Slightly Married (22 page)

“You did?” Buckley sounds dismayed. “Then why didn’t you ever say anything about it?”

Caught off guard, I offer a lame “I guess I didn’t think it was my place.”

“So you were going to let me marry the wrong woman.” Okay, now he just sounds pissed.

“You didn’t need my permission, Buckley. I mean, that was your decision.”

“But…Tracey, we’re friends. I count on you. I’m the one who coached you through your breakup with Will, remember? I’m the one who told you to be strong when he came crawling back. Remember?”

“Yes…”

“I wouldn’t have let you marry Will.”

“He didn’t want to marry me, Buckley. It was never an issue.”

“But if it had been an issue, I wouldn’t have let it happen.”

“No? What would you have done?” I have a sudden vision of Buckley galloping up to Most Precious Mother, shouting, “Halt!” and spiriting me away on horseback. The church has been transported to a bucolic countryside. I’m wearing my white gown and my hair is flowing, and Buckley’s wearing all white, too. Very picturesque.

“I would have sat you down and talked some sense into you.”

Oh. Well, as fantasies go, that’s not nearly as dramatic as the white-knight rescue scene in my head, but reality seldom is.

“If I wanted to marry Will,” I tell him, “nothing you said would have changed my mind. I would’ve had to figure out on my own that it was wrong, just like you did.”

He’s silent for a moment.

Then he says, “Tracey, if you had ever said I shouldn’t marry Sonja, I would have listened.”

“Oh, come on—you can’t pin this on me!”

“I’m not. I’m just saying…you could have told me what you thought long before it came to this.”

“And if I had, and you had married her anyway, you would have resented me for it. Same thing with Kate. I mean, I could have told her I didn’t think Billy was right for her, and where would we be now? Probably not even friends.”

I think of how I resented her back when Will was my boyfriend and she was convinced he was gay. We’re lucky our friendship withstood the tension.

“So if I didn’t think you should marry Jack,” Buckley says, “you honestly wouldn’t want to know?”

That gives me pause.

Would
I want to know?

Is that really how Buckley feels?

“You don’t think I should marry Jack?” Yeah, I guess I do want to know.

He hesitates. “I didn’t say that. I asked if you’d want me to tell you if I thought he was wrong for you.”

“No,” I say simply, “I wouldn’t.”

I’m in love with Jack. I’m going to marry Jack. He’s right for me, and nothing anyone says would change my mind about that.

Buckley lets out a heavy sigh. “I guess we’re just really different, then.”

“I guess we really are.”

“I should go,” Buckley says then, and I don’t argue.

We hang up.

I aim the TiVo remote and press Play again.

“—the person you’re involved with,” Billy Crystal resumes saying, “accuses you of being secretly attracted to the person you’re just friends with, which you probably are—”

I scowl and aim the remote again, zapping Harry and Sally and their ridiculous theories into oblivion.

10

F
lash forward to a gorgeous Saturday morning in June, the better part of which I have now spent drinking bad coffee at JFK airport in Queens.

You’re assuming I’m waiting for a delayed flight to Buffalo again, aren’t you?

Wrong!

I’m waiting for a delayed flight
from
Buffalo.

On the flight are seven Spadolinis: my parents, my grandmother, my sister, Mary Beth, my brother Joey, my sister-in-law Sara, and my nephew Joey Junior, newly potty trained.

Or maybe he isn’t, because he reeks. I can smell him coming from a few feet away when my family finally appears in the baggage-claim area.

Yes, my family. I know, I can hardly believe it either but here they are in New York City for the first time.

They came, of course, for the engagement party Wilma is throwing for us tonight in Bedford.

I couldn’t believe it when they decided to fly in for it. My parents haven’t been on a plane since my great-aunt Phyllis’s funeral in Fort Meyers years ago, and my grandmother never has, even though Great-Aunt Phyllis was her favorite sister.

But she finally decided it was time she got over her fear of flying.

When I asked her why, I thought she might say, “Because you’re my granddaughter and I want to be there to celebrate your engagement.”

Nah. Her explanation: “I’m at the end of the road anyway. If I go down in flames now, I’ll get a head start.”

A head start on eternal salvation. Now there’s something to strive for.

But here she is, in one piece. Here they all are. Here I am, enveloped in hometown hugs right in New York, with a sudden, unexpected lump in my throat.

“Oh, no, what’s happened to you? You’re too skinny!” my mother shouts at me in dismay, and everyone within earshot turns around expecting to see Nicole Richie. “Aren’t you eating?”

“Yes, Ma, I’m eating.”

“Dolce mia!”
cries Grandma as she pushes past Connie the Cobra’s fervent maternal embrace to hug me herself.

“Hi, Grandma! I’m so glad you could come. And you look beautiful,” I add, because as usual, she’s waiting to hear it, and because as usual, it’s true. She’s wearing full makeup, heels and what she likes to call “a slacks suit.” She’s also wearing lots of perfume, which I bet went over about as well with her fellow passengers as little Joey’s loaded diaper.

Sara gives me a quick hug, then rushes away to find a changing table, carrying my stinky nephew and a diaper bag.

“I still can’t believe we made it!” my mother announces loudly and dramatically enough for everyone else in the terminal to turn around and wonder if their plane lost a wing over Syracuse.

“I told you we would, Ma,” my sister says, but she looks a little shaken. She’s never flown before either, and this is her first time away from Vince Junior and Nino, who are spending the night with their father. They’ve never done that before even though Vinnie’s supposed to have them every other weekend per the divorce agreement. He always claims he doesn’t have room for them to stay over. That’s fine with my sister, who lives for the boys and doesn’t want to spend every other Saturday night in an empty house anyway.

“Ma was convinced we were going down over Elmira,” my brother informs me with an eye-roll.

“I can’t help it. I’m a nervous flier,” my mother says, like she does it all the time.

“So was it a rough flight, then?” I ask.

“No, it wasn’t bad at all, once we got off the ground,” Joey tells me. “They just held us on the runway forever because there was some problem with air traffic on this end. The seat-belt signs were on the whole time, so we couldn’t take poor Joey to the bathroom.”

“The plane stunk to high heaven by the time we took off, thanks to that kid,” my grandmother says, then cracks up maniacally, because puns slay her. “Get it?” She elbows everyone in proximity—me, my father, my brother—painfully in the ribs. “Plane! High heaven! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!”

Joey asks me under his breath, “There’re going to be drinks at this party, right?”

“Plenty.”

Drinks, food, music, waiters passing hors d’oeuvres on silver platters. Wilma is going all out: she’s having this soiree at Toute l’Année, “a lovely restaurant with sweeping views of the countryside.”

That’s how she described it to me, like she was reading from a brochure.

“And Toute l’Année means all year round, Tracey,” Wilma had added helpfully, “so I’m sure the view is lovely all year round.”

“And sweeping,” I couldn’t resist saying, and she smiled.

She’s been such a sweetheart about the party, the wedding, everything. And she said she’s going to be giving us money toward the wedding. I told her the engagement party could be her gift to us, but she told me not to be silly.

“Jack is my only son,” she pointed out. “This is the only time I get to be mother of the groom. I want to be a part of things.”

It made me feel guilty for thinking she was trying to commandeer our wedding way back in February at Gallagher’s.

Even my own mother hasn’t done that, for the most part. I’m sure it’s because the reception is off her home turf. She wouldn’t dare tangle with Charlie the banquet manager of Shorewood, who has a formidable reputation around town.

“Where’s Jack?” she asks as we walk arm in arm toward the baggage-claim area.

“He went up to Bedford last night so he can help his mother set up.”

“His father doesn’t help?” my father asks disapprovingly.

“Frank, they’re dee-vorced.” That’s my mother, masking her own disapproval with a big happy mother-of-the-bride smile.

I can tell she’s decided to embrace the Candell family, deevorce and all, this weekend. She promised me she would. Good for her. Good for me. Good for everyone involved.

It takes almost as long to get their luggage as it did for the actual flight from Buffalo. When it finally comes rolling out, I swear every other bag on the conveyer is marked with a bright red, white and green striped ribbon. Yes, like the Italian flag. These, apparently, are the colors for Team Spadolini, cleverly selected by my mother so that their bags would be readily identifiable.

Never mind that no other living soul would possibly mistake most of the Spadolini luggage for their own. My parents have matching suitcases they got years ago at a garage sale—the kind with the hard sides. I’m sure the last owners were a flapper and a bootlegger, and God knows they didn’t fill them with rocks as my parents must have, because it takes three of us to hoist them off the belt. They’re covered in something my mother insists is “Gen-u-ine walrus leather,” though I have never seen a walrus in quite that shade of green. Or any shade of green, come to think of it.

Oh, and did you know that walrus skin, according to the Conster, is reportedly the heaviest, thickest leather in the world? Which is why these days it’s probably used to cover, say, armored trucks, black boxes and nuclear-bomb shelters. As opposed to a matched set of luggage.

My sister, on the other hand, is traveling ultra-lightly. She’s packed her stuff in the boys’ bright blue-and-red Thomas the Tank Engine duffel, which reads Choo Choo! in a big white dialogue bubble emblazoned on the side. Wouldn’t you know, Vinnie the cheating louse got all the grown-up luggage in the divorce because, as Mary Beth put it at the time, “Where do I ever go?”

In addition to blessedly ordinary-looking rolling bags—four, mind you, and they’re large—Joe and Sara have checked a car seat and a shiny red tricycle with a rubber horn and handlebar streamers.

Yeah. You read that right.

They said Joey Junior screamed bloody murder when they tried to leave it behind, so they gave in and brought it along. Yes, that’ll show him who’s in charge: the tyrannical toddler himself. Brilliant move.

And then there’s Grandma.

Grandma seems to think she’s spending the summer abroad, because it looks like she’s brought a steamer trunk.

Oh. My. God.

I gape at the towering heap of…stuff. “How are we going to get all of this to the hotel?”

“Is there a nice big limousine?” my grandmother asks, looking around as if expecting to see one parked right here in the baggage-claim area. “They always take a big limousine on my stories.”

I’m trying to be patient here, really I am, but I hear myself barking, “Who? Who are ‘they’?”

“Well, Desiree and Destiny—they’re twin sisters—”

“They’re characters on one of her soaps,” my mother cuts in.

“Yes, and Desiree’s husband, Vlad, is—”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Grandma,” I say, “but we’ve got to get moving. There’s a bus that goes right to your hotel—” they’re staying at the Grand Hyatt, which I chose because it’s right near both the airport bus and Grand Central Station, where we’ll be catching the train up to Bedford later “—but we can’t get on a bus with all this luggage. We’re going to have to take a cab.”

“I’ve always want to take a real New York City taxi,” Sara says excitedly, then screams, “Joey, noooo!” as he runs down an elderly couple on his tricycle.

“Do they make a taxi big enough for all of us and all the luggage?” my sister asks dubiously.

“That would be a bus,” I say crisply. “Listen, we’re going to have to split up into groups. Let’s go.”

I attempt to hustle them through the crowd out to the taxi stand: Grandma in her heels, my mother clinging to me in sheer intimidation, little Joey veering left and right on his trike, everyone else pushing rented carts piled high with luggage—at a mere three dollars per cart, “highway robbery” according to my father.

As we stand on the world’s longest line, I give them a crash course in overall taxi etiquette, tipping and the hotel’s location.

When we reach the top of the line, I dispatch Joey, Sara and little Joey in the first cab, with my nephew shrieking at the driver, who insists on stowing the trike in the trunk with the rest of their stuff. Unfazed by the tantrum, the driver shrieks right back at him in Pakistani, then gives him an affectionate belly tickle and Joey laughs hysterically in response.

As they drive off, it occurs to me that if my overly indulgent brother and sister-in-law sent him to live with Abdul-Hakim for a week at Camp Tough Love, Joey’s terrible twos would be tamed in a hurry.

“Next!” the taxi dispatcher bellows, and I shove my parents toward the open doors of the waiting cab, shouting after them, “Don’t forget to tip twenty percent!”

“Twenty!” my father echoes. “I thought you said fifteen to twenty. Now it’s twenty?”

Glancing at the sweating elderly driver as he struggles to lug those prehistoric walrus bags into the trunk, I resolutely tell my father, “Twenty. Maybe twenty-five.”

Away they go, with my father grumbling and my mother, God love her, swatting his arm and saying something about “when in Rome.”

And then there were three.

It takes me, Mary Beth, the driver, the dispatcher and a Good Samaritan traveling businessman to wrestle Grandma’s chest into the trunk. And for once, when I say “Grandma’s chest,” I’m not talking about the famous bullet boobs, which are resting sedately in the backseat along with Grandma.