All Dressed Up (3 page)

“I’m fine to
drive. I’m fine.” Emma took the turn-off up Grays Hill Road faster
than usual. Her car protested. “We need to get home before everyone
else leaves for the restaurant, so we can call them.”

“They’ll
already be there, waiting for us,” Sarah had to point out. Emma’s
sense of time and geography had gone haywire. “Mom and Dad and
Billy were going direct from the church.”

“Does Terri
have her cell phone? I can call her,” Amber said.

“Okay, yes,
thanks,” Emma agreed, and she and Sarah listened to what Amber said
to Mom. It was brief and horrible.

“They’re at
the restaurant,” Amber reported. “They’ll tell everyone, and deal
with the cancelation, and meet us back at the house.”

“That
cancelation,” Emma clarified. “The dinner. Except, no, people
should still eat if they want. Call her back and tell her. I’ll
deal with the other cancelations. The Craigmore. The flowers…”

The rain had
stopped but the trees still dripped. Sarah glimpsed one patch of
blue sky, big enough to make a sailor’s pants. Someone had said
this once to her years ago in England, some jolly woman the Deans
had met in Cornwall on one of the tourist weekends they’d spent out
of London, during the three years Dad’s pharmaceutical company had
based him there. Enough to make a sailor’s pants. It was a jaunty
little saying, such a wonderfully subjective, illogical measurement
of sky blueness size, Sarah had never forgotten it.

Emma didn’t
care how many sailors’ pants there was blue sky enough for. Her
face was closed and smooth and it was impossible to know how she
really felt. She would handle it, because she always handled
things. She recognized what was required of her and she did it.
Perfectly. Selfishly. Straight As all the way. Sucking up other
people’s energy the way fire sucked up oxygen.

But Sarah knew
her sister hadn’t canceled her wedding on a whim. Selfish or not,
she needed other people’s help right now. “Let Amber and me at
least make some of the calls, okay?”

“No, it needs
to be me,” Emma said. “That’s the right thing to do.”

Ten minutes
after they reached the summer lake-house, Mom, Dad and Billy
arrived.

“Sarah, help
Billy find something to do,” Mom said, so Sarah helped Billy find
something to do and then sat down to do it with him, because play
with Billy and take care of Billy and keep Billy company had been
her principal job in the Dean family for ten years, ever since he
was born. She was sixteen at the time, they were in London, the
most miserable year of her life.

Sarah
entertaining Billy allowed Mom to shoot anxious questions at Emma
and suck out terse, I’m fine type answers from her, while Amber
held Emma’s hand. No, of course not literally. Amber wouldn’t have
had any hand left after an hour or so.

Why am I such
a bitch about my sister, Sarah thought. I do actually love her. I
know how hard she tries. “Emma, please, please let us make some of
the calls,” she offered again, leaving off playing with Billy’s
remote-control cars.

Billy didn’t
need her to help with his entertainment. He’d changed out of his
rehearsal dinner clothes into a T-shirt and baggy shorts that
finished just above his knobby knees, and was hovering, listening,
trying to work out whether he fitted anywhere in what was going on.
He zapped aimlessly on his car control, wasting the
non-rechargeables. The miniature machine spurted erratically across
the floor. Bzzt, stop, bzzt, stop, bzzt, bzzt.

“Could he
possibly be asked to stop with the car? Can he not hear how
horrible it is?” Emma yelled suddenly. “I swear, Mom, I’m going to
– ” She stopped and muttered, “I cannot bear this.”

“Go down to
the lake for a while, Billy, before it gets dark,” Mom said.

She took the
remote control. Dad was watching her, on the look out for
something, seeing something. He still had his key-ring clutched in
his hand, as if he expected to be dispatched on a mission at any
moment. He had way too many keys, he didn’t need to keep so many on
there.

Mom mouthed at
Sarah, about Billy, “Keep him company.”

“I’m sorry, I
shouldn’t have yelled at him,” Emma apologized to the room. “I’m
sorry.” She addressed him directly at last: “I’m sorry, Billy.”

Billy said
nothing in answer to this, just bent to pick up his car. He was
suspicious of Emma. He didn’t know her very well because she’d been
away at boarding school, college, med school and summer internships
most of his life. They barely spoke to each other. “Are we going,
Sarah?”

Sarah, he
trusted. He owned most of her heart. “Sure,” she said.

“Take a
snack,” Mom mouthed again. “And repellent.”

Sarah got a
couple of health bars, two juices boxes and bug cream, and changed
out of her rehearsal dinner clothes into shorts and a pink tee. Dad
told her, “Good girl,” as she pushed open the screen door.

The lake was
beautiful at this time of the evening, still and silent and
mirror-sheened, after the soft-footed two-hundred-yard walk beneath
the pines. This early in the season, a week before the July 4th
weekend, no-one else had yet occupied the other summer homes. The
floating wooden dock was still dragged up onto the coarse sand of
the beach from last fall.

The whole
place stayed the same every year, and this was important and
good.

Necessary.

The doggy
graves containing the precious remains of Ralphie and Peaches still
lay somewhere in the woods, beneath a thick tan carpet of pine
needles. The sun always set behind the same stands of trees on the
far slopes of cool, forested mountain, the rays showing up the bugs
surfing lazily through the pine-scented air. The lake was always
the same flat, still mirror. The garden belonging to the
neighboring house just above the community beach was always planted
with the same summer flowers – New Guinea impatiens in purple and
pink, with shiny reddish-dark leaves.

At the Deans’
place, the same three battered cans of herring in tomato sauce sat
on the highest, deepest shelf in the pantry, as they had ever since
Sarah could remember. Every year, Mom swore that this summer she
would use them up, apologized for buying them in the first place,
said she didn’t know what she’d been thinking, like if the power
went off or they were stuck in a winter blizzard with no food.

If she ever
did use them up, or if she accepted defeat and threw them away, who
knew, the world might come to an end.

You could
make, oh, close on six pairs of sailors’ pants from the blue sky by
this time – velvety soft celestial pants containing hints of sunset
gold. And a breeze had sprung up, blowing from lakeward onto the
beach and driving the mosquitoes back into the dimness of the
woods.

Billy played
in the sand on his own while Sarah sat on the beached wooden swim
dock, but then the sitting wasn’t good enough and he wanted Sarah
to actually play, too.

Okay.

She scrambled
off and hunkered down, her knees and shins soon coated with damp,
coarse sand. They made a miniature landscape together, gathering
twigs and bits of weed for bonsai trees and gardens. They made a
golf-ball chute, which took quite a while to get right so that the
ball would roll along the gritty sand track where it was meant to,
without getting stuck.

They drank
their juice.

Said things
like, “Pass that bunch of twigs,” to each other, and, “How about a
leaf pathway right here?”

Were otherwise
happily silent.

“What’s up
with Emma, anyhow?” Billy finally asked. He looked at Sarah with
his big green eyes. Five years from now, those eyes would start
breaking girls’ hearts. And the hair, dark and sheened. The high
cheekbones. The long black lashes. The olive skin.

“Oh, I don’t
know.” Sarah tried not to sigh. “She has a few things to work
out.”

“Who’s she
really mad at? Just Charlie?” He liked Charlie. Together they
speculated about the nature of the universe, how it could be
infinite in dimension, and where else there might be intelligent
life. Charlie knew not to say things like, “How’s school?”

“Maybe she’s
mad at herself for making the wedding so complicated,” Sarah
said.

Billy nodded,
trusting the answer. “She looked at too many bride magazines.”

“She
definitely did.”

“If I was
Charlie, I wouldn’t want to marry her, either. I would run for the
hills. Like, change my identity and go on the witness protection
program. Surgically alter my face.”

Sarah laughed.
“Better not tell anyone that, though.”

“Don’t worry,”
Billy answered with feeling. “I’m staying totally out of the whole
thing. I am not getting involved.”

“Good
decision, kid.”

Apparently
this was all Billy needed to hear or say. They went on playing.

Sarah loved
him all the time, but liked him best by the lake on a summer
evening. With other boys, after school, playing sports, on
weekends, he could be rough and crude and narrow and loud like most
boys. Down here, with no other kids around, he grew gentle and
thoughtful and patient. Younger, as if he hadn’t had enough of
being a little kid, yet.

He would float
on an air mattress in the reeds, thinking special thoughts, chin
resting on his hands, bony elbows stuck out. He would be creative
with pebbles, interested in nature, ecstatic if he saw a turtle,
tender toward the new-hatched baby ducks.

Sarah wondered
if all kids were like this if they got the chance. She didn’t think
so – and since she taught kindergarten in the Bergen County public
school system for a living, she should know. She thought Billy was
a little different, just that bit exceptional and precious.

Okay, so she
was biased.

The fabric for
the sailors’ pants turned slowly to Wedgwood blue and mauve. The
two of them paddled out into the lake in one of the old canoes. The
canoes hadn’t yet been used this season, but Dad had dutifully
loaded them onto the roof-rack of the car, brought them down to the
beach and cleaned off the understandable spider webs and somewhat
more mysterious dead leaves that always clung to their interiors
after a winter spent upside down beneath the porch.

“Shall we turn
back yet?” Sarah asked twice. Her arms ached from paddling. Water
had dripped from the oars onto her shorts.

But, no, Billy
wanted to keep going, so they passed the place where the two rocks
peeked above the water, and the place where first-time paddlers
realized that what they had up until this point thought was the far
side of the lake was actually only about one quarter of the way
around. There was a whole other, larger, wider arm extending to the
north.

From this part
of the lake, you could see Sarah’s old ballet camp – the white
plantation-style portico of the theater, the green grass sloping
down to the beach, the dining hall walled with wire insect mesh,
and the rows of cabins and practice rooms. She’d spent three
summers there, aged twelve through fourteen. She’d loved those
summers with painful intensity. For now, though, ballet camp looked
quiet and still. Camp season hadn’t started yet.

“Now we’ll
turn back.” This time Sarah didn’t give Billy a choice. It was
getting dark. “Are you hungry?” she asked him, when they’d beached
the canoe. “We haven’t had those health bars but I think we’d
better go up, see what’s hitting the fan.”

Nothing was,
apparently, though Mom was hitting the phone lines, going down the
guest list. She was trying to track down which motels all the
wedding guests were staying at, out of the dozens strung along the
lakefront. Not this lake, Diamond Lake, but Lake George – the big,
touristy one jutted into by Steeple Point, at the bottom of the
hill, where all the resorts had hand-painted wooden signs, hanging
on chains, and where the towns were full of cheap T-shirt stores
and amusement arcades and places selling gifts and souvenirs.

Emma had
already canceled the first night honeymoon suite, the florist, the
reception at the Craigmore Hotel, the videographer, the cars. She
had dropped Amber back down at the hotel where Amber was staying
with her boyfriend. Lainie had called with some information about
Charlie’s plans – he was handling the honeymoon cancelation – while
Dad’s brother and sister-in-law, who had just arrived from
Michigan, kept telling Mom, “Of course we’re not sorry we came,
Terri. We’re still getting to see you, right?”

Dad had gone
to pick up take-out Chinese, and Sarah thought he was probably
relieved to have an errand, to make use of that handful of
keys.

“Okay, Mom,
I’m leaving now,” Charlie said.

“You don’t
want to eat something first?” Lainie suggested.

He’d been in
the house over an hour, much of it in the shower. He’d also gone
jogging, must have run for miles. Now he was like a fighter jet
ready to spring from the deck of a carrier, but Lainie felt as if
an hour wasn’t long enough, as if they hadn’t even skated the
surface yet.

He’d called
his second cousin and best man Ben on his cell to find that Ben had
heard the news via Brooke and was back at his girlfriend’s
apartment over the old hardware store in Lake George Village.
Charlie had also talked for about forty-five seconds to Joe and
another minute to Elliott, the other two groomsmen, but Lainie
didn’t know where they were.

He had left
his beautiful new car in Lainie’s driveway.

Oh, my lord,
with the precious dress still laid across the back seat!

As they’d
driven away from the church, it had looked like a chauffeur-driven
princess behind tinted glass. Charlie had initially said he was
only coming in for five minutes, so they’d left it there. Lainie
hoped to high heaven that he’d remembered to lock up, because she
was on a busy road and they did get opportunistic theft out of cars
from time to time. Especially cars like his.