If her marriage were a contract she was looking over for a client, she would tell them to run for the hills.
None of it mattered on the day, of course. Anna had barely thought of the hours she had put in, stenciling chalk foliage, stamping placement cards and calligraphing menus; barely thought of the spreadsheet, the to-do list, and the invoices to pay as they and their guests enjoyed the eye-wateringly marked-up fruits of her unpaid labor. It was only as she’d read Sonny his fairy tales recently, then stayed up half the night working on his nursery school Book Day costume, which they had all forgotten about, that she’d realized who in her and Steve’s relationship was the elves and who the shoemaker.
That Steve had managed to run Celia down to the fancy dress shop in the car that afternoon to get supplies for Olwen’s costume and still not thought to do Sonny’s led to a full-blown row. But he was reviewing a gig for work that night, so Anna had glued the tinfoil sword together after she’d put their son to bed, Anna had attached feathers to the makeshift Robin Hood hat after she’d finished reading up on her latest case at work, and Anna had felt utterly taken for granted all the while.
She brushed yet more scattered petals from the kitchen table now and remembered the surprise of the confetti on her wedding day: that such a moment could feel like such an onslaught. And that was even before she’d encountered her divorced cousin standing at the end of the human walkway deliberately throwing sharp grains of easy-cook rice right into her face.
As the photo-op debris had drifted to her feet, encased under her skirts in a pair of icicle-gray satin ballet slippers (the closest she’d come to “something blue”—it hadn’t matched her color scheme), Anna’s bridesmaids had struggled to pull the petals, grains, foil hearts, and paper Cupids free of the carefully tonged tendrils of curly hair in which they had nested, to brush them from where they had pebble-dashed the gauzy sleeves of her elegant gown, and to surreptitiously excavate them from the line of her cleavage before they showed up in the photos like a lewd joke.
Anna had felt a welter of emotions that day, but the confetti shower left her shaken with its vague hint of aggression and the niggling feeling that, had the guests been holding buckets of slops, they might have emptied those over her and Steve too. Perhaps she had imagined it, but somewhere just beneath the goodwill and drunken euphoria of their guests had lurked the subtlest note of resentment at their happiness. Anna struggled to pinpoint its provenance, but had registered it anxiously nonetheless.
She looked at her husband as he returned to the suds and the dirty plates in the sink. She wasn’t ready to let him back into her heart yet—not until he had explained to her what on earth had happened for him and Iso to have been so thoroughly divested of their clothes at the same time and in the same place. Anna picked up a serving dish of tapenade from the side and plastic-wrapped it vengefully, before carrying it across the stone room to the larder.
“You can’t seriously think I would do that to you?” Steve followed her into the coolness of the little pantry, and pleaded with her. They were surrounded by white shelves neatly stacked with dry goods as bystanders to watch them question the vows they had made.
“I’m not the one not being serious,” Anna sighed. “You showed up semi-naked this morning, not me. What on earth am I supposed to think you were doing with her in that state?”
At this, Steve was forced to admit that he had no idea what he had been doing, what had happened. “But what about trust, Anna?”
“What about it?” she said, thrusting the greasy bowl of tapenade at him. The wine-like fumes from it brought acid to the back of his teeth, and by the time he swallowed it away again, she had pushed past him and returned to cleaning-up.
It hadn’t exactly been easy for him, she reasoned, adjusting to life—and wife—after a baby. Steve prided himself on sidestepping the usual pitfalls of modern masculinity that Anna’s friends railed against in her all-female group chats; she knew that as the two of them sat together on the couch, he read the messages as they came in, peering over her shoulder, his eyes slid right over in his skull until they watered and felt like he’d stretched them out on their stalks.
The other mums in her toddler group complained about their husbands’ socks everywhere, about their sleeping in, their pawing at them as much as the little children did. Of requiring far more attention than even the most grisly teething baby.
Steve didn’t do that. He waited passively—often in vain—until Anna showed him physical affection, and he tried to take his cues from her. He woke up and washed up, did nursery runs so she could get into the City early, before the crowds she so hated sharing trains with. He wrote his articles at home so he could also cook and clean, to make up for the travel he sometimes had to agree to for work. She knew that he loved her, simply but doggedly.
Still it never seemed to be what Anna wanted, and she wondered—with a regularity that made her angry with herself—whether in fact she’d prefer him to be a dick, a bore, an ungrateful, unheeding brute to her, just so she’d have something real to rail against. Instead, Steve seemed happy to be a punching bag when Anna needed him to be—he could see what her job did to her head and what Sonny had to her body (a body he nevertheless considered with near-religious
