engagement

The news may have hit the web site in September, but out in the real world, we got engaged back in August. August 24th to be exact, which spites my whole "Holidays are on the 25th" principle by being my birthday. This was apparently some sort of deadline for the Guy, who had been looking at diamonds for weeks.

Color me surprised. The Guy is constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret. He's the sort of man who will greet you at the door when you get home from work, tail wagging, and announce smugly that he's gotten you a present that you can't have until Christmas. It's hidden in the closet. Want to know what it is? Ask him. Ask him. Goddammit, ask him.

In point of fact, the ring hasn't arrived yet. It's literally being put together as I write this, and will theoretically arrive this week.

While I'm in the Cow.

Again.

The Island of the Purple Monkey King, also known as Work, exercised its right to sadistic humor again by sending me out to The Cow in the middle of one of the worst heat waves we've had this summer. This is the same heat that killed 10,000 Parisians a few months ago. Having run out of Parisians, it has moved over to the most convenient substitute for Paris: Silicon Valley.

An astigmatic logic could link Silicon Valley and Paris together, the sort of reasoning that would only make sense to a cataleptic mind. There are plenty of those out there in the world, God knows, part of the audience that would unquestioningly accept “Anna Nicole Smith” in a sentence with the word “Show” appearing either before or after the operative title. Both phrases are only tenuously related to each other, by a link that would require more optimism than imagination to understand; likewise Silicon Valley and Paris, which share a masturbatory passion for self-congratulations, but are hardly unique for their delusions of intellectual superiority.

Whatever the association in the mind of the weather gods, to Silicon Valley the heat came, and in Silicon Valley the heat stayed. Central Valley, the cradle of the Cow, is the barometric ceiling for what occurs in Silicon Valley. The biceps of heat that pump Silicon Valley bench press for the title in the Cow. The asphalt was molten outside my client's site, and clutched at my heels like a loan shark spying a Democratic hopeful; the impressions of my footprints as they zigged and zagged in a drunken search for shade are now permanently impressed across four rows of parking spaces. In after years when alien archaeologists investigate the ruins of The Cow, they’ll find those little holes in the tar and imagine some doe-footed biped, an alcoholic herbivore that was meat for larger, more sober predators.

Inside the client site, air conditioning. No measly department store air conditioning, this. This was Nature's post partum depression after giving birth to the Ice Age. My colleague and I wobbled through the corridors relying on jackets and body fat, respectively, and attempted to do our jobs through teeth that chattered like yahtzee dice.

Once of the nurses stared at my coworker in a dazed fashion while we waited for her doctor to get off the phone. "There's something different about your hair," she fretted. "Did you cut it? Did you dye it?"

"The color might be coming out a bit," my colleague admitted, "but it's not really different from last week."

"It's the ring," I suggested, and confiscated her hand to wave the diamond at the nurse. "All that glare makes her look blonder than she really is."

The nurse lunged for the hand, attention caught; it was an instinctive reaction and, like the next reaction, the same one that all the other women at the clinic had had. The nurse gaped at the ring and laughed. It was an If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed you could fit that in this orifice laugh, a disbelieving bark of mingled shock and incredulity. I'd already heard that laugh four times that morning and I'd enjoyed every single one.

"Holy crap!" she yodeled.

Two carats will do that to pretty much anyone.

The nurse's doctor eventually came out of his office and bore witness to my colleague's ring with a bemused, vaguely skeptical air. While most women's reaction to her ring has been of the merry, hip hip for the sisterhood! kind, the men's has been universally leaned towards self-preservation: the longer they've been married, the more unabashedly self-centered.

"If my wife sees that ring, I'm screwed," he observed, not entirely in jest. "When are you leaving?"

***

It was pure coincidence that both my coworker and I got engaged on the same weekend. I walked into work the following Monday, feeling like the thin skin that forms over cooling milk. My coworkers were already gathered around the ring, The One Ring, the two carat ring. My news seemed irrelevent compared to its shiny newness, and gratefully so; it felt fragile and delicate, and not up to the hard usage of public congratulations. I felt too disassociated from the event to consider it for any length of time, and the glaring light of other people's attention made me want panic and run, like a woman caught test-driving Kotex in Target.

My colleague's ring, while beautiful, turned ominous when I imagined something similar on my finger. It was massive and had the weight of responsibility to it. In my mind, size abruptly became synonymous with the reality of marriage: forever and ever, wasn't it? The bigger the diamond, the more immediate the engagement felt.

"If you get me a diamond that big, I'll kill you," I told the Guy, on a rising note of hysteria.

Initially there was a period of paranoid schizophrenia, when I would wake up and stare at the ceiling -- blearily, because I lacked glasses -- and think with a thrill of exhilarating terror, “I agreed to do what?!” Not because I don’t want to marry the Guy, exactly, but because getting married seemed like the ultimate, irretrievable step into maturity, like that last step off the roof. I discovered that the act of getting engaged had installed an incomplete flight-or-fight instinct in me, a shareware product that would only activate the "fight" part of the software if I paid $19.99 to the distributor.

I took to chanting, "I'm going to marry you," with assorted variations of inflection at the Guy -- "I'm going to marry you. I'm going to marry you. I'm going to marry you," -- under some hazy thought of reconciling myself to the idea. The Guy chafed restlessly under this treatment, eventually coming to view it as a threat rather than a charming new quirk of his beloved. I paid little attention to his feelings and continued my mantra for several weeks, as though the reiteration would somehow make maturity more palatable to my inner child, who was obsessively eating Elmer's glue.

Conversations about our upcoming weddings would draw a little wrinkle between my coworker's eyebrows; she was an organized woman, and a week after the engagement already had a list of guests, a possible caterer, the name of Tara's photographer, a date, and two potential sites. Me? My eyes would get big. Squinty little slivers of brown would start to get rounder and rounder and rounder, while my lower lip would slowly disappear inch by inch, sucked in between my teeth until I resembled a constipated goldfish straining on the toilet.

"Stop that," my pregnant coworker said at last, breaking off in the middle of a lecture about wedding budgets. "You're scaring me. Are you breathing? You're not breathing. Breathe, Yuhri. Breathe. Breathe."

Out of pity for me, matched by a worry I would eventually inhale my entire chin, my coworkers desisted with wedding talk, sneaking in bits of gossip like bonbons during my increasingly prolonged visits to the bathroom.

It took time for me to grow accustomed to the idea. Somewhere along the line, my repetitions of "I'm going to marry you," changed permanently to, "We're going to get married," an improvement in that I'd finally allowed the Guy to be a participant in the sentence, rather than a victim. The timbre changed as well. From a meditative, perplexed quality, it brightened and gained a declarative sincerity. We're going to be married, it said, and I'm happy.

I may have come to terms with the concept of getting married, but it took a little longer for the Guy. I dithered about telling others about our engagement, but despite my qualms ended up calling and emailing loved ones and relatives a short two days later. A month after he proposed to me, he still hadn't gotten around to telling his family.

"Are you planning on it?" I hinted three weeks into the engagement, not so delicately.

"Yes," he said, and added defensively, "My brother didn't tell me he was engaged until after he was married." British people. Warm as a llama's tit.

"This is your excuse?"

"It's not an excuse. I'm just telling you."

"So what, you're not planning on inviting him to the wedding until it's over?"

The Guy looked evasive. "Well," he began, and lost ground from there.

It wasn't until last weekend that he finally reached for the phone, with a feline air of I was intending to do it anyway that might or might not have been a result of my prodding over the last month.

It was an interesting conversation, from my side of it.

The Guy: "Hey. It's Yan. Is Mom home?"

The Phone: . . .

TG: "Oh. Okay. Is she heading out?"

TP: . . .

TG: "Tell her Yuhri and I got engaged."

TP: . . .

TG: "About a month ago."

TP: . . .

TG: "Dunno."

TP: . . .

TG: "Okay."

click.

I sat up on the loveseat, where I'd been pretending to play a video game. "What, that's it?" I demanded. "Did you talk to your Mom?"

The Guy was already crouched back over his laptop, head hunched between his shoulders like a triumphant tortoise who has snagged his piece of lettuce. "She was on the toilet," he said laconically. "My brother says congratulations."

"You couldn't wait for her to get off the toilet? Just this once?"

"She was on her way out," the Guy explained, in a tone of weary patience. Women are an irrational species. "She'll call back later."

I sank back into the cushions, convinced that we'd hear from my prospective mother-in-law the second she got off the toilet.

We didn't. I felt obscurely let down.

In fact, it wasn't until the next afternoon that we did, coming home from a long day of wedding-related errands to find the light blinking on the answering machine.

Answering machine: "Hallo?"

Silence. More silence. Heavy breathing.

Answering machine: "Yan?"

Still more silence. Heavier breathing. Lighter breathing. Thoughtful silence.

Answering machine: ". . . Okay."

click.

"Oh," said the Guy, unsurprised. "Mom called. See? Told you."

Posted by yhirata at September 23, 2003 11:54 PM