Slim Chance Read online

  The train was pretty crowded, and I hadn’t noticed till then but the man sitting on my right was leaning up against me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that he was clutching a ratty pink Barbie backpack tied up with brown cord. His left knee bounced up and down frenetically as he tapped his heel against the floor. On one foot, he wore a filthy Reebok cross-trainer smeared with what was probably not rust-colored paint. On the other foot, a purple toe with a black nail stuck out of a dirty sock. Disgusting. I’m so sick of this shit. His bulging eyes darted from my hand to my chest then back down to my hand. My Ring! He was staring at my Ring!

  Normally, in situations like these, which occur not altogether infrequently on the A Train, I get up and move. But today, the sight of this greasy interloper inspired within me the courage to take a stand for all peace-loving female commuters everywhere.

  I looked directly at him and cleared my throat. Bruce would have absolutely killed me. The guy looked up suddenly and when his eyes met mine, he let out a shriek so loud that the force of his very bad breath blew my bangs up off my forehead (In Style, April: “The New-Fashioned Fringe: Bangs Are Back!”). With a gasp, I jumped back onto the lady beside me. But she was wearing a Walkman and I guess she hadn’t heard him yell, so she freaked out and reflexively pushed me forward into the group of stunned passengers. I reached out wildly for the man standing in front of me wearing a black trench coat (as it turns out, a very sensible color for a trench coat). But he just deflected me and used the opportunity to slide into my seat. I landed on my hands and knees on the floor of the car. The crazy guy, whimpering a little, just rocked back and forth, staring at someone else’s hands.

  By the time I got home, Bruce was already there. I threw down my newspaper-stained, Pruscilla-smelling, mud-smeared, formerly white trench coat and flopped onto the couch and cried again. We decided not to go for dinner, not to call our parents, not to call our friends. We just stayed in and ordered a pizza. It may not sound romantic, but it was. We talked and talked, and by the time we went to bed, I felt like myself again.

  I woke up before Bruce the next morning, something which almost never happens. He’s the type who claims not to be a morning person, because it’s such an unpopular way to be, but who actually gets up on weekends at the exact same time, almost to the minute, that he does during the week. He usually spends Saturday and Sunday mornings on the Internet researching obscure factoids for his students or doing the grocery shopping or reorganizing my closet, while I sleep till noon and then thrash about in bed for a half hour or so complaining about him making noise. Like Bruce, I suppose I have an internal clock, too, it’s just that mine must be permanently set on Snooze because I’ve been working full-time since college and waking up at 7:00 a.m. was as torturous yesterday as it was my first day of work. I think it bugs the crap out of him, my sleeping in—his early-morning antics sure piss me off—although he’d never admit it. Let him think I’m lazy. I am.

  In that blissful moment of nothingness before I opened my eyes, before true awareness set in, the first thing I remembered was that it was finally Saturday. Thank God, no work. Maybe I’ll just go back to sleep for a bit. Then later I’ll go into the city. Yeah. There’s that Clinique Gift With Purchase thing on now at Saks…and I need some new pants for work. But I refuse to buy a size 14. Okay, so no clothes shopping till I’ve dropped 15 pounds, till I’m a 10. Serves me right, after what I ate this week, and last night, that pizza…wait a minute…the pizza…ohmygod…Bruce….

  And it all came flooding back. I turned over and looked at him. He lay on his back, still asleep, his chest rising and falling. Bruce always seems different without his glasses on, like I don’t really know him. Still cute, though. He was whistling softly through his nose. Did I really say yes? Did yesterday really happen? Am I actually going to marry this guy? My heart began to pound as I replayed the scene at work in my head about 37 times. God, I can’t believe I actually threw up. With a psychic snort, Bruce turned over and faced the wall.

  Just to make sure it was all real, I pulled my left hand out from under the pillow. The room was dark, but there it was, plain as day—The Ring. Turns out it was his grandmother’s. Mr. Fulbright had kept it for Bruce since she died, like, twenty years ago. Last night was nice, come to think of it. Bruce told me all about how he’d been planning to propose, and how his dad had been in on the whole thing.

  “My grandfather gave her this ring in 1939, the night before he left to fight in the war,” Bruce explained as he held my hand. “Six months later, he came back and married her. And nine months after that, my father was born in an air raid shelter during the Blitz.” Over the years, the Fulbright Nativity Story has evolved into an epic tale, complete with evil Nazis and valiant R.A.F. pilots fighting to the death in the Battle of Britain, including Bruce’s grandfather, shot down three months before little Bruce Jr. came into the world.

  I already knew the story, minus the ring detail. Bruce’s dad, whose name is also Bruce (Bruce Jr., actually—yes, that makes my Bruce, Bruce Fulbright III. God, that better not make me Mrs. Bruce Fulbright III), loves talking about the night he was born. The only time he’s ever animated about anything seems to be when he’s telling stories about the war and his parents and the horror of butter rations and all that. It was as if being born was the only thing Bruce Sr. had ever done with any style, and it’s been all downhill from there.

  Poor Mr. Fulbright. With the exception of Bruce, the only respect his family ever shows him is when he’s telling his stories, now only once or twice a year, usually on his birthday. His perpetually self-involved daughters know better than to dismiss him on this, and even Bertie tries her hardest to refrain from seeming bored. And while Bruce doesn’t quite hang on his dad’s every word like he probably did when he was a kid, now he listens intently. I’m sure trying to memorize every word so that one day he can tell his own kids. Make that our kids, I guess.

  “An insane woman tried to steal the ring—this very ring—off her finger while she was in labor,” Bruce continued, almost in a whisper. This was a new twist. Sounds like ole Bruce Jr. was getting a bit carried away.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, incredulous.

  Bruce raised his eyebrows and cocked his head to one side. “I’m just telling you what he told me when he gave it to me.”

  I looked down at The Ring, imagining a stoic, placenta-splattered Granny Fulbright fending off crazies in the bomb shelter as she simultaneously struggled to birth a child and hang on to the only thing she had left of her dead war-hero husband.

  It made me think about my mom and what she must have gone through having me all alone, especially since her parents had disowned her because my dad wasn’t Italian, or even Catholic for that matter. But then I wondered if Granny Fulbright would have cruelly refused to let her child go to school in California, even though she’d scored over 1300 on her SATs and had a partial scholarship to UCLA… Oh, no wait…that was my mother. And I was the one stuck at NYU, pissing distance from the house I grew up in. No, there would be no great collegiate adventure for me. But that’s where I met Bruce, so I suppose it had all worked out for the best. If you consider marrying your first real boyfriend the best.

  So last night was pretty good. We talked a ton about the wedding, what we wanted and all that. And we really laid our cards on the table. Bruce is as far from a commitmentphobe as is humanly possible in this city (Glamour, April: “Is Your Man Afraid To Commit? Take This Test and Find Out!”), so the usual male worry of only being able to have sex with one person for the rest of his life doesn’t really seem to concern him. “Evie, I would have asked you two years ago if I thought you were ready,” he’d said while massaging my feet.

  “How can you ever really be ready for something like this,” I mused, but he just looked at me, not understanding at all how marriage isn’t the most comfortable or logical step for some people.

  No, Bruce’s marital stress comes from more of a mama’s boy place. He was worried, and rightly so
, that his mother was going to give him a hard time about it, especially since his dad didn’t even tell her he’d given Bruce his mother’s ring.

  “Especially since she hates me, you mean,” I said.

  “She doesn’t hate you. She’s just a negative person sometimes. And she’ll think my dad went behind her back. I think she wanted to give the ring to Brooke, ’cuz she’s the eldest daughter or something I guess.”

  “Oh great. Now Brooke will hate me, too.”

  “Oh, Evie, don’t say that. She won’t.”

  “Yeah right. Then it’ll be my fault when she loses it and has another one of her ‘spells.’” His sister is a frail, skittish girl with four full-blown nervous breakdowns under her belt and she’s barely twenty-four. “She’ll probably cry as soon as she sees the ring on my finger.”

  And that’s a scene I can look forward to witnessing in person tomorrow night when we “stop by” to break the good news. Bruce’s dad was so excited about the whole thing that he made Bruce promise we’d come as soon as possible.

  “I doubt it,” Bruce said.

  “You just watch—she’ll be back in the looney bin by the end of the week,” I said, then instantly regretted it. Sometimes, I can go a little too far. It’s not that I don’t mean what I say, it’s just that I know that some thoughts are better left unsaid, especially when it comes to things like people’s families or haircuts. I think I get my big mouth from Claire, my grandmother. Only she gets away with murder because she’s old, and people seem happy to confuse her brutal honesty with quaint eccentricity.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “It was a relaxation facility, not a looney bin,” Bruce said, peeved. “They didn’t strap her down or anything.” He knows I know that—he’s only told me like a thousand times—but he can’t control himself either, sometimes.

  Despite my occasional overstepping of boundaries, it’s this sort of honest interchange about important things like family that convinces me that Bruce and I may actually have a chance. And in my own defense, there is an upside: There’s no point in letting the little things fester into giant, repressed issues when a bit of well-directed hostility can bring stuff out into the open right away. And so we make a point of being very open with each other about everything, although it’s not a natural thing for Bruce to be like that. He’s much more reserved when it comes to saying what’s on his mind, especially if it involves hurting someone’s feelings, but I’ve been helping him to try and get over that a little bit.

  It was in this spirit of openness that I admitted to Bruce later in the conversation that the idea of marriage makes me a bit crazy.

  “It does? I thought the puking and crying meant you were calm and rational about the whole thing,” he laughed.

  “I’m glad you can laugh about it already,” I told him. “That’s a good sign, I’m sure.”

  “Yeah, well, I hope so. But I think we’ll leave that part out when we’re telling our grandkids the story.”

  “Seriously, Bruce. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Don’t worry. Have another piece of pizza. And don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  I wanted to tell him that I knew that getting married was the next logical step in our relationship, and that it was definitely the right thing for us. Because we love each other and that’s what’s important. And not to worry about me—that I was ecstatic and sure and positive and all that sort of thing. But I don’t think he wanted to talk about it anymore.

  But there I was the next morning, lying in bed in a full sweat, feeling an awful lot like I had the day before in the bathroom. It was almost twenty minutes before my heart stopped thumping and I had psyched myself into a “Marriage is Good” place again.

  After mentally planning my nuptial dietary strategy for a good half hour—wavering back and forth between invoking the Member for Life clause in the Weight Watchers contract and developing a simple starvation plan on my own—I was firmly back in the camp of, “I’m getting married and I’m gonna look like a million bucks!” Trying not to ruin Bruce’s first attempt at sleeping in in years, I snuck out of the bedroom and into the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on. There were so many people who had no idea what had happened, and it was too cruel to keep them in the dark any longer.

  3

  First things first. I had to call Morgan—it was outrageous that I’d been engaged for almost 24 hours and she didn’t know.

  In high school, Morgan Russell and I were the quintessential loser odd couple—she, tall and freckly and skinny; me, dumpy and short and dark. By the time she came back from Berkeley, though, she was a bombshell. I, on the other hand, have remained vaguely potato-shaped over the years, although my skin has cleared up some. But Morgan is the kind of person who makes you not hate beautiful people. She’s just like that—smart, bitchy, funny, but still with enough hang-ups that it just gives you faith. She’s definitely no fun to shop with, though, not just because everything looks good on her, but because she hates it. She lets salesgirls dress her, and says things like, “Just give me what that mannequin in the window is wearing, in a size four.”

  “Hello?” her husky voice whispered on the other end.

  “Morgan? Wake up. It’s me.”

  “What time is it? Did I oversleep?”

  “No, no. It’s almost eleven. I just wanted to talk to you,” I said. “What did you do last night?” I asked, not really caring.

  “I’m going back to sleep,” she said, and hung up.

  I called her back.

  “What do you want, Evie? I didn’t get to bed till seven.”

  “You’re already up, or else you wouldn’t have answered the phone.”

  “Your logic astounds me,” she said. I could hear her lighting a cigarette.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I went out with Billy, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Did you have fun?” Billy is Morgan’s latest fling—thirty-seven years old, an architect, Ivy League, the whole deal. I get the sense that he’s a bit less uptight than her usual assortment of asshole Wall-Street types. She met him a few months ago at Lemon Bar, which to me sounds more like a dessert than a suitable place to meet men, but Morgan isn’t interested in finding Mr. Right. She gave up on that urban legend a long time ago.

  “We met up with some of his college friends. Dreadful bunch. They’ve all got debating trophies stuck up their asses. It makes you wonder, you know? How a person you like can like people you hate?”

  “I thought you didn’t like Billy, either,” I reminded her. Because of her bad instincts, Morgan had sworn off dating anyone she liked. After college, she had a string of bad luck with men she all thought were The One. The first guy, Tom, turned out to be gay, and was only dating her, he eventually realized, because something about her reminded him of Joan Crawford. Morgan didn’t find out her next boyfriend, Ryan, was married until after they’d been together for six months, and Matthew, the last guy, whom she was with for almost three years, was the most damaging of all of them—emotionally unavailable. After him, she decided it was best to stick with guys she was sure weren’t The One.

  “I don’t like Billy. Not really, I guess. I mean, he’s okay. More fun than his friends, anyway. I think it’s because he’s from Detroit.”

  “Detroit? How can being from Detroit make somebody fun?”

  “He sort of has that sexy working man thing going on,” she said sulkily.

  “Morgan, he’s not exactly blue-collar, he’s an architect for chrissake,” I said. “You’re talking like he wears overalls to work.”

  “He actually did work at GM one summer,” she added.

  “Oh, well there you go—you don’t like his personality or his friends, but he worked on an assembly line for one month and that makes him somehow more noble than the spoiled overachievers you usually date.”

  “Now you get it!” she laughed. “Evie, it’s not that I don’t like him, I do—he’s just not someone I plan to get
all crazy about.”

  “Just because his friends aren’t your thing doesn’t mean he’s not a nice guy,” I said, trying to get back to the point. “I hate Bruce’s friends, and look at us.”

  “I know, but I don’t really give a shit about Billy’s friends anyway. Come to think of it, I don’t really care if he’s a nice guy or not. If he can get me to forget about work and take me out for a few drinks and a good meal, and then not want to spend the whole night cuddling, that’s all I want. I don’t give a good goddamn about anything else right now.”

  “Are we still talking about Billy?” I asked. “He’d want to cuddle with you if you had leprosy.” The guy is so bloody crazy about her that he turned down a better job in Philadelphia to wait around for her scraps of affection. And he is a nice guy, no matter how hard she tries to pretend he isn’t. I suddenly realized how much fun it would be if Morgan and I were engaged at the same time. If I could get her to see what a good idea marriage is, and if Billy didn’t scare her off too soon…

  “He told me that he wants me to stop seeing other guys,” she sighed. So much for picking out wedding dresses together.

  “Gee, what a surprise. What did you say?” I asked, knowing the answer.