PART THREE
I Carry Your Heart
I
FORTY TWO
Rose Feller had never wished for a mother as much as she did during her engagement to Simon Stein. Their first date had been in April. By May they were seeing each other four and five days a week. By July Simon had all but moved into Rose's apartment. And in September he'd taken her back to the Jerk Hut, ducked under the table, ostensibly to retrieve a dropped napkin, and reappeared with a black velvet box in his hand. "It's too soon," Rose had said, still not quite believing that this was happening, and Simon had looked at her steadily and said, "I'm sure about you." The wedding was set for May, and it was already October, which meant, as the salesladies this afternoon had been quick to point out, that Rose was late in selecting a wedding dress. "Do you know how long it takes for the dresses to arrive?" the woman at the first shop had asked. Rose had thought of retorting, "Do you know how long it took me to find a guy to marry?" but decided to keep her mouth shut. "This is torture," she said, struggling to haul up the panty hose that had developed an inch-thick run the instant she'd poked one foot inside. "Shall I call Amnesty International?" Amy asked. Rose shook her head and tossed her sneakers into a corner of the peach-painted,
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lace-curtained dressing room of a bridal shop (or "shoppe," as Rose had learned to think of them), where the air smelled like lavender potpourri and the Muzak played only love songs. She was strapped into a bustier that hoisted her breasts to practically chin level and, as she would later discover, left nasty welts in her side, plus a girdle that the saleslady had tried to tell her was really a "shaper brief," except Rose knew a girdle when she saw one—and when she felt one cutting off her air supply. But the saleslady had insisted. "The proper foundation garments are crucial," she'd said, looking at Rose as if to say, and the rest of my brides-to-be have already figured that out. "You don't know what I'm going through," Rose moaned. The saleslady bundled a dress in her arms and held it open for Rose. "Dive," she ordered. Rose tucked her arms by her sides, bent at the waist, wincing at the pinch of her double-barreled girdle, and shoved her head through the opening, groping. The dress's full skirt fell down to her ankles as Rose poked her arms through the sleeves and the saleslady started attempting to work the zipper up her back. "What are you going through?" asked Amy. Rose closed her eyes and uttered the name that had haunted her during the two months of her engagement, and who would, she felt certain, continue to bedevil her as the wedding date drew closer. "Sydelle," she said. "Oy," said Amy. "Oy is not the half of it," said Rose. "My wicked stepmother has now decided that she wants to be my beet friend." And it was true. When she and Simon had driven to New Jersey to tell Michael Feller and his wife the good news, Michael had hugged his daughter and clapped Simon on the back, while Sydelle sat on the couch looking stricken. "How wonderful," she finally managed, the words squeezing through her thin, perfectly-painted lips while her jumbo nostrils flared as if she was trying to inhale the coffee table. "How wonderful for you both!" And the very next day she'd called Rose at home to insist that they have tea to celebrate, and to offer her services as a wedding planner. "Not to toot my own
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horn, dear, but people are still talking about My Marcia's wedding," she'd said. Rose thought that was understandable, given Sydelle's penchant for mentioning Marcia's wedding in every conversation, but she was caught so completely off guard by Sydelle's doing something that didn't involve criticism of her clothes, hair, or diet, that she agreed. With her brand-new ring still feeling strange on her ringer, she'd gone off to the Ritz-Carlton to meet Sydelle for tea. "It was wretched," she remembered as Amy nodded and smoothed the elbow-length lace gloves she'd tried on. Rose had spotted her stepmother instantly. Sydelle sat alone at a table set with a teapot and two gold-rimmed cups. She looked as formidable as always. Her hair was blow-dried into immobility, and her skin looked as shiny and taut as shrink-wrap. She wore immaculate makeup, imposing gold accessories, and the brown leather jacket that Rose had ogled in the window of Joan Shepp on her way to the hotel. "Rose," she'd cooed, "you look marvelous." The glance she gave to Rose's khaki skirt and ponytail suggested otherwise. "Now," she said, once they'd made a few minutes of small talk, "let's get to the details. Do you have a color scheme in mind?" "Um," said Rose. Which was all the opening that Sydelle Feller required. "Navy," she decreed. "Navy's the latest. Very, very chic. Very now. I'm seeing ..." And she closed her eyes, allowing Rose a moment to marvel at the shades of brown, taupe, and putty eyeshadow cleverly blended on her lids. ". . . bridesmaids in simple navy sheaths ..." "I'm not having bridesmaids. Just Amy. She'll be my maid of honor," said Rose. Sydelle raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow. "What about Maggie?" Rose stared at the pink linen tablecloth. She'd gotten a very strange message from Maggie months before. A one-word message, consisting of only Rose's name, and the word I'm. No word since then, although every few weeks Rose would call the cell phone and
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hang up after her sister had said "Hello." "I'm not sure," she said. Sydelle sighed. "Let's talk tables," she said. "I'm seeing navy tablecloths with white napkins, very nautical, v ery crisp, and we'll want delphiniums, of course, and those gorgeous gerbera daisies ... or, no. No," said Sydelle, shaking her head once, as if Rose had contradicted to her. "Pink roses. Can you see it? Masses and masses of pink roses, overflowing from silver bowls!" She smiled, looking pleased with herself. "Roses for Rose! Of course!" "Sounds beautiful!" said Rose. And it did, she guessed. "But, um, with the bridesmaids . . ." "And of course," Sydelle continued, as if Rose hadn't spoken, "you'll want My Marcia, too." Rose gulped. She didn't want My Marcia. At all. "I know she'd be honored," Sydelle said sweetly. Rose bit her lip. "Um," she began. "I really ... I think . . ." Come on! she urged herself. "Just Amy, really. That's all I want." Sydelle pursed her lips and flared her nostrils. "Maybe Marcia could do a reading," Rose said, groping desperately for a bone to throw her stepmother. "Whatever you like, dear," Sydelle said icily. "It's your wedding, of course." Which was the line Rose had repeated to Simon that night. "It's our wedding. Of course," she said, and buried her head in her hands. "I just have this horrible feeling that I'm going to wind up with My Marcia and five of her best friends in matching navy sheaths walking me down the aisle." "You don't want My Marcia?" Simon asked innocently. "But she's so classy! You know, I heard that when she was married, she bought a size six Vera Wang and had it taken in." "I've heard that rumor, too," Rose muttered. Simon took her hands. "My beloved," he said, "it's our wedding. It will be just the way we want it. As many bridesmaids as you want. Or none at all." That night, Rose and Simon wrote out the short list of what
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they wanted (great food, a kick-ass band), and what they didn't ("Celebration," a garter toss, My Marcia). "And no chicken dance!" Simon said the next morning. "We're having roses!" Rose yelled toward his departing blue-suited back. "Silver bowls overflowing with pink roses! Doesn't that sound beautiful!" Simon shouted a word that sounded alarmingly like "allergic" over his shoulder, and hurried toward the bus. Rose sighed, and went inside to call Sydelle. By the end of their conversation, she'd agreed to outfit her wedding party in navy, to dress the tables in white, to let My Marcia read a poem of her choosing, and to meet with Sydelle's preferred florist the following week. "What kind of women talk about 'my florist?" Rose asked Amy, as Amy cruised the glass case full of headpieces, finally selecting a pearl-studded pouf and plopping it on her own head. "Pretentious ones," Amy said, affixing an ankle-length veil shimmering with tiny crystals to Rose's head. "Ooh, pretty!" She found a matching veil and put it on her own head. "Come along," she said, and tugged Rose toward a mirror. Rose looked at herself in the seventh and final dress she'd selected. Yards of lace swirled around her legs. A glittering bodice, stiff with sparkling crystals, encased approximately two-thirds of her midriff and gaped open in back. Stiff embroidered sleeves choked her arms. Rose stared at herself miserably. "Oh, God," she said, "I'm a Mardi Gras float!" Amy burst out laughing. The saleslady stared at both of them. "Would shoes help?" she asked. "I think a lighter would help," Amy murmured. "I think," Rose began. God, she needed a mother. A mother would be able to take the situation in hand, to look at the dress and dismiss it with a brief but undeniable shake of her head. A mother would say, "My daughter likes things that are simple," or, "I see her in an A-line"—or a ballgown, a basque waist, one of those bewildering types of dresses. Even after weeks of study, Rose hadn't been
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able to puzzle out the differences between them, let alone figure out which one would look best on her. A mother would get her out of this itchy tornado of a dress, out of the iron-lung girdle, out of the showers and teas and cocktail parties and dinners that Rose could no more navigate than she could paddle single-handed up the Schuylkill. And surely a mother would know how to politely tell Sydelle Feller to take her two dozen suggestions and shove them up her tiny, tight ass. "It's awful," Rose finally blurted. "Well, I'm sorry," said the saleslady, whose feelings Rose had obviously hurt. "Maybe something a little less fussy?" Amy suggested. The saleslady pursed her lips and disappeared into the store's back room. Rose slumped into a chair, hearing a sighing noise as the dress deflated around her. "We should elope," she said. "Well, I have always loved you, but not in that way," said Amy. "And there's no way I'm letting you elope. You'd deprive me of my butt bow." The day after Rose had told her best friend that she was getting married—before Sydelle had issued her edict on navy— Amy had made a pilgrimage to Philadelphia's premiere thrift shop and procured a frothy salmon-colored frock with tiered layers of tulle, oversized rhinestone buckles at the shoulder, and a butt bow as wide as a city bus, plus, as an engagement gift, a six-inch-thick ivory candle studded with fake plastic pearls and the words Today I Marry My Best Friend curling around the sides in gold gilt. "You're not serious," Rose had said, and Amy had shrugged and said that she understood her role as maid of honor, that it was the bride's day to shine, and that if she bought this dress (with shoes dyed salmon to match), she'd be the shoo-in victor at Philadelphia's annual Bridesmaids' Ball, where the women competed to see who had the worst dress. "Plus, as it happens," she'd said, "I look yzmre in a butt bov." Now she wrapped her arms around Rose's shoulders. "Don't
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worry," she said. "We'll find it. We're just getting started! If it was supposed to be easy, do you think they'd publish thirty million magazines about how to find the dress?" Rose sighed and got to her feet. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the saleslady approaching, her arms overflowing with silk and satin. "Maybe this dress isn't so bad," she muttered. "No," said Amy, looking her up and down, "no, it is indeed awful." "In here, please," the saleslady said curtly, and Rose picked up her skirt and dragged her train in behind her.
FORTY'THREE
Ella Hirsh had endured almost an entire summer of her granddaughter's silence before deciding that she wouldn't take one moment more. Maggie had arrived in May, the day after that first tortured, stop-and-start conversation, during which Ella had to keep asking her to repeat herself to make sure that she understood what her long-lost granddaughter was telling her, that this was Maggie, not Rose, and that she was at Princeton, but not really there. Yes, said Maggie, Rose and her father were fine, but she couldn't call them. No, she wasn't hurt, or sick, but she needed a place to go. She didn't have a job at the moment, but she Was a hard worker, and she'd find something. Ella wouldn't have to worry about supporting her. There were a thousand things more that Ella wanted to ask her, but she stuck to the basics, the who and what and where, and the mechanics of how to get Maggie from the New Jersey supermarket parking lot down to Florida. "Can you get to Newark?" she asked, somehow extracting the name of New Jersey's major airport from her head. "Call me when you get there. I'll call the airlines, figure out who's got a direct flight, and there'll be a ticket waiting for you at the gate."
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Eight hours later, Ella and Lewis had driven to the Fort Lauderdale airport, and there, clutching a backpack and looking weary and bedraggled and scared, was Caroline. Ella had gasped and squeezed her eyes shut, and when she'd opened them, she saw that she was wrong. This girl wasn't Caroline, not really. Ella saw that as soon as she blinked . . . but the resemblance was very strong. This girl's brown eyes, the way her hair fell over her forehead, her cheeks and her hands and even, somehow, her collarbones, were all Caroline's. But the determined look on her face, the pugnacious set of her chin, the way her eyes had moved over them quickly, sizing them up, told a different story, and certainly forecast a different ending than the one her own daughter had come to. This girl, Ella saw, would not succumb to the lure of a rain-slicked road. This girl would keep her hands on the wheel. There was an early awkward moment—would they hug?— which Maggie had solved by shifting her backpack into her arms and holding it like a baby, as Ella stumbled through the introductions. Maggie hadn't said much on the way out to short-term parking. She'd refused Ella's offer of the front seat, and sat up straight in the backseat as Lewis drove and Ella tried hard not to pester her with too many questions. Still, she had to know, for her own safety, her own peace of mind, if nothing else. "If you'll tell me what kind of trouble you're in, I'm sure we can figure it out," said Ella. Maggie had sighed. "I was . . ." She paused. Ella stared at her in the rearview mirror as Maggie groped for the name of her transgression. "I was living with Rose, and it didn't work out, and I've been staying on campus for a few months ..." "Staying with friends?" Lewis guessed. "Staying in the library," said Maggie. "Living there. I was . . ." She stared out the window. "I was like a stowaway. Stowaway," she repeated, which made her sound like she'd been having a grand adventure on the high seas. "Only there was someone watching
