3
Black turtleneck and a black skirt and black tights; that’s what I wore to my wedding.
How we met was, he moved into the house where I’d been living with three fellow teachers. At first I wasn’t all that welcoming. He was the only male in our group, for one thing—sprung on us by Polly Soames when she moved out to get married. Plus, he brought along a rambunctious dog that he hadn’t asked permission for, and he generated hillocks of clutter wherever he sat, and he played his radio too loudly and stayed up too long after the rest of us had gone to bed.
(He was working then at an after-school center for inner-city children, which meant he kept different hours from us.) Also, he was forever nibbling at things in the fridge that didn’t belong to him. One time he consumed the entire contents of a jar labeled CAUTION—SEWAGE SAMPLE because he figured it was just a ruse to protect somebody’s chicken soup. Actually, it was just a ruse, but wouldn’t you think he’d have been embarrassed that the owner felt a ruse was necessary? He ate the last piece of cake that Julie Sears’s mother had baked her for her birthday. He cadged Priscilla Oakley’s umbrella from the hall closet on a rainy day and then, to make matters worse, left it by accident in his dentist’s waiting room.
Boundaries; that was his problem. He lacked boundaries.
I myself was all about boundaries.
Still, I couldn’t help liking him. He was exceptionally kindhearted with both animals and children, and he had a sweet, trusting face—beardless, back then—and he was happy to share anything in his possession, anything at all. Besides which, he thought I’d hung the moon. It’s hard to resist someone who thinks you hung the moon. “Oh, Gail is reading that too!” he would say to an acquaintance. “Gail reads everything; you wouldn’t believe how much.” Or, “You majored in Spanish? You should hear Gail’s Spanish; she rolls her rs like a native.” He always laughed at my jokes and he loved to hear my stories about my students. It bowled him over that I never wore makeup.
When we first met, I was dating someone, but I wasn’t all that serious about him; and meanwhile Max and I were falling into one of those half-flirtatious friendships that could become more than a friendship if one of us made the slightest move in that direction. We were kind of teetering, you might say. Things were hanging in the balance.
I had been teaching in a private school on a sort of provisional basis, filling in for a teacher who’d taken a year off to have a baby and then, as it happened, another year after that. It was implied that once she returned I might be switched to something more permanent; but no; when she announced the next spring that she’d be coming back in September, I was let go after all. I was devastated. “I thought I’d been doing such a good job!” I told Max, and he said, “You were doing a good job. It’s not your fault there wasn’t an opening,” and other such things that friends tell each other. He wanted me to apply at his center, but I had set my heart on teaching; nothing but.
While I was frittering my summer away hoping for another opening, he and I went to a lot of movies together, a lot of cafés and free concerts, and we grew steadily more comfortable with each other. Leaving a café, for instance, he might casually sling an arm across my shoulders; and during a horror film I might grab his hand for reassurance. Then in the fall—I’d been hired by a school in Baltimore County by then, and really should have looked for a new place to live but somehow did not—we went on a picnic out in Hunt Valley. It was Max’s idea. He must have done some scouting beforehand, because he drove us directly to a giant field, a vast stretch of wheat or oats or barley or something, very beautiful and golden. Of course we brought his dog along—Barbara, her name was; she was mostly black Labrador—and she kept racing ahead and then wheeling and racing back to us in sheer exuberance. She would stop short in front of me and jump up to place her paws on my shoulders, sending out warm puffs of dog breath. “I ought to be jealous,” Max said, and then, speaking to Barbara, “At least you’ve got good taste,” and she gave a yip and dashed off again. Max was carrying a Pantry Pride grocery bag with our lunch in it, and I remember that he set the bag down on a patch of grass under an oak tree before he turned around and cupped my face in both of his hands. He looked at me soberly for a moment, and then he leaned forward to kiss me on the lips. It was both unexpected and entirely natural-feeling. I hesitated for one brief second and then I kissed him back.
But even after that it was not a done deal, not by any means. I had to be won again and again, re-won several times over. I would wake some mornings—wake in Max’s bed, by then—and ask myself what I thought I was doing. I would rehearse how I would explain to him that we had no future together.
Partly, this was because he often struck me as a case of arrested development. A man nearing thirty, still renting a room in a houseful of single women! Still experimenting with new professions, new avenues of enthusiasm! Why, merely getting through college had taken him six years, because he’d kept switching majors. Also, he was just as annoying a housemate as he’d ever been. No amount of nagging from the rest of us altered his behavior in the slightest.
And yet…
I think he knew all that. I mean, he knew I blew hot and cold about him. He had this way of vanishing whenever I found him impossible, and then drifting into view again when he sensed I was starting to miss him. Once, I remember, I got so mad at him that I went to my parents’ house for the weekend without telling him I was going. He’d read my private mail, was why. I had come home from work to find him chuckling over a letter I’d left on top of my bureau, and even though it was merely a chatty, catching-up kind of letter from my old college roommate I was furious, and told him so, and he couldn’t understand why. “It was lying there out of its envelope!” he said. “And it was only about this blind date she’d had! If that was such a secret, why did you leave it out for all and sundry to see?” I didn’t bother answering that; I just left. Took my car keys and left. Stayed with my parents all weekend, and then on Sunday afternoon, when I was beginning to wonder how I should behave after I returned, he came to fetch me. Apparently he’d phoned my mother and she had told him yes, I was there, even though she knew the reason I was there. Mom was crazy about Max. So was my dad. (Dad asked how he could not be crazy about a guy who treated me like a queen.) So Max showed up at the house unannounced, bringing along Barbara, and when Barbara saw me she got down on her stomach and wriggled toward me, all whiny and obsequious and wagging her tail, even though she was not the one who had wronged me; and my parents stood behind me saying, “Aww!” and “Look at her, Gail! How can you resist her?”—meaning, of course, how could I resist Max, who had not uttered so much as a “Sorry” and was just standing there smiling hopefully with his arms folded across his chest. I don’t know who I was madder at: him or my parents. I was even mad at Barbara, a little, because she had no business making me feel so grouchy, and so guilty about feeling grouchy, and so lovingly entrapped.
When we got married, the following January, we did it all in a rush. Was it Max who decided that, figuring he should grab his chance before I changed my mind? Or was it me, in fact, for the very same reason—scared of my own fickle nature? Well, maybe both, a little. In any case, we chose a Friday afternoon and we drove downtown by ourselves and parked in a public lot. Several inches of snow were supposed to fall before evening, so all the other parked cars were sticking their windshield wipers straight up like soldiers in surrender, and the city had a startled, suspenseful feeling as if it were holding its breath.
But I’ve never been the type to play back scenes from my past. At most a single unexpected moment might pop up—Debbie taking her first steps and then abruptly plopping her plastic-coated bottom down; my father whistling “The Tennessee Waltz” as he tinkered with a leaky faucet—and I would think, Oh, that. Or, Oh! That! if it really took me by surprise. And then I turned my eyes away from it and thought about something else.
* * *
We had several hours to fill before the rehearsal, so Max went off to take a nap. (He’d always made kind of a hobby of naps.) Meanwhile I tidied up in the kitchen, and leafed through that morning’s mail, and started a load of laundry. I considered running the vacuum cleaner, but that seemed rude when Max was sleeping. Also, it might alarm the cat. The cat! I went upstairs to find her. She was curled up again on my pillow; she raised her head and gave a questioning mew and stretched out her front legs luxuriously. So I risked gathering her up and carrying her downstairs. She didn’t object, just gave a huge yawn when I settled with her in the armchair. “So, Madam Cat,” I said, “what’s your story, hmm?” She fitted herself to the shape of my lap and went back to sleep.
I had meant it when I said I didn’t want a cat. I didn’t even want a houseplant; I had reached the stage of life when I was done with caretaking. But for the moment, I enjoyed scritching her behind her ears, and smoothing her velvety front paws, and admiring her sprouts of eyebrows. I fell into a sort of trance, in fact, so that when the front door suddenly opened I was nearly as startled as the cat was.
It was only Debbie, though. She looked like a movie star. She was wearing her usual weekend outfit—jeans and a tank top—but she was stunningly made up, with bright red lipstick and soft pink blush and blue-gray eye shadow that brought out the aqua blue of her eyes, and her hair hung to her shoulders in a straight blond sheet. “Glamour puss!” I said.
I had never expected that a daughter of mine would look like Debbie. When I found out I’d be having a girl I had pictured…oh, a small, pale, bony girl with a watchful stillness to her, and she might wear horn-rimmed glasses and in her teens she wouldn’t date much and her friends would address her as “Deborah.” But children veer out from their parents like so many explorers in the wilderness, I’ve learned. They’re not mere duplicates of them. I was fascinated by that. I was fascinated by everything about her. “You should have a pack of photographers hounding you,” I said now.
But she just said, “Huh.” She didn’t comment on the cat. She sat down in a heap on the couch and grabbed the nearest cushion and hugged it close to her chest like a child with a favorite stuffed animal.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Is it the weather?” I asked. Because she’d been fretting for the past several days about the long-term forecast, and I did hear rain on the roof now.
But she shook her head.
Then she said, “Where’s Dad?”
“Oh, he’s—”
“Here I am,” Max said. He was padding down the stairs in his stocking feet, alert as always to any sign of Debbie’s presence. “Whoa!” he said as he came closer. “Miss Universe!” He bent to set an arm gingerly around her neck and give her a kiss. “How was your Ladies’ Day or whatever?”
“It was good,” she said.
“Everyone have a nice time?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. Max gave her a sharp look and then sat down on the couch too, but at a little more of a distance than he might have ordinarily. The cat, meanwhile, disappeared—just melted away, as cats do.
There was a silence. Then Max said, “What.”
“What,” Debbie repeated.
“Is something wrong?”
“What could be wrong?” she asked him.
Then she buried her face in the cushion and her shoulders started shaking.
I said, “Debbie?”
Max said, “Hon?”
“Debbie, tell us,” I commanded.
She raised her head and dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. Her face was entirely wet with tears.
“Is it Kenneth?” I asked her. “Is it something to do with the wedding?” Then I said, “You’ve changed your mind.”
She made a lunge toward the box on the coffee table and snatched a Kleenex and blotted her eyes.
“You know you’re always free to back out,” I told her. “Even at the last minute! Even walking down the aisle!”
Max stirred uneasily and said, “Well, now…”
“Is that it?” I asked her. “You don’t want to marry him anymore?”
“I can’t marry him,” she said.
From the way she worded it, my first thought was that she meant she wasn’t allowed to marry him. She was married to someone else, perhaps, or she’d run into some bizarre legal snafu. “Who says?” I asked her.
She said, “I was sitting at the manicure station, okay? I was about to get my nails done. And Liz was sitting next to me.”
“Liz,” I said, at a loss.
“Elizabeth, his sister, Mom. Waiting to get her nails done. Pay attention.”
“Okay…”
“She says to me, ‘Debbie, I am so, so glad Kenneth straightened things out with you before the wedding. I warned him,’ she said, ‘I said, “Kenny, you cannot embark on a marriage with this left unspoken between you,” and he was like, “Oh, sure; oh, sure,” and kept putting it off, and so finally I said, “Look here, Kenneth. If you don’t tell her, I will,” I said. So he was, like—”
This was becoming a bit hard to follow. I said, “So, wait—”
“And I was just baffled,” Debbie said. “I said, ‘Tell me what, Liz?’ And she got very quiet, and then she said, ‘Uh-oh.’?”
“Tell you what?” I asked.
“Turns out he slept with Carla Schmidt while I was at my college reunion last month.”
“Who is Carla Schmidt?” Max asked.
I just gave him a look, and Debbie, needless to say, didn’t bother answering. “One and a half days I was gone,” she told me. “Not even a whole weekend!”
I said, “But—”
I couldn’t get my brain around it. I felt I’d been kicked in the chest. Debbie’s Kenneth? But he loved her! I said, “I just can’t see that happening.”
“Then Liz of course was all, ‘Oops, I didn’t mean to—’ and, ‘Oh, God, I thought he’d told you! He swore to me he’d told you!’?”
“But how would Elizabeth even know about it?” I asked. “Did he actually discuss it with her? Why would he choose to do that?”
“Right,” Max said. He was nodding.
“He didn’t choose,” Debbie said. “She confronted him, straight out, and he couldn’t deny it. The minute I heard her say the words, it was like something just clicked in my mind, you know?”
“Oh,” I said.
“But…so, let’s suppose it’s true,” Max told her. “Merely suppose, I’m saying. Let’s put this in perspective. I mean, these things happen, Deb. Pre-wedding jitters, last-minute-fling sort of thing…It’s not the end of the world.”
Debbie wheeled on him. She said, “I might have known you’d say that! Men just think these things are normal, just in the normal course of events.” And then she turned to me and said, “I’ll have to call off the wedding, of course.”
“Yes…of course,” I said. I cleared my throat. My voice didn’t seem to be working properly.
She said, “Could you please be the one to phone the minister? If I have to do it myself I’m worried I might start crying.”
“Certainly,” I said.
“Wait,” Max said.
“And then also the guests,” Debbie said. “Well, the guests on our side, at least. I don’t care who gets in touch with their side. Let’s not even bother with their side. They can just all show up and wonder what could have gone wrong.”
“Would you two listen a minute?” Max asked.
This time, both of us turned on him. “Max,” I said, “we are talking about someone she’s been planning to spend her life with. Someone she needs to trust completely, she needs to believe in wholeheartedly until the end of her days. And now we hear he can’t be relied on for even as long as a college reunion?”
“All I’m saying is—”
“Forget it, Mom,” Debbie told me. “Apparently we’re dealing with one of those gender-gap things.”
“Now, that’s just plain insulting,” Max said. “I refuse to stand in for your notion of a male chauvinist.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Deborah Jean Baines,” Max said. “Please hear me out for one minute.”
Debbie grew very attentive, but in an ostentatious way. She sat up extra straight and fixed him with a wide stare.
“I suggest you delay this decision until you’ve talked with Kenneth,” he told her. “Is he at work still? What time does he get off work? Please just go see him and find out what he has to say about this. There may be some explanation that puts everything in a whole different light.”
“What possible explanation do you imagine that could be?” Debbie asked him.
“That’s my point. We don’t know what it could be, do we?”
“Mom?” Debbie said, turning to me. “You see my side of this, don’t you?”
“I certainly do,” I said.
“All I’m asking,” Max told her, “is let the guy speak for himself. Is that so unreasonable?”
“I’m beginning to get the picture here,” she said.
“What picture?” he asked.
She looked from him to me, and then she said, “Never mind.”
“What picture are you talking about?”
She turned back to Max. “Fine,” she told him. “I’ll go talk to him. I’ll do it as a special favor to you, Dad, since you seem to think it’s so important.”
“Thanks, hon,” Max said cheerfully. Whatever her nuances were, he seemed content to let them pass right over his head.
And he did have a point. Of course she should listen to Kenneth’s side of things. Still, though, I felt almost regretful when she stood up and slammed out of the house. There was something weirdly satisfying in the image of all those guests just sitting in church wondering.
* * *
It was nearly four o’clock by then, and I very much doubted that Kenneth would be working his normal hours today. (He had something to do with the legal side of a real estate company—not what I supposed to be a punching-the-clock type of job.) I pictured that Debbie might go directly from my house to his apartment, in which case she’d be nearing Charles Street by now, and now she’d be turning south. Probably Max was thinking along the same lines, because instead of heading back upstairs to put his shoes on he started drifting aimlessly around the living room, first tweaking the curtain to peer outside, then bending over the coffee table to inspect the front page of the newspaper, and finally wandering out to the kitchen, where I heard him open the fridge door and close it again. When he came back to the living room, he said, “What do you think she meant when she said, ‘I’m beginning to get the picture’?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” I said. Then I said, “You don’t really believe Kenneth can explain his way out of this, do you?”
“I’m suspending judgment,” Max said.
I looked at the clock on the bookshelf. I said, “If she doesn’t report back soon, we’re going to have to go ahead and start dressing for the rehearsal.”
“We should probably dress anyhow,” Max said. “Because in either case, we’ll need to show up at the church. Either to attend or to cancel, one or the other.”
“Maybe she won’t ever report back,” I said. “Maybe she’ll be too devastated to let us know, even; maybe she’ll just go home to her place and crawl into bed.”
Max thought this over. Then he said, “How’s this: if we still haven’t heard from her by the time we’re dressed, we’ll phone her.”
“Okay,” I said. But I went on sitting in the armchair.
He said, “Coming?”
Very slowly, I stood up. I said, “You know what I’m scared of?”
“What?”
“I’m scared she’ll call and say yes, he admitted it, but she’s going to marry him anyhow.”
“In that case, we’ll say, ‘Fine, hon. That’s your own personal business.’?”
I didn’t bother arguing with that. I was too irritated. I hated when Max acted so forbearing and holier-than-thou.
At any rate, we went off to our separate rooms to get dressed. All Max had to do was change into a collared shirt and put on his shoes and his sports coat, so he was back downstairs before I was. I could hear him talking as I descended; he was speaking into his cell phone. “Sure thing!” he was saying. “See you in a jiff!” and then he hung up.
“She said she’ll meet us at the church,” he told me.
I fixed him with a look and waited.
“She said Kenneth explained everything. His sister had it all wrong.”
“In what way did she have it wrong?” I asked.
“It turns out this Carla got food poisoning,” he said. “Everybody was at some party, Kenneth and his sister and I don’t know who-all from their high school days, and Carla felt sick and so he drove her home and stayed to feed her ice chips until she felt better. When he never came back to the party his sister just jumped to conclusions, he said. Besides which, she was miffed because she’d been counting on him for a ride and now she had to fend for herself.”
I waited until he met my eyes, which took him longer than it should have. “And you believe that,” I said.
“Why, yes, if Debbie does.”
“You don’t have any doubts.”
“No, indeed,” he said.
Max never used the word ‘indeed.’
“Well, I personally do not believe it,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said, levelly.
“Just look at the way Debbie put it when she was talking to us before,” I said. “?‘Something clicked in my mind,’ she told us. You know that feeling, right?”
“Not really,” Max said.
“And no matter how miffed Elizabeth was, would she really go that far to get even? Just because Kenneth didn’t give her a ride home?”
“You never know,” he said.
“Plus, that makes too many explanations. You should always be suspicious when someone gives you too many explanations.”
“Unless he actually has that many.”
Well, now he was just being stubborn. I gave up; I went to the closet for my purse. “Also,” I said, “I thought you weren’t going to phone Deb until we both got back downstairs.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “She’s the one who phoned me.”
I considered that.
“But anyhow!” he said. “Are we taking your car, or mine?”
“Yours, if it’s all right with you.”
“It’s fine.”
“And we’re picking up my mother on the way,” I said. “But let’s not tell her about the Kenneth business, okay?”
“No, of course not,” Max said.
I’d been scared of the wrong thing, it turned out. Not that Debbie would marry Kenneth even after he’d betrayed her, but that she would take his word for it when he claimed he hadn’t.