But she’s fast asleep and doesn’t hear him.
When they arrive at the apartment a little after midnight, they barely undress, and without so much as brushing their teeth, fall into bed.
At just about the same time, Eric Boulanger approaches his mother’s house and seeing the rusty Schwinn bike leaning against the side of the garage, slumps back in his seat and phones Michael, who has been on the same mission: driving around town in search of Bicycle Girl.
“Got her,” he tells his friend
“Cool.”
“Hey, thanks, Mike.”
“No prob. Come over for the game tomorrow. Beck and I got news.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“Hot damn! For a single guy you got that on your radar?”
“I’m a photographer. I’m observant—especially where the body’s concerned. When?”
“September. We don’t know what it is yet.”
“And the wedding?”
“No wedding. Beck doesn’t see a need, at least for the time being. You know she thinks outside the box about most things.”
“You down with that?”
“I want to marry her. She’ll change her mind—eventually.”
“Tell her she’s bad for business. Hey, Mike—”
“Yeah?”
“I’m happy for you. I love you.”
“I love you too, bro.”
Chapter 19
Sunday, April 13
FAYE AND HAROLD cannot wait. They’re like teenagers aching to elope but finding themselves without money for carfare. They have no time to waste: As Faye said: They’re melting faster than ice cubes on a summer day. They will not wait. They have no one to answer to. They will listen to no one. For that reason they pushed the wedding up a week. They also did it because Ryan couldn’t get them a reservation for Easter Sunday.
Ryan is convinced the frenzy to marry is just Faye’s attempt to beat her and Jason to the punch.
“Come on. She loves you to death,” Jason tells her as he knots his tie.
“That doesn’t make her less of a drama queen. What do you wear to your eighty-six-year-old grandmother’s wedding?”
“Same thing you wear to any wedding.”
“No, no, no. This is Faye, Jason. If Filene’s were still open, she’d probably go to the Running of the Brides, wheelchair and all.”
“The what?”
“The big designer wedding gown sale in Filene’s basement. When I was thirteen, I had to go for my mother’s cousin’s daughter. My mother wouldn’t go, of course, so Faye made my father drive me all the way up to Boston to take my mother’s place. I had to sit in a corner on the floor and not move, while Faye and her sister and her sister’s daughter and granddaughter grabbed gowns off racks, along with hundreds of other women, dumped them on me, then went off to hunt for more. Do you know how heavy some bridal gowns are? When they got the goods, the brides just undressed on the floor, trying on gown after gown until they found the one, and everybody started clapping. That’s what you heard, this clapping every five minutes. My mother was smart not to go.”
“So you never went again.”
“Oh yes. Another cousin’s wedding, before they closed the store. But that time I was a runner and not the dumpster.”
“I don’t understand how women can subject themselves to such abuse.” He takes his new sports jacket off a long hook behind her bedroom door where’s he’s hung his clothes.
“It’s the bargain gene all women carry, except for a few mutants. It’s what we do. How’s this?” She holds up a blue sheath with white polka dots. “Or this?” A short white crocheted one.
“That’s nice.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t wear white. Then again, Faye’s not. But better to be safe.”
“So the blue one.”
“I also have this.” She pulls out a white sheath with a thick black stripe running across the top from armhole to armhole and another down the center.”
“Is that a cross? Looks like a priest’s vestment.”
She tosses it into the pile of discards on the bed, then drops to her knees in search of a pair of black patent-leather pumps at the bottom of her closet.
“Is Tiffany coming?” He’s leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed, observing her move about as though she were in a scene from a movie.
“”No. Why would she?”
“I don’t know. Faye likes her.”
“This is only family and a few of their friends. Besides, I think she went home for the weekend. I know I have a black evening purse somewhere.”
“It’s not evening.”
“It’s just what you call it.”
“Why do you need a bag?”
“How can you go without one?”
“Easy. I have everything right here.” He puts his hands under his jacket and removes his wallet, phone, and key from the pants pockets.
“Not even a comb?”
“I’ll borrow yours.”
“Well, where would I put my makeup—and the comb and mints that you will also borrow—and my phone and keys and wallet? Most of our clothes don’t have pockets—not even our pants, and if they do, the pants are so tight even a tube of lipstick bulges and digs into your pelvic bone.”
“You see? There you go again, subjecting yourself to abuse. Why do you women put up with it? Either don’t wear makeup, or demand deep pockets. Look at you.” He watches her trying to close a bursting evening purse. “You can’t even fit what you have in that little pouch anyway. And how can you walk in those torture devices? I had a great aunt—Helen. You remember her. She wore those high heels every day of her life. At ninety-five, she couldn’t even walk around the house without them because her feet and leg muscles had all shortened. She was like a living Barbie doll.”
“We wear them to look good for you.”
“I don’t need you to wear them. Wear something comfortable.”
“If it were summer, I’d wear dressy sandals, but it’s still too cold out.” She looks at the shoes and hesitates. She’ll keep them on. She loves them; they were a great deal. She thinks how easily they’ve fallen back into being a couple. “Next time around I’ll come back as a man.”
“Me too,” he says, approaching her and putting his arms around her. “A gay man,” he adds bending over to kiss her.
“Don’t mess up my makeup.”
“Is this shirt okay?” He’s wearing a collared French Blue one, open at the neck, black sports jacket, no tie.
“Oh, now you’re worried about what you’re wearing.”
“Just checking.”
The blue brings out the color of his eyes. She loves his eyes. “Yes. It’s perfect. Are you upset about not being able to go to Mass today? It’s Palm Sunday.”
“I could have found an early Mass somewhere.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He shrugs. That’s what he gets for marrying into a family that’s half Jewish. Everyone has to make concessions.
* * *
The wedding takes place at the new Harbor Inn in a corner room with a view of the parking lot.
“Where’s the harbor?” Joe Toscano wants to know.
“Across the street,” his wife, Lauren, says.
“So why didn’t they call it Across from the Harbor or The Parking Lot Inn?”
Lauren giggles. This is good, Ryan knows. After all these years, after the betrayal and the heartbreak, she is still taken with his sense of humor. Always has been. Ryan has never found her father to be that funny. In fact he’s downright corny at times, but her mother thinks the man she swore she’d hunt down with the gun she didn’t own, the man she said had lost his fucking mind, the man who made her cry nonstop for thirty straight days was hilarious. And the gratitude his dreamy dark eyes, shadowed by heavy lashes and brows, directs at her says he still thinks she’s as beautiful and sexy and talented and desirable as she was thirty-five years ago—and, yes, blessed with such good taste in men.
; They are so meant to be together. She is striking, everyone said when Ryan was growing up, with the paper-thin body of Audrey Hepburn and the face of Ava Gardner. Ryan didn’t know who either of the two actresses were until she saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s on a plane ride to Europe and The Night of the Iguana in a film and theater class on Tennessee Williams in college. She followed up perusing old albums her mother had relegated to the basement to discover a more youthful Lauren, and she saw it: an amalgamation of the voluptuous Gardner and the nymph-like Hepburn. Lauren was Ava without boobs and Audrey with a seductive face. Ryan can still see it as she observes Lauren in her white-and-lime flowered shirtwaist dress, her bare arm brushing the suit-covered one of dark, solid, and muscularto-this-day Joe, with his full head of thick black hair. He is a magnet to which she gravitates. Together they are stunning.
Lauren greets Jason as she would a New England spring: with a cautious embrace that speaks relief but at the same time mistrust—this might just be a tease. Joe is friendlier, conveying the understanding that men screw things up. The two men no longer simply share an x and a y chromosome: They have hurt women they love deeply, and they are looking for redemption.
Ryan spots her aunt Robin fussing around Faye in her wheelchair. Beside Faye is the aide they have hired for the day at the nursing home’s insistence: Faye was not ready to venture out alone, to be transported, the authorities maintained, by a family that knows nothing about handling the compromised bodies of octogenarians. Though Harold has made great strides in his recovery, he’s having a hard time maneuvering his walker between the men’s room and the party. They could have held the affair in the Multi-Purpose room at Laurel Manor, but Faye and Harold wouldn’t hear of it, fearful that the uninvited residents would descend like vultures to participate in the festivities. Faye’s childhood friends Pearl and Tilly have made it today. So have Pearl’s sister Eunice and her husband, Fred, a lifetime smoker who wears tubes through which oxygen streams from a tank into his nostrils. Eunice and Fred’s daughter Patty has accompanied them.
Aunt Robin and Uncle Jake are more what one would expect adults in their late fifties and early sixties to look like. Robin always says she accepted the worst features from her parents in order to leave the best for her younger sister. Robin is not homely by any means; she is just plainer—the woman you pass in the supermarket aisle or sit across from on the T day after day and of whom you take little notice. Jake has not kept in as good shape as Joe, and through no fault of his own looks much older, because he’s nearly bald and insists on combing a few hideous gray strands across his scalp.
“You should come more often,” Ryan tells her mother, who holds a long-stemmed glass, as slender as she, with an extended arm, taking care not to spill her margarita.
“You’re right. But it’s hard for me to see her like this, to see them all in that place. It’s easier for you: Their timeline isn’t on your radar. All I see is a sign that says Next Stop. I know it’s cruel—and cowardly—but the last year has been hard for your father and me, and we need some time to rebuild.”
Faye said getting old wasn’t for sissies, Ryan thinks.
“I’m glad you’re here for her, but I don’t want you to burden yourself with her, Ryan. I mean that. And she doesn’t want that either. She didn’t do it for her own mother, and she doesn’t want us to do it. And I don’t want you to do it for me. Understand?”
Nice in theory, but unlikely. Furthermore, Faye’s parents died before Faye had reached adulthood.
“How were they able to go for a marriage license?” Lauren asks.
“I helped them out with that.”
“See what I mean?”
When Ryan had phoned her parents about Jason’s return, her mother was quiet, sending anxiety through the ether while her father filled it with positive energy: Everyone deserves a second chance, he used to tell the grade-school Ryan when she quarreled with friends, and he sure as hell was relying on that to be the case for him at the moment.
“So how’s it going?” Lauren sips on her drink.
“You mean with Jason?”
“No, the Easter Bunny. Of course with Jason.” (Who at the moment was accompanying Harold to the men’s room.)
“Great.” We’re getting married, she neglects to tell her. She and Jason had decided to wait until after today. This was Faye’s show.
“Well, take your time. He’s a nice boy but a little mixed up is what I always thought. Marriage is easy to get into and hard to get out of. And don’t listen to my mother; she’s living by World War Two standards.”
“She does use that passions were flying high; time was running out line a lot.”
“We married in a hurry before the boys shipped out so we could sleep together. I know my mother. Believe me. She might act like she’s in the twenty-first century, but she can’t shake those old taboos. She nearly went ballistic when your father and I waited ten years before we had you. Oh, she’s come a long way and I admire her for trying, but it’s tough to let go of those notions. Just take your time, sweetheart. Take your time.”
“She said you baby boomers think you invented sex and you’ll probably think you’re the first to ever die. She also said there’s never a right time to have children, that you just have to go for it. If you wait too long, you could find yourself out of luck.”
“I knew she was filling you with that!” Lauren says, then seductively licks the salt-crusted rim of her glass. “And I suppose she told you that women should wear lots of jewelry so everyone will think their husbands are doing well.”
“Something like that. You know, Mom, she’s not all off base. I have friends who feel the same way—about not waiting too long, that is.”
“She’s not altogether wrong, but that’s not a reason to rush. Your biological clock’s got a lot more ticking to do. We fought hard in the women’s movement. Use your freedom wisely.”
I have two mothers, Ryan thinks. Two very smart mothers.
Faye and Harold are adorable: he in his light gray suit, white shirt, navy tie with salmon diamonds; she in a silk salmon pants suit she purchased off the home marketing network (along with Harold’s matching tie), and the double strand of pearls and large mabe pearl earrings nestled in 14-karat gold she insisted Lauren retrieve from the safe-deposit box. The justice of the peace (Harold refused to have a rabbi, even the Reform one who agreed to officiate in a restaurant) is a middle-aged woman who terms the pair a stellar example of finding love in the twilight of one’s life. Ryan wishes she had left that last line out, while Lauren, a witness alongside Robin, shoots a glance at her daughter that says See, take your time. The couple exchanges matching Fimo clay rings they made in crafts class. (Faye said that real jewelry would only get stolen in the nursing home, where certain residents were prone to “shopping” in other residents’ rooms.) They say, “I do,” and lean in to one another to bestow a kiss. They drink champagne to Joe’s toast, despite their medication restrictions.
The room is too small for waiters to walk among guests with platters of appetizers, and besides, half of the guests are too old to stand for any length of time, so they sit down to servings of calamari with pomodoro sauce on the side, oysters on the half shell, crab cakes with drizzled lemon butter, and scallops wrapped in bacon—to which Pearl and Tilly raise their eyebrows. For whose benefit? Faye has never followed a kosher diet, and Harold believes in the aphrodisiac powers of oysters. Fred’s buttered roll gets caught in a tug of war between his teeth and trembling hands; Joe expounds on the merits of olive oil and garlic but cannot refrain from observing that the ringlets of breaded squid are a bit rubbery.
Time to choose entrees from a limited menu.
“I never know what ‘seared’ means,” Jason whispers to Ryan
“Me neither.”
“I’ll stick with the lobster ravioli.”
“I’ll get the filet mignon. We can share.”
“What’s frizzy salad?” Jason asks a waiter whose nametag reads John but who intro
duced himself as Jawn, like any good boy from Revere, where he said he was from.
“It’s frisée,” Ryan says, correcting Jason’s pronunciation.
“Yeah, but what is it?”
“Endive. It’s like lettuce with hairy edges,” Jawn says loud enough for everyone to hear.
Later, Faye and Harold feed each other cake with coconut-covered white icing, their unsteady forks threatening to miss their marks. Pearl chokes on a thread of coconut, but Robin, who is adept at the Heimlich maneuver, quickly dislodges it.
Lauren and Joe had spent the previous day directing a small moving company to transfer some of Faye’s belongings from her home to the new apartment in the independent living building at Laurel Manor for when she and Harold are ready to make the move. Lauren hung some of Faye’s favorite artwork and even a macramé planter she had made for Faye one Mother’s Day and that Faye will not relegate to the trash despite its being dated. Robin wants to put Faye’s house on the market, but Lauren insists on waiting: She knows Robin will not stick around the East Coast to help prepare it for the sale.
The staff at the Golden Meadow unit at Laurel Manor has put a cot next to Faye’s bed and made the bed as level with the cot as possible. They placed a long-stemmed rose on each newlywed’s pillows. Tonight, they will help them into their nightclothes: a pair of striped pajamas with an open fly and a silk nightgown that will easily slide up. The couple will be cautious and inventive and their own judges of their success. Joe and Lauren will head back to New York, Robin and Jake on to a golf tournament at Hilton Head before returning to the west.
* * *
Jason’s body is warm and smooth as they lie naked, face-to-face. He strokes her hair, her cheeks, fondles her nipples. They grow hard together. He is tender, smothering her mouth with his, entangling his tongue with hers.
“I love you,” he murmurs over and over.
“I love you,” she responds.
They loll around in bed until late morning; it’s Patriot’s Day. Maybe they’ll go out to brunch. After the bombing last year, they are determined to be out in the streets and not hiding. Faye and Harold’s wedding has instilled in Ryan a nostalgia for an era she had never experienced, a time when holidays were meant for leisure and not shopping, for a time when suspension of mail delivery meant just that. She remembers dinners at her father’s parents’ home in Brooklyn on Sundays and special occasions, when her grandmother started cooking early in the morning to make her tomato gravy and macaroni for a seven-course meal.
A Day in June Page 18