Three Story House: A Novel (17 page)

Elyse

A
s etiquette demanded, the invitation arrived exactly eight weeks before the wedding date. It had remained unopened for the last twenty hours—doing a better job than caffeine at keeping Elyse awake and agitated. She ran her fingers around the edge of the textured paper and over the indentations made by the nib of the calligrapher’s pen. Because her little sister still lived with their parents, the return address was that of Elyse’s childhood home in Boston. The last time she’d been home, snow had covered the ground, dampening the boisterousness typical of her family’s gatherings. She weighed the envelope in her hand, glad at its heft. Lord knows people have been undone by something as insubstantial as an e-mail, but Elyse needed her problems, especially this particular difficulty, to carry weight.

“My sister is marrying the man I love,” she said to the window.

The indistinct chatter of Benny and his crew answered her. She listened to the house, hoping for some acknowledgment of what she’d said. The usual hum of her cousins getting ready for the day and the creaks and groans of an old house greeted her. No single sound rose above another, which was how it should be. She took a deep breath.

“The man I love is going to spend the rest of his life with my sister.”

A small brown bird landed on the sill of her open window and ruffled its feathers. It wasn’t enough. Her admission still held an omission. That version of the problem put the blame on Landon. But wasn’t it his fault? She’d loved him since she’d known how to fall in love. And that business he’d said at Christmas dinner when they announced their engagement—the bit from Plato about how the gods divided the soul into two halves, leaving people to spend their lives searching for the missing part to make them whole. He said he didn’t know where he’d heard the story. Elyse knew. After reading the
Symposium
in a classics course, she’d heavily highlighted Aristophanes’ speech and then deliberately left the book in Landon’s car. How could he not know? Right up in the front of the book she’d written
Property of Elyse Wallace.

The bird turned its head and dipped its beak down as if urging her to go further. She tightened her grip on the wedding invitation. A warble escaped the bird’s throat and it nodded at her again before alighting and flying toward the river.

“I love my sister’s fiancé,” she said.

From below the house, voices rose quickly, followed by a deep clanging sound. She said it again, louder and then with a quick flip of the wrist, she sent the card sailing out the window.

After a good cry, she padded down the stairs in her bunny slippers and walked through the beaded curtain without first moving it aside. Neither of her cousins raised their heads from their phones as she took a seat at the table. Lizzie had pushed her cereal bowl to the side of the table and, based on the rapid finger typing, Elyse guessed she was texting with T. J. before he left for work. Isobel, still in her workout clothes, had positioned her chair directly underneath the ceiling fan. Judging by the way she gripped her phone, her thumb hovering over the screen, she’d spent the last five minutes refreshing her e-mail. Since filming the television special last month, Isobel hadn’t gone three minutes without checking for an airdate for the project.

“You realize it’s like six in the morning in Los Angeles, right,” Elyse said.

Isobel looked at her as if she’d been caught picking her nose. She set her phone down and busied her hands holding her hair off her neck. “I forget,” she said.

“They’ll get in touch,” Elyse said and then asked if she could eat some of Isobel’s cereal.

“It’s so sticky,” Isobel said, pulling her shirt away from her chest. “Besides, I thought you didn’t eat hippie food.”

“Too hot to eat anything better,” Elyse said, lifting the box of organic something or other crunch off the table. The wedding invitation, its ink smudged and slightly damp, leaned against a half-gallon of soy milk. One of the workers must have found it and brought it in. Elyse swallowed and turned away from the table.

“This isn’t hot. This is just the summer preheating. Wait until August, then it’s like standing inside an oven with a damp towel around your head,” Lizzie said, glancing up from her phone at Elyse. “What’s going on? You never eat healthy.”

Elyse pinched the fat on the side of her stomach. “I’ve been thinking I ought to start.”

“That stuff’s not low-cal,” Isobel said. “It’s just good for you. They only buy grain from small farmers and the ingredients are designed to work together to give you energy and vitamins and—”

“Let me guess,” Elyse said, “sunshine.”

“It’s full of fiber. Guaranteed to make you fart rainbows,” Lizzie said, the corners of her mouth twitching.

Isobel laughed, sounding like an angry goose. Lizzie giggled and Elyse, because crying could be mistaken for laughter, joined in until they heard the men outside mutter about crazy girls.

Elyse wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and glanced at the envelope on the table. “Seriously, what’s the best way to lose weight?”

“Eat less, move more,” Lizzie said, flexing her arms.

“Depends,” Isobel said, fanning herself.

“On what?” Elyse asked.

“How much you want to lose and how quickly. Some of the actresses I know decide they want to drop ten pounds and choose to eat one thing—like grapefruit or carrots and then they chew nicotine gum to curb their hunger.”

“That’s terrible advice,” Lizzie said. “You don’t need to lose weight anyway. You’re beautiful.”

“I’m not looking for compliments,” Elyse said. Since exiting adolescence, neither of her cousins had struggled with their appearance. Tall and athletic Lizzie never looked as if she carried any fat on her. Her body had the sort of purposeful beauty people admired in Michelangelo’s sculptures. Isobel’s attractiveness lay in her face—oversized eyes, all the more alluring because they were so closely spaced, framed by wild auburn hair. Arresting. That was the word used to describe her when she appeared occasionally on the pages of those garish tabloids. Of course she was too thin, but all actresses were too thin. Isobel didn’t have any of Lizzie’s muscle tone, but that would have drawn attention from her face, and the whole point of Isobel’s attractiveness was her face.

“You’ve got your boobs working for you,” Isobel said. “Men get tunnel vision when they see a good rack. And you, my dear, have a great rack.”

“The day is wasting,” Lizzie said, looking at the time on her phone and then at Elyse. “What do you have planned for the day?”

Elyse shrugged and grabbed a handful of cereal from the box. She decided to forgo milk as it would mean acknowledging the wedding invitation. “I’m off today and it’s too damn hot to consider any kind of cooking,” she said. She couldn’t admit the truth, which was that from the moment that invitation had arrived, she’d spent every waking second plotting. She played out all the scenarios in her mind trying to find the best way to stop the wedding and get Landon for herself.

“Yeah, the girls are in finals and can’t practice,” Lizzie said, setting aside her phone and glancing at Isobel with more directness than the observation deserved. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

Elyse doubted that her cousin didn’t know what to do. Lizzie kept a running list of things to do—not only what she had to do, but what she could do. There were lists of books to read, albums to listen to, places to visit, people to write letters to. When she was younger, she’d kept these lists, organized by category, in a spiral notebook, but now they were all on her phone. Turns out there was an app for her cousin’s obsessive list making. If Lizzie had five minutes of spare time, she’d find an activity to fill it. Lately most of her extra time had been spent trying to put that diary of her mother’s back in order.

As if waiting for a cue, Isobel agreed, noting that her day was wide open as well. “We should do something together to celebrate our birthday month. I never see you.”

“We live together. I see you every day,” Elyse said, feeling as if she were in the middle of a scripted sales pitch—at any moment her cousins would lead her to the inevitable conclusion that she needed a $1,200 vacuum or a new set of Japanese knives. She figured it had to do with the invitation. They were worried about her.

Lizzie suggested going to the Metal Museum and then to lunch. “You always liked the small stuff—the miniatures over the murals. There wasn’t ever anything worth seeing when I lived here and now there are as many museums as churches.”

“Not even close,” Elyse said, thinking of the number of churches she’d seen in her aimless walking around the city on days when she couldn’t stand the sight of her cousins or herself. Seems all it took in Memphis to start a church was to hang a sign on your front door and convince your friends that you knew the word of God better than the man or woman at the last pulpit they’d been to.

“Then it’s settled,” Isobel said, stripping off her shirt and heading upstairs. “I need a cold shower if I’m ever going to stop sweating. Leave in an hour?”

“Better not let Benny see you in that sports bra,” Elyse said. “He’ll have a heart attack trying to get enough blood to his—”

“Don’t be crass,” Lizzie said, twisting her high ponytail into a bun and securing it with the rubber band that had held the morning paper closed. She set her phone on the table face side down. “There’s mail for you. Must have gotten dropped on the way into the house yesterday. Benny found it in the monkey grass.”

“Right,” Elyse said, picking up the invitation and examining it as if she’d never seen it before. “It’s got your name on it too, and Isobel’s for that matter.”

“It’s not for us.”

“She should have sent three invitations. I mean, as it is, sending it this way means that none of us can bring a date. No T. J., no fling of the month for Isobel.”

“That’s not news. Your mother told you it was going to be a small wedding. Family only. Besides, you make a much better date than T. J., and Isobel won’t be with that bartender much longer—you know she only likes the beginning of a relationship.”

“Don’t we all?” Elyse said, even as she thought that what she was most familiar with was the end of other people’s relationships.

“Open it,” Lizzie said.

“I thought maybe it wouldn’t happen,” Elyse said, pushing back from the table.

“You want a list of all the stuff I didn’t think would happen?” Lizzie asked, tapping the floor with her right foot. She took the envelope from Elyse’s hand and ripped it open before handing it back to her.

“Knowing you, there’s a list of all that stuff somewhere.”

“Nobody ever needs to keep tabs on their failures. All the stuff that doesn’t happen gets written in that part of your brain that never forgets.”

Elyse slipped her finger inside the envelope and edged out the invitation. Lizzie was right. The brain filed its grievances against life and stored them, waiting for another situation to come up to compare it against. She had to leave her failures alone—playing what-if games never made anyone happy.
What if,
she thought and pulled the thick packet of invitation components from the envelope.

“Looks like Mom and Dad got Daphne the invitations she wanted despite the fact that they’re crazy expensive. When they started all of this, there was a budget.” Elyse let the envelope fall to the floor.

Lizzie reached down and picked it up. “Maybe they’re saving elsewhere, you know, because it’s a small ceremony?”

“Nope. Daddy assured his little girl that she could have whatever she wanted. Besides it’s only small because there’s this church tucked away on a side street by our house that has room for seventy-six people. Daphne’s wanted to get married there since I showed it to her when we were kids and liked to make believe we were saints.”

“Sounds lovely,” Lizzie said, describing a similar chapel she’d seen in Florida. Elyse half-listened while she separated the parts of the invitation, dropping bits of tissue paper on the floor as she flipped through the pieces. Lizzie continued to reach down and pick them up.

“If you’d wait a minute, I’ll pick them up all at once,” Elyse said, letting out a short breath. “Frickin A.” Her hands had stopped moving when she reached the photograph of Landon and Daphne. She held the photo back and pushed the other papers into Lizzie’s hands. “We should room together. The hotel information and stuff is there.”

“Or we could stay at Gram’s house,” Lizzie said.

Her cousin continued to talk and, without thinking about it, Elyse put her thumb over her sister’s face and considered what it would be like to be in that photo. It had been taken at their grandparents’ beach house, the one where they’d all spent summers over the years. Landon and her sister stood on the beach, wrapped around each other in a way that made it look like he had both arms. He was too tall for Daphne. Hell, he was too tall for Elyse too, but what did that matter to people in love? They were barefoot. Behind them, the surf lapped at a heart someone had drawn in the sand. Their jeans matched and both wore flowing white shirts. Instead of facing the camera, they stared at each other. Landon’s lovely jaw line was in profile. He had what Elyse had always thought of as a King Arthur jaw—strong and square. When he’d first been able to grow a full beard, she’d talked him into shaving it into a thin line that traced the architecture of his face.

“We’re not walking to that museum, are we?” Isobel asked as she thumped down the hallway in an impossibly high pair of wedges.

Lizzie shook her head, fanning herself with the invitation. “Too far in this heat. We got little cousin’s wedding invitation though.”

“Can’t wait,” Isobel said, holding the beads of the curtain carefully to the side before passing through them.

“You guys coming? Going to fly out to Boston and everything?” Elyse asked, looking up from the photograph.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Lizzie said. “You going to get dressed so we can go out and celebrate our birthdays?”

Elyse looked at her bunny slippers and then back to the photo, not able to stop herself from staring at the picture and considering what her life would have been like if she were marrying Landon. Isobel stepped behind her and peered over her shoulder.