All Dressed Up (7 page)

“Chocolate
with strawberries and cream.”

“Let’s eat
it.” Decision made.

“How are we
going to get it home?” Sarah tried, feeling that Billy had betrayed
her. What evil things boys’ appetites were!

“Disassemble
it,” Mom answered. “Get them to box each tier separately.”

“It’ll look a
mess, after that.”

“So that’s
good because then Emma won’t recognize it,” Billy pointed out.

They found Dad
locked in a polite but steely debate with the hotel manager over a
refund on the drinks. Mom touched him on the arm. “We’ll pack up
the centerpieces, Eric. And the cake.”

Dad looked
alarmed. “The cake?”

“It’s been
discussed. We’re aware of the underlying issues.”

Five minutes
later, Sarah was crossing the shiny rink of the hotel’s gorgeous
lobby with a box full of centerpieces stretching her arms wide and
suddenly –

Oh, you know,
the worst things in life happened like this.

Out of the
blue.

Always!

They happened
when you were least prepared. When you had other stuff to think
about, and this worst thing was the last thing on your mind. For
months Sarah had steeled herself to hear a particular voice every
time the phone rang. She had avoided anywhere she thought a
particular person might go, while secretly knowing that one day she
would see him and she would of course behave perfectly.

Wasn’t going
to happen like that today.

She saw him
coming in from the terrace bar. He had a redhead with him. Who
looked happy and was laughing. The way Sarah used to look when she
was in his company.

Sarah had
looked happy with him right here in this lobby, in fact. She had
brought him to this place, given it to him like a gift. To Creep,
the Craigmore Hotel, with all my love. Kind of shyly, not knowing
if it was to his taste. Hopeful, because if it was to his taste,
then something more was proved about their being together. She had
totaled up those little proofs for herself all the time.

She had gifted
him the terrace bar overlooking the lake, the little still life
near the telephone alcove that no-one else ever noticed, the row of
vodka bottles behind the bar with their wintry designs etched on
the inside of the glass, so that they were magnified and made magic
by the clear liquid.

In fact, she’d
gifted him the whole of the Adirondack State Park – the cold, clear
lakes, the forested islands in Lake George with their rickety boat
docks and lakeward-looking summer homes, the hiking trails, the
headwaters of the Hudson River shallow over the pebbly rocks, the
painted wooden signs along 9N, announcing Still Bay and Diamond
Cove.

The Craigmore
Hotel wasn’t his, to come to with new redheads, for God’s sake! It
belonged to her. The entire Adirondack region should have come to
her indisputably after their split, like her share of the DVD
collection in a property settlement, or like a friend who’d taken
her side after the divorce. It hadn’t been a shy gift after all, it
had been a short-term loan, with strings.

And the word
divorce was misleading, too. They hadn’t actually been married, but
they’d been together for nearly four years.

They had
broken up three days before Emma’s invitations went out. Two main
reasons, one of them being that Creep thought Sarah sacrificed too
much of her free time to Billy.

On learning
the news about the split, Emma’s priorities had as usual been fully
in place. She’d caringly offered to go back to the printer and have
Sarah’s invitation reprinted to read ‘and Guest’ instead of ‘and
Creep’ but Sarah had told her sister it didn’t matter.

Seeing him
here mattered.

“Hey-y!” He
could have pretended not to see her, she’d done half the work on
that for him already, carefully staring into the distance above his
right shoulder, his face a blot like a sun-spot in her lower
vision, but he wasn’t the kind of person who felt the need for
avoidance strategies. Instead he’d abandoned the redhead and come
over with a smile of welcome and his hands out in greeting. “Sarah!
What are you doing here?”

An appalling
question from so many angles that she couldn’t even count them.

She blurted
out, “It’s supposed to be Emma’s wedding today, but it’s been
canceled. We had to pick up some stuff.”

“That was
today?” Creep said. “I totally forgot.”

Yes. Of course
you did. I was always the walking calendar. You went with the
flow.

“Don’t worry
about it.”

And leave now,
don’t ask for details on the cancelation, because here come Mom and
Billy, and I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want Mom
feeling bad for me. Or failing to feel sufficiently bad for me. Or
feeling inadequate because she knows she’s not feeling sufficiently
bad for me. Or anything.

Creep picked
up her vibe, deposited another cheery grin, “So good to see you…”
and moved on.

“Who was
that?” Mom asked. With her arms weighed down by too many
centerpieces and her vision semi-obscured, she had to gesture with
her chin toward the back view of Creep and Redhead, who were
heading up the stairs.

“Unh… oh,
just…”

“It was Luke,”
Billy said.

“Oh, right,”
Mom said. Brightly, for Billy’s benefit. On the way out to the car
she nudged her box of centerpieces against Sarah’s arm and asked in
an undertone, “Are you okay?”

“No.” Pause.
“But you could help if you offered me the kill-or-castrate deal
that you offered Emma. I was jealous of that.” Another pause. “I
wouldn’t necessarily accept, but I’d really like if you
offered.”

“Oh, Sarah…”
Mom put the centerpieces down on the car hood, took Sarah’s box and
put that on the hood, also, then hugged her tight. Sarah couldn’t
soften her body enough, and Mom felt the stiffness. She read it
accurately, too. “Do we have a problem, here?” She pulled back,
leaving her hands on Sarah’s shoulders.

“Sometimes I
wish I wasn’t your easy-care, rational, understanding
daughter.”

“No, you
don’t.” She massaged the shoulders.

“Oh, okay, I
don’t. I was wrong. I don’t wish it. I’m totally happy.”

“Honey – ”

“Three days
before the invitations went out,” Sarah said. “So there was that,
and about four hundred other urgent wedding details, even the most
trivial of which still trumped the state of my heart, and Dad kept
singing about Fifty Ways for my Lover to Leave me, and, see, I’m
really trying to be difficult and accusatory and emotionally
demanding but already I’m sounding like an idiot to myself, because
Dad’s singing is not something a sane person can feel wounded over,
so I’m going to stop. It wasn’t Emma’s fault that he and I broke up
then. You’re right. I don’t wish I wasn’t your easy daughter.”

“Okay. Good,”
Mom said. She searched Sarah’s face. “I’m not sure whether to tell
you at this point that I never liked him.”

“Did you?”
Sarah said, half-eager, half-shocked. “Never like him?”

“No, I thought
he was wonderful. Until you broke up. Then I realized there was
something about his eyes. They were the exact color of pond scum.
Why had I never seen it before?”

Sarah laughed.
“Seriously? Pond scum?”

“In the right
light. I would castrate him, honey, in a heartbeat. Your choice of
weapon. Dad’s fish-gutting knife? Piano wire? The ornamental
samurai – ” She changed tack. Dad had an associative brain, Mom
leap-frogged her own sentences. “You don’t know how much I’d do for
you, Sarah, baby-girl, love of my heart. Do I not tell you that
stuff often enough?”

“I guess it’s
a compliment to me that you don’t think you need to tell me. You
think I know it already. You think I’m actually grown up, or
something.”

“Well, yeah,
and I know I’m not. Yet. Ever. You take after your father. The
grown up side of the family.”

“Let me take
after you, sometimes?”

“And be
irrational and over-wrought?”

“Sounds
perfect. I pick the ornamental samurai sword, I think it’ll be nice
and blunt.”

“Stop talking,
you guys, and open the trunk. My arms are dropping off,” Billy
said.

So it sort of
ended up okay.

“You know
what?” Lainie’s cousin Angie tilted her head and let her eyes dart
over Emma’s dress, her mouth pursed in assessment. “I actually
don’t like it.”

Lainie was
shocked. “You can’t not like it!” She loved it. It was a strapless
dream of beading and feathers, a princess of a dress, the kind of
spoiled, high-maintenance movie star dress that you loved anyway,
despite its aura of entitlement, perfect for Emma’s model-thin
figure and cameo oval face.

“You know
what, though?” Angie took another searching look, taking too long.
Lainie felt her usual uneasy prickle of mistrust in her cousin’s
company, and didn’t know what to do about it. “I just don’t. It’s
too...” She let her sentence trail off.

Too what? It
wasn’t too anything! Or rather, the too-ness of it was the whole
point. You couldn’t possibly say this dress was too and then not
finish.

Like her own
Charlie and Angie’s son Ben, Lainie and Angie were around the same
age – Lainie was two years older and six inches taller – and they’d
grown up together more like sisters than cousins, swapping fashion
tips and boyfriend stories through their teens, sharing a need to
get away from their downbeat Fort Edward background.

Thirty-five
years later, they still laughed, they drank coffee, they gossiped
and shopped, all the right things, but Lainie could never shake the
suspicion that if you looked at it in the wrong light, they weren’t
really friends, that Angie was out to get her in some subtle,
female, legal way that nobody would ever be able to put a finger on
or find a reason for.

Lainie
honestly knew herself to be someone who was never out to get
anyone, even her rare enemies. Despite spending years in the
cut-throat profession of real estate, she was still the kind of
person who has to say, “It’s not you, it’s me,” when she changes
hairdressers, so she felt at sea about it, at sea as to whether the
problem with Angie even existed. She had no proof. Maybe it was her
imagination. Maybe Angie couldn’t be held responsible for those
occasional odd expressions and comments. Maybe she, Lainie, was the
one to blame.

“Anyhow,
Angie,” she said cheerfully, hiding all this, “it doesn’t matter if
you like it, I just want your opinion on where I should store
it.”

“Emma doesn’t
want it back?”

“Oh, I expect
she does, at some point, but you know it’s sensitive right
now.”

“Would she
sell it, do you think?”

“I have no
idea. It’s too soon.” It was in fact just about the time when Emma
and Charlie should have been coming out of the church as man and
wife.

Lainie had
felt restless and down in the dumps all day, thinking about the two
of them and about the Deans, almost picking up the phone a hundred
times and then feeling too awkward and interfering and
mother-of-the-groom to call. Who would she ask for if Eric or Billy
picked up? Terri? Sarah? Or could she talk to Eric? He was a nice
man. Kind and quiet and clever. He stayed in the background, yet
you had the impression he didn’t miss much. But what would she
say?

“I’m going to
let everything sit for a couple of days,” she said, “then maybe
I’ll call up Terri just to let her know the dress is here and I’m
taking good care of it. I’m thinking the attic, but – ”

“Not the
attic,” Angie said, decisive on the subject. “And not a closet you
use every day. The spare-room closet.”

“That’s small.
It’s such a big dress.”

“We’ll go
look.” Angie led the way upstairs, taking charge.

Lainie carried
the dress, instinctively holding it high off the floor because it
was unbearable to think of the delicate hemline gathering even a
speck of dust. The dress would throw a tantrum and fire its entire
entourage if that happened.

“The attic is
out. Didn't it leak, last time it rained?” Angie said. “And if the
basement gets the slightest bit damp, the smell could soak into the
fabric and never come out.”

She went into
Lainie’s bedroom, where, if she was looking for any kind of a
subtle battle with her cousin, she would probably find ammunition.
The diet book on the bedside table, for example. Angie battled with
her weight, too, but more successfully. “A closet that you use a
lot won’t work,” she decreed. “You’re right, it’s a big dress.
Fragile. Didn’t it come in a garment bag?”

“Oh, my lord,
yes it did! Custom-fitted!”

“So where is
that?”

“It must be
still at the church, in the Reverend’s change-room.”

“Call him up.”
Occasionally, Angie could make very useful, clairvoyant
suggestions.

Lainie
discovered that she wouldn’t at all mind having a good reason to
call up the Reverend Mac, after their almost flirty conversation on
the porch. “Yes, because it does need the bag,” she said.

“In this
closet, you’d be pushing it out of the way along the rail every
time you need an outfit. If it gets squished in a small closet it
can always get pressed, but if it gets moldy and stained, or if the
swansdown starts shredding off because you’re bumping it around
every day, that’s that. I have a daughter getting married in four
weeks so I know!” Angie knew a lot of new things now that she had a
daughter getting married.

“Does Brooke
have her dress yet?”

“She does –
she left it way late! – but she’s being weird about it.” They left
the bedroom and crossed to the spare-room. “I don’t know why,”
Angie confided. “I keep telling her it’s a beautiful gown.”

“And she could
return it anyhow, right?”

“Well, no,
because she got it on discount from that bridal store off of Exit
18 that’s just gone out of business. No, it’s fine. If she’s having
second thoughts, they should be about the groom!” She added after
an effortful pause, “No, I’m just kidding, I adore him, too. He’s
so good to her, you wouldn’t believe.”