by Lisa Samson
“That’s why you start new ones,” he says. “To get it right.”
Not this again.
“I don’t know why you think I’d be a better mom than mine’s been.”
“Are you kidding?”
“True. How can I not be?” I wish the thought comforted me.
He stifles a yawn. “We’re gonna rock as parents. We’ll have the coolest little kids.”
“Kids, plural?”
“Yeah,” he whispers. “Four or five, just to get going. Then we’ll see.”
I push my elbow into Finn’s ribs, which only makes him laugh. He rolls back to his side of the bed, dragging the covers along with him, and tells me to go to sleep.
“Everything will be better in the morning.”
“Nothing will be different in the morning. There’s still gonna be a hole in my bathroom floor where the tile should be. There’s still gonna be a rusty medieval torture device laying in pieces in the middle of my studio. And Aunt Bel’s still gonna be here too.”
“You want her to go?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t know. I mean, I knew my family was a little off, but why can’t these two sisters even talk to each other? All these feelings generated by my grandparents and here they are, all these years later? I don’t know. Something isn’t right here. There’s got to be more. Daddy mentioned some accident years ago in all of this. And do you know, when I last talked to Mom on the phone and invited her down to have dinner with the three of us, she made some lame excuse and said her good-bye about five seconds later.”
“Sara, go to sleep. There’s nothing you can do about it right now. And is it even your job? You take everything on your shoulders. Let the grown-ups figure out their own stuff.”
As if it’s that simple.
He drifts away into sleep and I let him.
I don’t deserve him. Jabbing him about the floor and the Iron Maiden when he did absolutely nothing wrong. And he didn’t even get a little bit offended.
I poke him. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“It’s okay,” he says, voice so groggy I’m not surprised to hear a soft snort a few seconds later.
File today’s Wedding Expo under the heading of necessary evils. Since letterpress is a fussy and labor-intensive process, much more expensive than today’s digital printing options, the costs are considerably higher, which means clients come to us mainly on special occasions. The most special occasion of all is the blockbuster wedding. Tens, even hundreds of thousands will be spent, and a chunk of that change will go to fancy invitations. To get our share of the business, which goes a long way toward keeping the lights on, Finn and I started renting space at the major bridal shows—first in Baltimore and then branching out as far as Northern Virginia and Richmond.
If I had known that four weeks ago Holly Ringwald would walk into the studio with so much work and such a looming deadline, I would have bailed on the show this weekend at the downtown Hilton. We’re up to our eyeballs as it is. After ignoring the schedule as long as possible, toying with the idea of letting Diana staff the booth alone, on this Saturday morning I set aside everything Holly-related and finally put my bridal show face on for the weekend.
“So you are coming?” Diana asks when I call her to let her know. “I thought you were going to leave me alone with all those bridezillas.”
“Don’t tempt me,” I say. “Are you wearing the dress or pants today?”
“I don’t know—how about pants?”
Since this is a smaller, off-season event, the doors don’t open until noon, which gives me plenty of time to roll out of bed early, grab a couple of coffees and some croissants to go, and pick up Diana outside her Canton digs. She wears black slacks and a cashmere-blend V-neck sweater with sleeves down past her wrists, covering up all her ink. Since she chose pants, I’m in a charcoal gray wool dress with three-quarter sleeves and skinny black belt—we alternate back and forth for these events, variations in black. (Huey once suggested matching polo shirts as a company uniform, but no one took that seriously.) Down at the Inner Harbor, we sit down on a bench overlooking the water to have breakfast. The cold, gray funk that has enveloped the city for weeks seems to have lifted, bathing us in tentative morning sun that casts gold rays upon the brick walks and winks off the waters, rendering The Constellation even more worthy of a postcard. I’ve always loved that old boat.
At the hotel, we cruise the curtained aisles in search of our assigned booth, rolling two big cases behind us. We keep them pre-packed with all our display items, along with lots of sample invitations to give away. Our little booth is wedged between two larger ones. On our left is a bridal shop booth, its half dozen young attendants cinched into swishy white gowns, and on our right is a wedding photographer who’s set his booth up like a studio, complete with backdrops and lights. He snaps photos of any woman he can coax in front of his backdrop, the images appearing on a bank of flat-screen TVs.
“Sign me up for that,” Diana says, unzipping her case. “Like, right now.”
I laugh. “Nobody should want to see themselves that badly.”
Across the aisle a display of cakes prompts Diana to investigate, reporting back that they plan to give out free slices.
“That’s going to be a problem,” she says. “Don’t let me eat more than two.”
By half past eleven, we’ve arranged our invitations on the table we’ve covered in a tasteful black cloth and hung a wall of our posters to hide the curtained dividers. While Diana goes in search of food—she has one of those freakish metabolisms that keeps her thin no matter what she eats, and she seems to be famished in ninety-minute intervals—I wander over to the photographer’s booth. He is a great example of a certain type the wedding industrial complex specializes in: a svelte fifty-something man trying to pull off rock and roll. Black skinny jeans and a tight satin vest, with an oil-black goatee and spiked black hair with yellow-gold highlights.
A real groovester.
“Want to help me out?” he says, motioning me toward his Tuscan villa backdrop.
“I’m not one of the brides, I’m your next-door neighbor.”
“Go ahead anyway. My camera’s always in search of a muse.”
His showman’s patter, full of false enthusiasm, is one of the things I hate about these events. So much obsequious fawning. Some people can switch it on and off, while others have been in the game so long that all the unjustified gushing and cooing has become second nature. I’m not sure which category he’s in.
“You ever shoot film?” I ask.
“Not in ages. I still have my Hasselblad, though. I can’t give it up, even though I haven’t used the thing in years. Why, are you into film or something?”
“I’ve been playing around with medium format. I have a Minolta Autocord.”
“One of the twin-lens jobs? Most of ’em are paperweights these days. Come on, let me take your picture.”
So much for prattle between professionals.
Still.
I step farther into the booth without actually entering the circle of strobe lights. “I’m having trouble with doing everything manually—shutter speeds, metering light, all the stuff my digital camera does automatically.”
“Even with a digital camera, you can shoot in manual mode,” he says, beckoning me in front of the lens. “Stand over there.”
“I like to be behind the lens,” I say. “Not in front.”
“Everybody needs to be in front of the lens sometime. Give it a try. I’ll trade you some advice in return for letting me take your picture.”
He motions me toward the backdrop. I find myself edging over. “Just one.”
The strobes flare. I walk back, but he holds up his hand.
“You’ve gotta smile,” he says. “Come on.”
So I stand in front of the Tuscan villa, put my hands on my hips, and smile. The strobes flash once, twice, and then I drop my hands and get clear. “Now what’s your advice?”
“Next time you’re
shooting with your film camera, take your digital with you too. You can use it as a meter. Focus your subject, get the settings, and adjust the other camera accordingly. See? It’s a lot simpler than guesswork.”
“But it’s a lot to carry around.”
He smiles to reveal a set of new-looking teeth. “We all have a lot to carry around, but only some of us are catching it all on film.”
And … boom! The strobe lights pop.
What are you carrying, Sara?
I gaze over at Diana, who’s tweaking the arrangement of our wedding invitation books. A woman full bloom in pregnancy steps up to our booth and I have to admit, she’s beautiful, her belly encased in a cream-colored sweater dress, her blond hair pulled back into a braid.
There were a lot of such women at The Community where pregnancy was exalted to not just an art form but a state of grace. Thank goodness we don’t attend The Community anymore, or any church that makes a woman feel like crap because she’s not living up to God’s intended state for all females. “So when are you going to start a family?” they ask, as if it’s any of their business.
And I know what they think deep down. They think I’m the most selfish person in the world. But those of us who choose to remain childless have our reasons.
I just don’t know what my reason is yet.
The woman calls over what appears to be her sister, the bride, and begins to leaf through our books.
I walk back over. “Let us know if we can answer any questions,” I say. But after a few minutes, and taking our brochure, they amble on.
Diana and I sit down.
“Have you always wanted to have kids?” I ask her.
“Have you?”
“Nope. Never.”
“I’ve never been willing to settle for any old guy just to have them,” she says, reaching into her purse and pulling out her Altoids. “But I guess, yes. Yes, I always pictured myself as being a mom someday.”
“That’s just it. I’ve never pictured that for me. Is that weird?”
“Not weird.” She holds the tin toward me and I shake my head. “But not the average. Why are you so worried about it?”
“Finn.”
“Ahh. Well, marital issues are definitely something I’m not equipped to speak to. But I will say, if someone were to be a father, Finn would be amazing.”
I know. And how can I keep him from that?
But how can I do anything else at this point? Shouldn’t you really want a baby to have one?
Despite being off season, the unexpectedly good weather brings the bridal parties out en masse. Soon we are slammed. Brides and bridesmaids, mothers, mothers-in-law, and a few dazed-looking grooms shuffle past us by the dozen, some of them pausing a moment to figure out our booth, others rushing past to ogle the wedding gowns next door. All afternoon, the strobe lights pop on the other side of the curtained divider and I hear the photographer plying his trade, treating every woman in front of his camera as if she were the goddess of beauty.
“Work it, work it,” Diana mutters, then cracks a smile. “They just eat that guy up, don’t they?” She glances over at the cake display, practically licking her lips.
We give out a lot of cards and talk to a lot of women. By the end of the afternoon, we’ve filled our sign-up page and booked eight appointments over the next couple of weeks. As much as I dread working the booth, once we get busy and people start asking me about ink and paper, my spirits lift, reminding me that this is my passion, my mission in life. To take things and make them beautiful, as Holly said.
The traffic starts to thin after four, so I take a break and weave my way down every aisle in the hotel ballroom to check out the other booths. The best of them all is the tuxedo rental booth, three spaces wide, where two men in tails spin a couple of brides in an abbreviated, never-ending waltz. The ladies have their hair pulled back tight like ballerinas and they hold their dresses almost up to the knee, showing off midheeled Mary Janes and the sculpted calves of a dancer. There’s no music—at least, none I can hear over the crowd—but they move in sync, holding their bodies as rigid as flamenco dancers, which is perhaps what they are. I don’t know. I stand and watch them awhile, impressed by their unexpected elegance.
When I come to the end of the last aisle, I stop in my tracks as I see my mother.
She is floating on a cloud of worry, because if she’s not out of her element here, she’s not out of her element anywhere, and if there’s one thing my mom is good at, it’s being out of her element.
I sneak up behind her and lean over, closer to her ear. “The Universe is watching you,” I whisper.
She jumps. “Oh, baby! Don’t scare me like that!”
“What are you doing here?”
“Daddy told me about what happened to Aunt Bel. I have to talk to you.”
“What’s the matter?” It must be big for her to show up downtown.
“I don’t want to rush the conversation, baby. We have to talk.”
“Well, we’ve got another hour yet.”
She nods. No surprise to her. “I’ll drop by your booth when things wrap up,” she says. “Let’s grab a bite, okay?”
I return to the booth for the final stretch, contemplating the fact that Mom and Dad compared notes after his visit. So mysterious, the nature of their estrangement, resentments intertwined with lingering intimacies.
Why did they divorce? Really? They’ve never actually said.
My mother and I walk several blocks to the Afghani restaurant, Silk Road, on Charles Street. We order some kebabs—beef for me, tofu for her—and two beers, which, I assume, are from Afghanistan. I have my serious doubts about the tofu.
“Let’s talk, baby,” she says. “Now tell me about Walt’s visit. He said Aunt Bel was hurt at the shop.”
“I’m sorry about that, Mom. Finn was showing—”
“Oh no, baby. This isn’t about casting blame onto you. She’s a grown-up.”
Like Finn says.
“He told me about her studio in the basement, and that she doesn’t seem to be too set on getting a job, helping you all out with the expenses.”
I shrug. “It’s okay with me. She doesn’t eat that much.”
“You don’t feel like she’s taking you for granted?”
I shrug again, thanking the waiter who delivers our drinks. “Well, I do wonder where she gets the money for her cigarettes.”
“See? That’s what I mean. She can find the money for that, but doesn’t help out with the groceries?”
I can’t say the thought hasn’t entered my mind, but I haven’t wanted to be nitpicky, and family codes seem to be passed down. Aunt Bel gave her life on the mission field and I resent the food she puts in her mouth? Please. No. I’m negative enough as it is.
“He said he wanted to do something for Bel. Do you know what he was talking about?”
So that’s it. Dad hinted at the money without saying anything explicit, and that’s why Mom wants a heart-to-heart. She’s fishing for more dirt. “They talked by themselves. I have no real idea what they said in their conversation.”
She waves my words away. “He wants to set her up, doesn’t he? Give her a little nest egg to start a new life. Unbelievable. I can see this man’s moves coming a mile away.”
“Mom, you’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I? Your father always had a soft spot for Bel.”
“Well, he doesn’t anymore. It’s just the opposite. You know he couldn’t wait to pawn her off onto me.”
“Honey, you know nothing about men.”
“And you’re the expert?”
“Walt always had a wandering eye.”
“No, he didn’t,” I say. “You’re making that up.”
She shrugs and sighs. “That was probably a little too much information.”
“Are you saying Dad and Aunt Bel had a thing?”
She shakes her head. “It’s all over and dealt with.”
“Clearly it isn’t.”
“Y
our dad is a good man. He’s an odd man, Sara. But he’s a good person.”
Did Dad and Aunt Bel have a thing? Was the “accident” more of an accidental slip-up between those two? One of those “We didn’t mean for this to happen” sort of things? Is that what this is all about? This family confuses me. How can people who have all lived far apart for so long be tied so closely with the bonds of a shared insanity? Really!
“And there’s another thing, baby.”
There always is.
“What’s that, Mom?” The food can’t come soon enough, because as long as there’s some in Rita’s mouth, she’s polite enough not to speak with it there.
“I hope you’re not getting too attached to her.”
So I’ll actually have a consistent female influence in my life? “I don’t think you have to worry too much about that.”
“It does worry me. Because Bel can worm her way into your heart and then leave you when you need her the most.”
“Is that what happened when she left for Kazakhstan?”
“That was years ago, baby.”
These women!
“Don’t worry, Mom. You taught me how to take care of myself.”
Boy, did she.
Finn arrives home after midnight, signs of his assignation with the Iron Maiden in evidence all over him. “How did it go?” he asks.
He sits on the edge of the bed while I free my wet hair out from under the neck of my GOOD TASTE shirt, which I’ve just pulled on over my damp skin. As he watches, I towel dry my hair, rubbing hard enough to make my ears numb. I tell him about Mom showing up at the Expo and our hardly enlightening dinner afterward.
“Diana met Mom at the booth. She said, ‘Your mother and Bel are so different it’s hard to imagine them being sisters at all.’ ”
“I agree with that.”
“I’m not so sure. They have some things in common. They both have these elaborate mental constructs that shield them from the real world.”
“You think?” He doesn’t seem convinced.
“All I know is, I don’t want to be like them. I was sitting there in the restaurant, staring at my kebab, thinking, ‘This is not my life. This cannot be my life.’ ”