Considering that it was far too late in the game to truly change parts of my body (my too-big nose; the seemingly substantial fat stores in chins and thighs and stomach folds, which, in reality, probably didn’t exist, since I’d been weight-training feverishly for the past six months to get ready for the wedding), I focused on what I could possibly alter in the one-hour Pilates class I had scheduled for Thursday morning: height. Upon realizing that my trainer, Cynthia, could, at the very least, help me appear taller by stretching out my “spinal ver-tee-bras” and “ab-dominoes” (she was from Mississippi), I felt a blush of hopefulness. When Donald got home Wednesday evening I cornered him in the kitchen and asked him—without telling him why I wanted to know—exactly how tall Adrienne was.

“Gee.” He blinked, then tilted his head. “I’m not sure.”

Nice try. “Come on. You lived with her for two years. You were going to marry her. You have to know how tall she is.”

He blinked again. “No really. I don’t think I do.”

“Guess.”

“I can’t.”

“Estimate.”

He shook his head, an impossible task. “Really, I can’t. I’m terrible at this kind of thing.”

I pressed on. Cynthia’s class was less than twelve hours away and I had to tell her how much to torture me. “You’ve lived with me for six months! You’re going to marry me! How tall am I?”

He smiled nervously, then eyed me up and down, as if he were looking at me for the first time. You’d think I’d asked him to guess my weight again (we’d played that game, stupidly, once—and only once. He’d guessed 142, and while I was, thank God, below that mark, hovering somewhere around 130, I never forgave him for being so wrong). I knew he was trying to figure out what I wanted him to say—did I want him to err on the high side (tall) or low side (short)?—and finally, after a few seconds of testing the waters (and prolonging the inevitable), he took a deep breath and stuck his toe in.

“I’d say you are—well, if I had to make a wild stab, which clearly you’re forcing me to do, and which you know I hate— I’d put you somewhere around”—another breath, another few seconds—“five foot three.”

My blood pressure ballooned. “And Adrienne?”

“And Adrienne was—” He looked up, down, all around the room. “She was probably somewhere around, oh, five six. Five seven, maybe.” He paused again, deep in thought, unwittingly about to make it much much worse. “Five eight at the very most.” Upon releasing these guesses into the ether, he braced himself, awaited my reaction.

Nothing.

He shifted nervously. “How’d I do?”

“Badly,” I said flatly.

“Shit. How badly?”

“Very badly. Extremely badly. Unforgivably badly.”

“Shit.”

“I mean, I guess in your mind I’m this short fat blob. Unlike Adrienne who has this tall willowy”—I used my hands here to pantomime with aggressive exaggeration a gigantic elastic band stretching and stretching—“ attenuated body. Why are you even bothering to marry me if I’m so short and fat and blob-like?”