Amy Inspired (38 page)

Richard made an admirable attempt to cheer me up: “I’m fiftyone, and I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.”

“That’s reassuring.” I spun my coffee cup around and studied the rainbow on the front. Bubble letters read
Virginia Beach or bust!

“I’ve had worse with the old Dodge. It’ll be taken care of. ‘Don’t be anxious about anything,’ ” Mom recited, joining us at the table. “ ‘But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.’ ”

“I think He has more to worry about than dented fenders,” I said.

“If He has the hair on your head numbered, He has your fenders counted.”

I gave her a look.

“What?” she asked.

She was too excited about Brian’s Big Day to share in my misery.

The wedding was a week away and already our house was as bustling and chaotic as Zoë’s had been silent. Dresses hung in plastic, corsages chilled. There were rehearsals and scripts and props. Everyone had their part and seemed comfortable with their lines, while I stood mute at center stage, staring at the waiting darkness, hoping for a cue.

22

Mom’s church friends Sandy Baldwin and Mrs. Jenkins drove over the afternoon of the wedding rehearsal for a complimentary Luna home-spa treatment. I had been coerced into attending. To my mother’s endless distress I’d pulled two all-nighters to finish my grading. Lack of sleep was
terrible
for the complexion: She would not have
her
daughter wearing eye bags to
her
son’s wedding.

I sat across from Grandma and to the right of Mrs. Jenkins, my third grade Sunday school teacher, who liked to take personal responsibility for the fact I’d turned out so well. I traded surreptitious glances with Grandma over the table while the women talked: I was still weightless from the first euphoria of summer vacation and had patience enough for the both of them.

“I have eight grandchildren now,” Mrs. Jenkins answered to my polite query. “Seven by blood; the eighth from my Robert’s wife’s first marriage.” She dipped her hands in the warm wax Mom had mixed up in our old popcorn bowl. The old lady’s manicured red nails had terrified me as a child. Though her hands had wrinkled and shrunk with age, the pointed red nails had not changed. It gave me an almost physical jolt to see them.

“It’s not a good situation. He’s nearly twenty now. Into all sorts of things that are of no benefit to anyone. But I guess every family has one of them.” When she lifted her hands, the wax gathered to a point at her fingertips. “Not my business.”

“That’s why there are so many problems with the youth today,” Sandy said to me. Her expression was one of desperate concern. She was wearing cucumber slices on her eyes; the round whiteness of the cucumbers made her appear all the more alarmed.

“These young children don’t have the Lord in their hearts,” Mrs.

Jenkins said. “We need to make a great effort to teach them while they’re young.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Grandma. “We do right by some. What’s Lisa up to now? She was always a bright girl.”

“Still in Europe,” Sandy said. “You know Lisa. Impossible to keep track of. One minute she’s here, the next she’s flying to Paris. That girl wears herself out.”

“When is she set to come home next?” Grandma asked.

She was being overly polite. Behind Mom’s back she referred to Sandy and Mrs. Jenkins as “Those Cats.”

“Christmas, or so she says now,” Sandy said. “Give it two weeks and she’ll have changed her mind.”

“I thought she’d already been to Paris,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

“Well, she went once with the class trip. This is her second go, only now she’s working there the whole time, teaching English.”

“Meeting any Parisian men?” Grandma winked at me.

Sandy said, “That would mean some profit for all this running around. Now, I’m not one to pressure a girl, but land sakes, she’ll be thirty-one this July!”

She sounded shocked, as if her daughter had not been progressing steadily toward her next birthday month by month like everyone else.

“A woman can’t just live life as if age doesn’t matter.”

Mom stood abruptly and snatched the bowl of wax from beneath Mrs. Jenkins’s still suspended hands. In the kitchen, she refilled the bowl, her back to us.

Mrs. Jenkins raised her eyebrows. “She won’t be young forever. I hope she realizes that.”

“These girls are so different now. They’re so—so
entitled
,” Sandy said.

The cucumber on her right eye fell in her lap. She picked it up and, after a momentary hesitation, sniffed it. I hoped she would take a bite.

“They’re admirably ambitious,” Grandma said.

“I had two babies and a third on the way when I was her age,” said Mrs. Jenkins.

“I had two children, a mortgage, and an ex-husband,” said my mother. She shut the microwave door with more force than was necessary.

This was the first time Mom had spoken in half an hour, which in and of itself was strange. Moreover, it was the first time I’d heard her admit to the divorce in front of Mrs. Jenkins. Ever.

Sandy and Mrs. Jenkins had always accepted my mother as a friend, but their silence surrounding my parents’ separation kept any real intimacy at bay. My mother acted as though she were indebted to them for their resolution to ignore what they perceived as her greatest failing as a Christian and as a woman. Most peculiar of all, they now seemed as blind to her new boyfriend as they had been to her failed marriage. When Richard had come by an hour earlier to drop off some dry cleaning, Mrs. Jenkins blatantly ignored his presence.

I waited in suspense for Mrs. Jenkins to acknowledge my mother’s statement.

Instead, Sandy made some oblique comment about the difficulties of raising very young children.

“It is not easy,” Mrs. Jenkins agreed.

Sandy reached for the lotion. She did not eat the cucumber after all.

In the late afternoon Grandma went home to nap before the rehearsal. The rest of us drove with Mom to the chapel. Mrs. Jenkins had agreed to play piano for the ceremony at no cost; Sandy was present for moral support. The ladies’ shins bumped up against cardboard boxes of votive candles and plastic ivy. I sat shotgun next to my mother, uncomfortable in pantyhose and a dress, my cheeks exfoliated, red and tight as the skin of a newly blown-up party balloon.

“Weather’s looking dreary,” said Mrs. Jenkins, eyeing the dark clouds through the minivan window. “You’d better tell Marie to say her prayers.”

Sandy added, “The weatherman says it’ll be a fifty percent chance of rain tomorrow.”

“The Lord wouldn’t do that to me,” Mom said. “I’ve been asking for sunshine six months now. He’s promised it to me.”

Sandy grabbed the sides of Mom’s seat and peered around the headrest. “It’s a left here,” she said, pointing.

“I know where I’m going,” Mom snapped. Her hands were tight on the wheel, her knuckles white.

“It will be beautiful,” I said to her when we began unloading at the church. I expected rain, but I wanted to show a sign of solidarity.

“Sandy doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Mom replied. “That woman sits home all day watching the weather channel like it’s the greatest thing since Lawrence Welk.”

Mom: 2; Sunday school women: 0.

I took the boxes she was unloading and followed her across the parking lot, intrigued by this woman who was playing my mother.

The chapel was smaller than I had expected, narrow with a crowded aisle leading to a crowded platform. A stained-glass window featuring the ascension of Christ loomed over the little sanctuary. There was a piano to the right and a pair of candelabras at either side of the communion table. The place might have been pretty but for the garish purple carpet. It smelled musty, with the lingering odor of cleaning detergent used to polish blond wood furniture that had been all the rage in the seventies but now appeared tawdry and worn.

Brian and Marie had arrived earlier with two of her bridesmaids, who were already busy folding bulletins for the next day’s guests. Marie’s father had been charged with setting candles on the windowsills. Cousins were tying bows to every other pew, Marie’s mother following to undo and more perfectly retie every single one.

Within the hour, the rest of the bridal party arrived, the minister second to last, and—to everyone’s surprise—my father last of all.

“Darren,” Mom exclaimed.

I looked at Brian, alarmed.
Don’t look at me
, he mouthed.

Dad strode to the front of the chapel. He wore sunglasses on his head, sandals on his feet, a tourist stumbling onto what he hoped would be a good beach party. Though I had known there was a chance he would show before the wedding, his presence was scandalous. Perhaps it was the nonchalance of his entrance, the way he so casually interrupted the lives we’d made for ourselves without him.

Mom met him halfway down the aisle. “How are you?” she asked.

“Doing all right.” Chewing his gum, he surveyed the pews, the candelabras, the altar. “The place looks good. Real good.”

“When we didn’t hear from you, we assumed you couldn’t make it.”

Dad said, “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

“Well, you can sit in the back,” Mom instructed. “We’re just getting started.”

He obligingly sat in the very last pew, a safe distance away from conversation with anyone involved in the wedding.

I walked purposefully to his pew. “Anyone sitting here?”

“Hey, sport,” he said, rising to give me a hug.

Tall and thick-shouldered with a mane of white hair that hadn’t diminished over the years, my father was what some women might consider handsome. Brian and I had our father’s bold features: long nose, expressive eyes, full lips. But taking a seat beside him, I couldn’t help noticing he had changed a great deal since I’d last seen him. He was heavier, his waist wider and lower, his now-full cheeks bristled with a pepper-and-salt beard. He was crumpled and weary. Old.

“We’re glad you could make it,” I said.

“I’m real proud of your brother. He’s a fine kid.”

Dad often spoke about us as if gossiping to a neighbor about someone else’s family. It was particularly unnerving when he did this while addressing one of us directly.

The wedding planner corralled the bridesmaids into place at the foyer doors.

“How’s school going?” Dad asked.

I told him that other than the weekly desire to jump off a cliff, I did all right.

“I couldn’t do what you do.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It takes a special kind of person to be a teacher.”

“I’m not a teacher, Dad. I’m a writer.”

“You’re still on that?” he asked, frankly surprised. This from the man who filled my early childhood with incessant monologues on the fundamental virtues of the American Dream, social mobility, and the chasing of falling stars. He had changed, maybe more than I thought.

“Where’s Penny?” I asked, fully aware it was a loaded question. You never knew if Dad was on his way in or out of a relationship.

“Couldn’t make it. Work’s been riding her tail real bad this year.”

“I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“What’s it been now?” he asked. “A whole year?”

“Since the Christmas before last.”

He whistled. “Hard to believe. You ought to see Marjorie now. ”

“Is she in high school?”

“Freshman year of college,” he corrected. “Eighteen going on twenty-five.”

He retrieved his wallet from his suit jacket and opened it to a picture of Penny’s daughter, a product of her first marriage. She was a masculine girl, hair like yarn, braces barely restraining a fierce overbite. “It’s an old picture, of course,” he said. “She’s a real beauty now. A total heartbreaker.”

I imagined him showing a picture of me to Marjorie, saying
She’s a real beauty. A total heartbreaker
.

The rehearsal was well under way. It was too rude to talk without whispering. Brian and Marie recited their vows. The minister told Brian he could kiss his bride. He dipped Marie down toward the floor and raspberried her cheek.

When the wedding planner demanded a second run-through, Grandma drafted me to photograph the event with her camera, complaining that in the chapel’s dim light she couldn’t see well enough to do it herself.