Page 8 of This Is How It Started
He got back in bed and stole a strawberry off the plate. “You think about us?”
“All the time.”
“Me too,” he said and took my hand under the covers, lacing his fingers through mine. “What do you say we get married?”
As far as proposals go, it isn’t the most flowery or romantic. But it’s us. Real. Not like those people who propose over a giant scoreboard at the baseball game or hide the ring in the dessert at the French Laundry or write “Will you marry me?” in an explosion of pyrotechnics. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just isn’t our style. Ours is Sinatra, strawberries, and turkey bacon on a cold June morning in bed.
And today, we’re doing it. We’re merging our two lives. Josh likes to joke that if we smooshed our two names together a la Brangelina (pre-breakup of course), we’d be Rash.
Dad’s house—I refuse to call it Dad and Brooke’s house—is decked out with a bazillion white roses. My mother insisted we hire Ran Gately, San Francisco’s florist to the stars, to do the flowers. I’m pretty sure her ulterior motive was to cost my father as much as possible because he’s picking up the tab for the entire wedding. The Ackermanns threw the rehearsal dinner at Rabbits. It was a nice tribute to Josh’s work, and according to my mother, his parentskvelledall night.
I always knew I would someday be married here in my family home. I think I started planning my wedding when I was twelve. A few of those plans have changed, including the groom, who was supposed to be Campbell. But I’m surprised—and perhaps a little mortified—that a lot of my childhood fantasies about the perfect wedding have stayed the same. For example, Josh and I chose to hold the ceremony and reception outside. We put the chuppah, a white tulle canopy (okay, at twelve I envisioned it to be macrame but who does that?) covered in sprays of roses and hydrangea with two hundred white folding chairs on the lawn with a view of the bay in the background. It’s even more spectacular than I imagined.
Yesterday, an event company set up a huge white tent in the backyard. Josh has quipped at least a dozen times that our wedding is like a mullet: “business in the front, party in the back.” Honestly, it was barely funny the first time he said it. But I’m so happy, I refrain from socking him in the arm each subsequent time he brings it up.
Before the reception starts, someone from the company Mommie Dearest has hired has been tasked with lighting at least fifty floating tea light candles in the pool. With two bars—one for beer and wine and a second for mixed drinks and soda—and a labyrinth of buffet stations, it’s the most bougie wedding known to mankind. But I’ve decided to let my middle-class guilt go for a day. Tomorrow, I’ll let it fester, then donate to the food bank the commission from the Richmond studio I just sold.
Someone taps on the door of my parents’ old bedroom, which Brooke has turned into a guest suite. She and my dad have taken one of the smaller suites as their bedroom. It’s got to be weird for the child bride having the specter of my mother haunting every room of this big house.
My parents bought the Victorian before I was born. Back then it was a disaster, or as we like to call it in the real estate world, a contractor’s special. The place had been a boarding house, then a halfway house, and eventually a rental. Rumor has it that one of the members of the Grateful Dead lived here before the band got famous. Then a sugar heiress purchased it with grand plans to bring it back to life. But she died in a yacht accident off the Amalfi Coast. The house just sat for years while her children and lawyers fought over her estate.
In that time, squatters had destroyed and stolen whatever charm was left in the home. The wealthy and irate residents of Pacific Heights welcomed my parents, the new owners, with open arms. But they had their work cut out for them. Back then, my father’s cosmetic surgery practice was still in its infant stage, and the house had been way above my parents’ means.
Still, my mother made it her full-time job to turn the Queen Anne into a showplace. She had the chipping walls replastered, the ornate cornices and medallions returned to the ceilings, and the missing millwork replicated and replaced. And that was just the beginning. The knob and tube electrical and iron plumbing needed to be brought up to date, and many of the windows had cracked.
I was not alive at the time, but my mother loves to tell the story of how she combed through every salvage store west of the Mississippi to find everything from period glass to a hundred-year-old chandelier that once hung in one of San Francisco’s oldest bordellos. Who knows if the bit about the bordello is true? Shana Gold never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
But the house had always been their first child. From the time I was born, it was where every milestone of the Gold family was celebrated. Adam’s bar mitzvah, Hannah’s sweet sixteen, my high school graduation, my parents’ numerous anniversary parties. Even our relatives and friends threw their special occasions at the house on Vallejo. My father’s partner’s daughter’s quinceañera, my mother’s best friend’s third wedding, and my cousin Arie’s coming-out party to name a few.
That’s why we were all surprised when Mom let my father buy her out of the house during the divorce. While there was no way in hell she could afford to buy him out, let alone pay for the upkeep on an estate this size, we all expected her to fight dirty for it. Guilt is a great bludgeon when it comes to my dad. And my mother had the goods to send him to the poorhouse.
Instead, my father gave her half of everything they owned—including a note on his medical practice. She deposited her loot, bought a condo, and took art classes. We’re still waiting for her to exact her revenge, knowing that when it happens, it’ll be like Mount Vesuvius erupting.
I tell the person knocking at the door to come in, expecting it to be Whitney, the person who has been cutting my hair since I was sixteen and has promised to copy an updo in a picture I found on the internet. But it’s not Whitney, it’s Adam.
“I come bearing gifts,” he says and waves a joint in the air. “I figure between Mom and Hannah, you could probably use this by now.”
“You’ve got to be kidding?”
“Nope.”
“I’m not getting high on my wedding day.”
“Why not? Josh is.”
My brother is a bad influence on Josh. He’s a bad influence on everyone.
“Go in there and tell him to stop.” I give Adam a little nudge, but he doesn’t move.
“I was only joking, Rach.”
“No you weren’t.” Adam always uses “I was only joking” whenever he’s confronted with doing something inappropriate.
“He’s fine. He says for me to say hi.”
As tradition dictates, we haven’t seen each other since early yesterday morning.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask. Ten minutes ago, she went in search of Hannah. Now, both of them are missing in action. My best friend, Josie, went on the hunt for them, leaving me alone in the room. Until Adam.
