All Dressed Up (5 page)

“It’s closed.
It’s for sale, the Tuppers said.”

“Really?”
Sarah felt an uncoiling of curiosity and memories that made her
stomach go queasy.

Mom didn’t
appear to notice. Or didn’t let on that she’d noticed. Give her
some credit, Sarah. “You and Dad keep Billy busy tomorrow, can
you?” Mom suggested instead. “I’ll help Emma.”

“If she’ll let
you.”

“Even if she
won’t.”

“I’d like to
see which of you wins that one.”

Mom hugged
her. “Yes, you don’t have to tell me, you’re my easy daughter, I
know that.”

Wrong,
Mom!

“I can turn
into a prima donna if you want,” Sarah offered lightly. “Watch and
see. It’ll be fun for all of us. A breath of fresh air. The other
sister being difficult.”

I want my
nervous breakdown, and I want it right now!

It was funny,
she didn’t feel like this very often, she got on with her life,
good things happened, but then suddenly it would come, as if it had
been there all along – the resentment, the feeling that she’d been
short-changed.

“Sarah, I’m
being nice!”

“Okay, I know
you are.” Feeling her mother’s arms tight and warm around her, and
bear-hugging her back, however, Sarah wanted to challenge that
word. Nice. Was Mom nice?

She had a good
heart. She wanted the best for people. She never hurt anyone on
purpose, even people she didn’t like. But she was temperamental,
governed by energy levels that swung wildly. She had been a pro
tennis player in the years when Chrissie Evert was Mrs Lloyd, she’d
once gotten as high as six in the ATP rankings, and she still
coached part-time. She parented the same way she played, with
flashes of erratic brilliance and a tendency to lose concentration
at the wrong moments in the game.

Sarah
remembered some startling, wonderful childhood days, like the time
they’d lit a campfire to cook potatoes and hot dogs in their
suburban New Jersey back yard and almost set the whole garden on
fire. Mom had loved that part of it most of all. “Let’s not call
911 yet! We can put it out ourselves!” Steam and ash hissing and
boiling in the air, the smell of butter and salt and hot potato
skin, ketchup around their mouths sticky and vinegar-sweet, smoke
stinking up their hair. Sarah and Emma had been beside themselves
with excitement, filthy as chimney sweeps, round-eyed at Mom.

Other days,
Mom had been bored and lethargic and mentally absent, couldn’t get
motivated, craved some good sets of tennis, forgot various vital
supplies for school, withheld unpleasant news to spare people’s
feelings and then blurted it out at the worst possible time. ‘Nice’
implied a parenting style that was steadier, Sarah thought, but she
never doubted Mom’s sincerity or goodness or love.

“I know you’re
nice,” she repeated belatedly. “You’re fabulous. And it’s been a
tough day.”

“An insane
day. I so wanted to see Charlie in that stupid airplane
blindfold.”

“It wasn’t a
good look on him. Not in tandem with the freeze-up and unnatural
calm.”

“When did Emma
forget how to laugh about things like that?”

“You know
when,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, but
does it have to haunt us forever?” Mom hunched her shoulders, and
got that hunted look that said she thought she was the most to
blame.

Upstairs, Emma
lay in bed and listened to the music while she cried.

Oh, God,
Dad!

Fire and Rain.
Hallelujah. Norwegian Wood. Classical Gas. Moon River. Sunshine on
Leith. All her favorites, the ones she always asked him for, the
ones with little kicks of melody and poetry in them that made her
dance or cry.

Oh, God,
Dad!

She was crying
too hard to go down and thank him for it. They would all get too
worried about her if they saw her face this bad, saw her this
imperfect and torn apart. She knew Dad never liked to be thanked
for things anyhow. Tomorrow would have been her thanks to him for
the entire life project of being her father, of doing so much of it
right, even when she’d stuffed everything up so badly in
London.

She would have
thanked him by taking his arm down the aisle to the altar at St
James, where he would have given her to Charlie.

Charlie.
Charlie.

They wouldn’t
be doing that, now, she and Dad, so he was playing his guitar for
her instead. Thinking about you, sweetheart, said his music. Not
judging you. Just thinking about you.

She sobbed
harder. He played Horse With No Name and Heart of Gold and sleep
ambushed her sobs and slowed them and flattened them until they
went away. In sleep, she forgot what had happened. When morning
came, she woke up with her consciousness rising effortlessly,
pleasingly, like a feather in a drift of warm air, until the
bone-jarring crunch of memory hit.

Oh. That’s
right.

Now misery sat
on her chest again, as heavy as solid rock. She couldn’t move. She
just had to lie here hugging it to herself, cradling it in her
stomach until the surprise wore off and it fractionally eased.
Eventually, she got out of bed with the stiff, fearful movements of
an old woman, and only knew she was alive because it couldn’t hurt
this much to be dead.

The wedding
was off.

Charlie had
gone back to New York, wearing his reaction the same way he wore
surgical gloves, neat and impersonal with no hint of the intensity
beneath.

She wasn’t a
bad person, she just couldn’t stop herself from trying too hard,
because otherwise what was left? She owed it to everyone to try too
hard. She owed it to herself. To Billy. To Dad. Sarah couldn’t see
the extent of that inner pressure. Mom had no clue. She thought
that by now everything should be solved.

The one person
Emma should have counted on to understand her had gone, and the
fact that Charlie didn’t understand her after all, despite the
matching stripes in their souls, was her own fault.

The neat room
that she always slept in up here at the lake-house was crammed with
all the perfect things she’d made by hand for this day. Four
hundred white paper doves to hang from the trees surrounding the
church on invisible nylon filament, a hundred and twenty printed
wedding programs in hand-made dust jackets of champagne-colored
moiré taffeta, a hundred and twenty favor boxes with delicate
waistbands of thin gold and each guest’s name in hand-written
calligraphy.

There had been
months of planning and decisions and work involved, squeezed in
around the enormous commitment of her hospital internship year. She
never could have managed it all if she hadn’t moved back home – the
first time she’d lived with her family for anything other than
short summer visits since Billy was born.

For twenty-two
months the wedding had been the place her thoughts automatically
tracked back to, her mental elevator returning to level one. She’d
crammed the guest list with three generations of cousins and
friends and work colleagues from her side and Charlie’s. She’d
quested exhaustively for the right reception venue and had settled
on the beautifully restored Victorian-era Craigmore Hotel, sitting
on its own island in Lake George with the Adirondack Mountains
dreaming in the background, classy and just beautiful.

How could such
a perfect wedding not happen as planned?

Charlie.
Charlie.

And why had
she thought a perfect wedding would help?

Out of bed,
she took a shower, washing away a little of the old woman feeling.
When she turned the water up hotter it seemed to do some good, but
then she didn’t want to turn it off. Someone rattled the handle on
the bathroom door and she didn’t respond, just turned her face up
and let the hot water needles drum on her cheeks and her nose and
her chin.

After so much
guitar the previous night, Dad still had music in his head in the
morning, just as Sarah had predicted. It came out in snatches and
hums while he brushed his teeth and made coffee. It was his usual
unconscious and creative free association, this time on the happy
theme of weddings. “Going to the chap-el, and…”

Sarah kept
saying, “Dad! Change the tu-une, please!” in a sing-song voice that
was meant to warn him, but five minutes later he would be at it
again, half under his breath.

“Nice day for
a – ” Jaunty beat, emphasized with head movement. “ – white
wedding.” And then for some reason, some obscure line about
twenty-four years living next door to Alice, followed by the entire
tragic narrative contained in Leader of the Pack.

The weather
taunted them, but no-one mentioned it. Early cloud threatened rain,
and there came the sound of thunder, but then the cloud melted into
steamy sunshine, and a breeze moved at a perfect, steady clip
across the afternoon to blow in dry air and a soaring blue sky. It
would have been a nice day for a white wedding, all right!

After
breakfast, Emma stacked the dishwasher, wiped down the bench tops
and the front of the refrigerator and asked bright little questions
about her aunt’s and uncle’s lives. Sarah heard her on the phone to
Amber. “I have stuff to think about. Obviously. No, you were great.
Amber, I’m not going to listen to this, okay? Just spend the time
with Curtis before you head back to the city tomorrow and we’ll
talk. Oh. You know. We’ll talk soon.”

She didn’t
call Brooke-the-courtesy-bridesmaid. Her stiff shoulders didn’t
invite anyone’s hugs, but then they hadn’t for years. Mom cornered
Sarah in the kitchen and burst out, “I’ve tried, haven’t I? She’s
softer with other people.”

“Not
really.”

“She is.
Softer and just different. Just now, she was, on the phone with
Amber. She changes the moment I leave the room, or turn my
head.”

“You’re not
saying she’s any better with me?”

“Sometimes I
feel that if I whirl my head back around fast enough, I’ll catch
the real Emma, moving the way she really moves, laughing the way
she really laughs about the things she really finds funny, you
know?”

“I know,”
Sarah conceded.

“It’s my own
fault. Things are always the mother’s fault, right? The mother is
never forgiven. I try to solve it with little gestures but they’re
not enough. They backfire. And then I think, well, I’ll salvage
Sarah and Billy. It won’t happen with you two.”

“You put me
and Billy in together?”

Mom shrugged
defensively. “Sometimes. Is that wrong?”

To this, Sarah
had no answer.

“I’m going to
box everything up and head back to the city,” Emma announced at
one-thirty. She stood poised three steps up from the bottom of the
stairs, which always looked dark even in the middle of a sunny day.
Beneath the pine trees, the house never got enough light.

She hadn’t
eaten any of the pizza that Dad had picked up for lunch, after he
and Sarah had taken Billy for a game of mini-golf in the morning,
and she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday morning,
a planned-in-advance outfit noted in her wedding binder as ‘Pre Day
Of – Morning’ that consisted of jeans and a virginal looking lacy
top. She hadn’t done much to her hair since yesterday, and it had
lost some of its bouncy straightness and gloss. She wore it messily
loose, strands tucked behind her ears so that they didn’t irritate
her face. All the perfect pre-wedding make-up was gone, too.

“Will you
store everything at home?” Mom asked, peering up at her.

“In Saddle
River? If that’s okay. I’ll leave it neat, I promise. In the
basement.”

“It’ll be five
by the time you get back. Stay the night.”

“Here?
No.”

“Are you going
to use your vacation days?”

Emma crunched
shut her stubborn jaw and announced decisions she’d apparently just
made on the spot. “I’m going to call Hackensack on Monday and ask
if they want me to cover for anyone. As for Park, there’s obviously
some other stuff to think about.” But not to talk about, don’t you
dare, said her voice and her face and her shoulders. Park Memorial
Hospital in Manhattan was where Charlie worked, and where she was
due to start a surgical residency herself in two weeks. How was
that going to work out now?

Mom visibly
choked on all the possible lines of support she could give in
reply. They meant everything and nothing. Sarah thought about
saying them and choked, too.

Hang in there.
It will get easier, you know that. You’ll handle it, because you’re
strong. And because you’ll suck as much strength as you need to out
of the rest of us, and we’ll let it happen. Park is a big
hospital.

Sarah hung by
the kitchen door, hand on the jamb. Mom held herself at the bottom
of the stairs. Emma stayed up on the third step. At ground level
Mom and Emma were the same height, but like this Emma seemed
haughtily taller, long-waisted, supple, thin, such a healthy,
prime-of-life female body poised there, straining to get away,
suffering. Finally, she moved, heading upstairs. “There’s a lot to
pack.”

“I don’t care
how prickly she is, I’m going to follow her up and talk,” Mom
mumbled to Sarah. To Emma, she called, “Let me help you load the
boxes.”

“Thanks.”
Emma’s flat, strappy shoes thumped on the old wood and she was
painfully polite. “You know I’m going to pay you and Dad back for
the reception. For everything. The dress. Don’t tell me we don’t
need to think about that yet. I have to. I’d rather talk about it
all at once today than have it drag out.”

“You don’t –
”

“I’ll itemize
everything. I’ll use some of my tennis money.”

They all had
tennis money. Mom had banked a lump sum for each of them from her
playing days and let it grow their whole lives. Sarah and Emma had
each lost a chunk of theirs to Billy when he was born, but the
money would still be enough to buy a house or start a business.