The Wedding Machine (8 page)
“Mama?” Katie Rae says from out of nowhere. She stands in the doorway with a nice-looking young man who has her parrot, Froot Loop, on his shoulder.
This must be one of the fellows she met from that online dating service. Kitty B. says she's been seeing the man who opened the new Serpentarium near the ACE Basin, a veterinarian, and his father is some kind of evangelical preacher. Ray looks down at her espadrilles. She hopes they haven't offended him with their banter.
“Oh, it's okay, sweetheart.” Kitty B. pats her eyes with the backs of her palms and invites them into the filthy living room, where newspaper pages and birdseed are strewed amidst their trays of dirty plates and chicken bones and balled-up napkins. “These are my mom's gals,” Katie Rae says to the young man.
He smiles and reaches out his hand in Ray's direction. “I've heard a lot about you all. It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Marshall Bennington.”
Sis stands up and pushes down the wrinkles in her pants and waits behind Ray to shake his hand. He looks each of them in the eyeâand Ray has to admit, he's right polite and handsome, albeit slightly affected. Maybe she should get Priscilla onto one of those dating Web sites.
“What's that noise?” he says.
“Oh, that's LeMar snoring.” Kitty B. shakes her head, and Ray looks out on the porch, where the sick man snoozes in his rocking chair as the sun makes its descent behind the trees across the water.
“So nice to meet you, Marshall,” Ray says as she nudges Kitty B. “I better get going.”
The gals quickly load Kitty B.'s silver chest, her china teacups and saucers and creams and sugars into Ray's backseat to add to the stash for the Tea and See. Next they load up Miss C. and the lemon squares and the petits fours, which Ray positions carefully in the way back. Sis drapes some towels around Miss C. so she won't knock into the sweets and flatten them.
“Don't forget the wedding presents,” Kitty B. says as LeMar wakes up for a moment, smacks his lips, and drifts back into sleep on the rocking chair.
Ray doesn't see how she can fit any more into the Tea and See display, but Kitty B. went to Charleston last week on account of LeMar's doctor's appointment and so she stopped by Tirlants to pick up some wedding gifts. They're some of the most beautiful Little Hilda has received: four silver goblets, two teacups, six salad plates, a rice spoon, a place setting of silver, and a crystal ice bucket from Tiffany's.
“Well, y'all,” Ray says as Kitty B. and Sis carefully stack the gifts in the passenger seat. “I'll just have to find a way to squeeze them into the display.”
The summer day finally gives way to night as Ray pulls out of Kitty B.'s dirt driveway and heads home. As she bumps along the old road, she thinks of Eleanor chasing its tail over the Bahamas and Vangie Dreggs's foolish belief that her prayer could pop the storm like a pinprick in a balloon. Then she thinks back to Hurricane Hazel, the one that pummeled Charleston when Ray was ten and living in Mrs. Pringle's carriage house.
~ OCTOBER 14, 1959 ~
“You're crazy, Mama,” Nigel had called to Mrs. Pringle from the bottom of the stairs as Ray and Laura sat huddled on the love seat in Mrs. Pringle's guest room. “You mean to tell me you'd rather be holed up with that whore and her two bastard daughters instead of with me on higher ground?”
It knocked the breath out of Ray when he said those words. She can remember literally gasping.
Bastard?
She didn't think she'd ever heard the word before, but, as if by instinct, she knew precisely what it meant. For the first time in her young life she was face-to-face with the harsh reality of what she was. The sharp and succinct title that defined her.
Her mama, with her persuasive way of softening the edges of life, had never made it sound like that. Ray's daddy was a soldier whom Carla loved, if briefly, before his deployment. A brave man who fought for their country and surely died in the line of duty, didn't he?
Bastard
. Ray rubbed the pads of her fingers over that sharp word, and it pricked her as if it were the end of one of her mama's sewing needles.
Her mama ran out of Mrs. Pringle's bedroom to the top of the stairs and stood beside her employer. “Leave her alone!” she screamed down to Nigel. “She's eighty years old, and she's still got the right to make her own decision. She doesn't
want
to evacuate!”
Ray could hear Nigel scoff and punch at the crystals that dangled from the chandelier in the foyer as Laura curled up on the love seat and burrowed her head into Ray's chest.
“What did he mean?” Laura whispered.
“Mmm?” Ray asked, still trying to catch her breath.
“Mr. Pringle called us a name. Bastards. What does that mean?”
When that needle of a word pushed out of her little sister's mouth, Ray picked it up between her fingers, turned it from side to side, then pushed it into the pincushion of her heart, where it has been lodged ever since.
“Something bad, Laura,” Ray said as the bile rose in the back of her throat. “Something awful.”
Now as she drives down the gravelly island road with the sound of the goblets and the silver clinking together in the box, Ray knows she has no business running the Wedding Guild or posing as the first lady of Jasper. But, maybe that was part of her plan all along. To have her life so intertwined with the pack, have them so dependent on her that they couldn't throw her out if they wanted to. Even if they knew the truth.
Ray had married into Jasper society, after all, and borne two beautiful children who she thinks she raised well. Granted she spoiled them, but she and Willy provided them with everything, and they seemed to be making their way in the world.
Ray prides herself in how she rose to leadership under Roberta's tutelage with the ballet recitals and the Christmas pageants at church, then the debutante balls. Her role in coordinating the weddings of the next generation will seal her legacy and her place in Jasper society for good, despite the ugly truth of her origins.
Looking into the darkening woods with its tropical vines and scrub pines, Ray remembers her mama moving her daughters out of the carriage house and up to Mrs. Pringle's bedroom the night of the storm. They slept around the old woman's tall four-poster bed on the hardwood floor as the shutters slapped against the yellow clapboards and the water trickled from the edges of the panes and formed a puddle by their feet.
Now just as Ray turns on her headlights, a large brown figure leaps onto the road, then halts, its twelve white spears pointing up. He stands stone still. Like a wall. His nostrils flare, and his large black eyes glisten like moonlight on the smooth surface of Round-O Creek. She brakes, but it's too late.
She barely registers the impact as the air bag bursts from its storage bin like gunfire itself and punches her in the face before enveloping her with its warm, ballooning latex as the smoke and dust spew out of its pores.
The steering wheel is hot and her face begins to burn. As she opens the window, she smells lemon squares and cake and looks in the rearview mirror to see icing dripping from the ceiling. Bits of cake have landed in her hair, and chunks of lemon squares are sliding down the windshield and the creases of the deflated air bag. With a cursory glance, Ray sees that Miss C. has landed in the backseat and has lost an arm, and she's sure that Kitty B.'s teacups and Little Hilda's crystal ice bucket and Christmas china are cracked beneath the tissue in their gift boxes.
On the hood of her Volvo is a twelve-point buck, and before she passes out she can hear Cousin Willy calling to her as he runs toward the car, but she's not sure if she's dreaming it.
“Ray? Are you okay?”
Kitty B. teeters at the top of the stairwell wondering what her middle daughter would be like or who she would marry if she had lived to be twenty-five like Little Hilda and Priscilla. They were all the same age, you know? Born within a four-month span of one another. The three watermelon seeds.
In Kitty B.'s daydreams Baby Roberta is a younger version of herself. How she looked and felt as a teenager, stealing melons with the pack or chasing after her older brothers down Third Street when they stole her hat or her report card or the notes carefully folded in her back pocket that she and Ray would slip back and forth during Mr. Unger's biology class.
It's strange that she misses the young woman her baby might have become. She wonders if when she is elderly and the gals' daughters become middle-aged, if she'll yearn for the midlife version of her child, if she'll imagine what particular way Baby Roberta would have taken her arm and led her out of the nursing home and into the noonday sun for a lunch at Opal Dowdy's or an appointment with Angus.
Suddenly aware of the wide crease forming between her hips, Kitty B. turns to examine her turquoise linen dress suit in the hall mirror at the top of the stairs. She weighed in at one hundred and ninety pounds last month at the doctor's office, and she's not sure she can even sit down in the suit this year without it ripping open. She frowns at her wide hips and the gray in her long, stringy hair. She didn't have time to get the newfangled Spanx that both Hilda and Ray promised would suck it all in, and her girdle is so old that it is literally crumbling at the ends, leaving a trail of synthetic threads from her closet to the top of the stairs.
She suspects she won't be able to squeeze into her mama's sea-foam beaded gown that she'd planned to wear to Little Hilda's wedding, so she'll have to find a few hours to go to the plus-size shop outside of Charleston where the made-up fat ladies with their brightly painted nails come at her like a swarm of provoked wasps, piercing her skin with their questions, “Size sixteen, ma'am?”
She used to be a size eight, and she even went down to a six right after she had her firstborn, Cricket. But when she lost Baby Roberta at three months old, cooking was the only way to calm her nerves, and it was the one thing she seemed to have a knack for in the domestic realm. So she baked and sampled along the way and woke up one day to find a size sixteen staring back at her in the mirror.
One time when her youngest, Katie Rae, was in high school, she heard one of her school friends, Betsy Burnett, say, “I didn't know your mama was expecting.”
“She's not,” Katie Rae said.
Betsy Burnett blushed and covered her mouth. “Oh,” she chuckled, nervously.
Now Kitty B. wobbles down the stairs, and there is a problem with one of her bone-colored Ferragamos too. One of the bows is catiwompas, busted by Honey's paw one Sunday a few months back when she arrived home from church with the parish hall leftoversâa bowl of red rice and a Ziploc bag of poppy seed muffins. The Ferragamos are actually hand-me-downs from her mama. She inherited Roberta's whole closet, but it's too bad she can't squeeze herself into half of those beautiful clothes anymore. Heavens, her mama could dress! Roberta Hathaway was as regal as they came in Jasper, with her tailored suits and the fine Italian pumps she bought during her shopping trips down King Street in Charleston.
“I'm going,” Kitty B. calls to LeMar, who is slumped under the covers in the room across the hall from hers. They haven't slept in the same room for over a decade now, and sometimes Kitty B. feels as though LeMar is more like a cantankerous older brother than a spouse. She hears the strain of the springs as he rolls over in the bed and yawns. “The coffeepot's on and there are some slices of toasted banana bread on top of the stove.”
He moans and clears his throat, and from Kitty B.'s angle all she can see of his room is the eyelet curtains filling out like hoop skirts as the island breeze pushes through the window.
LeMar's room smells like medicine and metal and urine, and it takes all she can muster to go in there each day, pat his soft, wide back, and say, “Time to wake up.”
Well, she's not even going to bother right now. She's been up all night making petits fours and lemon squares to replace the ones lost in Ray's collision, and if LeMar wants to lie in bed till noon and feel sorry for himself all day, so be it.
Thank God Ray is okay
. Kitty B. just doesn't know if Little Hilda could get married without Ray at the helm of it all. If anything ever happens to her, the gals and everybody in their pack for that matter just might implode like an undercooked soufflé or a pound cake short of an egg.
In the kitchen Kitty B. stacks the five Tupperware containers of sweets as a large palmetto bug crawls out from behind her sugar jar and scoots across the countertop. She slips off the Ferragamo with the catiwompas bow and takes one swat at him, but he scurries toward the oven and escapes in a crack between the stove and the cabinet. She leans over and checks the rat trap beside the refrigerator. She catches a river rat in there every few weeks, but she doesn't dare tell the gals about that. They might not even eat her good food.