Sisterland (35 page)

“Almost four.”

“Okay. Almost four. He’s been missing for almost four months, and during that time, we’ve been debating steak versus chicken, and stuffed mushrooms versus spanakopita, and what color flowers.… So help me out here in understanding—”

“I said that I’m sorry. I know how annoying this must be.”

“Annoying?” Again, those almost pursed, almost amused lips, and the strangeness of his not being my ally. “Kate, the world is a big place, and there are always good and bad things happening at the same time. Should we cancel our wedding because of the Iraq War? Or violence in Kosovo?”

“My sister’s not directly involved in that.” Then I said, “Remember when J.F.K. Jr.’s plane went down? He was on his way to his cousin’s wedding, and the cousin called it off, but she and the guy still got married later. They just knew that weekend wasn’t the right time.” The plane accident had preoccupied me the summer it happened not only because of how young and good-looking Kennedy had been but also because the other passengers on his little plane had been his wife and the wife’s older sister, who was a twin. For months—even still sometimes—I’d wonder, what was the other twin, the living twin, supposed to do after the accident? She’d had two sisters and lost them both at the same time.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jeremy said, “but you’re not a Kennedy. And Brady Ogden isn’t your cousin. Would you know him if you saw him on the street?”

“I definitely would.”

“Maybe I’m a jerk, but I wouldn’t.” Jeremy folded his arms. “Here’s the thing. If we don’t get married in Mendocino, I don’t want to get married.”

Without a doubt, this was the most shocking thing Jeremy had ever said to me. I hadn’t imagined that he’d be pleased about my decision, but I had thought he’d let me persuade him. He’d be disappointed but he’d understand, and perhaps even be touched by my sensitivity.

I said, “So
you’re
willing to call off the wedding?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Are you afraid that people will be mad about having to cancel their
plane tickets? Even if they’re not refundable, they can put the amount toward a different ticket.”

Jeremy was shaking his head. “That’s not what this is about. It’s about a precedent for our life together that I don’t want to set.”

“Meaning what?”

“This idea you have that you’ll be punished for enjoying yourself—it’s a huge bummer, Kate. You’re allowed to experience ordinary pleasures, even if you didn’t get to when you were younger. You’re even allowed to have children.”

“Having children and not getting married in California have nothing to do with each other.” But I felt two opposing emotions: flattery that Jeremy had observed me so closely and betrayal that he had observed me so closely.

“I’m just afraid that if we get married”—he paused, possibly having jarred himself, as he’d jarred me, with that
if
—“that when anything bad happens, you’ll let yourself be consumed by it. You’ll shelve the rest of your life.”

Was this what he believed I’d done in the past? During the witches episode in eighth grade or after my mother’s death? I said, “If you think that, I’m not sure why you’d want to marry me in the first place.”

“Besides that I love you?” We watched each other over the kitchen’s high wooden table, and he said, “The wedding is all planned. There’s hardly anything left for us to do but get on the plane.”

“What if my feeling that we shouldn’t get married out there isn’t just about Brady Ogden? What if we get in a car accident driving up the coast?”

Prior to this, Jeremy’s anger had been dimming; it flared up again as I spoke. He was almost clenching his teeth as he said, “Do you think that will happen?”

“It could.”

He took a step backward. “I can’t let you drag us both to crazyville, Kate. Okay? I just can’t.”

In a small voice, I said, “I don’t think our car will crash. I just—sometimes it’s like my mind is this echo chamber.”

He stepped toward me again, around the table, and set his hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to have a really nice, fun, relaxed wedding. That’s not something you need to feel guilty about.”

We took a
cab to the airport because we’d be gone long enough that it was cheaper than paying to park. Sitting together in the backseat, passing the Dr Pepper syrup plant and the billboards for radio stations and car dealerships, Jeremy and I didn’t speak; an observer could have been forgiven for imagining we were on our way to a funeral rather than a wedding, and certainly it wouldn’t have seemed that the wedding we were on the way to was our own. In the airport, after we’d made it through security, we bought lunch at separate places and ate together at our gate, still barely talking. As the plane lifted off, I closed my eyes, and Jeremy took my hand.

I felt a strange weightlessness, a kind of absolution. I had tried to cancel the wedding; Jeremy had countered by saying he wouldn’t marry me; not marrying Jeremy would, clearly, be an enormous mistake. This sequence felt neat in the way of a syllogism—it seemed to mean there was no alternative and I was not responsible for whatever had befallen Brady Ogden, whatever was befalling him still.

And so if I could put one foot in front of the other, if I could merely not deviate from the path I was on, that would be enough. Though if I managed to fake a little bridal joy, that wouldn’t hurt. With my eyes still closed, I wondered if I ought to let Jeremy off the hook, if it was unfair to go through with marrying him. But surely I had given him an out, and he hadn’t taken it.

Now, when I look back on that plane flight, besides remembering the pall over what should have been a festive time, what I’m most struck by is how unencumbered we were—physically unencumbered, I mean. We were two adults sitting in our seats, dozing, reading, sipping soda. Did we have any idea how soon there would be little bodies squirming against our chests, grabbing our hands, bleating and whining, wanting to eat or
be entertained? I’d thought back then that I needed to be vigilant, but what was my vigilance for? It was only practice.

Or maybe I am being disingenuous—if I borrowed problems then, maybe I am borrowing them still. Maybe I have always been, as Vi would subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself then looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.

It was better
in California: the change of scenery and the fact that the scenery was so pretty, the deep blue sky and green hills, the glittering water and crashing waves. We arrived in Mendocino around dinnertime and walked to town from the inn, ate at a restaurant that seated us on a patio with little white lights woven into the trellis beside our table, and split a bottle of wine. We spoke more, but still solemnly—mostly about the logistics of the next few days. Jeremy ordered an after-dinner cognac, and we were both already buzzed as we returned to the room, where we found champagne in an ice bucket and two flutes awaiting us, compliments of the inn’s staff. Without consulting me, Jeremy opened the champagne—the cork hit the ceiling, the liquid foamed out in a way he did nothing to stop, instead letting it spill onto the carpet—and poured us both a glass. He passed one to me and said, “To us,” and we clinked.

“This is good,” I said, and he said, “It’s amazing what they throw in when you spend a mere twenty thousand.”

We got halfway through the bottle, sitting up side by side on the thick white comforter of the king-sized bed with our backs against the pillows, and then he took my glass out of my hand, set it on the floor, and rolled onto me. His mouth was over mine, and he was pulling at my clothes, and when I was naked, his teeth were on my nipples, his fingers inside me, and after a few minutes, he withdrew his fingers and slid into me, rocking his hips against mine; I gripped his arms above the elbows. We finished at the same time, and instead of pulling out, he just lay there, still inside me, and I could feel the trickle of liquid between us. After a minute, I said, “I’m glad you’re making me marry you.”

Our families arrived
the following day—Jeremy’s two sets of parents, his brother and brother’s wife and their two children, plus Vi and my father and Patrick. “I seriously almost puked on the drive in,” Vi said as we stood outside the main entrance of the inn in the cooling late afternoon. “You didn’t tell me the roads were so twisty.”

“Have you heard from the detective?”

She shook her head.

Jeremy had made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant, which seated us at a big round table with a lazy Susan in the middle, and it was seeing people interact from such separate parts of my life, of the life Jeremy and I now had together, that made me understand for the first time that a wedding was more than a party where you got married—that I had indeed been too literal in gauging whether it was worth the expense. Jeremy’s sister-in-law, Meg, was laughing uproariously with Patrick, and Vi and Jeremy’s mother were talking intently about something, and my father was very earnestly drawing a picture of a tractor for Eddie, Jeremy’s three-year-old nephew.

This feeling of enlargement, of random and merry reconstitutions of our friends and family, continued as people kept arriving the next day: Meg and my friend Janet in the pool together with their children, Jeremy’s friend Cockroach tossing a Frisbee with Patrick and Jeremy’s grad school adviser on the lawn in front of the inn. All the guests, which was still only twenty people because a handful wouldn’t arrive until Saturday, were invited to the rehearsal dinner on a terrace behind the inn. Jeremy’s divorced mother and father gave a joint toast about how wonderful Jeremy was and how thrilled they were that he was marrying me, and after they sat down, my father rose, and embarrassment clutched me; was it some breach of protocol for him to speak when he wasn’t paying for any of the wedding? But no one besides Jeremy and me knew, I reminded myself. “I’ve never been terrific at expressing my feelings,” my father said. “But Daisy and her sister used to like to sing and dance, and this is a song I want to sing in their honor.” It was “The Way You Look Tonight,” and he sang without musical accompaniment, and for several seconds I was horrified. Plus,
he’d just called me Daisy. But his voice, which had been a little thin to start, thickened—my father had always had a good voice—and at some point the song transformed from unbearable to charming. For the rest of the weekend and long after, my father’s toast was often mentioned by our guests as the wedding’s highlight.

Following dinner, the older generation and the parents of young children returned to their rooms and the rest of us sat around on big outdoor couches—Vi and Patrick were intertwined in a nearby hammock in a way that I was glad my father wasn’t awake to see, because it could only have confused him—and someone from the inn turned on two patio heaters, and I had that feeling, with the cool, sweet-smelling night air and the warmth of the heaters, of being inside a Christmas carol. This was the moment when I decided that instead of giving my father an excuse later on, I would wear my mother’s charm bracelet after all. I had packed it at the last minute, and really, there was no reason not to.

It was one o’clock when Jeremy and I returned to our room; we weren’t avoiding each other the night before our wedding, and he’d already seen my dress, hanging in a clear plastic bag in our coat closet in St. Louis for the last five months. He was in the bathroom brushing his teeth, and I was already in bed, when there was a knock on the door. I startled—after wanting so badly for Brady Ogden to be found, I now just wanted not to think of him, for his existence to be suspended until we got through the ceremony the next afternoon—and when I looked through the peephole, my fears were not allayed; it was Vi in the hall.

But when I opened the door, she was grinning. “I’m here to kidnap you.” An expression of alarm crossed my face, I knew, because she said, “Sorry, bad word choice. I’m here to squire you away.”

“Why?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“That can’t wait until tomorrow?”

“If you must know, I’m throwing you a bachelorette party. It’s only going to last five minutes, but it’ll be the best bachelorette party ever. You thought I didn’t know the maid of honor’s supposed to do that, didn’t you?” She was clearly pleased with herself.

I called, “Jeremy, I’m going with Vi for a second.”

He opened the bathroom door, his toothbrush in his mouth. “Now?”

“Hi, Jeremy,” Vi said. “She’ll be back before you know it, so don’t worry your pretty little head.”

I let her lead me down the hall and around the corner to her own room, and she did the shave-and-a-haircut knock on the door, then followed it herself with the two bits. Then she turned the knob, and when we walked in, a gaggle of women whisper-shouted, “Surprise!” I saw that they were my almost-sister-in-law, Meg; my almost-mother-in-law, Carol; my friend Janet; and Patrick, who apparently was an honorary woman, or maybe he was just there because he and Vi were sharing the room. Along the dresser, Vi had lined up six shot glasses of something pink, and she began passing them out as Patrick set a plastic tiara on my head; I was still, of course, wearing pajamas. “What is this?” asked Carol, and Vi said, “Bridal ambrosia. Everyone on the count of three?” She counted down, and, somewhat to my astonishment, all six of us threw back the liquid. It was vodka, I was pretty sure, mixed with lemonade. “That wasn’t nearly as disgusting as I anticipated,” Carol said.