Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes (26 page)

F
rom Shakespeare we learn that tragedy ends in death, while comedy ends in marriage.

Has anyone died here?

People have surely been dying all over the place while I've been telling my story—from disease, from accident, from war, from evil and from sheer stupidity—but I don't think anyone has died here. On the contrary, not only is there one marriage of sorts looming on the horizon; there are several.

Conchita and Rivera have realized that they are each the better other half of the other.

Stella is giving up Squeaky Qlean for good in favor of becoming Elizabeth Hepburn's live-in companion, enabling Elizabeth to give scheming Lottie the sack.

Black Jack Sampson has permanently laid down his nickname and will go back to being simply Jack Sampson for all time on the day he marries Vanessa Parker. As Jackie Mason would say:
mazel tov.

Hillary Clinton will go the whole traditional route, marrying Biff Williams in a white satin gown with red roses and baby's breath threaded through her hair. Old habit will make her toss the bouquet to the woman who will stand closest to her during the Episcopalian service and then she will need to rethrow it since her best friend is not her maid of honor, but rather her matron of honor, since her best friend—drum roll, please!—is already married.

Two years after the Vegas debacle—Sin City!—Chris and I tied the knot. In the interim, he persuaded me to finish my degree and I am now, like my mother before me, a teacher of English, only in my case I teach Shakespeare to senior high-school students who show more interest in sex than sonnets. Still, it allows me to channel my obsessive nature into something I love since, while teaching, I get to read my beloved Shakespeare over and over and over again.

As for Chris, he is now a full-time yo-yoist who travels all around the country for his work. This means that I do not get to see him as much as I would like, but being married to someone who is content is far preferable to being married to someone who is miserable.

We got married on a mountain in Maine in the autumn, our less sturdy family and friends needing to ride the ski lift up. When it came time to exchange rings, he had an extra surprise for me that he'd had Biff, his best man, carry up the slope. Out of a backpack he pulled a shoe box, within which was a pair of Jimmy Choos: the Ghost. Then he took out a high-heeled sandal, copper-colored, more pink than bronze, with diamond-shaped sapphire-colored stones encrusted with crystal stones across the toe strap and more sapphire and crystal bejeweling the intricate mesh of chain around the ankle with three straps of chain anchoring it to more copper leather at the back. I swear, when he slipped that gorgeous shoe on my foot, I felt as though my mother was kissing me on the cheek.

And on our honeymoon in Saint Croix, where we didn't leave our hotel room for a solid week? Chris didn't drop his yo-yos. Not once.

We now live in our own house in Danbury, where our cabinets are stocked with organic cocoa-flavored cereal, our freezer stocked with almost every organic product Amy's has ever made. We're still addicts, but we've learned to compensate, to make our addictions work for us rather than hurting us, and I've learned to forsake Diet Pepsi Lime and Jake's Fault Shiraz for the nonce because—second drumroll here, please!—I'm pregnant with our first child. And, with a little luck, I won't become so addicted to having babies that I turn into The Old Woman In A Shoe.