Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (31 page)

Luke had half hoped Ver Planck would tell him it was too late, that Atherton had found another plot of land. He imagined what
his great-aunt would say about their farmland being turned into a parking lot and a Budget Club. But there was no use fretting
about it. He needed the money. The land was part of the family portfolio and Luke’s to do with as he wished. The house was
not his to sell. A quick windfall from Budget Club would go a long way toward solving his financial problems. He could get
the roof fixed before it fell in on their heads and hire an attendant for Abigail, a nurse to help him care for her.

The annulment papers named Luke Silas Sedgwick IV as the plaintiff and Patricia Adams Sedgwick as the defendant. Luke brought
them home from Mayhew’s office in a legal-size folder and left them on Peggy’s bed for her to sign. In the ballroom, he stared
alternately at the computer screen saver and out the window. He longed for snow, to lose himself in the physicality of shoveling
the driveway. But there had been none so far this winter; the landscape was brown and dead. He got up from the computer and
went downstairs.

His great-aunt was in the mudroom, picking up rain boots and snow boots one at a time and holding them upside down. She didn’t
turn around, and he watched her work awhile, then asked, “Any luck?”

She picked up a garden clog and shook it.

Luke removed the umbrellas from their tarnished brass stand. A spider scuttled out; otherwise the canister was empty. He searched
the pockets of the ancient coats and slickers hanging along the wall and found a Swiss Army knife he thought he’d lost ages
ago, but no box with a star on it. “Do you really think you hid it out here?”

“No,” Abby admitted. “I still think it’s in the library.” They went inside.

He started at the top of the room, rolling the library ladder and taking several books at a time from the uppermost shelves
and shining a flashlight behind him. His great-aunt did the same on the bottom shelves, and for a while they worked together
companionably.

“My hands ache,” she complained after about forty minutes, and put down the books she was holding. “I guess I’m getting old.”

Luke hid his concern. It was the first time he could remember his great-aunt admitting to pain. For the rest of the afternoon,
he searched the library—deciding, after a time, that he might as well dust the books while he was at it—and spent the whole
of the next day, too, working mindlessly, removing, looking behind, dusting, and reshelving. By midday Thursday, he had dusted
the entire roomful of books and had found nothing hidden behind them but more dust. He moved on to the closed-off and long
neglected east addition, vacuuming and polishing. He searched every nook and cranny, under every cushion, in every drawer.
At last, empty-handed, dirt caked, and aching, he climbed the stairs to the third-floor bathroom. When he emerged from the
blackened bathwater, it no longer mattered to him whether Abigail’s treasure existed or not. She believed it did, and he would
keep looking for it. It was the only wish of hers he still held the power to grant.

The computer screen flickered in the dark room. Peggy watched intently, trying not to blink. Was this normal—a shifting, grainy
pattern; snow against blackness?

“I’m not seeing anything,” Josh said beside her, but just then a denser pool of darkness appeared.

“That’s your uterus.” Bex’s obstetrician waved her free hand in front of the circular void on the ultrasound screen. “And…wait…”

From her position on the table, a pink medical drape covering her from the waist down, Bex craned her neck. Josh reached for
his wife’s foot and squeezed it.

“There’s Embryo A!” The doctor waved her hand again. “And…good…we have a heartbeat…nice and strong. See that flicker, Josh?”

“Maybe,” said Josh.

“I do! Nice and strong!” Bex repeated.

Peggy could make out a blurry, lambent mass, nothing more, but she was happy to take the doctor’s word for it.

“Wait…” The doctor’s face turned serious, and Peggy’s chest ached as she braced for bad news.

“Here’s Embryo B. It looks like you’re having twins!”

On the subway home, Peggy and Josh sat on either side of Bex. No one spoke for many stops; Peggy guessed her friends were
in shock. It was one thing to consider the possibility of more than one baby. It was another to prepare for the reality.

The train came into Columbus Circle, and passengers crowded on. A woman and a boy squeezed onto the bench next to Peggy. The
boy leaned his head against his mother’s shoulder. “Mommy. Mommy. Do you know who the goddess of home and family is?” His
smile was a mismatch of adult and baby teeth. “Hestia.”

His mother snuggled him closer. “Is she mortal or immortal?”

“We need to buy an apartment.” Josh spoke up first. “We can’t raise twins living down the hall from each other. We have to
work as a team twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and neither of our places is big enough for four.…” He stopped
talking; Bex was crying. “Come on, Bexie, it won’t be that bad. I promise to be neater and—”

“Can you name the names of all nine Muses?” the boy asked his mother.

“Can you?” she returned.

“No, but I know what they do, at least most of them. There’s one of music, and one of drama, and there’s one of history. They’re
the goddesses of hobbies.”

Peggy patted Bex’s hand. “You’ll be able to afford it. There has to be one apartment in New York under a bazillion dollars.”
If she’d been able to stick it out with Luke, she realized, she could have lent Bex and Josh a down payment.

“Except for history. History isn’t exactly a hobby,” the boy continued.

“That’s not it…” Bex produced a ragged tissue from her coat pocket. “Poor little Embryo C! What happened to little Yehuda?”

A lump rose in Peggy’s throat. “You can’t think that way. You have two babies! It’s a miracle!”

“I know!” Bex sobbed, and then laughed, and Peggy and Josh laughed, too, wiping their faces and clearing their throats, and
then the train was at their stop, Seventy-ninth Street.

“You should hold the handrail,” Josh told his wife as they walked toward the subway station steps. “You’re carrying precious
cargo.”

“I’m not ninety years old, sweetie.” Bex took the hand-rail, but it was too late for Peggy; her friend’s response had reminded
her of Miss Abigail, and the thought of Miss Abigail had led her to Luke, and the thought of Luke was making her want to cry
some more, a luxury she would not allow herself, because the idea of wanting to cry over a human being as unimportant to her
as Luke Sedgwick was driving her mad. Especially when she loved Brock.

At her appointment with Jon-Keith the next day, she studied herself in the salon mirror as the colorist picked at her eternally
lifeless hair.

“We need to get you on a schedule right away,” he pronounced. “You’ll want your last set of highlights no more than two days
before the wedding, so there are absolutely no roots. Do you know what happens if you have even an eighth of an inch of roots?
Your part shows up in all your photographs as a black line down the center of your head. It’s a nightmare. Are you doing color
photos or black and white? It’s worse with black and white.”

“I don’t know.”

Jon-Keith looked at her in disbelief. “Okay, anyway, what I do with my brides is count back from the final appointment and
book all your previous appointments at six-week intervals. When’s the wedding date?”

“I’m not sure.” Peggy scrutinized her forehead. Maybe it was time to get those wrinkles fixed. Brides weren’t supposed to
have worry lines. “We only just decided on June.”

Jon-Keith narrowed one eye, which made him appear more piratelike than usual. “You have
got
to choose a date. Already, the good venues are probably booked up. Do you know how long it takes to get a dress made? Months.
You should have chosen your gown, like, yesterday, and you can’t do that until you decide where you’re having the wedding,
because the setting dictates the tone of the whole day, and Lord help you if you end up at a beach ceremony in a black-tie
dress. You’re getting
me
all stressed out, and I’m not the bride!” He slid a piece of aluminum foil under a few strands of hair and painted on the
highlights with a brush. Peggy felt like a turkey being basted.

The next day after work, Peggy stopped at a newsstand to pick up all the bridal magazines she could find, came home, and settled
herself at the coffee table. “What do you think of this dress?” She tore out a page and held it up.

Bex was on the couch, engrossed in
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
. “It says here I should eat six hundred extra calories a day, three hundred per baby. I eat six hundred extra calories a
day just at breakfast!”

“Oh, no!” Peggy let her magazine page slip to the floor. “In June, you’ll be a month away from your due date!”

“Actually I may be giving birth. The doctor revised my date; she says most multiples are born early.”

Peggy felt the familiar anxious tingle in her lungs. How could she marry without Bex? “We could push the wedding back.” She
felt better just saying it aloud. In the excitement of New Year’s Eve, she’d forgotten another detail: how to explain to her
parents that in a matter of a few months she not only would no longer be Mrs. Sedgwick, she would become Mrs. Clovis. How
her parents would react was the big question. They’d always liked Brock but seemed to have grown attached to Luke and Miss
Abigail over their Christmas visit. And they’d be stunned at the quick annulment.

“We could have the wedding in the fall instead,” she suggested to Bex.

“During football season? That’ll never work.”

The perfect model-bride on the magazine nearest Peggy beamed up as if to ask,
What’s wrong with you?
Peggy flipped over the magazine. “We could wait until next January, then.”

Bex turned pages in her book. “Don’t be silly. Get married in June. You’ve been waiting your whole life for this wedding.
Why put it off?”

As the news of Peggy’s engagement spread, there were excited calls and frenzied e-mails from the Las Vegas bachelorettes.
Andrea, now married, chirped, “It was the guy in the casino, wasn’t it? You told Brock and worked him into a jealous frenzy,
didn’t you? Nice job!”

Brock, out of town covering football playoffs, called constantly from the road. “Hey, Pegs,” he’d say. “Whatcha up to?”

“I’m at the store,” she’d tell him.
Just like I was two hours ago.

They settled on a date—the first Saturday in June. For a few hours, Peggy was glad to have at least made one decision. Then
came a new flurry of calls from Sharon Clovis, who peppered her with questions about menus and guest lists. By Friday afternoon,
Peggy had switched off her phone and had stopped dreading her trip to New Nineveh. Signing annulment papers and crushing Miss
Abigail with news of her impending split from Luke seemed preferable to another moment of wedding talk.

But when she drove up, the Sedgwick House was empty.

“Luke? Miss Abigail?” Peggy stood in the frigid foyer, her call reverberating back at her. Why hadn’t they left the light
on? Where would they be at ten o’clock at night? Luke wasn’t in his study, and Miss Abigail’s bedroom door was wide open—only
she wasn’t in it, or in the kitchen, or in the library—

She was standing next to the black phone in the den when its bell broke the silence. Too worried to be startled, she grabbed
it up before the first ring had finished.

“You’re there.” It was Luke. “We’re at the hospital.”

It was like a recurring bad dream in which she kept returning to Torrington General, hoping Miss Abigail would be all right.
The emergency room waiting area was exactly as it had been last time—the same sea-foam green walls, a similar cast of unhappy
patients and their companions, the same dog-eared issues of
AARP
and
Field & Stream
. A nurse motioned Peggy past the triage area toward a drawn curtain. Behind it, Miss Abigail was in bed, asleep, a bloodied
dressing on her forehead and a cast on one arm.

“You should have heard her when they went to stitch her up.” Luke looked drained. “‘No lidocaine,’ she said. The doctors took
it as a sign of dementia, but I told them, no, that’s just my great-aunt.”

They’d been cleaning out Miss Abigail’s bedroom, Luke explained, searching for something, and she’d tripped or lost her balance.
She had a fractured wrist and a gash from scraping her forehead against a drawer pull on her dresser. She didn’t seem to have
a concussion, but the doctors were keeping her again for observation. “The concern is that she may have had another one of
those practice strokes.”

Peggy patted Miss Abigail’s good arm and smoothed her hair.
She doesn’t belong in here. She should be home, in her own bed.
For the first time in months, she understood that this indomitable, seemingly indestructible old woman couldn’t have more
than a few years left. Soon Luke really would be the only living Sedgwick.

Luke motioned Peggy away from his sleeping great-aunt. “I’d like you to do me a favor,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t ask if it
weren’t for…” He nodded toward the bed to finish the sentence.

Peggy was shocked at how weary he appeared. She longed to take his hand, to let him rest his head on her shoulder. “Whatever
you need.”

“I don’t think Abigail can handle the idea of an early annulment.”

Peggy’s mood soared. It was exactly what she had been thinking. How could they break up now, with Miss Abigail in this weakened
state?

She’d postpone the wedding. Brock would be upset, but she’d think up a reasonable excuse. It was her duty. She’d stay married
to Luke until September, fulfill the promise she’d made, do the right thing by Miss Abigail. By then, too, she’d be more used
to the idea of marrying Brock. She’d be excited about her dress and her wedding and the napkin colors and all the things brides
were supposed to be excited about. She would be ready.

“That would be fine,” she told Luke. “We’ll stick to the original plan. September isn’t that far off anyway. I’ll wait and
get married after that.” If Brock couldn’t spare a weekend, they’d go to City Hall on a weekday, between his assignments.