Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Read online

“Unbelievable!” says Kath Chung.

  Kath is a real rabble-rouser, and for a moment it seems like she’s really about to start rousing some rabble, but before she can get too into it, the David who doesn’t talk says loudly, “This is not up for debate,” and we all at once realize the severity of the moment, because when the David who doesn’t talk talks, that’s when you know things have gotten serious.

  I return to the egg store. Sabrina the Person of Sales greets me with a big smile. “Hey, big guy! Did you want to take another gander at your masterpiece?”

  I can’t look her in the eye. “I need to trade it in. It’s too much.”

  She looks at me like I’m speaking another language. “You can’t trade it in. You already got it engraved.”

  “Okay, well, can I at least get the money back for the eunuch? We don’t need him. We’ll just leave the egg in the stand.”

  “That was a donation to the Church of the Wine God. You can’t just take that back.”

  “Sabrina, you gotta help me out here. Is there anything you can do for me?”

  Sabrina looks both ways, then leans in and whispers, “I can give you a coupon for twenty percent off your next purchase.”

  I explode: “Why would I ever need to purchase another Promise Egg?!”

  Not knowing what else to do, I hightail it to the Divinatory Rune Company and take the elevator all the way to the top. Dorothy’s father is in his office, looking out his window over the factory floor, overseeing the polishing and blessing of Divinatory Runes.

  “Peter! What can I do you for?”

  “Well…it’s about the wedding.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s about money.”

  “Oh.”

  And I mumble mumble something Promise Egg mumble mumble can’t afford it.

  Dorothy’s father sits down. He looks pained. “The Promise Egg symbolizes the promise you’re making to my daughter—the promise to provide for her and keep her safe. If I’m paying for it, what kind of message does that send?”

  “I can work it off,” I say. “After my shift at the quarry, let me come here for a stint on the polishing line. Dorothy doesn’t even have to know.”

  He takes a deep breath and looks at me like I’m a salad he just found a dead bug in and he’s trying to figure out whether it’s worth it to call the waitress over and send me back.

  “Peter, I really wish you’d reconsider, about the goats.”

  This throws me for a loop, because by this point, I honestly thought the goat thing was settled.

  “As per the goats of it all—” I start to say, but I’m immediately thrown off by the weirdness of starting a sentence with the phrase “as per the goats of it all.” That was a poor choice. I thought I could pull it off. I couldn’t pull it off.

  “Look,” he says. “I get it. At our wedding, we wanted to keep things small, so we only sacrificed twelve goats. But if you don’t sacrifice any goats, the Stone God is going to get angry and he’s going to put a curse on your house and your first baby will come out a statue. Now, that’s something I simply won’t allow.”

  “Sir,” I say, and it feels weird to call him sir, because when Dorothy and I first announced our engagement, he gave me a big hug and told me to call him Dad, but in this moment I know it would be even weirder to call him Dad. “Sir, with all due respect, has that ever actually happened? Has anyone actually not done the sacrifice and then given birth to a statue?”

  “It happened to Kyle’s Wife, in chapter twelve, verse eight of the Book of Kyle.”

  “Well, yeah, of course, obviously it happens in the Book of Kyle, but I mean has it ever happened to anyone you actually know, in your lifetime?”

  He takes a long drag off his cigar, the whole time looking me square in the eye.

  “Everyone I know,” he says, “made a sacrifice to the Stone God.”

  He pulls out a pen that probably costs more than I get paid in a year and starts scribbling in a checkbook. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “You want to sacrifice goats, I’ll pay for the goats—I’ll pay for however many goats you want, and I’ll even throw in a sizable chunk on top for the slaughterer. You want to ask your brother to slaughter the goats and use the money I give you on something else, well, that’s your business…”

  “I appreciate that, but all I’m asking for is—”

  “I think my offer is quite reasonable,” he says.

  I nod, ashamed I even tried to negotiate with the guy who basically runs the local branch of the Divinatory Rune Company.

  “And I like to think I’m a reasonable man. A modern, sophisticated, sensible man. But no daughter of mine is getting married at a wedding without goat slaughter.”

  I go to the House of Sorgenfrei. Kenny answers the door in a bathrobe. “Hey, brother.”

  “I need to talk to Dorothy.”

  “Ooh, no can do, buddy. The groom is not supposed to see the bride as she lies with the grand priest.”

  “I have to talk to her. Tell her it’s an emergency.”

  Kenny Sorgenfrei pouts, squints at me, then closes the door. A few minutes later, Dorothy emerges in a bathrobe. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “First of all, hi. You look beautiful.”

  “Peter, what is going on?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the wedding and I think we should sacrifice goats.”

  Dorothy quickly whittles the word “furious” into a verb and furiouses at me, “That’s the emergency?”

  “Well, the wedding’s in two weeks and I need to put an order in at the wholesale goat outlet…”

  “Okay, so when I want to lie with the grand priest it’s stupid and old-fashioned, but because your brother slaughters goats, suddenly—”

  “No, it’s not about that.”

  “Weren’t you the one who wanted to keep things small?”

  “Actually,” I say, “you were the one who wanted to keep things small. But we can just sacrifice ten goats. What’s the big deal? It’ll make a lot of people happy.”

  She tightens her bathrobe. “If today we say we’re sacrificing ten goats, tomorrow it’s going to be twenty-eight, and then before we know it we’re going to be one of those two-hundred-goat weddings where most of the ceremony is spent sacrificing goats.”

  “I’m just saying if the Stone God does put a curse on our house and our first baby comes out a statue, you’re the one who’s going to have to give birth to it.”

  She takes a deep breath, and for a second it feels like that’s going to be the end of it, but then she says, “Look,” and if there’s one thing I know about being in a relationship, it’s that no good sentence starts with the word “look.” No one ever says, “Look. That’s a great point! You’re right! Let’s stop arguing now!”

  “Look,” she says. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Partly on my own, and partly…in conversation with the Grand Priest Kenny Sorgenfrei.”

  “Conversation? What conversation?”

  “Multiple conversations, Peter.”

  “Why are you having multiple conversations with Kenny Sorgenfrei? You’re just supposed to lie with him—you don’t need to have conversations.”

  “Sometimes, after we lie with each other, we have conversations.”

  “That’s not part of it. Since when is that part of it?”

  “Some guys,” she says, with an edge in her voice, “like to talk after, instead of just going to sleep. It’s actually kind of nice.”

  “Okay, so you have conversations. What are these conversations about?”

  “As you know, Kenny lies with a lot of brides—like, most brides—and he says he doesn’t usually see brides who have so many…doubts.”

  Well, if there’s one other thing I know about being in a relationship, it’s that even worse than saying �
��Look” is when someone says “I have doubts.”

  “You have doubts?”

  “Yeah, I have a few doubts.”

  Suddenly I feel like I’m talking to some other Dorothy—a new, different Dorothy I don’t know how to talk to. I try to catch her eye, but she won’t look at me. “You’re having conversations, you’re having doubts—what’s going on with you?”

  “Recently you’ve been spending so much time at the quarry. I feel like I never see you, and…I don’t think that augurs well for our marriage.”

  “It doesn’t ‘augur well’? Who says ‘augur well’? Did Kenny Sorgenfrei say that?”

  “Well, he put it into words, but I was separately feeling already like the auguring of it wasn’t so good.”

  “I’ve been busting my ass at the quarry so I could afford to give you the perfect wedding.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like you’ve been working late hours because you don’t want to be around me.”

  “You think I don’t want to be around you?”

  “I’m just saying it feels that way!”

  “Well, if I don’t want to be around you, then why am I marrying you?”

  “I don’t know!” she shouts. “Why are you?!”

  I immediately think of a hundred Wrong Things to Say, but I can’t for the life of me think of a single Right Thing to Say, so instead I shout the most un-Wrong of the Wrong Things I can think of, which is “All the normal reasons!”

  I have never heard a person say a sentence with such disdain as the way Dorothy spits back at me, “All the normal reasons?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “The normal reasons. Like, I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. It’s all the dumb clichés about how even when I’m mad at you I love you and how every day the best part of it is waking up next to you. And it kills me that this is all the normal, typical people-in-love stuff, because I want to believe our love is special—that it’s bigger and more interesting than any love that anyone else has had before—but the heartbreaking truth is my love for you is so consistent and predictable and boring.”

  I can see Dorothy soften a little, which is good, because I don’t have anything else to say.

  “Is that why you want goats at our wedding?”

  “As per the goats of it all…I promised your dad we would have them. I needed more money from him because I got you the Felix Wojnowski Promise Egg and I couldn’t afford it.”

  Dorothy holds a hand up to her mouth. Her eyes go wide. “You got the Wojnowski?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s stupid. The whole thing is stupid. But…I love you.”

  Dorothy smiles. “Well, there’s nothing stupid about that,” she says in a detached-adjacent tone I can tell she intends to sound cool, but because her voice cracks and her eyes sparkle with tears, it comes across like the most sincere thing in the world.

  “No?” I ask, and she shakes her head.

  “Are you kidding?” she says, gently, sweetly. “I’m a godsdamn delight.”

  Now, let me tell you, I thought Dorothy was beautiful before, but when I’m standing at the altar and I see her walk into the Good Church in her marriage cloak—the stained-glass windows behind her—well, I could live to be a hundred and it would still be the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. And in that moment I think: This is the best possible way to have a wedding, because it’s the kind of wedding where while it’s happening, I get to marry Dorothy.

  My little brother does the goat sacrifice himself—we settle on fifty goats, a good round number—and it goes off without a hitch, except for a half hour later, during Aunt Estelle’s reading of the Gertrude Stein poem, it turns out one of the goats didn’t all the way die and it bucks off the sacrificial altar and scrambles up and down the aisle, braying and squealing and shooting blood everywhere. My little brother jumps up and tries to tackle it, but it’s a slippery little thing, all lubed up with the blood and guts of forty-nine other goats. Blood is squirting everywhere, and my mother leans in and whispers, “This is why you get a professional goat slaughterer.”

  Of course, this sets off one of the guys in the Shrieking Chorus. He starts Weeping and Flailing and Shouting Lamentations. And then the guy next to him starts Weeping and Flailing and Shouting Lamentations. And before you know it all twelve of them are climbing over the pews, their eyes rolled back in their heads, Weeping and Flailing and Shouting Lamentations.

  Meanwhile, Aunt Estelle is still reading the Gertrude Stein poem, and she doesn’t know what to do, so she just starts reading it louder and louder.

  My mother leans in and whispers, “For Gods’ sake, will you go help your little brother?”

  I run into the aisle, and my brother chases the goat right into my arms. I slip in blood and fall on my ass, but I hold tight of the wriggling thing so it can’t escape. My brother is shaking, and I realize too late why most couples wait until the end of the wedding to give the ceremonial goat-slaughtering knife to the youngest cousin to throw into the ravine. It always felt so anticlimactic to end with that, which is why we sent little Tucker off early, but now I get it. You’re going to want to hold on to that knife.

  “What now?” my brother asks.

  “I don’t know!” I shout, while struggling to get a better grip on the convulsing beast. “You’re supposed to be the big goat expert!”

  Then Dorothy shouts something, but I can’t quite hear her over the chaos and also Aunt Estelle. Dorothy shouts again and points to the eunuch at the back of the church, and I yell to my brother, “The egg!”

  He runs back and wrestles the big silver thing out of the eunuch’s hands. The eunuch has taken an oath to the Wine God to protect the egg at all costs until the end of the ceremony, so he doesn’t let it go easily, but then my brother punches him in the face and he staggers back. I cringe, thinking about how this must look to Dorothy’s side of the family—not to mention the Wine God, if He even really exists—and I’m sure my mother is thinking that she raised us boys better than that, but sometimes desperate times call for punching a eunuch in the face so you can steal his giant silver egg and use it as a blunt object.

  By this point, the Shrieking Chorus has started Weeping and Flailing their way into the aisle, so my brother has no choice but to run all the way around the side of the congregation to get back to me and the goat.

  I lie on my back and try to position the squirming animal in such a way that my brother can bash its head in quickly. He holds the egg high in the air, but then the goat’s eye twitches and looks up at him and suddenly my little brother melts.

  “Come on!” I shout, as the goat bucks in my arms and kicks me in the stomach. “What are you waiting for?”

  “I can’t,” says my little brother. “I can’t do it.”

  He falls to his knees and cradles the silver egg in his arms like a baby. I feel bad for him, but also I can’t help but think about all the money my parents wasted sending him to the university so he could major in goat slaughtering.

  “Screw it,” says Dorothy’s best friend Nikki. “I’ll do it.”

  Nikki squeezes into the aisle and grabs the egg from my brother, but in her eagerness she knocks over one of the aisle-lining candles of ascending height, and when the flames hit the bottom of her dress, the whole thing lights up like a Yuletide Hogfire. Nikki drops the egg and runs up and down the aisle all aflame. She’s screaming, and the goat’s screaming, and then everyone else starts screaming, except for Aunt Estelle, who, Gods bless her, has a job to do and isn’t going to sit down until she finishes her poem.

  I look at my bride, who is standing at the altar, frozen, mouth agape—mouth very agape—like for real I guarantee you’ve never seen a mouth so agape.

  She looks at me with her big forest-flavored eyes, like, Can you believe this?

  And I look at her, like, Well, what did we expect
?

  The goat convulses in my arms, and Dorothy starts laughing. Then she puts her arm up and juts her chin out, like she’s about to start doing the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite, and I start laughing. She’s laughing, and I’m laughing, and I swear to Gods I’m the luckiest man in the world. I look at her, lit by fire, caked in blood, scored by the Shrieking of the Chorus and the wailing of a dying goat, and I wish I could marry her again. I wish I could marry her a hundred thousand times.

  Missed Connection—m4w

  I saw you on the Manhattan-bound Brooklyn Q train.

  I was wearing a blue-striped T-shirt and a pair of maroon pants. You were wearing a vintage green skirt and a cream-colored top.

  You got on at DeKalb and sat across from me, and we made eye contact, briefly. I fell in love with you a little bit, in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person. But still, I think there was something there.

  Several times we looked at each other and then looked away. I tried to think of something to say to you—maybe pretend I didn’t know where I was going and ask you for directions, or say something nice about your boot-shaped earrings, or just say, “Hot day.” It all seemed so stupid.

  At one point, I caught you staring at me and you immediately averted your eyes. You pulled a book out of your bag and started reading it—a biography of Lyndon Johnson—but I noticed you never once turned a page.

  My stop was Union Square, but at Union Square I decided to stay on, rationalizing that I could just as easily transfer to the 7 at 42nd Street, but then I didn’t get off at 42nd Street either. You must have missed your stop as well, because when we got all the way to the end of the line at 96th, we both just sat there in the car, waiting.

  I looked over at you and tilted my head, curious. You shrugged and held up your book; you’d missed your stop because you were distracted, that’s all.

  We took the train all the way back down—down the Upper East Side, weaving through midtown, from Times Square to Herald Square to Union Square, under SoHo and Chinatown, up across the bridge back into Brooklyn, past Barclays and Prospect Park, past Flatbush and Midwood and Sheepshead Bay, all the way to Coney Island. And when we got to Coney Island, I knew I had to say something.