by Anne Wagener
“Now, now,” I say to Sam. “She’s my date this evening.”
Holly insisted a dateless bridesmaid would look pathetic. Alex wanted in on the drama, and Lena thought inviting a “lesbian” couple would be a good campaign move (“Of course your people are welcome”). Wedding crasher, token lesbian—full-service bridesmaid hire, indeed.
As the three of us walk up the church steps, Sam tugs on a lock of my hair and whispers, “Can you believe this shit? Of course he’d knock this chick up.”
“He told you?”
“He didn’t have to. I’ve known him for too long. He can’t be constipated without me knowing he’s keeping something in. Did he tell you?”
“Not . . . exactly. Have you talked to him about it?”
“If by ‘talked to him,’ you mean I got doused with a moral code stream of bullshit, then yes. Here’s what I told him: If your morals mean that your kid has the right to be loved and happy, how does that not apply to you, too?”
“Well said.” I stop on the top step to catch my breath. I can’t help but envision before-and-after wedding mug shots of Charlie.
Pre-wedding: He wears a T-shirt under a blazer, writing at an outdoor café while blowing a stream of smoke up to the stars.
Post-wedding: He wears a blue Snuggle Baby receiving cloth over his shoulder, cleaning chunks of spit-up off his chin while Holly gets her hair highlighted.
“Telling him my two cents didn’t get me anywhere,” Sam is saying, “so I’m here to have his back the best I can. I don’t agree with his decision, but I love the guy in a way that pushes the boundaries of heterosexuality.” He eyes Alex. “Just to clarify, there’s only one team I play for.”
Alex rolls her eyes. “Noted.”
We emerge into the lobby and pause while our eyes adjust to the dim lighting. The sanctuary is beautiful and capacious, with a huge stained glass wall behind the pulpit. As the sun waxes and wanes behind a cloud outside, rays of color undulate across the pews—red, orange, yellow, and blue. Such a beautiful place for such a tragic event.
The quiet dissipates as a cavalcade of car doors closes in the parking lot. Moments later, Lena, a tiny grandmother, and more of their entourage enter. Tiny Grandmother is without question Lena’s mother: She has the same intense gray eyes and high cheekbones. She also looks like she could take on a zombie horde using only her baby-blue handbag and a hatpin.
Other additions to the rehearsal cast: Charlie’s teenage cousin Josh, my escort for the aisle-walk; Holly’s older sister, Rachel, who looks like Holly Photoshopped as a slightly taller brunette; Susan; Uncle Rex; Charlie and Susan’s parents, who are both wearing custom-tailored power suits; and the Virginia senate chaplain, who’ll be officiating.
The motley crew thus assembled, we move into the sanctuary with the chaplain presiding. His voice has a massaging calm about it. But those pulses of calm are futile in the charged-up emotional atmosphere. Like trying to blow-dry a tsunami.
Holly arrives late, looking flustered but gorgeous. She comes down the aisle mumbling about traffic and not making eye contact with anyone. She’s wearing a light blue dress that makes her look surprisingly soft. Her hair has been released from its usual hair-spray lockdown; it could be described as mussed, but only relative to its usual helmet o’perfection.
I watch Charlie as she approaches. He has a different smile for her, a smile he struggles to hold—one corner of his mouth twitches down ever so slightly. A smile that seems to strain with the weight of their past and the uncertainty of their future.
After we walk through the ceremony a few times, the minister calls the family up front to go over a few final arrangements. He holds a clipboard with an official-looking form on it: the marriage license.
I join Alex in the purse-holding-zone pew. As I fish my bag out from underneath a frothy veil, Holly’s sleek black bag topples to the floor. An eep tweets from its depths.
Alex is on the case, cocking an eyebrow and bending over to retrieve the bag. It makes another eep! Alex undoes the zipper. Her eyes never stray from Holly, who’s confabbing with Biff, the bowler-hat-wearing photographer.
I catch Alex’s wrist before it dips below Holly’s purse zipper. She’s about to cross a moral Rubicon. A Rubicon I’ve been trying to retreat from ever since I binged on Holly’s iPhoto album and Facebook account. “Don’t. I’m being a grown-up here. Or trying to.”
“Yes, yes,” Alex whispers. “Very valiant. But the reason you invited me, sweetie, is because part of you isn’t resigned to this.”
“Huh?”
“Exactly. The ‘huh’ factor.”
Alex perches daintily on the pew, reaches into the bag, and pulls out Holly’s iPhone as casually is if she’s checking her Facebook status or the current barometric pressure. I glance at Holly, but she’s blocking out photos with three generations of Collinsworth women. Tiny Grandmother shakes her finger at Biff, telling him precisely where to stand.
Alex’s eyelined eyes widen. She motions me closer. “Be cool,” she says, handing me the phone. Guilt and curiosity do a quick joust; guilt topples, and I take the phone, holding it behind the pew. Guilt gives one last gasp, then collapses entirely. Alea iacta est.
The screen is locked, but the text preview bubble displays: BVH Miss you already. come bk tonight, my place 9ish. He doesn’t appreciate u
The vegan!
Alex leans in. “Take a picture with your phone. Now!”
I fumble in my purse, but my phone is playing hide-and-seek.
“Fine, I’ll do it!” Alex delves into her purse, but just as she extricates her phone with a victorious “Ha!,” we both glance up to find ourselves in the headlights of Holly’s gaze.
“Bring me my purse,” Holly says. “I need to show Biff something.” Eek! Does she suspect?
Keeping her hands below the pew-line, Alex slips Holly’s phone back into the sleek bag. For a moment, I’m frozen, but Alex gives me a peremptory and very Alex-like shove. As I approach Holly, it appears she’s more impatient than suspicious. After I hand her the bag, I linger to see if I can catch a reaction to the text message, but she gives me a glance that says, That will be all. I’m relegated to my lady-in-waiting post in the purse pew.
The rehearsal continues, but I’m present only in snatches. In high school, I had this horrible car accident. The experience felt like a series of slow-motion snapshots: the grille of the truck at eye level. My car in the opposite ditch, facing traffic. My hands shaking. A kind, bald policeman giving me a ride home. A cup of steaming tea on my parents’ dining room table. My mom’s face peering into mine. “Earth to Piper! Sweetheart?” All the in-between bits were grayed out like TV static.
That’s how I feel after reading the text from Blaine. I catch snapshots of what’s going on around me. The rest is grayed out in static.
“Let’s run through everything one more time,” Lena is saying. Then we’re blocking for group photos, the minister is saying, “This is where the vows go,” Charlie is giving me a look that says, What’s wrong?, Holly is saying, “My mom is going to give me away,” Uncle Rex is saying, “Daddy didn’t come after all? Aww, too bad,” and suddenly, I’m in the parking lot of Molto Bene, a five-star Italian restaurant, for the rehearsal dinner.
At dinner, Alex keeps prompting me with gentle motions. Edging my salad fork toward me with her pinkie finger. Pressing my foot with hers under the table when I’ve been asked a question.
Everyone blurs together. Susan picks at her food, her parents make polite conversation about Lena’s campaign and whether she’s going to need any custom power suits, Uncle Rex asks Holly and Charlie whether their honeymoon cruise will have unlimited drinks, Uncle Rex tells Alex he never knew lesbians could be so attractive.
I feel like I’m going to vomit.
I want to enlist Susan and Brandon’s help, but Susan seems uncharacteristically nondevio
us. Halfway through the salad, she pleads a sour stomach and slips out, Brandon in tow. Charlie looks after them, his face inscrutable, until Tiny Grandmother makes him fetch the waiter to bring her a fork without water spots.
Between the salad and the minestrone, Alex leans over and whispers to me behind her napkin, “You should tell him.”
I feel as if I’m watching Charlie speed into that intersection on yellow; I know disaster’s coming, but I’m not able to slam on the brakes for him. People just keep moving their utensils up to their lips, talking, a huge clock on the wall by the window keeps ticking, and Sam keeps trying to chat up Alex. She pretends she isn’t into him, but she obviously is. So much so that she doesn’t notice me pulling back from the table.
The bathrooms are on the opposite side of the restaurant, through a passageway crowned by an ivy-covered arbor. When I emerge from a good five minutes of rocking back and forth in the ladies’ room, I almost run into Sam. He stops me under the arbor’s arch. “Hey, two very important questions for you, chica. Is your friend single, and how does she feel about acid jazz?” When I don’t respond immediately, he frowns at me. “What’s with you? You look like you’ve seen the Ghost of Christmas Past. Acid jazz isn’t so bad.”
“It’s not that. I saw the Ghost of Charlie’s Future.”
“Oooh, a poopy-diaper ghost? That is scary.”
“Dirty, yes, but not that kind. Holly— She got . . . a text message. A love message.”
“From Charlie? Ugh. Say no more.” He puts his hand over my mouth. “I know they have sex—I mean, obviously, how else do you spawn a childlet—but I like to pretend they don’t. Like they’re Barbie and Ken and they just have these sort of bland gender-nonspecific crotches—”
I pull his hand away. “Sam!”
“Eh?”
“The text was from Blaine.”
“Wait, who?”
My explanation warrants his aviators coming off completely. He tucks them into his shirt. I give him a quick BVH recap, and he nods knowingly. “Charlie hates that guy.”
“It was one thing when I thought she cheated in the past, but this is—this is— What do we do? I want to tell him, but I can only see that going badly.”
“Maybe we can get him to look at her phone.”
“If—if the text is still there. I dunno. I’m a total disaster.” And then I tell him everything, about Susan hiring me, about falling for Charlie, all of it. It comes out in a rush, and a few tears come with it. Kind of like how you cry when you throw up: Everything gets forced out. Or like birth. Birth! Oh God! They’re having a kid together, and she’s cheating on him!
I start hyperventilating. My hands are balled into fists. I feel so hopeless to fix this situation, to fix my own life, any of it.
Sam plants a soft kiss just to the left of my lips. “Piper,” he says. “Earth to Piper. Shhh. It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure this out.”
“Guys?” Charlie’s head pops around the edge of the arbor. He takes in the ivy-framed scene: my back against the wall, Sam leaning toward me with one arm propped on the latticework above my head. “You’re missing dessert. What’s going on?” Charlie looks a little pale, and I take a quick vacation from my freak-out to wonder—is he jealous?
But it doesn’t matter if he’s jealous. The one he really should be jealous of is Mr. Soybean Eater, who’s low enough to cheat with Charlie’s pregnant fiancée. Or does Blaine even know Holly is knocked up? Is it all a WEB OF LIES? My breathing goes funny again.
“Nothing’s going on, buddy.” Sam steps away from me. “Just educating Piper here about acid jazz. She’d never heard of the rare groove movement—crazeballs, right? Hey, do they have lava cake?” We all return to the table. Winding our way back through the restaurant, Sam casts me a look that says, Hold steady. We don’t make our move just yet.
Somehow I eat dessert. It’s tiramisu, but I don’t taste it, which may be an even bigger tragedy than deception and unplanned pregnancies. When it’s over, everyone meanders into the parking lot toward their cars, drunk on carbs. A handful of glittering stars shine overhead: a perfect night in form, if not in substance.
Alex reaches over and squeezes my hand. I nod. This is it. Charlie deserves to know. I grab Sam, who’s walking on the other side of Alex, surreptitiously trying to take her hand. “Focus!” I nod toward where Holly and Charlie are walking in front of us. “It’s now or never. I need a diversion.”
He gives a military nod, puts his aviators back on, and runs full-tilt at them, screaming, “Red rover, red rover, send ME right over!”
Holly careens out of the way. Sam pursues her, wrapping his arms around her waist and hoisting her over his shoulder, carrying her toward a nearby imitation-Tuscan shrubbery and shouting, “Last chance for a piece of the S-Man!” Tiny Grandmother makes after them with her walker, outraged.
Charlie has stopped to watch the spectacle, so I’m only a few steps behind. I catch the sleeve of his dress shirt. Even before I’m in touching range, I can smell him, some kind of piney soap and the ineffable smell that is just pure man. I can’t make out his expression in the semi-darkness, but his face looks muted, as if this experience is already sucking the soul right out of him.
I pull him between two parked cars. His reflection bends across the surface of a BMW window. “We need to talk.”
He glances at Holly. Seeing that she’s out of commission, he turns back to me, studying my face. “What’s going on? Are you okay?” Several dozen yards ahead of us, Holly’s grandmother is hurling her shoe at Sam.
I take a deep breath, trying to get grounded in the present moment. Don’t eff this up like you do everything else, Brody. It’s go time.
“Listen. I totally and completely respect your decision about this wedding. Even as my heart rages against it, I care about you more for being so noble. I’m crazy about you, Charlie. But you already know that, don’t you?”
His eyes widen slightly, and his hand comes up to brush against my cheek, almost of its own volition. Just as abruptly, he drops his hand and closes his eyes, his weary sigh bouncing off the surrounding cars. “Piper, remember what I said about not making this harder than it already is?” He shakes his head slightly as if to clear whatever thoughts are percolating in there. “We should get back.”
“Wait. You probably won’t believe me, and this is going to sound crazy, but I think—” I hesitate, not wanting to say the horrible words. But Tiny Grandmother has fetched Sam from the bush. Holly has wrangled herself free and is smoothing her hair and giving Sam the Look of Doom.
“I think Holly’s cheating on you. With the veg—with Blaine. I mean, I know about before, the pond and all that, but this is new. Check her phone, okay? Ask her where she was this afternoon.”
Both Charlie and window-reflection Charlie are shaking their heads and frowning at me. They back toward the BMW’s tailpipe. “Don’t do this now.”
“Charlie, I saw the message on her phone. Alex did, too.”
He rests both hands on the top of his head, then pulls them over his face and shoves them in his pockets. “Jesus, Piper. This is really low of you. Just because you can’t commit to anything in your own life doesn’t mean I can’t. You can hardly finish a short story.”
My heart is a gong, and he’s taken a mallet to it. The pain of his words reverberates through me, but instead of crumpling, I reach for my verbal lassi. “Wow. Really? That’s what you have to say to me? This whole time I’ve been looking out for you, trying to help you. Do you have the slightest idea what it’s been like for me to be part of this wedding? Serving up my dignity like a blasted fig tart?”
He opens his mouth, then closes it.
I shrug. “It’s your grave.” With that, I march away from him toward Alex’s Miata, where Alex and Sam are loitering.
Sam has his phone out. “I seem to have lost my phone number,” he muses to Alex
. “Can I have yours?” When he sees me approaching, he frowns. “Uh-oh. What did he say?”
I can hardly speak, and I’ve started shaking from anger.
“What the hell did he say to you?” Sam says.
“They deserve each other,” I tell him. To Alex, I say, “Get me out of here.”
Charlie’s words rattle around in my brain, still gonging my heart as I sit cross-legged and motionless on my bed hours later. You can’t commit to anything . . .
He was rude, but he has a point. The City Paper article, which is due in under a week, remains parsed into half-assed drafts. What I started with such gusto now lies literally in pieces around my room. Cheer Bear holds one of them on his lap.
What’s the point in going to the wedding tomorrow? Maybe I should just leave them without a bridesmaid. Lena would probably kick Charlie’s cousin off as a groomsman to balance the pictures. I imagine Josh being hurled out the church’s front doors.
I stare out the window for a long time, watching cars fly down the Beltway. Frustration churns in me like a spinning wheel split into dartboard-like pie pieces: Sal, Billy, Holly, Lena, Kalil, Charlie. Sal, Billy, Holly, Lena, Kalil, Charlie. All of the humiliating, degrading experiences I’ve had since graduation keep spinning, gathering centrifugal force as they go. A rhythm whirs out from the spinning: You’re . . . not . . . worth . . . anything. A shadow feeling that crept in all my inner nooks and crannies throughout college, but was papered over by As on projects and poetry awards, is abruptly revealed for the naked self-loathing it is.
I stand and pick up the handwritten loose-leaf pages. My eyes land on snippets of text, which now seem amateur and ridiculous.
For four years in college, I pored over texts. Milton, Whitman, Austen. I analyzed themes and motifs, learned snazzy words like “postmodernism,” “anachronism,” and other various and sundry “-isms,” and learned to write a twenty-page paper on a concept that probably could have been summed up in a couple paragraphs (Book Antiqua is a bangin’ font—it’ll extend your paper at least two pages). After four years, I found myself, somewhat disoriented, sitting on the edge of my old bed in my parents’ basement, eating Lucky Charms out of a mug because there were no clean bowls, wondering what the *&^% all that jaw yapping was about. (Not that there’s anything unsatisfactory about a giant mug of Lucky Charms.) Had eighty thousand dollars really just gone down the drain so I could say things like “I think the motif here reveals the subtext of our protagonist’s journey into liminal space”?