You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

Author:Curtis Sittenfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

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For dinner the next night, Ed drove again. The decor of the restaurant seemed self-conscious—tiny multicolored tiles on the walls of the dining room, a sink in the women’s bathroom that was a long, flat piece of slate on which water pooled in ways I was pretty sure weren’t intentional—and the food was mediocre. We finished five bottles of wine, all of which Ed selected, and we split the bill down the middle. (Jason threw in his credit card, which was always how we did it when we ate with other couples.) When we reemerged into the night, after eleven P.M., I was solidly drunk. As we turned off the main drag to walk toward where the car was parked, I had a vision of Ed slamming the SUV into a deer, or something more exotic—a moose or a black bear. Before we got to the car, though, Ashley cried out, “Oh, this is the local dive bar! We have to go in!” She’d already opened the oversized wooden door and gone inside. I was glad no actual locals seemed to have heard her.

Unlike our hotel, this was a place where smoking inside was definitely still allowed. Most of the tables were full, and the people looked less preppy than at the resort—they wore jeans and jean jackets and flannel shirts. Willie Nelson was playing on a jukebox in the corner, and, a few feet from it, Ashley found an empty booth.

After a waitress took our drink order, Ashley leaned across the table toward me—our husbands had started discussing baseball again—and said, “I’m so glad we got to spend this time together.” I noticed a tiny black something—maybe only pepper—wedged next to her canine tooth. It didn’t count as real food stuck in her teeth, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing she herself would notice during a quick trip to the bathroom, but it seemed like some final, culminating piece of evidence, as if I still needed one, that her high school self no longer existed. RIP, Ashley Frye, I thought.

“My friend Cindy warned me that the secret of honeymoons no one tells you is that they’re really boring and make you second-guess your whole marriage,” she was saying. Even though I was sitting on the other side of the booth from her, her face was about three inches too close to mine; as she continued speaking, I realized she was trying to prevent her husband from overhearing, which was unnecessary, given the volume of the music. “There’s been all this activity leading up to the wedding, then you get away from it and the two of you stare at each other and have nothing to say. So we ran into you and Jason just in time, huh?”

The theory didn’t strike me as entirely wrong—more than once, I’ve thought that cribbage will probably do more in the long term for my marriage than sex—but I felt annoyed by Ashley’s implication that we had mutually rescued each other.

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