Julia Watts - Wedding Bell Blues

by Julia Watts

  “I know. I ought not to have done that. It was just that I couldn’t make the words come out right, and I’ve always been better at doing things than saying them. I know you’re not ready yet, Lily. You’re a widow in mourning — I understand that. I guess what I’m trying to say is...if you ever decide you’re ready, then I’m ready, too.”

  Lily’s head felt as if it might explode from being so full of fear and sadness and confusion. She hadn’t even been allowed a decent period of mourning before she had to worry about losing her daughter. Then there were the numerous pressures of maintaining a fake marriage, the hearing that was coming up sooner than she liked to think about, and now this. “Jack, I can’t even think about this right now. I still love Charlotte—”

  “And you always will. I understand that. But I don’t think Charlotte would want you to spend the rest of your life alone ... to bury yourself right along with her. Once the hearing is over, Lily, you’re gonna have to take a little of the time you’ve been using to think about Mimi’s needs and think about your own.”

  Lily choked back a sob. “Once the hearing is over, I might not have my daughter.”

  “That’s true. But even if you don’t, you don’t have to be all alone.”

  “Well, thank you for saying that. You’re—”

  “A good friend? I know. And if that’s all I can be now, I accept that. I just had to let you know, Lily. I had to tell you because the other mornin’, when I woke up knowing you were in my house ... the house was a lot happier place because you were in it.”

  Lily’s emotions were scattered all over the place. She felt simultaneously trapped, terrified, and touched.

  Jack rose from the couch. “I know you’re not in a position to make any promises, Lily. I just wanted to say my piece, and I reckon I’ve said it.”

  “Yeah, I guess you have.”

  “There’s just one more thing, though. I wanna make sure this isn’t my imagination. When our eyes meet, when you look at me...there’s somethin’ there, isn’t there?”

  Lily thought of the first time she saw Jack — the moment she realized Jack was a woman. She thought of Jack’s hands working to heal a wounded animal, of Jack rolling on the floor playing with Mimi. As much as she’d like to, there was no denying it. “Yeah,” she said, avoiding eye contact. “There’s something there.”

  Jack flashed a wide grin. “I didn’t think it was my imagination. I guess that was all I really wanted to know.” She headed toward the door. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I’ll go now.”

  Lily knew that Jack wanted her to tell her to stay. But Lily was ready for Jack to leave. She had reached emotional overload, and all she could think about was curling up in a fetal ball in the womb of her bed. “Good night, Jack.”

  “Good night.”

  In her bed, Lily cried because Charlotte had died before Lily had finished loving her. She cried because she knew that if Charlotte had died at the age of eighty, she still would have died before Lily had finished loving her. She cried because of the choice that lay before her: to stay married to a memory, or to move on.

  Rationally, Lily knew that Jack had a point — that Charlotte would have wanted Lily’s life to go on. But the problem was that Lily wasn’t sure she wanted her life to go on. Life seemed like a dangerous contact sport, full of opportunities for loss and injury, with victory being only the dimmest of possibilities. Right now, Lily wasn’t sure she even felt like being a spectator of such a sport, let alone a player.

  CHAPTER 16

  Lily rarely drank beer before noon. As a matter of fact, this was probably the first time she’d drunk a beer before two P.M. in her life. But today was a special occasion — in the same sense that the day you’re scheduled to get a much-dreaded pap smear is a special occasion.

  The hearing was two weeks from today, and yesterday she, Ben, and Buzz Dobson had sat down to plan their strategy. Buzz, once again, had turned his meager thoughts to the subject of Lily’s appearance.

  “I was thinking, Lily,” he’d said, biting into a sloppy hamburger that squirted ketchup all over his shirt. “It’d probably be a good idea to go ahead and pay some attention to your appearance. Get a nice hairdo, buy yourself two or three pretty dresses, go around for a couple weeks before the trial looking...looking—”

  “Normal?” Lily had offered helpfully.

  “Well, I wasn’t gonna put it that way, but yeah. You know, just let people see you out with Mimi at the playground, at church maybe, looking the way people around here expect a young mother to look.”

  So yesterday afternoon Lily had grudgingly called Sheila and asked what beauty shop she and Tracee would recommend. If any women embodied “the way people around here expect a young mother to look,” they were Sheila and Tracee.

  Sheila had been hysterical with joy at Lily’s call, sure, Lily thought, that the Faulkner County chapter of the Stepford Wives had just recruited a new member. “Ooh, me and Tracee already have an appointment over at the Chatterbox for tomorrow at eleven-thirty,” she’d squealed. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you tagged along. Oh, it’ll be so much fun! We can get our hair done and get facials, and you can even get a Mary Kay makeover if you want. Me and Tracee won’t, though, ’cause we don’t need a makeover. And I heard they got some new dresses over at the La-Di-Da. Maybe we could walk over there after we get our hair fixed, and spend some of the McGilly boys’ money.”

  And so here Lily sat, swilling beer in the morning, waiting for Sheila and Tracee to come get her. If Ben hadn’t already taken Mimi to Jeanie’s, she’d be tempted to grab her daughter and flee, before the peroxided pod people could turn her into one of them. She disposed of the empty beer bottle and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Just as she was spitting, she heard the horn of Sheila’s Lexus.

  Lily had hoped that the stylist at the Chatterbox would be a gay man—a Faulkner County queen who, out of allegiance to his family, had chosen to live and work in Versailles. Lily had no such luck. Instead, the Chatterbox was run by a creature who called itself Doreen and who worked with the theory that one could make more money in the beauty industry by undermining the self-esteem of one’s customers.

  When Sheila and Tracee presented Lily to Doreen, she shook her head and mumbled, “My, my, my. Look what the cat drug in.”

  Not that Doreen looked that hot herself. Her straw-textured hair was dyed neon orange, and her eyelids were shadowed with bright turquoise. But the most fascinating thing about Doreen was her eyebrows— or her simulated eyebrows.

  The old lady (how old was impossible to tell beneath the layers of pancake makeup) had plucked or shaved her naturally occurring brows and painted on violent black slashes that began at the bridge of her nose and ended up at her hairline above her temples. If this was the woman who was in charge of her makeover, Lily thought she was more likely to end up looking like an extra from Star Trek than an ordinary wife and mother.

  Doreen turned Sheila and Tracee over to her assistant for their trims and root touch-ups. She looked at Lily, stubbed out her cigarette, and said to no one in particular, “Well, I reckon I’ll have to roll up my sleeves to deal with this one.” When she finally addressed Lily directly, she ordered, “Sit down, honey. And get comfortable. This is gonna take a while.”

  Lily tried to sit still while Doreen yanked on her hair. “Never seen so many rat nests in my life,” Doreen muttered, her cigarette clenched between her teeth. Lily was fairly sure she felt a few ashes drop on her head.

  She knew her hair was a mess. She hadn’t done anything to it except wash it since Charlotte died, and her once-funky white-girl braids had turned into mats and tangles. Doreen pulled and combed so hard that Lily was sure her hair was being torn out by its roots. Tattoos and body piercings were painless compared to this torture.

  “Well, I reckon I got it combed out enough to wash it anyway,” Doreen said finally. When Lily turned her head to look in the mirror, she was greeted by the image of Elsa Lanchester i
n Bride of Frankenstein.

  “Lord, girl, don’t look at it yet. We ain’t even halfway there. It’s a good thing I eat my Wheaties this mornin’.” She tucked a towel into the collar of Lily’s plastic smock. “Lean back in the chair now.”

  After Doreen scrubbed Lily’s scalp as though it needed de-lousing, Lily sat up again. Doreen fluffed her hair with her red talons. “We’re gonna hafta take a lotta this length off,” she muttered. “You got split ends on top of your split ends.” Doreen’s scissors began snip-snip-snipping in a seemingly random pattern, and Lily sucked in her breath as large hunks of hair fell onto her smock and the floor.

  “How’s it going?” Sheila asked brightly. She and Tracee stood together, their coiffures trimmed and touched up.

  Doreen looked Lily over and frowned. “It’ll be another hour at least.”

  “Hmm,” Tracee said, “Well, I guess we’ll go grab some lunch at the Bucket. We’ll be back directly.”

  Doreen snipped until Lily figured she’d run out of hair, then mixed up a plastic bottle of some vile-smelling chemical solution and squeezed it on Lily’s hair. Lily’s eyes teared, and her nose ran. She had always drawn the body-piercing line at below-the-belt piercings, but right now a labia piercing seemed a comparative piece of cake.

  “All right, back in the sink,” Doreen barked like a cosmetology drill sergeant. Lily pondered the analogy as Doreen rinsed the chemicals from her hair. Just like a drill sergeant, Doreen was stamping out Lily’s rebelliousness and taking away her individuality to make her an acceptable member of a team.

  Hair—its color, length, and style — was always tied to individuality. After all, what was the first thing the army did to new male recruits? They gave them identical haircuts.

  Lily reflected on the symbolic significance of hair as her own shortened tresses were blown dry, hot rolled, brushed, sprayed, and spritzed. When Doreen finally turned the chair to face the mirror, Lily gasped. Doreen bared her yellowed teeth in a grin, mistaking her client’s shock for delight.

  Lily’s new short hair was not the carefree crop of a dyke. Her ashy tresses had been highlighted a sunny blonde and were now pouffed on top of her head, coming down in perfectly arranged petals around her face. It was a soccer mom’s haircut—short, sassy, and sprayed so stiff that neither rain nor sleet nor storm nor hail could budge it.

  Lily patted her stiff bubble of hair. With a do like this, she could be perkily reporting the six o’clock news. It was the perfect style for the image she needed to project, but looking at it still made her want to cry.

  “Is that what you wanted, honey?” Doreen asked, firing up another cigarette.

  “Yeah, it’s perfect.”

  “Now I don’t know if Sheila and Tracee told you or not, but I am a licensed Mary Kay consultant, so if you wanted some more makeup to complete your new look —”

  “Sure. Why not?” Lily looked at Doreen’s horrifying Kabuki mask of cosmetics. “But let’s keep it light and natural, okay?”

  “Sure, hon.”

  Lily’s “light and natural” makeover took thirty-five minutes. Sheila and Tracee returned from their lunch break and watched Lily’s transformation, oohing and ahhing as if they were watching the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel being painted.

  When Lily saw herself in the mirror, her newly painted mouth formed an “O” of surprise, making her look not unlike one of those blond, blow-up sex-toy dolls. She would almost have preferred to be wearing Doreen’s Kabuki mask — at least it had a spooky, avant-garde quality. As it was, her cheeks were dusted with peachy blush, her lips painted with equally peachy lipstick, her lashes brushed with mascara to give her a wide-eyed, Mary Pickford appearance. She looked—she shuddered at the word — wholesome.

  “Doreen, you are a miracle worker!” Sheila squealed. “Come on, Lily, let’s go buy you some new dresses!”

  A better name for the La-Di-Da Dress Shop might be Designed-to-Be-Dowdy, Lily thought, as she scanned through the racks. All the dresses were in the prim shirtwaist style preferred by Sunday school teachers and small-town librarians. Finally, deciding all the garments were equally vile, Lily closed her eyes and pulled two dresses off the “size eight” rack at random.

  The oversolicitous saleslady went into paroxysms of joy. “Oh,” she crowed, “those are positively the real you!”

  “Give it a rest, lady,” Lily muttered, marching toward the dressing rooms. “You wouldn’t know the real me if I bit you on the ass!”

  “Lil-ee!” Tracee chided her. “You’re aw-full!”

  But she had already shut the dressing room door behind her.

  In her light blue shirtwaist dress, black Naturalizer flats, and stockings, Lily was totally unrecognizable, even to herself. She was reminded of the scene in the movie Tootsie in which Dustin Hoffman first appears in full, dowdy drag.

  When Lily went to relieve Jeanie of her babysitting duties, Mimi screamed at the sight of her. The little girl eyed Lily suspiciously, then broke down in tears. “Where’s Mama? Where’s Mama?” she wailed hysterically.

  “Mimi-saurus, it’s me. I’m your mama.”

  “No! Not Mama!” Mimi screamed.

  “Honey, of course it’s your mama,” Jeanie said. “She just went to the beauty shop. Don’t she look pretty?”

  “Not Mama!” Mimi shrieked louder.

  Lily had to carry Mimi to the bathroom and show her her tattoos in order to convince the little girl that the pristinely dressed, carefully coiffed creature before her was indeed her mother.

  When Lily returned to the place she and Ben grudgingly called home, Ben took one look at her and cried, “Shit! Shiiit. Shi-it.”

  Lily flopped down on the sofa. “Hey, now, no profanity in front of the baby.”

  Ben shook his head like a wet dog. “Good god, you look like the president of the Junior League, and you say things like no profanity in front of the baby. It’s like you’ve turned into a...a...”

  Lily put on a mock Cockney accent. “A real laydee? Just call me Eliza, Professor Higgins.” She kicked off her shoes and began unceremoniously peeling off her pantyhose. “We got any beer?”

  Mordecai emerged from the hall and eyed Lily suspiciously. He approached her, sniffed her, and, satisfied as to her identity, settled down for an ear-scratching. Ben backed out of the room, still fixated on Lily’s transformed appearance. “I’ll...I’ll get you one.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a good husband.”

  Ben returned with their beers and sat down on the couch. “Say, why don’t I drive over to Callahan and pick us up a pizza for dinner? You can’t be in the kitchen cooking, looking like that. You’ll feel like fucking Harriet Nelson.”

  Mimi looked up from her shape sorter and joyously exclaimed, “Fuckin’!”

  “Mimi, that’s a grown-up word.” Lily leaned back on the couch and sucked down some beer. “A lot of good it’s gonna do me to change my entire image if my daughter’s gonna have the vocabulary of a longshoreman.”

  “Don’t worry; she won’t have to testify.” Ben flipped through the Versailles/Callahan phone book. Ripping that phone book would be no feat of strength, Lily thought. Mimi could probably do it.

  “So...” Ben said, “mushroom, green pepper, and black olive?”

  “Sure.” Lily was astonished at the tiredness in her voice.

  After Ben went to fetch the pizza, Lily made a bowl of oatmeal and a slice of toast for Mimi, whose idea of good eating was breakfast three times a day. Lily tied on Mimi’s bib, sat down with her, and began to spoon the warm cereal into the little girl’s mouth.

  “No, Mama,” Mimi said. “Feed self.”

  “Well, okay, grown-up girl.” She handed the spoon over, and Mimi took it into her tiny fist. Mimi shoveled away, managing to convey about sixty percent of the food into her mouth. Overall, she was doing a better job than Buzz Dobson.

  Every day Mimi was getting more independent, learning to do more things for herself, adding more words to her vocabu
lary, including some she’d be better off without. Colorful vocabulary or not, Lily was proud of Mimi, and she loved watching her grow and learn. She thought of the other steps Mimi would be taking in the next year or so — moving from a crib to a bed, learning to use the potty — and hoped she would be there to help her daughter with these difficult milestones.

  Mimi reached a dimpled, oatmeal-gooey hand out to touch Lily’s stiff hair. “Funny Mama.”

  Lily had to agree. “Yeah, I’m pretty funny looking all right. Are you done with your dinner?”

  “All done.”

  “Okay, let’s go hose you off, then.”

  Mimi grinned, flashing her perfect, white baby teeth. “Baffy?”

  “That’s right. Bathy time.”

  As Lily watched Mimi splash happily in the tub, she found herself wondering what the Maycombs and their kind thought she would do to damage her daughter. Did they think she was simply raising Mimi to recruit her, to train her from the earliest possible age in the rites of Sappho? Such thinking — if it could even be called thinking — was ridiculous. As long as Mimi found someone who’d be good to her, Lily didn’t care whom she grew up to love, male or female. She and Charlotte had decided to have a child to love, not to recruit.

  It was the fundamentalists who recruited. From the time their children were babies, they dragged them to Sunday school and church for hours on end, indoctrinating them when they were too young to know what hit them. Maybe this was why fundamentalists always assumed gays and lesbians were raising their children with some kind of agenda in mind; the fundamentalists themselves certainly were.

  Lily loved the way Mimi smelled and felt when she was fresh out of the tub. After she got Mimi diapered and dressed, Lily sat down in the nursery’s rocking chair for storytime. Mimi toddled over to her bookshelf. Lily was amused to note that while three of her own picture books were on the shelf, Mimi always avoided them like the plague. Everybody was a critic.

  Mimi returned to the rocking chair with Janell Cannon’s beautifully illustrated book Stellaluna. Lily cuddled her daughter on her lap, opened the book, and began to read.