The Wedding People

Chapter 4

She sits on the canopy bed and tries to relax, but being relaxed about her death is proving to be difficult, even on this king-sized pillow-top. She still feels like she should be doing something significant. She still feels too much like herself in her head, worrying about all the small things that are already ruining her beautiful ending, like the blood on the bride’s dress. The sound of the toilet flushing next door. The smell of the air conditioner, not to mention the wedding people gathering on the patio below.

The bride’s opening reception has begun.

She puts on the headphones of her old Discman to drown out the people talking below. But the CD is so scratched, the music skips. Instead of making her feel calm, it makes her anxious. So she takes them off, goes out to the balcony, and lights a cigarette.

This time, she actually smokes it. She hopes that it will make sitting on a chair seem more elevated than just sitting on a chair. Takes one puff like she’s posing for a painting. Woman Smoking and Drinking While Having Some Thoughts , she’d call it.

But when she blows the smoke out into the salty air, she starts coughing so hard, it burns her lungs.

“Shit,” she says. Not a good feeling. “Ugh. This is truly awful.”

Yet she takes another puff, because when she imagined her death, she imagined herself smoking. She imagined it would work like a metronome keeping the time. Keeping her steady. Because she has nothing to keep her steady. No dinner to eat, no music to enjoy, no luggage to unpack, no husband to call, no book to finish, no counters to clean, no hormone shots to inject, no vacations to research, no future life to organize into spreadsheets. There is no more time left and so there is weirdly no urgency for anything.

She smokes the rest of the cigarette slowly. She does not want to feel rushed. She does not want to go out frantic and through a window like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway , a scene that upset her so much, it became the only book in graduate school that she never finished reading.

Her stomach growls. She hopes she doesn’t get too hungry to kill herself. She takes another sip of the chocolate wine. At least the wine is partly chocolate, she thinks. At least I have this balcony. She watches the waves in the distance start to gather, but they never get large enough to break. Sort of like the jazz from the reception below—the notes rising and falling and rising and falling but never coming to an end.

She leans over the edge to get a better look at the reception. She’s curious, she admits. She’s always loved a wedding, will watch any TV show or read any book to the end if it promises a wedding. That’s how she got through those long novels in graduate school, reading hundreds of pages just to watch people get married.

She scans for the bride but sees only High Bun and Neck Pillow, picking up long-stemmed drinks from a tray. The Jims standing under some fairy lights, arguing with faces of men who want to kill each other, and it surprises her when they break into laughter.

At least I’m on the top floor, she thinks—up on the balcony from where she can stare and pass judgment without being noticed, like the seagulls that circle high above. From here, she can see it all, even what it will be like to be dead, because that is one of the few gifts that depression gives her: aerial vision. She already knows what the world will look like without her, because last August, she sat at home while everyone returned to their offices, their routines, their roles—and she knows the bride will be able to do this, too. The bride may gasp at the news of Phoebe’s suicide, but then she’ll take a walk down the beach to calm herself. She will feel the breeze blow her hair back. She will be grateful for the sun. For her champagne. She will laugh and lean on her groom’s shoulder, beautiful hair falling into her face, and Phoebe will be forgotten by sunset.

“Just get on with it,” Phoebe tells herself.

But then there is a knock on the door, as if someone heard her. She puts the cigarette out quickly, closes the balcony door, and the feeling of hiding her cigarette is strangely familiar. It makes her hope that her husband is at the door, though of course he’s not. He doesn’t even know where she is.

“Are you seriously smoking?” the bride asks.

The bride walks into the room as if it is her own. The bride’s dress is bloodless now—another white one, but gauzier and with dramatic fluttery sleeves.

“Sure, yes, please do come in,” Phoebe says.

The bride’s hand is wrapped in gauze, and Phoebe wonders who wrapped it. Gary, the groom with the barely receding hairline? Her loving mother? Is the bride the kind of woman who has a loving mother? Yes, Phoebe decides. Phoebe has become good over the years at detecting who has a loving mother and who does not, because Phoebe believes a loving mother gives a person a kind of confidence to exist that Phoebe never quite had. Phoebe could never burst into someone else’s room and give orders like it’s her own.

“You can’t smoke,” the bride says.

The bride talks louder than she needs to, the way actors on the stage are present but locked and preserved behind the fourth wall, and for the first time, Phoebe wonders what the bride actually does for a living. Is she an actress? Or maybe she is an airline attendant, good at announcing things to forty-seven passengers.

“Actually, it’s one of the few things left that I can do,” Phoebe says.

As if to prove this, Phoebe walks back out to the balcony.

“Actually, no,” the bride says, following her. “This is a nonsmoking room.”

“Good thing I’m out here on the balcony, then.”

“How did you get a real balcony, by the way?” the bride asks, like this is the real betrayal. “My balcony is just like, the suggestion of a balcony.”

She pauses to study the view.

“I mean, you can see the whole ocean from here! Why on earth wouldn’t Pauline put me in this room? I specifically requested a shoreline room.”

“Well, a shoreline room presumably faces… the shoreline.”

“But I thought shoreline meant… that you could see the shore.”

“Shoreline refers to the line where the ocean meets the land.”

Phoebe waits for Lila to blush, but she doesn’t get embarrassed. She just gets angrier.

“Who on earth would want a shoreline room then?” Lila asks. “Why would they even advertise a shoreline view like it’s something special? If I wanted to look at houses, I’d just stay home and look out my own window at houses. You know?”

Phoebe lights another cigarette, hoping the smoke will make the bride leave. But she doesn’t budge.

“The balcony is part of the room, by the way,” the bride says. “So you can’t actually smoke on it.”

Phoebe feels the sudden urge to argue. She has a contrarian impulse that stirred within her during class or at a party when anybody had the audacity to talk in absolutes. She never acted on it, though, because she never wanted to be accused of talking in absolutes. Those people were her least favorite.

But what does she care now? Might as well go out showing the world what she got from all those years of studying.

“The word balcony is borrowed from Italian balcone ,” Phoebe says. “Derived from medieval Italian balco , which originally meant ‘scaffold.’ And that comes from a Proto-Germanic word balk? , which probably meant something like ‘beam.’”

The bride stands there, confused.

“So, taken all together, we know that the word balcony originally referred to the beam or structure that holds up the balcony.” Phoebe releases a long, slow exhale of smoke before her final conclusion. “That’s how far outside the room it is. The balcony is not even the balcony.”

“Who are you?” the bride asks.

The bride sounds genuinely impressed, and Phoebe will admit that she has not lost the capacity to enjoy this kind of moment. Knowledge is power, all her teachers told her as a kid, which is why she spent the best part of her youth in quiet corners of libraries, reading books as quickly as she could. She wanted to be stronger, bigger. She knew that she would never be taller than her father, never be bigger or stronger, and that this was the only way to one day see beyond her father’s house.

“I’m a Victorianist,” Phoebe says.

“Huh?”

“A nineteenth centuryist,” Phoebe rephrases, thinking it might make more sense to the bride.

“I still don’t know what that means,” the bride says.

“I research nineteenth-century literature.”

“And people pay you for this?”

“Not well.”

“And the nineteenth century is really the 1800s?”

“Right.”

“I always have the hardest time with that.”

“A lot of my students do.”

“But I’m twenty-eight. I work at an art gallery,” the bride says. “I should know that.”

Phoebe is surprised enough by this new information to want to ask her first question of the bride.

“Are you a curator?” Phoebe asks.

“That’s my mother,” the bride says. “I’m her assistant. But one day, I’m supposed to be the curator.”

Lila waits as if Phoebe should ask follow-up questions, but Phoebe doesn’t want to know anything more.

“Though honestly, after I get married, I think I’m going to quit,” the bride says. “I’m just not very good at it.”

She confesses to getting Bs all the way through her art history degree in college.

“I never understood why my mother was so obsessed with art. I studied it for four years, and honestly, I get it even less now. Like seriously, what’s the point of it?”

Again, the bride looks at Phoebe and waits.

“Are you asking me?” Phoebe asks.

“Have you never been in a conversation before?”

“It’s been a while, actually.”

“I can tell.”

“And to be honest, I’m not sure I get the point, either.”

When Phoebe left for graduate school, she had very clear and beautiful ideas about art, how art is what elevates us, art is the magnificence wrung from the ugly dish towel of existence. Art helps us feel alive. And this had been true for Phoebe—Phoebe used to read books and feel astounded. She used to walk around galleries, inspired by the beautiful human urge to create. But that was years ago. Now she can’t stand the sight of her books. Can’t bear the thought of reading hundreds of pages just to watch Jane Eyre get married again.

“Well, that’s a relief to hear,” the bride says, like they’re old cousins again. “Nobody ever admits that. Everyone at the gallery walks around like, Oh, my, look at this white canvas. Look at what this painter has done with all this white space. He has chosen not to paint it! He has defied the conventions of painting by not actually painting! Isn’t that bold? Doesn’t that make you want to pay thousands of dollars for it? And some of the people are like, Yes, yes, it does, actually.”

Phoebe can feel how easy it would be to slip into this casual conversation about the false promises of art. She can feel herself wanting to rant about literature and how it didn’t end up saving her in the end, but the sun is starting to set. Phoebe is halfway done with her second cigarette. She looks back at the pills on the nightstand.

“What did you come in here for again?” Phoebe asks.

The bride seems offended by the directness of the question.

“I came to tell you to stop smoking,” the bride says with that edge to her voice again. “And to warn you that if you don’t change your mind about…”

But she can’t say the words.

“Killing myself?” Phoebe says.

“Yes. Then I am going to tell the front desk.”

“They can’t make a paying guest leave because the guest is sad.” Phoebe is amused by the thought. “‘I am so sorry, but we’ve all had a vote, and we’ve come to the conclusion that you are too sad to be here.’”

“You’re not sad, you’re suicidal ,” the bride says. “You should leave the hotel and seek help immediately.”

“Tried that.”

After her husband left, Phoebe tried so many things. She applied to forty-two teaching jobs. She took a virtual painting class. She purchased a brand-new bike with cute handlebars like her virtual therapist suggested. Go have real experiences, the virtual therapist commanded. Go read real books on your condition. So she read real books on depression. Books by real, depressed people. She journaled in real journals. She downloaded a meditation app. Ate bananas for breakfast every day. Started Lexapro, then stopped, because it didn’t make her feel any better, just made it impossible to orgasm. And that was the only time she felt relief from herself—in those few moments when she could make herself come, thinking of her husband being a terrible man.

But orgasming didn’t save her, because after, she was still herself. She sobbed. She signed up for online dating sites, exchanged texts with a man who called himself Transatlantic and talked a lot about his job in biotech. But then Transatlantic met someone else, someone in real life, he explained, and she deleted her profile, turned on the TV, and basically never shut it off.

“Then at least wait until the wedding week is over!” the bride demands.

“I’m not rescheduling,” Phoebe says. “This is not a dentist appointment.”

“I seriously don’t get it. What’s the rush? You’re going to be dead forever, you know. You might as well wait a week.”

Because if she doesn’t do it tonight, Phoebe knows she will lose the feeling. She knows this is the kind of thing that requires a certain feeling. And if she loses that feeling, she will have to wake up tomorrow and go home. She will have to clean up the crumbs on the counter. She will have to bury Harry. Then, she will have to drive to school in her gray blouse and watch her husband get coffee every morning with another woman.

“It’s not like you’re going to live for much longer,” the bride says. “Might as well wait it out.”

“Do you know something about my medical history that I don’t?” Phoebe asks.

“You’re middle-aged, obviously. And you smoke. And drink. I’d give you like, twenty years, tops.”

“That’s really encouraging. Thanks.”

“My father was perfectly healthy, used to run every other day and take these giant green vitamins from Switzerland, and he didn’t even make it to seventy.”

“Maybe it was the vitamins that killed him,” Phoebe says.

“It was colon cancer.”

Phoebe knows she is supposed to say “I’m sorry for your loss.” But she can’t feel sorry for anyone else right now. So she doesn’t say anything.

“How does it not scare you?” the bride asks. “I’m literally terrified of dying. All I worried about for the last two years was catching Covid and dying before I could have my wedding.”

“Well, that explains it! I already had my wedding,” Phoebe says. “It seems I’m cleared to go.”

“But what if you go to Hell?”

“There’s no such thing as Hell,” Phoebe says.

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just what I believe,” Phoebe says. One of the few things Nietzsche wrote that she agreed with in graduate school. “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Lila says. “I always worry so much about going to Hell.”

“Who did you murder?”

“Nobody,” Lila says. “But don’t you think I’m just like, a little too rich? All we ever did in Catholic school was talk about how impossible it was for rich people like me to get into Heaven. And then they had us write this paper on Dante’s Inferno , which I actually got an A on, but for years, I had nightmares about being stuck in his different versions of Hell. It got so bad, I started seeing the guidance counselor about it.”

She said her dread of Hell was extra annoying, because despite going to a Catholic boarding school, her parents didn’t raise her to have any particular religion. Her parents couldn’t decide which one. Yes, she went to Portsmouth Abbey but only because that’s where her Catholic father went to school. And her mother was from a family of Protestants who dated back to the Mayflower and whenever Lila came home for the holidays, her mother whispered things about the Catholics being full of shit.

“And I was like, Hey thanks, this isn’t confusing at all,” Lila says.

The nightmares went on for years.

“They were really creepy, too. Like once I was stuck running around a racetrack getting beaten with my own leg. Another time I was turned into the oak tree outside my father’s house and I bled every time my mother plucked one of my leaves.”

Phoebe releases the smoke so slowly in the air, it’s almost beautiful. She is getting good, she thinks.

“That’s what happens to the suicides in Dante,” Lila clarifies. “Except it’s not my mother plucking the leaves, obviously. It’s like, a bunch of random harpies.”

“So I’ve read,” Phoebe says.

“Then how can you take that risk? I’m not saying Dante is right. But I mean, what if Dante is right?”

Phoebe learned trying to explain her feelings to her husband that you can’t explain this kind of darkness to someone who has never felt it. And the bride is very much like her husband. Phoebe can tell by the way she dresses, everything so tailored to her body. Up close, Phoebe can see that the romantic tangle of braids is actually a calculated system with the exact same number of braids on each side of her head. She is like a character from an Austen novel, sometimes disappointed in the sequence of events, but never psychically destroyed by them. Never paralyzed by existential horror. Always able to find relief from a long walk through the countryside or the busyness of the day. And that’s how Phoebe had been, too, during graduate school and most of her marriage. She couldn’t understand why someone like Tom wanted to die. But Mia is so beautiful? But Tom’s a doctor? But they have a baby? Phoebe could only think practically about such a thing then, just like the bride now.

So Phoebe tries her best to speak the bride’s language.

“The point is, this hotel is very expensive,” Phoebe says. “I can’t afford to stay here and wait all week.”

“Problem solved,” the bride says. “I’ll pay.”

“No,” Phoebe refuses.

“Why not?”

“I don’t even know you. And that’s too much money.”

“Do you want to know how much I’ve already spent on this wedding?” The bride looks excited, like she has been dying to tell someone all day.

“No.” The more Phoebe learns about the wedding, the harder this will become.

“A million dollars,” she says, and then turns toward the ocean view like she might cry. “That’s what my father gave me when he got sick. Told me it was his dying wish to see his only daughter get married before he died. But then before we could have it, he died. And then there was a global pandemic for two years. So the least you could do is not die, too.”

Phoebe can hear in her voice that she is about to cry. Now more than ever it is important to sound forceful.

“My death has nothing to do with you,” Phoebe says.

“Of course it does! It’s going to happen here, during my opening reception!”

The bride starts to slowly breathe in, then counts to four as she breathes out. Watching her, Phoebe feels an old impulse, a tenderness, the kind of thing she felt when a student sat in her office on the brink of tears. She was being presented with a choice: She could remain silent and pretend she didn’t notice the despair because she had to get to class in five minutes and unpacking despair usually took longer than that. Or she could soften her voice and ask one more question, like, “What is this really about? Are you okay?” And that’s when the student would burst into a teary tale of their entire life story. Phoebe would be late to class, but the student would feel better, and so would she.

But the bride is not her student. Phoebe has no responsibility to care or even pretend to care. She will not ask questions about her dead father. She will not concern herself with the wedding. She will not reschedule her suicide.

“Do you know how much I spent on just tonight alone?” the bride asks.

Phoebe watches the cigarette burn between her fingers, a long nose of ash growing with each silent second. Phoebe will wait this out.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” she says. “Yep, that’s right. Fifty thousand dollars.”

But Phoebe must not look too impressed, because the bride continues.

“I special-ordered rare orchids from Borneo for the centerpieces. I took a calligraphy class so I could learn how to handwrite every single table card. I had each cocktail glass hand-sprayed in guanciale fat. I flew in the same jazz band that played at Prince William’s wedding. And do you know how long it took to figure out who played at Prince William’s wedding? How many hours I spent on message boards?”

“You didn’t hire a wedding planner to do that?” Phoebe asks, genuinely shocked.

“You think I’d trust a wedding planner with my dead father’s money?” Lila asks.

“I mean, yeah?”

“This money was the last thing my father ever gave me in this life. I wasn’t about to give thirty-three percent of it away to some wedding planner who suggested it might be nice to parachute into my own reception. No. I wanted my father to be proud of how I spent it, and I know he would be. I know this is going to be the most beautiful fucking wedding, and if I wake up to your corpse being rolled into the lobby tomorrow morning, you should know I’ll never recover from something like that.”

“Neither will I,” Phoebe says.

“Stop doing that!” Lila says.

The bride starts to actually cry, and it’s weirdly satisfying and horrifying to watch. Like watching a beautiful building be demolished.

“How can you joke about this?” the bride asks through her tears.

Phoebe doesn’t know. But after her husband left, her first impulse was to joke about it. She spent days making phone calls to friends from grad school that she hadn’t spoken to in years, saying, “Well, I never really liked the guy anyway,” in a high-pitched voice that didn’t sound like hers, because she wanted to impress people the way she had been impressed when she read what Edith Wharton said after seeing the names “Mr. and Mrs. Wharton” written in a guest book at a hotel she had never visited.

“Apparently I have been here before,” Wharton said.

But her friends laughed uneasily. Her friends had been at her wedding, had seen how in love Phoebe had been. “It’s okay to be sad that your husband left you,” one of them said, and it made Phoebe feel stupid for trying to joke about it—joking was all she had left.

“Just get out,” Phoebe says in a stern voice.

“You can’t tell me to get out,” the bride says. “This is my wedding hotel. You get out!”

Phoebe doesn’t know how some girls grow up to become women like the bride, or like Mia, who treat everything, even this nineteenth-century mansion, even Phoebe’s husband, as their inheritance. Phoebe had been raised to feel sorry for everything—sorry for being born, sorry for almost drowning, sorry for getting an A-minus on my exam, sorry for not bearing children, sorry for not getting to the last three slides of the PowerPoint, everybody. Sometimes, Phoebe sent her class apology emails after lectures when she didn’t finish on time. Because she was a good professor. A good woman. But where is the line? When did Phoebe being good become Phoebe being nothing?

She doesn’t know. But she does know this.

“I paid eight hundred and thirty-six dollars to stay in this room for one single night!” Phoebe yells. “This is my fucking room!”

The bride looks stunned, as if nobody has ever shouted at her this loudly before. In the bride’s silence, Phoebe waits for some bad, foolish feeling to come, but she feels so exhilarated she wishes she had yelled at Mia like this. At her husband after he told her about the affair—but she couldn’t yell then. She was still trying so hard to be her best self, to stay reasonable, to save the marriage, to ask the right questions, gather all the information, as if understanding could help her solve the problem. But it didn’t matter how much he told her—she never understood. She was sick with information, sick with all the things she never said or did.

“Get out !” Phoebe screams.

“Fine,” the bride says. “Whatever. What do I care? Just die .”

“I will !”

Phoebe came here to die and so she will die.

But then the bride says “ Good” so angrily, she bares her teeth just enough for Phoebe to see it again: the food.

Phoebe can’t believe it’s still there. Phoebe figured one of her friends would have told her by now. But maybe the bride is the kind of woman who doesn’t have friends like that, friends who are honest even when it’s embarrassing. Maybe that is why she is here in Phoebe’s room instead of down at her reception sipping on a fat-washed cocktail.

“Have a nice time in Hell,” the bride adds.

The cigarette ash falls on Phoebe’s leg. She is surprised by the burn. It feels like something awful being set in motion. The world gone bad. The bride will be sent down to her reception with food in her teeth and Phoebe will die.

But not yet.

“Wait,” Phoebe says, because she cannot send a woman out to her wedding with food stuck in her teeth. Whatever the bride might think, Phoebe is not a monster.

“You have something in your teeth.”

The bride’s face falls. “But I haven’t eaten since this morning.”

The bride walks to the bathroom mirror, which is as tall as the room itself. She picks at her teeth as she says, “I’ve seriously been going around all day with food in my teeth and nobody said a word?”

“Maybe nobody noticed.”

“Oh, trust me, the people here notice everything.”

She leans closer to the mirror, picks harder.

“Gary’s mother has noticed that my dress tonight is ‘very young,’ which is code for her saying I look like a godless whore. And Marla, my future sister-in-law, has noticed how expensive this hotel is, though she won’t ever say it. She’ll just list off the price of every single item on the menu until we all want to scream.”

Lila backs away from the mirror. “Do you have any floss?”

“I seem to have forgotten the floss.”

Lila looks around the bathroom. “They’re supposed to have everything here.”

Phoebe helps her search through the contents of the most beautiful wicker basket she has ever seen, but there is only ginseng lotion. Hibiscus bath salts. Thyme bodywash. By the time she looks up, the bride is at the phone.

“Can you bring floss to the Roaring Twenties?” the bride says. “Yes, that’s fine. I’ll wait. Thank you.”

“Why are you having him bring it here?” Phoebe asks when she hangs up.

“Let’s wait on the balcony” is all the bride says, like they are a team now and their only job is to restore Lila’s teeth to their perfect condition. But when Phoebe doesn’t budge, she adds, “I think you can hold off on eternity for thirty minutes. Oh, hey, there’s the bird watching kit I bought for everybody.”

She picks up a pair of binoculars from the desk and ignores the pamphlet about North Atlantic birds.

“Thirty minutes?” Phoebe asks, but she follows the bride out to the balcony. “How long does it take to bring up some floss?”

“Carlson has to go to CVS to buy it. Apparently they don’t have any.”

“So he’s going to CVS to get it?”

“It’s literally his job.”

“Is it?”

Lila shrugs and crosses her legs. “I’m Lila, by the way.”

It sounds funny to hear Lila introduce herself so formally after all this, and Phoebe must be smirking because Lila says, “Is there something amusing about my name?”

“No,” Phoebe says. “It’s a beautiful name.”

It was a name Phoebe had wanted for herself when she was younger. Phoebe had read too many Sweet Valley High books, in which the most beautiful girl at the school was named Lila. One of the first beauty icons with brown hair that Phoebe had encountered—until Lyla from Friday Night Lights , who had long brown hair so thick, it made Phoebe want to move south and join a football team.

“It’s a nickname. My name is actually Delilah,” Lila says. “My mother named me after her favorite artist. And not even like a classically famous artist. Just some woman who lives in Bushwick and makes millions painting abstractions of babies eating womb-shaped fruit.”

Phoebe pours herself a little bit more of the wine, then offers the bottle to the bride. Why not? They have thirty minutes. And it’s her wine.

“This is better than I thought it would be,” the bride says, taking a sip. She leans over the edge to see the reception in full swing below. “Wow, you can really see the whole thing from up here.”

The bride looks through the binoculars and starts announcing names like she’s spotting wild animals at the zoo.

“There’s Nat and Suz,” Lila says. “Marla. My mother. Jim. Uncle Jim.”

Phoebe can feel the bride still wanting her to ask questions, and she does find herself wondering.

“How many people in your family are named Jim?” Phoebe asks.

“The Jims are in Gary’s family,” she says. “Gary’s father, uncle, and Gary’s dead wife’s brother.”

“Oh. Gary was married before?”

“Yeah. They had a daughter. Then his wife died of cancer. Weird, right?”

“I don’t know. Was she supposed to be immortal?”

“I mean, it’s weird that his dead wife’s brother is here as his best man. Gary insisted on Jim. He kept being like, Lila, come on, the man is my brother.”

She says it’s true that they’re really close.

“They watched a woman die together, and now they’re like, bonded for life, I guess,” she says. “Jim comes over like every Saturday, even though that’s Gary’s one day off, and we spend it watching Jim cut up monkfish at the kitchen table while he brags about himself. He’s like, Oh, I’ve just been at home building my seaplane, even though I know for a fact he doesn’t have any of the parts. And did you know his great-uncle used to be in the Mob?”

“How deep was his uncle in the Mob?”

“That’s really not the point,” Lila says.

“What’s the point?”

“The point is, I don’t get why Jim has to be around all of the time. They’d never be friends if Gary didn’t marry his sister.”

She explains that her fiancé, Gary, is this handsome doctor who lives in Tiverton and spends his one day off running science experiments in the garden with his daughter, and Jim is an engineer who can’t keep a girlfriend longer than a month so he is always kind of hitting on everyone.

“Even me,” she says. “He like, bought me a skirt for my birthday. I mean, isn’t that weird?”

“I don’t know. Did you need a skirt?”

“That’s exactly what Gary asked, and I was like, It doesn’t even matter if I needed a skirt! Why would my fiancé’s brother-in-law buy me a skirt for my birthday? It’s not even a normal skirt.”

“What’s a normal skirt?”

“Whatever kind of skirt you can buy a woman and it wouldn’t be weird.”

“I don’t think that skirt exists.”

“This was some kind of professional skirt. The kind you’d buy at Macy’s or something to wear with a matching jacket. And when I showed Gary, he was just like, Yeah, I don’t think Jim understands how to buy presents for women.”

Phoebe likes how Lila does Gary’s voice, too. Lila, it seems, is good at voices.

“He was like, Lila, this is a man who used to buy his own sister tampons in bulk whenever they were on sale at Costco.”

“That’s kind of nice, actually,” Phoebe says. Phoebe’s father mostly pretended her period didn’t exist, and so Phoebe pretended it didn’t exist. She felt criminal throwing a tampon in the trash, like she was throwing out a bloody carcass, because her father didn’t think to keep the can lined, so she often flushed them down the toilet. When the toilet backed up once a year, she knew it was her fault but watched her father with the plunger and said nothing.

“Gary thought so, too,” she says. “Gary is such a doctor. He like, truly only sees the good in everybody.”

“That is… not my experience with doctors.”

“Well, maybe he’s just got this blind spot when it comes to Jim. It’s like, Wendy died and Jim did their dishes for a year straight, and took his daughter to school when Gary didn’t have the strength, and now Jim is a forever hero. And so is Wendy. That’s the dead wife.”

The words dead wife land hard at Phoebe’s feet.

“Might I suggest alternate phrasing?” Phoebe asks.

“There’s seriously no other way to describe her,” she says. “You can’t use her name. Anytime her name is spoken, somebody is required to have a complete mental breakdown. Sometimes it’s his daughter. Often, it’s me. But still.”

Lila clutches the wine bottle, looks back down at her party.

“We’ll all be having a nice time sitting at the beach or something, and out of nowhere, Jim will just be like, Remember when Wendy tried to make a kite out of beer cans?”

“Is that possible?”

“Apparently, it didn’t fly,” Lila says. “And fine, I get it. In his eyes, I’m his dead sister’s replacement and he always wants me to remember that. But this is my wedding week. And I can’t stop having this horrible feeling that somehow Jim is going to ruin it. I mean, if you don’t beat him to it.”

Then Lila scans the reception with the binoculars again like she’s looking for Jim. When she finds him, she narrows her eyes with alarm.

“Oh my God, is Jim seriously hitting on my mother ?”

She hands the binoculars to Phoebe.

“Which one is your mother?” Phoebe asks.

“The one who looks like she’s just about to go on Dancing with the Stars .”

“Can you be more specific?”

“That’s actually very specific,” Lila says. But then she points to a woman in a yellow dress.

Even with the binoculars, Phoebe can’t see much beyond a man and a woman talking with drinks in their hands. Every so often, Jim leans in, puts his hand on her mother’s shoulder. But it doesn’t look especially flirtatious. More familial.

“They look like they’re just, you know, talking,” Phoebe says.

“Oh, there is no just talking with my mother,” Lila says. “With her, it’s like always this intense spewing of information, like here is the last book on Gaudi that I just read and now I am going to tell you all about it verbatim. And my father used to just sit there and take it for thirty years, until he finally exploded and told us that he hated modern art. He actually confessed that to us on his deathbed. Isn’t that awful?”

“Wait, what?” Phoebe asks. “Your father confessed on his deathbed that he didn’t like modern art?”

“That’s right,” Lila says. “My father called from the hospital and asked to be put on speaker, and we were all gathered around, because we never knew which call was going to be his last, and he was like, My darlings, every man must come to terms with his true nature at the end of his life, and it is time I do the same, and my mother was like, Are you sure that’s a good idea, Henry? And my father was just like, I have always despised modern art, particularly the Cubists and everything that followed.”

Her father blamed Picasso, especially, for bringing dignity to the whole movement away from painting as representation.

“And maybe in some families this wouldn’t seem like a big confession, but my parents’ marriage had basically been built on the fact that they were these great, benevolent supporters of contemporary art,” Lila says. “My father bought my mother her first painting.”

Buying art together was how they fell in love. They made a name for themselves building one of the country’s most important collections of contemporary artists. They gave a five-hundred-thousand-dollar grant to the NEA each year. All of this helped make sense of the millions her father made in waste management. Helped give meaning to the landfills of trash her father owned across the country.

“So to find out that he only did all this just to impress my mother in the beginning,” Lila says. “Insert a montage of monologues from my mother about how her mother was right, how she never should have married a much older man who was literally in the business of trash, and how dare that man call anything a waste, let alone Cubism , and she knows now she really should have married her cousin’s cousin Gregory Lancaster like her mother had suggested, because the joke’s on her. Gregory is still alive.”

Phoebe looks through the binoculars and watches Jim walk away. She waits to see if anything comes over Lila’s mother’s face. She wonders if it’s hard to be at this wedding alone after her husband’s death. Is she worried about who she is going to talk to next? How long she’ll have to stand there alone?

“And so now my mother is convinced that I’m making a mistake marrying Gary, just like her,” Lila says.

“How do you know?”

“She tells me! When she’s really loaded at two in the afternoon, she just says these things. She’s like, Lila, you don’t have to get married just because your father’s dying wish was to see you get married. What does it matter? He’s already dead! And then she goes off about how I might want to think twice about marrying an older man in waste management like she did.”

“I thought Gary was a doctor?”

“My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. Totally different jobs, but my mother is just like, Like I said, they’re both in waste management. Two men, on a mission to help the country deal with their shit.”

Lila is quiet for a moment, like she is considering something deeply, perhaps the entire trajectory of her life.

“Can you imagine having a mother who talks to you like that?”

“My mother is dead,” Phoebe says.

“Oh. Well, you’re lucky then. My mother, she just monologues,” Lila says, as if she were not doing the same exact thing right now. “Which is absolutely why she is not getting a speech at this wedding. I kept telling her, Mom, the mother of the bride doesn’t even get a speech, and she was like, Yes, and why do we think that is, Lila? Why do you think the men have always wanted the mother of the bride to be silent?”

The bride takes another sip.

“And I’m like, It’s not about men! It’s about you! Why would I trust you with a speech? You’re just going to get loaded and stand up there and talk about how Gary is too old for me or something!”

Phoebe wonders how long Lila could go on without a response. Again, she wonders if this is the difference between growing up with and without a mother. Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it. In her teens, Phoebe was regularly astonished by how awful her friends were to their mothers, and the mothers just took it, because the mothers knew that sometimes they were awful, too. The mothers had made their own mistakes.

But Phoebe’s mother sat high up on the fireplace mantel, in a gilded frame, like a martyred saint. Under her gaze, Phoebe was careful never to make any mistakes. Phoebe was quiet and obedient, never talking too fast or too loudly, because she never wanted to be a burden to her father. She had felt this way in her marriage, too—careful never to cry too hard or tell meandering stories at dinner. Careful always to wear nice pajamas to bed. Careful never to lose control. Even at the end, when she learned about the affair, she stayed so calm that her husband was confused. “You’re being so nice about this,” Matt said.

But Lila talks without end, without clear transitions from topic to topic, assuming that Phoebe, a total stranger who has already announced multiple times that she wants to die, is interested in hearing every detail about her personal life. Phoebe can’t tell if it’s the most appalling or most impressive display she’s ever witnessed.

Either way, Phoebe is interested.

“How much older than you is Gary?” Phoebe asks.

“Only eleven and a half years,” the bride says. “He’s forty, but you can barely tell.”

“Oh,” Phoebe says, genuinely not impressed. “That’s not bad. I’ve seen much worse.”

“Like what?” The bride looks hopeful.

“Like this seventy-five-year-old historian at my university had an affair with the twenty-six-year-old admin.”

“Jesus. That’s just weird.”

“Especially since she wasn’t even trying to get her PhD,” Phoebe says. It feels good to talk about her old life so casually like that. As if it were all just funny subject material to share in conversation with Lila. “I mean, we could never figure out why she was doing it exactly. Like what would this admin with no aspirations in higher ed gain from dating a married geriatric academic?”

“Maybe she was in love,” the bride says. “Not everything is a pathology, you know. I was like, Mom, not everything is about Dad dying! I didn’t even know Dad was dying when I met Gary. Gary just randomly came to our art gallery looking for some paintings to fill up his new house, and then two days later, I took my dad to his GI because we were expecting bad news, and I was shocked to see that Gary was the doctor. I mean, truly a wild coincidence. Gary and I both knew it had to mean something.”

But her mother was not convinced.

“My mother is like, We all knew on some level that your father was going to die. And I’m like, Well yeah, I’ve always known that someday my father will die. But maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that Gary and I love each other? I mean, why does everything have to be about my father one day dying? And my mother is like, I didn’t make the rules, sweetheart. Take it up with Freud.”

The bride sighs.

“We should have just gotten married right after he proposed,” Lila says. “My father was actually doing really well then, responding to the treatments the way Gary said he would. But we had just gone into lockdown, and so we kept postponing the wedding, thinking the lockdown would end at any moment. And then my dad got so much worse and after he was hospitalized, it didn’t feel right to celebrate anything. I mean, he hardly made any sense at the end. He was so high on morphine, it became unbearable to take his phone calls. We’d put him on speaker and be like, Hi, Dad, but then there would be nothing but this long dramatic pause until finally, he was like… Herbbbbballll Essences!”

Phoebe is confused. “Herbal Essences?”

“I don’t know,” the bride says. “That’s what he said. It made no sense. It was just… silence… and then Herbbballlllll Essences! And I was like, Okay, Dad. What about Herbal Essences? But he hung up. And then he died. And those were literally my father’s last words to me.”

Phoebe looks at Lila and Lila looks at Phoebe. The sadness of the story is so stark, her voice so monotone when she delivered it, they erupt into a laughter so intense it surprises Phoebe. Every time they are about to calm down, the bride says, “Herrbbbballl Essences!” and Phoebe starts laughing all over again. It makes her feel high.

“Stop,” Phoebe says. “I can’t breathe.”

“Isn’t that your goal?” the bride asks.

The snipe makes it feel serious between them again. Phoebe can’t remember the last time she laughed like that. Maybe that time with her husband in the Ozarks when they found the Sax for Lovers CD? But that was so long ago. And they didn’t even really laugh—they smiled and joked and then had sex. But they had never, Phoebe thought, really laughed.

Phoebe looks down at the reception, sees waiters in white shirts passing out tiny dots of food. Women in cocktail dresses eating olives off toothpicks. People already on their second drink. Phoebe wonders why Lila is so worried about her million-dollar wedding being ruined yet doesn’t seem concerned to be missing the start of it.

“It’s actually Gary’s sister, Marla, who is the worst about it all,” the bride says.

“The worst about what?”

“Our age gap.”

“I thought we were talking about your dad.”

“I am tired of talking about my dad. My dad is dead . It’s been a year and a half and it is time to finally accept that, even if my mother cannot.”

“Okay, so Marla.”

“Marla keeps making this big deal about me being super young whenever we’re together. Like earlier today in the lobby, she was like, Wait, what do twenty-eight-year-olds know again? I forget. And she doesn’t even think this is rude. She acts like it’s just professional curiosity, like she’s just getting to know twenty-eight-year-olds as a species.”

“Is she an anthropologist?”

“She’s a lawyer, or well, she was until she became the mayor of her town. And now she acts like she’s the most moral human being to have ever walked the earth. Meanwhile, she’s the one who will probably have to resign for having an affair with a federal judge. And do I say a word about it? No.”

Now Phoebe is really interested. She is curious about affairs, as if any affair can teach her something about her husband’s.

“Why did she have an affair with a federal judge?”

“She must have a fetish for judges, because that is exactly what her husband is, too,” Lila says. “Except he’s just like, a regular judge. But honestly, I don’t know much more than that. Gary doesn’t like to talk about his sister’s sex life, understandably, and the rest of the family doesn’t know about it. And she never talks to me about it, obviously. We’re not close. But I do know that her children and husband barely speak to her right now, which is why they probably aren’t coming to the wedding. And serves her right. Because she fucked up her life, for real. And sometimes, I just want to be like, What do you know, Marla? Do you know anything? Because even twenty-eight-year-olds know that being the mayor and then having an affair with a federal judge is definitely a terrible idea.”

“Did you say that to her?”

“No! I’d never say that to Marla. You can’t really say anything to Marla. She’s very defensive.”

There’s a knock on the door, and Lila rushes to open it.

“Your floss,” Carlson says, and presents it on a regal brass platter like it’s a meal. It looks so small on the plate, it makes Phoebe want to laugh again. But the humor is lost on Lila.

“Thank you, Carlson,” Lila says.

Lila starts flossing while Phoebe tips him.

“I feel so much better now,” Lila says after, like all the problems are gone now that the body has been restored to perfection. She picks up the brush from the wicker basket. She combs her feathery bangs back into place. She puts a cold washcloth to the back of her neck. She is so quiet, so steady, it almost feels holy, like watching a nun prepare herself for the Lord.

“I guess I should get back down there,” the bride says, as if now she doesn’t even want to go. Now, she just wants to stay here and drink wine that is really chocolate and talk shit about her entire family with Phoebe. Phoebe almost wants that, too. Phoebe hasn’t sat and talked like this with another woman in so long. But Lila puts her hand on the doorknob.

“What can you do?” Lila asks.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s what my father said to me after we got his diagnosis. I couldn’t stop crying about it, and he was like, Lila, is there one thing you feel capable of doing right now instead of crying? And there always was.”

“What was it?” Phoebe asks.

“I would take a very long bath,” the bride says.