Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701) (11 page)

As she walked briskly down the hall, she caught a glimpse of her granddaughter Justine skimming down the stairs. In the past her twin granddaughters had liked fooling people about their respective identities and had insisted on dressing identically. But this had changed, and now Portia sported a streak of fuchsia in her long hair, whereas Justine had gone for the piercings, something that made Betsy shudder. Of course that was the whole point, wasn’t it? To make the adults cringe? Betsy remembered the overalls she had worn the better part of her freshman year at college; she knew that Lenore had wanted nothing more than to burn them.

But where was Justine going in such a hurry? Where did she have to be, other than outside under a gorgeous rented sailcloth tent at seven o’clock this evening? Even with all the myriad people and demands making claims on Betsy’s attention, something about the girl’s demeanor—and not just right now—made her want to know more. Was she having trouble in school? Or with a boy? Betsy knew that the separation had been hard on the girls; they loved their father and had blamed Gretchen when he moved out. Wasn’t that often the way? Her own kids had been furious when she’d made Lincoln go, even though he had been an out-and-out drunk for years.

Betsy glanced at the Mickey Mouse watch on her wrist—another gift from Don—and wondered when Ennis would arrive. Lincoln had already gotten here; Caleb had gone to the airport to pick him up. But she wouldn’t see him until the wedding; though she had invited him with great sincerity to stay at the house, he had declined, choosing instead some fleabag outside of town. That was Lincoln all right: so filled with his cockeyed principles. It was defensible to escape into drink, essentially abandoning wife, kids, and all semblance of a responsible life. Yet it was compromising to stay under her roof and bury the hatchet for the sake of their children. The door slammed, and the dog commenced upon a frenzy of yapping. “Gretchen?” called out Betsy.

“I’m downstairs,” Gretchen called back. “Ennis is here. I just let him in.”

Betsy hurried in the direction of her daughter’s voice. She knew it would be difficult for Gretchen to see Ennis, and she wanted to help smooth over the rough edges. But the sound of laughter—Pippa’s distinct, wheezing
chee, chee, chee,
the more melodious peals emitted by Angelica—stopped her. It was coming from Angelica’s room; Angelica and Pippa were behind the closed door, giggling like a pair of teenagers on a sleepover. Why did this make Betsy feel so utterly bereft, as if she too were a teenager, an unpopular one, condemned to remain outside the charmed circle of their intimacy?

“Mom?” Gretchen called up. “Are you coming?”

Betsy forced herself to move away from Angelica’s door. She knew she was being ridiculous. Angelica was her daughter, for heaven’s sake. Pippa was nothing, no one. By tomorrow, once the wedding was over, she would disappear from their lives, vanishing as if she had never been.

This cheering thought propelled Betsy down the stairs into the foyer, where Gretchen, Ennis, and Justine had gathered. Ennis was looking well—hair neatly cut and a pressed, pale blue shirt—if a bit awkward. Gretchen was studying with rapt interest the black-and-white marble tiles that composed the entryway floor.

“Hello, Ennis,” Betsy said. She leaned in to give him a quick peck on the cheek.

“Isn’t it
great
that Dad’s here?” Justine said. Her voice had a manic edge. “I mean, I didn’t know he would be coming, but I’m so glad he did.” She grabbed his hand.

“Does anyone want anything to eat?” Betsy said brightly. Once a Jewish mother, always a Jewish mother. “Esperanza set out croissants and fruit in the breakfast room.”

“Coffee would be great,” Ennis said, putting his battered olive drab knapsack on the floor.

“You can leave that there,” Betsy said. “Someone will bring it downstairs.”

“Where’s Portia?” asked Ennis.

“Sleeping,” Justine snorted. “But I’m going to wake her up.”

“It’s okay, baby,” Ennis said. “Let her sleep. I’ll see her later.” He walked into the dining room with Justine, who was still clutching his hand.

Betsy, left alone with Gretchen, watched them go. “I know this is hard for you,” she began.

“It’s all right,” Gretchen said. “He’s their father. And it would be worse if he’d deserted them.”

“That’s true,” Betsy said. She had an urge to smooth the tangle of Gretchen’s curls, but she refrained. Her daughter was a grown woman with daughters of her own. Too old to have her hair smoothed by her mother.

“They still blame me,” Gretchen said in a low voice. “They don’t know everything. I haven’t told them yet.”

By
everything
Gretchen meant this: Ennis, who taught poetry at Brooklyn College, had slept—only once, he swore—with one of his students in the MFA program. But the single indiscretion had had major consequences. The girl—she was in her twenties but still, truly, a girl—had gotten pregnant. And she had refused to have an abortion. When Ennis had told her—kindly, gently, he swore—that he would not marry her, she had become so hysterical that she had shown up at their house after downing a bottle of Ambien, and because Ennis had not been home, Gretchen was the one who had called 911 and accompanied her to the emergency room.

“You were protecting them,” Betsy said. “That’s what mothers do. Good mothers, anyway.”

“I tried,” Gretchen said. She ran a hand through the tangle; it didn’t seem to help. “Not that they’re grateful at all.”

“No, of course not,” Betsy said. “What makes you think children are ever grateful?”

“What about us, Mom?” Gretchen said. “Were we grateful? Did you have to protect us from Dad?”

“Whatever your father did, you all knew about it. There was no hiding anything.” This was true: how many times had Teddy or Caleb or one of the girls come upon Lincoln, dead drunk on the bathroom floor or passed out by the front door, after he’d stumbled in at four in the morning? How many times had they heard the excuses, the promises, the pleading?

“What did Dad do that we all knew about?” Teddy asked; he must have come through the kitchen, where either Esperanza or Carmelita would have let him in. Teddy, Betsy observed, seemed to be in the pink: sleek and well attended to. It must be that girl he had brought with him.

“There’s no time to go into all that now,” Betsy said, consulting Mickey Mouse again. Good God, it was already after eleven. Just then Betsy looked up and saw Angelica and Pippa descending the stairs. They had linked arms, and though it hardly seemed possible, they were
still
giggling. And as absurd, childish, and embarrassing as it was, the sight of them together caused a scrim of tears to cloud Betsy’s eyes. She would not let them fall; she rarely did. But she knew that they were there, and she turned her head so no one else would see.

G
retchen jackknifed off the side of the swimming pool and straight into the blue. She was a good diver and a good swimmer too, swimming being one of the few—okay,
only
—sports she could not just tolerate but actively enjoy. Down, down she went, slick as a seal, until she had traversed the length of the pool—interior walls painted a haunting shade of indigo—and burst up to the surface at the other end. God, that felt good. She needed to do this more, she decided. There was a free public pool out in Red Hook and another in Sunset Park. Or she could join a health club with a pool. That was another thing she planned to look into next week; her list was growing. She gathered her hair—now flattened against her skull and pasted to her neck and shoulders—into the elastic she had around her wrist and began to swim: long, even strokes, back and forth, back and forth.
Work off some of those breakfast calories
, she thought as she swam.
It couldn’t hurt
.

After Ennis and Justine had disappeared together downstairs, where presumably they would take on the chore of waking Portia (the girl would sleep all day if allowed), Gretchen faced the inevitable
now what?
The rest of the household would be consumed by wedding preparations; the women who were doing hair and makeup had arrived, along with the florist, and Betsy had disappeared in a flurry of instructions, directives, and imperatives.

Gretchen decided against having her brows done after all; she’d seen the alarming mask—a gleam of purple shadow, false lashes as thick as fur—on the young woman assigned to the job and decided she did not want this person anywhere near her face. She planned to steer clear of the hairstylist too. Her long, wild curls may have been a mess, but they were her mess, and she liked them just the way they were.

Outside, the gorgeous June day had beckoned. Even though the weather report, which had been a constant, feverish topic of conversation since her arrival, was predicting a thunderstorm in the late afternoon, there was no evidence of it yet: the sky was a limpid cerulean blue, and only the gentlest of breezes wafted over the fat pink roses that bloomed along the stone wall outside the kitchen door.

And so here she was, clad in the sensible black maillot, a trusty, tried-and-true staple of the Lands’ End catalog that did not let her down, even with the extra poundage she was carrying. Spread out across a chaise longue was one of her mother’s heavenly white towels, ready to receive her when she finished her swim. Swimming was good: it cleared her mind of Ennis, of Justine, of Angelica, and of just about everything else. She focused instead on the movement of her body as it sped through the water, arm over arm, legs kicking vigorously behind her.

She had swum the pool’s length about six times when her solitude was broken by a buff, tanned guy with a smoothly shaved head who was walking purposefully across the lawn, past the pool. He gave her a friendly wave, and she waved back, though she didn’t know who he was. He looked good though. He wore cutoffs, and he was shirtless; an amazing pair of tattoos—huge blue-black wings whose rippling feathers were filled with slashes of purple, scarlet, blue, and green—covered his shoulders and draped down his back.

Gretchen, who was a secret admirer of such bodily markings and, though she would never have told her daughters, was contemplating having a small tattoo—A flower? No, that was such a cliché; perhaps a bee or a mushroom would be better, more original—inked on her ankle or her hip, was mightily impressed by the whole package. She remained at the deep end, treading water as she watched him disappear into a shed and then emerge again with a red wheelbarrow. Mystery solved. He was clearly someone her mother had hired, part of the grounds crew, no doubt. Not that such a thing would bother her. Not a bit. Hadn’t she just been fantasizing she might meet someone at this wedding? Well, she hadn’t imagined anyone this hot. Gretchen continued treading water and hoping that her sodden ponytail did not make her look too foolish.

“How’s the water?” he called out.

“Fabulous,” she replied.

He nodded as if this were important information worth weighing and considering.

“I’m Gretchen,” she added.

“Jon,” he said. He adjusted the wheelbarrow. “You’re here for the wedding, right?”

“Sister of the bride,” she said. The treading was tiring, but she didn’t want to move down to the shallow end, where the water would no longer cover her. She wasn’t ready for him to see her in her bathing suit. Not yet, anyway.

He nodded again. “Big day for your family.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” she said. She was aware that she sounded too effusive somehow, as if she were drunk. But she hadn’t met anyone who had appealed to her in the longest time, and she was seriously out of practice.

“Well, have fun,” he said, resuming his walk with the wheelbarrow. The sun gleamed on his head; maybe he oiled it.

“See you,” she called back lamely. But would she? She certainly hoped so.

She tried to resume her swimming, but her concentration—and with it her sense of pleasure—was broken, so she climbed out of the pool, unbound her hair, and settled with the towel on the chaise longue. She wouldn’t stay out here, of course; she was always mindful of her pale skin, which burned easily. But, oh, the sun felt so good. She closed her eyes and drank in the warmth.

“That’s an upstairs towel.”

Gretchen squinted up at Caleb, who was leaning over her.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your towel. It’s from the bathroom upstairs.”

“So what?” The point of this exchange eluded her.

“Mom said the upstairs towels should stay upstairs. Towels for the pool”—he shook a turquoise-and-yellow-striped towel in her face, as if he were the matador and she the bull—“are in the cabana. Over there.” He let the towel go limp and pointed.

“Big deal,” she said, rolling over and away from him. “Who even cares?”

“Mom. She made a point of telling me.”

“So what is she going to do about it? Dock my allowance? Ground me?” She was annoyed; ordinarily she got on well with Caleb, but right now he was deliberately baiting her.
Regression
, she thought again. That was what happened when all four adult siblings were under a single roof.

“No need to get all huffy,” he said. “I was just stating the rules of the manor. Milady’s pleasure, if you know what I mean.”