I Now Pronounce You Someone Else (11 page)

For a moment, I stood looking at Peter and Jared, comparing the two even though, in terms of physical beauty, no one in the world was prettier than Peter except Mother. It’s true. Peter is pretty for a guy in a very blond, otherworldly way. But I preferred Jared’s rough hand-someness, in part because I loved him so much, and in part because it wasn’t strange and foreign—so strange and so foreign I couldn’t approach or join them.

It.

Him.

Gram managed to pull Mother’s otherwise devoted attention away from Peter, who then caught me looking at him and smiled peculiarly. Head back. Almost as if he were wearing invisible bifocals. His smile grew bigger, and he tugged at his hair and pointed to me.

“I like it,” he said, and Mother’s head whipped around.

“Doesn’t she look beautiful,” Mother said to him.

“Yeah,” he said, still looking at me. “You look like Dad.”

No one—not even Jared—could top that for a birthday present.

So, yes, my birthday. Whitt stood in the center of the room, welcomed friends and family—I felt like bursting—and said a few words about the significance of turning eighteen.

“Don’t get sued,” Granddad added to a few laughs.

“Howard, shh.”

“Bronwen,” Whitt continued, “this is the beginning of your young adult life.” He raised his glass. “May it be exciting. May it be fulfilling. And if you tackle it with the grace and responsibility you’ve shown these past many years, I’m certain you’ll be a success no matter what you do. Happy eighteenth birthday.”

The group echoed the benediction, and then Jared stood and made a simple toast to me. “Happy birthday to the most beautiful person I know.” He spoke clearly, calmly, and without a hint of unease, just loose and happy, still moving ever so comfortably to music only he could hear.

With his hand, he waved me next to him.

“Mr. VanHorn, Mrs. VanHorn,” Jared said easily, “Mom, Dad, everyone else, I think you all know—” He looked at me. “—just how much I love Bronwen for too many reasons to list.”

“Hear hear,” Mr. Sondervan said, and Granddad repeated it and drank his own toast.

“She’s,” Jared continued, “well, she’s just the most amazing person I’ve met, which is why last night—this morning, actually, at twelve-oh-five—I asked her to marry me, and she said yes.”

My friends in the room—
whew
—cheered and clapped, which triggered a general and polite round of applause from what I knew were stunned and worried old people.

“Now before anyone thinks we’re rushing into this,” Jared said, “I want you all to know that we have no plans to actually get married anytime soon. We have not talked about a date. Bronwen has college to look forward to. I graduate in May. We’re engaged. And for now, that’s all we are.”

Mr. Sondervan was the first to speak, and he did it kindly. Warmly even.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. Maybe by the timing, but I see how much you love each other, and, as you say, you have lots to think about.”

“May I ask,” Mrs. Sondervan hazarded, “what you
think
your plans might be? Just in general.”

And we explained them in general since we only knew them in general—Hope for a few years, Holland, their cottage, graduation.

“And then we’ll go wherever the best job takes us, I guess,” Jared said. He held my hand.

“Well,” Mr. Sondervan said, rising, “this is definitely good news, then, and I think I speak for the whole Sondervan family when I say, Miss Bronwen, that we couldn’t be happier.” He held his arms open to me. “Welcome to the family.”

I cried a little as I hugged him. Glasses clinked. Mr. Sondervan kissed my cheek. Friends cheered some more. Whitt shook Jared’s hand. Mrs. Sondervan and Lauren hugged me. I spent the entire evening showing off my ring, talking with friends about weddings, laughing with the Sondervans, and avoiding Mother’s worried gaze.

Peter looked at me, looked at Jared, looked at me again. “Hey, that’s great. Congratulations.”

He shook Jared’s hand, gave me one of his now famous one-arm hugs.

Mrs. Sondervan kissed my cheek a little longer than usual and said, “You’ll need to call us Jay and Pat now.”

And I agreed happily because Jay and Pat were one little ceremony away from what I really wanted to call them: Mom and Dad.

Just one little ceremony and a license to sign.

A new kind of Signing Party, and this one was going to happen.

By Monday at lunch, the news that I was engaged to my college boyfriend had practically set fire to the halls of East. Several of my friends swarmed around my locker, where each examined my ring, called it
beautiful
,
fabulous
,
so cool
, and wanted to know all my plans, and I thrilled to tell them.

My birthday always kicked off the holiday season, as far as I was concerned, and marked the beginning of that time of year that always moved too quickly. The days of that particular fall, that particular holiday season, passed at an almost dizzying pace.

I saw Mother and Whitt at breakfast and infrequently for dinner.

We talked as much as we ever did.

I never had time to Make a Day of It with Mother anymore, but she stopped suggesting it now that I was no longer blonde.

After my birthday, most of October flew by, and Homecoming was fast upon us, and Spirit Week before that and the Homecoming edition of
East Vision
, and
Jared didn’t come home once, and I didn’t have time to go down to Holland.

We talked every day. Sometimes three or four times, and sometimes just to say
love you, miss you, dream of me.

During Spirit Week—the week of Homecoming, which, that year, was the last Friday in October—the names of the Homecoming Court are announced, ten girls, ten guys. I was on the Court. Kirsten was not, which surprised me considering how pretty she is, but she also—I’ll admit—had the habit of speaking her mind a little too plainly at times, which I found refreshing but which other people found, at times, abrasive.

Before the game Friday night, the Homecoming Court is escorted onto the football field, and the King and Queen are crowned in front of fans and parents. Mother and Whitt came for that part and stood with all the other parental paparazzi. Gram and Granddad were there, and I think Gram took six pictures of her own eyeballs before Granddad yanked the camera away from her. I saw their mouths move.

“Damn it, woman.”

“Howard, do not say damn.”

Caitlyn was crowned Queen. A guy named Tim Harris—actually one of Caitlyn’s old boyfriends—was crowned King, and all was right with the world.

After the game, we went to the dance. I loved school dances, loved dancing, still love it. Starting in junior high, Kirsten and I went to every single dance and stayed to the very end, and often left—like so many others—sweaty and half-deaf and eager for the next one. But this Homecoming Dance was different.

Kirsten and I danced in a group to a few fast songs, but the minute the music slowed down, we left, walked outside, and sat on the steps of the school for a few minutes. There were some other kids out there, sprinkled around the place.

Neither of us needed to explain much. We felt the same—disappointed and full of longing to be somewhere else at that very moment, with our boyfriends—
my fiancé!
—who did not fit in here. It made us awkward too, so we both went home early.

Mother had waited up for me, to make sure I was okay. She actually hugged me when I walked in the back door—hugged me—as if I were slightly ill and returning from a brief hospital stay.

“Oh, honey,” she said, and I ever so slightly pressed my way out of her weak embrace.

“Mother. What?”

“I’m just—” She pressed her hands against her chest. “Well, you must be so disappointed to have lost.”

“You know, if it’ll make you feel better, I will be disappointed just for you,” I said, tossing my keys on the counter.

“I—I don’t—well, you’re upset.”

“Do you want me to be upset?” I asked, half irritated, half—I didn’t know—half something else I didn’t feel like exploring.

“Well,” she said and cleared her throat, which served as her retort.

I sighed myself out of my bad mood and said earnestly, “Mother, I never expected to be Queen. Everyone has known since seventh grade that Caitlyn Pryce would
be it. She’ll probably be Homecoming Queen in college too, and that really is okay with me. She made a great Queen tonight.”

“Oh, honey,” Mother said, putting a hand on my arm. “I knew you should have kept your hair blonde.”

I just nodded—all the way up to my room.

I lived with her. I knew her priorities, but I could never get used to them. She obviously felt the same way about my hair.

Jared understood what my mother did not. I told him the whole Homecoming story Sunday morning, and he said he wished he had seen me on the Court but understood why I didn’t mention it.

“You’d have come in to see me lose to Caitlyn, who, by the way, I voted for,” I said.

“Send me pictures,” he said.

I included two of Gram’s eyeballs.

The following Tuesday, before breakfast, I handed Mother my completed application to Hope, sealed in its official envelope, and asked her if she’d mind mailing it.

“No, of course not, honey,” she said, happily taking the thing from me and glancing at the back, hoping it wasn’t sealed. If she had asked me, I’d have let her read the whole thing.

“So the other four schools are definitely off your list?” Whitt asked.

“Definitely.”

“Not that I’m surprised. Or worried you won’t get into Hope,” he said.

I ate a bite of granola.

“Have you given any thought to a major?” Mother asked just as Whitt handed me the metro section of the
Grand Rapids Press
, and we—he and I—just stared at her. How many years now had I been talking about writing for a newspaper? Four?

She clicked and tapped across the kitchen, putting my cereal box away, wiping up an already spotless counter. Looked up at me. Eager for my answer.

“A major? Yes,” I said. “Proctology.”

“Proc—oh,” she said. “Honestly, Bronwen, I don’t know where you get some of your ideas.”

“Same place I get my teeth,” I muttered into the paper.

Whitt heard me.

And grinned.

I finally saw Jared at the beginning of November. He came home for the weekend, and we had our hottest make-out session ever. Up in my bedroom, Mother and Whitt out again, and
go, have a good time, stay out late.
We ended up wet from kissing, nearly breathless and nearly naked, but I stopped us at last between kisses.

“You’re sure?” Jared asked.

“I am. Let’s wait. Let’s wait for the honeymoon,” I said, which I still thought sounded incredibly cool and right, and very good for me.

“Okay,” he said and kissed me again. “Okay.”

And he flopped back on my bed, and we both caught our breath.

“I’m completely impressed by your restraint,” he said.

“I’m more impressed by yours.”

“Well, you should be,” he said, grinning as he propped himself up on his elbows. “But then again, I’m not a high school guy.”

“Oh, hey. Speaking of high school guys. Chad Dykstra has slept with three—count them, three—girls in my class since breaking up with me. It’s going to be at least five by graduation.”

“He’s hoping for five by Christmas.”

“I can’t believe two girls have bought his ‘I love you’ line.”

“How come you didn’t?” Jared asked.

“Prom night? My parents’ basement? Need I say more?”

“No.”

“Anyway, I knew I didn’t love him. Love is this, isn’t it? It’s planning your life with this person, your entire life, your whole future, together forever, unless, of course, you get divorced. And then there go all the memories—never mind the cost—of your Dream Wedding. Right down the toilet.”

“You have a dream wedding?”

“Every girl does. I don’t care how cool she pretends to be.”

“What’s yours?”

“You and I, on the beach in August. Not this August,
but some future August,” and I explained about the breeze and the clouds.

“All right. It’s a date.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said and started kissing me again. “But I wouldn’t mind it if it were this August.”

“This August?” I asked, sitting back.

“This August. Next August. Some August soon. I love you, Bronwen. I want to marry you, not just stay engaged to you. I want to start a family—not kids, not for a few years. I just want it to be the two of us, starting out on a great adventure together.”

We kissed a minute or two more, but my thoughts drifted to my beach wedding and the concrete shape my dream was taking.

Reality grounded me to Earth two weeks later when Thanksgiving and the Bridenthals struck.

Around two o’clock on Thanksgiving afternoon, my uncle Milton Bridenthal entered our kitchen, throwing open the front door and announcing, “Oh! What a relief to be out of that automobile in all this crazy traffic. The drivers on the road are lunatics, and—” He kissed Mother’s cheek. “—you, look at you, skinny, gorgeous thing—your sister is one of the worst.”

Aunt Miriam and her lion’s mane of red hair roared in next. “You always complain about my driving, but I have never gotten a ticket, and I’ll tell you who else has
never gotten a ticket. Max. Margot has, but—” Kiss, kiss. “—that wasn’t her fault at all.”

More kisses. Kisses all around. Gram and Granddad, Uncle Sid the Butt Doctor and his wife, Ivy, Mother and Whitt, and Jared and I formed the receiving line to greet, in order, Milton; Miriam; their son, Max; his round-eyed wife, Amber, who looked like Little Bo Peep at her wedding—
THAT was her Dream Wedding?
—and Margot, the youngest Bridenthal, two years my senior and superior in every other way as well. Just ask her.

“That ticket absolutely was not my fault,” Margot said. “But that stupid cop cited me anyway because—”

“—something to eat around here? We’re starving,” Miriam said.

“Right here,” Whitt said, pointing out cheese, crackers, nuts, and shrimp on the center island.

“—I argued with him and was smarter than he was, and obviously he has issues with women.”

“—haven’t met Jared yet,” Mother said, making the introductions that practically went unnoticed in all the Bridenthal chatter.

Peter had gone to Jenna’s house near Toledo, which made Granddad laugh when he heard it. He called Toledo a toilet.

“Howard, do not say—”

“Toilet is not a swearword.”

Jared stood still in the middle of the chaos until I led him to the safety of the kitchen’s perimeter.

“It’s never officially Thanksgiving,” I whispered to him, “even if we’re in the middle of dinner or dinner’s over, until one particular event occurs.”

“And what’s that?”

And because I did not want to ruin the surprise, I told him he’d just have to wait to find out.

“—and their pathological disregard of patient care,” Milton, who had been talking since he walked in, said as he sliced a wedge of brie.

“What’s this?” Granddad asked.

“Those damn doctors,” Miriam said and popped a handful of peanuts into her mouth.

“—a Coke or something around here? I do not drink diet anything,” Margot said, opening the refrigerator door, forcing Mother to move out of the way.

“Over here, Margot,” I said, waving her toward me. I stood in front of the bar in the kitchen and pulled a soda out of the tiny refrigerator for her.

“I guess this will do,” she said of the brand.

“I want to know who’s complaining about doctors,” Granddad said.

“Ah, shit, Daddy, they’re all so arrogant.”

“Miriam, do not say shit.”

“Arh,” Granddad practically growled. “Have you lost your mind? Your uncle Sid’s a doctor, and he’s sitting right there.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Miriam said dismissively. “Sid knows I’m not talking about him.”

“Well, it was different when you were practicing,” Milton, a registered ER nurse, said, patting Sid’s hand, which only further infuriated Granddad.

Gram had said more than once that Milton’s mother clearly lived on Chinese food while pregnant with him.

“Today, they’re just a bunch of spoiled brats running
around the hospital barking orders as if they’re generals, and they keep me—”

“Which they’re not,” Miriam added.

“—running like a chicken with my head cut off, and doesn’t this kitchen just smell fabulous. Jacquelyn, you must—”

“—go to Hope?” Margot asked Jared, who didn’t know exactly which conversation to join. There were, by then, about six, with Gram stridently involved in three.

“Sorry?”

“You go to Hope? College? Hello? Earth to the fiancé.”

“Yes. And it’s Jared. Where are you?”

“Right here in front of you,” she said dryly and sipped a tiny bit of soda.

Miriam, from across the kitchen, told Jared that Margot was a junior at the University of Illinois, where she majored in Biology and “is writing a novel that will reverse the decline of American literature.” It was about a college student majoring in Biology and writing a novel that eventually reverses the decline of American literature.

“I’ve read it so far, and it’s brilliant,” Miriam said.

“Do you know what the best, the absolute best book I’ve read lately is?” Milton asked no one in particular.
“To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“—bored me to tears,” Miriam said.

“It did not,” Gram insisted.

In the safety of our little corner—now that Margot had migrated back toward the snacks—Jared whispered, “Is it Thanksgiving yet?”

“Not even close,” I nearly laughed.

“—like to read?”

Someone had put a question to Jared.

“Sorry?”

“Do you like to read?” Miriam asked.

“He doesn’t listen very well, does he?” Margot hollered to me.

“Yes. I do,” Jared said. “Listen well and like to read.”

“What’s your favorite? Mysteries? I bet it’s mysteries. Is it mysteries? You seem like a mysteries kind of guy,” Miriam asked.

“No, but they’re okay.”

“Favorite book,” Margot said, holding a cracker right at the edge of her lips.

“My favorite book,” Jared said and darted a glance at me. “I’d have to say
The Onderdonk Reliable Method for Preventing Most Diseases of the Rectum.”

Everyone who was not a Bridenthal laughed. They smiled dutifully and spoke among themselves for a moment about brie and peanuts while Uncle Sid approached Jared, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “You sit next to me at dinner, son.”