We’re in the car on the way to see Debberoni and Harry. They live in the lone quasi-exclusive neighborhood Morris has to offer, big fish in a small pond, just the way they like it. They don’t inhabit spaces where they’d let just anybody in. They have “a man” to do their gardening and “a woman” to do their cooking. Mr. and Mrs. Rose don’t regard them as important enough to call by name. They put on such airs, the first time I visited I expected to see bars of gold used as doorstoppers. You’d think Harold had been secretary of state instead of an investment banker.
I hear the crinkle of plastic and look askance to see a bouquet of flowers resting on the back seat. For one stupid, miserable beat my heart leaps into my throat and I think they’re for me—but then I see.
Of course. They’re roses.
I can’t help myself. “Wow, thank you for the flowers. You’re so sweet.”
“Oh.” His cheeks turn pink. “They’re for Mom, actually.”
“What’s the occasion? Is it her birthday?”
Her birthday was in January, same as Nicholas. He bought his mom a treadmill she circled for him in a catalog, and on top of that he proudly presented her with this little scroll of paper that said he’d gotten a star named after her.
“No. The flowers are … just because.”
I shouldn’t let myself be affected by this, but I am. This man sucks at being a fiancé. Imagine how much he’ll suck as a husband. “It’d be nice if you treated me like you treat your mom,” I say to the windshield, because I’m not quite brave enough to say it to his face. In my head I repeat what I just told him and my eyes bulge. I’ll take Things I Never Thought I’d Say for two hundred, Alex.
“You want me to give you stuff because you make me feel obligated to, not because I want to?”
I consider it.
“Yes. At least then I’d be getting flowers. If I waited for you to want to give me flowers, I’d be getting as many then as I’m getting now. Which is none.”
“Oh my god, Naomi,” he sputters. “You told me forever ago that you don’t want flowers. You said you didn’t need them.”
“Well, I didn’t mean it! Obviously I want flowers. What girl doesn’t? Can’t wait till I have an adult son so I’ll finally get some.”
I can feel his burning stare. “If I told you I didn’t want something, would you buy it for me anyway?”
I turn to him. “Why would you want flowers?”
His laugh is chilling. “Yeah, why would it ever occur to you to give me anything? A token of affection? Of course you don’t think about that.”
I am giving him something. Patience. It is a gift. I’m giving him a miracle in that I don’t launch myself onto his seat and throttle him for insisting we hang out with his friends on my birthday and treat them to wings and cheese fries; for staying late at work on the Fourth of July when I wanted to go to a water park, but purchasing an enormous ball of fire for his mother—him, king of monologuing about the impracticality of gifts. If the galaxy imploded tomorrow, my last intelligible thought would be Ha ha, there goes your fucking star, you bitch!
“How long have you been stewing in this?” he demands to know.
An eternity.
“I’m not stewing. I’m fine.”
“Sure.” Another humorless laugh. “Mad at me for not bringing you presents. Meanwhile you ignore me at home, staring at the TV. You sit there like a doll on the shelf. You pout when we go to these dinners at my parents’ house, but you don’t have any family who live nearby and I’m struggling to give us some kind of family foundation here. It’s amazing we still get invited over, frankly, because you exist inside your own head the whole time. No animation from you whatsoever from the second we get in the door.” He shakes his head. “I might as well be there alone.”
For a moment I’m stunned, because he’s not supposed to know I’m inwardly pouting at these dinners. From my point of view, I’ve put on a convincing presentation of being happy and content. If he’s known all along that I’ve been faking it, why hasn’t he called me out on it before?
I spend the rest of our journey to Sycamore Lane thinking about how my next fiancé is going to be Nicholas’s polar opposite. He’ll have long blond hippie hair and a beard, an artist who rubs Pop Rocks on his teeth. His name is Anthony but he writes it & thony. He’s indisputably an orphan.
Then we’re in the driveway, narrowing in on what is sure to be two awful hours. I can’t remember the last time Nicholas and I had fun in each other’s company. We practice our in-front-of-other-people smiles and he hurries around the side of the car, reminding me of his one redeeming trait: there’s something mesmerizingly fluid about the way he moves his body when he’s not busy stomping to make a point.
His eyes snap to mine through the window, and his hand reaches for my door.
Then he smirks and chooses to open the back seat instead, grabbing the roses. He walks alone up to the porch. I follow behind him like a stray dog and wish that I could bark and snarl like one.
A Shakespearean plaque is bolted to the brick siding: A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD STILL SMELL AS SWEET. There’s not supposed to be a still in that quote. I looked it up once to make sure it was a typo but never pointed it out to Mr. and Mrs. Rose because I don’t want them getting a new one with the correct quote. I derive vicious pleasure from knowing their plaque is wrong.
I think about the first time I stood on this doorstep, nervous and optimistic, hoping so hard that I’d fit seamlessly into their world and they’d treat me like part of the family. Nicholas had wrapped his arm around my shoulders and kissed my cheek, grinning from ear to ear. They’re going to love you, he’d said.
The door opens. Deborah bares all her teeth at me in a smile she doesn’t mean, and I want to stick my finger down my throat right in front of her.
Nicholas and I exchange one last look of mutual loathing before we grin and hold hands. He squeezes. I squeeze back harder, but end up hurting my own fingers.
Their lair smells like a postapocalyptic Bath & Body Works that has been stagnating in dust for ten years, with base notes of Aqua Net. The dusty odor has always confounded me, since I’ve never managed to find any actual dust. Each room is heavy and rich, trying hard to evoke French castles with Louis XV chairs while hoping you don’t notice the stained pink carpet. If you’re under twenty years old, you’re expected to take off your shoes. There’s one single television in the “salon”—a relic of the seventies that is never turned on and whose sole purpose is to reflect your shock that such a mammoth television set is still in someone’s house.
Absolute silence falls over you like a hood once you cross the threshold into an Agatha Christie murder set and makes you want to speak quietly, which is translated through Mrs. Rose’s human emotions processor as admiration.
It’s her ode to a gilded age gone by, when children suppressed all their thoughts and emotions to make life easier for their boozy parents. Cherry wood, thick fabrics, onyx-on-charcoal damasks. Thousand-dollar bourbon, cork undisturbed, and crystal candy dishes that have nothing in them. Ornate frames of gold rope and eighteenth-century ashtrays you can Look At But Not Touch, enshrined behind backlit glass. A museum of Rose history that no one cares about except for the withered old Roses who grow here, and maybe me, the unwelcome and unsightly weed, if I end up having to marry into this mess.