The introduction was awkward. Tyler held out a hand, but Doris wanted an embrace. She put her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “I’m so glad to meet you,” she said, stepping back and then reaching for Lily. “How happy I am.”
Lily saw that she was forcing it a little, and took hold of her elbow. “You look wonderful,” she said.
Doris led them into the house, where she had prepared lemonade, and she talked about the evening’s plans—Lily’s father and his new wife were coming to dinner, and she’d put a roast in the oven; she hoped Tyler liked roast beef. She’d made an apple pie from scratch, though she couldn’t remember the last time she had baked something from scratch, and the crust would probably taste like leather. But she was a person who believed in doing things with special care for special occasions, and this was a very special occasion indeed. She didn’t want to cause any discomfiture, but she did wish there was going to be a real wedding, a church wedding with a choir and a lot of people and a priest, a cake with a little bride and groom on top. Tyler and Lily must forgive her for bringing it up, but she couldn’t help herself. She went on with a kind of breathless jollity, and Tyler was gracious, the perfect gentleman, nodding and smiling and agreeing, sipping his lemonade.
“I know I’m rattling on,” Doris said. “And of course, these days people don’t even bother getting married before they move in with each other. You two are doing the right thing.”
“The house smells just like Thanksgiving,” Tyler said.
“Thank you, dear.” Doris turned to Lily. “Your father and Peggy ought to be here by now.”
“Can I show Tyler the backyard?” Lily asked.
“There’s nothing out there anymore, sweetie. I had your old swing set removed.”
Lily smiled. “Well, it sat out there for ten years rusting in the rain. It was starting to look like a fossilized skeleton.”
They were all outside, in the wet grass, when Lily’s father pulled in, with Peggy, who wore a black, shapeless cotton dress and had her hair in two pigtails one on each side of her head. She looked like someone trying to appear girlish, though she had a cigarette in her mouth and wore dark-red lipstick. Lily noticed the polite way her mother offered her hand to Peggy, and then kissed Lily’s father on the cheek. Tyler seemed rather wonderfully at home with them, looking from one person to another, and talking about having grown up in Steel Run, so close.
They were all standing out in the hot sun, being gracious, and getting along better than Lily could have hoped.
She excused herself and went into the house and upstairs to her room. It was essentially as it had been when she was in high school—pictures from productions her father and mother had been in, a row of books, including the book of explorers. She opened it and gazed at Mary Kingsley, then gently closed it and put it back.
The others had come in downstairs. Her father was opening a bottle of red wine. Peggy chattered about the humidity, which was almost as bad as the humidity along Lake Michigan, maybe worse. Tyler said he’d never been to the Midwest.
Lily started down the stairs and they all stopped. They were in the living room, where her mother had set the silver tray—tall glasses, the ice bucket, and the pitcher of lemonade—on the coffee table. No one had taken any of it, though now Doris was offering it. Peggy said she would have a glass, and Doris poured it for her. Lily’s father had one arm lightly across the top of Peggy’s back. Doris sat in the love seat, legs crossed, the one leg swinging slightly. No one spoke. Lily abruptly had the thought that this might be the longest afternoon of her life.
Her father said, “Where will you have the ceremony?”
“We’re leaving for Mississippi, Daddy. We’ll probably wait until we get down there. We haven’t decided anything, really, except that I don’t want a ceremony.”
“I never knew you to be such an enemy of ritual,” he said.
They were all quiet again. The strangeness was now palpable, like a stirring of overheated air.
Abruptly, Doris began to cry. She excused herself and went into the other room. Lily saw Peggy exchange a look with her father.
Above the mantel of the fireplace were paintings Doris had done years ago, and Tyler began admiring them. Doris had stopped painting because the oils made her allergies act up, and caused her to get skin rashes. The paintings were quite good. Doris had even had a few shows in her youth, back when she was still dancing, and when Lily was a baby. She occasionally taught painting and sketching at the local junior college.
When she returned to the room, wiping her eyes with a napkin and apologizing for what she called her silliness, Tyler remarked that he would like to have anything she might paint to decorate the living room of the place he and Lily would live in. Doris took the napkin away from her face and said, “I haven’t painted in years. The oils give me eczema. And I never was any good at watercolor.”
“Sure you are,” Lily’s father said.
“Oh, Scott. You were never very interested in it, even when I was doing it.”
“Excuse me—but I think I hung these.”
“Only because I asked you to. Do you remember that day, dear?”
They all fell silent. Peggy had paused in her clattering of ice, and swallowed once. She looked at Scott, and then concentrated hard on the drink.
“I think they’re wonderful paintings,” Tyler said.
2
THE AFTERNOON AND EVENING were better than Lily had feared, everybody finding neutral things to say. She was impressed by the fact that Peggy helped prepare and dish out the food. The conversation at dinner was assiduously superficial, mostly about the verbal incompetence of the Bush administration. Finally Doris, apologizing for changing the subject, asked what the young couple’s plans were for the next few days. Lily explained that they would pack everything up and send it south, and they would head there themselves within the week.
“When and where it’s going to take place,” Scott said. “That’s all your mother wants to know, and I want to know. You know me and weddings, but we’d like to be there.”
“This is Lily’s call,” Tyler put in.
“You’ll all have to understand,” said Lily, putting her hand over Tyler’s. She had an image of a wedding in which her family was on one side of the church—the grandparents and all the aunts and uncles and cousins—and Tyler’s on the other: she saw it in her mind, the vacant seats on his side. “I just don’t want a big fuss.”
“No presents?” Scott said. “No cake?”
“We just want to get on with life, Daddy.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
“I’ve never been to Mississippi,” Peggy said. “In fact, I’ve never been farther south than Tennessee. But I almost went there to college. Mississippi, I mean. I had a boyfriend who went down there on a football scholarship.”
“Peggy almost married a football player,” Scott said. “What saved you, honey?”
“He was majoring in socket wrenches or something. Dumb as a wall.”
“But pretty, right?”
“Handsome, sure.”
“Would anyone like some coffee?” Doris asked.
After dinner, Tyler and Scott went out on the porch and smoked cigars. They each had a small glass of whiskey, and they looked like the cliché of the about-to-be father-in-law counseling the younger man about women. Lily stood behind the screen door and listened to them, and she was surprised to find that they were actually exchanging jokes about honeymoons.
“Well,” Scott said. “On my first honeymoon, the damn room service guy brings the champagne, and he winks at me. I’ve never seen this fellow before in my life and we’re in this—this collusion with each other. I wanted to go out and walk up and down in the halls, denying the whole thing, the whole concept.”
Lily went to the kitchen, which still smelled of the roast, and out to the patio in back, where Peggy sat alone with her glass, which was empty. Doris had excused herself and gone upstairs when the dishes were done.
“Hello,” Peggy said. “I’m incredibly thirsty.”
“Let me fix you something,” Lily told her.
“I’ll come in while you do—it’s lonesome out here.”
Holding the door for her, Lily realized as if for the first time that this young woman was her stepmother. It was a wildly bizarre moment. Peggy sat in the breakfast nook, quite at home it seemed, while Lily made herself a glass of whiskey with ice.
Lily took a place across from her, deciding that it would be rude to leave her sitting there.
“What are the men talking about?” Peggy asked.
Lily lied. “Politics.”
“Tyler’s nice.”
“Thank you.”
Peggy swallowed the lemonade. Above them was the sound of Doris moving around; the floor creaked. “I have news.”
Lily waited.
“I don’t know that this is the right time,” Peggy said.
Lily felt heat rising along her spine, and into her cheeks. She said, “You’re pregnant.”
The other woman nodded, then smiled and gave her a confiding look. “Scott doesn’t know it yet.”
You couldn’t have thought that this would make me happy, Lily wanted to say. She could only bring herself to murmur, “When do you plan to tell him?”
“I guess now isn’t the time.” Peggy frowned a little, then forced a level expression. You could see the effort she had made. “It’s an accident.” She nodded, as if Lily had expressed some surprise. “I don’t know how I feel about it, yet. I always swore I’d never have any, you know.”
“Cheer up,” Lily said, rising. “Maybe something will happen.” She was appalled at her own words. She hadn’t been able to hold them back.
Peggy stared, holding the glass at her lips. It was as if both women had heard some inexplicable and shocking sound. Lily walked away from her, since there was now nothing else she could think of to do. She went through the living room, out to the porch, where the men were still smoking their cigars. Her father was talking about the month he had spent in Biloxi, Mississippi, when he was in the air force. He saw Lily and stopped. “Where are your mother and Peggy?”
Lily sat on the top step, put her elbows on her knees, and rested her head on her arms. “I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You okay, love?” Tyler said.
“I’m a little tired.”
“Listen,” Scott said. “I’m going to make you-all out a small check. I want you to take it as a wedding present from us.”
“You don’t have to do that, Daddy.”
“Of course I do,” Scott said. “Christ almighty. Of course I do.”
“It’s kind of you,” Tyler said to him. The two of them went on talking a little about the future; Tyler said he wasn’t sure how long he might remain in the car-sales business. “I’m just going to try it for a while, and see.”
Lily ran her hands through her hair and looked at him, and when he looked back, she forced a smile.
“You’re awful quiet,” he said.
Peggy had come to the front door and was watching through the screen. Lilly saw Peggy out of the corner of her eye.
“Premarital jitters,” Scott said lightly. “Hey, kiddo. Don’t be nervous.” It was his old, teasing tone with her, from when he had lived here and she was small.
It made her want to go through the house and look at all the rooms.
Peggy walked out onto the porch, and along it to the other end, away from them all. She stood with arms folded, looking out at the lawn. “Grass needs cutting,” she said.
Lily heard tears in her voice.
The men went on talking; they had gotten onto the subject of single malt scotches, and hadn’t noticed. Doris came downstairs and walked into the kitchen, and Lily heard her put ice in a glass. She stood and moved to where Peggy was. Peggy did not look at her. They were side by side, Lily leaning on the railing, looking out at the dusky light on the lawn. Some stars shone in the sky now, through a thin haze. The crickets had started. Fireflies flickered in the deep shadows of the other side of the street. You could still see light in the sky, and nearly transparent striations of cloud in what was visible of the horizon.
“I’m sorry,” Lily said, low.
“Forget it.” Peggy ran the back of one hand over her eyes, then glanced at the men and kept herself turned from them, arms folded again.
“What’re you two talking about?” Scott asked.
Doris had come to the screen. “It looks so blue out there,” she said. “From in here.”
SEVEN
1
TYLER HAD ARRANGED for the sale of the car before they left to visit Lily’s parents, and when they returned to Charlottesville, he completed the deal. He used the money to send their books and clothes to Oxford, along with a few items of furniture that had belonged to his father, and that he had kept in storage for the months he was finishing college: a cedar chest from the old man’s boyhood, a wooden nightstand he had fashioned out of pine planks when Tyler was a baby, a big leather reclining chair, and several heads of animals and fish trophies—big game from land and sea, as Tyler described it. He wanted their house, wherever it would be, decorated with these things. He liked to hunt. His father had been an avid hunter. One of his earliest memories was of being out in the cold, in the woods, hunting rabbits, listening to his father’s bitch beagle Mina sounding in the distance. “My dad was a hard man,” he said. “Old school.”
“You mean about hunting?”
“About everything. When I was five, I couldn’t catch a ball. No matter how hard I tried. And I tried. So he threw it at my face. He hit me with it three, four times, and finally I learned to put my hands up.”
“God,” Lily said.
“I learned to catch a ball. And when he wanted to take me hunting, I went with him. And I learned to like it. He took me everywhere.”
“How’d he teach you to hunt—by shooting at you?”
Tyler smiled and shook his head. “I got so I loved going out with him.”
He had a couple of trophies of his own, including the head of an elk, from a hunting trip the year before his father died. Lily was surprised to find that he owned two high-caliber hunting rifles, a double-barreled shotgun, and several antique pistols. He shipped everything to Oxford.
They were married by a justice of the peace, on May seventeenth, and Tyler, meaning it as a surprise for her, got Dominic to come to the ceremony as a witness. Dominic hugged them both, and seemed happy to be a part of it all. He kissed Lily on the cheek, calling it a “chaste peck, for good luck.” Lily saw Tyler’s face take on a fleeting expression of curiosity. But then the talk went on, with Dominic making everyone laugh, describing the way his aunt Rosemary, for her fourth marriage, had a drunken priest at the ceremony, and how this priest toppled over at the moment of pronouncing her the wife of a Buick dealer, also drunk. “The priest, when they revived him, got into a crying jag, and said he was helplessly in love with Rosemary and couldn’t something be done about it? Rosemary said he should go to confession and we all just stared.”
“Was Rosemary widowed three times?” Tyler asked.
“Um, annulled,” Dominic said. “Technicalities.”
They all went to the Flaming Wok for an early dinner, and at one point, when Tyler had gone to the rest room, Dominic took Lily’s hand and said, “How are you?”
“I never dreamed how happy,” she told him. “What about you, Dom?”
“Oh, hey, you know. I’m always the same.”
She turned her hand in his, and squeezed. “I’m going to miss you.”
“I won’t let that happen,” he said.
She let go and he leaned back.
“I feel very good,” he told her. “I’m so happy that I feel completely kind. That’s somewhere in Tolstoy, I think.”
Tyler came back to the table and sat down, and Dominic offered a toast to the new couple. They drank, and then they were quiet for a few momen
ts, as if out of respect for their own warm feeling. When the waiter brought the check, the two men argued jovially over who should pay it. Dominic had grabbed it, and wouldn’t let go. He paid with a credit card, joking that this was one his father had forgotten to cancel. They went out into the dusk, and Dominic hugged them both. Lily promised to stay in touch; Tyler said Dominic should come south for a visit before the summer ended.
“That’s a real possibility,” Dominic said. “I mean that.”
Even so, Lily had for a dark instant the sense that it was just talk. She took his hands and said, “We mean it, too, Dom.”
“I know you do. Well, be good to each other for me.” He turned and walked away, toward the Rotunda, the college, the new life he was leading in the city.
2
THEY TOOK THE TRAIN south, a sleeper. There were two very small beds, one that pulled down from the wall. It was a tiny room, and when they had made love, they decided it was more comfortable to sleep separately; there really wasn’t enough room on one bed. She lay in the shifting dimness, the passing lights of stations south, the slow going by of the cities in the night. The ride was surprisingly rough, the train jolting and rattling on the curves, and there was the rhythmic clacking of the seams in the rails, like a counting out of seconds. She couldn’t sleep. Tyler was very still in the cot above her, and once she leaned up on her elbow and said his name. Nothing. She lay back, and a string of light poles shot past, a flicker that startled her. Finally she turned in the cot so that she saw only the line of light around the closed door of the room.
Sometime near dawn, when the light from the window had grown steadily and the other lights made less of an impression on her, she drifted into a half sleep that was disturbed by voices in the vestibule. Tyler turned in the cot above her and moaned, and uttered an indecipherable phrase. There was the perceptible coming of morning through the window. A rush of elation went through her, hearing it. She was a married lady. She lay over on her back and luxuriated in the idea.
Perhaps she drifted again. She couldn’t tell. Finally she turned to the wall, and was gone for a time, and then, after a space of vague dreaming, she lay over on her back again. Here was Tyler, who had climbed down, and was standing in the sunlight, naked, hands on his hips, completely comfortable and relaxed.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 16