Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories (10 page)

“So why aren’t you interested in me?” I know this sounds like I’m pushy, but you don’t know how hard it is to find a guy my father won’t make fun of.

“I’m gay,” Scott said.

“Oh, hell,” I said, and he got me another daiquiri, and we discussed what a great butt one of the waiters had and which one of us had a better chance of picking him up. We put five bucks on it. I lost, of course, but I had a good time anyway which is a vast improvement over Steph’s last wedding.

So like I said, I don’t think I’m cut out for this marriage bit, even if I could find a guy my father wouldn’t refer to as “somebody your sister would marry.” After all, I’ve got a big career in law ahead of me, and I’m going to be great. I have to be. My father won’t speak to me again if I’m not.

That’s a joke.

1983

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Scott says.

We are, of course, at my sister’s wedding. We’ve been seeing a lot of each other, Scott and I, and he has turned out to be everything I could wish for in a man except for that tiny little problem about our non-matching sexualities. There are some good things about this. As Scott says, at least when he stays over with me, nobody has to sleep on the wet spot, but I’d be willing. On the other hand, this is a great relationship, so who am I to bitch? It’s certainly lasted longer than any of Steph’s previous three.

Yeah, three. This is her fourth wedding, sixteen years after her first, which I know because I was a smart-mouthed fifteen-year-old then and I’m a smart-mouthed thirty-one now. We cannot blame the second divorce on David although, as my father says, irreconcilable boredom should be grounds. David was everything he’d promised to be: secure, hard-working, responsible, and a great father when Jess arrived a year after they were married. That’s her, the eleven-year-old over there in the seafoam green flower girl dress, swatting the ring bearer with her basket. My kind of kid. But then four years passed, and according to David’s timetable, it was long past time to produce another kid. He started pressuring Steph, and she just freaked.

She came out of Kroger’s one day and got run down by this guy on a motorcycle, and when he picked her up off the pavement, she got on the bike with him and rode off. I think after marrying twice for potential, Steph just looked at Cam and thought, “This is all he’ll ever be, a hunk on a motorcycle,” and went for the Moment the way Mom had always taught her. Jess was at Mom’s, so Steph called and left a message that she’d be home late. They came back two weeks later. They’d had the urge to go to Mexico, Steph said, so they went, and she got a quickie divorce and then a quickie marriage (my mother had to lie down at that part) and now she was really, truly happy.

Right.

I tried to talk her into letting me get her an annulment right away. Any fool who looked at Cam knew he was worthless, but all Steph could see was the romance. That was fine when all Steph was screwing up was herself, but she had a kid now.

My niece Jess is great.

In fact, the only good thing about Steph’s elopement was that I got to spend every evening of the entire two weeks with Jess who was only two at the time and who was a little freaked out that her mother had disappeared. Steph and David had tried to raise the kid to be another Stepford bride, but I saved her. Steph used to read her crap like Cinderella, and Jess would point to the pictures and say “’Rella” and “p’ince,” and Steph would tell her how cute she was. By the time Steph got back from Mexico, Jess was pointing and saying “loser” and “wimp.” Steph was not amused, but I pointed out that a mother who deserts her child to elope to Mexico wasn’t much of a role model, either. I was already in trouble with Steph because when she had introduced Jess to Cam, his unfortunate resemblance to the Disney prince made Jess point at him and say, “Wimp.” My mother said, “She’s just like her Aunt Caroline,” and I looked at this kid who had Steph’s face and my mouth and said, “Behold the master race.”

My father laughed until he choked, but Steph didn’t.

I also pointed out to Steph that her Mexican divorce was illegal, which is when I started pushing for the annulment, but it turned out to be not much of a problem because Cam did not last the year. Stephanie said she fell in love with him because he was deep and free-spirited. She stopped speaking to me for a week after the memorable family dinner at which Cam passed out with his head in the lasagna, and I felt behooved to mention that deep was not the same as brain dead, which was what chemical substances had evidently rendered Cam. Fortunately, shortly after that, Stephanie saw the light, and Cam saw the door, and Steph was 0 for 3: 1967, 1971, and 1976. Steph came close to trying it again several times in the seven years after her divorce from Cam (which I handled brilliantly, I must say; I may suck as a sister but I’m a great lawyer), but every time she brought somebody home as a candidate, my father would say, “Look at that tie,” and I’d say, “Boring,” and Jess would say, “Wimp,” and she’d drop him and start over.

Then a couple of months ago, she brought home Paul, and my father said, “Look at that tie,” and I said, “Boring,” but Jess said, “I like him,” and so here we go again, up to our butts in chiffon, cake, and colored punch.

Of course, Steph being Steph, Cam is, as my father says, forgotten but not gone. That’s him over there by the buffet, moving across the stuffed mushrooms like a locust. And yes, you’re right, that’s Andy hitting on Darla the bridesmaid again (and that’s Darla’s husband Max about to put Andy’s head in the punch), and there’s David boring the caterer. My sister is not the type to hold a grudge. Or, as far as I can tell, a memory. As my father says, all of Steph’s ex-husbands should be grateful to her because for most of them, her weddings provide their only social outlet.

I have plenty of social outlets. Lawyers are supposed to schmooze, and since I’m the hottest thing in my firm, I schmooze like nobody else, but my real social life is Scott. He is the only successful relationship I’ve ever had with a male, not counting my father, which is not to say that I haven’t had relationships. Oh, God, let me count the ways. But at least I don’t
marry
the sociopaths I sleep with. Unlike Steph, I have some standards.

Which is why I’m on the sidelines of another in a series of weddings brought to you by my sister, designed by my mother, and paid for by a grant from my father. When he mentioned that he thought two weddings might be the legal limit required from any parent for any individual daughter, I offered Steph my two. I won’t be using them, and this way, she’ll have one to spare after this one goes belly up. Besides my mother hadn’t done a wedding in twelve years, and she was due. She went all out; this time we’re “Under the Sea” which means we’re all draped in sea foam green chiffon, not only are there starfish in the bouquets but I also have one stuck to the side of my head, something that Scott finds hysterically funny. That’s me, anything for a laugh.

The good news is that this damn chiffon is the color of daiquiris, which means that my mother’s punch is literally laying them in the aisles. I can’t wait to see what she’s going to do for Steph’s fifth wedding.

Although there might not be a fifth; Scott swears this one is going to last. Paul is a plumber, which is a little blue-collar for us, but as my father says, at least we got the upstairs bathroom fixed right. It was taking so long to get all the plumbing to work without a glitch that he thought it might have been built on an Indian burial ground, but then Paul showed up and got it straightened out in no time, which made up for his awful ties. And it turns out, Paul is also human, which is a step in the right direction for my sister, and he seems to love her. I could almost envy her except he’s a little boring. As my father says, not the oh-my-God-somebody-drive-a-stake-through-my-skull-so-I-don’t-have-to-listen-to-this-asshole-anymore kind of boring—that was David—but the dear-God-has-this-man-ever-had-an-evil-thought kind of boring. And I know he’s going to turn out to have another wife or another head or something, but he sure looks like the real thing. Of course, as my father says, after Andy and David and Cam, anybody Steph brought home would look like a Kennedy.

“I think she’s going to make it this time,” Scott says again. He’s surveying the happy couple over his umpteenth cup of punch, a little rocky.

I snort in disgust. I usually don’t snort, but countless cups of daiquiri will do that to the best of women. “I got twenty bucks says you’re wrong.”

Scott tips his head back, patronizing me. He does it because it used to make me mad and I’d say stupid things. After twelve years of seeing him do this to me almost daily, I kind of like it, which gives you a rough idea of how I relate to men. “Nope,” Scott says. “Did you see the way he looked at her when he said ‘I do’? This one’s for keeps.”

Scott is usually not this dippy, but he fell in love about two years ago with the second best guy I’ve ever met, and they’re very happy, so now he thinks the whole world is The Love Boat with better music. Usually, people in love give me the creeps, but I visit Scott and Jake because I like them. I tell them it’s because I want to be there when one of them comes to his senses and goes hetero for me.

Anyway, no matter how much I want to, I’m not buying Scott’s take on Steph and true love. “You’re forgetting this is another one of Steph’s.” I dig a twenty out of my bra where I have stashed it for cab fare so that I can escape if somebody starts singing “Close To You.” “Here you go. Twenty says they don’t make it. You want to hold the stakes?”

“No.” Scott pushes my hand away. “Never bet on happiness. You’ll jinx it.”

I look over at Steph, and she’s dancing with her train thrown over her arm, bobbing up and down in all that cream chiffon, and I wonder what it would be like to be that free, to be that happy, to feel that “I Get Around” is the perfect song to dance to at my fourth wedding. What is it like, I wonder, to be completely unconscious of what people think? Or maybe she’s not. Maybe she knows that whatever she does, people will smile with her because she’s so damn happy. It’s hard to make fun of happy people.

I don’t know how to be like that. I’ve never managed what she does just by breathing, and sometimes I think I’d like to give it a try, but I know better because you can’t go against your nature. She’s Mom’s daughter and I’m Dad’s, and I know there are some things like falling in love and getting your heart broken that are rites of passage at fifteen but stupid at thirty-one. I should have made those mistakes long ago, it’s too late now. I think it was always too late for me. I just never was that kind of person.

But I watch Jess dance next to Steph, watch Steph smile at Paul like she’s just won the lottery and doesn’t have to share it, and for a minute I think that kind of thing might have been nice.

Of course, I’m just romanticizing the whole thing. As my father says, we’ve been here before. And probably will be again.

1996

I am at my sister’s wedding.

This is her fifth and maybe her last. All the great tragedies have five acts: Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Stephanie. By now she should just about have this down, so I’m counting on this being her last one.

Actually, I don’t care. I’m too upset about the punch. In fact, this whole wedding sucks. It’s very elegant and very tasteful, but there’s no theme, and the only thing pink in the whole damn place is our dresses.

My mother died last year. She was sixty-nine, twenty-three years older than Stephanie, twenty-six years older than me, forty-six years older than Jess. I did the math at her funeral because she was the oldest of all of us women. She was the matriarch, and I missed it. She died so fast that I didn’t have time to catch on; she caught a cold, it turned into pneumonia, she went into the hospital, and she died.

I hate it that she died in a hospital because the decor there sucks. That sounds like a wisecrack but it isn’t. It was November. I should have brought in turkeys and pilgrims, draped her in orange and brown afghans, hung up autumn leaves ironed between wax paper the way I saw her do it a million autumns when I was a kid. But she died so fast, even my dad was caught flat-footed. “She never does anything without planning it first,” he told the doctor. “She couldn’t have died without a color scheme.” The doctor was appalled at him, but I don’t think that was a wisecrack. Steph does, but I don’t. For my dad, that was high emotion.

For the funeral, Steph and Jess and I went all out. It was the prettiest funeral anyone had ever seen, with orange bows on the chairs, and pumpkins on the floor, and pressed leaves scattered over the coffin, and back at the house we had a punch bowl full of orange punch with ice in the shape of leaves floating in it. Mom would have loved it. I even varnished pine cones for it. It was great, except that Mom was dead and missed it. At the cemetery, the minister said, “And now let us pause for a moment in memory of Grace,” and I had this terrible urge to laugh because Mom was finally getting her own moment and everybody was pausing, and then I realized that wasn’t a wisecrack, either, that this was probably the only moment that was hers in her life aside from her wedding, that she’d spent a lifetime dyeing punch for other people’s moments, and I wanted to cry.

A month later I was standing beside Steph in the same church, watching her suck up grief like a Hoover. Paul had turned out to be a good man with a heart so big it had exploded. One minute he was lifting sheetrock in the garage they were remodeling into a family room, and the next he was dead on the floor, and all the 911 in the world couldn’t bring him back. At the service, I stood with Steph, reminding her to breathe when she forgot, staring into her eyes that were pits of shocked emptiness, and just for a moment, I envied her. So much pain. How much joy must she have had in thirteen years to have fallen so far? “I’m so sorry, Stephie,” I whispered to her. “I am truly so, so sorry.” She hesitated for a moment, I suppose not sure whether there would be a punchline in a minute, and then she leaned on me, and I put my arm around her.

And then my father came up, and took her hand, and said the only thing he knew how to say, the funny thing, the kind of thing that had gotten him through life up to now: “Well, he did a great job on the upstairs bathroom.”