by Darcy Cosper
“No,” he answers. “But it’s only been, what, twenty-three years? There’s still plenty of time for me to bore you, Rabbi.”
“Ladies and gentlemen.” Ruth’s father stands with his wife at the microphone in the empty space of the dance floor, with the band behind them. Ousted from his place, the band leader shifts sheepishly off to one side, hands folded and eyes downcast. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?”
“Hey.” Gabe turns to me. “How are you holding up, Red?”
“Fine,” I whisper back, not looking at him. “Hush.”
“Thank you,” Ruth’s father says. “Thank you all so much for coming to be with us today, and being part of it. And today, we want to give special thanks to Josh’s grandparents, Morris and Eleanor Silverman, who, I think we can all agree, are a model of what a marriage can and should be. Josh tells me they have been an inspiration to him all his life. And yesterday, they celebrated their sixtieth anniversary. Eleanor and Morris, please come up here.” My grandparents, my dad’s mother and father, whom I adore, stand as the guests applaud and make their way to the front of the room, where they exchange kisses and embraces with Ruth’s parents. Waiters begin handing around glasses of champagne to the guests. Papa offers Nana the microphone, but she laughs, says something to him, and pushes it back into his hands.
“Friends,” Papa tells the room, “as my dear wife has just pointed out, my whole life I’ve been holding forth to my family, and she sees no reason I should stop now. And this, I say to you, is the key to a lasting marriage: a spouse who knows and forgives your foibles. It’s easy to love strengths. But, Ruth and Josh, for you, I wish that you should learn to love the worst in each other, too—pride and anger, vanity, fear.”
I glance over at Gabe. He is leaning in to Ora, who whispers something to him. He nods, and I look away.
“Such faults, you must work to overcome in yourselves,” Papa continues. “But treasure them in each other, if you can. These failings, they’re part of the people we love. They make us human, and the more they are loved, the more you look on them with compassion and patience, the less they nip at your heels and make problems in your life together. I don’t mean you should put up with any serious trouble, God forbid, and Ruth, if Josh misbehaves, you call me over—I’m old-fashioned. I believe in a good spanking.” He pauses for the room’s wave of laughter. Nana shakes her finger at Josh, who is seated at a table next to the dance floor, and he mock-cowers behind the wide folds of Ruth’s dress.
“Do you love my foibles?” Gabe’s voice is low; his lips brush against my ear.
“I didn’t know you had any.” I watch Ora watching us.
“Love really is blind, isn’t it?” He slips an arm around my shoulders. “Thank god for that.”
“I trust and hope,” my grandfather continues, “that I’ll never get such a call. Josh and Ruth, I can only wish that you are as lucky and happy in marriage as I have been, and continue to be, with this wonderful woman who has stayed with me, in spite of all my failings, for sixty years.” Papa reaches out and takes Nana’s hand, and raises a glass with his other hand. “We wish you a lifetime of love and understanding. My friends, to Josh and Ruth.”
“To Josh and Ruth,” the room cries, glasses aloft.
“To Josh and Ruth,” the guests at my table tell one another, and Gabe touches his glass to mine.
“And now,” says the band leader, restored to his rightful position, “the new Silvermans have requested that their grandparents share the first dance. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to present Josh and Ruth Silverman, and Morris and Eleanor Silverman.”
He turns and waves to the band, and the opening notes of “My One and Only Love” are heard. The guests murmur with pleasure and smile at their seatmates. The two couples move into each other’s arms and out onto the dance floor. At our table, my little cousin sighs and leans her chin on her arms. Jacob takes Mina’s hand and kisses it. James grins at Charles, who actually blushes.
“How sweet.” Ora smiles radiantly at Gabe. He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at me. Ruth leaves Josh to dance with my father, and Josh dances with my mother. When they separate to collect Ruth’s parents, I watch as my parents stand facing each other, hesitating, until my mother laughs and says something to my father, and he holds his arms out to her and they begin to dance.
“Come on, then.” Gabe stands and takes my hand. “Time to dance, my one and only.”
Wednesday, June 20, 200—
IT’S A TORPID MIDAFTERNOON, a bona fide dog day. Charles and I are at the Invisible conference table, going over assignments, when we hear stomping up the stairs, accompanied by a loud and tuneless rendition of “Love and Marriage.” A few moments later our front door swings open and Henry skips into the office. She is wearing a very tight green T-shirt that reads It’s not a bald spot. It’s a solar panel for a sex machine.
“Like a horse and carriage,” Henry announces. “Hi, guys.”
Tulley and Pete, seated at the other end of the conference table, look up from their latest Extreme Romance manuscript and applaud.
“Could a Juilliard graduate really find love with the tone-deaf?” Charles kisses Henry’s hand.
“Miracles happen. Want to come try on wedding dresses with me and Joyless?”
“Ivory isn’t my color,” says Charles.
“Don’t be so traditional, Vern.” I shake my head. “All the girls are wearing orange to their weddings this year.”
“Right,” Tulley says. “Orange is the new white.”
“Then what’s the new orange?” Pete asks.
“Up, up, and away, Jojo.” Henry lifts me out of my chair and I follow her out the door and down the stairs. A man with a tear-stained face nearly knocks me down as he leaves the psychologist’s suite. He brushes past me and hurries ahead of us. His silhouette lingers for a moment in the bright arch of the front entrance and vanishes.
WE TAKE A TAXI to the dressmaker’s shop, which is on a dirty street on the Lower East Side. I look at the boarded-up storefront, and raise an eyebrow at Henry.
“O ye of little faith,” Henry says to me. “Just wait.” She rings a buzzer beside the graffiti-covered door and waits. The door opens, and a young woman beckons us in. We pass through a dark lobby and into a large room where bolts and bolts of fabric in rich, shining colors are piled high against the gold-painted walls. For a moment I think I’ve stumbled into Ali Baba’s cave of treasure. I blink. Henry grins at me triumphantly.
Standing at the center of the room is a beautiful, ageless woman with deep-set black eyes, dark hair pinned up on top of her head, and a cigarette dangling from her lips. She advances on us.
“Veruka?” Henry extends her hand.
“Yes, it is me,” the harpy says in a very thick Russian accent, ignoring Henry’s hand. “You are Henry.” She’s not asking. “An odd name for such a pretty girl as you. And who is this?” She peers in my direction; I have instinctively moved slightly behind Henry.
“This is Joy,” Henry says. “One of my attendants.”
“You are from Odessa,” Veruka tells me. She’s not asking.
“My father’s family, a couple generations back.” I peek around Henry.
“Yes. I also am from Odessa. It is in the eyes. Good. Very good.” She claps her hands. “Magdalena!” she calls, and the young woman who let us in rematerializes. “Please to measure the girls, dear,” Veruka instructs her. “Off, off,” she says to us. “You take clothes now off so we can see.”
“Just her,” I tell Veruka.
“Wrong,” says Henry through the T-shirt that is halfway over her head. “I’m buying you a dress.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.” Henry, topless, glares at me.
“No, you’re not. I don’t want a dress. Hank, you know I hate dressing up.”
“Off, off!” says Veruka sternly, tugging at my shirt.
“What did you think you were going to w
ear to my wedding?” asks Henry.
“I thought you’d spare me another insane ball gown. How about black tie? I am your best man, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Henry says. Magdalena’s hands appear from behind her, straining to get the measuring tape around her breasts. “And as such you’ll do as we say. Now strip!”
I strip. Magdalena entwines me in her yellow measuring tape.
“Please to put these on.” Veruka hands us thickly embroidered Chinese robes. “Let us now look at the dresses, yes?” With one hand on each of our backs and a fresh cigarette clenched in her teeth, she marches us to the far side of the room, where rows of soiled white sample dresses dangle like grimy angels on the metal racks. Veruka looks Henry up and down, and begins pushing through the dresses.
“You have the big bosoms,” she says with her back to us. “We will show these off, I think. Ahh.” She lets out an ecstatic breath, pulls a dress off the rack, and shoves it into Henry’s hands. “You are a size ten.” She’s not asking. Henry takes off her robe and starts to step into the dress. “No, no!” shrieks Veruka. “No, no, no. You must to put it on in there.” She points to a curtained cubicle behind the racks. “You put on, then you come out and we see.”
Henry shrugs and strides away, the dress a superhero cape flung over her shoulders and flapping behind her.
“It is the magic,” Veruka says to me, smoke drifting into her eyes, hand on hip. “We must not see her put the dress on. We must only see it on, so. Ah, yes, like so. You see?”
A bride appears around the corner of the dress rack. She is wearing a gown that grazes the floor at the bottom and her nipples at the top, with a long billowing stretch of white in between.
“This is fucking beautiful,” says the bride to her reflection. “What do you think? Joy? Hello?”
“Henry,” I say.
“What?”
“Henry.”
“What?”
“Is very nice, no?” Veruka reaches a hand around Henry’s waist to tighten the fabric slightly.
“Is very nice, yes,” I tell Henry.
“Is perfect,” says Veruka. “I know. You will take?”
“I will take,” Henry agrees.
“You don’t want to try on any others, just to be sure?” I ask. Veruka looks at me disapprovingly.
“No. Why you try another? Is perfect. I know. When you find perfection, you do not try further. You rejoice.”
“I’m rejoicing,” says Henry.
“Very good.” Veruka beams at her. “Magdalena! Pins, please.” Magdalena trots over carrying a red velvet pin cushion in one hand and fabric swatches in the other. “Take in, here, here,” Veruka says to Magdalena, jabbing her cigarette at the bodice seams. “Now. Let us look at fabric.”
“I like this.” Henry strokes the dress.
“No, no. Is all wrong. Here.” Veruka holds an ivory square out to Henry. “Is what you want.” Henry rubs the scrap of cloth against her cheek. Her face is suddenly gentle, simple. She looks very far away. For some reason this makes me feel like crying.
“Yes,” Henry says dreamily. “Yes.”
“Now.” Veruka turns on me with ferocious intent. I briefly consider asking her to marry my father. “Now is your turn.”
I look pleadingly at Henry, who ignores me. Veruka runs her hands swiftly along the rack, looking not at the dresses, but at me.
“Size four,” she says, and pulls out a dress, not taking her eyes from me. “This pattern will be very good for you.” She puts the dress into my hands. “Go.”
I go. In the dim of the small curtained cubicle, I take off my robe and look askance at the dress, which I have hung on a hook. It’s a full-length affair, white smudged by the hands of a hundred, a thousand prospective brides before me who have undressed in this little room, living out a dream that may very well have haunted them from earliest girlhood: The Dream of the Dress. I never had it. Naked, I slip the dress off the hanger and step into the acres of cool, slippery fabric, sliding the bodice over my hips, reaching around myself to close its long zipper. There’s no mirror, but I can feel that the dress fits as if it were made for me alone, the heavy, silky cloth lifting me, bearing me up, defining precisely the space that I occupy.
As I turn and push the curtain aside, its long train whispers on the floor behind me. Henry begins singing “Here Comes the Bride,” then stops, and her eyes widen. Veruka, a fresh cigarette drooping from her lips, nods without expression as I cross to them. I catch a peripheral glimpse of a figure moving through the mirrors, but do not turn to face it.
“Wow,” says Henry. “Maybe you should get married instead of me.”
“We will make without train, to be sure. Leetle shorter, yes? Just below knee.” Veruka tugs at the skirt. She puts her hands on my hips and turns me to my reflection. The train of the dress swirls on the floor, ascending into a narrow, unadorned sheath of white held up by thin, delicate straps. I look into the eyes of The Bride. From a great distance, from some other place, she looks back. I blink. And it’s just me, in a dingy white dress, Henry behind me smiling like a kid in a Jell-O commercial, and Veruka squinting through her cigarette smoke.
“What color you want?” Veruka asks Henry. “Everybody this season, orange, orange. You want orange?”
“Henry,” I beg. “Not orange.”
“Orange,” Henry grins fiendishly at me. “Oh, very orange.”
IT’S JUST AFTER ten o’clock, and I’m not particularly tired, but I climb into bed, turn out the lights, stare into the dark. For the past couple of nights, I’ve worked late and come home to an empty nest; on Monday Gabe caught a shuttle flight up to Boston, to be with his family during the preparations for his little sister’s wedding. I will fly up on Friday afternoon to join him for the rehearsal dinner, and the wedding on Saturday.
It’s been odd with him gone. I’d always thought of myself as an independent, resourceful person, but the evenings without him have been aimless and vacant, and I’ve turned in early just to avoid the sudden large quiet of the apartment, which makes me vaguely anxious.
I am just tipping over the edge of sleep when the phone rings. It’s Gabe.
“Hey, Red.”
“Hi.” I pull the phone under the covers with me. “I’m glad you called.”
“You sound sleepy. What are you doing?”
“Just getting ready for bed. How was your day?”
“I wish I were there to tuck you in. What are you wearing?”
“Your pajama top. As usual. Sorry I missed your call this afternoon. I went to look at wedding dresses with Henry.”
“Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that scene. How was it?”
“Hysterical. The dressmaker is this brutish, gorgeous Russian woman, kind of a cross between Sophia Loren and General Patton. I want her to marry Daddy. She ordered us around, barking commands, and Hank turned into this docile little puppy. I’ve never seen her so obedient.”
“Good lord. I think she should marry your father. Let’s invite her to crash his wedding. Sounds like she could take Desiree down.”
“No contest. She could take both of them down without putting out her cigarette.” Now that I think of it, Veruka would make a marvelous bodyguard. I wish I could get her to be my escort for the Winslow wedding.
“So was the expedition a success?” Gabe’s voice trembles with laughter.
“Yup. Veruka—that’s the dressmaker—pulled a dress off this rack of maybe a hundred dresses, without even looking, and it was perfect on Hank. Really beautiful, actually.” I have a vision of Henry in her gown, her face soft and remote, and then of the white, strange figure I saw when I turned to face myself in the mirror. Something in me unlatches and pulls.
“Gabe?”
“I’m here.”
“I miss you.”
“You, too. It’ll be nice to have you here. But you’re really better off not here, just now. The Winslow women are on a rampage. I’d bet on my mother in the ring with your dressmaker, at
least this week. You should have heard her on the phone with the florist today. Mom put the fear of God into them.”
Of this I have no doubt. Where Gabe is concerned, Mrs. Winslow personifies tender indulgence, but she’s one of those incredibly poised society matrons who can ice you with a glance.
“Ah,” Gabe says. “And there she is. Hi, Mom.”
I hear Mrs. Winslow’s voice in the background.
“Joy, Mom says hello. She’s looking forward to seeing you. I need to go—there’s some family conference happening downstairs.”
“Talk to you tomorrow?”
“Of course. Sleep tight.” He hangs up. I hold the receiver against my ear for another few moments, listening to the silence.
“I love you, too,” I tell the empty room.
Saturday, June 30, 200—
I WAKE UP IN A BED and breakfast in upstate New York, with sun streaming through the open windows, and Gabe whistling in the bathroom. For a moment I’m lost in a sleepy sense of absurd well-being, the way I used to feel as a child opening my eyes on the first day of summer vacation, all those golden days of nothing unfurling before me. I pull the covers over my head and watch the light filter through the blossom-print duvet, a little Eden—until the awful memory of last night slaps me awake.
I MAY BE SUFFERING post-traumatic stress syndrome from the Winslow wedding last weekend. It looked like any other understated and overpriced wedding, except bigger. That is, if you didn’t know that the well-mannered, badly dressed, overbred, gin-preserved, dour-faced guests crowding Trinity Church were Kennedy cousins and Rockefeller offspring, titled Europeans and Fortune 100 scions. When I arrived in Boston last Friday afternoon, Gabe presented me with a gift from the family: a dress to wear to the wedding. It was this gauzy, floaty, floral number selected by his mother, probably hideously expensive, and about as much to my taste as mud wrestling. I joined the charade that this was a marvelously thoughtful gesture and not a catty insult (as was obvious to everyone but Gabe), and wore the damn thing with what little poise I could muster; I looked like something out of a 1970s feminine hygiene commercial.