“Hi girls,” Kitty B. says. “Don’t y’all look nice.”
Truth is, Cricket is the only one in the Blalock clan to have gotten her act together. She married one of the McFortson boys of the large and successful McFortson Funeral Home business that has locations up and down the South Carolina coastline. She even works there part-time while she and Tommy try to start a family. Cricket’s dressed in a sleeveless, teal linen dress that looks like one of her tailored Talbots, size-four specials with a tasteful gold slider necklace that has an octagonal medallion charm with her monogram dangling just below the center of her neckline.
Cricket is in good shape and well-proportioned with a short hairdo that always looks freshly cut and in place, and sometimes she seems so together that she makes Kitty B. uncomfortable. Like maybe Cricket should be the mother and Kitty B. should be the daughter so that she could rear her up with the kind of order and organization that Kitty B. has never been able to muster.
“We came in a hearse, Mama,” Katie Rae snickers, and Kitty B. notices a piece of pepper or spinach lodged in between her daughter’s front teeth.
Katie Rae turns and points to the street, where sure enough there is a long black hearse parked in front of Kitty B.’s brother Jackson’s house. “To carry the wedding gown.”
“Of course,” Kitty B. says. That is Cricket’s role to play in the wedding—to pick up the wedding gown from the cleaners and carry it in the hearse, so it has plenty of room to lie flat, to the church dressing room.
Cricket clears her throat. “Check your teeth in the powder room,” she whispers to Katie Rae, who covers her mouth and scurries into Ray’s half bath beneath the stairwell.
“Good to see you, Mama,” Cricket looks her mother up and down. “What happened to your Ferragamo?”
“Oh,” Kitty B. says, patting her on the back as if to console her. “It broke on the way over. I’ll get it fixed next week.”
Cricket pulls a roll of double-sided tape out of her little square teal purse, then leads Kitty B. by the elbow to the corner of the dining room, where she kneels down and tapes the bow back on her mother’s shoe.
“That’ll hold it for now,” Cricket says, standing up and shaking her head gently as her do settles back into place. She smiles at Kitty B. and pats her forearm. “You okay, Mama?”
“Yes.” Kitty B. nods. “Now go over and greet the bride.”
When Trudi Crenshaw, Angus’s girlfriend who claims to be his fiancée, arrives before Hilda with her plump twelve-year-old daughter Dodi, the junior bridesmaid, in tow, they are all a little uneasy. Little Hilda greets them merrily, and Ray directs them to the fruit punch, and before you know it, half the women in town are making their way through the foyer. There’s Mayor’s wife, Tootsie Whaley, and Missy Meggett and the ladies who make up the garden club and Junior League of Jasper.
When Sis’s mother and the rest of the older ladies arrive on a bus from the Episcopal retirement home on Seabrook Island, Ray runs out to greet them and help them down one by one, making sure their canes and walkers are on firm footing on her new slate walkway.
Some of them eye the hearse with concern, and Ray pats their hands and says, “It’s for the wedding gown. Cricket’s picking it up from the cleaners this afternoon.”
Then Vangie Dreggs and her sister-in-law pull into the middle of the front yard in a golf cart as if they are on a putting green or in the small confines of an exclusive island resort. They come in with a bang, laughing and hooting and making their introductions.
Now Kitty B. notices Hilda’s long white Mercedes as it creeps quietly up into the driveway. From the kitchen she sees Hilda check her makeup twice in the rearview mirror before slipping in through the back door in her cream silk pantsuit.
“Hi, gal,” Kitty B. says, pinning the corsage on her and lying, “You haven’t missed a thing.”
“I’m sorry I’m late.” Hilda fans herself with her hands.
“You look lovely,” Kitty B. soothes as she rubs her friend’s back.
“Thanks, darling.” Hilda straightens her posture before she enters the dining room to greet everyone with a painted smile.
Kitty B. takes her place at one end of the dining room table, where she mans the Earl Grey tea station. Before she knows it, a line of tea drinkers forms, and she pours cup after cup of tea as the familiar buzz of feminine chatter swells up and falls away over and over like the waves on a choppy day at the mouth of the Edisto River.
The older ladies cluck over the gifts, and the young girls form a circle around Little Hilda, who blushes and shows her engagement ring, an antique-set princess cut that belonged to Giuseppe’s great-grandmother who is buried in the Tuscan village of Trassilico that crowns one of the mountaintops they will visit on their honeymoon next week.
“How much do you want for the whole house, Ray, furniture and all?” Kitty B. hears Vangie Dreggs say, half joking. She points to her sister-in-law, who’s visiting from Houston. “Deanna says she’ll give you a million-two for the whole kit and caboodle.”
“Oh my,” Ray says, straightening out her powder blue linen top. “Well, I appreciate your interest, I suppose”—she nods to Deanna—“but our home is not for sale.”
“Of course it isn’t.” Vangie squints her faux emerald eyes. “I was just pulling your leg.”
Ray laughs nervously and catches Kitty B.’s eye from across the room. I told you so!
Thing is, Kitty B. was the one who convinced the gals to invite Vangie to the Tea and See. Vangie has volunteered to do so much for the wedding that Kitty B. just felt they had to. After all, the “Lone Star” is putting up Giuseppe’s entire family in her newest block of furnished apartments between here and Beaufort, and she managed to get a suite donated for Senator Warren, Giuseppe’s boss, at the newfangled five-star Sanctuary on Kiawah as well as the honeymoon suite for Giuseppe and Little Hilda on their wedding night.
But the look on Ray’s face tells Kitty B. that Ray thinks she was dead wrong in insisting.
~ JULY 7, 2005, ONE MONTH EARLIER ~
“You do have Vangie on the guest list for all of the Prescott parties, don’t you?” Kitty B. asked Ray while they’d picked out the wedding tent from Thomason Rental.
“Don’t be so naive,” Ray said. “Can’t you see that Vangie’s just trying to buy her way into our town?”
“I don’t think that’s true.” Kitty B. shook her head and turned to Ray. “She’s gone out of her way to be helpful. You have to admit that.”
Ray rolled her eyes.
Then Kitty B. blurted out, “You were new here once, too, remember?”
Ray’s eyes narrowed as if Kitty B. had accused her of committing a crime. “That was thirty years ago.”
Within seconds Ray pointed to the tent that she wanted for the wedding without so much as asking Kitty B.’s opinion and turned to face her.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Just as Kitty B. nods to Ray, who summons her to a talk in the kitchen, Little Hilda comes over with a frosted glass of mint julep and says in a hushed tone, “Miss Ray, have I told you about Giuseppe’s friend Donovan?”
“No, honey,” she says.
“Well,” she says, her cheeks flushed from all of the excitement. “He’s from New Jersey and he worked on Senator Warren’s campaign a few years ago, and now he’s a medical resident at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Anyway, he wants to be introduced to a nice southern girl, so I’m trying to persuade Priscilla to look after him this weekend!”
“Oh, that’s a fine idea,” Ray says and Kitty B. can see her tension over Vangie fading. Ray is no fool. A liberal Yankee is not ideal, but she would certainly take a nice doctor any day of the week over Poop 2.
With Ray diverted, Kitty B. ambles over to chat with Sis’s mama and some of the other older ladies who were Roberta’s friends. They all want a report on LeMar’s health, and they are already organizing a time to bring over a casserole dinner next week. Just when she thinks her mama’s gals are gri
nding to a halt on account of old age and death itself, Kitty B. learns that they still have a little more gas in the tank—what a pleasant surprise!
Then Sis comes over, pats Kitty B.’s elbow, and says, “Hilda’s simply not acknowledging Trudi Crenshaw’s presence whatsoever.”
“What’s Trudi doing?” Kitty B. asks.
“Well, go see for yourself and report back to me,” she says. “I’ve been staring at both of them too much.”
So Kitty B. grabs a cup of tea and checks out the situation. Trudi seems to be avoiding Hilda like the plague, making a point of scurrying into another room whenever Hilda changes places.
Now some of the guests are picking up the gifts and looking on the bottom of them to note the manufacturer or the pattern. This isn’t the most mannerly thing to do, but one can understand since they are on display. Trudi follows their lead, noting to her daughter the names beneath the china and the crystal. But then, in a nervous frenzy, Trudi goes from picking up the gifts on display to picking up the knickknacks and doodads from the shelves and end tables all over Ray’s home. Now, that’s just not something you do.
Then Vangie Dreggs and her sister-in-law, curious as ever, are right behind Trudi, peering over her shoulder to see. Kitty B. knows that even the Lone Star pain in Ray’s behind knows better than to do this, but, by golly, she’s not going to miss the opportunity to snoop.
This goes on for about fifteen minutes—Trudi picking up antique plates and picture frames and books as Kitty B. watches in astonishment, sipping her tea and nibbling on a lemon square.
Suddenly, Hilda walks over to Trudi, who is studying the bottom of a small antique wooden box from Ray’s great-aunt Nell Pringle, and says plainly, “The whole house is not on display.”
Then Hilda grabs the box, turns it right side up, and continues, “Let’s mind our manners,” before she places it back on the bookshelf where it belongs.
“Oh my,” Vangie says, with her hand over her thick painted lips. She turns back to her sister-in-law, who nods in acknowledgment, as though she is up to speed on all of the Jasper drama.
Kitty B. eyes Sis as the whole party seems to stop and stare. Then Ray steps in. “Oh, don’t give it a second thought, Trudi. I’m honored that you’re admiring that piece. It belonged to a dear old aunt of mine from Charleston.”
But Ray is too late. Trudi’s eyes fill with tears before she scuttles out the front door, her hefty daughter Dodi chasing after her.
“Mama!” Little Hilda runs over. “That was awful!” The little bride slings the pomander off her arm and runs after Trudi. The ball of hydrangeas lands on the Oriental rug in Ray’s living room, where it rolls beneath the coffee table, leaving a small trail of flowers.
Hilda looks up and around at everyone. A few throats clear before she says through clenched teeth, “Thank you so much, Ray and Kitty B. and Sis. This has been lovely.” Then she walks through the kitchen and slams the back door.
The gals look around at one another, wondering why in the world she’s mad at them, and the guests clear out faster than you can say, “Boo!”
FIVE
Kitty B.
When they are all alone, Ray shakes her head and throws up her arms.
“Lord, I give up!” she says, patting her black eye and flinching at the pain. “We have worked ourselves to the bone for this wedding, and Big Hilda thinks she deserves every bit of it and more. As if we are on her daddy’s payroll!”
She scoops up a handful of dirty silver forks and throws them into the sink before adding, “This is not the Jasper Mill monarchy! The mill is long gone. And so is Angus and so is Little Hilda. And we’ll be gone, too, if she keeps this up.”
“Let Sis and me clean up, Ray.” Kitty B. says. “You need to rest.” “My eye hurts like the dickens.” She pulls out some Advil from the cabinet above her and swallows three at a time. “But I’m too angry to rest.”
Then Ray fills the sink with suds and scrubs the silver with a sponge. Kitty B. works with Sis to collect the dirty plates and cups and saucers and place them carefully at the sink. Then she picks up a hand towel and dries the forks and spoons before handing them to Sis, who places each one in its rightful silver box. Ray has a laminated sheet on each of the gals’ silver boxes on which she has typed out the number of spoons, forks, knives, and serving pieces that belong in each box.
They all chose the same pattern—Chantilly by Gorham—at Roberta’s suggestion so they could pool their silver resources for occasions such as this. Of course, they about died a few years ago when the book A Southern Belle Primer: Or, Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma came out because it noted that ladies with the Chantilly pattern were “loose” in high school.
“I was a little loose,” Sis had said when Ray pointed out the chapter one weekend as they sipped gin and tonics on Ray’s screened porch at Edisto Beach.
“Yes, you were,” Hilda said, ashing her cigarette in a pink conch Ray bought at the gift shop. “But at least you were monogamous.”
Now the kitchen window is open, and Kitty B. hears Priscilla and Little Hilda, who have gathered on the porch with a few of their friends and a pitcher of mint juleps. They’ve slipped off their high-heeled sandals and relax with their legs over the arms of the wicker furniture where they murmur about the blowup and Little Hilda’s frustration with her mother.
After everything is cleaned and put away, the gals retire to the other end of the piazza on the long porch swing that Cousin Willy installed last spring.
“Well, here’s to that disaster,” Sis says, handing Kitty B. and Ray mint juleps, which they sip heartily as they rock back and forth, consoling one another in the swampy air about the fact that the blowup wasn’t their fault. It was just Hilda being Hilda.
Ray dips three napkins in an ice bucket and gives one to each of them to put across their foreheads.
“Hot flashes,” she calls to the young girls, who are looking inquisitively at the older women. She puts the sopping linen around the back of her neck and adds, “Just wait.”
Just wait is right, Kitty B. thinks. Menopause pales in comparison to the daily struggles of married life. She remembers the night before her wedding some thirty-five years ago. The curlers with the Ace bandage, the pep talk, the silk nightie. The gals had buoyed her with a sense of wonder and expectation about her life with LeMar, and she let them. How were they to know what was to come?
The girls giggle, their rosy cheeks filling with air as the gals wipe themselves down with the cool water. Then they settle back into their cushions as Little Hilda recounts the story of Giuseppe proposing to her on the steps of the Capitol last Fourth of July.
Kitty B. moans softly in the bittersweet gathering of her missing daughter’s contemporaries. Her child ought to be right there with them. It’s what she thought at their christening twenty-five years ago and at each of their birthday parties and their high school graduation and debutante balls, and it’s what pains her each time she passes over their child-sized handprints sealed indelibly in the concrete on the corner of Third and Main Street. That someone who should be here is missing.
Suddenly, the sky turns gray from what could be an early band of Eleanor, and the wind kicks up, sending the dead oak leaves and the browning petals of the summer flowers spinning in circles.
Kitty B. lies back and so do Sis and Ray. They close their eyes and swing back and forth, enjoying the fresh wind on their face as the sweetest scent wafts over the piazza.
“Y’all, I swear I smell gardenias,” Kitty B. says.
“Me too,” Sis says, “I was trying to place it.”
Ray keeps her eyes sealed shut as if she is asleep, as if she is soaking herself in this warm air and the sorely missed chatter of young girls on her piazza. She looks worn and fragile with her swelling eye and the black gash across her cheek. It makes Kitty B. uneasy to see her best friend wounded and suddenly looking every one of her fifty-five years.
“That’s the confederate jasmine
,” Ray mumbles.
“No,” Sis says, sniffing the air. “It smells just like those gardenias we carried in Kitty B.’s wedding.”
Now Kitty B. pictures the small, fragrant bouquet her mama placed in her bedroom the morning of her wedding day. Roberta set the gardenias on the bedside table, then pulled opened the drapes to let the morning light in, and the gals squinted their eyes and moaned and burrowed beneath the sheets and pillows like earthworms, their arms and legs groping for cover.
“It’s a glorious day,” Roberta had said. “Y’all wake up.”
If Kitty B. had known what lay ahead, she would not have risen and dressed and walked down the aisle that day.
SIX
Hilda
Big Hilda sees her daughter’s reflection in her vanity mirror. The bride-to-be stands in the bathroom doorway the night before her wedding in the strapless raw silk cocktail dress they bought together at Saks in Charleston a few months ago.
“Hi, Mama,” Little Hilda says.
Big Hilda thought the day Angus packed his bags and left for good was the most dreadful day of her life. But now she realizes that this wedding weekend will be the worst, watching her lovely daughter marry a foreigner while her husband sports his cheap and chubby girlfriend on his arm. She’s heard that Trudi claims they are getting married, but she doesn’t believe that for a minute. She hasn’t seen a ring on her finger, and she can’t imagine Angus marrying her or anyone for that matter.
“We have to be at the church for the rehearsal in twenty minutes,” Little Hilda says, tilting her head gently to the side, the gold clasp on her pearl necklace catching the light. “You about ready?”
Angus has always said their daughter is a miniature version of Big Hilda. She’s petite with a round doll-like face and wrists and ankles that you could easily fit your hands around. Sylvia Crenshaw, the town hair stylist, has fixed her golden hair for the wedding rehearsal and the dinner that will follow. It’s up in a clean French twist with the faintest wisps curling around her forehead and her pearl drop earrings. Her little legs are balancing on a pair of super high silver heels like the models wear in the store windows in Charleston, and she’s simply stunning.
The Wedding Machine Page 7