Life After Yes (2 page)

“Dad started walking me down the center of the court-
room. He walked slowly, limping from his college football injury, and I looked ahead, eager to see my future husband. But something was very wrong.”

“Time's up,” Victor says, pointing at the oversized clock above us. It's ten to eight. “Just kidding, keep going. This is fierce. Soap-opera silly.”

“There were
three
men,” I say. “Three
grooms
.”

“Shit.”

“I studied the faces. Everything grew sharper. Two faces and then, finally, Sage's. Phelps and then poor Sage. He was just one of the guys on our wedding day.”

“Phelps? Ah, the infamous Rowboat Boy,” Victor says, grinning.

“My hands were suddenly behind my back, trapped in huge white handcuffs, and each groom dangled a key,” I say. “As if I were to choose.”

“Handcuffs? Kinky, Quinn. And here I thought you were the square attorney type.”

I shut him up with my eyes. “The music stopped and the judge slammed his mallet. He said, ‘Prudence, do you take…' and then he named all of the guys' names, ‘…to be your lawful husband.'”

“Wait—”

“Let me finish,” I say.

“Okay, but please tell me you said no,” Victor mock-pleads.

“No, I said what a happy bride is supposed to say at the altar on her big day. I said ‘I do.' Then my handcuffs were gone and then so were the keys. Everyone clapped. Everyone was happy. I didn't know whether I was supposed to kiss all of them, but then there was a loud noise, a piercing scream. It came from the jury box, from a little girl,
my flower girl. And at first I didn't recognize her. She was
screaming
, but then I realized who she was…”

“Who was she?” Victor asks.

“It was
me
. As a little girl. And when I realized this, I passed out, but my husbands—yes, husband
s
, all of them—they caught me. And then everything went black.”

“Gnarly dream, girl,” he says. Now, our time really is up.” Victor's next client, a portly CEO type, white and bald as a golf ball, hovers, scratching his crotch.

I follow Victor to the back of the gym. To the massage tables where trainers stretch their clients. I hop on one and lie down flat, like I always do.

“I have a question,” he says, grabbing my leg and straightening it out.

“Hit me,” I say. I'm sweaty and nervous. My pulse: rapid-fire.

“Who's Prudence?”

“That's me. My name's really Prudence.”

Confusion contorts his face, rearranging his features. “That one can wait until Wednesday, Miss Witness Protection Freak. You said there were three. Three grooms. But you named only two.”

“No, there were three.”

Now he's rubbing my shoulders, getting the kinks out like he does at the end of every session. “Well, who was the last guy?” he asks.

I pause. I realize something. The music charges on. CNN terror alerts scream silently from muted televisions. Hurried souls braid in and out of each other, racing off to work with sopping hair and untied sneakers. Business as usual. The gym smells of sweat and burnt coffee.

“It was you.”

I
n the locker room, nipples face north and south. Cobalt and eggplant veins stretch like spiderwebs over winter white skin. Floppy breasts and varicose veins welcome me. Mozart floats faintly from camouflaged speakers, drowned out by the buzz of hair dryers and morning gossip. Near the entrance, a squat woman in faded black stacks warm towels that smell like marzipan. A middle-aged woman sits naked and cross-legged, raving to no one in particular about her daughter's performance in the holiday play. The room smells like burning hair and watermelon shampoo. Bodies snake by each other in various stages of undress; some are swaddled in crisp towels far too small for coverage. Some sport stringy thongs; others, sensible briefs. Many wear nothing at all.

A skeletal woman with a forest of pubic hair stands in front of the mirror, hips jutted forward, cleaning her nostrils with Q-tips. She leaves the yellowed and bloody cotton swabs on the faux granite countertop, angering the woman
who stands next to her painting a freckled face with makeup many shades too orange.

I sit on the bench in the middle of the locker room, hunched over, ponytail flipped, eyes fixed on my tattered gray New Balances and the sea blue floor of tiles, wondering what's wrong with me. Victor's arrogant grin is tattooed in the front of my mind.

“Quinn!”

I turn and see Avery, my oldest friend and fellow West Sider. She bounds toward me in her matching pink sports bra and shorts, her blond ponytail dancing behind her.

“I just finished my first Buff Brides class,” she says, flexing thin arms. “That instructor kicked my butt, but hopefully it'll show come wedding time.”

Avery is getting married to Jonathan, a lawyer like me, in the fall.

“Maybe I'll have to join you in that class,” I say.

Confusion washes over Avery's face only briefly, and then her eyes light up. She grabs my hand, lifts my ring to only inches from her face.

“Oh Quinny!” She hugs me hard. “You're getting married! We're both getting married!”

And she jumps up and down, jogging in place like a kid on Christmas morning.

“We're not little girls anymore, huh?” I say.

She shakes her head, still grinning, perfect teeth shining bright.

“The ring is stunning, Quinn.”

“His mother picked it,” I say. “Same setting as hers.”

“That's
so
sweet,” she says, smiling. “I love family traditions.”

And I nod. Because maybe, just maybe, “sweet” is the ap
propriate word for this “family tradition”? “Maybe you're right,” I say.

“You don't like it,” she says, pointing to the ring.

“I do like it,” I say. “What I don't like is that he's her little puppet.”

“No, he's now your little puppet. Take the strings. Quinn, you should've told him what you wanted. Men need directions. They're like kids. They need to be told what to do. They
crave
instructions.”

And I nod again. Because I have no doubt Avery, a kindergarten teacher, a sunny and sensible creature, is right about such things.

“But what if I don't know what I want?” I say.

And I think we both know that we're not just talking about diamond cuts and ring settings and meddling in-laws.

Avery, ever the optimist, grabs my shoulders, looks me in the eyes, and says, “You
do
know what you want. And here you are, getting it. You're a lucky girl, Quinn.”

She grabs her things from her locker. And hugs me hard.

“I've got to run,” she says. “I want to get home to make Jonathan breakfast.”

While my friend hightails it home to fix her fiancé eggs, I decide to linger, to hide out in a public shower.

Normally, I would go home to shower there. My apartment is only a block away, and I much prefer the privacy of my own bathroom to this nudist shower scene. But I'm not ready to emerge from this haven to see Victor or Sage. A master avoider indeed.

So I grab three towels, turn toward my locker so no one can see me, and slither out of my sweat-soaked clothes. I wrap one towel around my top and another around my waist—a
makeshift terry bikini—and tiptoe along the cold tiles to the showers.

The shower doors are transparent. Anonymous bodies twirl around, hands soap away. I step into an empty shower and drape the towels over the door so no one can see in. As I fiddle with the faucet, I notice the rainbow of hairs—blond, brown, gray, and black; curly and straight; long and short—slicked on the tiles. I remember Katie Couric's exposé on foot fungus and long for a pair of flip-flops.

When I said those three damning words, “It was you,” Victor's dark eyes glimmered and confidence rode his butter-scotch lips. In the mirror behind him, I caught the beet red of my face; I have an unfortunate problem with blushing.

“See you Wednesday,” I said to him before I escaped, not sure if I meant it.

“Looking forward to it…” Victor said, and winked, patting me on the back I pay him to sculpt. “…Prudence.”

Yes, my name is Prudence. I'm not in the Witness Protection Program, though that would be an infinitely more fascinating rationale for my alias. The truth: I was born Prudence Quinn O'Malley on January 12, 1975. I'm about as Irish as they come, keeping those naughty stereotypes nice and robust. Despite religious visits to an overpriced midtown salon, hints of auburn pierce through my dirty blond hair. My skin is translucent year round, alabaster sprinkled with connect-the-dot freckles.

Most importantly, I love to drink.

Especially since September.

 

Phelps Rafferty, a.k.a. Rowboat Boy (Boyfriend, 1987–1999). I could easily blame everything on him; my sudden and se
vere allergy to my given name, my fondness for cocktails, my soft spot for fishermen.

On my twelfth birthday, he called. Phelps lived in Chicago and I only saw him for a few weeks each summer when both of our families stayed at the private fishing club Bird Lake in Wisconsin. Though he's my age, to me he always seemed older, and as far as I was concerned, the boy was full of infinite wisdom.

The summer before that phone call, Phelps kissed me for the first time. On the dock of the lake. We had told our parents we were catching tadpoles, but we came back that afternoon with an empty jar and big smiles.

“Happy birthday,” Phelps said, when Mom handed me the phone. Then he paused and laughed. “Remember to be prudent.”

“Huh?” I said.

Maybe he had been studying extra early for the SAT, but Phelps stumbled upon the truth about my name before I did. “Your name is a word,” he told me. “And not a cool one.”

When we hung up, I sneaked into Dad's office and thumbed through the P's in his battered maroon leather dictionary. I learned what it meant:
exercise of sound judgment in practical affairs; wisdom in the way of caution and provision; discretion; carefulness.
I was horrified. Why would my parents give me such a name? I didn't understand why my older brother, Michael, had gotten so lucky.

I walked into the kitchen. Mom sliced big red tomatoes for my birthday dinner when I asked her the simple question that would change so much.

“My name is a word, isn't it? It has a meaning,” I said.

“Prue, all names have meanings. Did you know Michael's
means ‘resolute guardian'? Yours just has a meaning that people know. Like Brooke or Charity. Yours is one of those names,” she answered, smiled, and went back to her chopping. As if that would be the end of it.

I became Quinn a few days later at my birthday party. It was a cold Saturday afternoon in winter; local weathermen paced in front of colorful backdrops buzzing about a looming nor'easter. Mom and Dad had rented the basketball court at the public school on the corner of our street for the evening. I divided my friends into two teams. Mom and Dad donned striped polyester and plastic whistles. Michael kept score.

The night before my party, I stayed up late with Mom and Michael spray painting numbers and names in green or red on the white Hanes T-shirts Mom bought in packs of three at the pharmacy.

When it came time, I wrote my name on the back.

My new name.

Quinn.

“What are you doing?” Mom asked, peeling plastic from a red whistle.

“I don't want to be Prudence anymore. I'm Quinn now.”

Mom froze. She stopped blinking. She just stared at me. Finally, she moved, looping her long fingers through the red whistle cord, and muttered that one word: “Why?”

Sure enough, as anyone would have predicted—as my parents should've—my classmates had begun to call me Prude. We kids could be cruel. But I didn't really care. In truth, I kind of liked the attention and the swells of laughter around me even if they were at my expense. And, anyway, I wasn't a prude. At nine, my art teacher caught me kissing Bobby Sands under the metal slide on the school roof. Manhattan
kids had recess on rooftops; we ran around in circles on concrete patches overlooking city streets. Bobby was king of the monkey bars and all the girls liked him, but no one admitted it. At that age, we girls weren't worried about herpes or HIV, but something just as scary and equally enigmatic: cooties. Luckily, Mom and Dad, a lawyer and a doctor, ever the pillars of parental reason, assured me cooties didn't exist. Little did they know this little lesson led to my first kiss.

The truth came too late to make a difference. My parents didn't expect more of me than they did my brother with the more mundane moniker. They didn't envision me, their baby girl, as president. They didn't pray that with such a name, I would mature into the earthly embodiment of the Christian virtue. It was nothing like that.

The truth: They were huge Beatles fans. Mom said John Lennon appeared in her dreams. And Mom was a fervent believer in the importance of dreams. Dad said Lennon was the only other man Mom could kiss given the chance because he loved him too.

Together, Mom and Dad sang one of their favorites to me, their little girl—“Dear Prudence,” bodies curled like commas over my cedar crib when I was a baby and over my bed when I was a bit older.

“It was the only song I could bear to listen to at the hospital while we waited for you to come,” Mom explained, tears glossing her blue eyes. “When I was five months pregnant with you, we learned that you were a girl and it was obvious what your name would be. We loved you, little Prudence, even before we saw you.”

She said Dad played the song over and over on his boom box on that bitter cold day in January while they waited for my arrival.

 

Dear Prudence won't you come out to play?

Dear Prudence greet the brand new day

The sun is up the sky is blue

It's beautiful and so are you

Dear Prudence won't you come out to play?

 

Dear Prudence open up your eyes

Dear Prudence see the sunny skies

The wind is low the birds will sing

That you are part of everything

Dear Prudence won't you open up your eyes?

 

Look around round

Look around round round

Look around

 

Dear Prudence let me see you smile

Dear Prudence like a little child

The clouds will be a daisy chain

So let me see you smile again

Dear Prudence won't you let me see you smile

 

Dear Prudence won't you come out to play?

Dear Prudence greet the brand new day

The sun is up the sky is blue

It's beautiful and so are you

Dear Prudence won't you come out to play?

 

“You loved the song,” Mom promised. “Each time Dad and I sang it to you, you opened your eyes and looked up at us. And every time we trailed off, you flashed that gummy smile even when you were almost asleep.”

So it was not a surprise that my parents were deeply saddened when I decided to shed Prudence, the name they so carefully, so organically, chose for me their daughter. On that night after my basketball party, I overheard Mom crying and peeked through their bedroom door. Dad mumbled something to her in his deep crackly voice, rubbing her back in small circles. “She will always be Prudence,” he said, “if only to us.”

To cope, my parents maintained a staunch loyalty to their decision and to my name, to their beloved lullaby, the theme song of my young life. They refused to call me by my middle name, Mom's maiden name, the name she herself had forsaken fifteen years before, upon exchanging vows with Dad. I think they were confident it was all a passing phase, a fit of rebellion or adolescent fire that would flicker out.

But it never did.

Fast-forward six years. The Quinn-Phelps anti-Prudence movement continued. It was a balmy June night. Our parents picnicked a few miles away, oblivious to the romance that had been brewing for years now between their eighteen-year-old children.

Phelps and I went fishing on Bird Lake.

Dad taught me how to cast when I was very young. Out on the grass by the lake, he'd show me his watch, the leather band battered and brown. He'd point to the numbers, and though I was just learning to tell time, I got it.
Ten o'clock, two o'clock, ten o'clock, two o'clock
, he'd repeat rhythmically as I flung the fishing line back and forth. Dad said I was a natural. Only now do I wonder if he meant what he said, or whether this was a prepackaged parental lie uttered to encourage effort.

Anyway, fishing with Phelps, I started out confident,
ready to brandish my skills. But soon, my casts were robotic and awkward, more like nine o'clock, three o'clock, far from the fluid arcs I effortlessly accomplished with Dad. After ten minutes of fishing, I caught Phelps above the lip with my fly.