Hillary Gordon,  How To Pick Blueberries When You're Single

My husband Daniel had planned the perfect Sunday. He packed a cooler full of snacks and we headed to wine country promptly at 11am. He said he just wanted to drink Rose in the morning sun, and even in my melancholy state, I couldn’t argue with that. The coast was thick with fog when we got onto the mountain road that heads way up and East. He let me pick the music after failing to find something I found listenable.  One thing about my husband and I- we don’t like the same music. But we were able to agree on The Gin Blossoms as we left the fog behind us.  When we got to the winery, he set up a picnic of cheese and berries, hummus and chocolate that sat on a newly varnished cedar table near the manmade lake that glowed turquoise from the sun growing stronger on the winery property. Our spot overlooked sprawling golden fields dotted with oak trees growing in knots and twists, looking like wrinkled, arthritic hands, reaching up from the dry, but somehow fertile, land of the Santa Ynez Valley. The fog peaked over the mountaintops, but it felt really far away. Daniel poured each of us a glass and told me about the girl he met last night. Another thing about my husband and I - we’re not married. We’re both single.

We once pretended to be married because we thought we could get a better deal on a guitar that Daniel was buying off Craigslist if we if we had a story.  If we said we were broke from the wedding. It worked. And it’s worked for us many times since. And not just in a monetary way, but in many, many social situations. Because when you’re on the wrong side of 35, and you’re single, particularly a single woman, you start to make people a little uncomfortable. Lying somehow feels easier than admitting to spinsterhood. Really, I’ll do or say just about anything to not have to hear, “he’s out there,” or “when you stop looking you’ll find him,” or “I had an aunt with no kids, she was cool. She went to Italy!” Calling someone my husband also just feels good. It feels normal. We do it all the time joking, but I think both of us like the way it sounds. Daniel dates more than I do. He is strikingly good looking with light blue eyes and the way he carries himself makes him seem bigger than his 5’11”.  He is someone I would definitely swipe right on, and probably be pretty excited about for a few months if we were strangers. But, I know him well enough to know that I am not in love with him. We’ve spent holidays together, taken my grandmother out for Mother’s Day Brunch, traveled together and spent many late nights drinking beer and watching movies. He checks in via text if we haven’t spoken for a few days.  If we were going to be in love, we would be.

        I am trying hard to enjoy this Sunday with Daniel and not think about what happened yesterday. I put on a long, flowy sundress with daisies on it this morning. When the breeze picks up, my dress flows, and it makes me feel beautiful; which is not an everyday feeling for me. The flattering dress is helping me trudge through the morning a tiny bit. Behind my sunglasses my eyes are burning from lack of sleep, and my stomach is heavy, though I’ve not eaten since yesterday.  It takes an enormous amount of effort to listen to Daniel talk, to react appropriately, to smile at his jokes, to make my own. To drink the damn Rose. I finally tell him about the backyard birthday party one of my oldest family friends had for his girlfriend yesterday. How beautiful it looked with white twinkling lights in all the trees and tiny cupcakes on all the tables. How I saw pictures of many friends and family, eating burgers, posing arm in arm. How most of the girls had on flowy sundresses with flowers on them. How I was the only one who wasn’t emailed an invitation, even though the opportunities to be invited were many. I told him how seeing those pictures ached in a way I wasn’t expecting. Almost in a physical way.

  “Well, I’m sure it wasn’t personal, he said, sipping his wine. “You know, it was probably a couple’s thing.” I nodded and told him that I’d seen a few of our mutual, and single friends there.

  “Men or women?” Daniel asked. 

“Men,” I said, rolling my eyes and swirling the wine in my glass. 

“There you have it.” he said. “You’re a single woman so you’re a threat to the new girl. Don’t take it personally.” My face reddened as I tilted the glass and finished off the syrupy wine. 

“Even if Our friendship has been nothing but platonic for a million years?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “doesn’t matter. They’ll invite you again once you have a steady man in your life.” I sighed and told him I hadn’t felt this sad since my last broken heart. “It almost feels like a breakup,” I said. “This sort of rejection. At this age, you think you know who your friends are.”

  “Doesn’t compare,” Daniel said, recently going through his own breakup. “You just don’t remember because you’ve been single for so long.”

And I have been. Most of my life actually. In my adult life I’ve had two men tell me they were in love with me. I loved neither back, and not for lack of trying. Conversely, I have been absurdly, hopelessly and helplessly in love twice in my life. Though both men I loved have kissed me strong and deep, and both claimed to very much love me, one said, “just not like that,” and the other said, “just as best friends.” Both are married to other women now, and if social media holds any thread of truth, both are very happy in those marriages, which kind of sucks. I’ve had long-term almost-relationships, friends with benefits, and had one man, after two years of on-again, off-again flings, say to me, on Valentine’s Day nonetheless, “I’m attracted to you, the sex is great, I like your personality, but I just don’t love you. I wish I could.” And even though that hurt like hell, I understood. One thing that man did love, without question, was the drink. And he wasn’t the first man in my life to kiss me only after he kissed a bottle or three. So as circumstance (or as my psych major friends would say, something else altogether) would have it, I have been unlucky in love.  And it’s not getting any easier. The older and softer I’m getting around the edges, the fewer and fewer men approach me. While Daniel’s graying hair is a turn on for girls of all ages, my emerging crow’s feet seem to work as a warning sign: “biological clock ticking.”  It’s not false advertising.

Last weekend Daniel and I were eating hamburgers by the beach. There was a Chinese family sitting next to us with a baby girl who kept offering me french fries from their wooden table. I winked at her and waved at her and she cooed, and I felt an ache deep in my stomach. Daniel, who had spent a semester in China, tested out his Chinese on her. “Oh, no,” the mother, who is younger than us said, “we’re American, don’t speak any Chinese.” It was Saturday and there were people everywhere, the sun slowly sinking behind the water, getting ready to turn our day into a Saturday night. 

“What I’m scared of,” Daniel told me, chewing his lettuce- burger, not looking toward me or the attractive family next to us, “is getting desperate to the point where I meet a girl who likes 75% of me, but we’re both so scared and so far behind, we get married and have kids, and five years later she hates 100% of me.” I nodded and moved the french fries around on my plate. “Maybe that’s why we’re still single,” I said. “Maybe a lot of people settle for 75%?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe there is something fundamentally flawed in us.”

“Maybe,” I said and changed the subject. 

I thought back on this meal as I finished my third glass of wine. By now the wine had helped my mood a bit, helped to shallow the sadness that had felt so deep just hours before. I began to get sunburned and Daniel said he couldn’t drink another drop of wine and still drive. So, he told me, the next stop on this perfect Sunday, would be Gaviota State Beach. Weeks before, I made him watch my favorite movie. A film called Sideways about two best friends taking a trip to the Santa Barbara wine country for a bachelor party. I told him how much I related to Miles, the main character who was unlucky in career and love.  Even though Daniel had hated the movie, and told me I’m nothing at all like Miles, he agreed that the scene at Gaviota State beach under a steel railroad bridge was beautiful. I had told Daniel that even though I lived only thirty minutes away, and even though that was my favorite scene from my favorite movie, I’d never seen the bridge in person. He then told me he’d saved extra snacks from the winery, so we could finish them off and watch the sunset on the beach under the bridge. “How are you single?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders, “I’m working on it.”

  “Are you going to leave me when you start dating someone?” I asked. 

He put his arm around my shoulder, “I’ll never leave you,” he said. “Happy wife, happy life.”

I nodded my head. “Good answer. I hope your 2nd wife agrees and still allows you to invite me to barbecues.”

“Me too.”

“Hey!” I said, hoisting myself into his truck, “no Red Hot Chili Peppers when we’re sitting under the bridge,” 

“What!? Why? They’re like the best band of the 90s!” 

“Ugh,” I said, smiling a tiny bit, “I want a divorce.”

We’d been on the freeway for about twenty minutes when Daniel pulled off the 101.  “I have a surprise for you!” he said. I looked up to see little, wooden shack off the side of the 101 freeway as we pulled up and parked in front of it. Painted in cursive, a sign above the shack read “blueberry picking.” Daniel said, “Something that I think will bring you back to your East- Coast farming days,” with a perfect smile on his face.  

A few years earlier, much to Daniel’s annoyance, I had moved from California to New York for a dream job I couldn’t turn down, even if it was 3,000 miles away. I was going to be the program director for a well-known widely-syndicated radio show. The job held clout.  This was the job I’d dreamed of since high school and I had worked long hours and hard days for shit pay my whole life, just for an opportunity like this.  I was at a friend’s kid’s birthday party at the zoo when I told everyone I was leaving. It was that weird week between Christmas and New Year’s where everything feels slow.  No one is really working, and everyone is just awaiting the new year and for life to get back to normal. It was unusually cold for the California coast, even for December.  The children lined up, their cheeks rosy from the wind, and held a giant boa constrictor with the help of a Zookeeper. All the parents had their cameras out, oohing and ahhing at the serpent who could swallow their kids whole if it really wanted to. The air was thick with holiday stagnation and the smell of elephants.  “Makes sense,” my friend said to me. “I mean if you’re our age and still single, what else is there to do but leave?” I was 29.  At 32 I sat at her wedding. When it was time for the couple’s dance, every person in that room left their table and headed to the dance floor. Every. Person.  I looked around the room, my face reddening, my whole being shrinking as I sat alone in the giant hall. It felt like all the walls were laughing at me. 

“How is this even possible?  I asked my coworker sitting across from me with his wife. “How am I the ONLY single person in a room of 200 people? 

“201” he said with a laugh. Then he put his hand on my arm and said “we aren’t gonna do this. We’re not leaving you here alone.  We hate this dance anyway.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

Two weeks ago, I sat at that bride’s Malibu country club baby shower among fifty other women all around my age. Some cradling babies, others talking about their pregnancies and school districts and diapers. I sipped on a coconut La Croix and nodded my head, wishing I had anything to add to the conversation. I looked up to the sky, looked out to the ocean, hoping to see a dolphin or a boat, or anything to distract me. I decided on a seagull and watched it float up and down over the waves.  I looked down at the Olympic size pool and watched wealthy, white families sunbathing and splashing. My pregnant friend, who is younger than me by two days, really looked beautiful in a long, yellow dress with growing twin boys in her belly, her coffee-black hair thicker and longer than I’d ever seen it. And her handsome husband, oh, her handsome husband, was wiping his wispy ash- blonde hair with one hand, his other hand gently resting on her perfect baby bump. Like her growing belly was made for his big hand to rest on, biology in motion.  “I’m so excited for her,” her former coworker said, “for what she’s about to feel. I didn’t know what love was until I had my boy.”

“Exactly,” her cousin chimed in. “I don’t know what I was doing with my life before I got pregnant. Looking back, it was all so meaningless.” I finished off my La Croix and went back to looking for that seagull.

        When we got out of Daniel’s truck and went into the little, blueberry shack, the woman said “we close in thirty minutes. You guys are late. Might not be a lot of berries left.” Daniel bought two small tin buckets anyway, and we went out into the fields and hunted for berries. We decided to start at the back toward the oak-tree spotted mountain the blueberry crops ran into, “maybe there’s some good ones no one has picked yet,” he said, “or some that may have been overlooked.” We linked arms and searched for good berries. “She was right,” I said, “we’re a little late.” But, because we paid and because we were determined to eat blueberries under the steel bridge at Gaviota, we kept picking. Hoping for a ripe blueberry among the many green ones we filled our buckets with. When our thirty minutes were up, we combined the blueberries and drove to the beach.

        We sat under the big steel bridge as train after train zipped by above us, the calm grey ocean behind it. I tried to take pictures of the train and the sunset but couldn’t get it quite right on my iPhone. I gave up and sat down to eat the leftover hummus and chocolate and our picked blueberries. Daniel threw hand fulls in his mouth while I carefully picked out the ripe ones, which were quickly running out. 

“I don’t know how you can eat the green ones,” I said. “They’re sour and gross.” 

He shrugged, “better than no blueberries at all, I guess.” We separated out the green from the blue into piles and I began to throw the green ones to the eager seagulls. Daniel picked up two out of the blue pile and held them over his eyes, looked at me and said “take a picture of this!”

  “You’re not too far off,” I said.  “Your eyes are actually prettier than those.”

“Yours aren’t too bad either.”

“With my blue eyes,” I said, “And with yours, I feel like that’s what our kid’s eyes would look like, little blue-eyed monsters.”

“We would have beautiful babies,” he said.  And just for a minute I entertain the idea. 

“Maybe we should do it?” I said. “I mean we’ve faked the marriage thing, maybe we should just do it and have beautiful blueberry-eyed babies. I mean if we have a crying baby, it could drown out your shitty music. And, I mean, I could live with shitty music.” Daniel held the blueberries for a few moments longer. I could tell I had him, that he was thinking about it, too. I held my breath. He took the blueberries from his eyes, threw them up in the air and caught them in his mouth. 

“I don’t want you to ever 100% hate me” he said. I nodded my head, knowing his mind was made up.

  “Happy wife, happy life,” I said. 

He put his arm around me and we watched the trains speed by us.