A Wedding Invitation

by Alice J. Wisler

  seven

  As I drive to Dovie’s after the reception, the sky is bountiful with pastry-puff clouds lit by a shimmering sunset. My feet are sore from dancing and I look forward to taking off my heels. At least in the Philippines the flip-flops we wore didn’t hurt my feet, even after dancing or walking across the camp from one neighborhood to the other.

  At her chalky white two-story I park my car in the gravel driveway. Milkweed, her overfed tabby cat seated on the olive green love seat on the screened-in porch, greets me like a purring Southern hostess.

  I walk up the three brick steps and knock on the front door, which stands heavy against the right side of the porch.

  Within seconds, Dovie appears in a periwinkle cotton dress and fuzzy polka-dotted slippers. “How was the wedding?” she asks after she kisses my cheek, tells me I’ve gotten taller, and ushers me into a kitchen smelling of baked bread.

  Beanie, looking thinner than the last time I visited, stands in a pair of jeans, an oversized flannel shirt, and an apron, stirring a tall pot with a slender spoon. “Long time no see,” she says.

  “Hi, Beanie.” I know not to embrace her; like my mother, Beanie resists affection. She claims it’s the Chinese side of her that causes her to be this way. “Smells good,” I say as I peer into the pot and see chunks of chicken and flat noodles in a velvety broth.

  Beanie grins. If you compliment her on much else, she won’t accept it, but she does believe she can conjure up a tasty meal.

  It’s nearly eight, just about dinner hour for Dovie and her boarders. Dovie collects people like squirrels store food. Young, old, wealthy, or miserly, my aunt takes them in. Beanie’s history is long and dark, although I have never heard all the details in sequence.

  “So, how was the wedding?” Beanie pauses from her stirring like she’s waiting for a good story. “Tell us.”

  “It wasn’t the right one.” I place my clutch bag on a clear spot on the counter.

  “What?”

  “My friend didn’t get married.” Pulling off my heels, I sink into a cushioned kitchen chair. Through my panty hose, I see blisters on both of my big toes and wince.

  “Oh,” says Beanie. “Those kinds of happenings do happen, so I’ve heard. The bride gets cold feet and never makes it to the wedding.”

  “She made it. She just isn’t my friend.” Standing, I put my shoes over to the side of the room near Milkweed’s food dish and begin to remove my stockings.

  “You and her got in a fight?” Beanie’s face lights up like one of the pillar candles I just spent an uncertain hour with. “That can happen. There are times I know I shouldn’t, but something comes over me that I just can’t get ahold of and tame. Did you win? Must have because you still look pretty good.”

  “No.”

  Beanie frowns. “Are you hurt?”

  “Only my toes.”

  “I hate it when someone steps on mine. Makes me all kinds of annoyed.”

  Beanie is like a train out of control. I put an end to all her illusions, something we often have to do when she wants to believe the nonsensical. “No, no fighting.”

  “But she’s still not your friend?”

  Moistening my lips, I start to explain. “I thought that my friend Avery was getting married and that she’d invited me to her wedding. But there must have been some mix-up. I didn’t know anyone at the wedding and she wasn’t even—”

  Aunt Dovie interrupts. “Catalina Afternoon.”

  Beanie’s brow is furrowed. “Really?”

  I search their faces. Is this some kind of code? “What?”

  “Catalina Afternoon is a movie we saw. Friends end up at the wrong wedding.” She hands heavy pottery bowls one at a time to Beanie.

  Well, I think, if I’d known that a movie title would set Beanie straight, I would have tried that tactic from the first.

  Beanie takes a bowl and ladles soup into its deep opening.

  Deciding I should make myself useful, I take the bowl and set it at the table.

  Beanie hands me another bowl. “Those friends didn’t realize they were at the wrong wedding until it was too late. Tragic, in an odd sort of way.”

  As we sit at the kitchen table with a spring breeze blowing through the opened window, my aunt offers a prayer of thanksgiving to God.

  After her joyful “Amen and amen!” I ask, “So, you’ve seen a movie about someone who ends up at the wrong wedding?”

  “Yes,” says Dovie as she passes me a basket of sliced oatmeal bread—one of her homemade specialties. “Only there was violence at that one.”

  “Three die,” Beanie adds. “Or was it four?”

  Aunt Dovie refers to movies and TV shows as examples for just about anything. “Let’s see,” she says as she butters her slice of bread with swift motions. “There was the daughter. Then the sister-in-law.”

  “And the hamster.” Beanie lets a laugh escape from her mouth like a secret.

  “Two hamsters?” asks my aunt as she chews a crust of bread. “Wasn’t one a guinea pig?”

  “No, the neighbor with the John Deere had the guinea pig. It got caught under the wheels.”

  “Was that before or after the rehearsal dinner?”

  Before Beanie can comment, I say, “Well, no one died today. In fact,” I add, smiling, “I met someone.”

  “Ohhhh,” says Beanie as she lifts a heaping spoonful of noodles into her mouth. Chewing, she says, “I’ve heard about that, too. Two people end up meeting at a wedding and then get married themselves right quick.”

  He did ask for my number. Beanie and my aunt discuss the plot of another movie they saw about a hairdresser and prison guard who met at a wedding and later married in the Grand Canyon.

  I watch the lacy daisy-colored curtains billow at the window as a hefty gust of wind enters the kitchen. I close my eyes and think of the way Taylor made me feel as we danced. When I let my mind drift back to the conversation at the table, Beanie says, “Well, the church is full of hypocrites.”

  Dovie asks, “Now, what makes you think that?” It is not the first time Beanie has said something like this. Last time I drove down for a weekend, she complained that church people wouldn’t accept her due to three failed marriages, her crooked left eyebrow, and her past obsession with Johnnie Walker.

  “Folks look at me like I shouldn’t be there.”

  “Nonsense,” Dovie cries. “The church is one place where everyone is welcomed.”

  “In theory.”

  In theory is one of Beanie’s favorite phrases.

  “In theory all should feel cozy warm at church worshiping God. But those folk choose who is welcome and who is not.”

  “Why don’t you feel welcome?” I ask.

  Beanie spits a fingernail out of her mouth. “ ’Cause they don’t like women who used to dance for a living.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I get these vibes.”

  Beanie chews her nails, trimming the ragged edges with her teeth, and when a piece winds up in her mouth, she lets it dangle on her tongue and then forces it into the garbage can when she stands to get us dessert. I start to decline dessert because I had two slices of wedding cake, but then I see Beanie take a strawberry cheesecake from the fridge and know I must have a piece.

  “What color am I?” asks Beanie as she stands at the counter with a knife in her hand.

  “You are a mixture of everything.” Dovie’s words are warm.

  She nods. “I am a product of a black father, Hispanic mother, and great-grandfathers who were Chinese and French. I should be welcome everywhere because I am every woman.”

  Dovie starts to hum “I’m Every Woman.” Beanie laughs, her left eyebrow twitches, and then we all have a generous slice of cheesecake.

  As we place dishes in the dishwasher, Beanie tells us she went for a job interview at the local Wachovia branch and “feels this might be my ticket to employment.” She describes how the manager interviewing her kept sniffing and that finally Beanie offere
d her not only a tissue but some of her allergy medication.

  “I helped her with what she needed and now I hope she’ll help me.”

  “Do you like bank work?” I ask.

  Beanie laughs. “I like having money in the bank. Right now my disability check is not big enough to keep me in underwear.”

  “Disability?” After I say it, I wonder if it’s rude to ask why Beanie is on disability.

  The phone rings, and since I’m standing beside it, I answer. Little, a woman who’s been living with Dovie since Thanksgiving, has finished her shift at Wendy’s, her bicycle has a flat tire, her head hurts something awful, and she needs a ride home—quickly, before any other parts of her world cave in. “We’ll be there,” I tell her because I know that’s exactly what my aunt would say to her.

  Under a moonless sky, the three of us pile into the cab of Dovie’s pickup with the cracked windshield and begin the drive to the Wendy’s where Little works.

  We park in a spot by a florescent light that flickers off and on like a Christmas tree. After five minutes, a short, middle-aged woman with a round face and a crop of curly blond hair comes from the restaurant toward us. She’s balancing a cardboard carrier in her tiny hands.

  Beanie rolls down her window. “What you got?”

  Carefully, Little hands her the cardboard through the window. The contraption holds three yellow cups with lids. “Frostys for you,” says Little.

  Beanie steadies the milk shakes on her lap. “Going to fire you,” she warns, “if you give food away.” She pops a straw into the lid of one of the cups.

  Little smiles, the gap between her two front teeth extensive. Squeezing into the back with me, she says, “Who says I’m giving food away? These, I found in the trash can.” She speaks slowly, each word a feat to get out of her lips.

  What I know about Little is that, growing up, she was constantly interrupted when speaking. Apparently, due to her speech impediment, it took her a while to get her thoughts out, and her six siblings and parents were not patient. Dovie and Beanie have learned to be patient, and Little seems to like that.

  Little rests her head against the windowpane. From her uniform, the aroma of fried food fills the car. “I thought eleven o’clock would never get here.” She eyes me and says with a smile, “Good to see you, Sammie Girl.”

  Beanie hands me a Frosty. Then she sips from another. “Pretty good for dumpster food. And trust me, I would know.”

  Beanie was homeless for a few weeks before she found sanctuary at Dovie’s house. She claims that all she had to her name at that time were her cloudy reputation, a stale loaf of pumpernickel bread, and a folded dollar in her shoe.

  I shove a straw into the hole in the plastic lid and take a small taste. The coolness of the contents is soothing against my dry throat.

  As Dovie pulls her truck out of the deserted fast-food restaurant’s parking lot, she passes her milk shake behind her to Little. “Take a sip.”

  “Oh, no,” says the woman. “I don’t want to get sick from dumpster food.”

  Laughter and slurping carry us back to Dovie’s. Dovie and Beanie talk about some 1950s movie about milk shakes and a lovers’ quarrel.

  I think of Mom and feel a tinge of guilt that she’s alone in Falls Church, so far from this happiness that I feel she could use. Yet I remind myself that Dovie always extends the welcome mat to her. Mom chooses not to accept, claiming she has a new life in Falls Church and wants to put her past in Winston-Salem behind her. I heard her tell Dad once that her childhood was not pleasant due to her parents’ fighting and dysfunction. Now, as a woman in her sixties, she prefers to stay away from Winston and its many reminders. Dovie, on the other hand, tells me that Winston-Salem is the only place she feels at home. “Why,” my aunt has been known to repeat, “Winston is where I feel the most alive and feel God’s hand on my life.”

  eight

  I trail behind my aunt, sleep still in my eyes. The early service at her church this morning was lengthy because there were several prayers for a youth team preparing to travel to Haiti. After the prayers ended, I had to force my eyes to stay open. I longed for my grandma’s Life Savers, always a sure way to keep me from dozing off in church. Now there’s no time for a nap; we’re preparing for a butterfly release.

  In Dovie’s fenced-in backyard are two matching wooden sheds—their only differences being the color of the roofs. Dovie rattles a set of keys as three hens scurry from our path, making their way to the apple tree. These clucking birds all have names—Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner—affectionately given, but not with the intention of actually consuming any of them for the meal they were named after. Dovie purchased them solely for their egg-laying capabilities.

  As the noisiest hen pecks at a tray filled with grain, Dovie unlocks the first shed with the sloping red roof. Gently, the door creaks open. We enter, shutting the door behind us.

  The interior is damp and cool, with peculiar odors. A tiny window about two-feet square lets in rays of late morning sunshine. This hatch, as she calls it, holds a crudely built wooden table that is crammed with branches sticking out of dirt-filled pots. Large green plants spray out over the floor. In the early spring, this is the hatch that holds lots of about-to-change caterpillars. The larvae stick to these branches until they’re ready to become butterflies. Today there are just a few late bloomers. One she studies and wonders aloud why it has not broken from the silky sack and tried its wings.

  “Are you too cozy inside there to even try to come out?” she asks it as one would question a child. “Come out, now, honey. It’s a fascinating world.”

  The next shed is a colorful wonderland. This is where Dovie keeps the monarchs that emerge in the previous shed. She takes them out of their first home and places them in this hatch—the same size but with more greenery and better sunlight. I quickly close the shed door and step into the beauty of life. Dovie stands with her fingers outstretched, and within minutes one of the insects has landed on her thumb. She smiles at me and then motions for me to pick up the wire cage on the left side of the room. Slowly, trying not to disturb anything, I reach for the tightly woven cage, open its tiny door, and place it on the table in the center of the shed. Dovie covers the butterfly with a hand and swoops it into the cage.

  From the time I was small, Dovie taught me the cycle of the monarch butterfly, but all I fully recall is that each female lays her eggs on the underside of the milkweed leaf. After the egg is laid, the caterpillar is born, and basically goes through his short days and nights eating leaves and pooping. Dovie’s explanation included that the caterpillar was then ready to pupate and form a chrysalis and spin a silky thread around him until it was time for him to emerge as a butterfly. When I was small I thought the words were puke and crystal, so for a long time I held an image of these minute, furry bugs puked into crystal dishes and then the puke magically turned into a silk sac that, for some reason, hung upside down, possibly because it was still too nauseous to stand upright.

  I watch Dovie lock the shed door, place the keys in her pocket, and then pick up the cage filled with monarchs. We make our way to the driveway where her truck sits. With a gentle swing, she puts the metal cage into the cab. Then we hop in.

  Little left for work about the time Dovie and I headed into town for church. As she drained her mug of coffee and finished two slices of toast spread with coconut butter—a product she discovered when she lived in Dundee, Florida—Little said she hoped not to be working next Sunday. “I can go to church with you then,” she said as she wiped her mouth with a napkin. “I do miss it when I have to work the morning shift. Asking whether or not the customers want lettuce and tomato on their burger is not at all as glorious as singing hymns to Jesus.” Then she stood in her uniform outside by the porch, waiting for a coworker to pick her up and take her to Wendy’s.

  Although Beanie has no plans for the day, she declined Dovie’s invitation to join us for church, and now she refuses to come to the butterfly release.

/>   “I don’t do silly sentimental things,” she states. “Besides, I have some potatoes I need to boil for dinner tonight.”

  “So where are we going?” I ask Dovie when we are about a mile out of her driveway. With a firm hand I secure my camera on my lap.

  “Today it’s the Amber Grove Cemetery.”

  I nod, recalling having previously heard the name of this particular cemetery. Uncle Charlie is buried there, with a headstone that has a motorcycle engraved in it. My great-uncle liked to ride fast, and my relatives tell me that his Harley out-sped any police car on the Forsyth County squad. He also made moonshine, borrowing a recipe from Scottish immigrants who settled in the Appalachian Mountains.

  “This is a group of parents who have had children die,” Dovie tells me.

  My tongue freezes like one of the orange popsicles I ate growing up.

  “They ask me to come to the cemetery every year for a butterfly release. You’ll see that parents of deceased children have a strong connection to the butterfly.”

  The truck hits a pothole; we steady ourselves. “Why is that?”

  But my question gets lost as we pull into the cemetery and Dovie sees a mass of balloons. “Balloons, too,” she says as her truck bounces along the uneven narrow road toward dozens of parked vehicles.

  She finds a spot for her truck under the branches of a mammoth oak tree and then turns to me. “Balloons and butterflies are free.” Her eyes hold flecks of light. “And when they sail into the sky, they eventually disappear. But their beauty remains in our hearts. These parents feel the connection.”

  I sit a bit longer as she makes her way over to a group partially veiled by an assortment of colorful bouncing balloons. The people are all wearing dark blue T-shirts with white words and some sort of indistinguishable emblem. I watch Dovie speak to a woman and then my aunt comes back toward the truck, her strides long and purposeful.

  She takes her cage of butterflies out from the back of the cab and smiles at me. “We’re at the right place and on time.”