Wedding Cake for Breakfast Read Free Page A

funny? Please, tell me I was funny. I wasn’t worrying and second-guessing too much, was I? I took quizzes to find out.
    I’d wake up sweaty and dry-mouthed. To preempt any domestic tedium, I became fixated, oddly, on tedious domestic things like tea lights and matching napkins. Every night when we got home from work, I decided, Bob and I had to have a candlelit cocktail hour—some wildly romantic “alone time” replete with toothpicks and breadsticks. I picked up smoked mackerel, pretentious imported cheese, herbed tofu spread, inedible candied kumquats. When Bob arrived home, he’d find a trayful of bizarre hors d’oeuvres on the coffee table alongside an opened bottle of Cabernet and a half-drunk wife.
    â€œWell, well,” he’d say bemusedly. “I see happy hour’s already started.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by ‘happy hour’?” I’d say anxiously, struggling to sit upright. “Are the other twenty-three we spend together miserable?”
    Before I was married, I never bought lingerie. It was just glorified underwear; you were paying a lot of money for what was, essentially, string. Plus, the way guys carried on, fondling my breasts was like winning the lottery. So why, I wondered, should I knock myself out?
    Now I went to Victoria’s Secret. Most of their lingerie is designed to make women with modest or regular curves look curvier. But if you’re curvy to begin with like me, you just look ridiculous. In the “Angel Collection,” I looked nothing like Stephanie Seymour or Tyra Banks and everything like two grapefruits stuffed into a sweat sock. But I thought of my mother, the artist, in her tie-dyed leotards, funky head scarves, and hand-crocheted vests. My father often wished she’d dressed up more. I bought three aerodynamic lace push-up bras with tiny matching thongs. Bob didn’t seem to mind—though he wasn’t nearly as dazzled as I’d hoped he’d be. “Wow,” was his reaction. “Can you breathe in that?”
    Until my brother and I were in college, my parents didn’t take a single weekend away together. By the time they began tromping grimly to Italy and San Francisco, they weren’t on vacations so much as rescue missions. And so I began planning little post-honeymoon getaways for Bob and me, obsessively reading reviews of “romantic country inns” on the Internet. As soon as Bob walked in the door, I’d pepper him with questions: the Shenandoah Valley or Rehoboth? Beachfront or garden view? The Laura Ashley Room or the Beatrix Potter Suite?
    I arranged for us to attend plays, film festivals, women’s basketball games. I brought home porn. I baked cookies (okay: Pillsbury dough roll). I called Bob at work to see if there was any dry cleaning he needed me to pick up on my way home. Was he out of shaving cream? Should I rent a video? What did he think about ordering in sushi? Did he see the article on the latest climate change treaty? Had he heard the story about Eddie Izzard on National Public Radio? What was he thinking? How was he feeling? “How’s your heart and soul?” I’d say. “Is everything okay? Just checking in.”
    In a matter of months, I’d gone from being the bestselling author of a book called
Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess
to a postmodern geisha who was essentially tromping around our apartment with a feather duster and a pair of bunny ears, hovering over my husband and chirping 24/7: “Do you want fries with that?”
    It would be easy to argue that I was selling out my principles—or reverting to some supposedly “natural” female state of subservience. But my behavior, as I see it now, transcended all permutations of gender. It was rooted in something far more basic and universal: that desperate, overarching desire.
Please. Love me. Don’t leave.
    Is it a surprise to anyone,