A few months after I moved in, Graham proposed. It was simple, really, and quite nice. Probably what my dream proposal would be in very different circumstances. We ate dinner outside, watching the sunset and listening to sirens, betting two dollars on whether it was an ambulance, police car, or fire truck before someone leaned over the banister to check. When it was dark, and the fairy lights flickered on, I looked over to Graham, sitting beside me on the couch, and he kissed me. It was a moment—one of very few—that felt almost unadulteratedly blissful. Sometimes, when I let my guard down, I would find myself getting used to this life—the spoils of being with someone like Graham, who thinks you deserve the world and has the money to prove it.
He leaned into me and for a second I thought he was going to put his head in my lap, but when he leaned back I realized he’d pulled a ring box out of his pocket. My first thought was how uncomfortable it must have been for him to be sitting on it all night, like the pea in the mattresses in that story my mother used to tell me.
Inside the navy blue box was a piece of Walker history: his mother’s engagement ring, which she inherited from Douglas’s great-grandmother. A kite-set diamond, on a delicate gold filigree band. If I were to be honest for a moment, this is exactly the engagement ring I would have wanted.
“Marry me...”
He said it in a way that was difficult to define. It was not a question. He did not ask me if I wanted to marry him, or give me an opening for a yes-or-no answer. It was more of a statement. Less harsh than a demand, but something deceivingly close.
“I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” I finally said, letting him slide my three-carat fate onto my finger. I hugged him and didn’t let him go until I could muster a few happy tears and make sure a believable smile was plastered onto my face.
For years I felt numb. Hollow. Like I was just going through the motions, resigned to my fate. But, for the briefest second, as my face nuzzled into Graham’s neck, still smelling of chlorine from a recent workout that made my head spin, I felt a strike of excitement in my chest. It lasted a millisecond, like lighting on the Freedom Tower, but it was there. And it was exactly what I needed to step back, look at my fiancé, and kiss him.
I didn’t want an engagement party, but I knew it was part of the process. Like a sweet sixteen or quinceañera or debutante ball, announcing us and our intentions to the world. We’d send out invitations (come celebrate with us!) that would no doubt occupy a top spot on countless strangers’ refrigerators; we’d find a venue, hire a caterer, bring in a band. It was like a prewedding; a party for the locals to give you a taste of how great the actual wedding will be. And Veronica volunteered her Walker party planning expertise.
“What about all of Doug’s Vermont cronies?” I had asked, the day Veronica came over to order everything online, using the address book from their engagement party as a baseline—it’s not like I had anyone to invite. I’d insisted all the invitations only refer to me as Eliza. Not Eliza Bennet. Not Elizabeth. But just Eliza. I’m already more of a Walker than I ever was a Bennet, I’d explained, staring into Graham’s eyes the way everyone expected me to when saying something like that.
“Just locals for the engagement party,” Veronica explained. “Everyone gets the wedding invite, though. Get ready for an onslaught of Doug’s important friends. And their checkbooks.”
“If you don’t have anything nice to say,” I began, “write a check instead.”
She laughed, but I’m not sure she understood the joke.
Three months after we got engaged, I was standing on a rooftop in Midtown, a place Veronica loved but couldn’t book for her own engagement. It looked like a tight and trim Versailles garden, with paths between tidy shrubs surrounding the perimeter of a grassy center, all in twenty-five hundred square feet of Rockefeller Plaza. However, instead of a golden palace where a war was ended towering behind us, we got a hulking St. Patrick’s Cathedral, looming over me like an abusive boyfriend, lit from below as the sun went down to give the same air of menace I was feeling. Like the church was watching us, counting our sins one by one. An unbelievably apt and twisted mind-fuck that Veronica wasn’t clued in enough to know she’d planted.
Maybe that’s why my mother kept popping into my head that evening. I did not think about my parents—or my brothers or the farm—often. At first I was afraid that would be my downfall, that being here with these people would force out of me a longing for my old life—a life that was simple, but difficult in other ways. Money couldn’t buy us out of all our problems; instead my parents believed we could pray our way out of them. Pray for guidance, pray for a solution, pray for it all to go away.
That shit never worked for me.
“You need another?” one of the waitstaff asked, hovering beside me with a tray of empty glasses, a rainbow of lipstick stains scattered on the surfaces like an advertisement for Sephora. She couldn’t be older than eighteen and if she was, I needed to know her skincare routine. I was immediately jealous but not enough to ask. She smiled kindly. “I’ve been told to keep a special eye out for you and...him,” she said with a wink, as if I didn’t know I’d get special attention at my own fucking engagement party.
She nodded toward Graham, who stood near the entrance greeting Jim and Ellis, two friends from work. They all came up at BlackRock together. Though none of them are self-aware enough to discuss it, I’m sure they were also subconsciously drawn to each other as three men who only work in finance to please the whims of their overbearing and under-caring fathers.
Graham looked especially good today. He’d come home from work a few days before with a bag from Carson Street Clothiers and the excitement of a child anxious to tell me everything he just bought.
“It’s apparently what all the celebs are wearing,” he said in the prim voice of Charles, the man who always styles him. He spun around in the navy blue suit, paired with a plain white T-shirt and brown wing tips and he looked hot. An understated sophistication that, I knew, would go perfectly with the light blue floral maxi dress I had decided to wear. The dress made me feel like a carefree wife who goes to 10:30 a.m. Pure Barre classes and always has perfectly beachy curls and shops down Madison Avenue on a Tuesday afternoon. But it also reminded me of my mother’s church dress, the one she made herself out of a similar blue floral-patterned fabric that had been donated to the church office. She’d worn it every single Sunday as long as I could remember, and hand-washed it in the bathtub with the kind of slow tenderness I think about sometimes when I’m doing dishes.
I like to think I looked like what she could have been in another life. I do have her eyes.
“He doesn’t drink...” I told the waitress, slipping my empty vodka soda onto her tray and staring at the three of them as they laugh in anxiety-inducing harmony. I could feel her staring at me, probably processing the two or three old-fashioneds she’d already served him this evening. I could taste the whiskey on him an hour ago.
When I finally turned to her, she’d lost whatever Jergens glow she had on her face before and her mouth was agape in that unattractive way it falls if you’re not paying attention. A bug is going to fly into your mouth, I wanted to tell her, a line my mother repeated to us whenever we opened our mouths or cried in public.
“Just kidding,” I finally said, a gentle smile on my face, the kind that merely lifts your cheeks but doesn’t touch your eyes. “I would like something else, actually. Perhaps a sauv blanc?”
She nodded and turned before responding any further, no doubt desperate to get the fuck out of here before I could play with her anymore, which is always a satisfying power. The only power I had that day, it turned out.
My dress blew ever so slightly with the wind, and I was thinking about my mother again. I kept imagining her here, walking around in that graceful way she did, like she was floating—a stark contrast from my father’s lead feet stomping around the rickety house, always like he was on a mission. It was a trait we only became thankful for once we appreciated it for what it was: a warning.
I imagined my mother, in her church clothes, greeting Graham. He’d tower over her bony five-foot-two-inch frame. She wasn’t allowed heels and got skinnier and skinnier with each child, like all her excess anything went into us from birth. Her forehead was creased with years of worry, her crow’s feet deep from a lifetime of planting in the sun. She always had dirty hands and soil-filled nails, except on Sundays. She’d stand at the kitchen sink, yelling for us to hurry up, while scrubbing her skin raw with a brittle brush. She kept a tin of O’Keeffe’s in her nightstand, always working it into her hands and elbows to try to undo the damage.
I think, on the surface, she’d be disappointed in my relationship; marrying an agnostic banker, living with him in sin, taking birth control so I could fuck him whenever I wanted. More than that, I think she’d hate that I’d become dependent on Graham—his money, his family, his success. I didn’t need him, but as far as this life went, the life I’d gotten used to, the second he was gone, it was gone—the roof over my head, the clothes on my back, any kind of security I felt. Right now, he and his money served all my basic needs. That was part of the plan, of course, but as far as appearances went, she’d be unimpressed I couldn’t live this life myself.
My parents met at a church singles’ night, got married in a joyous ceremony with a dry after-party at my grandparents’ farm. My mother even had a job for a brief period in the beginning—a secretary at the elementary school in town. That is, until she got pregnant and it was deemed inappropriate for a pregnant married woman to work; until they had moved hours away from her family, from town, from any kind of normalcy, because he found a good deal on an expansive Christmas tree farm near a church far more extreme than the one my mother had grown up in. Until he was in control of her money, her chores, her reproductive system. Until she became them and my mother turned from Grace into the woman I knew. Into someone’s wife.
But under those layers of fear, so deep-seated I’m not sure anyone would be able to exhume it, I think she’d be proud of me. For doing what she said. For taking the scariest leap and leaving them and the farm. For getting an education and a job that pays more money than my parents have ever seen. For reading whatever books and wearing whatever clothes and doing whatever activities—not only because I could afford it but because I had freedom. I had autonomy. I had everything.
I think that would thrill her.
She never wanted what she got. And she especially didn’t want it for me. I was their only daughter. She used to call me her second life.
Don’t think of us, I remembered. Do not—
“Here you go.” A glass of wine so clear it almost looked like water was dangling in front of me and I took it from the waitress’s streaky tan hand quickly, nodding a thank-you I couldn’t quite get out of my mouth.
At least, I like to think my mother would be proud. But part of me wonders if she’s even still alive. If she received the brunt of the repercussions when I never came home. Someone had to, and my father would absolutely assume a female conspiracy. I haven’t talked to them since the day I left for school. Communication wasn’t exactly easy considering the only phone my family had was hidden around the house at my father’s will and used for emergencies only. But I could have tried—I could have called the church, asked them to send a message to my mom. I could have left messages on the phone, updated them on how I was doing, what classes I was taking. I could have told them about Ruthie.
But all of those things felt like an opportunity to be taken away; an excuse for my father to assume I was doing badly, making poor decisions, hanging out with the wrong people. It started to feel like the less I reminded my father that I was there, the more likely he’d forget about me entirely. Leave me alone. Let me get out.
So I never called. I never went home. I never spoke to them again.
Don’t think of us, my mother told me the day I was leaving for school. The last time I saw her. She had just put my necklace in my hand and told me to hide it in my bra until I was on campus, away from them, away from my father. Don’t think of us, she said, her eyes shining at me. Do not—
My father walked in then, barreling through the front door and into the creaky foyer, annoyed that I wasn’t sitting in the car waiting for him. Bringing me to school was an inconvenience. It meant he had to be sober enough to drive.
I never found out what my mother was going to say just then. Before she could finish, I was pulled by my hair to the loaded car and thrown into the passenger’s seat so hard I thought I might have bruised my hip.
Don’t think of us, she said. Then, after that? I like to think she was going to say do not come back.
“Can I do the same, please?” I looked up to see Lena standing next to me, sending the waitress away with another order before the girl could try to invade my personal space again. “Nice party.”
I was grateful for the distraction. I didn’t want to think about my mother anymore. Not now.
“Thanks to Veronica,” I said, lifting my glass toward the center of the garden where my future sister-in-law party planner, wearing an off-white dress a little too bridal for me to not be somewhat offended, bent down in her four-inch heels to whisper something to Reed.
Lena and I leaned into each other with a cheek-to-cheek kiss greeting, the kind of affection rich people save for when they don’t want their makeup to smudge. But then I go rogue and wrap her into a hug, my wineglass moving gingerly around her as I bring her in close.
“This is...nice...” she said into my ear, confused but not uninterested in the affection. Or the attention that some affection from the bride brings.
Behind her I could see a few people watching us, but my eyes moved quickly past them to the bartender—a lanky woman in a suit and tie with a bob of dark hair and arms that seemed thick underneath her formal black jacket. I smiled at her. She nodded at me.
“Sauv blanc,” the waitress said, handing Lena her drink after I released her from my selfish grip.
We both thanked her properly this time and Lena clanked my glass surreptitiously, like our celebration was different from the one for which everyone else was here.
“Engaged,” she said, more to herself than to me. I could have sworn she side-eyed my ring. But I’d gotten so used to people gazing at it that I didn’t think about it anymore. It was just a five-figure addition to my hand. “I’m honored to have introduced you.”
I took a sip of wine to stop myself from rolling my eyes. She loved bringing that up. As if I hadn’t planned the introduction all along.
“Now I’ll return the favor...” I leaned back against a decorative light pole. “Don’t look now, but the bartender has been eyeing you.”
She looked, of course, but in the inconspicuous way I expected her to, never moving too quickly, taking a deep breath before doing anything, always in control. She doesn’t operate in a manner that would get her caught for looking. She’s too composed for that.
“She’s cute,” Lena said when she turned back to me, satisfied.
“You should go for it.”
“Yeah?” She looked back at the bartender intentionally this time, staring at her for long enough to establish interest. It was like they were having sex with their eyes across my engagement party. She’ll definitely be Lena’s guest at the wedding.
Lena was about to say something when glasses started clanking around the garden, the sound bouncing off the buildings around us, and Veronica approached.
“Toast time,” she sang, tugging at my arm and pulling me toward the center of the party where Graham was waiting and a circle had begun to form, everyone gently tapping forks or knives or spoons against champagne flutes that had mysteriously appeared in everyone’s hands.
“I’d like to make a toast...”
Reed’s voice echoed around me like the precursor to an avalanche as he climbed onto a chair. The impossibly short, silent, eerie beat before everything begins to crumble.
Graham put his arm around my waist and turned me to face Reed and I reminded myself to smile, to show teeth, to exude joy from my stance and my eyes. The more you look like you’re actively laughing, the harder it is for anyone to decipher what’s actually happening underneath.
“I’m the groom-to-be’s brother, for anyone here who doesn’t know. Actually—” he scanned the room quickly “—is there anyone here who didn’t know that?”
From the bar in the back, Brittany and Ashleigh and a few of my colleagues raise their hands and cheer like we’re at a talk show and the host mentioned the small town in Missouri they grew up in. Judging from the way Brittany’s skinny strap kept falling over her shoulder, I’m guessing she was at least two drinks in and, no doubt, discussing how she wished Reed weren’t married.
“Eliza doesn’t have a lot of family, that’s what I’m told. At least not family she’s introduced us to—” He motioned toward himself and his parents. “She could have a secret second life no one knows about...” The crowd laughs and I do, too. Because it was a joke, of course. “We always thought that was kinda strange. A girl we know almost nothing about—I mean, she had five suitcases when she moved in with my little brother. Her entire life in five suitcases. And she just walks in here and takes Graham for all he’s got.” He looked at Veronica, who was sitting at the table in front of him gushing like a mom at her kid’s first ballet recital. “At least no one’s questioning how quickly we got married, babe. This was way faster.”
The crowd offered a few uncomfortable laughs.
“The day I met Eliza was the day she moved in with those five suitcases. I was there to help them unpack but there was nothing for me to do. Literally nothing. She’s the first female minimalist to ever exist.”
All the women in the room laugh, to make Reed feel less bad about offending us, in that charming way we care about other people’s emotions before our own. I look up at Graham, who’s smiling but cautiously, like concern might be bubbling in him the same way it was in me.
“And I knew the second I saw her that she looked familiar. I told her that—I said I feel like we’ve met before. I was convinced we had. I mean, look at her—” All our guests turned toward me, looking me up and down. I smiled back believably, but it was only believable because just two people there knew me well enough to read through it. “She doesn’t exactly have a face you forget,” Reed continued, once he got everyone’s attention again. I felt myself get rigid in Graham’s arm. Was this really going to happen here? At my engagement party? The gig was going to be up after all this? I was so close.
“I started racking my brain, you know, trying to come up with places we would have met. Did we grow up together? No, she’s from Rhode Island, we’re from Vermont. What about college? No, she went to Brown, we went to Yale. That semester we studied in Spain? No, she was in London. Then I had the sudden panic that, well...maybe we’d hooked up...” The room exploded in guffaws loud enough to break the stained glass windows of the church behind us. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I felt like Graham’s hand on my waist was getting too tight, my dress was shrinking. If there was ever a moment in my five-year plan that I wanted to run, this was it.
“I’m kidding,” Reed continued, laughing, his hands out to the crowd apologetically. “We never hooked up. Don’t worry. Wouldn’t want to start a rumor here—”
“—she’s too good for you,” Graham yelled, squeezing me tighter against him as the crowd bloomed in laughter again. Talking about me like I wasn’t standing right next to him. Like every time he wobbled in his buzzed happiness, I wasn’t the one keeping him stable.
I kept a smile plastered on my face like I thought this was charming. Just boys being boys, and all that other bullshit. I scanned the crowd and saw Veronica, still staring at her husband with stars in her eyes. There were Jim and Ellis, slapping their knees and taking a sip of scotch from the old boys’ club. There were my coworkers, by the bar, laughing only because they were grateful for a break from talking to one another.
Then I saw the bartender, the woman who was inevitably going home with Lena tonight, standing next to the caterer, both staring at Reed with the kind of straight face reserved for funerals and boring subway rides. Finally, someone who was allowed to look the way I felt. Bored, unenthused, and, honestly, ready to go home. At least they were getting paid to listen to this shit, I guess.
Reed finally calmed the crowd down by saying, “The faster I’m finished, the faster we can get back to drinking,” which was so déclassé I could physically feel Cheryl shaking with embarrassment from across the room. “This is all to say,” Reed continued, red-faced both from the gin and from the satisfaction of making an entire room laugh, “I guess she looked familiar because she’s always been my sister. I just didn’t know it yet.”
The room awwed and I pretended to wipe a tear from the corner of my left eye. Emotional didn’t look good on him. It looked pathetic. Like he was trying too hard. Like maybe he was playing some kind of game, too.
After Graham and I hugged him and the entire room cheered and drank to our union, I excused myself and slowly made my way to the bathroom. I was about to open the door when I realized what I really wanted was the employees-only bathroom, one where no one could find me and touch me and congratulate me. Congratulations for what? I always want to say back. For proving I’m lovable?
I snuck into the kitchen, where only a few suit-clad waiters stood delicately placing prosciutto-wrapped honeydew and mac and cheese balls on metal trays and followed a WR arrow down a steep staircase and onto a platform.
When I pushed through the heavy door, the automatic lights flickered on like a bad horror movie. It took three blinks of darkness before they stayed lit, fluorescent and slightly blue, reflecting off the white tiled floor and walls like fake daylight. The room was cold and damp and I felt uncomfortable in how out of place I was. I hadn’t peed in a bathroom without complimentary deodorant and Q-tips in over a year.
I sat on the toilet in one of the stalls unsure if I needed to throw up or pass out. Neither would relieve the nausea that speech had brought on. My head was spinning with the thought of being recognized, of the conversation in the closet, of the night we met. God, I fucking hate him. I hate everything about all of them.
The door whispered open, and I steeled myself, preparing for someone to recognize my shoes under the janky gray stall and realize I didn’t belong here. I’m sorry, they’d apologize, as if they were invading my space. As if I hadn’t prevented them from relieving themselves comfortably.
I heard two sets of practical shoes pulse against the tile floor until they were standing at the sink, still. They turned the faucet on and let the water run, probably staring at a sign that says Employees Must Wash Hands while washing their hands. The sound of water running was helpful, distracting, a much-needed separation from my own thoughts. I sat there and breathed deep, healing breaths, breaths a doctor or yoga teacher would be proud of, until the nausea subsided, and I started craving another drink. My last, probably until the wedding. The conversation about which wedding diet I was planning to undertake had already started. And none of them allowed drinking your calories.
I stood up and pretended to re-dress and flushed the fresh toilet water down the drain.
When I opened the stall door, the caterer and the bartender were there, no longer leaning over the sinks but standing still, hands clean and dripping wet onto the floor, the water still running like a wasteful noise machine.
I moved to the sink in between theirs and they watched me wash my hands, just standing there, silently, watching like prison guards untrusting I wouldn’t take my own life or the life of another. I rubbed my hands in boiling water like my mother had done each Sunday. It felt like they’d never be clean.
The caterer pulled a paper towel from a stray roll sitting damp and crusted on the countertop and handed it to me. I pulled back from the sink and took it, gently patting my hands so they wouldn’t get irritated and bleed from the hot water on my dry skin.
“You okay?” the bartender asked.
I nodded.
Neither of them seemed satisfied with that answer. They continued to look at me through the mirror. Did they think I was floundering? Having second thoughts? Cold feet before the wedding planning even started?
I stood up straight and let out a deep breath. Then I turned off my sink, then the other two, until the room was so quiet you could hear the heartbeat of the party happening two floors up.
“Everything’s going fine,” I said. I looked at the two of them, feeling more at home with the help than my guests. They stared, more unconvinced by the minute. “We’re good,” I repeated. “It’s all good.”
I tossed the paper towel into the bin and walked out.