Maybe Once, Maybe Twice(2)
“If I’ve learned one thing from all my past girlfriends, it’s that no female has said she was fine and meant it.”
His one-sided smirk sent me to another planet, allowing me to feel the masculine version of fine: totes fine!
“I’m fine,” I said again, with my forehead tilted toward his gorgeous face.
“No, you’re not.” He pointed upward to the ceiling. “The song’s almost over, and I haven’t heard one ‘What’s going on?’”
My ears shifted, hearing Linda Perry’s low register croon through the speakers. I had never, in the history of ever, kept my mouth closed during 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” and Garrett knew it. He knew it because he knew how my heart beat out of my chest for anything I loved, making it impossible for me to cage my emotions—which is why it felt like I swallowed a sunrise whenever his eyes met mine.
“Maggie?”
He put a hand on my shoulder and craned his neck so I’d meet his scrunched-up face. Our eyes locked, and my heart beat faster. Taxi headlights beamed in through the glass window, lighting up his blue eyes in an unfair way. His face tightened on my lack of response.
I swallowed hard as the horrible truth battled its way toward the surface. He was the one person in my life who would make something treacherous feel less devastating. I should tell him. I opened my mouth, but the thought of reliving it strangled my throat.
Garrett’s eyes widened as he clasped his hand around my numb fingers.
“Maggie, you’re shaking.”
I studied his hand on mine, my heart pounding in my eardrums, my throat dry and tight. All at once, the only way to breathe was to crack open my mouth.
“Tonight…tonight when I blew out the candles, my birthday wish was for us to end up together.”
The maybe horrible truth fell out of me, and I couldn’t put it back in. Garrett studied me like he was dropped inside a play without knowing any of the lines. My lips stayed parted in the air—stunned by their own handiwork. There was a familiar blazing adrenaline coursing through my body, the kind of bravery I only felt when I sang under a spotlight. Which is why I kept going, even as all rationale screamed, STOP SAYING WORDS, MAGGIE.
“If we’re not married in five years, promise me you’ll show up at my door and marry me,” I heard myself say.
“You…you want me to marry you?” he asked slowly, as if he needed to say the sentence aloud to understand it.
I shook my head. “Scratch that.”
“You don’t want me to marry you?”
“I do. But I’ll show up at your door—you’re horrible with timing.”
Garrett opened his mouth, but no words followed. His brows pressed together for a long moment as my breathing became more rapid. I couldn’t feel my fingers, and there was a ringing in my ears.
Did I just spring a marriage pact onto Garrett Scholl?
I knew I was in a bad place, but I didn’t know I was in a reckless one. I bent my neck forward with my hand around my throat, fighting the wave of humiliation rising from my stomach. I turned toward the bar, focusing hard on the freshly washed glasses, as if they were a time machine. Garrett reached his hand down to my seat, twisting my barstool toward him and bringing us face-to-face. My heart thumped as his eyes scanned every line on my face. And then, Garrett stretched forward, the heat of his mouth against mine.
“Why do we have to wait until we’re thirty-five?” he whispered against my lips.
1
THIRTY-FUCKING-FIVE
THE ONLY PROMISE IS THAT nothing is promised to us. Someone should have told me that at seventeen. I should have known better by thirty. Much, much better at thirty-five. A childhood therapist once told my mom I was “filled with promise.” I had been promising for over three decades—like a drug that could work, but lacked federal funding.
While I was filled with promise, I was not so much filled with eggs, according to my gynecologist’s tight smile. He loomed beside my paper-gowned body like the grim reaper, while his scythe—a rubbery ultrasound probe—searched for signs of life inside my dying planet. He pulled the wand out of me, sighing in my direction with a slight head shake. I recognized this look. Like my former math teachers, this doctor expected more from me. He snapped the gloves off his hands, flicking the latex into the trash can as if he were the LeBron James of vaginas.
“I don’t want you to take this personally. Most women lose ninety percent of their eggs by thirty.”
I went to scream, “How am I NOT supposed to take MY personal body personally?” but instead, air huffed between my slack jaw, which I had forgotten to pick up off the not-so-cute floor of infertility. It was a thrilling way to ring in the elder age of thirty-fucking-five.
I studied the receding hairline atop my gyno’s round face. He appeared to be in his late forties, and my eyes slipped down to his hand, where there wasn’t a wedding ring in sight. I wondered if he was like me: childless and single. I wondered if it scared him.
Of course it didn’t.
Men under fifty stroll through dark parking garages the same way they approach their birthdays: without a second thought. They don’t lose sleep over their place in the world—not until they find themselves inside a midlife crisis. Women don’t have midlife crises, because we’ve spent our lives constantly in crisis. If only I had done a better job of leaning into the societal role that a woman should play. Every birthday should have been a gentle reminder that I was losing a war against time—that my branch on the family tree might hang aimlessly in the air. Instead, the End of Days had crept up on me like an asteroid in a Michael Bay movie. I had wandered the halls of my future with the false confidence of a mediocre white man, and I would pay for it like a woman.