“She would have made such a lovely bride.
champagne problems | Taylor Swift
What a shame she’s fucked in the head,” they said.
Time seems to whip right by her. One moment, her hands are plunged into soft bread dough, the next, she is opening the door to a pack of people who flood in, hugging her, then each other.
The reunion is chaotic but no less cheerful for it. She sinks into each and every embrace, hoping to make up for lost time. They go weeks, sometimes months, without seeing each other in person. Though they text often – constantly, even, like it is the air that they breathe – she misses their physical presence. Their arms around her, the limitless fondness invoked.
She pours drinks that fill her best glassware in a pink fizz. When she drops a wedge of grapefruit into each, the bubbles go wild. Her home fills with the sound of glasses clinking and crossover conversations. As she returns to the kitchen, just a step or two over from where her friends are standing, she listens to snippets of each conversation, more to enjoy the sound of their voices than anything else. They all seem happily wrapped up in each other – in fact, they are so immersed that they have forgotten to sit down, and so they stand in a circle just beyond her kitchen, chatting and laughing and drinking.
The world feels most like home when it is quiet, but here amongst the buzz exists a different sense of belonging. She has hungered for this all day; longer, even, but her yearning heightened when she woke up before dawn. The entire day has been devoted to making everything just so for the evening ahead. Earlier, at the market, all by her lonesome, she took pleasure in filling her cart with everything her friends would most enjoy. Afterwards, she hurled herself into hours upon hours of baking and cleaning, cleaning and baking, rinse and repeat.
Now, the bread is done, the scent of it everywhere, warm and inviting. She feels as though she could burst with pride as she pulls the golden loaf from the oven while her friends watch. Steam billows, clouding her glasses, as she turns the loaf to tap its base. It sounds like the beat of a drum. She sets the loaf to settle and tops up her friends’ drinks.
As raspberry and rose gin glugs into their glasses, one of her friends says, “You’re going to make a wonderful wife someday.”
She thinks at first he might be joking, in which case the right thing to do would be to laugh along pleasantly. But nobody else is laughing. They are watching and waiting to see how she will react. Perhaps her reaction will sway theirs.
Chance would be a fine thing.
Her heart rate is rising like it always does when someone questions her in this way. As she returns the gin to the fridge, letting the cool air wash over her, she hopes it might temper her response.
It doesn’t. With her pulse accelerating, she admits, “I can’t think of anything worse.”
What a ghastly thing to say, she thinks to herself, cringing at her own cruelty. Five of the six other people in the room are married. She remembers giddily dancing at their weddings, throat hoarse from singing along to love songs.
It isn’t you, she wants to explain, but before she can do so, he comes out with another question.
“What do you mean by that?”
The curiosity seems friendly at first. She sometimes feels invisible in groups of people, so to have someone tilt the spotlight gently in her direction isn’t a bad thing. But as she steps into the glow, it becomes blinding.
It starts to scald her when she admits, “I have a visceral reaction to the idea of marriage. Not broadly speaking. Just for me personally. I don’t want it.”
Her other friends gaze at her with mild interest, but he reacts differently. His curiosity grows barbed. He leans in, as if looming across an interrogation room table, and demands, “What does that mean?”
She turns back to the loaf of bread, still steaming but settled, and begins to carve into it. Sawing through it and hearing the serrated edge of the knife crack the crust offers some reprieve. As she cuts off great slices, warm and soft within, bordered by crisp edges, she explains.
It is rare to be given space to speak her mind. She should be grateful for that. Enough time is allotted that, as she speaks, she can fill her friends’ plates with bread that they spread with their favourite toppings. She knows exactly who will reach for the plum paste and brie, the hummus, the olive oil and balsamic. As her predictions prove true, she smiles to herself.
As everyone digs in, she continues talking, while bringing various other dishes to the table. It is an eclectic spread stemming from her friends’ different tastes and her own whims. Plump dumplings and gnocchi with pesto and garlic potatoes jump out as her picks of the bunch, all clustered between half a dozen other dishes which render the table rainbow.
“But are you sure you mean that?”
The spotlight loses its warmth. It casts a harsh, cold light her way, stripping the table of its colour and the room of its cheer. She settles into her chair but a sense of unsteadiness persists. The meal is only beginning and yet she has been cast out of her own home.
“I’ve been sure since I was twenty,” she says, as firmly as she can manage without having to fear she is causing harm.
“I remember when I was twenty,” he muses. “I thought a lot of things that I’ve grown out of now.”
She is thirty-two now, he is a mere handful of years older. It occurs to her, fleetingly, to demand what he has grown out of and engage in her own interrogation of him. But retaliation seems cruel. She worries her friends would become collateral damage in the resulting back-and-forth.
What is lingering on the tip of her tongue is a point he likely won’t believe: that she came to realise what she wanted at twenty but has spent the twelve years since examining and re-examining, like she does with everything, and she is as sure now as she ever was.
This is not a path she stumbled down in some fit of youthful naïveté. This is a path she searched for, one which she delighted upon finding, and the only path she cares to know.
“It just isn’t for me,” she says, smiling apologetically at her other friends.
She didn’t start this, but she feels responsible for it. All she wants is for her house to feel like their home for these next few hours. Instead, it is beginning to feel like a warzone.
In a matter of fact way, she traces through her twenties, and is glad that her friends actually seem to be listening. All of the things she learned, all of the times she crossed forks in the road but stuck to her chosen path. Not once did she do so sightlessly or senselessly. As she journeys through the past twelve years, it feels less like inviting her friends into an intimate telling of her life, and more like pleading her case.
It is probably all in her head, but they seem to stop smiling. The kindness she has known for years seems to fade from nearly every face tilted her way.
She tries once more to explain how she feels. The words ‘bride’ and ‘wife’ are lovely applied to others: dreamy and romantic and deserved. When she thinks of them in relation to herself, there is nothing there. No connection or relevance, no sense of aspiration or hope. It provokes a discomfort in her; an instinctual feeling that she doesn’t belong to those words, nor do they belong to her.
To admit to that is like taking the knife laying next to the bread and carving herself open. She does so willingly, in the hope that wrenching her heart from her chest and holding it out before the lot of them will suffice.
But it isn’t enough.
“I’m not hearing a real reason,” he says, and all at once, the other vultures join him in peering at her. The strips of flesh thrown their way are inadequate. The heart laid out before them turns to stone. She is hollowed out to a husk, and yet they still hunger.
What reason would be real enough? What confession would stop them from staring at her with such intrusive intrigue?
The meal she has laid out is not enough; nor her earnest declarations of love for the life she has battled for. Her plate is full of food that she has laboured over, dishes learned from watching her mother cook or borrowing recipe books from friends. She picks at it while staring at the loaf of bread, now carved down to a third of its original size. With a dull throbbing in her throat, she remembers how her hands sank into the dough, how they shaped it with care, all for these people and for the fondness she feels for them, which once seemed infinite.
With her pulse racing, she tries and tries and tries. The words stumble out of her around the lump in her throat. Earnestly, she protests that a life without marriage doesn’t mean a life without love. She wishes she could point to the evidence surrounding all of them. The paintings from her father and grandfather, books gifted by and borrowed from her closest friends, ornaments plucked up from far corners of the earth, and plants which stretch wildly in every direction. All of it is drenched in love in one way or another, but it would appear that all he sees is an abandoned desert plain.
“I’m still not hearing a real reason,” he says again. “It seems like a shame, that’s all.”
That becomes lost in the fray of shifting conversation. She catches it – or perhaps it catches her – and though she pretends to look away and focus on the new topic being tossed about, she stays with those words. To a greater extent, she stays with the shame: the idea of it, the weight of it, the shape of the word and all it carries.
What a shame he cares more to interrogate than to listen.
What a shame he has created combat where she has only ever known comfort.
She has fought valiantly in the hope that he might listen, but she might as well have thrown fists at a brick wall. It certainly feels like she pulls back bruised and bloodied. Underneath the dining table, her hands lock together.
She can normally tether herself in moments like these: to the brush of the lace tablecloth against her knuckles, to the scent of the freshly baked bread. But the cloth feels like steel wool and the bread carries the stench of mold. She watches, spellbound, as her friends carve off great slices. Steam continues to pour from the loaf, rising through the candlelight in curling wisps. They eat it with lashings of butter, which melts and oozes. She wonders if they taste the rot within.
Poison for poison, she thinks.
Maybe they have no chance of tasting the bitterness. Perhaps he has stolen that away as well. They might all go on, gnawing on the toxic loaf, mold coating their tongues and leaving blue-green traces on their lips, the lot of them none the wiser.
“This is the best bread I’ve ever had,” one of her friends remarks, moaning as they take another bite.
There is a hum of agreement that echoes around the room. It is a warm sort of hum, but the room is otherwise cold. It begins to take on a deathly chill. She wonders if the bread was rotten all along and they have already fallen prey to it. Maybe they are all in an irreversible state of decay.
She glances around the room and tries to latch on to the pieces of herself that are everywhere. It is dark magic, how he has transformed this space to nothingness when it once was everything. She tries to remember how precious this all is, but she struggles to clear the hurdle of his condemnation.
Nothing she can say or do is enough. Her own magic is lost and without it, she fades away from the conversation while the room crumbles around her. All of these signs of life and love, none of them ever enough, simply diminish to dust.
Everything goes quiet, but it isn’t the type of quiet she likes. It will be hours yet until she can return to that type of quiet. For now, she is caught on the periphery of a cycle of chatter that proves deafening.
There exists a mild temptation to say something, to profess the hurt he has caused, to plead her case once more. But even if she could raise her voice up above the fray, she fears she will only take her hurt and inflict it upon everyone else. They have returned to the night she had envisaged; she is somewhere else. Why drag them across the divide?
Later, she will clean the house of any trace of this party, wiping surfaces and scrubbing dishes until everything gleams. If she can shake his curse off her shoulders, she will dance around the kitchen and remember what it felt like to have her friends gathered in a circle here, merrily reunited before everything collapsed in on itself. When she is just past the point of exhaustion, she will take herself to bed and curl up, warm and safe, having pieced herself back together as only she knows how to do.
But for now, there is just noise and rot, a crowd of strangers who she wishes she still recognised, and who don’t seem to recognise her. She was sure they did before tonight.
With an ache threatening to cave in her chest, she wonders: If all of that was lost to his dark magic, was it ever there to begin with?
She tries to remember nights gone by: the enthusiasm with which they perused her bookshelves, the questions they asked while thumbing through photo albums. She wonders if they remember those details. Snowfall in New York and rain slick in Sydney; the authors who fill entire shelves and the books of theirs which are so beloved, their covers now fuzzy around the edges. All of it hers but also just her, scattered across pages and pictures, once capturing her friends’ fascination as though each memento were gilded.
What a shame, she thinks, her gaze fixed at portraits on the wall that stare back lifelessly. Tonight could have been such a lovely scene, if only they could see that she is enough.
