Chapter 2
It turns out the hotel my mom’s wedding is to be held at is in Georgetown—a charming, wealthy section of Washington, DC without access to the metro. But it’s not until I get off at the nearest stop that I realize I’ve made a grave error. Too late now. I already made the decision to save myself the cab fare, and what have all those spin classes been for if not to prepare me for this moment?
It’s an old city—well, old by American standards—and the uneven sidewalks aren’t doing me or my gigantic suitcase any favors. The air feels about a thousand degrees, and the humidity exceeds sauna levels of saturation. By the time I arrive in Georgetown, my suitcase bumping and rattling the whole way, I have a blister on my foot and pit stains beneath my arms, and my previously tasteful ballet bun has devolved into a frizzy pouf on top of my head.
The neighborhood is bubbling over with charm. Colorful townhouses line the streets with window boxes full of tumbling, flowering vines. Lush trees do their best to provide shelter from the baking sun. Tourists snap photos as they walk, and students from the university dart in and out of salad shops and bookstores. Cars pack the street running down the center of it all, competing for impossibly small parallel parking spots.
As I approach the glass doors of the elegant hotel, I make determined eye contact with a bellman who’s looking at me apprehensively. As though he’s unsure about the protocol of allowing a deranged bag lady into the lobby. All around me, black sedans sit with calm serenity, with tinted windows and interiors undoubtedly clean, and fresh with air conditioning. A woman saunters past in white flowing slacks and a beige silk camisole. Her blond hair is twisted into an elegant chignon, and she talks on her phone in crisp syllables. I march past her, determined to claim my place here, among these beautiful, wealthy people. It doesn’t matter that I’m limping on what I am fairly sure is a bloody foot.
When it becomes obvious that I’m not slowing down, the doorman seems to accept the fact that he’s going to have to acknowledge me, and he swings the door open with a white-toothed smile and a nod. The cold air hits me like a divine blessing from God himself. On a large glass table, adorned with a stunning display of orange and pink flowers that I’m too hot and exhausted to fully appreciate, there are tall glass vessels containing ice water with sliced cucumbers. I stagger towards it like a woman wandering out of the desert, dragging my purple suitcase and simultaneously trying to wriggle the heel of my foot out of my shoe to give myself some relief.
It’s not until I’m on my second glass of cucumber water that I take the time to really absorb my surroundings. The air is scented with lavender, and discreet sconces glow softly so that no one here will ever have to face the prospect of being seen under bad lighting. Here, everyone gets to be beautiful. A modernist chandelier soars proudly from the ceiling overhead. To the left are the doors to a restaurant and bar, and on my right a bank of elevators. A man seated at a large, black grand piano plays a soft tinkling tune, and ahead of me, behind a long desk of blond wood, a stunning woman in a dark suit is squinting in my direction. She must have deduced by my luggage that I am, in fact, in the right place, despite everything else about me screaming intruder.
When I’ve checked in and collected my key card, I ride the elevator up to the fourth floor. I’ve never been so grateful to reach a hotel room before. When the door swings shut behind me, the silence comes as a benediction. It's tastefully appointed, all varying shades of unobjectionable taupe and white. The bed’s headboard goes all the way up to the ceiling, and a large panoramic image of the city hangs on the opposite wall.
I desperately need the fluffy duvet on the oversize bed, access to the mini bar, and a soaking tub. These things are luxuries, but throughout the day they quickly came to feel like necessities. The talismans I was holding on to, to keep me moving towards my destination. It’s not just that I’m exhausted from the journey to the hotel, or the oppressive heat of this city, or the awkwardness of walking into the ritzy hotel while looking like I just went for a swim in the Potomac River. It’s everything. The fact that I’m going to this wedding feels like an insult. Plus, Cara isn’t with me, and I’m going to have to face my ex-fiancé and meet his new girlfriend who is (I know from my not-at-all creepy or obsessive internet sleuthing) gorgeous, and it means the weekend looming ahead of me feels as appealing as walking into a graveyard in the dead of night.
The last time I saw Rob he was sitting on the opposite end of my sofa looking mournfully at me with his golden retriever eyes and shaking his head.
“It’s just way too complicated, Daisy. I can’t do this. I can’t stop… thinking about it. Every time I look at you it’s right there, like a damn splinter.”
“When you look at me?” I’d asked, as though I didn’t understand. Although I understood perfectly well. My face, I learned, had become a constant, terrible reminder for him.
Things had become unwieldy. Horribly complicated and painful for us both. Actually, to be perfectly frank, they were fucked up. It was the sort of thing people tune into daytime TV to watch to make themselves feel better about their own small messes. Other people whose lives have devolved into utter chaos. Other people who can’t keep their shit together. We were never supposed to be those people, and yet there we were, attempting to untangle a shamble that was so out of control it seemed to have formed a life of its own.
“How the hell are we supposed to move past this?” he’d asked me. “Infidelity is supposed to be a deal breaker.”
I’d been unable to look at his face when he said that. I knew what he saw when he looked at me. I knew he saw dishonesty and disloyalty, and that he had come to believe I wasn’t the person he thought I was. The injustice of that punched me in the stomach so hard it was almost nauseating, but I tried to win him back to my side—the side that wanted to fight for our relationship.
“We move past it by choosing to move past it,” I’d argued. “We can deal with this, just like we’ve dealt with everything else.”
“Everything else? What would you compare this to, Daisy?” His voice had risen as his temper increased, and I shrank back. “This isn’t exactly a disagreement about bills, or who does the dishes or something, you know?” He’d run his hands through his blond hair in frustration, gripping his scalp like he could tug an answer from his head. “It’s embarrassing! I mean, can you even imagine going out with friends at this point? Family holidays? With what everyone knows?”
I couldn’t, but as far as I was concerned, that was beside the point. The point was that relationships should be resilient, and ours was proving not to be. I knew what was happening—our engagement was ending. I should have been crushed. But the overriding feeling was disappointment. Just as Rob had begun to see me as a different person, I realized he had been a different person all along. I wanted to fight for our relationship; he wanted to walk away when things were at their most difficult.
My eyes had welled with tears, but I’d finally accepted defeat and nodded, and Rob had left with a box of his things. When I tried to give him back the ring, he had refused it with a rueful shake of his head. He’d kissed me on the forehead, a chaste kiss, like a child. And that was it—the end of our present, the end of our future.
I’d called my mom immediately and wailed over the phone and she tutted at me, and I heard her talking to Michael in the background while she cooked dinner. Cara had, of course, been there immediately, spending hours watching all of our favorite girl movies while drinking wine and gorging on chocolate. She was irate.
“We should burn his apartment down,” she’d suggested while I cried.
“You can’t just burn down one apartment, Cara,” I said through the tears.
“Fine, we sneak in and hold up a lighter to his sprinklers, and we drown his apartment instead.” And then I’d begun laughing through all the crying, and she’d held me to her breast like a mother hen and let me fall asleep with my head resting in her lap.
I’d woken the next morning on the sofa, with my own pillow, and the blankets from my bed wrapped around me. Cara was asleep in the Poang chair from Ikea, her head tilted to the side, with a small string of drool leading to a puddle in the groove of her collarbone.
We’ve since implemented what she calls the Cara Test, which means I am only to date men who live up to her standards of masculine appeal mixed with soft-hearted tenderness. Dates, however, have been few and far between, because I just can’t seem to spark with anyone. Apparently, there’s something off-putting about a woman wallowing in a universe of self-pity.
As far as anyone else knows, Rob and I had just grown apart. Cara was the only one I’d ever told the full story to, but our modern era doesn’t make secrets easy to keep, and just like Rob had predicted, the truth of what had happened was soon clear to anyone who cared to look.
For the next six months I’d gone to work and to the gym and then home, keeping a healthy distance from everyone except Cara, and stayed as far away from social media as I possibly could. But when I had to get on Instagram to work on a social media push for my department, I’d been unable to resist the temptation to check out Rob’s social media, and I saw her. Tall and slender and sporty with hiking boots (duh, we live in Colorado) and a ponytail that probably swings back and forth like a cute jump rope when she’s out on the trail. And that was when the last little glimmer of hope that the life I had imagined for myself—for myself and Rob—was really gone. I didn’t begin to come back to life until my boss let me take the lead on my first big campaign—to get a piece of land put into conservation. But then, of course, I lost that fight too, because I haven’t been able to do anything right this entire year.
I lie sprawled across the fluffy hotel bed for a while, staring at the ceiling, reliving the last year of my life like a reel of film, and then decide it’s time to stop moping and enjoy what’s in front of me. The soaking tub and the variety of complimentary soaps on offer are irresistible, and I draw myself a luscious bubble bath. I shave my legs (long neglected) and wash my hair, then read my book while the bubbles slowly evaporate. Finally, when my fingers and toes have turned to prunes, I climb out and wrap myself in a robe and climb under the covers of the plush bed, exhausted and still, embarrassingly, feeling sorry for myself. This won’t do. I’m in a new city, in a luxury hotel, and most of the guests won’t be flying in until tomorrow, which means that if I want to hit the restaurant downstairs without fear of being recognized, now is the time.
When I open my suitcase to get dressed, I realize right away that it’s been riffled with. It’s not the first time this has happened. The TSA will occasionally get extra handsy with my things, and I’m not worried about stolen items since I don’t have anything valuable to begin with, but I unpack my copious amounts of stuff anyways. I have shoes for any eventuality, including an impromptu trip to Appalachia or a night at the opera, dresses upon dresses, jeans, workout gear, slacks and tank tops, a blazer, a windbreaker, nail polish, earrings, balls of yarn. I don’t put it away, exactly, but I do sort of organize things into sections, and hang up the dresses so they don’t get wrinkled. And that’s when I see the dress. The dress for the wedding.
The very important, very expensive dress that I purchased specifically because it’s short enough to make my legs look long and the straps thin enough to make my shoulders look delicate. The dress that is supposed to make Rob realize what a mistake he made, and make my mom realize that her daughter is something special after all, and prevent all of our collective friends and family from pitying me . This very important dress has a snag in the silk right across the bust that pulls and bunches in a way that absolutely cannot be repaired. I’m going to have to find a new, perfect evening dress in a city that I don’t know, in one day. And I’m a petite size. As in, sizes for short people. I can’t just walk into a store and expect everything to fit just right. There’s a whole special section for the vertically challenged ladies of the world, and most stores have relegated them to the internet. Shit.
But, after ruminating over this dilemma, and talking myself off a ledge, I decide that this is a problem not worth worrying about until tomorrow, and I go to dinner.