Dreaming : Hard Luck and Good Times in America (9780307807274)

by See, Carolyn

  She called up one afternoon from a store in Brentwood and said she had found her wedding dress. Would we like to come by and check it out? John, Lisa, her friend Gretchen, and I went over to the store. It sold fake hippie dresses, “flowerdy” prints, things with wrinkled ribbons coming off. Nothing here on the racks even looked vaguely like a wedding. Clara was a little late and she clomped in, the way she does when she’s already made up her mind, when she expects an argument.

  She grabbed a dress off the rack, went into the dressing room, came right back out. Her face was pale with stress. “I figure this is it,” she said stubbornly. “All I need is a hat.” She grabbed a hat with flowers and plunked it flat down on her head. “What do you think? This is fine, isn’t it?” She was so grim that all we could do was stare, unable to say yes, afraid to say no.

  An up-and-down white frock of crinkled white organdy hung straight from her shoulders to mid-calf. Two shepherdess panniers draped in front.

  “You might want to look around a little bit,” her sister said.

  “It does look better with the hat,” I said.

  “Fine, fine,” John said gamely.

  Gretchen just looked.

  “Why don’t I put a deposit on it?” I said. (That was easy, because it came in under two hundred dollars.)

  Clara changed into a sweatshirt and baggy pants and clomped off.

  Heartbreak time. What had we—or life—done to Clara, that she thought her net worth came to under two hundred dollars?

  Was it that father of hers? Or was it the car accident she’d been in, which might have left her feeling not pretty enough? Where was that drunk-driving Guatemalan! We’d kill him.

  “I’m not saying anything,” Gretchen said, and drove away, sad and quiet.

  I was scared to say anything either, because I knew from hard experience that whatever your mother tells you to do, you will try as hard as you can to do something else.

  In the end it was Lisa who talked to Clara with some heat, explaining that Clara had to be the most beautiful woman at her own wedding, no matter how much money it took. It was Lisa who marshaled us all at the bride store, the one where they serve the relatives coffee and stick the bride up on a pedestal and pin $2,000 creations on her. Clara began to object. “I cannot stand the infantilization of the bride,” she cried. “I’m not a doll, I’m a human being!” Underneath her socialist harangue, and not very well hidden, I thought I heard the scathing phrase: bourgeois sellout. But hadn’t I tortured her poor father for years with “You can take the house, the books, blah blah, but YOU’LL NEVER HAVE MY GOOD OPINION”? Might not this be Karmuppance for us all?

  What was it in our family that made us impostors in our own eyes? Why was it, with all the education in the world and all the therapy and all the training, we still felt, or would at least occasionally succumb to the feeling, that we weren’t “good” enough to dress up, have a party, be beautiful, stand up for a marriage—and have children, and friendships, and grandmas, and cookies, and nobody throwing up in the living room?

  Part of Clara’s objection was that to pay two thousand dollars for a dress and parade around in it for one day was criminal, the way the economy was. Every day she struggled to find clean underwear for her homeless ladies. How could she do it? And how could she cross her father?

  OK, well, then things started to happen. The sales girls stuck a dress on her that made her breasts look like cream and her waist something like Miss America’s, and the skirt a fluff of tulle. Of course she wouldn’t buy it at this flossy store but found a discount warehouse that carried it. The happy couple picked out invitations and when a friend of Chris’s criticized the quality of the printing, Clara threw him out of her house, just like some crazy Sturak Slovak of old. Every one of Chris’s brothers was coming, and every one of their mothers was coming. Then Chris’s own dad said he couldn’t/wouldn’t come. Too many wives! But Clara and Chris would make him do it.

  Clara wanted Richard, my first husband, to come, along with his mom and his wife and nice daughter from his second marriage. He would be marrying a third time about a month after Clara, finally hooking up with a fabled “beautiful black woman,” Anne Jennings. Anne would be out of town, but Clara wanted his second wife, Pat, to come, because she was family by now.

  Because they were related to Lisa, and weren’t we all family now, and didn’t family mean everything to Lisa, Clara, Carolyn, Tom, Richard, John, Dick Kendall and his dear sister Nan and her husband, Pat, and John’s daughter, Alice, and her husband, Ralph, and John’s younger daughter, Susan, and her son, Jordan, and Chris Junior, Chris Senior, and Chris’s mom, and stepmoms and everyone by now? Clara invited my mother. She invited Rose, who was still brooding on the teasing subject of marriage.

  Invitations. How come people don’t RSVP anymore? What’s wrong with this country?! Lisa threw a shower in her garden for a flock of pretty ladies in country dresses. Clara wore her first choice for her wedding dress, the crinkly organdy one, and the hat full of flowers. It looked great, and she started collecting juicers, lasagna pans. Chris’s dad called to say he’d be coming after all. How could he miss the occasion?

  Clara found bridesmaids’ dresses. Cake-box pink with artificial pearls over the shoulders like sundresses. Cocktail length. The thickheaded mother of the bride took cocktail length to mean somewhere down around the ankles, but cocktail length meant somewhere above the thigh. You could crumple a dress in one hand and still have room left over for a sandwich. “No infantilization of women!”

  Mexican food! A mariachi! All of Chris’s family put up in one hotel. John got up at five one morning and bounded back to bed at seven. “I’ve done it,” he said triumphantly. “I wrote them a sestina, a difficult form that first came into existence in the year 1190. Nobody writes a sestina anymore!”

  During a series of frank discussions with his daughter, in which Tom Sturak reportedly made as many moves as an octopus trying to get out of a handbag, he finally shifted gears, toned down, allowed as how he might wear a tuxedo down the aisle (and allow his son to do so as well) on the strict condition that he be able to change into a high-fashion black T-shirt as soon as the ceremony was performed. I guess you might say he and Clara came to a bourgeois draw.

  Clara and her bridesmaids. “No infantilization of women!”

  —

  The night before the wedding, John and I, Clara and Chris, were going to have dinner with Chris’s mother, Marthe, a brilliant professor of philosophy. The first of Chris Chandler, Sr.’s, wives and mother of two of his children, she would be flying in alone to California. We were going to meet at I Cugini (the cousins, in Italian), and we would get to know each other. Clara thought her new mother-in-law might have some nervousness about seeing her ex-husband in this whole wedding context, and—God!—probably some general nervousness about the whole thing.

  John and I waited in the early evening California beach sunlight. You got to see the whole world here in I Cugini, how the better part of the California almost-rich had made it through the past thirty years. Girls swirled by in long, sheer Janis Joplin dresses, hardworking females in suits and carrying briefcases came in, sat down, and sighed. Big, beautiful, tanned men came in to cruise: it was a good bet they hadn’t done a day’s work in years. Carefree, careless, careworn. This was a big restaurant and it was filling up quick. John and I began to worry. It was the kind of place where you couldn’t sit down until the rest of the party showed up. So, where was the rest of the party?

  Then we saw Clara, outside, striding along, swinging her purse. Smiling. She went straight to the hostess. “Instead of a party of five, we’ll be a party of eight.” Then, to us, “Chris found one of his stepmoms in the hall of the hotel. Denise, you met her, didn’t you? And her husband, and Chris’s brother, Travis. They’ll be joining us for dinner. They’re waiting for Trav to get ready. Sixteen-year-old boys. You know how long they take!”

  Then they all came barreling in. Denise de Clue, successful screenwr
iter, with a handsome, affable husband, Bob; Travis, a lanky, blushing version of his older brother; and Marthe, holding onto Chris, looking exactly like Chris, and looking a little like me. Because our families really did mirror each other.

  We went for it! Found a corner table, and then ordered champagne, and then went for the good white wine, trying to cram eight life stories into a three-hour span. “The mothers want another,” Marthe and I would say, or “The mothers need a drink.” We drank toasts to the future and the wedding and the present. I remember Marthe telling me about how terrible she felt when she had to take a teaching job, after she worked so hard for her PhD; how she felt she was shortchanging the boys: “But I had to,” she said, and her face came into close and perfect focus, “I had to do it then, or else I’d never do it.”

  I told her about going off on magazine assignments, leaving the kids to fend for themselves. “But I had to,” I said. The sentence had two meanings. One was that we had to support the kids, because our cute husbands (who looked uncannily alike, it would turn out) were devoting their lives to heedless pleasure, and we had to support the kids! But the true “I had to” was “I had to.” I had to make a meaningful life, follow my calling, or I would have died or killed somebody. Or made another whole set of people achingly unhappy, which—be fair—might have happened anyway.

  “I wanted you to come out here,” Chris said steadily to his mother, “so that you could see what I’ve made of my life. I’m not the same person I was five years ago.”

  Chris was right. He had come from that familiar metaphorical nothing our family knew so much about, out from Chicago to live in LA in an apartment supplied by one of his dad’s girlfriends’, worked as a busboy in one of his dad’s girlfriends’ restaurants, found the charming and beautiful hostess, my Clara, worked in a print shop, found friends, gone back to school, invented an honorable life. All on his own. Chris was a hero.

  After dinner we split. Denise, her husband, and Travis wandered off to the Santa Monica Pier. Clara and Chris took his mother back to the hotel. John and I drove home and went to bed early to be up in time for the wedding.

  So ordinary! So extremely pleasant! During the last six months of planning, there had been no slithering storm of vicious insults that stuck and stung like poisonous jellyfish. No hard drugs. Not even a real raised voice. And the tuxedo question, which might have occupied us earlier for from five to ten years of acrimony, was already beginning to fade from memory. It was not impossible to put a dozen divorced wives and husbands together, along with two hundred of everybody’s closest friends. It was going to be ordinary. We had, knock wood, gotten into the habit of being happy.

  —

  The wedding was held—held, what a great word—in Gretchen’s backyard. Gretchen was Clara’s friend since the seventh grade—part of her extended family now, since Gretchen’s parents had taken Clara in during a Topanga flood. Some backyard! A sylvan glade on two levels, with a meadow and a winding creek and dappled light all over everything. Trees twined overhead to frame the wedding party.

  In the back bedroom five beautiful women struggled mightily with control-top panty hose and underwear they weren’t used to, and when they were dressed, four girls were in cake-box pink cocktail dresses (and you could see Clara’s point: no infantilization. She wanted babes, women, out there), but there was one missing dress—one missing scrap of cake-box crepe. Consternation.

  I took a look in the mirror. The mother of the bride, all right. I’d gained some righteous weight after the last wedding. I looked like one of those Helen Hokinson ladies in the old New Yorker cartoons. And there was that same old birthmark, hanging around like a boring party guest who won’t go home. (But of course it was home.) Without it, I might have taken typing, married a dull man, and lived my life asleep. I was certainly in no position, now, to complain.

  Clara, composed and dignified, swished out to have her picture taken. Tom’s wife, Jacqueline, was at the ready, by the guestbook, looking swell in lace and flowered cotton. “I went for comfort,” she said demurely.

  We were nervous! Nervous in nineteen ways. Please, I prayed, don’t let me lose it here, don’t let me confide some strong-minded opinion about somebody, or if someone does the same to me, let me be silent. Lisa, in her size two cake-box pink outfit, kept zipping her lip, pulling her fingers across her firmly closed mouth. She’d have her own dad, Richard, her former stepdad, Tom, a surrogate stepdad (jolly Harvard) and another surrogate stepdad (dear John). Besides her half sister Clara, she had another half sister, Ariana, from her dad and her former stepmother, Pat. “I’m keeping my lip zipped,” Lisa said a hundred times, and then went off to get her picture taken. The lost dress got found.

  The Mariachi UCLATLÁN strolled in, ranged themselves along a raft of greenery, and began to tune up. Time had gone by! We’d listened to them, critically, since they’d been weedy undergraduates at UCLA. Now the lead musician had a long gray beard. I stood beside Tom—he’d turned away from me, what else was new!—but we both watched the mariachi. A few tentative notes, and they began to play. “Escaleras de la Carcel,” the steps of the jail. Tom’s best friend, Jim Andrews, dead now, had played that on a scratchy record when he got married in Topanga, the night I’d found out about Jennifer. “Escaleras de la Carcel.” What a way to think about marriage. But now it was just beautiful music. “Reminds me of Jim,” Tom said.

  If you were a guest, you strolled into the garden, checked out the beautiful green world, let the violins and the guiteron vibrate through your skin and into your bones. You signed the book, surveyed the folding chairs, but between them was a bartender serving white wine and frozen margaritas. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to reach for a refreshing drink, swallow a margarita imprudently, so that the roof of your mouth began to ache and, gasping, begin to call out to friends. There were Cousin Jerry and Cousin Jack! Because of the cruel dynamics of divorce, I hadn’t seen those cousins of Tom since Jerry had model airplanes hanging from his ceiling.

  It was wonderful to see them. There was the graduate student who’d lied to me about Tom, covering for him when he was off with Jennifer. Ah, that graduate student was sixty now, with white hair. And I’d covered for Judy when she ran off to the Island of Yap. Judy was there, absolute reassurance locked in a human body.

  And up where the groom and his men were flocked, cool and urbane, with white wine in their hands, Chris—who’d died a hundred deaths of worry about his family and whether they’d make it here and be OK—seemed happy and serene. His father, equally urbane and killingly handsome, chatted amicably with all his wives and girlfriends. Well, didn’t Muslims do it all the time?

  The judge joked about those smashing bridesmaids’ dresses. (He came in a seersucker suit, on the way to see his mother.) John read his sestina, a work of sheer elegance that nobody could understand, but it knocked the poets in the place right out of their folding chairs.

  Continuity. Stability. Civility. How do you even describe these things? What are the telling details?

  After the mariachi went away, a DJ played golden oldies. Everybody danced. This was no Philip Roth wedding, where aging uncles grumbled because they hadn’t had enough blow jobs and life had passed them by. Every grown-up danced because they’d lived through years of drugs and drink and divorce and other people’s dying awful deaths. Because of the envelope of time they’d lived through, they’d probably had too much pleasure, if such a thing is possible, but now it was time to calm down, rest up, buy some Wedgwood china, cash in on all those years and years of therapy, come back down to the ground.

  My grandson Alexander led a conga line across the lawn and over the dance floor and all around the meadow. He was nine, and he loved his tuxedo. “How’d you learn how to do this?” a hard-boiled journalist asked him. “Oh, it was spontaneous,” Alexander coolly replied. His little brother danced too. My stepmother, still a beautiful woman, regarded my little brother, six feet tall and twenty-three, as he rocked out. What am I
trying to say here? That in some places, some times, this is a beautiful world.

  Lisa, as the afternoon wore on, danced more, receding to an age when she had once been a go-anywhere, do-anything beauty of Topanga. Her husband, Dick, danced along with her. After ten years of marriage, they were still the perfect couple, and would remain forever young.

  During the toasts, I mentioned that this really was the triumph of hope over experience, and that everyone in our “overextended family” was a sport. Tom saluted Clara’s sturdy and relentless determination to change the world. She was so much more than one of a thousand points of light! She was an Old Testament miracle, she’d make those patriarchs sorry they’d tried to take advantage of innocent homeless women and children.

  Chris’s father, celebrated rakehell, the one who outscored all of us—in terms of drugs, drink, and serial marriage, from two thousand miles away—had written out his toast. His hands shook when he read it. “Clara and Chris,” he said, “don’t do as we did. Do what it was we wanted to do when we started our lives. Adhere to those high ideals. We were part of our times, we were part of a larger social explosion. Learn from our mistakes …” I thought I heard him say: “Who knows, you might make it!”

  In the house and out in the shrubbery you could catch a whiff of a little pot-smoking from the younger generation, but there was a lot of Perrier being imbibed too, because many of the married ladies there were pregnant, or were going to be. And inside the house Lisa had brought videos for the grandkids, so that when Alexander and his little brother, Chris, got sick of the conga line they could catch up on Terminator II. Their new uncle by marriage, Travis, so cool and sixteen, got tired of the party and went in to loll with the kids, to snuggle, even, checking out the video. Clara’s little brother Michael liked his new brothers-in-law from Chicago and showed his affection in such a sweet Sturakian way: he slammed into them repeatedly; they picked him up and turned him upside down.