I put a bite of fish in my mouth and suddenly noticed Wray’s sister, Ali, his aunt, Pam, and his mom, all standing up in front of the crowd, wearing theatrical Sunday hats as if they were going to the Mother’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. Wray’s two little cousins, who were just five and eight, stood in front of them.
“Going to the chapel and they’re gonna get married,” they began to sing out of the clear blue. Nicole looked at me as if the people belting out the song before us had lost their minds.
In spite of their enthusiastic efforts, they were wildly off-key. They’d made up lyrics that explained how Wray and I had met, but it was impossible to hear the words as they all sang on top of each other. They must have reached the end because they stopped singing, and after a pause, the crowd started clapping.
Mom stood up and walked to the back of my chair with a rueful smile. “You would kill me if we stood up and embarrassed you like that,” she said, leaning over to speak in my ear. “Good luck with that.”
She was right. I would have been furious with them. But it was hardly the time to point it out.
“Please, just stay here with me,” I begged Wray as he deposited me in the room that was supposed to be mine but had nothing of mine in it. I’d fled the rehearsal dinner shortly after dessert.
“No, sweetie. I can’t do that. I have a million people waiting for me.” He smiled, itching to get back out the door.
I tried to kiss him. “Please, don’t leave me here. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Tomorrow is going to be a disaster. There are so many people and personalities to manage, I’m not sure how I’m going to keep everyone together for the whole day. Tiffany can’t relax and Mom is going to insult someone beyond repair. I can feel it. It’s going to be a disaster.” I sighed.
“Stop saying things like that. It’s going to be wonderful! You are starting to hurt my feelings with all this,” he said.
“You know that’s not what I mean. I just wish we’d planned a beach wedding somewhere, with no dress, and no programs, and no chairs with bows. Just here’s the beach where we are getting married, come if you can, don’t wear shoes, we’ll have a big party afterward with lots of margaritas. No big deal. We would have planned it. Very little fanfare. It would have been perfect. It would have been my wedding.”
“You’re tired. You’re stressed. Our families are making you crazy. Have a drink. Take some Advil. Go to bed. What can I get you?” he said.
I went inside the walk-in closet and changed out of my dress and into a chemise while we were talking. Then I walked out and pulled him to me and kissed him, thinking I could use some feminine wiles to keep him there.
“No. Not tonight. Tomorrow. Not here. Not now. Go to bed. Or come out with us,” he suggested.
“No. The last thing I need is to stay out all night drinking. I’ll be hungover and splotchy tomorrow.”
“Okay . . . ,” he agreed.
And with that, he disappeared.
In the morning I got up and went down to the kitchen to find Deborah, the wedding planner, waiting with coffee already made.
“Good morning! It’s the bride,” she said with way too much energy. I wanted to turn down her volume but I didn’t see the knob.
The doorbell rang, and Wray’s little sister, Ali, wandered in. It wasn’t even nine, and she’d agreed to be the hair and makeup artists’ first victim. Asking her to show up early was Mom’s subtle way of hazing Wray’s family. Ali looked like she hadn’t slept.
“My mom dropped me off in the driveway. I’m sorry, she’s still in her workout clothes. She didn’t want to come in.”
The wedding planner handed her a cup of coffee, which she took politely and then set in the middle of the coffee table without sipping.
“Do you want something in it?” I asked.
“No. Thanks. I’d rather have a Diet Coke,” she answered. Then she dove into the couch and hid her head under a stiff decorative pillow.
Ali was a senior at Florida State, a sorority sister, and an all-around good sport. She’d been nothing but welcoming to me, even as I joined a family where she’d always been the unchallenged princess and the only girl. Now she was trying to power through an intense hangover to get ready, ridiculously early, for a full day of wedding formalities. She was a superstar. I stopped myself short of making any comparisons to my own sister.
“I will go check and see if they’re ready to start your makeup,” I said, walking up the stairs. When I got to the top, Tiffany was standing on the landing.
“Who’s here?” she asked. Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. The remnants of last night’s black eyeliner had bled into dark circles under eyes; her skin looked red and irritated.
“Ali just got here. What are you doing?” I said.
She pulled a small bottle of Kahlua out of the pocket of her robe.
“Look! I got this for our coffee. For while we’re getting ready,” she said with a sly smile.
“Seriously? It’s like nine o’clock in the morning. Not even,” I said. I flashed back to the bathroom at Magic Mountain.
“But this day is going to be absolute torture,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to be,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said, putting the bottle in her pocket and going back inside her room.
Tiffany stayed lost in her room for most of the day, while my other bridesmaids arrived and changed into plush, monogrammed robes. Together we reveled in the ceremony of getting our faces painted and our hair curled and pinned into place, tendril by tendril. We sipped tea and gossiped, as my friends politely ignored my sister’s glaring absence.
Even though they were too gracious to say anything, I felt ashamed that my own sister, my maid of honor, didn’t want to celebrate my wedding day with me the same way my girlfriends did. Friends representing every stage of my life had flown in and agreed to wear dresses they’d never choose for themselves or wear again, all for me. But the one person who’d been there from birth couldn’t bring herself to lock arms with me and just be at my side. It hurt.
By the time we were ready to leave for the ceremony, the sky was still gray after drizzling that morning, which had sent Mom and Deborah into a tailspin. We were walking down a red velvet aisle, outside on a terrace, with no protection from the elements. We’d banked on the fact that it almost never rains in Southern California. The entire time I was in high school, rain never fell on a school day.
“Are you ready?” Mom said, walking into the bathroom. “You look so beautiful. I know you are going to be so happy.”
“Thanks, Mom. Where’s Tiffany?” I asked.
“She was just torturing me about that dress. She looks beautiful, but she doesn’t think so. She’d be happier if she were thinner. Your friends are gorgeous; that’s hard for her,” she said with a sigh.
“I know. I wish . . .” My voice broke off. I didn’t want to get emotional yet; I knew it was going to be an emotional day. And I didn’t want to say aloud that I just wished she would be normal for one day. Calm and relaxed in her skin. Or even able to just set aside her anxiety for one day to focus on something or someone else.
“Just let it go for now. It’s your day. I love you. Now let’s go,” Mom said, for once the voice of reason.
When we pulled up in front of the Lake Sherwood Country Club, the cloud cover hung low, casting a foggy haze over the fairway that rolled up to the back door. I could see the edge of the terrace, where busboys were crouched down, mopping up the moisture that had collected on the stone deck. They moved back and forth quickly with small white towels, drying and polishing the limestone.
Clusters of pink and off-white lilies, hydrangeas, and roses greeted us at the door as we got out of the car and approached the main part of the club. Dana walked next to me, holding the train of my gown to make sure the thick white silk didn’t pick up any dirt.
We stepped through the doorway where Deborah greeted us and ushered us into a back room, so none of the gatheri
ng guests would catch a glimpse of the dress.
“Perfect!” she said. “The dress fits like a glove.”
I’d picked a two-piece wedding dress, a straight skirt, and jeweled corset that laced up the back, passing up the traditional wedding-cake-shaped gown with a full skirt and way too much fabric. I carried the long veil that I would put on right before I went down the aisle.
Deborah led us to a room right off the terrace where I was to wait with my bridesmaids for the ceremony to start. I could hear Wray in the next room, laughing loudly with his friends, having a great time. They were horsing around while we were sweating the last-minute details, like whether one of us needed more powder or lip gloss, or if there were enough chairs for the number of guests who turned out.
Eventually the time came for the girls to head down the aisle ahead of me. They went out one by one, holding small bouquets and smiling nervously. Tiffany was last. She’d been the last to arrive in the waiting room, brow furrowed and frowning.
“Are you ready?” I asked her. She was supposed to walk out ahead of me. When I looked in her face, I saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, starting to panic. She didn’t respond.
Deborah came over and tapped her arm to let her know it was her turn.
“Are you ready?” Deborah asked. Tiffany shook her head no, but then stepped across the threshold anyway.
I had been focusing on holding it together myself, but now Tiffany was a dam ready to burst, the last thing I needed.
“This is it, baby,” my dad said, looping his arm through mine. “I love you so much.”
When we emerged through the doorway, 176 heads swiveled to see us. I looked over the crowd and saw the faces of my life as I walked slowly down the aisle, arm in arm with Dad, trying not to trip on the carpet of the hem of my dress, smiling and nodding at guests here and there.
Wray stood to the right of the altar, so handsome in his black tuxedo, beaming with happiness, the Prince Charming at the end of any fairy tale. All his groomsmen surrounded him in black-tie glory. My eyes swept over my bridesmaids, each prettier than the one before, smiling, pink lip gloss freshly applied, hair cascading.
Then I saw Tiffany’s face at the end of the line, flooded with tears that poured down her cheeks, landing on her steel gray dress in dark pools just below her neck. She stood there, crying as if someone had died, right next to a grand, graceful arch of greenery and flowers that buzzed with dozens of hummingbirds.
Wray and I spent two blissful weeks in Bali and then Hawaii, totally isolated from the world. A wave of relief washed over me as soon as we put distance between ourselves and the hysteria of the wedding, our families, our friends, everyone we knew in the world. I didn’t worry about anything except getting a sunburn.
Wray was the polar opposite of my family. He had such carefree joy. Even when he saw a problem, he just solved it instead of assigning blame and making it worse, like my family always had. If we were late for dinner, he didn’t get angry about who’d gotten ready too slowly. He just called the restaurant or sweet-talked the hostess to get us seated a little later.
“No need to panic,” he’d tease with a smile. I didn’t know how I’d gotten so lucky. He made happiness easy.
We’d been back in the country for twenty-four hours before I could bring myself to call my parents’ house and break the spell. I got Dad.
“Well, I have something to tell you,” he said. “Your sister is in rehab.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t figure out what was more startling, the news or the fact that my parents were acknowledging that Tiffany had a problem and they were doing something about it.
“Well. Wow,” I said finally.
Looking back at the wedding, Tiffany’s mood had shifted after the ceremony. She’d ditched her bridesmaid’s dress and changed into a black number of her own choosing before the wait staff had even finished serving cocktails, a move no other bridesmaid in the modern era had ever had the nerve to pull.
I walked into the main dining room and saw her standing with my dad in a floor-length black halter-neck gown. I did a double take. I’m sure all of my bridesmaids would have preferred another dress over the one my mom had chosen for them, if only to avoid being dressed like quadruplets, but they wouldn’t have dared to change. Only Tiffany would blow off protocol so blatantly.
Frankly, I didn’t care about the dress. I wanted her to feel comfortable. But this new twist in her behavior was just another shock on top of her already jaw-dropping conduct during the ceremony.
“You changed,” I said slowly.
“Yeah, isn’t this cute?” she said with a smile, the flood of tears at the altar now long forgotten. “I just feel so much better in this dress. The one Mom made us all wear was awful.”
I just nodded without really responding. The bridesmaids’ dresses were pretty, long gray gowns without too much detail. The skirts might have been too full, tighter would have looked better, but overall they were nothing like so many of the over-the-top frilly prom styles I’d seen.
As the sister of the bride, Tiffany should have been the best sport, the most cooperative, not the most unmanageable. You’d never guess she was the maid of honor.
“Your sister changed?” my college roommate Debbie said, as she came up beside me. Debbie had been particularly understanding about the bridesmaid dress, given that her usual wardrobe was urban hiking wear. Her biggest fashion decision was usually whether to wear her L.L.Bean or the Patagonia fleece. But she hadn’t complained, even about the makeup, which she usually barely wore.
“I didn’t know that was an option,” she continued.
“It really wasn’t,” I said.
Over the next few hours, I never saw Tiffany without a drink in her hand. She bounced up and down wildly on the dance floor, arms flailing, shoes long gone. An hour in, she pulled her hair up into a sloppy ponytail, throwing any wedding decorum out the window. She was partying like it was New Year’s Eve.
“Well, your sister seems to be having a wonderful time now,” one of Wray’s mom’s friends commented primly. She was a slender tee-totaler with a neatly coiffed bouffant and a tight, perfectly tailored turquoise dress. Her dark eyes danced beneath her plucked brows as she observed Tiffany’s behavior.
“It was so sweet the way she just sobbed when you were at the altar, her little sister getting married ahead of her. What a sweet and sensitive girl she is,” she continued.
I didn’t respond. Her comments felt like a dig. But I couldn’t be sure, so I let it go.
Tiffany went from painfully withdrawn to sobbing to euphoric in the course of the night. Her moods, and the impact she was making on the other guests, were exhausting to track.
By the end of the night I was just done.
“So how did that happen?” I asked Dad, my thoughts returning to rehab.
“Well, it turns out, she didn’t exactly leave her job at Walters and Flemming of her own accord. They caught her drinking during the day at work. She admitted it to me a few days before the wedding but I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it while you were here. And I talked to her buddy Molly, who admitted that they drank and dabbled in a little of everything at Cal, but said she too was really worried that Tiffany never sort of settled down. She seemed stalled. Maybe she needs to kick the booze to jump-start her life.”
“I hope alcohol is the problem,” I said.
“Why? You think it’s drugs?” he asked.
I realized that I had felt unsure of Tiffany’s moods for a long time. Her behavior wasn’t so easily explained by substances. “No. I just don’t know if removing the alcohol eliminates the problem, or just unmasks it,” I said. “I’d love to think alcohol was the reason she behaved like a jerk at the wedding, but I just don’t know.”
I called a few days later and got Mom.
“So you heard about Tiffany?” she said. Her tone oozed irritation.
“Yeah. It’s good
news. A fresh start,” I said, immediately wanting to be positive.
“Do you have any idea what rehab costs? It’s gonna be like ten thousand dollars. And you know, they don’t even guarantee it works on the first try! They almost guarantee it won’t work. I’m going to kill her if she comes out and throws it all away drinking again,” Mom said.
“I don’t think anyone ever just does it once, and presto! they’re fixed,” I said, trying to manage her expectations.
“Well, we don’t have the money to do this again. Do you?” she said.
“No. That’s a pretty big percentage of my reporter’s salary.”
“And now the wedding bills are all piling up! And she adds this to it. At least I’m done paying for you. Once we pay for the wedding, that’s it.”
I hadn’t called to talk about money. So I tried to change the subject.
“How’s everything else going? What’s new with you?” I asked.
“Nothing. Have you heard more from everyone about how beautiful the wedding was?” she solicited.
“Yes, all my friends thought it was the most beautiful wedding ever,” I replied. Never mind that most of them weren’t married and we didn’t have that much experience to draw on.
“Like who? What did they say? I want details. I worked so hard, I want to hear every word . . .”
I could tell we were going to have a lot of conversations like this over the next few months.
Tiffany emerged from rehab a month later. I had to call home a number of times to actually get her.
“Hey,” I said when I finally caught up with her.
“Hey. So. How’s married life?” she said in an even tone.
“Good. How about you?” I asked. I wanted to tell her I was proud of her, but that seemed condescending coming from a little sister.
Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter Page 23