Ms. Taken Identity (26 page)

When I came back from Chicago with the manuscript, I had Katharine’s comments. Now Marie and Bradley have read it and offered
theirs, and I’ve considered what everyone’s had to say and made my changes. It’s finished. I call Katharine to let her know
it’s on the way.

The conversation is brief and cordial. She tells me she’s looking forward to reading it, which is nice, and that her agent
will probably want to start shopping it around to publishers, which is great; and when she asks about my plans for the holidays,
I mention that my girlfriend and I will be celebrating our first Christmas together, which, in my opinion, is the best news
of all. There’s a pause, and I can tell her mind goes back to my first trip to Chicago, when I said I had a girlfriend and
we didn’t sleep together, then to my second trip, when I said nothing about a girlfriend and we
did
sleep together, so she must realize we’ve patched things up and we’re back on track and everything is going well.

“Good for the two of you,” she says, and she sounds sincere. Which means, if I’m reading her right, the fact that we slept
together will never be mentioned again, by either of us.

Now I need to get to work on that letter to Virginia and tell her there really is a Santa Claus.

Hanukkah starts on the eighteenth, and my father has a party. He’s had this party every year and invited me each time; and
each time he’s invited me, I’ve never gone, usually without the courtesy of a reply. This year is different: he invites, I
reply, it’s a yes, for two.

The house is filled with people I don’t know: brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews on Leah’s side, friends of my dad
and Leah, a few faces I recognize from the course; but everyone is warm and friendly. The kids run around and play games and
quote lines from Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song,” and there is every conceivable shape and style of dreidel, from glow-in-the-dark
to wood to pure chocolate, and the kids take turns deciding who will spin which one—or eat it, as the case may be. We light
the Hanukkah candles and Nathan leads us in the prayers; he’s a year away from his bar mitzvah and intent on getting his pronunciation
correct: “
Baruch ata adonai elohaynu melech haolam
…” My dad helps him when he stumbles, which isn’t often.

After dinner, the adults play a gift-stealing game. We’ve all brought a wrapped gift under ten bucks, gag or serious, and
we throw all of them on the dining room table. Low number chooses the first gift and unwraps it, then each subsequent person
opens a new gift or steals one already unwrapped, which gives the person who lost a gift a similar option, steal or unwrap.
It’s a surprisingly lively game, and we ooh and ahh a lot, and haggle and barter and groan, because there are a few desirable
gifts that everyone tries to get—a six-pack of microbrewed beer, a tin of gourmet biscotti, a coffee thermos; a handful of
duds—a Chia Pet, a porcelain clown, a squeaky mouse toy; and some that are too wacky to classify—a rubber fireman puppet,
The Complete Pizza Party in a Can. In the end, Marie and I wind up with a bottle of sparkling wine and an Aquaman toothbrush
holder, which I actually like, but then Kyle sees it and wants it, so I give it to him.

At the end of the evening, my father escorts us to the door and helps us into our coats.

“How’d you make out?” he asks.

We show him our lone bottle.

“Hmm, not so hot. Then take these.” He shuttles two gift bags our way, then adds conspiratorially, “Don’t open them here.
I don’t have enough for everyone.”

We wait till we’re back at Marie’s to open them, and I figure he just felt sorry for us and gave us something generic like
cookies or a fruitcake. But Marie opens hers, and it’s soft and feminine, a bath set, with salts and a candle and an array
of scented lotions and creams and washes, the good ones, and it seems just right for her. And mine, well, mine is a book,
leather-bound with gilded pages and fancy endpapers:
The Collected Stories of Sherlock Holmes
.

“You like those?” she asks.

I nod, and despite myself, I’m a little choked up. “My favorites when I was a kid.”

I call my father the next morning to thank him for everything: the evening, the gifts.

“My pleasure,” he says, and there’s a long pause, and when he speaks again, his voice is a little emotional. “I’m glad you
brought Marie. She’s a special one.”

It’s only much later, after Marie has gone to work and I’ve graded the last batch of essays and I’m on my way to school to
drop off my grades, that I understand his shaky voice: of all the girls I’ve ever dated—the high school crushes and fellow
summer camp counselors and art majors and working girls, like Hannah—this is the first one he’s ever met.

W
ith Christmas only days away, we plan one final trip to the mall. All the heavy lifting is done—gifts for my mom and her parents,
Bradley and Skyler, Rosie, Scott and Melinda and Kyle—and now we’re left with a few odds and ends. We finish up in the early
afternoon and bring all those goodies to the car, then trek back inside and go our separate ways, to
browse
. Of course, when we reconvene at six, we’ve browsed our way into a hundred or so bags whose contents we can’t share with
each other at the moment. We head back to her place for dinner, since we’re so poor now that we may never eat out again. Even
so, that doesn’t stop me from going out the next day, while she’s at work, to make one more purchase, something that wasn’t
on any of the lists she gave me.

Thanksgiving was a slipshod affair, thanks to Jason, but Christmas will be a different story. We’ve got it all mapped out.
Christmas Eve: Mass, then over to Skyler’s for dinner, putting up a tree, watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
, and a sleepover. Christmas morning: opening presents at my mom’s with Scott, Melinda, and Kyle. Christmas evening: opening
presents at her parents with all the relatives. In fact, there’s only one thing that could ruin our plans, and it has nothing
to do with Jason.

Mass is at five, and it’s festive, upbeat, a celebration. But how can it not be? It’s a birthday party. The church is decked
out with Christmas trees and lights, swags of evergreen, and wide-eyed kids in velvet dresses and clip-on ties who know what
happens tonight; and every ten minutes or so we’re singing carols (not “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” or “White Christmas,”
but “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World,” which put you in the mood just the same). Marie isn’t a very good
singer, but it doesn’t really matter because she enjoys herself and sings along just fine. The service lets out around six
fifteen, and it’s still snowing, which means everything is frosted over like cake icing, glittery and white. Since we have
time to kill—we’re not due over at Skyler’s till seven—I suggest, nonchalantly, that we drive a couple blocks over to Forest
Park for a stroll.

Forest Park is thirteen hundred acres of zoo and art museum and outdoor amphitheater and ponds and jogging trails, and on
a summer’s evening, the place is swarming with people. Not so tonight, on Christmas Eve, in the snow. As we make our loop
around one of the ponds, the Grand Basin, Marie leaning into me for support, which I like, snow crunching under our shoes,
the only other spot getting any action is the hill that sweeps down toward us. A few kids and adults are out on sleds and
saucers, giving it a go.

I gesture to a bench. “Shall we?” I suggest, and she nods.

We sit with our shoulders together, hand in gloved hand, quiet, listening, watching. I start to get the feeling we’re in a
Norman Rockwell painting: the sledders laughing and hollering and making their runs, the silhouette of the art museum at the
top of the hill, the snow splashing around us, tumbling into the dark waters of the pond and rippling the surface. I realize
this is my moment, my perfect opportunity to tell her all the things I’ve rehearsed, how I love her kindness and generosity
and forgiving and caring heart, and just her, plain and simple, the whole package, the way she walks and hitches her thumbs
in her jeans and tilts her head and flicks her hair out of her eyes and lets her eyes bug out sometimes, on purpose, to express
cartoon-like shock, the way she sits and sleeps and picks up the phone, and if I were God or whoever and had the power to
start the whole human race and base it on one person, it would be her, with every feature and expression and trait, and I
couldn’t love her any more than I do, even if I had a thousand more years to try. And then I open my mouth to say it.

“Cold, isn’t it?”

She shrugs. “A bit.”

Son of a bitch. “Do you want me to grab a blanket?”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“I have one in the car. It’s no problem for me to get it.”

“Mitch, I’m fine. I swear.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Jesus. I need to stop talking. And breathe. And regroup. I start small. “The sledders look like they’re having fun.”

“Yeah, they do.”

“Ever come sledding here?”

“Not really. We had a great hill near our house, so that’s where we went. I came over with Rosie a couple times in high school,
so she could meet guys. Never on Christmas Eve, though.”

Ah, Christmas Eve. My way back on track. “Remember what you were doing on Christmas Eve last year?”

She narrows her eyes. “Hmm. I won’t swear to it, but I think I was still driving in from North Carolina. I might’ve just been
getting in around this time, or a little before. How about you?”

“Over at my mom’s. We did Christmas Eve there, then Midnight Mass.”

I take a deep breath, one that’s a little shaky on the exhale part, and my heart knows what’s coming next, so it starts jumping
around in my chest.

“Marie, I know we have lots of separate memories about our past Christmas Eves, which is natural, since we didn’t know each
other till this one. But what I’m thinking is that I’d like it if we didn’t have any more Christmas Eves, or any eves, really,
where we didn’t have the same memories. Though not that we won’t remember some things differently, because two people can
go through the same experience and have different memories about some of the details, like did I wear a brown shirt or blue
one to the party, and maybe you think it was brown and I think it was blue, so we have to try to remember which shoes and
pants I wore. Which really isn’t a big deal, though, even if we never agree on which it was.” Jesus. I’m sweating despite
the snow. “Do you have any idea where I’m going with this?”

Her hands go up toward her mouth, and they’re trembling. “Maybe. I think.”

“Good.”

I get down on my knee in front of the bench and pull out a small box and flip it open, and it’s all by the book and utterly
clichéd—a thousand proposals from a thousand stories and books and movies, and this is the best I can come up with?—and I’m
about to pass out, but I’m also about to cry.

“Marie, will you marry me?”

For a moment I’m not sure she heard me, because nothing happens, but then her nostrils begin to flare and her lips quiver
and her eyes well up, and her hands don’t know what to do with themselves, so they just tremble even more, and do something
like a clap, then grab for the ring and stop, and we both laugh, and we both start to cry a bit, and finally she gets it out,
as if she had to.

“
Yes
.”

I’m sure there will come a day when I tell her all those things I had in my head, about how much I love her, and why I love
her, and how wonderful she is, and how lucky I am to have her. But not now. Now we just hug. And from the way I’m hugging
her, and the way she’s hugging me back, I get the feeling that even if I meet with some freakish tongue accident tomorrow
and lose my power to speak and never get those words out, she’ll know exactly what I was trying to say.

The next twenty-four hours are a blur. We go to Skyler’s and my mom’s and her parents, and uncork the announcement each place,
and get showered with kisses and hugs and handshakes and women clamoring to see her ring and men clapping me on the back to
offer
Congrats!;
and there is so much of this over the next few days—at the studio, her salon, New Year’s parties—and I’m so proud and exhilarated
and tempted to sprint straight to Chicago to ask Oprah if I can hop up and down on her sofa and say “I’m in love I’m in love
I’m in love” that I decide the early days of an engagement should have their own name. I tell Marie.

“Honeymoon,” she says.

“How so?”

“It’s the ‘honeymoon phase’ of our engagement.”

I try to be gentle. “Nope. Won’t work. We already use honeymoon for marriage.”

“So.”

“
So?
Put it this way. You won’t be planning for the ‘Fourth of July’ of our engagement, will you? It’s our
wedding
. And we won’t celebrate the ‘birthday’ of our marriage: it’s our
anniversary
. Important ideas need their own names, not one borrowed from something else. Make sense?”

“No. Not really. I still like honeymoon.”