825 PM Mia
Mia: sasha mitch spilled an entire bottle of red wine on me.
Mia: RED WINE
Mia: now I look like gumby if gumby had a botched abortion
Mia dunked a napkin into a glass of club soda and used it to rub at the red spots on her dress.
It wasn’t doing any good—there was too much wine.
What she had now were eight different wet spots at the center of which were dark blobs and patches of visible skin.
Yet she found a weird, paradoxical pleasure in ruining something that was already destroyed, so she kept at it, dumping the napkin back into the glass, then scrubbing harder and harder.
As she worked, she thought of all the times she had sensed him looking at her tonight, all the moments she’d caught his glance out of the corner of her eye.
She had wanted to tell him to stop, to leave her alone.
At the table she’d done her best to be civil.
She’d set her napkin on her lap and endured the torturous, self-aggrandizing small talk of Mitch Reynolds, and when Marco and Emily sat down, she’d nodded politely and said hello.
She let everyone else eat from the guacamole before she did, and after finishing her first glass of wine, she didn’t immediately signal to the waiter for a second one.
But whenever Marco looked at her she felt a hot, suffocating embarrassment.
She thought about the night of Alison Liu’s birthday, where she had gotten too drunk, too hopeful that her mistakes could so easily be corrected with a single late-night confession.
The sides of her face burned and she scrubbed harder. She wanted to disappear.
Two days after Alison’s party, Marco had called her—she remembered how she was walking home from the subway when she saw his name on her screen.
She thought about answering it, but then the call rolled over to voicemail and she immediately deleted his number from her phone, along with the message he had left her.
She wanted to pretend that night had never happened—she convinced herself that, if she obliterated all signs of it, she could.
She listened to songs about being strong and independent, and she stopped smoking so many cigarettes, and she spent time with people she loved, and she bought self-help books with images of inspiring mountains on their covers.
She was an infrequent user of social media, but now she began posting pictures of herself having fun, and paired them with thoughtful, cryptic captions.
A shot of her on the Brooklyn Bridge, and under it a lyric from the Cranberries.
A picture of her smiling in Sheep Meadow, with a line from Rilke.
None of it worked—instead she felt as if she was going through the breakup a second time, though in this case it was Marco who was breaking up with her.
She saw that her choice hadn’t been deliberate and well-thought-out, but rather a failure of imagination—she had been so focused on keeping her life exactly as it was, without realizing that so much of that life was Marco.
To that end, she hadn’t really made a choice at all so much as she had stood back and allowed inertia to handle things for her.
She stopped buying herself luxury bath bombs and listening to Taylor Swift—she began to think that buying luxury bath bombs and listening to Taylor Swift were signs that you were a sucker who was depressed.
“You’re not a sucker,” Adam had said when she explained what had happened at Alison’s party. “Things didn’t work out. Sometimes that happens.”
“I made a fool out of myself. I don’t know why I thought he’d just take me back.”
When he heard this, Adam looked at Mia.
“Are you more upset because you made a fool out of yourself, or because you’re still in love with him?”
Mia didn’t answer the question.
Now, standing at the bar, she kept rubbing at the wine stains on her dress as more and more guests drifted toward the dance floor.
Sweat dampened her brow, and she dried it with the back of her wrist. She didn’t want to think about him anymore—she wanted to completely excise him from her consciousness—but how was she supposed to do that when he was sitting directly across from her?
How was she supposed to not think about him every time she went to a wedding alone?
The issue wasn’t that she wanted to get married so much as she worried that she had missed a chance at something that would never present itself again.
She dipped her napkin back into the glass and thought of Adam’s question: Are you more upset because you made a fool out of yourself, or because you’re still in love with him?
Well, Adam, the answer was both—objectively she had made a fool out of herself, but she was also terribly, infuriatingly, obviously still in love with Marco.
How else was she meant to explain how much she hated him?
“Mia?”
Looking up, she saw Emily. Her hair was lit in soft, angelic light. A Tide pen was clutched in her right hand.
“I thought this might help.”
Mia stood up straight. She brushed her hair from her face.
“I think we might be past that point.”
But Emily didn’t listen to her. She uncapped the pen and began working on one of the stains, a blob on Mia’s left rib cage that was roughly the size of a sand dollar.
Her eyes narrowed and her focus intensified: knowing what she knew, it was impossible for Mia not to imagine her holding a scalpel, excising a section of her intestines.
The speakers’ bass thumped beneath her feet.
The band had shifted to something stronger, and the dance floor was crowded.
When Mia looked over, she saw Courtney at the center of it, her toned, calisthenic-ed arms rising into the night.
“I think you might be right,” Emily said.
“Thanks for your help anyway.”
Mia straightened out her dress. She turned to leave, but Emily stopped her.
“I’m sorry he’s acting like such an idiot—”
“I’ve seen him act like an idiot before.”
“—I think he’s just nervous.”
An older man slid between them, trying to get to the bar. Mia took a step back. She didn’t know whether to hate Emily or to thank her, whether she wanted to hug her or punch her in the ribs.
“Would you like a drink?” she said.
Emily smiled. “A glass of white wine, please.”
Mia got them two glasses of pinot grigio, and then moved with Emily to the far end of the dance floor. At the center of a loose circle, Mitch Reynolds lifted one of the flower girls to his shoulders. Two bridesmaids clapped. The flower girl began to cry.
“To be honest, I was pretty terrified to meet you,” Emily said.
Mia shook her head. She said, “That’s silly,” and did little to hide how much the comment pleased her.
“He talks about you all the time.”
“Then you should tell him to stop.”
“I don’t mind. Or maybe I do, but I don’t have the time to be jealous.”
“Too many colons to excise?”
Emily sipped her wine. She held the glass with both hands, like a child.
“Yes,” she said. “Something like that.”
The flower girl was really crying now, her screams cutting through a cover of an old Robyn song as she banged her hands on top of Mitch’s head.
“This is my sixth one of these things this year,” Mia said.
“Six! I’ve only had three.”
“When you’re single you’re easier to invite. You’re a good plug to fill a hole at a table. You’re basically rhubarb.”
Emily laughed. “I think you’re a little more than rhubarb.”
Out in the bay, lights flickered from the bows of cargo ships, their reflections blurring on the water. Waves lapped against the shore.
“What do you think the big surprise is?” Mia asked.
“It’s fireworks. I heard someone talking about it earlier. They’re going to spell the names of the bride and groom in fireworks after the last dance.”
“How thrilling.”
Emily took off one of her sandals, burying her toes in the sand.
“Everything feels like such a competition. Can’t anyone just get married anymore? When did they all turn into halftime shows?”
Mia laughed, finishing her wine. “You want another one of those?”
“Sure, I guess.” Emily handed Mia the glass. “I told Marco that we’re capping our wedding at forty people, and even that I feel overwhelmed by. Five decisions, that’s what I told him. When it comes to planning, I want to make five decisions for the entire day, and that’s it.”
Mia looked down into the two empty glasses.
Everything was hot and covered with a sticky film.
Near the dance floor’s lights, gnats swarmed in large, shifting clouds.
She could tell that Emily was staring at her, and she knew that now was the moment to smile.
So that was what she did, though it took her a few moments too long: for a split second, she let Emily see how she felt.
“Shit,” Emily said quietly. “I’m sorry, I figured that he would have told you. The ring’s getting resized.”
Mia held her smile; Emily chewed on the corner of her thumb.
She apologized again, and while she sounded sincere, Mia found herself wondering if it was all an act, every single second of it, and if Emily was practicing her bedside manner, pretending she was telling a patient that she’d found a tumor the size of a cantaloupe, and that she had six weeks to live.
In the end, it probably didn’t matter either way.