The Ring I Returned Twice
Twice he asked, twice I ran, and once I finally understood why.
The jeweler recognized me the second time. There is no good way to feel about that.
"Back again," he said, and slid the little velvet box across the glass with the gentleness of a man returning a hamster to a child who keeps losing it. He did not ask questions. Jewelers, I think, learn early that the questions answer themselves.
Nikhil proposed to me the first time on a Tuesday, in the parking lot outside my dentist's office, because he said he could not hold it in until the dinner he had planned. He had a whole speech. I remember the smell of rain on hot asphalt, the way his hands shook so badly he almost dropped the box into a puddle, and I remember opening my mouth to say yes... and hearing myself say, "Can I think about it?"
You cannot think about it. That is the one thing everyone knows about proposals. There are two answers, and mine was neither, and we stood in that parking lot while a man in scrubs walked past us pretending very hard not to have seen anything.
He gave me the ring anyway.
"Keep it while you think," he said, which is either the most confident thing a man has ever done or the saddest, and I still cannot decide which.
I kept it for nine days. It sat on my dresser like a small gold accusation. I did not try it on once. On the ninth day I drove it back to the shop, and then I drove to Nikhil's apartment and told him I loved him, which was true, and that I could not marry him, which was not, though it took me two more years to find that out.
Here is the part that shames me: he stayed.
Not in a doormat way. He asked hard questions, he took three weeks where he did not call, he went to Goa with his brother and came back with a terrible sunburn and a decision. "I'm not going to audition anymore," he told me. "But I'm also not going anywhere unless you tell me to go." We rebuilt something quieter and better, and for a year we did not say the word marriage, the way you do not say the name of a ghost in the house you both live in.
The second proposal was not really a proposal. It was a Sunday night and he was stirring dal at my stove, wearing my apron, the one with the cartoon lemons, and he said, without turning around, "I found the ring shop's card in your glovebox. You kept the card."
A silence... Then: "Marry me. Not today. Whenever. But marry me."
And my whole body did the thing again. Cold hands, hot face, a sound in my ears like a train arriving. Everyone talks about cold feet before engagement like it is a joke, a punchline about tuxedos and open bars.
Nobody tells you it can feel like the smoke alarm going off in a house that is not on fire, and that you will evacuate anyway, every time, because your body refuses to check.
I said... "I can't."
He turned off the stove. He did not cry in front of me. He packed a bag and went to his brother's, and two days later I found the ring in my mailbox with a note that said, "It was always yours. Do what you want with it."
I returned it. Second time.
Same jeweler, same velvet box, same glass counter with the smudge of a hundred hopeful thumbprints.
"Back again," he said.
The phone on the wall
What broke it open, in the end, was not therapy, though therapy helped, and it was not a self-help book, though I bought four and read one. It was my mother, on an ordinary visit, telling a story I had heard pieces of my whole life and never once actually listened to.
She was talking about the year my father left, the year I was six. She mentioned, laughing a little, the yellow telephone that used to hang on our kitchen wall. "You used to drag your stool to it," she said. "Every evening. You'd stand on the stool with your hand on the phone so you'd be the first one to answer when he called."
"How long did I do that?" I asked.
She stopped laughing. "About a year," she said. "He never called on the phone. He wrote, later. But you stood there... for about a year."
I do not remember the stool. I do not remember the phone. But my body remembered something, because I had to leave the room, and I sat on the edge of the bathtub in my mother's house, a thirty-four year old woman, shaking like the six year old on the stool.
I was never afraid of marrying him. I was afraid of becoming someone who could be left, and I had confused the two my entire adult life.
Standing at that yellow phone, some small clerk in my chest had written a rule and filed it away where no one would ever audit it: people who are promised to you are the ones who can disappear. Keep nothing. Promise nothing. Stand near the exit.
Nikhil never had a chance. Neither had the two men before him, or the version of me that wanted, more than anything, the exact thing she kept handing back across a glass counter.
I did what I always do when something is too big to hold: I wrote it down. Badly at first, then honestly. There was a prompt I found on a poetry prompts page that just said, "Write about the object you waited beside." I wrote about the phone. Then I wrote about the stool. Then I wrote a poem about love that was really a poem about fear wearing love's coat, and when I read it back I cried in the specific, undignified way you cry when you have finally caught yourself in the act.
The third time
I went back to the shop on a Thursday morning in March. I had rehearsed a whole explanation. The jeweler was polishing something small and did not look up right away, and when he did, he smiled like a man watching the end of a movie he had seen before.
"I never sold it," he said. "Twice is a story. I wanted to know the ending."
He had kept it in the back, in a drawer, in the same velvet box. I paid for it a second time, which felt right, like buying back something I had pawned. He refused the extra money I tried to give him for storage. "Invite me to the wedding," he said, "if I'm wrong about all this, you can return that too."
I proposed to Nikhil in his brother's driveway, because I could not hold it in until dinner. I did not kneel; my legs would not have managed it. I held out the box and said the truest thing I have ever said out loud: "I'm still scared. I think I might be scared at the wedding, and scared on the honeymoon, and scared some ordinary Tuesday in year twelve. I'm not asking you to fix it. I'm asking you to be there while I stop evacuating."
He looked at the ring for a long time... Long enough that the smoke alarm in my chest began, softly, to sound. And then he said, "Third time's mine," and put it on his own finger, where it did not fit, and wore it like that, on the wrong hand, jammed at the knuckle, until we could get it sized for me the next morning.
We got married in November, small, no speeches. The jeweler came. He gave us a card that said, "No returns."
The ring sits in a dish by the sink when I do the dishes, and every night I pick it up and put it back on, and that small motion, off and on, off and on, is the whole story of me, except now it always ends the same way. I wrote our wedding poem myself, about beginning again, about a girl on a stool and a phone that never rang. Somewhere in the second verse, my husband started to cry.
He says the yellow phone should have a plaque. He says it did more for our marriage than the ring did.
He is wrong. It was the stool.
It was the girl who finally, after twenty-eight years, climbed down.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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