Jennifer Weiner - Good in Bed

Still, I persist. I write about trends, about gossip, the mating habits of stars and starlets. I do reviews, and even the occasional interview with the handful of celebrities who deign to stop by the East Coast on their promotional juggernauts.

I wandered into journalism after graduating from college with an English degree and no real plans. I wanted to write. Newspapers were one of the few places I could locate that would pay me to do it. So, the September after graduation, I was hired at a very small newspaper in central Pennsylvania. The average age of a reporter was twenty-two. Our combined years of professional experience were less than two years, and boy, did it show.

At the Central Valley Times, I covered five school districts, plus assorted fires, car crashes, and whatever features I could find time to churn out. For this I was paid the princely sum of $300 a week – enough to live on, just barely, if nothing went wrong. And of course, something was always going wrong.

Then there were the wedding announcements. The CVT was one of the last newspapers in the country that still ran, free of charge, lengthy descriptions of weddings – and, woe to me, of wedding dresses. Princess seams, alençon lace, French embroidery, illusion veils, beaded headpieces, gathered bustles… all of these were terms I found myself typing so often that I put them on a save-get key. Just one keystroke, and out would pop complete phrases: freshwater pearl embroidery, or ivory taffeta pouf.

One day I was wearily typing the wedding announcements and musing on the injustice of it all when I came across a word I couldn’t read. Many of our brides filled their forms in by hand. This particular bride had written in looping cursive, in purple ink, a word that looked like CFORM.

I carried the form over to Raji, another cub reporter. “What’s this say?”

He squinted at the purple. “C-FORM,” he read slowly. “Like MDOS, or something.”

“For a dress, though?”

Raji shrugged. He’d grown up in New York City, then attended Columbia Journalism School. The ways of Central Pennsylvanians were strange to him. I headed back to my desk; Raji went back to his dread chore, typing in a week’s worth of school lunch menus. “Tater Tot,” I heard him sigh. “Always, the Tater Tot.”

Which left me with C-FORM. Under “contact for questions” the bride had scribbled her home phone number. I picked up the phone, and dialed.

“Hello?” answered a cheerful-sounding woman.

“Hello,” I said, “this is Candace Shapiro calling from the Valley Times. I’m trying to reach Sandra Garry”

“This is Sandy,” chirped the woman.

“Hi, Sandy. Listen, I do the wedding announcements here, and I’m reading your form and there’s a word… C-FORM?”

“Seafoam,” she answered promptly. In the background I could hear a kid screaming, “Ma!” and what sounded like a soap opera on TV. “That’s the color of my dress.”

“Oh,” I said, “well, that’s what I needed to know, so thanks”

“Except, well, maybe… I mean, do you think people will know what seafoam is? Like, what do you think of when you think of seafoam?”

“Green?” I ventured. I really wanted to get off the phone. I had three baskets of laundry reposing in the trunk of my car. I wanted to get out of the office, go to the gym, wash my clothes, buy some milk. “Like a pale green, I guess.”

Sandy sighed. “See, that’s not it,” she said. “It’s really more blue, I think. The girl at the Bridal Barn said the color’s called seafoam, but that’s really more of a green-sounding thing, I think.”

“We could say blue,” I said. Another sigh from Sandy. “Light blue?” I essayed.

“See, but it’s not really blue,” she said. “You say blue, and people think, you know, blue like the sky, or navy blue, and it’s not, like, dark or anything…”

“Pale blue?” I offered, running through my bridal announcement-gleaned gamut of synonyms. “Ice blue? Robin’s egg blue?”

“I just don’t think any of those are quite right,” Sandy said primly.

“Hmm,” I said. “Well, if you want to think about it and call me back…”

Which was when Sandy started to cry. I could hear her sobbing on the other end of the phone as the soap opera droned in the background and the child, who I imagined, had sticky cheeks and possibly a stubbed toe, continued to whine, “Ma!”

“I want it to be right,” she said between her sobs. “You know, I waited so long for this day… I want everything to be perfect… and I can’t even say what color my dress is”

“Oh, now,” I said, feeling ridiculously ineffectual. “Oh, listen, it’s not that bad”

“Maybe you could come here,” she said, still crying. “You’re a reporter, right? Maybe you could look at the dress and say what’s right.”

I thought of my laundry, my plans for the night.

“Please?” asked Sandy, in a tiny, pleading voice.

I sighed. The laundry could wait, I supposed. And now I was curious. Who was this woman, and how did someone who couldn’t spell seafoam find love?

I asked her for directions, mentally cursed myself for being such a softie, and told her I’d be there in an hour.

To be perfectly honest, I was expecting a trailer park. Central Pennsylvania has plenty of those. But Sandy lived in an actual house, a small white Cape Cod with black shutters and the proverbial picket fence out front. The backyard boasted a plastic orange SuperSoaker, an abandoned Big Wheel, a new-looking swingset. There was a shiny black truck parked in the driveway, and Sandy stood at the door – thirtyish, tired-looking around her eyes, but with a tremulous species of hope there, too. Her hair was pale blond, fine as spun sugar, and she had the tiny snub nose and wide cornflower-blue eyes of a painted figurine.

I got out of the car with my notebook in my hand. Sandy smiled through the screen door. I could see two small hands clutching her thigh, a child’s face peeping around her leg, then vanishing behind it.

The house was cheaply furnished, but neat and clean, with stacks of magazines on the pine-veneer coffee table: Guns amp; Ammo, Road amp; Track, Sport amp; Field. The ampersand collection, I thought to myself. Powder-blue wall-to-wall carpet lined the living room floor; fresh white linoleum – the kind you roll down in a single sheet, with patterns stamped on it to make it look like separate tiles – covered the kitchen. “Do you want a soda? I was just about to have one myself,” she said shyly.

I didn’t want soda. I wanted to see the dress, come up with an adjective, hit the road, and be good amp; gone by the time Melrose Place was on. But she seemed desperate, and I was thirsty, so I sat down at her kitchen table under the stitched sampler that read “Bless This Home,” with my notebook at my side.

Sandy took a gulp of her drink, burped gently against the back of her hand, closed her eyes, and shook her head. “Excuse me, please.”

“Are you nervous about the wedding?” I asked.

“Nervous,” she repeated, and laughed a little. “Honey, I’m terri-fied!”

“Is it…” I wanted to tread carefully here, “have you done the whole wedding thing before?”

Sandy shook her head. “Not like this. My first time I eloped. That was when I found out I was pregnant with Trevor. Justice of the peace over in Bald Eagle,” she said. “I wore my prom dress to that one.”

“Oh,” said I.

“Second time,” she continued, “there never was a wedding at all. That was Dylan’s daddy, who I guess you could call my common-law husband. We were together seven years.”

“Dylan, that’s me!” piped up a little voice from underneath the table. A small, sleek blond head peeked out. “My daddy’s in the army.”