3
I looked around for Max, planning to fill him in on this latest development, but he was deep in conversation now with Spofford. Apparently he was having more success than I had had.
All this time, music had been playing in the background. Oldies, mostly: Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins and such. But the music came to a stop, all at once, and somehow people knew that they should turn to face the elevator. Debbie and Kenneth were just emerging from it, hand in hand. Then Anne Murray started singing “Could I Have This Dance?”
and Kenneth took Debbie in his arms and twirled her around. Both of them wore somber expressions—frowns, almost—because, as I happened to know, neither was much of a dancer. But they did their best, and gradually they loosened up and Debbie even leaned back a bit to smile into Kenneth’s eyes.
Could I have this dance, for the rest of my life? What a cataclysmic question, when you stopped to think about it. I wondered how it was that anyone on earth ever found the courage to marry.
But no one else seemed to wonder. The guests formed a circle around the couple, and when the dance was finished they clapped. Then after the briefest pause, the music swung into “Lean on Me,”
and Debbie turned and walked over to Max and held out her hand. Poor Max couldn’t dance to save his soul, but he swallowed hard and squared his shoulders and gamely set a palm on her hip.
Debbie was the one who had selected that song, I supposed. Of course she was. And it did seem appropriate. (She and Max had always had a special connection.
You had only to see how she gazed up at him now to know that.) After a few beats Kenneth stepped onto the floor with his mother, and I had a moment of panic when I wondered if I would have to dance with his father.
But no, when the song was finished Debbie turned from Max to call out, “Come on, you guys!”
and another song began—“Today,”
with the New Christy Minstrels—and Kenneth reclaimed Debbie while a dozen or so other young couples joined them.
(I thought Kenneth’s father looked as relieved as I felt.) When Max came back to stand next to me, I said, “Shall we get ourselves a drink?” and he said, “Yes!” like a man in a desert.
The bar was already surrounded by other dance-averse people, so I waited with Mom and my cousin Cheryl while Max threaded his way to the front of the line. Cheryl wanted to know how Debbie and Kenneth had met. “They went to law school together,”
I told her. “It wasn’t love at first sight, though, or anything like that. More like a growing friendship, at least on Debbie’s part.”
“On Kenneth’s part, though…,”
Cheryl suggested with a glint of a smile.
“On Kenneth’s part, I don’t know,” I said.
“Of course it was first sight for him!”
my mother said. “Our Debbie? Our gorgeous Debbie? How could he resist her? Just from watching his face while they were dancing, you could tell he was totally smitten.”
“That was concentration,”
I told her.
“Was what?”
“Concentration on getting the dance right.”
“Honestly, Gail,”
my mother said, and she gave a dismissive snort and told Cheryl, “Gail doesn’t have a romantic bone in her body, I swear. Her very own, darling own daughter, and yet she won’t admit a young man could fall madly in love with her!”
“What can I say,”
I told her.
Because one of life’s frustrations is that sometimes, it’s best to say nothing.
When dinner was finally announced, I saw from the place cards on our table that Jared had created a space for himself at my left and for Elizabeth at her father’s right.
The new settings had clearly been arranged by an amateur, with the silverware slightly crooked and the bread plates on the wrong side.
As I was assessing all this, Jared arrived next to me and pulled my chair out for me.
“I figured you might actually welcome the extra company,”
he said in an undertone once I was seated. “It’s awkward to be thrown together with an estranged spouse, don’t you find?”
“Well, but—” I began.
But Max and I were not estranged, exactly, I wanted to say. Not after all this time. I stopped myself, though. No point going into it. And anyway, by now Max had taken his place on my right and was introducing me to the minister’s wife, who sat at his other side. “How do you do,”
she said to me. “I am Marie-Louise.”
She had a very strong accent of some sort, and that announcing tone of voice that you often hear with certain foreigners. But she was extremely attractive—a stylish woman in her late forties, with dark hair that was cut way longer in front than in back.
“I guess you have to attend a lot of these things,”
Max told her.
“I do not,”
she said flatly. “But the Baileys are especial friends of ours, and supporters of our church.”
I decided against telling her that especial was almost not used anymore.
The waiters were whisking our empty plates away and substituting filled plates.
I had the salmon, and Max, it turned out, had ordered the prime rib.
(I didn’t say a word.) Jared and Elizabeth caused a small rush of confusion till their own choices were redirected to our table—prime rib for both of them.
I was curious about Elizabeth’s reaction to being banished from the bride and groom’s table, but evidently she had taken that in stride.
She was rolling her eyes now at her mother’s comment on the centerpiece. (“Skimpy” was Sophie’s verdict.)
Jared asked, close to my ear, “Are you still teaching, these days?”
I redirected my thoughts. I said, “Not exactly. I’m assistant headmistress at the Ashton School.”
“Ah,”
he said. Then he gave me a long, searching look. “And are you happy in the life you’ve chosen, Gail?”
“Am I…? Of course I’m happy,”
I said. Then I changed the subject. “I’ve been wondering why it is that you’re Kenneth’s best man. I’ve heard of the father being best man, but not, so far as I know, the uncle.”
“Oh, Kenneth has always looked up to me,”
Jared said. “In fact, I took him hiking in Europe the summer after his high school graduation and we got along like a house afire, really better than he and his father ever did, I have to say…”
And he was off and running, telling how he himself was a very experienced hiker, unlike Kenneth’s father, who was more of a couch potato; how even with the age difference Kenneth had trouble keeping up with him when they climbed Mount—
Till Sophie lowered the index card she’d been studying and gave him a look. “Pay attention, please, Jared,”
she said. “You’re going to offer a toast to Debbie.”
“I am?” he asked.
“?‘Best man toasts the bride,’?”
she said, reading from her card. “Immediately after the cake is served. You stand up and propose a toast.”
“Got it,” he said.
“I can offer you some pointers if you’re wondering what to—”
“I’ve got it, Sophie.”
“Then the maid of honor toasts the groom,”
she told Elizabeth. “That would be you, dear.”
Elizabeth was discussing some sort of transportation issue with her grandmother, but her response was instantaneous. “No,”
she said. She didn’t so much as turn her head. She told her grandmother, “I can give Aunt Bee a ride too, if she needs one.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
Sophie asked.
Now Elizabeth did turn. She said, “Why would I toast somebody who doesn’t even want me sitting at his table?”
“But he’s your brother!”
Sophie said. “I don’t care what silly spat you’re having!”
Max, of all people, was the one who saved the day. He asked Sophie, “Who comes next?”
“Pardon?”
“Who offers the next toast after the maid of honor?”
“Why, the host,”
Sophie said.
“The host?”
“?‘The host of the reception, which is to say the father of the bride and/or the financer of the reception,’?”
she read off from her card.
“So let’s jump ahead to the host,”
Max told her. “Meaning me.”
It could also mean Rupert, but Sophie was nice enough not to point that out. She sent Elizabeth a frown, and then she said, “Well, I suppose that’s how we’ll have to do it. So first you’d toast Debbie and Kenneth, Max, and then you would welcome the guests.”
“Consider it done,”
Max said, and he picked up his fork.
Sophie couldn’t resist one last glare at Elizabeth, but Elizabeth was absorbed now in her grandmother’s description of totaling her Oldsmobile. Or she seemed absorbed, at least. Although she had that ears-perked posture of someone listening to a whole other conversation elsewhere.
My salmon was like a shoe sole, no surprise. Everyone said the prime rib was excellent, though. By now the talk was general. The grandmother widened her discussion of her car wreck to include the entire table, and Rupert chimed in with a wreck he had had, a couple of years ago. True to form, he insisted on supplying every last eentsy detail. “This was right around Christmastime,”
he said. “Or no, I’m lying to you; it was more like New Year’s. I remember distinctly, because…”
For once, I didn’t feel the least bit impatient. I was just happy no one was counting on me to help fill the airwaves.
But then: “I have to say,”
Jared said, close to my ear. “It was a real surprise when you took up with Max Baines.”
I turned. I said, “Um—”
“Usually a person would announce such things to someone she was currently dating, but I just had to draw my own conclusions when I saw you out and about with him.”
“Well, he was a friend!” I said.
Jared drew back and gazed at me meaningfully, as if I had proved his point.
Anyhow. I turned back to the others. People were eating their salads now; we had finished the main course. Salad at the end of the meal: that always struck me as foreign. Maybe it was Marie-Louise’s influence, if she and the Baileys were so chummy.
In fact, a cross-cultural issue seemed to be the subject of the current conversation. Marie-Louise, who had just waved away the offering of a second dinner roll, asked seemingly out of the blue if Americans used the word ‘fool’ in polite society. Everyone looked puzzled, but Max said, “I do remember that we weren’t allowed to say fool in front of my great-aunt. She was a foot-washing Baptist, and she claimed there’s a passage in the Bible that expressly forbids it.”
“Ah,”
Marie-Louise said. “Thank you for straightening this out. We were always told as children that after a large meal we should never say we were fool.”
The others fell silent, briefly. Then my mother asked, “Because you were…fool of food?”
“Yes.”
A soft “Oh!”
traveled around the table.
“In my country,”
Marie-Louise said, “the word has a sexual connotation.”
Max said, “A…?”
“It has to do with the engorged male member, you understand.”
“Okay,”
Max said. “Well, just to back up for a moment, here—”
“Or maybe drop it altogether!”
Reverend Gregory said in a bright tone of voice.
“Yes, of course, we shall drop it,”
Marie-Louise said hastily, and we all got very busy with our salads.
After the salad came the wedding cake, finally. Seven towering layers topped with a heap of sugar roses, riding on a wheeled cart propelled by two very focused waiters. Everybody oohed and aahed, and Sophie said, sternly, “I trust you all saved room!”
Max told me, under his breath, “Trust you’re not too—”
I gave him a sideways kick beneath the table, and then both of us sat straighter and faced forward.
There was some confusion about the toasts.
First, the timing.
Sophie had said the toasts should take place immediately after the cake was served, but how immediately? Did that mean even before people had picked up their forks? But how would they know to wait? So maybe it meant while they were actually eating.
No, that seemed just plain wrong, to have the scraping of plates and the munching sounds drowning out the toasts.
Surely it made more sense to get the eating over with first.
It was Sophie herself debating this now, with some input from her mother-in-law and from Rupert, but it was Jared who pointed out the scraping-of-plates factor, and that settled it.
We went ahead and dug into our cake.
(At some of the tables, people had already started.) This was a lemon-flavored cake, with grated lemon rind in the frosting—better than your average wedding cake.
And the waiters came around with coffee and tea, and we were finishing our cake and beginning to relax and nod passively as Rupert launched into a description of his and Sophie’s own wedding cake, a portion of which they’d hand-fed to each other according to the custom, although they hadn’t done that crazy thing of smushing it into each other’s face…when Sophie said, severely, “Now your toast, please, Jared,”
and Jared said, “Yes, ma’am,”
and pushed his chair back and stood up and tinkled his knife against his champagne glass.
Table by table, the others stopped talking, and Jared turned to the head table, where Kenneth and Debbie sat watching him expectantly.
“I would like to offer a toast to Deborah, our beautiful bride,” he said.
“The only woman I know of who could make Kenneth pass up his poker night for a lecture on the legal rights of undocumented immigrants.”
Here and there people chuckled, and Debbie smiled and mouthed a silent “Thank you”
to Jared.
Then he went on to welcome her to the family, and to make a little crack about how she’d have to learn to put up with Rupert’s dad jokes, after which he raised his glass and took a sip from it and sat back down.
I felt Max beginning to collect himself next to me, but before he could stand up there was a sudden shriek of chair legs on the other side of the table and Elizabeth stood instead, already holding her glass high.
“And I propose a toast to the groom,”
she said.
“Here’s to you, Kenneth, my very dear brother—for the most part.” More chuckles, all from tables other than our own.
(Our own was more alert to the possibility of pitfalls.) “We’ve had some good times together,” Elizabeth told Kenneth, “including several when you totally saved my ass, and I wish you many more good times with your darling Debbie.” And she tipped her glass toward the couple and then took a sip.
Kenneth said, “Thank you, sis.”
Then he said. “I mean it. Thanks,”
and I don’t think I was imagining things when I say there was a certain misty look to his eyes.
Some of the people who were in the know—Elizabeth’s father, her grandmother, Jared—made soft sounds of approval as Elizabeth sat back down, and Sophie said, “That was very sweet, dear,”
and gave her an approving smile.
After that, things came to a stop, for a moment. Then Sophie said, “Max?”
and Max said, “Huh?”
“Your toast?”
“Oh,” he said.
This time, he made it to a standing position. “Debbie’s mother and I would like to welcome you,”
he told the room. “We’re grateful you’re here to celebrate with us, and especially grateful to the Baileys for supplying the venue.”
(I was glad he’d thought to mention that.) “Most important, though: I hope you’ll all join us in wishing Kenneth and Debbie the very happiest of marriages.”
Every one of us murmured agreement to that one.
Here the toasts were supposed to end, according to Sophie’s index card, but a lot of people didn’t know that and so several of them stood up to make spontaneous toasts of their own, sometimes unintentionally preempting other people who’d taken it into their heads to stand up at the very same moment. Bitsy Taylor announced that she’d been the first to realize, on the very evening when Kenneth and Debbie were introduced, that they were meant for each other. Dave the usher told us that “Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and not for better”
was completely not the case with Deborah Baines Bailey. (Since Debbie would be keeping her maiden name, this didn’t seem all that relevant.) Even Spofford Talbot had something to say. He spoke up from a far corner of the room where he had retreated, hugging his camera, to call out, “Thanks for posing, all,”
in a surprisingly deep voice. (“Who was that?” several people asked each other.)
Then Sophie consulted her index card one last time and said, “Tossing of the bouquet!”
At which point Cyndi Lauper burst out with “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”
while various young women—not only the bridal attendants but also young women from other tables—rose to gather around Debbie in the center of the room. I hadn’t realized that mere guests could be involved. The one who caught the bouquet was a little sprite of a redhead who merely reached out and snagged it nonchalantly. In fact, the whole production lacked any sense of urgency. “In my day,” my mother said, “girls would scramble all over themselves trying to catch the bouquet.”
“Yes, well, that was then,”
Sophie said with a sigh.
I could tell that this whole event had fallen far short of what she thought a wedding should be.
She and Rupert had done way more than their part, though. I did realize that. Max and I were hardly more than bystanders. So later, as we began heading toward the exit, I went up to her and said, “Thank you, Sophie. I wouldn’t have known the first thing about how to arrange all this.”
“Why, you’re welcome, my dear!”
Sophie said. I got the feeling that she was surprised I’d had the good manners to say anything. “It did go well, I thought,”
she said. “And upon reflection, I can understand why they had plain old roses on their cake instead of a bride and groom. A bride doll in white satin would not have gone with Debbie’s outfit in the least!”
Sometimes when I find out what’s on other people’s minds I honestly wonder if we all live on totally separate planets.
Like Jared, for instance. While the first group of leavetakers was waiting for the elevator—Max and Mom and I among them—Jared came up to me and said, “So. Gail. May I call you?”
“Call about what?” I asked.
“I had thought we might go out sometime. Go out to dinner, say.”
“Oh. I don’t know,”
I told him. “I’m not really all that social.”
“I see.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“That’s okay!”
He turned abruptly toward an older woman standing nearby. “Millie Decker! How’ve you been?”
he asked in a loud voice, and then the elevator doors slid open and I boarded, followed by Max and my mother. Jared, however, held back, even though there was plenty of room. “Told you so,” Mom said to me under her breath.
I pretended not to hear her. And I was careful not to look at Max. I said, “You-all don’t think this is the last we’ll see of Debbie, do you?”
“The last we’ll see of her forever?”
Mom asked.
“No, Mom. The last time tonight. Are we going to see her again downstairs?”
“I kind of doubt it,”
Max said. “It looked to me like she was still caught up with some of those gals from the bouquet tossing.”
“Darn,”
I said. “I wanted to tell her good-bye.”
“So give her a call tomorrow. They’re not leaving till afternoon, remember.”
“I can’t phone the day after their wedding!”
“Why not?”
“It would be intrusive!”
The elevator landed so smoothly that I had to look up at the panel of numbers to make sure we had arrived. “Where will they be going?”
Mom asked as we stepped out.
“Bermuda. Their plane leaves at two or so.”
“Well, she’s right,”
Mom told Max. “Even if they’re in town still, you wouldn’t want to disturb their privacy.”
“Suit yourself,”
Max said with a shrug.
Our crowd fanned out across the dim parking garage. I had no idea where the car was; it seemed to me we’d parked days ago. But Max headed toward it unerringly, and Mom and I followed.
Once we had settled in our seats, I told Max, “I was thinking we’d all be leaving the club in a bunch, and that’s when we’d tell her good-bye.”
“I guess I was thinking the same,”
he said. He plucked the parking receipt from above his sun visor, meanwhile inching behind a stream of taillights toward the exit. “And also, of course, Kenneth,” he said.
“Kenneth?”
“Telling Kenneth…”
He rolled down his window to feed the ticket into a slot. “Telling him, I don’t know, just to take good care of our daughter, I guess.”
He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Remember after our wedding?”
“We didn’t have a—”
“Remember how we went to your folkses’ house afterward to let them know? You remember, Joyce. And your dad took me aside and told me that any time you did something that just completely baffled me, I should come to him and he would explain it.”
In the backseat, my mother snorted. “I’d like to hear what he would have said,”
she told Max.
But I didn’t even need to consider. “He’d say, ‘Well, she’s always been difficult.’?”
Max laughed. My mother, though, was quiet. “Oh, my,”
she sighed after a moment. “Wouldn’t he have loved to watch his granddaughter get married!”
After that, all three of us were quiet.
We exited the parking garage into semi-twilight, onto streets giving off a gray sheen although it wasn’t actively raining. Other cars passed with a faint hissing sound, including one long, sleek, silver sedan that I thought might hold Reverend Gregory and his wife, although I couldn’t be certain.
When we drew up in front of Mom’s apartment building, she said, “Thank you for the ride, Max.”
“You’re welcome,”
he told her.
Then she turned to me and said, “Now, don’t you go feeling sad, you hear?”
“No, I’m okay,” I said.
“It was a lovely, lovely wedding,”
she said, “and you should be very proud of her.”
“I am proud.”
What I mainly felt, though, was flatness. As soon as we were on our own I slumped down in my seat, and Max may have felt the same way. In any case, neither of us said a word for the rest of the drive home.