The New Yorker Stories

“We’re not going to live in any apartment,” Charlie said. “We’re going to live in a house.” And “You’re not going to have to go up and down stairs. We’re going to find a split-level.” And “It’s not going to be any neighborhood that’s getting worse. Our neighborhood is going to be getting better.” And “You don’t have to lose weight. Why don’t you marry me now, and we can get a house and start a life together?”

But she wouldn’t do it. She was going to lose twenty pounds and save enough money to buy a pretty wedding dress. She had already started using more makeup and letting her hair grow, as the beauty-parlor operator had suggested, so that she could have curls that fell to her shoulders on her wedding day. She’d been reading brides’ magazines, and long curls were what she thought was pretty. Charlie hated the magazines. He thought the magazines had told her to lose twenty pounds—that the magazines were responsible for keeping him waiting.

She had nightmares. A recurring nightmare was one in which she stood at the altar with Charlie, wearing a beautiful long dress, but the dress wasn’t quite long enough, and everyone could see that she was standing on a scale. What did the scale say? She would wake up peering into the dark and get out of bed and go to the kitchen.

This night, as she dipped potato chips into cheddar-cheese dip, she reread a letter from her mother: “You are not a bad girl, and so I do not know why you would get married three times. Your father does not count that black man as a marriage, but I have got to, and so it is three. That’s too many marriages, Cynthia. You are a good girl and know enough now to come home and settle down with your family. We are willing to look out for you, even your dad, and warn you not to make another dreadful mistake.” There was no greeting, no signature. The letter had probably been dashed off by her mother when she, too, had insomnia. Cynthia would have to answer the note, but she didn’t think her mother would be convinced by anything she could say. If she thought her parents would be convinced she was making the right decision by seeing Charlie, she would have asked him to meet her parents. But her parents liked people who had a lot to say, or who could make them laugh (“break the monotony,” her father called it), and Charlie didn’t have a lot to say. Charlie was a very serious person. He was also forty years old, and he had never been married. Her parents would want to know why that was. You couldn’t please them: they hated people who were divorced and they were suspicious of single people. So she had never suggested to Charlie that he meet her parents. Finally, he suggested it himself. Cynthia thought up excuses, but Charlie saw through them. He thought it was all because he had confessed to her that he sewed. She was ashamed of him—that was the real reason she was putting off the wedding, and why she wouldn’t introduce him to her parents. “No,” she said. “No, Charlie. No, no, no.” And because she had said it so many times, she was convinced. “Then set a date for the wedding,” he told her. “You’ve got to say when.” She promised to do that the next time she saw him, but she couldn’t think right, and that was because of the notes that her mother wrote her, and because she couldn’t get any sleep, and because she got depressed by taking off weight and gaining it right back by eating at night.

As long as she couldn’t sleep, and there were only a few potato chips left, which she might as well finish off, she decided to level with herself the same way she and Charlie had the night they told their secrets. She asked herself why she was getting married. Part of the answer was that she didn’t like her job. She was a typer—a typist, the other girls always said, correcting her—and also she was thirty-two, and if she didn’t get married soon she might not find anybody. She and Charlie would live in a house, and she could have a flower garden, and, although they had not discussed it, if she had a baby she wouldn’t have to work. It was getting late if she intended to have a baby. There was no point in asking herself more questions. Her head hurt, and she had eaten too much and felt a little sick, and no matter what she thought she knew she was still going to marry Charlie.

Cynthia would marry Charlie on February the tenth. That was what she told Charlie, because she hadn’t been able to think of a date and she had to say something, and that was what she would tell her boss, Mr. Greer, when she asked if she could be given her week’s vacation then.

“We would like to be married the tenth of February, and, if I could, I’d like to have the next week off.”

“I’m looking for that calendar.”

“What?”

“Sit down and relax, Cynthia. You can have the week off if that isn’t the week when—”

“Mr. Greer, I could change the date of the wedding.”

“I’m not asking you to do that. Please sit down while I—”

“Thank you. I don’t mind standing.”

“Cynthia, let’s just say that week is fine.”

“Thank you.”