Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [24]
After Matt’s visit, Abby felt herself slipping back in time. It took her hours to pick out which shoes to wear, and when she finally did, she immediately regretted her choice. Her clothes seemed to fit differently, tight in places they never were before, too loose in others, and she pulled at them, trying to figure out why they didn’t look right. “Do I look okay?” she asked more often. She stared at herself in the mirror until Matt grew impatient, telling her she looked fine when he wasn’t looking at her at all.
Abby couldn’t help what was happening. She needed Matt around all the time, felt confused when he was gone, followed him around the apartment, her toes hitting his heels when he stopped short. “Your wanting,” he said one night, “is overwhelming.” It sounded poetic, but Matt was not a poetic person. One night, she woke up holding a fistful of his shirt. Matt stared at her across the darkness, then shook his shoulders like a dog does when it’s wet, and rolled over to face away from her. She knew he would be gone soon.
Three months after Abby woke up holding Matt’s shirt, she arrived alone at her parents’ house. As she pulled into the driveway, she thought, “The neighbors are neglecting their exotic birds.” That was not unusual. Ever since the peacock incident, that sentence came into Abby’s head at the oddest of times. “The neighbors are neglecting their exotic birds,” she wanted to say when there was a lull at a dinner party or a friend told her that she was pregnant. And so she wasn’t surprised that on the night she came home to tell her parents that she wasn’t getting married, it was that thought that ran through her head: The neighbors are neglecting their exotic birds.
It was no stranger than what she had come to tell them: that the wedding was off, that Matt had moved out, and that they would probably not be able to get a refund on anything. She turned off the car and thought about her options. “The neighbors are neglecting their exotic birds,” she said out loud to no one. Her breath made little puffs of white in the winter air, and she sat in the car until it was too cold to bear, and then she walked inside the house.
“Mom, I’m not getting married,” Abby said as soon as she walked through the door. Her mother was reading a book on the couch, and she marked her place with her finger before she looked up.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m not getting married.” Abby made no move to take off her jacket or move farther into the room.
“All right, then,” she said. “Why don’t you come on in, and we’ll talk about it?” She put the book down on the couch and stood up. “Would you like some tea?” she asked. Abby nodded.
Abby’s mom didn’t even look surprised to see her. She’d driven all the way from New York, walked into the house unannounced, and her mom acted like she’d been expecting her. Abby had never been able to shock her mom. Once, in college, Isabella had said, “Can you imagine if you had to tell your mom that you were pregnant?” She shuddered after she asked this and Abby made a sympathetic noise, but she couldn’t really relate. Abby could have told her mom that she’d been arrested for heroin possession while carrying on a lesbian affair, and she would have taken it in and then suggested that they talk about it.
“So, will we still have the party then?” her mom asked. They were sitting at the kitchen table with their tea, and it took Abby a minute to realize that she meant the wedding. She and Abby’s father were never officially married, of course, so maybe she thought they just decided to skip the legal part and live together forever.
“No, Mom,” Abby said. “No party, no wedding.”
“So you and Matt are …”
“Done. We broke up.” She nodded