by Dawn Dumont
When I found out that Tabitha was pregnant, I wanted her to move back home. I would have gladly shared my bedroom with her and the new baby. She didn’t need to go off and get married and be all grown up. But this was hardly something you could say when everyone was swept up in the excitement of wedding planning. My sister was married. I had lost the battle and now I had the crinoline scarred legs to prove it.
I sighed deeply and reminded myself that what was done was done. At least her wedding afforded me the chance to attend a party. There were a lot of people at the wedding and I wanted to meet everyone. First I had to get drunk.
My sister Celeste, my cousin Jolene and I had found a stash of beer the night before. Found, stole, it’s hard to remember which now. We hid the beer in the back of the hall while everyone else was decorating. When Jolene went to look for the secret stash, it was gone. Of course now when I look back, beer had a way of disappearing when Jolene was around.
It was no matter. Everyone got their hands on drinks. All the adults were drinking and the liquor was spilling over into the mouths of the teenagers. My fourteen-year-old cousin Cindy passed out on the table at ten pm, her head in her hands.
I was the youngest bridesmaid and was paired up with my brother-in-law’s nineteen-year-old brother Charles. I hoped that he would have been a tall, lean Corey Haim look- alike.
Not quite. Charles was a shorter, heavier version of my brother-in-law with a buffalo-sized head. Charles and I danced together for a waltz.
“Your parents let you date?” Charles asked.
“Not until I’m in grade eleven and I’m only in grade nine.” (This was a lie — the topic had never come up — but there was no way I was gonna let Buffalo Head know that.)
“You’re in grade nine? What a coincidence, so am I.”
“Quit lying!” I said giving him a playful swat.
“I’m not.” His voice was hard.
I looked at him in disbelief then wiped the look off my face when I saw him redden.
“Oh right, I think I remember my sister mentioning that.” I nodded my head as if that was a normal thing. “How are you finding chemistry?”
He’d seen the shocked look in my eyes and the waltz was awkward after that, as has been every other encounter since.
The dance with the groomsman ended my bridesmaid responsibilities. Sitting alone at the head table, I sipped cranberry juice from a plastic cup and cursed my heavy dress. It was long and scratchy. There were grandmothers dressed cooler than I was. Everywhere I turned everyone seemed to be tipsy, half cut and fully wasted and I wanted to catch up! I went in search of my extra clothes that I had given Celeste the night before and told her: “Bring this to the wedding, Celeste, so that I won’t have to walk around looking like the tooth fairy all night.” I found Celeste at a table in the corner, building a pyramid of plastic beer cups with Jolene.
“Where are my clothes?”
“Hey, it’s the pink lady!” Celeste elbowed Jolene and they laughed in that happy, euphoric way that only stolen beer causes.
“Where are my clothes?”
“What clothes?” she asked.
“The ones I asked you to bring for me.”
“Oh, I knew I forgot something. You look nice,” Celeste said. A lie. My skin was red from the scratchy pink dress and I was limping in my one-inch heels. Celeste, on the other hand, was comfortably dressed in a pair of tight jeans with cool Reebok sneakers on her feet.
Nothing, absolutely nothing was falling to place. No cute escort! No cute jeans! It was gonna be the worst night of my life.
My sister finished another beer and piled it onto the top of her beer pyramid.
“Hey, you know what?” she breathed Budweiser into my face.
“What?”
“I think I left a skirt in the change room from the rehearsal dinner last night,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded as she took a sip from another beer that Jolene had placed into her hand.
“What about a shirt?”
“Here you go.”
Jolene drunkenly pulled her T-shirt off to reveal a white tank top underneath. And a black bra underneath that. A pretty risqué look even for the eighties. But like I said, Jolene has always been ahead of her time.
I ran to the back of the hall to the change room. I found my sister’s wrinkled black miniskirt. I held it up next to Jolene’s beer-stained T-shirt. Wrinkled and dirty, or prissy and pink?
I had nowhere to put my dress so I bundled it up in a ball and stuffed it into a black garbage bag. Days later my older sister would find it and confront me for being an ungrateful brat but that was in the future and I was living in the NOW. I wanted to meet someone, a cute guy, with black hair who played hockey and who looked cool drinking a beer. “He” would be here. I had no doubt.
I looked around the wedding. I couldn’t see any cute guys or at least not any that I wasn’t related to. I saw a lot of women. Most of them performing the same desperate scan I was making. My eyes locked with an older girl cousin who had been single longer than I had been alive. I quickly looked away.
My brother walked up to me. David’s face was red and his hair was stuck to his head.
“Where’s Mom?” His voice had a thick milky quality.
“I don’t know, why are you talking like that?”
“I’m sick.”
I sniffed him. “You’re drunk. Hey, were did you get those?” I asked pointing at his neck.
David’s neck was ringed with giant hickeys. You could have matched the mouth to those hickeys, they were so dark and distinct. Wow, even my twelve-year-old brother was getting lucky.
“What are you talking about? Where’s Mom?” he asked. Then he stumbled and grabbed onto me. I tried to pry his hands off me. “Go play with our cousins or something,” I told him.
“I want to go home.” His big eyes were watery. I rolled my eyes, now here was someone who could not hold his liquor. Although in retrospect, I’d be frightened to meet a preteen who could.
I went to find Tabitha. She would know what to do with David.
David followed along behind me. “Quit walking so fast,” he complained.
“I’m not walking fast, you’re really slow,” I replied. I headed out of the hall over to the bar/motel. To escape her family and friends, Tabitha had booked a room in the motel next to the hall with her husband. I knocked on the door of her room. Tabitha opened it looking like she was tired of being asked for things.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You better get him home,” she said, looking at David who staggered under the weight of her gaze.
I had no intention of doing that — I was pawning him off on Mom as soon as I found her. “Where are the keys to the truck?”
“Dad must have them,” she replied and shut the door.
I ran next door to the bar. I heard my dad’s giant laugh from outside. “You stay here,” I told David.
“I’ll do whatever you want, I just want to go home,” he said. (Whenever David drinks, he becomes oddly obedient.)
I pushed my way into the bar, sure that my heavily made up face would get me past the bouncer. I was right. I stood in the bar and enjoyed the ambiance for a moment. The ceiling was low, clearly no one anticipated any NBA players popping by. People were crowded around the bar, talking loudly. A man sat by himself at a table with his head in his hands as he sobbed. The air was stale, like it had died and lingered. (There was also a smell of burnt cabbage but the bar served no food. Odd.) My heart beat excitedly to be in such a glamorous environment.
My dad was holding court among old friends and new. He had married off his oldest daughter; not many men at the table could say that. He knew he had done something right. If you asked him to tell you what that was exactly, he would have been at a loss to explain.
I asked him the question that I’ve surely asked him a thousand times since I’ve learned to drive. “Do you have the keys, Dad?”
/>
“How’s your dad gonna get home?” one of my uncles asked.
“I’m gonna ride Nathan home,” Dad said, and the whole table broke into laughter.
By this time Nathan was passed out in a chair beside my dad, his face looking young in an old, grey suit.
Dad handed me the keys and I hurried out of the bar. With the keys to the family vehicle in my hand, I still believed that something amazing could happen. In order of most exciting: 1. A cute guy would kiss me. 2. I’d get invited to a really fun party. That’s it. At fifteen, there was not much else on my mind.
I went back into the hall and was disappointed to find that it, and the opportunity for the best night of my life, had emptied out. The tables were bare now and one of my more formidable aunties was cleaning up. I edged into the shadows so that I couldn’t be enlisted to join the cleaning patrol. This is where my mom found me. She walked out of the bathroom and ran straight into me. My mother rarely drank. When she did, she made it seem like a tedious job. She was only tipsy and already seemed hung over.
“Find your sister and brother,” she demanded. “We’re going home.”
I was caught.
A few minutes later, five people had piled into our pickup truck. It was a single cab, meant for three at the most. I drove; Celeste, Jolene, my mom, and my brother sat next to me. It was too cold for someone to sit in the back, although if someone could have, my vote would have been for Celeste who spent the whole trip dry heaving beside me.
Celeste was in good spirits, however, and laughed at everything she saw. David complained that Celeste’s laugh was hurting his ears. Mom kept telling everyone to shut up and Jolene sat quietly, calculating the quantities of beer in each of her secret stashes located throughout the province of Saskatchewan.
I was happy to be the driver, as I didn’t even have my license yet. My happiness would have been complete if: 1. A cute boy had kissed me, or 2. I had been invited to a cool party, and 3. My mom had passed out instead of giving me frequent orders to slow down.
We got to the house and I thought, there’s still a chance. I enlisted Jolene as my wing woman because she was one of those rare creatures who was always up for fun and because Celeste was already snoring on her bed. I couldn’t use the truck because Mom wisely tore the keys out of my hand before heading to her bed to pass out. So Jolene and I snuck out of the house. At the very least, I knew my family members would be partying next door at Uncle Frank’s house. It was less than five minutes way at a brisk jog. The path was dark but we had walked it a million times.
The path was wet with dew. The sky looked half awake and I ran faster because I knew my chances for a fun night were running out
We got into my uncle’s yard just as three cars pulled into the driveway. I didn’t recognize any of them and I was glad because I knew it was my older sister’s friends, the leather and jeans clad teenagers. I ran up to one of the cars and the driver rolled down the window.
“Hi!” I said brightly (I had been aiming for cool). “Do you know where a party is?”
Before the driver could reply, the voice of God rang out from my grandpa’s porch. And he sounded exactly like my Aunt Beth. Normally, she was my sweetest and gentlest aunt, except it seemed, when her sixteen-year-old niece was leaning into a car full of strange boys.
“Dawn, get your ass over here!” she yelled. I was still young enough that an adult’s voice had power over me. I immediately backed away from the car. My uncle stepped out onto the porch next to my aunt. For the past four days they had hosted a bachelor party. (Yes, a four-day bachelor party.) They had bought beer and hard stuff and even a Texas mickey. They had driven to town to pick up more booze and snacks. They had helped write naughty words on the faces of my cousins when they passed out and had taken pictures of the bachelor party guests in embarrassing positions with goats and other livestock. All of that was over. Now their faces wore the looks of people who had never partied and never would again.
The driver rolled up his window and turned his car around. The other cars followed him out of the yard. I still remember the look of their lights as they all turned in the same direction, away from me.
“Good night Dawn!” my aunt called gleefully from the front steps as she walked back inside the house. Her cockblocking efforts had put an extra bounce in her step.
Minutes later Jolene and I trudged back to my house down the same path, the smell of spring rising up into the air as we crunched the grass and gravel under our feet. I silently cursed my bad luck. Jolene sipped a beer she had procured from one of her stashes.
The next day Tabitha and her new husband came by the house for brunch. My brother-in-law teased my siblings and me with newfound confidence; God had officially sanctioned his obnoxiousness. Tabitha sat beside me on the couch as she drank her coffee and I worked my way through a stack of pancakes. “Did you have a good time at the wedding?” she asked.
“Yeah, it was fun. I didn’t meet any cute guys through.”
She smiled with the confidence that comes from wearing a gold ring. “Don’t be in such a hurry. Everything comes in time.”
Mom’s Wedding
In the picture, Mom’s wedding gown ballooned around her as she clasped her bouquet to her waist.
“Wow, you look so chubby,” I said.
“Cuz I’m inside her belly, right Mom?” Celeste asked.
“Yup. Five months, pregnant.” Mom added, “I had the worst case of hemorrhoids.”
Behind Mom stood three bridesmaids. All of them wore excited smiles as if to say, “I can’t believe we’re getting away with this.” Mom touched her own photo, smoothing out the corners. “I can’t believe I ever looked that young.”
A new question occurred to me. “Hey, when did you and Dad meet anyway?”
“I knew him from school and we had dated this one time when we were teenagers. I broke up with him because I thought he drank too much. I was much smarter back then.” She got up to refill her coffee cup.
“Then what happened?” Celeste asked. “Did he stop drinking for you?”
“I moved to the city and then after a couple of years, I came back and started working at the band office.”
“And Dad was chief!” Celeste and I said in unison.
“He was the band administrator then.”
“Was he like really cute and you were like all weird around him, like you couldn’t even breathe right when he walked into the room?” I asked.
“He was okay,” Mom answered as she stirred sugar and cream into her coffee. “I was too busy looking after your older sister. I wasn’t thinking about dating anyone.”
“He asked you out on a date?”
“I was living with grandpa and grandma so he came over and asked grandpa if he could go out with me.”
“See, now that’s romantic!” I crowed.
“I guess so.”
“Where’d you go on the first date?” Celeste asked. “Somewhere fancy in the city like Red Lobster?”
We had never been to Red Lobster because Mom always said it was too expensive.
“As if. There wasn’t even Red Lobsters back then,” I told Celeste.
“I’m not a dinosaur,” Mom said dryly.
“So there were Red Lobsters?”
“Well, no there weren’t. That’s not important cuz we didn’t go to the city, we went down to the valley. To the old pizza place. I wasn’t used to going out so I got really drunk and your dad had to take me home early. I’m surprised he even asked me out again.”
“But he did.”
“He did.”
“Then you had me. In a blizzard,” I added, turning the page in the photo album to a baby picture of me.
“And then you got pregnant with me!” Celeste said and pointed to a baby picture of her.
“God, you were an ugly baby,” I said.
“Dawn!” Mom said in her warning voice.
“Then Dad said, ‘we should get married, eh?’ That’s the worst proposal I’ve ever
heard,” I said even though it was the only one I had ever heard of.
“Life isn’t like the movies,” Mom replied as she brushed Celeste’s bangs out of her eyes.
“Did you love Dad?” Celeste asked.
“Well, yeah, why else would I marry him?”
“Cuz you had me and you were pregnant with that one,” I said.
“That didn’t matter. Grandpa told me, ‘you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. We’ll help you look after the little ones.’”
“Do you ever wish you didn’t marry Dad?” I asked. It was a fair question because Mom complained about Dad’s drinking to us all the time.
“Every day,” she said.
“Really?” Celeste asked, her eyes big with worry.
We could never tell when Mom was being serious. Neither Mom nor Dad were romantic and they mocked their relationship every chance they got, like a Catskills comedy team. “You’re a nag.” “You’re a cheap bastard.” “Your face makes me want to puke.” “People say I look like you!” Despite their protesting, we suspected that love was keeping them together, or a shared part in a homicide.
A.J.’s Wedding
My cousin A.J. married a white girl nearly a decade after Tabitha’s wedding. It was the first mixed wedding in our family. “So what if she’s a white girl? It’s not a big deal,” everyone kept saying. A.J. had known the girl for years; the family all knew her. “It’s not a big deal! So what if she’s white?!”
A.J., like my older sister, was a family pet so everyone went to his wedding. The wedding itself, I missed. Having been a bridesmaid, I knew from experience that Catholic Church weddings were deadly boring. I knew that the real action was at the reception and this one promised to be the best reception yet — especially since I was legally allowed to join in the drinking fun.
The reception was in full tilt when we arrived. Everyone was drinking. The whites, the Natives, the grandmas, the grandpas, the teenagers, even toddlers were having a good time. The bride and groom were older and more laid back than any I’d ever seen. They seemed to be enjoying the party as much everyone else.