Chapter 13
Wedding planning should come with a hazard warning, Liz thought to herself as the wind whipped her hair. Wedding planning was nothing like the dream that all those movies made it out to be.
She and Cam were seated on the upper deck of the ferry, where a blond goldendoodle with big brown eyes grinned goofily at her from across the aisle. His mouth was wide open, a pink tongue slipping out with each pant. The red bandanna tied around his neck read “Meet Me on Fire Island.” His owner held the leash like a clamp, the dog practically buzzing, as eager to jump off the ferry and leap toward a beach weekend as the humans on board.
“What’s his name?” Liz asked the dog’s owner.
“Sunny,” she replied with a smile.
Liz gestured to the gorgeous day, the gorgeous bay. “Fitting,” she said.
She wished she could appreciate the simple joy of this moment, but she was still a hundred miles away, back in New York.
Yesterday had started out fine enough. After weeks of dodging to-do lists and half-heartedly participating in the daily “Peters Plan” Wedding Summit calls, where Roseanne and her assistant, Meghan, debated the merits of low-rise floral centerpieces versus tall ones, with fancy verbiage Liz was sure they used but was never inclined to remember, she finally made the only appointment to which she was genuinely looking forward:
Dress shopping.
She called the boutique and scheduled the appointment for only one. No guests, no bridesmaids, no friends, no parents. Only Liz.
The one person whose taste Liz had ever trusted was her mom. She’d never had any sisters to shop with, to share hand-me-downs. Liz’s dad had picked up and left, ditching their family and any responsibilities of fatherhood before she could walk, but it didn’t matter. Loneliness had been a rarity in the Grey household. Nancy had made even an empty room feel full with her loud Brooklyn accent and infectious, generous laughter. Mother and daughter alike had earth-shattering bellows that charmed any who passed. Nancy would sneak the “Closed” sign on Grey’s Garments, her alterations and custom gowns studio, pick up Liz early from school, and the two would spend the late afternoons spinning around any vintage rack they could find. They’d take the train to the city and run their hands along the bolts of fabric at SJ Garments. They’d envision their next designs as they walked down Eighth Avenue, a street hot dog in one hand, a bag with their successful finds in the other. Mother and daughter both dreaming of fabrics and dresses, the clothes they would make.
Maggie used to join, Liz hated to remember now. Their next-door neighbor never missed an excuse to grab her camera and a notebook and explore beyond their Long Island enclave. Maggie’s parents were hardly around, always working late evenings at their law firm downtown. They never encouraged Maggie’s filmmaking itch. Instead, Maggie and Liz often spent their after-school time together. They both sought inspiration, creativity. It was probably why the two of them got along. Well, why they used to get along.
Before it all.
Her nerves danced again, so she looked for a color.
White: the foam hugging the bay waves as the ferry cut through the water, propelling toward the Ocean Beach dock.
White: the dress Liz never thought she’d have to try on by herself.
“You should have asked my mom,” Cam had said Friday morning, over coffees in their dollhouse-size kitchen. “Or Brenna or Quinn or Maggie, even.”
“Maggie would never come,” Liz said.
“Hell, Robyn would probably go with you! It’s not too late.” Cam was smiling, but the concern was clear as day.
“The appointment is in a few hours. It’s too late,” Liz had said, shrugging between sips. “Plus, I want to do this myself. Unless you want to come?”
Cam shook his head fervently. “Do you want bad luck? I’m not seeing you in that dress until you’re walking down the aisle.”
Tradition didn’t mean as much to Liz. Sure, she had daydreamed about marrying Cam, about a house and a family and a marriage license, even, but she didn’t care about escort cards or guest lists or venue uplighting or entrée selections. She just wanted to marry Cam. What did the other elements matter?
Cam disagreed, though. So far, he’d thrown himself headfirst into every wedding task at hand. He loved the planning summits and had even downloaded Pinterest to make mood boards for his tuxedo and his groomsmen’s shoes, at his mom’s behest.
Liz wished she could match his excitement level, but there was something when it came to wedding planning, something that she couldn’t or didn’t want to articulate. When she found herself thinking about it, she pushed the words down and away into the darkest corners of her mind.
She wouldn’t let herself go there.
Until she tried on the first dress at Amsale Bridal. She’d selected a beautiful princess dress, a classic ball gown. It was strapless with a full flouncy skirt.
It was also suddenly wrinkled. And slightly wet.
Because Liz was sitting on the dressing room’s three-inch pedestal, her knees pressed against her chest, dress pooled around her. And she was crying.
It had hit her like a ton of bricks.
She couldn’t do this without her mom. She didn’t want to do this without her mom.
Why had she thought she’d be able to do any of this without her mom?
The selection was overwhelming. So many styles and shapes and silhouettes. Liz trusted her own taste, but it wavered amid the hundreds of dresses, crowded on dozens of racks.
The store owner had raised his eyebrows when Liz confirmed she’d be shopping alone today. She accepted the single free glass of prosecco he poured—“Just one? Really?”—with a judgmental stare, but Liz had felt independent and strong.
Now, as she wiped her face and dried off her cheeks, she took a sip. Still on the floor. She tasted the bubbles and tried not to harp on how everything felt broken. Empty.
She hiccupped and heard a voice.
“Liz? Are you back here?”
Liz gasped. Was it the store owner checking on her already? Were her silent sobs audible from the store’s sitting room?
No, Liz reasoned. The owner was a man, and the voice piercing through the dressing room wings sounded feminine. It couldn’t be her mom, so maybe…
Was it Maggie?
Liz couldn’t believe that was her next thought. Did she want it to be Maggie? She closed her eyes and saw a flash of what the day would have looked like if she’d fulfilled her high school promise of Maggie as her “Mags of honor.” If the two hadn’t fallen out and drifted apart, but instead had stayed best friends. Like sisters. Would Maggie have selected gowns that matched Liz’s style? Would she have taken photos of Liz twirling, posing with those “I Said Yes to the Dress” signs? Would Maggie have held her hand while Liz cried?
It didn’t matter.
Because a whoosh of the curtain slamming into the cubby’s wall revealed the voice’s source to be Roseanne Peters.
It was Cam’s mom.
“Mrs. Peters?” Liz stammered at the sight of her future mother-in-law, designer sunglasses on her face, straight blond hair blown out, intimidatingly attractive even in athleisure.
Roseanne’s jaw dropped at the sight of Liz, balled up in the corner, eyeliner running and nose red from crying.
“Oh, honey,” she said, pulling Liz up into a hug.
Liz didn’t know what was happening. Was this some sort of fairy godmother of wedding dress shopping? A maternal force when she unexpectedly needed it most?
“I know this is a lot. This is hard,” Roseanne murmured, and Liz let herself be held a little tighter. She let herself whimper a tear-soaked exhale onto Roseanne’s shoulder. “We’ll find your perfect dress,” Roseanne continued. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
It was like the record had been scratched mid-symphony.
“What?” Liz mumbled.
“No more tears over dresses, young lady. Unless they’re happy tears, of course!” Roseanne didn’t even notice Liz’s face grow paler as she took in the ball gown Liz was still wearing, looking her up and down. “Let me go talk to the owner, I’ll grab some options that feel a bit more…you. We can do better than this!”
Alone again in the dressing room, Liz felt like she’d had the wind knocked out of her.
She didn’t take a deep breath and count to ten. She didn’t scan for a color and remember a memory, the way her therapist had taught her. She didn’t stretch her face into a smile and brace for the pretend.
Instead, she shimmied out of the gown and threw on her jean shorts and old Jones Beach concert tee faster than she’d ever gotten dressed in her life. She raced down the hallway, into the store, and out the door, leaving behind a frazzled Roseanne shouting “Liz!” while the disgruntled owner rolled his eyes. Liz knew she had made a scene, but she didn’t care. She had to get out of there.
She sprinted the twenty blocks back to her and Cam’s apartment and swung their door open with a shout. “Why was your mom at my fitting? Was she just standing on the street, waiting for me to mess up or something?”
“She asked me when you’d scheduled it for, and I guess, yeah, she texted me this afternoon confirming. I figured it was just part of her job. But wait—did you say she showed up at your fitting?” Cam’s voice trailed from behind the bedroom door. He sometimes worked from home on Fridays and had made a makeshift desk out of the radiator next to the bed. Liz felt her heart speeding up, her breath shallow from the race home. She knew that Roseanne Peters prided herself on being a supportive, detail-oriented mom. And she was grateful, truly, that Roseanne was offering her expert planning skills on their behalf. But this was all starting to feel like too much. It hadn’t been this intense, this exhausting, before the engagement. Liz wasn’t sure how to reconcile this behavior now with the before.
“Yes, Cam,” she called out, between pants, as she walked down the hallway to their bedroom. “It was humiliating. I wasn’t ready for that—”
She opened the door, but the sight was so startling that she couldn’t finish her sentence.
Cam was in sweatpants, under the blankets. Hair misaligned. Eyes empty.
In the middle of the afternoon.
“What’s wrong, do you have a fever?” Liz rushed to the side of the bed to feel his forehead, but other than a little moisture from presumably an afternoon nap, Cam’s head felt normal.
It was everything else that was far from it.
“Just feeling a little tired,” was all he could manage back. “I didn’t think you’d be home for another half hour at least.”
“Sorry,” Liz said, though she wasn’t sure what for. How could she transfer her anger onto Cam when he looked so helpless, so hopeless? “What happened? Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, no. It’s fine. Everything’s fine,” he said. “I guess we should pack if we’re going to make the five p.m. ferry?” he continued, changing the subject, but his voice was drained.
“I’m exhausted, honestly,” Liz said, still frozen at the doorway. “Can we just go tomorrow?”
“I guess so,” Cam said. “Yeah, sure thing.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
She turned and left him like that. Later, they ordered Chinese takeout, silently slurping noodles while watching reruns of Seinfeld on the couch. Cam fell asleep by nine p.m. and Liz hated that she let him sleep out there all night.
Now they were on the Saturday ten-thirty-a.m. ferry to Ocean Beach, and Liz had to remind herself to reapply her fake smile every few hours as if it were sunscreen. She ignored the incoming voicemails and texts from Mrs. Peters. She ignored the “weekend agenda” planning e-mail from Roseanne’s assistant, Meghan. Instead, she looked right at Sunny the goldendoodle, who seemed to mock her with his unfailingly happy gaze. Never had Liz envied the life of a dog more.
Cam sat next to her, and he looked like a different person entirely from yesterday’s fog. Whatever it had been, he was back. His easy smile, his charismatic grace. Liz couldn’t help but wonder if she was marrying a professional pretender.
“He’s adorable,” Cam said to the owner, who grinned with puppy-parent pride.
He leaned closer still to Liz, lowered his voice to a whisper. “Liz, I’m so sorry. My mom is so sorry. She’s calling and texting nonstop. She feels like an idiot, for not realizing what you really were—”
“It’s fine,” she said, cutting him off. She couldn’t get into any of that again.
She had something else to focus on.
When Cam wasn’t looking, she slipped out her phone and angled the screen out of his view. A few touches with her fingertips and her inbox refreshed. She bit her lip when she realized there were no new emails.
It had been a week since Liz had applied for the Domus Fellowship, having been encouraged by her professor and the program website’s FAQ to apply early, to take advantage of the rolling admissions cycle. She’d seen a Reddit forum of candidates celebrating their acceptances over the past few days. It reminded her of her college-prep era, when Liz would scan message boards for commiserating posts about SAT questions, debating answer choices. A perfectionist through and through, Liz would crave her results immediately after any standardized test.
The Domus process was no different. Now that some contenders had received hopeful welcomes, Liz wanted hers, too. Would she find out this weekend? Could her acceptance come next?
How would she tell Cam?
Despite the sinking feeling in her stomach, Liz had decided that she wouldn’t worry Cam with the program information unless it was serious. Unless she was admitted. It was a secret, but it wasn’t selfish, she told herself. Their schedule was hectic enough already, with summer travel and work and the incessant wedding planning. Through it all, her fiancé still didn’t seem himself, hadn’t shaken off whatever funk had clouded his mind so far this summer. For all Liz knew, he was keeping secrets from her, too.
Why stir the pot if the water wasn’t boiling?
A warm lick on Liz’s ankle pulled her mind back to the ferry. Sunny had taken advantage of a momentary lapse in his owner’s leash stance and bolted across the aisle, directly to Liz. Enamored, she reached down to scratch behind the dog’s ears, allowing him to lick her calf.
Cam leaned over, too, smiling as he gave the dog some rubs. “You’re the cutest thing, aren’t you?”
There was an ease to this. A ferry ride with her fiancé, a dog by their side.
Life could be sunny.
Yet somehow Liz couldn’t shake the restlessness that had taken residence in her body. Nothing felt right anymore. Nothing as sunny as it should have been.
She wished she’d hear back about the Domus program soon. Was Milan her destiny? Liz didn’t know how else she would satisfy this newfound yet undeniable craving.
An itch to escape.