two D-Day
Debbie did call, as it happened.
She called us on the morning of her wedding day. Called Max, to be specific. We were in the kitchen at the time. Max was flipping an omelet on the stove, and when his phone rang he pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen and told me, “Debbie,”
as he punched the screen. “Hello?” he said.
I set a bowl of kibble on the floor for the cat and went to stand next to him.
“Well, yes, I was; why do you ask?”
he was saying into the phone. And then, “No, I didn’t, because the only one I have is winter weight.”
He glanced over at me and mouthed, “Suit.”
“What?” I said.
“She wants to know if I’m planning to wear last night’s sports coat to the wedding. Or did I happen to bring a suit with me, she wonders.”
“Uh-oh,” I said.
Debbie said something else.
Max said, “That’s very nice of you, hon. But you’ve got a big day ahead! How about I just ask your mom to give my sports coat a good ironing. I think that should do it.”
I couldn’t hear what she answered. I asked Max, “What’s she saying?”
“She wants to come take us suit shopping,”
he told me.
“Oh!”
I said. “Tell her we’ll go.”
“We will?” he asked.
“It’ll be just the three of us!”
I said, barely above a whisper. “Take her up on it. Say we’ll do it.”
“Your mom says we should say yes,”
he said into the phone. “Right. No, that’s not necessary; I can—okay, see you then.”
He put his phone back in his pocket. “She’s coming by at a quarter of ten,”
he said. “We’re going to hit Lerner Brothers the instant they open and buy something right off the rack and have her back home in time for the cosmetic person.”
“What did you say was not necessary?”
I asked him.
“That she should pay for it.”
“No, certainly not,”
I said. “But don’t you see? This is perfect! Even if it takes just an hour or two, we’ll have one last chance to reason with her.”
“Gail,”
he said. “No.”
“I won’t be pushy. I promise! I’ll be very subtle. I won’t tell her not to marry him; I’ll just suggest she spend more time on her decision.”
“What is with you, Gail? Why are you interfering in this?”
“For the same reason I’d interfere if I saw my two-year-old preparing to jump off a cliff,”
I told him.
“This is not a two-year-old, Gail. She’s a fully grown woman, and she’s choosing to marry somebody who made one single mistake.”
“See? See there? You don’t believe him either! You just admitted he did it!”
“I misspoke,”
he said. “You confused me.”
“That’s the part that gets me,”
I said. “That he wouldn’t tell her the truth.”
“No, it ‘got’ you, as you put it, before he’d told her a thing.”
I hate the way Max pursues an argument into the ground. It used to wear me out, back when we were married. “Can we just drop this?” I said.
“You’re the one who brought it up.”
“Fine, I’ll change the subject. How’d you sleep?”
I asked him.
“I had this really embarrassing dream.”
Oh, yes, another of Max’s flaws was that he was fond of recounting his dreams, and they were always interminable. Now he said, as he served up my share of the omelet, “I dreamed I sent my principal a sympathy note but then I realized no one had died.”
“Who did you think had died?” I asked.
“His wife. I had dropped my note in the corner mailbox, and so in order to get it back I made this sort of fishing-rod arrangement with a length of string and a wad of chewed gum…”
I sighed and took a bite of my omelet. It wasn’t bad, actually.
“Then when that didn’t work I thought, I know what! If he has one of those letter boxes on the outside of his house, I mean just hanging by his front door, I could wait behind a bush for his mailman to show up, and then…”
What with my worries about Debbie, I’d neglected to pursue the issue of my employment situation.
Now I pondered my choices.
Max had a point about those students who had a thing against math: I had always loved changing their minds.
I waited for him to take a breath (he had reached one of those non sequitur moments that often occur in dreams, where he found himself all at once on a cruise ship), and then I said, “Do you suppose it takes a lot of red tape these days to get a teaching job?”
“Excuse me?” he said.
“I’d like to go back to teaching, but would that even be possible now? I’m not sure I have the proper certification anymore.”
He studied me. “What you need,”
he said finally, “is a thunder jacket.”
“A what?”
“One of those really snug jackets they put on dogs who are scared of thunder. I mean, good grief! Do you keep an itemized list of things to worry about? How do you remember them all?”
“But wouldn’t this jacket have four sleeves?”
I asked. “What’ll I do with the extra two?”
“Add that to your worry list,”
he suggested.
I laughed and stood up to fetch the coffeepot.
“You want to come teach where I teach?” he asked.
I said, “You know I can’t leave Baltimore. I’ve still got my mother here.”
And besides, there was Debbie. But I didn’t say that part.
“The head of my school is really nice,”
Max said. “He and his wife invite me over for all the major holidays.”
“Maybe they’re going to stop doing that, now that you’ve sent him your condolences,” I said.
“No, it was my principal I sent condolences to. The principal and the head of my school are two different people.”
I plugged the coffeepot back in and sat down. I said, “We need to decide what we’re going to say to Debbie.”
“We’re not going to say anything to Debbie.”
“I’m glad she’s giving us this chance to talk to her,”
I said, “but I hate that it’s because she suddenly cares what you’re wearing. This is all on account of the Baileys, I tell you. Debbie never used to mind in the least what we wore! Now I’m wondering if it’s the Baileys’ doing that she offered to take me dress shopping. And the spa day, come to think of it. She’s never been to a spa in her life!”
“She’s never had a wedding in her life,”
Max pointed out.
“Do you suppose she’s going over to their side?”
“What side is that?” he asked.
“Just…you know. Different from us.”
He paused in the middle of raising his coffee cup. “That’s the first time in a long, long while that you’ve said there was an ‘us,’?”
he told me.
“Hmm? No, I just meant—I remember how I felt when I was young myself. I felt kind of ashamed of my parents. They didn’t play golf or tennis or go to charity balls.”
“My parents were very fond of them,” Max said.
“I know that,”
I said. Then I said, “I’m the one your parents had trouble with. I wasn’t huggy and touchy-feely enough.”
“Now, now. They liked you very much,” he said.
Notice he didn’t say “loved.”
Another thing that might have put them off was how he introduced me. He brought me to their house unannounced on our way to dinner one evening, and, “Mom!”
he shouted. “Dad! Here’s Gail! You finally get to meet Gail!”
Lord knows how he’d advertised me beforehand. And I, of course, was so anxious about making a good impression that I closed up like some kind of turtle. I couldn’t help it. I knew I was doing it, but I couldn’t behave any differently.
If my parents approved of the marriage because Max thought I hung the moon, Max’s parents probably did not approve for the very same reason. Their son had brought home this aloof, stiff girl who he claimed could do no wrong. He claimed he was the luckiest man in the world to have such a girl even notice him. I could see their side of it now. If not then.
And I can just about guarantee that if they had lived long enough to witness our divorce, they would have told Max, “No surprise to us!”
* * *
Debbie arrived exactly on time, at a quarter till ten. I was watching for her at the front window so she wouldn’t have to park. “You sit up front,”
Max told me as we crossed the porch. I didn’t argue. I wanted a closeup view of her; I needed to gauge her mood.
Her mood seemed fine, as far as I could tell. “Morning, you two!”
she said as we climbed into her car. She was wearing jeans and a chambray shirt and not a bit of makeup, although her hair still hung to her shoulders. Generally, she put it in a ponytail on weekends. I guessed she didn’t want to cause any crimp marks.
“Happy wedding day, hon,”
Max said from the backseat. “It’s nice of you to start it off by taking your parents shopping.”
“I’m just trying to fill the time,”
she told him. She checked her side mirror and then pulled out into the street. “Nothing’s going to happen till two p.m., when Darleen comes to make us all up again.”
“What’s your lunch plan?”
I asked. In Debbie’s position, I couldn’t have managed even a bite of lunch.
But she said, “Kenneth’s mom is bringing sushi.”
“Ah,”
I said. Then I said, “Will she be eating it with you?”
“Hmm? I don’t know,”
she said, flicking her turn signal on. “I mean, maybe she will; I didn’t ask.”
She would, I could guarantee. Otherwise, why not just order by phone and have it delivered? She would bring the sushi to Debbie’s door and make a halfhearted move to back out again but the girls would say, politely, “Oh, don’t feel you need to go!”
and she would say, “Well, just half a minute, maybe…”
“We might get some actual sunshine,”
Max announced. He spoke too quickly, too loudly; I bet he thought I was about to say something disparaging about Sophie. But I wouldn’t have done that! I just smiled fiercely out my side window.
Debbie said, “I hope you’re right.”
I should have offered to bring lunch myself. I didn’t know mothers could do that.
“Will you be staying out of the groom’s sight today?”
Max asked. “Or has that tradition changed?”
“I won’t be laying eyes on him,”
Debbie said. “He doesn’t even know what I’m going to be wearing. I just told him it would be street length, so he wouldn’t think he needed a tux.”
We passed my school, and I looked away because even though it was a Saturday, I worried someone might spot me. (“What can Gail Baines be up to, I wonder, lurking around the Ashton School? Everyone knows she lacks people skills.”)
We passed the little soda shop where our students hung out after class, and the lake trout joint, and Mayella’s Produce with its sidewalk display of fruits that always had a withered look. Debbie was telling us how Kenneth’s grandmother had given them her entire chest of antique silverware. “A really beautiful pattern,”
she said, “with some pieces I don’t even know the purpose of. Knives with these odd notches to them and forks with only two prongs.”
“Good grief,”
I said. “How will you keep it all polished?”
“That’s no problem. If you use silver every day it will stay polished on its own.”
“You’re going to use the oyster forks every day?”
“Is that what they are? Oh. Well…”
From the backseat, Max said, “Am I right in assuming that I can get an extra day’s wear out of the shirt I wore last night?”
Debbie glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “You didn’t bring another?”
she asked.
“Not one with a collar.”
She rolled her eyes at me.
“We’ll find one at Lerner Brothers,”
I told her.
“This is getting expensive,” Max said.
“I told you I’d like to pay for it,” she said.
“No, no…”
I don’t know why he’d mentioned the expense. Lerner Brothers was about as cut-rate you could get.
And sure enough, when we walked through their front door, passing a rack of boxer shorts in three-packs and a counter piled high with track shoes, what should we find but a sign advertising All Suits 40% Off.
“See there? It was meant to be,”
Max told us, just as if this trip had been entirely his idea.
He and Debbie headed toward where the suits hung, while I made a side trip to a display of shirts.
I knew his size, but I worried these might be skimpy, so I rummaged through them looking for a cut that could handle his barrel shape.
And had he packed a tie? Just to be safe, I selected one from a counter of unwrapped ties all tangled together like castoffs.
Navy blue with tiny white stars, I chose.
That would go with just about anything.
By the time I reached the suit rack, Max had already disappeared into one of the changing booths and Debbie was sitting nearby in the shoe department, scrolling through her phone.
“What do you think?”
I asked, dropping into the chair beside her. I held up the tie, and she nodded. “As long as he doesn’t decide on the brown,”
she told me. “He took a brown suit and a black and a navy into the booth with him.”
“Brown!”
I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, he didn’t seem to feel strongly about any of them, so why don’t we push the navy,” she said.
“As long as it halfway fits,”
I told her. “It’s not as if Lerner Brothers has its own tailor on the premises.”
“Right.”
She went back to her phone.
The sound system was playing “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”
An elderly couple was chuckling together over by the T-shirts, the wife holding up one that was printed with some kind of caption.
“Debbie,”
I said. I cleared my throat.
“Hmm?”
she said, not looking up.
“Deb, do you realize how permanent this is?”
Now she did look up. “Actually, it’s not,”
she said. “As you should know better than anyone.”
“But nobody wants a divorce,”
I told her. “No one goes into a marriage saying, ‘Oh, well, I can always walk out tomorrow if I happen to change my mind.’?”
“In fact, I imagine quite a few people do,”
she said. And she went back to her phone.
So I decided to let it go. It would kill me if my only daughter stopped speaking to me on her wedding day.
At that point, though, she abruptly dropped her phone into her purse and turned to face me. “Okay, Mom,”
she said. “You want to know what I think?”
I braced myself.
“I think that just because of your own experience, you’re bound and determined that the man in the situation should have to face the music.”
“My experience! What are you talking about?”
“I can put two and two together! I’ve never asked the particulars, and I’m not asking now. I honestly don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you this much: I have had a lifelong education in what not to do. I refuse to be one of those wives who hold a grudge forever. Who won’t forgive their husbands for one little stupid mistake.”
I said, “But—”
“How do I look?”
Max asked.
He looked like a funeral director. Well, except for his crew-necked top. But the suit he wore over it was made of a hard, shiny material so intensely black that it turned his skin ashen. It made him seem dead, almost.
Right at that moment, though, I didn’t feel able to tell him that. I couldn’t make myself do it. His expression was so hopeful; he wore this hopeful, trusting smile. Clearly, he thought he looked wonderful.
It was Debbie who said, finally, “Try the navy.”
His smile faded. “Really?”
he asked. He looked over at me. “What do you think?”
he asked me.
“Yes, maybe the…navy,”
I said faintly.
“Excuse me?”
“Try the navy.”
“Oh,” he said.
He looked down at one sleeve regretfully, and then he turned to go back to the changing booth.
“And put this shirt on underneath!”
I called. I stood up, waving the shirt I’d chosen. “Put this tie on!”
“I’ve already got a tie,”
he said over his shoulder. “And I won’t have to put any of it on, because the navy is the exact same style as the black.”
I hadn’t really paid close attention to the black, beyond the issue of its color. But I let it go. I returned the tie to its counter and sat down again next to Debbie. “Luckily,”
I told her, “no one actually looks at the father of the bride.”
“Right,”
she said. She was studying her phone again. She said, “Guess what: Bitsy has hives.”
“Hives!”
“She thinks it’s something she ate last night.”
“What a pity,”
I said. “Deb—”
“Maybe the pineapple in the chicken dish, she thinks.”
I forced myself to consider the subject at hand. I said, “Can she still be in the wedding?”
“She can still be in the wedding, but her face will scare small children, she says.”
“Well, no one looks at the bridesmaids, either,”
I told her.
This made her laugh. She said, “Now, there you might be stretching things, Mom.”
“I’m right, though,”
I said. “Aren’t I right?”
I asked Max, because he was walking toward us now, wearing his everyday clothes again and clutching the navy suit in a bunch under one arm. “Nobody looks at anyone but the bride, when they go to weddings.”
“Absolutely,”
he said, and he dropped the suit on top of the shirt in my lap. “Which is why my khaki sports coat would have been fine; believe me.”
Debbie returned her phone to her purse and stood up. “Bitsy’s got hives,”
she told him as we walked toward the checkout counter. “She thinks it was last night’s pineapple.”
“Right, in the chicken dish,” Max said.
I said, “You had the chicken dish too?”
“I did.”
“I thought you were vegetarian!”
“I am, but I’ve never really felt that chickens were sentient beings.”
I sent Debbie a resigned look, but I don’t think she caught it.
Once we had paid for our purchases—once Max had paid—and we were out on the street again, Debbie said, “There! That’s done. Time to get home before my bridesmaids arrive.”
“Thanks again, hon,”
Max told her. “I appreciate your helping out like this.”
Which I had to admit was gracious of him, since it was only for her sake that he had agreed to the trip.
The rain was still holding off, although the air felt damp and heavy. I hoped it wasn’t going to turn hot; Debbie’s wedding dress had a high neckline. But maybe she wouldn’t notice the heat. Maybe she would be one of those brides so buoyant with happiness, so positively airborne, that the weather wouldn’t cross her mind.
To me, though, she didn’t seem that way. She seemed like our regular low-key Debbie, steering capably through the Saturday-morning traffic. Although I was sitting in back this time, since I had somehow ended up with the bulky Lerner Brothers bag, and I couldn’t see her expression.
All three of us rolled our windows down, and Debbie turned her radio on. They were delivering the sports news. The Orioles were doing well, it seemed, and Debbie was of the opinion that they just might keep it up. Max said he agreed. “I really think they might make it to the World Series this year,”
he told her.
I happened to know that Max couldn’t care less about the World Series. He was only trying to connect with his beloved daughter. And something about this, coupled with my memory of his trusting smile as he’d stood posing in that ghastly black suit, hurt my heart. I can’t put it any other way. It hurt my heart.
We pulled up in front of my house, and he leaned over to give Debbie a peck on the cheek before he got out. But I had that bag to maneuver, so I was just shutting the car door behind me while he was already climbing the steps to the porch. I paused next to Debbie’s window and said, “Deb—”
And she said, “Mom—”
She was afraid I was going to raise the subject of Kenneth again, I could tell. She wanted to forestall me. But I overrode whatever she was about to say. I said, “Deb, I can’t let you go on thinking…I know what you’re thinking. But that’s not fair to your dad. It wasn’t your dad. It was me.”
She said, “What?”
“It was me who made the stupid mistake,” I said.
She opened her mouth and drew in a breath to speak, but then she just sat looking at me, both hands gripping the steering wheel.
I couldn’t bear it anymore. I walked away.