Chapter Twenty-Five
twenty-five
Lanie
“What’s the matter, Sec?” Tulip asked Lanie, looking up from her episode of the upcycling show Money for Nothing . She was in her recliner, with her knit throw over her waist and her word search in her hands. Lanie lay across her grandmother’s bed, purportedly hanging out with her, but she was mostly in her own world.
“Nothing,” she replied easily, but her grandmother frowned behind her bifocals. “Just nonsense,” she continued when that answer was unsatisfactory. “With some guy.”
It had been two days, and Ridley hadn’t gotten her key back to her yet. After overhearing Dash on the phone, Lanie wasn’t sure she wanted to speak with Ridley at all anyway. He’d spoiled what was supposed to be a morning of light—or at least productive—wedding planning with Gemma. The dresses were a pain to haul even with Ridley’s help, but Lanie was still excited to see her cousin’s enthusiasm—even though she decided none of the samples were quite right in the end.
A little fun , he’d called her. It burned in her gut every time she thought of it.
They were supposed to be meeting at the Bank tube stop on Sunday to go someplace called the Sky Garden for brunch before she flew out that evening. But right now, Lanie wasn’t certain she wanted that to happen.
“Is this the white man you’ve been seeing?” Her grandmother peered over her glasses to ask.
“Gran!” Despite her general funk, Lanie burst out laughing. “What white man?”
“Gem said you met some white Englishman named Ridley on the plane and you had been seeing him. You disappear for hours, sometimes for a whole day while you’re here. I thought to ask Gem and that’s what she told me.”
Lanie sobered. She hadn’t realized anyone had been paying attention to her comings and goings. Between Gemma’s classes, her full-tilt wedding prep, Les’s absence and Gran’s new tendency to hole up in her room, Lanie thought gossip would be the last thing on their minds. Although, knowing Gem, Les and Gran, they’d find time.
“Despite his name, he’s not white.” She chuckled again thinking about it.
Poor Ridley.
Her grandmother looked skeptical but nodded. Lanie was sure she caught a distinct sense of relief. Her grandmother’s father had been white and Lanie knew as far as her grandmother was concerned, being fetishized for their resultant light skin and eyes had caused her and her children no end of troubles.
“And he’s not English. He’s an American, he just lives here.”
“And what does he want with my good granddaughter?”
Lanie smiled. Unlike with her mother, Lanie could feel the affection laden in her grandmother’s words.
“Oh nothing, we’re just friends.”
Gran pinched her lips together and poked them out in the universal old Caribbean woman expression of “if you say so” skepticism.
“Honestly! It’s purely platonic.” On his side at least...regardless of what his friend was trying to do.
“What is going on with your face, then?”
“Huh?” Lanie feigned innocence. She really had to learn to school her features better. She could feel her cheeks begin to burn. “Nothing.” And work on being a better liar overall, apparently.
Gran nodded. “Well, it’s been a long time since I fancied a man, maybe I’ve forgotten what that looks like.”
Lanie giggled nervously at that description. “I do not ‘fancy’ him.”
Her grandmother couldn’t possibly know how much time they spent in contact with one another or how many hoops they now jumped through regularly just to make sure they saw each other, spoke to each other. So, if it already looked suspect, wow... Lanie marveled.
“MOH-MOH! Get up!” Gemma burst into the room, startling them.
“I refuse to answer to that stupid nickname.” Lanie folded her arms and rolled onto her back to look at the ceiling.
“Oh, but you are my little MOH-MOH.” She flopped onto the bed beside Lanie. “My darling maid of honor.”
“I thought I was the ‘best mate’?”
“That too.” Gemma plied Lanie with gentle tickles in her sides.
Lanie slapped at her cousin’s hands. “What am I, five? Stop it.”
They tussled briefly until their grandmother’s ancient bed frame creaked in protest, then they both sprang off it in alarm.
“A-good! It serve you right if it broke down under your backsides! You too big to still be doing that nonsense. I warn you from me,” Gran admonished, but then a huge smile broke across her face. “My silly girls.”
Lanie was grateful for moments like these with her grandmother. Gemma too. Like when they were children. The idea that they’d come really close to losing that made a chill run through her.
“We have to run, Nan,” Gemma said. Her voice was pitched high and excited. “I got us in at Kaashvi and Co! Well, Charity did. They had a cancellation and her friend’s sister’s roommate is one of the salesgirls there. So, she’s hooking us up! Get dressed.” She pointed at Lanie. “We have to be in Notting Hill by one fifteen.” And with that, Gemma rushed back out of the room.
Notting Hill? Lanie’s stomach rolled.
“Sec? You’re sure you’re alright?”
Lanie caught her grandmother’s look of concern.
“Of course.” She took a deep breath and smiled.
Gran still looked doubtful.
At least she could get her damn backpack back.
“What do you think of this?” Gemma walked out of the dressing room in an ivory tulle saree with embroidered sequins in a floral design. It had a sweetheart neckline that strained against her startlingly full breasts and a sheer sequined sleeve on one side with the loose, decorative fabric end of the saree, called the pallu , sweeping the floor on the other. It looked great and complemented her slim figure. “I don’t know if I want this much of my stomach exposed,” she complained.
Lanie wrinkled her nose, frowning. Though she might have understood since Gemma had recently gotten curvier in the middle, the truth was her cousin had once reigned as queen of the exposed midriff. At one point in their youth, Lanie wondered if Gemma was deliberately cutting all her tops in half.
Still, Lanie agreed, while the dress was undeniably beautiful, Gemma was right to have serious misgivings—though chances were they weren’t the same misgivings as Lanie’s. For Lanie, the primary concern was that she and Gemma’s other bridesmaids were expected to wear sarees at all.
“It’s spectacular,” the saleswoman, Charity’s friend’s sister’s roommate, Parminder, said.
Gemma rolled her eyes and Lanie grinned behind her hand. Parminder had said the same thing about the last three dresses. Yet it was also true. Each one had looked amazing on Gemma. She had the body for sarees.
“I liked the peach one better,” Marissa offered, coming out of a different dressing room wearing a cream-colored georgette saree embroidered with sequins and soft blue and pink flowers along the edges.
“Oh yes, that one was an Amitava Lahiri. He’s a really famous Bengali designer. Very in demand. Does all the Bollywood movies. Really superb stuff,” Parminder added, walking over to Shanice, who had emerged from yet another dressing room, and adjusting the pallu sliding off Shanice’s left shoulder.
Lanie leaned forward from her perch on the velvet-damask, Louis the Fourteenth–style chaise longue at the center of the styling suite and whispered, “Is this okay?”
She’d been watching all three women gleefully going through an assortment of different outfits for, according to the time on her cell phone, the past seventy minutes of a two-hour appointment.
Gemma, who spun in a three-way mirror trying to catch a clear view of her bottom, paused. “What?”
“Us wearing sarees. Is this in good taste?” Lanie knew from experience that Gemma could get ideas in her head and not really think of the consequences or implications. Whereas Lanie couldn’t even bring herself to try one on for fear of the inappropriateness.
“Do you mean wearing Indian sarees when Jonah is Sri Lankan?” Gemma asked in her regular speaking voice, not catching that Lanie was trying to be discreet. “Syreeta told me herself that Indian sarees were the way to go.”
“Oh, technically, a saree is the traditional everyday wear of an Indian woman,” Parminder said, coming back to Gemma to again adjust some fabric. “Those are sarees.” She pointed to the bridesmaids’ dresses, made up of a blouse and one piece of intricately draped, folded and tucked fabric. “This is a lehenga choli . Well, to be even more technical, the lehenga is the long skirt, the choli is the fitted embroidered blouse and the dupatta is this long piece of cloth worn with it for special occasions, like a wedding.” She smiled and draped the dupatta across Gemma’s neck.
Lanie smiled tightly at the correction that overlooked her actual point. “Thanks.”
Parminder looked the lehenga over. “So, what do you think?”
“I don’t know. They’re all so beautiful,” Gemma hemmed.
Beautiful and expensive as hell , Lanie thought.
It was nice that Jonah had given her his credit card and told her to get what she needed, but in Lanie’s opinion, Gemma was losing the plot. She had Jean-Georges taste on what should be a Nando’s budget. Every lehenga she’d tried on topped out at over five thousand pounds. And that didn’t even factor in the three-thousand-pound Reem Acra dress she was wearing for the Catholic wedding mass that Lanie had finally found on luxury consignment.
Lanie girded her loins. “Gem.”
Gemma looked up from admiring herself in the mirror again.
“Is it appropriate as Black women for us to be wearing sarees—I mean, lehengas ?” Lanie put it plainly.
Marissa, the lone white woman, just stood there awaiting the answer and Shanice began slipping the fabric off her shoulder, guiltily. They all looked at each other as if this was the first time any of them had thought of this.
Seriously?
“Black people can culturally appropriate too,” Lanie reminded them.
“Yes, look at what happened with Rihanna,” Marissa added.
“But she snapped in that—” Shanice started.
“But was it right?” Lanie interjected.
“O-kay,” Gemma huffed, putting her hands up in surrender. “What do you think, Parminder?”
The saleswoman put a finger to her chin like she was really considering it.
As if she’s going to pass up thousands of pounds in sales by saying no. Gemma knew that too, which was why she asked. Where’s Fatou’s level head when we need it? Lanie lamented.
“No, I think this is tastefully done. You are obviously planning on being respectful of the culture. And you said your fiancé is South Asian, right?”
“Yes.” Gemma nodded.
“Well then...” Parminder said as if resting her case.
“See? Mel, no problem.” Gemma turned back to the mirror. “So, um, sweetie, I don’t know about this one. Maybe the first one?”
Lanie sighed, pulling out her phone. But she paused before texting Ridley in frustration as she might normally. This would just be about getting her backpack. Nothing else. Let him find someone else for “a little fun.”
LANIE:
Hey, I’m around your way shopping with my cousin. Can I drop by?
There was a pause before those three dots, the bane of her existence, started to bob.
RIDLEY:
You’re in West London?
LANIE:
I am.
RIDLEY:
I’m not. I had to come into work today.
LANIE:
I want my bag Ridley. Cuz it feels like you’re holding it hostage.
RIDLEY:
What if I was?
This dude thinks his ass is funny.
“I’m going to think about this for a little while longer but we’ll take the saree Marissa is wearing,” Gemma declared.
Lanie looked up. “We will?”
“Yup.” Gemma smiled with Parminder. “Let’s get them all measured.” Gemma pointed at her bridesmaids. “And the other girls will stop by later.”
RIDLEY:
Can you come by after 7pm?
LANIE:
We’re wrapping up now. We have another thirty minutes tops
The dots again.
RIDLEY:
Damn, I really wanted to get it to you myself. But let me see what I can do.
“Lanie! C’mon.”
Lanie looked up again to see Parminder holding a pad and pencil while one of the other sales associates, who had appeared out of nowhere, looked ready to accost her with a measuring tape.
She pasted on a smile for Gemma and stood for her measurements, playing the role of perfect MOH to a T.