Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (24 page)

I made my way through the crowd. “Annie, come on down.”

She looked down. “Darcy?”

She let go of her partner and started to lose her balance. I grabbed at her, pulling her toward me so that she didn’t fall into the trash can. I caught her under her armpits, steadied her. She was very light.

“Darcy?” She was having trouble focusing.

And then she threw up on me. The other students lurched back, but I held on to her, and she sagged against me, retching, the contents of her stomach cascading down the left side of my body, spilling over on my bare arm—bits of hot dog, shreds of lettuce, pickle relish, sour and sticky.

I lowered her to the ground. She curled up into a ball and moaned. The students kept a safe distance. I knelt beside her. Her breathing was regular, she was pale, but not bluish, and her skin was not clammy. I pinched her and she instantly jerked; her reflexes were still good. She didn’t have alcohol poisoning.

“Are you her mom?” one of the students asked almost timidly.

“No, but I know her family.”

“Which dorm is she in? We’ll help you get her there.”

I looked at them. The vomit was drying on my arm. “She doesn’t have a dorm. She’s not a student here. She’s a high-school junior, visiting your college.”

That sobered them up quickly. “She told us that she was a transfer. That she had come at the beginning of the semester.”

“Oh, come on. You think that she’s been here since then, and this is the first time you noticed her?”

They glanced at one another, admitting the truth of that.

None of them knew which girls she was staying with, and Zack didn’t either. A couple of the students helped me get her to a dorm room, and she and I had a lovely afternoon. She threw up another couple of times, and then she just wanted to sleep. Pretty soon the girls she was staying with were located, and they crept in, apologetic and frightened. They went to pack up her things, and once she stopped vomiting, I got her cleaned up for the car ride. She rode home with me, sleeping most of the way. Zack followed us in his car.

When we were back at the house, I told her that she needed to call her parents.

“I will,” she said. “But not yet. They’re taking Finney to an early movie. I’ll call them when they get home.”

The plan was for Zack to take her to the train station Sunday morning. She had originally taken the train to Baltimore, but she said that she had a credit card to pay for the extra fare involved in leaving from Washington. I reminded the two of them to set alarms—I had to be at the hospital before eight on Sunday morning—and then left them to sort out the arrangements.

Zack was in his basement bedroom playing video games when I got home from work Sunday evening. “You got Annie to the train?” I asked.

He pushed back from his desk. “Actually I drove her up to Baltimore. If she had changed her ticket, her parents would have found out about what happened. So, Mom, please don’t tell them. I promised her that you wouldn’t tell them.”

“She told me that she was going to call them when they got home from the movie.”

“And she did call them. She just didn’t tell them where she was.”

“Oh, Zack, come on, I have to tell them.”

“No, no, you don’t. Yes, she had too much to drink, but she’s fine now. Come on, Mom, please, don’t make me sorry that I called you. I promised her.”

I supposed that it was no accident that Cami and Jeremy had felt that they needed to go to a California college. They needed to get away from their families. They were each so tied up with being the “good child” that they couldn’t let go of that role without moving across the country.

But Zack was going to be only an hour away. He and I were going to continue to be available to each other. I wanted him to be able to call me. I wanted him to be able to make that transition from childhood to adulthood without having to cross the continent. He needed to believe that I trusted him, that I would let him make his own choices as surely as if he were in California.

But still . . . not tell a girl’s mother?

“She doesn’t want to worry them,” Zack pleaded. “She says her mom is totally stressed out about this wedding, and she hates to cause her more trouble.”

I could sympathize with that. I didn’t want to cause Rose any more anguish either.

“Okay, I won’t tell them,” I promised.

I have trouble admitting that I’m no longer twenty-five. I was always stronger, faster, more agile than all the other girls on the playground and a fair number of the boys. I can still pound the stairs down to the Emergency Room when they can’t get an IV into a failing baby. I can lift patients and can wedge myself into tight spaces to look at the back of a machine. I’d mind losing those abilities as much as other women must mind the crow’s feet and sagging boobs.

I’m as effective at work as ever, but the cost is higher. When I started this schedule of three twelve-hour shifts, I could come home, make dinner, do the laundry, and help the boys with their homework. Now I barely check my e-mail.

And I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to a patient because I couldn’t get down the hall fast enough.

I had the skills to do a variety of other things—I could help run drug trials for pharmaceutical companies; I could review cases for HMOs or insurance companies; I could even be director of nursing at a midsize hospital. But those were desk jobs; I would hate them, and I would never be as good at them as I was at this.

The one thing that interested me was nursing education. I watched the new nurses. Some were well trained and confident. Others were ill-prepared and didn’t know it. Nothing is worse in a hospital setting than people who think they know more than they do. Of course, to get a faculty appointment to teach nursing, I would need to have a Ph.D. in nursing. Thanks to Ritalin, I could flog myself through the first part of such a program. In fact, I probably already had a lot of the course credits. And the research part of a dissertation would interest me, but the actual writing of a book-length manuscript? That was daunting. If I couldn’t stay awake during a Shakespeare play, how was I supposed to write a dissertation?

Mike had already been instructed twice by Claudia to ask whether I had found a dress, and if not, could she help? Each time I had told him not to worry. Even though I hadn’t then found the dress, I definitely did not want Claudia’s help.

I had gone out twice on my own and had not even come close to locating a low-contrast print with soft colors, Impressionistic rather than distinct outlines, and an even balance between figure and background. But I was not as pathetic as Claudia probably thought I was. I did grow up in East Grand Rapids. I have some sense and some experience. I called the personal shopping service at Neiman Marcus and told the representative what I needed.

“Oh, my,” she said after I had read off the list of requirements. “I thought I had seen it all. Mothers of the groom have to jump through a lot of hoops, but this . . . I’ve never heard of anyone getting such very detailed instructions.”

“It’s not the bride’s family who’s insisting on this.” I wanted to defend Rose. “It’s my ex-husband’s girlfriend.”

“Ah, yes,” she said knowingly. “These not-quite family members are sometimes the worst.”

She called me back several times to say that she was working on it, that she hadn’t forgotten me. Finally she located three dresses, but as she had told me over the phone, only one of them was really right.

I went to the store and tried it on. The background was a pale amethyst; the design was layers of some blurry leaflike things in shades of what she called “champagne and gold” and I was going to call beige. There was something drapey going on at the neckline, but otherwise it seemed a perfectly ordinary dress.

Except for the price. This dress was unimaginably expensive. In a normal year I don’t spend half that much on my whole wardrobe. I hated the thought of spending so much money.

“I understand,” the saleslady said. “You should definitely go on looking, but remember how hard it was for me to find this.” She assured me that as long as the tags were still on the dress, I could return it at any time. “Take this as a backup in case you can’t find anything else.”

I handed her my credit card.

The rehearsal dinner was becoming more elaborate by the
minute. Although Guy and Rose had told us countless times that we could limit the rehearsal-dinner guest list to the wedding party and family members, many of the other wedding guests were coming to the Hamptons for the weekend, and Claudia was eager to invite as many of them as the restaurant would hold. “She says that we need to remember,” Mike told me, “how high a profile Guy has. People won’t want to feel slighted.”

I didn’t know how high or low a profile Guy had, but I did know that the more people at the dinner, the more important Claudia could make herself sound on her blog. I now only occasionally went to her Web site because the blog was entirely about the construction of those dresses. For the first time in her career, she had placed the article with a fashion magazine, not a sewing one, and that was a big deal to her.

Although she didn’t mention names or even identify me as the groom’s mother, I knew which dress was mine. I learned, along with the rest of the population of cyberspace, that she was sewing bust pads into my dress to compensate for my “youthfully boyish” figure. I am not a modest person, and anyone looking at me closely would figure out that a few bust pads wouldn’t hurt, but did we have to talk about it at such length?

Jeremy’s graduation was the weekend of Zack’s senior prom, so Zack wasn’t going to California with me. I was also happy to learn that Claudia couldn’t go either. She had a professional commitment in Cleveland that had been scheduled more than a year earlier.

Finney was also not going to the graduation. It was unusual
for the Zander-Browns to travel without him, but his school was having a little carnival on that Saturday. Rose and Guy knew that if they told him that he wouldn’t mind missing the carnival, he would believe them. He was easily manipulated. But it didn’t seem fair; he would have a grand time at the carnival. So Rose had arranged for him to stay with a family that she knew through the corn-allergy network. The Zander-Browns had kept their children before; this was the first time Finney was going to stay with them. A family from the school would chaperone him at the carnival. He was excited about the plan even without someone telling him to be.

Mike called me the night before I was leaving for California. “It’s about these invitations to the rehearsal dinner.” He sounded hesitant.

“What about them?” I glanced at the buff-colored garment bag that Neiman Marcus had used for my overpriced mother-of-the-groom dress. The sight of it did not make me feel very charitable toward Claudia.

Mike said that Claudia had used three different printers, one for the maps, one for the vellum pocket, and a third for the little luggage tag . . . which did not seem like the actions of a person who was managing her perfectionism particularly well. As soon as the maps and the pockets were completed, she’d quickly turned them over to the person she’d contracted to sew the pockets onto the maps and stuff the tags into the pockets. When the final invitations had been delivered to her this morning, she realized that my name was still misspelled.

“She is devastated,” Mike said. “She’s been on the phone all day, trying to get it fixed. She needs to have both the map and the vellum pocket reprinted, and neither printer is being very accommodating about redoing them in a timely way.”

“I thought printing could be done overnight these days.”

“Apparently these were pretty complex jobs. The map guy already had to redo the maps once at his own expense.”

“So she’s used up all her chits.”

“I don’t know about that,” Mike said. “I’ve told her that she needs to go with a simpler invitation, but she’s very passionate about these.”

What on earth was this wedding doing to people? I wondered if I was getting as crazy as the rest of them and simply hadn’t noticed.

“She was going to call you,” Mike continued, “and ask you if you wouldn’t mind having the invitations sent out like this, but that didn’t seem fair. She wouldn’t mean to be difficult, but she cares so much about this that I don’t think she would let up until you said that it was okay. So the compromise was that I would ask you.”