All Dressed Up (15 page)

Lainie clicked
her tongue, poured the last melty contents of the blender jug into
her own glass.

“ – and
because it just gets so boring to keep talking about it. Like,
you’re probably dying, here, but I can’t seem to stop. Then
thinking, Okay, am I more cynical now? Less trusting? Will I ever
throw myself into a relationship like that again?”

“Oh…”

“And I will
hate him if he’s changed me that way! I will hate if this has done
something permanent to my heart, Lainie! Scarred it over. I don’t
want my heart to be scarred. And I go over every little moment from
the whole relationship, wondering about the clues I missed in the
happy time, and how blind I was in the happy time, and wondering
when the happy time really stopped.”

This would
have been the point where she stood up and started pacing the
kitchen. With expressive arm movements. Glass of margarita dregs in
her volatile hand.

“And – back in
the tying myself in knots phase, not now – coming up with little
things he’d said or done and going, “Aha! I knew he loved me, and
this proves it!” and then matching those things up against other
things that proved the exact opposite and just not knowing what I
was left with after all of that.”

“Oh, I know, I
know.” Lainie made all sorts of sounds of empathy and support.

“Sorry, sorry,
this is so boring.”

“No… no…” But
what else could Lainie have said?

“And women are
always so stupid about this stuff, Lainie. Most of us. We obsess.
And on behalf of all the women in the world who do this, I am
proud! I am proud that we love the way we do. That we pay so much
attention to the state of our hearts. That so many of us can’t
sleep with a man and afterward not love him at least twice as much
as before. And I welcome the men who love like we do, and I even
cherish the, I have to believe, majority of men who don’t, you
know. Because it would get crazy if both sexes were like this,
don’t you think? We need men and women to be weird about love and
sex in such different ways, you know, and I am proud to be weird in
my female way.”

Slurp. No more
margarita left in the glass.

“And he will
not change my heart. And I am not the fool in this, I am not the
loser.” Voice crack. “I win! I win! Because I have the good heart,
and I am not going to let that go!”

“I know,
honey, I know. All of it. It’s all true.” Lainie stood up and came
over to where Sarah stood high and proud on her invisible
broken-heart soap-box in the middle of the kitchen floor and hugged
her hard.

Sarah sobbed
extravagant margarita-laced sobs with the chili from the salsa
still hot in her mouth. Sobbed and sobbed on poor Lainie’s
shoulder. Talk about dresses getting damp. “That felt good,” she
said when she finally stopped. “Woo! Very good. Emotional bulimia.
I think I’ve made progress.” The room wobbled. She felt euphoric.
And not even embarrassed any more. Which was pretty
embarrassing.

“Have you said
any of this to him, honey?”

“No, none of
it. Not a woo-w-word.”

“Do you think
you should?”

“No, because
that would make him the winner, again. He shouldn’t get all the
prizes, right? I should keep some of it to myself. It’s good I said
it to you, though. Just to someone.”

“You haven’t
said it to Emma?”

“Ooh, no.”

“Or
anyone?”

“No. No one.
It’s very, very good. Thank you. Thank you. I’ve been terrible. I
should go soon… I should say more things to people… Have you ever
felt that, Lainie? That you want to drum your heels on the floor
like a two-year-old and scream I want my nervous breakdown!”

“We’d better
fix you something to eat and have you sit for a while before you
drive, honey.”

“Definitely.”

Standing at
the stove, Lainie returned to an issue she and Sarah had lost track
of around 32 fluid ounces of margarita ago. “Can we seriously not
tell Emma about the damage to the dress until we know if it’s going
to come clean? Give me a chance, first? Give her a chance? She’s so
fragile.”

“I said.
Exo-skeleton. Like a bug. Hard and crunchy on the outside, soft and
gooey within.”

“I know you
know more than you want to tell me about why. And when you think of
what she put everyone through, what she put Charlie through with
that airplane mask blindfold, purely to be able to rehearse the
gown going up and down the aisle without losing the gasp of
admiration from him on the day... How long did she take to find the
perfect dress? Six months?”

“A year,
really.”

“I keep saying
to myself, it’s a fifteen-thousand dollar gown.”

“I think I
should tell her before we know if it’s going to come clean,” Sarah
said. “She’ll be angry, if we don’t, and then it doesn’t. I would,
if it was me. I hate secrets. I really hate them. They leach
something out of you… out of the love… like chemicals leaching out
of rock. And this secret’s not going to help anybody,” she went on.
“I’ll be the one to tell her, Lainie. Seriously. You’d have to make
a special call. Or come see her. I can pick my moment.”

“When there’s
a chink in the wall?”

“Something
like that.”

When Sarah
arrived at the lake-house pretty late – after the bacon and cheese
omelet and toast triangles and salad and coffee that Lainie had
made her to give her liver a chance to process the serial
margaritas – Mom had just put down the phone after calling her own
mother, Grandma Powell, so she was feeling tense.

“You only just
told them, Mom? It’s been three days.”

“Well, the
wedding can’t have been very important to them, or they would have
flown over for it.” Mom didn’t like her parents.

She had some
justification. Grandma and Grandpa Powell had strange priorities,
such as choosing not to come to their elder grand-daughter’s
wedding because “it was too far” when they were the ones who’d
decided to retire to Hawaii twelve years ago. Instead, they’d
scheduled a quite arduous tour of China, commencing three days
after the wedding, to seal their no-show. “You must see that it’s
impossible, Terri,” they’d said to Mom, “and we’ve been wanting to
take this tour for three years.”

Sarah
suspected Mom had deliberately held off calling them until the day
before their departure for Hong Kong in the hope that this would
keep them out of telephone contact while they digested the
news.

Mom had never
quite grown up when it came to her parents. Again, you could see
why. They still treated her like a teen making all the wrong
choices. Mom reacted accordingly. She suppressed less desirable
news, bitched about them behind their backs, felt inadequate
underneath the bitching. Dad still had to scrape her up off the
floor and glue her back together again every time she spoke with
them on the phone.

Mom had had
several miscarriages, the last of which Sarah remembered vividly
because it happened their first winter in London just before she
turned fifteen. Mom had taken months to get over that one. She was
really down, really absent from all their lives that year. Dad
hovered over her, speechless with worry. It was a twin pregnancy.
Apparently women were more likely to conceive twins at that age.
Grandma’s comforting comment that Mom, “wouldn’t have wanted twins,
anyway,” had been typically supportive.

“So what did
she say?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, the
usual.” Mom flapped her hands. “We should never have let Emma set
her sights on such an extravagant wedding. I have no sense of
proportion. It’s not a question of whether we could afford it, it’s
about self-discipline. We could have prevented this fiasco if we’d
set limits from the start. Et cetera. At what point do they get so
old that I have to forgive them for this stuff?”

“Eighty’s
probably about your cut-off. Younger, if their health is bad.”

“So I have six
more years.”

“Enjoy it
while it lasts.”

“You’re later
than I thought, Sar. Did you stop at Lainie’s?”

Sarah felt a
temptation to suppress her own piece of less desirable news, but in
view of her woozy epiphany about the destructive effect of secrets
a couple of hours ago, she bit the bullet. “I’m sort of over it,”
she said, after she’d explained. “I’m taking it logically, and not
panicking. Brooke’s mom says she knows the best cleaner in the
area, and if she can’t make it perfect again, no one can.”

“Let’s not
even think about breaking it to Emma, yet,” Mom said.

“Lainie said
that and I told her no. You shouldn’t do this, Mom. You shouldn’t
ration out these kinds of things, or try to put a different,
helpful spin on them to different people, the way you do. It
doesn’t work in the long run. It really, really is not working for
any of us right now, and it hasn’t been for a long time! I’m just
going to call her up and tell her.”

But the
land-line rang as Sarah was putting her overnight bag on the bed –
she’d hidden the Bergdorf Goodman bag in her closet – and she was
the first to get to it on the extension in her room. She heard
Emma’s voice. “Just checking you got there safely with the
dress.”

Then she heard
the click of Mom picking up the other handset downstairs.

“Right,” Sarah
said to Emma. “Yep, I’m here.”

“With the
dress.”

“Sarah?” Mom
said urgently into the other handset. Something clattered. She must
have tripped over the adjacent armchair in her hurry to get to the
phone and intercept the missile of disastrous news. Sarah? Put the
phone down on the ground in front of you and step away with your
hands in the air. “Honey, I’ll talk to Emma, I know you’re all wet
from the shower.” I know you’re not, you know I know you’re not,
I’m lying through my teeth. “Hi, Emma, sweetheart, are you planning
to come back up?”

“Mom…” Sarah
said. “Remember what Dad says to you about listening to his advice?
Remember how you always say I take after him?”

“Honey, go get
dressed.” Put the phone down and step away. “I hate when you drip
on the floor.”

“I don’t
know,” Emma said in answer to Mom. “Does it matter if I’m here or
there? Tomorrow?”

“We can talk
then about where you want it stored,” Mom said.

“I can’t
listen to this,” Sarah said.

“So put the
phone down, honey.”

“Emma – ”
Sarah began.

Mom said,
“Sarah, let me handle it.”

“Will you
handle it? Do you promise you will actually handle it?”

“In my own
way,” Mom said.

Sarah sighed
and put down the extension, came out of her room and sat halfway
down the stairs, watching Mom stand with the phone pressed against
her ear and her legs as wide-spaced and twitchy as if she was
returning volleys from the base-line in a doubles match.

“I know, me
too,” she said into the phone. “But we could clear out the closet
in the downstairs bedroom. We don’t need any of that junk.”

Emma said
something. Apparently about the risk of dirt in the closet, and the
impossibility of getting the dress cleaned.

“Of course we
could clean it, not that there is going to be mildew or dust.
Anyhow, Lainie says she knows the best cleaner in the area.”

Mistake! Mom
jammed her teeth over her bottom lip. Why would Lainie be talking
about cleaning, at this point? Mom began to gabble, masking her
guilt with transparently flustered words. “Sarah only just got in.”
Pause to listen to Emma. “I don’t know, honey. No, I’m not putting
her on, she’s just out of the – ” Pause. “I just want you to relax.
I’ll get her to call you back.” She put down the phone and sighed
and reported to Sarah, “I shot myself in the foot. She knows we’re
hedging. I said too much. Stupid.”

“We have to
tell her. I’m angry about this, Mom. You shouldn’t have lied, and
you should have trusted me. I would have picked my moment.”

“Sarah,
sweetheart, you’d come within three seconds of spilling it when I
picked up the phone.”

“Yes, maybe
so, and I’m going to call her right back.”

Chapter
Seven

Charlie would
have told Emma very bluntly that she shouldn’t be driving like
this.

Which she
knew.

But there was
so little keeping her anchored to this earth at the moment – the
hot water in the shower, the packet of cigarettes in her purse.
Perversely, driving when she was this tired, in other words risking
her life, made Emma more aware that she didn’t want to kill herself
over this. She wanted to find a way through.

So she fixed
her aching eyes to the dark road and gripped the steering wheel so
tight her finger joints creaked. She counted every mile marker that
went by, and every landmark she knew by heart from all the years
they’d been coming up here. The service areas at Saugerties and New
Baltimore, the big exit and toll plaza that took her from I-90 to
I-87, just outside of Albany, the arched bridge over the Mohawk,
the exit signs for Saratoga.

Nearly there.
Glens Falls on the right. Prospect Mountain on the left. The exit
to 9N. The cabins and condos and motels along the lake. Nearly
there. Grays Hill Road. The white house on the corner. The turn-off
through the open gate, the track twisting downhill through the
pines. The house, dimly lit. Everyone would be in bed.

Except Mom,
who appeared in her pajamas at the top of the stairs and told Emma
she should have waited until morning, she wouldn’t be able to see
the dress until it came back from the cleaner.

“I don’t care
about the damage to the dress. That’s not why I came up so
fast.”

It was true,
even though she’d yelled at Sarah over the phone about Lainie’s
incompetence and how she, Emma, should have known something like
this would happen. She’d heard herself saying it – “Oh God, I
should have known!” – and it had sounded so ludicrous, so pompous
and self-righteous and entitled. Should have known? That your
unworn gown was going to get rain-damaged in your ex-groom’s
mother’s attic? After you yourself had callously abandoned it on
the church floor?