And a dress code, in italics at the bottom: Ladies in navy or black. Gentlemen black tie.
I had our daughter Poppy on the twelfth of April. She was five months old that September.
I mention that because it matters, and because I’m tired of it mattering.
I was standing in a fitting room at a store on Bellamy Street on Saturday the thirtieth of August with three navy dresses over my arm when my phone rang.
Vivienne said, “Ivette, darling. Don’t buy anything. I’ve ordered you a dress.”
I said, “Oh — you didn’t have to do that.”
She said, “It’s coming from Verrick’s. It’ll be with you in a few days. It’s stunning. Don’t worry about a thing.”
I hung up and stood in that fitting room with three dresses on a hook and a feeling I couldn’t name.
I want to explain what that feeling was, and to do that I have to tell you about the six years before it.
Vivienne has never liked me. That is not a thing I worked out slowly; she made it available immediately.
I’m a paramedic. I did not go to the right school and I do not have the right parents and my father drives a delivery route.
The first time I ate at her table, in 2018, she asked me — in front of nine people — whether I found it difficult to “be around that sort of thing all day.”
Over six years the greatest hits included: the way I load a dishwasher, the fact that I buy bread instead of making it, the way I hold a wine glass, and a recurring bit about how her son “was always going to have his pick.”
That last one was the one she liked. She used it at Christmas in 2021. She used it at Rollo’s fortieth—sorry, at his thirty-third. She used it, twice, at our wedding.
And after Poppy, it turned into a different thing.
Because after Poppy, she had a subject.
“Are you getting back to the gym, Ivette?”
“When was the last time you had a proper look at yourself in a mirror?”
And once, in her kitchen in July, with Poppy asleep on my shoulder: “My son needs to be with an attractive woman. I’m not saying it to be unkind. I’m saying it because nobody else will.”
I want to be honest that I did not fire back. Not once. Not one single time in six years.
I stood there and made a face and changed the subject, every time, because Rollo had asked me to. He had asked me, kindly, repeatedly, over years, to just let it go, because if I said something back there would be a scene, and if there was a scene there would be a phone call, and if there was a phone call there would be six weeks of it.
