“Still in Europe,” Sandy said. “You know Lisa. Impossible to keep track of. One minute she’s here, the next she’s flying to Paris. That girl wears herself out.”
“When is she set to come home next?” Grandma asked.
She was being overly polite. Behind Mom’s back she referred to Sandy and Mrs. Jenkins as “Those Cats.”
“Christmas, or so she says now,” Sandy said. “Give it two weeks and she’ll have changed her mind.”
“I thought she’d already been to Paris,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
“Well, she went once with the class trip. This is her second go, only now she’s working there the whole time, teaching English.”
“Meeting any Parisian men?” Grandma winked at me.
Sandy said, “That would mean some profit for all this running around. Now, I’m not one to pressure a girl, but land sakes, she’ll be thirty-one this July!”
She sounded shocked, as if her daughter had not been progressing steadily toward her next birthday month by month like everyone else.
“A woman can’t just live life as if age doesn’t matter.”
Mom stood abruptly and snatched the bowl of wax from beneath Mrs. Jenkins’s still suspended hands. In the kitchen, she refilled the bowl, her back to us.
Mrs. Jenkins raised her eyebrows. “She won’t be young forever. I hope she realizes that.”
“These girls are so different now. They’re so—so entitled,” Sandy said.
The cucumber on her right eye fell in her lap. She picked it up and, after a momentary hesitation, sniffed it. I hoped she would take a bite.
“They’re admirably ambitious,” Grandma said.
“I had two babies and a third on the way when I was her age,” said Mrs. Jenkins.
“I had two children, a mortgage, and an ex-husband,” said my mother. She shut the microwave door with more force than was necessary.
This was the first time Mom had spoken in half an hour, which in and of itself was strange. Moreover, it was the first time I’d heard her admit to the divorce in front of Mrs. Jenkins. Ever.
Sandy and Mrs. Jenkins had always accepted my mother as a friend, but their silence surrounding my parents’ separation kept any real intimacy at bay. My mother acted as though she were indebted to them for their resolution to ignore what they perceived as her greatest failing as a Christian and as a woman. Most peculiar of all, they now seemed as blind to her new boyfriend as they had been to her failed marriage. When Richard had come by an hour earlier to drop off some dry cleaning, Mrs. Jenkins blatantly ignored his presence.
I waited in suspense for Mrs. Jenkins to acknowledge my mother’s statement.
Instead, Sandy made some oblique comment about the difficulties of raising very young children.
“It is not easy,” Mrs. Jenkins agreed.
Sandy reached for the lotion. She did not eat the cucumber after all.
In the late afternoon Grandma went home to nap before the rehearsal. The rest of us drove with Mom to the chapel. Mrs. Jenkins had agreed to play piano for the ceremony at no cost; Sandy was present for moral support. The ladies’ shins bumped up against cardboard boxes of votive candles and plastic ivy. I sat shotgun next to my mother, uncomfortable in pantyhose and a dress, my cheeks exfoliated, red and tight as the skin of a newly blown-up party balloon.
“Weather’s looking dreary,” said Mrs. Jenkins, eyeing the dark clouds through the minivan window. “You’d better tell Marie to say her prayers.”
Sandy added, “The weatherman says it’ll be a fifty percent chance of rain tomorrow.”
“The Lord wouldn’t do that to me,” Mom said. “I’ve been asking for sunshine six months now. He’s promised it to me.”
Sandy grabbed the sides of Mom’s seat and peered around the headrest. “It’s a left here,” she said, pointing.
“I know where I’m going,” Mom snapped. Her hands were tight on the wheel, her knuckles white.
“It will be beautiful,” I said to her when we began unloading at the church. I expected rain, but I wanted to show a sign of solidarity.
“Sandy doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Mom replied. “That woman sits home all day watching the weather channel like it’s the greatest thing since Lawrence Welk.”
Mom: 2; Sunday school women: 0.
I took the boxes she was unloading and followed her across the parking lot, intrigued by this woman who was playing my mother.
The chapel was smaller than I had expected, narrow with a crowded aisle leading to a crowded platform. A stained-glass window featuring the ascension of Christ loomed over the little sanctuary. There was a piano to the right and a pair of candelabras at either side of the communion table. The place might have been pretty but for the garish purple carpet. It smelled musty, with the lingering odor of cleaning detergent used to polish blond wood furniture that had been all the rage in the seventies but now appeared tawdry and worn.
Brian and Marie had arrived earlier with two of her bridesmaids, who were already busy folding bulletins for the next day’s guests. Marie’s father had been charged with setting candles on the windowsills. Cousins were tying bows to every other pew, Marie’s mother following to undo and more perfectly retie every single one.
Within the hour, the rest of the bridal party arrived, the minister second to last, and—to everyone’s surprise—my father last of all.
“Darren,” Mom exclaimed.
I looked at Brian, alarmed. Don’t look at me, he mouthed.
Dad strode to the front of the chapel. He wore sunglasses on his head, sandals on his feet, a tourist stumbling onto what he hoped would be a good beach party. Though I had known there was a chance he would show before the wedding, his presence was scandalous. Perhaps it was the nonchalance of his entrance, the way he so casually interrupted the lives we’d made for ourselves without him.
Mom met him halfway down the aisle. “How are you?” she asked.
“Doing all right.” Chewing his gum, he surveyed the pews, the candelabras, the altar. “The place looks good. Real good.”
“When we didn’t hear from you, we assumed you couldn’t make it.”
Dad said, “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“Well, you can sit in the back,” Mom instructed. “We’re just getting started.”
He obligingly sat in the very last pew, a safe distance away from conversation with anyone involved in the wedding.
I walked purposefully to his pew. “Anyone sitting here?”
“Hey, sport,” he said, rising to give me a hug.
Tall and thick-shouldered with a mane of white hair that hadn’t diminished over the years, my father was what some women might consider handsome. Brian and I had our father’s bold features: long nose, expressive eyes, full lips. But taking a seat beside him, I couldn’t help noticing he had changed a great deal since I’d last seen him. He was heavier, his waist wider and lower, his now-full cheeks bristled with a pepper-and-salt beard. He was crumpled and weary. Old.
“We’re glad you could make it,” I said.
“I’m real proud of your brother. He’s a fine kid.”
Dad often spoke about us as if gossiping to a neighbor about someone else’s family. It was particularly unnerving when he did this while addressing one of us directly.
The wedding planner corralled the bridesmaids into place at the foyer doors.
“How’s school going?” Dad asked.
I told him that other than the weekly desire to jump off a cliff, I did all right.
“I couldn’t do what you do.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It takes a special kind of person to be a teacher.”
“I’m not a teacher, Dad. I’m a writer.”
“You’re still on that?” he asked, frankly surprised. This from the man who filled my early childhood with incessant monologues on the fundamental virtues of the American Dream, social mobility, and the chasing of falling stars. He had changed, maybe more than I thought.
&nbs
p; “Where’s Penny?” I asked, fully aware it was a loaded question. You never knew if Dad was on his way in or out of a relationship.
“Couldn’t make it. Work’s been riding her tail real bad this year.”
“I haven’t seen her in a while.”
“What’s it been now?” he asked. “A whole year?”
“Since the Christmas before last.”
He whistled. “Hard to believe. You ought to see Marjorie now. ”
“Is she in high school?”
“Freshman year of college,” he corrected. “Eighteen going on twenty-five.”
He retrieved his wallet from his suit jacket and opened it to a picture of Penny’s daughter, a product of her first marriage. She was a masculine girl, hair like yarn, braces barely restraining a fierce overbite. “It’s an old picture, of course,” he said. “She’s a real beauty now. A total heartbreaker.”
I imagined him showing a picture of me to Marjorie, saying She’s a real beauty. A total heartbreaker.
The rehearsal was well under way. It was too rude to talk without whispering. Brian and Marie recited their vows. The minister told Brian he could kiss his bride. He dipped Marie down toward the floor and raspberried her cheek.
When the wedding planner demanded a second run-through, Grandma drafted me to photograph the event with her camera, complaining that in the chapel’s dim light she couldn’t see well enough to do it herself.
As soon as I stood, she took my seat beside Dad. She kept him busy with whispered conversation the remainder of the rehearsal. This could have been a gesture of kindness; however, she seemed more to be controlling the situation than enjoying it, like a small woman walking a very large dog, mindful of the energy on the other end of the leash but fully capable of restraining it.
At dinner afterward I saved a seat for Dad. He never showed.
———
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday 5.18.07 11: 05 PM
Subject: the Big Day
Zoë:
Eve of the wedding. Brian is with his groomsmen at the hotel and Marie is sleeping at her house. Is very quiet here now that the Sunday school ladies have left. Mom’s downstairs ironing her shawl for the third time. She’s been worrying this one particular wrinkle since noon.
Amy
———
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday 5.18.07 11: 20 PM
Subject: Re: the Big Day
Amy,
weddings are beautiful and lovely and overrated.
above all, be faithful to me. if some man sweeps you off your feet, remind him
you already have a housemate.
love
Zoë
———
I had grown up in a world that lived in perpetual anticipation of the marriage of Christ and the Church, the glorious Bride without spot and wrinkle, the wedding that would kick off eternal bliss. In this world, sex is a union of souls and every wedding a microcosm of the Great Consummation—a mystery belied by the daily mechanics of most every relationship I had ever seen and by the failure of my own parents’ marriage. And so Brian and Marie’s wedding ceremony (lovely, romantic, flawless even) seemed like just another rehearsal, a shadow or reflection of the great thing it aspired to be.
Afterward I rode with Grandma to the reception. Brian and Marie had chosen to rent out the public park beyond the schoolyard, where he and I had attended elementary school. I laughed when he told me. In my mind, the park was as it had always been: a muddy field with a rickety merry-go-round and a dandelion hill only good for dizzying, consecutive somersaults.
My skepticism was unwarranted. Over the years, the swing set had been replaced with a cast-iron sculpture of birds in flight. Carefully cubed shrubs had been planted in place of the rusted jungle gym. Now the park was pure magic. White candles in glass votives had been hung from the overhanging tree branches with white ribbon. The lights swayed in the breeze. Beneath the pavilion, the DJ had begun to play a round of classical dinner music. We ate platefuls of chicken and salad and bread. Laughter burst out overhead.
I worried that enjoying the reception would be a betrayal of Zoë, but despite my best attempts to remain ironically aloof, the festivity worked its way into my blood. Soon I was laughing, enjoying myself. My brother was charming in his tux and well-gelled hair. Marie had lost the anxiety that shaded her face all through the day’s preparations and the aftermath of the ceremony. Everyone seemed happy and relaxed. Everyone was, for that fleeting moment, beautiful. The sun set, but we were too busy to notice. Our plates were miraculously cleared away, carried off, perhaps, by fairies from the trees.
The dancing began shortly after sunset. The crowd was small, most guests married and thereby consigned to one partner, the rest faithful members of the First Fundamentalist Church of God and therefore forbidden to dance at all. As such, there was a severe shortage of male partners. I sat on one of the folding chairs lining the pavilion, watching the fun and trying to be philosophic about it: Elizabeth Bennet didn’t have anyone to dance with either, and look what that started.
Grandma came and sat beside me. “The ceremony was lovely, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“It was.”
For a moment her smile faltered. “It’s all over so quickly.”
“I know. Say a few vows and you’re married. Hard to believe how much work goes into half an hour.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she replied. “Look at Brian.”
He was dancing with the flower girl, who stood with her feet on his. I used to dance that way with my father. It gave me a fleeting vision of Brian with children of his own. Aunt Amy, I thought, trying it on for size.
“I always knew he was going to be a romantic,” Grandma said. “It was the way he cared for your mother even as a little boy. Remember how he always bought her flowers on Valentine’s Day? All the way up to high school?”
I spent a moment remembering.
“He will make Marie a happy woman,” she concluded.
“Grandma, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, Sugarpie. What is it?”
The blue balls dangling from her earrings swayed on her old earlobes. They made me think of little planets.
“Did Dad make Mom happy? Ever?”
My grandmother did not reply immediately, blindsided by the question. No one in my family discussed my parents’ marriage. Ever. A part of me wanted to take it back, to apologize for ruining the evening. But there was my father, eating cheddar cubes off toothpicks and presiding over the wedding with a certain kind of pride despite the fact that he’d missed every other monumental moment in my brother’s life. And as always we accommodated his presence. We remained somehow righteous in our indifference, as if silence were sufficient absolution for the sins of the past.
Grandma leaned back in her chair with a heavy sigh.
“Your mother was very much in love with Darren once,” she said.
“Did he make her happy?”
“Sometimes.”
“She never talked about him,” I said. “All my childhood. All through high school. And she was aloof at best when he came by— like he was a stranger from the church who had come to visit. She never seemed shaken by his presence.”
“That’s because she didn’t want to worry you kids,” Grandma said. “Don’t underestimate your mother. It took a lot of work for her to hold it together back then. A lot of work.”
“I just don’t understand why she refuses to talk about the past. We have a right to know.”
“Did you ever think that maybe this isn’t about you?”
But something in me protested:To some extent it was about me. It was my mother who had been left, and my home that had been abandoned. He left me too, and after all these years I wanted someone to acknowledge the hurt, to let me know it was only natural to find myself still daily dressing a ch
ildhood wound.
“Maybe she just wants to be happy,” Grandma said. “After all these years, it’s finally her turn.”
We were both thinking the same thing.
“She’s really fallen for Richard, hasn’t she?” I asked.
“He worships the ground she walks on. You can’t do much better than that.” She watched the party with a wistful glint in her eyes. Parties made her miss our grandfather. They’d always thrown the better steak-fries and birthday dinners. But she was never one to indulge her grief if there was something brighter to think about. She quickly turned playful. “So. How about it? You ready for your turn?”
“Someday, of course,” I replied automatically, though I wasn’t sure it was true. I thought of Brian, dealing with a confusion between his mother-in-law and the minister; our family suspicious of the dancing; Marie’s family bewildered by mine. The scene of barely contained chaos and strained diplomacy seemed discouragingly representative of the married life.
An old friend stole Grandma’s attention, and I took the chance to slip away. The caterers had already begun to clear the dinner dishes. The bare tabletops glowed opalescent in the moonlight. I traded my shoes for my shawl, stowing the heels beneath my dinner chair. The grass felt cool and wet against my blistered feet.
As I returned to the pavilion, I saw my father cross the dance floor with purpose to his step. He stopped when he came to my mother, who sat talking happily with some second cousin. He extended his hand. After a momentary hesitation, she accepted.
This was unprecedented: She did not dance, by rule.
My father led her to the dance floor, placed his arm around the small of her back, and together they began to sway in time. She let him lead, but barely. Her back was stiff, and they stood just close enough to manage a stilted sort of rhythm, the way I’d danced with boys at the junior high prom, elbows stiff and shoulders back. He made conversation. She spoke with the same polite economy with which she danced, calm but wary.
The song had not yet ended when Richard stepped in. My mother beamed at him. A new song began, lively and loud.
To the alarm of the watching Fundamentalists, my mother danced.
Amy Inspired Page 25