2
This time when we entered the house we found everything as we’d left it, which I took to mean the cat was feeling more comfortable. Not that I wanted her to get too comfortable, of course. She strolled down the stairs to greet us with a mild “meow”
and then continued into the kitchen, where I heard the rattle of kibble a moment later.
“You want me to model my new suit?”
Max asked.
“I’ll just wait till the wedding,”
I told him.
Because his suit was the last thing on my mind right now, in fact. I was thinking about what I’d said to Debbie. I was experiencing this out-of-breath sensation, as if I’d just done something dangerous, and I had to collect myself before I spoke again. “It’s not as if we could do anything about it at this late date,”
I told him.
“Actually,”
Max said, “we could do a little something.”
I gave him a wary look.
He said, “You could maybe shorten the sleeves a tad.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Just a tiny amount, I promise. Just an inch or two.”
“An inch or two!”
I said. “Honestly, Max.”
But I handed him the Lerner Brothers bag, and he dumped it onto the couch and took out the coat and shrugged himself into it. He was right: the sleeves extended all the way to his knuckles. “Why didn’t you just try on another size?”
I asked him.
“I didn’t want to use up any more of Debbie’s time,” he said.
“Instead you’re going to use up my time.”
“Yes, but you have more of it,”
he pointed out.
Well, I couldn’t argue with that. I had all the time in the world, sad to say. I went to fetch my sewing box.
While I was pinning the sleeves up—Max standing in front of me with both arms stiffly straight, like an obedient child—he said, “I was thinking that after this, I could invite you out to lunch.”
“That’s okay,”
I said. “Thanks anyhow.”
“I could take you to the Cultured Crab; how about it?”
“We’ve got plenty of food here,”
I told him.
“Like what?”
“Like these frozen chicken pot pies that are really delicious, since I know now that you eat chicken. All they need is microwaving.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have a crab dish?”
“I’m actually not all that hungry,”
I said. I stripped the suit coat off of him, careful of the pins, and started digging through the sewing box for navy thread.
“Well, of course you’re not,”
he said after a moment. “I don’t know what I was thinking. This is kind of a fraught day for you.”
“Yes, it is, kind of,” I said.
Because I wasn’t about to admit that I just didn’t want to leave the house for fear I’d miss a phone call from Debbie.
Maybe she would call as soon as she got home. She would call my landline, knowing that my cell phone stayed in my purse, as a rule, and she would say…what? What was I hoping she would say?
I should have gone on standing next to her car window after I had confessed. I should have waited to hear her reaction. It was only that I’d been so terrified of what that reaction might be.
But in any case, she wasn’t going to call. By now, she would have been home for some time. She could easily have called if she had wanted to.
Still, I chose the chair closest to the phone when I sat down to thread my needle.
“We’ll just stay here and have comfort food,”
Max was saying. “Cozy little chicken pot pies! I can do the microwaving.”
“Thank you, Max,”
I said. I really meant it. I looked up from my sewing and said, “Thank you very much.”
So he went off to the kitchen.
I snipped the thread on the first sleeve and went on to the other.
Max, now: that much I could console myself with. At least I had cleared his name with her, even though he would never realize it.
I envisioned him as he had looked in his dead-black suit, so hopeful and so unaware, the kind of man who would never, ever in his life knowingly harm another person, and my mood lifted, gradually. My breathing grew even again. I sewed dots of tiny navy-blue stitches, and with each stitch I felt calmer.
Even when he asked after lunch if I happened to know what to do in case a little pot pie goo had somehow stuck itself to the floor of the microwave, I just shrugged and told him not to worry about it.
* * *
While Max was taking his afternoon nap, I ironed his sleeves flat.
Then I touched up my own dress, just to keep myself busy, and I tracked down a manila envelope for the photo display.
For a moment I considered making a run to the reception site to arrange the photos ahead of time, but that seemed sort of silly since there were only six of them.
Instead, I sat down on the living room couch and petted the cat for a while. She allowed it, more or less. She stirred and said, “Mmph,”
but went on sleeping.
I wondered if Sophie were still at Debbie’s house, chitchatting with the girls and eating sushi.
No, by now she must be home again, maybe dressing for the wedding.
I was curious about what she’d wear.
Part of me hoped she was one of those mothers-in-law who tried to upstage the bride—wore something fancier than the bride’s dress, maybe even something off-white.
But I knew that was ridiculous.
Sophie had more common sense than that.
I was just feeling jealous because I worried Debbie might start preferring her to me.
When Debbie was a little girl, way before Max and I divorced, she’d had a habit of falling in love with other people’s families.
She would come home from her friends’ houses wishing that we too lived out in the country and staged giant family reunions and holiday celebrations.
Why, oh, why was she an only child? she wanted to know.
I explained that we couldn’t afford more children—not if she wanted the very best college education. “See there?”
she said. “You’re always trying to do things perfect, when I’d rather do things just so-so but have lots of brothers and sisters.”
“Perfectly,”
I corrected her.
I didn’t let on that I’d been fielding such complaints for most of my life. Couldn’t I ever settle for just okay? I’d been asked more than once.
* * *
At three thirty I climbed the stairs with our two outfits draped over my arm. I stopped outside the guest room to knock, thinking Max might need to be wakened, but he opened the door immediately and said, “Hi.”
“We should be leaving in half an hour,”
I said as I handed over his suit. “Remember we have to pick up my mother.”
“I remember.”
I went on to my own room and laid my dress across the bed. It still felt a little bit warm from the iron. Maybe I would just skip the pantyhose, I decided. My skirt reached to mid-calf, after all.
In my bathroom mirror, I looked old.
People don’t warn you ahead of time that some days your face will be netted with wrinkles and other days almost smooth.
Today I was wrinkly.
My eyes were quirked into triangles and so many lines crossed my forehead that it resembled a sheet of ruled paper. But at least my hair hung vertically. No trace anymore of the beauty parlor experiment.
I dressed without checking the mirror again and went back downstairs.
Max arrived a moment later, wearing his new suit and shirt and a really ugly tie, royal blue slashed with yellow lightning bolts.
He was still in his everyday shoes, though—black canvas with crepe soles.
Well, nothing to be done about that now. At least he wasn’t looking old.
Although who could tell, under that stubble? Men had all the advantages.
The rain was still holding off, for the moment, and people were going ahead with their usual Saturday plans. Family cars drove past with beach chairs piled on their roof racks, and station wagons were double-parked to pick up swarms of children lugging sports equipment. I started worrying we’d be late.
Then when we reached Mom’s apartment building we saw no sign of her, although usually she’d be waiting out front. “Of all times,”
I said, and I took out my phone and punched her number.
“Hello?”
she asked finally, in a tone so tentative that you’d never guess she had caller ID.
“Where are you, Mom?”
I asked. “We’re down here waiting.”
“Well, I could have been there by now if my phone hadn’t started ringing.”
I rolled my eyes at Max. “We’re sitting in front of your building,”
I said, “parked in a no-parking zone.”
I hung up and put my phone away. “I mean, the woman’s up before dawn seven days a week,” I told Max. “Why does she choose today of all days to dawdle?”
“Aw, now,”
he said. “Cut her a little slack, Gaily-girl.”
“Could you please not call me Gaily-girl?”
“My apologies, madam.”
I folded my arms across my chest and glared out the windshield, and Max shut off his engine. When I heard my mother fumbling at the rear door I didn’t even turn my head.
“So sorry!”
Mom caroled as she got in.
“We’re in no hurry,”
Max assured her.
“Speak for yourself,”
I told him. He restarted the car and pulled out into traffic, while I twisted around in my seat to inspect my mother’s outfit. She was the only woman I knew who still wore a hat on special occasions. This one was narrow-brimmed and tilted, with a ruche of white chiffon poking up at one side like a handful of Kleenex.
“I suppose I could have caught a ride with a friend,”
she was saying, “except they’ve all turned into such bad drivers lately. I would hate to end up dead on my only granddaughter’s wedding day.”
“Oh, we just wouldn’t have told her till after the ceremony,”
I said in a soothing voice.
Max gave a bark of laughter, but my mother said primly, “That would probably have been wisest,”
and turned to look back at a young girl waiting on the curb in what had to be last night’s outfit—a transparent blue gauze sheath with a front slit rising all the way to her crotch. “Goodness,”
Mom murmured. “What kind of underwear would you need?”
Max said, “We did get a glimpse of Debbie this morning, incidentally. Looking very put together and self-possessed.”
“Of course,”
my mother said. “She takes after me.”
I wondered why it was that I had so many irritating people in my life.
Today the church parking lot was busier.
I saw Max’s niece Rose walking across the tarmac with her husband, and a trio of brightly dressed young women whom I didn’t know, and Debbie’s old piano teacher.
Max chose a space next to Dave’s convertible to pull into.
“Will this be a very big wedding?”
my mother asked as she got out of the car.
“It’s not supposed to be,”
I said, “but I do think Kenneth’s parents have squeezed in a few extra guests.”
In fact, they’d had a lot more to say about the arrangements than the groom’s parents usually did, because they were footing most of the bills.
Certainly Max and I couldn’t have swung it.
We’d been aiming for something lower-key; even Debbie and Kenneth had.
But one thing led to another, as they say.
The reception, for instance, would be taking place at a club that the Baileys belonged to, so they were the ones paying for that.
I didn’t even want to know how much it was costing them.
Our instructions were that we should wait with the bridal party in a small side room off the foyer until it was time for us to be seated, but first we had to connect my mother with an usher.
It turned out to be the usher whose name I didn’t know.
He gave her a courtly bow before he offered her his arm, and she sailed away with her ruche bobbing jauntily on her hat brim.
In the side room we found the three bridesmaids gathered around Debbie, fussing with her dress in a way that struck me as needless.
She already looked like a model on a magazine cover.
In fact, I felt almost shy in her presence, and it wasn’t only because of our most recent conversation.
The dress was a deep emerald that brought out the gold in her hair, and her shoes were emerald too—ballerina flats because she hated heels.
She had told her attendants they could wear whatever they liked as long as it was some shade of green, and Bitsy had chosen kelly green while Caroline was in a paler green flecked with white daisies, and Elizabeth wore an olive scoopneck.
(The olive didn’t really go with the other greens, in my opinion, but never mind.)
Max was the first to speak. “Oh, honey-bunny,”
was what he said, and his voice had a little break in it that made me instantly resolve to behave sensibly. I just said, “You look very nice, Deb,”
which didn’t begin to convey how I really felt she looked.
“Thanks,”
she said. “Would you believe the flowers haven’t come? We ordered them from Cindy Ross; you remember Cindy; she dropped out of college junior year to start her own florist shop and here I made such a big deal of ordering our flowers from her and she was supposed to bring them to the house in person while we were getting ready but oh, no, oh, no—”
“Never mind,”
Max assured her. “No one will notice they’re missing. And look at you, Bitsy! Not a single hive! Or”—to himself—“would the singular be hife, I wonder.”
He was being tactful, because she did have kind of a bumpy complexion. But she said, “You should have seen me when I first woke up! My mom said, ‘Bitsy Taylor! You are surely not going to a wedding like that!’?”
I felt a tap on my shoulder. “It’s time,”
Dave told me.
I wanted to spend a few more moments with Debbie. I wanted to say…I don’t know what. But I took Dave’s arm and walked out of the room without another glance at her, and Max followed close behind.
The church was even fuller than I had expected.
Most of the guests were on the groom’s side, of course, but our own side was fairly well populated.
As we proceeded up the center aisle I noticed Aunt Tess and her daughter Cheryl, and Debbie’s tennis partner, and two of Debbie’s friends from our carpool days along with, I guessed, their husbands.
Up front in the lefthand aisle a lurking, shadowy figure startled me till I realized it was Spofford Talbot, Debbie’s old high school classmate—an awkward, fumbling boy (still a boy) who was trying to make it as a freelance photographer.
Sophie had wanted to bring in a team of professionals but Debbie had prevailed, and there he was, doing his best to shrink into the woodwork while tentatively snapping pictures.
And all the while the organ was playing something murmury and generic, nattering away with no one listening.
Dave led me to the front pew and waited for me to sit down beside my mother.
She gave me a brilliant fake smile and turned to face forward again.
Then Max settled next to me.
He sat with his back not quite touching the back of the pew, as if he were planning to jump up again at any moment.
The organ stopped, briefly, before it uttered a single crashing chord and swung into something purposeful. It wasn’t “Here Comes the Bride”
but something else; I couldn’t say what. Something with almost a trumpet sound to it.
Reverend Gregory was waiting up front, dressed now in a sharply cut gray suit, and Kenneth and Jared stood beside him.
To me Kenneth seemed his usual self, not noticeably tense or nervous.
He wore a white carnation in his buttonhole, which surprised me.
I had thought the bride’s florist supplied the groom’s flowers as well, but evidently not.
I don’t know why I was focusing on the flower issue.
I should have been watching for the bridal procession.
Instead, I faced stubbornly forward and let everyone arrive unexpectedly—first Bitsy with the nameless usher, then Caroline with Dave, then Elizabeth on her own, carrying…oh! Carrying a bouquet.
Something white and lacy.
And the others carried flowers too, I realized belatedly, and so did Debbie, as I saw when she finally appeared.
Her florist friend must have come through at the very last possible moment.
Debbie was the only one who walked normally, no little hitch in her step to acknowledge the music.
And her expression was so serene, I was finally convinced that she must know what she was doing.
She arrived at the front of the church; she handed her flowers to Elizabeth; she took her place next to Kenneth.
He was smiling at her broadly, his whole face alight.
The organ fell silent. Reverend Gregory looked out at the congregation. “Dearly beloved,” he began.
I kept my eyes very wide and tried to think non-teary thoughts. I made myself remember, for instance, how annoying Debbie had been when she was in her teens. She used to parrot these ridiculous phrases she must have picked up from her friends. “Youey tooey?”
she would say, meaning “You too?”
anytime she agreed with someone. It wasn’t even natural-sounding! It had so clearly been invented! Recalling that phrase did me a lot of good. I began trying to think of some others.
“Who is it who blesses this couple’s choice?”
Reverend Gregory asked out of the blue. Or to me it seemed out of the blue. Max and I stood up together. Somehow Max already had hold of my hand, and now he squeezed my fingers and both of us said, “We do,”
in perfect unison.
Then things moved on. I don’t recall Debbie and Kenneth saying their “I do”s, but of course they must have, and next thing I knew they were kissing. At that moment I remembered another of Debbie’s phrases—this one from early childhood. She had fallen off a seesaw at nursery school and cut her forehead, and when she looked at her stitches later in the bathroom mirror she had asked, “Will I have permage?”
“Will you have what?” I asked.
“Will it stay this way always?”
“Oh! You mean ‘permanent damage,’?” I said.
“Will I, do you think?”
But that phrase, of course, had not annoyed me in the least. That phrase had merely amused me. “You’re going to be good as new,”
I had told her.
And she was.
Kenneth took a step back and smiled down at her gravely, and then he tucked her hand in his arm and turned to lead her back up the aisle. The organist broke into Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”—following Reverend Gregory’s playlist, finally—which seemed exactly right, because what could have sounded more joyous? The two of them very nearly skipped to the beat as they walked out.
There was a considerable period of milling and mixing among the guests after that. Of course they had to greet the people they knew, and introduce those people to other people, and talk amongst themselves. Kenneth’s parents came over to tell us what a lovely bride Debbie made (Sophie in a perfectly appropriate mother-of-the-groom dress, needless to say), and I told them that Kenneth had looked very handsome. And we did say hello to Max’s niece, and compliment Reverend Gregory on his ceremony, and give a wave to Spofford Talbot, although he was too busy fumbling with his camera to manage a real conversation. Out in the foyer a small crowd was gathering now around the bridal couple, but it wasn’t my kind of scene, to be honest, or Max’s either, and so eventually we looked at each other and I said, “Well? Should we be heading to the reception?”
“If you’re sure it’s not too soon,”
Max said, sending an edgy look toward the others.
“Someone has to be first,”
I told him. “Besides, I promised Sophie I would put those photos up.”
We detoured to collect my mother from a group of her relatives, but she said she would hitch a ride with Aunt Tess. (Apparently she felt freer to die now that Debbie was married.) So Max and I left on our own, not talking. It was bliss not to talk. Although once we’d settled in the car and rolled our windows down, Max did say, “Well, then,”
on a long sigh. Then he sat for a moment with his hands at the base of the steering wheel before he started the engine.
The Clarion Club was way downtown, in that area I still thought of as new—that collection of luxury hotels and high-end restaurants and waterfront promenades where glamorous couples strolled by in their yachting clothes.
To get to the club itself, we had to park in an underground lot and take an eerily silent, room-size elevator to the very top floor of a very tall building.
There we found ourselves surrounded by massive plate-glass windows overlooking a harbor so distant and postcard perfect that a person had to ask, “This is…what city did you say this was?”
I had been there once before, at an auction dinner for the Ashton School, so I wasn’t as dumbstruck as Max was.
He stopped in his tracks the moment he stepped off the elevator, while I went directly to the front desk facing us.
The ma?tre d’ stationed there said, “Ma’am?”
I said, “I’m just looking for—”
but then I spotted the bulletin board next to him. “Oh, good,”
I said, and I drew the envelope of photos from my purse. Sophie had already put her own photos up, I saw. They were strung across the board with wide empty spaces between them: a baby boy laughing in a stroller, a toddler boy astride a plastic motorcycle, a grade-school boy in a Cub Scout uniform…
At the very bottom, all alone, centered very precisely, was an 8? x 11 of Debbie and Kenneth together, finally—all grown up and arm in arm and dressed for some formal occasion, Debbie in a full-length gown and Kenneth in a tux.
I shook my photos out of the envelope and started tacking them up as Sophie had instructed—Debbie’s baby photo in the space next to Kenneth’s baby photo, her toddler photo in the space next to Kenneth’s toddler photo, and so on.
But if this project had been left up to me, I would have arranged a solid block of Debbie photos and then a solid block of Kenneth photos—or Kenneth photos and then Debbie photos; what did I care?—above the photo of the two of them.
Because isn’t that how it works, for most couples? You don’t start out with someone next to you; you start out all alone.
You go through infancy and childhood and adolescence, as a rule, before you meet your other person.
When I was finished, I stepped back to survey the final effect. “What do you think?”
I asked Max. He was standing at my elbow with his head cocked. “I love the shoes,”
he told me. He meant the shoes that Debbie wore on the day she started first grade: saddle oxfords so new, so gigantic and so dazzlingly white, that she hadn’t been able to take her eyes off them. All the observer saw of her was the top of her bent head.
The two of us stood staring at that photo for quite a while. You’d think there was no more fascinating sight than the center part, just the tiniest bit crooked, that separated Debbie’s two heartbreaking pigtails.
Not counting the staff—the ma?tre d’, the barman at the drinks counter, and the DJ tinkering with his lineup of equipment—Max and I were the only ones there; so we had a little time to walk around casing the joint, as Max put it.
All the tables were rectangular, draped in heavy white linen and set with gold-rimmed china and crystal stemware.
The two at the front bore place cards, although elsewhere it appeared that people could settle wherever they chose.
I had no hope of sitting at one of those myself, unfortunately.
Max and I had been assigned to Table Two, along with Kenneth’s parents and the two surviving grandmothers and Reverend and Mrs.
Gregory.
Table One was the bridal couple with their attendants and—I was guessing, here—the attendants’ significant others.
I wondered if Elizabeth had a significant other, but I couldn’t tell from the place cards.
Once we’d made our circuit of the room, we returned to the area nearest the elevator where the guests were beginning to collect.
A man in a sky-blue leisure suit was introducing himself to a woman with long white hair, and an ancient-looking couple was talking with another ancient-looking couple, and Spofford Talbot was trying to do something to his camera.
“Get any good ones yet, Spofford?”
I asked, because at least he was someone whose name I knew. But this rattled him so that he said, “Um…”
and forgot to answer, so I took pity on him and backed off.
“Looks like I’ll be joining you at the old folks’ table,”
someone behind me said. I turned to find Jared. He was holding up two place cards as if they were winning lottery tickets.
I said, “Table One has an age limit?”
“No, but the groom is refusing to sit at the same table as his sister,”
Jared said. “Sibling rivalry makes no allowance for weddings, it turns out.”
This was interesting. I said, “So…he’s including you in that rivalry?”
“Not specifically,”
Jared said, “but since I’m the best man, I figure I ought to sit wherever the maid of honor sits.”
And he headed off toward Table Two with his place cards.