The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Freddy Harwood would die if he couldn’t have this wedding here. He is fantastically excited about it. So are the girls. Did you bring a list?”

  Stella fished it out of her jacket pocket and handed it over. “It’s seventy names. This one is my cousin in Oklahoma City. The one who lost a child in the bombing. They have two foster children they’re trying to adopt. So I think they will bring them. Two little girls they found in a Catholic home down on the border. One’s eleven and the other’s seven. My mother’s been very involved in it. She specializes in children with learning disorders. They had to round up all sorts of counseling. They were kids no one else wanted to adopt. Anyway, they are coming to the wedding.”

  “Maybe they should be bridesmaids. Tammili and Lydia would love some help.” Nora Jane stretched her legs out in front of her. She was eight months pregnant. Sometimes she forgot about it for hours, then the baby would start moving and remind her.

  “I should have thought of that. Of course they can be in the wedding. But how will we get them dresses? Don’t the dresses all have to match?”

  “That’s easy. Bridesmaids’ dresses are big business. I’ll have a shop here send them things or they can send measurements and we’ll have dresses waiting for them. Where are they going to stay?”

  “I made reservations at the Intercontinental.”

  “Let your cousin’s family stay with us. The guest house is just sitting there. Four little bridesmaids. This is starting to sound like a wedding.”

  “I’ll call Jennifer tonight. Momma said they were nice little girls. She said it’s working out a lot better than anyone thought it would. It’s been a godsend to me. It kept Momma off my back while Nieman and I decided what to do.”

  That was Friday morning. By Monday afternoon a bridal shop in San Francisco and one in Oklahoma City were deep in consultation on the subject of four pink bridesmaids’ dresses that must be ready by October the sixteenth. The four little girls had been introduced on a conference call and Nora Jane Harwood and Jennifer Williams had gone past discussing dresses and hats and shoes and flowers and were into the real stuff. “You just went down there and got them?” Nora Jane asked. It was the fourth time they had talked.

  “We had to live. When I saw them, my heart almost burst. They aren’t a thing alike. Annie looks like she belongs in Minnesota. We still haven’t figured out how she ended up in Potrero. But Gabriela is a little Mexican Madonna. Her ambition is to be a singer and get rich. She is very interested in getting rich.”

  “Can you adopt them?”

  “We don’t know yet. It’s pretty certain we can have Annie but there aren’t any papers on Gabriela. We’re just living from day to day. I think if anyone tried to take them Allen would run away to Canada with them. Actually, the people here seem to think it will be all right. We’re trying not to worry about it.”

  “This wedding is going to be amazing. It keeps growing. Freddy and Nieman found a string quartet and it’s been in the papers twice. ‘The famous iconoclastic bachelor Nieman Gluuk,’ that’s what they’re calling Nieman.”

  “What are they calling Stella?”

  “‘Brilliant, reclusive scientist’ was in the Chronicle. Freddy’s teasing them to death about it.”

  “We will be there,” Jennifer said. “I don’t think either of them have ever been to a big wedding.”

  It was several weeks before eleven-year-old Annie started worrying about going to California to the wedding. Once she started, the worry fed upon itself. She began lying on her bed in the afternoon pretending to be asleep. Also, she started eating everything in sight.

  “Don’t you want to jump on the trampoline?” seven-year-old Gabriela asked her. “Don’t you want to do anything?” She had known something was wrong with Annie for several days but this was the first time she had felt like doing anything about it. It was nice living in Oklahoma City, but Gabriela was getting worn out with all the things she had to do to keep it together. Keeping Jennifer happy, letting Allen teach her to play the piano, trying to learn the arithmetic at school, talking Annie into taking her pills. The doctor had given Annie some pills that were supposed to keep her from getting mad at people, but she was afraid they would poison her and Gabriela had to help talk her into swallowing them. Sometimes Annie was afraid she would choke to death swallowing them and sometimes she just thought they might be poison. Gabriela would get on one side of Annie and Jennifer would get on the other side and Gabriela would say, “Would I let you get poisoned? Jennifer got them at a drugstore, Annie. She knows the guy who sold them to her. You swallow food all the time and it doesn’t choke you, does it? It would take a lot of pills to make a French fry.” Then Gabriela would take a piece of cereal or bread and demonstrate swallowing it and in the end they would usually get Annie to take the pill.

  “You better let us keep them in our room,” Gabriela advised Jennifer and Allen. “That way she’ll know nobody’s trying to slip her something.”

  “I’ll take her to the drugstore to get the prescription filled,” Allen suggested.

  “Yeah, well, I knew a guy who worked in a place where they made pills.” Annie was backed into a comer of the living room sofa. They were all around her. “He said they threw in rat shit when they got in a bad mood. He said you wouldn’t believe what all was in pills you buy at the store.”

  Allen and Jennifer looked at each other. Both of them sort of half believed it. It was not the first revelation these girls from the lost half-world of the Mexican border had brought them.

  Allen sat down on the floor. “Well, look at it like this,” he began. “We have a system of trust in our culture. We all eat and drink things all day long that other people have handled and we have to believe that our inspectors, the people who go into factories where pills are made, are doing a good job of seeing that the things they sell us are clean and made out of the right things, not out of rat feces. Most of the people who make things for us do a good job of it, just like we would if we worked there. I’ll find out where the pills come from, Annie. I’ll find out where the factory is and I’ll call them and see if they’re doing a good job before you take any more of them.”

  “That’s right,” Gabriela added. “I guess you got to think of it as getting lucky. If your luck’s good, you don’t get poisoned or raped or anything. If your luck runs out, you’re fucked.” She looked at Jennifer. She was trying not to say fuck around Jennifer. Jennifer smiled and went to her and touched her shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Say anything you want to say. So, Annie, what should we do? Should we trust the doctor and this druggist and take these pills or not? I don’t want you to be scared every day when you have to take them.”

  “She’ll take them.” Gabriela went to her friend. “You’re going to take them, aren’t you? Look at me, Annie. Say something about it.”

  “I’m taking her to the drugstore to see where they come from,” Allen said. “We’ll find out where they’re made. Maybe we can call the company and check on them.”

  “Okay. Give it here.” They handed Annie a pill and watched as she swallowed it.

  “Okay,” Gabriela said. “Now let’s talk some more about what we’re going to get for our birthdays.”

  The next afternoon Allen took Annie to the drugstore and they talked to the druggist about where the pills were made and looked them up in the PDR and the druggist let Annie watch him put them in the bottle.

  “You can keep them in your room,” Allen said. “In a safe place. Every morning when you take one you can write it down in a notebook.” They found the stationery department and picked out a pink notebook with a pencil attached. When they got home Annie put the pills and the notebook on a shelf in her closet.

  “Tell us that again,” she asked Allen that night. “That part about everybody trusts everybody else not to poison them.”

  “You think it’s wise to let her keep them in her room?” Jennifer asked later.

  “She needs to learn to wr
ite down dates. It will serve several purposes. I don’t want her taking that stuff for long, Jennifer. The warnings in the PDR are pretty scary. It’s just a form of Dexedrine. Why did Doctor Cole think she needed it?”

  “Just to calm her down until we can get her settled in school. He says she’s plenty bright. He just wants to make sure she doesn’t get further behind and get the idea that she’s dumb. Thank God for the sisters. She’s going to stay in the fifth grade no matter what we have to do.”

  “She liked the notebook. I don’t think she’s had much of her own. Did you see the way she arranged her things in the room? She touches my heart, Jennifer. I can’t believe how much I am attached to her already.”

  “Gabriela wants a savings account. She asked me to take her to my bank. Where did she find out about banks?”

  “I’d be afraid to ask.” They shook their heads in disbelief at what they had brought into their lives. Neither of them said Adelaide and neither of them had to. She was there, alive in their hearts and in every moment. World without end, amen.

  On top of everything else she had to do, when Annie started acting funny about going to the wedding, Gabriela decided it was up to her to fix it. “I’ll talk to her” she told Jennifer. “I can always get her to say what’s wrong with her.”

  “How do you do it?” Jennifer asked.

  “I just keep after her until she tells me. She’s never afraid of anything except stuff that isn’t true. She gets ideas in her head. She may be worrying about the airplane. She didn’t like flying here too much but we didn’t want to tell you.”

  That afternoon after school Gabriela cornered Annie in their room while she was changing clothes and started in on her. “Are you afraid of going on the airplane?” she asked. “You think it’s going to crash or something?”

  “I think they won’t bring us back. I think they’ll leave us there. They’ll take us back to the home.”

  “No they won’t. Jennifer says we’re the reason she and Allen are alive.”

  “It’s costing too much money. They have to pay the doctor and they have to buy me those pills. They cost twenty-four dollars. When I went to the drugstore with Allen to meet that guy that bottles them up I saw the bill. Twenty-four dollars for that little bottle that wasn’t even full. They have to buy us all that food. They’re going to get tired of that. They’ll send us back.”

  Gabriela moved over and began to stroke Annie’s hair. “They don’t want to get rid of us. Would they buy us all these clothes if they weren’t going to keep us? Not to mention that saddle Allen got you. Listen, you were so cute in that play last week. I bet Allen and Jennifer think you’re the cutest girl they could ever get in the world. Come on, don’t hide your face.” Annie was starting to smile, thinking about the applause at her school play. Gabriela pressed her advantage. “If you’ll stop worrying about going on the plane, I’ll tell you what we’ll do.”

  “What?”

  “We won’t be taking any chances. Wait a minute.” Gabriela walked over to a painted chest at the foot of her bed and opened it and took out the brown cape. She arranged the cowl. “All right. Here’s what we’ll do. We will take this cape with us. This cape has been very lucky for us. The day we got it Sister Maria Rebecca told me about Allen and Jennifer coining to meet me. And it made you remember your lines last week when I made you sleep with it, didn’t it? Admit it. Say something, Annie.”

  “Where do you think it came from?”

  “I think some old monk had it in Nevada or somewhere, or else it’s real old. Lucky stuff doesn’t have to come from somewhere. You know when something’s lucky for you.”

  “Okay. It’s lucky for us.”

  “Then we’ll take it to California to keep our luck going. Those girls we talked to on the phone are waiting for us. They’re rich as they can be. They’re going to make their dad take us to an amusement park. This is going to be a vacation, Annie. I never went on a vacation in my life. I want to go on one.”

  “All right,” Annie said. “I’ll go to this wedding. If I get to carry the cape.”

  “You can carry it. But if you lose it, I’ll kick your butt. Do you get that?”

  “I’d like to see you try.” Annie stood up and grabbed her smaller friend around the waist and wrestled her to the bed. They fought for a minute, then they started laughing. The cape had gotten tangled around their legs. Besides, it was hard to fight without making any noise and it scared Jennifer to death if they punched each other. They had almost given up having fights, which was a shame because they were beautifully matched, despite the difference in their sizes. Annie was a wrestler, who liked to get holds on people and then sit on them or twist their arms. Gabriela was a stomach puncher and a shin kicker and a biter. She was also a good spitter and had won several battles at the home by spitting on people at crucial points in a fight.

  The bridal shop in San Francisco mailed the dresses to the bridal shop in Oklahoma City. They were dresses by Helen Morley, who had also designed the dress Stella was going to wear. Stella’s dress was elegant and simple, thick white silk with embroidery down the back and capped sleeves and a high neck.

  The dresses for the girls were made of pale pink lace over satin slips. There were tiers of lace ten inches wide going down to the ankles and high-waisted bodices and full soft sleeves. When the owner of the shop in Oklahoma City pulled the first dress from the box a sigh went around the room. “Well,” she said. “California always has to outdo everybody.”

  “They have all those Asian ideas,” a saleslady comforted her. “Plus Hollywood.”

  “Yeah,” said a third. “What do you expect?” Then the ladies recovered from their moment of jealousy and one ran off to comb the neighborhood for shoes. Another ran out to a rival store for gloves. A third began to work on the veils, which had been crushed in the mail.

  At five that afternoon Jennifer and Annie and Gabriela arrived at the store and were ushered into a huge dressing room with golden chairs and a golden sofa. The girls took off their school clothes and were dressed in the pink lace costumes.

  “I wasn’t expecting this,” Annie said. “How much does this dress cost?”

  “This is for the Queen of Sheba,” Gabriela agreed. “How are we going to wear this on a sandy beach?”

  “Shit,” Annie added, turning to see the back in the three-way mirror. “We look like a bunch of hibiscus flowers by the well.”

  “Fucking merde.” Gabriela went to stand by her taller friend in the mirror. Even then the dresses looked perfect.

  “Fucking-A,” Annie agreed.

  “Well, let’s try on the gloves and shoes,” the owner said. “We sent Roberta all over town to find shoes. We think white patent sandals since it’s by the water.”

  The saleslady named Roberta began to open the shoeboxes that were stacked in the corner. “Every size they could possibly wear,” she said proudly. “I looked all over town. We aren’t going to be outdone by anyone in California. They will arrive with everything they need.” Except mouthwash, she was thinking, and then chastised herself for being mean. Everyone in Oklahoma City knew the Williamses’ story.

  Annie sat down on the sofa and allowed Roberta to try the shoes on one by one. “You might consider shaving her legs,” Roberta said. “I started shaving mine in the sixth grade.”

  Annie bent over and looked at the elegant little sandals on her feet. She examined the small, light-colored hairs showing along her bones. She pursed her lips.

  “Her legs are perfect,” Jennifer was saying. “She doesn’t need to shave her legs.”

  “She’s right,” Annie muttered. “That looks like shit. I know how to shave it off. I seen a girl in the home doing it. You get me a razor and a bar of soap and I’ll take care of that.”

  “Do you like the shoes? Is that pair comfortable? Get up and walk around in them.”

  Annie got up from the couch and began to parade around in front of the mirrors. What would it be like, being in a wedding? The priest w
ould be fixing the wine. The altar boys would be swinging incense. Everyone would be looking at her. She stood very still, lost in thought. Gabriela moved across the room and took her arm. “Don’t start getting moody,” she said in a whisper. “Ask them if we’re just going to wear these dresses, or if we’re going to get to keep them.”

  “I need the shoes with the heels on them,” she said in a louder voice to Jennifer. “If I wear those little ones I’ll look like a midget.”

  It was seven that night when Jennifer and the girls got home from the store. They had gloves and hats and shoes in an assortment of sacks and boxes. The dresses had been left to be altered and hemmed. “So now do you think they would get rid of you?” Gabriela asked Annie, when they were alone in their room getting ready for bed. “After they got you a dress that cost about two hundred dollars and all that other stuff that matches it?”

  “I’ve got to get me a razor,” Annie answered. “I’ve got to shave these fucking hairs off my legs.”

  It stormed in the night. A huge thunderstorm that roared in about twelve o’clock and woke up the town. Jennifer and Allen lay in bed listening to the hail hit the roof. Then they went into the kitchen and got out food. They got out potato chips and sliced chicken and mayonnaise and lettuce and tomatoes and chocolate chip cookies and Gatorade. Since the girls had been there they had completely altered their diet and gone back to eating things that tasted good. “Something’s bothering Annie,” Jennifer said. “She’s worrying about something and I don’t know how to ask her what it is. I don’t know if I should wait for Doctor Cole to find out or ask her. I don’t know how far to pry into her mind. What would it be like, to be here with us, to think you were on probation, whether you were or not? What else can we do?”