Chapter 7

When she’d got back from washing her hands, Cat went to Memere to give her a hug. Kate hugged her back. When the physical imbalance of having her knees hugged and touching only Cat’s head bothered Kate, she led Cat to the sofa and sat down. When she patted the cushion beside her, Cat climbed up. This hug was much more comfortable. They were still sitting together when Kathleen and Charles came back. When Charles had sat down in a deep chair, Kathleen selected the chair furthest from others that would hold herself and Cat.

“Come here, Cat, and tell me some more jokes.” That earned her a smile of appreciation from Jeanette. Cat needed to be reasonably inactive for the hour after dinner, but she would resent any more restrictions from Maman. Cat looked to Memere. At her nod, she scurried over to Tante Kathleen. “Y’know, sweet, when I was your age, ton papa told me lots of jokes. I told them to my friends. Ta memere warned me to tell them to the students at my school, but not to the teachers or other adults. That’s a good rule, but you can tell them all to me. Do you know how to stick out your tongue and touch your nose?” Cat happily performed that feat.

“Think she’ll remember?” Jeanette asked Bob.

“Vi didn’t. On the other hand, that’s one limit that came from the people who normally spoil her. Kathleen’s doing us a favor, probably quite consciously. Did you hear her on books Cat would enjoy when she was old enough?”

“And your mother. Despite the way I had to do it, I’m sometimes glad to be a Brennan.”

“Well, you had to take the husband with the mother-in-law. There was no other way.”

“I’ll suffer through it,” Jeanette said.

“Not ‘til tonight.” They shared a smile. They were parents, not lovers, just then. They were, however, comfortable in both roles. They walked over to the couch. “Did Cat help?”

“Very much. I’m sorry, dears. I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s called grief. Don’t apologize, Mom. I’ve felt it, too.”

“If he doesn’t still break out in tears, Katherine, you laid out the reason. You’re no longer Russell Brennan’s wife. He is still his son.”

“I felt awful when I heard,” Bob said. “But, probably, not one tenth as awful as I would have felt if we hadn’t been reconciled.”

“And that was your doing, dear. I’m ever so grateful, and Russ was, too.”

“Well,” Jeanette said, “he was always incredibly kind to me -- even when I wasn’t kind to him.”

“You were standing by your man, dear. And Russ would never have blamed you for that. And, of course, the man you were standing by was the son he loved. Family relations are so complicated.”

“Brennans don’t know how poisonous they can be.”

“Maybe not poisonous, dear, but you’ll have to admit that our relationships are as complicated as any other.”

“I’ll buy that.” Charles had joined them. “I think I’m beginning to understand Kath, and then we come here, and she’s an entirely different person.”

“Well, dear, you have to expect that. You’ve known Kathleen for years, but they were years in which she had minimal contact with us. I don’t have to tell you how often residents can come home.”

“Those years, she -- indeed I -- had contact with Bob and Jeanette.” He stopped there. Kath’s mother might not know about their borrowing Bob and Jeanette’s apartment for sex. She certainly wouldn’t want to hear about it if she was totally aware.

“And, to a great extent,” Jeanette pointed out, “the sibling rivalry was muted. You might not have thought so from what you saw, but it was at much lower volume than it is here.”

“And here is where all the memories lie -- at least, a different set of memories. You might think that those apartments were partly mine. Kathleen thought of them as Jeanette’s. She wants to be nice to Jeanette. I’ll give you one clue for free. Our dad was adamant on one point: the essence of masculinity is loyalty towards your woman. Kathleen sat at his table for years while he pounded that home. He was talking, usually, to me, but she had to have absorbed it.”

“I did note,” Jeanette said, “when I first met you, how many ways you resembled Bob and his father. Kathleen may have been rebelling, but she didn’t get very far when she was looking for a man.”

“And, dear, she wasn’t rebelling against Russ. That was Bob. She was rebelling against me.”

“She seems very loyal herself.”

“Well, yes. It wasn’t like pink and blue,” Bob said. “It was more that loyalty was the highest virtue for men. But it was the highest virtue he mentioned for anybody.”

“We were just saying, dear, that Russ admired Jeanette for standing up to him when he quarreled with Bob. She was being loyal, see? And Russ would never criticize loyalty, even if it worked to his detriment.”

“And, you have one very great advantage. She’s the stubbornest person in a stubborn family. She’s decided you’re her man, and she has never been known to change her mind.”

“There are other opinions, Charles, of which Brennan is stubbornest,” Jeanette said. “But I’ll testify that it’s often an advantage when a stubborn person has decided that he’s married to you.”

“Your daughter isn’t that stubborn, ma femme.”

“No, mon mari, but her father is.”

“Well,” Kathleen asked Cat, “If you have a nine-hundred pound gorilla, where would he sleep?”

“Anywhere he wants to. I forgot that one.”

“Remember any more?”

“No.”

“Then go get Charles to read to you. I’m going up to take a shower.”

“Sharl, may I have some books, please?”

“Certainly. Let’s go over there.”

“And I think you’ve all been maligning me.”

“Not I,” Bob said. “It was Jeanette that said you weren’t the stubbornest person in the family. I’d never make that accusation.”

“I’ll grant that he fired the first shot this time, Kathleen, although you’ve fired several since the truce. But don’t you think that a long argument on which of you is the more stubborn would rather make the point that you’re each denying.”

“Good point! I’ll let the stubborner one have the last word. I’m off to the shower unless someone needs something from the bathroom first.” Kathleen headed for the stairs.

“And,” Bob pointed out, “the stubborner one had the last word.”

“Just now.”

“Dear, you married a quite intelligent woman.”

“If she was so smart, then why did she marry me?”

“I plead temporary insanity.”

“Or, dear, you have qualities which are not apparent to a mother.”

“Everybody picks on me,” Kathleen said.

“Dunno. Charles has been notably silent,” Bob said.

“Wisely so, dear.” Charles, glad to have wisdom attributed to him by the font of Brennan wisdom, stuck with Horton and Cat. When she selected the next book, though, he deferred to Bob.

“I think you have a special way of reading this book, Cat. Do you want to take it to Papa?” It turned out that Cat sat on Bob’s stomach and bounced while he lay stretched out on his back on the floor. It was an active way to read, but not really hopping on pop.

“I just hope that he doesn’t throw up.”

“If he does, dear, you can be sure we’ll blame him and not you.”

“Yes, that’s one advantage of visiting here.”

“I’m told that you sometime think that you have two children.” Charles had joined them.

“Can you blame me?” Jeanette gestured towards the two on the floor.

“And yet, you also say he’s a rock when you need him.”

“Quite. When I think back to our early married years, I shiver. I’d had one year of college; he’d had two. We were so young and naive, objectively. But, hard as it is to believe watching him now, Bob was mature where it counted back then -- earlier, too.

“It helps, of course,” Jeanette continued, “that we’d both decided that we wanted to be married to each other. That’s wrongly stated, but you get the idea. Anyway, Bob did for us what he did this morning for you. ‘What does Jeanette really want? What does Bob really want? How can they each get what they want most?’ And, of course, you can’t both have the particulars that you want. You have to ask for the reasons you want those particulars.”

“I’m done,” Kathleen called from the stairs. “Whenever you can free yourself from your pleasant confinement, Charles, the shower is free.”

“Come up with me,” he said to Jeanette. She looked a question at him. “I want you to talk to both of us.”

“Bob would be better.”

“Not for Kath.” Jeanette saw his point. She followed him up the stairs.

“You’re going to shower with her?” Kathleen didn’t even fake anger at the idea. It was just a Brennan joke.

“We’re going to talk with her. Us!” He led the way into Kath’s room.

“All right,” Jeanette began. “First of all, while Charles has a right to commit both of you in most situations, this isn’t going to work unless Kathleen is willing.”

“I went to you for advice years ago.”

“You’ve grown since.”

“So have you. You’re only what? four years older than I am. You’re nearly two decades longer married. I assume that’s what this is about. And, as Mom points out, you’ve managed to have a successful marriage with Bob.”

“Drop that prejudice, Kathleen. This is serious.” Although it pointed out what Charles had said. Bob couldn’t do this with this couple. Whether or not she could, that was a question. “Okay, let’s sit down. Do you have pencils and paper?” That was a rhetorical question; Kathleen was a Brennan.

“Pens.” When each had paper on a handy book in their lap and a ballpoint, Jeanette moved her chair where she was facing both and clearly could not see the papers.

“Okay, you’re each going to make a list. I’m not going to see the list. List the ten things you want from this marriage. If it’s something you don’t want me to see, I won’t. Whether or not it’s something you want me to see, I still won’t. If it’s something you don’t want your spouse to see, we’re in real trouble.”

She waited until both looked up. “All right. Go over that list. Why do you want that thing?” She watched. Some of the answers came easily, some with a struggle. “I’m not going to go any further. You should. If you tell your partner your deepest wishes and he tells you his, you can usually find a way to get both. If it’s something concrete that you see as the way to get your deepest wishes, then finding a compromise is much harder. If we’re going out to eat and I want comfort food when Bob wants to give his taste buds an adventure, I might suggest one of our old favorites. Bob might suggest the new Ethiopian place where we’ve never eaten. If we tell why, we’ll compromise on an oriental restaurant where I can get won ton soup while he can try something he’s never tried before.

“Now, let me go from the general to the particular. Charles, why do you object to Kathleen’s paying all the rent?”

“I don’t have to have my wife support me. I can support myself. When I was growing up, I pictured myself supporting my wife, for that matter.”

“Ouch! Y’know, I keep saying how much harder it was for us since we married earlier. You two were MDs out of residency before you moved in together. Pardon me if I don’t count the wedding as the start of your marriage. Let me tell you about us. We wanted to get married, but -- we found out -- we didn’t quite mean the same thing by those words. I really think Bob would have been happy camping out -- not a tent because there aren’t enough bookshelves in a tent. But I’d swear that the only thing that dissatisfied him about his dorm room was that I didn’t share his bed. After the wedding, we were sleeping together, and he saw that as the essence of marriage.

“Okay, I wanted us to be a family. I’m still not sure what I meant, it certainly didn’t include a child in my thoughts back then. But I came out of a dysfunctional family, and I was going to be part of a functional one. I didn’t envy your mother the lovely dining-room table with matching chairs at which we just ate. I sure-as-hell envied her the conversations around that table.”

“Jeanette, you’d have died of boredom. I nearly did.”

“You don’t know how poisonous talk can be. Anyway, when Bob saw what I wanted, he tried to give it to me. I, of course, cooperated with his idea of marriage. He would tell you, or would tell you if he were more worried about honesty than about shielding his wife from criticism, that my cooperation wasn’t total. And it wasn’t. And some of the things I wanted he thought silly. But we worked out our differences because our ideas of marriage weren’t opposites. They were different but not incompatible.

“Now, you two grew up apart. And you each developed an idea of your future. And those ideas may well be incompatible. You had the picture of supporting a wife.” Charles nodded. “And you had the idea of being independent.” Kathleen nodded.

“Well, you’ve both already compromised. When she walked down the aisle, Kathleen traded that independence for something she saw as more important.”

“Before then.”

“And, when you’re splitting the rent, you’re accepting that you’re not supporting your wife.”

“I always knew that Kath wasn’t that sort of wife.”

“So you granted her her independence. Each of you pay half.”

“Sort of.”

“But, you heard her say that she traded in her independence for something she saw as better. Y’know, I’m going to stop claiming neutrality in this. Because I think Kathleen’s picture of being a family is something near my picture. And I’m totally prejudiced in favor of my picture. I’d want a joint checking account. I don’t know where that conditional comes from. We’ve had a joint checking account since maybe a month after the wedding.”

“Well, dear,” Kathleen said, “I now see that how far your agreement to move to a house has compromised your picture of yourself. I won’t push you farther. Someday, though, we have to talk about what sort of marriage we have and what sort of marriage we want.

“And somehow,” she continued, “I can’t be affectionate without sounding like my mother. Anyway, we’ll both leave you now. You can have your shower in peace. I’ll be downstairs. And I love you.”

Bob and his mother sat on each side of Cat. One read a story book, and then the other did. Cat was content for a while. Then she felt that there was space in her stomach.

“Memere, may I have a pickle, please.”

“Not until your mother comes down, dear. And then only if she ways yes.” Cat started to get off the couch. “She’ll say ‘Ask ta memere,’ won’t she?”

“Yes.”

“And, if you go up those stairs now, I’ll say no.”

“You will?” Memere never said no.

“If you don’t wait for her to come downstairs. Of course, instead of ‘Ask ta memere,’ she might say no to a rude girl who interrupted her when she had gone off to talk with other people. You still wouldn’t get a pickle. You have to wait for others sometimes, dear. Now, do you want another story?”

“Yes, please.” But the tone didn’t sound like ‘please.’ The tone sounded like a girl who felt she had to wait for others all the time. Kate wasn’t working on tone right now, not with Bob sitting beside her. Bob, also content with the words, started the next book. Kathleen came downstairs a little ahead of Jeanette.

“Cat, your mother is a genius!”

“That means, ma jeune fille, that Maman is very smart. The proper response is ‘Of course she is. She managed to marry Papa, didn’t she?’”

“Maman, may I have a pickle please.”

“Ask ta memere. They are her pickles.”

“Memere, may I have a pickle now, please.”

“Certainly, Cat. Dear would you get it for her? I don’t want to move.” Jeanette took Cat into the kitchen.

Kathleen said, “‘Managed to marry you’? Hmph!”

“Well, dear, you’re rather trapped. Is Jeanette an intelligent woman who picked Bob? Or is she a woman whom Bob trapped into marriage despite her intelligence?”

“I think the sound is dripping from the trees, not rain. I’m going to look outside and see.”

“She may be rusty,” Bob said, “but she’s still a tactician.”

“I’m afraid I was spoiling Cat, but am I turning too stern?”

“Sounded just right to me. After all, I’m not about to teach you about parenting.”

“But, dear, you taught me an immense amount about parenting. Just as Cat is teaching you.”

“I have a list a mile long of things which don’t work.”

“Yes, dear, and remember that the first rule is consistency.”

“Which means that, when you use something and it doesn’t work, you’re obliged to use it again?”

“Precisely. And, when you have two children, whatever you used with the first that was a total disaster, he’ll remember and complain if you don’t use it with the second.”

“Was I that bad?”

“Dear, you don’t want my memories of your youngest days. Not while Cat might hear.”

“Jeanette claims Cat’s stubbornness is inherited.”

“That’s strange. What does Jeanette know about your stubbornness?”

“What don’t I know about it?” Jeanette had returned and was hoping Cat didn’t figure out the subject of the discussion.

“Dear, you’ve only experienced the fading remnants.” Kate was equally eager to keep Cat in the dark. “The full-blown examples were before your time.”

“Everybody maligns me. Ma jeune fille, aimes-tu ton papa?” Bob asked.

“Je vous aime, Papa. Je vous aime, Memere. Je vous aime, Maman. Je vous aime, Tante Kathleen.” The latter had just returned from outside.

“I love you, too, Catherine Angelique. It has stopped raining. Do you want to go out?”

“Get your flip-flops first. Bring them down here.” Cat scurried off.

“I’m sorry. I should have asked you first.”

“No problem. She would have heard you, anyway, and she does need exercise. It’s just that running upstairs for the flip-flops is exercise, too. We brought several pairs of shoes, so that pair getting wet won’t matter.” Cat came back at a run and handed her flip-flops to her mother. She and Kathleen went out.

“Really, dear,” Kate said, “you take more care of my carpets than I ever did.”

“Well, ‘Don’t track in dirt’ and ‘Don’t go barefoot when you’re visiting’ are good rules. A very wise woman told me that children need to learn rules as much as they need to learn reading.”

“Why thank you, dear.”

“Well, you can read rules,” Bob said. “Learning reading is more important.”

“Says the man who reads excellently and knows damn few rules.”

“Why do I need to control my swearing when you do it when she can’t hear you?”

“Because I remember whether she can hear me.”

“I said ‘wissenschaftliche Unmoeglichkeit’ in a faculty meeting the other week.”

“Because you didn’t remember where you were.”

“Vissin -- um?” Kate asked.

“Jeanette doesn’t want me to swear in front of Cat, Mom. I thought of German, because it’s the one language I have that Cat doesn’t. But many German oaths sound too much like English. ‘Sheiss’ is clear to anyone. On the other hand, a great many German words sound like you’re swearing. So I adopted a truly vile-sounding phrase. I say it at moments of great stress. Cat had been known to repeat it, and is scolded for that. But she fell down in front of the principal of her school. The woman, it happens, speaks German. The next student conference, she asked us about it. Between my accent and Cat’s memory, she hadn’t been clear about the words. Jeanette doesn’t believe it, but my French accent is better than my German accent.”

“I don’t say I don’t believe it. I just say that it is hard to believe.”

“Anyway, my accent may be awfully Yank, but it isn’t bad enough to keep several of my fellow teachers from understanding me.”

“It means scientific impossibility.” Jeanette explained.

“Which is good enough for an oath, at times. That wasn’t one of the times. You never warned me how many limits having a child puts on your life.”

“You never asked, dear, and -- after all -- Jeanette was the one who went through pregnancy. And she was the one who nursed her child, too. You went much longer than I did, dear, and I admire you for that.”

Jeanette said, “Three generations of Brennans like me for my breasts.”

“I was admiring your persistence and fortitude, dear. I’d guess my milk was as nourishing as yours.”

“And, of course, her pregnancy and breast feeding didn’t put any onus on me.”

“Not one that you’d mention in front of your mother, dear. Hello, dear.” That to Charles, who had just come down the stairs. “Kathleen and Cat decided to explore the outdoors.”

“Yes, the rain seems to have stopped. Jeanette...” She walked a little away from the others with him. They could be overheard, but the conversation -- if not private -- was clearly between the two of them.

“First, thank you. I don’t know how much help you were, yet, but I feel much better. Second, you know how Kath ended the conversation. You and Bob always say ‘I love you’ when you part. I wonder whether we should do that.”

“Well, you gain something, but you lose something. Mostly, it’s insurance. If something would happen, you don’t want your last words to the other person to have been an argument.”

“Argue? I’ve never heard you argue. That joking around...”

“Sniping? Sure. After all, you groan when you hear a pun. Bob reported to me once about some fellow faculty member that he laughed at puns. Bob couldn’t figure him out. Anyway, you hear sniping, but you don’t hear us really arguing. You’ve never seen me have a bowel movement, either, but guess what?

“Anyway, see this?” She held up her left hand so he could see the wedding band. “That’s an external sign that you have frequent arguments. Not always, of course. Katherine still wears one. But it’s fairly well a guarantee.”

“They’re one-sided now, dear. That’s all.”

“Anyway, the last thing we say as we’re going out the door is ‘I love you.’ So, if one of us is hit by a truck, that will be the last communication that the other ever hears. On the other hand, Kathleen was expressing a deep emotion and a decision then. You’ll have to hear from her what the decision was; I haven’t the faintest. When Bob leaves for work thinking about how he’ll start the first class on one level, worrying about where he parked the car on another level, and checking that he has his keys and the right briefcase on a third level, his ‘I love you’ while he’s facing the door is quite perfunctory.

“When he comes back on his late day, having traveled by two EL trains, he walks in and sees that the living room is a disaster area. Dinner is late. He sees that I look frazzled and that Cat is chattering in the kitchen distracting me. He says, ‘C’mon Cat; I’ll help you pick up your toys.’ Now that, when he could be complaining about my not doing my responsibility of dinner or having Cat pick up her toys before she leaves the room permanently, shows a deep love.”

“C’mon Cat. I’ll help you pick up your toys.”

“Context is all, mon sot mari.

“Y’know, Charles, that’s an example. Bob enjoys being silly, even enjoys being called silly. Did Bob trap me into marriage or did I trap him? Which of us claims which depends on the day. The truth, of course, is rather more complicated. We almost grew up together, and high school is full of that sort of banter-fights. If you’ll forgive my criticizing your wife, Kathleen sometimes still confuses that sort of thing with real arguments. You don’t slap your spouse on a real boil. Partly, of course, it’s that her fights with Bob used to be with both of them trying to draw blood. I’m mixing my metaphors terribly.”

“I think I know what you mean. She crossed your line once, and you froze her.”

“I don’t remember.”

“She does. Believe me, she does. Anyway, can’t Cat pick up her own toys? She seems quite responsible to me.”

“Sure. And I’m remembering back. Helping her means holding up the lid of the toy box while she runs around finding most of the toys. Then you ask her if those are all. Sometimes, she needs quite specific hints -- ‘Have you looked under the green chair?’ She picks them all up. She finds most of them by herself. Often, she picks up things and puts them in the toy box without supervision. If I can’t find my purse, I look there. But she is far from thorough. Without supervision, she never gets them all. I shouldn’t say never.”

“You two sound so tolerant.” Charles said.

“More tolerant when talking with you than when talking with her. Mostly, it’s a matter of deciding what you’ll tolerate now, and what you won’t. After all, as Katherine points out, you start with a person who screams when she wants something -- you have to figure out what she wants. She shits and pees when she feels like it. All this, you have to train her to change. Leaving her toys all over the floor and asking ‘why’ instead of going to bed are minor compared to that. It’s just that you want to be finished.”

“And you’ve just begun, dear. Wait until she starts dating.”

“Well,” Bob said, “she’ll be twenty-one then. We expect her to be much more cooperative.”

“Wrong on both counts, dear.”

“Somebody expects Bob’s daughter to be more cooperative,” said Jeanette. “Not I.”

“And twenty-one, dear?”

“It’s not worth fighting about now,” Jeanette said. “Not that I think that he’s serious. I remember what age I was when he first asked me out. If he actually raises an objection when she’s that age, I’ll remind him.”

“That will be your real problem, dear.”

“What?”

“Bob was almost your first date, wasn’t he?”

“Third. Second, really. The first dance I went stag. Do girls go stag?”

“Well, dear, what happens when Cat goes to her third dance with a boy? She’s a freshman. She comes home and says, ‘I’m in love; I’m going to marry him; whatever we do is okay.’ What then? You can’t tell her how many boys you were in love with before you met the one you married.”

“I’ll tell her that if it is love, it will grow. If he loves her, he’ll wait. You don’t ask hard questions do you? This was supposed to be a vacation. Then I’ll send her to her aunt Kathleen who’ll tell her about graduating from college before she met her true love. Can’t I worry about second grade this year?”

“Well,” Charles said, “your answer may not satisfy Cat. It reassured me. You think Kathleen will be talking about me as her true love in ten years time?”

“Seven years, dear, and a good fraction,” Kate said. “It’s clear that you two are in love. It’s equally clear that you haven’t settled on an arrangement which satisfies you both. The first, dear, is a necessity. The second you should work on, but it’s a poor basis without the first.”

“And, when you have it,” Bob said, “life takes it away. What are we on, Jeanette, our fourth marriage arrangement?”

“Something like. It depends on what you count. Was every apartment move a new arrangement? My pregnancy and then The Kitten’s birth were major adjustments. Your getting a teaching job was a sea-change.”

“But those were imposed from without. Did you find anything unsatisfactory in your first arrangement?”

“That’s a private question. But, yes. We’re just not going to say what.”

“One thing, not necessarily the main thing, was that we carefully divided housework at the beginning. Jeanette would do certain tasks; I would do certain tasks. As time went on, we became much more flexible. But, our marriage wouldn’t have worked without the first division. If we’d left it to what each saw that needed to be done, I’d have done the laundry, and Jeanette would have done everything else.”

“And, you and Kathleen are in a quite different situation than Bob and I were. At one point, our weekly splurge was one ice-cream cone shared between us. So our answers aren’t anything for you to copy. Maybe our questions are.”

“Dear, we didn’t know.”

“Mom, going tight for a temporary period is reasonable,” Bob said. “You were behind us if we ever really needed it. And, one time, we really did. We got it. Actually, one shared ice-cream cone a week tastes delicious. Probably as much taste as buying a half gallon. And much better for my waistline.”

“Well, I think I’ll join my wife and her niece outside.”

“Your niece, too.”

“Thanks.” When Charles went out, Cat rushed over to him. He swung her up as far as his arms could reach, then brought her down to a hug. “Can you tell Tante Kathleen a secret for me?” He got a vigorous nod. “Tell her that Charles loves her.” When he set her down, Cat raced over to Kath. They whispered together for a second. Then Cat raced back. He bent over to hear her.

“Tante Kathleen says she loves you, too.”

“That’s nice to hear, Cat. Let’s go over to talk with her.” He reached down two fingers, and Cat gripped them. They walked to where Kathleen was standing. “She brought me some good news.”

“You could have heard it from the horse’s mouth ten minutes ago.”

“And so I did. It’s always nice to hear. Maybe my message is one I don’t deliver often enough myself.

“I always like to hear it.”

“I love you, Kath. Are we going to work through Jeanette’s exercise?”

“Might as well, no sense having a genius for a sister-in-law if you refuse her advice.”

“Something which didn’t seem to fit on the list. I want to be married to you.”