I Now Pronounce You Someone Else
Read I Now Pronounce You Someone Else Online
Authors: Erin McCahan
Erin McCahan
For Tim.
I was switched at birth.
Okay, not really. I just like saying that. I like how it sounds, how it makes me smile, and how it irritates my mother, who pretends with a laugh to find it amusing.
Even now when I am no longer Bronwen Oliver but Bronwen Someone Else—as I always should have been and would have been had I not been switched at birth, which I wasn’t—I like saying it: I was switched at birth.
It happens every now and then—just happened about a month ago. I saw this on the nightly news. Two fifty-three-year-old women from Odd, West Virginia, were informed by letter that they had been switched in the hospital a couple hours after birth. And their reactions to reporters were nearly identical:
That shore explains a lot.
So they found their Real Families after all this time and slipped effortlessly into them and changed their names to what—and who—they were supposed to be
all along (not really, but they should have), and they giggled and sighed and pored over family photos and told each other, “You look just like Mom.”
Some people are so lucky.
Had I not been switched at birth, I would have been taken home from Blodgett Hospital, here in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, by the Lilywhites—Percival and Kitty Lilywhite. They would have named me after a favorite but eccentric great-aunt, Phoebe, a journalist ahead of her time, known for her sharp tongue and big floppy hats. All of them green to match her eyes. And mine.
Here’s how I imagined the return would happen:
The phone would ring, and an overwrought administrator from Blodgett would say to Mother, “We’re sorry, Mrs. VanHorn”—that’s my “mother’s” remarried name—“but our records indicate that years ago your baby girl was accidentally switched at birth with the daughter of Percival and Kitty Lilywhite, who bake, read newspapers, enjoy walks on beaches, and are, tragically, brunette. Your own daughter, you’ll be pleased to know, is alive and well, is blonde, of course, and physically perfect, and is destined to be Homecoming Queen all four years of high school. We here at Blodgett Hospital are so sorry to have inconvenienced you with the daughter
you
were forced to raise, and we’re sure you’ll want to make the switch as soon as possible.”
A girl can dream.
The truth is, my family’s not so awful, really, no more
than any other typical, law-abiding family—plus or minus a few cranks, drunks, and lunatics organically installed in every family by birth or marriage, whose sole reason for being is to make holidays unpleasant. This brings to mind some of the stranger things I’ve agreed with at Thanksgivings over the years, just so people would stop talking to me and let me finish dinner and life in peace:
- Pregnant women who eat MSG have gay babies.
- Lightning can freeze.
- The Dutch invented epilepsy.
Agreeing with crazy people is so much easier—and certainly more diplomatic—than disagreeing. And, for the record, I’ve never had to agree with anyone that the next-door neighbor’s dog is telling the owners to murder us in our sleep. That’s not the kind of crazy I’m talking about.
The kind of crazy I’m talking about is this: Grown women earnestly arguing about the properties of frozen lightning until one of them starts crying. Winner, loser, doesn’t matter. The argument’s not over until someone boo-hoos. Some
ahems
and awkward silence follow, no apologies, and, at the end of the day, it’s hugs and kisses all around, lots of
I love you
’s and waving good-bye as if someone’s leaving for the army for the next six years. It’s the kind of crazy that leaves me shaking my head and swearing I cannot be related by blood to these people.
The other way I know I’m not truly a member of this family is ketchup. Everyone in my family loves it. They
put it on everything you can put ketchup on and a couple of things you just shouldn’t, like potato chips and scrambled eggs.
I can’t stand it. I can’t stand the smell, the color, the texture, the gelatinous crud that forms inside the cap. I actually don’t like any single condiment in the Great Universal Suite of Condiments. (I’m kind of disturbed by pickle relish too.) But I detest ketchup most of all.
Certainly, by the time I was seven, my mother should have known this about ketchup and me. But there we were, at a big family cookout—her family, not mine—when Mother handed me a hamburger with ketchup all over it, and I stood there, holding up the line, waiting for her to remember that I was on the verge of serious gagging. But she didn’t, so I asked for a plain burger instead. Rather than fill such a complicated order, Mother scraped ketchup off the thing, handed it back, and puffed a little air at me when I protested that I still could not eat it.
You can’t get ketchup out of a bun!
Mother turned to her sister and said, “Honestly, sometimes I don’t know where she came from.”
And my aunt said back, “Are you sure she’s yours?”
My aunt’s words—Mother’s too—percolated in me a few years until I formed the happy idea that, hey, maybe I’m not hers. Maybe my Real Parents were somewhere in Michigan raising a girl who loved ketchup and was perfect for my so-called family in other ways. And if she were perfect for this family, then I’d be perfect for that one, and—
whew
—what a relief—Real Parents to embrace and encourage my Real, Ketchup-Hating Self.
All we had to do was find each other.
Think about it.
Isn’t that what everyone wants?
Thus did I become Phoebe Lilywhite, which was great fun for a few years. My friend Kirsten helped me perpetuate the fantasy by calling me Phoebe, signing her up for our youth group at Grace Episcopal Church, and sending us magazines in Phoebe’s name.
Shape
,
Modern Bride
,
Cat Fancy
,
American History Magazine
, and
Newsweek
all came to my house addressed to Phoebe Lilywhite. (She, like all the Lilywhites, had a variety of interests.) Mother would call the magazines’ customer service numbers to tell them that the “oddest error has occurred in your billing department again.”
Even now, at twenty years old, long after I accepted the end of the fantasy that I was switched at birth, Kirsten still calls me Phoebe or Pheebs. Couple other friends do too. No one in my family does. It wouldn’t seem right.
So imagine my shock when, a few years ago—right at the end of my junior year of high school—a man walked up to me at the Java Bean and said, “Pardon me. Aren’t you Phoebe Lilywhite?”
I had not seen Jared Sondervan since he and my brother, Peter, graduated from high school three years earlier.
Let me say up front so there are no misunderstandings later: Peter is Jesus. By which I mean he’s perfect, by which I mean my mother thinks so. Absolutely perfect. We will all get along much better with her if we can agree to this right here, right now.
Good?
See—agreeing with crazy people is easy, isn’t it?
College, I learned by watching Peter, reworks people. Makes them better in some ways. Makes them worse in a few. Makes them occasionally unrecognizable in speech or habits. Peter grew a couple inches, took to calling me kiddo, and developed a one-arm, hey-there, glad-to-see-ya hug. And he lost touch with all but two buddies from high school on the grounds, he once sniffed, that he had outgrown them all.
So he lost touch with or outgrew Jared, who now stood in front of Kirsten and me, in all his cheery blondness,
looking as if he was about to laugh and asking me if I was Phoebe Lilywhite.
Kirsten tapped her foot against mine to get me to speak and probably to get me to close my gaping mouth as well.
“Why, yes, I am Phoebe Lilywhite,” I said.
“I’d like to see that as an autograph.”
I held up a palm toward him.
“I’m sorry. I don’t give autographs.”
“Mercedes Occidental,” Kirsten said by way of an introduction. “Her executive assistant.”
They shook hands.
“I’d ask you to join us, but I don’t believe you have an appointment with Miss Lilywhite today,” she said.
“Do very old friends need appointments?” Jared asked, and we grinned as he took a seat at our favorite table in this, our favorite coffee shop, easily stepping his long legs over the back of the chair, and I made the introductions for real.
“I can’t believe you remember that,” I said.
“I remember all of it,” he said and proceeded to prove it.
Four years earlier, he had been breezing through our house with a bunch of Peter’s buddies. Kirsten was there with me, and Jared overheard her call me Phoebe. He stopped, turned around, and sat with us a few minutes to get the backstory on the name.
We told him my Switched at Birth Theory, and the then-seventeen-year-old Jared Sondervan was kind enough to nod and smile throughout.
“I’m impressed,” I told him now.
“So am I,” he said of himself.
Technically—despite the cooling of Peter and Jared’s high school friendship—Jared was an Old Family Friend. His dad and my stepdad, Whitt VanHorn, were partners in a brokerage firm called VS Securities. Jared was all arms and legs with loose joints and an ever-present smile. He looked very comfortable in his skin and bobbed a little when he laughed, moving side to side as if, just for a moment, listening to a favorite song only he could hear.
“Are you home for the summer?” I asked him.
“Yep. Just finished up my junior year.”
“Us too,” Kirsten said. “Well, in a couple weeks.”
It was late May—Sunday, May 23, to be exact. Somewhere around two in the afternoon.
“Seniors. All right,” he said. “So where are you applying to school?”
“Hope, Dickinson, Gettysburg, Middlebury, and Davidson,” Kirsten and I said in unison and almost in harmony too.
I had known, since becoming Phoebe Lilywhite, that I would attend a small, gorgeous liberal arts school, join a sorority, turn my friends into Family, write for the campus paper, fall in love, and live the rest of my life surrounded by normal people. On the beach. College, no matter how it changed me, was going to be perfect—no parents, no grandparents, no frozen lightning. Perfect.
“Well, that’s all right,” Jared said of our list, nodding at us. “Those are good schools. Is Hope at the top?”
Jared went to Hope—Hope College, about thirty-five miles from East Grand Rapids and five miles from the Lake, which is positively the only way we ever refer to Lake Michigan. When you say, “I’m going to the Lake today,” no one ever asks, “Which lake?” Well, no one from Michigan does. People from Ohio might, and then we snicker at them and feel sorry for their geography.
“We haven’t decided yet,” Kirsten said.
“Right,” I teased her, and she narrowed her eyes just a little, as she often did when I caught her being seventeen, rather than the thirty-five-year-old with a condo and a job she longed to be.
“Hope’s at the top of your list,” I said. “Admit it.”
“It is,” she reluctantly conceded.
“Her boyfriend’s going there in the fall,” I said.
“Yeah?” Jared asked. “Where’s your boyfriend going?”
“Hell,” Kirsten said, which made me smile.
“Interesting,” Jared said. “Do I know him?”
“Chad Dykstra,” I said.
“No, but I already hate him. What happened?”
“We broke up last night,” I said.
“Prom,” Kirsten added.
“You broke up at the prom?” Jared asked.
“After,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story. We’re here discussing it now.”
“Pretty much we’re just talking trash about him,” Kirsten said. “I’m going to have Charlie find her the right guy next year at Hope.”
That was news to me.
“Does Bronwen need help finding dates?” Jared asked.
“No,” she said.
“I didn’t think so,” he said, and Kirsten tapped my foot under the table. “Oh, hey, how’s your brother?” he asked me.
“He’s fine,” I said, and we spoke for just a minute or two about Peter’s vitals—school, major, girlfriend—until hitting one of those organic conversational dead ends of
oh yeah, yeah, great, hmm.
Nod.
“Well, listen, I didn’t mean to interrupt you guys. I just came in for coffee,” Jared said as he stood. He wrote his phone number down on one of the napkins on the table. “Here,” he said and passed it to Kirsten.
Kirsten?!
“Tell your boyfriend to call me anytime this summer if he has questions about Hope.” He took his cell phone from his pocket and handed it to Kirsten—
again?
—as he stood. “Put his number in there for me. Put yours and Bronwen’s in too, while I go grab coffee. I’ll set up a formal pitch for Hope. You two should come visit in the fall.”
We said okay and promptly began a hushed, in-depth analysis of the previous five minutes while Jared got his coffee. We didn’t immediately notice him—I still don’t know how long he was standing there—when he returned to the side of our table, and we just sort of froze when, without a word, he reached over me, picked up his phone, and slid the napkin with his phone number on it from Kirsten’s left side to my right hand.
“Her boyfriend can get this from you if he needs it,” he said to me and left.
“Don’t watch him, don’t watch him,” Kirsten whispered, but it was too late.
I watched him all the way to his car. He opened the door. Looked back at me. Smiled. Waved.
I did the same back and then sipped at my coffee, stalling, not knowing exactly where else to look.
After a handful of seconds passed, Kirsten said, “Okay, he’s gone.”
“What was that?” I asked through a huge smile.
“I bet he calls you by Wednesday. You have to call me right after. You know he’s going to ask you out.”
“And I happen to be free.”
“Yes, you do,” Kirsten said and raised her mug to me. “Here’s to getting dumped on prom night.”
We clinked mugs.
I didn’t drink.
Mother taught me you don’t drink to yourself when you’re being toasted.
She grumbles at every wedding when the bride and groom do that.
It was eleven o’clock that night. I had just finished brushing my teeth, ready for bed, when my cell phone rang, and I answered it hastily, thinking—okay, hoping—it was Jared.
It wasn’t.
“Hey,” Chad said evenly.
“Hey,” I said back.
“So, look, um, I’m really sorry about last night. You know. After prom. You hate me?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Good,” he said and sighed. “I meant what I said, you know.”
“I know. But, Chad, I’m—”
“No, Bronwen, I know. I get it. I really do. You get it too, don’t you, that I was just upset and said things in the moment I shouldn’t have?”
“I know that. I know you, and you’re a really good guy.”
“Thanks. That means a lot. So, okay then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah. See you.”
Later, I fell asleep with my face scrunched up, wondering if it was, in fact, possible for it to freeze that way—Mother always said it would—and relieved in the morning to find that it hadn’t.
The relief was temporary, though, and I returned to scrunching.
Had I gotten back together with Chad Dykstra?