Free Good In Bed by Jennifer Weiner Page B

fell against her skin. She twirled and twirled and her sons stared at her as if they were under a spell, until finally she stopped. “What do you think?” she asked. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was breathing hard. I could see each breath make her bosom swell against the tight-fitted scalloped edges of the bodice. She turned once more, and I could see tiny cloth rosebuds stitched all down the back, tight as a baby’s pursed lips. “Is it blue? Green?”
    I looked at her for a long moment, her pink cheeks and milky skin, and her sons’ delighted eyes.
    “I’m actually not sure,” I said. “But I’ll figure something out.”
    I missed the deadline, of course. The city editor was long gone by the time I made it back to the newsroom, after Sandy had shown me her pictures of Bryan, and told me all about their honeymoon plans, after I’d watched her read her sons Where the Wild Things Are, and kiss their foreheads and their cheeks, and add a finger’s worth of bourbon to her soda, and half as much to mine. “He’s a good man,” she’d said dreamily. Her lit cigarette moved through the room like a firefly.
    I had three inches to fill, and I had to write to fit, write only enough to fill the allotted space beneath the blurry picture of Sandy’s smiling face. I sat at my computer, my head spinning a little, and keyed up my fill-in-the-blank marriage form, the one with spaces: bride’s name, groom’s name, attendants’ names, description of dress. Then I pressed the “escape” key, cleared the screen, took a deep breath, and wrote:
    Tomorrow Sandra Louise Garry will marry Bryan Perreault in Our Lady of Mercy Church on Old College Road. She will walk down the aisle with antique rhinestone combs in her hair and will promise to love and to honor and cherish Bryan, whose letters she keeps folded beneath her pillow, each one read so many times it’s worn thin as a butterfly’s wing.
    “I believe in love,” she says, even though a cynic might say there’s every indication that she shouldn’t. Her first husband left her, her second is in jail— the same jail where she met Bryan, whose parole begins two days before the wedding. In his letters, he calls her his little dove, his perfect angel. In her kitchen, the last of the three cigarettes she allows herself each night burning between her fingers, she says he is a prince.
    Her sons, Dylan and Trevor, will attend the bride. Her dress is a color called seafoam, a color perfectly balanced between the palest blue and the palest green. It isn’t white, a color for a virgin, a teenager with her head full of sugar-spun romances, or ivory, which is white tinged with resignation. Her dress is the color of dreams.
    Well. A little florid, a little overwritten and overwrought. A dress the color of dreams? The whole thing had “Recent Graduate of College Creative Writing Workshop” stamped on every syllable. The next morning I came to work and there was a copy of the page splayed over my keyboard, the offending passage circled in red copy-editor’s grease-paint pencil. “SEE ME,” said the two-word message scrawled in the margin, in the unmistakable hand of Chris, the executive editor, an easily distractible Southerner who’d been lured to Pennsylvania with the promise of moving on to a bigger, better paper in the chain (that, plus unparalleled trout fishing). I knocked timidly at his office door. He beckoned me inside. A second copy of my story was opened on his desk.
    “This,” he said, pointing with one spindly finger. “What was this, exactly?”
    I shrugged. “It was just… well, I met this woman. I was typing her announcement and there was a word I couldn’t read, so I called her, then I met her, and then…” My voice trailed off. “I guess I thought it sounded like a story.”
    He looked up at me. “You were right,” he said. “Want to do it again?”
    And a star was born… well, sort of. Every other week I’d find a bride and write a short column