by Karen Karbo
Mimi lurched into the hallway, determined not to be left out. She had changed back into the red Merry Widow and was struggling with the zipper. “Don’t you want to get both of us? Two sisters? Just make sure, I need to be filmed from the side –”
“– go back,” said Ivan.
“Forget it,” said Mouse. “The show’s over.”
“No, I like this. Perhaps, though, you should see if Mrs. Lynx has that same thing in white. We want to emphasize the totemic quality of the white.”
“Brides want to be white, inside and out,” said Mimi. “I know how that is.”
“Just give me two bras, thirty-two C,” said Mouse crossly. “In beige.”
AFTER THEY FINISHED at Sins, Mimi drove Ivan and Eliot home, bumper-to-bumper down Lincoln Boulevard to Venice. This was less fun than she imagined. She hadn’t realized she’d also be roped into chauffeuring these two clowns around. How can they live in L.A. and not have a car? She glanced in the rearview mirror right into the big glass eye of the camera. Eliot and Ivan were squeezed into the backseat, filming what Ivan called “the all-important woman talk,” in which presumably much would be revealed. Ivan shot while Eliot operated the Nagra from his fat lap.
“You’ll regret that you didn’t buy anything,” said Mimi. “You only get married once for the first time.”
“I bought something.”
“Two bras, big deal. In beige.”
Mouse looked out the window.
“You can do all that weird Africa stuff and you’re afraid to spring for some decent underwear.”
“I am not,” said Mouse hotly. Mimi was right, she was. What was wrong with her? She just could not bring herself to buy those things. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars. The yearly per capita income of Mali for a peignoir set? The monthly salary of a Tanzanian schoolteacher for a teddy? It was frivolous. It was self-indulgent. It was not serious. It was something Mimi would do. And if Mimi would do it, Mouse would not. She was depressed.
Mimi sang along with the radio. “Sir or ma’am would you read my book…” She had a good voice, she thought. Not much of a range, but a clear strong alto. If anybody saw this stupid film maybe they’d hear her singing and cast her in a musical – “’cause I want to try and take the back right turn, take the back right turn!”
“It’s ‘paperback writer,’” said Mouse.
“No, listen.” Mimi turned it up.
“It’s ’cause I want to be a paperback writer,” said Mouse.
“I played this album every day of my life, I should know what it is.”
Ivan laughed in the backseat. “I used to think ‘life in the fast lane’ was ‘pipe in the Vaseline.’”
“Pipe in the Vaseline,” sang Eliot in a booming bass. “I like it.”
“You always have to be right, don’t you?” said Mimi.
“I am right,” said Mouse.
“You bought those two stupid bras,” sniffed Mimi, snapping off the radio.
Mouse reached over and snapped it back on.
Unaccountably, the traffic suddenly eased up. They caught all the lights. Mouse rolled down her window, laid her head on her arms. The thick salty air blew her hair off her face. Her eyes watered. She pretended she was a dog with no problems. On the radio, another Beatles’ song, one of the instrumentals from the psychedelic period tolerated by every one, liked by no one.
Suddenly, up ahead, a flurry of brake lights. A light-yellow Buick two cars up braked too late. The driver began to veer left onto the median, just as the car ahead of Mimi’s Datsun clipped the Buick’s rear bumper, sending it first sideways, then up, up, straight into the air, over onto its roof.
It did not look like a crash. It looked choreographed, a trained dolphin swooping into the air before falling over on its back. No horns honked. No brakes shrieked. No one screamed. There was only the homely sound of crunching sheet metal, like a trash can falling over.
To avoid the pileup, Mimi swung into the right lane without looking. Miraculously, it was clear. They sped past the Buick. The passenger window had been crushed to the size of a toaster. Wedged in the window was a rear end in khakis. The trunk had sprung open, dirty laundry was scattered on the street. The license plate was Canadian: Friendly Manitoba. Mouse knew, somehow, that the Manitobans were dead. No rear that big fits in a window that small without the fatal squeezing of some serious bones and organs.
They drove in stunned silence to a convenience-store parking lot, where Mouse called 911 on a pay phone.
Nine-one-one was more interested in knowing whether Mouse was a witness. She said she was. She described the front end rising into the air, the glint of the sun on its shiny bumper, the khaki-clothed rear end pinched in the window, the laundry scattering, Friendly Manitoba.
But did she see what happened? they asked, irritated. Did she get license numbers? What happened to the car that hit the Buick? Whose fault was it? The insurance company will need witnesses. Mouse didn’t know.
She hung up and bought some cigarettes. She imagined the phone call, luring some farm wife in from her kitchen garden, a bunch of muddy onions dangling from her hand, only to hear the horrible news. She will get all the gruesome facts and none of the important ones. She will never know: Did they realize they were dying? Did they suffer? What were their final, confused thoughts?
She will drop the onions and toss together a funeral. It will be in Manitoba; a local minister will officiate, not some hip, oversympathizing L.A. priest who’ll get the names wrong. There will be no carnation-pink hearses, no gravediggers who look like realtors sporting gold-shovel tie tacks. The final resting place will be restful, not an overcrowded cemetery with a view of the San Diego Freeway. The farm wife will make it as nice as she can, and inasmuch as these occasions can ever be nice, this one will be. Still, now and then she’ll curse herself: last year we should have gone to Europe.
Mouse went back to the car.
While she was on the phone, Mimi had broken out the potato salad. Ivan and Eliot ate greedily from a Tupperware tub with tablespoons, complimenting Mimi on the salad and her quick reflexes.
“We are used to movie sound,” said Ivan, licking mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth. “It’s bigger than life. That’s why this seemed so surreal. We are so inundated with images that reality has begun to feel unfamiliar.”
“I just think when your number’s up, your number’s up,” said Mimi. “It’s like a giant Baskin-Robbins in the sky. Number seventy-two! If you’re number seventy-two, that’s that. How else do you explain the one person who survives a plane wreck?”
“I want to go back,” said Mouse.
“By now the fuzz’ll be there,” said Eliot. “It’ll be gridlock city. We should have gotten some shots of it while we were there.”
“Are you all right?” said Ivan, leaning over the seat. He squeezed her shoulder, his eyes filled with concern.
“I want to be white inside and out,” said Mouse.
“She wants to take her bras back,” said Mimi. “This is exactly what I did. She wants the whole nine yards.”
“I want the saucy aubergine spandex Merry Widow,” she said. “I want the French what-is-it lace thing and the demicup underwire lace bra and the string bikini and the body brief and the champagne satin slippers and the red and black silk-lace teddy. I want it all and I want it in white.”
“All right!” said Eliot, “Pipe in that Vaseline.”
18
IN FEBRUARY, THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE WEDDING, Tony began to find Mouse’s lists all over the apartment. On a steno pad left on the bathroom sink he found: colors? rings? limo? One morning, while folding up the futon, he spied a dusty scrap of yellow paper wreathed in dog hair underneath: ask Tony – priest that married Shirl and Fitzy? Little Chapel of the Valley or Dorothy Chandler Pavilion?
He thought it was cute. He told her, whatever she wants he wants.
There was no more talk about what project they would do next. Mouse surprised him one night wearing some
phenomenal purple lace contraption the likes of which he’d only enjoyed before in the magazines he hid at the bottom of his suitcase. They made love after everyone else had gone to sleep, under the doleful eye of Sniffy Voyeur. He supposed she was finally happy. He knew he was.
Mouse wanted everything. Everything Nita could think of sounded good to Mouse. Personally designed invitations on hand-pressed paper, engraved in 22-carat gold ink. A horse-drawn carriage to take her and Tony to the reception at the Bel Air Hotel. Champagne imported from the Loire Valley. A wedding-morning breakfast buffet at Shirl’s. A day-after send-off barbecue at Malibu, complete with volleyball match, including printed T-shirts for each team (brides vs. grooms). Gold keychains for the ushers. Gold bracelets for the bridesmaids. The church lit entirely by candles flown in from Vatican City. The Pink Fiend, who had badgered Mouse for as long as she could remember, tacitly approved.
Mouse lay on Nita’s mooshy mauve sofa poring through piles of two-ton bridal magazines. There were two things Mouse did not want: (1) a theme, (2) a band at the reception whose rendition of “Brown Sugar” was so lousy they might as well play the CD.
All right, said Nita, no theme, but what image did Mouse want to convey? Would she like the wedding to have a country feel? A tropical feel? An African feel?
Move over Chuck and Di, said Mouse, is the feeling she wished to convey. Money was no object.
Mouse was only mildly surprised at her change of heart. For every action there was an opposite and equal reaction. This was a law of human behavior as well as physics. She remembered once waiting nine hours at an airstrip in a small Sudanese village to catch a plane to an even smaller Sudanese village. She and Tony read aloud from a book they had found in their hotel. It was the story of a Uruguayan soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes. They were flying home from Peru. They were stranded in the Andes for months. Those who lived cannibalized those who died. In the end, three were rescued. When they returned to Uruguay, one committed suicide, one joined a religious order, one threw himself into a life of complete excess. Mouse and Tony decided if the same thing had happened to them, Tony would probably be the one to hurl himself back into life, cashing in on the world’s blatant pleasures. Mouse, they figured, would either become a monk or work herself to death trying to get funding for a ten-part series on survivors. Well, well, well.
This was Mimi’s attitude. Well, well, well. The chickens come home to roost. She was relieved. At first. Relieved and smug. Mouse losing sleep over whether to go with a chapel-length or cathedral train proved to Mimi that she was right all along: all brides want an extravagant, fairy-tale wedding and Mouse, Ms. Free Spirit-World Traveler, was no different from all brides. Was no different from her, Mimi.
Mouse began to jog with Mimi around the neighborhood each morning. Mimi welcomed the company. At first. Mimi could hardly keep up with her. Not because Mouse was in better shape but because Mimi could not stop talking, warning Mouse of impending prenuptial pitfalls. Do not, do not, get a facial on the day of the wedding. Eat something before, you won’t eat a bite at the reception. Put Vaseline on your teeth. Mouse panted lightly beside her. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Uh-huh.” Mimi knew she wasn’t listening, merely indulging her.
“Isn’t she cute, the little bride,” said Mimi, one night when Mouse was curled up next to Tony on the couch, badgering him to at least give her an idea about the sort of china pattern he would like. A nice floral Wedgwood lined with 24-carat gold? Or maybe some plain old white bone Limoges. Money was no object.
“It’s an object to those of us who have to put out for the fucking place settings,” Mimi yelled from the kitchen, where she was making oatmeal cookies, forking the batter into her mouth with her first two fingers.
Mouse lay on Nita’s mooshy mauve sofa reading the résumé of a woodwind quartet for the pre-ceremony musical entertainment while Nita made phone calls. Lining up bands to audition for the reception. Arranging interviews with prospective florists and caterers. Finding the best wedding photographer, portrait photographer, and videographer.
Booking a famous at-home hair stylist and makeup artist who would come to Shirl’s the day of the ceremony to work her magic on Mouse, Shirl, Bea Cheatham (Tony’s mother, coming from Hong Kong with Noel Cheatham, his father), Mimi (Maid of Honor), Carole and Lisa (bridesmaids), and Gabrielle (Mouse’s best friend, also a bridesmaid, coming from Nairobi with her Belgian husband, Wim). Mouse would also have a facial, a pedicure, a manicure, and a Shiatsu body massage. It was not easy finding a manicurist to tackle Mouse’s green under-the-nail fungal disease, but eventually one was found.
Money was no object. After the usual bureaucratic delay, Shirl received her settlement, doled out Mr. Edmonton’s thirty-five-percent fee and deposited the rest in a checking account on which Mouse and Tony were joint cosigners. On the advice of Shirl’s accountant, the proper percentage was set aside for taxes. Mouse and Tony bought an inexpensive Toyota. Remembering Ralph’s warning that no one wanted to make a movie with someone who drove an econo-box, Tony insisted upon the next up from the bottom of the line, anticipating all the production meetings he would be driving to once Love Among Elephants was finally a “go” movie.
The money dwindled. Still, it was more than what all but a fraction of the world made in a year. Some of it was used to foot travel expenses for Gabrielle and Wim. Mouse also commissioned Gabrielle to track down Stanley, buy him a top-of-the-line electric wheelchair, a suit coat, and an airplane ticket. Stanley had often said he wouldn’t mind seeing the States; Tony said he wouldn’t mind having a few more souls sitting on his side of the church. If Stanley was not at his usual post outside The New Stanley hotel, perhaps he could be found at his village, three days into the bush. Pas de problème, Gabrielle wired Mouse after receiving the instructions. Because it was her best friend’s wedding, Gabrielle, earnest and duty-bound as a doctor taking the Hippocratic Oath, swore to do everything humanly possible to get Stanley across two continents and one ocean to witness the happy occasion.
There were moments when Mouse thought she should be shot for spending so much on what amounted to a fifteen-minute ceremony. Instead, everyone indulged her. She was, after all, the bride.
Shirl wanted to accompany Mouse to her meetings with Nita, but Mouse said she wanted Shirl to be surprised. What Mouse was waiting for was the right moment to break the news about Wedding March. Then Shirl, now Mouse’s best friend and confidante, would be more than welcome.
Mouse insisted that Shirl use some of the settlement money for whatever remodeling she wanted to do. Although everyone coming from out of town could be put up at the Bel Air, Shirl and Auntie Barb wanted to host the wedding-morning breakfast buffet at the house on Cantaloupe Avenue. Shirl wanted to paint. She wanted new carpet installed. She wanted the lagoon drained and the bottom repainted. Mouse pored over swatches with her at the kitchen table, a box of doughnuts between them. Shirl was off glazed and onto cake, an improvement, in everyone’s eyes. Her hair had grown back. She took Mouse with her to the salon when she had it dyed and, pointing to her daughter’s espresso-colored curls (the perm had grown out nicely), said, “I want that.”
Auntie Barb hovered, eavesdropping, in the background, her mouth a disapproving line embedded in her big wrinkled face. In Oregon, people were prudent. In Oregon, a girl knew how to make her wedding day special without spending an arm and a leg.
Since Auntie Barb had been in Los Angeles taking care of Shirl, she had subscribed to the Oregonian, from which she cut out articles on Oregon brides who wove their own headpieces from woodland flowers, on the potluck reception then enjoying a renaissance in the great Northwest. She left them and other pieces on the kitchen table in the morning for her sister next to her orange juice and anticonvulsant medication. Shirl thanked her, then passed them on to Mouse with a roll of her eyes.
One afternoon Shirl took out her wedding album to show Mouse. They were sitting outside at a patio table by the lagoon eating macaroons. A Santa Ana had swe
pt in at the end of February. Dry palms rustled overhead. Auntie Barb practiced her much-admired golf swing on the patch of dichondra by the side of the house.
“Dermot and Shirley” was engraved on the cover of the album in gold. Shirl ran a chubby finger over their names. Mouse expected her to cry. Instead she said, “Can you believe I married a man named Dermot? How could anyone do that to a child?”
The pictures were large and few. The requisite tender portrait of the bride, in which Shirl looked as though she was ready to burst out laughing. Fitzy and Shirl trooping down the aisle. The kiss at the alter. Cutting the cake. Throwing the garter. They were dark-haired and trim, dazed as a pair of rabbits caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Mouse saw her chin and eyes in Fitzy, Mimi’s wide mouth in Shirl.
“Mom, remember I told you that Ivan wanted to make a documentary film about the wedding?”
“Ivan” – Shirl shook her head – “what a confused boy.”
“What do you mean? He won an Oscar.”
“You used to be confused like that. Lorraine – down to the craft shop. You know, with that skin problem? Teaches gold-leafing? Her daughter is forty-one and hasn’t had sex in eight years. She’s just green that my Mousie Mouse has found somebody.”
“We’re doing it,” said Mouse. “Making the movie.” She explained the situation. They were shooting her portion first, in order to prove to Tony that this, too, was Oscar-winning material. If after they showed the footage to Tony he still objected, the project would be scrapped.
“It makes it even more special, Mom. Have any of your friends at the craft shop had a movie about their kids’ weddings shown on TV?”
Shirl considered this. “She hasn’t had a date since the hostage crisis, Lorraine’s daughter.”
Out of the corner of her eye Mouse saw Auntie Barb dashing her golf club to the ground. She stomped over, fists on her hips, the tendons in her scrawny neck taut. “I cannot bear this a minute longer. Shirl, open your eyes. She’s taking advantage of your good nature, can’t you see? You already said you were against this movie idea and she’s gone ahead and done it anyway. You are footing the bill, and here she is waltzing around like the world was made for her own pleasure. You wouldn’t see a girl in Oregon getting involved in some foul movie nonsense. In Oregon, children respect their parents –”