Instead, I fall back to watch her—she’s spotted Rob waiting for her by the entrance. She’s practically skipping her way to him. Her little white dress bounces as she moves, and though I can’t see her face, I don’t need to. I’ve got it entirely memorized. I’m sure she’s smiling that large smile of hers that stretches to expose her gums. My smile does the same thing, and I was always a little embarrassed by it until Effie came into the world and I saw how good it looked on her.
Rob and Effie embrace, looking like an obvious pair in their black-leather boots. I hear her say something to him that sounds like, “Can you believe this is happening?” I watch her stand tall beside him, holding his hand. I worry she believes herself to be more mature than she is, and then I admonish myself for that worry; I cannot bring myself to think of her as less than what she thinks of herself.
It’s a Thursday. It’s their wedding day and I didn’t even try to talk Effie out of wearing that bright red, garish lipstick that looks absurd against her still-baby-faced skin.
I haven’t tried to talk Effie out of anything, and maybe that’s why I haven’t been sleeping, or why I’ve been chewing the skin around my thumbnails more than usual. Effie’s always been a strong wind in my life—difficult to stand up against.
❦
There was a September afternoon, back when Effie was in middle school, that she came home from school and declared she was going to be a poet.
“Effie the Poet,” I said. “Has a nice ring to it.”
She started carrying around a notebook and looking very seriously out the passenger window when we drove places together. Some nights, at the dinner table, Effie would ask me if I wanted to hear a poem. I’d say, “Of course,” and then make every effort to keep a neutral face while she read lines full of preteen sentiment and angst and repeated rhyming words that were, frankly, hilarious. But she read them so earnestly. “Heart, apart,” I remember her reading in her small voice. “My heart, fall apart.” I was a good mother—I did not cringe.
I don’t know very much about poetry, but I’m sure Effie’s poems were bad. Still, I would sit across the table from her and feel a little in awe of her willingness to write about hearts at all. Brave girl, I’d think.
In high school, she became Effie the Painter. I think she must’ve shown promise; her art teachers used to send her home with extra assignments that she’d lock herself away in her room to finish. She showed me these less often than she’d shared her poems, but sometimes I think about the swirls of startling reds on a canvas she once carried through the kitchen. “It’s abstract,” she’d said when I asked if she could explain it to me. “It’s about a lot of things.”
I used to think those were the hardest years of mothering, mostly because she was growing and becoming difficult to understand and spending more time away from the house, which meant more time to miss her, but also because it took great effort during those years not to tease her whenever she descended the stairs wearing that absurd felt beret she used to wear when she was Effie the Painter. I think she figured it made her look like a Parisian artist, but I always thought it looked more like something a retired professional golfer would wear. Even so, I remember watching her leave the house like that and still admiring how brave she was to be a little different, brave for trying to figure out who she was. I was always afraid of myself when I was her age.
I don’t think those were the hardest years of mothering anymore.
❦
Inside the courthouse, we pass through security and metal detectors and find Rob’s mother already waiting on the other side. Caroline is waving at us with both arms, wearing the kind of platform heels that make me concerned for her ankles when she walks toward us. She’s a nice enough woman. A little obtuse in conversation sometimes, but she seems to like Effie, so that’s something I guess.
Caroline shakes my hand like we’re embarking on a business venture and not the wedding of our children. “Big day,” she says.
“Big day,” I say back to her. I don’t like it, but I do feel a kind of camaraderie with Caroline today. Neither of us has a man of our own at this wedding. We are used to mothering our children alone; Effie’s father had been an acquaintance whom I never spoke to again.
It occurs to me now as I watch Rob whisper something in Effie’s ear that the absence of fathers is something the two of them have in common. I wonder if this is something she loves about him: they’ve shared a similar, father-shaped hole. That would be my own fault, then. That will be hard to live with if it’s true.
“Does anyone know where we’re supposed to go?” Effie asks, looking up. The courthouse is large—four stories. All granite and glass and cold.
Back home? I want to joke, but no one will find it funny.
“I’ll find out,” Caroline says. She hurries away for directions, heels clacking against the tile.
Left alone with Rob and Effie connected by arms around each other’s waists, Rob says to me, “Thanks again for coming. Means a lot to us.”
This grates; I don’t need to be thanked for coming to my daughter’s wedding.
❦
In her junior year of college, Effie brought Rob home for a long weekend. By that point she’d become something so brilliant and shiny to me. She would come home over school breaks and talk circles around me. She’d managed to preserve the poet and the painter, but then also became Effie the Scholar. Suddenly, she was the kind of thinker I couldn’t, and can’t, keep up with. I’d keep mental notes of the things she’d say that I didn’t understand. On my lunch breaks in the same office at the same accounting firm where I’ve worked since Effie was born, I’d look up names like “Simone de Beauvoir” and “Cixous” and “Judith Butler,” and I’d read what I could of them. Brave girls, I’d think. Effie, too.
That weekend, it was a little startling to see Effie in love; the way she leaned into Rob like he was holding her up, the way she watched him as he spoke about graduate school, and artists they both admired, the evils of capitalism. I liked him. I couldn’t help it, though I hated his tattoo—not because I hate tattoos, but because his was the sort of forearm hieroglyphic that someone gets when they want to be perceived as edgy. It felt dishonest. It made me think of the felt beret of Effie’s high school years.
When I was in the kitchen running our dinner plates under warm water, I heard Rob say, “Your mom is cool.” To which she replied, “I told you she was.”
I’m a little embarrassed to admit how much I loved hearing that. I was Cool Mom.
Not long after that weekend, Rob cheated on Effie with a girl he’d met in one of his grad classes. When Effie cried to me over the phone, all I could think of as I listened to her heart break for the first time was Effie’s little-child voice saying, “Heart, apart.”
“Forget him,” I told my daughter through the phone, and I meant it. “Seriously, Effie, this isn’t your loss.”
Around that time, I started chewing the skin around my nails.
❦
We find our way to the clerk’s office on the third floor where we’ve been told there’s a small room where the weddings are performed. We take our place in line with others waiting to file for concealed-weapon licenses and business registrations and divorce. There are other couples dressed in black and white, looking like they are here for a marriage, too.
“Shit,” Effie says beside me. “Shit, shit.” She has the hem of her dress in her hands. It’s a simple dress that she’d ordered online, and she looks lovely in it, though I’d have washed all that heavy makeup off her face if I could. She’s spotted a small stain near the bottom. A dark red spot. It looks like blood.
“How did this happen?” she asks, upset. I’m almost relieved to see her unmasked for a brief second, her façade of sophisticated coolness dropping to show that she did, in fact, have expectations about how this day would go and how she’d look for it.
“Let me see it,” I say, and Effie turns so I can inspect the stain. I bend to get a closer look at it, holding the fabric in my own hands. It occurs to me as I see the reopened scab beside my thumbnail that it might’ve been me who stained her dress. Earlier, when she’d gotten out of the car in the parking garage, the hem of her dress had folded upwards and was stuck that way. I reached down to unfold it for her, smoothing it flat.
“Babe,” Rob says, and I hate the sound of that word directed at her, “don’t worry about it.”
Effie straightens. She’s trying to act like she’s not upset, but I know what it means when my daughter’s jaw clenches. She’s pretending again, smiling an unconvincing smile because Rob is beside her, nonchalant. That nonchalance is part of his appeal—even I can see that. And Effie thinks she needs to be that way for him, too.
❦
I didn’t even know Effie and Rob were back together until she came home one weekend in February and sat across the dinner table to tell me she was moving in with him after she graduated in May. They wanted to get married. Something very small. They imagined what they were planning was modern and subversive and uniquely romantic, as if couples haven’t been rushing to courthouses every day for decades and decades.
“I waited to tell you because I knew you might not like it,” she said to me. “But he was so sorry, Mom. You don’t really know him very well yet. He’s never going to do anything like that again.” I could tell she really believed that.
I wanted to say: This is a mistake. What do you know about marriage? But then, what do I know about marriage? I’ve never been married myself. I hadn’t ever been sorry about that before, not until Effie was telling me of her wedding plans, and then I wished so badly that I could speak from some experience, to tell her something true about the profound difficulty of marriage, or the profound difficulty of men.
“Why do you feel like you have to rush this?” I asked, instead.
Effie looked past me and said, “It doesn’t feel like rushing.”
Before I could make my counterargument in which I might’ve told Effie how brilliant and shiny and awe-inspiring she is, and that I didn’t even hate Rob and didn’t care about what kind of wedding day she wanted, it was only that Effie was so young and I could see beyond Rob to the rest of her life in a way that she couldn’t yet, she knocked me over with that wind of hers.
She said, “Try to understand.” She spoke slowly, like she was explaining something to a child. “I know what I want. And he unseats me.” Effie the Poet was back. “It’s like I was sitting in the world and then I met him, and now I’m standing or running or something. I don’t know how to explain it any better.”
I wanted to scream: What language are you speaking?
But also, how could I argue with that?
❦
“I’ll just run to the bathroom,” I say to Effie. “Wet some paper towels. I might be able to get it to fade some.” I nod to the hem of her dress. Caroline is rummaging through her tiny, bedazzled purse as if there’s anything in there that could help.
Effie nods, her lips pressed tightly together.
Rob waves the idea away with a hand, though.
“We’re up next,” he says. “They’ll call us any minute.”
Then, he takes the hem of her dress in his own hands to look at the stain. He kneels on the ground, and I almost gasp aloud when he puts Effie’s dress in his mouth. He sucks on the stain like he’s sucking the venom out of a snake bite.
I look around at the faces of the people behind us in line, none of whom seem to be particularly affected by the sight of Rob on his knees with Effie’s dress in his mouth, his head tilted up like a hamster trying to drink water from the dropper. I’m waiting for his own mother to tell him to get off the ground, but Caroline looks touched by the sight of her son kneeling before his bride. She’s dabbing at the inner corner of her eye.
“You’re going to make it worse,” I say to him, more harshly than I mean to.
And there’s Effie, looking down on him with so much affection it quiets me. She lifts a hand to his face with the kind of tenderness I’ve only ever felt for her. Maybe they will be OK. Maybe they will last forever.
I feel a little unsteady on my feet. When their names are called, Rob and Effie step forward in line, but I stay where I am. What I feel in my gut, and everywhere else—I’ll leave the poetry to Effie—is something like refusal. Caroline comes alongside and loops her arm through mine to usher me along. But I pull away, roughly, causing Caroline to drop her bedazzled clutch with a thud that echoes off the cold tile floors.
Effie and Rob look at me. There’s surprise on both of their faces. Neither of them knew I had such roughness in me. Even I don’t know what I have in me yet.
But the four of us move on like a real family—we don’t talk about it. Caroline just shakes the moment off, and Rob pulls Effie along. Embarrassed, I take a step forward, following, always, in Effie’s wake.
❦
The room where the ceremony takes place is small. It’s cramped with the four of us inside. The judge looks large and a little ghoulish in her oversized black robe. I stand with my back against a wall to make space and pick at the skin around my nail beds.
Effie is beaming. The stain on the bottom of her dress is much bigger and browner than it was before Rob intervened. But she can’t stop looking at him, and I think: OK. So this is it. This is what Effie has chosen for herself.
They stand beneath a pair of paper hearts hanging from the ceiling as the judge leads them through their vows. The whole thing takes about five minutes. Effie and Rob kiss. Caroline claps her hands loudly. Even I clap because I need something to do with my hands, because I want Effie to see me clapping, and because even if I don’t like it, I think it’s brave of her to make the promises she just made to Rob.
We are ushered out of the wedding room as the next couple in line is ushered in. Rob and Effie are almost wildly happy on the escalators back down to the first floor, Rob with his fist in the air like he’s in The Breakfast Club, Effie holding tight to his other hand. Caroline and I follow, trying to keep up with our kids, who seem very much like kids in this moment as they practically run through the lobby.
When we emerge from the building, the sun is still high and we squint to see each other. Rob and Effie are going to a bar where their friends will be waiting to celebrate them, but before they descend the courthouse steps, Rob throws an arm over my shoulder.
“Thanks again, Mom,” he says. And though I believe he is earnest when he says it, I also don’t like the sound of him calling me Mom. It doesn’t fit, and I think of what Effie told me about him, how he unseats her. I didn’t understand what that meant at first, but now I think maybe I do.
I don’t think I’ll let him call me Mom again, but I won’t say anything to him today. I wave goodbye as they race off together, excited about the life they believe they’ve just started. There will be lots of time to say all types of things to him.
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