lucy B. Parker
On Friday morning, I was sitting in the living room with Lois, going through her scrapbook with pictures from last year’s apple festival (she won second place for her apple cobbler), waiting for Pete’s silver Oldsmobile to pull up with him and Rose and Beatrice. Which would explain why I got so confused when, instead, the car that pulled up was Beatrice’s moms’ black Mercedes station wagon. And I was even more confused when the car doors opened and not only did her two moms get out, along with Beatrice and Pete and Rose, but SO DID BLAIR LERNER-MOSKOWITZ.
“OH MY GOD!” I screamed when I saw him jump out of the back-back and wipe his face with his Pac Man T-shirt.
“I know, I know,” Lois sighed. “I can’t believe they gave the blue ribbon to Betty Miller, either. Don’t get me wrong—I like Betty. But plain old apple pie should not be winning county fair contests.” She sat up straight. “We have a reputation to uphold.”
“No! That’s not what I meant! What I meant was…I mean, I can’t believe…I mean, what am I going to do…I mean…will you excuse me, please?” I babbled as I pulled my boots on the wrong feet and ran outside.
“Oh wow. Look who’s here!” I said as I walked toward the car with a big fake smile on my face. I was so getting my period at that moment from the stress of this. I had to be. “It’s Beatrice and Pete and Rose who were supposed to be here, and then the rest of the Lerner-Moskovitzes!” I turned to Rose. “Please tell me you have some fried plantains with you,” I whispered.
She patted me on the cheek. “For my baby? Of course I do!” she said, whipping out a bag and handing it to me.
“Hey, Lucy,” Blair said as he made his way to the door. “They have cable, right?”
How could he act so…normal?! “Actually, no. No, they don’t,” I replied. “But Bill’s got a bunch of bowling shows taped if you want to watch those.”
He shrugged. “Okay,” he said as he walked in. I guess Mom was right when, once when I was overlistening to her talk to Deanna, I heard her say that men were very simple creatures.
“Beatrice, I had no idea all of the Lerner-Moskovitzes were coming,” I said with the same fake smile on my face. “I thought it was just you.”
She gave me a weird look. “Why are you talking like a flight attendant giving the safety speech?” she asked.
“I am not,” I said, smiling.
Pete nodded. “Chica, she’s right—you are.”
I dropped the smile and looked over at Beatrice’s moms, who had just finished checking the pressure on the tires (according to Pete, part of being a New Yorker included being neurotic) and were walking toward us. “Hello, Lucy,” said her mom Marsha. “We’re going to go inside and see if we can’t get the owners of that bed-and-breakfast we booked the next town over on the phone.”
“Okay,” I said with my frozen smile.
After they were gone, I dropped it. “Beatrice, what is going on?” I cried. “What is your brother doing here?”
“I told you he was coming in the e-mail I sent you,” she replied.
“What e-mail?”
“The one that said that my moms had decided that this would be a good way to have some quality family time—so everyone was going to come up.”
“But there’s no signal up here!” I said.
She shrugged. “That’s probably why you didn’t get it then.”
How could she be so calm?! Pete patted me on the arm. “Don’t worry, Lucy. There’s no reason to be nervous, even though your local crush is gonna be staying in a bed-and-breakfast down the road for the weekend.”
Marsha came to the door. “FYI, we have a little change of plans!” she said. “The other B and B mistakenly overbooked, but luckily there’s an extra room here.”
“Scratch that—your local crush is going to be staying under the same roof as you,” Pete said.
Forget worrying about The Change, or what was going to happen when Beatrice and Marissa met. I now had even bigger things to worry about.
Team Northampton (Dad, Sarah, Ziggy, and Marissa) were the next to arrive. “OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD!” Marissa screeched as she flew out of the car and ran straight toward Beatrice and threw her arms around her so hard she almost knocked her down. “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M FINALLY MEETING YOU!”
Beatrice wiggled out of her embrace. “You must be Marissa,” she said,
“Of COURSE I’m Marissa!” she cried. “Who else would I be?! This is SO cool! It’s like meeting a BFF I never even knew I had! I just feel sooooo close to you already. It’s like I’ve known you my entire life instead of just a minute.”
Beatrice looked at me, panicked.
I shrugged. “I warned you,” I whispered as I made my way to the car to pick up Ziggy. I felt a little bad leaving her there, but I needed to give my brother a kiss as soon as possible. When I got there, he was being all fussy and cry-y, but as soon as I picked him up, he quieted down.
Dad shook his head. “You really have that baby- whisperer vibe, Lucy,” he said.
“You sure do,” Sarah agreed. She squinted. “I think it’s your aura. It’s looking very purple.”
According to Sarah and her weird friends, auras were your energy and they changed colors. Seeing that purple was my favorite color, that worked for me.
“Thanks,” I said as Ziggy grabbed my index finger with his tiny fist.
“So how’s it going?” Dad asked. “Your mom just told me that your local crush Blair Lerner-Moskovitz is here.”
“What?!”
He nodded. “She called me about an hour ago and told me,” he said. “So that we’d be prepared and not embarrass you about it.”
Um, embarrass me? Kind of like he was doing at that moment? Did my divorced parents really have to communicate THAT much?
“How are you feeling about it?” he asked. “Is it making you uncomfortable? Because it really shouldn’t. Crushes are a totally normal part of human development.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Well, it’ll be fine as long as you stop talking about it.”
Just as we were about to go inside, a big Escalade pulled up. Laurel came flying out of house, almost tackling Austin as he got out of the truck. Jeez, if she wasn’t careful she really would end up blind. As they ran into the house to catch up (forty-eight hours without being able to text had been super hard for her), Blair walked out.
“Hey, Lucy—you got any snacks lying around?” he asked. “All they have here is stuff made of apples. I hate apples. They’re so…healthy.”
“Yeah. In my room. I’ll go get them,” I said as I followed him inside. Once I got up there, I crouched down so I was eye level with the doorknob. “Yeah, hi, Whoever’s out there? It’s me, Lucy B. Parker,” I whispered. I had recently discovered that the whole praying business that people did really worked—even when you prayed to a doorknob instead of God or Buddha. Which was good because I wasn’t sure how I felt about either of them. “I don’t have a lot of time to talk, but I just wanted to know if You could help me get through the next few days with not too much embarrassment. Including the toast.”
Before I could continue, I heard Ziggy start to cry. “And now I have to go, because my baby brother is crying and I’m the only one who can calm him down, but if I can, I’ll be in touch later. Thanks a lot.”
That night at dinner (apple and corn fritters, pork loin with braised apples, and apple rice pudding) Alan announced that all members of the Parker-Moses family would have IBS sessions the following morning before the wedding. (“Our last non-married ones.”)
Marissa began to wave her hand wildly. “Oh! Oh! I have a question!”
Alan flinched. I don’t think he had quite believed me when I told him how annoying Marissa was. “Yes, Marissa?”
“Can non-family members also have them?”
“Absolutely. In fact, I strongly encourage them,” he replied.
She reached over and grabbed Beatrice’s arm. “Good. I call Beatrice, then!”
From the look on her face, Beatrice would have rather spent her time picking splinters out of her finger.
Laurel’s and Mom’s would be spent with Laurel helping with hair and makeup while Alan and I would go see if we could find any flowers to make a bouquet for Mom. Although the fact that it was the beginning of November would make it kind of hard to do that. As far as I was concerned, I got the better end of the deal, because no matter how many times Laurel tried to say it was fun, putting on makeup was really boring. Even Camilla thought so, which is why the camera crew was going with us.
The next morning as we walked through the woods, Alan turned to me. “Lucy, there’s something we need to talk about,” he said as I began to make Mom a bouquet of pinecones.
I turned to him. “I don’t know why you would automatically think I was the one who was eating chocolate-covered pretzels in the living room.”
“What?” he asked confused.
“Nothing. You were saying?”
“Wait, wait,” Wendi said. “Nikko, get the camera ready.” Once he did, she looked into the lens. “People, at this moment—the day that Alan Moses and Rebecca Parker are to unite their two families—we’re on a pre-wedding quality-time stroll with Alan and his soon-to-be stepdaughter, Lucy Parker—”
“Lucy B. Parker,” everyone corrected.
“Lucy B. Parker,” she repeated. “Okay, you can go back to bonding now.”
He reached out and took my hand. “Lucy, you have no idea how lucky I feel that Laurel and I found you and your mom—”
“Are you getting this?!” Wendi asked Nikko.
“Yes, I’m getting it,” he sighed.
Uh-oh. I could see Alan’s eyes getting all watery. “I know. It’s okay,” I said, hoping to stop him from going on. For some reason it made me uncomfortable when grown men did what Mom called “getting in touch with their feelings.” Especially when there was a video camera around. She said I’d appreciate it when I got older, but all it did now was make my neck itch.
“Laurel’s never been happier in her life,” he went on. “I tried the best I could to help her have a normal childhood, but it wasn’t until you came around that she really learned how to have fun.” He swiped at his eyes. “Lucy, you’re very lucky that you have your dad. He’s a wonderful person and I know I could never replace him, but I just hope…well, I hope that you know how much I love you.” His eyes got all teary again. “I couldn’t love you more if you were my own.”
Now I was crying. “Thanks, Alan,” I said, wiping at my own eyes. “I’m really glad Mom’s marrying you. “’Cause even though she was always saying she was happy after she and Dad got divorced, I think she was lying sometimes. Because with you, she’s really happy.” I smiled. “And I am, too.”
Due to the fact that she was so not into beauty stuff, Mom with makeup and nice hair didn’t look all that different than Mom without makeup and nice hair. That being said, because she didn’t want to run the risk of messing it up, for our IBS she didn’t want to take a walk. Instead, she came up with what had to be the single most horrible idea I could think of.
“Me trying on bras is not my idea of a fun IBS!” I cried as she dumped out a Walmart bag full of them.
“Well, honey, if you stopped growing so quickly, we wouldn’t have to do this,” she said, as if I had any control over the issue.
“When did you even get these?”
“When you and Laurel were posing with the Dairy Queen in front of the store,” she said. “They were on sale.”
The day before, after running out of things to do at the inn, we had taken a field trip to the local Walmart. (In Vermont, “local” meant forty-five minutes away.) It turned out that Laurel wasn’t the only celebrity there—that year’s Dairy Queen winner (dairy as in moo, cow, rather than ice cream) was, as well. Which, according to Martha from Walmart, meant the picture would be on the front page of the weekly paper for sure.
I sighed. I had enough experience to know that me trying to get myself out of this bra thing was not happening. At least it was just us. The first time I had gotten a bra it was at Barbara’s Bra World in the Holyoke Mall, and Barbara had touched what she insisted on calling my boobies. The whole thing still gave me nightmares.
“Okay, off with it,” Mom said, pointing to my sweater.
I shook my head as I grabbed a bunch of the bras. “I’ll just take them into the bathroom.”
“Oh,” Mom said. “Oh.”
I stopped and turned. “Oh what?”
“Nothing,” she said, her lip quivering.
Did all families cry this much or just mine?
“It’s just…” A few tears dripped out of her eyes, kind of like our leaky kitchen faucet back in Northampton. “You’re just…” Then, as if someone had turned on the one in our kitchen in New York—the one with the awesome water pressure—the tears came full force. “…getting so grown up!” she wailed. “And I’m not talking about your breasts!”
So much for her makeup. Even though there was no one else in the room, I still wanted to crawl under the bed and hide. I was glad that Wendi was off filming Laurel and Alan browsing through the most recent Container Store catalog, because I did not need all of America hearing about my breasts.
“I’m not that grown up,” I said, in hopes of getting her to stop crying. “I haven’t even gotten my period yet.”
She reached for a tissue. “I’m talking about your attitude,” she sniffled before she honked into it. “To watch how you’ve dealt with so much change this year, and how, even when you’ve been scared—like when you had to change schools, or when you were running for class president—you’ve just walked through it.” She honked again. “Lucy, I don’t think you know how brave you are.”
“But I don’t feel so brave sometimes,” I admitted. “Sometimes I feel very…not brave. Like with this whole Change thing.”
“What’s The Change?” Mom asked.
It made me feel a little better than there was someone on the planet who didn’t know what it was. “Apparently it’s this thing that happens when people get remarried,” I explained. “And suddenly everything changes and no one’s on their best behavior anymore and the kids who aren’t loved as much as the other ones get sent away to boarding school.”
“Is that what you think is going to happen to you?” Mom asked. “That we’re going to send you away?”
“No,” I said defensively. “Okay, fine, yes,” I admitted. “Maybe sometimes I worry about that.”
She came over and pulled me toward her. “Lucy, no one’s going anywhere. We’re a family, okay? Sometimes families fight, and sometimes they get annoyed with each other, but, like it or not, family is forever.”
Just then my phone—which I had put in the corner near the door along with everyone else’s, because we had figured out that that was the only place in the entire place where you got service—beeped with a text. I walked over and grabbed it. “It’s from Alice,” I said nervously. She was feeding Miss Piggy and Dr. Maude while we were gone. And making sure Miss Piggy didn’t kill Dr. Maude. Thought u’d want to see this, it said underneath a photo. I clicked on it. “I can’t believe it,” I gasped. Instead of being a photo of something out of a horror movie, it looked like a page from one of those cute animal calendars. A sleeping Miss Piggy and Dr. Maude, curled together like some sort of giant fluff ball.
Mom looked at it and laughed. “Well, there you go. Sometimes it takes a while for some of the members to come around, but they do. Eventually.”
I don’t know if there are a lot of wedding videos where the ceremony has to be stopped so one of the maids of honor (me) can take hold of a crying baby (Ziggy) because she’s the only one with baby-whispering powers. But this one—with a title card that read “A film by Blair Lerner-Moskovitz”—had that. It also had a ponytailed wedding officiant (Dad) who used to be married to the bride (Mom) who cried through a long-bordering-on-too-long speech about the beauty of being able to watch your ex-wife find new love while his new baby mama (Sarah) cried along with him.
Laurel leaned over. “Is it just me or is all of this just a little weird?” she whispered.
“It’s not a little weird,” I whispered back. “It’s a lot weird.”
As Dad went on and on comparing life to flower petals before shushing Marissa, who wouldn’t stop whispering to a glum-looking Beatrice, I looked longingly at the tray of turkey and apple roll-ups that Lois had prepared as little pre-wedding hors d’oeuvres, and wondered if it would be considered really rude if I walked over and took some. For the last hour I had had hunger pains—a whole new experience for me because I never actually let myself get hungry. I had always heard they were sharp, but these were more constant and made me feel like I was going to throw up. And not just because a few times when I had glanced over at Blair I had caught him looking at me first.
And then it happened.
I was trying to pay attention to Dad’s story about Buddha, who lived a gazillion years ago, and how that tied in with modern-day families, but when the dripping feeling started, I got a little sidetracked. I felt the bottom of Ziggy’s diaper, but it was dry. So what was going on? I had purposely avoided drinking anything for an hour before the ceremony so that I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom in the middle of it, but that didn’t seem to matter. While my baby brother was able to hold his bladder, apparently I—his older sister—could not.
I tried to casually cross one leg in front of the other in an effort to stop the dripping, but casually was not something I had a lot of experience with, which explained why I bumped into Laurel.
Laurel gave me a look. “What are you doing?” she whispered.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I hissed.
“Can’t you just wait until the ceremony’s over?”
More dripping. Like a lot.
Um, no. I couldn’t just sneak out; there were only a few people here. So I raised my hand. “Excuse me. I hate to do this, but I really have to go to the bathroom,” I announced.
“But I was just about to read a poem by a seventeenth- century Sufi mystic,” Dad said.
“You can e-mail it me,” I yelled over my shoulder as I ran toward the bathroom.
I had thought I was done with Incidents-with-capital-I’s. First the Straightening Iron one, then the Hat one, and now the Peeing-in-My-Pants-During-My-Parents’-Wedding one. That one was so long I was going to have to abbreviate it to PIMPDMPW.
But as I looked at my underwear I realized I was wrong. This would not go down in history as the PIMPDMPW Incident.
Yes, this was my parents’ wedding day. But just as importantly, it would go down in history as the day that the Period Incident occurred.
I looked at my watch. November 4, 2:17 p.m. Finally—FINALLY—I had something to enter in the “Official Period Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning.”
Armed with two Advil (they were period cramps—not hunger pains!) and a maxipad topped by a minipad, I made my way back to the ceremony.
“Is everything okay?” Alan asked anxiously.
“Yup,” I said.
“You’re sure?” Mom asked.
“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to keep a straight face when what I really wanted to do, if I hadn’t been tone deaf, was break into song. “So, uh, where are we?”
Laurel looked at me. “Oh. My. God,” she gasped.
I couldn’t believe she knew what had happened. Actually, I could. It was a frister thing. I broke into a huge grin. “Uh-huh.”
“What?” Marissa demanded. “What is it? What’s ‘Oh my God’?” She turned to Beatrice. “Do you know what they’re talking about? What did we miss?”
Beatrice’s eyes were glazed over, as if she had left her body like twenty minutes earlier.
“Nothing,” Laurel and I said at the same time.
“So where are we?” I asked.
“We’re just about to do the vows,” Dad said. He turned to Mom and me. “Rebecca and Lucy, do you two take Alan and Laurel to be your lawfully wedded husband, daughter, father, and sister?”
She turned to me. “What do you think, Lucy?”
I smiled. “Okay.” I balled my hands into fists in an attempt to stop myself from adjusting my maxipad. You’d think with all the time I had spent practicing with them it wouldn’t feel so weird but it did.
Dad turned to Alan and Laurel. “Alan and Laurel, what about you guys? Do you two take Rebecca and Lucy to be your lawfully wedded wife, daughter, mother, and sister?”
“We do,” Laurel answered.
Maybe it was hormones, but I couldn’t help myself—I started to cry. And I didn’t care that I was being filmed not just by a TV crew but by my local crush.
“Well, then, there you have it—I now pronounce you a family. You can…all hug!”
And we did. For a very long time.
For the rest of the day, whenever I did something, I couldn’t help but think: This is the first fill-in-the-blank I’ve had/done since I got my period.
This is the first apple pig in a blanket I’ve had since I got my period.
This is the first time I’ve suffered through Marissa rambling since I got my period.
This is the first toast I’ve given at a wedding since I got my period. (Actually, it was the first toast I had given at a wedding ever.)
This is the first time I’ve danced with a boy who is not my frather since I got my period.
And, in that case, that was the first time I had danced with a boy, period.
“They sure eat a lot of apples up here, huh?” Blair asked after dinner as we picked at our apple pie à la mode (with apple ice cream, natch).
“Yeah. I guess.” That was the first time I said, “Yeah. I guess,” after getting my period, I thought to myself.
After flipping through Bill and Lois’s limited CD collection, Alan pulled one out. “Ooh—I love this one!” he cried. “And I know just what song to put on.” As he put it in the boom box, the sounds of some guy singing about not being able to smile without someone filled the living room.
“What is this?” I asked warily. The last time Alan had chosen the music, at the mock dance he had put together for me and him on the night of the Sadie Hawkins one, he had chosen Neil Diamond doing a sad duet with some lady named Barbra Streisand about how they didn’t bring each other flowers anymore.
“It’s Barry Manilow,” he replied. “‘Can’t Smile Without You.’”
Blair looked at me. “Never heard of the guy.”
“Me, neither,” I replied.
As we sat there, Mom and Alan began to dance, followed by Laurel and Austin and then Dad and Sarah and then Pete and Rose. Even Bill and Lois got into it. Beatrice and Marissa were off in the other room watching Antique Roadshow on PBS. (“Anything to drown out her talking,” Beatrice had said.)
“So, uh, you want to?” Blair asked, staring at the ground.
“Do I want to what?” I replied.
He gave a long sigh. “Dance!” he said, all upset.
“Jeez. You don’t have to get all huffy,” I said, just as upset.
“Well, do you?”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
We stood up and made our way to the dance floor, which was really just a sliver of space near the coffee table.
“So how do we do this?” Blair asked.
I looked around at everyone else. “I think you take your hands and put them on my hips, and I take mine and put them on your shoulders.”
He looked doubtful. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t know! It’s not like I’ve ever done this before. I mean, with someone who wasn’t an almost-parent.”
He reached out and put his hands near my hips without exactly touching them. They just kind of…hovered there.
“Are we going to do this or not?” I asked. “Because we don’t have to, you know. We could just—”
“Okay, okay,” he said, grabbing them so tight I’m surprised he didn’t squeeze the maxipad off of me.
“Ow.”
Once he loosened up on them, I reached up and put my hands on his shoulders. Or, rather, near his shoulders.
“I shouldn’t be the only one who’s doing this, you know,” he said.
“Fine,” I said, holding on to them as little as possible. Once we had bodily contact on both ends, we both relaxed a bit and began to…well, it wasn’t exactly dancing. It was more like we moved from side to side, sometimes in rhythm, but mostly not. With a lot of stepping on each other’s toes.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but is this supposed to be fun?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I think so. But you want to stop and go through my snack supply?”
“Yes,” he said as he quickly let go of me and headed for the stairs.
Okay, so maybe I couldn’t say I had danced with a boy for the first time. But still, it was something. At least I was on my way. And at least I had had my period when it happened.
As I got to the stairs I stopped and turned around.
There they were—my family. Some who had given birth to me; some I lived with now; and some who weren’t actually related to me but whom I still loved as if they were. To other people, it may have sounded confusing when I tried to explain how we all fit together, but to me?
It made perfect sense.