Chapter 14 Enter Momzilla
ALL RIGHT, BULAN,” I SAY, rolling up the rear trailer door. “What’s first on our agenda?”
Bulan, carrying a pen in his teeth, observes from atop a shiny new clipboard: “Paranormal review session! Druids today trace their descendance from a line of Celtic nymphs, possibly as many as ten generations back. Most of them are no longer capable of turning into trees at will—”
“Such a disadvantage,” I deadpan.
“Really is,” coos Mandy. “Palm trees seem so happy.”
“—but they can communicate with most anything that has chlorophyll on a cellular level. They have a strong reverence for the cycles of nature, for the earth, and of course they are responsible for funding Greenpeace. Also, many Scottish Highland dramas.”
“Ooh, I didn’t know that!” Mandy says.
“Do druids have any magical abilities I should worry about?” I ask.
“Depends! I was friends with a druid once!” says Bulan. “Well, you could say he and I were… more than friends, actually… Oh, look what you’ve done. You’ve made me miss my body.”
Mandy pats him on the head. “There, there.”
“What’s next on the list?” I say, because lamenting a centuries-past romantic tragedy is not a good ritual for a wedding.
“Right!” Bulan returns to form, all but cross-eyed as he evaluates the bullet-pointed items on the clipboard. “We need to create the wedding stage, then tackle the seating. And bring over the flowers, the catering—”
“Weren’t you supposed to be illiterate?” I ask.
“I have a highly detailed memory!”
“Great. Anyway, let’s get the pallets out first.”
“To the secret island!” Bulan shouts with a two-foot-high bounce.
Mandy claps her hands together. “Yay, secrets!”
According to Google Street View, the only thing in the middle of Frye Pond should be lily pads and frogs.
Maybe mosquitoes carrying West Nile and malaria.
But Fi told us to expect an oddly luminous island in the center of Frye Pond, and sure enough, that’s the spectacle we discover.
It’s so mesmerizing, it initially keeps us from looking at the shoreline—and our feet.
Which is how I end up banging my shin into the first of five canoes with firefly-lit lanterns affixed to their hulls.
“At least that solves how we’re getting to the magic island,” I mutter, rubbing my leg. “Let’s load up, team.”
“Check!” calls out Mandy after biting into a chocolate bar.
“We can only say check after we’ve gotten the pallets ready,” I remind her.
“Uncheck!” Mandy pretends to roll up her sleeves, then jumps into action, alternating between chewing and chattily unloading pallets to me.
The two of us pack the first canoe, only belatedly realizing we’ll need to be inside them to cross the pond.
As a result of our oversight, I’m forced to sit hunched, with my head twisted so far left it’s like I’m auditioning for The Exorcist. Which is how I happen to spot the hazy form of something in the woods, ten feet deep into the trees.
Pretty much the moment I see it, the indefinable, whitish thing pops out of sight. Like, it actually pops. What the hell?
“Did you see that?” I ask.
Mandy cranes her neck. “What, the moon?”
I shake my head. “It could’ve been a plastic bag…”
Though those don’t randomly move or pop. A ghost, maybe? Only, it didn’t remind me of the ghosts at Dave and Amanda’s wedding. I cling hard to the oars, feeling weirdly vulnerable, when salvation appears in the form of a light over the water.
“ ’Ello,” calls out a voice emanating from the glimmering light. The person who the voice belongs to seems to be—
I’m sorry, it’s not a person.
Okay, that’s rude. People can be hairy. That doesn’t make them lose their personhood. But this person is ungroomed to the point of approximating a friendless primate, without a companion to pick bugs from their hair. I squint.
And, shit. It really isn’t a person. It’s Sasquatch.
So, apparently, Fi failed to mention that her venue coordinator is America’s #1 Most Wanted Cryptid.
“ ’Ello,” the Sasquatch booms again. “Are you Sabby?”
“Yeah, hi,” I call back. “Are you my venue contact? Robert?”
“That’s right,” says Robert the Sasquatch, balancing a lantern on his head as he swims toward us. “Lovely to meet you, Sabby and friends.”
I check behind me once again, confirming the plastic bag hasn’t returned for an encore performance. Then I sweep my arm toward my staff in introduction. “This is Mandy and Bulan.”
“Hello!” they say.
“How nice, and hello!” says Robert. He emerges from the water, all eight to nine feet of him, and in a very experienced way, shucks off his head lantern and shakes away pond water like a gleeful golden retriever.
Grainy footage always depicts the Sasquatch as being lopey and dopey, but Robert is impressively slick, with a great sense of balance.
“We need to get across the pond,” I say. “Can you push these canoes for us?”
“Absolutely,” he says. “Not.”
Pained, I ask, “Which one is it: yes or no?”
“That was a joke!”
“Sorry?”
“I’m a stand-up Sasquatch,” Robert says. “The joke was when I said ‘not.’ ”
Unfortunately for Robert, comedic timing matters. I stare at his overwrought, fuzzy forehead until I get the feeling he might run off awkwardly in shame. Sasquatches are notorious for this.
In the end, Mandy’s the one to rescue us from not laughing. Balling her hands into fists, she cries, “I’M SO EXCITED! This is my first wedding! EVER!”
Either appeased by Mandy or enraptured by her, Robert agrees to do his job. And so Mandy, Bulan, and I release the oars and let a man-ape ferry us across the pond to Fi and Asher’s extremely makeshift venue in a worrisomely porous canoe.
In retrospect, maybe I should have worked through lunch to earn a longer nap. Because looking past the pallets and my companions, at the glowing island ahead, I feel a sense of… I don’t want to say that I’m overwhelmed.
It’s just a lot.
I shut my eyes, imagining I’m far away from this boat of grim passage—specifically, that I’m back in New York with Jane.
That I’m well-rested and unruffled, with my taupe, pilled cotton comforter tucked up under my armpits.
A blah and characterless apartment wall in front of me, and a dry, drab-covered book about tax history askew in my lap.
That would be great. So great that I meditate on this image for the entire crossing until the canoe lands on the island’s shores with a sloshy, wet bump.
The island, it turns out, is also a bit leaky.
When I clamber off the now-dampened pallets and jump onshore, mud floods the toe box of my Crocs. This is a just punishment for wearing them to a wedding again. One must reap what they sow and all that. But does it have to be this… mushy?
Mandy hops into the slop beside me, apparently unworried about her rainbow-striped tights being swallowed to the ankles. Then she shrieks.
“Chihuahua tongues!” Her shriek becomes a laugh. “It feels like tiny dogs licking me!”
“The island does that,” calls out Robert from the shore. “He’s just saying hello.”
“He?” I demand.
“We call him Dexter.”
“What kind of name for an island is Dexter?”
“Oh, let me guess!” answers Bulan. “He goes by Terry for short!”
Because the world is unfair, Bulan doesn’t sink into Dexter, the overly friendly island that also goes by the nickname “Terry Firma.” Instead, Bulan finds himself bouncier on this surface than usual. He’s practically an astronaut, freshly landed on the moon. He jumps like it’s his job.
Which reminds me. We have a job to do here. I forcibly wrest my attention from Dexter/Terry and focus on the circle of boulders at the island’s center. It’s lit dramatically by floodlights, which explains the glowing from the shore.
“Robert, is everything ready at fake Stonehenge?” I ask. “Can we set up?”
“It’s a historical replica,” sniffs Robert. “Not ‘fake.’ ”
“Sure it is. I’m going to start off with the ceremony area, setting out pillows and pallets. Mandy will go to the reception. If you could point her to where she should store the catered food, then…”
“A head? Right here!” Robert points at Bulan defying gravity and laughs.
“Or right hair,” says Mandy, grabbing onto Robert’s dangly arm hairs.
“Har-har!” Robert is now bent over laughing. “Har-har-har!”
Bulan jumps up and down to emphasize the hilarity of these puns.
Since everyone around me is useless, I act as if it does not, in fact, feel like my feet are being perpetually greeted by Chihuahuas and unpack the pallets by myself.
Armed with a venue coordinator and an able-bodied assistant, I should have no trouble setting up for a wedding—even if said wedding is hosted on a not-entirely-inanimate island.
And that seems to be true initially: by the time Robert pushes the last of our supply-bearing canoes across the pond, Mandy and I have finished creating the base of the stage-cum-wedding-altar in the center of the stone circle.
We’ve covered the pallets with carpets, emptied twelve trash bags of leaves on top, and laid out the freshly woven garlands of silver dollar eucalyptus, threaded with dahlias, daisies, and white phlox.
I artfully pluck a few blooms out and strew them across the ground, which… eats them.
And burps.
Thankfully, Dexter doesn’t have a taste for stones, the stage, or the seating.
I appreciate this, because the tasseled floor pillows are rentals.
Robert helps Mandy and me position them meaningfully around the stone circle; then we walk the venue, ticking through items on the checklist. Our wedding setup seems to be going off without a hitch.
The venue looks almost boho-cool instead of just weird and random.
I hold up a hand.
“High five?” I ask Robert. He eagerly lopes to meet me, and gears up to slap my palm with satisfaction, when we’re interrupted by a huff.
A disapproving, ominous one.