Getting Engaged

It didn’t hit me that he was serious until he gave me the Mickey Mouse pin.

“I know it’s cheesy,” he said. “I don’t mean to make it seem not serious or degrade it, but I found this and it just seemed destined.”

The pin, a Walt Disney collectible, had a picture of Mickey in black tie. Minnie sprawled across his arms and she wore – gasp! — wedding gown. The mice engaged in heavy lip locking, eternal collectible lip locking.

I stared.

I stared some more.

That was it. I was engaged.

Doug, my favorite cowboy proposed on the veranda of a stateroom on a Disney Cruise, which makes my life like an episode of the “Love Boat” somehow, I guess. The “Love Boat” was one of those hour-long 1980s TV shows where mini soap opera plot lines are all resolved in 45 minutes or less. It starred Gavin McLeod. One of the Gabor sisters – maybe Zsa Zsa – and Charo were regular guest stars. That’s the kind of show it was. It had happing endings, lots of tan people and lots of kissing. Somehow, somehow my life had turned into that. Hopefully, I am more like Charo with her castanets than Zsa Zsa with her diamonds, but I wasn’t sure.

“How did this happen?” I ask everyone as soon as I get back to Maine.

They ignore the question. My male friends can’t believe I’m getting married. Again.

“Did you not learn anything?” they say.

“But it was a Mickey Mouse pin,” I explain. They don’t get it.

“I can’t believe you fell for that. A freaking’ Mickey Mouse pin.”

All my women friends totally believe it, but they want to know one thing.

“Did he go down on his knee?” they demand. “Did he do that?”

I nod. “Twice.”

Then they shriek. They know I’ve got me a good man. I guess everyone knows. In town it was the early morning talk at Curves. I have no idea why, so I go and ask our newspaper’s feature editor, Don Radovich.

“He’s Ellsworth’s most eligible bachelor,” Don tells me in his office when I ask him why my love life was the talk of the workout set.

“He is?”

“Uh-huh,” says Keri, the ad rep for our newspaper. “At least top five.”

“He’s the hospital CEO,” Don says.

Keri nods. “And he’s cute. Easily Ellsworth’s most Eligible.”

And so begins the freak out.

All my life I wanted a man who was kind and good and actually loved me, even though when I get stressed my upper lip gets all dry. All my life I wanted a guy who didn’t mind that I, um, actually like to sing show tunes sometimes, particularly when vacuuming. Now, I had one, and it turned out that he was one of Ellsworth’s most eligible bachelors.

I slump in the chair in Don’s office, right under his poster of Nightmare on Elm Street. Don is big into horror movies. “People are going to hate me.”

“People get jealous,” says Grady, copy editor and best friend. He hangs out at the threshold of the door, resting his weight on the frame. There are cookie crumbs in his white beard. “Ignore them.”

Ignore them.

Ignore them.

I can ignore the brilliant red light in my car that’s telling me I need to check my engine. I can ignore five extra pounds on each of my thighs, but I am having a hard time ignoring the roaming hordes of Hancock County Maine ladies who are picketing my office because I have snagged Ellsworth’s Most Eligible Bachelor Number One.

“I didn’t mean to!” I yell from the barricade that I erected behind my iMac computer stating, holding up a surrender flag made out of white correctional fluid and scotch tape. “I don’t know what happened! I didn’t write this! It’s not my fault. It’s not like I’ve written some article where I’ve spelled something wrong and I can put out a correction in the paper. This is my life!”

Truth is, I can understand their anger. I have finally found a man who is amazing. Let me offer the evidence:

1. He built a tree house for my little girl after only two weeks of talking about it. Most men it takes five years and the impending marriage of their last-born child to get a tree house even started.

2. He holds my hand in front of his men friends and even in front of his women friends.

3. His ex-wife lives a good 14 hours away, almost in another time zone. His parents and his daughter are beautiful and bright and warn and he talks to them every week and the talk does not include, prison terms, bail conditions, or any family members’ current ranking on “America’s Most Wanted.”

4. And he hugs me every day! Multiple times! And tells me how lucky he is.

Yes, sometimes I push against his skin to make sure there’ no metal underneath the surface and he isn’t really some demon robot clone.

I don’t know why he wants to marry me, but he does.

“You can never complain about anything ever again,” Keri tells me.

“Not even the picketing panthers pacing outside my door, ready to rip off my engagement ring when I fall asleep?” I whine, peeking through the blinds. “What about them? Can’t I complain about the ladies in the grocery store who won’t make eye contact with me any more?”
“No. Not about them either,” she said, and rolled her eyes.

“I don’t deserve him.”

She thought about this. “Has he ever asked you for money?”

“No.”

“Not even to buy beer?”
“Nope.”

“It’s all over then,” she smiled. “You can never complain again. I hope you can handle that, girl. Because that is a lot of pressure.”

I collapsed on the couch in her office, while a psychic on the TV screen talked to Montel Williams about the meaning of dreams.

“He’s too perfect,” I said. “He can’t be in love with me. How can he be in love with me?”

She shrugged. “Go figure.”

“I mean really?”

“Got me,” she said. “Want some gum?”

See, she knows the truth. She has seen me in the morning after a marathon 12-hour Bar Harbor Planning Board meeting. But, then again, so has he, Doug, Mr. Engagement Man.

Maybe love always works out that way. You don’t know why the other person would even imagine rubbing your winter cold feet for the rest of your life, but they do. There’s the miracle right there.

Now the hero this is that fact that you say, “Yes, I’ll marry you,” even though you know that one night someone might sleep on the couch, or that some co-worker hussy woman might grab his thigh while she tries to ascend up the bleachers at a high school basketball game; even though you know that maybe he won’t read your poem the moment you give it to him or that he might not ever write one for you.

Hold on a minute.

Or, worse yet, his poem might have dolphins in it and rainbows and he might read it out loud in a Mickey Mouse voice during the wedding ceremony.

“Doug,” I tell him during dinner, “we have to promise each other not to write our own vows, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Pinky promise?”

He does not raise his pinky, because he is a man, but he says, “I swear.”

The languishing love-worn ladies sigh. One more cowboy will no longer be roaming the range, unless of course, he starts writing about dolphins and rainbows.

Let me add that Doug asked me to marry him even after the hair incident.

We were in the Bahamas and cruising around with Mickey Mouse on the Disney Wonder. We strolled down the beaches of Paradise Island by Nassau.

Emily spotted a group of ladies plunked down in a row on the beach. Beads glistened in their braided hair. Hands bearing combs beckoned. Emily yanked me over, and the women crowded in. One grabbed her and began beading and braiding long, thin braids down her little back. Emily tried not to yelp too loudly and attract the beach roaming dogs.

“How about you,” the oldest braiding lady asked me.

I took a step backwards. “Oh no. Not me.”

“Come on, you be a real Bahama Mama.”

Now, it is simple truth time. I am not a Bahama Mama type. I don’t tan well. I don’t watch Bo Derek movies that involve running down beaches or drinking a lot of rum. I have forgotten what it’s like to wear a bikini. Basically, I am so uptight that since I am no longer the same swimming suit size that I was 10 years ago, I actually wear a T-shirt and short over my swim suit. I wear them until the last possible moment, right before I go in the water. Then I whisk them off and scurry in, sort of in a crouched crab like position while yelling at everyone, “DO NOT LOOK! Promise me you won’t look!”

I stared at the lady. She grabbed my arm in a kind of wrestling hold grip and started pulling me down the beach with her. I struggled. “Oh, no. I ‘m no Bahama Mama. I am from Maine. I’m a good Maine girl. Are beaches aren’t sandy even. They’re made of stone.”

I looked for Emily to rescue me, but she was busy being tortured and having her scalp pulled back by all the hair yanking maneuvers necessary to make a nine-year-old girl look like someone form MTV’s Spring Break Week. I glanced over at Doug, who was still a boyfriend, not yet a fiancée.

He did the ultimate man thing, the gesture that makes all women seethe with uncontrollable rage, with dynamic fury.

He shrugged.

It was hopeless. I was alone and lost in the clutches of a Bahama Mama. Then I had a brilliant idea.

“You couldn’t possibly braid my hair. It’s all tangled. I forgot the detangler at home. You can’t even get a brush through it.”

Her eyes lit up.

“I untangle all the time. I’ll show you.”

She whipped out a wide tooth comb aka torturing deceives and began to work.

After about 30 minutes she sighed. “What’s the matter with you? You don’t comb your hair?”

“It gets curly here. It’s the humidity,” I whined.

The Bahama Mama Lady shoved me down on the sand and clamped me between her thighs. I wasn’t going anywhere.

“Your hair,” she said, suddenly sounding like my mother, “is ridiculous. Do you cut it?”

“I’m afraid to get it cut.”

“Hair like this you need a good cutter, an expert cutter,” she said. She yanked pieces of hair towards her.

The other Bahama Mamas agreed.

“Oh… hair like that.”

“Super cutter man needs to do that hair.”

“Good cuts.”

It was like an angry chorus of Greek gods was chastising me for my Medusa hair. I tried to make excuses, turn their chorus into stone.

“I don’t have time. I have a nice lady who cuts it sometimes, though,” I pointed at Doug sitting in front of us, smiling. SMILING! “I asked him to cut it the other day.”

My combing lady shrieked. “Do you want him to leave you?”

I shrugged, because the way he was smiling as he sat on his soft little sand perch, no one ripping out his hair, made me wonder.

“I braid your hair,” the lady said.

“Oh, no,” I tried again. “You don’t understand. I live in Maine. We don’t braid hair in Maine.”

“You aren’t in Maine. You are in the Bahamas.”

I shook my head, Dorothy lost in Oz. Where was Kansa? Where was Aunt Em and Toto? Where was LL Bean and wool hats and negative 100 wind chill factors? Where was the dry gas and the ice skates and those little heat pack that you put in your socks to keep your feet warm?

More importantly, why wasn’t my stupid boyfriend saving me. He was laughing and smiling. He was (gasp!) enjoying himself.

“She did untangle it,” he said.

I tried a compromise. “How about a French braid?”

French braids are elegant. They are sophisticated. They don’t look like Medusa-gone-through-the-carwash hair, with random twisting coils of braid sprouting out of your head in all different directions.

“Two,” she said.

“Fine,” I said.

Then she began to work. Two hour later and $100 shorter in cash I had five hundred million tiny braids flying out from my head.

“You look good,” the woman said as I sobbed into a sand pile. “Don’t get sand in it. You have to enjoy life, you know. When you die you are dead.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You ever see a dead body?”

Emily wiggled her eyebrows.

“Yes,” I said. I have seen a lot of dead bodies.

My answer was not good enough. “You ever see a dead body dug up from the grave?”

Being a good Maine girl who does not work for the state police department of a grave robbing franchise I had to be honest.

“No.”

She slapped her hands together. “It is dust. The Bible says that. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. We be dust and that’s it.”

Em closed her eyes.

The Bahama Mama smiled, “You have fun now. You a real Bahama mama.”

Then she sold a beaded necklace, to Doug, a man who wears suits to work, has never owned a necklace, or an earring, or worn more than one ring at a time. The beaded necklace, however, did not elicit the same stares that my hair evoked when we went to Friendly’s back home. You can tuck a necklace beneath your shirt collar. You can not do that with Medusa hair.

I hunkered down in the booth and cringed.

“Who does that woman think she is?” someone whispered.

I wanted to yell it. “I’m a good Maine girl!”

Doug wrapped his arm around my shoulders, pulled me to his side and tweaked one of my braids. “How’s my Bahama Mama?”

Then he winked.

And then he reminded me that we were engaged. ENGAGED! He’d proposed to me the night I had those silly braids stuck in my hair.

Maybe those Bahama Mamas knew something after all.