Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  “Rudy and Sylvia Fusco, everybody,” said Anna.

  Abigail ripped the corrugated box apart like a strongman’s telephone book. A large delicate cranberry glass sphere popped up and arced over the heads of well-wishers, smashing out of sight against the window seat.

  “It was a vase,” said Sylvia Fusco.

  “It was lovely,” I said, for Abigail, who obviously didn’t give a shit.

  “Cranberry glass, wasn’t it?” asked dutiful Hilda, scribbling away.

  “Dorcas made me do it,” said Abigail. “It’s Dorcas’s fault.”

  In then came the Walrus, with a blast of Arctic air, twirling his waxed mustachios.

  “There’s our man,” said hearty Guy, and a wan cheer went up for the groom, who advanced toward us with a heavy oblong package under his arm, wrapped in kiddie paper potato-stamped with pastel balloons and cartwheeling elephants.

  “I told you!” shouted Abigail, jumping up to embrace him. He sat her back down with the elephant box.

  “For my lady,” said Conrad Lowe. Amid appreciative groans he knelt at her feet. He smiled tenderly, right at her. His eyes were guileless. “Open it, sweetmeat.”

  I couldn’t bear to watch. I tiptoed backward, then made a dash for the cellar broom closet. I was going to clean up the broken glass, and I was going to take my sweet time about it.

  Which I did, but even in the cellar, directly underneath them, I could hear the long, awful silence, broken by uncertain titters and the scraping of chairs, and more silence. And more.

  What had the bastard given her? A vibrator? A cow flop? Why didn’t somebody kill him? Why was I lurking in the bowels of my own library, like some sullen child on the lam?

  “It’s a really good one,” I heard my sister say, in a small muffled voice, as I trudged upstairs with the broom.

  “The best,” Hilda said, “according to Consumer Reports.”

  “It’s in the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalogue, too,” said Guy.

  “I wouldn’t mind having one myself,” said Gloria Gomes.

  Ob Minurka stepped forward and stared down at Conrad’s gift. “If I gave my old lady one of these she’d ream me out with a snowblower.”

  Conrad had given his fiancée a Health O Meter Professional Dial Bathroom Scale, doctor-quality, with a precision heavy-duty rack and pinion mechanism. Ob showed Conrad his bad, gappy teeth. “You know, pal, pardon my French, Abigail, you’re a real sack of shit. Pardon me all to hell.”

  “Shut up, Ob,” said Abigail, giving the little man a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Her eyes swam in tears.

  Conrad Lowe glided up to me, proffering a cup of punch.

  “I have a mess to clean up,” I said, turning away without meeting his eyes. I was so angry I was afraid I would cry too.

  He followed me over to the exploded cranberry vase. “So do I,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I began to sweep the glass onto a sheet of cardboard, chucking it bit by bit into a metal wastebasket. “Do you think you can just apologize? Make it all right with a few hypocritical phrases?”

  “Apologize for what?” He drained my punch glass and made an incredulous face. “What the fuck is this? Rum and clam juice?”

  I dumped the last pile in the basket, crumpling up the cardboard, stabbing myself in the palm with a stray cranberry blade. “You said, you implied, that you had a mess to clean up. I assumed you were talking about one of your own messes.”

  “I was talking about your sister. I don’t intend to have a fat freak wife.”

  “You’re despicable.”

  “Thin is in. Besides, I worry about her health. Don’t you?”

  “She’s as healthy as a horse.”

  “She’s a porker. Not my type. As I mentioned before.”

  “Then why? Why? Why?” I screamed at him in a whisper, my face inches from his. We were unnoticed because the rest of the crowd was gathered around Abigail and her new bathroom scale, taking turns weighing themselves.

  “Because she’s the next best thing.”

  “To what?”

  “You, Dorcas.”

  “Horseshit.”

  “You’re probably right.” Suddenly bored, he handed me the two empty punch cups. “See ya’ in jail, sis,” he said, and started for the door.

  A hush rose up from the crowd as Abigail ascended the scale. She held her head high. She looked like some sort of fertility goddess. “Read it out, Ob,” she said.

  “One-ninety-eight,” said Ob.

  “One-ninety-eight,” said Abigail, regarding her husband-to-be. Her expression was unfathomable, neither defiant nor submissive. Whatever it meant, Conrad didn’t like it. He flashed her an all-too-fathomable look, then swept out the door like Snidely Whiplash.

  I remember thinking that she looked heroic, standing there on the scale, facing him. What struck me was the lack of shame, the lack of fear. You have not hurt me. You cannot hurt me. But now I’m remembering too what Frank Calef said, about the way she looked on the ice, naked and undiminished. She just handed it to you, the responsibility for her life, for her character, her future, her past, she just handed it over.

  For the record, here’s

  WHAT ABIGAIL SAID TO CONRAD ON THEIR WEDDING NIGHT

  “Hey, that looks handy.”

  “Sterling, isn’t it?”

  “Great, now I have two.”

  “This will last forever.”

  “Mauve! My favorite color.”

  “Oh, dear, you really, really, really shouldn’t have.”

  “Jeez, this weighs a ton.”

  “Where are you supposed to put this? Does anybody know where this goes?”

  “Great, now I have three.”

  “These will look beautiful on my chiffarobe.”

  “I can’t read the inscription. Where are my reading glasses?”

  “Is this some kind of a joke?”

  “Wow! Look at this!”

  “Oh, oh, oh, that’s gorgeous, that’s absolutely incredible.”

  “I just love this.”

  “Thank you, oh, thank you, so much. Thank you.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Dorcas made me do it. It’s Dorcas’s fault.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Homage to King Philip

  Chapter 13

  Spring Bride

  The bride was truly radiant, the groom dignified and handsome, the occasion festive. All of us who loved them both rejoiced upon their formal union. Even my husband, who ordinarily shuns what he calls “ceremonial goose-stepping,” joined the rest of us in pelting the laughing couple with rose petals and sunflower seeds. The sun shone brightly on the newlyweds and their loving circle of friends. But even on this day of bright beginnings, ugliness was just around the corner….

  Isn’t that a song title? This is really hilarious. Also, it turns out there was half a bottle of Jim Beam in the window seat compartment in my reference roomette. The sky is turning Deep Purple, and the day is shaping up. Whoopee!

  Well, Hilda’s memory is a mite addled, natch. To start with, I forget whose bright idea it was not to throw rice—it was a minitrend of the times, a trendette, a trendoid; people with nothing better to do worried about rice kernels bursting the stomachs of house finches—but I do distinctly recall that Abigail wasn’t “laughing” as she was showered with birdseed. She was pissed as hell, and spent fifteen minutes shaking out her hair and picking black husks out of her cleavage.

  I don’t know why Conrad Lowe insisted upon a church wedding, but since Guy was his best man they had to pick a church which Guy (“I won’t goose-step; don’t ask me”), a conscientious agnostic, could enter without disgracing himself. Before whom? Before himself, I guess; before the Great Void. Which meant they needed a Unitarian church; which meant trundling all the way to Providence.

  The ceremony took place during Lent. The marquee on the church lawn read

  EASTER FOR NON-BELIEVERS

  WEDNESDAY NITE
S UNISEX AEROBICS

  The minister, or facilitator, whatever, was a youngish man with haunted eyes, ginger-haired and flabby. Behind his professional nuptial smile he radiated despair to such a degree that I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. He looked like a man in hell.

  Guy stood up for Conrad Lowe. I should like to say that I stood up for my sister. But if anyone had stood up for Abigail that day I wouldn’t be sitting here now, drunk and disgraced, and Abigail’s book would never have been written.

  We all saw the sunset-colored bruise on her right lower jaw, under heavy orange powder, carelessly applied. Abigail was never artful with makeup, but I had the feeling that she wanted us—me—to see the bruise.

  We all saw that she had lost at least ten pounds. Which wasn’t much, but there was enough difference in dimension to make me uneasy. Abigail had never dieted in her life. She was an utter sensualist and took pride in all her appetites. She was foolish about many things, but never about fashion. She had lost it all, I think, around the hips, so that there was something oddly scrawny about them, though, to the objective eye, she sailed down the aisle like a great white barge and her husband, had he stepped ahead of her, would have disappeared completely from view.

  We all saw that Conrad Lowe had started off his wedding day with a drink. He was steady on his feet but his coloring was high, and you could smell it, the juniper smell. His drunkenness, however controlled, introduced into the already oppressive air inside that dead church the charged atmosphere of violence, in a way that Abigail’s bruise, stark evidence, did not. The violence was like Mother’s ozone, instantly recognizable though encountered for the first time: a new and horrible sensation of the nose.

  We all saw how happy each was, and how different in happiness. Abigail shining-eyed, foolish. Conrad Lowe glittering, triumphant.

  And I think we all saw how appallingly sexless the ceremony was, the occasion. Which was maybe the worst part.

  There is more erotic promise, more bawdy anticipation, in even a typical Congregational wedding (the function of which would confound a Samoan anthropologist) than there was in my sister’s wedding, and the wrongness of this was deeply oppressive to me. She was desexed here, and unaware of it. The sad minister pronounced them man and wife, and Conrad Lowe kissed his bride and grabbed the flesh of her midriff and squeezed it in his long hand, on the side facing us, so that we could see what he was doing; and the chunk he held seemed unimportant, merely matter, no more significant than a fistful of batting.

  The minister went with us to the “intimate reception,” which was held at the Rational Tap, an old haunt of Abigail’s. Conrad Lowe had insisted upon the venue.

  The Rational Tap was built and named by an immigrant who made good named Manny something. It’s been here, on the western fringe of Frome, since I can remember. Manny himself is long gone, taking with him whatever explanation he could have offered for his choice of name. It’s pretty clear, though, that he meant something like “cheap watering hole.” He just wasn’t too sharp on English nuances. Until about ten years ago the Rational Tap was just a fixture of the town, a neighborhood bar, grungy and welcoming, unremarkable, familiar. I even went there once in a blue moon. Frome is a small town, with only one other tavern, the Blue Moon, an unsavory dive.

  Then some clown from Brown University discovered the Rational Tap, and in no time the place was inundated with day trippers who came to tipple and giggle. The first time I caught one snapping a picture of the sign over the front door I wanted to feed the woman her Minolta. I could imagine the term “Rational Tap” working its way into students’ letters home, faculty lunches. That Rhode Island had a Rational Tap would be one of the first things a Brown newcomer would learn. It was, overnight, a legend in its own time.

  At first Joe Enos, Manny’s nephew, who owned the bar, was understandably pleased about his burgeoning profits. But as the regulars got crowded out by the day trippers, or stopped coming in on principle, Joe, in a stunning combination of conscience, brilliance, and greed, hit on the idea of buying out the moribund Happy Hour on the other side of town, right off Route 10, which he could afford to do with his soaring business, and naming the new place the Original Rational Tap. The ploy worked.

  The new bar was much more convenient for the academics, plus they went nuts over the “Original” part. Nobody From Around Here goes to the Original Rational Tap, and at night under the flashing neon, parked in orderly rows, are Japanese and German cars, every one of them legible, by which I mean decorated with messages. They all have Ivy League parking stickers and bumper stickers that say

  YOU CAN’T HUG CHILDREN WITH NUCLEAR ARMS

  BABY ON BOARD

  REPEAL THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

  JOE ENOS’ ORIGINAL RATIONAL TAP

  The Mather-Lowe wedding party trickled into the truly original Rational Tap on a bright Saturday afternoon, when the sun was only halfway down the sky and Joe’s venetian blinds could not keep it out. There is nothing more depressing to me than to be in a dark room on a sunny day, with the shades pulled against the light, and the false electric lights trying to assert themselves. I remember as a child loving to get into dark small places, like under card tables draped with blankets, and hide from the sunlight. I loved rainy days too. Children have this luxury. Children can spurn the sun.

  And of course it seemed fitting that we come to this place, hiding from the all-revealing rays, etc., skulking in the gathering gloom. Considering what we were up to. Considering what we had witnessed and allowed to happen unchecked.

  We were the only ones there at first, except for two teens playing Pac-Man. We sat in a corner booth and ordered a pitcher of Narragansett. Conrad Lowe fed quarters into the jukebox and made at least ten selections. We all watched him in silence. (The tunes included Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and some awful maudlin pop thing about a boy whose father always ignored him. He repeated that one twice.) Abigail’s dress glowed in the murk. The minister got himself a glass of red wine at the bar and brought it over. His name was Stanley. He didn’t say anything either.

  Guy was probably the least uncomfortable of the lot of us. Guy is by nature a melancholic anyway, and I don’t think that this depressing occasion was any sort of watershed for him. He was comfortable in his misery, you could tell. He looked as though he had been here before. His weary, tragic sighs gave me a weird kind of comfort. Looking at him I could believe, for seconds at a time, that this was an ordinary occasion, and not the beginning of the end of the world.

  Guy finally spoke. “I hate ceremonies. I abominate ceremonies. Ceremonies allow us to do the cruelest, most unspeakable things. The most elaborate ceremony I ever witnessed was a Kenyan rite of female circumcision. Ceremonies make wars possible. I shall never participate in another ceremony.”

  “I agree with you,” said Stanley.

  Conrad Lowe blew smoke in his old roommate’s face. “When were you ever in Kenya?”

  “He saw it,” said Hilda, “on channel two. I made him turn it off.”

  “What do you mean, you agree?” I asked Stanley. I despise namby-pamby religions. Give me a Charismatic Catholic any day. “I don’t believe in anything myself, but at least I have the guts to follow through.”

  “Yes,” said Stanley.

  “You performed the ceremony yourself, for God’s sake. You do this for a living.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Stanley.

  “You guys kill me,” I said. “You’re so goddamn agreeable.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said Stanley.

  “So what?” I was being unconscionably rude, but I couldn’t resist the distraction argument offered. “What’s the good of all your agreeing and understanding, if it doesn’t inform your behavior? What good are you? What good is your church?”

  “Dorcas, cut it out,” said Abigail.

  Stanley burst into tears, sobbing hoarsely, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. Everyone looked at me. I was instantly beyond guilt and emba
rrassment, teleported to Golgotha, far from the sight of righteous men. I fumbled in my purse for a Kleenex and handed it to him, feeling as though I were forcing a Band-Aid on someone whose arm I had just lopped off.

  “My wife is dying,” Stanley said, and this is when he told us about her terminal cancer, his loss of faith (which, he avowed, had once been strong, even though he was a Unitarian); and he told us in detail about her suffering, and his, and the cruel irony of his profession, and what torture it was for him to ascend the altar, and so on. He said, “I feel like God’s mortician.”

  This was my sister’s wedding reception.

  Stanley talked for what seemed like hours, and when he finally wound down, the Tap was filled with Saturday evening regulars, many of whom I knew, all of them known to Abigail. They saw our bedraggled little party, the pathetic white satin costume, the sobbing cleric, the rest of us inclined toward him with terrible impersonal solicitude, as though we were an encounter group. They took it all in and looked away and went on with their business.

  That’s one fine thing about Rhode Island, and most of New England, and New York, too. No, not New York. New Yorkers genuinely have no curiosity. They don’t want to know. New Englanders do, but they’ll be damned if they’ll ask.

  One time Father and Mother and Abigail and I went bass fishing on Tucker’s Pond. The rowboat turned over and we all fell in. Father had to dive repeatedly to the muddy bottom to recover his tackle and car keys. When we got back to the car we were covered with mud and slime from head to foot. We had nothing with which to wipe ourselves off. Father wanted some cigarettes, so we stopped at a country market on the way home, and we all got out and sloshed in. Father squelched to the counter and asked the man for a pack of Luckies. The man handed him a pack of Luckies. Father reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a palmful of mud from which a minnow leaped, flip-flopping on the wooden floor. He had to poke through the mud for the right change. He paid the man and we left. No one ever asked what happened. They stared, but they didn’t wink or smile, and they didn’t ask.