"Engagement, April 2010" by Allison Renner

Engagement, April 2010

after Egg Toss, August 1989

In my memory the engagement happened to two adults, though we were anything but,

with me fumbling my way through grad school, trying to act as an authority figure as a

TA to students older than me, him working the front desk of a hotel so he always had a

free place to stay when he traveled. We stay up late every night, drinking beer at a new-

to-us bar or downing six-packs at home. We play Guitar Hero and watch episodes of

Friends—even though I prefer Seinfeld—or anything on the Food Network. We pretend

our opinions matter, pontificating about meat and cheese and toppings on our Burger

Blog. It’s just an excuse to go out, take pictures of our food, and eat something greasy to

soak up the beer. We don’t realize other people take it more seriously than us until a

cattle ranch sends a cooler of ground meat to our apartment door and Sonic reaches out

with a sponsorship, but by then, we hate burgers and can hardly stand each other.

And it would be a lie to say the relationship was anything more than “just cuz.” We met

because, in a city of transients, we were two people far from the same home. I avoided

his type in high school but ignored the red flags in a new location. I wanted someone

who didn’t spend sixty hours a week on campus, someone who didn’t need me to review

their essay, someone who didn’t think I drank too much. In the house with four other

TAs, I hide vodka in my room. With him, I’m free to drink beer and inhale burgers and

pretend I’m going to drop out of school to become a comedian.

And I can see how that felt like enough. When you have nothing going for you but this

person who doesn’t expect anything from you. I understand why I said yes when he got

down on one knee, surrounded by candles like Chandler, or was it Monica? And I knelt

too, and it felt like this was ours, though it obviously wasn’t.

In another moment the candles’ heat becomes too much and I’m sweating, and we blow

them out one by one, and there are tears in my eyes but I wave off the smoke as an

excuse while he looks at me with love because he thinks those tears are me, overcome

with my love for him, but it’s not that at all.

For that moment though, in my memory, my lying, longing memory, there’s only that

room, our bodies, the heat, nowhere to go. I hear my housemates in the kitchen, see the

stack of readings on my desk, imagine the bottle of vodka hidden in the drawer below. I

look at the ring on my finger, the thin silver band, the diamond chips catching the last

flame, the sparkling amethyst, something I would have chosen myself but didn’t, and he

says, “Let’s celebrate,” but we don’t drink beer and we don’t eat burgers. We go to a

diner and I order cereal because I can and I never have before, and I take the last soggy

bite, thinking, “This isn’t like Seinfeld at all.”

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