Slightly Engaged Read online

  That’s it, all right. Our Lady of Everlasting Misery is decked out with floral wreaths on the open doors, long black limousines parked out front and elegantly dressed Manhattanites milling alongside the white satin runner stretching down the front steps.

  Ah, weddings. Gotta love them.

  Grow old along with me…the best is yet to be…

  How romantic is it to stand up in front of everyone you ever knew and vow to be with one person all the days of your life?

  I experience a glorious flutter of anticipation until I remember that I’m not the bride here. That I may never be the bride anywhere. Not if I stick with Jack.

  Given that the alternative to sticking with Jack is breaking up with Jack, and that I happen to be head over heels in love with Jack, my flutter of excitement swiftly transforms into something that calls for Maalox.

  “This is going to suck,” Jack mutters as we pull into the crowded, sun-steamed parking lot beside the church.

  I’m not sure whether he’s referring to the challenge of finding an empty space or the big event itself, but in either case, I couldn’t agree with him more.

  Chapter 2

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the new Mr. and Mrs. Michael Middleford!”

  We all—me, Jack, my three co-workers and their spouses—stand and clap as the band launches into a rousing rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” Our table is in the far reaches of the room, a zone that’s obviously been designated for Work Friends and Aging Distant Relatives. There’s a row of walkers and canes and even a wheelchair lined up beside the adjacent table, where nobody is standing or clapping, presumably because the occupants can neither see nor hear.

  Mike and Dianne swoop into the reception hall with their clasped hands held high, resplendent in black tux and white gown. Mike looks dashing, and Dianne…

  “She looks like a cockroach,” Yvonne observes over the rim of her martini glass.

  “A cockroach? Yvonne, that’s a terrible thing to say about a bride.” Brenda’s Joisey accent seems stronger than ever here among the natives.

  “Not if it’s true,” Latisha proclaims.

  “Oh, it’s true.” Yvonne gives her Pepto-Bismol-tinted bouffant a little pat. “She might be all decked out in a tiara and veil but she still has a pinched little face and her eyes are beadier than the bodice of her dress. Cockroach.”

  “I couldn’t agree more, Why-vonne.”

  Naturally, that quip came from Jack, who is on his third scotch and consumed nary a liquor-absorbing mini-quiche or bacon-wrapped scallop during the cocktail hour. He claimed he lost his appetite when he was forced to kiss the bride in the receiving line.

  Yvonne nods, for once choosing not to chastise him for calling her Why-vonne, which he insists is his way of being affectionate. Never mind that Yvonne hates nicknames and generally shows affection for no one. Not even her husband, Thor.

  Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t love us all to death. Affection just isn’t her style. She’s a tough old New York broad who can generally be found steering clear of small children, kittens with yarn balls and potential group-hug situations.

  “Gawd, I hope you people weren’t trashing me at my wedding,” Brenda says with a shake of her big curly black hair. “Did you think I looked like a cockroach, too?”

  “Of course we didn’t, Bren,” I say reassuringly, avoiding Yvonne’s and Latisha’s eyes in case they, too, remember that we’d all cattily wondered how Brenda, in her billowing sequin-studded gown and towering rhinestone and tulle headpiece perched atop a mountain of teased hair, was going to fit through the doorway of the honeymoon suite.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you didn’t.” Brenda knowingly shakes her head at me, no doubt reminiscing about how we’d snidely speculated whether Yvonne got a senior citizen discount on the caterer for her green card marriage to her much younger Nordic pen pal, Thor. Oh, and how just last May we placed bets on whether Latisha’s enormous lactating boobs would actually pop out of her low-cut bridal bodice when she bent over to cut the cake.

  “Babe, what could anyone possibly say about you?” Paulie asks, patting Brenda’s shoulder. “Yo-aw go-aw-jus.”

  It takes me a second to decipher Paulie’s accent, and when I do, I have to smile. He and Brenda are so cute together. She’s far from gorgeous these days, with perpetual dark circles under her eyes and thirty extra pounds of postpregnancy weight. But Paulie is still madly in love with her after two years of marriage and a colicky newborn.

  “When I get married, I don’t know if I’ll dare to invite any of you,” I find myself saying. “There are plenty of things you can say about me.”

  “Tracey, we would never!” Brenda protests, then asks, nudging Jack’s arm, “So when are you guys getting married, anyway?”

  Terrific. I don’t dare look at him.

  “I was thinking a year from next February thirtieth would be good,” Jack says without missing a beat.

  “Very funny,” I mutter as the men chortle and the women bathe me in sympathetic glances.

  I reach for my gin and tonic and find that it’s empty. I’m about to flag down the passing waiter when I realize somebody’s got to drive the lemon-fresh minicar home. Judging by the way Jack’s imbibing, I’m assuming he’s assuming it won’t be him.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s raise a glass as our best man, Mike’s brother, Tom Middleford, toasts the bride and groom.”

  “He better keep it short and sweet,” Latisha murmurs as we all obediently lift our champagne flutes. “I’m ready for prime rib and garlic mashed potatoes.”

  I’m ready for prime rib and garlic mashed potatoes, too. What a shame that I was compelled to order the poached salmon and steamed baby vegetables.

  Yes, I live in constant fear of gaining back all the weight I lost two summers ago. So far, that hasn’t happened, thank God. But it might. The second I let down my guard, I’ll find myself straining to zip the old fat jeans I keep in the top of my closet as a reminder.

  With a sigh, I sip my ice water—which you wouldn’t expect would taste like tap water in a fancy place like this, but it does—and turn my attention to the toast.

  Unfortunately, Mike’s brother Tom is as eloquent a speaker as Mike is a writer. Meaning, his big speech is all but incoherent. Not because he’s drunk—at least, he doesn’t look drunk. What he looks is distressed. Distressed that his beloved big brother has just been joined for all eternity to a cockroach in a tiara.

  Or maybe I’m reading too much into his expression and his rambling, emotional speech. Maybe I shouldn’t assume that just because I’ve never met anyone who actually likes Dianne, such a person doesn’t exist. Maybe the best man is overcome by joy, and not sorrow.

  Nah.

  By the time Tom winds down his toast with a dismal, “Cheers,” I’m feeling mighty depressed about the evening ahead.

  “Anybody want to come to the smoking room with me?” Yvonne asks, snapping open her black clutch and pulling out a pack of Marlboros and a fancy lighter.

  All of us women immediately take her up on it, including Latisha, who doesn’t even smoke.

  The men—Yvonne’s husband, Thor, Brenda’s husband, Paulie, Latisha’s husband, Derek, and my non-husband, Jack—are content to stay put at the round flower-and-candle-bedecked table.

  The four of us traipse through the ballroom and out into the hallway, where a tiny closed-in space has been graciously set aside for those of us who are willpower-challenged, cancer-defiant, and thus still addicted to nicotine. A noxious haze rolls out when we open the door, but we pile into the crowded room and light up.

  Rather, three of us light up. Latisha fans the air with a hand that sports the recently bestowed wedding band she claimed not to want or need. As she fans, she asks, “Tracey, is it my imagination, or is Jack not into getting married?”

  “Oh, it’s your imagination,” I tell her breezily. “He’s actually got a diamond ring in his jacket pocket and he’
s just waiting for the right moment to pop the question.”

  Everyone laughs.

  I try to laugh but end up making the kind of sound one might make if an MTA bus rolled over one’s pinkie toe.

  “Are you okay?” Brenda asks as Latisha pats my arm and Yvonne’s eyes take on the deadly gleam reserved for bosses who ask her to start payment reqs at five to five on Friday afternoons and eligible bachelors who refuse to marry their live-in girlfriends.

  “Yes,” I say, inhaling my filtered menthol. “I’m okay.”

  When met with dubious silence, I add, “Sort of.”

  “Are you sure?” Brenda asks.

  “Of course she’s not okay,” Yvonne barks. “Her boyfriend refuses to marry her. She feels like shit. Who wouldn’t?”

  Maybe somebody who hasn’t been told that she should feel like shit, I can’t help thinking. I mean, if my friends weren’t here to validate my irritation with Jack, I might be able to convince myself that it’s just a typical guy thing; that I should just bear with him a while longer.

  After all, Jack isn’t downright commitmentphobic like my ex-boyfriend, Will, whom I dated for years without his even entertaining the notion of cohabitation.

  No, Jack asked me to move in with him practically the second we met.

  Then again…

  Don’t you think that’s a little suspicious?

  Yeah, me too. But only lately. For the first year of our relationship, I was blissfully happy and oblivious to the idea of ulterior motives.

  But that was back when I assumed that Engagement, Marriage and Baby Carriage would be the logical progression of our relationship. That’s how it seems to work for everyone else I know, though Latisha swapped the order of Marriage and Baby Carriage, and I seriously doubt there’s a Baby Carriage in Yvonne’s immediate future.

  Meanwhile, now that Jack and I are stalled at phase one, Living Together, I can’t help wondering why he wanted to do that in the first place.

  Was he merely desperate to get away from Mike’s eternal chipperness? Dianne’s eternal wenchiness? Brooklyn?

  Obviously, he could never have afforded a Manhattan apartment with a roommate, because half the rent on a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment is way beyond a media supervisor’s salary.

  Half the rent on a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment is just barely within Jack’s budget, and mine. So if we weren’t living together, he’d still be in a borough and I’d still be in my dingy downtown studio.

  Or maybe I’d have given up on New York City by now and moved back to my hometown way upstate. That’s what everyone back home always expected me to do sooner or later. The residents of Brookside know that one doesn’t leave home without someday regretting it…or, at the very least, paying a terrible price.

  I still remember the neighbor’s son who notoriously turned his back on his home, his family, his legacy.

  In other words, he moved to Cleveland. When he was run over by a snowplow in a freak accident, my parents said he’d gotten what was coming to him.

  Yes, I’m serious.

  I’m the first person in my family to move more than a few blocks away from my parents. They’ll never forgive me for moving four hundred miles away, and I’m sure they’re assuming I’ll eventually get what’s coming to me. That would explain why my mother’s always offering up novenas in my name.

  Forgiveness doesn’t come easily in the Spadolini family. My parents still haven’t forgiven me for daring to say that I don’t like the abundant fennel seeds in Uncle Cosmo’s homemade sausage, for missing Cousin Joanie’s first communion, for forgetting to call my grandmother on her birthday.

  I sent her flowers.

  But I didn’t call.

  In my family, you call.

  You can send somebody three dozen roses, imported Perugina Baci and front-row tickets to see Connie Francis, but if you don’t call, you’re out.

  So yeah, I’m out.

  Especially now that I’m living in sin.

  In my family, living in sin is one step away from killing somebody.

  Actually, it’s probably worse than killing somebody, considering my parents’ pride in our Sicilian roots, and how they’ve alluded to the fact that our ancestors weren’t exactly antigun lobbyists and didn’t take any crap from anybody.

  My father likes to share a colorful anecdote about his father’s compare Fat Naso, and what may or may not have happened to Scully, the neighbor who called Fat Naso’s mother something so heinous it can’t be repeated at Sunday dinner.

  Never mind that Fat Naso’s mother callously dubbed her own son Fat Naso because of his weight problem and prominent beak. Back then in Sicily, it was okay to insult somebody as long as you gave birth to them. Conversely, it was never okay to stand by while somebody else insulted the person who gave birth to you.

  Pop never comes right out and says what Fat Naso did, but I do know that he didn’t just stand by, and that Scully was never seen again. Pop is real proud of that.

  But he definitely isn’t proud of me, his daughter, the puttana.

  Okay, he’s never actually come right out and called me a puttana. But I know that to him and the rest of my family, a woman who blatantly sleeps with a man who isn’t her husband is a whore.

  The thing is, I don’t feel like a whore. Should I?

  I ask my friends just that.

  “You? A ho? Get outta here,” is Latisha’s response.

  “A whore is somebody who turns tricks for money, Tracey,” Yvonne informs me, in case I didn’t know the Webster’s definition.

  But Brenda, who grew up in an Italian-American Catholic family like mine, gets it. “My parents would have killed me if I lived with Paulie before we got married. They’d have called me a puttana and worse.”

  “What could be worse than puttana?” I ask her, and she shrugs.

  So do I. Then I say, “I wonder if it’s even worth it.”

  “If what’s worth what?” Yvonne asks, releasing a smoke ring that wafts into my face. Funny how my own smoke—the smoke I’m inhaling directly into my lungs—doesn’t bother me, but secondhand smoke does.

  Mental note: Stop for patch on way home. Time to quit.

  This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of that. Jack has been after me to quit smoking for a while now. He even promised me a weekend trip to a fancy spa outside Providence if I can go for an entire month without a cigarette.

  So far, I’ve made it through an entire morning. Several times.

  It’s the afternoon lull that’s a deal-breaker for me. I can never seem to get past the postlunch hump without lighting up. But I swear I will, sooner or later. I’ll do it for Jack. I’d do anything for Jack.

  “I wonder if living with Jack is worth the grief that my parents give me,” I tell my friends. “Maybe if I weren’t living with him, I’d already have a ring on my finger. Do you think I would?”

  Without the slightest hesitation, they all nod.

  Terrific.

  I definitely should have held out, like Dianne did. Well, it’s too late now.

  “What do you think I should do?” I ask the three of them. “And don’t tell me to break up with Will, because I know I can’t.”

  “Will?” Latisha echoes, her eyebrows edging toward her cornrows.

  “What?”

  “You said Will, Tracey,” Brenda points out. “Instead of Jack.”

  “I did not.”

  “Oh, yes, you did. And I bet it’s Freudian,” Yvonne informs me. “You’re in the same boat with Jack that you were with Will a few years ago.”

  “I am not,” I protest, even though I realize she might be onto something. “Jack isn’t Will. Jack loves me. Jack wants to live with me. Jack—”

  “Doesn’t want to marry you,” Yvonne cuts in. “Right?”

  “Wrong. He’s just not ready yet. It happens all the time with men.”

  Nobody says anything.

  I glance from Brenda (who started dating the devoted Paulie in junior high) to La
tisha (who turned down dedicated Derek’s repeated proposals for over a year) to Yvonne (who only intended to have a green card marriage and was promptly swept off her feet by dashing Thor).

  Well, what do they know? Their relationships are the exception.

  “You know what they say, Tracey,” Brenda tells me. “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never will.”

  “Was,” Yvonne corrects, stubbing out her cigarette. “If it doesn’t, it never was. Not Will.”

  “Why does everybody keep slipping up and saying ‘Will’?” Latisha asks slyly. “Does Brenda have a subconscious thing for him, too? Bren, are you secretly lusting after Will?”

  “Yeah, and I’m secretly lusting after Carson from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, too.”

  Did I mention that all my friends were convinced Will was closeted and I was a deluded fag hag? No? Well, they did. And obviously still do. At least the Will-being-closeted part.

  “Look, Tracey, the point is, maybe you need to set Jack free and see what happens.”

  Maybe Brenda’s right. Good Lord, is this dismal, or what?

  “Come on,” Latisha says cheerfully. “I bet it’s time for dinner.”

  After a ladies’ room pit stop, where I ensure that I am still looking ravishing in red—so why doesn’t Jack want to marry me?—we troop back out to the ballroom, where the band is playing “Always and Forever.” That song, I recall, is supposed to be Mike and Dianne’s first dance together. But the dance floor is empty, the newlyweds are nowhere in sight, and the crowd seems vaguely uneasy.

  “What happened to the bride and groom?” I ask Jack, sliding into my seat.

  He sips his scotch. “Oh, they left.”

  “They left?”

  “Yeah, you just missed it. They started dancing and then they had an argument. You should have seen it, Trace,” he says almost gleefully. “She was shaking her fist at him and everything. Right out there on the dance floor with everyone watching. Then she went stomping away and he chased after her. Wuss.”