Erika Krouse - Come Up and See Me Sometime

A young couple stood at the cake table, drinking nonalcoholic champagne. The woman, who had glasses and a frumpy haircut, smiled a lot. She wore a long angora sweater dress with a matching cardigan draped over her shoulders. Hey, I thought, you’re my age. You can’t do that.

She said, “I don’t know. This champagne doesn’t taste nonalcoholic. It’s just a little too convincing.”

“I don’t care,” her husband said. “It is what it says it is.”

I concentrated on standing upright on the wet earth. But my spike heels sank into the mud, and my shoes kept getting stuck.

“Our wedding had no champagne,” the wife said. “So you couldn’t get them mixed up, nonalcoholic and alcoholic champagne. There just wasn’t any. Just coffee, tea, like that.”

“Are you an alcoholic?” I asked.

“Certainly not,” she said.

I was thinking about the word “certainly” and how I rarely heard it in conversation anymore. Then I realized that they probably couldn’t drink because of their religion. I slapped my forehead with my palm, while my heels dove into the ground again.

“Mosquito?” the husband asked politely.

She was a marketing manager, and he was an accountant. They worked for the same company and had been married since they were both nineteen.

“And you?” they asked.

“Oh, not much. Part-time sometimes, temporary other times.”

“Who are you here with?”

I pointed to Johnny with the bottom of my champagne glass. At that moment he was showing a woman how he could click his heels together in the air. The woman laughed and applauded. Some mud splattered on her shin from the heels of his shoes.

I said, “Johnny there. I live with him.”

“Ah,” the husband said. “You’re married to Johnny.”

“No. I live with him.”

They nodded. The wife said, “Well, then,” and brushed her husband’s shoulder. Her long nails made scraping noises on the tightly woven cloth. They moved together toward a couple under a dripping tree. “Oh, Seth, Marie,” the wife said.

I stood alone again, holding my glass in my hand. After all, I was what I said I was.

JOHNNY AND I were underdressed for Sam’s wedding. Johnny wore a big white shirt and no tie, and I wore a kimono. Nobody talked to us, but a big band was playing, so we drank a lot of wine and headed toward the floor. First we tried a polka, then a jitterbug, then a tango. Johnny pushed me into a bridesmaid’s bare back, and I stepped backward, detaching her foot from its satin pump. “I’m sorry,” I told her, then whispered to Johnny, “Why can’t you lead worth a damn?”

I walked outside. Standing in front of me was a statue of Hiawatha with Minnehaha in his arms. Her dress hung in strips, and his biceps barely bulged under her weight.

I heard Johnny walk up behind me. “See that?” I pointed to the statue. “Is that how it’s supposed to be?” I turned around, but it wasn’t Johnny, it was Sam, the groom.

“Yeah,” he said, “but you take what you can get.” We looked through the window at the wedding guests, and at Johnny dancing with the bride. They were beautiful together, the whites blurring together, the bride ringing on his arm like a giant bell. They could have been any two people that you had seen once and forgotten.

“BUT IT wouldn’t feel like a wedding if we drove to Vegas and got married by an Elvis impersonator,” I said, holding a spatula. “We could act like it didn’t mean anything.” In the pan, the eggs chugged like a motor.

“Do you really want to get married in Las Vegas?” Johnny asked, next to the stove.

“No,” I said, confused. “No, I don’t really want to get married.”

“Good. Me neither. After Sally, I promised myself never again.”

“What if you think about wanting to marry me and I think about wanting to marry you? And we’ll both know that we won’t do it—that we’ll promise not to do it.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“Even with me?”

“What are you talking about? You hate all this. What is it that you want? The wedding part?”

“No. I couldn’t stand to be around my family for a whole day.”

“Do you want to be married?”

“No. Everyone would expect me to take your last name. Get fat.”

“Everyone who?”

“Just everyone.”

I had meanwhile flipped the eggs for the second time, so the yolks were faceup and coated with a doughy white film. Johnny turned the burner knob to OFF.

I looked around the yellow kitchen, with the yellow linoleum peeling at the edges.

“I hate yellow,” I said.

“Well, that’s what you get when you rent,” Johnny said. “Listen, honey. I love you. I don’t know what you’re asking me for.”

“I want to be that important.”

“To whom?”

I started crying, sliding the eggs from the pan and onto a plate. They had sat too long in the hot pan and were now rigid, even the yolks.

“I want you to want me like that. I want you to love me that much. As much as you loved Sally.”

Johnny ran his fingers through his short hair and looked at me blearily. “It wasn’t about love with Sally. It was about marriage. It was never about love.”

“I still want you to love me that much.”

He looked at the plate and then at my face. His voice was scorched and halting. “Do you love me that much?” he asked.

I INTRODUCED Nancy and Gary at an informal wedding reception. Nancy was Johnny’s coworker, one of those embarrassing guests who laugh too loudly at everything everyone says. Gary had wispy hair and permanently flared nostrils. He had once followed me home telling me about his pet lizards.

They talked at the buffet table for two hours, after the reception had moved outdoors, after the keg burped its last. Nancy flushed red. Her voice became even louder, her shoulders even wider. She’s in love, I thought, and turning into a man.

Nancy finally left after saying good-bye for thirty minutes. Gary stayed, holding an empty plastic cup. “Go after her,” I whispered. He hesitated until he saw her brake lights ignite in the parking lot. Then he ran toward her, waving with both arms.

Gary called me the next day. I had been up all night and wore a purple crescent under each of my eyes. Johnny was still in the bathroom, crying. “I was thinking of asking Nancy to coffee,” Gary said.

No, not coffee. A date. Say the word “date.” “Say ‘date,’” I said. “Bring flowers. Kiss her good night, with tongue.”

He repeated everything. Date. Flowers. Tongue.

In the next room, Johnny had emerged from the bathroom and was dividing our books into stacks. He got The Great Gatsby . I got Anna Karenina. Romeo and Juliet we gave away, since in that one, both of them died.

GARY TOLD me about his engagement over a hot cup of coffee. The windows were steaming in the coffee shop, and I drew little animals in the frost on the windowpane while he talked.

When Gary proposed to Nancy, it was raining, but he had planned a picnic, so they spread a blanket and sat on a curb. The chicken had gotten soggy, but the potato salad could be saved. He handed her a small white box. Nancy started crying. When she saw that the box contained a pendant, not a ring, she cried harder.

That night they called their parents. His hooted so loudly that Nancy could hear their voices through the receiver from across the room. Her parents were quiet. They said, “Oh.”

When she got off the phone, Gary asked, “How did they feel?”

Nancy said, “They said, ‘Oh.’”

Gary slept all night, but Nancy walked back and forth in the moonlight. When the sun came up, he said, she was still waiting by the window. He woke up. She looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes and said, “Okay, I’m ready for it.”